Coffee Break With Game-changers, Presented By Sap

Corporate banking. If your treasury department is in a stranglehold with your bank, you’re not alone. Richard Walker: “For commercial banks, the imperative is on improving customer experience and becoming easier to do business with through ease of integration, data and process transparency...” Olli Kähkönen: “When you walk through a storm, hold your chin up high...At the end of the storm is a golden sky... (Lyrics: You’ll Never Walk Alone) Robert Grimes: “With everything from supermarket chains (e.g. Tesco, Sainsbury, Walmart) to technology giants (e.g. Google, Paypal/eBay) entering the financial services sector, banks have a new challenge to not only compete with their own kind but also with completely new players.” Tom McAllister: “Demand for new revenue sources driven by capital needs, and mitigation of short- to mid-term geographic risk, is causing many banks to look beyond their borders for other sources of capital.” Join us for Corporate Banking: Show Me the Money.

UI (user interface) is king. Why? If software UI is not beautiful, easy, intuitive – and fun – even the most brilliant engineers and designers will fail to please their intended business or consumer end-user audience. The experts speak. Bill Newman: “Over-burdened knowledge workers are tasked with doing more with less. With the economy picking up, particularly in the US market, these ‘technocrats’ demand access to necessary, complex information in easy to use, engaging means.” Anders Raft: “The art of teaching kids to gamble is that there is no teaching needed. Ella Morgulis: “Easy, fun, user-friendly WORK experience at work is no longer an oxymoron; it is a requirement today. The ‘iron curtain’ between work and consumer experience have fallen.” Mariano Kristensen: “As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product.” - Jef Raskin (1943-2005), human-computer interface expert at Apple, 1970s Join us for more insights on All About the UI: Technology without the gory details.

Charge! If you’re a greenie eying an EV (electric vehicle) as your next car, there’s a lot to consider: battery pack size, driving range of plug-in hybrids like C-Max Energi or Volt vs. all-electric Leaf, power grid impacts, ongoing costs and more. The experts speak: Christine Hertzog: “A consumer-centric EV market maturity model could help accelerate EV adoption. Alaa Owaineh: “The world is increasingly urban, and cities are an important part of any strategy to build smarter, more sustainable energy systems.” Sam Jaffe: “Teach your mouth to say 'I don't know' and then progress will be made.--Maimonides Maurizio Cattaneo: “In the more densely populated areas of the world, electric vehicles will soon make up 10-15% of the vehicles on the road. They may not sound like many, but if all would charge at the same time, today’s electricity grid would not be able to cope and blackouts would be almost inevitable.” Join us for more insights on Charge! Driving Global Electro-mobility.

Selling. Today’s savvy salesperson must combine many skills: a gatherer-analyst of customer and competitor data; social business guru; collaboration champion; and much more. Our experts speak. Barry Trailer: “There is work to do in every sale. Imagine holding your hands two feet apart. The more work you do ‘selling’ – identifying key buying influences, needs and personal wins, establishing and elevating relationships, etc. – the less ‘negotiating’ you need to do. So, if you do 18” of selling, you have 6” of negotiating ahead…4” of selling, 20” of negotiating. Simply stated, there are no shortcuts.” Anneke Seley: “The business of sales is changing; whether your business changes with it will determine your long-term success.” Ross Wainwright: “The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather in a lack of will.” (Vince Lombardi) Join us for more insights on Selling: Art or Science, Negotiation or Persuasion?

What’s in a name? Plenty, for today’s CIO. Why? The role is changing so much, so often that it’s hard to know what the “I” means at any time. The experts speak. Steve Romero: “Calls for the ‘new CIO’ are not new at all. CIO Magazine’s State of the CIO ‘07 survey resulted in the identification of four distinct CIO archetypes: Business Leader, Innovation Agent, Operational Expert, Turnaround Artist. In 2011, its 4 Personas of the Next Generation CIO were Chief Infrastructure Officer…Integration Officer…Intelligence Officer…Innovation Officer.” Nigel Fenwick: Marketing is the biggest opportunity for IT since the Internet. Martin Heisig: “To go boldly where no one has gone before. This is what today’s IT leaders have to do. Consumerization of IT is the new innovation driver. I have to make my end users a core part of my IT design processes. I have to know what consumers want next because they will want it soon in the enterprise.” Join us for the Changing Role of the CIO: The I’s Have It.

Education. How do we equip our kids to succeed in a tech-driven world? Kim Jones/ Curriki: Textbooks are becoming as obsolete as the rotary dial phone Kim Saxe/Nueva School: “The Internet and technology (such as Skype) supports the teaching of more open-ended and complex projects than ever before.” Curtis Johnson/“Disrupting Class” author: “The role of teachers will see profound changes – all good… from a qualified source of knowledge dispensing information to largely passive students (in rows of desks) to planners, facilitators, and coaches in the learning process.” Neeru Khosla/CK-12 Foundation: “We no longer need textbooks.” John Mayerhofer/SAP: “Technology will enable schools and other institutions, essentially experience providers, to cost-effectively facilitate personalized student-centered learning for today's learners and an additional 3 billion new minds.” Join us for Future of Education: Teaching Kids to Think

Subsidiaries. Straight path to market expansion or potentially tangled ecosystem? The experts speak. Steve King/Emergent Research: “For the first time in modern history, the developing world, not the developed world, is the global engine driving economic growth. This, coupled with the rapidly increasing use of social technologies, is fundamentally changing the relationship between companies and their foreign subsidiaries. Erich Joachimsthaler/Vivaldi Partners: “As internet analyst Mary Meeker said in her State of the Internet address this year: ‘We are merely in spring training.’ This creates a new reality for companies of how to manage the global organization and how to achieve competitive advantage and profit from it.” Mike Morel/SAP: “Companies are squandering their investments in subsidiaries. They need to share more, implement governance, compliance, and regulation, and manage subsidiary independence.” Join us for Subsidiaries: Curing Chaos at the Family Dinner Table.

Today’s buzz term: “BI” – business intelligence. Oxymoron? Or game-changer that can make your company smarter, more agile, able to leap over tall competitors in a single bound? Continuing our Apr. 4 and May 9 discussions, we’ll revisit why even the best intelligence needs a strategy, and look at big data, analytics, cloud, single version of the truth and more. The experts say: Brian Sommer / Techventive: “Detectives have hypotheses and working theories they try to prove or disprove. Why shouldn't BI initiatives use the same rigor to uncover huge insights into business?” Josh Greenbaum / EAC: “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.” (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1999-03-01), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes) Colin Dover / SAP: “Responding to the seemingly simple business requests of providing a consolidated view of a global corporation is enough to send an IT department into a collective cold sweat.” Pour a cup and join us for How Smart Is BI without a Strategy? - Part 3

“Are you working hard or hardly working?” goes the old saying. Today, we’re seeing a massive shift in how people work due to the co-impact of big data, mobile, cloud, and social media. Are you feeling it yet? Our experts speak: Alan Lepofsky / Constellation RG: “New technologies such as in-memory database, mobile, and cloud are transforming the way people work.” Richard Edwards / Ovum: “Often using their own mobile devices and free-to-use cloud-based community collaboration solutions, employees are applying their consumer persona and experiences in the workplace and in the field; changing the way the job gets done and results are achieved.” Kijoon Lee / SAP: “Every now and then, we see a truly disruptive technology emerge. In-memory database is one of these. This technology will change the face of business and transform how millions of people work and live.” Join us for more insights on Changing How You Work: Big Data, Social, and Mobile Collide and Converge.

M2M. Rise of the machines. The promise of a world of connected devices, where machines of all types and sizes can autonomously communicate with each other. Don’t believe it’s a reality yet? Global M2M revenue is projected to soar from $121 million in 2010 to $948 billion by 2020, the year Ericsson predicts the number of connected devices will reach 50 billion. Our experts have a lot to say. Jason Sumner, EIU: “M2M is going to be big. We have heard this before but there are reasons to believe it’s different this time.” Joe Dignan, Ovum: “When is M2M not M2M? I would suggest a lot of the time. There are fully automated processes but a great many examples of what I am told is M2M needs a human 'guiding mind' somewhere in the interaction.” Fergus O’Reilly, SAP: “Customers no longer buy products, they buy experiences. This is the real driver for the move to ‘Everything-as-a-Service’.” Join us for their insights on M2M Rise of the Machines: Coming to a smart city near you.

Social communities and storytelling. The connection? Ask the experts.Rachel Happe, The Community Roundtable: “Social communities leverage an increasingly expensive asset - people - by allowing them to work out loud, connect with more people, establish trust, and find relevant information and solutions more quickly. Our job as community sponsors is to co-create value and be the storytellers of that value. It is no longer a story about us alone, but about that collaborative journey.” Sean O’Driscoll, Ant's Eye View, “Social engagement is a journey with defined stages leading to the fully engaged enterprise…Digital storytelling is a critical new competency.” Mark Yolton, SAP: “As SAP CMO Jonathan Becher likes to say, ‘Big glass buildings don’t buy software…people do.’ With the lines between B2B and B2C blurring, enterprise marketers must become better storytellers to articulate the impact of their solutions on real people.” Join us for more on Building a Social Community: Tell Me a Story!

Factory of the past vs. the future. Does Charlie Chaplin’s struggling Little Tramp in the 1936 film “Modern Times” represent today’s factory worker and the shop floor scenario? No, according to IDC’s Bob Parker. “Recent research conducted by IDC Manufacturing Insights shows that manufacturing employees care deeply about quality, and management truly appreciates their team's skills and dedication. The age of contentious labor/management relations is over in manufacturing. SAP’s Mike Lackey is optimistic, too. “What’s under the water? Manufacturing is active, growing and improving like a living entity.” The factory of the future? IDC’s Pier Manenti predicts, “Mobility will be integral to workforce engagement. The amount of network traffic on the factory floor will increase by an order of magnitude in the next five years. Persistently connected employees and assets are a fast-approaching reality. Join us for more insights on Factory of the Future: Ready, Set, Now – Part 2.

Right Time Experiences. Huge business potential for you, but mobile solutions require business insight, technical chops and strong design to get it right.

You’re a game-changer! You’ve created the new product or service of the millennium, but have no money to take it to market. Your best options: beg your FFF (family, friends, fools) circle, tap an angel for seed money, or convince a venture capitalist to invest millions. Our experts have a lot to say. Chris O’Connor / Taptera : “You've got to have a pretty face (user experience) to get attention; the old ‘desktop’ solution isn't very sexy with VCs.” Sanjay Parthawarathy / Investor: “When the VC’s ego is valued higher than the funding, it’s better to look elsewhere.” MR Rangaswami / Sand Hill Group: “In these frothy financial times, how many entrepreneurs want to use the strategy of a company that is ‘Built to Last’ versus ‘Built to Flip’?” Gaurav Tewari / SAP Ventures: “Picking the right investor is one of the most crucial decisions for an entrepreneur. If you thought getting married is a commitment, try raising money.” Join us for more on the Sweet and Sour of Investing – Part 2.

Digital marketing. Your increasingly digitally-smart customers expect more from your website than being able to buy something. They’re demanding a relevant, personalized browsing experience with new product discovery, research, price comparisons and feedback exchange. But if your company is just going through the motions of ecommerce, you’ll lose them fast. Our experts can help you get there. Glenn Conradt: “Companies need to start incorporating contextualized content into the e-commerce experience to leverage the Internet as a dynamic and profitable sales, marketing and service channel.” Scott Liewehr: “Big data is the Lady Gaga of digital marketing – all hype, no substance.” Jamie Anderson: “’eCommerce is DEAD! Long live distributed commerce.’ I love this. I read it from a blog on eConsultancy...Engaging and selling to today’s digitally savvy customer is a lot more challenging than merely having a website and being open for business.” Join us for The Future of Digital Marketing: Now!

Sales transformation. A catch phrase “for virtually every C-level executive in the race to find answers to questions about sales and earnings growth, positioning and differentiation; even survival,” says Bob Nicols, author of The Journey to Sale Transformation: Twenty-five Axioms for Becoming a Trusted Partner to your Customers. Bob and other experts have a lot to say about why and how your sales organization needs to change...now. Bob Nicols, AXIOM Sales Force Development: “Sales is the most broken of all business functions.” Kimberly Senior, AT&T: “Transformation, like a leopard’s spots changing, happens seldom and slowly. Transformation is a marathon, not a sprint. So, the key to success in driving any type of transformation is committed, focused, disciplined incremental improvement over time.” Nicholas Kontopoulos, SAP: “Sales force automation is dead :).” Join us for their insights on Sales Transformation: From approved vendor to trusted advisor.

M2M. Rise of the machines. The promise of a world of connected devices, where machines of all types and sizes can autonomously communicate with each other. Don’t believe it’s a reality yet? Global M2M revenue is projected to soar from $121 million in 2010 to $948 billion by 2020, the year Ericsson predicts the number of connected devices will reach 50 billion. Our experts have a lot to say. Jason Sumner, EIU: “M2M is going to be big. We have heard this before but there are reasons to believe it’s different this time.” Joe Dignan, Ovum: “When is M2M not M2M? I would suggest a lot of the time. There are fully automated processes but a great many examples of what I am told is M2M needs a human 'guiding mind' somewhere in the interaction.” Fergus O’Reilly, SAP: “Customers no longer buy products, they buy experiences. This is the real driver for the move to ‘Everything-as-a-Service’.” Join us for their insights on M2M Rise of the Machines: Coming to a smart city near you.

Utilities. How “smart” are they about the smart meter data they can now read and its value to the consumer? Our experts weigh in. Roque Marinho: “With the smart meter being part of operations...utilities have to cope with the fact that there is no turning back on the ‘quantum leap’ on the multitude of reads.” Stuart Ravens: “Smartness begins and ends with analyzing the vast volumes of data created in a smart grid deployment.” Christine Hertzog: “There’s not much research about how much consumers really understand about who might touch their energy consumption data (nor what it’s worth) when third parties are involved.” James McClelland: “A whole new area of service will be created, providing energy efficiency to the consumer. How far inside of the meter do you want outside companies to have automatic access to adjust your energy consumption? Depending on the type of customer you are, I think the answer will be, ‘It depends.’” Join us for Utilities: Shining the light on the smart grid.

Retailers: We know it’s tougher than ever to turn customers into loyal evangelists for your brand. The experts say: Christine B. Whittemore: “The winners in retail today are retailers who understand that the customer calls the shots. Few retailers can compete strictly on price...” Brian Kilcourse: “Retailers have a big opportunity to re-define the in-store experience by making it a part of the world that today’s consumers operate in.” Lisa Joy Rosner: “Where business intelligence provides the rearview mirror to what has happened, social intelligence is what's happening right now. C2B (customer to business) is the new world order.” Mark Johnson: “Why is it so hard to ‘listen’ to our customers, when we ‘heard’ what they said?” Jon Wurfl: “If word of mouth remains the most powerful marketing influence, do shoppers with large social networks, and maybe loudmouth friends, make better purchasing decisions?” Join us for more game-changing insights for you and your customers.

Open government. Transparency, participation, collaboration. Sounds good on paper, but is it a true game-changer yet? Our experts say: Dr. Natalie Helbig: “Opening government is a perfect storm, but we don’t know whether it will just be a lot of data or a sustained and meaningful change in the way we govern and are governed. Russ LeFevre: Technologies exist to enable open government. This ‘genie’ is out of the bottle. What needs to change is policy, culture and the will of government leaders to champion and sustain change.” Jeanne Holm: “With the international ontology for space, we are trying to create the framework by which we can share data about any mission, any project that the governments are interested in having us collaborate on....so the whole world is a global space community.” David Nero: “The City of Boston has made significant investments during the past 5 years to uplift its technology and business solutions portfolio.” Join us for Open Government: Game-changer yet?