I have always been a firm believer that there is no such thing as a dumb question. Many times I have outed myself as the dumbest guy in this room with a simple question, and in the process, I hope I have been able to enlighten others.
For those of us who work in financial services, blockchain is the most interesting technology trend to emerge in recent years. Evangelists of this technology expose the decentralized nature of blockchain, and use phrases like “world computer” to describe the promise of this technology. While it’s true that blockchain has revolutionary potential, it’s important at this stage of the adoption cycle to investigate valuable use cases that will drive broader adoption.
Once upon a time, I couldn’t do without my middleware. To make my application resilient and scalable, and to allow it to talk to everything else in the enterprise, I had no choice but to stand up an ESB in my architecture. It was literally in the middle of everything I did. Then, when I moved to the cloud, my world began to change.
Larry Ellison once said that a “CRM provides a 360-degree view of your customer, provided you don’t care about getting paid.” This quip was intended to ward off new threats to the dominance of ERP. Many organizations, having implemented GL and ERP, were dipping their toes in the CRM waters––particularly service heavy industries, such as utilities and manufacturing. These industries built their services, sales, and marketing functions into this CRM domain.
Although we hear a lot about robots replacing jobs, most businesses are already well down the path of automation. Moving forward, businesses will continue to leverage advances in automation technology. However, the new frontier of competitiveness has shifted to product and service innovation. Success on this front goes to those able to create customer experiences that deliver insight and convenience. These experiences are created by understanding the lifestyle needs of mobile consumers, and strategically inserting services that satisfy these needs along the consumer’s path.
In the early Internet era, we used to say that every company needed to become an Internet company to survive. At that time, many companies either did not know what this meant or were in denial as to the threat the Internet posed to their traditional business. Fast forward several decades, and we find the companies that are thriving are those that successfully extended their business to the Internet. Now, it’s the dawn of a new era –
