Stories by: Cindy Waxer

Ten years ago, Logicalis, a systems integrator, would have needed a wiretap to overhear the grumblings of a competitor's dissatisfied customer or prospect. But when a Logicalis sales representative stumbled across a LinkedIn status update revealing an individual's frustration with a rival company's cloud service, he knew just what to do.

Delivering packages to customers in a timely fashion takes more than a good shipping label.

The odds weren't in Republican John Albers' favor when he decided to run for Georgia State Senate from District 56 in May 2009. "I was the underdog in the race," recalls Albers, CIO at Ronald Blue, a financial-management firm. "In fact, when the race first started out, most people said I wouldn't get one percent of the vote."

How Swedish agribusiness Lantmännen cultivated a more cost-effective infrastructure.

For a US$5.5 billion agricultural cooperative whose 42,000 farmers work cohesively across 19 countries to supply food and farming services, Lantmännen's IT infrastructure was surprisingly unwieldy.

At first glance, UPS's warehouse workers might be mistaken for gun-toting cyborgs out of a dystopian movie. But a closer look at the stainless steel devices wrapped around employees' forearms reveal a hi-tech contraption that scans barcodes and shoots bright magenta ink--not laser beams.

When Bill Horne sauntered into an evening meet-and-greet being held by a local packaging company in search of fresh IT talent, the retired computer engineer knew his chances of leaving the event with a job offer were slim.

"Many CIOs are a little cavalier about making raising customer satisfaction an explicit goal," says Harley Manning, vice president and director of Forrester Research's customer experience group. Rather, he says, objectives such as cost avoidance and innovation are far more likely to receive top billing on a CIO's project roster. That's because not only is bolstering customer loyalty a hard sell among corporate bean counters, its (arguably) intangible benefits and its (allegedly) nebulous returns often make it a thankless job. After all, when it comes to customer feedback, CIOs typically hear one of two things: harsh criticism or the sound of one hand clapping."

Application monitoring tools can help companies tune up their engines