Individual message management is rapidly becoming a chore that erodes personal productivity and the impact on business can be disastrous.

Electronic bill presentation and payment (EBPP) was expected to be the next `killer app`, but two years later, the South African adoption has been much slower than expected. There are, however, some hopeful signs.

Technology has restored organisations` ability to foster close relationships with customers.

The rand`s diminished status is hurting everyone, not least the market for imported software.

Change is inevitable, and is driven by a number of business issues, but what is the impact of internal change on data integration routines?

A look at whether return on investment is the right metric to justify enterprise application integration.

Personalisation is a business imperative, and the backbone of loyalty and one-to-one marketing campaigns, but it does have the potential to over-step privacy boundaries.

In a sluggish economy, customers spend less, making it doubly important for companies to gain share of customer rather than share of market.

It is in the nature of business intelligence today that in-house data often needs to be supported by external data to improve the quality of decision-making.

Integration of dispersed systems requires that complex decisions be made, as there is no quick fix.

Customisation shifts the focus to customers and their needs or wants, ensuring products and services take a secondary role in the CRM scenario.

Many IT departments have learned the hard and frustrating way that hand-coding a complete extraction, transformation and load application is a more daunting undertaking than they had realised.