Industry
The status quo is changing for most industries as boundaries blur between fields due to innovation, disruption, and digitally-driven change. That’s why keeping abreast of emerging trends in sectors outside your own is vital, not only because your organization’s competitive landscape may be changing, but because there are universal, strategic lessons to learn from the opportunities and threats convergence poses for every marketplace. We examine emerging trends and the impact of evolving tech in key fields such as healthcare, financial services, telco, energy, mobility, and more to help you capitalize on the possibilities of the future while managing the challenges of today.
Recently Published
There's a digital revolution descending squarely upon an industry that time (and TCP/IP) nearly forgot: our aging, yet highly reliable, electric utility grid.
So long to the gorilla dust at GM. That’s what billionaire entrepreneur founder of EDS and ex-General Motors executive Ross Perot called the annual optimistic projections of GM executives during the 1980s, as it continued to lose market share. “When gorillas fight, they throw dust in the air to distract one another,” Perot said.
This article describes the development of the Zeus,1 an anesthesia workstation for use in operating rooms. For the duration of a surgery, the Zeus supplies the patient with breathing gases, with active ventilation, and with narcotics both inhaled and intravenous. At the same time, the patient's life signals and the Zeus machine parameters are monitored. During a surgery, the patient's life is highly dependent on the medical staff and on the quality and safety concepts of the medical devices.
In a recent Newsweek article about Google (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10296177/site/newsweek/), Eric Schmidt outlined Google's Ten Golden Rules for getting the most out of knowledge workers. Since agile development is really more about mindset and philosophy than specific practices, I found it interesting to analyze Google's rules from an agile perspective.
Most IT organizations today are struggling with the same problem: how to be more agile, responsive, and competitive. When we look at the companies that excel in these areas, we notice some similarities. First, these companies have taken an overall enterprise-wide approach to defining their business processes and the IT infrastructure needed to support them. Underlying and unifying the IT infrastructure is a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Second, these companies have implemented changes in their business and development organizations to support this new approach.
In the US, agriculture employed 63% of the workforce in 1840 compared with just 2% today. In 1943, the number of US blue-collar employees reached its peak, accounting for at least 40% of the workforce. That number has steadily declined since then to about 8%, and before the end of the century may well fall to the same level as that of agriculture [3].
