For the midmarket, integrated CRM solution improves business productivity at a low total cost of ownership.

Building and maintaining strong, solid relationships with customers is essential to the success of any business. According to Adam Sarner, an analyst with Gartner who focuses on the customer relationship management (CRM) industry, obtaining a new customer is 10 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.

It's no secret that automating and integrating processes and procedures previously confined to paper and incompatible, disparate applications is proving to be a  cornerstone for effectively managing customer relationships.

Until recently though, affordable technology designed specifically to meet the customer CRM needs of midmarket businesses, was not available to these organisations. That's all changed - and for the better.

When it comes to customers, sales and service are fundamental to an organisation's success. If salespeople can't manage leads and opportunities, sales will doubtlessly be lost. And the service they do deliver is likely to be inconsistent.

No matter how you look at it, our future will be built on a skilled workforce.

At a time when employers are finding it increasingly difficult to source the skills they need to get the economy moving, it is becoming increasingly clear that we need to invest in the dramatic upskilling of our workforce to defend ourselves against, and benefit from, the emerging economic giants to our north.

We have the advantage of being first movers, we already have the tertiary eduction structures in place, but our neighbours are investing massively in improving their education market, and we should be looking at moving further up the value chain to retain competitive advantage.

What is very important is that the prosperity we are enjoying now was built on the educational achievements of our predecessors. For the economy to prosper we need to ensure that those who are going into the workforce have first had access to excellent schooling, so they are ready to take on the challenges and learn throughout their lives.

We need to shift our organisational paradigm to measure our peers and ourselves based on results, not hours spent in the office.

We have to stop deluding ourselves. We have to let go of this baseless notion that the current skills shortage is somehow cyclical, and that someday soon we'll wake up to an economy where sourcing skilled staff is again a challenge but not an impossibility.

The problem is now critical. For the third year running a survey of our membership at the Association of Consulting Engineers Australia indicated that up to two thirds of projects are having to be delayed or put off indefinitely due to insufficient personnel to do the job.

The globally integrated economy requires fresh thinking and innovative approaches to managing change. 

In today's globally integrated economy, CEOs are bombarded by change -- can they handle it? According to IBM's 2008 Global CEO Study of 1,130 CEOs, which was conducted face-to-face in 40 countries, CEOs are battling to keep up with the pace of change.

CEOs reported a surprising level of optimism about change as an opportunity to build new competitive advantage. In fact, 83 percent of surveyed CEOs expect substantial change in the future, an increase of 28 percent in just two years.

Yet, while CEOs see change ahead, their ability to effectively manage change is increasing at a far slower pace. CEOs rate their ability to manage change 22 percentage points lower than their expected need for it, a ‘change gap' that has nearly tripled since 2006. The study reveals that CEOs were specific about where the most important change will occur - within their own customer base as two classes of customers emerged: the ‘information omnivore' and the ‘socially-minded' customer.