Malcolm Frank, Chief Strategy Officer, Cognizant

OREANDA-NEWS. “The world is teetering on the brink of a technology revolution, one that will drastically change the way businesses engage with customers,” said Malcolm Frank at the IDE Platform Strategy Summit held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Frank compared the current technology revolution to the industrial revolution. He said that after a large “burst of innovation”, a period of time he called “the chasm” would occur until a large-scale build-out of technologies spread across the market. “We are currently in the chasm, and approaching the next phase of the revolution.” Excerpts:

“We’re about to enter that great digital build-out. In that digital boom, businesses will embrace big data and analytics in new ways to interact with customers. Through a platform-based approach, companies will be able to collect and utilize data to better understand their customers and drive more business.

Those platforms, by taking and analyzing points of data from a large number of consumers, can better understand and predict patterns of individuals. This will drive changes in how both new and longstanding companies alike go to market, as they begin to use those analytical platforms in their strategy.

For businesses, that doesn't mean that they have to become the next Uber. Businesses will have to rethink how they approach the market through a platform, but each industry will reach that point at its own pace.

However, this transformation, like any, will not be easy. As the technological boom evolves, businesses will need to watch out for pitfalls such as rising mobility, which will drive eventual platform and device consolidation. As they expand their platforms, businesses also need to keep an eye on their processes, user interfaces and keep ethical concerns in mind with data privacy.

The ramifications of technological innovations made years ago will continue to be impossible to see until we have the benefit of hindsight years down the road.

The future is already here.”