You may not believe it but today, knowledge and expertise are increasingly  becoming a commodity? Now everyone can become an expert with just a click. Talk to experts in auditing, engineering and business consulting and they will voice their concern about the trend that professional knowledge is becoming a commodity. For instance, automation of preparation of tax returns and auditing. Also, all the information including the latest about any field is already available on the internet and clients are wanting to know what they don’t already know. In addition, a lot of the content is being written by Artificial intelligence.  

Expertise or complex knowledge no longer demands the huge premium it used to in the past. Firms now fear vulnerability and expect instant response. The question is if the traditional delivery of expertise is no longer acceptable then what is? The answer maybe lies in the trust equation. What is this trust equation? To find out, we urge you to read this article and also discover what is becoming more and more important today, “what you know” or “who you know?” 

Online education is getting more and more popular. It is at the takeoff stage with the present global market at $91 billion and expected to grow annually by 20 percent till 2017. The growth of elearning is dependent on the growth of cloud technology which offers seamless information access, easily sharable data and multi-user collaboration, an ideal environment for a virtual classrooms. Technology related to online-learning platforms has improved considerably making them flexible and easily accessable on a variety of devices like smartphones and tablets. The sources for developing content have also increased. Online-learning platforms offer businesses a flexible and cost effective corporate training option. Here Adam discusses six new promising cloud-based learning platforms (TalentLMS, Moodle,  Degreed, BIStrainer, BizLibrary and Grovo) that are expected to boost the elearning marketplace. If you have interest in elearning and online education, then you must definitely read this article  to gain knowledge of these latest tools of online education. 

Robert has come up with an interesting 360 degree on the thought that one should focus on resolving the big issue and everything else will be resolved automatically and the famous 80/20 rule. And guess what, he makes sense. He does this by comparing managing in an organization with programming by web developers and suggests that apart from the thinking big thoughts the high level managers need to also make sure that these small mundane things also work. Quite a few times, the ignorance of these mundane things can lead to disaster.Robert has tried to support his contention by elucidating three lessons that high level managers can learn from web developers. One that being “off-by-one” or being extremely close is partial success but not success. Two, being redundant is not always bad as having a back-up plan is good thinking. The developers always have inbuilt checks and balances for critical processes so that nothing major goes wrong.Management trainingof managers should also include discussion on how to avoid the common myth that being “off by one” cannot lead to major consequences.

Management consulting as an industry is going through a lot of change mainly brought about by digital transformation. In fact these days no firm is formulating its corporate strategy without aligning the same with technology. Thus the acronym SMAC has emerged to notify Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud. Cognizant being a technology company at heart has been among the first movers and thus growing at great pace in consulting. Clients no longer accept the traditional hierarchy bound model but instead demand a system based on agility.  

A business consulting publication has provided us with certain misconceptions we take for granted which will be harmful for the CRM strategy of the firm. It is often thought that all data must be cleansed, yet that is not necessary as one never knows when which piece of information will come prove handy. More volume of data may not always be desirable. CRM data can be useful for all departments and verticals and not for any one particular. Also CRM is not important only for sales but for other tasks as well such as content creation. While businesses indeed are stuck with legacy systems, they can be modified depending on the immediate requirement. Often firms provide incomplete information believing that whatever is available must be shared. However, disseminating any piece of information without grip of the context can have disastrous implications.