The last few years have seen tremendous changes in the business world; particularly the way customers, employees and partners are interacting and collaborating to conduct their business. Customers are making decisions to buy or discontinue a service with a click of a button. The “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) trend involves employees bringing their own smart phones and tablets to work, which is significantly impacting both IT and business. Brokers and agents are leveraging smart gadgets to speed up the business cycle by educating, building relationships and doing business with customers.  For example, using a tablet, an insurance agent can instantly run illustrations and compare premium quotes for insurance products simultaneously, making it easier for clients to see the various options. The “consumerization of IT” trend is having an enormous impact on businesses and is something they must take steps to embrace. In other words, the “empowered consumer” has arrived and is here to stay! (more…)

Last week I had the pleasure of hosting a webinar with Jeffrey Hammond, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research and Rohit Sharma, Global Head of Mobility at Virtusa.  The topic was “Overcoming Challenges in Early Stage Enterprise Mobility Programs”.  This post is a short synopsis of the webinar.  For those who were not able to attend the session, you can view it here.

The webinar started with Jeffrey Hammond reflecting back to the early 1980’s with the introduction of the personal computer.  He offered his observation that many IT organizations are reacting to mobile devices and smartphones today in the same way IT organizations greeted the PC; with skepticism and doubt.  Today, the personal computer is a dominant platform for computing power, a major productivity tool and a huge segment of the technical market.  Hammond predicted that mobile computing will exceed the personal computer many times over. (more…)

Depending on who you read, we are in the fourth or fifth wave of computer technology development.  In 2005, Om Malik and Michael Copeland published The Fifth Wave in Business 2.0 Magazine.  They defined their waves as the eras of mainframe, mid-range, PC, Internet and networked computing. Written six years ago, their premonition preceded smartphones by many years.

In 2009, Forrester Research VP Andrew Bartels cited US Department of Commerce data showing that we are in the fourth wave of technology investment.  Specifically, the four waves are:

• 1951 – 1976: Mainframe computing
• 1976 – 1992: PC computing
• 1992 – 2008: Network computing
• 2008 – 2016: Accelerated innovation

Each of the waves experiences two phases – innovation and growth followed by refinement and digestion.  The current phase of accelerated innovation is in the innovation and growth phase, coinciding with the global economic recovery cycle.  Bartels substantiates his position by analyzing the US IT investment to GDP ratio CAGR for each phase.  The average ratio for the growth eras is 4% while the average for the refinement eras is -1.13%. (more…)

Over the past year, few technology developments have challenged IT staffs more than the mobility wave.  Two years ago it was the social phenomenon.  Now it’s mobile computing.  Virtusa’s BFS business unit has seen a surge in the number of inquiries regarding mobile.  And now, the questions are not about “if”, they are about “how”.  Here is a familiar scenario.

You’re a product manager in a major financial or commercial company and you have just gotten the assignment of launching a mobile version of your product. You’re thrilled but you’re terrified. Your mind is racing. Where do you start? Pour yourself an herb tea or some other relaxing drink, realize that it will not be easy, and start planning. Even the organizations that appear as though they are miles ahead of you have probably only “mobilized” a small subset of their potential offerings. A major bank, for example, may be offering some exciting consumer goodies but, if you knew the mobile product team, they would tell you they have barely scratched the surface. The same bank’s B2B offerings are probably still on the drawing board at best. (more…)

Recently, I was accompanied by Boris Evelson of Forrester Research and Ajoy Kumar, leader of Virtusa’s data warehousing and business intelligence practice for a webinar on Pervasive Business Intelligence.  In the webinar, with attendees from industry and blogging community, Boris and Ajoy discussed the issues associated with pervasive business intelligence as well as best practices and benefits organizations can expect to derive from BI.

Before Boris (@bevelson) began his session, I asked him “what is your definition of pervasive BI?”  His answer was a company in which BI is everywhere, data and information are readily available, and an organization which is poised to compete not only on the basis of its goods or services but on the quality of its decisions as well.  That definition places a culture of “informed decision making” at a premium and views BI as a vehicle to deliver the information upon which critical decisions are based.

(more…)

The last few years of the millennium have seen old business models giving way to new ones. Customer needs are transitioning from those of pure consumption-oriented to those of convenience-oriented with the coming of age of the digital native. Organizations big and small are being affected by the onslaught of myriad of factors including enlightened and demanding customers, newer modes of communication, technology advancements with user dependence on mobility and small form factor devices, and the power of collective intelligence – blogs, wikis, user generated reviews and feedbacks, etc.

So has the meaning of value literally changed from what it was in the earlier days to the present? Or has Value in its representation evolved to “Value 2.0” i.e. becoming more user-oriented, keeping in line with the changing times? How are businesses upgrading themselves to meet the evolving juggernaut of customer needs and wants?

(more…)

In the first part of this series of post, we had discussed on how social media is rapidly gaining ground and extending its influence sphere. In continuation to the earlier post, this post will delve on the deepening influence of social media in an enterprise value chain, by aligning business process for social intelligence.

Evolving Enterprise Value Chain

A great validation of the Mobile use of Facebook is that 60% of subscribers access through mobile browsers and most active mobile users are in Indonesia, South Africa, Kenya, Canada and the US, where at least 60% of Facebook users spend just as much time on a mobile device as on the desktop. The collaboration between social media tools and mobile operators and app developers has created a revolution in the adoption rate of social media across the deepest parts of developing and developed worlds alike. (more…)