A day of disruption – and otherwise – for CIOs
Read more: Westpac NZ to deploy private cloud
Day two of Forrester Research’s 2014 Forum in Sydney brought in CIOs to think and talk about “IT’s role in empowering digital business in the age of the customer”.
Instead of an agenda stacked with technology info, this forum wove more unusual themes of storytelling, marketing, disruptive new technologies, the CIO’s role in guiding marketing around data and customer experience (CX).
Forrester presented findings of its new report The State of Customer Experience Management in Australia, 2014 at the Forum. The good news is that 98 per cent of companies had CX in their strategic priorities list (compared to a global 92 per cent), but worryingly 51 per cent had the person leading CX initiatives outside of the C-suite.
Less than a third included CX values in their recruitment screening. These features demonstrated a market with CX enthusiasm but not maturity or alignment between CX value aspirations and delivery.
Three companies relatively new to APAC, provided an insight into disruptive alternatives to the status quo. The goal was to free up budget for IT teams wishing to support CMO initiatives and invest in CX projects instead of spending the traditional 80 per cent keeping the lights on.
Read more: The digital enterprise, coming to a competitor near you
Rimini Street has a simple message for CIOs: Save 50 per cent on SAP and Oracle maintenance fees.
The enthusiasm of customers globally to engage in discussions with Rimini Street indicates corporate enthusiasm to engage more budget in CX and innovative tech and digital projects.
Data centre and networking provider Curvature is busy challenging the status quo on hardware maintenance costs. A Forrester Research report commissioned by Curvature revealed that “while 76 per cent of IT decision makers are concerned about pressures to reduce costs, many are unaware of the available options that exist for alternative maintenance contracts and are unduly influenced by vendors regarding hardware refresh cycles”.
Commvault shared its disruptive approach of ‘data unification’ to save costs and increase efficiency by eliminating stale data and Fred’s home videos, out of the data management problem box.
Every business talking CX will need to start rethinking how it delivers CX out of its traditional business units to prevent the otherwise inevitable decline.
This much disruption in one place, by the new kids on the block, felt like a naughty conversation behind the bike shed, but it was clearly overdue.
Every business talking CX will need to start rethinking how it delivers CX out of its traditional business units to prevent the otherwise inevitable decline.
Fatemah Khatibloo, principal analyst at Forrester, talked about the help CMOs needed from CIOs in understanding big data and what to do with it when combined with little data.
Speakers from Westpac, ING and Orange reinforced the benefits of showing non-IT colleagues what was possible with data, using cross team collaboration with a lot of disruption to deliver results.
The value to tech leaders gaining insights into the world of the customers and their marketing colleagues should not be underestimated.
With 70 per cent of Fortune 1000 companies being new on the index in just one decade, the businesses that are customer obsessed and digitally driven are going to win the war. Each battle will only be won if disruptive technologies are employed and everyone works together. It sounds pretty simple… or maybe not?
Jennie Vickers (jennie@zeopard.com) is principal of Zeopard Law. She posted some of the slides and comments from the Forrester Forum captured on Twitter on her website.
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