For
technology executives sometimes the biggest challenge when building a
business strategy is getting your executive team to realise the
importance of new technologies.
New
technology innovations, commonly known as “game-changers”, change at
the speed of technology itself. As such, when you’re a Chief
Financial
Officer and looking from the outside in, it is often hard to grasp what
the real changes are that will impact businesses in the future.
In an effort to highlight the technologies that could be
“game-changers” for the CFO, TechExec. has put together a list of five
tech disruptions that your CFO should know about.
Cognitive Computing
Cognitive computing uses data mining, pattern recognition, and
natural language processing to help a computer simulate the human
thought process. A form of Artificial Intelligence (AI), cognitive
computing is rapidly developing and is already being used in Australia.
The latest in this technology is
Google’s AlphaGo project.
Their recent AI system has shown its capability by beating a
professional player at one of the most complicated board games of all
time, Go. The 2,500-year-old game has over 250 moves a turn and has been
explained as having “more configurations of the board than the number
of atoms in the universe.”
From an enterprise technology perspective
IBM’s Watson,
launched in Australia last October, is the most well-known cognitive
computer solutions. Watson’s biggest triumph was when it beat two human
contestants at a game of Jeopardy! in 2011. From a solutions
perspective, according to IBM, it is already being used in Australian to
“assist organisations to explore and build cognitive capabilities into
their applications, products, systems, and processes.”
For the CFO cognitive computing represents an efficiency that has yet
to be realised in the corporate world. If companies have the ability to
expand their business knowledge without the need to extend manpower,
cost-savings and solutions will start to be found quicker than ever
before.
Hybrid Cloud
Cloud is already a prominent topic in a C-Suite’s technology strategy, and the hype has been well deserved.
While cloud provides a storage solution, the “hybrid” cloud – is a
data strategy that looks to include data centres both internally and
externally – ensures companies can capture the benefits of the cloud for
non-critical data storage; whilst at the same time ensure important
business information assets are held inside the business.
At TechExec’s most recent Disrupt event in Brisbane, an overwhelming
93% of the audience identified that they believed the future of storage would either be completely in the cloud or a hybrid cloud environment.
Out of that majority, 67% of participants believed that the hybrid
cloud would be the main platform that will support their businesses.
This stat confirms not only that the hype of the cloud exists, but the
reality that the most effective cloud strategy is in hybrid form.
From a CFO perspective, understanding the benefits of cloud, and
identifying assets that should stay within the business, is crucial to a
cloud strategy.
Battery Storage
Used across the commercial and residential spaces, battery storage
captures power and stores it. Simple. The reason why the technology is
gaining momentum is because businesses are starting to think differently
about energy consumption.
Battery storage is beefing up the possibility of renewable energy
becoming an asset to businesses. And it is already happening. The
biggest example of this inside an office is in
Southern California where Tesla’s Powerpack – the front-running piece of hardware in the battery storage world – has been used to power dozens of office blocks.
At the time, this project was the biggest green energy initiative in
California and was expected to save enough power to supply to 10,000
homes.
There is no shortage of industries looking to embracing solar and
battery storage as a cost-effective and renewable source of energy.
Prescriptive Analytics
Prescriptive Analytics is where data science, technology, and machine
learning will meet. Dubbed the “third phase” of business analytics,
prescriptive analytics technology will take company information, analyse
it, provide a hypothesis about it, and suggest a strategy based on
these findings.
The
final frontier of data analytics could potentially come quicker than
most think, with both data analytics and machine learning being current
hotbeds for innovation.
From a CFO perspective, utilizing this type of technology in business
reporting could be the entry point for prescriptive analytics into big
business, because datasets from business silos like sales, marketing and
inventory should be at a point where they are easily identifiable and
analyzed.
The value of this type of technology has gone slightly unnoticed in recent times, in its most recent
“Gartner Hype Cycle for Advanced Analytics and Data Science”,
Gartner placed prescriptive analytics as two of the seven “data science
techniques that are still underrated in their impact and, therefore,
noteworthy to highlight.” Watch this space.
Open Data
Open data creates a platform for information that is free for the
public to access and use. This form of information can assist government
agencies and the public in sharing knowledge to streamline processes.
Chris Macleod, Transport for London
A good reference point is initiatives from the
Transport for London (TfL),
they were one of the first public bodies to use open data to create new
applications, providing access to hundreds of travel applications to
millions of users.
“We power 400 apps, and that’s just transport data, and that’s what I
mean when I talk about ‘reach’ we have 3 million people on social
media.” Chris Macleod, Marketing Director of TfL,
told TechExec.
In Australia, the government’s open data platform data.com.au is
focused on the publication of datasets to assist businesses, the
government, and the public.
A combined result of the Government’s Declaration of Open
Government and a Government 2.0 Taskforce Report, The platform initially
had only 514 datasets. It now consists of over 5,000 and shows signs of
constant growth.
Open Data should be on the radar of CFOs from all types of industries
because it represents a new asset that could prove invaluable to
driving new business and enterprise. With investment in data analytics
constantly on the rise, having the ability to take advantage of large
government datasets, and investing resources into looking at the
benefits of these to your business will be a critical strategy of any
enterprise large or small.