Technology Revolution: The Future of Now

The buzz: 4th Industrial Revolution. Welcome to the Age of the Smart Factory, where a new generation of systems delivers real-time awareness and dynamic interactions among machines, systems, assets, people and things – aka The Internet of Things. Consumers are connected through sensors and smart tags. Printing is now 3D. Is your business ready to seize innovative opportunities or are you stuck in...

The buzz: Mentoring. Basic mentoring involves a more experienced or knowledgeable person guiding someone less experienced or knowledgeable for personal or professional development. Time for a pop quiz: Is your company allowing mentors for a privileged few, perhaps mostly males, or for a broader employee population? Are your mentoring practices building a diverse leadership or merely cloning stereo...

Today's buzz: Customer experience. Is technology the magic bullet to help you give customers everything they want and more – and thus ensure their loyalty? Not quite. Technology can indeed give you real-time insights to be relevant, to respond with agility and speed, to connect collaboratively and transact efficiently. But the perfectly seamless, frictionless customer experience can be elusive. Th...

Today's buzz: Simplification. Complexity is intensifying for businesses, communities and us as individuals. Is this what we really want or need? If the complexity trend perpetuates in established companies, at risk are the agility, adaptability, scalability, and cost-effectiveness that allow leaner, simpler organizations to compete better and win bigger. Before you try to recapture your long-gone...

The buzz: Thinking. Increasingly, in-demand jobs require proficiency in critical thinking. Without it, how can a company validate the information it uses for decision making? Think about it. The experts speak. Dr. Mark Battersby, Professor: "Learning to think more critically involves developing practices that lead to more carefully thought-out, evidence-based decisions and judgments." Dr. Sharon B...

Today's buzz: Marketing. We're all bombarded by a never-ending deluge of marketing content that rarely works its intended magic. If you're among the thousands of marketing writers spewing the reams of boring, forgettable content that's likely harming your brand, it's time to get help. Listen-up for insider tips that can help boost your messaging to memorable, experience-rich, relevant, actionable...

The buzz: Fraud. As hard as you try to implement effective anti-fraud processes and tools, fraudsters work harder. Take heart! Predictive analytics technology can help you understand emerging fraud patterns and adapt against new types of attack. The tools continue to advance, but is your management team making analytics – and their insights – a high enough priority? The experts speak. Derek Snaida...

The buzz: Manufacturing. Manufacturers are pushing automated processes into overdrive to survive in the global marketplace. As this evolution spawns new jobs demanding specialized skills best performed by robots, will the factory workforce need humans? The experts speak. Mike Yost, MESA International: "Governmental initiatives, like Germany's 'Industry 4.0' and US National Network for Manufacturin...

The buzz: Game on! Games are an integral part of all societies. A formalized expression of play, games carry the ideas and behaviors of a culture through time to future generations (Wikipedia.org). But while we thought they it just for fun, the concept of games was maturing into a serious player in the diverse arenas of formal learning, job training, workplace productivity, sustainability, healthc...

Today's buzz: SMEs. If you're the entrepreneurial founder or leader of a small-to-midsize company, you likely face challenges that test your commitment every day. Once you get past grappling with financing and building a leadership team, you need to focus on scaling technology, opening sustainable channels of distribution, engaging new customers, mastering social media opportunities and more. Read...

Today's buzz: Data overwhelm. What's the big deal about big data when it comes to marketing your products and services? Successful marketing hinges on gaining insight from the mountains of data you capture and store, so you can build great relationships and experiences with your customers and prospects. Do you have the right people and tools to sift through all that information and find the golden...

Today's buzz: Fraud. With today's sophisticated detection and prevention technology, you'd hope we'd be able to stop the bad guys from stealing our money and identities, cheating companies and consumers. Alas, industrious cybercriminals are busy this very second devising clever schemes to attack vulnerable merchants and buyers, creating innocuous-looking blogs and referral sites, targeting chat fo...

The buzz: Mobile BI. Mobile BI is quickly becoming mainstream, with a majority of organizations considering it "critical" or "very important," particularly in smaller organizations, in the Retail segment, and outside North America and EMEA. In fact, according to the Howard Dresner Mobile Analytics Study 2013, mobile business intelligence is the third most common use case for mobile business worker...

The buzz: Mentoring. Mentoring at its most basic involves a more experienced or knowledgeable person helping to guide someone less experienced or knowledgeable for personal and/or professional development. But mentoring can be so much more. It's a two-way learning street, with its own rules and culture. It can be done in reverse. And it can help your organization pass on cultural norms and more. T...

The buzz: Game on! We've always been drawn to games in our leisure time, from Senet (Egypt), Mahjong (China), dice (Iran, India) to Monopoly (US), and videogames. But while we were having fun, gaming became a serious player in the arenas of formal learning, workplace productivity and even sales. We've heard that 70% of the top 2000 companies plan to use gamification (term coined in 2002 by Nick Pe...

Today's buzz: Industry 4.0. It's 2014 and we're witnessing the rise of the Industrial Internet and orchestrated manufacturing. This Age of the Smart Factory brings a new generation of systems delivering real-time awareness and autonomic interactions among machines, systems, assets and things aka The Internet of Things. Is your business ready to adjust and take advantage of the opportunities - or w...

Today's buzz: Mobility. Welcome to the Mobile 2.0 world. Enterprise mobility is moving at triple-Internet speed. Adoption of BYOD and enterprise-wide B2E, B2B and C2B is disrupting traditional computing. Nearly 50% of organizations will invest in mobile apps, devices and mobile device management solutions over the next 12-18 months, but not all have a mobile strategy in place to ensure effective d...

Today's buzz: Thinking. According to "The 10 Skills That Will Get You Hired In 2013" (Forbes.com, Dec. 10, 2012), the top four skills required for 9 of the top 10 most in-demand jobs were critical thinking, complex problem solving, judgment and decision-making, and active listening. Pop quiz: If you apply for a "hot" new job today and are asked to honestly rate your proficiency in these skills, do...

Today's buzz: Marketing. We're all bombarded daily by a deluge of content. Some works its intended magic; most fails with a splat or simply vaporizes. If you're among the legions of writers (or a manager of writers) spewing forgettable content that's doing injustice to your brand, and your only authentic words are curses flung at your keyboard, help is here. Tune in for insider tips to go from dul...

The buzz: Project teams. When it comes to technology implementation roll-outs, achieving success demands astutely aligning your time, money and people with corporate objectives. The bottom line: If your project teams aren't earning high-fives on design, development, testing, training and ultimately process integration — and your PM (project manager) locks their door and turns off their phone — it'...

Today's buzz: Shared value in education. What if your company could deliver shareholder returns while simultaneously helping to solve our global education crisis, and better prepare the workforce for the jobs you need to fill? You can! A growing number of smart companies are using their core business strategy and operations to create the power to solve education solutions, far beyond the reach of...

Today's buzz: Cloud. The IT industry is in a state of flux, with its traditional approaches heavily impacted by disruptive technologies. Cloud computing tops that list. Want to know more? Hear what five cloud experts see in the cloud this year. Sven Denecken, SAP: "The most important long-term benefits of cloud are greater business flexibility and agility vs. cost savings." Allan Krans, TBR: "What...

The buzz: Cloud. Three technology visionaries meet to gaze into the cloud. What do their expert eyes see? Jeff Kaplan, THINKstrategies: "In my view, the cloud computing marketplace will change rapidly in the coming year." Jorge Garcia, TEC: "In the Age of Analytics, as products and services become 'lighter' (i.e., less physical and more digital), manufacturing and distribution costs—while still im...

The buzz: Social regulation? Social media has given customers a powerful voice that can make or break your brand reputation in a virtual heartbeat. If you've suffered their slings and arrows, did you succumb to the temptation to fire back? Hold the presses. Let's evaluate social risks, rewards and regulation. The experts speak. Raluca Druta, TEC: "Instead of seeking the explanation in a general co...

The buzz: Social. Have your company's social engagement tools and practices evolved to meet the demands of today's digitally-empowered, brand-controlling customers – or are you stalled, stumbling, or just plain failing? If the latter, wake up right now! The world of customer service has changed, with your audience tipping the balance of power in their favor. They expect you to welcome and serve th...