Executives with a capital "C" in their title generally don't have a clue on how to adjust to the social, mobile, and cloud-based business world. Now IBM wants to help these Luddite execs adapt -- by plunking them down into a new lab where it will show them what the IT tools at their disposal can actually accomplish.
IBM's new Customer Experience Lab aims to deploy 100 hand-picked specialists — industry titans from the world of machine learning, analytics, and a slew of other "Big Data" fields — as a consulting consortium aimed at aiding C-suite executives.
"Take for example a CMO whose life has changed quite a bit as a result of social and mobile in the last couple years," explains Clay Williams, senior manager of "front-office innovation" at IBM. "The goal here is to bring the headlights that IBM research has to shine and show them further down the road… so that IBM can help them chart the path forward."
In other words, IBM wants to provide some tools, and some advice, to help top executives learn how not to screw things up in a landscape they have no hope of understanding on their own. After all, a CFO may be well-versed in the complexities of financial-based business models, but isn't going to have the slightest idea of how to employ data mining and machine learning to better understand a single customers needs.
IBM knows that, and it insists it isn't looking to educate these individuals. "It's not so much teaching, but delivering these new technologies," Williams says. "It's built around us working in partnership."
"Big Data" Tools
With more than $6 billion going into research and development each year, IBM is one of the very few global companies capable of offering up an expensive, need-based Big Data consulting service.
But what exactly will it look like? Well, the new IBM lab aims to give business leaders the opportunity to work alongside those 100 experts in order to jointly create new business strategies based on what the companies' own data tell them.
For interested companies, IBM will pinpoint a C-level candidate exec and help craft new business strategies for him or her. Or, if you prefer the original IBMspeak: "From nomination to partnering to understanding the client problem and finding the right research team, then what we do is look at proof of concept model," Williams says. "We see if they are appealing, rapidly prototype some of those ideas and then go to a full solution process."
IBM outlines three generic sorts of breakthroughs it has identified for potential clients to leverage:
Customer insight: Applying advanced capabilities such as machine learning and visual analytics to predict differences in individual customer behavior across multiple channels.
Customer engagement: Using deep customer engagement to drive insight and continuously deliver value by personalizing engagement, versus transactional experiences.
Employee engagement: Embedding semantic, collaborative, and multimedia technologies to foster employee engagement and insight – in person and online.
Mobile Banking? Great, But What's Next?
Williams offers an example from banking, both because that's an area where Big Data technologies can be particularly helpful, and because it's the sector in which two of the IBM lab's first clients — British mutual institution Nationwide Building Society and Mexican superbank Banorte — happen to operate.
"If you think about phase 1 of enabling [mobile] devices for banking, it was largely about parity with web-based banking," he says — for instance, offering the ability to transfer funds or pay bills via mobile apps. Williams says IBM aims to go beyond that. If a bank wants to develop a plan for individual, social network-based experiences down the line, IBM can bring in a machine learning expert to parse how customers are interacting with businesses across various channels and develop algorithms for predicting behavior. "Now they're are asking the deeper question: 'What's going to happen next?'"
And that's the question IBM's customer-experience lab wants its would-be clients to be asking. It's supposedly the key with which international-scale business can craft strategies that fit the needs of individual customers -- though exactly how you get there from here still remains a bit fuzzy. One thing is for sure: IBM is convinced that it depends on crunching mounds of data. Oh, and on paying those consulting fees.
Image courtesy of Tomasz Bidermann / Shutterstock.com.
Related Posts:
How The Mobile Enterprise Puts Business Leaders On The Hot… Guest author Robert LeBlanc is Senior Vice President of IBM ...
Africa May Leapfrog The World In Big Data Africa is already well known for leapfrogging the rest of ...
Big Data And The Landfills Of The Digital Enterprise You do realize that you work for the only company ...
How To Take Back Social Media Marketing From Facebook &… Guest author Rob Tarkoff is the president and CEO of ...
Report: Twitter Buys Bluefin Labs, A Social TV Analytics… According to a new report from Business Insider, Twitter's latest ...
Businesses Think They ‘Get’ Social Media. Do… Just a few years ago, social media and mobile marketing ...
Office 365 For Business Is Here. Good Luck Figuring Out What Office 365, Microsoft's cloud-based office suite, is moving the turf ...
Box CEO Aaron Levie On The Future Of Data Storage [Video] Last week, ReadWrite Editor-in-in-Chief Dan Lyons sat down with 27-year-old Box CEO Aaron ...
Who’s Right In The Oracle-Forrester Slugfest? Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison seldom shies away from a fight, ...
New Startup Gives CIOs Some Cloud Control It's hard to believe, but just 10 years ago open ...
BII REPORT: How Location-Based Services Are Transforming The The possibilities for location-based services on mobile go beyond consumer-facing ...
How Location-Based Services Are Transforming The Mobile… The possibilities for location-based services on mobile go beyond consumer-facing ...
Red Hat’s Big Data Push: All Hat, No Cattle Big Data is, well, big these days. (Maybe too big ...
Microsoft Reverses Itself, Stops Bullying Office 2013 Users… After weeks of heated customer backlash, Microsoft has reversed its ...
BII REPORT: How Location-Based Data Is Making Mobile… With 770 million of the 1.2 billion smartphone devices worldwide ...
The post IBM Wants Your CEO To Embrace The Future — And It Will Do All The Hard Work appeared first on Ebests.com.