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Following are IBM's seven recommended keys to success:
The very point of sale
Your future is on the line
By Dale S. Laszig
recently attended FinovateFall 2019 in New York
City. Since 2007, Finovate has hosted over 40 confer- 3. Architect your business for change: Creating
ences and more than 2,300 live product demos. Each
I year, events in London, San Francisco, New York,
Hong Kong, Dubai, Singapore and Berlin provide financial
service providers a cornucopia of future-ware. Organizers
described FinovateFall2019 as a sales demo, press confer-
ence, analyst briefing, tradeshow and business develop-
ment meeting, and said their "360 degree approach means
attendees vie for demoing companies' attention, not the
other way around."
At the conference, I noticed cards placed strategically
invited attendees to visit the IBM lounge. "The next chapter
of transformation is here," the cards read. "Visit the Digital
Reinvention Bookshelf at the IBM lounge to uncover the
answers you need to transform your enterprise." When I
took my seat in the meeting hall, I found a note on one of
the cards that said, "What will happen to me?" Through
all the expertly staged and perfectly timed seven-minute
demos that followed, the note kept coming to mind. I felt I
had to answer it and made a point to visit the IBM lounge.
Reinventing your company
The IBM lounge had comfortable seating surrounded by
tall white bookcases. Hardcover books with built-in iPads
illuminated seven keys to success. Attendees browsed the
digitally enhanced library at their own pace, discussing
concepts with on-site facilitators. Combining print and
digital media was a clever way for IBM to demonstrate
how converging technologies are reshaping the business
landscape.
IBM detailed its vision for next-generation business
models, citing data from its report titled The Cognitive
Enterprise: Reinventing your company with AI. "A new era of
business reinvention is dawning," report authors wrote.
"Organizations are facing an unprecedented convergence
of technological, social and regulatory forces. As artificial
intelligence (AI), automation, Internet of Things (IoT),
blockchain and 5G become pervasive, their combined
impact will reshape standard business architectures."
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1. Create platforms to unleash digital Darwinism:
As technology platforms reshape the global economy,
dominant players open their platforms, allowing oth-
ers to join. These top performers apply design think-
ing, open workflows and agile approaches to building
flexible, scalable platforms.
2. Leverage the incumbent advantage in data: Big
data provides deep insights that drive successful busi-
ness models. While supply chains are leveraging more
data analytics than ever, IBM analysts have observed
that less than a quarter of data is being analyzed in
real or near-real time.
a conceptual blueprint that defines organizational
structure and operations can be difficult, particularly
for legacy companies, "because enterprise blueprints
often reflect accumulated history" and accidentally
aggregated legacy choices made by enterprises over
decades, researchers noted.
4. Redesign company workflows around AI: Instead
of creating processes that direct worker actions, orga-
nizations can harness AI and exponential technolo-
gies to define how work gets done. Working together,
smart machines and smarter humans can create op-
erational processes that continuously learn and open
workflows that span ecosystems and networks.
5. Get agile, change fast and build things: Agile,
cross-functional teams can create fluid workflows
that react quickly to change, align activities to core
platform intents and remove bottlenecks in work-
flows. Providing a strong sense of purpose while free-
ing employees to become problem solvers can create
a "tightly aligned and loosely coupled" organization,
accelerating the flow of ideas and data and driving in-
novation.
6. Reinvent your workforce to ignite talent: Com-
petition for skilled labor is fierce; organizations must
effectively manage skills, talent and culture to at-
tract and retain key employees. This need will only
increase as new business platforms and workflows re-
quire new and ongoing skills training and rapid skills
transfer and development.
7. Win with trust and security: Security can some-
times feel like a tug of war between the need to cre-
ate frictionless consumer experiences and the need
to protect identities and data. Security will continue
to dominate business platform building, as organiza-
tions strive to secure human and machine elements,
workflows and data sources. IBM recommends taking
an open network approach that protects all platform
participants.