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IBM Center for Applied Insights

It's one thing to learn how the principles of a Smarter Planet can help your business infuse intelligence into all systems. It's another to apply those principles, define the strategy and embark on enhancing your business capabilities.

The IBM Center for Applied Insights (CAI) helps enterprises like yours assess the strategic and financial impact of a Smarter Planet—and make the case for implementation. The CAI conducts primary and secondary market research on new ideas, new ways of thinking, working and leading. To help you achieve your enterprise goals, we also provide tools, techniques and access to networks of forward thinkers.

“By defining client pathways to achieve smarter outcomes, we quantify the expected value and help our clients make the case for smart.” - Steve Rogers, Director, IBM Center for Applied Insights

Outperforming in a data-rich, hyper-connected world

Business leaders wonder how they can harness power of all this big data and hyper-connectivity to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their enterprises and institutions. The CAI surveyed 1,168 such leaders around the world, across nine industries, to discover how forward-thinking enterprises are harnessing data, becoming smarter and outperforming their peers. We found that they are able to capture real-time data, use common data definitions and exploit that across end-to-end processes to understand and listen to their environment. We also found that they are able to model and predict future outcomes in an effort to anticipate their environment and act in ways that drives superior financial performance.

As a group, these outperformers illustrate that enterprises can grow the top line while controlling and even cutting costs. They are challenging the old maxim that you can not do both. And the equity markets are rewarding them for it.

Read the executive report, Outperforming in a data-rich, hyper-connected world, to see what enterprises are doing and the capabilities they’re applying to outperform their peers.