How Telcos can develop into Integrated Digital Service Providers

The majority of telcos have digital agendas to build multi-channel or omni-channel capabilities. However, their digital transformation is often only in the early stages.

Telcos to become Integrated Digital Service Providers

The objective for telcos should be to develop into Integrated Digital Service Providers, bringing together digital infrastructure, digital business operations & capabilities and digital offerings.

Telcos could become key players in the digital value chain by assuming new roles and offering new services such as: M2M enabler, Cloud Service provider, one stop IT service provider, smart city enabler or offer vertical solutions (digital home and home health care integrator, transport tolling partner, etc.).

Telcos need to take necessary actions

In order to do so, telcos must rethink their current customer operations and inherent BSS/ OSS landscapes. Core capabilities should be extended to campaign management, order entry, fulfillment, charging & billing, self-service user interface and other.

Operators should increase their strategic capabilities in the service market including omni-channel experience management, single order product catalog and entry function for all sales channels, integrated policy management & control. Partner enablement across the value chain must include M2M and over the top providers, Content, resellers, roaming, wholesale and other players.

The use of APIs and techniques next based action, Unified Marketing, social sentiment analysis, real time charging, can help.

Data need to be integrated with decision support and campaign management systems as well as the analytics engine to trigger context aware events in real time. Customer platforms need to enable marketing campaigns down to the micro and nano level of segmentation and customization. They must support a seamless omni-channel experience, including crowdsourcing. A key word is mass differentiation.

A Web and mobile Portal needs to effectively enable ecommerce, Mobile & Web care, Collaboration Community and order entry. Cloud based sales & services need to guarantee Social listening & Ads, Lead & Opportunity, management, forecasting, etc.

Such system needs to bring together all key parts such as Customers, Prospects, Partners, Social networks, Call Centers, Shops, Connected devices, etc.

How to bring things together for an overall solution

One approach is to split the production systems (Billing & collection, accounts receivables & payables, CRM) from the distribution systems (omni-channel, customer experience management, product catalog, order entry) and integrate those through a Hub.

This Hub could serve as a layer above the network and BSS/OSS layers and then enable digital marketing, online sales, eRetail, smart care and other functions.

Other initiatives could complement:

1)      Drive agile and design thinking across the organization.

2)      Simplify, minimize and standardize. For example, examine and address the overlapping boundaries and inefficiencies among business relationship, development & transformation, IT governance and maintenance.

3)      Leverage SaaS technologies or build virtualized software-based operational stacks.

4)      Move to cloud or outsource tasks such as commissioning, trouble ticketing, fraud & churn analysis, work force management, roaming settlements and partner management.

Work the architecture at two speeds

The backend and transactional core systems of records must be designed and operated for stability, resilience, scalability, reliability and high quality data management. All telcos, different to digital native companies, will need to build on their existing legacy systems. Release cycles will be longer here.

The customer facing front part of the architecture requires fast and highly agile software development and servicing. New micro services must be deployed within hours. Developers should be able to use a wide range of programming languages without being locked in by a stringent development frame work. Business users should be able to make immediate changes to automated processes. Time consuming integration work must be minimized. Decouple products from the processes. Enable work load balancing across private, public and other clouds.

Build a new organization and governance model in parallel with the technology.

The Enterprise Architect’s opportunity to play key role

The Enterprise architect plays a key role to help the CIO drive the digital transformation. The skill set of enterprise architects of the future will include business strategy formulation & execution, business innovation, stakeholder management and agile management. The EA needs to support both hunting and harvesting.

+++
To share your own thoughts or other best practices about this topic, please email me directly to alexwsteinberg (@) gmail.com.

Alternatively, you also may connect with me and become part of my professional network of Business, Digital, Technology & Sustainability experts at

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwsteinberg   or
Xing at https://www.xing.com/profile/Alex_Steinberg   or
Google+ at  https://plus.google.com/u/0/+AlexWSteinberg/posts


  

Applications for competitive advantage - recommended actions

Applications have become a key driver of strategy, innovation and competitive differentiation. Applications are a crucial gateway to seamless customer experience, new services, and revenue streams. Application and business strategies need to align and merge over time.

Companies need to become software driven businesses. They require a new mind set and way of working, an overall organizational approach to business, IT and applications.

Many opportunities and much to be done

A new IT/ OT operating model needed

IT and Operational Technology must increasingly integrate in the age of IoT. Companies require a new IT operating model and a way of how they design, build, use and manage software. Enabling software in itself is becoming a revenue generating product.

The cloud can help mesh together the formerly inaccessible enterprise and machine generated data. It will help bring different business functions even closer together.

New software development thinking

Traditional coding of applications with complex, lengthy implementation cycles does not meet the business requirements any longer. Companies require modular architectures. They need to use next generation integration techniques, driven by a mobile-first, cloud-first mind set.

Applications need to be quickly assembled out of existing, small, reusable components leveraging modular architectures.

Leverage available technologies

Massive amounts of available data, processing power, natural language learning, cognitive computing and machine learning, rule-based algorithms and other advances in data science call for embedding Software Intelligence directly in the applications or processes.   

Intelligent automation helps achieve major productivity increases, minimize errors and throughput time. It also can effectively support and enhance humans in higher quality work. Integrated Analytics enables Applications to analyze, comprehend and take appropriate actions independently.

Digital Agents, enabled by self-governance, are already serving customers. The artificial intelligence company IPsoft has already deployed an effective digital help desk application that can understand human language in 10 languages, search knowledge and databases and respond to specific customer questions within seconds.

Develop better software

The technological advancement enables also of how software can be developed. Test automation tools can use cognitive computing and robotics to generate test artifacts (scenarios, conditions and results) based on plain text functional requirements.

Post deployment tools for service operations can continuously accelerate problem resolution by curating specialized application knowledge and leveraging descriptive analytics and natural language processing.

Applications can and should now automate routine tasks, improve business processes through integrated analytics und ultimately govern themselves.

Leverage Agile, DevOps and other agile engineering techniques!

The importance of APIs

New Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) must enable flexible, efficient exchange of internal and external software components and services. The Internet of Things will bring together all current IT devices with technology equipment, sensors and other devices.  Products will increasingly turn into product-service hybrids.

Support Big Data & Analytics correctly

Extracting the biggest value from Big data & Analytics, requires the right structures, processes and components across the value chain. Big data architectures need to be embedded within the business processes and applications, not at alongside.

Re-work IT systems

One of the barriers is the often monolithic nature of IT systems. Astonishingly, 70 percent of all business transaction still happen in COBOL. Enterprise architecture must support platform integration capabilities, security, API lifecycle management and monitoring. Virtualization, abstraction, simplification, separation of technical and business logic, modularization, componentization and containerization are effective techniques.  

As part of an ecosystem, the individual player need to work together to mitigate the risks of connected applications. Obsolete and legacy applications carry limited or now security built in and must be tightly managed.

Unfortunately, while key technologies are advancing at massive speed, business processes and applications lag behind.

Use IT across the organization

On a larger scale the formerly stand-alone IT function need to be integrated in and fully used by the individual business functions across the organization and value chain.

Integration, Orchestration and Business Process Management services will help configure applications customized to business needs at an ongoing basis.

+++
To share your own thoughts or other best practices about this topic, please email me directly to alexwsteinberg (@) gmail.com.

Alternatively, you also may connect with me and become part of my professional network of Business, Digital, Technology & Sustainability experts at

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwsteinberg   or
Xing at https://www.xing.com/profile/Alex_Steinberg   or
Google+ at  https://plus.google.com/u/0/+AlexWSteinberg/posts

From Big Data to Smart Data – A practical 11 step cycle to implement

There is much excitement, hype and delusion around Big Data. Everybody is aware of opportunities, but high aspirations are often disappointed. A large number of Big Data projects have missed on meeting expectations.
There are many reasons. One key explanation that companies approach Big Data wrong. Overwhelmed by the massive amount of data (available or imagined), companies through ever increasing computing power and data bases at the growing problem.
I suggest a different approach. Moving from Big Data to Smart Data: Thinking first, then collecting and processing data.
Enclosed I offer an 11 step process that works as endless repeating cycle of planning, execution, learning and improvement:

1. Ask the right questions based on your objectives and develop sensible hypothesizes: focus on business problems and explore opportunities across the value chain; identify ways to leverage digital technologies
2. Collect, create and acquire the right, necessary data prioritized by objectives and head maps)
• Generate data oneself
• Transaction data (Turn over and dynamic turnover sales data, usage and service data)
• Behavior data (customer profiles and core customer data)
• Other data: customer contacts with/ without transactions, customer requests, campaign reactions, movement profiles, social media relationships, benchmarking, need tree structures
• Own databases are often spread silos, but contain much valuable data!
• Gather free or cheap market data through surveys, etc.
• Buy from external sources
• Obtain through exchange with partners. Understand additional customer needs.
• Identify cooperation partners: Suppliers, retailers, and other companies across industries; build long-term network to share data
• Conduct competitive analysis (customer turnover data of competitors)
• Do additional research (total customer demand; promoters across the customer journey)
3. Understand the customer. Combine the often different, complementary and conflicting views from strategic marketing, Product marketing, Customer services, Sales and Logistics and develop one picture. Unite all respective parties across the organization that should be involved to create a commonly agreed pool of socio-demographic, psychographic and transactional data. This allows for an integrated segmentation later. Do multi-variant analysis of customer transaction data as starting point.
4. Segment customers in ideally groups of homogeneous consumer behavior. They should have the same decision parameters for consumption & purchase. Groups should be well distinguishable and separate. The naming and context should be clear and agreed across the entire organization. Apply hierarchical, partitioned and fuzzy cluster analysis or density based techniques.
5. Further correlate and refine segments. Use power questions to further segment. Test and refine. Be aware that changes to segments will need to occur as objectives and priorities change.
6. Focus on 20/80 rule – 20 percent of data generates about 80 percent of insight. Companies have hardly ever all data that they need. And it is not necessary. Companies can get started with available data by looking where there are the biggest results for the effort. A good example is lost-order analysis.
7. Refine USP by understanding customer needs, channel preferences, purchase drivers, share of wallet with new and current customers, campaign selection, offer customizations, improvement of algorithms, enable machine learning.
8. Determine and take action according to specific segments. Test different offering options and improve accordingly.
9. Manage channel mix. Use Envelope Analysis to optimize output level in relation to input variables.
10. Understand and manage customer journey:
• Put yourself fully in the shoes of the customers and define all interaction from their perspective, not company perspective.
• Understand all contact points and the individual experiences of customers at each touch point
• Prioritize customer touch points and take actions. Here, often decides success and failure of companies.
• Identify and establish connections between touch points; improve to speed up the movement from one touch point to the other
• Identify purchase promoters
• Align marketing activities accordingly
• Deploy special techniques such as associated analysis and collaborative filtering to suggest customized product and service recommendations to prospective buyers.
• Establish and manage metrics
11. Learn and refine begin a new circle

+++
To share your own thoughts or other best practices about this topic, please email me directly to alexwsteinberg (@) gmail.com.

Alternatively, you also may connect with me and become part of my professional network of Business, Digital, Technology & Sustainability experts at

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwsteinberg   or
Xing at https://www.xing.com/profile/Alex_Steinberg   or
Google+ at  https://plus.google.com/u/0/+AlexWSteinberg/posts

How digital reality is changing companies and what to do about it

The Web is like a gigantic public discussion. Everything about everybody becomes known. A digital moral has emerged where positives are praised, negatives punished. A new mobile generation, LoMoSos (Local, Mobile, Social) takes the lead in melting the physical and online worlds into a new reality of life and being.
The touch points with customers have become the moments of truth for companies and also one of their biggest drivers for success or failure. Convincing the minds of customers must go in line with winning their hearts.
Companies need to learn a new way of communicating with their customers. It requires listening, watching, engaging, inviting, asking, sharing, expressing interest, suggesting, inspiring, earning trust and adding value.
Companies are not in control over their own marketing and branding messages. As soon as they publish anything, it is at the mercy of market consent and commenting.
While companies where pushing their marketing messages and products to the consumers, the customer today is in control. Mouth-to-propaganda, evaluations, whistleblowing, recommendations and raising of discontent are powerful weapons in the hands of today’s customers.
People increasingly use the likes/ dislikes of the friends in their extended circles to form opinions and make purchase decisions. Opinion leaders, Influencers, Lead users, Multipliers have strong impact. Bad companies lose nearly every second potential customer through the Internet without even knowing it.
The meshing of people creates cooperation and cooperation requires/ creates a new form of online moral.
The customer journey of the past had only a few touch points that followed a fairly linear progress across limited channels. Today a complex Web of touch points across numerous channels – physical and off-line – has emerged where companies jump all across while expecting an integrated, easy and fulfilling customer experience.
The closing of the sale today is only the start of the next sale for the same customer and thousands of potential buyers. Those other people can follow in real time that buyer’s purchasing experience and satisfaction level with the new product & services. Pros and cons become transparent to everybody who cares to know. Web browsers, communities, circle of friends and other tools readily aggregate and display the information.
Companies must learn to think differently and build the necessary skill sets, organizational structures, processes and cultures in order align with the new market reality. Top-down hierarchies do not fit with the customer touch point journey. Leading companies are building new matrix structures where all people work and communicate horizontal, vertical and diagonal. Management, staff and external collaborators are organized across customer groups and their experiences.
New employment and working models have also emerged. Companies see increasingly the advantages and also the pressure to think beyond traditional staffing models. The demands for new market skills are massive. Few companies can have all skills in-house. So, they must creatively bring together a new work force combining regular employees, free lancers, crowdsourcing, outsourcing and service companies, partners and other parties.
Working with such heterogeneous group, contributors companies need to manage these individual value contributors also across all touch points of the delivery journey (serving the customer journey).
Everything becomes customer driven. Successful companies look outside-in and re-build/ align their organizations and work force accordingly. Michael Porter today promotes shared value, rather than shareholder value.
Companies experience the laws of nature. Not the biggest and strongest, but the most agile and adaptive animals survive. Their own lack of flexibility and unique value proposition, rigid leadership and missing digital adeptness will force companies out of the market.
Winners will be those companies that truly care about their customers and do everything to meet their needs and expectations within reason and based on sustainable principles.
It is amazing of how the teachings of the Bible on fundamental values and human interactions hold true in the digital age. Some top leaders and management should save huge costs on marketing gurus and rather buy a copy of the Bible: Specially recommended readings therein: Book of Proverbs (Jewish Tanakh/ Old Testament) and Gospel of John (New Testament).

+++
To share your own thoughts or other best practices about this topic, please email me directly to alexwsteinberg (@) gmail.com.

Alternatively, you also may connect with me and become part of my professional network of Business, Digital, Technology & Sustainability experts at

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwsteinberg   or
Xing at https://www.xing.com/profile/Alex_Steinberg   or
Google+ at  https://plus.google.com/u/0/+AlexWSteinberg/posts

Predictive Analytics with Big Data - Challenges & solutions

Business analytics and Big Data help improve Customer Experience (precise customer segmentation , interaction & servicing: increased loyalty & retention, Operational Efficiency (Increase transparency, Resource Optimization, Process Quality and Performance) and developing new business modes (expanding existing or generating new revenue streams).

Data becomes big data when its variety, volume or velocity exceeds the ability of traditional IT systems to ingest, store, analyze and process this data. Big data requires often a both technical and cultural change.

Traditional tools work on enterprise data captured in the data warehouses. Additional statistical analysis, data mining, text mining and predictive analytics takes now usually place on separate, dedicated servers. The process of exporting and creating copies on external servers is time consuming and becomes infeasible when data amounts become too large.

So let us talk about Prescriptive Analytics in relationship with Big Data.

Available tools make predictive analysis increasingly manageable. It is not only domain for data scientist any longer. One click predictive modelling automatically run a series of algorithms on the data and select the one with highest accuracy.

A number of challenges still remain and require respective actions:

-          Explore and discover what data you really have and how these data sets relate to each other.

-          Develop insight through a process of experimentation and iteration you gradually.

-          Mine the data to discover patterns and relationships

-          Determine how such data relates to the traditional enterprise data

-          Simplify the process to implement and automate the necessary actions.

-          Minimize data movement to conserve computing resources (ETL architecture becomes with less efficient with increasing data amounts)

-          Use intuitive discovery, BI tools and In-database analytics; use Hadoop for pre-processing data to identify macro-trends and special information (such as out of range values)

-          Enable decision making and informed action based on predictive modelling, business rules and self-learning.

A systematic step-by-step view on process can help companies:

1.       Identify and gather data relevant to the business goal from a variety of sources across data silos in enterprise applications and external sources (social media, public, licensed). Use visualization tools to ease work.

2.       Prepare the data. Integrate and enrich into an analytical data set: Calculate aggregate fields, merge multiple data sources, fill missing data, strip extraneous characters, etc.

3.       Build predictive model using statistical and machine learning algorithms (depending on type/ completeness of data available and level of prediction desired). Run analysis on training data and use model to predict test data set.

4.       Evaluate and assure predictive model is effective and accurate. It must predict the test data set.

5.       Use model in applications and deliver actionable prescription to business (predict opportunity/ avoid negative event)

6.       Monitor, improve and update model (adjust parameters of algorithms, add new/ more data)

There are proprietary and open source programming tools. The Open Software Community is strongly driving predictive analysis. The open source programming language R is a widely used across the industry. API libraries in Python, Java and Scala are available. Many BI platforms (Accenture, Deloitte, Infosys, etc.) already include some predictive analytics capabilities.

IBM, SAS and increasingly SAP are the clear leaders in predictive analysis tools.

IBM has the most comprehensive set to build models, conduct analysis and deploy predictive applications both on-premises and in the cloud. SAS provides data scientists with an all-in-one visualization and predictive analytics solution, integrated with R, Python and Hadoop. Other providers are RapidMiner, Alteryx, Oracle, Alpine Data Labs, Angoss, Dell, Fico and Knime and Microsoft Azure Machine Learning.

One major problem still remains: Much time and effort needs to be spend in the data preparation (30 to up to 60 percent) when using data from data ware houses. A main reason is that data is often stored without context. The process integrating data from multiple databases become very complex. Modelling the context takes another 20 to 30 percent.  The following chart explains:

Traditional companies such as SAS, IBM, Oracle and Cognos try to solve the problem leveraging their computing resources and throwing “brute force” at it.

Another option that online retailers and credit card companies use is to build applications that store their own transactional context and then process that data in batch after execution. The difficulties are: data volumes become large and logging difficult (storage, overhead for the application, etc.). Difficult to gain value from the data in real time. Still significant post-processing occurs. Often it is not feasible to enable already to existing applications.

Another interesting option, proposed by OpTier, would be to create transaction context through a third party software application and build a single stream of data from multiple sources. This is still an area that requires more research.

+++
To share your own thoughts or other best practices about this topic, please email me directly to alexwsteinberg (@) gmail.com.

Alternatively, you also may connect with me and become part of my professional network of Business, Digital, Technology & Sustainability experts at

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwsteinberg   or
Xing at https://www.xing.com/profile/Alex_Steinberg   or
Google+ at  https://plus.google.com/u/0/+AlexWSteinberg/posts

How Web Content Management Systems enable digital

You all know my passion about digital and how to drive forward related technologies & applications. Today I want to share my thoughts on WCMS and explain why we should care about it.
Web Content Management Systems (WCMS) can been viewed as a technology and content delivery back bone for digital experiences. There are over a billion Web sites in this world and each site needs a WCMS!
Wikipedia describes, “A web content management system (WCMS) is a software system that provides website authoring, collaboration, and administration tools designed to allow users with little knowledge of web programming languages or markup languages to create and manage website content with relative ease.”
A WCMS brings together the specialized products that customers use across the customer journey (Marketing, Software and Commerce Suites, Customer Service Systems, Community Sites, Social Systems, etc.).
This back bone brings together Customer data, Resources and Orchestration, Contextual Delivery, and Touch Points. The platform extends through APIs, Integration frameworks, Data extractions, and Developer Environment. Insights are generated through Data capture, Analytics, Machine learning and Dash boards.
Customer Data includes the Master profile, segmentation, preferences, audiences and external data. Resources and Orchestration includes the Assets (Marketing, Social and third party content, rich media), Interactions (forms, rating & reviews) and Business Operations (localization and globalization).
While Web Content Management has existed for now decades, systems are evolving to meet the needs of for providing mobile, social and personal experiences and meeting application development & delivery needs.
WCMS must enable all roles (site designers, marketers, merchandisers, product managers, editors, etc.) to manage and create content in an effective way. Such content must be delivered effectively on browsers and mobile devices. Unfortunately no vendor is currently providing adequate mobile app support…
The WCMS must also effectively integrate with other key applications such as CRM, Customer Communication Management, digital asset management, test & target tools and employee portal products. The WCMS should be a single tenant PaaS, ideally multi-tenant SaaS.
WCMS has important responsibilities across the customer journey: Manage Marketing, user generated product content. Organize micro-sites and landing pages. Enable search ratings and reviews. Support employee and self-service portals. Manage Customer Reviews.
Companies need to carefully examine a vendor’s global reach, partner network, code base, as well as ease of use for own developers,
Locking at companies: Adobe is the clear leader, also perhaps most pricy in the industry. Site core, Acquia and IBM (both Cloud based or focus) the other two big leaders. HP, Oracle, Opentext and SDL are also strong players.

+++
To share your own thoughts or other best practices about this topic, please email me directly to alexwsteinberg (@) gmail.com.

Alternatively, you also may connect with me and become part of my professional network of Business, Digital, Technology & Sustainability experts at

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwsteinberg   or
Xing at https://www.xing.com/profile/Alex_Steinberg   or
Google+ at  https://plus.google.com/u/0/+AlexWSteinberg/posts


 

Keys to building your digital commerce platform right

Building effective commerce platforms are important to meet the sophisticated needs in the digital age. The undertaking is very complex as it requires work on the strategic, tactical and operational level. Looking only at technology is a frequent shortcut to failure.
Every larger company should consider working with a service provider that can ideally address all aspects of this complex undertaking.
Based on previous projects, I provide you with a check list of key areas and recommendations.

Vision, strategy and business model
Your service provider (SP) should be able to help you develop/ refine your digital vision, strategy and business model. Your SP should be able to help you build a roadmap for transforming your organization.

Management, business and technology consulting
Your SP should not only speak tech-language, but truly understand your business needs from top to bottom. Throwing technology at problems, before clarifying/ solving the business side, often only creates more problems.
The SP should provide true vertical domain knowledge, including customer behavior & 360 degree view, Omni-channel objectives, partner models, inventory, pricing and sales.

Operations
Many areas are obvious candidates for outsourcing. Your SP should be able to take you through various options such as hosted, managed services, performance based pricing models, staff outsourcing, etc.
As requested, the SP should be able to provide commerce infrastructure and operations services (advanced automated site testing, performance management, security testing on cloud platforms)

Systems
Often upgrades to ERP and order management systems are necessary. The SP needs to be able to integrate disparate internal client systems (legacy, home grown ecommerce systems, etc.) and advise on design and architecture.

Technology
Ability to implement the technology flawlessly has become a basic requirement. The SP need to implement a solid commerce technology infrastructure able to meet the expected demands in the future. It involves upgrading and optimizing existing sites and integrating diverse technology programs to enable a comprehensive digital experience. As needed ecommerce, call-center, in-store and other areas need to be fully brought together; applications, mobility wisely integrated.
Big Data & Analytics increasingly drive the marketing of the digital age. XaaS and Cloud enable faster, better and more efficient business and operations. The SP needs to understand these areas and incorporate those effectively into the overall solution.
The SP should offer accelerators and own of the shelf software and solutions to minimize time/ cost to market and maximize value of the new commerce applications. Further the SP must be able to provide solid post-implementation support.

Organizational alignment and Program Management
Markets, Customers and Competition are rapidly evolving. Realignment of the organizational structures, roles, processes, policies, procedures and metrics is unavoidable. The SP should provide guidance in organizational design, transformation & change management. Solid Program management and project execution should support all efforts.

Innovation and agility
The SP should be able to drive innovation and offer best practices from across the industry; leverage insight and solutions from its own innovation labs.
The SP should practice agile methodology and should drive agility throughout the organization.

Price/ Costs
Be aware that the price quoted is not the total cost! Some service providers may be considerable cheaper, but also come with substantial burden on the client organization in terms of increased management time and other overhead. The biggest – often unaccounted - expense – is that of missed revenue and business opportunity.

Engagement
Last but not least the SP should really support a collaborative arrangement and offer various pricing and operating models in line with the client’s needs and performance metrics.

Finding the right Service Provider
Not all Service providers (SP) obviously have breadth and depth of experience to provide the mentioned necessary service. Nevertheless, a good number of companies, also called Global Commerce Service Providers, are able to address most of those needs and provide full client solutions.

Accenture Digital, Sapient Nitro, Deloitte Digital, Razorfish Global, Cognizant and IBM GBS are among the leaders of GCS Providers. Strong contenders are Tata Consulting Services, Infosys, HCL, Wipro and others.

Finding and selecting the right Service Provider for your company is both a science and an art. This guide has given you some key pointers. For questions and thoughts, please let me know.
+++
To share your own thoughts or other best practices about this topic, please email me directly to alexwsteinberg (@) gmail.com.

Alternatively, you also may connect with me and become part of my professional network of Business, Digital, Technology & Sustainability experts at

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwsteinberg   or
Xing at https://www.xing.com/profile/Alex_Steinberg   or
Google+ at  https://plus.google.com/u/0/+AlexWSteinberg/posts

CIO actions to build/ improve IT operations

Companies are facing very challenging times. Here, a list of key actions that CIO and Heads of IT should consider. Many of these actions could be financed by vendors/ partners through managed services, cost and risk sharing models:

Build Operations

-          Enable ecosystems of things to respond to action, rather than static, predefine work flows and procedures. Guide end-to-end experience through user personae and journey maps. Monitor/ detect signals and predict impact in the market.

-          Decide on architecture based on use case and business outcomes: Embed intelligence on edge/ each device, in network, cloud broker or back on enterprise hub. Channels and Customer touch points are multiplying the complexity to bring things together

-          Manage all physical and functional attributes of sensors and devices; enable to remotely manage devices. Keep overview of spectrum of network technologies and protocols. Manage properly.

-          Integrate information flow from varying type of devices with proprietary protocols

-          Secure the entire system of devices, connectivity and information exchange. Manage security at the seams (devices, sensor, communication chips, analytics, event analytics, rules engine, etc.)

-          Virtualize and automate operating environment (server, storage, network, security)

-          Implement software defined networking (SDN). Systems must allow real-time integration across multiple services, servers, clouds, data stores enabling mobile devices to initiate requests from everywhere.

-          Build/ support digital platforms to handle all channel, campaign, context and content related activities. Effectively work with CMO to provide richer, target driven, targeted campaigns, promotions and properties. Understand that Marketing is becoming increasingly technology driven and enabled. Connectivity, data and technology have become part of the new marketing mix (with engagement as the forth).

Improve operations

-          Streamline, optimize and automate operations

-          Switch to out-of-the box solutions, minimize customizations and work on technical debt

-          Improve current technical systems through a persona based, user-centric focus.

-          Move applications to the cloud

-          Implement DevOps improving  requirements management, Continuous build, configuration and release management across the organization

-          Upgrade core applications on the existing platform, implement new solutions or overhaul / rebuild platform

-          Drive down operations, people and infrastructure costs. Lead progress in Software defined storage and Software defined data centers as far as feasible (applications strongly dependable on legacy hardware)

-          Drive other sustainable, green initiatives (including energy efficiency programs)


+++
To share your own thoughts or other best practices about this topic, please email me directly to alexwsteinberg (@) gmail.com.

Alternatively, you also may connect with me and become part of my professional network of Business, Digital, Technology & Sustainability experts at

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwsteinberg   or
Xing at https://www.xing.com/profile/Alex_Steinberg   or
Google+ at  https://plus.google.com/u/0/+AlexWSteinberg/posts


  

Turning APIs into a competitive advantage

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), treated formerly just as a development technique or technical assets are gaining increasingly for business and operations.

APIs are a fundamental building block for making the Internet of Things work. They support the digital demands for Openness, Agility and Scalability. The use of APIs contributed visibly to the success stories of companies such as Instagram and Twitter. At Netflix, almost all API traffic is through services and devices.

APIs allow companies to leverage their existing information, resources and services across the organization as well as to the outside. Companies can add features and content to products and services. At times the APIs turn into own product offerings. Packaged application vendors and SAAS providers are increasingly publishing they sell as a Web API.

There are numerous advantages to companies to increase the use of APIs:

APIs encourage and facilitate the external developer community to engage with the company and enhance existing products & services. The ecosystem of the company becomes larger and valuable. It has a direct impact on revenues, market share and profits. APIs can help build competitive advantage.

APIs also enable companies to drive innovation from the inside out. The company can identify resources & assets to leverage and monetize those. IT departments find opportunity to develop their own products & services.

With the opportunities come also a number of challenges:

Security can be an issue when company information passes organizational boundaries. Often backend layers, formerly protected by firewalls, are less secure than frontend layers.  Technical debt in former software development implementations becomes painfully aware, creating security holes. Legal issues on liability pose risks.

Systematic API management is necessary to leverage the advantages and address mentioned risks.

A good approach is to build an API management platform to enable and manage three key functions: 1) Create and deploy APIs 2) Secure, monitor and optimize usage 3) Market, monetize and support assets.

There are a number of vendors and service providers that can effectively help in addressing the issues. Mashery, CA Technologies, Axway, MuleSoft and Apigee are listed in Gartner’s respective top quadrant.


+++
To share your own thoughts or other best practices about this topic, please email me directly to alexwsteinberg (@) gmail.com.

Alternatively, you also may connect with me and become part of my professional network of Business, Digital, Technology & Sustainability experts at

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwsteinberg   or
Xing at https://www.xing.com/profile/Alex_Steinberg   or
Google+ at  https://plus.google.com/u/0/+AlexWSteinberg/posts