Is your approach simply focused on reducing costs or have you adopted the best practice from top performers?

The real win when your company decides to outsource IT and Communications services may have nothing to do with cost cutting and everything to do with velocity.

Small to mid-sized organizations are much more likely to benefit from increasing their speed to market and ability to ramp up capacity to meet demand when they outsource Information and Communications Technology (ICT) according to feedback from more than 500 senior technology executives recently surveyed by our colleagues at the Economist Intelligence Unit for its report Technology and growth at mid-sized companies.

You can download the report from the Resource Center to learn how outsourcing can save you headaches in tight labour markets (such as the US) and outperform your peers at the same time.

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Change Management Problem Introducing User Toolkits for Innovation
from PDMA Blog by Michael Osofsky

Von Hippel and Thomke proposed “user toolkits for innovation” to address the age-old problem of communication breakdowns between engineering teams and product users that result in users not getting what they want. User toolkits are a way for engineering teams to expose enough control over their product for users to be able to customize or configure the product to address their specific need. Examples include a food flavorings company that provides buyers with a toolkit to create their own flavorings, a product category where it is difficult to create products because it is hard for buyers to describe in English the type of flavoring they want. User toolkits are an approach to innovation because they put the solution-building task into the hands of the person who has the problem. Toolkits are another way of applying the maxim that necessity is the mother of invention.

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Who “Owns” A Web Service
from A VC by Fred

You cannot build a successful sustainable business in today’s society and economy unless you treat your customers as owners. You do not need to give them shares in the business. Those go to the people who stay up all night trying to move from joyent to verio and people like me who risk capital in the hope that they can get it right.

But users are stakeholders in your business. More than stakeholders, in this world of peer production, personal expression, viral distribution, etc, the users are contributing significant value to your business. They must be respected and treated with a lot of value back.