Lisa Schwartz, Senior Director of SaaS Applications for Oracle’s Cloud Business Group, discussed the ways emerging technology makes data more valuable in today’s workforce.

She started by explaining the idea that data is the new oil. It’s clear that data is not fossil fuel, we cannot run our cars on it, or heat or homes with it. However, in a less literal sense, the analogy applies.

“As with oil, data only begins to have value when it is unearthed from the depths of data lakes, data warehouse, databases, and data repositories and put to good use.”

—Lisa Schwartz, Senior Director of SaaS Applications for Oracle’s Cloud Business Group

Additionally, data begins to have the most value when we unearth it in creative ways. This is where emerging technology plays a part. Creative, emerging technology applications like AI, IoT, blockchain, and chatbots, can help humans discern the signal from the noise. These easy-to-use, sophisticated, emerging business applications can help create new business value by unearthing data to help:

• Predict, project, present, and deliver what customers and companies need next
• Sense when to provide service to customers
• Track and validate transactions across an entire industry
• Answer a variety of questions through natural language voice interface for instant resolution

Common Questions About Emerging Technology

Emerging Cloud technologies enable organizations to step into the future and leverage their own AI-based prediction machines. However, all of these emerging and exciting SaaS technologies are still leaving many customers with many questions. There are a few common questions that Lisa said come up frequently when examining emerging technologies and how they will affect today’s workforce.

1. What will the future look like for my business and my industry?
2. How does our business harness the power of data and emerging technologies to benefit?
3. What questions do I need to easily answer for my customers and my employees?

To help handle these questions, Oracle took a deeper look at how specific business processes could be impacted by emerging technologies. The introduction to a new Oracle e-book written by Steve Cox, Group Vice President of Oracle’s Cloud Business Group, and titled Modern Best Practice—Predicted examines how areas like finance, supply chain, customer experience, and human resources can get the most benefit from emerging technologies like AI, machine learning, IoT, blockchain, and chatbots. This document cites specific processes to consider when applying emerging technology within your business. It can help take the guesswork out of how your business can benefit from easily accessing data with Cloud applications.

A Shift in Operating Model

Many customers are looking to adopt new, dynamic operating models and do so with best practices in mind. In particular, a lot of customers are looking at the best way to manage growing amounts of data. It’s predicted that data will continue to grow at astounding rates, and the volume of this data can be overwhelming to some organizations. For those who have invested in IoT, this amount of data will grow even more each year.

While it’s nice to have access to all of this data, drawing insight from this data requires more than human effort. That’s why it’s important to leverage emerging technology like Cloud, blockchain, AI, etc. to help manage data. A digital business process that harnesses these technologies will drive business performance.

AI, IoT, blockchain, chatbots, autonomous software, etc. will do more than change the way that humans work. They will change work and society into something entirely different than what it was before. The Oracle document explained that, within the next 10 years, these technologies will give rise to social networking, one-click e-commerce, the mobile worker, and other new realities that are now commonplace.

Emerging technologies can help reduce the number of steps a process includes, the time it takes to complete a process, and much more.

Modern Best Practice—Predicted is a follow-up to Oracle’s e-book Modern Best Practice—Explained. The full follow-up e-book is not yet available, but Modern Best Practice—Explained is still available for free as a download from Oracle.