The Buzz 1: Data governance the organizational framework…to understand where your data originated, how it was handled, and the goals your AI platform and machine learning models set out to achieve.” [https://www.datarobot.com/wiki/data-governance/] The Buzz 2: “Companies have tons and tons of data, but [success] isn’t about data collection, it’s about data management and insight.” [Prashanth Southekal at the Data for Business Performance Institute] The Buzz 3: “You can have all of the fancy tools, but if [your] data quality is not good, you're nowhere.” [Veda Bawo at Raymond James] Big data and artificial intelligence (AI) are accepted as key drivers for the digital transformation of organizations and today’s societies. To succeed with data-driven innovation, companies around the world need to develop an agile mindset and experiment with new technologies. However, with key concerns about data access and data quality in analytics and AI initiatives, applying data governance is often perceived as rigid and non-value adding. Is data governance an inhibitor suffocating technical innovation or a mandate that facilitates the success and further adoption of AI and machine learning (ML)? We’ll ask Christine Legner, Maria Villar and Wolfgang Epting for their take on AI and Data Governance – Friends or Foes?

The Buzz 1: “We have a single mission: to protect and hand on the planet to the next generation.” (Francois Hollande) The Buzz 2: “It’s a collective endeavor, it’s collective accountability and it may not be too late.” (Christine Lagarde) The Buzz 3: “It angers me when sustainability gets used as a buzz word. For 90 percent of the world, sustainability is a matter of survival.” (Cameron Sinclair) The Buzz 4: “The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.” (Robert Swan) Sustainability – “the new frontier of digital transformation” – is dominating business conversations from the C-suite to the front lines of customer service. The top challenges they’re talking about? De-carbonizing and eliminating waste. Driving meaningful social responsibility across supply chains. Moving to cloud platforms to integrate and extend applications across business networks and optimize growth and innovation. Enabling visibility of fragmented data for compliance, including ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) reporting, holistic steering, and supply chain transparency. The bottom line? Leaders and stakeholders want to understand what their businesses are doing—and what more they can do—to improve the health of the planet. Data-driven insights are essential for building that understanding to drive action and measure impact. We’ll ask SAP’s Frank Omare, Jennifer Beason and Japen Hollist for their take on Creating The Sustainable Enterprise In 2022 and Beyond.

The Buzz: “Why doesn’t a company know that a target customer has connections to an existing customer? Why doesn’t it automatically see that a new customer may be involved with a company that engaged in fraudulent activities? There are so many good reasons to know business relationships – and integrate this knowledge into processes in a standardized way…countless pieces of information are publicly available, but not intelligently linked and easily retrievable.” (www.palturai.com) The ecosystem of businesses and people that surrounds your organization is full of hidden potential as as well as harm. The ability to successfully navigate in this ever-more-complex environment requires a revolution in data-driven insights. You need now – more than ever – to transform data with contextual insights into applicable knowledge that uncovers hidden opportunity as well as risk. Why? Knowledge gained from business network insights drives an evolution in customer acquisition and retention by enabling high-value, relevant customer interactions. And understanding the dynamics of an interconnected business ecosystem expands capabilities in risk mitigation. Good news! Innovative knowledge graph solutions – powering today’s AI – deliver the contextual understanding your business needs to be competitive in tomorrow’s connected world. We’ll ask Bernhard Ritz and Noel Billingsley at Palturai, and Falk Rieker at SAP for their insights on thriving in today’s challenging global marketplace on Business Network Insights: Tomorrow’s Competitive Differentiator – Part 2.

The Buzz: On August 20, 2014, Maamar Ferkoun (AP IBM–Cloud Computing & Cognitive Technologies) wrote, “The flexibility and scalability of the cloud acts as an ideal complement to business intelligence activities. The ‘democratization’ of the cloud is now allowing organizations that have used business intelligence with on-premises applications and on a limited scale to reach a whole new level—all through the use of storage, networking and tools that can sift through big data…” (www.ibm.com) Indeed, in the last few years, we have seen a huge adoption of cloud native applications for both edge applications and line-of-business functions, yielding new insights, business agility and lower IT costs. In addition to migrating their ERP landscapes to the cloud to achieve those benefits, companies are adopting the latest best practices to eliminate in-house customization and to bring intelligence at scale into the enterprise. Done right, this can have immense impact on the speed, agility and intelligence that companies like yours can tap into, to win market share and optimize your ecosystem of suppliers and partners. We’ll ask Allan Coulter at IBM and Christian Thisgaard at SAP for their insights on the opportunities to exploit, as well as the pitfalls to avoid, in this business transformation. Tune in for The Second Cloud Wave Is Emerging: Delivering Enterprise-Scale Intelligence.

The Buzz: “Data! data! data …I can't make bricks without clay” (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, #12). Intelligent Enterprises know how to use their data assets to achieve desired outcomes faster and with less risk. How? Especially in times of uncertainty like the COVID-19 pandemic, intelligent enterprises anticipate and pro-actively respond in real time to put their employees and customers first. And they create personalized, unique digital experiences from disparate data sources while leveraging AI, chatbots and voice technologies. Most importantly, they build digital ecosystems leveraging orchestrated data to create new business models and revenue streams to monetize data-driven capabilities and apply core business competencies in innovative ways. We’ll ask Mike Price at Capgemini, Ritesh Menon at Incture and Scott Harrison at SAP for their expert insights on how your organization can get on board. Join us for The Intelligent Enterprise: Data Assets and Your Digital Ecosystem.

The Buzz 1: “Simply put, a data ecosystem is a platform that combines data from numerous providers and builds value through the usage of processed data.” (mckinsey.com) The Buzz 2: “Data ecosystems provide companies with data that they rely on to understand their customers and to make better pricing, operations, and marketing decisions.” (mixpanel.com/blog) How can today’s business organizations solve important societal problems and offer participants and consumers more benefits? The answer to this big challenge: data ecosystems. Data ecosystems offer a new, powerful way to achieve this and lay the foundation for real innovation. With the right approach, data ecosystems can be built up within a short period of time and offer long-term opportunities for expansion and value creation. But building and leveraging the value of data ecosystems can be a challenge for some companies. Leaders may be hesitant due to potential risks from sharing sensitive data with competitors and potential hackers. We’ll ask Wolfgang Epting, Data Enthusiast and SAP Solution Advisor Chief Expert, Prof. Dr. Christine Legner, Academic Director Competence Center Corporate Data Quality (CC CDQ), and Maria Villar, SAP Enterprise Data Management and Governance Innovator, for their take on Winning with Data Ecosystems: Real Innovation for Value Creation.

The Buzz: “What drives IT executives to initiate cloud migration? Deloitte’s survey of more than 500 IT leaders and executives reveals that security and data protection is the top driver…increasingly relying on the expertise of third-party cloud-based security and infrastructure providers to protect their data…The No. 2 driver for cloud migration, data modernization, primarily involves moving data from legacy to modern databases.” [www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/technology/why-organizations-are-moving-to-the-cloud.html] Let’s look closely at this trend. Moving to the cloud is more than just a technology replacement; it is also a mindset change. The key to cloud adoption is leveraging cloud technologies in the right way, taking a center of excellence “COE” or “app factory” approach with a fail-forward, continuous iteration and improvement mindset. This is happening in many companies, as millennials demand increased automation and digitalization of key business processes. Rapid application development tools plus the empowerment of business user “citizen developers” – less reliant on central IT, with more development within lines of business – are reducing effort and shortening timelines. How can your organization adopt cloud efficiently and productively? We’ll ask Madhu Angara at Deloitte, and Vipin Varappurath and Chris Aron at SAP, for their take on Heads Up: Cloud Adoption Strategy Insider Tips – Part 2.

The buzz: “It’s imperative that you find the right balance between automation and human intelligence within your business. Automation is shy; it’s great for boring, repetitive tasks behind the scenes, but not so much when it comes to the frontlines.” (tigersheet.com/blog/best-automation-quotes-and-what-can-be-learnt-from-them/) Nobody wants a job doing the same repetitive tasks all day, every day. Instead, they want to spend their time making good decisions to better serve customers. Similarly, business organizations want to make optimal use of their trained people to provide the best levels of service – with a workforce increasingly working remotely, reflecting workplace flexibility accelerated by the COVID pandemic. Can your company eliminate the boredom of repetitive daily tasks? Can you better apply workforce skills to deliver consistently great service to customers and partners? Can you achieve these goals in a flexible workplace? Yes to all, when you have Intelligent Automation (IA), also called cognitive automation. IA is the use of automation technologies – artificial intelligence (AI), business process management (BPM), and robotic process automation (RPA) – to streamline and scale decision-making across organizations. We’ll ask Chet Harter, Sukshitha R, and Keith Grayson for their take on Excel At Your Job, All Day, Every Day: Intelligent Automation.

The buzz: Big Think (https://bigthink.com/words-of-wisdom/nikola-tesla-2) discovered a visionary quote by Nikola Tesla [1856–1943] in a 1926 interview with Collier’s magazine where he described the modern-day smartphone: “When wireless is perfectly applied, the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.” Fast forward to today: The Internet of Things, aka ‘IoT’, has crossed over into mainstream commercial and business use. In honor of Tesla, we googled “IoT Trends 2021” and got ~75,700,000 results in 0.49 seconds. What would Tesla say about how IoT now impacts data analytics, computing at the edge, remote work, remote health care, robotics, smart homes, life in cities, automation, smart retail, cybersecurity, industrial equipment monitoring, and customer experience? We’ll ask Don DeLoach at Rocket Wagon Venture Studios, Tom Raftery at SAP, Dave Friedman at Ayla Networks, Rob Tiffany at Ericsson, and Ron Rock at Microshare, Inc. to unpack IoT in the News: Ripped from the Headlines – Part 2.

The buzz: What drives IT executives to initiate cloud migration? Deloitte’s survey of more than 500 IT leaders and executives reveals that security and data protection is the top driver. With 58 percent of respondents ranking it No. 1 or 2, security is top-of-mind for everyone, from C-suite IT executives and senior leaders to IT managers and developers.…The No. 2 driver for cloud migration, data modernization, primarily involves moving data from legacy to modern databases.” [https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/technology/why-organizations-are-moving-to-the-cloud.html] Let’s look at this trend more closely. Moving to the cloud is more than just a technology replacement; it is also a mindset change. The key to cloud adoption is leveraging cloud technologies in the right way, taking a center of excellence “COE” or “app factory” approach with a fail-forward, continuous iteration and improvement mindset. This is already happening in many companies, as millennials in the workforce are demanding increased automation and digitalization of key business processes. And rapid application development tools plus the empowerment of business user “citizen developers” – less reliant on central IT, with more development within lines of business – are reducing effort and shortening timelines. How can your organization adopt cloud efficiently and productively? We’ll ask Sarah Lottman at Deloitte, and Chris Aron and Vipin Varappurath at SAP, for their take on Heads Up: Cloud Adoption Strategy Insider Tips.

The buzz: Big Think (https://bigthink.com/words-of-wisdom/nikola-tesla-2) discovered a visionary quote by Nikola Tesla in a 1926 interview with Collier’s magazine where he described the modern-day smartphone: “When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.” Let’s bring his vision full circle to the present day. The Internet of Things, aka IoT, has crossed over into mainstream commercial and business use. In honor of Tesla and the title of this long-running SAP Game-Changers Radio series, we googled “IoT Trends 2021” and got ~75,700,000 results in 0.49 seconds. What would Tesla say about how IoT now impacts data analytics, computing at the edge, remote work, remote health care, robotics, smart homes, life in cities, automation, smart retail, cybersecurity, industrial equipment monitoring, and customer experience? We’ll ask Don Deloach at Rocket Wagon Venture Studios, Tom Raftery at SAP, Rob Tiffany at Ericsson, and Anu Shah at SAP to unpack the IoT news they find most compelling on our special episode, IoT Trends 2021: Ripped from the Headlines.

The buzz: “CEOs are looking ahead to their post-Covid challenges. Nowhere is this challenge more daunting than figuring out if the global pandemic and its far-reaching impacts have created a temporary shock to their markets or a permanent shift in them.” (Bob Zukis, Contributor, www.forbes.com/sites/bobzukis/2021/02/15/shock-or-shift-the-post-pandemic-strategic-challenge-for-boards-and-ceos/?sh=48623f2e1870) As the world gradually emerges from the global pandemic, we expect 2020’s business and digital transformation trends to accelerate in the second half of 2021. While these complex and disruptive business shifts differ by industry, line of business, and region, all acknowledge that adapting to the new reality requires change across all functions. As business and technology experts last year planned for re-opening and transformation acceleration, strong central themes emerged. The pandemic’s impact on the business demand and supply equation. How a business’s ecosystem will adjust and how technology will help accelerate it. The changing workforce – contract, remote, part-time, gig – coming back virtually or physically with new expectations. Keeping workers motivated and loyal while attracting the best talent for new business demands. We’ll ask SAP’s Ryad Semichi and Craig Stasila about this perfect storm that will require us to adapt to multi-dimensional shifts in industry, technology, and work.

The buzz: “Many organisations are looking to make significant investments in data assets, but without the appropriate strategy, they run the risk of putting the cart before the horse and making poor and regressive investment decisions.” (pwc.com) Becoming a data driven intelligent enterprise helps to build resilience and succeed in times of crisis and beyond. The intelligent use and smart discovery of data determine whether an organization and specific roles – CDO, Head of Data and Analytics, Chief Information Security Officer, Head of IT, Head of Architecture – can survive in the market. Companies lacking an outcome-driven data strategy will fail to generate value from data. But with Big Data proliferating, AI/ML is introducing new ways of creating business value that will fundamentally impact and change the data value chain. We’ll ask SAP’s Wolfgang Epting at SAP, PWC’s Wolfgang Sock and SAP’s Maria Villar for their take on Generating Value from Data: From Pious Wish to Reality.

The buzz: “From a business standpoint, human-centered AI solutions leverage human science and qualitatively thick data to understand the deeper needs, aspirations and drivers that underlie customer behaviors…to tap into user behavior and subconscious patterns to construct products and services that follow more satisfying, informed, enriching…user experiences.” cognizant.com We’re living and working in the era of game-changing technologies including IoT, AI, ML, and Predictive Analytics. Beyond disrupting business models and creating new business processes, these technologies have a huge impact on us, the people who are part of the processes. But what good are these technologies if they don’t work well for us humans? Unless innovators take a user-centric approach, they run the risk of creating a set of technical prototypes without delivering real business value. We’ll ask Naeem Zafar at Telesense and Bert Laws and Adam Mardini at SAP for their take on AI Is For Humans – Part 3.

The buzz: “AI is developing at whirlwind rates. While nobody can say for certain how it will impact our work and personal lives, we can make a good few educated guesses…with COVID-19 limiting human interaction in the built environment, advancements in AI and automation are on course to accelerate.” (axenter.com/ai-future-work-171663.html) AI and related disruptive technologies are impacting how we work more today than in recent years – with collaboration technologies (Slack), video meetings (Zoom), and intentions/task assigning (Cortana). The bottom line: AI is the engine transforming the workforce landscape – spawning new tech jobs, eliminating repetitive busywork assignments, automating hazardous jobs, reducing human error, evaluating job applicants, and even rating sales leads via sentiment analysis. We’ll ask Naeem Zafar at Telesense, Sena Zorlu at Kubera Venture Capital and Peter Woo at Course Hero for their take on Get To Work! How AI Is Transforming the Labor Market.

The buzz: “Why do only 13% of data science projects, or just one out of every 10, actually make it into production?…Data scientists have been around since the 1950s — individuals sitting in a basement working behind a terminal. But now that it’s a team sport…it’s essential that every person on the team is able to collaborate with everyone else: the data engineers, the data stewards… BI specialists, all the way up to DevOps and engineering.” (venturebeat.com) Data science has become an integral part of 21st century organizations. Yet, setting up and successfully running a data science practice has not been fully achieved by most businesses. The majority of data science projects fail. And even many of the successes are not considered “accurate” enough to be utilized. How can this failure rate be turned around? We’ll ask Reliance Jio’s Naman Bhayani, and SAP’s Ankit Garg, Varun Thamba and Luigi Di Rito for their take on “Inconceivable? Data Scientists and IT on the Same Page!”

The buzz: “The term Experience Economy was first used in a 1998 article by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, describing the economy after the agrarian economy, industrial economy, and most recent service economy. Businesses must orchestrate memorable events for customers. That memory becomes the product: the “experience”. en.wikipedia.org Welcome to the Experience Economy, where experience-based services drive economic growth in transportation, hospitality, consumer products, entertainment and other industries. Today, how your business manages and uses customer data is becoming as important as your products and services. How to do it right? A cloud-first approach can help accelerate cycle times, focus on strategic competencies, improve scalability and innovation, and allow customers to pay only for services they use. Are you on board yet? We’ll ask Ethan Jewett at Mindset Consulting LLC, and Craig Stasila and Chris Pauxtis at SAP for their take on Journey to the Cloud: Part 2.

The buzz: “APIs are the unsung heroes of the connected world.” (businessinsider.com) Cloud migration continues to accelerate, with AWS’s 1M business customers in 2015 growing to 2.6M+ today, and Google and Microsoft not far behind in market share. The COVID-19 economic crisis could accelerate this trend, as companies that moved or are moving operations and infrastructure to the cloud are running efficiently even when employees can’t physically access the office or the servers housing their data. Reality check: Every enterprise should harness cloud infrastructure and APIs to deliver new and innovative experiences, from streamlining employee onboarding to delivering a digital app for partners to jointly access key data. Serving their ecosystems in new ways internally and externally will provide a solid chance to endure. We’ll ask Mark Geene at Cloud Elements, and Chris Aron and Dr. Harsh Jegadeesan at SAP for their take on Full-Enterprise Integration Lynchpin: Open Connectors.

The buzz: Big data is a familiar term. Data exhaust is less widely known, tends to be raw, unstructured, and even bigger. In some ways it's an evil twin brother. (computerworld.com) While humans began encountering large volumes of data from 1932, NASA coined the phrase “Big Data” in 1997. Today's “dataquake” upon us is too big to ignore. We and everything around us are “data exhausts”, with 10B+ devices interconnected. The number of connections per second will probably be unmeasurable with 5G. Decades of data, which is now training machine learning, plus new data – from health devices, trees, livestock, gas pumps, retail shelves, smart clothing, manufacturing devices, bridges, smart farms – will overhaul the data processing infrastructure. Petabytes of data vs. terabytes of data will become the norm. We’ll ask Shyam V Nath at Oracle, Aaron Werman at Techwave and Gerard Das at SAP for their insights on Big Data Journey: Dataquake, Human Data Exhausts, and Now Machine Learning?

The buzz: “The graph paradigm goes well beyond databases and application development; it’s a reimagining of what’s possible around the idea of connections.” (neo4j.com) A major inhibitor in business is a fundamental lack of trust and transparency with the customers, suppliers and other stakeholders within and outside your ecosystem. Understanding “hidden” connections can reveal threats and opportunities, as well as enhance your business relationships to develop trust, increase efficiencies and minimize risks. Graph Intelligence solutions aka business graph technology provide the ability to map and visualize connections within data. Beyond primary applications for banking, insurance and government agencies, the technology can be used for enterprise risk management, procurement, sales solutions and data integrity. We’ll ask Noel Billingsley and Bernhard Ritz at Palturai and Dirk Haeussermann at SAP for insights on Mapping Your Business Networks: Hidden Connections Enable Trust.