Technology Revolution: The Future of Now

Selling. Today's savvy salesperson must combine many skills: a gatherer-analyst of customer and competitor data; social business guru; collaboration champion; and much more. Our experts speak. Barry Trailer: "There is work to do in every sale. Imagine holding your hands two feet apart. The more work you do 'selling' – identifying key buying influences, needs and personal wins, establishing and elevating relationships, etc. – the less 'negotiating' you need to do. So, if you do 18" of selling, you have 6" of negotiating ahead…4" of selling, 20" of negotiating. Simply stated, there are no shortcuts." Anneke Seley: "The business of sales is changing; whether your business changes with it will determine your long-term success." Ross Wainwright: "The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather in a lack of will." (Vince Lombardi) Join us for more insights on Selling: Art or Science, Negotiation or Persuasion?

What's in a name? Plenty, for today's CIO. Why? The role is changing so much, so often that it's hard to know what the "I" means at any time. The experts speak. Steve Romero: "Calls for the 'new CIO' are not new at all. CIO Magazine's State of the CIO '07 survey resulted in the identification of four distinct CIO archetypes: Business Leader, Innovation Agent, Operational Expert, Turnaround Artist. In 2011, its 4 Personas of the Next Generation CIO were Chief Infrastructure Officer…Integration Officer…Intelligence Officer…Innovation Officer." Nigel Fenwick: Marketing is the biggest opportunity for IT since the Internet. Martin Heisig: "To go boldly where no one has gone before. This is what today's IT leaders have to do. Consumerization of IT is the new innovation driver. I have to make my end users a core part of my IT design processes. I have to know what consumers want next because they will want it soon in the enterprise." Join us for the Changing Role of the CIO: The I's Have It.

Education. How do we equip our kids to succeed in a tech-driven world? Kim Jones/ Curriki: Textbooks are becoming as obsolete as the rotary dial phone Kim Saxe/Nueva School: "The Internet and technology (such as Skype) supports the teaching of more open-ended and complex projects than ever before." Curtis Johnson/"Disrupting Class" author: "The role of teachers will see profound changes – all good… from a qualified source of knowledge dispensing information to largely passive students (in rows of desks) to planners, facilitators, and coaches in the learning process." Neeru Khosla/CK-12 Foundation: "We no longer need textbooks." John Mayerhofer/SAP: "Technology will enable schools and other institutions, essentially experience providers, to cost-effectively facilitate personalized student-centered learning for today's learners and an additional 3 billion new minds." Join us for Future of Education: Teaching Kids to Think

Subsidiaries. Straight path to market expansion or potentially tangled ecosystem? The experts speak. Steve King/Emergent Research: "For the first time in modern history, the developing world, not the developed world, is the global engine driving economic growth. This, coupled with the rapidly increasing use of social technologies, is fundamentally changing the relationship between companies and their foreign subsidiaries. Erich Joachimsthaler/Vivaldi Partners: "As internet analyst Mary Meeker said in her State of the Internet address this year: 'We are merely in spring training.' This creates a new reality for companies of how to manage the global organization and how to achieve competitive advantage and profit from it." Mike Morel/SAP: "Companies are squandering their investments in subsidiaries. They need to share more, implement governance, compliance, and regulation, and manage subsidiary independence." Join us for Subsidiaries: Curing Chaos at the Family Dinner Table.

Today's buzz term: "BI" – business intelligence. Oxymoron? Or game-changer that can make your company smarter, more agile, able to leap over tall competitors in a single bound? Continuing our Apr. 4 and May 9 discussions, we'll revisit why even the best intelligence needs a strategy, and look at big data, analytics, cloud, single version of the truth and more. The experts say: Brian Sommer / Techventive: "Detectives have hypotheses and working theories they try to prove or disprove. Why shouldn't BI initiatives use the same rigor to uncover huge insights into business?" Josh Greenbaum / EAC: "There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact." (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1999-03-01), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes) Colin Dover / SAP: "Responding to the seemingly simple business requests of providing a consolidated view of a global corporation is enough to send an IT department into a collective cold sweat." Pour a cup and join us for How Smart Is BI without a Strategy? - Part 3

"Are you working hard or hardly working?" goes the old saying. Today, we're seeing a massive shift in how people work due to the co-impact of big data, mobile, cloud, and social media. Are you feeling it yet? Our experts speak: Alan Lepofsky / Constellation RG: "New technologies such as in-memory database, mobile, and cloud are transforming the way people work." Richard Edwards / Ovum: "Often using their own mobile devices and free-to-use cloud-based community collaboration solutions, employees are applying their consumer persona and experiences in the workplace and in the field; changing the way the job gets done and results are achieved." Kijoon Lee / SAP: "Every now and then, we see a truly disruptive technology emerge. In-memory database is one of these. This technology will change the face of business and transform how millions of people work and live." Join us for more insights on Changing How You Work: Big Data, Social, and Mobile Collide and Converge.

M2M. Rise of the machines. The promise of a world of connected devices, where machines of all types and sizes can autonomously communicate with each other. Don't believe it's a reality yet? Global M2M revenue is projected to soar from $121 million in 2010 to $948 billion by 2020, the year Ericsson predicts the number of connected devices will reach 50 billion. Our experts have a lot to say. Jason Sumner, EIU: "M2M is going to be big. We have heard this before but there are reasons to believe it's different this time." Joe Dignan, Ovum: "When is M2M not M2M? I would suggest a lot of the time. There are fully automated processes but a great many examples of what I am told is M2M needs a human 'guiding mind' somewhere in the interaction." Fergus O'Reilly, SAP: "Customers no longer buy products, they buy experiences. This is the real driver for the move to 'Everything-as-a-Service'." Join us for their insights on M2M Rise of the Machines: Coming to a smart city near you.

Social communities and storytelling. The connection? Ask the experts.Rachel Happe, The Community Roundtable: "Social communities leverage an increasingly expensive asset - people - by allowing them to work out loud, connect with more people, establish trust, and find relevant information and solutions more quickly. Our job as community sponsors is to co-create value and be the storytellers of that value. It is no longer a story about us alone, but about that collaborative journey." Sean O'Driscoll, Ant's Eye View, "Social engagement is a journey with defined stages leading to the fully engaged enterprise…Digital storytelling is a critical new competency." Mark Yolton, SAP: "As SAP CMO Jonathan Becher likes to say, 'Big glass buildings don't buy software…people do.' With the lines between B2B and B2C blurring, enterprise marketers must become better storytellers to articulate the impact of their solutions on real people." Join us for more on Building a Social Community: Tell Me a Story!

Factory of the past vs. the future. Does Charlie Chaplin's struggling Little Tramp in the 1936 film "Modern Times" represent today's factory worker and the shop floor scenario? No, according to IDC's Bob Parker. "Recent research conducted by IDC Manufacturing Insights shows that manufacturing employees care deeply about quality, and management truly appreciates their team's skills and dedication. The age of contentious labor/management relations is over in manufacturing. SAP's Mike Lackey is optimistic, too. "What's under the water? Manufacturing is active, growing and improving like a living entity." The factory of the future? IDC's Pier Manenti predicts, "Mobility will be integral to workforce engagement. The amount of network traffic on the factory floor will increase by an order of magnitude in the next five years. Persistently connected employees and assets are a fast-approaching reality. Join us for more insights on Factory of the Future: Ready, Set, Now – Part 2.

Right Time Experiences. Huge business potential for you, but mobile solutions require business insight, technical chops and strong design to get it right.