Companies have invested heavily in information technology known as Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) systems, which generate everything from basic budget and financial statements to complex forecasts of how to best meet consumer demand. But too few firms are using the systems to their full potential, according to Professor Robert St. Louis and doctoral student Jeremy Glassman.

There’s a cloudy forecast ahead for corporate IT shops, and it’s getting cloudier fast. Analysts at Gartner predict that Infrastructure-as-a-Service, or cloud-based computing, will reach a compound annual growth rate of 41 percent through 2016. As enterprises adopt cloud computing models, they’ll need to make other changes, too, say researchers at the W. P. Carey School of Business.

In a recent debate with Twitter investor Mark Andreessen of Netscape fame, Paypal founder Peter Thiel observed that the millennial generation grew up watching flying cars on their Saturday morning TV shows. But today, all we have for evidence of innovation is Twitter, he argued. Then he went on to poke fun at that 140 character limit. Have the graduates of 2013 been shortchanged? Are they victims of an educational system that stifled innovation? Do they miss the flying cars?

Among the many differences between college and career is the simple matter of neatness. In class the questions and answers are usually straight forward, but on the job it’s a different situation. Things can get messy, and that’s one of the big lessons students learn during the capstone project, a requirement of Computer Information Systems majors.