 | Issue: | Latin America 2012 |
| Article no.: | 2 | |
| Topic: | The transforming power of information and communications technologies | |
| Author: | Mary Livingston | |
| Title: | President for Canada, Caribbean & Latin America region | |
| Organisation: | AT&T | |
| PDF size: | 226KB |
About author
Mary Livingston is the Vice President of AT&T’s global sales team in the Canada, Caribbean and Latin America (CCLA) region since July, 2008, supporting a team of 150 sales and support professionals. As a veteran of AT&T since 1977, Mary has held various leadership positions in sales and sales support, including Vice President of sales operations for enterprise business, national account manager and branch manager. She has run AT&T’s international and private line cente in New York City and was a key member of the product team for digital services. She has spent almost half of her tenure with AT&T as a Region Vice President in the Premier Client Group, supporting enterprise business clients in the northeast United States. During the early 1990’s Mary led a major change initiative involving 18 teams for re-engineering and sales effectiveness initiatives. This work was highlighted in Katzenbach’s book on Real Change Leaders. More recently, Mary was recognized as one of the New Jersey 50 Best Business Women for 2008 by NJBiz magazine. She has achieved the highest level of AT&T sales recognition four times.
Outside of AT&T, Mary is involved in numerous non-profit activities including the Board of Trustees for the Summit Area YMCA, President’s Circle for NJ All Stars/Developmental School for Youth and the Greater NY Explorers Leadership Council. She is an active member of the International Women’s Forum. She is also the founder of Team 101, whose focus is to help women of all ages improve their health, confidence and spirit through the sport of triathlon. Mary is an avid tri-athlete and competes all over the U.S in short and long distance events.
Mary Livingston received her MBA from the University of Missouri. She lives in Short Hills, NJ with her husband and two sons. Her office is located in Morristown, NJ.
Article abstract
Latin American larger corporations are going global, and this requires the ability to provide consistent inter-operable service across borders. For multi-national enterprises, as it is for consumers, the Internet is an essential tool, but to maximize benefits, regulations should ensure that the Internet isuniversal, open, safe, and respects data privacy. Enterprises seeking growth through advanced ICT, are looking for mobilization (connectivity on the go and BYOD), virtualization (access to corporate data and applications, anywhere, whenever needed) and globalization (interworking across several countries). The Health Industry is a prime example where advanced ICT enhances patient care and save costs at the same time.
Full Article
Latin America is a region that is experiencing a unique moment in history, thanks to its vibrant emerging, growth markets. The regoon’s various countries are gaining a larger role in international trade. This leads to a two-fold trend: while multinational companies continue to expand worldwide and, as a result, search for improved presence and competitiveness in the region, there is also an increase of global Latinas, or multilatinas – companies with leadership and headquarters in Latin America that are expanding internationally. In fact, there are now 12 companies from Latin American markets listed in the latest Fortune 500 Global Company ranking, which features the world’s largest corporations.
All multinational companies, irrespective of their country or region of origin, rely on processes, information and communications systems to achieve their business goals by ensuring their operations run smoothly, seamlessly and efficiently across borders, and by enabling collaborative-driven environments for key operations to connect internal and external stakeholders around the world. Ultimately, for any business, this needs to translate into growth and optimal service to customers. Consequently, the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector plays a key role in these companies’ quest to internationalize their business operations and to achieve their full potential through ongoing innovation and investment.
Regulatory environments to enable growth
Optimal market environments and regulatory frameworks are essential to promote investments and innovation that allow enhanced communications services. Generally, Latin America has demonstrated a positive trend in the last couple of years with various governments and regulators putting in place enabling environments for investment and competition in the ICT sector. However, there still remain wide differences in the regulatory regimes among nations and within nations. We believe that licence streamlining is a potential positive step towards facilitating and encouraging market access, with minimal barriers to investment and innovation. This would facilitate the ability of AT&T and other providers to provide consistent services to business customers across all regions, even as technology and customer needs have expanded. Indeed, AT&T has encouraged governments and regulators elsewhere in the world to adopt this light-touch approach and the results are really positive. Furthermore, regulatory frameworks should differentiate between regulations that are relevant to large enterprise customers (multinationals) as opposed to residential customers.
First, some countries have embraced market liberalization, allowing new companies to get licences to provide a wide range of innovative and competitive services. Second, countries have put in place pro-competitive regulatory models that ensure reasonable access to essential infrastructure. In general, liberalization has been more established in the mobile sector.
Furthermore, governments are increasingly taking an active role in stimulating demand and awareness of ICT services, by promoting e-government initiatives, so that citizens better understand the benefits of ICT services. As these government efforts evolve, focused on both the supply and the demand for telecommunications, they are having an overall positive impact in the industry.
The impact of ICT adoptions in fostering economic growth is well documented. The equation is clear: when people and companies can connect and communicate, commercial velocity accelerates, productivity increases, and economies grow. A report prepared by Oxford Economics and commissioned by AT&T, demonstrates and quantifies the gains that can be achieved from ICT investment in the future. According to the study findings, investment in ICT generates a bigger return to productivity growth than most other forms of capital investment.
More so than any other communications medium in history, the Internet has the ability to transform our society, our economy, and our way of life. To realize its full potential, however, the Internet must be (1) universal, in that it must be available and affordable to consumers everywhere. The Internet also must be (2) open, in that the Internet ecosystem must enable consumers to exchange ideas and communicate freely, give them freedom to access the lawful applications and content they want to use, and afford them the ability to choose and assemble packages of services and equipment that meet their needs. The Internet must respect (3) privateinformation so that consumers are in control of how, when, and by whom their personalinformation is used. The Internet must be (4) safe, so that networks and services are protected from harm and consumers are secure when they go online. By endorsing—and properly balancing—these four fundamental Internet values, it would foster not only greater broadband deployment and use in general, but greater development of the Internet‘s potential as a transformative engine of economic and societal advancement.
Looking forward and considering the interconnected economic landscape, policy-makers will have an ever important role in making sure that there are consistent and interoperable cross-border regulations. A sound interoperable policy framework is essential to drive investment in the communications technologies that enable business productivity and, therefore, economic growth.
Emerging trends transforming multinational enterprises
While information and communication technologies will continue to be essential in increasing productivity, it is remarkable to witness the way they power businesses to perform at their utmost potential. Companies and industries are using technologies to reshape the way they do business. We have the privilege to be in ongoing dialogue with business leaders from across the region, and can attest to the ongoing hard work to identify new business models, assessing their options on how to benefit from the key global trends emerging from the fast-changing technology landscape that are impacting the way companies do business: mobilization, virtualization and globalization.
Mobilization is sought by enterprises to enable their people, processes and information stores to always stay connected and be optimized on-the-go almost instantly with innovative mobility solutions.In 2012, we have seen a positive trend in the widespread proliferation of mobile technologies in enterprises. Mobilizing the enterprise, however, is creating a need for companies of all sizes to look for systematic ways to develop holistic mobility strategies, encompassing mobile device management, creating applications, deployingBYOD (bring-your-own-device) solutions and ensure mobile security. We are only seeing the tip of the iceberg with connected business. As the global trend continues to unfold, the coming years will hold great potential for expanding mobility in Latin America. Customers will begin to fill-in-the-gaps in their value chains to establish entire ecosystems enabled by mobility.
Virtualization is another key trend affecting the way enterprises use ICT technologies globally, which has started to show traction in Latin America. There have been significant discussions in companies from Mexico to Brazil to Argentina on how to use cloud services to operate efficiently, reduce IT costs, and address business priorities with reliability, security and best-in-class service levels.
The third key trend, globalization, is essential for Latin America. Our large multinational corporation customers are globalizing their operations, especially where there is fast GDP growth–and the Latin America region is playing a key role in that expansion strategy. Various emerging markets and economies with significant growth potential in the region are serving as a magnet for multinational companies to expand operations in the region.Additionally, the entrepreneurial spirit of Latin American leaders is also propelling the expansion of companies from the region to all corners of the world. Latin American products and services from across industry sectors have increasing availability in all the Western Hemisphere and are making headway into Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific.
As a result, we are seeing strong demand for IP-based business services. It is quitenormal to hear from our customers that top priorities for them include Ethernet, Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), hosting and application services. Wherever they go, they need help to run all of their critical applications, from voice communications to enterprise resource planning (ERP) and video collaboration.
To address the needs that arise from globalization AT&T is committed to creating ecosystems that benefit partners and customers by connecting communities in a way that would have been impossible five years ago. A central tenet of AT&T global strategy is interoperability –developing solutions that work across different countries, carriers and companies, and that are able to deliver on consistent cross-border customer experience. Some examples include telepresence interoperability agreements with global carriers to help promote open collaboration among businesses and single SIM solutions with expansive global coverage, so M2M device manufacturers can create connected devices capable of travelling worldwide.
Healthy outcomes
Every industry sector has a story to share on business transformation. The enterprise and social benefits of the use of technologies can be very well illustrated with the case of the healthcare sector.With mobile technologies and smart networks offered across the continuum of care – from patients to physicians to providers – it is possible for the healthcare industry to dramatically improve quality of patient care, reduce costs and contribute to a healthier world.
Mobile health technology, or mHealth, is one of the key drivers of transformation in the healthcare industry. When patients, doctors, nurses, hospital staffs, insurance providers and care-givers are all wirelessly connected, the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare will soar.For instance, remote monitoring makes it possible for patients to go home and live their lives, while still remaining in contact with their physicians.Medication adherence devices help patients remember to take their prescriptions on time, reducing the risk of recurring illness or complications. Disease management applications encourage chronic disease patients to take proactive measures to manage their symptoms – right on their mobile devices. Healthcare professionals can get work done faster in hospitals and doctors’ offices thanks to their smartphones and tablets.
Furthermore, Telehealth, like mHealth, will allow connecting patients with their doctors without an office visit. Using video conferencing, for example, a patient could show his doctor how a wound is healing without ever leaving his house. This kind of virtual appointment will save both time and travel costs, and allow services in remote communities.At the same time, cloud-based technologies can help relieve the burden of the healthcare industry’s ever-increasing data requirements.
The benefits of using information and communication technologies are not exclusive, of course, to the healthcare industry. Every week we talk with leaders from almost all sectors that are relying on enhanced communication services to improve their businesses… from finance to consumer packaged goods, energy, hospitality, logistics, among many others. All of them are transforming their organizations to expedite growth and better serve their customers. With the tremendous power of communications and innovation, they will be able to achieve their goal, thus contributing to the overall progress of countries and communities throughout Latin America.
