New Technology Elite How Great Companies Optimize Both Technology Consumption and Production

The New Technology Elite

How Great Companies Optimize Both Technology Consumption and Production

Their zip codes are far from Silicon Valley. Their industry codes show retail, automobile, or banking. But industry after industry is waking up to the opportunity of "smart" products and services for their increasingly tech-savvy customers. Traditionally technology buyers, they are learning to embed technology in their products and become technology vendors.

Meanwhile in Silicon Valley, you marvel at the challenge of rolling out 25 million Apple iPads in the first year of the product, 20 million users for Google+ in its first month of service, and the infrastructure to support over 750 million Facebook users. They are considered "consumer" tech but have better technology at a larger scale than most enterprises do in their data centers, retail stores, application ecosystems, global supply chains, and design shops. They are the new best practice leaders in many categories.

The New Technology Elite describes these two powerful trends¿the "consumerization of enterprise technology" and, in contrast, "the enterprising of consumer technology." These trends are revising the definition of who qualifies today as a technology elite. The seventeen case studies and four guest columns throughout the book bring out these elite attributes in detail.

It is no longer about being able to talk geeky terms like HTML5 or SQL Injection or cloud architectures. It is now about:

• Product design elegance

• Physical presence in strategic retail locations

• Ecosystems of developers and thriving app stores

• Social savvy

• Paranoia in the world of hacker groups such as LulzSec and Anonymous

• Pragmatism in a world where attorneys are even more influential than engineers

• Being able to fly to Xiamen or Xanadu at a moment's notice

• And much more

Designed for business practitioners, CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, technology vendors, venture capitalists, IT consultants, marketing executives, and policy-makers, The New Technology Elite provides the essential building blocks your company needs to go from 0 to 60 on the innovation gauge by emulating the secrets of the technology elite.