The rise of the social web provides an abundance of opportunities to reach and engage with potential customers, but these added touch points muddy the waters when it comes to effectively tracking and monitoring your company's interactions with individual prospects.

There is no doubt that big data has become a growth market, and is becoming one of the few on-premises projects seeing increased spending, as companies move less data-sensitive functions to the cloud. But where's the needed talent?

Luxottica Group, a global luxury sunglass and eyeglass company, reports that it has improved quality, as well as the efficiency of its receiving, quality-inspection and subsequent re-stocking of returned products, by between 30 and 50 percent, by deploying a Near Field Communication RFID system. The solution employs an NFC dangle tag attached to each frame, and software that enables workers to view data about the item, and to update its status via NFC-enabled tablets.

Customer relationship management technology has evolved to support increasingly complex business needs. How do you find one that's right for you?

Mobility is a hot topic these days. Regardless of industry or profession, a mobile application or ecosystem is in development to serve it. The supply chain is no different. In fact, given its very manual and distributed nature, the supply chain is better suited to mobile application deployment than most business processes. For distribution and fulfillment services, where most of the activities take place away from the desktop, the extension of business processes to mobile applications just makes sense. Most CEOs today are looking to the supply chain for competitive advantage (think Amazon's drones), so the time is right for supply chain managers to begin the process of introducing mobile into their processes.