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Tag Archives: Holiday

Ohio GOP wants to declare a 14 June state holiday because it’s ‘Trump’s Birthday’

January 31, 2021   Humor
 Ohio GOP wants to declare a 14 June state holiday because its Trumps Birthday

“California celebrates February 6, President Ronald Reagan’s birthday, in its public schools with “exercises remembering the life of Ronald Reagan, recognizing his accomplishments, and familiarizing pupils with the contributions he made to California.”

And he’s not even dead yet, or even a son of Ohio, but there remains Trumpist delusions. Then again shouldn’t James Buchanan get his national holiday on 23 April.

Republican Reps. Jon Cross of Kenton and Reggie Stoltzfus of Paris Township sent an email to their House colleagues Friday asking them to cosponsor an upcoming bill “to celebrate one of the greatest presidents in American history.”

[…]

Ohio House Democrats think June 14 is the wrong day.

Yes, it’s the former president’s birthday, but it’s also a national holiday: Flag Day, which commemorates the adoption of the American flag on June 14, 1777.

“I don’t like the idea of changing an existing federal holiday that honors the flag,” Rep. Jeff Crossman, D-Parma, said. “I think it’s disrespectful. “

www.dispatch.com/…

x

Former President Donald Trump, determined to remain a force in Republican politics, is gaining new opportunities with a crucial Senate seat unexpectedly coming open in Ohio, and an ally announcing for governor of Arkansas. https://t.co/GJZa4EGOS0

— NYT Politics (@nytpolitics) January 26, 2021

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Visualize 5 Cool Insights on Holiday Tree Trends Over Time

December 31, 2020   TIBCO Spotfire
TIBCOSpotfire ChristmasTree scaled e1608573759606 696x365 Visualize 5 Cool Insights on Holiday Tree Trends Over Time

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Did you know Thomas Edison’s assistants proposed putting electric lights on Christmas trees? There’s a long and rich history surrounding holiday trees, in America and around the world. According to the History Channel, symbolic traditions involving evergreen trees in winter began in ancient Egypt and Rome and continue to take on new meaning today. 

New Holiday Traditions: Annual Analytics

Here at TIBCO, we’ve started our own holiday tradition involving the classic festive trees: using our data visualization software to understand trends in holiday tree data. Last year, we shared our analysis and “treemap” visualization (quite literally a treemap of trees) via TIBCO Spotfire®. This year, we dived even deeper into the data, using the new Spotfire Mods functionality to design custom apps for greater interactivity. Here’s what we found:

  • Top Tree Producing States: All 50 states contribute to the holiday tree industry, but our analysis shows the greatest production occurs in Oregon, North Carolina, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Also interesting is that while Oregon and North Carolina are top producers overall, states like Ohio and Michigan definitely over-index for total tree producing counties as a percentage of their total land area. 
 Visualize 5 Cool Insights on Holiday Tree Trends Over Time
Immersive, interactive exploration of a bubble “tree-map” visualization Mod alongside county-level Spotfire geoanalytics  [*source: USDA census data]    
  • Artificial vs. Real Tree Sales: As you can see below, artificial tree sales have been on the rise over the last decade, with 162 percent growth between 2004 and 2018. Artificial trees are taking over. Actually, 81 percent of the trees on display, whether in storefronts, businesses, or homes, in 2019 were of the artificial variety. But what does that mean for the global economy when China produces 80 percent of artificial trees worldwide and given that artificial trees cannot be recycled like real trees?
 Visualize 5 Cool Insights on Holiday Tree Trends Over Time
Tree sales volume over time in this area chart visualization Mod in Spotfire [*source: National Christmas Tree Association] 
  • Rising Average Price of Real Trees: According to an article in the Hustle, “During the recession in 2008, ailing farmers planted too few trees. As a result, prices have been much higher since 2016.” The article also cites the National Christmas Tree Association as stating that the average retail price for a real tree in 2019 was $ 75. Obviously, this is a huge market, but one that continues to shift with economic and social changes—which makes us wonder just how different our analysis next year will look.
  • Consumer Demand Lower in 2019: In the area chart visualization above, we see that sales for natural trees still account for a larger share of the market. However, the artificial tree category set new high marks for sales in each year progressively from 2016 to 2018. Why could this be? One hypothesis might be that as Baby Boomers retire as “empty-nesters” and downsize their homes, they are buying fewer trees, but let us know your thoughts on this surprising find. 
  • The More the Merrier? Multiple Trees: According to a survey by the American Christmas Tree Association, the number of households in the United States that display more than one Christmas tree has grown by 10 percent from 2014 to 2019. In 2019, approximately 16 percent of American households display multiple trees. But will this trend continue or, as with the overall tree sales, will the number of trees per household decrease in the coming years?

We’ve started our own holiday tradition involving the classic festive trees: using our data visualization software to understand trends in holiday tree data. Click To Tweet

A New Tradition: Immersive Yourself in Custom Analytics Applications 

But this is just one festive story you could tell around data trends. What about shopping trends this year, will there be an increase in small business online sales? What will be the top gifted items in 2020? 
You tell us! Join our tradition, and read our whitepaper to learn how the immersive qualities of Hyperconverged Analytics will create new value for your business. For a closer look at all of “What’s New in Spotfire®” including visualization Mods, watch our 20-minute intro webinar on demand. 

Previous article20 for 2020: Looking Back on a Year of Blogging

Shannon Peifer is a Marketing Content Specialist at TIBCO Software in Denver, CO. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018 with a double major in marketing and English honors, and loves writing engaging content related to technology. Shannon grew up overseas, and loves to explore new places. When she’s not writing, you can find her swimming laps at the pool, gulping down iced lattes at local coffee shops, or scouring the shelves at the bookstore.

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Holiday Decorating

November 27, 2020   Humor

Posted by Krisgo

About Krisgo

I’m a mom, that has worn many different hats in this life; from scout leader, camp craft teacher, parents group president, colorguard coach, member of the community band, stay-at-home-mom to full time worker, I’ve done it all– almost! I still love learning new things, especially creating and cooking. Most of all I love to laugh! Thanks for visiting – come back soon icon smile Holiday Decorating


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HOLIDAY HUMOR

December 24, 2019   Humor

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This Holiday Season, Be Thankful For A Great Customer Experience

November 21, 2019   BI News and Info
 This Holiday Season, Be Thankful For A Great Customer Experience

Is it just me or has Black Friday turned into Black November?

Before the pumpkins rotted, before Halloween candy was devoured, before the ghosts and ghouls were put back in the attic, we were already deluged with Black Friday adverts and mailers.

Of course, this onslaught of promotion is entirely predictable. The fact is, no retailer can afford to sit out Black Friday – not when it’s the day that pulls them out of the red (in accounting terms) and into the black. For retailers, Black Friday can literally make their year.

More than a day

Traditionally, we think of Black Friday as the day after Thanksgiving here in the United States – when throngs of people flock to the malls. Increasingly, though, the term is being broadened to refer to the full five-day period that starts with Thanksgiving Day and runs through Cyber Monday.

The cyber part of the extended Black Friday shopping weekend continues to show its strength. Yes, you can still expect jammed parking lots at your mall of choice, but by some estimates at least, brick and mortar store shopping on Black Friday was slightly down last year. On the other hand, online sales for Black Friday more than compensated, jumping 23.6% from 2017 to hit $ 6.2 billion.

Indeed, online sales now must be seen as the main show for the Black Friday weekend. Take Cyber Monday, for example. Once the laggard in terms of sales, Cyber Monday won the weekend in 2018 with a $ 7.9 billion haul that weighed in as the highest U.S. e-commerce sales day in history.

The idea of Black Friday (or something akin to it) is not exclusive to the US, of course. In the UK, shoppers spent £8.29 billion during the Black Friday weekend. In France, they spent £5.99 billion.

Neither is it limited to Christmas. In China, the big shopping day comes on Singles Day – which is sort of like Valentine’s Day on steroids. This year, Singles Day broke records again, raking in $ 38.4 billion. Reportedly, Alibaba reached $ 1 billion in sales in its first 68 seconds and $ 13 billion in its first hour!

Toward thankful customers

So yes, there is a lot at stake for shopping days (or weekends) like Black Friday. But let’s remember that here in the US it all starts with Thanksgiving, which isn’t about shopping but about … well, giving thanks.

Thankfulness is a powerful human emotion, and companies that can engender it in their customers are likely to keep those customers over the long term. But how do you move forward? It all comes down to delivering a great customer experience.

Keep in mind, though, that a great customer experience doesn’t end when you place the order. In fact, it doesn’t even start there. Great customer experiences are woven into the entire end-to-end process of designing, making, and delivering the products you sell.

Companies should create experiences that make their customers want to say thank you in the following ways:

Thanks for thinking of me with a great design experience:

Great customer experiences start by designing and manufacturing products that the customer actually wants. What a concept! But understanding what customers want can be difficult. Leading companies are mixing data from sales and social media with advanced analytics and machine learning to detect shifts in demand patterns and customer preferences. To meet these preferences, companies are also designing highly configurable products that make it easier to make exactly what customers want.

Thanks for making it easy for me with a great ordering experience:

With so much of sales shifting online, companies need to find ways to make ordering as simple as possible. This starts with understanding who the customer actually is, remembering their past interactions, and prepopulating ordering data as much as possible to make the checkout process painless. Nowhere is this more important than with mobile. Customers want tap-tap-buy capabilities on their phones – and customers who get it will keep coming back.

Thanks for bringing it to me when and where I want it with a great delivery experience:

According to Adobe Analytics, 2018 saw a 73% increase in customers choosing the BIOPIS (buy online, pick up in store) option – with 64% making a further in-store purchase while picking up. So, what’s the downside of making it as easy as possible for customers to get what they want when they want it? I can’t see one. But to get there, companies need omnichannel visibility of customers, orders, inventory, availability logistics carriers, and more. Integration across all phases of operations is the key.

Thanks for remembering me with a great after-sales service experience:

Remaining attentive after the sale is critical for maintaining customer loyalty. Wherever possible, leading companies are using IoT sensors and greater connectedness in general to more effectively monitor usage data and post-sale customer experiences. Some companies are even using predictive analytics to detect issues before they arise – enabling them to take action ahead of time to ensure the best customer experiences possible.

So, when it comes to Black Friday or any other kind of high-stakes shopping day for retailers or manufacturers, keep in mind that thankfulness pays. If you can create experiences that make life easier for your customers, you may very well be showered with thankfulness expressed by your customers with their ongoing business.

Happy Thanksgiving and good luck on Black Friday.

Be thankful for a free whitepaper from IDC about how to drive a great customer experience from design of new products, through to their operation at a customer.

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Retailers: Prepare Now for Holiday Outages

November 11, 2019   CRM News and Info

In the age of fast shipping and one-click ordering, a single technical glitch can be detrimental to retail sales. A server outage during the holiday season could be a critical issue.

Target is a prime example, considering the brand experienced multiple technical outages in 2019. The retail giant’s in-store registers and online services were down for a few hours as recently as September. Target’s payment-processing system was down for more than a day in June.

The June outage
cost Target an estimated US$ 100 million in sales, and left customers
feeling frustrated with their shopping experience. Shares fell 2 percent after the incident.

Target’s blackout was nothing new for consumers and retailers alike: Almost
96 percent of IT decision makers worldwide experienced at least one customer-impacting outage in the last three years.

Just last Thanksgiving,
J.Crew,
Ulta, and
Walmart experienced outages lasting from as little as a few minutes to several hours.

Unifying All Employees and Services

Looking internally at the employee experience during an outage, workers could be unable to access a production server to check out customers or log information. This can lead to employees submitting hundreds of IT tickets for the same issue. At the same time, employees have to communicate with upset customers and field questions they can’t answer — like when service will return to normal.

Since retailers often rely exclusively on their internal systems to process payments and orders, an outage of this magnitude is a major problem for business. Without preparing both the front- and back-end teams, it’s difficult for retailers to communicate between online and in-store systems and resolve issues quickly. It’s crucial to have a unified IT service management (ITSM) solution in place that can equip retail IT teams with the tools to identify and resolve the issue quickly and get employees back up and running.

To prepare adequately for the holiday season, retailers must align with their IT department and employees to put a unified strategy in place. On the back end, a robust ITSM solution facilitating change management can help control technical infrastructure proactively to prevent issues.

Incident and problem management processes can be the key to getting systems back up and running quickly when there is an issue, while also facilitating communication with all employees to make sure the entire organization is aligned.

So how does ITSM come into play for retailers?

At the center of any retail outage are the retailers’ customer-facing employees who are on the frontline should a software glitch occur. Employees are not only hit with complaints from customers, but also unable to use the technology they need to do their jobs, potentially resulting in hundreds or thousands of tickets to being sent to IT service teams about the issue.

With
more than half of retailers saying they experience a decrease in employee productivity during an outage, it seems next to impossible to recover lost sales and keep employees productive during a major technical glitch.

When multiple departments are involved in a company-wide outage, it’s even more difficult to address tickets, get systems running again, and keep employees productive while IT is fixing the issue.

To better handle a technology outage, it’s beneficial to have all employees and departments connected to the same platform and service tools. This includes integrating business critical applications into the service desk, like IT monitoring tools.

For example, if an IT monitoring tool is integrated with the ITSM solution, a monitoring alert that a network or system is down can trigger a ticket automatically in the service desk, providing IT service teams with immediate visibility into broader IT issues and enabling quicker resolution.

ITSM solutions also can provide powerful technology asset data to the IT teams dealing with incidents like this. With IT asset management, IT can discover, track and manage the technology assets that employees and the business rely on.

When incidents occur, IT can align impacted assets with the incident, creating a digital trail of any issues a specific device or piece of software experiences. This helps identify problem devices and equips teams with the data they need to be proactive in terms of technology upgrades and preventing future issues.

When it comes to communication during an outage, employees could be in the dark in terms of what’s actually happening. With an ITSM solution, service teams quickly can communicate through a company-wide portal announcement exactly what the issue is and the steps being taken to address it.

Leveraging Smart Technology

As retailers invest in new tools and smart point-of-service systems for their front-end employees, it’s important to strengthen systems at the back end as well.
Smart technology, like artificial intelligence (AI), can streamline consumer-facing processes and experience. Likewise, this technology can benefit workers and IT technicians alike on the back end.

For recurring issues on the frontlines, workers can turn to their ITSM solution and its service portal for quick access to resources. As workers start typing in their issues, AI can guide them to relevant self-service solutions articles or service request forms that make it easy for them to provide IT support with all the pertinent details IT needs to troubleshoot.

In the event of an outage, teams can be prepared with a knowledge base article about how to communicate the issue to customers.

For IT techs, this same technology, along with automations, can streamline processes significantly, keeping incident queues organized, guiding them to one-click solutions, and identifying multiple related incidents that are indicative of a bigger problem.

If a technical glitch were to occur, having smart technology to increase the resolution speed and consolidation of tickets can only help the IT team get things back up and running more quickly.

By having business critical tools, systems and applications connected to the service desk, IT teams are better able to identify broader issues impacting the entire organization, and can more efficiently communicate with key stakeholders and employees.

Putting It All Together: ITSM

Resolving an outage quickly and efficiently, with minimum damage, is a challenge for retailers. Even if stores think they’ve learned their lesson after last year’s Black Friday issues, online traffic is increasing each holiday season.

It’s no longer enough to assume your website can handle a sharp increase in traffic or assume your system can be back up and running in no time without a clear plan in place. Even an outage that lasts only a few minutes can cause a steep loss in sales and customer loyalty.

This holiday season, retailers must align their departments with a streamlined IT service management strategy to ensure they are equipped with the right tools to anticipate and resolve a potential service outage.

With strong IT service management, retailers can develop effective and consolidated communication within their organizations and streamline resolution of service issues. By providing IT technicians with the best tools to organize tickets and field them to the right person or team, they can resolve service outages more quickly and efficiently.

At the same time, a cohesive ITSM strategy gives all employees the best knowledge and resources for how to handle an outage, uniting the entire organization under a single message. With the right solution and plan, retailers can gear up to handle service outages that might occur this holiday season.
end enn Retailers: Prepare Now for Holiday Outages


Matt Cox is senior director of technical operations, ITSM, at
SolarWinds.

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TIBCO Brings Joy This Holiday Season with Connected Intelligence

December 25, 2018   TIBCO Spotfire
GettyImages 889538316 960x640 TIBCO Brings Joy This Holiday Season with Connected Intelligence

























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Non-Promotional Holiday Email Ideas To Transition Into The New Year

December 24, 2018   CRM News and Info
Holiday Emails 1 e1545171857787 Non Promotional Holiday Email Ideas To Transition Into The New Year

The holidays are here, and we’re in the homestretch before everyone turns their full attention on 2019. You’ve probably been pushing holiday promotions and seasonal offerings in some form for every stage of the customer journey, but these marketing campaigns are coming to a close and it’s time to think forward. Before jumping right into 2019 nurture programs and messaging, let your business press pause on the promotions, offers, and value-packed opportunities to simply recognize and appreciate this holiday season. It’s a way of staying top-of-mind with your customers while smoothly transitioning from holiday-centric content to gearing up for an exciting new year.

Wrap and put a bow on your holiday messaging during this next week with a non-promotional email to your customers. It’s a way of letting them you know you’re thinking of them during the holidays, and that you recognize and appreciate the opportunity to celebrate this special time of year together – even if it’s just in the form of an email.

7 Non-Promotional Holiday Email Ideas

1. A sincere letter from the executive team or CEO. Your business wouldn’t be where it is today without your customers and they’ll appreciate hearing it on a personal level from the top.

2. If they currently have products with your business that are great to use during this hectic time of year, it’s worth a friendly reminder! A financial institution, for instance, may want to let its cardholders know that this month’s cash-back rewards are in categories that pertain to their needs around the holidays, like groceries (a reminder just before Christmas dinner shopping) or department stores (for last-minute gifts). It’s not promotional if they already have the product, and serves as a reminder of how it can best benefit your customers this time of year.

3. A message on how to stay safe during this holiday season, especially as it relates to your industry. This can be in the form of a list, infographic, or even a short video. Insurance firms are a great example with how they can share safety tips around the home for large gatherings and incremental weather. Not in the business of much safety hazard during this time of year? Give it a cheeky spin with how to unplug from our devices and even work to enjoy the holiday.

4. Share how your business gave back to its community this holiday season. Perhaps your local offices, branches, or agencies hosted a food drive, volunteered as a team, made a charitable donation, or contributed to families in need – your customers want to know that they’re supporting businesses that give back to their communities. Briefly recap with a few photos why you chose this type of charitable work, the experience, and the outcome. Be humble and appreciative to your customers for helping make this happen; help them feel part of how the business gave back.

5. Reflect on the past year for the business, community, and customers. This is a great opportunity to share your 2018 successes and, what’s more, extend those successes to your customers. Keep the reflections somewhat high-level and light; now’s not the time to crunch numbers and create charts. What do your customers care to hear about, and how did they help you achieve it? What accomplishments instill trust in your brand?

6. Shine light on a customer who has made an impact on their community. It’s not about how successful they’ve been since implementing your product or service; this is all about celebrating their positive contribution and sharing the holiday spirit. (Remember to make sure they’re okay with you sharing!)

7. Create a list of top content in your industry from this past year. Is there a particularly great thought leadership article, value-packed report, or several books that your professional network will love? Again, we’re keeping this light and non-promotional as we wrap up the holiday season, but this informational round-up serves as a good transition from 2018 to 2019.

At the end of the day, never underestimate the power of a personal note that expresses appreciation. It’s the gesture more than anything, and a reminder in their inbox that you’re thinking of them (and not their wallets).

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AFTERNOON HOLIDAY HUMOR

December 22, 2018   Humor

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Retail’s Untamed Power: Avoid The Death Star That Holiday Promotions Create

December 23, 2017   BI News and Info

Businesses share something important with lions. When a lion captures and consumes its prey, only about 10% to 20% of the prey’s energy is directly transferred into the lion’s metabolism. The rest evaporates away, mostly as heat loss, according to research done in the 1940s by ecologist Raymond Lindeman.

Today, businesses do only about as well as the big cats. When you consider the energy required to manage, power, and move products and services, less than 20% goes directly into the typical product or service—what economists call aggregate efficiency (the ratio of potential work to the actual useful work that gets embedded into a product or service at the expense of the energy lost in moving products and services through all of the steps of their value chains). Aggregate efficiency is a key factor in determining productivity.

SAP Q417 DigitalDoubles Feature2 Image2 Retail’s Untamed Power: Avoid The Death Star That Holiday Promotions CreateAfter making steady gains during much of the 20th century, businesses’ aggregate energy efficiency peaked in the 1980s and then stalled. Japan, home of the world’s most energy-efficient economy, has been skating along at or near 20% ever since. The U.S. economy, meanwhile, topped out at about 13% aggregate efficiency in the 1990s, according to research.

Why does this matter? Jeremy Rifkin says he knows why. Rifkin is an economic and social theorist, author, consultant, and lecturer at the Wharton School’s Executive Education program who believes that economies experience major increases in growth and productivity only when big shifts occur in three integrated infrastructure segments around the same time: communications, energy, and transportation.

But it’s only a matter of time before information technology blows all three wide open, says Rifkin. He envisions a new economic infrastructure based on digital integration of communications, energy, and transportation, riding atop an Internet of Things (IoT) platform that incorporates Big Data, analytics, and artificial intelligence. This platform will disrupt the world economy and bring dramatic levels of efficiency and productivity to businesses that take advantage of it,
he says.

Some economists consider Rifkin’s ideas controversial. And his vision of a new economic platform may be problematic—at least globally. It will require massive investments and unusually high levels of government, community, and private sector cooperation, all of which seem to be at depressingly low levels these days.

However, Rifkin has some influential adherents to his philosophy. He has advised three presidents of the European Commission—Romano Prodi, José Manuel Barroso, and the current president, Jean-Claude Juncker—as well as the European Parliament and numerous European Union (EU) heads of state, including Angela Merkel, on the ushering in of what he calls “a smart, green Third Industrial Revolution.” Rifkin is also advising the leadership of the People’s Republic of China on the build out and scale up of the “Internet Plus” Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure to usher in a sustainable low-carbon economy.

The internet has already shaken up one of the three major economic sectors: communications. Today it takes little more than a cell phone, an internet connection, and social media to publish a book or music video for free—what Rifkin calls zero marginal cost. The result has been a hollowing out of once-mighty media empires in just over 10 years. Much of what remains of their business models and revenues has been converted from physical (remember CDs and video stores?) to digital.

But we haven’t hit the trifecta yet. Transportation and energy have changed little since the middle of the last century, says Rifkin. That’s when superhighways reached their saturation point across the developed world and the internal-combustion engine came close to the limits of its potential on the roads, in the air, and at sea. “We have all these killer new technology products, but they’re being plugged into the same old infrastructure, and it’s not creating enough new business opportunities,” he says.

All that may be about to undergo a big shake-up, however. The digitalization of information on the IoT at near-zero marginal cost generates Big Data that can be mined with analytics to create algorithms and apps enabling ubiquitous networking. This digital transformation is beginning to have a big impact on the energy and transportation sectors. If that trend continues, we could see a metamorphosis in the economy and society not unlike previous industrial revolutions in history. And given the pace of technology change today, the shift could happen much faster than ever before.

SAP Q417 DigitalDoubles Feature2 Image3 1024x572 Retail’s Untamed Power: Avoid The Death Star That Holiday Promotions CreateThe speed of change is dictated by the increase in digitalization of these three main sectors; expensive physical assets and processes are partially replaced by low-cost virtual ones. The cost efficiencies brought on by digitalization drive disruption in existing business models toward zero marginal cost, as we’ve already seen in entertainment and publishing. According to research company Gartner, when an industry gets to the point where digital drives at least 20% of revenues, you reach the tipping point.

“A clear pattern has emerged,” says Peter Sondergaard, executive vice president and head of research and advisory for Gartner. “Once digital revenues for a sector hit 20% of total revenue, the digital bloodbath begins,” he told the audience at Gartner’s annual 2017 IT Symposium/ITxpo, according to The Wall Street Journal. “No matter what industry you are in, 20% will be the point of no return.”

Communications is already there, and energy and transportation are heading down that path. If they hit the magic 20% mark, the impact will be felt not just within those industries but across all industries. After all, who doesn’t rely on energy and transportation to power their value chains?

That’s why businesses need to factor potentially massive business model disruptions into their plans for digital transformation today if they want to remain competitive with organizations in early adopter countries like China and Germany. China, for example, is already halfway through an US$ 88 billion upgrade to its state electricity grid that will enable renewable energy transmission around the country—all managed and moved digitally, according to an article in The Economist magazine. And it is competing with the United States for leadership in self-driving vehicles, which will shift the transportation process and revenue streams heavily to digital, according to an article in Wired magazine.

SAP Q417 DigitalDoubles Feature2 Image4 Retail’s Untamed Power: Avoid The Death Star That Holiday Promotions CreateOnce China’s and Germany’s renewables and driverless infrastructures are in place, the only additional costs are management and maintenance. That could bring businesses in these countries dramatic cost savings over those that still rely on fossil fuels and nuclear energy to power their supply chains and logistics. “Once you pay the fixed costs of renewables, the marginal costs are near zero,” says Rifkin. “The sun and wind haven’t sent us invoices yet.”

In other words, zero marginal cost has become a zero-sum game.

To understand why that is, consider the major industrial revolutions in history, writes Rifkin in his books, The Zero Marginal Cost Society and The Third Industrial Revolution. The first major shift occurred in the 19th century when cheap, abundant coal provided an efficient new source of power (steam) for manufacturing and enabled the creation of a vast railway transportation network. Meanwhile, the telegraph gave the world near-instant communication over a globally connected network.

The second big change occurred at the beginning of the 20th century, when inexpensive oil began to displace coal and gave rise to a much more flexible new transportation network of cars and trucks. Telephones, radios, and televisions had a similar impact on communications.

Breaking Down the Walls Between Sectors

Now, according to Rifkin, we’re poised for the third big shift. The eye of the technology disruption hurricane has moved beyond communications and is heading toward—or as publishing and entertainment executives might warn, coming for—the rest of the economy. With its assemblage of global internet and cellular network connectivity and ever-smaller and more powerful sensors, the IoT, along with Big Data analytics and artificial intelligence, is breaking down the economic walls that have protected the energy and transportation sectors for the past 50 years.

Daimler is now among the first movers in transitioning into a digitalized mobility internet. The company has equipped nearly 400,000 of its trucks with external sensors, transforming the vehicles into mobile Big Data centers. The sensors are picking up real-time Big Data on weather conditions, traffic flows, and warehouse availability. Daimler plans to establish collaborations with thousands of companies, providing them with Big Data and analytics that can help dramatically increase their aggregate efficiency and productivity in shipping goods across their value chains. The Daimler trucks are autonomous and capable of establishing platoons of multiple trucks driving across highways.

It won’t be long before vehicles that navigate the more complex transportation infrastructures around the world begin to think for themselves. Autonomous vehicles will bring massive economic disruption to transportation and logistics thanks to new aggregate efficiencies. Without the cost of having a human at the wheel, autonomous cars could achieve a shared cost per mile below that of owned vehicles by as early as 2030, according to research from financial services company Morgan Stanley.

The transition is getting a push from governments pledging to give up their addiction to cars powered by combustion engines. Great Britain, France, India, and Norway are seeking to go all electric as early as 2025 and by 2040 at the latest.

The Final Piece of the Transition

Considering that automobiles account for 47% of petroleum consumption in the United States alone—more than twice the amount used for generators and heating for homes and businesses, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration—Rifkin argues that the shift to autonomous electric vehicles could provide the momentum needed to upend the final pillar of the economic platform: energy. Though energy has gone through three major disruptions over the past 150 years, from coal to oil to natural gas—each causing massive teardowns and rebuilds of infrastructure—the underlying economic model has remained constant: highly concentrated and easily accessible fossil fuels and highly centralized, vertically integrated, and enormous (and enormously powerful) energy and utility companies.

Now, according to Rifkin, the “Third Industrial Revolution Internet of Things infrastructure” is on course to disrupt all of it. It’s neither centralized nor vertically integrated; instead, it’s distributed and networked. And that fits perfectly with the commercial evolution of two energy sources that, until the efficiencies of the IoT came along, made no sense for large-scale energy production: the sun and the wind.

But the IoT gives power utilities the means to harness these batches together and to account for variable energy flows. Sensors on solar panels and wind turbines, along with intelligent meters and a smart grid based on the internet, manage a new, two-way flow of energy to and from the grid.

SAP Q417 DigitalDoubles Feature2 Image5 Retail’s Untamed Power: Avoid The Death Star That Holiday Promotions CreateToday, fossil fuel–based power plants need to kick in extra energy if insufficient energy is collected from the sun and wind. But industrial-strength batteries and hydrogen fuel cells are beginning to take their place by storing large reservoirs of reserve power for rainy or windless days. In addition, electric vehicles will be able to send some of their stored energy to the digitalized energy internet during peak use. Demand for ever-more efficient cell phone and vehicle batteries is helping push the evolution of batteries along, but batteries will need to get a lot better if renewables are to completely replace fossil fuel energy generation.

Meanwhile, silicon-based solar cells have not yet approached their limits of efficiency. They have their own version of computing’s Moore’s Law called Swanson’s Law. According to data from research company Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), Swanson’s Law means that for each doubling of global solar panel manufacturing capacity, the price falls by 28%, from $ 76 per watt in 1977 to $ 0.41 in 2016. (Wind power is on a similar plunging exponential cost curve, according to data from the U.S. Department of Energy.)

Thanks to the plummeting solar price, by 2028, the cost of building and operating new sun-based generation capacity will drop below the cost of running existing fossil power plants, according to BNEF. “One of the surprising things in this year’s forecast,” says Seb Henbest, lead author of BNEF’s annual long-term forecast, the New Energy Outlook, “is that the crossover points in the economics of new and old technologies are happening much sooner than we thought last year … and those were all happening a bit sooner than we thought the year before. There’s this sense that it’s not some distant risk or distant opportunity. A lot of these realities are rushing toward us.”

The conclusion, he says, is irrefutable. “We can see the data and when we map that forward with conservative assumptions, these technologies just get cheaper than everything else.”

The smart money, then—72% of total new power generation capacity investment worldwide by 2040—will go to renewable energy, according to BNEF. The firm’s research also suggests that there’s more room in Swanson’s Law along the way, with solar prices expected to drop another 66% by 2040.

Another factor could push the economic shift to renewables even faster. Just as computers transitioned from being strictly corporate infrastructure to becoming consumer products with the invention of the PC in the 1980s, ultimately causing a dramatic increase in corporate IT investments, energy generation has also made the transition to the consumer side.

Thanks to future tech media star Elon Musk, consumers can go to his Tesla Energy company website and order tempered glass solar panels that look like chic, designer versions of old-fashioned roof shingles. Models that look like slate or a curved, terracotta-colored, ceramic-style glass that will make roofs look like those of Tuscan country villas, are promised soon. Consumers can also buy a sleek-looking battery called a Powerwall to store energy from the roof.

SAP Q417 DigitalDoubles Feature2 Image6 Retail’s Untamed Power: Avoid The Death Star That Holiday Promotions CreateThe combination of solar panels, batteries, and smart meters transforms homeowners from passive consumers of energy into active producers and traders who can choose to take energy from the grid during off-peak hours, when some utilities offer discounts, and sell energy back to the grid during periods when prices are higher. And new blockchain applications promise to accelerate the shift to an energy market that is laterally integrated rather than vertically integrated as it is now. Consumers like their newfound sense of control, according to Henbest. “Energy’s never been an interesting consumer decision before and suddenly it is,” he says.

As the price of solar equipment continues to drop, homes, offices, and factories will become like nodes on a computer network. And if promising new solar cell technologies, such as organic polymers, small molecules, and inorganic compounds, supplant silicon, which is not nearly as efficient with sunlight as it is with ones and zeroes, solar receivers could become embedded into windows and building compounds. Solar production could move off the roof and become integrated into the external facades of homes and office buildings, making nearly every edifice in town a node.

The big question, of course, is how quickly those nodes will become linked together—if, say doubters, they become linked at all. As we learned from Metcalfe’s Law, the value of a network is proportional to its number of connected users.

The Will Determines the Way

Right now, the network is limited. Wind and solar account for just 5% of global energy production today, according to Bloomberg.

But, says Rifkin, technology exists that could enable the network to grow exponentially. We are seeing the beginnings of a digital energy network, which uses a combination of the IoT, Big Data, analytics, and artificial intelligence to manage distributed energy sources, such as solar and wind power from homes and businesses.

As nodes on this network, consumers and businesses could take a more active role in energy production, management, and efficiency, according to Rifkin. Utilities, in turn, could transition from simply transmitting power and maintaining power plants and lines to managing the flow to and from many different energy nodes; selling and maintaining smart home energy management products; and monitoring and maintaining solar panels and wind turbines. By analyzing energy use in the network, utilities could create algorithms that automatically smooth the flow of renewables. Consumers and businesses, meanwhile, would not have to worry about connecting their wind and solar assets to the grid and keeping them up and running; utilities could take on those tasks more efficiently.

Already in Germany, two utility companies, E.ON and RWE, have each split their businesses into legacy fossil and nuclear fuel companies and new services companies based on distributed generation from renewables, new technologies, and digitalization.

The reason is simple: it’s about survival. As fossil fuel generation winds down, the utilities need a new business model to make up for lost revenue. Due to Germany’s population density, “the utilities realize that they won’t ever have access to enough land to scale renewables themselves,” says Rifkin. “So they are starting service companies to link together all the different communities that are building solar and wind and are managing energy flows for them and for their customers, doing their analytics, and managing their Big Data. That’s how they will make more money while selling less energy in the future.”

SAP Q417 DigitalDoubles Feature2 Image7 1024x572 Retail’s Untamed Power: Avoid The Death Star That Holiday Promotions Create

The digital energy internet is already starting out in pockets and at different levels of intensity around the world, depending on a combination of citizen support, utility company investments, governmental power, and economic incentives.

China and some countries within the EU, such as Germany and France, are the most likely leaders in the transition toward a renewable, energy-based infrastructure because they have been able to align the government and private sectors in long-term energy planning. In the EU for example, wind has already overtaken coal as the second largest form of power capacity behind natural gas, according to an article in TheGuardian newspaper. Indeed, Rifkin has been working with China, the EU, and governments, communities, and utilities in Northern France, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg to begin building these new internets.

Hauts-de-France, a region that borders the English Channel and Belgium and has one of the highest poverty rates in France, enlisted Rifkin to develop a plan to lift it out of its downward spiral of shuttered factories and abandoned coal mines. In collaboration with a diverse group of CEOs, politicians, teachers, scientists, and others, it developed Rev3, a plan to put people to work building a renewable energy network, according to an article in Vice.

Today, more than 1,000 Rev3 projects are underway, encompassing everything from residential windmills made from local linen to a fully electric car–sharing system. Rev3 has received financial support from the European Investment Bank and a handful of private investment funds, and startups have benefited from crowdfunding mechanisms sponsored by Rev3. Today, 90% of new energy in the region is renewable and 1,500 new jobs have been created in the wind energy sector alone.

Meanwhile, thanks in part to generous government financial support, Germany is already producing 35% of its energy from renewables, according to an article in TheIndependent, and there is near unanimous citizen support (95%, according to a recent government poll) for its expansion.

If renewable energy is to move forward in other areas of the world that don’t enjoy such strong economic and political support, however, it must come from the ability to make green, not act green.

Not everyone agrees that renewables will produce cost savings sufficient to cause widespread cost disruption anytime soon. A recent forecast by the U.S. Energy Information Administration predicts that in 2040, oil, natural gas, and coal will still be the planet’s major electricity producers, powering 77% of worldwide production, while renewables such as wind, solar, and biofuels will account for just 15%.

Skeptics also say that renewables’ complex management needs, combined with the need to store reserve power, will make them less economical than fossil fuels through at least 2035. “All advanced economies demand full-time electricity,” Benjamin Sporton, chief executive officer of the World Coal Association told Bloomberg. “Wind and solar can only generate part-time, intermittent electricity. While some renewable technologies have achieved significant cost reductions in recent years, it’s important to look at total system costs.”

On the other hand, there are many areas of the world where distributed, decentralized, renewable power generation already makes more sense than a centralized fossil fuel–powered grid. More than 20% of Indians in far flung areas of the country have no access to power today, according to an article in TheGuardian. Locally owned and managed solar and wind farms are the most economical way forward. The same is true in other developing countries, such as Afghanistan, where rugged terrain, war, and tribal territorialism make a centralized grid an easy target, and mountainous Costa Rica, where strong winds and rivers have pushed the country to near 100% renewable energy, according to TheGuardian.

The Light and the Darknet

Even if all the different IoT-enabled economic platforms become financially advantageous, there is another concern that could disrupt progress and potentially cause widespread disaster once the new platforms are up and running: hacking. Poorly secured IoT sensors have allowed hackers to take over everything from Wi-Fi enabled Barbie dolls to Jeep Cherokees, according to an article in Wired magazine.

Humans may be lousy drivers, but at least we can’t be hacked (yet). And while the grid may be prone to outages, it is tightly controlled, has few access points for hackers, and is physically separated from the Wild West of the internet.

If our transportation and energy networks join the fray, however, every sensor, from those in the steering system on vehicles to grid-connected toasters, becomes as vulnerable as a credit card number. Fake news and election hacking are bad enough, but what about fake drivers or fake energy? Now we’re talking dangerous disruptions and putting millions of people in harm’s way.

SAP Q417 DigitalDoubles Feature2 Image8 Retail’s Untamed Power: Avoid The Death Star That Holiday Promotions CreateThe only answer, according to Rifkin, is for businesses and governments to start taking the hacking threat much more seriously than they do today and to begin pouring money into research and technologies for making the internet less vulnerable. That means establishing “a fully distributed, redundant, and resilient digital infrastructure less vulnerable to the kind of disruptions experienced by Second Industrial Revolution–centralized communication systems and power grids that are increasingly subject to climate change, disasters, cybercrime, and cyberterrorism,” he says. “The ability of neighborhoods and communities to go off centralized grids during crises and re-aggregate in locally decentralized networks is the key to advancing societal security in the digital era,” he adds.

Start Looking Ahead

Until today, digital transformation has come mainly through the networking and communications efficiencies made possible by the internet. Airbnb thrives because web communications make it possible to create virtual trust markets that allow people to feel safe about swapping their most private spaces with one another.

But now these same efficiencies are coming to two other areas that have never been considered core to business strategy. That’s why businesses need to begin managing energy and transportation as key elements of their digital transformation portfolios.

Microsoft, for example, formed a senior energy team to develop an energy strategy to mitigate risk from fluctuating energy prices and increasing demands from customers to reduce carbon emissions, according to an article in Harvard Business Review. “Energy has become a C-suite issue,” Rob Bernard, Microsoft’s top environmental and sustainability executive told the magazine. “The CFO and president are now actively involved in our energy road map.”

As Daimler’s experience shows, driverless vehicles will push autonomous transportation and automated logistics up the strategic agenda within the next few years. Boston Consulting Group predicts that the driverless vehicle market will hit $ 42 billion by 2025. If that happens, it could have a lateral impact across many industries, from insurance to healthcare to the military.

Businesses must start planning now. “There’s always a period when businesses have to live in the new and the old worlds at the same time,” says Rifkin. “So businesses need to be considering new business models and structures now while continuing to operate their existing models.”

He worries that many businesses will be left behind if their communications, energy, and transportation infrastructures don’t evolve. Companies that still rely on fossil fuels for powering traditional transportation and logistics could be at a major competitive disadvantage to those that have moved to the new, IoT-based energy and transportation infrastructures.

Germany, for example, has set a target of 80% renewables for gross power consumption by 2050, according to TheIndependent. If the cost advantages of renewables bear out, German businesses, which are already the world’s third-largest exporters behind China and the United States, could have a major competitive advantage.

“How would a second industrial revolution society or country compete with one that has energy at zero marginal cost and driverless vehicles?” asks Rifkin. “It can’t be done.” D!


About the Authors

Maurizio Cattaneo is Director, Delivery Execution, Energy and Natural Resources, at SAP.

Joerg Ferchow is Senior Utilities Expert and Design Thinking Coach, Digital Transformation, at SAP.

Daniel Wellers is Digital Futures Lead, Global Marketing, at SAP.

Christopher Koch is Editorial Director, SAP Center for Business Insight, at SAP.


Read more thought provoking articles in the latest issue of the Digitalist Magazine, Executive Quarterly.

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