Innovation and technology
For a long time now, technology has been front-page (or first-screen) news. Business, institutions and society at large have become increasingly tech-dependent, and the technology sector is a main engine of more than one national economy. Technology and innovation are no longer just "operational" considerations; they’re strategic necessities, indispensable to survival and growth. Additionally, you can explore all of PwC's publications covering current business issues and industry trends.
CIO leadership in post-transaction relationships: IT’s role in customer engagement
By evolving IT to focus on the end customer, CIOs have the opportunity to be key partners in helping their businesses break new ground.
The Thing Stack: Technologies that guide customers to their goals
Emerging technologies continue to bring down the cost and complexity of adding networked sensors to products and services, accelerating their integration and driving new customer value....
Internet of Things: Evolving transactions into relationships
This issue of the Technology Forecast examines the impact of Internet of Things trends on businesses and the IT organization. It analyzes how businesses now have the ability to continue the relationship with customers after the sales transaction by helping them achieve the goals for which they buy the products.
Using technology to help customers achieve their goals
Businesses that embed capabilities to understand usage in their products in service of customers’ goals stand to reap unparalleled value.
Cities of Opportunity: Analysis and forecast of global urban economic centers: PwC
Download the 2012 edition of PwC’s Cities of Opportunity. This year’s report, our fifth, analyses in depth the trajectory of 27 capitals of finance, commerce, manufacturing and/or culture across 60 variables -- and offers insight into what factors and conditions make cities function best, plus customized, interactive tools for exploring the data.
APEC 2012 CEO Summit survey report: Addressing challenges. Expanding possibilities.
PwC's report, building on a survey of more than 370 business leaders and interviews from across the region, confirms the necessity of regional cooperation for our companies' futures.
APEC 2012 CEO Summit: Improving supply chain integration to make them more reliable
One of the challenges for the continued economic growth of the APEC territories, are integrated supply chains that are reliable. Removing key trade bottle necks will facilitate faster, less expensive, and more secure intra-APEC trade.
APEC 2012 CEO Summit: APEC's path to green growth
A global market for green goods and services offers benefits of prosperity and job creation. PwC's report offers CEO insights on this and other topics.
Closing the loop on sustainability information
We’ve identified four key emerging information technology areas that directly affect enterprise sustainability. These areas span the lifecycle of information—from where it is created to where it is reported.
How does one tax the cloud?
From a tax perspective, client service professionals must stay informed about potential changes in state tax policies regarding the tax treatment of the various cloud computing platforms.
Raising your digital IQ: PwC's 4th Annual Digital IQ Survey
The 4th Annual Digital IQ Survey includes respondents from nearly 500 US companies about the current state of their technology-related activities and plans for the future.
Medical innovation
The way we assess value in medical technology is changing radically. Payers are refusing to pay for incremental innovations that do not significantly improve health or reduce cost.
Protecting your brand in the cloud: Transparency and trust through enhanced reporting
Cloud computing is making deep inroads into the marketplace, but organizations are concerned about risks regarding security, privacy, availability, data protection and retention. Any one of these could damage a company’s business and its brand. How can the risks impact companies’ brands and how can third-party assurance provide a solution?
WSJ CEO Council: New approaches to global health
Improving health conditions and offering greater access to care around the world will require a new set of tools, including public-private partnerships, emerging technologies and evolving regulation.
WSJ CEO Council: Encouraging and protecting business innovation
From the education of global talent pools, to national immigration policies, regulation and international intellectual property protections, the public policy issues on the new innovation landscape are abundant and complex.
Boardroom agenda
In this short report, PwC discusses new governance regulations, new risks, and issues of executive compensation and succession planning.
Sustainability: Moving from compliance to leadership
Sustainability is moving from “something that’s nice to have” to one of the most important strategic initiatives enterprises will undertake in the coming decade—a practice deeply embedded in the organization.
The CIO’s next leadership opportunity: Sustainability
CIOs can demonstrate natural leadership with sustainability—by surfacing information that can educate, motivate, and catalyze decision-making, and by using metrics and other IT tools to embed sustainability practices throughout the organization.
The CIO’s role in social enterprise strategy
Social technology offers considerable promise, but CIOs and business units are struggling to figure out how to use it effectively. A key reason is that most social media outside the enterprise is just pure communication. Making the same use of these tools inside the enterprise only imposes more channels on already overwhelmed staff. What alternatives exist to help alleviate communications overload?
Enterprise success with emerging social technology
Mention social technology or social networking, and most people think of consumer-driven applications such as Twitter or Facebook. But some organizations realize that Facebook, Twitter, and their secured equivalents inside the enterprise are just a catalyst for deeper changes that must be made to collaboration tools and methods. So what are the changes companies need to make to improve things?
The anytime, anywhere business opportunity
No longer viewed as a strictly consumer phenomenon, smart devices enabled by wireless data networks are getting down to business. Companies operating within all kinds of value chains are embracing them to improve processes, enhance collaboration, and reduce costs. But those benefits are only the beginning. Where do the real payoffs come from for companies using them?
Making over healthcare
While there’s still a great deal of uncertainty around the specifics of healthcare reform, one thing’s clear: The healthcare industry in the US will never be the same. And 2011 is shaping up to be a makeover year for healthcare providers, health insurers, pharmaceutical and life sciences companies, and employers. But what are the most significant issues in play? A recent report identifies six.
The technology powering business mobility
Operating systems, devices, wireless networks, and other IT components all comprise business mobility. But the real power lies in the convergence of the technologies and in how each organization applies them to redefine the way it works. While the chief information officer will lead the charge here, it's important that the rest of the leadership team understand the choices and issues that pertain to the following technology building blocks.
Striking the innovation balance
History is littered with companies that have failed to innovate, but innovation is now climbing to the top of the CEO agenda as a primary strategy for achieving profitable growth in a post-crisis economy. Is your company innovating to its full potential -- and what are the tensions that most affect a company’s ability to innovate successfully?
Measuring innovation
What is innovation? And how do you measure and benchmark it in your organization, be it private, public or academic?
Rebooting Your IT Strategy: Using IT to Accelerate Your Business
A review of IT organizations in financial services and discussions with bank CIOs reveal that firms benefit when their IT organizations innovate and are aligned with their business groups.
Building a business case for your global sourcing strategy. Benefits of a data driven approach.
What does a proper business case look like and what should you be doing to avoid the pitfalls? Where do you begin, and why is a comprehensive, fact-based evaluation of the organization and rigorous due diligence on the global sourcing alternatives available so important? Here, we guide you through the answers to these questions.
How business innovation happens: Technology forecast: PwC
Is radical innovation conceived in a single, stunning act of invention and delivered as an entirely new offering? No. Innovation is a process that taps into genius, but it need not be the accidental province of the madly brilliant. Here we look at how organizations can develop, manage, and continually improve an end-to-end process, supported by technology, in which innovations are more likely to be discovered, better assessed, and better converted into profits—what PwC calls the idea-to-cash process.
The strategic CIO’s new role in innovation
Innovation is the next frontier for all CIOs, and now is the time for the CIO to prepare and take action. What is your CIO doing to get in the game?
Turning handheld power into enterprise clout
The smartphones, tablets, and other handheld devices your employees already own are productivity drivers. Here's how you can seize the opportunity.
How to exert leadership on enterprise mobility
PwC outlines some best practices for a sound enterprise mobility strategy.
Mobile technology’s journey from peril to promise
Once viewed as an oddity to be kept at arm’s length, mobile devices are now seen as a potentially powerful platform for enterprise value. PwC sorts out the drivers, and the ramifications, of this sea change.
Cloud computing gets strategic: Reducing technology costs is just the starting point
Most organizations today are no longer deciding whether they’ll use cloud computing - rather, they're deciding how they'll use it. But will they use software-as-a-service to provide CRM for their sales team instead of managing the application in-house? Should they take advantage of inexpensive, virtualized storage to meet mushrooming data needs? Will a private cloud enable them to better leverage technology investments among different business units? These are now the questions being asked and here, we take a look at the answers.
Customizing healthcare: How a new approach to diagnosis, care, and cure could transform employer benefits in a postreform world
Healthcare reform in the US will change funding, insurance coverage, and regulation will affect virtually everyone—including large employers, the majority of which are self-insured. What are proactive companies doing already to consider how reform will change plan eligibility, plan design, underwriting rules, tax deductions, and more and how are they reevaluating their benefits strategies accordingly?
Selling the smart grid
For the first time, the utilities industry is preparing to deal with a challenge it has not encountered before: customer relations beyond billings and outages. As cities across the United States gear up to introduce the smart grid, utilities are hoping to find ways of convincing customers that the new technology is beneficial. What must utilities companies do to sell the idea successfully?
Framework for SOA services
SOA is now a mainstream strategy for improving IT performance, yet the architecture often does not live up to expectations. The reason? Many implementations are not built on a proven framework for reusable services. To realize maximum gains from SOA, organizations must take extraordinary care to craft a Centralized Services Framework that fuses business knowledge with technical expertise.
The cloud you don’t know: An engine for new business growth
Cloud computing can unlock latent value in an organization's key internal capabilities and processes by enabling the extensible enterprise. CEOs who think of cloud computing as strictly a better solution to internal IT will miss a potentially huge opportunity. Is your company on track to embrace the potential opportunities cloud computing offers?
Making the extensible enterprise a reality
When it comes to the extensible-enterprise strategy, CEOs will need to consider what cloud computing can do for business growth, and CFOs will need to recognize the ramifications for governance and risk. For their part, The CIO should help identify new cloud-based business opportunities and deliver the network of business platforms to support them.
How CFOs should audit the cloud balance sheet
Initially viewed simply as a way to create more agile, efficient IT organizations, cloud computing is fast becoming the means for a new type of growth based on an opportunity that PwC calls the extensible enterprise. How can CFOs use cloud computing to help the enterprise grow, while dealing with the new challenges it presents around governance, risk, and compliance?
The value-creating CIO*
CIOs are no longer behind the scenes at their organizations. Now they’re more often expected to create value in client-facing, revenue-oriented areas where employees need the help of technology to explore and capitalize potential new opportunities and demands. Finding these opportunities means getting involved where the business action is: the business itself. So how do CIOs do this successfully?
The situational CIO: IT problem solver, cost cutter, strategist
During the recession, CIOs and other executives had to focus on tactical issues like efficiencies and cost cutting, rather than on developing new business strategies. Here, PwC explains how that may change and outlines ways the CIO can become more strategic while handling other responsibilities – an idea we call the “situational CIO”.
The future of the CIO: Business strategy and technology innovation
Every Chief Information Officer (CIO) knows that the job has become more complex. The changes of the past 20 years will seem mild compared with those of the next five. CIOs will face unprecedented pressures, and our research shows that many executives expect CIOs to point the way for agile business in today's volatile economy. So how can your CIO help define and execute forward-looking business strategies for your company? Here, we offer some ideas.
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