Q. What do you see as the major IT challenges facing South African companies?

Small to mid-sized enterprises are being squeezed from all sides: larger rivals are trying to edge them out, and customers are gradually exerting their increased power in pricing and the setting of contract terms. 

To respond effectively to these challenges, smaller enterprises must make intelligent use of ICT (information and communications technology) to gain a competitive edge within their industries to grow faster and become more profitable amidst the current global economic crisis. 

For example, data integration provides a business with a complete view of the same data and applications that automate business processes such as payroll, accounts and customer relationship management boost efficiency. But while business functions are optimised according to their business goals, they usually fall short in connecting one department with another. This connection is the key to successful process management. 

Marketing might generate leads but not qualify them, whereas sales might focus on closing sales rather than qualifying new leads. The result is a disconnected business process where a high number of unqualified leads never generate sales in this lead-to-order process.

Business practices must support the "new product development process”, where a number of teams work together. But a strong marketing, legal, or sales function alone won't guarantee success. The necessary individuals involved in this process need to be well-connected and end-to-end along the new product development process to quickly churn out innovation. 

Q. Are customers expressing concerns to you about the scope of potential security threats they face as they interact with customers through more and more technology-driven channels?

Smaller enterprises today have fewer resources and less market power than giant corporations and are forced to do more with less. In industries such as financial services and healthcare, they face regulatory burdens that even big companies find challenging.

Regulations now require institutions to take actions to mitigate the risk of suspicious activity related to a covered account. To combat the myriad sophisticated security threats, companies can leverage technologies that evaluate risk in real-time and take proactive measures to prevent fraud. 

For example, context-aware authentication ensures that only registered users get access to their accounts while blocking fraudsters who use harvested information from gaining access. Identity verification services using techniques such as geo-location, device fingerprinting, behavioural profiling and technologies based on cross-channel fraud detection can help institutions to gate account access via traditional channels such as ATM, kiosk and phone banking, in addition to online access.

Importantly, enterprises are now also responsible for their customer data in document and spreadsheet form, as well as the consequences if it leaves the company perimeter via email, storage devices and laptops. After reporting a data breach, losses in company valuation can be as high as four percent. These costs can range from regulatory fines to litigation settlements to providing credit monitoring and identity theft protection services. 

One approach to protecting document information involves encrypting documents and providing permissions to enable authorised users to view those documents, ensuring that even if a document is shared outside an organisation, it is still protected from viewing by unauthorised users. More importantly, if the document is accidentally lost, such as the case when it is on a lost laptop, the document is not viewable to users who cannot login as a legitimate user.  This approach, known as information rights management (IRM), where the usage of a document can be fully controlled. 

Q. How are your customers asking you to help increase the loyalty of their customers and reduce churn?

One method companies employ to create better customer relationships is through the analysis of customer information, documentation and interaction, such as emails. Historically, though, business intelligence (BI) has primarily been used in structured and semi-structured data sets. Uncovering that data for BI analysis has been challenging, but emerging solutions can enable BI engines to utilise semi-structured and unstructured information. Now, unstructured data can be analysed to provide vital, enriching context for traditional BI results.

At the forefront of customer relations are the contact centres. They provide that critical link between the business and the customer. Through technology, contact centre staff can have the freedom, assistance and confidence to support marketing, by knowingly offering a more personal experience, making the absolute most of that brief window of opportunity. A dashboard of intelligent offers gives non-sales staff the guidance, support and authority to sell goods from across the business, even with little product training. The smallest piece of customer information, such as a change of address, transferring funds or sending a gift, could flag for instance the top product recommendations available from the business. 

Q. How are you helping customers to become more agile?

As we collectively learn from our successes and mistakes and reach new plateaus of understanding of how best to adopt Services-oriented Architecture (SOA), there are new opportunities to improve upon traditional practices. 

The SOA grid is a new approach to thinking about SOA infrastructure. It provides state-aware, continuous availability for service implementations, data, and processing logic. It's based on architecture that combines horizontally scalable, database-independent, middle-tier data caching with intelligent parallelisation and an affinity of business logic with cache data. 

This enables newer, simpler, and more-efficient models for highly scalable service-oriented applications that can take full advantage of service virtualisation and event-driven architectures and give organisations the agility they need in today’s economic environment.