No 2: Embrace Web 2.0

Like it or not, we live in a Facebook/Twitter/iPhone world. And if your line-of-business apps don't sport the latest Web service features, you could lose your best young employees to a company that does.

"Many IT organizations are not as ready for Web 2.0 as they need to be," says David McFarlane, COO for Nexaweb Technologies, which makes software and services for modernizing legacy applications. "They need to prepare for the millennium generation -- the audience that has only heard the legend of the DOS interface and expects to have a ubiquitous iPhone-like experience every time they touch a computer or related device."

Your youngest, most tech-savvy employees expect to interact with the system from any browser, whether it's on their laptop or a cell phone, and access virtually any data from anywhere. If you don't provide that, somebody else will.

"Part of the reason to embrace Web 2.0 is to show your employees that your company is forward-thinking and willing to do things differently," says Jim Lanzalotto, vice president of Yoh, a technology talent and outsourcing firm. "It sounds bizarre, but if you don't do enough to energize your employees, they may lose interest in you as a company."

Your customers also have increasingly high expectations, adds Nexaweb's McFarlane.

"They expect to be part of the extended enterprise," McFarlane says. "If they order a part from you, they expect to be able to track where it is in the process, when it was dispatched, where it is now. If they file an insurance claim, they expect to participate, to take photos of the damage and upload them to the file. Companies can't departmentalize these things anymore. You need to deliver rich, compelling, engaging applications for your customers as well."

No. 3: Tame the data monster

Bad, incomplete, or unusable data has been the bane of thousands of enterprises. Even data that's perfectly usable in one form may be useless in a broader context -- which leads to poor decision-making.

Tony Fisher, CEO of data-quality specialists DataFlux, recalls the time he was working with the CEO of a Fortune 10 company who was concerned about the aging population of the company's workforce.

"His first question was, 'How many employees do we have and where are they?'" says Fisher. "But the best estimate he could get was between 90,000 and 115,000. He was never able to drill down to age of the population or its distribution."

The problem: It was huge global company with 120 locations, each with an HR system that treated data just a little bit differently. The data was sufficient for the needs of the local organizations, says Fisher, but they couldn't integrate it across different systems -- an increasingly common dilemma for many enterprises.

"Better data makes for a better business," Fisher says. "You need to make sure data isn't just accurate but is also fit-for-purpose, so it can drive business initiatives."

And this should be done sooner rather than later because the data deluge is only growing. Studies have found that the amount of data generated per year is growing by 35 to 40 per cent, notes Sean Morris, sales director at Digitech Systems, an enterprise content management provider.

"IT folks need to take a closer look at how they are capturing, encrypting, and storing all the data their companies generate, including e-mail, invoices, and contracts," says Morris. "Companies with a solid ECM strategy will have a competitive advantage going forward, and IT can be positioned to be the hero."