What’s the primary goal for IT and business executives as they pursue Big Data initiatives?
Improving customer experience.
That was the top response from IT and business leaders worldwide in a recently released Gartner survey. Customer experience is on the radar of the 64 percent of Gartner respondents investing or planning to invest in Big Data technology this year (less than 8 percent said they have deployed already). Gartner found that IT folks can sometimes get caught up in the logistics of Big Data – how to get it, how to manage it, what to do with it. But in the end, customer experience trumps all. How customers interact with an enterprise’s systems can have a huge effect on their loyalty, and ultimately their lifetime value to the organization.
Supporting the Gartner survey findings, IBM has done a lot to keep the mainframe current in the era of Big Data, social, mobile and analytics – the customer experience sweet spots, if you will. Earlier this year the company announced a new product in the zEnterprise lineup, zBC12, designed to handle the latest in analytics, cloud and mobile computing. Additionally, in March IBM launched its Customer Experience Lab. There, IBM research scientists and business consultants have worked with more than 100 customers from across the world to create new technologies and “revolutionize the way companies interact and engage with customers.”
If you’re in the business of serving customers, read the latest SHARE President’s Corner blog post, “New Driver in Mainframe: Customer Experience? You Bet.” to learn why and how customer experience is impacting the future of the mainframe.