According to a recent IBM report, leading companies are three times more effective in collecting and leveraging information than the laggards in their markets. Analytics has replaced intuition for business decision-making through what IBM dubs business analytics and optimization (BAO).

The IBM report, titled “Breaking Away with Business Analytics and Optimization,” describes three ways leading companies use data to separate themselves from the pack: 1) disrupting the status quo, 2) anticipating the future, and 3) empowering workers to make decisions based on information.

Top performers, IBM continues, are eight times more likely to pursue information-led transformation at an enterprise level than underperformers. The laggards sit around the conference table, each manager with his/her own spreadsheet, arguing over whose data is right. Where does your company fit in? more

I’m always amazed at how many people, even business folks who should know better, subscribe to the myth that services are not subject to sales and use taxes. If you’ve ever spent any time in Hawaii or South Dakota, where just about everything is taxed, you’d know that it just ain’t so.

True, for most states you’re fairly safe in making the general assumption that goods are taxed and services aren’t. But nationwide the picture is much more complicated than you might think. more

If your life is like mine, you face an overwhelming array of ways to spend your time. Some of these time investment opportunities seem to hold the promise of greater success. The potential value of other opportunities remains more mysterious, such as those emails from people who sound familiar but you just can’t quite remember why.

Still other “time consumers” seem more necessary because we feel expected to perform them – reading the morning papers and fresh content on our favorite Web sites, for example. After all, don’t our bosses, clients, and colleagues expect us to keep current on our rapidly changing world?

But how necessary – and how valuable – are these time-investment opportunities, really? more

After New York’s Supreme Court ruled last year that online retailers are required to collect sales tax on orders they receive through affiliate Web sites based in the state, it was always pretty much a certainty that other states would pile on with their own versions of the “Amazon tax” (see my blog here). But I have to admit I’ve been a bit taken aback by how fast that’s happening this year. No fewer than five states — Virginia, New Mexico, Mississippi, Vermont, and Colorado — have jumped on the bandwagon in the past few weeks. more

Nice to see the Wall Street Journal headlining some good news this morning — “Tech Spending Bounces Back as Profits Rise” — and let’s all cheer some impressive earnings reports from Cisco et al. IT spending, which was in the pits much of last year and 2008, has been staging a modest comeback. A December study from Gartner projects total IT spend in the U.S. (for both products and services) at around $960 billion for 2010, up from $930 billion in ‘09.

What I’m wondering is how much, if any, of that money will be heading corporate tax’s way. more