IBM’s Digital Agencies Point of View
Introduction: What's the World making Today
Every industry, every organisation, every Line of Business is facing some form of technological disruption today. Some organisations have leveraged the powers of technology to adapt and transform the way they work, other are facing the challenges of becoming irrelevant due to not have seen this change happen on time. It doesn't matter what size of organisation you are, if you're a government institution or a NGO or a commercial enterprise, everyone can take huge benefits of these new approaches thanks to disruptive technologies that can be summarised into Data, Cloud and Engagement. These 3 concepts contain most of the newest and most innovative transformational drivers like Internet of Things, Economy of API's, personalised engagement, mobility, cognitive computing, Social sentiment analysis, big data, and many more "buzz" words out there. Taking advantage of these 3 concepts can help organisations to drastically transform the way they work, and improve their services or products towards their markets or even better, into NEW untapped markets. The sky has literally become the limit of possibilities for many industries.
Data, Cloud, Engagement
Let's take a closer look at what these concepts encapsulate and which sense they make for a business or government institution. One thing is important to know, every technology driven transformation holds all 3 of these concepts in it, you can't separate them one from each other. There's no personalised engagement without some form of data analytics or cloud environment.
Data In today's world, we are producing 2.5 Billion Giga bytes of data every single day. That’s the equivalent of about 170 newspapers being delivered to every man, woman, and child on this planet. Information is growing at an accelerated pace; it’s proliferating and it’s simply overwhelming. The amount of information created in the last two years alone eclipses all the information created since the beginning of time.
By 2025, demand for oncology services will grow 42%, while the supply of oncologists will grow by only 28%, creating a shortage of more than 1,400 oncologists. What if we had a system that enabled us to scale the knowledge, expertise, and talent of the world’s premier oncologists to guide the care of the more than 66% of newly diagnosed cancers (and the majority of cancer patients), which will be in regions that have the fewest resources to tackle them?
9,000 pages of financial news are published each day by Reuters and 5 research documents are produced by Wall Street analysts every minute. Financial Services experts must make decisions that generate value for their clients based on this information, every day. What if your Asset Manager was able to surface all relevant insights from across these reports and publications?
There's no way a normal human being can manage or handle these amounts of data based on his expertise or skills. You need very powerful Analytics and even Cognitive technology to leverage the gigantic information and benefits that can be found in Big Data.
Managing data and getting the most out of them require deep industry skills and expertise, combined with state-of-the-art technologies.
Cloud Gone are the days that every organisation had their business applications and - transactions run on their own labour-intensive and expensive infrastructures. Today in the digital world, every interaction, every transaction, every client - or product - or competitive - or market analytics must run on flexible, cost effective and very scalable cloud environments that can easily adapt to fluctuations, seasonality, demand peaks, growth and periodical decreases.
Clouds have become the preferred "server" environment for mobile devices to connect with. Whereas before fat clients were accessing big server infrastructures, today a mobile device accesses the cloud and gets you what you need in context of who you are, where you are and what you need at that point in time.
Cloud is a very generic concept that contains a lot of possible varieties depending on the organisation's needs, requirements, flexibility, security and legal compliance. Choice between public clouds, private cloud, dedicated cloud, on premises data centers and most importantly hybrid forms of all these has become a business as usual.
These discussions and decisions can be very challenging and, just like with Data, needs quite some expertise and skills to make it a success.
Engagement It doesn't matter who your final "client" is, be it a consumer, a citizen, an employee, a patient, you name it, we all want to be treated more and more in the most personalised way possible. If we don't get this from our provider, we just click away and move to another supplier or app on our smartphone. More than ever, the engagement you build with your end-user will define your success or even relevance in your market. The simplicity of the way your client can engage with you and can do business with your organisation will give you competitive advantage. Not for nothing approaches like Design Thinking are required to reinvent processes towards your customer. Mobility has become the de facto standard of engagement, but 80% of the mobile apps on our smartphones are only opened once. How do you cope with that, how do you make sure you integrate the right analytics and backend systems to your app, to your point of sale engagement to make it compelling enough. Again, this approach requires skills and know-how on how to create that WOW-factor that will keep your client sticky.
A crucial aspect in Engagement is without a doubt Security. This is an aspect that has become more and more a Board level matter. It has a potential impact on every single line of business in your organisation. Sales, marketing, production, R&D, legal, HR are all impacted by the way your environment is being secured or not. Making mistakes or not investing enough into security can have enormous impacts on your organisation. The world of digital security has become so vast, so rapidly changing, so dangerous, that a structured and strategic approach is a must.
Innovation that matters
Organisations that want to bring innovation that matters in their business-as-usual way of working must cope with the delicate combination of three worlds: Systems of Record Systems of Insight Systems of Engagement
In short, Systems of Record are your organisation's business transactions (coming from ERP, CRM, structured databases, workflow engines, ...) Systems of Insight are you analytics and big data engines that will enrich your knowledge and make decisions faster and more accurate. Systems of Engagement are the ways you make your client interaction unforgettable, personal, intimate.
Finding the right balance between these 3 elements will bring continuous innovation to your business. All of these 3 paradigms will require the right cloud deployment approach and the right security approach in order not to breach your business.
Companies have understood that they cannot cope with all of these elements themselves anymore, that they need to surround themselves with the right eco system of partners and suppliers to make this happen.
The role of Digital Agencies (DA)
As a logical result of the Digital (r)evolution, it is clear that Digital Agencies have received more and more attention from organisations. Typically Digital Agencies have focussed more on the Systems of Engagement part of the equation. That is historically the sweet spot of their activities and know-how. They have become the Trusted Advisor of the Chief Marketing Officer. They are involved in strategic decisions, as well as the roll out of campaigns, branding, social interaction, you name it.
Traditionally, Digital Agencies have learned to use marketing automation tools, social interaction tools, campaign management tools, website building platforms, online communication tools, web/click behaviour tools, mobile app development tools, agile development tools etc... These days, most of the Agencies have entered as well the Systems of Insight approach, where they are learning their first steps into digital analytics, social sentiment, 360° view of the customer, customer journey maps. Clients of these agencies have appreciated the "one-stop-shop" approach Agencies are trying to offer.
There is a "but" however in this trend. As we tried to describe earlier, these Systems of Insight, the secure and scalable integration with Systems of Record, the overall security and cloud approaches have become so specialised, that very few Digital Agencies can or want to take overall responsibility and ownership of such projects.
As described above, also their client start to see that working with the DA only can have risks and can create gaps in their expectations. They are more and more looking for eco systems of DA surrounded with specialists in domains such as deep analytics, cognitive computing, economy of API's, design thinking, security, cloud management, internet of things, smarter cities.
The role of the new IBM
Since Ginni Rometty took over as CEO and Chairman of IBM, the company has undertaken a vast transformation towards this new Digital cloud based and data driven world. IBM has adopted a series of Strategic Imperatives to completely turn around our business models towards a world of Data, Cloud, Engagement and Smart Systems.
By doing so, IBM is positioning itself more and more towards DA to complement their eco systems towards their end clients. Very often these clients are the existing clients of IBM, where we run their business and know their industry pains and opportunities. Very often these are new clients that have found their way towards IBM Watson or IBM Bluemix to create innovative business models (see lower).
What are the most important initiatives and new partnerships IBM invested in to enable our Strategic Imperatives?
Data Our point of view on Data is simply put: analytics everywhere. Every single business decision or next move should be based on some kind of analytics, from the most strategic decision to the daily operational decision to be taken.
Today IBM is one of the top leading providers of big data and analytics solutions. In order to keep this lead and be ahead of most vendors we have undertaken a huge strategic investment in what we call Cognitive Computing with IBM Watson. With Watson we are transforming Healthcare, Education, Wealth management, legal, help desk environments and many other parts of society. IBM Watson
In order to even further enrich our data lead, we have signed strategic partnerships with Twitter, Facebook and the Weather Company to help our client better understand the power of the network, not only for the voice of the customer, but also to better manage logistics, stocks, insurance, etc... These partnerships are reflected in the deep integrations of their Big Data into our Analytics and cognitive solutions and consultancy. IBM and Twitter IBM and Facebook IBM and The Weather Company
Open data and open platforms IBM is investing heavily in open technology in order to make analytics as accessible as possible to both data analysts as to business users. Therefore, we have helped launch an open data platform called Spark on which we have now committed to train over a million data analysts around the globe.
With solutions like Watson Analytics and Watson Explorer we are make business users lives easier by giving them access to state of the art and ready to use cloud based cognitive capability. The business will be able to grasp the power of deep analytics much faster by using our Industry Analytics Solutions, always for the same purpose: Analytics everywhere
Cloud Our point of view on Cloud is Hybrid. Our client must have complete choice and flexibility on the type of cloud used and rely on a seamless integration between different cloud types or platforms. We have invested a lot in acquisitions like Blue Box to make this happen.
With Box, we have a created a partnership that allows organisations to securely share knowledge and files internally and externally, based on IBM Security and Cloud technology.
Economy of API's With IBM Bluemix, we are providing developers the full choice and flexibility to use the best IBM technologies to build their applications or integrate functionality into them. Fail fast, be creative, try and start over at no cost. We call IBM Bluemix the Innovation platform. This platform provides access to API's from Twitter, Watson, Box, Apple, security, analytics, predictive analytics, push notifications and many many more great stuff.
Open Cloud platform IBM Bluemix fully supports Cloud Foundry, Docker, Openstack, Open Power, to ensure developers don't have to cope with proprietary platforms.
Engagement Our point of view on Engagement is Design Thinking, Personalisation and Security. Our client must be able to build a relation with their end users based on trust and personal approach.
IBM has created IBM Interactive Experience, the leading Digital Agency in the world. This business consultancy division uses IBM Design Thinking as their primary methodology to rethink the way our client interacts with their end users. Based on this part of the business and design thinking, we have created a strategic partnership with Apple with whom we are now reinventing >100 job roles towards mobility.
The vast majority of engagements happens through mobile devices, this is why IBM has become a strong leader in Mobile technology to support our Interactive Experience and Design Thinking philosophy. Application management Device management and mobile marketing are all available today in IBM Mobilefirst.
Security has become a Board level discussion. IBM has built most comprehensive security environment on the market covering all levels of security and governed by strong security analytics to support the business. The IBM Security offering will guarantee trust and confidentiality in every end user engagement or - transaction.
Conclusion
We believe that our mutual client will strongly benefit from an ecosystem where the DA and IBM are working together to make their innovative business outcome a reality. Together we can bring know-how and technology to the table that is unmatched in the industry.
We have lots of common clients already today, but we only do not approach them together yet. By doing so, we will open our client's eyes towards the future and provide him with that end-to-end approach he is looking for to meet his objectives.
You bring your deep engagement - and marketing skills to the table, we bring deep analytics, cloud infrasructure, security, business integration and industry knowledge and bundled together we will change the way our client is doing business forever.