Stories about: Focus Group

In all the world's religious cultures, particularly the most extreme, every adherent knows exactly what constitutes acceptable behaviour. There is usually a rigid hierarchy, and everyone shares a language, set of ideas and beliefs, customs, taboos, codes, rituals and ceremonies. Typically, the culture was defined so long ago that no living person has any real idea how the habits and practices now considered the norm evolved. And typically, that does not matter one whit, because everyone knows what they need to know: if they move beyond those norms they will be ostracized.

You don't have to do anything to retain employees when they have nowhere to go. But doing nothing now will lead to problems tomorrow

Cigna CIO Andrea Anania looked out at 250 peers at an October 2001 conference in Rancho Mirage, California, and declared that she had successfully re-engineered her company's IT. These days, she said, projects are completed on time and within budget. Anania spoke too soon.

In an episode of the TV drama The West Wing, President Josiah Bartlet uses chess as an analogy for geopolitical strategy. Bartlet, locked in a global game of brinkmanship with the Chinese, observes that in both chess and foreign relations, it's dangerous to focus too narrowly when considering your next move. "You've got to see the whole board,"he tells an aide

When it comes to e-services delivery, Australian government agencies may want to take a page out of Canadian whole-of-government CIO Michelle d'Auray's e-government book. D'Auray is finding that a bit of intuition goes a long way in delivering online initiatives for citizens.

How to go from partner to plaintiff in one not so easy lesson.

Security is the biggest concern for anyone engaged in e-business, no doubt about it. However, it's no longer a matter of whether companies have security--if they don't, they won't be in business long--but just how effective that security is.

It's easy to talk about developing leaders. Turning that talk into action is hard. Here's how you can do it

In case you haven't noticed, the Web and e-commerce are all about eyeballs. Already around 10 Web pages exist for each Australian, and we're rapidly heading toward a world in which the ratio of information to eyeballs is overwhelmingly large. Unless future citizens plan to do nothing but stare at screens all day, we're going to encounter a huge shortage of attentive pupils. Attracting, retaining and transferring eyeballs will be all the rage.

It seems a simple proposition: deploy the latest technology to capture more information about customers, and then use that information to serve them in an individualised way that will earn their loyalty.