SigmaWay Blog

Digitalization revolution is forcing organizations to change or review their organization processes and strategies. Jay Scanlan (Strategy leader of McKinsey Digital) in his Mckinsey article talks about some questions which an organization should ask at the time of introducing digitalization into their organizations:
• Whether your current business model is viable, or do you need to fundamentally change the nature of how you compete in the marketplace?
• Do you need to transform your core business-as-usual organization rapidly, or you can afford to build new businesses and the new capabilities required to compete and win over the next 10 to 15 years?
• How many new functional capabilities do you need to grow and develop, and how much do you need to change your existing supply chains, your existing operational capabilities, and your existing channel architecture to be more effective?
And to introduce digitalization, you need to rethink on your resource allocation and budgeting strategies. To know more about the benefits of digitalization and how digitalizing is changing strategy, please follow this link: http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/strategy/how_digital_is_changing_strategy

According to successful CEOs and marketing experts, the survival of any business in the near future will rely on maintaining close relationships with customers. In this competitive and dynamic world, the ability to predict, adapt and change are the basic necessity for organization’s survival. According to Shawn Casemore (President and Founder of Casemore and Co Inc.), there are three fundamental areas of business that affect the profitability of any organization are:
• Customers
• Market
• Employees

 But for the growth and long-term survival of an organization, they need a close relationship with their customers. Three steps to create a close relationship with your customers are:

• Shift away from a functional mentality.
• Build offerings that deliver value.
• Tune into customer feedback.
To know more about these steps and professional view regarding marketing, please follow this link: http://www.industryweek.com/customer-relationships/increase-profits-creating-closer-customer-connections

According to IT research firm IDC report, IoT market will grow by 19% in 2015. The increasing importance of the IoT in manufacturing and operations market, leads to the growth of the IoT by $56.6billion. Digital Signage market, which is used in the retail sector, will be the major driver for growth and IoT retail market will grow from $6billion to $35.7billion by 2018 in this market. The main reason for increasing demand for IoT is decreasing prices and technology advancement. Read more at: http://www.informationweek.com/it-life/iot-market-will-grow-19-percent-in-2015-idc-predicts/d/d-id/1320500

Cloud Analytics is one application that is growing very fast and will accelerate in the coming decade. According to Ashutosh Kulkarni (Sr. Vice President and General Manager, Informatica Cloud), scalability, affordable price, simplicity to offer domain specific and user-specific capabilities make cloud analytics unbeatable. The scalability of Hadoop, and the emergence of highly elastic cloud analytic services like AWS, EMR and Redshift, Microsoft Azure, and Salesforce Wave Analytics, has helped in moving IT infrastructure to the cloud and cloud integration Platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) is designed to support the scalability, reliability and security of cloud analytics. Read more at: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2924846/data-analytics/the-future-of-cloud-analytics-is-now.html

Healthcare analytics, estimated to be over 20 billion, is growing very fast. The main reasons for the growth are: improved population health, reduced healthcare cost and patient safety. Thus, a vast majority of healthcare decision-makers have made analytics their priority. However, there are four main factors that could impact the adoption rate of analytics in healthcare. Data integration: It is the most important challenge because of the absence of unified datasets and inoperability between technologies.

Data breaches and security: This needs to be taken care off when data needs to be transferred to cloud in view of the recent healthcare data hacks.

Data sciences talent: There is likely to be stiff competition for talented data scientists with experience in healthcare and analytics.

Low current levels of analytics investment: The order of magnitude of investment in analytics may be the biggest challenge for the growth of analytics in healthcare.

Read more at:http://www.cio.com/article/2904270/healthcare/healthcare-analytics-4-things-impacting-the-adoption-rate.html

High speed internet network connecting villages across India; that's the dream PM Narendra Modi has been nurturing. A ministry appointed committee raised allocation for the National Optical Fiber Network. Estimated time is 3 years for laying down the fibers. It will help in linking 250,000 village clusters to the Internet which is an essential part to digitalize India. Higher spending potentially will expand opportunities for fiber suppliers and telecommunication vendors. Read more at:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-18/modi-mulls-11-billion-outlay-to-bring-rural-india-online

Instincts, intuition and creativity are invaluable when it comes to customers, but they cannot paint the whole picture. A solid grasp of data and analytics is required along with them to make a mark in the market. For example, logic does not come out as a winner when deciding loyalty but data and applied analytics tells us a different story. Results though counter intuition sometimes provide important insight which helps develop the marketing strategies. Advanced analytics ventures into the field of correlation and converts guesswork into evidence-based decisions. Advanced analytics also improves customer experience.  Sometimes it does not completely rely on intuitive results, deviates from it but helps to validate targeted campaigns.  To know more please follow the link:http://www.cmswire.com/cms/digital-marketing/they-love-me-they-love-me-not-data-analytics-can-tell-you-029247.php

It was predicted that faster job creation and cheaper gasoline prices would drive the strongest growth rate in America but it is far from expectation. The reason is thought to be the start-and- stop spending by American households that represent almost 70% of the economic activity. It can be seen that there is a trend among the consumers not to spend freely. It is baffling as to why US consumers are being cautious. Interest rates are low; stock market is at an all-time high, home values are recovering, unemployment rate decreased to 5.4% yet things are not turning around. Savings rate went up to 5.7%. Though gasoline prices have fallen expenses on energy bills, food, housing, medical care, education has kept on rising. Wages though being adjusted for inflation cannot benefit the workers. Economists believe that US economy will turn around and the consumers will regain their confidence. Read more at:http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-consumers-are-so-cautious-2015-05-19?page=1

Web-Connected devices that can talk to each other, transfer data, and carry out tasks without human interaction, are what make up the Internet of Things (IoT). These devices/ things are becoming popular among any firm looking for an edge. Generally IoT refers to devices in Consumer products such as Smart Phones, Smart cars etc. In Industrial sector these devices are used to build smart factories by integrating sensors and software to complex machinery. Growth of these devices will be very high as suggested by a report from Deloitte and there are only few firms working in IoT/Industrial Internet implying that there will be enormous opportunities for entrepreneurs in this sector.

As is the case with any budding technology, this area also faces challenges. Some of which are data security, addressing potential customers’ concerns about privacy, the lack of common standards between companies developing software for these devices; and the need to build physical infrastructure to support the collection and analysis of the data.Read more at: 

http://www.wamda.com/memakersge/2015/05/5-minute-guide-internet-of-things

Corporate profit margins may be narrowing down with the S&P 500 index declining more than 20%. The stock market being overly dependent on wide profit margins is vulnerable. Statistics and various calculative methods show us that the six-decade average profit margin of corporate America is 6.3%. If corporate profitability reverted back to its average, it is likely that S&P 500 would be on its way down.  The stock market would have single digit growth. Way out could be P/E expansion and widening of corporate profit-margins. Opinions differ; many proponents believe the stock market will be affected no matter what the level of corporate profit margins. To know more, follow the link: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/investors-need-to-face-the-possibility-of-a-great-reset-2015-05-20

Do you think security questions are secure? Well think again. These questions meant to provide an extra layer of security. Google conducted a study collating hundreds of millions of these questions and their answers. It showed that these questions are neither secure nor reliable. They can be easily hacked or faked. A considerable percentage of the population could not even recall the questions. It was found in some cases that answers to some questions were similar for many people. Logic dictates that if anybody can guess the answer to a question, more security questions should be added. But this hikes up the probability that the user forgets them.  Researchers argue SMS backup codes, secondary email addresses should be used for authentication. Read more at: http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/21/google-study-shows-security-questions-arent-all-that-secure/?trk=pulse-det-art_view_ext

•  Adoption of digital technologies has led to a customer-centric set of services. These technologies are nowadays demanded by banks, financial services firms and insurance companies.   With the world becoming competitive, sectors such as banking, finance services and insurance industries and product development, delivery and customer engagement are now being driven by a more mobile, social and data driven experience. But, the financial industry is still way behind firms in the consumer and retail markets. Firms in financial industry must ensure that they build a foundation for digital change. Read more at:   http://blogs.sap.com/banking/2015/05/19/digital-innovation-in-banking/

•  Big Data enables various capabilities like forensics and the analysis of long-term historical trends. By collecting data and analyzing historical trends, you would be able identify when an attack started, and what were the steps that the attacker took to get a hold of your systems. These techniques could play a key role to detect threats at an early stage. Big Data provides  opportunity to consolidate and analyze logs automatically from multiple sources rather than in isolation. This enhances intrusion detection systems (IDS) and intrusion prevention systems (IPS). Integrating information from physical security systems, such as building access controls and even CCTV, could also enhance IDS and IPS to a point where insider attacks and social engineering are factored in to the detection process. This presents the possibility of significantly more advanced detection of fraud and criminal activities. Big Data could result in far more practical and successful SIEM, IDS and IPS implementations. Read more at-         http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/big-data-analytics/how-big-data-is-changing-the-security-analytics-landscape/

• Apache Hadoop- as software vendors are targeting the distributed storage and processing architecture, need for Hadoop is increasing 
• Apache Spark-The rapid rise of the in-memory stack is being extended as a faster and simpler alternative to MapReduce-style analytics.
• NoSQL-Databases like MongoDB and Couchbase are taking over jobs previously handled by monolithic SQL databases like Oracle and IBMDB2.
• Machine Learning and Data Mining- Big data pros who can harness machine learning technology to build and train predictive analytic apps are in high demand Statistical and Quantitative Analysis-Add in expertise with a statistical tool like R, SAS, Matlab, SPSS, or Stata is of high demand in today’s world. 
• SQL- SQL is still in demand for the next-generation of Hadoop-scale data warehouses. 
• Data Visualization-It has become most important in the job market. 
• Progamming Languages-Knowing programming languages like Java, C, Python, or Scala could give you the edge over other candidates. Read more at: 

http://www.datanami.com/2015/01/07/9-must-skills-land-top-big-data-jobs-2015/

US companies make huge profits by paying employees minimum wage. US taxpayers pay $153 billion public assistance to working families. Now public opinions are divided. They want these corporations to pay workers enough to live decently. A proposed bill in Connecticut states that companies paying below $15 per hour will be imposed a fine of $1 per hour, per worker and this money will be spent on social welfare. Each Walmart in Connecticut costs taxpayers $1 million in social programs; also state pays $486 million in medication and cash assistance.  The bill could be a creator of many positions, and also help to shift the social assistance burden from taxpayers back to employers. The bill though in its initial stages has gained politicians' attention. Read more at:

http://www.fastcoexist.com/3046341/is-it-time-for-companies-to-pay-for-not-paying-enough-the-walmart-tax-gains-momentum

Companies want to have an edge using analytics but struggle due to unavailable technologies, outdated software, cumbersome systems, complex integrations coupled with huge costs in infrastructure and personnel. The cloud has transformed the way organizations look at big data and analytics solutions. It has been predicted that investment in cloud over the next five years will grow threefold. • Open source platforms like Apache Spark provide simple and fast data processing capabilities. These though powerful, due to expensive hardware, long lead times are difficult to deploy. The cloud allows immediate usage of open source platforms without initial investments.
• Cloud -based software are user friendly, simple to grasp and sort in comparison to on premise counterparts and release cycles are shorter.
• Cloud-based analytics provide a platform where hard business problems can be effectively tackled.
• Processing and extracting data are easy from a synced centralized location.
• Better connectivity leads to better productivity, deployment of data pipeline is easy. Read more at:

http://insidebigdata.com/2015/05/08/5-reasons-data-analytics-in-the-cloud-will-take-center-stage-in-2015/

Researchers gave out warnings of a "full" internet or a capacity crunch which may arise as a result of exceeding the upper limit of information passed through the optical fibers. This is primarily due to the fast growth of online media consumption through YouTube, Netflix, etc.  The trick of increasing the capacity of the optical fiber by increasing the power of light beamed through them has hit a dead end as increasing the power beyond a certain point degrades signal quality. Thus, data rationing and other restrictions may be the only options if the researchers aren’t being able to commercialize the solutions they are coming up with like creating fibers with multiple cores or new techniques to compensate for distortion at high power.

Read more at: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27536-the-internet-is-running-out-of-room--but-we-can-save-it.html#.VVq8ByuUcV8

Natural disasters unlike other man-made disasters are the most terrifying events in the world since they cannot be controlled. However, by using the power of big data, it is possible to help in disaster management. For this purpose big data can be used through crowdsourcing which can be achieved by the increasing use of social- networking in the present days. In case of earthquakes, instead of using dedicated sensors which are highly expensive one can use the almost similar sensors in smartphones through Wi-Fi-hotspot and GPS to collect data to create an overall picture. For this, infrastructure needs to be set up so that information can be uploaded from the affected areas so that the affected people can be tracked down. Moreover the maps created through crowdsourced collaboration helps to optimize the recovery process. Read more at :http://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/big-data-in-a-crisis

Counter party credit risk is becoming important nowadays; advanced risk management methods are being implemented in power and financial-services sectors. Transportation infrastructure industry lag behind but the need is immediate. Technicality in rail infrastructure is complex, thus the need for assessing risk. Failures are growing due to lower rated original equipment manufacturers (OEM). It is necessary to integrate systematic assessment of credit risk into the supplier selection process. Minimum rating requirement could be a way out allowing customers to control and lower the risk of supplier default.  This increases transparency, improves efficiency of risk assessment and facilitates monitoring of counterparties.  Customers of railway projects should learn from the available risk assessment methods and use them to their benefit. Read more at:

http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/risk_management/managing_supplier_risk_in_the_transportation_and_infrastructure_industry

According to a recent study, 50% of the consumers believe that their brands are clueless about how to reach them and only one in three customers believe that their brand understands them. According to Bill Carmody (CEO of Trepoint), the best way to understand the customer is by emotional intelligence. Emotional Intelligence refers to the ability to perceive, control and evaluate emotions. It is about being real, authentic and intuitive and also helps to develop digital marketing campaigns. Here are some tactics to implement emotional intelligence in digital marketing campaign:
• Understand your audience by using social listening tools such as Topsy, Hootsuite and Social Mention.
• Add value to customers rather than simply pushing your agenda. Adding value includes finding ways to enhance and improve the customer’s experience.
• Try to attract customers by thinking beyond benefits and features.
• Think ways to surprise or delight your audience rather than creeping them. This can be done by using predictive analysis.
• Respect when retargeting.
Read more at: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/246390