Tata Consultancy Services recently conducted a major study to understand how large organizations in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America have been revamping their strategies, products and processes to win the loyalty of consumers who use mobile devices to do business with them– the so-called “Digital Mobile Consumer”. The Study focused on how companies are coping with this mobile consumer. Some key findings are summarized here.
Inside the Next Transition
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Big Data and the Emerging Era of Engagement
I often tell the IBM Watson story as a way of describing the future of analytics. Watson – with a large quantity of Big Data behind it – beat the two biggest Jeopardy winners of all time. Although that became the story, the bigger story for me was the business application of what I had just witnessed. Watson showed us how analytics will mature from descriptive to prescriptive. Most companies I talk to are still in the descriptive stage – reporting on that which has happened.
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The CIO and the Future of Enterprise IT
The Big Four areas of innovation (Social, Cloud, Mobile, and Big Data) have generated much discussion about their transformative and disruptive nature. As I’ve described in a recent post, the future enterprise is a Digital Enterprise. In the last two months, I’ve been involved in several forums where the discussion centered on the future of Enterprise IT, and more specifically, the changing role of the CIO. While there are no clear answers, there are a lot of opinions and much speculation.
I’ve been on the side of this argument that believes significant change is coming to Enterprise IT – and for that matter – current organization structures. The big four have created an environment that can’t flourish in traditional command and control models. In a recent IBM CEO Study, CEOs emphasized the need for openness and collaboration. Openness has clear benefits, as empowered employees drive better results by generating ideas, bringing creativity to the innovation process, and delighting customers. But as the study points out, openness comes with risk. The open culture required for success will drive companies to align employee and company values in a way that encourages value-driven decision making – not control-driven. What this translates to in terms of organization design is anyone’s guess – but organizational change is coming to the Digital Enterprise.
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The Digital Enterprise and New Ways of Thinking
This recent Article titled “Sayonara Sony” by Adam Hartung provides a great example of the dangers of not evolving as a business. I can’t help but think that this story will play out countless times over the next three to five years. In Sony’s case, it is a stubborn reliance on industrial age thinking that has driven their downward spiral. Those companies that won’t abandon their specific reliance on legacy practices will suffer the same fate. We’ve moved on from the industrial age. We are in the midst of an information age that requires completely new ways of thinking. Sustained innovation is the new mantra, and the emerging digital enterprise will not function on long standing management theory. Leaders need to realize this and adapt – or suffer the consequences. They need to embrace the characteristics of the new digital enterprise:
- Sustained innovation
- Engagement and insight-driven
- Mobile first
- Context-aware
- Business Technology NOT Information Technology
- Relationship-based
- Flexibility in operating & business models
- Experiential versus transactional
- Prescriptive
The best leaders can adapt – but we’ve never seen a time quite like this before. There is so much unchartered territory and things are changing very fast. Therefore, leaders need to be flexible, they need to be students of the disruptive forces that are driving change, and they need to be open to new ways of doing things. In short, they need to disrupt, before being disrupted. If not – it’s “Sayonara fill-in-the-blank”.
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Is Data and Insight a New Source of Revenue?
In this world of Big Data and advanced analytics, many companies are starting to wonder about the revenue potential of their data. An opportunity to create new revenue streams is an attractive scenario – if data assets can become information products. Although not new, the number of companies that pursue information related products could grow considerably. Most companies upon inward reflection will find that the analytic core competence required to deliver insight – the higher end of the monetization scale – does not exist internally.
This introduces some interesting scenarios that underscore the market need for analytic outsourcing and the establishment of analytic centers of excellence. The evaluation process for this opportunity involves a market analysis that identifies the value-added information products for the target market. Understanding the business outcomes enabled by insight is a critical step in determining which products make sense. In addition, the data required to enable these products must be clearly understood, available, and clean enough to deliver the required insight. The process is then enabled by the appropriate analytic methods, taking advantage of advances in computing power and in-memory capabilities. The ability to include insight from unstructured data through the use of text mining expands the opportunity for value creation.
I envision a number of relationships emerging between technology companies and value chain players. These relationships enable new, more insightful information products by combining traditional data related skills with deep analytic and domain expertise. Companies will look to supplement existing offerings with analytic oriented products and services, or pursue new innovative offerings altogether. Insight as a driver of business and decision processes will be enabled in the future by internal movement towards analytic excellence, the use of external information products and services, or some combination of both. This is a natural response to the “Big Data” phenomena and the need to improve the speed and quality of decision making. It introduces a new era of information brokers that deliver new innovative products and services enabled by business analytics.
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A New Kind of Intelligence
The explosion of data and content is not limited to social media and represents a top of mind issue for many companies. The opportunity exists to create unprecedented business value – but there are significant hurdles like greater risk exposure, more complicated risk management, and difficulty extracting relevant insight from large volumes of data.
As volume grows, automation is critical. For example, social media monitoring is a common practice today, one that becomes increasingly ineffective and costly as the social web expands. Monitoring tools that enable the analysis of dialog on social networks like LinkedIn, FaceBook and Twitter provide a basic level of insight. But a deeper level of insight still requires a manual process, where irrelevant content is filtered before finding meaningful insight. Information management is therefore a growing challenge.
Inside the Next Transition 