One of your important missions
Gather insight and improve customer service! Integrated e-commerce systems on a unified technology platform provide a seamless shopping experience for customers, while enabling online retailers to facilitate cross-selling between brands, gather increased customer insight for effective target marketing and reduce maintenance and development costs.

CLUE: Who has done it already?

Watch 1-800-Flowers on YouTube (00:03:28)

One of your many missions
Customers increasingly expect cross-channel integration. Inability to deliver hurts customer satisfaction and causes defection

CLUE: Who has done it already?

Watch Marks Warehouse on YouTube (00:04:20)

One of your many missions
A survey of more than 32,000 consumers found that 79% of them want to use Web sites and print coupons, 75% wanted to use their smart phones to find store locations, and 66% want to see what goods are in stock before going to the store.

You need to improve your customers’ shopping experience and lower costs, but also use technology in smart phones, kiosks and social networks to create customer advocates.

CLUE: Who has done it already?

Watch Moosejaw on YouTube (00:01:57)

• Intelligent Instrumentation
  "Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
  
  Popular Mechanics
  forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949
• Imagination
  Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create.
  
  – Albert Einstein
• Interconnectivity
  The interdependency of humankind, the relevance of relationship, the sacredness of creation is ancient, ancient wisdom.
  
  – Rebecca Adamson
• Services reuse
  SOA is not something you buy, it's something you do. Nothing clarifies the concept better.
• Business Process Management
  Process Management - Business Process Management (BPM) is at the intersection between management and information technology, encompassing methods, techniques and tools to design, enact, control, and analyze operational business processes involving humans, organizations, applications, documents and other sources of information.
  
  Learn more about Business Process Management by playing the INNOV8 game.
• Cloud Computing
  “Cloud Computing Will Be As Influential As E-business.”
  
  – Gartner
• Local Insight
  “There is nothing so terrible as activity without insight.”
  
  – Goethe
• Sustainability
  The very process of the restoring the land to health is the process through which we become attuned to Nature and, through Nature, with ourselves.
  
  – Chris Maser
  Forest Primeval

• Collaboration and Knowledgeshare
  The reality today is that we are all interdependent and have to co-exist on this small planet. Therefore, the only sensible and intelligent way of resolving differences and clashes of interests, whether between individuals or nations, is through dialogue.
  
  - The Dalai Lama
• Vision
  Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world!”
  
  – Joel Arthur Barker
• Agility
  These are times that pit the familiar against the new. These are times that ask us to chose between standardization and efficiency or creativity and agility. Companies need to decide what they want to become and chose their technology accordingly because the technology they use is what they will soon be (for better or for worse).
  
  – Michael Hugos
• Transparency
  Transparency is vital because agility starts when everyone in a company knows what’s happening; when they have reason to care about what’s happening (usually because they get bonuses tied to performance); and when they have authority to act so as to continuously improve what’s happening (so they can earn higher bonuses). That means everybody needs access to timely and relevant information so they can act in real time to optimize their performance as conditions change.
  
  – Michael Hugos
• Intrapreneurship
  "The chief thing you as an innovation leader must realize is that when it comes to making innovation happen, people matter more than ideas.
  
  Take a moment to think about that. Many innovation initiatives fail miserably because their leaders don't understand this simple fact. In fact, it is actually more important to have A-grade people than it is to have a slew of A-grade ideas because A-grade people can take a B-grade idea - or perhaps even a C-grade idea - and turn it into a successful reality. B-grade people, on the other hand, will struggle with even truly great ideas.
  
  So before you get all fired up about generating a ton of ideas, first figure out how you're going to match those ideas to people who can make things happen."
  
  – Stefan Lindegaard
• Responsiveness
  “By being responsive to the needs and desires of specific groups of customers, companies can wrap their products and services in a blanket of value-added services to consistently earn an additional two to four percent (and sometimes more) in gross margin than they would otherwise earn for the product or service alone. This customer and market specialization is the most promising and the most sustainable source of profits in our fluid, real-time economy.”
  
  – Michael Hugos

What do athletes, soldiers, doctors, and IT professionals have in common? They are all using serious games to prepare themselves for events – potentially disastrous – that occur outside the norm of their trade. Serious games are video games that do more than entertain; in that they prepare professionals to work smarter by enabling them to visualize the consequences of their actions and explore different permutations of events in a visceral way.

In case you still think that games are solely the domain of 14-year-old boys, 67 percent of U.S. heads of households play games, and the number is even higher in Asia. The average age of a game player is 35, and 47 percent of PC gamers are older. Forty-three percent of PC gamers and 38 percent of console gamers are women, according to the Entertainment Software Association

IBM has been developing serious games for some time that can teach problem solving for real issues in key industries, helping companies to learn how to work smarter. With CityOne, IBM is going a step further by developing a game in which users experience some of the complex problems facing cities. They can implement changes and understand the results in terms of how various technology solutions can help revolutionize industries within a municipality.

Read more in our SWG newsletter, Aug 10 2010

Also check out our INNOV8 2.0 BPM Simulator Game