In our present age of digital disruption, the fact that digital technologies cause many of the challenges companies face doesn’t mean that technology is necessarily the solution to those problems. Where do companies focus their transformation efforts if not on technology? They focus on their most valuable assets: their people.

In this webinar, IBM chief human resource officer Diane Gherson describes the technological and cultural challenges her company faced when they designed their new, digitally enabled performance management system — with buy-in from their 650,000 employees.

B2B Marketing departments never have enough time, manpower, or money. AI solutions such as automated emails and predictive analytics can help companies push back against these constraints. AI marketing products can act as a force multiplier. Imagine filling your headquarters with thousands of brilliant marketers, expertly analyzing data and providing actionable insights that increase the productivity of your existing marketing team.

A webinar featuring ADP chief behavioral economist Jordan Birnbaum describes how data-driven performance management can be used to improve the organization.

Digitization opens opportunities for the world’s sustainability challenges, but it also transforms industries, holding out the possibility of dramatically improving their social and environmental performance. To capitalize on this development, an emerging area of opportunity is the digitization of physical products and production.

Digital customer service is becoming more widely adopted, but one place it falls short is in the language and phrases it uses. Many digital service platforms use words that alienate customers rather than engage them; selecting customer-centric language for chatbots and service platforms can make a significant difference in customer satisfaction.

In a webinar featuring Google Cloud’s Quentin Hardy, MIT SMR looks at historical precedents of disruptive technologies and how they remade society — and work — in the past. Are we on the brink of the next big technological disruption to business, labor, and education thanks to Big Data and Cloud technologies? And how do managers prepare themselves, their teams, and their organizations for the changes to come?

In the eyes of many leaders, artificial intelligence and cognitive technologies are the most disruptive forces on the horizon. But most organizations don’t have a strategy to address them.

Companies used to spend years clarifying business requirements before they would even think of launching new software. Today, cheaper cloud-based apps mean that implementation decisions are made on the fly — and there’s no going back.

A key takeaway of our exploration of the digital thread is that continuous learning and performance enhancement via technology are all based on the feedback that real-world experience provides.

In Part 8 of our eight-part video series, we examine how the digital thread — and its companion, the digital twin — could revolutionize not only the way we design and develop products, but the way we manufacture and service them as well.

AI’s most potent, long-term economic value may lie not in the thousands of new startups, but in the ability of AI to augment the discovery and pursuit of basic scientific advances that could be the foundations of new industry.

Digitalization and sustainability are two of the most powerful market influences in the current business landscape. Each will change management practice, and more broadly, business and society. What happens when the two trends start influencing one another?

Digital technology has already upended the media and information sectors. It’s about to do the same to the manufacturing economy, and pave the way for what can be called the “pan-industrial” strategy.

Blockchain has recently taken center stage in the conversation about management’s digital makeover. Many believe the impact of blockchain on the ways organizations function and produce value may be greater than other technologies that have grabbed most of our recent attention — data and analytics, the cloud, even artificial intelligence.

A recent MIT Sloan Management Review article argued that companies need to choose whether to focus their digital strategy on customer engagement or digitized solutions. But several readers wondered why they needed to choose one option over the other.

Cyberattacks are in the news. All kinds of organizations — ranging from Target Corp. and Bangladesh Bank to the Democratic National Committee in the United States — have fallen victim to them in recent years. MIT cybersecurity expert Stuart Madnick explains some of the biggest cybersecurity risks businesses face today — and what executives should do to decrease their companies’ vulnerabilities.

Smartphones and cloud technology work in tandem to provide a prized perk to managers lower on the corporate ladder: The ability to pass repetitive, tedious scheduling tasks off to someone (or in this case, something) else. As digital agents become ubiquitous, their input will greatly enhance collaboration.

Nicholas Bloom, William Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University, conducted an extensive study of 30,000 US factories, and found that two practices, underpinned by innovative software and IT systems, stand out in highly effectively managed operations: monitoring and incentives.

Successfully incorporating today’s digital technologies requires companies to operate in new ways. However, research by MIT SMR shows that being able to effectively incorporate digital strategy is strongly associated with a company’s overall digital maturity. There’s also an important HR component to digital strategy: Respondents expressed a strong preference for working for a digitally mature company, but many were dissatisfied with how their own companies were reacting to digital trends overall.