Tag: automation

While digitisation and automation create many opportunities for businesses to streamline tasks and deliver benefits of ease and convenience to customers, this doesn’t automatically translate to good customer service. In fact, that assumption can create a significant risk for any business, because the simple truth is that you cannot entirely remove the human element from your business when you are dealing with customers who are human.

Let's have a look at the impact of "deglobalisation" on some of our favoured themes: smart manufacturing, energy transition and climate change, and the circular economy.

The pressure to optimise costs and maximise productivity is at the forefront of all business leaders’ minds. Today, this pressure is exacerbated by disruptive technology, the increasing complexity of geopolitics and global trade, evolving risk and regulation, and the ongoing race to find and keep the right talent with the right skills.

To succeed in today’s economic environment, manufacturers must find new ways to create and capture value. But how do they do this when South Africa is currently facing a massive energy crisis, with load shedding impacting production and grinding their operations to a halt?

The era of emerging technologies is changing everything in our lives. It’s changing the jobs landscape and how we work, but also how we interact with one another, how we are entertained, and how we learn. At the same time, businesses face changing customer expectations, and governments must contend with new demands from their citizenry.

As technology continues to advance rapidly, governments worldwide are grappling with the need to regulate various aspects of the digital realm. South Africa, a leading economy on the African continent, has not been immune to this global trend.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is finally emerging onto the market as a technology that connects devices, systems and solutions and that has the potential to revolutionise multiple industries. IoT isn’t new, but it has simmered on the edges of innovation and transformation for years and now it has, as the World Economic Forum puts it, ‘quietly arrived’.

In today's rapidly evolving business world, the role of the CIO has become increasingly vital in driving organisational productivity. However, these executives are confronted with challenges such as outdated technology, insufficient infrastructure, and increasing technical debt. 

Usually, as we move from one year to the next, we look at trends for the coming year so that we know what to expect. This is especially pertinent in the IT industry where things evolve at lightning speed. This is not so that we can invest in the latest and greatest for their own sake, rather it is to keep businesses relevant and competitive on their digital journeys, as well as to keep them safe from a cybersecurity perspective.

We live in a new reality post-COVID-19, where customers are more digitally savvy, online 24/7 and have easy access to more options than ever before. Businesses need to adapt to this new reality, or they will be at a significant disadvantage.