An article by: David Tan, Chief Technology Officer, CHIPS Technology Group
I don’t care what industry you are in, what type of business
you run, how many people you have or how you work today, you are standing on
the precipice of a virtual tsunami of change that threatens to drag your
business under if you’re not prepared and thinking about the future. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing today,
it’s time to begin spending serious time and energy thinking about the coming
changes, because I can promise you, your competition is, your future employees
are, and your customers are, and if you don’t keep up, you get left behind.
What type of change am I talking about? The buzzwords are everywhere – mobile, big
data, cloud, internet of things, wearables, analytics, and the list goes
on. If you want to stay relevant in the
next 5 years, you’re going to have to change how you interact with everyone
from customers to partners to employees.
You’re going to have to communicate and collaborate in real time. You also need to be quick and agile, capable
of reacting to data that is coming at you at an ever increasing speed. You need to do all this faster and cheaper
than you ever have.
I thought it might be helpful to talk about some of the
areas of technology you need to be thinking about as you grow and shape your
business for the coming waves. This is
not meant to be a blueprint for change, more a roadmap to get you on your
way. Think of it as the foundation of
thinking and planning you need to do to meet the challenges. This is just your jumping off point – taking
this information and molding it your business and industry will be crucial to
success.
The first thing I want you to think about is
communication. Let’s face it, e-mail is
slow and cumbersome. It’s hard to
believe when you’ve been working since before companies had e-mail systems, but
it’s the stark reality. One-to-one
serial communications, which is basically what e-mail is, has given way to the
likes of chat, group messaging, and inter-company collaboration tools. People need good answers in real-time and
can’t wait for the seemingly never-ending process that is an email thread to
dig up the right solution. If you’re not
looking at enterprise chat applications like Yammer or Slack, you are already beginning
to fall behind.
Cloud and mobile solutions are so obvious at this point that
they almost don’t merit discussion, but it’s worth spending a little time. Your company needs instant access to all data
from anywhere at any time and on any platform.
You need simple tools in place for sharing data outside of company
borders and firewalls. You need to
enable employees to perform 100% of their job on any device they have
accessible, from wherever they may be.
There is no way to get this done if you’re not embracing a real cloud
and mobile strategy across your entire organization.
Now let’s talk for a few minutes about some of the trendiest
of buzz words I mentioned above – internet of things and big data. No matter what industry you are in, from
healthcare to hospitality, from finance to manufacturing, there are and will be
connected devices that drive your business and your customer experience. These devices will generate data that you
need to capture, analyze, and act upon quickly.
This is the essence of IoT and big data.
For most people it’s hard to see the impacts of these technologies on
their businesses at first blush, so let’s take a quick look at some practical
applications and how they can impact a typical business.
The simplest way to think of IoT is as a series of
sensors. What do sensors do at their
core? They give us feedback. Imagine a series of sensors tied to your
production or manufacturing process that could give you insight in
inefficiencies or potential disruptions.
Monitoring and analyzing this data could help you prevent these before
they become a problem, or find interesting ways to gain efficiencies that you
never knew were there. How about
healthcare? The data coming from
everything from watches to fitness trackers to passive health monitors can give
you the insight you need to treat patients more proactively. I promise you that if you’re not working with
your patient to understand this health data, they will begin finding someone
who will. Customer experience will be
driven by IoT in a lot of ways as well.
Finding ways to drive convenience and enhance interactions will be
crucial for success.
Let’s take the sensors out of it for a minute and talk about
big data in general. Let me give you a
scenario. Pretend you run an insurance
company, and you have to staff a claims call center. What if you could do some simple historical
research and find straightforward correlations between weather and claims –
i.e. claims go up when the weather is bad, this seems pretty logical. All the historical weather data you could
want is available, it wouldn’t be a very difficult task to see that in my case
above, claims volume is up for 3 days following a snowfall of more than 6
inches. Well how great would it be to
know you could just adjust staffing levels or move resources around after a
snow storm and meet this demand proactively, instead of having to find a way to
react. This is a very simplified example
of the power of big data and analytics.
I don’t want to come off as overly dramatic. I’m sure traditional businesses will continue
to operate smoothly for some time. There
is nothing saying you can’t continue business as usual and be just fine. I’m not talking about being fine, I’m talking
about evolving and flourishing. A theme
we have tried to pass along in the past rings true now more than ever. Every business is a technology business. You just need to embrace that, and understand
how to internalize it to your company.
Like I said, now more than ever, innovate or die.