In light of the digital transformation imperative, IT has taken center stage as a key enabling function supporting the survival and growth of the modern energy and utilities provider. New technologies and tools support anytime, anywhere access of data, real-time processing, and increasingly rich analytics functionality. As executives and line-of-business owners increase the pressure on IT teams to deliver these new capabilities to support strategic business objectives, demands on IT have exceeded IT delivery capacity. 

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In addition to improving customer and stakeholder experiences or increasing employee productivity, energy and utility companies are also expanding their product portfolios beyond their traditional offerings. 

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My previous blog in this series explored how forward-leaning energy and utilities providers embrace digital technologies to improve the experiences of the constituents that they serve. But in addition to turning outward to meet the growing expectations of external constituents, these firms face increasing pressure to turn inward to improve their own operational efficiency.

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My first blog post in this series gave an overview of why energy and utilities firms like Siemens are undergoing digital transformation to remain competitive. One common digital initiative for energy and utility providers is improving customer satisfaction; conditioned by other high-tech industries, consumers increasingly expect personalized, omnichannel experiences — leading utilities to tap into new technologies.

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The energy and utilities industries are undergoing a dramatic shift driven by rising stakeholder and customer expectations, increasing economic, and political uncertainty, and emerging new technologies. 

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Integration has become a mission-critical strategic imperative for business across industries, from financial services, to healthcare, to manufacturing. Yet the nuances of how to implement an effective integration strategy differ by industries.

This year at Dreamforce, MuleSoft and Salesforce will be presenting a series of sessions specifically tailored to the needs of businesses across different industries, featuring trailblazers from leading firms such as HSBC,

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Drug prices for Americans under 65 are projected to rise more than 11% in 2017. For consumers and health insurance companies, this is a real challenge as prescription drugs account for 10% of all healthcare spending in the United States. In an increasingly competitive landscape, where consumers can compare and choose cheaper drugs and where insurers want to pay less, pharmaceutical companies are feeling pressure to drive down costs.

IT is at the center of many initiatives designed to reduce the cost of developing and bringing new drugs to market,

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In our most recent Connectivity Benchmark Report, we surveyed over 951 IT decision makers (ITDMs), and approximately 90% of healthcare IT leaders ranked the adoption of cloud technologies as an “important,” “very important,” or “extremely important” priority for 2017. Why is this so important to the healthcare industry? The typical drivers for cloud adoption (cost savings, better application scalability) are a factor, but there are also industry-specific drivers that have created a sense of urgency around healthcare organizations moving to the cloud.

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In the midst of increasing competitive pressures from both incumbents and startups, companies across all industries are adopting Software as a Service (SaaS) technologies as a means of increasing operational efficiency, improving digital engagement with customers, and accelerating new product go-to-market market faster.

For organizations with decades of accumulated on-premise infrastructure and applications, adopting these technologies in a way that enables them to coexist with existing technologies presents a number of thorny,

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In 2016, the Government Accountability Office, a US government watchdog, published an account of the oldest government IT systems. The average age of those systems, which handle things like our nuclear forces, our weather satellites, and incidents involving hazardous materials, is 49.8 years. The oldest system, at 56 years old, is the Internal Revenue System that handles taxpayer data and handles refunds, which is  “written in assembly language code — a low-level computer code that is difficult to write and maintain —

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