How to build a data science team; on-boarding in the cloud; using big data to improve executive communication skills.

Rather than waiting for impressions about a company to be driven by others in social media, CEOs of large companies can help shape the conversation by becoming active on Twitter. Journalists often check a CEO’s Twitter account before covering the CEO or the company, and certain types of business-related CEO tweets — including tweets about new management initiatives; strategy and performance; and new products and services — have even correlated with positive movement of company stock prices.

Thanks to social media and an increasing flood of data, the capacity to generate causes and controversies almost instantly has become the new norm in today’s “super-transparent society.” Individuals and organizations produce a voluminous, mostly involuntary, “digital exhaust,” which reveals much more about them than they think it does. Most business leaders have not yet come to grips with the new reality — and what it means for their organizations.

As the first Chief Digital Officer for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sree Sreenivasan leads the charge in managing the museum’s digital content — which means storytelling for a global audience. “My job is to tell a million-plus stories about a million-plus pieces of art to a billion-plus people,” he says. In a Q&A, Sreenivasan discusses the global vision for the Met App (for the museum’s 32 million annual onsite visitors), the museum’s use of social media, and its media lab about the future of museums.

How can geographically distributed companies monitor large clients’ attitudes about their services? Traditional customer satisfaction surveys can lack sufficient timeliness and detail. But taking a big data approach to analyzing collaborations lets companies gain valuable and timely insights into client satisfaction. Examining the structural properties of email communication patterns and correlating them with external performance metrics can offer managers helpful insights.

While change and innovation clearly produce much of the turbulence that besets modern businesses, research suggests that change itself is not the culprit, but rather how organizations perceive and cope with change. Both people and organizations rely on analogies to help them comprehend change, including the meaning and potential of new technologies, systems and processes. But do all analogies function in the same way? How strongly should organizations adhere to their chosen analogies?

Allowing yourself to be interrupted all the time reduces your effectiveness as much as an all-nighter, says Boston University’s Marshall Van Alstyne. The solution is to batch your time on task and step away from the social media.

The capabilities of computers are now improving so quickly that concepts can move from the realm of science fiction into everyday life in just a few years, rather than a lifetime. Rapid advances in information technology — computer hardware, software and networks — are yielding applications that can do anything from answering game show questions to driving cars. But to gain true leverage from these ever-improving technologies, companies need new processes and business models.

Author Christopher Johnson’s new book Microstyle: The Art of Writing Little highlights the best ways to get messages noticed, remembered, and passed along. “Brevity is just a minimal requirement,” he says.

When an activity turns into a buzzword, the odds are high that managers will stop thinking consciously about the behavior they‘re trying to elicit and the best way to set expectations clearly. When it comes to the messy, human realities of management, a dose of straight talk — and clear thinking — can go a long way.

Paying attention to personal relationships accelerates learning and increases the effectiveness of alliances.

Falling communication costs are enabling companies to decentralize their decision-making structures. Now they must seek a balance between empowerment and control.

In an overview of the future role of the IT organization, the authors examine the business and technological changes that are effecting change in many IT units. They cite eight imperatives in which IT organizations must excel in order to succeed. Additionally, they examine the evolving key of IT managers: ensuring that all line managers understand the potential of IT and how it can be used to implement business strategies effectively.

As the corporate sponsorship of sports events has grown, so too has the practice of ambush marketing. Is the practice legal and ethical? How can a legitimate sponsor counteract the effects of an ambusher?

Executives, engineers, and operators often don’t understand each other very well. A lack of alignment among the three groups can hinder learning in an organization.