Overlooked this excellent piece from Design Intelligence, April 20, 2012 - and worth re-posting here:
By Bradley Horst
Information technology strategy increasingly means enabling engagement. The cloud, mobile, and social platforms can take you there.
The A/E/C professional practice environment continues to change, challenge, and evolve our organizations dramatically. I often ask myself how this is changing us and where is it leading. Both are difficult questions to answer, although I think there are clues all around us, sometimes in adjacent industries. What was once considered impossible from a computational standpoint is now possible and affordable through modern technologies and innovations. Long-held assumptions about what a professional services practice could be or should be, how it should look, and how it should behave are changing, especially in light of solutions built around the cloud, mobile, and social computing platforms. If ever there was a time for your firm to have a clear and deliberate forward-thinking information strategy, this is it.
The connective tissue that ties together the cloud, mobile, and social platforms is information, or as some might call it, Big Data. I like to think of it as information rather than Big Data because information holds within it a degree of context that makes it more meaningful than mere data. To take this a step further, add expertise to information and you get business intelligence, which leads to even better customer experiences. The argument might look something like this:
- If, Big Data + Context = Information
- And, Information + Expertise = Business intelligence
- Then, (Big Data + Context) + Expertise = Better intel (i.e., a better customer experience)
Intuitively, I think we all know that the proactive management and strategic deployment of digital information (or intel) holds the potential to grow a firm’s knowledge and expertise exponentially throughout the practice over time. So what does it all mean and how do we use it to our business advantage? READ MORE >>
via www.di.net
