Strategic advice to leverage new technologies

Misunderstood, poorly identified, and often brushed aside, the gap between strategic business demands and the ability of deployed IT solutions to meet those demands grows by the day.

Mobile device management will continue to play a key role in enterprise mobility in 2013 as organizations accelerate their use of smartphones and tablets in an effort to increase employee productivity and enable the business to respond more efficiently to customer wants and needs.

As organizations rediscover that it costs far more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one, there appears to be a marked increase in assessing customers' experience. In this regard, customer surveys and focus groups are the typical tools of the trade.

There has been a lot of discussion about the need for organizations to adopt tablet devices (e.g., iPad, Android-based, PlayBook) to enable their employees to communicate via email, participate in mobile conferencing, and to access, view, and interact with corporate data via reports, dashboards, and other functionality while o

CMMI is the de facto standard for process improvement in the software development domain. This standard encourages a systematic approach to process improvement. On the other hand, agile software development fosters high customer collaboration, rapid feedback, and empowerment of the individual developer. Both approaches have already been proven to be compatible and synergistic.

A few months ago, I was asked by a colleague who graduated from the Paris School of Mines to contribute an article to the school's alumni journal on the topic of the impact of "new technologies" on the work of consultants.