Episodes

Today’s buzz: The city. More than just your snail-mail address, the city is a vital entity with the power to impact local quality of life as well as national and global economies. How’s your city running? The experts speak. Dr. Theresa Pardo: “Running a city is a complex and challenging task. Running it well, even more so. The best run cities ... embrace the complexity of the task, see the opportunities that information and technology offer in managing that complexity, and seek out innovative ye...

M2M. Machines connected and talking to each other. By 2018, nearly everyone, everything, everywhere will be connected real time, affecting how we innovate, collaborate, produce, govern, and achieve sustainability. Think about coffee plants telling farmers how and when to irrigate, harvest, pack, tag, ship. Mmm. Miguel Blockstrand, Ericcson: “Unleashing the power of connectivity to all people places and things is inevitable.” Steve Hilton, Analysys Mason: “M2M is a jumble of technology thrown tog...

Customer experience. Have you figured out what each of your customers really, really wants? If yes, have you designed a personalized, easy, conversational experience they won’t perceive as intrusive or creepy? If no to either question, listen up. The experts speak. Paula Rosenblum, RSR: “The essence of precision retail is what I call ‘The Grand Unified Theory’ – combining the customer intimacy and knowledge of the very, very small (independents), with the economies of scale and scope of the very...

Mobility is becoming ubiquitous. Exactly as planned. Some burning questions: Will the iPad Mini deliver anything new for business? Where does the BYOD (bring your own device... to work) trend end? With Windows 8, is a mobile device different from a PC? When mobility reaches full stride, will you ever have to leave the house again? The experts speak. Maribel Lopez, Lopez Research: “Mobility is about apps and business processes, not devices.” Philippe Winthrop, VeliQ: “BYOD - at least for me - has...

Talent, talent everywhere, but they can’t find jobs. What is HR doing about it? The experts speak. Dr. Katherine Jones: “Businesses of all sizes have struggled to shift their resources toward growth markets, yet they find a shortage of talent and leadership holding them back. We call this the ‘talent paradox.’ Companies need skills, yet unemployment remains high. We do not really have a job shortage—we have a skills shortage. Why?” China Gorman: “The changing demographics within the workforce ar...

People vs. numbers. Which should matter more to your business success? The experts speak. Greta Roberts: “Numbers are the language of business. If employees want to be valued, they need to be measured in a way that business understands ... as numbers.” Haig R. Nalbantian: “Too many organizations give lip service to the people side, but fail to apply real discipline to workforce management. They rely instead on intuition, benchmarks or so-called ‘best practices’ to inform their people-related dec...

Glocalization. Does this “portmanteau of globalization and localization” (Wikipedia) describe your company’s growth? If yes, the dichotomy will challenge your HR team as they try to manage a mobile workforce and multi-country payroll. If not yet, your time will come. The experts speak. David Ludlow: “The world is ’glocal’ (play on the combination of think globally, act locally). Today's talent is global, connected, and mobile. New categories of solutions are required to leverage that talent to o...

Fraud. It’s 2013. Surely by now we’ve figured out how to catch the bad guys and gals. “Not”, say our experts: Jonathan Middup: “Corporate fraud is most often a product of good people in bad circumstances. Depending on those circumstances, we could all be fraudsters.” Jonathan E. Turner: “Over the past 15 years we’ve made great strides in understanding fraud, increasing technology-based tools, and created focused legislation – yet fraud losses are increasing and fraud schemes go longer before det...

CRM 2013: Remember me?If you thought your customers were very demanding in 2012, wake up and smell the coffee in 2013! Is your sales team skilled enough in the art and budding-science of social monitoring and sentiment analysis to handle it? Are you analyzing field-fresh customer data and giving sales the 360-view needed to make smarter sales? Do you know when and where to use push vs. pull marketing? Are your CMO and CIO equipped to lead the way? So many questions – and our panel has answers. B...

CRM 2013: Remember me?If you thought your customers were very demanding in 2012, wake up and smell the coffee in 2013! Is your sales team skilled enough in the art and budding-science of social monitoring and sentiment analysis to handle it? Are you analyzing field-fresh customer data and giving sales the 360-view needed to make smarter sales? Do you know when and where to use push vs. pull marketing? Are your CMO and CIO equipped to lead the way? So many questions – and our panel has answers. B...

Truth time! On a scale of 1 to 10, rate your corporate social responsibility program. If it’s below 5 (you know who you are), our experts may inspire you to raise the bar in 2013. Daniel Elliott: “International corporate volunteer programs are a win-win-win proposition. The host organizations gain access to pro bono world-class consulting services, volunteers gain a unique, once-in-a-lifetime experience, and companies enhance their brand and increase exposure to new markets.” Rebecca Wang: “The ...

Your company’s Social Media IQ. Do you know the score?If you haven’t checked recently, or it’s embarrassingly low, do something now – yes, this second day of 2013.

Although 2012 holiday gift-giving is officially over, we’ve got another present for you: Game-Changers 2013 Predictions – Part 2. Yes, more than a dozen thought leaders (guests on previous Coffee Break and In the Cloud programs) will gaze into the SAP Game-Changers Radio crystal ball, joining our 14 experts from last week’s program. Their collective gift is a smorgasbord of insights into the technologies, strategies, people and trends that can help you grow your business and compete better in 20...

What’s on your holiday business wish list this year? If it’s a crystal ball to help you predict what 2013 will bring for your company, we’ve got the next best thing. Today and next week, more than two dozen thought leaders from previous Coffee Break and In the Cloud programs will gather to gaze into the SAP Game-Changers Radio crystal ball. Their gift to you: a grab-bag of insights into the technologies, strategies, people and trends that can help you grow and compete better next year and beyond...

Social entrepreneurship. Yes, good things do come in small packages. The experts speak. Alexandra van der Ploeg: “Donating money is easy, volunteering in the traditional sense is easy, but is it effective? Corporate social responsibility should not be about philanthropy, but about leveraging capital, technology or talent to truly create an impact in the communities we work in.” Anne B. Evans: “Social entrepreneurship is love and respect in action.” Patrick Furlong: “I believe in the importance o...

Banks and big data. Risky business, according to our experts. Simon Paris: “As reported more or less daily, banks continue to face multiple risk and compliance challenges – are they not willing or not able to do proper risk and compliance management?” Ralph Silva: “Banks have to find some humility and realise that retailers, auto companies and grocery chains are far better at managing and mining data than they are. Steal it if you can.” Jane Griffin: “It’s understanding the risks in the market a...

Corporate banking. If your treasury department is in a stranglehold with your bank, you’re not alone. Richard Walker: “For commercial banks, the imperative is on improving customer experience and becoming easier to do business with through ease of integration, data and process transparency...” Olli Kähkönen: “When you walk through a storm, hold your chin up high...At the end of the storm is a golden sky... (Lyrics: You’ll Never Walk Alone) Robert Grimes: “With everything from supermarket chains ...

UI (user interface) is king. Why? If software UI is not beautiful, easy, intuitive– and fun– even the most brilliant engineers and designers will fail to please their intended business or consumer end-user audience. The experts speak.

Charge! If you’re a greenie eying an EV (electric vehicle) as your next car, there’s a lot to consider: battery pack size, driving range of plug-in hybrids like C-Max Energi or Volt vs. all-electric Leaf, power grid impacts, ongoing costs and more. The experts speak: Christine Hertzog: “A consumer-centric EV market maturity model could help accelerate EV adoption. Alaa Owaineh: “The world is increasingly urban, and cities are an important part of any strategy to build smarter, more sustainable e...

Selling. Today’s savvy salesperson must combine many skills: a gatherer-analyst of customer and competitor data; social business guru; collaboration champion; and much more. Our experts speak. Barry Trailer: “There is work to do in every sale. Imagine holding your hands two feet apart. The more work you do ‘selling’ – identifying key buying influences, needs and personal wins, establishing and elevating relationships, etc. – the less ‘negotiating’ you need to do. So, if you do 18” of selling, yo...

What’s in a name? Plenty, for today’s CIO. Why? The role is changing so much, so often that it’s hard to know what the “I” means at any time. The experts speak. Steve Romero: “Calls for the ‘new CIO’ are not new at all. CIO Magazine’s State of the CIO ‘07 survey resulted in the identification of four distinct CIO archetypes: Business Leader, Innovation Agent, Operational Expert, Turnaround Artist. In 2011, its 4 Personas of the Next Generation CIO were Chief Infrastructure Officer…Integration Of...

Education. How do we equip our kids to succeed in a tech-driven world? Kim Jones/ Curriki: Textbooks are becoming as obsolete as the rotary dial phone Kim Saxe/Nueva School: “The Internet and technology (such as Skype) supports the teaching of more open-ended and complex projects than ever before.” Curtis Johnson/“Disrupting Class” author: “The role of teachers will see profound changes – all good… from a qualified source of knowledge dispensing information to largely passive students (in rows o...

Subsidiaries. Straight path to market expansion or potentially tangled ecosystem? The experts speak. Steve King/Emergent Research: “For the first time in modern history, the developing world, not the developed world, is the global engine driving economic growth. This, coupled with the rapidly increasing use of social technologies, is fundamentally changing the relationship between companies and their foreign subsidiaries. Erich Joachimsthaler/Vivaldi Partners: “As internet analyst Mary Meeker sa...

Today’s buzz term: “BI” – business intelligence. Oxymoron? Or game-changer that can make your company smarter, more agile, able to leap over tall competitors in a single bound? Continuing our Apr. 4 and May 9 discussions, we’ll revisit why even the best intelligence needs a strategy, and look at big data, analytics, cloud, single version of the truth and more. The experts say: Brian Sommer / Techventive: “Detectives have hypotheses and working theories they try to prove or disprove. Why shouldn'...