A smart business is one that runs on the numbers. Today, open communication means more access to customers and competition than ever. Even small companies have world-wide customer lists, in part due to the increasingly streamlined logistics companies that help with shipping. In a business world of static customers and increasing competition, staying ahead of the curve often means staying on the leading edge of technology. Smart businesses leverage technology for direct gains, and that all comes down to the data. Efficiency improvements, trend tracking, smooth workflows and dozens of other [...]

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Descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive analytics can each provide insights into the business and as such improve and optimise your performance and increase your competitive advantage. Descriptive and diagnostic analytics enable organisations to learn, sense, filter, shape and calibrate opportunities by providing insights as to what has happened in their environment. This will allow your organisation to better sense opportunities than the competition. Predictive analytics can improve your decision-making across your organisation to help you understand which opportunities are best [...]

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Using AI to automate processes means substantial efficiency improvements in nearly any business function. Now, that same solution is being deployed to create better, faster and smarter AI technologies. Think of IBM Watson Studio as an AI that trains other AIs. It helps automate the Deep Learning process, so you can train your system to handle independent tasks much more rapidly. After all, some of the biggest barriers to entry with AI technology are the availability of skilled programmers, standardized formats for easy deployment and the sheer complexity involved in training any AI. With IBM [...]

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If you take care of your customers, your customers will take care of your shareholders. It is that simple. To create value for your shareholders, you should focus on your customers. Offering your most important stakeholder what they need, when they need it. Unfortunately, many organisations fail to recognise the customer as their most important stakeholder. Thereby threatening the success of the organisation. There are multiple reasons why organisations fail to take care of their customers. One reason could be because the organisation is more focused on cost reduction instead of service [...]

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A question that I get asked a lot is how should organisations navigate today’s digital transformation? An interesting question that encompasses different layers. It depends on who asks the question, the company involved, the industry the company is in, the size of the company, etc. Since the arrival of information technologies, digital transformation has been on the agenda for many organisations. Most of these organisations seem to be struggling with it. With the appearance of the first wave of ‘advanced’ IT in the 1990s, the nature of organisations changed. IT changes organisation [...]

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With the development of distributed ledger technology now ten years in the making, slowly enterprises are exploring the possibilities of blockchain as well. While most of the blockchain startups working on innovative solutions focus on public and/or permissionless blockchains, enterprises will predominantly use private and/or permissioned blockchains. The most important difference between a public and a private blockchain is that within a public blockchain, the actors involved in the network are not known, while in a private blockchain they are. As a result, within a public blockchain, [...]

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Last week, Sir Tim Berners-Lee revealed his new vision, one where the internet becomes decentralised again as he originally had envisioned it. His technology is called Solid POD and will allow every internet user to store their own data, be it video; articles; wearable tracking data or comments, and share that with anyone or any website that has connected to the Solid ecosystem. Using the Solid POD, the user will remain in full control over their own data and who has access to it and who not. A great new initiative that will hopefully bring us closer to a decentralised society where data is [...]

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Increasingly, big data is invading consumers’ lives. It affects consumers' privacy as the web has become such a centralised platform. When you have centralised organisations collecting so much consumer data and using it to offer personalised advertising to their users, it causes problems. As Jonathan Taplin discussed in his book Move Fast and Break Things, organisations that have access to so much data and use it to steer consumer behaviour could directly undermine our democracy. These centralised organisations do not forget or forgive. Since actions (i.e. data) speak louder than words, it [...]

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This week, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released a report stating that in the coming years, robots and AI will replace 75 million jobs globally. At first, this is due to four specific technological advances—ubiquitous high-speed mobile internet; artificial intelligence; widespread adoption of big data analytics; and cloud technology. By 2022, thanks to smart algorithms and advanced robotics, almost 60% of those organisations surveyed expect to have significantly modified how they produce and distribute their products. As a result, the productivity of existing jobs will improve [...]

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There is more data than ever in the world and in the coming years, it will only increase exponentially. However, just collecting data is not enough if you wish to become a data-driven business. For that, you need to analyse the data to gain insights, and as you are probably aware, there are multiple ways to do so, each increasing in complexity and the value they create: descriptive analytics, diagnostic analytics, predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics. Descriptive and diagnostic analytics is similar to business intelligence; it helps you understand what happened in the past, from [...]

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