Successful Workplace

Real-time marketing is all the rage, though as TIBCO Loyalty Lab’s David Rosen is quick to point out, brands really need to be focused on right time marketing. “The speed and reaction of marketing needs to be relevant when the consumer is discovering, shopping or sharing,” he said. Brands need to act with relevance and […]

In an interesting piece yesterday, GigaOM reported that Netflix has an architecture built around timelines. This struck home for a guy who spends a great deal of time talking to people skeptical about the need for zero latency, real-time systems. The truth is that some things have to go at the highest speeds and others […]

I had a great chance this week to catch up with a friend from Venture Beat about my thoughts on what’s revolutionizing our world in this moment. While that’s a broad question, the answer is very specific: The patterns for how people buy and sell are shifting very rapidly.  Buying and selling touches everything that we […]

This week it was announced that a collaboration between Microsoft and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology created software that predicts future events using a combination of archived news material from the New York Times, real-time data and information from a variety of web sources like Wikipedia. In their research paper they focused on predicting disease outbreaks, riots and […]

Many made predictions as 2013 kicked off, but one caught my eye. Forrester’s Nigel Fenwick called this new year the Year of Digital Business. As Fenwick points out, there has been a communications evolution that has many retailers scrambling to find ways to get closer to their customers with innovative new technology to beat the […]

Real-time means something a little different to everyone. The term is too-often used to describe getting information on what happened up to the moment, a rolling report of the history of something – like customer purchases, staffing costs or inventory levels. It’s like asking what time it is. There’s only an accurate answer for that one-dimensional question at […]

That’s the answer to the question, “When do we need in-memory computing?” The question came up in a meeting with a technology industry analyst today and his answer was so simple, so direct, that it needed to be repeated. In-memory computing is the answer whenever scalability and performance are an issue. Those close to technology […]

We’re reached the moment where old information pathways won’t work anymore. Managing right here, right now requires a framework that we’ll get to in a moment. First some history. Growing up before the Internet, ‘right now’ technology showed up as the rare long distance call or watching live television coverage of an Apollo launch. Everything […]

Forrester’s John Rymer sums up his opinion succinctly when he says, “Big Data: The worst category name ever.” It certainly has challenges in name and how people conceive of it. Big Data as the hype would have it, I call, “The elephant riding the bicycle.” I’ll give you the seven things you need to consider, […]

We’re heading into Columbus Day Weekend in the U.S., giving us a great chance to look at the fundamental changes that technology is bringing to retail. The new game is event-based marketing. Big Sale! A quick look at the LA Times shows who’s in the old game. The pages are full of merchants using discounting as […]

When you think of railroads, do you think of high tech? Maybe you’re like many who think of trains as a quaint, lingering sign of a simpler time. The reality is that today’s railroads are a far cry from the business of even a few years ago. Technology and trains While their paths may be […]

We built our current business world on the premise that it takes a hierarchy of management to get work done. The idea stems from the assembly lines of the Industrial Revolution and is based on the fact that most people used to produce physical ‘stuff’. People, especially uneducated, unmotivated and bored people, needed to be […]

Observe, orient, decide, act. These are the four elements of the OODA Loop developed by a USAF pilot, Colonel John Boyd. Known as “Forty Second Boyd”, he had a standing bet as an instructor pilot that from a point of disadvantage, he could defeat any opposing pilot in forty seconds or less. He ultimately saved […]

The globalized, industrialized world is run mostly by Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. That’s been the case since the 70′s, when we first computerized accounting through mainframe and other monolithic, all-or-nothing applications. Dun & Bradstreet eventually dominated a marketplace where only the wealthiest companies could afford to play. The arrival of client-server applications in the […]

Retail has gone through enormous stresses in the past decade, with more to come. Just the normal ups and downs of local and global economies, supply chains and personal taste are a huge challenge. Add to that mix the increasing maturation of concepts like e-Commerce, Big Data, RFID and mobile. Each of these would be […]

The following is a guest blog by Simon Hall from Newbury, England. In Simon’s words, “Sales and selling have been my life. I’ve never been more excited than I am now about what the future of technology and business can be.” We’ve all heard Big Data can help us to find the proverbial needle in […]