Seeking to strengthen consumer loyalty, 7-Eleven has launched a chatbot and a new rewards app, and is experimenting with other emerging technologies such as drones, biometrics and peer-to-peer payments. If the initiatives work as intended, they will help the chain redefine convenience for the 55 million consumers who visit any of the chain’s 63,000 stores…
Everybody makes mistakes. Most are harmless, some are embarrassing but forgivable, and some can take your career — or your company — down with them. Some of the most common IT gaffes include becoming trapped in a relationship with a vendor you can’t shake loose, hiring or promoting the wrong people, and hiding problems from…
One of the biggest threats to enterprises isn’t a hacker halfway across the world hoping to score valuable data to sell on the black market. And it isn’t a disgruntled former employee looking to do the same. It isn’t even a rogue nation-state perpetrator looking to disrupt big business. It’s shadow IT. Broadly defined, shadow…
“In China there is a ton of money going in [to quantum computing] and no public record coming out,” said Jaya Baloo, CISO at Dutch telecoms company, KPN, at a recent Kaspersky event in Dublin. Baloo is a very cogent and forthright individual. She was on the steering committee for the European Commission’s work into…
Remote and flexible work opportunities are quickly becoming a differentiator for attracting and retaining top tech talent. But remote workers face unique challenges that on-site colleagues don’t, according to a new study from authors and social scientists Joseph Grenny and David Maxfield, including unequal treatment and gossip, according to the study. The study, which surveyed…
Digital transformation has the potential to be, well, transformative; when done right, a digital transformation can enable your business to reap significant, and well-documented, benefits. But with many things IT, there comes a tendency to get wrapped up in the hype and not think through the hard truths of execution until the promise doesn’t live…
CIOs have long struggled to quantify the value of IT services relative to production costs, a financial black box that sows distrust between the tech department and business divisions. As IT implements additional digital capabilities in service of the business, this disconnect is widening, inspiring more CIOs to embrace technology business management (TBM), a discipline…
At first, it was just a whisper. Someone from Marketing was complaining to a colleague from Sales about the new home-grown sales and marketing automation system that IT installed last year. The system wasn’t working right, it was too hard to use, and the features weren’t exactly what Marketing needed. The marketer’s point: IT was…
Successful digital transformation requires internal disruption, and CIOs intent on embracing a digital future must often alter their IT operating models to get there. Nowhere is this more evident than when it comes to developing software and services. To build software faster, CIOs are kicking old waterfall habits in favor of agile methodologies in which…
Companies considering moving workloads to cloud environments five years ago questioned whether the economics of cloud were compelling enough. The bigger question at that time was whether the economics would force a tsunami of migration from legacy environments to the cloud world. Would it set up a huge industry, much like Y2K, of moving workloads…