Uber was created in 2009 and is now known all around the world. AirBNB was created in 2008 and offers more hotel rooms than any hotel chain. What makes such companies different? They are service brokers. The job of Uber and AirBNB uses IT technology to link people together.  These companies don’t have an IT department, yet their business totally relies on information technology. Business is IT and IT is business. They worked hard at a great customer experience and developed the applications and infrastructure required behind that.    Some…

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Social is a whole different breed these days. Everyone is attached to their smartphones, tablets and connected devices, and they’re staying connected 24/7. Learn how your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software can be your company’s best social friend in the connected marketplace. The Rise of Connection According to the Deloitte 2015 Global Mobile Consumer Survey, 70 percent of consumers worldwide own smartphones, 51 percent own tablets, 14 percent own wearables and 9 percent own all three types of mobile devices. Consumer use of these devices takes up the majority of…

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With every .brand that is launched onto the web, the industry watches closely to examine their strategy, analyse their success and evaluate whether the approach can be replicated and learned from. We’ve seen a wide range of launch strategies in recent months, from the full transition of www.barclays.com to www.home.barclays, to the BNP Paribas online banking sites, to the promotional site www.play.afl for the Australian Football League (AFL). By launching home pages, major commerce platforms or significant promotional and initiative-based sites on .brand domain names, these organisations are making a…

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The antagonism between healthcare and cloud computing is finally coming to an end. In the survey results shared by Imprivata and Porter Research, leaders and pioneers from the healthcare segment are realizing the limitations posed by the traditional IT solutions against the collaborative offerings from cloud adoption. Cloud computing promises to step beyond EHR systems and help achieve a true collaboration among the various players in the healthcare sector from the medical practitioners, hospitals to research facilities and government. Read on as we explore the new trends in the healthcare…

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Your network may not be a formal part of your ERP implementation, but network performance has a major impact on how satisfactory your ERP system is. Network problems can slow your ERP response time to a crawl and force you into all sorts of workarounds to get your ERP performance up to something at least partially acceptable. Not surprisingly, the network isn’t the first suspect for poor performance of an ERP system. You’re more likely to look at the ERP database, processor speed or other factors before examining your network’s…

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It’s no surprise that globalization, always a hot-button topic, has resurfaced in the US presidential race. But a lot of the discussion continues to re-litigate the past rather than proposing how to compete in the future. While we’re still talking about tariffs, trade deficits, and currency wars, globalization has morphed in a very different—and more digital—direction. Our old image of globalization was one of container ships moving manufactured goods from far-flung factories to markets around the world. Cross-border trade in goods remains a major force in the global economy, but…

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The Internet of Things (IoT) is a key technology that will provide the data that will fuel the cognitive business era. Cognitive systems will ingest all the IoT data and use it to infuse intelligence into systems and processes. As a result, businesses will become more efficient, improve overall customer experience, discover new business opportunities and better anticipate risks and threats. Our research over the past year has revealed three important trends driving adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) as we move through 2016. They are: 1) IoT systems…

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