Africa [credit: Mapswire.com]
Africa is a nascent innovation powerhouse, and its leadership will become increasingly obvious during the coming decades, but the seeds are already visible as this post reveals: Africa’s population is exploding, and its young people are adopting tech alternatives to countries’ long-insufficient health, education, and financial infrastructure.
If you’ve been interested in international development for long, you have seen many prognostications about “Africa rising” over the years only to see them fade into oblivion. Predicting profound economic shifts is like predicting earthquakes; you study the driving forces and your algorithms crunch the data.
That isn’t stopping Helga Stegmann. She has led “user experience” agency Mantaray since 2006, and she gave a riveting talk last week in Chicago hosted by partner agency BoldInsight. In my experience, user experience folks rarely have their hands on the pulse of disruptive economic change, but the reason she is an exception reflects that Africa’s economic transformation is happening at the grassroots level (as with most revolutions), and her key orientation is user experience design, so researching users across rapidly evolving interfaces in devices. Follow along with my notes of her remarks […]
Technologies Enabling the Police State describes the inevitability of pervasive surveillance, how it’s developing, and how we can act now to maintain the maximum degree of freedom. This is Part1 of a series on autonomy in the digital age. Personal and Collective Actions to Maintain Autonomy (Part2) is a how-to post, while Police State Scenarios (Part3) discusses ways that collective permanent loss of autonomy could unfold.
The connected car and customer experience reveals a new opportunity for carmakers to dial into real customer behavior and desires around connected cars and autonomous cars. The Connected car and the autonomous car are powerful services that will help transform how people move around, and they are emerging during an era of unprecedented volatility in markets. I’ll wager that there’s never been a better or more challenging time to be a carmaker because opportunities and threats have never been higher. I’ve been fortunate to meet product managers and engineers who are pioneering connected and autonomous car services. I’ve also been meeting leaders in the Internet of Things (smart devices), of which the connected car is a part.
Astute CEOs and boards of established firms and brands are awakening to an increasingly uncomfortable reality: for many, business results have been flat, and customers are behaving “unpredictably.” Since this is such a prevalent trend, there is emerging consensus that “going digital” is the way to get closer to customers(1) and revitalize business. CEOs or board members get on the phone to their executive recruiter to search for a Chief Digital Officer, a “digital CMO,” or maybe a digital-savvy CIO to lead digital transformation. As we’ll see, in so doing they are too often putting the cart before the horse. They will get better results by assessing their needs for digital expertise first, so I’ll offer a simple yet robust needs assessment process.
CIO Guide to CDOs and Digital Transformation summarizes a presentation I gave to TechLeaders Association, a Chicago-based CIO group. It will brief you on how digitally empowered B2C and B2B customers are forcing change on enterprises by demanding seamless interactions across digital and analog interfaces, the rise of the Chief Digital Officer and how CIOs can use this disruption to their advantage. Omni-channel will become the new normal in industries in which a leader provides the omni-channel experience and raises the bar. While explaining omni-channel, I asked the room how many had abandoned transactions with ecommerce or mobile sites because they were too difficult to use, and 40% raised their hands. When leaders field their omni-channel experiences, customers will reject laggards en masse. CIOs can use these developments to their advantage, and the CIO Guide to CDOs and Digital Transformation shows how.
Omni Channel From Brand and Agency Viewpoints takes you behind the curtain of the digital provider world. The audience of the Digital Analytics Association’s Chicago Symposium was focused on omni-channel from the point of view of how its moving parts functioned because members buy and sell media and marketing content. Brand and agency digital professionals are caught in the tidal wave of data, which is straining legacy processes and relationships to the limit.
The rise of design signaled the fall of Nokia, RIM and Motorola describes how engineering is becoming less important in distinguishing hightech and other products from each other. It also presages a seismic shift away from product towards customer experience in determining market leaders for people-oriented products and services. A very large portion of product companies will follow in the footsteps of these three former mobile phone titans unless they transform their focus from product features (engineering) to customer experience (design).
Omni-Channel Retail, Mobile and Big Data offers tantalizing glimpses into current and future omni-channel retail trends and technologies. I “sat down” with three thought leaders and a crowd of smart people on AllAnalytics’ real-time webcast, which featured real-time Q&A with the panelists afterward. You can watch it here.
[UPDATED] The Future of the Retail Store in the Omni-Channel Age is third in CSRA’s retail & omni-channel series, and it is especially relevant to Chief Digital Officers, who orchestrate profound organization change using digital technologies and processes. It also offers rare opportunity to high-stakes CMOs. Part1 of The Future of the Retail Store outlines several aspects of market disruption that are affecting retailers as a group, albeit by varying degrees. Part2 features examples of “reimagining retail” for mobile, banking, grocery, hardware and apparel “stores.”