... management with an online, Wikipedia-like service. In an audience poll at Computerworld's Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference this month, 62 percent of the 163 respondents said their IT departments are responsible for developing and supporting contact management systems for users in sales and marketing. And in most cases, the poll showed, the monthly cost is more than US$50 per end user. What they -- and you -- might consider is Jigsaw Data Corp.'s online contact management service. "Jigsaw is Dun & Bradstreet Reports meets Wikipedia," quips Jim Fowler, CEO of the San Mateo, Calif.-based company. Its namesake service includes a system that gives users 200 points to start with. For each business contact that you add to your personal list from Jigsaw's database of more than 2.5 million people, the system subtracts five points. For every accurate name that you add to the database, you snag 10 points. But if you put in bad information, Jigsaw takes an equal number of points out of your account. Although you can avoid charges by accruing and selling points, Fowler says that few users do so. Most Jigsaw members simply pay $25 per month, or less with corporate discounts. Fowler says Jigsaw has 52,000 members and adds 10,000 new contacts to its database daily. You can sort them by industry, job function, geography and other parameters. You also can import and export data from and to Outlook, Salesforce.com and other applications. Over the course of this year, Fowler says, Jigsaw will be bulking up its corporate profiles to provide detailed competitive information.
'The Y2k of SOX is over, and now it's...
...time to manage the process better." That is Mark Portu's advice on complying with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and other regulations. According to Portu, senior vice president of compliance solutions at Open Text Corp. in Waterloo, Ontario, companies need a broader view of compliance that goes beyond point solutions for specific regulations -- one that encompasses all aspects of records management. He claims that Version 3.0 of Open Text's Internal Controls software, due next week, will help users manage documents related to financial, environmental, labor and other regulatory requirements in countries such as the U.S., Canada and European Union member nations. Portu says an average implementation runs about $280,000.
'What, me worry?' That could be...
...the corporate slogan of the early 21st century. A Gartner Inc. study released this month reveals that 99 percent of companies "will not be able to respond to an avian influenza outbreak." And Genesys Conferencing Inc. in Reston, Va., polled 586 of its users last month and learned that 60 percent of them either didn't have a business continuity plan or didn't know if they did. Denise Persson, executive vice president of global markets at Genesys, says the survey helped prompt the company to offer its Emergency Meeting Center service. Users get a toll-free number that can handle 200 or more callers dialing in to receive instructions on what to do in the face of a disaster. There's no charge to sign up. If, heaven forbid, you do need it, you're charged for the minutes you use.
Read the SLA's fine print before...
...you sign up for hosted CRM. In the aftermath of a series of outages affecting users of Salesforce.com Inc.'s online CRM service, Natalee Roan, chief marketing officer at Salesforce.com rival Entellium Corp., advises CIOs to take a hard look at any software-as-a-service vendor's service-level agreement (SLA) before signing up. Roan says you need to know three things: What is the vendor's specific time commitment for resolving an outage? Does it offer an automatic cash or service-credit rebate after an outage? And how frequently does it back up your data? She says you need to get the answers in writing. If you can't, Roan warns, you should be suspicious of the hosted service's stability. Needless to say, Seattle-based Entellium claims it answers those questions in its SLA.
Are you a gadget geek but ashamed...
...of admitting it? Maybe you need a wardrobe upgrade via the TEC clothing line from ScotteVest LLC in Ketchum, Idaho. ScotteVest says its Milan jacket boasts a plethora of hidden pockets to fit your "Blackberry, iPod and Bluetooth [devices] into its Razr-thin patented personal area network." That way, you'll always be connected, but no one has to know it. Since this is Version 4.0 of their fetching fashions, let's hope they've eliminated most of the bugs.