Name: Insight Enterprises CEO Ken Lamneck Discusses the Rise of Intelligent Technology
Uploaded: 2018-04-18
Duration: 4 min 51 s
Description: Companies that want to win should move quickly to embrace artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and machine learning.

 Ken, you say that the world is shifting from information technology to intelligent technology. What do you mean by that? What's the difference? We're meaning by that is the fact that the products now are all having intelligence built into them. So you start looking at things like artificial intelligence, which we hear a lot about, machine learning, which you're hearing more and more about, IoT-- internet of things. It's all about intelligence being built into the products that make the products more valuable to our end customers. Why should businesses pay attention to what you're saying? Well, because that's the evolution, right? And technology, as we say, is every company is having to become a technology company. We look at all the companies that have been disintermediated by technology and didn't see it coming. So companies have to embrace it. Companies have to look for it. Because technology now is becoming-- it's not just a source of productivity, it's a source of how companies innovate. It's a source of how companies collaborate, and very importantly, how the companies differentiate themselves from their competition. Insight Enterprises helps companies make this shift from changing their IT department from a back office function into being the core of their businesses. So how does this change the way that the companies do their business? And how does it impact employees and how they should be thinking about technology? Can we make the business more efficient? We can help them on that management side of the business. We can make it much more efficient, much more cost effective than they're currently doing today. And then we can impact the business as they transform the business, and bring them solutions that really make a difference with their interface with clients. And for the people, for the employees, how do they look at all this differently? Or you think that they should think differently? Yeah, they should. Because they're all looking for to say, how do-- they want modern workplaces. They want a modern toolset. And a lot of companies are still steeped in very old technology. And especially when you're hiring a millennial type workforce, they've come up through college, they're used to using very modern systems and modern applications. They want that same experience, that same environment. What's the downside if a company doesn't make this change? They'll be disintermediatiated, right? You've seen that happen in so many industries, where companies miss the wave because they're not embracing technology to really take them to that next frontier that they need to. Or if they don't embrace it internally, they're not going to become a company that people want to work for. You know, at Fortune, we did a CEO survey and found that one of the biggest worries is the rapid pace of technological change. These CEOs are overwhelmed by all of these new tech innovations, like artificial intelligence, Blockchain, virtual reality, you name it. And they're just not sure what they should have, what they shouldn't have. What do you tell businesses? In general, you're basically seeing technology shifting so quickly, that a lot of the technology solutions you have could be obsolete within 36 months. So you've got to prepare for that. So you've got to build very agile systems, very open, flexible environments that allow for you to be able to make those shifts where they may occur. Because we're not sure exactly the timing of all that, when it may occur. So that's the most important advice we give, is make sure you're building open, flexible systems that take advantage of that. Every 36 months? That's three years. That's a very short window. And all this stuff is expensive. So what are the critical building blocks that every company should have, whether they're a small business or a big Fortune 500 company? Most companies will have some sort of enterprise, ERP system-- enterprise resource planning system, or manufacturing resource planning system that's really at the core of their environment. And those are companies like SAP, and Oracle-- those big systems that companies need to operate on. And then around that, in the periphery, they need to make sure they're building really important collaborative systems-- mobile systems that are very flexible, storage environments, data analytics, all the AI tools around that. They're building them very flexibly, because that part is going to shift very, very quickly. When it comes to making these important tech decisions, what are some of the most common mistakes that a CEO, or a chief technology officer, or the chief financial officer make? Yeah, I mean, there's quite a few. But a lot of them, I think, the critical decisions that are so important is really looking at-- again, building environments that are very open, flexible so they don't get locked into one aspect where they can't get out of that. For a company, let's say, who is new to this whole intelligent technology movement, what's the best advice that you can give to a CEO on how to get started? I'd say that first off, to really either do internally or have somebody come in and do an assessment of where they are today, where they really understand their current environment, where are they, where are they positioned, and then really work with some outside resources to help them-- really put together a roadmap, because it is a journey of saying what are the proper steps they need to take? What are the proper investments they need to make? So getting really good advice so they can really build out a journey map of what they need to do and where they should make those critical investments. 

Insight Enterprises CEO Ken Lamneck Discusses the Rise of Intelligent Technology

Tech

Companies that want to win should move quickly to embrace artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and machine learning.