3 min read

Since Henry Ford, the alchemy of turning raw materials into mass-produced products has been complicated and challenging. At best, it has been a delicate and precarious balancing act; at worst, something akin to herding cats. The trick has always been to align ever-shifting patterns of customer demand with far-flung ecosystems of miners, designers, suppliers, engineers, […]

3 min read

Up in the mornin’ and out to school The teacher is teachin’ the Golden Rule American history and practical math You study’ em hard and hopin’ to pass Chuck Berry’s old hit “School Days” sums up an educational model that has persisted since the 1800s — if not since Aristotle. Students and their classmates sit […]

3 min read

We live in a time of tremendous and challenging technological disruptions. Yet it is also a time when the opportunities for business transformation are equally vast and impactful. This is particularly true for the retail industry. The wave of change, which Cisco calls the Internet of Everything (IoE), is fast-moving, and retailers will need to […]

3 min read

Walking the miles of aisles at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, it’s easy to see how the Internet of Everything (IoE) is revolutionizing our lives. Super-smart homes, cars, drones, and all manner of entertainment are on display seemingly everywhere, along with a mind-boggling array of wearable, connected technologies. But CES — […]

3 min read

If it seems as if the roles of chief information officer (CIO) and chief diversity officer (CDO) rarely overlap, think again. In today’s hypercompetitive — and hyperconnected — global marketplace, inclusion, collaboration, and technology are merging as essential drivers of innovation and business success. And the relationship between the CIO and CDO may never be […]

3 min read

On a typical day, we leave a vast trail of data in our wake. Our browsing histories, online preferences, shopping habits, work decisions, social interactions—all are rendered in binary code, prompting a complex interaction of requests, responses, affirmations, and denials. And that’s just from our laptops and smartphones. What about when the Internet of Everything […]

2 min read

Futurists have long envisioned a world where fabulous innovations transform our lives in mind-boggling ways. And while some of their ideas may remain far-fetched, the most exciting thing about their future is that so much of it is already here, today (flying cars notwithstanding). Indeed, we are living in an age of unprecedented technological transformation, […]

3 min read

It doesn’t take long to realize it’s going to be one of those days. You drag out of bed, bleary-eyed after a bad night’s sleep in a stuffy, overheated room. Desperately in need of a caffeine jolt, you then discover that you’re out of coffee. You turn on the TV but are too harried to […]

3 min read

Science fiction writers have often mused about the merger of humans and machines. But while RoboCops and bionic superheroes aren’t likely to fight evil anytime soon, some exciting wearable smart technologies are already here. They may not match Tony Stark’s Iron Man suit, but they are enabling ordinary people to interact with the wider world […]