The Window 10 technical preview continues to chug along, and while we don't have an official release date for the finished software, it's widely assumed that it will appear before the end of 2015. What milestones can we expect along the way, how can businesses begin planning to make the shift, and what traps should they avoid?

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software has all the sex appeal of an infected toenail, and is considerably more difficult to manage. Cloud technology is improving ERP, but it's a very slow process. Here are five questions to ask to help speed the transformation.

Gamification -- using game-like techniques to offer rewards for achievement -- is an increasingly popular technique to help engage employees and encourage them to use apps. While you can use it to help achieve business goals, you can't make those goals the actual point of the game-like experience.

We constantly hear about the importance of data to effectively running businesses, and there's no shortage of sources we can draw on. But actually doing that? It's still much rarer than it should be.

Picking the best areas to develop IT skills for future career security is always difficult, but two themes do keep popping up at Gartner's Symposium/ITxpo event this week: analytics and procurement.

If you're building a new business application, the obvious temptation is to ask the prospective end users what they need it to do and how they want it to work. But that approach, no matter how well-meaning, is built on a very shaky premise: that those users have any idea what they actually require.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune is probably working in IT. Staff remain the single biggest expense for IT departments -- but that won't necessarily be the case in the very near future.

In a world where a single provider can rarely handle every possible IT challenge, hybrid cloud is the inevitable outcome. If you work in IT, that means that skills in juggling multiple vendors are likely to be more important than technology platform knowledge.

New digital platforms present a threat to conventional banks -- but there are several factors that mean they aren't going anywhere in a hurry. Here's why the future of banking looks more like the past than you might think.