The rise of the social web provides an abundance of opportunities to reach and engage with potential customers, but these added touch points muddy the waters when it comes to effectively tracking and monitoring your company's interactions with individual prospects.
Today's supply chains form the arteries and veins that keep global trade alive, connecting a largely borderless, always-on world economy. New innovations offer disruptive possibilities for the future of global trade. It's easy to hypothesize that Star Trek-style teleportation, drones, 3-D printing, and space logistics, will change trading. But the biggest shift to the supply chain will see it digitally connected and becoming part of the Internet of Things.
Technological advances have driven dramatic increases in industrial productivity since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The steam engine powered factories in the 19th Century, electrification led to mass production in the early part of the 20th Century, and industry became automated in the 1970s. In the decades that followed, however, industrial technological advancements were only incremental, especially compared with the breakthroughs that transformed IT, mobile communications, and e-commerce.
IBM says it will invest $3bn over the next four years to establish a new Internet of Things (IoT) unit, and that it is building a cloud-based open platform designed to help clients and ecosystem partners build IoT systems.
There is no doubt that big data has become a growth market, and is becoming one of the few on-premises projects seeing increased spending, as companies move less data-sensitive functions to the cloud. But where's the needed talent?
The latest data and analytics buzz comes from the field of advanced HR analytics, where the application of new techniques and new thinking to talent management is becoming more mainstream.
When the term "cloud" came into popularity about a decade ago, it was so vague, encompassing so many different types of services. We prefer somewhat more precise terms, such as Software-as-a-Service. However, the term cloud took on a life of its own and everyone and their brother wanted to be known as a cloud solution provider (thus stretching the definition even further).
Analyst Insight: Supply chain management ... the words are a freely exchanged contemporary coin of the realm. Yet reality has fallen short of promise because of anachronistic functional silos, presided over by vice presidents who fiercely defend their worn-out turf with an endless stream of misguided initiatives. Sales and operations planning (S&OP) was designed to bash these barriers, but it, too, has fallen short because of overmatched implementation technology. Fortunately, there is a readily available solution. – Jeff Karrenbauer, president & co-founder, INSIGHT Inc.
Analyst Insight: Radically changing market conditions in the global pharmaceuticals industry are creating volatility in supply and demand, as well as affecting customer service levels and costs. Pharma companies are also faced with impending margin pressure from generics. In this environment, pharma executives are looking to improve efficiencies, understand emerging market customers and be better prepared to meet financial objectives. Supply chain analytics provides pharma supply chain executives with powerful tools to maintain a competitive edge. – Jay Welsh, Principal, and Srihari Rangarajan, Manager, Ernst & Young LLP