“Becoming an intelligent enterprise is really about looking at every process across the enterprise, and applying intelligent technologies in the right places,” says Mike. “Sometimes that may be things like machine learning; and sometimes it might be connecting devices with IoT; sometimes it may be using blockchain to secure a set of transactions.”

Since the intelligent enterprise is more than the sum of its parts, it creates solutions that benefit as many of its people as possible. Helping frontline workers — who are often the face of the brand — can improve the big picture, says SAP expert Derek Klobucher in one of his recent articles on news.sap site.

First things first: Finding the right problems to solve

Flannagan continues: “It’s not just about designing something that works for the end user — or about designing something that works for the senior executive. It’s about finding the problem that senior executive cares about for business reasons … and the guy on the shop floor cares about from a day-to-day workflow reason. If you can bring those two together, now, you’ve got a problem that everybody agrees is the right one to focus on. Those are the really cool problems to solve.”

In essence, the intelligent enterprise does not simply implement the latest in the technology space, like AI, IoT or ML. Rather, its efficiency stems from a culture of identifying the perfect business problem to solve – and then coming together as a team to devise the perfect solution.

However, aligning your frontline workers with your C-suite is no easy task. So how do we get, say, the shop floor workers on the same page as the CEO?

Let me know what you think.

By: Venkat Nanduri