The world is changing and never more so or more quickly, than it is today. Financial crisis aside, what are the challenges that the industry faces over the next five years?
Well, here are a few that I am sure most people would recognise and agree will and should be part of current strategic thinking:
• Globalisation and geographic reorientation
• Consolidation
• Life extension and health improvement
• Consumer attitudes to risk and financial strength
• The needs of ‘Generation Y’ consumers and their role as employees
• Governance and regulatory change
• Nimbleness and speed to market
• Understanding the customer [and the consumer!] – who they are and what they want
• Information access and communication – on-demand (anytime, anywhere, any device)
• Competitive differentiation in an increasingly commoditised market
• Cost reduction and bottom line improvement
• Service
• And of course technology!
– Analytics & optimisation (IBM has invested heavily in this area with ‘Stream’ computing –instant data pattern identification – that seems to ‘leapfrog’ Data-Mining)
– CEM – Customer Experience management
– SaaS – Software as a Service (listen to the mantra from Salesforce.com – NO SOFTWARE!)
– SOA – Service oriented architecture
– Web 2.0 [3.0?]
– Mashing – combining different functionality from different applications to create a new/different application (usually delivered though the browser)
– Genome and bio technology
So what does this mean? Well, in next week’s blog, I will look at some of these pressures from a Product Provider perspective…
