After these past few months, it has become clear that not every enterprise software firm is addressing or weathering the storm equally well. That said, enterprise software has, overall, been thriving admits the pandemic and, at this point, has a good chance of emerging relatively unscathed.
It turns out that building a global blockchain infrastructure, though not cheap or straightforward, is very do’ able. What was impossible to access just five years ago is now accessible from any connected laptop with the swipe of a credit card. Though admittedly, there is more to be done, the global blockchain backbone exists today and is available to anyone that wants to use or develop upon it.
This year we spent time researching and talking to experts in Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the US. The result is this new report Oil & Gas: Mitigate Future Disruptions with an Intelligent Supply Chain. The report is free to access, and we hope you take the time to read it and provide us any feedback you may have.
Oracle, SAP & IBM all have impressive Blockchain credentials; within those organizations, there are people with vision and ambition. But we need that excitement to be reflected if not driven at a higher level within society. Change is on the horizon like it or not; the question is whether we will lead the change or if we are going to get dragged along unwillingly.
All established organizations must deal with their legacy IT, with decades of hodge-podge implementations, custom development, and little appreciation for the bigger picture. But the good news is that broken processes that became painfully obvious this year will put business transformation in play for the better. Using RPA systems to hit the organization’s head against figurative brick walls are but a symptom of the work that is ahead of us.
Whenever we discuss trends, the conversations inevitably turn to the future of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) in process automation and robotic process automation (RPA). Frankly, I’ve found that most vendors latch on to the idea but have very little substance behind their words in terms of strategy and product roadmaps.
The question that intrigues everyone is whether organizations will remain highly virtual when the pandemic recedes or whether hordes of workers will restart their commutes to corporate offices and headquarters.
Increasingly, my colleague, Alan Pelz-Sharpe, and I are finding substantial convergence and common ground in our coverage areas. (Alan covers blockchain, content, compliance, and AI/ML, and I cover digital process automation, RPA, process mining, and customer experience.) The COVID-19 pandemic is pushing this trend even harder as companies struggle to get their arms around documents, tasks, processes, commerce, and customers so they can deliver products and services more rapidly across ever-morphing supply chains.
Have you ever wondered where all the Lean, Six Sigma, continuous improvement, and operational excellence practitioners have gone? When the BPM (methodology + software) conversation turned toward digital process automation (software and very little process methodology) much of the continuous improvement conversation went away. Poof–it disappeared, to be replaced by a lot of technical talk.
COVID-19 has turned the world upside down, changing the lives of individuals and deeply impacting how businesses, governments, and even countries operate. The closest equivalent is how 9/11 changed the world. But the permanency of changes from this pandemic could be even more pervasive than those caused by 9/11.
