How people speak is as important as the words they say when it comes to sentiment analysis. "The human voice is made of many repeating patterns," said Amir Liberman, CEO of Nemesysco. "Everything that attracts your attention will generate a slight disturbance in these patterns. We look carefully at this voice chart, and we identify disturbances."

You can love CRM as a discipline, but don't have any illusions about its ability to survive in the cruel world. The reality is that customer relationships are fragile things; they need the right environment to flourish and be profitable.

One of the tricky parts of developing a social CRM (SCRM) strategy is that it requires left brain and right brain thinking. The left brain, where more logical and procedural thinking takes place, is comparable to how "traditional" CRM operates, organizing and distributing data based on predetermined processes. The right brain, the center of creative thinking, is comparable to SCRM, discovering new relationships and communication models and engaging and conversing with customers.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, wrote George Santayana, and if you've observed technology long, you know that the cycles of repetition become shorter with each passing year. When it comes to CRM, we're seeing it again in the form of social CRM: companies are making the same mistakes they made at the start of the CRM era.

Now that software as a service and the broader cloud computing concept have gained widespread recognition and acceptance, it will be interesting to see whether online marketplaces will become a preferred method for acquiring these on-demand resources.

Your sales people need to do the things that work, and they need to repeat them. If something is demonstrably effective in closing a sale, then it should be discovered and shared - and, even if there's just one sales person, it should be identified and utilized. If your selling process has become complex enough that these processes are no longer easily identified, it's time to look at CRM.

There are three things certain in life. We all know the two cited by Benjamin Franklin, but there's a third certainty that we all face regularly and have to cope with constantly - that we'll make mistakes. Everyone makes them; if it hasn't happened to your business, you haven't been in business long.

The exponential growth of data from a widening array of sources is making the term "Big Data" a hot topic among corporate executives from businesses of all sizes across nearly every industry.

Managers of information technology systems in both the private and public sectors have had their hands full dealing with security breaches that come from hackers invading IT systems. Increasingly, however, IT systems are becoming vulnerable from another channel - the actual supply chain sources of both hardware equipment and software programs.

Project planning can be incredibly time-consuming and tedious, but it's worth it to keep a project running smoothly. A critical piece of the plan is creating your team. This task becomes easier when you know exactly who is available - with the skill sets you need - and what their schedules will be for the duration of the project.