Enterprises have always had IT to back up their business strategy with technology. Businesses have been descriptive about their requirements, while IT has been prescriptive about the
Enterprises have always had IT to back up their business strategy with technology. Businesses have been descriptive about their requirements, while IT has been prescriptive about the technology and its limitations. Today, however, the trends are changing. The proliferation of consumer technology is transforming the user, and in turn, enterprise behavior. The workplace is turning digital. In a digital workplace, the underlying technology allows the employees to communicate and collaborate irrespective of their location. The four factors that define a digital enterprise are Social, mobile, analytics and cloud, or SMAC.
SMAC play a pivotal role in empowering the workforce to contribute without being tied to their desks. Let us evaluate what role each plays to that end.
Social – A major initiative today with a lot of corporates is to evolve into an ‘intelligent’ organization. There is a reason why this is becoming priority. With the US job market opening up, large organizations are losing a lot of tribal knowledge to attrition. Another factor is that the knowledge within the organization exists in silos, and is therefore underutilized.
A core enterprise social platform allows for employees to collaborate over an informal channel. Expert advice can be sought from experts you never even thought existed in the company, ideas can be bounced off, and tribal knowledge residing in peoples’ heads can be formalized and reused even if the person leaves the organization.
Mobile – People with field jobs like sales can easily get disconnected with the corporate agenda and data since they are constantly away from their desks, and do not have the access to the corporate networks in the field. This is a major challenge, since the unavailability of data to the field can very soon turn out to be a competitive disadvantage.
Mobility addresses this in two ways. First, BYOD or COPE models for device ownership, bundled with a strong MDM solution allow users to access the corporate data and applications through their mobile devices. Second, enterprise internal applications can be exposed as mobile applications, so that the employees can use them while on the road.
Analytics – Today, enterprises collect and own huge amounts of data. From sales to finance to procurement to operations to field services to customers themselves, every transaction, every activity and every purchase is a record in one database or the other. The issue is that while a lot of data is captured and stored, very little is really used for real time decision making / intelligence. The enterprises sit on veritable goldmines of data, without putting it to use.
Analytics and BI platforms specialize in mining the enterprise system of records for trends and patterns that can help them understand customer, employee, and process behavior better. If used efficiently, this same data can turn into real intelligence and can have direct impact on topline and bottom line. Predictive analytics can help you target specific customer segments, or provide you with the foresight into trends, the knowledge of which you did not even know you possessed.
Cloud – One of the primary concerns of the employees from IT teams is that they are too slow to respond to business requirements, and that their policies are too restrictive. This leads to a lot of dissatisfaction among business resources who want to move fast, or project teams that want capacity fast. IT typically has to go through long procurement cycles to provision capacity, which negatively impacts the time to value for the enterprise projects.
Cloud (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS) offers a flexible, OPEX based capacity on demand to facilitate agility in execution. Cloud also offers universally accessible storage and APIs that can help sharing of common resources across organizations. Further, unlike popular beliefs, cloud offers enterprise class security features.
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