Showing posts with label real time. Show all posts
Showing posts with label real time. Show all posts

Human, Digital and Future Cadences on a Time Continuum

Strategy is the art of making use of time and space. I am less concerned about the later than the former. Space we can recover, lost time never. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

Digital transformation involves the process of transforming a business from one state to another.  It is also about time.  An important part of this transformation is speeding up the cadence of business and information movement along the time continuum from human, digital and finally to future-time.  Businesses today must be capable of competing in all three of these cadences on the time continuum simultaneously.

What are the time cadences on the time continuum?

1. Human-time – time cadence governed by our physical, biological and mental limitations as humans and the regulatory environments that we work within.
2. Digital-time – time cadence supported by the digital and mobile technologies used including computers, software applications and network transmission speeds.
3. Future-time – time cadence stretching into the future and only limited by the lack of available data, computing power and the sophistication of algorithms used to analyze, predict, model, project, forecast and recommend.

Speed, Personalization, Analytics and Enterprise Information Systems

Ninety percent of 18-34 years old strongly value a personalized mobile and web experience, and eighty-two percent of of those over 45 years old value personalization.  What kind of personalization?  Forty-seven percent of shoppers prefer location or time-based personalization in mobile applications or websites.  In other words, don't show me things that are not available for me to purchase in Boise at this time, or that I don't like!  Given this survey data we all know what needs to be done and are taking the necessary steps to be able to offer personalization, right?  Wrong it seems.  Many companies are not using available data to understand their customers better so they can provide them with contextually relevant and personalized mobile application experiences.

My colleague, Benjamin Pring, at Cognizant's Center for the Future of Work recently published a research paper titled Putting the Experience in Digital Customer Experience.  In his research he found fewer than 20% of respondents use analytics generated by application programming interface (API) traffic to understand their customers’ online and offline purchase journeys.  Just 41% of respondents in the retail industry say they will be effective at analyzing customer metadata by 2017.  A mere 42% of respondents say they have adequate tools and skills to analyze digitally generated data.  Only one-third of respondents have made adjustments to their business model to pursue strategies driven by digital information about their customers.

An additional challenge, is that personalizing mobile user experiences takes speed, speed many do not have available in their current IT environments.  As organizations begin developing mobile strategies and implementing mobile apps, they quickly realize simply developing and deploying basic mobile apps, infrastructure and frameworks is not enough.  They must push further and implement a real-time enterprise to remain competitive.  This real-time requirement is at the root of many problems.  Eighty-four percent of survey participants reported they have IT systems too slow or incapable of supporting real-time mobility, which negatively impacts mobile app performance and the user’s experience.

We have some more work to do.


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Kevin Benedict
Writer, Speaker, Senior Analyst
Digital Transformation, EBA, Center for the Future of Work Cognizant
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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

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