Home Innovatie & Strategie Efficiency gains for innovation’s sake

Efficiency gains for innovation’s sake

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‘Time is money’ is an old saying that still holds true. In the difficult economic times that we are living since the start of the financial crisis in 2007, companies and government institutions alike are looking for ways to rev up their operations, save time and cut costs. Information technology is helping enterprises turn this ambition into reality. One thing must be clear however: improving efficiency should never be an aim in itself.

A number of technology advancements are coming to the aid of companies. Let’s focus on just two: artificial intelligence and big data. Artificial intelligence is delivering to the modern world what electricity brought to the industrial revolution: by adding intelligence to objects, you can let them perform in a far more productive way, effectively taking over a number of tasks from human workers. At the same time, this intelligence is augmented by the large volume of data that are now available. As the American author Kevin Kelly argues in his latest book ‘The Inevitable’, artificial intelligence has been around for a long time already, but only came to fruition recently, because these engines can now be fueled with enormous amounts of information that turn them into veritable learning machines.

Digital personal assistants are smarter

Let’s illustrate this with an example in the financial sector. Thanks to the artificial intelligence, it is becoming possible to replace a large portion of work that private bankers are doing, by automated personal financial assistants that help people in making choices for investments, savings or retirement plans. These personal assistants have a wealth of knowledge they can draw from and work very much like the recommendations that we know from webshops and travel sites.

At the basis of these efficiency improvements, is information technology. The IT department itself is a great example of how time can be saved. For one thing, converged infrastructure – a concept introduced just a couple of years ago – brings storage, networking, compute and virtualization in one preconfigured and pre-tested package. IT pro’s no longer need to put the puzzle together themselves: converged infrastructure allows them to quickly modernize the datacenter, and have new applications up and running in days rather than months.

‘Lean’ is no longer a differentiator

Is improved efficiency going to save companies in the rat race that is going on? Not at all: being lean is no longer a differentiation. Enterprises will win the war for the customer by offering services that are more innovative or offer a better customer experience. Cost reduction and operational efficiencies are offering organizations extra breathing space to make way for innovation. Smartly investing these saved resources in disruptive products and services is the way to go for enterprises that want to lead tomorrow and in the years to come.

Jacques Boschung, SVP of EMEA Global Alliances and Telco at Dell EMC

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