Episodes

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'...

“Are you working hard or hardly working?” goes the old saying. Today, we’re seeing a massive shift in how people work due to the co-impact of big data, mobile, cloud, and social media. Are you feeling it yet? Our experts speak: Alan Lepofsky / Constellation RG: “New technologies such as in-memory database, mobile, and cloud are transforming the way people work.” Richard Edwards / Ovum: “Often using their own mobile devices and free-to-use cloud-based community collaboration solutions, employees ...

M2M. Rise of the machines. The promise of a world of connected devices, where machines of all types and sizes can autonomously communicate with each other. Don’t believe it’s a reality yet? Global M2M revenue is projected to soar from $121 million in 2010 to $948 billion by 2020, the year Ericsson predicts the number of connected devices will reach 50 billion. Our experts have a lot to say. Jason Sumner, EIU: “M2M is going to be big. We have heard this before but there are reasons to believe it’...

Social communities and storytelling. The connection? Ask the experts.Rachel Happe, The Community Roundtable: “Social communities leverage an increasingly expensive asset - people - by allowing them to work out loud, connect with more people, establish trust, and find relevant information and solutions more quickly. Our job as community sponsors is to co-create value and be the storytellers of that value. It is no longer a story about us alone, but about that collaborative journey.” Sean O’Drisco...

Factory of the past vs. the future. Does Charlie Chaplin’s struggling Little Tramp in the 1936 film “Modern Times” represent today’s factory worker and the shop floor scenario? No, according to IDC’s Bob Parker. “Recent research conducted by IDC Manufacturing Insights shows that manufacturing employees care deeply about quality, and management truly appreciates their team's skills and dedication. The age of contentious labor/management relations is over in manufacturing. SAP’s Mike Lackey is opt...

Right Time Experiences. Huge business potential for you, but mobile solutions require business insight, technical chops and strong design to get it right.

You’re a game-changer! You’ve created the new product or service of the millennium, but have no money to take it to market. Your best options: beg your FFF (family, friends, fools) circle, tap an angel for seed money, or convince a venture capitalist to invest millions. Our experts have a lot to say. Chris O’Connor / Taptera : “You've got to have a pretty face (user experience) to get attention; the old ‘desktop’ solution isn't very sexy with VCs.” Sanjay Parthawarathy / Investor: “When the VC’s...

Digital marketing. Your increasingly digitally-smart customers expect more from your website than being able to buy something. They’re demanding a relevant, personalized browsing experience with new product discovery, research, price comparisons and feedback exchange. But if your company is just going through the motions of ecommerce, you’ll lose them fast. Our experts can help you get there. Glenn Conradt: “Companies need to start incorporating contextualized content into the e-commerce experie...

Sales transformation. A catch phrase “for virtually every C-level executive in the race to find answers to questions about sales and earnings growth, positioning and differentiation; even survival,” says Bob Nicols, author of The Journey to Sale Transformation: Twenty-five Axioms for Becoming a Trusted Partner to your Customers. Bob and other experts have a lot to say about why and how your sales organization needs to change...now. Bob Nicols, AXIOM Sales Force Development: “Sales is the most br...

M2M. Rise of the machines. The promise of a world of connected devices, where machines of all types and sizes can autonomously communicate with each other. Don’t believe it’s a reality yet? Global M2M revenue is projected to soar from $121 million in 2010 to $948 billion by 2020, the year Ericsson predicts the number of connected devices will reach 50 billion. Our experts have a lot to say. Jason Sumner, EIU: “M2M is going to be big. We have heard this before but there are reasons to believe it’...

Utilities. How “smart” are they about the smart meter data they can now read and its value to the consumer? Our experts weigh in. Roque Marinho: “With the smart meter being part of operations...utilities have to cope with the fact that there is no turning back on the ‘quantum leap’ on the multitude of reads.” Stuart Ravens: “Smartness begins and ends with analyzing the vast volumes of data created in a smart grid deployment.” Christine Hertzog: “There’s not much research about how much consumers...

Retailers: We know it’s tougher than ever to turn customers into loyal evangelists for your brand. The experts say: Christine B. Whittemore: “The winners in retail today are retailers who understand that the customer calls the shots. Few retailers can compete strictly on price...” Brian Kilcourse: “Retailers have a big opportunity to re-define the in-store experience by making it a part of the world that today’s consumers operate in.” Lisa Joy Rosner: “Where business intelligence provides the re...

Open government. Transparency, participation, collaboration. Sounds good on paper, but is it a true game-changer yet? Our experts say: Dr. Natalie Helbig: “Opening government is a perfect storm, but we don’t know whether it will just be a lot of data or a sustained and meaningful change in the way we govern and are governed. Russ LeFevre: Technologies exist to enable open government. This ‘genie’ is out of the bottle. What needs to change is policy, culture and the will of government leaders to ...

Risk. A fact of business life today. What is your company doing about it? Hear what our experts say. Dr. Parveen Gupta: “Today, nothing is more fundamental to business and more vexing to a company’s directors than effective risk governance...a failure in risk oversight could be interpreted by the regulators and the courts as a breach of fiduciary duty by the Board.” Barry Murphy: “Good information governance allows companies to get value out of information while minimizing the costs associated w...

Have your employees demanded a BYOD (bring your own device) policy yet? If not, the writing is on the wall – or on the tablet. Any day now, they’ll be bringing their iPhones and iPads to work. Is this trend a threat or an opportunity for you? Consultant Steven Romero sees the latter, advising companies to “leverage the consumerization of IT to advance enterprise mobility.” Forrester’s George Lawrie agrees. “74% of the information workers in our survey used two or more devices for work—and 52% us...

Today’s the day! You’re hiring a well-vetted, steep-salary C-suite exec and you’re staffing a business-critical new department. Surely your HR folks gave you rock-solid validation for these particular human capital investments. Well, did they? Bersin and Associates founder Josh Bersin doubts it. “One of the biggest opportunities for HR to drive value in the coming years is talent analytics, but HR teams are absolutely not ready. And the systems vendors aren’t helping much either!” SuccessFactors...

Bankers, listen up: It’s not about YOU anymore. Customers are demanding a hassle-free experience, convenience, faster transaction processing, fair fees. Gone are the days of luring them with a free toaster. Two recent blogs tell the story: “4 Reasons Why Bankers Should Think Like Retailers” and “Stop Running Banks for Bankers—Run Them for Customers.” What do the experts say? Javelin’s James Van Dyke: “In today’s increasingly always-on and real-time world, people increasingly want more control of...

Enterprise mobility is an unstoppable force. By 2015, this game-changer could impact over 37% of the world’s workforce - about 1.3 billion people. And by that time, 50% of enterprise mobility applications will be HTML5, predicts Sanjay Poonen, President & Corporate Officer, Technology & Innovation Products, Head of Mobile Division at SAP. He notes, “Mobile technology is creating both an expectation and impatience in people that never existed before. In fact, mobility has such an impact on compan...