Is Your ERP System Lean and Human-Centered?

Companies have reinvented their business models, IT architecture, and ways of working. So why are they taking an outdated—and largely unsuccessful—approach to ERP?

Hyper-Personalization for Customer Engagement with Artificial Intelligence

Personalization based on customer attributes and behavior is a familiar concept among marketers, and artificial intelligence is making it increasingly effective. AI-based hyper-personalization employs both sophisticated methods and far more data than previous methods and is far more precise as a result. Thomas H. Davenport discusses the role of AI in personalization as well as the growing backlash against personalization fueled by data privacy concerns. … [ Read more ]

3 Visions of the Future of AI for Customer Engagement: 2027 Scenarios

Artificial intelligence (AI) is making deeper inroads into every aspect of business and society every day. By 2027, how will AI transform the future of customer engagement? Management and Business Review and the Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) Global Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Growth Council recently organized a forum to discuss three possible scenarios for the future – optimistic, pessimistic, and realistic.

The algorithmic trade-off between accuracy and ethics

In The Ethical Algorithm, two University of Pennsylvania professors explain how social values such as fairness and privacy can be designed into machines.

Daniel Hulme

For millennia, philosophers have been debating how society should be structured and what it means to live a “good life.” As our environments start to intelligently interact with us, we’re giving them the power to create and destroy. We have to embed ethical behaviors into these system, which makes it an extremely exciting time for humanity, because we now have to agree on what those … [ Read more ]

Daniel Hulme

The best definition of intelligence — artificial or human — that I’ve found is goal-directed adaptive behavior.

Web3 beyond the hype

While buffeted by the recent market downturn and bankruptcies, digital assets and the technologies underlying them still have the potential to transform business models across sectors.

Digital Operations: Autonomous Automation and the Smart Execution of Work

By digitizing operations, companies may replace manual work with increased automation, but they may also augment human work through smarter execution. Robert Boute and Jan Van Mieghem present a conceptual framework that distinguishes the different levels of digitization, automation, and intelligence. This framework can serve as an audit, helping companies to assess where they are now and where they could be in the future.

10 principles for modernizing your company’s technology

Today’s technology platforms are not just new versions of legacy systems. They allow you to design a completely new digital enterprise — as long as you follow these guidelines.

How effective boards approach technology governance

As technology’s strategic importance to the business expands, management needs stronger board guidance. Four engagement models have proven useful.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

So what happens when we automate our most impactful and superior cognitive capacity—thinking—and we don’t think for ourselves? I think we end up not acting in very smart ways, and then the algorithms are trained by behaviors that have very little to do with intelligence. Most of the stuff we spend doing on a habitual basis is quite predictable and monotonous and has very little … [ Read more ]

How the Metaverse Will Remake Your Strategy

As digital technologies move to the next stage of advancement—the metaverse—there are two questions companies should ask: How will the metaverse change our business? And how can we get ahead of the change and shape it to our advantage? This is our perspective on both.

James Surowiecki, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge

It’s easier than ever to enter into, and successfully monitor, partnerships, and to outsource even core corporate functions to outside players. Intermediaries and brokers are less important. As a result, the transaction costs of doing business outside corporate walls are falling, which means that the economic case for the traditional big corporation (which exists in large part because of its ability to coordinate production with … [ Read more ]

James Surowiecki, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge

What we are witnessing, they contend, is the advent of an economy in which data matters far more than capital, a change that represents “a fundamental reorganization of our economy.”

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Up to this point, we’ve used price as the key determinant of how resources are allocated — what we make, how much of it we make, what we invest in, and so on. We’ve done this … [ Read more ]

Can Blockchain Manage Trust in Organizations

David De Cremer and Yan Pang illuminate both the limitations and the potential of blockchain technology as the new currency of trust in organizational life. They have found that building trust within organizations requires leaving room for vulnerability, which makes blockchain unsuitable. For building trust between organizations, however, blockchain technology shows more promise because it acts as a regulatory middleman.

How Can Managers Use AI to Find the Right People?

Eight recommendations to help firms win the war for talent.

Chris Gagnon

Every company has to include technology. Technology is there to enable people. But I’ll tell you, what’s really important is people. An organization is designed to organize people and their work and their efforts. Almost all the things that we discuss as keys or imperatives can be enabled by technology, but they’re designed to help people perform. At the heart of this thinking is humanism, … [ Read more ]

The Five Layers of the Modern Martech Stack

Martech stacks provide the tools organizations need to determine marketing success at every potential touchpoint.

A well-built stack increases marketing effectiveness and generates tangible value. A convoluted stack increases complexity. But what makes martech stack creation so difficult is that so many solutions are available and no one tool or platform can handle every marketer’s need.

The key is knowing what other marketing functions can be digitized … [ Read more ]

Introducing the Periodic Table of Community Strategy

Here are the most important considerations in online community strategy distilled into a quick reference visual – the Periodic Table of Community Strategy.

The table is structured around 10 categories: community strategy, community types, community management techniques, social media platforms, community platforms, community goals, community management roles, community membership roles, community governance, community checklists, and community member motivations.