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Market Context
CxO Agenda
Market Context

As you start your digital journey, understanding how your challenges might evolve will help you to be more resilient, more prepared for the uncertainties that lie ahead. Equally importantly, it will sharpen your understanding of how technology can help you overcome the obstacles and take advantage of the possibilities along the way.
A few years from now and many firms will have made great strides along their digital journey. We take a look at what this new world looks like and means for the CxO.

## Digital Journey

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
  Customer expectations are changing: focused on the outcome and experience rather than the underlying product or service. Companies have turned their attention to reflecting those expected outcomes in their customer contracts rather than the underlying capabilities that deliver them.
BUSINESS REINVENTION
  The rise of the technology giants and emergence of new digital players together threaten markets previously held tight by legacy players. To counteract these threats, traditional companies are reinventing themselves, developing new business models – initially for the B2C space and later the B2B space.
OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE
  Today’s organizations are more agile and responsive than ever before and more efficient in delivering massively customized products and highly tailored services. They’ve moved from working on timescales based on months or years to ones based on days or weeks, giving the business more confidence in a face-paced world.
TRUST AND COMPLIANCE
  Partner ecosystems have become broader and value chains longer. The longer value chain – along with additional complexities in manufacture and the supply chain – is opening up additional security and safety challenges. Ensuring the partner of the partner, for instance, doesn’t act inappropriately is crucial.

Technologies in the Digital Journey
Technology | x | y | x (phone) | y (phone) | Impact | Range | Section | Keys | Description
--- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | ---
Ambient Computing | 39 | 33 | 80 | 17 | Adolescent | 2019+ | High | experience,trust | Concept On today’s digital networks, everything is now just a microsecond away. This has a strong impact on business as well as individual lives.Always connected, anytime and anywhere, we’re confident the technology we rely on will be there when we need it.This is just the beginning: with the rise of the wearables and the Internet of Everything, we enter an ambient computing world where information technologies become invisible yet surround all aspects of life with personalized services, communication and anytime, anywhere insights. Impact We’ve not only become increasingly reliant on technology in our everyday lives; we also have increasing expectations about our technological experience. As we share and collaborate naturally, all we care about is simplicity and a compelling and seamless experience as we move across our multitude of connected devices that span the real and virtual worlds. Mobile, cloud, and the Internet of Everything must therefore be at the heart of digital strategies for a seamless customer experience.Ultimately, success lies in delivering a unified experience (even though it may involve several enterprises from diverse sectors) and finding the best way to deliver the perfect personalized and timely experience: the right personalized insights and services at the right moment. This will require increasing collaboration between verticals and probably the reinvention of many business and service ecosystems. The smart city experience of tomorrow, for instance, may encompass seamless infotainment, transportation, utility, healthcare and security services.While new technologies can enhance lives and streamline the way we do business, unfortunately there are individuals and entities who will attempt to exploit them to do harm. But this is not the only danger: no electricity to power our devices would not only impact our personal lives, but society and the economy as a whole. Strong protection against cybercrime is critical.
Amplified Intelligence | 87 | 49 | 88 | 43 | Adolescent | 2018 | Low | experience,excellence | Concept With data volumes growing and analytics advancing, our lives are becoming increasingly dependent on the objective intelligence provided by machines. There are instances, however, where peoples’ more subjective experience and know- how plays an equally important role in answering vital questions.Amplified intelligence augments machine- generated data-driven insights with the human intelligence that is able to direct analysis in new ways, proposing alternative possibilities that only the know-how of the human mind can provide. Equally amplified intelligence sees machine-generated, data-driven intelligence augmented by the human life experience needed to ensure the right – but not always entirely logical – decision is reached. Impact Take a machine analyzing trends in human behaviors online, for example. A trend might show people suddenly switching to a specific payment option without any insight into why. Only a person would realize that this trend is likely driven by extensive media coverage of extensive cybersecurity threats relating to some of the other payment options. In another instance you wouldn’t leave a final decision on which children are most vulnerable and need the most help entirely to a computer, but machine-generated intelligence will provide some of the vital insight needed to ensure the right decision is made.Often organizations can only answer the what, where and why of atypical scenarios impacted by human behaviors by combining machine-generated data-driven intelligence with wider human experience and understanding. Understanding where and how machine- generated and human intelligence complements each other – and how best to leverage that combination – will become increasingly important as our reliance on machine-driven data analytics grows.Amplified intelligence will therefore support improving customer experience and excellence in operations, bringing answers in domains not within our current reach. However, the CxO should take care to not lose control of the decision-making process.
Analytics for Social | 86 | 18 | 35 | 45 | Mainstream | 2016 | Medium | experience,trust | Concept Customer behavior – both positive and negative – is largely influenced by social relationships. As such, corporations and governments alike must put the social voice at the heart of their digital strategies to build the trust that is vital to their success. They must not only listen, but also react, leveraging the voice of the social community to steer them in the right direction.The emerging discipline of social network analysis brings to light the complex patterns of connection, influence and reciprocity that are the main factors in customer behavior. Meanwhile, social media analysis, with its social media monitoring and sentiment analysis, helps companies derive intelligence from customer conversations on digital media. Impact As companies raise their game in customer experience, understanding the social equation across diverse customers segments is crucial. Together social network analysis and social media analysis can help reveal the key influencers who could, in turn, be leveraged as brand advocates.That said, the primary purpose of social media analysis is to understand customer needs, desires, behaviors and concerns whether at an individual level or across specific customer segments. It can, for example, help identify growing customer dismay so that it can be addressed before impacting a brand’s reputation. Equally, it can help reduce churn by allowing brands to react quickly to disgruntled customers, delighting them with unexpected surprises that will buy their enduring loyalty.Organizations must, however, take into account how their customers feel. People don’t always like being listened to. To successfully leverage social insight to enhance their services, organizations across both the private and public sector will need to ensure critical customer relationships aren’t impacted – and local and international regulations around privacy are respected.
API Economy | 61 | 42 | 65 | 50 | Early Adoption | 2018 | Medium | business | Concept In a digital, networked economy, success comes not only from innovating by yourself, but also from fostering the development of partner ecosystems. Application programming interfaces (APIs) help organizations do that by allowing them to safely ‘expose’ the functionality of their internal applications or services to the outside world in a limited fashion, either for free or for a fee. IT capability is effectively virtualized, decoupling application or service implementations from their consumers. These then become building blocks for third parties that create their own unique services – mobile apps for instance – by integrating multiple services together.Companies are increasingly generating revenues by exposing their IT capability through APIs. The API economy reflects how APIs are now positively affecting an organization’s profitability. Impact As ‘every company becomes a technology company’, this mechanism becomes increasingly critical. Organizations will increasingly publish APIs to extend their products and services and interface with partners and customers in new ways.New business models and new market offerings are already being created based on companies opening up their internal IT systems to the external world.While SalesForce.com, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and Google have all opened up new revenue streams in this way, Netflix has used its APIs to extend its service to more than 200 different devices – including television, gaming devices and remote controls – and all major mobile platforms in less than two years. According to analysts, while APIs started in media and high tech, they have now moved into financial services, government and retail. Most future API use will come from digital business applications and the Internet of Things.
Bi-Modal Businesses | 70 | 16 | 63 | 25 | Early Adoption | 2017 | High | business,excellence | Concept With so much transformation taking place, organizations also need to consider what they should do with their legacies. Should they shut down parts of their business? Should they reinvent them? Throughout their digital journey, companies will want to ensure legacy systems that they do decide to consolidate or transition to a new platform are decommissioned seamlessly and any legacy that remains continues to run at peak performance. In effect a two-speed business will emerge: accelerating innovation to keep pace with today’s fast-moving world while meticulously planning the maintenance or potential phase out of the legacy business – along with its supporting processes and tools.Banks and stores, for instance, need to ensure their bricks-and-mortar environments continue to operate optimally while they transform to a new omni-channel model that also encompasses online and mobile. For this they will need to ensure they don’t take their eyes off their legacy network. Impact Companies may be seeking a hybrid environment where their legacy dynamically enhances their new IT environment. From a legacy systems perspective, this may mean ensuring interoperability between new and legacy environments, deploying legacy applications on alternative (modern) platforms or cloud-enabling legacy services.Equally, planning and communicating the phase out of legacy business is key. There may well be resistance internally, but communicating the options and benefits will help. Externally, marketing departments and competitive pricing will help accelerate customers’ move from the legacy to the new business.
Cyber-Physical Systems | 68 | 37 | 75 | 32 | Early Adoption | 2018 | Medium | business,excellence | Concept As web pioneer Marc Andreessen famously prophesized: “Software is eating the world”. Devices and production assets are becoming smarter. Their function is no longer solely defined by their mechanical parameters, but also by their software, processing and communication capabilities. They are becoming unified cyber-physical devices.Bringing these devices together in an intelligent way creates a complex cyber- physical system (CPS). CPSs are defined as ‘systems of collaborating computational elements controlling physical entities’. Essentially, within CPSs, physical entities are fully controlled by IT. A device’s functionality is defined by software as well as its physical features.When applied to the world of production, the CPS becomes the smart factory where manufacturing units leverage relevant information to behave autonomously. Impact Currently used throughout industry in aerospace, automotive, infrastructure, energy, transport and other areas, CPS are increasingly critical to manufacturers and the factory ecosystem. Smart factories open up new business models based on the convergence of physical devices and IT.CPS are already impacting the way factories are constructed and run and playing an ever-increasing role in the way smart products, connected machines and augmented operators work together.
Cybersecurity Techniques | 89 | 14 | 78 | 35 | Early Adoption | 2016 | Medium | trust | Concept Cybercrime is estimated to already cost more than 1 trillion a year. And while cybercrime has now emerged as an industry, digital warfare is a key factor in nations’ military and economic success. Attacks may come from activists, disgruntled employees, mafias, terrorist organizations, government agencies or even competitors (industrial espionage).Mobile and boundaryless networks are now a core route to exposure and systemic vulnerabilities have been weaponized. Every industry is at risk: increasing automation makes electrical grids and telecommunication systems more vulnerable; military activities that use computers or satellites are at risk of disruption; transportation infrastructures are vulnerable to breakdown; security breaches in financial institutions have already gone far beyond stolen credit card numbers and fraudulent transactions on the stock markets.While cloud and mobility are now widely adopted across the enterprise, new paradigms such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart machines are forcing companies to rethink protection. Impact To fight new risks, cybersecurity requires a multitude of techniques coupled with holistic convergence between information, physical and operational security across the whole digital chain. Application shielding, for example, shields applications in secure zones with trusted (corporate) information brokers acting as a central verification service between individual zones.Organizations also need to take a more proactive approach to cybersecurity, using probes to look for evidence of specific suspicious behaviors, for instance, to help anticipate threats. Millions of events can now be analyzed in real time thanks to high performance computing. And after a potential incident is detected, forensic analysis can help identify where the attack started, who is behind it and how it was carried out.Today’s advanced prescriptive security techniques utilize a variety of analytical and machine learning techniques to study recent and historical intelligence. They allow companies to do more than simply foresee future threats; they analyze possible responses, prescribing the optimal approach for eliminating threats before they happen.The impact of applying proper cybersecurity techniques is not only significant in lowering exposure and accelerating curation of potential damages; it can also enhance operations by building trusted agile infrastructures, reward business innovation thought better IP protection, grow customer experience with trusted services and perfect compliance to privacy regulations. While trust has always been a core business asset, business- driven cyber protection can turn risks into business value.
DevOps | 78 | 24 | 80 | 30 | Early Adoption | 2017 | Low | business,excellence | Concept In today’s fast-paced world, organizations need to be able to respond quickly to ever- changing customer demands. At the same time, IT systems are becoming increasingly complex and need to be integrated with a higher degree of reliability and availability. As such, duplicating production environments for testing has become difficult.Meanwhile, developers are often unable to understand the trade-offs between performance, scale and reliability. Operations teams, on the other hand, often become involved far too late in the development cycle and are limited to keeping production services stable.Emerged out of applying Agile and Lean approaches to operations, notably with the cloud, the DevOps (an abbreviation of Development and Operations, illustrating that they are now linked) approach to building new and changing existing services removes the traditional hurdle between the development of software and putting it into operations. DevOps includes best practices such as continuous delivery, continuous integration, automated testing and application monitoring. Impact Implementing DevOps requires significant changes to existing processes and governance within the organization. Development and operations teams can then work closely together, supported by established well-engineered repeatable processes that intrinsically consider change, replacement and evolution.Fully integrated tools and lean processes ensure development and operations are totally aligned and fully in sync, decreasing IT operational costs while improving software quality and accelerating time-to- market.Operations are improved and changes can be implemented faster since they no longer need to wait for long development cycles followed by long testing processes. This brings increased agility to the organization.Automation eliminates slow, costly and error-prone manual processes while advanced release management methods and automated operations build reliable self-healing systems. Standards and standard components reduce complexity and enable easier and faster build-to-order services.But, in fact, this thing we see in IT is just the tip of the iceberg. DevOps will reach far beyond the IT department. It will help with streamlining processes and workflows. It will help the business develop a culture of continual experimentation and learning, and react more quickly to ever-changing market conditions.
Economy of Data | 50 | 28 | 58 | 35 | Early Adoption | 2018 | High | business | Concept The massive growth in personal smartphone usage and increasing prevalence of connected devices are leading to an explosion in data generation. The Economy of Data (EoD) sees new business models derived from this data, not simply for reselling data, but for creating completely new market offerings. As highlighted by Atos ‘Ascent Journey 2018’, an EoD organization is one that understands that data can provide more than mere insight into market trends. When multiple sources of data are combined and refined, they can unlock access to new markets and revenue streams. Such an organization will target potential users and providers of data to form a multi-sided market, building partner, customer and supplier ecosystems and establishing shared data asset platforms to be used by the participating players. Impact At a basic level, value creation within the platform comes from the act of sharing data that offers benefit to multiple parties (the direct approach). Data may be exchanged in its raw state or refined and combined with additional Open Data sources. Participating parties extract the value for their business context.At a more sophisticated level, data semantics can be used to exploit data fed back from participants engaging in the direct approach to extract further value and meaning. This new insight and value is then shared through the platform (the indirect approach). An EoD system can drive business benefit by offering access to a larger market, increasing profitability by sharing market operating costs between participating members and enabling higher prices through the perceived increased value of services enriched by the shared data insights.
Gig Economy | 73 | 48 | 79 | 42 | Adolescent | 2018 | Medium | business,excellence | Concept The new on-demand economy goes beyond simply matching buyers with sellers, passengers with taxis, tourists with accommodation. The gig economy matches workers with gigs (or jobs), on- demand. In the basic model, gig workers enter a formal agreement to provide services with the on-demand company. Prospective clients can then request their services via a smartphone or web page – in the same way a passenger would request a taxi from Uber – and the worker is compensated for the tasks they perform.Recent surveys have shown that gig workers represent a growing segment of the labor market. Some estimate that, by 2020, 40 percent of US employees may be freelancers, for instance. Impact As delivery models become more abstract and flexible to allow services to react to changing market demands and transient opportunities, CxOs can take advantage of the gig economy to help align capacity and capability with their ever-changing talent requirements.In fact, the gig economy will be vital for enabling the liquid corporation. After all, a large pool of flexible, highly-skilled workers available almost on-demand makes for an incredibly scalable workforce. You could even think of it as a ‘swarm of skills’ responding both reactively and proactively to emerging demands.Embracing a remote workforce by eliminating restrictions based on geographies will be key to gaining greater access to this flexible, highly-available talent pool. Virtual communication and collaboration tools will make it easier for dispersed teams located across the globe to work together.
Horizon Scanning | 83 | 12 | 60 | 35 | Early Adoption | 2016 | High | business | Concept The third digital revolution is driving continual change. Social, mobile, IoT, analytics, cloud, smart technologies, Industry 4.0, bioinformatics and more are forcing business to evolve at an unprecedented speed and scale. Exploring what the future might look like helps companies to be more resilient, to be prepared for the uncertainties that lie ahead. Horizon scanning allows organizations to systematically and continuously analyze evidence about future trends, emphasizing new technology and its effects. It’s a technique for detecting early signs of potentially important developments through a systematic examination of potential opportunities and threats. Small groups of experts share their perspectives and knowledge with each other, consider how emerging trends and developments might potentially influence the future of their organization – its strategy, products, services and more.The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) notes that horizon scanning helps develop the big picture behind the issues to be examined. Often based on desk research and involving a wide variety of sources (including prospective research communities, think tanks, public organizations and NGOs), it comments that horizon scanning can also be undertaken by small groups of experts at the forefront of the area of concern: sharing their perspectives and knowledge with each other so as to ‘scan’ how new phenomena might influence the future. Horizon scanning may be complimented by other future-oriented methodologies such as trend impact analysis and scenario building, or the Delphi method, which builds consensus among experts on predictions concerning a specific issue by following a structured and iterative process of brainstorming. Impact An awareness of what the future might look like is the first step on the innovation journey that will guide companies to achieving their strategic goals. In contrast to processes focused on predicting the future, horizon scanning encourages participants to develop new insights by thinking out of the box. Looking at technologies in new ways may reveal ideas that never come to fruition, but equally it may uncover ideas that drive substantial competitive advantage. After all, initial ideas that often seem far-fetched can lead to the most disruptive innovations. Horizon scanning allows organizations to stay one step ahead by providing the insight needed to develop strategies that anticipate future developments. CxOs should ensure their organizations have the strong horizon scanning capabilities needed to ensure their portfolio strategy is aligned with evolving demand. Internal or outsourced, these capabilities will need to leverage suitable digital tools and processes.
Industry 4.0 | 73 | 5 | 75 | 10 | Mainstream | 2017 | Transformational | excellence | Concept Technology-wise, Industry 4.0 is a melting pot that combines the Internet of Things (IoT), advanced Big Data analytics, new generations of human-machine interfaces and reliable layers of ubiquitous connectivity. It helps organizations manage the flood of information from smart machines, connected workers and the products themselves.Initiated in Germany to reflect the fourth industrial revolution, this European term is increasingly being adopted across America and Asia, in synergy with the ‘Industrial Internet’ concept. Impact Industry 4.0 addresses growing demands for digital production, providing greater flexibility, transparency, knowledge and the pervasive use of smart production facilities. Traditional layered shop-floor MES, PLM and ERP systems that see top-level business processes separated from shop floor processes are transformed into a smart connected production environment. The interconnection of machines, components, products, people and processes is bringing disruptive changes at all levels and functions. Smart actors extend from ‘top-floor to shop-floor’ and even to the customer of the product. Smart supply chains are restructured dynamically for optimal performance, with some physical links even removed. The fully autonomous operations allow on-demand operations to configure production lines directly, according to specific design parameters. Individual digital blueprints accompanying component parts interactively direct both machine and human manufacturing resources. Prescriptive maintenance uses data collected from shop-floor monitoring to determine a minimum downtime maintenance strategy.Two-way communication between machines and workers on the shop-floor via smart devices, tablets or even wearable technology ensures continuous interaction. Procedures such as maintenance, reconfiguring, refitting or calibration become extremely agile, responding to actual production needs in near real time.In sectors where automation and connectivity are already mature, realization of Industry 4.0 concepts is more imminent. Where production is outsourced, adoption could extend decades into the future. Industry 4.0 will bring significant improvement in operations, but will require the reinvention of all aspects of production, product and market strategies. We can expect to see a number of different approaches adopted across and within different industries, with some undoubtedly more successful than others. The courage to change business doctrines and cultures and the ability to learn from mistakes and adapt on the way, will ultimately determine success and select the winners.
Innovation Value Webs | 63 | 21 | 35 | 45 | Adolescent | 2017 | High | business | Concept Innovation is rising up the corporate agenda. One way to keep ahead is to develop an innovation model that enables more efficient and effective interactions beyond conventional organization boundaries – whether internal or external. Innovation value webs facilitate open innovation both within the social enterprise and beyond its borders.In fact, organizations are increasingly moving away from the traditional R&D intensive ways of working. They are embracing corporate ‘intrapreneurialism’ (entrepreneurialism, but within the organization), establishing in-house corporate venture capital capabilities and building collaborative relationships internally across organization siloes and externally with third parties. These include start-ups, SMEs, universities, suppliers, lead producers, competitors, interest groups and customers. The new relationships and interactions that result are highly dynamic. They encourage new insights, improve creativity and enable rapid assembly of the solution components required. Impact As this new business ecosystem of actors exchanges objects of economic value toward a shared goal of profit generation, a new view on how things get done emerges. Relationships move from simple collaboration to active cooperation. Organizations that embrace innovation value webs will drive up their innovation productivity and ultimately increase their competitive advantage.Social business tools help organizations and employees develop and participate in a new marketplace of ideas. But success demands more than new technology alone. Firms need to redesign the way they innovate, with implications for their business model, their alliance management processes and their operating model, as well as for their IT. Hackathons are one such example of these processes.
MOOCs | 65 | 48 | 70 | 55 | Adolescent | 2018 | Medium | excellence | Concept Multiple for-profit and not-for-profit education providers (such as Coursera, edX and Udacity) are now offering Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) through the internet, adding quizzes, projects and more to YouTube lectures and picking up millions of users along the way for participating universities and colleges. As a lecturer talks, his output is recorded and posted online. It can be complemented by interactive user forums to support community interactions among students, professors, and teaching assistants. Impact MOOCs have the potential to scale up to enable millions of students to attend a single course consecutively. They not only democratize education, even from some of the most prestigious universities in the US, Europe and Asia, but also facilitate education in emerging economies. Currently mostly targeted at the undergraduate market, they are also beginning to offer professional training. In an enterprise context, MOOC can be seen as the road to the future employee education system.As MOOCs models refine, technologies such as augmented reality may be leveraged to combine work with education. An employee could receive customized information via a wearable device, enabling progressive training that complements a specific role.Though MOOCs seem to be booming, some issues still remain. While large foundations and venture firms fund MOOC initiatives, potentially replacing millions of teachers, questions remain on privacy, the ownership and accuracy of information and the risk of propaganda. Stronger international certifications may be needed in the future to regulate this new field of education.
Neurobusiness | 73 | 72 | 80 | 60 | Emerging | 2019+ | Low | business,excellence,trust | Concept Neurobusiness leverages neuroscience capabilities to improve business decisions and interact with people and communities more effectively. Closely associated with digital marketing research on how to reach consumers and influence purchasing better, it uses psychology, social sciences, wearables and brain-computer interfaces, such as electroencephalography headsets, to track emotions and guide sentiments. This, in turn, may allow organizations to influence attitudes, actions and behavior. Impact Interest in neurobusiness is growing. The technology is just emerging and it may take three to four years for brain-computer interfaces to hit the mainstream, but potential applications are large. Insight derived through neurobusiness techniques will give marketing departments a whole new perspective on customers’ beliefs, behaviors and desires. In turn, this intelligence will help organizations surprise and delight their customers, who are increasingly focused on the experience and outcome rather than the product or service. It may also help companies retain customer interest in a product or service at a time when customers are becoming more fickle and less loyal – and less susceptible to manipulation – than ever. Internally, neurobusiness techniques may have a role to play in helping organizations keep their staff engaged and loyal, while also encouraging the creativity that is vital for driving innovation. These techniques may give employers looking to retain Generation Z talents, for instance, a better understanding of how they can deliver the flexibility and fulfillment this lucid generation needs. Furthermore, neurobusiness may also help improve productivity, particularly in stressful or demanding roles. CxOs would do well to build – or hire – some in-house neurobusiness expertise, though they should be vigilant to potential ethical and privacy issues.
Omics | 51 | 57 | 70 | 42 | Emerging | 2019+ | Medium | business,excellence | Concept Omics refers to the collective technologies that explore the behaviors of the molecules that make up cells, such as genes, proteins, cellular carbohydrates and cellular lipids. Genomics, for example, explores the roles, relationships and actions of genes.Omics techniques have exploded in the last decade, powered by the completion of the human genome project. These techniques are now routinely being applied to a wide range of important topics in life sciences (including microbiology, agriculture, veterinary sciences and medicine) allowing scientists to get a full understanding of the molecular processes that govern living beings.Meanwhile, biocomputing – the growing capability of leveraging high performance computing and simulation to solve problems in biology, biochemistry and genetics – has become a cornerstone of life sciences in the recent years. It may well contribute to what may be the next technology revolution, combining digital, biotechnology, nanotechnologies and cognitive sciences. Impact Omics technologies reduce time and cost of laboratory tasks, shifting the bulk of the workload downstream from the laboratory (wet lab) to the data analysis processes (in silico lab). Already helping pharmaceutical companies reduce the cost and time of inventing, experimenting and releasing new drugs, for instance, they promise radical advances in healthcare, with multiple startups and large groups heavily investing in omics-powered personalized medicine.Omics also has a wider role to play: it is helping farmers increase their crop yields and it may one day help life insurers better understand risk or CPG companies understand more about nutrition. New business models may emerge based on new insight into our individual health risks or how our individual bodies react to different foods, for instance.
Omni-Channel | 78 | 6 | 30 | 20 | Mainstream | 2016 | Transformational | excellence | Concept Today’s multitude of devices – from wearable devices to our smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops and TVs – together form an intelligent computing and communication ecosystem that enhances the real world we live in. As we transverse from a real bricks-and-mortar world to a virtual online one, we expect a consistent and uninterrupted end-to-end experience regardless of where we are and how we are connected. We expect an omni-channel experience. After all, the lines between our offline and online worlds have blurred over the past few years. It doesn’t matter how we communicate with friends and family – we seamlessly switch between face-to- face, telephone, SMS and social media interactions. The challenge for the retailers, banks, government departments and other organizations is to enable correspondingly flexible interactions. Impact The goal is to deliver the best service anytime anywhere, the way customers want it – whether purely digital (web, mobile apps, kiosks, connected device for instance), physical (such as store or call center) or hybrid (connected store and help desk, for example). It requires all touchpoints to be unified to provide a seamless personalized experience that delights across all channels. The omni-channel customer experience can, therefore, only be fully realized once core business operations within disaggregated service supply chains are aligned and optimized.To achieve a true omni-channel experience, organizations also require a single source of information about the end user that is accessible to all points of contact: from the store, branch and office to the call center and online website, social media site or chat. However, assurances may need to be given that all stored personal data will not be accumulated or used without explicit contractual agreement.The omni-channel experience helps organizations engage with their customers more intimately and individually than ever before, ensuring customer engagement, loyalty and advocacy. CxO should review their IT strategies and ensure their enterprises are well-positioned to build an omni-channel experience since existing IT systems might limit this ambition. Bi-modal IT can offer a means to reaching this goal.
Personalization | 51 | 8 | 70 | 11 | Adolescent | 2018 | Transformational | experience,business,trust | Concept While the Ford industrial era developed the concept of mass production, digital brings in a new promise: mass personalization. The seemingly opposing forces of ‘maximizing process efficiency’ and ‘personalizing user experience’ present a complex business challenge. Understanding how to make them work together rather than against each other is critical. This requires operations and supply chains to be optimized for both B2B and B2C interactions.Enriching personalized experiences also requires a balance between individual choice, regulatory compliance and trust. There will be a point at which customers consider sharing the source data used to shape a personalized B2C interaction is an unacceptable invasion of privacy, limiting trust and therefore adoption. Impact The personalization of products, services and interactions in general can be a key factor in driving customer experience, improving satisfaction, ensuring loyalty and attracting new business through advocacy. Tech-savvy digital natives, for instance, demand richer connection and engagement through seamless, personalized experiences across virtual and physical channels.With the advent of data analytics, end user behaviors can be determined in far greater detail. This enables organizations to personalize and target specific interactions through tailored services, driving service monetization where access to a service will be in exchange for the use of personal data, giving companies the opportunity to reinvent parts of their services.Wearables, for instance, could provide real time biometric information about consumers, indicating emotional and physical responses to interactions. This will provide valuable input into the monetization process, including a whole new level of dynamic, ultra-personalized, embedded advertising.
Protecting Digital Property | 62 | 61 | 77 | 40 | Adolescent | 2019+ | Medium | trust | Concept Digital Rights Management (DRM) may have been around for more than 20 years, but today it has more recently taken on a new significance. As products such as music, games and videos are increasingly distributed through online digital platforms, DRM plays a vital role in ensuring creative outputs are not copied or stolen.However, DRM will require the supporting economy to be further developed to avoid a slowdown of exchanges. Impact Soon, as we face the third digital revolution, DRM will be extended into digital manufacturing where it will play a key role in protecting intellectual property. With 3D printing, for instance, as the number of products created on 3D printers grows and manufacturers turn their focus from manufacturing physical products to producing digital product designs that consumers can download and use to ‘manufacture’ the products themselves at home, DRM aims to help manufacturers retain product IP.
Servitization | 60 | 7 | 45 | 10 | Early Adoption | 2017 | Transformational | business | Concept Services are increasingly being employed as profitable and stable revenue streams to enhance product businesses. Leading firms are adopting an ‘as a service’ business model, offering customized solutions to clients. Leveraging the cloud and the Internet of Things, these business models can help grow high-end and very differentiated personalized offerings when manufacturing is no longer a differentiating process. This process, where services make up a larger part of a product company, is known as servitization. An early example was the change in the aircraft engine industry when manufacturers such as Rolls-Royce, who coined the term ‘power-by-the-hour’, started to sell air power as a service rather than engines, maintenance and spares.Today companies across a wide range of industries are developing services as a way to expand their offering, target new customer segments or differentiate their commoditizing business. Retailers are looking at offering consumers services linked to the goods they sell, automotive companies are offering tires-as-a-service on a pay-per-use basis and manufacturers are offering preventive diagnostic services. Impact After all, services are broadly seen as attractive business: providing additional high margin revenues on top of the product business; representing a relatively stable business that can act as a damper against volatile product business; and enabling a deeper connection with the end customer and, with it, insight into customer needs and desires.Developing a product business toward a service business typically involves four maturity stages: – Product manufacturer: sell products and charge for basic break-fix services. – Value added manufacturer: sell products and service to enhance the product performance. – Full service provider: replace products by (managed) services and enhance customers’ operational performance. – Integrated solution provider: take over (parts of) customers operations.As servitization transforms entire product industries from ‘technology-push and product oriented’ business to ‘customer-pull and service’ business, players will need to adapt their business models to keep pace. Furthermore, the as-a-service economy very often finds heightened success when it bridges multiple actors with differing agendas within multi-sided markets.

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