Statistically Speaking

In a recent study IDC projects a 6.9 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2008 in business and IT services, a faster clip than overall global GDP. Performance in the United States is expected to be just shy of the global average, at 6.7 percent. The Asia/Pacific market, excluding Japan, shows the most promise, at just less than 13 percent growth. Leading the pack of promising growth areas were service-delivered software, with more than 24 percent CAGR, IT infrastructure at 14.1 percent, and key functional business outsourcing at 10.7 percent. The study considered performance and projections from top providers of IT outsourcing, as well as business processes in customer care, human resources, finance/accounting, and procurement.

Companies are doing a poor job of handling email response to the Hispanic market, according to Don DePalma, president of Common Sense Advisory. Only four of the top Internet retailers even offer content in Spanish, according to a recent survey conducted by the market research firm. According to DePalma, Hispanic residents represent 13 percent of the U.S. population and they also represent the fifth-largest group of Spanish speakers in the world. In the study Common Sense Advisory sent out four separate email messages to each of the 50 top Internet retailers in English and Spanish. They used 17 different servers to conceal that all the questions were coming from the same place. Thirty percent of the companies didn't respond to queries at all, even if they were sent in English.

About one third of the more than 150 business executives in 21 industries that Aberdeen Group and CRM magazine surveyed for the report, "Price Optimization in the Sell-Side Channel," were not willing to invest in channel pricing management at all, and more than half of the respondents said they would devote less than $100,000 to it. Currently, only 22 percent have a channel pricing-management system in place. Among those companies deploying channel price management, more than three quarters used a system developed internally or as a custom programming project, but about 75 percent of those who responded also said that they would rather obtain such capabilities either as packaged enterprise software or as an on-demand service.

57 percent of respondents to a survey conducted on behalf of Teradata said that the amount of data they were handling was doubling or tripling every year, a percentage that has remained consistent over the three years the survey has been conducted, but 83 percent of respondents complained that they had to turn to at least three separate sources of information before they could make a key business decision. Of those executives, one fourth said they regularly consult at least six data sources.

According to a Capgemini survey, managed care organizations are expanding their Web self-service options. Sixty percent of sites allow members to alter information, up from last year's 39 percent. Fifty-three percent allow members to complete a health risk assessment, compared to 30 percent for last year. Forty-seven percent of sites offer options online to change physicians, which is a 15 percentage-point boost from last year. Forty-two percent of sites have an offer to complete an enrollment application, a rise from last year's 28 percent.

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