Last month, I attended to the Foundation Cigref symposium on Digital Innovation for Business Transformation. I won’t tell you a whole story that you are able to listen there : 2nd symposium. I would just outline some special moments.
Françoise Mercadal-Delasalles, Head of Human Resources at Socgen, outline how the bank current strategy based on innovation and on weaving new ways of customer relationship, is in line with Cigref Foundation researches objectives which are to show how usages of Information Technology sustain business innovation. I am noting too another similarity on strong international culture of Socgen and Cigref Foundation which may claim to be a first class international think tank on Information Technology.
Taobao.com, leading Chinese company in e-commerce, has just entered the top 100 companies with the highest numerical value in the unlisted world. Lu Peng his vice-president told its impressive story. I had the opportunity to discuss a little bit about its terrific numbers. If we have a look beyond the business size indicator we would discover soon that China is at the first stage of e-Commerce which is “produced locally-sold locally”. All remain to be build for next stages which are “produced remotely-sold locally”, especially a strong logistic business to bring goods and services to the costumer premises.
Professors XIE, TSUI and GUO made presentations which may have been done in a discussion about west companies. The matters were “IT High management support, competences, IT department organisation, middle management support” beside “Knowledge management” opportunities from IT and managing invetsment on the Business alignment criteria.
Thierry Gaudin made a brilliant talk on humanity futur challenges especially decrease of biodiversity, climate change, ageing of west people, all what innovations should help to face. I had a little conversation with Thierry who explained to me that prospective is an uneasy work since scientific domains produce models with different maturity levels. The less mature to predict fuiture is from economics. As well, it is incredibily difficult to weave relations between models and to figure out the impacts of phenomenon from one model to other domain model.
Dr Françoise Roure showed opportunities and threads of online communities. It seems to be a growing and pervavise subject for Business since interconnecting is exploding.
Professor El Sawy talked about the stage of Fusion view where business models are now designed to digital platforms. He identifed game changers in digital community who will open new opportunities for business in the next 5 years. Especially in the spaces of Internet business processes, internet social networks, internet of things.
Professor HO outlined in details the adoption of Product Lifecycle management process and tools in Tawain industries. He showed expectations, trends, brakes in great details. Proudly, it is one of few fields where french software idnustry is a major player through Dassault Systèmes.
Lyne Bouchard presented a Canadian think tank, action IT, which support innovations through IT.
Professor Benoît Aubert unveiled first results of IT usages in Canadian Business. It seems that agressive growing firms benefit of scalability given by IS systems. Analyst based business firms benefit of large data volume capability. Cost saving based businesses have opportunities to outsource their IS. In short, integration based usages of IS seems to provide more benefits than reactive usages.
It is always interesting and mind refreshing to see how others are dealing with the challenges in front of us, since they are questionning in the same way our old west societies. But, I am pleased to stay on former Senator Pierre Lafitte talk which outlined how an old industry like tourism is impacted with big changes due to IT new capabilities.