Johannesburg, 23 Apr 2014
A new era is upon us, as evidenced by a few transformational shifts.
Look at social networks, for example.
We see them everywhere. They better connect us to friends, family, colleagues and, increasingly, customers, partners and employees. The technology behind these networks is fundamentally changing engagement in the world today.
And the pace is increasing - staggeringly, 2.7 billion people are online, and a quarter of all people in the world today are on social networks. And an ever increasing number of them are accessing those networks through mobile devices, allowing them to be always connected, everywhere. (source: emarketer, Worldwide Social Network Users: 2013 Forecast and Comparative Estimates, June 2013)
Then there's cloud computing - which is speeding growth and innovation, with rapid deployment of new services and bottomless infrastructure. It's matured well beyond buzz-term status - 62% of workloads will be on a cloud infrastructure by 2016 (source: Morgan Stanley Cloud perspective: http://www.morganstanley.com/views/perspectives/cloud_computing.pdf
Of course, all this generates enormous amounts of data - 2.5 billion gigabytes of data, every single day. Inside this data lies insight on every facet of the business. (ibm.com/software/data/bigdata).
Because of these shifts, we live in a moment of enormous possibility and transformation. We no longer have the luxury of standing still. Today, competitive advantage is being created in fundamentally different ways. Business models are evolving in real time as businesses rethink processes from a people-centric, mobile-centric, market-in perspective.
And data is emerging as the new natural resource, one that allows decision making to be based on insight, not just hypotheses about what will happen.
Overall, enterprises are reinventing themselves digitally, and software is at the heart of this transformation.
In this new era, businesses are employing three methods of new value creation:
* First, leverage data as the new basis of competitive advantage. Accelerate growth by applying sophisticated, real-time analytics and, increasingly, cognitive capabilities.
* Second, leverage cloud as a growth engine for business. Drive faster innovation with lower cost and risk while integrating with your existing capabilities.
* Third, drive people-centric engagement for new profit channels, using social and mobile technologies, underscored by security. Engage all constituencies as individuals, while retaining their trust.
Individually, each of these has immense potential, but integrated, they change everything:
Sophisticated analytics yield real-time insights to, for example, better understand customers and employees as individuals.
Cloud helps to both accelerate this analysis and immediately react to it with innovative new services.
And the right systems of engagement utilize the insights and cloud services to deliver personalized, exceptional user experiences. These interactions then feed back into the analytics.
Of course, as these create massive opportunity, they also greatly expand the boundaries of business and require more intelligent approaches to protect data, ensure privacy, and guard against security threats.
As you might imagine, this opportunity impacts all areas of the business.
For finance, it means more effectively measuring and monitoring business performance, driving enterprise cost reduction, managing and mitigating risk, integrating financial information across the enterprise, and gaining predictive insights to meaningfully contribute to enterprise strategy.
For marketing, it means engaging customers as individuals and providing them with an exceptional and consistent experience, end-to-end, from first contact to post-purchase service, across all channels and all touch-points.
For the workforce , it means attracting, empowering, motivating, assessing, and rewarding talented employees - whether they're office-based or remote.
For operations, it means greater integration and visibility across the value chain; the ability to improve flexibility, anticipate disruptions and optimise for greater efficiency and satisfied customers.
For product and service innovation, it means new ways to provide exceptional value.