Last week, WTN Media’s Fusion 2014 conference in Madison, WI captured information technology-driven external business challenges and IT leaders’ responses. Small or large, government or private, non-profit or for-profit, the challenges are shared. Here are my take-away thoughts. IT’s Role IT leaders now largely accept a distributed model. “Shadow IT” is here to stay. The shift is correct from my perspective now that insight is one of remaining sources of advantage. Data is abundant and its interpretation must be real-time, predictive and prescriptive. As Greg Pfluger, VP for Information Systems at American Family Insurance, commented, “Marketing … better understands technology than IT people understand marketing. Treat them with respect.” Despite the complicating issues, Software as a Service (SaaS) is a winning business model; the benefits far outweigh the cons for customers and suppliers. A primary IT role is to ensure integration and security…
Business-to-individual business models will win out in the Connected Customer Era
Dealing with the move from the Industrial Era to the Digital Era was tough for many companies. And now we are in the middle of yet another transformation of comparable magnitude. Today’s customers, clients and consumers are instrumented, interconnected, intelligent, engaged, informed and empowered. They want companies they buy from to interact with them on their terms and personalize marketing offers and customer support. They even want personalized products and services. It’s called the Connected Customer Era. Early adopters of quality improvement methods in the Industrial Era gained competitive advantage. In the movement to the Digital Era, early adopters of automated, efficient back-offices and strong web presences won. As the Digital Era matured, traditional strategies to maintain margins – cost containment, product innovation, branding and marketing communications – became far less effective because they did little to nothing to offset the multiple forces…
Fidelman’s RaynForest business model creates marketplace for endorsers and marketers
Humanity generates as much data every two weeks as was generated from the dawn of civilization to 2003, according to Google’s Eric Schmidt. Whether his estimate is exact or as some argue exaggerated, we do know that two weeks will fall to two minutes then two seconds as use of data begets more data. Understandably, companies have had an increasingly hard time getting past all this noise. In response, marketers initially shifted advertising dollars from traditional media (TV, print and radio) to digital advertising’s banner ads and more recently to Facebook’s, Twitter’s and Google’s personalized ads, many of them location dependent. But “smarter” marketing – as personalization is called – isn’t the solution according to Mark Fidelman, Fortune columnist, author of Socialized! and CEO of marketing consultancy Evolve! In his view, we increasingly tune out to digital ads just as we learned to…
Politics makes our basic research ecosystem increasingly fragile
Government funded basic research gives birth to new industries and jobs. Shortchanging it is akin to not eating while you are pregnant to save money for the baby’s future. Nevertheless, our nation’s growing (and repeated) budget crisis is short changing research and its long term economic cost is perhaps nowhere so clear as is it in research advancing health. The Atlantic Meets The Pacific, an annual event of The Atlantic Magazine and University of California San Diego (UCSD), gave testimony to the high return to innovation and the urgent need for more of the same. Sadly, many speakers coupled their comments about discoveries with growing fear that the lack of reliable funding will harm our ability to push the boundaries of medicine forward. One medical frontier is cancer, a disease that will afflict one in four of us and poses a demographic time…
The high price of profits from many business models
As a budding economist, I was initially awed by the market mechanism: the invisible hand that encourages innovation and leads companies to efficiency levels that grow our nation’s wealth. Observing underlying economic principles at work never ceased to amaze me as a college or graduate student. My learning journey in economics was not unlike that of a science student seeing beauty in the laws of nature. What I have learned in decades of practice and observation however is that outcomes are only as positive as the underlying motives of decision makers in the private and public sectors. And in this regard, “Houston, we have a problem.” Over the holidays I read a Wall Street Journal article, “Counterfeit Cancer Medicines Multiply.” As the price of cancer drugs rose, they moved to being 8th among the top 10 drugs targeted by counterfeiters, according to the…
Smarter marketing requires more than personalized messages
I feel overwhelmed by the volume of digital messages coming at me from all corners of my life. And I am not alone. My 2013 prediction is that value is about to rapidly migrate once again in technology markets. Over the holidays I met a young woman in her 30s — a former boutique owner who now works at a leading retailer — who told me that she stopped using Facebook when she realized the postings kept growing in number and falling in sincerity. Also, she’s “unsubscribed” from retailers she buys from, finding that their recommendations based on past purchases more often insult rather than reflect her taste. She is tuning out to digital messaging much as I ignore the ads in newspapers to make my newspaper reading more efficient. Perhaps my message overload problem was not age-related, I thought leaving our conversation….
Curators: A growing business model opportunity
If you are feeling overwhelmed by the volume of information, options and messages bombarding your daily life, you are not alone. Enter the curator – a role that I believe will become even more dominant in the decades ahead, creating opportunities for individuals and companies alike. The term curator has traditionally been associated with the experts working at museums who bring together the right collection of pieces to convey new insights into a subject, be it an art movement or geological period. Normally, seeing a part versus the whole of something reduces our understanding. Who would envision an elephant from a tusk? The genius of museum curators rests in their ability to select, from an entire body of work, the right subset to deepen the audience’s understanding of both the part and the whole. There are many other types of curators all around…
A search for “the whole truth”
I used to love Meet the Press, the Sunday morning TV show where I’d gain new insights into a pressing public issue. Today the show feels more like a platform for propaganda from different sides of the political debate. For example, when guest Rachael Maddow tried to dig into the “fundamental disagreement about the facts” between Democrat’s and the GOP’s view on women’s economic issues, it could have been an opportunity for host David Gregory to add, “Might both arguments be true?” We, the audience, could have discovered how the issue is far more complex than the simplistic explanations offered by the propagandists. But it wasn’t understanding that increased, just the volume from each side spouting its pre-planned comments and incomplete solutions. The demise of what I (and many others) valued in Meet the Press is symptomatic of a larger trend in our…
Marketing plays a key role in strong business models
The market share battlefield and its weaponry changed considerably as our economy transitioned from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. In particular, the growing sophistication of marketers (and IT needed to support them) has been nothing short of breathtaking. The movement from the Industrial Age to the Information Age increased customer power, expanded offerings and growing competitive intensity. (See Sidebar.) As a result, both of marketing’s roles have become more important. Marketing’s tactical role is demand management, or deciding on the right channels and teeing up the awareness, considerations and positive attitudes that lead target customers to select their company’s offerings. The strategic role is to make sure the company has the right offering at the right price and margin. In the information age, marketing is transitioning from an art to a data-based science highly reliant on the strength of the IT…
4 Trends Reshaping Business Models as Everything Computes
“Today everything computes. Intelligence has been infused into things no one would recognize as computers: appliances, cars, roadways, clothes, even rivers and cornfields.” So begins an IBM Smarter Planet ad in the Wall Street Journal arguing that computing must get smarter to manage today’s wealth of data. This data is not your father’s data of computer bits and bites. It now includes tweets, visual images, videos, machine output, etc. In this new world, IBM argues, computing must be: Designed for new data streams Optimized and fine-tuned to specific user tasks Managed in cloud-based solutions that offer security and flexibility Major computer models don’t change often, IBM states. But when they do change they “unleash enormous productivity, innovation and economic growth,” capturing the conclusion of economists who study Kondratiev long economic cycles. Does your business model capitalize on a rising sea of data from…