Always Focus on the Customer

First make sure your CIO and CMO are on the same page when it comes to focusing on the customer.

From manufacturing to marketing, from procurement to product development, from finance to Facebook, the CIO and the CMO should have tremendous insight into their companys operations, its priorities, its vulnerabilities, and its opportunities. So today, as our legacy systems of record become agile systems of engagement, and as the social revolution opens up all facets of our enterprise to customer interactions as well as customer scrutiny, isnt it time to eliminate the internally constructed silos that are the primary reason the operational pain still exists. Maybe a bit far reaching when dealing with change, but shouldnt we try to engage our customers in product development, service plans and operations, maybe even marketing and pricing options?

So how do we get there? First we must lead by becoming change agents.

With the rise of mobile applications and the growing use of cloud solutions, platforms have exploded actually increasing the operational pain points in the short run. These new applications must now interact with an ever-increasing number of software platformsmoving the need for integration to the forefront. As cloud computing continues to explode with many predicting a 36-40% compound annual growth in cloud computing through 2016, CIOs must face a growing problem: integrating all these cloud apps and services. While the cloud holds enormous potential to lower costs, improve time to market and increase flexibility, the truth is that as it stands, most businesses are jumping on the cloud bandwagon without a lot of planning, and its costing them. Beyond the benefits are potential pitfalls for IT: it is well known that over 50% of businesses miss deadlines due to poor integration of cloud apps across vendors, and a stunning 65% are unable to integrate their cloud apps with other legacy apps. How important is integration? I would suggest application integration problems are a top reason why businesses are slow to deliver business innovation at the speed demanded by their customers.

As any of you that have followed my posts in the past know I have been on the Big Data soap box for some time now and while change is in the air we cant forget to address our Big Data strategy as it relates to focusing on the customer. I believe that CIOs who choose to sit back and wait for the business to tell them what to do will end up reporting to the CMO within a year or two. But companies will fare much better if their CIOs eagerly and rapidly begin framing Big Data challenges and opportunities in terms of customers, opportunities, revenue, and business value. As we know much of the talk about Big Data has obscured the fact that the real issue is enabling intelligent and instantaneous analysis to provide optimal insights for business decisions. CIOs need to ensure theyre looking at these high-volume, high-velocity challenges in the right way: as business enablers, not tech projects. For example: What if you could perform fraud-detection analytics across all of your transactions in real time, instead of across just a random sampling of only a few percent of all those transactions? What if you could analyze three years worth of customer data in minutes, rather than only the past three months in hours? In the meantime, we can be certain that the scale and speed of this current challenge will only increase as CIOs must rapidly and seamlessly enhance their traditional corporate data with vast new streams of social and mobile data to realize the full potential of these strategic Big Opportunities. In summary, while there are other important issues CIOs are facing, integration and Big Data will likely be at the top of their list of issues that impact how their company responds to changing customer needs.