Today's Top Stories CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Every Daimler Trucks North America truck sold over the last two years has been equipped with a sensor that sends information about the truck to the company's call center if it detects an abnormality, said Dieter Haban, chief information officer of Daimler Trucks North America, during a panel at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium held here Wednesday. If an irregularity is noted, the call center informs the driver whether he or she needs to have maintenance work performed. "It's like driving around with a bunch of virtual technicians," Haban observed. Daimler Trucks North America's truck brands include Detroit Diesel, Freightliner, Thomas Built Buses and Western Star. Haban relates that if there is a major problem with the truck, Daimler notifies the driver and the nearest dealer, looks up whether the parts needed to repair the truck are available and schedules a service appointment with the dealer. The company provides a service app that tells the dealer when the truck arrives and pulls up the information on the truck and the company. The repairs are done while the driver waits. "So we connect all those dots and deliver a good customer experience," he explains. Sanjay Sarma, director of digital learning at MIT, told the panel that that there is an "incredible opportunity" with the Internet of Things (IoT). "We are at the beginning of putting everything on the Internet." Unfortunately, there is no overarching paradigm or architecture to enable IoT. "Until that happens, we are groping the dark," he warned. Chris Kuntz, senior director of business development at ThingWorx, explained that IoT is "not just about connecting a smart device and capturing data, it's about what do you do with that data, how do you integrate with your business process to effect change," he said. "People have begun to embrace the ability to not only enhance existing business processes but create new ones," he added.
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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Mobility and the cloud are profoundly changing the way businesses do business, F. Thaddeus Arroyo, chief information officer of AT&T Services, observed during a panel discussion at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium held here Wednesday. "Advances in technology, led by powerful mobile computing connected to fast and ever-present networks accessing intelligent services in the cloud, are changing the way we do business ... This is causing us and many companies to look differently at our products and services," Arroyo observed. "We want to take digital technologies that inform the products we have in the marketplace and use those to change the way we operate our business ... We want to tap into the connected industrial Internet," he said. By 2020, AT&T Services wants 80 percent of its interactions to be digital, Arroyo said. "To get to that point, we had to take a more holistic approach in driving the digital transformation," he related. Tanya Cordrey, chief digital officer at Guardian News and Media, said that digital content consumption is rapidly changing. "We are seeing different forms of content consumption emerge. It is very different when you are looking for the headlines at 7:45 in the morning on your smartphone versus context and analysis on your tablet late into the evening," Cordrey explained. According to a study conducted by George Westerman, research scientist at MIT Center for Digital Business, companies that are "digital masters" are 26 percent more profitable than their peers in a particular industry. "These leaders drive transformation top down. Technology for them is not just a technology. It's a way to rethink how their business operates. The only way to make that happen is to drive it from the top," Westerman said during the panel discussion.
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 Major retailer Walmart is enhancing its mobile platform by adding e-receipts as an alternative to the normal paper slip usually given to customers, according to a Mobile Commerce Daily article.
What's the big deal? Plenty of retailers offer e-receipts, you might say. The difference in Walmart's strategy is that the e-receipts aren't just emailed copies of regular receipts. These recorded purchases are organized and stored within the user's Walmart mobile app, and the customer is able to utilize them to perform actions like making a new shopping list, says the article. The e-receipts can be delivered to the customer in two ways--by scanning a QR code on a regular receipt or by providing the cashier with a mobile number before having it sent electronically. In an interview with Mobile Commerce Daily, Wendy Bergh, vice president of mobile and digital strategy at Walmart Global Ecommerce, said that e-receipts in product exchange situations are a plus for customers because they don't have to carry around paper receipts. Walmart's mobile app also offers the popular shopping list feature. Customers are able to see prices and product descriptions as they are making their shopping lists, according to the article. Bergh opines that the e-receipts will enhance the shopping list feature with the data collected on previously bought items.
For more:
- see the Mobile Commerce Daily article
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