Companies are always looking for ways to operate lean by reducing waste and redundancies in business processes throughout the organization. Value stream mapping (VSM) found its start in manufacturing, but it’s proved equally as helpful in the enterprise as a visual mapping technique to optimize and improve systems and processes. By implementing value stream mapping…
Shelter-in-place orders around the world are forcing more and more employees to work remotely. And while flexible workplace strategies have gained traction of late, for many teams, the pandemic’s push toward full-team remote work and collaboration has presented challenges. Agile development teams, in particular, often lean on processes undertaken largely in-person, leaving many team leaders…
On March 31, Jim Swanson had been EVP and Group CIO at Johnson & Johnson for six months. In any other year, he would be executing on a transformational business technology strategy designed for efficiency, innovation, and growth. This year, however, Swanson faced a challenge that eclipsed all of that: Manage a global pandemic that…
In a previous blog post, I discussed the less evident short-term impact of COVID-19 on your digital transformation programs, but there are so many longer-term implications. Will the current economic crisis have an impact beyond 2020? I believe the answer is yes, and it could be significant. To understand the long-term impact of COVID-19 on…
SAP remained profitable in the first quarter, with the COVID-19 pandemic only beginning to hit cloud bookings and software license sales in the last two weeks of March, executives said in a call to discuss its first-quarter earnings on Tuesday. The company expects the second quarter to be rougher, with the economy gradually improving in…
In the wake of shelter-in-place mandates around the world, non-essential brick-and-mortar retailers are forced to shut their doors until social distancing measures ease. As a result, e-commerce demand is soaring. According to a new “Global Shopping Index” report published by Salesforce, the number of unique digital shoppers rose 40% year-over-year (YoY). Digital shoppers drove 20%…
There’s a disconnect between IT priorities and spending — one that could jeopardize your organization’s long-term prospects. Digital transformation and innovation remain top priorities for CIOs, with the 2020 IT Trends Study from the Society for Information Management (SIM) finding digital transformation and innovation ranked No. 4 and No. 9 respectively among the most important…
As organizations around the world are adjusting to working from home, leaders want to know how they can look after their teams. Ultimately the goal is to get to full productivity as soon as possible but that isn’t likely to happen without a plan. My team has been operating 100% virtually for 15+ years. I’ll…
Organizations steeped in text documents have an ally in their quest to streamline business processes. Natural language processing, a branch of AI focused on communication, is helping companies such as Accenture surface high-value information and cut costs by bringing text-based, unstructured communications into the machine learning age. With more than a million contracts in…
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a double whammy for Jack O’Hara, CIO of Springfield Clinic. O’Hara was still adjusting to being a brand-new CIO in a new state, when he had to mobilize a team to rapidly deploy telemedicine in a rural community. He did the latter in a span of three weeks. “We had…