Everybody knows data warehousing is big data. But when you want to understand what's really going on with your customers' social interactions, terabytes may seem small. It's a laborious process, but the insight it provides can reap big rewards.

George Carlin made phrases like 'jumbo shrimp' famous. But the need to control agile projects is no joke. Ask the right questions along the way, though, and you'll bring order to a process than can easily turn chaotic.

With most enterprise applications, the security model can be simply user/group/world. It can't be all that complicated with CRM, right? Think again.

Some parts of vendor evaluation never change. Many folks boil it down to just three words: References, references and references. In the cloud, you really need to do a more thorough screening. References are important, but they are only part of the process.

Your cloud-based system may have been in use for seven years or more. It probably needs a tune-up. Let's see what kind of shape it's in and what you need to do to make it run like new.

Everybody uses the cloud. How can there be any secrets? Many companies had to learn these three little lessons the hard way, but there's no reason your business can't learn from those mistakes.

Getting beyond the basics of using CRM-- tracking the evolution of the customer relationship--means using the system to improve time management close rates and customer satisfaction. In the real world, that means playing the probabilities and using the system to prioritize your team's efforts.

Agile is the best approach for CRM projects, but what if management just won't let you go there? What does it really mean to have a fixed-price, fixed-deliverable project? You will have to put in more effort, but you can succeed in the long run.

In most enterprise IT systems, record ownership is about as controversial as a ham sandwich. Not so in CRM. In fact, it can become quite the political topic. Fortunately, good governance can solve most CRM data ownership problems.

A user interface can be too easy. Just ask any cloud administrator who learned the hard way that there's no undo feature. Here's our wish list for 10 things that would make a cloud admin's life much easier. Most are a few years in the making, though.

Putting the 'social' in your social CRM strategy means aggregating more information about your customers and prospects. A new generation of tools is being developed to make this happen.

Best-practices articles are as dull to read as they are to write, columnist David Taber says. So here are 10 customer support system worst practices that are certain to derail customer satisfaction.

With most enterprise systems, it's immediately clear who should be users and what they should be able to do on the system. Not so with CRM -- and, over time, more and more employees and departments will need to be on the system.

A tradeshow is a tradeshow is a tradeshow. But developer conferences can tell you a lot more, providing key indicators for the future. At DreamForce 2012, Salesforce.com.com is showing roughly 90,000 attendees what its high-profile customers are able to do.

Like most enterprise applications, CRM systems mean tighter business processes. Unlike most enterprise apps, however, CRM users typically aren't ready this for this. Here's a look at what needs to be fixed before you should really start a CRM project.