A Philips executive explains how the CIO role is shifting as the company connects smart devices like lamps and toothbrushes with medical equipment like MRI machines. They use Salesforce to build applications faster and run a digital accelerator lab with design and R&D to prototype new customer services.
Well, I think the role of CIO is in the middle of a huge change. Now we're connecting, we're connecting our devices, we're connecting our customers, and suddenly the playground has dramatically expanded. And the impact you potentially have is so much bigger than it was before. Our ambition is to be entirely driven by the needs of our customers. We believe that the way we're going to sell is not by selling something directly to you, it's by first engaging. So basically we're going back to that one on one relationship where people knew you, but now we're doing it on a scale of 100 million. And that's where I believe the big opportunity is. Speed is a new currency for business. You gotta move fast and you gotta be bold. Time to get innovation to market is everything. And especially in a world where, you know, the winners tend to take more and more. The Salesforce environment is really easy to develop. We have many examples where we build stuff that would have taken months or sometimes years that we put together in days. Tapping into that means changing the way you run your company, changing the way you do sales, changing the way you do marketing. So immediately look at it from the perspective of, in this case, marketing, cloud sales, cloud and service cloud. People start creating applications, they start creating solutions that will leverage our connected lamps, our connected home cookers, our connected toothbrush. Basically, we don't see it as a toothbrush anymore. We see it as part of an ecosystem that may include helping people to have a much healthier lifestyle. If you look at light today, it's digital. You can completely control that light. You can have 16 million colors. You can illuminate the Bay Bridge here in San Francisco. So Salesforce is very much into the core of our value chain. Every mri, every X ray machines we have out there is connected. So we collect a lot of information about how these devices are being used. So we can have an mri, you know, given us an early warning sign initiated by a message from the MRI into our service center, which is powered by the surface cloud. And then through chatter, we can engage with the hospital. So if you can watch screens together, talk to each other, and ultimately also look at each other while you're talking. It's really, for us, the next stage of how to run a company. As an organization, you always need to be one step ahead, and you can only do that by being very close to what your customers need and constantly exploring how you can take that to the next level. We've set up a digital accelerator lab and Salesforce is actually partnering now. We're pushing each other. That's the whole idea. And that's why we have not just people from Salesforce there. We have our design folks. We have R and D. We come to create new ideas, things that you never be able to do on your own so you get people to move. By painting a very compelling vision, we can come back and articulate a solution that our customers haven't thought of yet. If we can work with people like Salesforce, we can actually do this, and we can do it fast. Every day, we're getting a little bit closer to where we want to be.
