Information and People - The Keys to Your Competitive Future

By Narinder Singh (@singhns)

Today represents a significant step forward for a strategy Appirio believes will help us continue to redefine how technology can transform business.  This morning, we announced our intent to acquire Knowledge Infusion (KI), an incredible organization that has spent the last several years helping connect HR, and an organization’s “talent”, more directly to improve business outcomes. 

Businesses today are going through a major transformation because people are fundamentally changing the way they interact with each other at home and at work:

• Facebook has over 1B users and accounts for 1 out of every 5 pageviews on the Internet worldwide
• By 2013, there’ll be almost twice as many mobile devices shipped vs PCs
• 1 in 6 people found their jobs through social networks

Providing strategic guidance without understanding how cloud, social and mobile are transforming the interactions between organizations and their customers or workforce is analogous to planning a supply chain assuming only horses and wagons. At Dreamforce 2012, enabling the future of work emerged as a new front in the ongoing battle between the old world providers and cloud leaders.  Yet while many of these drivers have laid havoc to the ability of legacy providers to keep up, we have always recognized that great technology innovation alone does not create lasting business change.  



By bringing KI into Appirio, we can ensure that we not only create great, innovative technology solutions but that we put people and strategy first as we do this. This is the most impactful way for our customers to drive dramatic business change. 

It's not enough to change technology. Instead, organizations must use new technology to fundamentally change how they attract employees, engage them, develop them and measure them.

For a CIO, helping transform your enterprise’s HR and talent requires a much stronger alignment with the Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) than with most other departments - because fulfilling any business objective requires thinking about talent, information flows and collaboration, and ‘systems’ across every person in your organization.  Yet, it’s broader than even this.  Because getting results from any 'transformational' initiative in your company, technology-driven or not, requires understanding how to change human behavior.

By joining forces with some of the world’s leading experts on helping transform your people, and combining it with our unique model of cloud, social and mobile innovation, we have a special opportunity to serve you, the customer in a unique way.  And disrupting a legacy SI model that can’t even transform itself, let alone its customers - well that’s just a perk.