Is mobile retail starting to grow up?

It really takes two things for mobile retail to become the norm…it has to be high on the agenda of the major brands and it has to be an expectation of the consumer. We’re making progress on both fronts. A recent survey by Internet Retailer shows that 79% of retailers now find mobile commerce important, […]

Technology, not politicians, will rescue healthcare

Watching the political theater in the US Capitol one has to wonder if there may not be a legislative solution for the American healthcare system. It seems as a country or government that we’re unable to agree on the approach or even on the scale of the problem. But there has to be something more […]

Do your customers seek you out?

How much does customer loyalty bring your business to your stores, site or app versus how often you seek out the customer? If you’re achieving meaningful customer engagement and your loyalty programsare working, the balance will be in your favor. Being Sought We’ve worked hard to help people accidentally find us. Search engine optimization (SEO) is as old […]

BPM and the Internet of Everything

Peter Schooff, writing on BPM.com, asked, “How will the Internet of Everything impact BPM?” This is a great and timely question because the Internet of Everything, the growth and convergence of people, process, data and things on the Internet, is a phrase that’s popping up everywhere. This week at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando, Paul LaBelle […]

Why Customer Experience Management and Why Right Now?

You run a successful business, your customers are primarily repeat offenders, and your marketing department is giving you everything you ask for. Why would you care about doing more around customer engagement and, more importantly, why would you do it right now? These are great questions that customer loyalty marketers should be asking themselves. After all, who […]

Do we have a right to be forgotten?

The Web and Big Data are making the world a much smaller place. Uncomfortably small in some cases. As reported in the NY Times, many sites have sprung up across the Internet that post mugshots online in what could be best described as extortion…they’ll take them down for a fee. What truly makes it extortion […]

After the Great Recession comes the Great Integration

Are you ready for the Great Integration? To realize how absolutely crucial data integration has become, you need to first think back to the mid-2000’s. The hot conversation was around service-oriented architecture (SOA) and the benefits of loosely coupled business systems that that allowed information to flow between applications and databases through reusable interfaces built […]

A glimpse inside the retail bank of the future

In previous blogs we referred to the operating models of retail banks by identifying certain product and channel features that drive the changes in the industry. This post will focus on the evolving operating model and the impacts it has on people, process and enabling capabilities, which is more than the technology that drives most […]

Reading tomorrow’s newspaper today

What’s the value of yesterday’s newspaper? Not much. What’s the value of tomorrow’s? Priceless. We’re fast moving into a world where tomorrow’s news is accessible today. The chips light When I flew for the US Navy back in the 90’s, I was fascinated by something we called the “chips light.” The chips light was the […]

3 reasons Google Glass is inevitable

Even when Google Glass was  only a rumor, there were questions about whether it was a glimpse of the future or just a gimmick. It was enough of a question that it made the Weekend Update on Saturday Night LIve as the cast ridiculed the device (it was very, very funny). It was clear that […]

Suddenly, mobile location got really, really easy

We all know retail is being transformed by mobile technology and big data…that story is being told pretty much everywhere.   Some of the biggest changes, however, are the ones happening very quietly and without hype. The recent release of Apple’s iOS7 gave us iBeacons, something Apple didn’t shout about publicly but is clearly the reason […]

Someday the magic will stop

The following is a guest post by Alistair Croll. I posted this on Facebook but it belongs here instead. There’s a meme running around that somehow the iPhone fingerprint scanner uploads your biometrics to Apple’s servers. The way these things work is that your fingerprint is turned into a series of numbers, usually through a one-way mathematical […]

Breaking Bad: Show’s over, but the business lessons remain

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT. If you read further, you will be aware of how Breaking Bad ended. We warned you… It’s hard to believe Breaking Bad has reached its conclusion. Who imagined that Jesse would take out Todd, Walt would take out everyone else and that Lydia would succumb to Stevia (in a way…). It has […]

Big Data calls for the rise of the citizen developer

John Skovron has over twenty years of experience working with systems that run mega scale grid computing solutions. These are the systems used primarily at financial trading shops that are able to compute against loosely coupled, high variety and distributed data that most of the world wouldn’t ever consider as possible. When he slows down […]

4 Secrets of Killer Loyalty Programs

Few things hold more promise right now than Big Data, mobility, social platforms, and cloud computing. Their impact on brand loyalty and customer engagement management is enormous. The reasons aren’t that hard to figure out and look like this: Big Data brings a rich tapestry of information together at the perfect moments for customer engagement. […]

Analytics is the marriage of geek and (business) jock

Harvard Business Review published a really interesting interview with Nate Silver this week. Silver was asked about how to approach analytics based on several different points of entry to the field. One of the best questions involved how an organization should deploy ‘stat heads’, Silver’s term for data analytics experts. The interviewer wanted to know if […]