The changing landscape of IT/BPO industry has led to the emergence of new locations in Africa. Among many African nations, Ethiopia is growing at the rate of more than 10% per annum and is likely to attain the middle-income status by 2025. Leveraging ICT with a focus on capacity building is catalyzing economic prosperity and creating sustainable employment opportunity in the country.
Social, Mobility, Analytics, and Cloud (SMAC) are the convergent forces that are driving new business paradigms for enterprises. The 21st century is already witnessing a crumbling of traditional enterprises while competing against new age disruptive organizations.
The potential for Passenger Service Systems (PSS) to add business value to the airlines industry is significant. PSS can enhance the airlines’ asset utilization and customer loyalty and thus directly impact the topline. Recent activity suggests that both large airlines and low cost carriers are considering their PSS options seriously. The PSS market is expected to expand, fuelling more IT innovation in the airline industry.
A new and innovative technology platform or stack comprising of Mobility, Analytics, Cloud Computing and Social Networking (popularly referred as SMAC) is creating the foundation for new and innovative business models that is transforming customer experience. In this article, we look at each of these technology innovations and discuss their impact on future business models.
Friedman in his 2005 epic book “The World is Flat” argues that convergence of personal computer with fiber-optic micro cable, along with the rise of work flow software, will have a flattening effect on world commerce and trade. It will create a level playing field, where developing economies will be able to compete with developed economies on even terms, leveraging converged Information & Communication Technology (ICT). However critic of Friedman, including noble prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz were critical of Friedman’s book. In “Making Globalization Work” Stiglitz writes: “Friedman is right that there have been dramatic changes in the global economy and global landscape; in some directions, the world is much flatter than it has ever been, with those in various parts of the world being more connected than they have ever been, but the world is not flat. Not only is the world not flat: in many ways it has been getting less flat.” The reason for this is the worldwide “Digital Divide” that is being manifested by the rapid deployment of ICT. The digital divide is an inequality or gap between groups, broadly construed, in terms of access, use and knowledge of ICT. Not only is this divide widening between developed and developing economies, but is also manifest within a developed economy like US. This divide is visible within the US population when one analyses usage of ICT against factors such as education and income levels, age, sex and race.
Health care in Canada is delivered through a publicly funded health care system, which is mostly free at the point of use and has most services provided by private entities. The government assures the quality of care through federal standards.
In their endeavors to become high performing organizations, businesses are pushing all innovation frontiers to do more with less and achieve excellence even in these times of curtailed budgets. Shared services is one such definitive innovative model that many organizations have adopted to beat the ever growing challenges of seamless service delivery, consolidation of distributed accountabilities, progressive efficiency improvements, and fiscal pressures.
For more than a decade, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has played a significant role in both economic growth and poverty reduction. ICT increases efficiency, provides access to new markets and services, creates new opportunities for income generation and gives economically handicapped people an opportunity for sustainable employment.
Strategic Sourcing, largely beneficial, has always evoked cautionary reactions from the US Government and public at large. Currently US Government is caught between cutting budget spends and gaining greater efficiencies for public service. Strategic sourcing can not only help the US Government deliver better public services but also gain significant cost savings year on year. This paper attempts at breaking the taboo of outsourcing by showing that if properly managed, strategic sourcing can result in great cost savings while increasing cost and process efficiencies.
The cloud has pretty much disrupted the de facto standard: the client/server and enterprise computing models, which displaced the mainframes. As a concept, cloud continues to be defined and redefined.
