Is Internet of Things (IoT) for your business? How to use it?

A new buzzword has exploded in the last 2 years: IoT. Behind this acronym, everybody recognises know the very wide family of connected devices, from portable ones like watches, sensors of any kind included in many industry products, to vehicle/shipping tracking systems. The object of all these devices is to deliver continuous data to their owner to facilitate gathering of information via GSM on a certain topic like body health status, fields hydrometry, or GPS localisation. With the massive decrease of cost of these small sensors, their usage has recently increased massively and opportunities to use them are developed every day.

Among them, there are for sure few business applications that could be of use for any company in the world. But once identifying the right idea, how to put it in place? And what are the pitfalls?

Gartner: Canadian CIOs priorise cybersecurity although aware of Digital Transformation urgency

Digital Transformation remains the main development driver for the coming years, no question on it. Still, after few years already investing on it and being aware that they are only at the beginning of the journey, some CIOs may face conflicts between their day-to-day issues and their transformation dream.

That is somehow what Gartner has found out by interviewing 117 CIOs in Canada.

To speed-up your Digital Strategy, get even closer to business and automate as much as you can!

I already shared my view on the importance to get IT as close as possible to Business, considering that Digital Transformation is first a change on the approach of Business, before considering the technical side of the story.

I have recently found this article from the CTO of Worksoft, Shoeb Javed, where he is listing 5 ways to accelerate a Digital Business Strategy:

• Understand critical business processes
• Automate early and often
• Blur the boundaries between business and IT
• Use Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to analyze & optimize
• Create a Center of Excellence (COE)

Why is employee engagement is foundational to customer engagement?

Digital Business

Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is foundational to customer engagement. It is highly unlikely that an employee who hates their job or who is disengaged from what they do will create a great customer experience.

Employee engagement, by any number of studies and research reports, leads to higher levels of business results. Most notable is Gallup’s work in this area evidenced by Gallup’s own Q12 engagement survey. Gallup scientists spent decades writing and testing hundreds of questions, because their wording and order mean everything when it comes to accurately measuring engagement. Their research yielded Gallup’s Q12 survey: the 12 questions that measure the most important elements of employee engagement. Gallup has studied survey results from more than 25 million employees around the world.

• The lost suitcase and a grumpy old man’ – a story about employee engagement – Blog post by Ian Golding  – Customer centric organizations tend to have a…

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Implementing an Internal Social Media Platform is not (only) a technical issue

source: 7Summit

I was recently writing about the value of implementing a collaborative platform within a company to support its’ digital transformation. This has been confirmed recently by Real Story Group.

Now, I may imagine that you are convinced of the need of such a platform and understand the real difference between such an interactive solution and the usual web portals all our Intranet are full of.

Then comes the main question:

“How to make this happening?
How will I put in place such new platform?”

Let be clear from start, the main question won’t be to select the right technology, but to define a real strategy. As many other topics in Digital Transformation, putting in place an Enterprise Social Media is a real cultural change where technology is actually a very small thing. To get convinced on this, have a look on this marvellous book from Jacob Morgan: “The Collaborative Organization: A Strategic Guide to Solving Your Internal Business Challenges Using Emerging Social and Collaborative Tools“.

Why is marketing integration critical to the digital experience at the contact center?

Digital Business

We know we have silos. We know they are not useful. As leaders, we must insist the customer service (the contact center) and marketing align their functions.

As call center agents are on the front lines and make their living speaking to customers and prospects, they know first-hand which words and phrases resonate. Efficiency of interactions is critical for agents, and as such they are keenly aware of what works and what does not when trying to explain products and services over the phone. It is an art form, and experienced agents are masters at their crafts. We all know this.

So how do you integrate this talent within the corporate marketing functions? Start small, but think big. 

Begin with a complicated message and then help marketing simplify. Reps are uniquely qualified to breakdown complex concepts and deliver it in such a way that it is easily digestible. They know…

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When collaboration helps Healthcare: The project Epidemium from Roche & Paillasse

I was writing about the power of collaboration few days ago, giving my views on the value of increasing internal network usage within a company. This is of course valid as well “outside” the company walls as I already mentioned through the NASA “Solve” example.

So when I learnt Today that Roche France was launching the project Epidemium in collaboration with Paillasse, I’ve seen in it a very interesting example on how people can interconnect and contribute together in a common project.

The aim of the project is to involve many scientists to get a better understanding of Cancer disease thanks to resources available via Big Data, through a “Data Challenge”, during a reasonably short term period.

A very nice example on the kind of project that can be executed quite quickly with a controlled budget and high level resources!

Do you really need a collaborative platform for your company?

About one month ago, Facebook announced the soon launch of their new platform “Facebook at work” after a successful 10 month pilot executed within 100 different companies. This has put back the focus on professional collaborative platforms and on the value it may have for companies implementing it.

The subject is actually not new at all and many companies have already in place some systems offered by, for example, Salesforce (Chatter), Microsoft (Yammer / Sharepoint) or IBM (Connections / Domino). Still, this approach in companies remains very rare and restricted, as if very few managers were convinced on their value. As mentioned by Dionne Lew, “only 30% of CEOs are social, and mostly because they’ve (only) signed up on LinkedIn“.

image source: Altimeter Group

But collaboration is part of our current world and won’t fade out. That’s even part of DNA’s Younger generation. In a digital world, this is fully modifying the way to interact within the company too, and this in a positive way.

Will standard software suite help moving to digital? 2/2

In my previous article, we explored some key elements for a successful digital transformation of the IT landscape. We understood the core importance of business requirements to lead such transformation but with a “LEAN” approach in the way to define and prioritise them.

Still, this first journey didn’t help us yet to check if implementation of standard suites would help or not such transformation.

But what are the characteristics of Standard applications that may make the difference from self-developed platforms?

Will standard software suite help moving to digital? 1/2

As mentioned in my previous article, a Digital Transformation has many side effects. One of them on the IT side is to aim for application landscape simplification, without limiting the UX. Following Gartner point of view, we all know that Complexity leads to failure.

Replying to this trend, some vendors tends to advise to go for standards (preferably their own ones of course). That is for instance the case of SAP as they explain very well their point of view in their recent article “Winning the Digital Battle with Simplicity” while promoting HANA.

But does simplication implies necessarily standardisation?
Is it actually the real keypoint?