Context Is Key for 21st Century Mobile Experiences

It’s always nice to be with 100,000 close friends at a mega-event like Mobile World Congress 2015 in Barcelona. With a career’s worth of trade shows under my belt, I’m still in awe of their size and scale – attendees literally need days just to make it through the building. Here’s my big takeaway: mobile is no longer just about apps. It is about enabling a single, cohesive value chain that begins and ends with empathy for the individual user on the device of their choosing.

Everything begins with the user because 21st century mobile experiences require user-specific context as the key ingredient. We can’t unlock the value of technology if we don’t understand (and use) all available information about that individual. Where in the world are they and where are they trying to go? What are they trying to accomplish? What are their interests, challenges, likes, and limitations? All of this information is as significant for a business traveler as it is for a field mechanic on the job. This information is context – and context is the fuel that drives the mobile experience.

Once the value chain is equipped with context about the user, this is when intelligent, real-time networks can unlock the full power of connecting users, devices, and businesses.

For that business traveler, the context-driven network effect offers the promise of a personalized and productive visit to anywhere. Barcelona is the prime example. Powered by innovation from Telefonica, SAP’s HANA Cloud Platform and Concur, visitors to Spain’s second largest city will soon have a context-rich mobile experience.

As visitors move around the city to experience breathtaking sites like La Sagrada Familia, businesses will have the opportunity to recognize each individual traveler based on their location and personalized itineraries. This will enable real-time, meaningful recommendations, promotions and other customized insights to help create a memorable experience. The traveler will effortlessly move from airport to hotel to meetings, and in the final act of simplicity, all of the associated spend shifts into a pre-populated expense report that can be automatically submitted at the end of the trip. This is the ultimate example of using the power of the network to improve people’s lives.

The same concept of contextually aware networks is fast becoming a reality in the workplace, as well. For the field mechanic, contextual information collected about her location, her expertise, and her supply inventory can help ensure that her time is maximized. The industrial equipment she maintains will communicate directly with the manufacturer, deploying early warnings about when service is necessary to prevent a breakdown.

The manufacturer, in turn, is able to identify the most conveniently located field mechanic to provide the service – but only if that mechanic has the necessary part and expertise to do the work. This mobile experience is a prime example of how the Networked Economy and “Internet of Things” are dramatically revamping business processes and reshaping business models. In each of the two examples, think about the sophistication necessary to deliver the outcomes. In both cases, the users, devices, and businesses are connected in that single, inherently mobile value chain. Data integrity, security, and privacy are all critical components in ultimately delivering an experience that, to the user, looks and feels simple.

For businesses, the sophistication goes a level deeper. To enable the this context-rich experience for the user, core business applications – like finance, point of sale, human capital management and procurement – all have to be integrated and extended into the network. We only know that the dispatched field mechanic has the right expertise if her employee profile from the human capital management system verifies that she does. For the Barcelona experience, businesses can only engage the traveler if their reservations, point of sale and social media channels are fully integrated. Both outcomes may appear simple, but the inputs are anything but.

So if you didn’t get the chance to take a casual stroll past the 2,000 exhibitors at the Mobile World Congress, mobile is the clear standard, and the expansive opportunities it offers to create a new world are endless. The focus now belongs on bringing together the platform, applications, and networks necessary to make “simple” real for every user on any device.

Source - http://blogs.sap.com/innovation/mobile-applications/for-21st-century-mobile-experiences-context-is-key-02418414

Technology Innovations You Have Never Seen

Everyday we are introduced to innovations that remind us just how much our world is changing and how technology is impacting every aspect of how we live. From the Internet of things to biometric devices, we are often left with our minds blown and thinking, “Is this real life?” Yes, it is real life and we need to get used to it.

So besides mind-blowing apps (they would warrant their own 2000 word post), here are three product innovations that may make you think that the hover board will be hitting store shelves and we will be hovering across country in no time.

1. 1. The Birth Control Chip – This is exactly what it sounds like – an implantable chip that releases hormones and works just like the birth control pill. This chip, developed by MicroCHIPS, a Massachusetts-based IT startup in the MIT lab, can be implanted and will continue releasing hormones for up to 16 years. The tiny chip is controlled by a remote control, which allows the implanted woman to turn the tool on and off, allowing her to determine when she will start ovulating and be able to get pregnant.  This device is backed by Bill Gates and is expected to head to preclinical trials next year – and could be available for use as early as 2018.
2. 2. FingerReader – The FingerReader prototype, produced by a 3D printer, is a ring equipped with a small camera that scans text and reads the text aloud through a synthesized voice. This tool is a great innovation for those are visually impaired, and gives them immediate and affordable access to printed words, allowing them to read documents, books, and other materials needed for daily living. If the visually impaired reader starts to stray from the text, the small device vibrates, which lets the user know they should slowly move the device to get back on track.
3. 3. SimSensei – This prototype, was launched by The University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies’ (ICT) within DARPA’s Detection and Computational Analysis of Psychological Signals (DCAPS), with the goal of using artificial intelligence to identify indicators of psychological distress such as anxiety, depression, and PTSD. Using a Kinect motion-sensing camera to monitor facial tics, the SimSensei software produces a computer generated diagnosis determining whether or not the person is depressed (and so far, they are boasting a 90 percent accuracy rate in the technology).

A Guide To Beat Complexity and Deliver Value

In today’s networked, always-on world, we are presented with more information and more challenges than at any other point in our past.  Complexity, which comes in all shapes and sizes, has emerged as one of our biggest challenges.  It can be the difference between success and failure; between being stuck in the weeds or using the massive amounts of information to our advantage.  And, as SAP’s CEO Bill McDermott says, “Only when you understand intense complexities can intense simplicity emerge.”

Our world, with the lines blurring between business and personal, is getting more and more complex. Within the next five years, 2.5 billion people will be connected on social networks.  And, an astonishing 75 billion devices will be connected. This presents a huge opportunity for companies, particularly technology companies.

Most executives – in fact according to a recent Economist survey, 90 percent of executives – agree that business is becoming more complex, specifically across three dimensions: management, business and technology.  Let’s first explore the three categories before examining ways to beat complexity and deliver value.

Management complexity

Mergers and acquisitions, new products and services, and expansion can create additional layers of management.  Some companies are known to have at least 20 layers of management, and that creates a distance between customers, employees, leaders, and managers.

Business process complexity

Often times, business processes have not kept pace with the way consumers engage outside of the office.  Employees want a simple experience at work.  And, too often, business processes are defined by complex workflows that limit or inhibit collaboration.

Technology complexity

We all know the challenges that technology complexity presents from the massive amounts of data (structured, unstructured, dark, soft and hard) to the multiple layers of IT systems.  Because many legacy systems run homegrown applications, companies often find it difficult to scale or work on different platforms and systems.  This challenge increases when multiple systems are integrated as a result of an M&A or consolidation across businesses and geographies.

So what’s the answer to all this complexity?

Companies can unlock real value by running simpler and delivering value with simple technology and solutions.  When companies easily consume technology, they more rapidly simplify their business processes and spend their time, money and resources on innovating.  Companies that innovate are proven to be more successful.

Tapping into partner expertise

While all of this may be simple in concept, simple doesn't necessarily mean easier.  However, the simple choice should be the smart choice.

• Partners are arguably the most efficient, effective and valuable way for a customer to acquire technology.
• Partners play a critical role in helping companies run their business in an easier, simpler manner, regardless of the company’s vendor of choice.
• By calling upon their industry and market knowledge, partners can help companies grow their businesses and improve their bottom line in a more personalized, localized way.
• Conversations with partners should go beyond deployment to a real understanding of how the partner can enable true business transformation.

With all this in mind, it’s important to understand the capabilities partners have developed, as well as the resources they provide.  It’s no surprise that our most successful partners are the ones offering consulting and software solutions to help businesses Run Simple, helping businesses beat management, business process, and technology complexity.

Working with partners is the smart choice.  I believe it’s the most efficient and profitable way for companies to grow and scale.  It’s how we can run simple, beat complexity and deliver value.

Source - http://blogs.sap.com/innovation/innovation/beat-complexity-deliver-value-02085037

A Guide To Succes Of Wining Team Building

Success of any organization depends upon the employees and their potential to work. No organization can reach the number one position without its employees working as a team. Therefore to build synergy employees need to work as team. By working as a team employees will be able to distribute their task efficiently.

Team Building via Cool Daily Infographics

Future Technology Predictions - Doctors Will Use Your DNA For Health Check Ups

Watson sifted four Terabytes of data to play Jeopardy! Now, it’s sorting even more healthcare data with the likes of WellPoint, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, MD Anderson Cancer Center, and Cleveland Clinic. Next, IBM predicts that over the next five years, similar cognitive systems will help doctors unlock the Big Data of DNA to pin point cancer therapy for their patients. 

Source  -   Doctors will routinely use your DNA to keep you well

Five Steps To Develop Your Brand

5 Future Evolution of Technology at IBM

In 5 years, computers will have a sense of smell. We will see vast advances where sensors will be equipped to smell potential diseases that feed back into a cognitive system to tell us if they suspect a possible health issue. Your phone will detect if you're coming down with a cold or illness before you do.



Source - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYkSvNKdyBM

Inbound Marketing Funnel With Measurable Results

Marketing is changing and the emphasis is increasingly on making your Marketing activities ‘Inbound’ rather than ‘Outbound. ‘The key is “Talk To” your customers don’t “Talk At” them.

I am not saying cancel all your traditional Outbound marketing but what I am saying is understand the value of traditional Outbound marketing has decreased. Look at changing the balance of your Marketing activities and putting much more of your time and effort and a little money in to ‘Inbound Marketing ‘ .Remember you heard it here first.

Keys to Success for Healthcare

Healthcare reform, ACA, Business Intelligence, Enterprise Portals, predictive analytics, pay for performance, the Triple Aim, total cost of care, patient safety….these, and many more,  are the buzzwords in healthcare and medicine these days.  Install this system, connect that system, run these reports, use this “intelligent program”… Do you ever wonder if we can solve all of these problems with just technology?

As a clinically oriented physician working in a technology world, I need to take a step back and look at behaviors and workflow.  How can we mentor the next generation of physicians, nurses and allied health professionals, teach them skills and foster their curiosity while encouraging them to be technologically savvy? I believe there are two critical keys to success:critical thinking and decision support.  Both are crucial and neither should exist without the other.  Here’s why.

Critical thinking is an essential tool for physicians.  Physicians who have this innate ability are often the most successful at diagnosing and treating their patients well. It is part art and part skill but ultimately, it affects patient safety and wellness.  I was pleased to see that medical school curriculums are now focusing on this as a fundamental skill. According to the recent Wall Street Journal article, “The Biggest Mistake Doctors Make,” the program at Dalhousie University “aims to help trainees step back and examine how biases may affect their thinking. Developed by Pat Croskerry, a physician known for his research on the role of cognitive error in diagnosis, it uses a list of 50 different types of bias that may lead to diagnostic error”.  Couple this with technology driven decision support at the point of care, which assists but never negates clinical judgment, and you have a winning combination.  These basic building blocks allow clinicians to concentrate on their craft: diagnosing and treating patients safely and effectively.

Healthcare reform is necessary but it does not have to undermine the knowledge and experience of our clinicians.  Adding technology, such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), real time decision support, predictive analytics, patient entered data via portals, mobile healthcare management apps and yes, even Watson, can only enhance and advance healthcare, streamline treatment and decrease costs.  Simple?  Let me know your thoughts!

Source - http://blogs.perficient.com/healthcare/blog/2013/11/20/two-keys-to-success-for-healthcare/

5 Reasons Your Sales Analytics Success

Welcome to the data world. Many secrets are hidden in big data, and now, with the computing power to unearth them,analytics promises to deliver transformative power wherever it is put to work. Still, the technology is a relative newcomer in the healthcare world. Brett Furst, CEO of Arbormetrix, says there is nothing to fear – and that analysis of clinical data has much to offer the medical world. Here, he shares his top five requirements to succeed with, or at least get excited about, the power of clinical analytics.

1. Know the difference between solutions. Analytics solutions vary widely in size and shape. Furst says it is important to know what the different kinds are, and how to apply each one to specific problems, whether they have to do with population health and disease management, episodic delivery or post-acute care. Population health and disease management focuses on "improving the general health of a population and keeping them out of a hospital," according to Furst. Think screening a database to find people who might be at risk for a certain condition and reaching out to them. Episodic analytics "focuses on identifying variation in the delivery and associated outcomes of specialty and acute care." This kind of analytics is about looking back and finding ways to improve care in the future based on how it was provided previously, says Furst. Post-acute analytics centers around "utilization management so patients receive the appropriate level of care after hospitalization, with a focus on cutting down on wasted resources." Essentially, the three flavors Furst outlines could be seen as the analytical equivalents of before, during and after. 

2. What's in the data? Knowing which analytics can be applied to which problems opens the door to immense functionality. With the rise of ACOs and the paradigm shift of reimbursement for quality of care, healthcare providers are scrambling to approach the health of their populations proactively. Clinical analytics has a role in this shift, and Furst says harnessing its power means that organizations will be able to more intelligently identify, solve, and manage the challenges that they are beginning to face. Furst says being able to ask questions such as, "Where the spending is, how many readmits do we have every year, and how do outcomes stack up against variances of treatment?" have a massive "effect on clinical performance [that] goes to the actual outcome of the patient." By taking the data generated in a hospital and making sense of it with clinical analytics, Furst says there is a real ability to find and tackle performance issues. "When you combine good clinical data with good accounting data, you can pinpoint what types of conditions might make for readmits," he says.

3. Make data actionable. Furst says there's a common malaise in the industry around the promises analytics and big data seem to offer. He is careful to caution that "just aggregating your data isn't going to lead to big benefits," and that "data is just going to be a reference point." The important thing to remember, he says, is that clinical analytics is a tool first and foremost, and that without knowing which problems need to be solved, their use is limited. Furst says the ideal way to look at it is as if a hospital were like any other type of business: trying to do a top-to-bottom complete overhaul is a tough pill to swallow, and one that may not end up being that effective. Instead, he recommends taking the approach of "Let's start zeroing in on one area, and use the data to find where to start." Furst says the best results will come from focusing on a specific area to approach, with clearly defined goals and steps to take. "I see the real opportunity ... when you apply a higher level of algorithms to make the data more actionable," he says.

4. Understand the additional benefits. Who says clinical analytics is a one trick pony? By its very nature, analytics is the practice of taking a close look at a large amount of data and then driving outcomes with its findings. Furst says this can be put to a variety of uses in the healthcare world. When the lens is turned in an analytical fashion to the ways doctors work, the results can drive and change the development of best practices. Furst says that in the old fee-for-service world, "surgeons would do what they thought was medically appropriate, but they did so in a vacuum." Now, "when you come to them saying this device is $15,000 and this one is $2,000. And guess what, the $2,000 one is actually better, you're improving care and impacting your bottom line." 

5. Provide evidence based on the demographics of the patient. As well as being a powerful tool to drive changes in the operating theatre and the board room, clinical analytics has a role in communicating with the patient. Furst says a clinician should be able to sit down with his or her patient and be able to pull up treatment outcomes that match that patient's demographics as a way of saying "based on evidence the better procedure is A instead of B." Compared to already existing tools such as WebMD, which Furst feels contain "a deluge of information," that may not necessarily be relevant to the person reading it, clinical analytics has the ability to filter what's unimportant and to provide better information. Furst says the analytics enables practitioners to say, "Our statistical science shows this treatment option will deliver the best probable outcome for you."

Source - http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/5-ways-get-sold-clinical-analytics

Five Elements That Catalyze Great Marketing

Although this may seem like a lot to handle, the rapid changes and fast-breaking opportunities facing marketers in the 21st century suggest to us that the best ones will have good answers to all of these questions. In our opinion, those that do will not only enjoy above market growth, they will define the next golden age of marketing.

Source  -  http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/marketing_sales/the_dawn_of_marketings_new_golden_age

A Guide To Brand Page Strategy for Google+ and Facebook

More and more it is becoming clear that organizations can no longer just make and sell products. Today they have to make products, build brands and sell them as one. It is because of this that designers have been introduced into the process of helping design the brands the organization sells. As the way an organization conducts business changes and the fragmentation of media channels continues, designing and building brands becomes harder. No longer can designers build a brand with some clever advertising that simply states the features and benefits of a product. Instead they have to consider the many dimensions of experiencing a brand and how to keep it all consistent. Because of all this, building brands for an organization has become a primary function of business, being as important as developing business strategy itself.

Adoption of Mobile Commerce Infographic By SAP

Mobile devices have become the cornerstone for consumer communication and transactions. This interactive visualization explores the global use of mobile commerce services to uncover. The Mobile Consumer research survey shows an international mobile consumer community running at different speeds, maturing at different rates and presenting different opportunities, creating marketing complexity. For an in-depth look at the...  SAP Mobility Solutions

By SAP.com

Big Data Infographic 2015 By SAP and KloudData

Major Things you Need to Do About Big Data in 2015

#BigDataSolutions

Strategic Marketing Process Planning Implementation and Control

There are 7 Vital Steps Of Strategic Marketing Process. It is a planning process which seeks to establish a clear direction & unique purpose for all marketing activity's. These are the below given steps you should follow to create and complete a winning marketing strategy.

via Cool Daily Infographics