
Recorded July 24, 2015 A conversation about Demand Management between TAC president Peter Schay and TAC expert Patrick Savard, who consults with Fortune 500 businesses…

A conversation with TAC President Peter Schay and guest Bruce Guptil, TAC expert and skilled speaker, media contributor, and author of hundreds of research notes, reports, blog posts, articles, and presentations on business IT change, strategy, tactics, planning, acquisition, and value, from cloud, mobile and social IT, to digital business transformation, to changing IT roles and value.

How could Home Depot and Neiman Marcus fall into the same trap that Target did months earlier? Could it be that this is not considered material enough to spend money on both the technology (to prevent & detect data losses) and the human behavioral changes needed to minimize incidents?

Investing in new software to resolve an issue within businesses is a common but often misguided solution, since many times the required functionality already exists within the business’s software portfolio or is available at some level for free on the Internet.

As with ideas, the same factors: need, broad knowledge base, environment, and timing all come into play. We can, In fact, start with the notion that an idea becomes an innovation when it fundamentally changes the way we do things. The more change a new idea makes, the more innovative it is.

Google, Amazon, Verizon, the NSA, and others are currently compiling an “Encyclopedia Galactica” of metadata for the same reason Seldon did in Asimov’s books… to influence decisions that people make. Having data about where people go, how long they stay there, who they call and how long they talk, and hundreds of other metrics, Big Data analysts seek patterns in previous behaviors to influence future behaviors of individuals.

While the Federal Government seems to want to act out the final scene from “Thelma and Louise” with our economy, we can’t wait for someone to hit the brakes. Regardless of what the government does (or does not do) in the next few days to avert the fiscal cliff, we do know that taxes will go up on those making at least $400,000, including small businesses.

Ideas are the result of the exposure to a certain piece or pieces of key information in an environment conducive to solving a perceived or subliminal problem at a critical moment in the thought process. In other words, ideas happen in much the same way babies “happen”; it’s a matter of being in the right place at the right time doing the right things to produce them.

Social media sites have flourished and withered on a regular basis (witness Myspace, for which News Corporation paid $580 million in 2005, and then sold in 2011 for $35 million). The younger crowd gets bored easily and have a herd mentality. They will follow the crowd to the next hot thing. You can already see this by the Facebook demographics. The average age of members is getting older by the day. The advertisers see this as well, and it’s only a matter of time before they move on as well.

EaaS is an extension of the SaaS philosophy, allowing the procurement of information, expertise, performance management and measurement and other necessary IT services the same way. This way of thinking is not new to the enterprise; legal and finance departments have leveraged outside counsel and accounting firms for decades.