In today’s world where consumers are continuously bombarded with marketing messages; delivering the right ones, in the right context, and at the right time is essential.

We've all been there. To that land of customer enchantment and delight where a recording tells us our calls are important. In fact, we’re so important that we're typically put on hold and pushed to a self-serve website to solve our own problems. If we want to talk to a human being, there’s little satisfaction in knowing our calls will be handled in the order they were received.

5G May Still Be a Few Years Away, But Now is the Time to Start Preparations

The time is now for telecommunications, media and entertainment (TME) companies to start preparing for new 5G-enabled business…

All 3 parts of this Blog Series can be found at InfoWorld.

Previously in this three-part series, I wrote about how to introduce microservices in a legacy environment and provided an overview of domain-driven design (DDD) and how this development philosophy can be used to represent the real world in code, while also being well-suited to a microservices implementation. This time, I cover some of the tools and frameworks that can be used when implementing microservices.

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.

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.

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.

The Internet of Things provides an opportunity for cable and satellite TV companies. The window is closing fast, however, as competition from Amazon and other smart home devices are in place tosupplant the set-top box permanently.

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.

Projects are the primary implementation vehicle of the corporate strategy. Insights into the progress, roadblocks and speed bumps of those projects is the critical role your Project Management Office (PMO) needs to perform flawlessly. The PMO tracks corporate strategy and ensures the project portfolio contains the right projects and resources to ensure the expected return on the strategy. Properly performing PMOs should be identifying and alerting the executive team of projects drive further investments and alerting the executive team to need of projects that require reprioritization, additional support, postponement, scaling back, or even cancellation to deliver the strategy.

Here’s the problem. PMOs often underperform—badly.

Two of Capto’s centers of excellence – healthcare and TME (Telecommunications, Media, and Entertainment) – at first would not seem to have much overlap, but our experience finds significant commonality in the business and technical issues faced by these industries. One area of similarity is the need for both healthcare and TME to develop an omnichannel approach to improve customer experience. In a December 2016 study by Chief Marketing Officer Council, 49% of marketers stated that alignment between physical and digital customer experiences is selective at best.

Capto was recently featured in Light Reading discussing the need for making and understanding your business case for virtual reality before jumping on the trend.

Disruption is the new reality for business leaders, extinction the ever-present threat. Unpredictable, abrupt change is obsoleting time-tested companies and long-standing industries and is giving rise to new business models to replace the old. Varying levels of vulnerability and volatility are cycling across industries, fueled by technological (digital), developments. Now it is the telecom, media and entertainment (TME) industry’s turn.

The imperative that Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) and Chief Information or Technology Officers (CIOs) merge their agendas to collaborate for success of their companies, their CEOs and their futures is at the crux of the TME industry’s fight for customer retention, new skill sets and fresh sources of revenue growth.

Healthcare organizations (HCOs) have been, and continue to be, invested heavily in IT to improve outcomes and lower costs. While much of this investment continues to support the implementation and optimization of mandated electronic medical record (EMR) systems, the post-EMR implementation world is on the horizon, and all of those EMR systems will be generating tremendous amounts of data. According to PwC’s 2016 Annual Global CEO Survey, 95% of healthcare CEOs are already looking beyond EMR and say they are exploring better ways to harness and use big data.

Telecom, media and entertainment industries are crossing paths with increasing regularity in hopes of seeking a fruitful partnership. Navigating the increasingly connected, ever-changing wireless ecosystem is not for the faint of heart. Inking the deal is just the first step. Integrating technologies, teams and operating cultures are what can really make or break the customer experience and thus profits.

Capto CEO, Tracy Currie, had the opportunity to sit down with Carol Flagg of RCM Answers during the recent Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) ANI conference. They discussed the business and customer experience opportunities for healthcare in the near future.

CIOs and CFOs need to stop worrying about aligning IT with the business and start running IT as a business to resolve the majority of issues CIOs are having getting a seat at the strategy table and collaborating with their business unit peers.

CIOs and the CFOs who work closely with them can check out the specific steps I outline in my recent article, "IT Should Drive Decision Making, Not Just Participate", published in CFO Magazine.

Data is exceptionally valuable for companies making decisions concerning reducing costs and increasing revenues. Though it’s seemingly simple to run a data report, getting to the right actionable insight can offer both opportunities and missteps.

We found it interesting that Comcast was singled out by six senators in Washington for billing customers the rental fee for their modem after the modem had been returned. Comcast acknowledged issues in their customer service and called out a focus on their billing systems to avoid such mistakes in the future.