Not long ago, businesses typically directed high-end notebooks and mobile devices toward the C-suite, whether those executive users needed high-performance machines or not. Devices were a bit like wristwatches, valued for their ability to show off status nearly as much their ability to perform a task. Today, most organizations are becoming more strategic about device…

Recently, a Girl Scout asked me if I wanted to buy some cookies. I’m a sucker for Thin Mints, but I told the young fundraiser that I didn’t have any cash. No problem, she told me. She was accepting payments via a mobile app on her tablet. The point here isn’t that I bought a…

Recently, I worked with leaders in a Texas school district who were making a conscious attempt to support modern pedagogical practices. They wanted to give teachers the freedom to change up room layouts to better enable collaboration, but teachers also needed students to sit in rows during portions of their classes. Changing the furniture around…

When I talk to retail executives about making investments in digital transformation initiatives, they often ask me what impact the changes will have on the customer experience. It’s understandable that retailers want to prioritize the customer when considering IT investments. However, retailers should reframe that question. With stiff competition from online retailers, and with other…

For retail companies, the point-of-sale (POS) system is the heart of every transaction, so choosing the right POS solution to suit your needs is an important decision. Whether you’re selecting a point-of-sale system for the first time, or upgrading your old POS to a new system, there are many factors to consider. One of these…

In business, we often ask how we can be more valuable to our customers. But, according to Michael Schrage, research fellow at the MIT Center for Digital Business, there’s another question that we don’t ask often enough: How can we make our customers more valuable to us. At CDW’s Improving Productivity with Digital Transformation Summit…