There are many interpretations of Salesforce's elevation of Keith Block to serve as co-CEO with Marc Benioff. Block has been the company's vice chairman and president for several years, and the elevation could be a recognition of the obvious -- he's been doing the job without the title for a while. However, Salesforce and Benioff are well known for getting added mileage from any move they make.

"Everybody's using technologies like artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, marketing automation tools, search engine marketing and lead analytics tools," said Michelle Cirocco, head of global marketing for Televerde. "We're using all these tools and technologies to identify who we should communicate with, and we use them to set the stage for our marketing and demand-generation efforts."

For pretty much my entire career, CEOs have been almost invulnerable. Even when Apple founder Steve Jobs tried to get then-CEO John Scully fired from Apple, he lost and got fired himself. I've watched CEOs at companies with zero-tolerance employee dating policies have affairs with subordinates and get a pass. Things have changed. Almost every week, another CEO bites the dust for misbehavior.

Tech companies have been going through a lot of CEOs of late. HP had a revolving door for CEOs with mistake after mistake. Yahoo's board kept making choices that made things worse, Uber's CEO almost took the company under, and CEOs fired for ethical lapses jumped a whopping 36 percent. When an employee misbehaves and has to be fired, it generally is at least partially the fault of management.

To say we live in troubled times would be an understatement. It often feels like the politicians and executives who surround us are interested only in who can tell the biggest whopper while lining their own pockets and leaving their constituents and customers to pay the bills. I recently read that the real reason Jon Stewart stepped down from The Daily Show was that he was incredibly angry all the time.

"Human capital management is the idea that your humans are your capital, and so you should be investing in them and managing them, making sure that you're giving your talent opportunities to grow, and that they have purpose in their work," said HighGround CEO Andee Harris. "Human resources is more about HR benefits and core HR systems," she noted, while HCM "is more about people systems."

The American Technology Council, which President Donald Trump established this spring by executive order, has four years to rebuild the federal government's information technology structure. A massive reboot of both hardware and software will be necessary to bring government computers up to modern standards. The effort will force many government agencies to shift years of floppy disk and other outdated storage technologies to the cloud.

Analytics is "about having a sense of curiosity -- the ability to look at data and say, 'what is it telling me?'" said Olivia Duane Adams, chief customer officer at Alteryx. "I define analytics as 'the ability to ingest any and all relevant sources of data that might help answer a question being asked.' Analytics is the ability to use all the data you have to answer a question."

President Donald Trump aims to save taxpayers $1 trillion over the next 10 years with a little help from America's high-tech industry. "Our goal is to lead a sweeping transformation of the federal government's technology that will deliver dramatically better services for citizens," the president said Monday at a roundtable session of the American Technology Council.

Reacting to the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, several high-tech industry leaders have pledged renewed environmental efforts. "Disappointed with today's decision. Google will keep working hard for a cleaner, more prosperous future for all," tweeted CEO Sundar Pichai. "We will double our efforts to fight climate change," tweeted Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party's presumptive presidential candidate, this week unveiled a technology and innovation agenda that calls for a broader commitment to improving computer science and STEM education, expansion of broadband Internet to the entire United States, and deployment of 5G wireless networks. Clinton's plan calls for advancing high-tech training in American schools.

Google has been working on an incubator that would let employees pitch business plans and work full time on approved projects while remaining on its payroll, according to news reports published this week. The incubator, to be called "Area 120," will be led by Don Harrison, VP of corporate development, and Bradley Horowitz, VP of streams, photos and sharing.

Following Apple's latest announcements, I noticed a number of reports on how disappointed customers were that there was nothing they wanted to wait in line for hours to buy. I personally thought they should have been excited about that, because I hate to stand in lines. I've never really figured out an Apple fanatic's penchant for pain. Still, it is very clear that today's Apple is very different.

The Association of Computing Machinery on Tuesday named Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman recipients of the 2015 ACM A.M. Turing Award for their contributions to modern cryptography. Their invention of public key cryptography and digital signatures revolutionized computer security, the organization said. The award includes a $1 million prize, with financial support provided by Google.

The Chicago Board of Education on Wednesday voted unanimously to make computer science a graduation requirement for all high school students beginning with next year's freshmen. Chicago Public Schools has become a national leader in computer science education since Mayor Rahm Emanuel launched the Computer Science for All initiative for grades K-12 in 2013, the board said.

IT pros -- the gatekeepers of company security policies -- are willing to bend the rules to get things done, according to Absolute Software, based on survey findings it released last week. Forty-five percent of IT pros confessed they knowingly worked around their own security policies, according to the survey. Moreover, 33 percent admitted to hacking their own or another organization's systems.

All but one of Apple's top team received a pay raise in 2015, according to a proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission this week. While Angela Ahrendts, Apple's senior vice president for retail and online stores, didn't get a raise, she's still pulling down the highest executive compensation at the company at $25.8 million. Her compensation in 2014 was $73.4 million.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's 2016 resolution to challenge himself outside his work is to build a simple artificial intelligence assistant to run his home and help him do a better job juggling his business responsibilities. "You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in 'Iron Man,'" he suggested. Zuckerberg first will explore the available technology, then train it to understand his voice to control everything in his home.

Apple on Thursday announced some personnel moves that suggest CEO Tim Cook's future vision for the company. He named Jeff Williams chief operating officer, elevated Johny Srouji to senior vice president, broadened the powers of Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller, and added Tor Myhren as vice president of marketing communications.

The 18th annual PwC CEO survey of 1,322 corporate leaders in 77 countries, conducted between September and December 2014, found an overwhelming proportion are embarking on digital transformation initiatives to respond to escalating customer demands and intensifying competitive pressures. However, many are taking different paths to achieve their corporate objectives.

Federal agencies need to change course in handling IT spending quickly, particularly in reversing the inertia behind longstanding conflicts between CIOs and CFOs over the procurement of IT resources, according to IDC Government Insights Research Director Shawn McCarthy. Government IT managers need to focus on the advantages of newer technologies, suggested Gartner Research Director Rick Howard.

The dynamic world of information technology calls for a future-oriented approach to IT management. However, government agencies too often may be looking backward rather than forward with respect to how they operate IT systems, especially when it comes to investing huge sums of taxpayer money into those resources. Two recent assessments of government IT make the point.

The surround strategy for legacy ERP is real. It's been going on for several years, and if I was a legacy ERP vendor I would be concerned. The strategy refers to the idea of leaving legacy ERP in place while implementing cloud ERP to handle specialized parts of a business, like a region with currency conversion issues, subscriptions, or something like that.

It takes prodigious amounts of cash to launch a company these days and that's especially true when trying to insert a new idea like cloud ERP into the collective consciousness. FinancialForce today announced a financing round of $110 million from lead investor Technology Crossover Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures, which is Salesforce's corporate investment group.

Docker -- the open source application container technology that has drawn broad interest from the enterprise IT industry -- recently marked its second birthday. Judging by its growth and traction thus far, and the example set by such open source projects as Linux, Hadoop, Android, OpenStack and Cloud Foundry, expect big things from this young open source software project and community.

18F, a development unit within the General Services Administration, was established a year ago to tap into the success of the United Kingdom's Government Digital Services unit by pursuing a similar strategy. The unit is tasked with getting developers from Silicon Valley and the ranks of civic developers all over the country to change how federal technology gets done.

Cloud-based alternatives to traditional hardware and software systems and enterprise applications are experiencing a new level of CxO acceptance. Chief Financial Officers are the latest members of the C-level suite to embrace SaaS, PaaS and IaaS solutions to not only reduce operating costs, but also improve their operating effectiveness so they can better achieve their corporate objectives.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has announced he is gay. Typically, when a CEO's personal life becomes a major issue, it is a bad thing. I do think this will have an adverse impact on Apple's sales, but I also think it will have a beneficial impact on the world. I'll share my thoughts about why a CEO doing something both controversial and potentially heroic is a good thing.

Andy Rubin, the creator of Google's ubiquitous Android mobile platform, has left Google, the company confirmed on Friday. "I want to wish Andy all the best with what's next," said Google CEO Larry Page. "With Android he created something truly remarkable -- with a billion plus happy users. Thank you." Rubin reportedly is departing to start a tech incubator for hardware-focused startups.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has come under fire for comments he made on Thursday suggesting that women should trust in karma rather than ask for pay raises. "It's not really about asking for the raise but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along," Nadella told a mostly female audience at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.