Thomas Heimann is a graduate computer scientist. His career began in the savings bank industry, where he worked as a software engineer, enterprise architect and group leader. Since 2000, he has been working for Capgemini in various roles and different industries in the context of IT architecture. In addition, he was temporarily responsible for marketing in Germany. During this time, he took over the responsibility for the Capgemini IT Trends study. Thomas is currently working for a large public sector organisation providing advice on IT strategy, enterprise architecture and innovation management.
Publications
Part 1
Digitalisation not only affects the way businesses meet and beat future challenges – it also pervades ongoing business activities. In fact, sales and marketing were among the first ground-breaking digital functions (e.g., the move of advertising onto the Internet). It is essential to consider the best place to reach the customer and how to communicate with them in a digital world, even more so in light of the current trend of decreasing customer loyalty to a particular company or its products – see, for example, the result of a banking study by IBM, which found that ‘… a new generation of financial technology companies are … threatening to reduce the incumbents to settlement agents of last resort’.
Part 3
According to Gartner, one out of four companies will lose its current market position because of its digital incompetence. The MIT confirms this trend and prophesises that 40% of today’s Fortune 500 companies on the S&P 500 will disappear by 2025. We can already see this trend in history. Established companies such as Kodak (USA), Quelle (Germany) and Nokia (Finland) suffered crises or complete breakdown. Most companies recognise the importance of digitalisation today. Although the radicalism of the digital business transformation will not have the same intensity and depth in each sector, the modernisation of business models to meet the requirements of the digital world is high on the agenda of most companies.
Part 4
It is easy to see that if a business can ‘inspire’ its market, it will have a much easier task of claiming leadership in that market. However, inspiring the market goes beyond attracting the right kind of attention of the customer and includes positively influencing other stakeholders, beyond the primary buyer and seller, including retailers, distributors, partners and suppliers. This section discusses how to enthuse an enterprise’s market environment. When a company has successfully inspired its market, buyers and the other associated parties will have a natural attraction towards that company’s selling proposition and will play their roles more naturally and enthusiastically.
