Digital transformation is a foundational change in how an organization delivers value to its customers. Here is what transformation truly entails, along with tips to ensure your company is on the correct course. Source: What is digital transformation? A necessary disruptionRead More →
Success in the digital transformation era starts with providing the best customer experience. CIOs should use AI to redefine how businesses interact with customers. Business entities are focused on improving customer experience as that becomes one of the key differentiators for businesses moving forward. What’s critical for CIOs to understand, though, is that the focus shouldn’t be on slightly improving customer service; it should be on completely rethinking it, and that requires the use of artificial intelligence (AI). Customer service needs a rethink in the digital era Customer service today is largely reactive. An individual calls into a business’s contact center and needs to provideRead More →
As consumers increasingly move online, traditional retailers are struggling. These technologies will help. Despite the fact that the economy is strong and American consumers are shopping in full force, traditional brick-and-mortar retailers across the United States are continuing their nosedives into bankruptcy. This so-called “retail apocalypse” began in 2016 when major retailers began shuttering their brick-and-mortar locations by the thousands. Sears has fewer than a third the number of retail stores it had ten years ago. Walmart just closed 63 Sam’s Club stores. Macy’s closed 68 stores last year and J.C. Penney closed more than 100. Payless filed for bankruptcy, and half of the malls in the U.S. areRead More →
Digital transformation is revolutionizing every industry. Here are the top digital transformation trends for hospitality and tourism. It used to be that we’d visit a brick-and-mortar travel agent every time we needed to plan a family vacation or work trip. (Granted, some of you may not remember that.) But today, thanks to mobility, travelers are playing a much larger role in the experience. They want to find a hotel that matches their style—on their terms—the very moment they need it. And thanks to players like AirBnB, which set the stage for a completely new era of travel, they can. Indeed, when it comes to theRead More →
Digital transformation – Way Forward Let’s break down three misconceptions about digital transformation for CIOs racing to make progress. CIOs, the next time you’re sitting at a conference, look to your left or look to your right. It’s likely that neither one of you has finished your digital transformation. Most likely, neither one of you is even close. One of you may have barely started. It’s the unspoken truth of the “digital transformation” age, based on my conversations with CIOs: Everyone thinks they are horribly behind their peers. Fact is, you read story after story about the companies at the head of the pack – theRead More →
The internet can be a giant laboratory where you hypothesize, validate, change direction and generate revenue, all while you build and evolve your product Research, build, promote, sell, repeat. That has been the norm in business for decades. But today, the internet is scrambling that order. Products are being sold before they are built. Selling and research can be conflated. Customers promote a company’s products, more than the company does. Marketing is built into the very products being promoted. Let’s take a look at some examples in this topsy-turvy, Alice-in-Wonderland world. Sell before you build Kickstarter, the crowdfunding website, helps you find customers for productsRead More →
Digital Business transformation augments the value creation processes of today’s leading organizations. A successful transformation begins by identifying where and how digital technologies, and the resulting data, can be applied to optimize key business processes, uncover new monetization opportunities and create a more compelling customer experience The world is undergoing a digital transformation. For example, there will soon be over a billion smartphones, impacting all aspects of organizations’ value chains, commerce, and customer and supplier engagement processes. This transformation will result in an explosion in digital data (see Figure 1), and more importantly, usable insight. Figure 1: IDC’s Digital Universe Study, April 2014, sponsored byRead More →
Interesting Interview on Digital Transformation: Almost every organisation and every CEO now acknowledges that Digital is no longer an option. It is a competitive differentiator and a way to improve customer engagement. However, there are still some laggards who are slow to adopt digital. In an exclusive interview with Brian Pereira of BW CIO World, Kiran Bhagwanani, CEO, Dimension Data India tells us about the consequences of not moving to digital. Kiran also gave us an insight on how his company is helping customers in their digital transformation journeys. BW: What are the key drivers for Digitisation today? How would you define Digital? Kiran Bhagwanani:Read More →
StubHub When CIO Marty Boos joined StubHub five-plus years ago the ticket retailer’s infrastructure was struggling to handle the sheer volume of a business that processes thousands of ticket transactions daily for concerts and sporting events. Leveraging Linux servers and technology from VMware, Akamai and Oracle, Boos built a private cloud that scales elastically. To better support global transactions in the wake of StubHub’s purchase of Ticketbis, Boos is close to picking a public cloud vendor to process payments locally in 44 countries worldwide. “We’re going to use that to get the transaction closer to the consumer,” Boos says. The private but soon-to-be hybrid cloudRead More →