I was following some of the live tweets from technology professionals attending Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando today. Much of the discussion at the event is around helping CIO’s and IT leaders focus their attention on growth, cost reduction and competitive advantage – all while filtering out the noise around disruptive technologies like cloud, social, mobile and information in general. In financial services, there is great opportunity to take advantage of information innovation.
The purpose of my post is to provide a financial services perspective on a term that Gartner expert, Mark McDonald, discussed today at the Gartner Symposium. Mark talked about creating a “digital edge” within an organization and how it can forge innovation and value.
What is a Digital Edge?
As IT leaders harness the nexus of emerging technology forces in financial services they need to take things a step further. This is where digital edge becomes relevant. Digital edge strategies bring together unconventional thought processes, and digital and physical resources to build capabilities creating sustainable competitive advantage. Another element includes creating leadership teams that will support new opportunities. To put this into context for financial services, mobile banking is widely used in operations to satisfy customer transactional needs, yet only some of the larger banks are leveraging “out-of-the-box” strategies to expand mobile services and generate new sources of revenue (versus self-service cost reduction). More details on the convergence of these tranformational banking strategies using mobile, social and big data are covered in our Mobile Banking Series videos.
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Multiple technology research sources have identified the top strategic technology trends and IT spend for 2013, and issues like mobile and analytics appear at the top. Yet we know that banks are just at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to implementing these two trends. That being said, CIO’s might look to identify the right digital edge for their business as they weed through all the hype around big data and customer analytics. Defining a digital edge at the enterprise level may help bring together resources and legacy IT investments to better leverage customer intelligence in real-time for services like mobile banking, payments and loyalty and rewards.
I’m interested in learning more about this term adopted by Gartner, especially some examples that would translate over into fnancial services to support consumer value and banking profitability goals.
