Overview of the key trends from the Accenture Technology Vision 2016 report. Includes a perspective from over 300 stakeholders engaged during the development of the report
Thrive with accenture product and platform engineering servicesAccenture Technology
Accenture’s Product and Platform Engineering Services team helps clients navigate through the new wave of platforms. With more than three decades of experience, our deep engineering-skilled workforce of over 8,000 professionals has grown out of the development of our own commercially-available software and platforms. With expertise across more than 40 industries and all business functions, we deliver transformational outcomes for a demanding, new digital world.
Accenture Tech Vision 2019 for Consumer Goods and Servicesaccenture
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Driving change, leading with the SAP®ecosystemaccenture
Accenture’s 2021 Technology Vision for SAP Solutions explores five technology trends that enable SAP customers to chart a path to future growth. https://accntu.re/3vIvYoQ
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In a world of digital disruption, how ready are Swiss companies to face the digital challenge? Accenture assessed the digital maturity of the largest Swiss companies and industries and offers insights into how to seize the digital opportunity.
Thrive with accenture product and platform engineering servicesAccenture Technology
Accenture’s Product and Platform Engineering Services team helps clients navigate through the new wave of platforms. With more than three decades of experience, our deep engineering-skilled workforce of over 8,000 professionals has grown out of the development of our own commercially-available software and platforms. With expertise across more than 40 industries and all business functions, we deliver transformational outcomes for a demanding, new digital world.
Accenture Tech Vision 2019 for Consumer Goods and Servicesaccenture
Each year, Accenture assesses the IT landscape to identify trends that will have the greatest impact on organizations in the years ahead. Here's what Accenture's 2019 Technology Vision study, found.
Reinventing the Last Mile: Win the Race to the Top (AU)accenture
A pivotal moment has arrived for traditional postal organisations. As retailers race to the top to win customer loyalty and market share, they are transforming their supply chains to enable the fast and free shipping that customers not only want, but expect. However, traditional postal organisations have not responded accordingly, and are now putting their future survival at risk. But by joining the race to the top—and taking advantage of their enviable position to offer the solutions retailers are looking for—they can transform their networks and win the last mile for decades to come.
Driving change, leading with the SAP®ecosystemaccenture
Accenture’s 2021 Technology Vision for SAP Solutions explores five technology trends that enable SAP customers to chart a path to future growth. https://accntu.re/3vIvYoQ
Accenture makes major investments in IT automation capabilities to advance to more intelligent and touch less IT operations, and business efficiency. Read more.
In a world of digital disruption, how ready are Swiss companies to face the digital challenge? Accenture assessed the digital maturity of the largest Swiss companies and industries and offers insights into how to seize the digital opportunity.
Driving Unconventional Growth through the Industrial Internet of Thingsaccenture
The emerging Industrial Internet will unleash new energy into the world of industrial products and services. To be a desirable supplier as well as partner in the digitally contestable future—and thus generate new revenues—companies will need to make the necessary changes. The time to push is now.
Deep dive into the Trend 1 of the Technology Vision 2015 - the Internet of Me - and discover how new frontiers of personalization centered on the individual open up as everyday objects and experiences become digitized.
Seamless Retail Technology – Unleashing an Integrated Shopping Experience accenture
Retailers are investing in technology and IT infrastructure to support future trends in retail to deliver a digital and seamless retail shopping experience.
Deep dive into the Trend 1 of the Technology Vision 2015 - the platform R(e)volution - and discover how industry platforms will fuel the acceleration of digital disruption during the next three to five years.
Rapid technological advancements are opening up new possibilities for innovation, intelligence and automation. Intelligent Automation is being used across multiple industries to create new value for businesses and society alike.
7 Ways to Drive Digital Transformation in your Organization. A presentation I gave at Gartner Symposium in Dubai on the 28th Feb. The topic was where do you start with Digital Transformation. Every organisation has 7 business systems (IT, Finance, Product, Asset, Partners, Workforce and Customers). OpenText have six pillars of solutions (Content, Experience, Analytics, Business Networks, Process, Discovery). This presentation aims to provide at a high level potential starting points for Digital Transformation
Scale your business through B2B eCommerce in ChinaTMO Group
On 24th of November 2021, Jing Zhou, Business Director of TMO Group, participated as a guest speaker in "China's Manufacturing Industry Status and Market Trends'' forum in Shanghai. The forum was organized by Shanghai Hansheng Law Firm and LvS Partners. Dozens of foreign investors, as well as representatives of Chinese manufacturing companies attended the event.
Jing's speech was titled "Scale your business through B2B eCommerce in China''. We are happy to share the slides of Jing’s presentation.
The deck covers topics of China B2B eCommerce Landscape, , B2B eCommerce Marketing in China. Presented by eCommerce agency TMO Group
Deep dive into the Trend 5 of the Technology Vision 2015 - Workforce Reimagined - and discover as the digital revolution gains momentum, humans and machines must do more together.
Industry X.0 in Action at Hannover Messe 2019accenture
Our Industry X.0 demonstrations at Hannover Messe 2019 will showcase a five-step journey showing how our IX0 framework enables the transformation of entire industries, brought to life by real industry examples. Learn more.
Open Insurance - Unlocking Ecosystem Opportunities For Tomorrow’s Insurance I...Accenture Insurance
For early adopters, open insurance offers new revenue streams, increased customer engagement and continued market relevance.
Learn more: https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insights/insurance/open-insurance
The traditional approach to software and application testing is evolving. Learn how Accenture is ushering a new era of Quality Engineering
Find out more: https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insights/technology/quality-engineering-new
Driving Unconventional Growth through the Industrial Internet of Thingsaccenture
The emerging Industrial Internet will unleash new energy into the world of industrial products and services. To be a desirable supplier as well as partner in the digitally contestable future—and thus generate new revenues—companies will need to make the necessary changes. The time to push is now.
Deep dive into the Trend 1 of the Technology Vision 2015 - the Internet of Me - and discover how new frontiers of personalization centered on the individual open up as everyday objects and experiences become digitized.
Seamless Retail Technology – Unleashing an Integrated Shopping Experience accenture
Retailers are investing in technology and IT infrastructure to support future trends in retail to deliver a digital and seamless retail shopping experience.
Deep dive into the Trend 1 of the Technology Vision 2015 - the platform R(e)volution - and discover how industry platforms will fuel the acceleration of digital disruption during the next three to five years.
Rapid technological advancements are opening up new possibilities for innovation, intelligence and automation. Intelligent Automation is being used across multiple industries to create new value for businesses and society alike.
7 Ways to Drive Digital Transformation in your Organization. A presentation I gave at Gartner Symposium in Dubai on the 28th Feb. The topic was where do you start with Digital Transformation. Every organisation has 7 business systems (IT, Finance, Product, Asset, Partners, Workforce and Customers). OpenText have six pillars of solutions (Content, Experience, Analytics, Business Networks, Process, Discovery). This presentation aims to provide at a high level potential starting points for Digital Transformation
Scale your business through B2B eCommerce in ChinaTMO Group
On 24th of November 2021, Jing Zhou, Business Director of TMO Group, participated as a guest speaker in "China's Manufacturing Industry Status and Market Trends'' forum in Shanghai. The forum was organized by Shanghai Hansheng Law Firm and LvS Partners. Dozens of foreign investors, as well as representatives of Chinese manufacturing companies attended the event.
Jing's speech was titled "Scale your business through B2B eCommerce in China''. We are happy to share the slides of Jing’s presentation.
The deck covers topics of China B2B eCommerce Landscape, , B2B eCommerce Marketing in China. Presented by eCommerce agency TMO Group
Deep dive into the Trend 5 of the Technology Vision 2015 - Workforce Reimagined - and discover as the digital revolution gains momentum, humans and machines must do more together.
Industry X.0 in Action at Hannover Messe 2019accenture
Our Industry X.0 demonstrations at Hannover Messe 2019 will showcase a five-step journey showing how our IX0 framework enables the transformation of entire industries, brought to life by real industry examples. Learn more.
Open Insurance - Unlocking Ecosystem Opportunities For Tomorrow’s Insurance I...Accenture Insurance
For early adopters, open insurance offers new revenue streams, increased customer engagement and continued market relevance.
Learn more: https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insights/insurance/open-insurance
The traditional approach to software and application testing is evolving. Learn how Accenture is ushering a new era of Quality Engineering
Find out more: https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insights/technology/quality-engineering-new
Customer Engagement Solution - The alliance between Accenture Digital and Adobe Marketing Cloud provides joint solutions that help our clients dramatically improve both marketing performance and marketing efficiency by achieving relevance at scale.
Read more: http://bit.ly/1AjioCI
Five trends on Indonesian digital consumers - AccentureAccenture ASEAN
Learn what makes the Indonesian digital consumer tick from our report "Everyone's a Screenager".
This Accenture report is especially for clients in the media, communications and technology space.
Indonesian screenagers are a profitable growth area for telcos and device makers that can understand them and cater to their digital demands.
One in three goods crosses national borders, and more than one-third of financial investments are international transactions. And in the next decade, global flows could triple, powered by rising prosperity and participation in the emerging world. In a new McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) report, "Global flows in a digital age: How trade, finance, people, and data connect the world economy," scenarios show that global flows could reach $54 trillion to $85 trillion by 2025.
Smarter Investments, Outstanding Results: Resources Industries Digital Transf...accenture
More than 200 senior technology leaders including CIOs, CDOs and CTOs from chemicals, energy, metals, mining and utilities industries participated in our global Digital Transformation survey. The key findings from the research are shared in this presentation and provide valuable insights into current and future transformational technology trends and plans.
Building Digital Trust: The role of data ethics in the digital ageAccenture Technology
Data is the biggest risk that is unaccounted for by businesses today. In the past, the scope for digital risk was limited to cybersecurity threats but leading organizations must now also recognize risks from lackluster ethical data practices. Mitigating these internal threats is critical for every player in the digital economy, and cannot be addressed with strong cybersecurity alone.
Accenture Technology Vision for Workday 2016:People First: The primacy of pe...Accenture Technology
Examine the five key trends from this year’s Technology Vision—Intelligent Automation; Liquid Workforce; Platform Economy; Predictable Disruption; and Digital Trust—and learn how Workday’s technologies resonate with and play out in this year’s analysis.
The Accenture Technology Vision 2016 identifies five technology trends fueled by the people first principal and that are essential to business success in the digital economy.
The Accenture Technology Vision 2016 identifies five technology trends fueled by the people first principle that are essential to business success in the digital economy.
People First: The Primacy of the People in the Age of Digital InsuranceAccenture México
John Cusano, Director Global de la Industria de Seguros, dio a conocer cómo la innovación es un habilitador para superar los desafíos que pueden surgir de la adopción de modelos digitales
Accenture Technology Vision for Industrial 2016accenture
New technologies are not just transforming how industrial companies manufacture their products. They are also having a profound impact on workforce and marketplace dynamics, creating new pathways for collaboration – amongst people, machines and organizations. Increasingly, companies’ destinies will be defined by how successfully they use digital to reorient their workforces, enable collaboration and both anticipate and drive disruption.
Accenture Technology Vision 2016. Focus on Pega® Technology.Accenture Technology
In the “Technology Vision 2016—Focus on Pega Technology,” discover how Accenture and Pega are helping companies use the key capabilities of Pega solutions—process automation, provisioning and personalization—to use technology in a way that embodies the “People First” mentality. Peer through our Pega lens as we look at how the 5 trends—Intelligent Automation, Liquid Workforce, Platform Economy, Predictable Disruption, Digital Trust—align with our Pega solutions and capabilities.
People First: The Primacy of People in the Communications Industryaccenture
The Accenture Technology Vision 2016 identifies five technology trends fueled by the people first principle and that are essential to business success in the digital economy.
We take a look at these trends and their potential for disruption though the lens of Communications Service Providers
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To learn more, visit https://www.accenture.com/bankingtechvision
Digital ecosystems will be the next big wave of enterprise disruption. Traditional boundaries between industry verticals are fading. The result? Unexpected newcomers are creating market power shifts.
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The 2016 Customer Vision pushes every C-Suite executive to consciously choose the most impactful combinations of five business-technology trends for their refreshed customer and growth strategies.
Intelligent automation allows your business to not only do things differently, but to do different things. Discover 3 lessons learned to guide your intelligent automation path:
In the Technology Vision for Oracle 2016 we explore how Accenture and Oracle are applying their individual strengths to enable organizations to carve out their places in the digital ecosystems that are defining their industries in the platform economy. With Oracle technologies residing at the heart of so many of the world’s largest organizations, their contribution to achieving the ‘People First’ agenda is growing more important all the time. Peer through our Oracle lens as we look at how the 5 trends—Intelligent Automation, Liquid Workforce, Platform Economy, Predictable Disruption, Digital Trust—align with our Oracle solutions.
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DevOps and Testing slides at DASA ConnectKari Kakkonen
My and Rik Marselis slides at 30.5.2024 DASA Connect conference. We discuss about what is testing, then what is agile testing and finally what is Testing in DevOps. Finally we had lovely workshop with the participants trying to find out different ways to think about quality and testing in different parts of the DevOps infinity loop.
Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey 2024 by 91mobiles.pdf91mobiles
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LF Energy Webinar: Electrical Grid Modelling and Simulation Through PowSyBl -...DanBrown980551
Do you want to learn how to model and simulate an electrical network from scratch in under an hour?
Then welcome to this PowSyBl workshop, hosted by Rte, the French Transmission System Operator (TSO)!
During the webinar, you will discover the PowSyBl ecosystem as well as handle and study an electrical network through an interactive Python notebook.
PowSyBl is an open source project hosted by LF Energy, which offers a comprehensive set of features for electrical grid modelling and simulation. Among other advanced features, PowSyBl provides:
- A fully editable and extendable library for grid component modelling;
- Visualization tools to display your network;
- Grid simulation tools, such as power flows, security analyses (with or without remedial actions) and sensitivity analyses;
The framework is mostly written in Java, with a Python binding so that Python developers can access PowSyBl functionalities as well.
What you will learn during the webinar:
- For beginners: discover PowSyBl's functionalities through a quick general presentation and the notebook, without needing any expert coding skills;
- For advanced developers: master the skills to efficiently apply PowSyBl functionalities to your real-world scenarios.
Kubernetes & AI - Beauty and the Beast !?! @KCD Istanbul 2024Tobias Schneck
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Dev Dives: Train smarter, not harder – active learning and UiPath LLMs for do...UiPathCommunity
💥 Speed, accuracy, and scaling – discover the superpowers of GenAI in action with UiPath Document Understanding and Communications Mining™:
See how to accelerate model training and optimize model performance with active learning
Learn about the latest enhancements to out-of-the-box document processing – with little to no training required
Get an exclusive demo of the new family of UiPath LLMs – GenAI models specialized for processing different types of documents and messages
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Keynote at DIGIT West Expo, Glasgow on 29 May 2024.
Cheryl Hung, ochery.com
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In this talk, I'll show you step-by-step how to secure your Kubernetes cluster for greater peace of mind and reliability.
Generating a custom Ruby SDK for your web service or Rails API using Smithyg2nightmarescribd
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Accelerate your Kubernetes clusters with Varnish CachingThijs Feryn
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This presentation was delivered at K8SUG Singapore. See https://feryn.eu/presentations/accelerate-your-kubernetes-clusters-with-varnish-caching-k8sug-singapore-28-2024 for more details.
Before we dive into the five trends, let’s reorient on the major themes of the Vision in the last three years. In our 2013 Vision, we said that Every Business is a Digital Business. We saw that digital technology was becoming a primary driver of profitability and market differentiation in every industry…and it has.
Two years ago, we talked about how industry leaders were taking this transformation to heart, reimagining their businesses for the digital era in big ways, and using technology to disrupt and gain business advantage…and they are.
Last year, we explored how leading digital enterprises are stretching their boundaries, forming digital technology ecosystems and embracing the “we” economy. They’re beginning to use technology to shape customer experiences, deliver business outcomes and ultimately tackle bigger problems….and it’s starting to happen now.
In fact, we are all watching how these trends play out. What’s more, we are experiencing them right here, right now—as enterprises and as consumers. In this pivotal year of 2016, these trends will continue to define how technology is changing digital businesses today and where it takes us as people tomorrow.
So let’s move to the specific trends. I’ll spend a few minutes on each one and talk about how they will affect our clients—along with their employees, customers and ecosystem partners. To bring each trend to life, I’ll also highlight innovative examples in the market as well as work Accenture is doing to help our clients put People First in the digital economy.
Trend 1: Intelligent Automation
The first trend is about Intelligent Automation, the essential new co-worker for the digital age.
Companies have been automating processes with tools and technology for quite some time. It started in the agricultural era, picked up speed in the industrial era and is moving even faster now in today’s digital era with advancements in artificial intelligence.
Initially enterprises used automation as a way to achieve efficiency gains by transferring tasks from people to machines. It’s bound to continue. Here’s a startling fact: In the US alone, analysts predict that between 40 to 60 percent of all tasks that workers do could be automated. But productivity gain is a short-term view.
Historically, every wave of technology has added more jobs than it has taken away. That’s why Accenture believes Intelligent Automation will actually create new opportunities for people and new types of jobs. According to a recent Accenture Institute for High Performance survey of 1,700 first-line, middle-level and executive-level managers, the vast majority (84 percent) believe intelligent machines will make them more effective and their work more interesting.
That’s why we’re saying that Intelligent Automation is not about replacing people or existing things that companies are doing. It’s about driving a much more productive relationship between people and machines. The real value comes from people using Intelligent Automation—their new digital co-worker—to do things differently and to do different things.
Let’s look at an example from Arizona State University. ASU is using online bots from a company called Knewton to help teach their mathematics courses. This is fundamentally changing the way they are educating students. The university is using Intelligent Automation to personalize and customize a curriculum for each individual student. To reiterate what I just said about jobs, the online bots are not replacing the professors and teaching assistants; instead the automation is giving people a new role and a chance to do different things.
Now the professors and TAs are doing less direct teaching duties, but more research and content creation. They are working with these machines to understand what an individual student knows, what each is good at and how each learns. And they are helping the students to learn better and faster. Arizona State University has a 12 percent increase in the completion rate of courses. For about half of the class, they are able to complete the course in 40 percent less time.
If you extrapolate this idea into the business world, the Intelligent Automation trend is about applying technology to do different things across the entire business. Leading organizations are starting to drive more of their processes into smarter machines. They’re rethinking what they do across every area of the enterprise: for example, in the supply chain with automated driving; in application development with auto-generated code; in CRM with virtual agents that use machine learning through every customer interaction.
They will start using Intelligent Automation to create innovative products and services on a much bigger scale—and even drive new business models. A great example comes from Siemens, a leading supplier of energy-efficient power generation and transmission systems, which has automated some of its production lines so that they can run unsupervised for several weeks. They call it a “lights out manufacturing plant” and Siemens envisions it a step toward creating the fully self-organizing factory (aka Industrie 4.0) to industrialize the manufacture of highly customizable products. In this future plant, machines will largely organize themselves, supply chains will automatically link together, and orders will be directly converted into manufacturing information.
So how does this trend mesh with our People First theme? In order to capitalize on Intelligent Automation, digital businesses must not only recognize it is coming but start working now to transition their workforces, customers and ecosystem partners. Case in point: Siemens’ lights out manufacturing plant still requires 1,150 employees to support it. They just have different roles than before, as many are now focused on programming, monitoring and machine maintenance.
Incorporating automation and artificial intelligence technology into the business is going to change the processes for how employees work. For example, our research shows that management will need to trust the advice that machines provide when making business decisions. In order to do this, 60 percent of middle and first-line managers want to understand how the system generates the advice—and nearly half (49 percent) want the system to explain its logic.
Likewise, automation and AI is going to change the level of engagement with customers. And it’s going to change the interfaces with business partners. Understanding these implications and proactively planning for them is critical for success.
That’s because Intelligent Automation will ultimately help enable digital businesses--and evolve digital cultures and skill sets--to manage pervasive change and thwart disruption.
Sources: “Germany Develops ‘Smart Factories' to Keep an Edge,” Marketwatch, October 27, 2014; “Manufacturing: Self-Organizing Factories,” Siemens, 2015.
Trend 2: Liquid Workforce
The second trend is about Liquid Workforce and the importance of building the workforce for today’s digital demands.
Companies are starting to realize that if their businesses are digital, their organizations, people and cultures have to be digital, too. Our Vision survey indicates the top two attributes companies feel their workers need are proficiency with digital technologies (40%) and an ability to quickly learn new work requirements (39%). After all, it’s the workforce who will change what products and services are produced, who will modify business models and the processes that support them. This means people need to develop new skills and learn different, much more agile ways of working.
But here’s the catch. The workforce not only needs to change, but it needs to be ready to change constantly because these new factors are not going away. We talked about the pace of technology change earlier. As companies become increasingly digital and rapidly incorporate new technologies, their people need new skills around big data analytics, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, security and more. Competition and disruption are also major reasons for workforce change. More than 80% of business and IT executives we surveyed say they feel pressure to evolve their business before they are disrupted from the outside or by their competitors.
Other factors are contributing, too. Think of the changing demographics of the workforce. Millennials will account for 75% of the global labor pool in less than 10 years. These are people who grew up with technology. They have very different expectations about what a job is and what is going to fulfill them in their career.
The evolving composition of the workforce is another factor. In the next five years, up to 40% of the entire US workforce is expected to be contractors. And crowdsourcing is a growing option to distribute ad-hoc projects to people around the globe and pull in the right experts when needed. Clearly, a Liquid Workforce means employing different kinds of talent.
This is a glimpse into the future of work and it will be the new normal for workforces. In response, Accenture believes digital businesses will need to build their workforces for today’s digital demands, to make their people both agile and highly adaptable enough to change constantly. It will be a competitive advantage.
General Electric, GE, is a stellar example of this. Historically known as a hardware manufacturer, GE has created a new software business that will fundamentally change the workers it wants, the strategies that the company pushes into the marketplace. At the same time, GE is actively changing its culture—going from a conventional Global 2000 mindset to a lean startup mentality. They are doing it through a new approach called FastWorks, where they embed LEAN startup practices into the workforce, enabling it to make smarter decisions, while staying close to customers.
Rigid approval processes are being replaced so that people can switch directions quickly. Ongoing training provides employees with the skills they need. Best of all, GE’s FastWorks program is getting results. The company built a diesel engine for ships nearly two years ahead of competitors. And the Appliances group designed and delivered a high-end refrigerator that sold twice as well as preceding models, in less than a year’s time.
In order to solve their workforce challenges, enterprises must use digital technology to enable agility at three levels: skills, projects and organizations as a whole. I’ll touch on each one briefly.
Starting with skills, companies will need to tap into new scalable training solutions, such as massive online open courses (MOOCs) and virtual reality to train and reskill employees on a continual basis. These digital training platforms can fill immediate skills gap while enterprises work to make training a core competency.
At the project level, digital businesses need to leverage collaboration tools and cloud-based workflows to connect the workforce and empower anytime, anywhere working. They also need to use technology to assemble the right people from inside and outside of the organization to solve business problems and build new products. This includes contractors, freelancers, alliance partners, start-ups and crowdsourcing platforms.
A great example is Domino’s Pizza. In an innovative project involving multiple partners, the company redefined how it delivers pizza to customers. Dominos coordinated with automotive design firm Roush Enterprises, crowdsourcing platform Local Motors, and individual Dominos franchise locations, to build the Dominos DXP, a fuel-efficient pizza delivery vehicle with an in-car oven that can carry up to 80 pizzas. It’s completely different from anything competitors offer.
Lastly, there’s the organization level, which must be highly flexible to support a Liquid Workforce. Many companies are still operating with organizational structures that support relatively static business goals—back when there was time to analyze the market and reconfigure the organization. The digital age and constant threat of disruption compresses this timeframe to months.
An agile organization also requires the right technologies. Companies are increasingly using end-to-end workforce management solutions that provide insights into workforce capabilities and readiness. They’re also starting to look to predictive analytics to make better hiring and promotion decisions.
By taking a People First approach and making their workforces change-ready, digital businesses will be able to access critical skills sooner, innovate faster and operate more effectively.
"Cold Pizza No More: Domino's Reengineers the Delivery Car,” Los Angeles Times, October 22, 2015.
Trend 3: Platform Economy
The third trend is about the Platform Economy. Another way to think of it is technology-driven business model innovation from the outside in.
We talked about digital platforms in last year’s Vision and we’re emphasizing them again because the opportunity around platforms is huge. Look at the Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies--the most profitable ones with the highest growth rate are platform companies. In fact, the top 15 companies within the platform space have a staggering market capitalization of $2.6 trillion worldwide.
Here’s the cool part…it's not just Amazon, Google and Apple and other technology players on this list. Now we see Phillips and Kaiser Permanente creating platforms in the healthcare industry. Monsanto and Caterpillar are building platforms for precision agriculture. Schneider Electric for smart cities, buildings and homes. Bank of New York Mellon for financial services. And a number of auto manufacturers for connected cars.
In fact, roughly 40% of the 3,200 business and IT Executives we recently surveyed said that adopting a platform-based business model was very critical to their success. In the next three years, analysts predict we’re going to see 500 new industry platforms—not technology platforms—but industry platforms. Traditional companies will use these to fundamentally drive their digital strategies. The race is on to figure out which ones are going to be successful platform players and control this model.
Of course, not every enterprise will choose to build a platform. Those that do will need deep digital technology acumen with cloud services, APIs and architectures, open source and reusable software, and the Internet of Things. Together, these technologies create a connected, collaborative and scalable business model that makes businesses more agile and responsive.
However, Accenture believes that every company will need to have a platform strategy and the business know-how to exploit it. As cities become smart, as connected cars and connected homes become a reality, digital businesses will end up operating in these ecosystems. So they have to figure out their role and begin forging partnerships with a range of other companies now.
Now here’s the second—and even more important—takeaway from this trend. Whether enterprises operate a platform or plug into an ecosystem that these platforms have created, they have to understand the rules have fundamentally changed for how to operate and grow their business.
The best way to illustrate this is with an example. Consider Google and its Android platform for mobile devices. Google has invested hundreds of millions of dollars to develop the Android operating system. But unlike traditional players, they give it away for free. That’s because they're playing a different game. They're not trying to sell as many copies as they can of their Android platform. They're gathering consumer demand. Having that consumer base and controlling access to them gives Google an enormous amount of potential to make money. They do it in one of two ways, either by showing their consumer base advertisements or by funneling them to their app store where Google takes a percentage of every single app that consumers buy.
We call this the network effect, and it’s one of three ways that companies can grow through platforms. The other two—distribution power law and asymmetric competition—are covered in more detail in the Platform Economy trend in the Technology Vision. These new rules of business are the foundation for a major macroeconomic shift from supply-side to demand-side economies of scale.
This new agile mode of operating can also enable constant growth and create value by tapping into resources and capacity that companies don’t have to own. Case in point: Google has established the Android ecosystem but they are not creating most of the apps. They’re letting other companies—thousands of them—assume the risk and invest to build a wide range of apps much more quickly. But guess what, regardless of which apps become wildly popular and which apps fail, Google wins.
This is truly a technology-driven business model innovation powered from the outside in. It’s also an “ah-ha moment” for digital businesses because product strategies, pricing strategies and frankly the entire growth model will no longer depend just on the strength of just one company. It will depend on the strength of the entire ecosystem. This includes how well business partners are doing and the satisfaction of consumers with all the moving parts that go into delivering a product or service.
Take the connected home ecosystem, for example. It relies heavily on consumer adoption of Internet of Things devices. Yet our 2016 Accenture Digital Consumer Survey shows that consumers continue to having trouble using their IoT technology, with 16% saying they are too complicated to use and 13% saying they didn’t work as advertised. All the companies involved in the connected home market will need to work together to resolve these issues and make the ecosystem viable (Source: Accenture 2016 Digital Consumer Survey). As I said before, the rules of the game have changed.
So what do all these economic principles and technology platforms have to do with People First? Two words: positive outcomes. Companies are changing how they do business with their new platform-based business models—and that will have many positive ramifications for people. Take healthcare as an example. Philips is building the “HealthSuite” digital platform for continuous patient monitoring—from hospital to home.
By collaborating with cloud partners, Philips is offering a secure cloud infrastructure for health data and devices that can support solutions for the growing population of seniors. Elderly patients who want to maintain independent living have more opportunities to do that with technology – devices in their homes can help remotely monitor their needs using platforms. We’ll see the same People First mindset in platform strategies from industries as diverse as energy, retail, automotive, insurance and public services.
Trend 4: Predictable Disruption
The fourth trend is about Predictable Disruption, which despite what you may think is not a contradiction in terms. It’s about looking to digital ecosystems for the next waves of change.
We just talked about platforms in the last trend and how they change an individual company—their internal technology and business strategy. But in order for all of these platforms to be successful, they will have to create ecosystems around them. These ecosystems are essentially new digital industries--precision agriculture, connected home, smart cities, even business-to-business financial transactions using block chain technology. They’re going to become a source of disruption in and of themselves. But unlike traditional technology disruption, these ecosystem disruptions are predictable.
Let’s walk through the difference. Think about big data as a technology disruption. Digital businesses are making major gains from using big data in their analytics. However, it's hard to understand exactly within a given industry or even within a given company how big data is going to manifest. What's different about these ecosystems is that they are already industry-specific with a clear business model behind them. So it's easier for digital businesses to understand where these ecosystems are going. Then they can either ride that wave or figure out what role they want to play in the ecosystem. Best of all, they can do it proactively.
Let’s look at what is quickly becoming a classic example: Uber. The company has spent the last 5+ years building a platform and ecosystem around car sharing. It’s had a profound impact on the taxi and rental car industries with much more to come. Their openly stated goal is to “change the way that people fundamentally view car ownership.” That’s a big wake up call for the automotive industry. It’s potentially a game-changer for insurance, which stakes a large part of its business model on providing personal insurance coverage. We won’t pretend to know how Uber’s strategy will actually play out.
The point is this: Accenture is saying that enterprises now have a line of sight into these digital ecosystems. They can anticipate the trajectories and impacts with a fairly high level of certainty. That’s because these ecosystems are telegraphing themselves. They start out small and ramp up slowly. The companies developing them are vocal about what they are planning to do because they are trying to attract other companies to help build the ecosystem and build demand from consumers.
What’s more, since ecosystems are tied to industries and business models, large organizations have distinct advantages; they have the scale, resources, deep industry knowledge and maturing digital abilities to get ahead of the game. That’s why we’re encouraging digital businesses to begin now--looking to digital ecosystems for the next waves of change and developing their ecosystem strategies to participate in entirely new markets in the future. For example, both the smart home and smart city will significantly impact companies across the energy sector. It’s a disruption that power companies should be planning for today.
As ecosystems emerge and mature across all industries, the effects of the disruption will spread to not just adjacent industries, but those previously thought entirely unrelated. More than 80 percent of the 3,200 business and IT executives we surveyed globally believe industry boundaries are being erased, and that every industry is being significantly impacted. All you have to do is point to Uber and its forays into delivering vaccines as well as transporting medical equipment. That’s an early and obvious signal to the healthcare industry, and hopefully leading healthcare companies are taking notice.
Coming back to the People First idea: with Predictable Disruption, enterprises have a choice. They can ignore these digital ecosystems and be blindsided. Or they can recognize that people are getting a preview into what tomorrow's disruptions are going to be. As we said early on in this presentation, technology is providing new opportunities to equip people—from executives to ecosystem business partners—with capabilities they’ve never had before.
In this case, the digital technologies and ecosystems are providing an unprecedented opportunity to predict what is going to happen and when it's going to happen. Forward-looking digital businesses can prep their strategies and decide how to turn disruption into an opportunity--or potentially even join in early to help guide and accelerate these new digital ecosystems.
Trend 5: Digital Trust
The final trend is about Digital Trust and particularly about strengthening customer relationships through ethics and security.
As businesses gain momentum with their digital strategies and technologies, they can scale new products and services rapidly. They can do incredible things like introduce software updates for automated driving features like Tesla did recently. It’s exhilarating to watch technologies like these unfold; Tesla’s customers love it and the company gets a reputation boost.
But here’s what digital businesses of all types may not realize--this ability to act and react at speed also significantly increases their digital risk. More than 80% of the executives we surveyed already said that their businesses are exposed to more risks than they are able to handle as a digital business. This number will undoubtedly get bigger. Rapidly releasing products and services to tens or hundreds of millions of consumers, or sharing data about consumers at that scale, makes exposure to business risk more systemic.
In our most recent Digital Consumer survey, security is cited as a barrier to consumer adoption of IoT devices and services, with nearly one quarter (24 percent) of consumers postponing purchase of an IoT device and another 18 percent terminating an IoT device or service until they were assured of safety.
And going back to the automobile example, all auto manufacturers (not just Tesla) are increasing their risks with connected car services. Not only do they need to secure against people getting data off the car—such as GPS data or credit card information—but also prevent hackers from being able to take control of a single automobile, or worse, a whole fleet of vehicles.
Digital businesses know it is essential to secure data at every step of the data supply chain and they are investing heavily in security initiatives to achieve this aim. Next-generation security mechanisms are following the data and extending well beyond the perimeter. Security solutions such as security-aware application design, integrated database security, dynamic access controls, and runtime application protection are being integrated into new products. A great example comes from AT&T, which is upgrading its back-end architecture, moving toward data-centric security in its databases and its applications. The company is doing this to ensure high data integrity, so data is stored securely and not manipulated in transit.
But security only half of the Digital Trust story. The majority (80%) of the 3,200 business and IT executives we surveyed said that trust is a key differentiator in the digital economy. Accenture is saying that companies must now gain the trust of customers by not only having strong security, but very high digital ethics at every stage on the customer journey. Digital businesses need to maintain trust to use and share big data. They need it to develop ecosystem connections to a range of business partners. They need it to satisfy regulators and cybersecurity insurers.
Let’s focus on this idea of digital ethics for a minute. Most companies tend to have policies related to data privacy, which is part of data ethics or how businesses handle and control data. Digital ethics is much broader. It involves determining what are the right actions to take based on the information and capabilities a business has. It’s about acting in accordance with corporate values in order to sustain trust with customers, investors and partners.
Digital technologies are bringing a plethora of new capabilities. They’re also introducing new digital ethical concerns that we’ve never encountered before. It’s causing companies to ask entirely new, and highly nuanced questions. To return to the automated driving example: what happens when a machine-controlled car knows that it's getting into an accident? Does it hit the car with a family in it, or the one with a single person in it? This is the self-driving car version of the classic Trolley Problem. Or maybe it’s not a life or death question, but a money question. Does the car destroy public property or residential property? Does it hit another vehicle that is insured by the same company or one that is uninsured?
These are the kinds of Digital Trust questions that companies will need to start grappling with. Every time companies imagine and build new products and services, they must understand both the security implications as well as the ethical circumstances. They must do it upfront and systematically. From a People First perspective, enterprises will need to instill comprehensive policies, training, incentives and consequences for data and digital ethics to reduce exposure to risk and adverse outcomes. With these steps, companies will be able to maintain previously established trust, while retaining customers, market share and company valuation.
In summary, these five trends are all elements of a digital strategy, digital technology and digital culture that companies must embrace in order to move forward and transform themselves. Leveraging the power of a digital business is no longer simply about incorporating these technologies into the organization. It’s about reinventing the organization – and the culture within it – to drive innovation, to drive change, to drive the business into the next generation.