Daily Disruption
Capgemini Bolsters Digital Transformation Services with $4.1B Acquisition
Consulting giant Capgemini seeks to solidify its position as a digital transformation change agent with the $4.1 billion acquisition of engineering and research and development firm Altran Technologies. With the deal completion expected by the end of the year, the merger of the two companies will create a combined company......
Tyson Foods CTO’s 3 Rules for Enterprise Innovation
Since the arrival of Scott Spradley as CTO at Tyson Foods two years ago from his previous post as CIO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, he’s been pushing the poultry conglomerate to take huge steps to modernize its IT infrastructure and tech philosophy. Last year he embarked on a journey to......
How One Former CFO Prioritizes Digital Investments as a CDO
Schneider Electric Chief Digital Officer Herve Coureil has run through the executive trenches in many different capacities. Prior to his appointment as CDO of the company, he was a more operationally minded CIO for the French energy firm for eight years. And his resume also has him serving a stint......
Investing in Innovation Yields Companies Double the Financial Performance
A new report out by a Wall Street data guru found that long-term investments in research and development (R&D) yields companies outsized gains—frequently doubling the performance of the S&P 500. Head of quantitative investment strategy at Nomura Instinet, Joseph Mezrich recently compiled an “Innovation Index” that tracks stock market and......
Time to Rebrand CMO as CXO?
The most recent PwC Global Consumer Insights Survey shows that customer experience beats everything when customers choose which companies to do business with. Approximately 65% of U.S. consumers say that a positive experience with a brand is more powerful and influential than advertising. As so many digital initiatives home in......
BP Reaping Billions of Dollars in Digital Transformation ROI
Energy giant BP has made huge investments in digital innovation in the last few years, and according to reports out of last week’s Offshore Technology Conference in Houston, the firm’s executives say it is reaping billions of dollars in returns as a result, both in savings and new revenue opportunities.......
Mastercard API Platform Will Help Glue Together Fintech Ecosystem
Mastercard wants to tap into the greater ecosystem of fintech innovators, and it hopes to accelerate that collaboration with a new API-based digital platform. Dubbed the Mastercard Innovation Engine, the platform is built to offer plug-and-play integration between Mastercard digital assets and financial technology services in a seamless experience for......
The Two Factors That Make or Break CDO Success
Enterprise digital leaders face a tough task in leading the cultural and technological changes necessary to spur on digital transformation. According to some of the preeminent researchers on digital transformation, a study of more than 500 chief digital officers (CDOs) shows that their success boils down to two major leadership......
Enterprises Turn Up the Volume on Voice Commerce
As enterprises look for new channels to extend their reach to consumers, voice technology and smart speaker apps are on the cusp of widespread adoption. A new study from Adobe Analytics shows that 91% of organizations report they’re making significant investments in voice, and by the end of the year......
A Snapshot of Digital Platform Growth
IT organizations are increasingly relying on digital platforms to help them roll out new technology capabilities to the business more quickly. Digirupt wrote up an example of this phenomenon in action at Deutsche Bank, which created a home-grown platform-as-a-service (PaaS) called Fabric to enable faster delivery of applications. A recent report......
Western Union and MoneyGram in Heated Race Against Digital Disruption
In a world of Venmo, Zelle, and a plethora of other digital payment options, old school money order businesses are at risk of extinction. Leadership at two of the biggest players in this space, Western Union and MoneyGram, are well aware of the digital disruption at play and are scrambling......
Holographic Meetings Coming to an Office Near You?
Microsoft believes that holographic meetings via mixed-reality tech will be a mainstay of the future of work. In a sign of that commitment, this week it demoed new augmented reality technology developed in collaboration with the company Spatial, which will integrate Microsoft Teams and the mixed-reality Microsoft HoloLens 2 headset......
3 New IT Operations Roles Key for AIOps Success
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in IT ops analysis tools, otherwise known as AIOps, is on a path to massive growth over the next five years. Many experts say that as AIOps automation reduces the amount of manual work typically done by entry-level operations personnel, it’s going to change......
Microsoft’s Machine Learning Push: Low Code, No Code, Simple
Microsoft seeks to help enterprises leverage machine learning in their applications more simply through a bevy of new Azure Cognitive Services tools and machine learning models released this week. According to TechCrunch, these include new APIs for building personalization features and recognizing handwriting, enhanced speech recognition services for transcriptions, and......
Domino’s Proves How Important Data Modernization is to Everything Digital
One of the darlings of digital transformation, Domino’s Pizza has gotten to the point where it’s driving 60% of its incoming orders from digital channels. The company has been continuously improving its digital capabilities for the better part of a decade now, with no signs of slowing down. According to......
Analysts Expect More than 10x Gains in AI Software Market by 2025
A new report out this week from analysts with Tractica shows that the artificial intelligence software market will shoot up from $9.5 billion in 2018 up to $118.6 billion annually by 2025. Analysts say that as AI shifts from hype to realistic use cases, a wide range of industries will......
Caution the Prevailing CIO Sentiment About AI
In spite of the intensifying hype over artificial intelligence (AI) in 2019, most CIOs today are at the yellow light phase of adoption, according to Isaac Sacolick. A digital transformation consultant and author of Driving Digital: The Leader’s Guide to Business Transformation through Technology, Sacolick’s read on recent surveys and......
Change Management Stands as ERP’s Biggest Obstacle
While technical challenges still plague organizations deploying enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms, the thorniest ERP issues usually crop up from process and organizational change. So say recent survey results in the 2019 ERP Report from Panorama Consulting Solutions, which has been running this ERP survey for over a decade now.......
Enterprise Cost Management Saving Money For Digital Transformation
Whereas just a few years ago the cost management function in the enterprise was primarily operating under a mindset to pursue cost savings to fund growth strategies, that has shifted. Experts with Deloitte report that today the prevailing mentality is to use cost savings to fund digital transformation. This save-to-transform......
The Role of Critical Thinking in Data Science
There’s a reason why data scientists say they’re ‘interrogating’ data. According to Bill Schmarzo, CTO of IoT and analytics for Hitatchi Vantara, one of the most important skills that a data scientist brings to the table is critical thinking—in other words never taking things at face value and always digging......
The Emerging Technology Driving Digital Transformation of Supply Chains
Gartner experts say that with supply chains becoming “increasingly globalized and more complex,” organizations are turning to a number of key technologies to provide visibility into the partners and transactions involved in the supply chain network. According to Christian Titze, vice president analyst for Gartner, the eight technologies that organizations......
Random Acts of Digital Won’t Change an Organization
There is no single piece of technology that will shift an organization from the inertia of traditional operational models into the dynamic state of digitally enabled progress. Scott Buchholz and Kavitha Prabhakar of Deloitte say that at a minimum there are nine technological forces that run through the fabric of innovation......
Business Intelligence in the Cloud at an All-Time High
The number of organizations that rank cloud-based business intelligence (BI) capabilities as critical or very important to their operations has reached a high watermark, according to recent research. In its eighth year running, the 2019 Cloud Computing and Business Intelligence Market Study from Dresner Advisory Services found that organizations are......
Five Questions to Get the Jump on Digital Disruption
In this day and age, every type of company needs to start thinking like a technology company or risk experiencing the full brunt of digital disruption. That new tech-minded mentality needs to inform how even the most staid traditional organization interacts with customers, partners, and suppliers, as well as even......
Board of Directors Can Lead Digital Transformation With Better Metrics
Corporate governance expert Betsy Atkins says directors of public companies need to take a much more proactive role in leading digital transformation within their organizations. One of the key ways they can start igniting change isn’t by mandating technology like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), but instead by......
Distributed Renewable Energy Sources Driving Electrical Grid Transformation
The growth in new renewable energy sources is shifting the entire paradigm of what the energy grid was designed to do. According to the CTO of GE Grid Solutions, Vera Silva, this is one of the biggest trends that’s driving transformation in the energy business. Silva told industry publication Electric......
Low Power Wide Area Networks to Expand on Industrial IoT Explosion
The low power, wide area network (LPWAN) market will go on a tear in the next six years, pushed forward largely due to the increasing proliferation of IoT, says a new report by Global Market Insights. The firm predicts that LPWAN will surpass $65 billion by 2025. According to Innovation......
Where Blockchain Will Disrupt Enterprises First
In spite of all the hoopla over blockchain’s potential, the vast majority of enterprises have still chosen not to touch it. Consider a KPMG survey conducted across 740 global tech executives that found 67% of respondents are not using blockchain technology. The study does show a significant chunk of tech......
P&G Seeks to Clean Up Online Ad Platforms
Procter & Gamble Co., one of the world’s largest consumer products makers — and one of the biggest online advertisers for Facebook and Google, is threatening to use its considerable weight to affect change among internet advertising platforms. Specifically, speaking at a conference Thursday, P&G chief brand officer Marc Pritchard......
Ford Shake-up Accelerates Digital and Smart Vehicle Efforts
Ford Motor Company Wednesday announced a significant management shuffle the automaker hopes will accelerate its efforts to succeed in the rapidly changing car market. The moves are designed to sharpen Ford’s focus on using data analytics, mobility, and autonomous vehicles. “In the past two years, we have made tangible progress......
Dive Deep Early in Digital Transformation
Enterprises seeking to establish digital maturity would do well to focus more on depth than on breadth. Innovation experts with Deloitte recently broke down how digital transformation and digital maturity are driven by seven ‘digital pivots,’ competencies in areas like business model adaptability, unified customer experience and data mastery. They......
VC: 99% of Insurance Tech Investment Wasted
More than $12 billion has been invested in insurance tech ventures in the last five years, and at least one venture capitalist believes $11.88 billion is set to vanish. This is what Jonathan Kalman, founding partner at Eos Venture Partners in New York told the audience at a recent insurance......
The First Law of Digital Transformation
Similar to the way Moore’s Law predicted the pace of change in computing performance, digital transformation can be observed under its own guiding law. So says one of the most respected luminaries when it comes to business and digital transformation, George Westerman. A senior lecturer with the MIT Sloan School of......
AR Will Become the New Reality for 100M Shoppers by 2020
Gartner analysts say that retailers will leverage augmented reality (AR) to reinvent online and in-store customer experiences. They predict that by next year 100 million consumers will use AR to shop, and that 46 percent of retailers will use either AR or virtual reality (VR) to add value to flagging brick-and-mortar......
Hey Alexa, What’s Wrong with My Back?
In an invite-only initiative, Amazon launched a service for a handful of healthcare groups to build HIPAA-compliant Alexa voice assistant skills. The new capability launched with a half dozen of skills, from checking on prescription status for patients to scheduling appointments.According to Rarchel Jiang, head of Alexa Heath and Wellness, the......
A Visual History of Hyped Technologies Since the Dot-Com Bubble
As technologists, we’ve lived through our share of hyped technologies. After all, the “paperless office” was just around the corner in 1988. The rise and fall of hyped trends rolls on like waves as each technology eventually finds its productive path (Gartner Hype Cycle, anyone?). Living through so many of......
Putting HR at the Heart of Digital Transformation
Consensus has it that people and not technology are at the heart of digital transformation. To reimagine business models and embed digital capabilities into business processes, organizations need the right mix of people who’ve got the mindset and the skillset get over the hump of corporate inertia. As such, this......