Sarah Diamond
General manager Consulting Services
IBM
Q: What do you see as the biggest opportunities for the firm in 2014?
A: As our clients make the transition to be more data-intensive, experience-based enterprises, there's a technology component to that change, but there's also massive organizational and cultural transformation required. People have to get comfortable trusting the data; they have to get comfortable sharing and operating in an organizational setting that's more fluid and transparent than what they might be used to.
I believe a design point for competitive advantage in that world is going to be the willingness to open up to external influences—and seriously integrate them throughout the enterprise, all the way to strategic planning. Then, at the level of the front-end model of engagement, the newest technologies—social media, mobility, analytics and cloud—create very rapid-cycle evolutions in how people, businesses and governments interact. That's today. What's the next vital innovation going to be—12 months from now? Or in two years, or five? That's a very important question in a period of this kind of change.
Q: What, if anything, surprised you about the year?
A: The real surprise was that everything we believed would happen, happened, but it all took shape even faster than most people predicted. The rise of a business agenda led by data and the technologies to exploit it—social and mobile engagement, analytic insight, and cloud delivery of services—isn't just a category of transformation and value, it's the dominant set of client priorities. And their agenda is all about unlocking possibilities that were unimaginable just a few years ago.
The proliferation of mobile and smart devices transforms the way people consume and share information, creating one kind of opportunity; cloud is going to become the delivery platform for all manner of services, not just a new way to provision computing.
On the other side of the coin, business leaders recognize that massively available volumes of data and the ability to use it doesn't just allow them to create deeper and more personalized engagement with their customers; it's also going to drive fundamental changes to all the core processes of the enterprise. So, in effect, we've reached a tipping point. For a long time, this industry has talked about information technology in support of business strategy. This is different. This is information technology as business strategy.
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.