Several of our clients have made substantial bets recently on strategies that merge mutually supporting bricks and mortar and Internet retail approaches. The synergy argument has the added benefit of making it easier to track results when you can integrate f2f retail with the electronic variety. The impact on the customer experience discussion continues.

According to Experian Hitwise, in early March Facebook surpassed Google as the most visited Website in the US. Though the traffic levels between the two were close, Facebook’s year-over-year growth jumped 185%, while Google's traffic grew by only 9%! Like it or not, social media is radically changing how we interact online – and no group is more plugged into social media than teens (73% of all teens online use social media – Pew Research, March 23, 2010). For organizations targeting the teen market, such as our college and university clients, this news is another wake-up call for developing an effective and adaptable Web presence.

The  move toward widespread virtualization is usually accompanied by new systems architecture. This would address load balancing, failover and high availability, and also support WAN-based access for remote offices and workers (e.g., sales people who work from home).   Because it's designed for efficiently replicating data from one site to another, this architecture streamlines disaster recovery.

In conversations with current and prospective clients over the last few weeks, most believe the economy is in recovery. Yet these same CIOs have two sharply divergent views on the state of IT and the approach they're taking to develop roadmaps for the future.  I've labeled these perspectives restoration and transformation – see how they align with your thinking.