Archive for the ‘ceo study’ Category
IBM Retail Online Index: Mobile Up, Social Down
If you’ve been following the mobile and social space, and especially if you own your own smartphone, you know the impact that that increased mobility means in terms of your ability to conduct business –- personal and professional –- while on the go.
Now, IBM has some empirical data that indicates those behavioral changes due to smartphone adoption are occurring on a more massive scale.
The IBM Retail Online Index, a cloud-based analysis of the online retail sector, integrates factual marketplace data from its analytics offerings, including the Benchmark, with insights from the IBM Social Sentiment Index, an advanced analytics and natural language processing tool that analyzes large volumes of social media data to assess public opinions.
The combination of these two offerings provides the most accurate and immediate snap shot on the state of the online retail market.
According to the latest IBM Retail Online report, mobile shopping rose while social media sales fell, providing an indication of where US retailers may invest in order to capture the attention and loyalty of the digital consumer. The IBM Retail Online Index reported that retailers experienced 15 percent growth in sales from mobile devices but saw a 20 percent decline in sales traced to social media based on a much smaller base over this three-month period.
This report follows today’s news from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Census Bureau which announced its estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales. According to the findings, retail sales fell 0.5 percent in June from May, the third straight month sales have been down from the month before. On a positive note, June 2012 sales were 3.8 percent above the pace of June 2011.
IBM’s Retail Online Index: Mobile Commerce Now 15% Of All Online Purchases
IBM’s Retail Online Index identified several trends of importance to chief marketing officers (CMO), e-commerce leaders and customer service professionals. Over the second quarter consumers continued to embrace mobile devices as a shopping tool, with mobile commerce accounting for 15.1 percent of all online purchases, an increase of more than 14 percent. Despite this momentum retailers are still struggling to sustain substantial success with their social media efforts, evidenced by a more than 20 percent drop in social shopping.
According to IBM’s State of Marketing 2012 survey, one explanation for social commerce’s failure may be the absence of a CMO and CIO alliance which is critical as marketing and online commerce become increasingly technology-driven. The lack of this alliance hinders the deployment of integrated technologies capable of fueling effective social media efforts.
A second factor is marketing’s inability to form a clear consensus on how to utilize social channels. As a result, the retail online index saw a decline in positive sentiment around social media, which according to the online index dropped from 25.1 percent in Q1 to 18.6 percent in Q2. Leading factors for this shift were the lack of deals being offered by retailers through these channels, which were more prevalent in Q1.
More Shoppers Are Multi-Channel, Mobile And Social
“Shoppers today are shifting from a singular online approach to a multi-channel experience that includes both mobile and social media. As a result, retailers must be prepared to connect with their customers on all fronts, or lose them to the competition,” said Craig Hayman, General Manager, IBM Industry Solutions. “As we enter the home stretch for the 2012 holiday season, we will continue to watch how CMOs and CIOs tackle these challenges and create social media efforts that deliver value to the customer while driving revenue for the business.”
Over the second quarter, while online traffic and sales for Q2 were down 6.7 percent and 2.3 percent from Q1 respectively, there were signs of optimism. Specifically, for completed orders, shoppers bought more items (average items per order grew 2.6 percent) and spent more for each transaction (average order values for each purchase grew by 2.3 percent) over the second quarter.
Part of IBM’s Smarter Commerce initiative, the Retail Online Index draws data and insights from IBM’s big data offerings to provide the industry’s most comprehensive look into the pulse of online retail through traditional and social media channels. The index analysis for second-quarter 2012 reveals the following trends:
Online Retail Sales for Q2 2012 versus Q1 2012:
- Consumer Spending: Total online sales for the quarter were down 2.3 percent over Q1 2012.
- Average Order Value: The average value for each order in Q2 grew by 2.3 percent.
- Items Per Order: The average number of items per order increased by 2.6 percent.
- Page view Per Session: Page views per session dropped by 2 percent to 6.4 pages.
- Mobile Sales: Sales from mobile devices reached 15.1 percent, up from the 13.3 percent in Q1 2012.
- Mobile Devices: While Apple’s iPhone continued to rank one for mobile device retail traffic at 8.2 percent, Android surpassed the iPad which finished at 6.8 percent and 6.7 percent respectively.
- Social Traffic: Shoppers referred from social networks generated 1.3 percent of all online traffic over Q2 2012, a slight increase from the 1.1 percent seen the previous quarter.
- Social Sales: Shoppers referred to retailer sites from social networks generated 1.9 percent of all online sales over Q2 2012, a decrease from the 2.4 percent seen in Q1.
Online Retail Categories for Q2 2012 versus Q1 2012:
- Consumers further intensified their focus on the home with home goods sales growing by 35.3 percent in Q2.
- Department stores continued to catch the attention of consumers with sales growing 3.7 percent
- Jewelry stores maintained its upward track with sales growing by 1.4 percent.
Consumer Sentiment for Department Stores for Q2 2012 versus Q1 2012 based on the IBM Social Sentiment Index:
- Social Media: A potential result of retailers failing to deliver compelling campaigns through these channels, positive sentiment around social media dropped by 6.5 percentage points, from 25.1 percent in Q1 to 18.6 percent in Q2.
- Loyalty and Pricing: Where sales and clearing inventory were priorities in Q1, retailer prices returned to more normal rates in Q2, a shift that fueled negative sentiment around pricing which grew by 2.1 percentage points. These factors also impacted consumer loyalty where negative sentiment grew by 2.1 percentage points.
About IBM Smarter Commerce
IBM’s Smarter Commerce initiative delivers software and services to help companies transform their business processes to more quickly respond to shifting customer demands in today’s digitally transformed marketplace. The initiative is driven by the demands from organizations who are increasingly looking for ways to bring new levels of automation to marketing, sales and fulfillment to secure greater customer loyalty. The growth of mobile, social and online commerce are key trends within Smarter Commerce.
You can learn more about IBM’s Smarter Commerce initiative here.
New IBM Software Transforms the Digital Experience
The IBM Intranet Experience Suite pulls together company information and data, personalized content and news, and social media and analytics, enabling employees to connect, collaborate and access information at anytime, from anywhere.
IBM today announced new software that helps CMOs and CIOs transform the digital experience for employees, customers and fans across a broad range of mobile devices.
The IBM Intranet Experience Suite pulls together company information and data, personalized content and news, and social media and analytics, enabling employees to connect, collaborate and access information at anytime, from anywhere.
By 2017, the CMO will have greater control of the IT budget than the CIO, according to Gartner. Marketing budgets will grow 7-8 percent over the next 12 months, which is 2-3 times that of IT budgets.
With the growing number of mobile devices, social networks and social media tools on the rise, CMOs struggle to reach their audiences. At the same time, CIOs are struggling to provide access to company data on every type of device for a geographically distributed workforce.
Given the business realignment between marketing and technology, the CMO and CIO can no longer afford to operate on separate stages. To succeed, they’ll have to forge a shared agenda to deliver business results through innovation and efficiency, working together to streamline their technology needs.
The convergence of social and mobile is prompting organizations to revisit decades-old website to create exceptional web experiences to reach and engage with their audiences.
And despite their growing reliance on technology and their soaring budgets, CMOs readily admit they lack the skills that IT requires. According to the IBM CMO Study, while 79 percent of CMOs expect high levels of complexity in their job over the next five years, only 48 percent feel prepared to deal with it.
Building on these increased demands, IBM is delivering a new Customer Experience Suite giving millions of marketing professionals the power to manage and integrate all types of data on their web sites and then analyze it for deeper insight into customer buying patterns and sentiment.
Also delivered today, the new IBM Intranet Experience Suite pulls together company information and data, personalized content and news, and social media and analytics, enabling employees to connect, collaborate and access information at anytime, from anywhere.
The Power of Social, Mobile And Analytics
The new IBM Intranet Experience software brings together the power of social networking, analytics and mobile computing to front office operations and externally to clients, allowing companies to create exceptional Web experiences. As a result, organizations can gain faster insight on customer buying patterns and consumer sentiment allowing them to more quickly reach and engage their audiences.
At European industrial automation technology manufacturer Omron, employees are connecting knowledge and technical know-how through the organization’s Intranet, helping to meet the specific needs of their customers.
Omron delivers an exceptional Web experience through a single communication platform that embeds relevant social data into the daily workflow. Omron has sped knowledge sharing across boundaries and between departments, enabling employees to support customers better and faster.
Working with IBM and its partner Portico, Omron created an award-winning business intranet, called Ozone internally, helping to create a single-source communication and collaboration platform for all 1,700 European employees.
The IBM Intranet Experience Suite integrates with external social media, including Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube, allowing employees to pick and choose which applications they want in their Intranet view. For example, a sales manager can leverage the Cognos software integration to ensure a clear view into monthly sales reports by region, as well as competitive background on new product updates and forecasts.
“The world is changing and is becoming increasingly connected and social,” said Michel Min, Head of Strategic Communication & eMarketing, Omron Europe B.V. “Because of this, we know our clients are changing as well, which is why it’s increasingly important to ensure our sales teams have the right information at the right time.”
Analytics to Help Marketers Engage Audiences
From digital marketing and mobile commerce, to websites and social media, marketers are inundated — often paralyzed — by data amassed from consumers via searches, purchase histories, Facebook “likes” and comments on Twitter.
Combine that with data about in-store traffic, conversations with call centers and updates from suppliers, today’s marketers confront a daily deluge of data waiting to be sifted for nuggets of intelligence they can act upon to boost their business.
Because of this, it’s critical for CMOs to not only be aware of and monitor the social conversation, but to truly understand the sentiment and interact one-on-one with that customer. Taking it one step further would be to integrate these conversations directly into the organization’s web site, providing one place to both network and shop.
The new IBM Customer Experience Suite provides CMOs with the power to manage and integrate all types of data on their web sites and then analyze it for deeper insight into customer buying patterns and sentiment.
Web data has evolved today to include social media, videos, and web-based forms, as well as traditional enterprise data such as financial, customer and order data, and transactions. The software suite pulls together IBM’s market-leading enterprise portal, web content management, forms, and enterprise social networking software into a single view.
CIOs Creating Exceptional Intranets To Help Employees Gain Insight from Data Deluge
The new IBM software also helps business leaders extend their corporate intranet to a broad range of mobile devices in an effort to deepen employee collaboration and information sharing.
According to IDC, employees typically see up to a 30 percent increase in productivity using social tools internally to complete their work. With unlimited access to any type of information, consumers expect this same level of information availability in their professional lives, in order to work efficiently and reach business goals quickly.
The new IBM Intranet Experience software brings the power of social and analytics capabilities to CIOs and lines of business employees helping organizations innovate and evolve their internal operations and communications. The solution pulls together company information and data, personalized content and news, and social media and analytics, enabling employees to connect, collaborate and access information at anytime, from anywhere.
You can learn more about the IBM Intranet Experience Suite here.
New IBM CEO Study — Command & Control Meets Collaboration
Just because I’m here in Madrid covering the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit doesn’t mean that there isn’t other important news emerging from back at the mother ship.
This year’s IBM CEO study reveals three new essential imperatives for changing the nature of business: Empowering employees through values, engaging customers as individuals, and amplifying innovation with partnerships.
In fact, there’s some major news that I always get excited to report on, and that’s the results from our annual CEO study.
The ink on the report is hardly dry and straight off the presses, but this year’s study of more than 1,700 CEOs from 64 countries and 18 industries has a headline that CEOs (and their C-level ilk) everywhere may be interested to hear: CEOs are changing the nature of work by adding a powerful dose of openness, transparency, and employee empowerment to the command-and-control ethos that has characterized the modern corporation for more than a century.
Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is a headline!
The study reveals that the advantages of this fast-moving trend are clear: Companies that outperform their peers are 30 percent more likely to identify openness — often characterized by a greater use of social media as a key enabler of collaboration and innovation — as a key influence on their organization.
Those “outperformers” are also embracing new models of working that tap into the collective intelligence of an organization and its networks to devise new ideas and solutions for increased profitability and growth.
For those of us who have been working in the social realm for some time now, we’re probably not exactly surprised to hear this news. But to have it come from the lips and pencils of the CEOs themselves…well, change it is a comin’ and for many, has already arrived.
In order to forge those closer connections with customers, partners, and a new generation of employees in the future, CEOs plan to shift their focus from using e-mail and the phone as primary communication vehicles to using social networks as a new path for direct engagement.
Today, only 16 percent of CEOs are using social business platforms to connect with customers, but that number is poised to spike to 57 percent within the next three to five years.
And while social media is the least utilized of all customer interaction methods today, it stands to become the number two organizational engagement method within the next five years, a close second to face-to-face interactions.
Top Down To Bottom Up
With this news coming after decades of top-down control, this shift has substantial ramifications — not just for CEOs — but for their organizations, their managers and employees, and also for universities and business schools, not to mention we technology suppliers.
More than half of CEOs (53 percent) are planning to use technology to facilitate greater partnering and collaboration with outside organizations, while 52 percent are shifting their attention to promoting great internal collaboration.
Of course, greater openness doesn’t come without some risks. Openness increases vulnerability. The Internet — especially through social networks — can provide a worldwide stage to any employee interaction, positive or negative. For organizations to operate effectively in this environment, employees must internalize and embody the organizations’ values and mission.
This also means organizations must equip employees with a set of guiding principles that they can use to empower everyday decision making. And championing collaborative innovation is not something CEOs are delegating to their HR leaders. According to the study’s findings, business executives are interested in leading by example.
That is, from the front.
Big Data Means Big Changes
Given the data explosion being witnessed by many organizations, CEOs also recognize the need for more sophisticated business analytics to mine the data being tracked online, on mobile phones and social media sites.
The traditional approach to understanding customers better has been to consolidate and analyze transactions and activities from across the entire organization. However, to remain relevant, CEOs must piece together a more holistic view of the customer based on how he or she engages the rest of the world, not just their organization.
The ability to drive value from data is strongly correlated with performance. Outperforming organizations are twice as good as underperformers at accessing and drawing insights from data. Outperformers are also 84 percent better at translating those insights into real action.
From Theory to Action
This latest study is the fifth edition of IBM’s biennial Global CEO Study series. To better understand the challenges and goals of today’s CEOs, IBM consultants met face-to-face with the largest-known sample of these executives between September 2011 and January 2012.
1,709 CEOs, general managers, and senior public sector leaders were interviewed around the world to better understand their future plans and challenges in an increasingly connected economy.
For access to the full study findings and case studies, please visit the IBM CEO Study website.
In the meantime, check out the video from Shell CEO Peter Voser to hear what he has to say about partnering to drive innovation.
What Do CEOs DO All Day?
If you were wondering what your CEO was doing all day, you need wonder no longer.
A story in today’s Wall Street Journal cites a research study conducted by the London School of Economics and Harvard Business School entitled the “Executive Time Use Project” reveals that CEOs spend about a third of their work time in meetings.
Funny, I would have thought a third of their time was spent on airplanes!
In any case, as a study overview on the London School explains, “A CEO’s schedule is especially important to a firm’s success, which raises a few questions: What do they do all day?”
And, more importantly, can they be more efficient with their time?
Here’s a few other sound bytes from the study:
- On average, some 85 percent of a CEO’s time was spent working with other people, with only 15 percent spent working alone.
- The time CEOs spent with outsiders had no measurable impact on firm performance. But, time spent with other people inside the company was strongly correlated with positive increases in productivity.
- In companies with stronger governance, CEOs spent more time with insiders and less time with outsiders, and at the same time were more productive.
So how else did they spend their time? In total, some 85 percent was spent working with other people through meetings, phone calls, and public appearances.
Of that precious time spent with others, 42 percent was spent with only “insiders,” 25 percent with insiders and outsiders together, and 16 percent with only outsiders.
The time spent with insiders, however, was strongly correlated with productivity increases. For every 1 percent gain in time spent with at least one insider, productivity advanced 1.23 percent.
Not so reassuring was the fact that the time CEOs spent with outsiders had no measureable correlation with firm performance.
Turbo’s Translation: Focus on meeting with your more senior troops, skip some of the speaking engagements, and be very discriminating about the biz dev meetings you take.
Information on Demand 2011: Big Data, Bigger Insights
Greetings from Viva Las Vegas, Nevada.
The CNN Republican debate is long over, the media circus is over, and the information gatherers for IBM Information on Demand 2011 are arriving en masse.
My Webcasting partner-in-crime, Scott Laningham, and I arrived here yesterday mostly without incident. We scoped out the situation, and decided that the Mandalay Bay Race and Sports Book was the perfect venue to sit down, have a burger, and watch the third game of the World Series.
Since baseball and data are going to be an underlying theme in Michael Lewis and Billy Beanes’ keynote about Moneyball later this week, it only seemed appropriate.
And though my Texas Rangers ended up taking a beating, we did witness some new data added to the baseball history books: The Cardinals’ Albert Pujols tied Babe Ruth and Reggie Jackson for the most home runs struck in one game of a World Series, the magic number three (to be precise, the Babe did it twice).
And though you may never be able to fully predict the specific outcome of a single baseball game, Billy Beane and his Oakland A’s team proved that you can use past player performance statistics to help build a better team, one that could compete with the “big money” teams.
Okay, so if past prediction can help prove future performance, where does that leave we Information On Demanders for this 2011 event?
Let’s start with the business benefit, which in these tough times are necessary for even the most profitable of enterprises.
IBM studies have demonstrated that the performance gap between those leaders and the laggards and followers is widening: Organizations that apply advanced analytics have 33% more revenue growth and 12X more profit growth.
That ought to get some executive attention.
But we’re also seeing some major shifts in the external environment. Information is exploding. We’ve now got over 1 trillion devices connected to the Internet, and we’re expecting 44X digital data growth through 2020.
And yet we’re also finding that business change is outpacing our ability to keep up with it all: 60% of CEOs agree they have more data than they can use effectively, and yet 4 out of 5 business leaders see information as a vital source of competitive advantage.
So what’s the remedy? Well, those flying in to Vegas have taken the first step, admitting they have a problem (No, not “The Hangover” type problems — you’ll have to talk to Mike Tyson about those).
No, successful organizations are turning all that data into actionable insight by taking a more structured approach through business analytics and optimization (BAO).
They’re embracing it as a transformational imperative, and demonstrating that they can improve visibility throughout the enterprise, enhance their understanding of their customers, and fostering collaborative decision-making while providing those key predictive insights and optimizing real-time decision making.
So, like a good baseball player, or manager, your job over the next several days here in Vegas is to do a few key things, and do them well.
Focus, keep your eye on the ball and on the topics most important and relevant to you.
Listen, including both in the general sessions and individual tracks, but also in those all important hallway conversations — you never know what you might learn.
Participate, particularly in the social media. We IBMers and our key partners want to hear from you, and we’re only a Tweet away. Use conference hashtag #iodgc2011 to speak up, as we’re listening in return.
Commit, to the actions coming out of the event that you think will be helpful to you and your organization, and to bring those business and technology goals into becoming a reality.
And one other thing…have fun! Whatever happens in Vegas may not stay in Vegas…it may even end up on Facebook…but that shouldn’t stop you from having a good time and learning a lot this week.
As for Scott Laningham and myself, we’ll be blogging and covering key sessions, and “livestreaming” from the Expo floor. Stop by and say hello.
IBM Industry Summit: Frank Kern On Mastering The Tsunami
IBM vice president Frank Kern explains to the IBM Industry Summit in Barcelona how they can begin to master today's information tsunami.
Frank Kern, senior vice president of IBM’s Global Business Services followed a tough act in Ginny Rometty, but provided yet another valuable and, dare I use the word, “insightful” look at the smarter planet agenda.
He began, appropriately enough, with data.
From the IBM 2010 Global CEO Study, which IBM conducts every couple of years (and which I wrote about extensively in a prior post), Kern indicated it’s always a pleasure to meet with over 1,500 CEOS from around the world so IBM can “listen and learn.”
And learn we did. Lessons, in fact, that are driving IBM business decisions, and creating a harmony across IBM’s various product lines unseen since…well, forever.
So what’s on the CEO agenda, Kern asked, particularly coming out of a recession?
First, accelerating global complexity, driven in large measure by our increasing interconnectedness and voluminous amounts of new data. Systems linked, if you will, to other systems.
Second, CEOs identified a gap between that accelerating complexity and their organizations ability to deal with it, some thirty percentage points between those who are embracing the complexity and those befuddled by it.
Creativity, therefore, is the top leadership quality, Kern reported, that CEOs indicated could best equip them to get out of this mess. Creativity, not operational rigor or management discipline (although a little of those probably wouldn’t hurt, either).
CEOs are also telling us there has to be a willingness to break with the status quo, to break current models, even if they still work.
The top organizations that performed best during the growth years, and during the downturn, were those which are also the most likely to take on new possibilities — 23% more likely to advocate change to their business models, and growing revenue 6% more than the average Joe Company.
Technology, Kern said, also continues to rise in importance on the CEO agenda, from 6th to 2nd position (ahead of macroeconomics and governemnt regulation).
People alone won’t get fast enough, smart enough, capable enough, Kern indicated, to deal with all this uncertainty. The smartest, best-intentioned people just can’t help do some of the things that need to be done: Uncover new revenue sources; build operating dexterity; reinvent customer relationships.
Creativity unlocked by new technology is required to capitalize on those new opportunities.
Or, conversely, Kern posed the question, “Does anybody here think our customer relationship is going to be reinvented by increasing sales face time???”
There are other new and exciting opportunities on the horizon.
Enterprises are starting to hear global conversations going on about their brands, across social networks. They can capture, analyze, decide, and act. They can be fast, and they can be right.
Who needs Mark Zuckerberg?
Apparently, everybody. And LinkedIn. And all the other venues around the globe where important conversations are taking place, and business decisions are being made, and people are being influenced.
Social business, is what we’re calling it at IBM.
All this realtime information is out there, tremendous amounts of it. We’re processing more information than ever before, but less of what is available, and radically less than what’s generated in real time.
That’s why customers fear they are operating with blind spots growing bigger, even as they sense this huge opportunity if they can master the tsunami.
Threat or opportunity, Kern continued. Last year that was an open question: It is not a question anymore.
Today, Kern explained, we see examples of clients that are looking to exploit this historic explosion of data to their advantage.
The New York City Police department, for example, who, by using analytics, can now predict where the bad guys are going to go after they’ve committed a crime (Hint: The location is not their friendly local NYPD precinct.)
Just last month, IBM released a report on electronics spending for Nov/Dec 2010, and the forecast said spending would be up 4% in US. (We were probably right…I just bought a new laptop, which surely sent the numbers up a few fractions of a percentage point).
North Carolina’s Health and Human Services is helping detect fraud in public services with a fraud detection solution (I’m hopeful we’ll be able to use this one for politics as well).
There’s that inflection point again, said Kern, driven by a pressurized, intense environment, shifting from value propositions that were labor-based journeys to ones focused on committed business outcomes.
What makes this outcome orientation different from ten years ago?
An idea whose time has come, said Kern. We’re seeing a a broader and deeper substitution of technology for labor. We’re replacing custom work with standard repeatable assets.
We’re developing asset content that’s embedded in solutions, all the way through delivery. Without this repeatability, and throughout the life cycle, it’s hard to get a path to these committed business outcomes.
With IBM business consulting, along with IBM research and yes, even IBM software, we can infuse our consulting with repeatable solutions born out by real world implementations.
Why now? Standardization, in a word.
In a world that’s grown increasingly complex, we can now have greater certainty with our outcomes using repeatable, predictable progression paths. Say that three times quickly, then overhaul my business while you’re at it.
Finally, we’re on to higher order problem solving. We have to be.
Companies and organizations must use technology, business analytics, smarter systems, and underlying infrastructures that better allow them to adapt to all the aforementioned complexities.
Then, we can move along to the next orders of value, predicting market behaviors and even consequences of individual decisions.
The key theme here, noted Kern, is about new insights, and how they must be operationalized. How you can align your insights with your business strategy, and your organizational processes?
Easy to say, hard to do.
If we take a step back, concluded Kern, we’re seeing indicators of something important and even optimistic (And we could all go for a little of that about now, couldn’t we?)
We’re at a remarkable point in time, entering a new normal of economic conditions, one with an accelerating climate of unpredictability, and emerging out of all of this is this question on the minds of global business leaders:
What’s my greatest possibility?
When you got from what’s the problem to what’s the possibility, what are the prospects, what’s available to my enterprise that was never there before…well, this is a prospect worth the best efforts of us all.
And with our clients and partners we can enable and participate in all that.
THUNDEROUS APPLAUSE
IBM Industry Summit: Setting The Stage For A Drastically Different World
At the IBM Industry Summit this week here in Barcelona, executives from companies around the globe representing industries across the spectrum will be in attendance.
One of the key themes those executives can expect to hear discussed at the Summit is the challenge of responding to increasing complexity.
Hearkening back to the 2010 IBM Global CEO Study, which I provided a summary of in this blog earlier in the year, 79 percent of executives surveyed believed that they expected the high level of complexity only to increase, and yet only 49 percent of those polled felt they were prepared for that complexity.
The combined insight from 1,541 interviews conducted with C-level executives around the globe in the 2010 IBM Global CEO Study: Be creative, reinvent customer relationships, and embrace complexity by building dexterity.
Call that “The Complexity Gap.”
Mastering The Complexity Gap
Edward Lonergan, president and CEO of Diversey, Inc., responded in the published results that “The complexity our organization will have to master over the next five years is off the charts; a 100 on your scale from 1 to 5.”
So how to even start an attempt to master such massive complexity?
That led to the second of several key findings in the study.
CEOs asserted that creativity is the most important leadership quality in our new and more complicated world.
Not a characteristic one typically hears as being highly valued in the boardroom, yet with all this acknowledged complexity, executives seemed to be saying traditional rules don’t apply, and creative leaders tend to encourage experimentation through their organization.
In the study results, they also indicated that creative leaders make deeper business model changes to realize their strategies, and take more calculated risks and keep innovating in how they lead and communicate.
Collaboration Inside And Out
But that innovation can’t stop just short of the corporate firewall.
The third key finding was that CEOs around the globe believe that the most successful organizations co-create products and services with customers, and they also integrate those customers into core processes.
An astounding 95% of "standouts" surveyed in the IBM Global CEO study data revealed An astounding 95 percent said that “getting connected” with customers is their top priority.
You’ll be hearing more about this key meme from IBM in an announcement later today, but this idea is recognition of a simple concept: Customers know best.
The most successful organizations not only partner with their customers to create new products and improve services — they also adopt new channels to engage and stay in tune with them, and they glean more intelligence from the barrage of available data and make customer intimacy their number-one priority.
Simplify, Simplify
Henry David Thoreau spoke of simplification in his renowned Walden.
But he also wrote there that “it is characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”
Truth is, when it comes to successful organizations, the CEO study data revealed that the better performers manage complexity on behalf of their organizations, customers, and partners.
How?
Through simplification, for one.
They simplify operations and products, but they also increase their dexterity to change the way they work, access resources and enter markets around the world.
In fact, more dexterous leaders can expect to generate 20 percent more of their future revenues from new sources than other CEOs.
In this climate,
Adapt And Evolve
So, as the IBM Industry Summit prepares to get underway here in Barcelona, leaders around the globe may want to review the findings of this important study in more detail (you can get more information on the CEO Study here.)
It provides some excellent food for thought in helping shape your thinking about how you might start to manage your organization’s own complexity, whatever its nature, and it will no doubt set the stage for what should prove to be an informative and insightful week here in Spain.
For those of you following from afar, I look forward to sharing more from the IBM Industry Summit here in this blog throughout the week.
Information on Demand 2010, Opening Session Keynote: Gain Insight, Optimize Results
At this morning’s opening keynote session of the IBM Information on Agenda 2010 event, Robert Leblanc immediately got down to the business at hand: Telling organizations everywhere the basic rules of the road on how to work towards establishing their own effective Information Agenda.
With Blue Man Group-ish performance troup Cobu first setting the agenda for the conference with a beat all its own, Leblanc answered in turn and explained the conference theme: “Gain Insight, Optimize Results.”
Robert Leblanc, IBM VP Middleware for IBM Software, expounds on the opportunities of an information agenda at Information on Demand 2010 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Leblanc is the Senior Vice President, Middleware Software, for the IBM Software business, and opened his comments by citing from the IBM 2010 Global CEO Study, which had three key findings in terms of what CEOs are looking for these days: 1) Embody creative leadership; 2) Reinvent customer relationships; and 3) Build operating dexterity.
Leblanc posed a few key questions to set the stage: How do I share information in more of a two-way manner with my clients? How can I modify my products and services to better serve clients? How can I draw insight from the organization that is specialized to the client set I’m going after?
In other words, information management professionals, CEOs need your help!
A quick sound byte, related Leblanc: There will be 44X as much data and content over the coming decade, from 800K petabytes in 2009, to 35 zettabytes in 2020.
Yet people are starved for the right info and insight. More sound bytes:
- 1 in 3 make critical decisions without the information they need.
- 1 in 2 don’t have access to the information they need to do their jobs.
Clearly, there’s a gap between information and outcomes.
That’s partially due to the Information Explosion, wherein organizations haven’t aligned their information needs with their business processes, or determined how to make the right information available when and wherever it’s needed throughout the organization.
In short, how to get to one version of the truth.
After being joined by customers CenterPoint Energy and Visa, who explained how their own organizations are using an IBM Information Agenda to get the right information to the right people when and wherever they need it, Leblanc summarized the roadmap for establishing your own Information Agenda.
First, he said, you need to plan an information agenda that aligns with your business decisions. Second, you need to master your information to ensure it is accurate, relevant, and governed (and with a nod to increasing governance and regulatory requirements around the globe).
And finally, you must work to apply business analytics to anticipate and shape business outcomes, because increasingly, information is going to come from everywhere, requiring a response characteristic of radical flexibility and extreme scalability.
Leblanc summarized that no matter where in the organization you sit — C-Suite, Business Analystcs, Executive — you can take the lead on mapping out and setting your own information agenda.
turbotodd
Turbotodd 