Benchmarking can be an effective tool to determine areas in need of process improvement and budget realignment with business goals. Used correctly, benchmarks are used to develop and continuously improve a high-performing organization. It is important to keep in mind, however, that a benchmark is simply a place to start—a point of reference for motivating action aimed at improving the organization’s future position.

In November, I delved into explaining how microservices can be introduced into a large organization with well-established legacy systems. In this post, I cover domain-driven design (DDD) and how this development philosophy can be used to represent the real world in code while being well-suited to a microservices implementation.

What technology will change marketing the most in 2018?

This was just one of many questions posed to 350 marketers, CEOs and influencers, including Capto, by John Koetsier, Mobile Economist at TUNE regarding their thoughts on MarTech in 2018. See the results.

Consumerism has significant implications for understanding data analytics, including the need to better understand the healthcare customer before they ever become a patient.

A Forbes and Sitecore study found that organizations have an average of 35 data gathering points, but little to no integration. This kinds of breakage in marketing and IT systems breaks down the customer experience and costs companies revenue in lost opportunity.

My article in Chief Marketer offers five ways for marketing to get their internal martech house in order.

A customer-first, omnichannel experience is reigning supreme across industries. We’ve seen it hold traction for years in telecom, media and entertainment (TME) and oft discussed, but omnichannel has been more slowly applied to other areas, such as healthcare.

While no consensus exists on how to define microservices, it is generally agreed that they are an architectural pattern that is composed of loosely coupled, autonomous, fine-grained services. The services are independently deployable and communicate using a lightweight mechanism such as HTTP/REST. Enterprises that need to make frequent changes to their systems—and where time to market is paramount—need to be investigating how to introduce microservices in their legacy environments to realize a digital transformation that drives tangible business results.

The most successful IT outsourcing decisions create truly innovative execution strategies that deliver meaningful business results. The outsourcing decision, however, frequently comes down to a cost-driven ROI calculation: how much will all this innovation cost us, and how long will it take to recover those costs? This is the wrong mindset and often the primary reason why IT outsourcing is generally underperforming.

On August 6, 1991, marketing was changed forever by the birth of ‘Internet technology’. It was day one of the World Wide Web. The web would one day grow up to be the mechanism that not only gave the power of brand influence to the people, but inextricably connect marketing to IT.

Hospitals are not strangers to complexity. Here are clear steps to make sure your organization is ready for new regulations, new customers and new patient experiences that I recently published in Becker's Health IT and CIO Review.

Now that Google, Apple, Facebook and other muscle brands have revealed plans to enter the crowded field to win the highly coveted and competitive telecommunications, media and entertainment (TME) market, time is running out to restart your IT funding engines to ensure the tech geeks down the cube-riddled hall are firing on all cylinders.

This should be done to a large extent by revving up internal funding sources that can transform IT departments from cost centers to revenue generators.

There's a lot of hype around IoT in healthcare as well as other businesses. If you're considering, or already implementing, IoT strategy in your organization, you should be using these four sequential areas of focus, or the four As of IoT: Access, Aggregation, Analysis, and Artificial Intelligence.

Tides are turning on who owns the technology budget. CMOs are increasingly under pressure to improve revenues switching the traditional technology budget owner. Read the full article in RCR Wireless.

The telecommunications, media, and entertainment (TME) industry – specifically in the new world of streaming video – has become highly competitive as over-the-top (OTT) providers seek to acquire new customers while locking down existing ones.

Free video service promos, flexible packages, predatory pricing, and lack of differentiation make churn inevitable. Even market leaders with less than two percent churn are exposed to losing customers and the revenue associated with their departure. Add to that the expense of replacing lost customers and it’s easy to see that controlling churn is a top priority for TME players.

Healthcare has seen a boom in sexy new “killer apps” that have drawn a lot of attention from payer organizations seeking to advance their health IT investment strategies. Many have opened innovation centers or spawned new sister organizations to evaluate, invest in, and market new innovations venture-capitalist style. This is all well and good but typically makes for better PR than ROI.

Disruption. Transformation. Talent shortage. These are all continuously moving factors impacting business strategies. If you are only asking “How are we doing against what we said we wanted to do?”, it’s likely your organization lacks the agility needed to address the fast-changing behaviors of your customer and the marketplace. If you’re only looking at the speedometer and not the horizon you risk driving significantly off course.

As healthcare providers prepare for the shift to value-based care, they may find the key to success lies within lessons learned from the past.

Hewlett Packard Enterprises’ CEO, Meg Whitman, keynoted at Infosys’ Confluence 2017 last week and her message was on point…five years on point.

Meg Whitman figured a few things out fast when she became the 4th CEO of Hewlett-Packard within a 13-month span. If she was going to lead the company in a turnaround where qualified predecessors before her had failed, it would take five years; playing to their strengths versus shoring up weaknesses, and a culture shift more difficult than any technological change. And getting those messages out early and often may have just saved her job and the company.

With the ACA repeal not clearing its first legislative hurdle, it appears that Obamacare will remain in effect for the foreseeable future. Payers and providers will need to continue to work together to implement new payment models that maximize performance for both parties under the ACA and MACRA frameworks.

Currently, ACO models promise to align payers and providers around the shared goals of keeping patients healthier and thus reducing the cost of care. In practice, however, creating the actual contracts that transform that theoretical alignment into mutually acceptable business commitments has been elusive. Two of the primary reasons for this have been organizations not understanding which types of alternative payment models will be the best fit for their organization, and not knowing how to structure payment contracts to maximize their immediate and strategic value to the organization.

Capto's CEO, Tracy Currie, was recently interviewed by Telecom Rambling's editor, Rob Powell. Their discussion covered IoT in telecom and healthcare, big data and IT investment strategy.