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Will Democracy Survive?

September 7, 2020 Humor

Here are a series of articles about how Donald Trump, Republicans, and right-wing media are trying to destroy our democracy.

First is tonight’s article by Heather Cox Richardson. She goes through a list of the things that democracy depends on, and then gives examples of how they are being attacked and even destroyed:

The rule of law. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy coerced his employees to contribute to the Republican Party, and then reimbursed them by giving them bonuses. Not only did he buy an election, he bought himself a cabinet position.
Equality before the law. Minorities, especially Blacks and Latinos, are discriminated against by the courts and by the police.
Reality-based policy. Today Trump claimed “Our Economy and Jobs are doing really well.” We are in a recession and unemployment is 8.4%.
History itself. This weekend, Trump demanded that schools change their curriculum, or they will lose federal funding. He is trying to rewrite history.
Universal suffrage. First Trump, and now Attorney General William Barr are spreading false statements (which are the same as false statements being spread by the Russians) claiming that mail-in ballots will lead to massive fraud. At the same time, Republicans are fighting to suppress Democratic votes.
Elections must provide a choice. Republicans are attempting to delegitimize the Democratic Party. Today, Trump tweeted “The Democrats, together with the corrupt Fake News Media, have launched a massive Disinformation Campaign the likes of which has never been seen before.”
Checks and balances. The Trump administration is blocking the long-established right of Congress to investigate and subpoenas the executive branch.
Transition of power. Trump keeps suggesting that he will not relinquish power, even if he loses the election.

Second is an article in the Daily Beast, pointing out that one of the reporters of the One America News Network (OANN), Trump’s favorite news source, is actually an employee of the Kremlin.

Trump is now even attacking Fox News, because they sometimes don’t buy into Trump’s constant lies.

And finally, Trump is attacking the widow of Steve Jobs, because she is the majority owner of The Atlantic, which recently published an article detailing how Trump disparaged soldiers (especially dead or captured ones) by calling them “losers” and “suckers”. The White House claims the article is completely false, even though there is plenty of video and other records of Trump doing exactly that, and multiple news outlets have confirmed the facts in the article, including Fox News.

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Political Irony

Fail, Survive or THRIVE? What will be your outcome to the current economic downturn?

May 21, 2020 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

What will be your outcome to the current economic downturn?

The Harvard Business Review studied the last 3 recessions finding very important information that every business leader should review.

A few of the study’s findings:

-Firms that cut costs faster and deeper than rivals don’t necessarily flourish. They have the lowest probability—21%—of pulling ahead of the competition when times get better *

-Companies that reduce costs selectively and invest relatively comprehensively in the future by spending on marketing and other key areas have the highest probability – 37% of regaining pre-recession sales and profitability levels*

-Companies that invest in, for example, marketing during a recession may produce only modest benefits during the recession but adds substantially to sales and profits afterward*

Roaring Out of Recession studied the strategy and performance of 4700 businesses during the past 3 global recessions, breaking down the data into three periods: the three years before a recession, the three years after, and the recession years themselves.

The findings are stark. Seventeen percent of the companies in the study didn’t survive a recession The survivors were painfully slow to recover from the battering. About 80% of them had not yet regained their prerecession growth rates for sales and profits three years after a recession*

Only a small number of companies—approximately 9% of the sample—flourished after a slowdown, outperforming rivals in their industry by at least 10% in terms of sales and profits growth*

Want to learn what businesses did and didn’t do that determined how the recession impacted their business? Join us for a free, informative webinar

Wednesday, June 10th 1pm Eastern Click Here to Register

Speakers

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

Quilts Survive The Maker

August 5, 2018 Humor

Respect for the one who loved to create, sew, and share .

j1h4mwS Quilts Survive The Maker

“Woman made many quilts for those she loved while she was alive. This was taken at her funeral. ❤ ❤ <3.”
Image courtesy of https://imgur.com/gallery/v5r4uy0.

Steam Spy switches algorithms to survive Valve’s data shutdown

April 28, 2018 Big Data

The PC gaming market-intelligence resource Steam Spy lives. Its creator, developer Sergey Galyonkin, is shifting the tool to a new algorithm that calculates the sales of PC games on the the Steam distribution platform based on “coincidental data” from around the internet. Galyonkin had to make this change after Valve began hiding its customers’ game libraries by default after years of exposing that information through its API.

In response to that privacy change at the time, Galyonkin said on Twitter that Steam Spy would not have the data it needs to operate. But he is now saying that the site will continue, but he needs some time to dial in his algorithm and integrate it into the site. Galyonkin said he wanted to solve this problem after indie developers from around the world reached out to him.

“I received over two hundred emails and messages from developers telling me how Steam Spy improved their lives,” Galyonkin wrote in a blog post. “There was an indie company from Berlin that managed to secure financing from the government for their niche title because they had the data to prove that this niche is big enough. The title got released and succeeded.”

The need for reliable data to enable smart business decisions is not in question by anyone. The problem, instead, is that the gaming market is so large and dynamic that algorithmic models are often inaccurate.

The good news for Steam Spy is that Galyonkin’s new math does seem capable of making estimations within an acceptable margin of error … some of the time.

“Frostpunk devs just announced that the game sold 250,000 copies and the new algorithm estimated it at 252,000 copies,” reads Galyonkin’s blog. “[But overall, it’s] not very accurate, to be honest.”

A small pool of developers have shared their sales data with Galyonkin. He has the numbers for approximately 70 games. For 90 percent of those, the algorithm was able to calculate their sales within a 10 percent margin of error.

“But I also saw some crazy outliers,” said Galyonkin. “Where the difference between the estimates and the real data could be fivefold.”

Steam Spy will still charge ahead. Galyonkin has closed off most of the site’s features while he makes some changes and improves his system. But he does plan to reopen essential information to the public once he gets everything fixed.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

How Restaurants Can Survive Digital Disruption

March 23, 2018 BI News and Info

For nerds, the weeks right before finals are a Cinderella moment. Suddenly they’re stars. Pocket protectors are fashionable; people find their jokes a whole lot funnier; Dungeons & Dragons sounds cool.

Many CIOs are enjoying this kind of moment now, as companies everywhere face the business equivalent of a final exam for a vital class they have managed to mostly avoid so far: digital transformation.

But as always, there is a limit to nerdy magic. No matter how helpful CIOs try to be, their classmates still won’t pass if they don’t learn the material. With IT increasingly central to every business—from the customer experience to the offering to the business model itself—we all need to start thinking like CIOs.

Pass the digital transformation exam, and you probably have a bright future ahead. A recent SAP-Oxford Economics study of 3,100 organizations in a variety of industries across 17 countries found that the companies that have taken the lead in digital transformation earn higher profits and revenues and have more competitive differentiation than their peers. They also expect 23% more revenue growth from their digital initiatives over the next two years—an estimate 2.5 to 4 times larger than the average company’s.

But the market is grading on a steep curve: this same SAP-Oxford study found that only 3% have completed some degree of digital transformation across their organization. Other surveys also suggest that most companies won’t be graduating anytime soon: in one recent survey of 450 heads of digital transformation for enterprises in the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany by technology company Couchbase, 90% agreed that most digital projects fail to meet expectations and deliver only incremental improvements. Worse: over half (54%) believe that organizations that don’t succeed with their transformation project will fail or be absorbed by a savvier competitor within four years.

Companies that are making the grade understand that unlike earlier technical advances, digital transformation doesn’t just support the business, it’s the future of the business. That’s why 60% of digital leading companies have entrusted the leadership of their transformation to their CIO, and that’s why experts say businesspeople must do more than have a vague understanding of the technology. They must also master a way of thinking and looking at business challenges that is unfamiliar to most people outside the IT department.

In other words, if you don’t think like a CIO yet, now is a very good time to learn.

However, given that you probably don’t have a spare 15 years to learn what your CIO knows, we asked the experts what makes CIO thinking distinctive. Here are the top eight mind hacks.

1. Think in Systems

Q118 Feature3 img1 Jump How Restaurants Can Survive Digital Disruption A lot of businesspeople are used to seeing their organization as a series of loosely joined silos. But in the world of digital business, everything is part of a larger system.

CIOs have known for a long time that smart processes win. Whether they were installing enterprise resource planning systems or working with the business to imagine the customer’s journey, they always had to think in holistic ways that crossed traditional departmental, functional, and operational boundaries.

Unlike other business leaders, CIOs spend their careers looking across systems. Why did our supply chain go down? How can we support this new business initiative beyond a single department or function? Now supported by end-to-end process methodologies such as design thinking, good CIOs have developed a way of looking at the company that can lead to radical simplifications that can reduce cost and improve performance at the same time.

They are also used to thinking beyond temporal boundaries. “This idea that the power of technology doubles every two years means that as you’re planning ahead you can’t think in terms of a linear process, you have to think in terms of huge jumps,” says Jay Ferro, CIO of TransPerfect, a New York–based global translation firm.

No wonder the SAP-Oxford transformation study found that one of the values transformational leaders shared was a tendency to look beyond silos and view the digital transformation as a company-wide initiative.

This will come in handy because in digital transformation, not only do business processes evolve but the company’s entire value proposition changes, says Jeanne Ross, principal research scientist at the Center for Information Systems Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “It either already has or it’s going to, because digital technologies make things possible that weren’t possible before,” she explains.

2. Work in Diverse Teams

When it comes to large projects, CIOs have always needed input from a diverse collection of businesspeople to be successful. The best have developed ways to convince and cajole reluctant participants to come to the table. They seek out technology enthusiasts in the business and those who are respected by their peers to help build passion and commitment among the halfhearted.

Digital transformation amps up the urgency for building diverse teams even further. “A small, focused group simply won’t have the same breadth of perspective as a team that includes a salesperson and a service person and a development person, as well as an IT person,” says Ross.

At Lenovo, the global technology giant, many of these cross-functional teams become so used to working together that it’s hard to tell where each member originally belonged: “You can’t tell who is business or IT; you can’t tell who is product, IT, or design,” says the company’s CIO, Arthur Hu.

One interesting corollary of this trend toward broader teamwork is that talent is a priority among digital leaders: they spend more on training their employees and partners than ordinary companies, as well as on hiring the people they need, according to the SAP-Oxford Economics survey. They’re also already being rewarded for their faith in their teams: 71% of leaders say that their successful digital transformation has made it easier for them to attract and retain talent, and 64% say that their employees are now more engaged than they were before the transformation.

3. Become a Consultant

Good CIOs have long needed to be internal consultants to the business. Ever since technology moved out of the glasshouse and onto employees’ desks, CIOs have not only needed a deep understanding of the goals of a given project but also to make sure that the project didn’t stray from those goals, even after the businesspeople who had ordered the project went back to their day jobs. “Businesspeople didn’t really need to get into the details of what IT was really doing,” recalls Ferro. “They just had a set of demands and said, ‘Hey, IT, go do that.’”

But that was then. Now software has become so integral to the business that nobody can afford to walk away. Businesspeople must join the ranks of the IT consultants. “If you’re building a house, you don’t just disappear for six months and come back and go, ‘Oh, it looks pretty good,’” says Ferro. “You’re on that work site constantly and all of a sudden you’re looking at something, going, ‘Well, that looked really good on the blueprint, not sure it makes sense in reality. Let’s move that over six feet.’ Or, ‘I don’t know if I like that anymore.’ It’s really not much different in application development or for IT or technical projects, where on paper it looked really good and three weeks in, in that second sprint, you’re going, ‘Oh, now that I look at it, that’s really stupid.’”

4. Learn Horizontal Leadership

CIOs have always needed the ability to educate and influence other leaders that they don’t directly control. For major IT projects to be successful, they need other leaders to contribute budget, time, and resources from multiple areas of the business.

It’s a kind of horizontal leadership that will become critical for businesspeople to acquire in digital transformation. “The leadership role becomes one much more of coaching others across the organization—encouraging people to be creative, making sure everybody knows how to use data well,” Ross says.

In this team-based environment, having all the answers becomes less important. “It used to be that the best business executives and leaders had the best answers. Today that is no longer the case,” observes Gary Cokins, a technology consultant who focuses on analytics-based performance management. “Increasingly, it’s the executives and leaders who ask the best questions. There is too much volatility and uncertainty for them to rely on their intuition or past experiences.”

Many experts expect this trend to continue as the confluence of automation and data keeps chipping away at the organizational pyramid. “Hierarchical, command-and-control leadership will become obsolete,” says Edward Hess, professor of business administration and Batten executive-in-residence at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. “Flatter, distributive leadership via teams will become the dominant structure.”

5. Understand Process Design

When business processes were simpler, IT could analyze the process and improve it without input from the business. But today many processes are triggered on the fly by the customer, making a seamless customer experience more difficult to build without the benefit of a larger, multifunctional team. In a highly digitalized organization like Amazon, which releases thousands of new software programs each year, IT can no longer do it all.

While businesspeople aren’t expected to start coding, their involvement in process design is crucial. One of the techniques that many organizations have adopted to help IT and businesspeople visualize business processes together is design thinking (for more on design thinking techniques, see “A Cult of Creation“).

Customers aren’t the only ones who benefit from better processes. Among the 100 companies the SAP-Oxford Economics researchers have identified as digital leaders, two-thirds say that they are making their employees’ lives easier by eliminating process roadblocks that interfere with their ability to do their jobs. Ninety percent of leaders surveyed expect to see value from these projects in the next two years alone.

6. Learn to Keep Learning

The ability to learn and keep learning has been a part of IT from the start. Since the first mainframes in the 1950s, technologists have understood that they need to keep reinventing themselves and their skills to adapt to the changes around them.

Now that’s starting to become part of other job descriptions too. Many companies are investing in teaching their employees new digital skills. One South American auto products company, for example, has created a custom-education institute that trained 20,000 employees and partner-employees in 2016. In addition to training current staff, many leading digital companies are also hiring new employees and creating new roles, such as a chief robotics officer, to support their digital transformation efforts.

Nicolas van Zeebroeck, professor of information systems and digital business innovation at the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management at the Free University of Brussels, says that he expects the ability to learn quickly will remain crucial. “If I had to think of one critical skill,” he explains, “I would have to say it’s the ability to learn and keep learning—the ability to challenge the status quo and question what you take for granted.”

7. Fail Smarter

Traditionally, CIOs tended to be good at thinking through tests that would allow the company to experiment with new technology without risking the entire network.

This is another unfamiliar skill that smart managers are trying to pick up. “There’s a lot of trial and error in the best companies right now,” notes MIT’s Ross. But there’s a catch, she adds. “Most companies aren’t designed for trial and error—they’re trying to avoid an error,” she says.

Q118 Feature3 img4 fail How Restaurants Can Survive Digital Disruption To learn how to do it better, take your lead from IT, where many people have already learned to work in small, innovative teams that use agile development principles, advises Ross.

For example, business managers must learn how to think in terms of a minimum viable product: build a simple version of what you have in mind, test it, and if it works start building. “You don’t build the whole thing at once anymore.… It’s really important to build things incrementally,” Ross says.

Flexibility and the ability to capitalize on accidental discoveries during experimentation are more important than having a concrete project plan, says Ross. At Spotify, the music service, and CarMax, the used-car retailer, change is driven not from the center but from small teams that have developed something new. “The thing you have to get comfortable with is not having the formalized plan that we would have traditionally relied on, because as soon as you insist on that, you limit your ability to keep learning,” Ross warns.

8. Understand the True Cost—and Speed—of Data

Gut instincts have never had much to do with being a CIO; now they should have less to do with being an ordinary manager as well, as data becomes more important.

As part of that calculation, businesspeople must have the ability to analyze the value of the data that they seek. “You’ll need to apply a pinch of knowledge salt to your data,” advises Solvay’s van Zeebroeck. “What really matters is the ability not just to tap into data but to see what is behind the data. Is it a fair representation? Is it impartial?”

Increasingly, businesspeople will need to do their analysis in real time, just as CIOs have always had to manage live systems and processes. Moving toward real-time reports and away from paper-based decisions increases accuracy and effectiveness—and leaves less time for long meetings and PowerPoint presentations (let us all rejoice).

Not Every CIO Is Ready

Of course, not all CIOs are ready for these changes. Just as high school has a lot of false positives—genius nerds who turn out to be merely nearsighted—so there are many CIOs who aren’t good role models for transformation.

Success as a CIO these days requires more than delivering near-perfect uptime, says Lenovo’s Hu. You need to be able to understand the business as well. Some CIOs simply don’t have all the business skills that are needed to succeed in the transformation. Others lack the internal clout: a 2016 KPMG study found that only 34% of CIOs report directly to the CEO.

This lack of a strategic perspective is holding back digital transformation at many organizations. They approach digital transformation as a cool, one-off project: we’re going to put this new mobile app in place and we’re done. But that’s not a systematic approach; it’s an island of innovation that doesn’t join up with the other islands of innovation. In the longer term, this kind of development creates more problems than it fixes.

Such organizations are not building in the capacity for change; they’re trying to get away with just doing it once rather than thinking about how they’re going to use digitalization as a means to constantly experiment and become a better company over the long term.

Q118 Feature3 img6 CIOready How Restaurants Can Survive Digital Disruption As a result, in some companies, the most interesting tech developments are happening despite IT, not because of it. “There’s an alarming digital divide within many companies. Marketers are developing nimble software to give customers an engaging, personalized experience, while IT departments remain focused on the legacy infrastructure. The front and back ends aren’t working together, resulting in appealing web sites and apps that don’t quite deliver,” writes George Colony, founder, chairman, and CEO of Forrester Research, in the MIT Sloan Management Review.

Thanks to cloud computing and easier development tools, many departments are developing on their own, without IT’s support. These days, anybody with a credit card can do it.

Traditionally, IT departments looked askance at these kinds of do-it-yourself shadow IT programs, but that’s changing. Ferro, for one, says that it’s better to look at those teams not as rogue groups but as people who are trying to help. “It’s less about ‘Hey, something’s escaped,’ and more about ‘No, we just actually grew our capacity and grew our ability to innovate,’” he explains.

“I don’t like the term ‘shadow IT,’” agrees Lenovo’s Hu. “I think it’s an artifact of a very traditional CIO team. If you think of it as shadow IT, you’re out of step with reality,” he says.

The reality today is that a company needs both a strong IT department and strong digital capacities outside its IT department. If the relationship is good, the CIO and IT become valuable allies in helping businesspeople add digital capabilities without disrupting or duplicating existing IT infrastructure.

If a company already has strong digital capacities, it should be able to move forward quickly, according to Ross. But many companies are still playing catch-up and aren’t even ready to begin transforming, as the SAP-Oxford Economics survey shows.

For enterprises where business and IT are unable to get their collective act together, Ross predicts that the next few years will be rough. “I think these companies ought to panic,” she says. D!

About the Authors

Thomas Saueressig is Chief Information Officer at SAP.

Timo Elliott is an Innovation Evangelist at SAP.

Sam Yen is Chief Design Officer at SAP and Managing Director of SAP Labs.

Bennett Voyles is a Berlin-based business writer.

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Digitalist Magazine

How Grocery Retailers Can Survive Digital Disruption

March 16, 2018 BI News and Info

In a future teeming with robots and artificial intelligence, humans seem to be on the verge of being crowded out. But in reality the opposite is true.

To be successful, organizations need to become more human than ever.

Organizations that focus only on automation will automate away their competitive edge. The most successful will focus instead on skills that set them apart and that can’t be duplicated by AI or machine learning. Those skills can be summed up in one word: humanness.

You can see it in the numbers. According to David J. Deming of the Harvard Kennedy School, demand for jobs that require social skills has risen nearly 12 percentage points since 1980, while less-social jobs, such as computer coding, have declined by a little over 3 percentage points.

AI is in its infancy, which means that it cannot yet come close to duplicating our most human skills. Stefan van Duin and Naser Bakhshi, consultants at professional services company Deloitte, break down artificial intelligence into two types: narrow and general. Narrow AI is good at specific tasks, such as playing chess or identifying facial expressions. General AI, which can learn and solve complex, multifaceted problems the way a human being does, exists today only in the minds of futurists.

The only thing narrow artificial intelligence can do is automate. It can’t empathize. It can’t collaborate. It can’t innovate. Those abilities, if they ever come, are still a long way off. In the meantime, AI’s biggest value is in augmentation. When human beings work with AI tools, the process results in a sort of augmented intelligence. This augmented intelligence outperforms the work of either human beings or AI software tools on their own.

Q118 ft2 image1 DD How Grocery Retailers Can Survive Digital Disruption

AI-powered tools will be the partners that free employees and management to tackle higher-level challenges.

Those challenges will, by default, be more human and social in nature because many rote, repetitive tasks will be automated away. Companies will find that developing fundamental human skills, such as critical thinking and problem solving, within the organization will take on a new importance. These skills can’t be automated and they won’t become process steps for algorithms anytime soon.

In a world where technology change is constant and unpredictable, those organizations that make the fullest use of uniquely human skills will win. These skills will be used in collaboration with both other humans and AI-fueled software and hardware tools. The degree of humanness an organization possesses will become a competitive advantage.

This means that today’s companies must think about hiring, training, and leading differently. Most of today’s corporate training programs focus on imparting specific knowledge that will likely become obsolete over time.

Instead of hiring for portfolios of specific subject knowledge, organizations should instead hire—and train—for more foundational skills, whose value can’t erode away as easily.

Recently, educational consulting firm Hanover Research looked at high-growth occupations identified by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and determined the core skills required in each of them based on a database that it had developed. The most valuable skills were active listening, speaking, and critical thinking—giving lie to the dismissive term soft skills. They’re not soft; they’re human.

Q118 ft2 image2 softskills DD How Grocery Retailers Can Survive Digital Disruption
This doesn’t mean that STEM skills won’t be important in the future. But organizations will find that their most valuable employees are those with both math and social skills.

That’s because technical skills will become more perishable as AI shifts the pace of technology change from linear to exponential. Employees will require constant retraining over time. For example, roughly half of the subject knowledge acquired during the first year of a four-year technical degree, such as computer science, is already outdated by the time students graduate, according to The Future of Jobs, a report from the World Economic Forum (WEF).

The WEF’s report further notes that “65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in jobs that don’t yet exist.” By contrast, human skills such as interpersonal communication and project management will remain consistent over the years.

For example, organizations already report that they are having difficulty finding people equipped for the Big Data era’s hot job: data scientist. That’s because data scientists need a combination of hard and soft skills. Data scientists can’t just be good programmers and statisticians; they also need to be intuitive and inquisitive and have good communication skills. We don’t expect all these qualities from our engineering graduates, nor from most of our employees.

But we need to start.

From Self-Help to Self-Skills

Even if most schools and employers have yet to see it, employees are starting to understand that their future viability depends on improving their innately human qualities. One of the most popular courses on Coursera, an online learning platform, is called Learning How to Learn. Created by the University of California, San Diego, the course is essentially a master class in human skills: students learn everything from memory techniques to dealing with procrastination and communicating complicated ideas, according to an article in The New York Times.

Although there is a longstanding assumption that social skills are innate, nothing is further from the truth. As the popularity of Learning How to Learn attests, human skills—everything from learning skills to communication skills to empathy—can, and indeed must, be taught.

These human skills are integral for training workers for a workplace where artificial intelligence and automation are part of the daily routine. According to the WEF’s New Vision for Education report, the skills that employees will need in the future fall into three primary categories:

Foundational literacies: These core skills needed for the coming age of robotics and AI include understanding the basics of math, science, computing, finance, civics, and culture. While mastery of every topic isn’t required, workers who have a basic comprehension of many different areas will be richly rewarded in the coming economy.
Competencies: Developing competencies requires mastering very human skills, such as active listening, critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, communication, and collaboration.
Character qualities: Over the next decade, employees will need to master the skills that will help them grasp changing job duties and responsibilities. This means learning the skills that help employees acquire curiosity, initiative, persistence, grit, adaptability, leadership, and social and cultural awareness.

Q118 ft2 image4 usingsoftskills DD How Grocery Retailers Can Survive Digital Disruption
The good news is that learning human skills is not completely divorced from how work is structured today. Yonatan Zunger, a Google engineer with a background working with AI, argues that there is a considerable need for human skills in the workplace already—especially in the tech world. Many employees are simply unaware that when they are working on complicated software or hardware projects, they are using empathy, strategic problem solving, intuition, and interpersonal communication.

The unconscious deployment of human skills takes place even more frequently when employees climb the corporate ladder into management. “This is closely tied to the deeper difference between junior and senior roles: a junior person’s job is to find answers to questions; a senior person’s job is to find the right questions to ask,” says Zunger.

Human skills will be crucial to navigating the AI-infused workplace. There will be no shortage of need for the right questions to ask.

One of the biggest changes narrow AI tools will bring to the workplace is an evolution in how work is performed. AI-based tools will automate repetitive tasks across a wide swath of industries, which means that the day-to-day work for many white-collar workers will become far more focused on tasks requiring problem solving and critical thinking. These tasks will present challenges centered on interpersonal collaboration, clear communication, and autonomous decision-making—all human skills.

Being More Human Is Hard

However, the human skills that are essential for tomorrow’s AI-ified workplace, such as interpersonal communication, project planning, and conflict management, require a different approach from traditional learning. Often, these skills don’t just require people to learn new facts and techniques; they also call for basic changes in the ways individuals behave on—and off—the job.

Attempting to teach employees how to make behavioral changes has always seemed off-limits to organizations—the province of private therapists, not corporate trainers. But that outlook is changing. As science gains a better understanding of how the human brain works, many behaviors that affect employees on the job are understood to be universal and natural rather than individual (see “Human Skills 101”).

Human Skills 101

As neuroscience has improved our understanding of the brain, human skills have become increasingly quantifiable—and teachable.

Though the term soft skills has managed to hang on in the popular lexicon, our understanding of these human skills has increased to the point where they aren’t soft at all: they are a clearly definable set of skills that are crucial for organizations in the AI era.

Active listening: Paying close attention when receiving information and drawing out more information than received in normal discourse

Critical thinking: Gathering, analyzing, and evaluating issues and information to come to an unbiased conclusion

Problem solving: Finding solutions to problems and understanding the steps used to solve the problem

Decision-making: Weighing the evidence and options at hand to determine a specific course of action

Monitoring: Paying close attention to an issue, topic, or interaction in order to retain information for the future

Coordination: Working with individuals and other groups to achieve common goals

Social perceptiveness: Inferring what others are thinking by observing them

Time management: Budgeting and allocating time for projects and goals and structuring schedules to minimize conflicts and maximize productivity

Creativity: Generating ideas, concepts, or inferences that can be used to create new things

Curiosity: Desiring to learn and understand new or unfamiliar concepts

Imagination: Conceiving and thinking about new ideas, concepts, or images

Storytelling: Building narratives and concepts out of both new and existing ideas

Experimentation: Trying out new ideas, theories, and activities

Ethics: Practicing rules and standards that guide conduct and guarantee rights and fairness

Empathy: Identifying and understanding the emotional states of others

Collaboration: Working with others, coordinating efforts, and sharing resources to accomplish a common project

Resiliency: Withstanding setbacks, avoiding discouragement, and persisting toward a larger goal

Resistance to change, for example, is now known to result from an involuntary chemical reaction in the brain known as the fight-or-flight response, not from a weakness of character. Scientists and psychologists have developed objective ways of identifying these kinds of behaviors and have come up with universally applicable ways for employees to learn how to deal with them.

Organizations that emphasize such individual behavioral traits as active listening, social perceptiveness, and experimentation will have both an easier transition to a workplace that uses AI tools and more success operating in it.

Framing behavioral training in ways that emphasize its practical application at work and in advancing career goals helps employees feel more comfortable confronting behavioral roadblocks without feeling bad about themselves or stigmatized by others. It also helps organizations see the potential ROI of investing in what has traditionally been dismissed as touchy-feely stuff.

Q118 ft2 image3 automation DD How Grocery Retailers Can Survive Digital Disruption In fact, offering objective means for examining inner behaviors and tools for modifying them is more beneficial than just leaving the job to employees. For example, according to research by psychologist Tasha Eurich, introspection, which is how most of us try to understand our behaviors, can actually be counterproductive.

Human beings are complex creatures. There is generally way too much going on inside our minds to be able to pinpoint the conscious and unconscious behaviors that drive us to act the way we do. We wind up inventing explanations—usually negative—for our behaviors, which can lead to anxiety and depression, according to Eurich’s research.

Structured, objective training can help employees improve their human skills without the negative side effects. At SAP, for example, we offer employees a course on conflict resolution that uses objective research techniques for determining what happens when people get into conflicts. Employees learn about the different conflict styles that researchers have identified and take an assessment to determine their own style of dealing with conflict. Then employees work in teams to discuss their different styles and work together to resolve a specific conflict that one of the group members is currently experiencing.

How Knowing One’s Self Helps the Organization

Courses like this are helpful not just for reducing conflicts between individuals and among teams (and improving organizational productivity); they also contribute to greater self-awareness, which is the basis for enabling people to take fullest advantage of their human skills.

Self-awareness is a powerful tool for improving performance at both the individual and organizational levels. Self-aware people are more confident and creative, make better decisions, build stronger relationships, and communicate more effectively. They are also less likely to lie, cheat, and steal, according to Eurich.

It naturally follows that such people make better employees and are more likely to be promoted. They also make more effective leaders with happier employees, which makes the organization more profitable, according to research by Atuma Okpara and Agwu M. Edwin.

There are two types of self-awareness, writes Eurich. One is having a clear view inside of one’s self: one’s own thoughts, feelings, behaviors, strengths, and weaknesses. The second type is understanding how others view us in terms of these same categories.

Interestingly, while we often assume that those who possess one type of awareness also possess the other, there is no direct correlation between the two. In fact, just 10% to 15% of people have both, according to a survey by Eurich. That means that the vast majority of us must learn one or the other—or both.

Gaining self-awareness is a process that can take many years. But training that gives employees the opportunity to examine their own behaviors against objective standards and gain feedback from expert instructors and peers can help speed up the journey. Just like the conflict management course, there are many ways to do this in a practical context that benefits employees and the organization alike.

For example, SAP also offers courses on building self-confidence, increasing trust with peers, creating connections with others, solving complex problems, and increasing resiliency in the face of difficult situations—all of which increase self-awareness in constructive ways. These human-skills courses are as popular with our employees as the hard-skill courses in new technologies or new programming techniques.

Depending on an organization’s size, budget, and goals, learning programs like these can include small group training, large lectures, online courses, licensing of third-party online content, reimbursement for students to attain certification, and many other models.
Q118 ft2 image6 AIandhumans DD How Grocery Retailers Can Survive Digital Disruption

Human Skills Are the Constant

Automation and artificial intelligence will change the workplace in unpredictable ways. One thing we can predict, however, is that human skills will be needed more than ever.

The connection between conflict resolution skills, critical thinking courses, and the rise of AI-aided technology might not be immediately obvious. But these new AI tools are leading us down the path to a much more human workplace.

Employees will interact with their computers through voice conversations and image recognition. Machine learning will find unexpected correlations in massive amounts of data but empathy and creativity will be required for data scientists to figure out the right questions to ask. Interpersonal communication will become even more important as teams coordinate between offices, remote workplaces, and AI aides.

While the future might be filled with artificial intelligence, deep learning, and untold amounts of data, uniquely human capabilities will be the ones that matter. Machines can’t write a symphony, design a building, teach a college course, or manage a department. The future belongs to humans working with machines, and for that, you need human skills. D!

About the Authors

Jenny Dearborn is Chief Learning Officer at SAP.

David Judge is Vice President, SAP Leonardo, at SAP.

Tom Raftery is Global Vice President and Internet of Things Evangelist at SAP.

Neal Ungerleider is a Los Angeles-based technology journalist and consultant.

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How to Survive the 4 Stages of CRM User Adoption

January 15, 2018 CRM News and Info

Just like a good marriage, user adoption for your new CRM system takes work. It doesn’t happen overnight, but it can be done. And the results are worth the effort.

Whether you’re starting a new CRM initiative or salvaging an existing one, you must start with the mindset that implementing a new CRM system is a transformative process. It involves organizational culture, project rigor and perseverance from your CRM project leaders.

Your organization will ultimately go through each of these four CRM adoption stages; the goal is to get through them as quickly as you can.

The Honeymoon

The new CRM system is about to get implemented! You’ve struggled so long doing things the old way and now you’ve found the holy grail and all your problems are about to be washed away. You are confident that the time and money you spent was well worth the investment and you can’t wait to reap the rewards. Your company will finally be transformed into the well-oiled machine you know it can be. You can’t wait to “go live”.

Living Together

You want me to do what? In this “self-awareness” stage your users will quickly voice their opinions on the new processes and procedures; especially the ones that interrupt the “way I’ve always done it.” This is the time when executive sponsors need to stand tall and quickly address user’s concerns and justify the benefits and reasons for the “new process in CRM”. It’s also very important at this stage to listen to your user base, document their feedback, and then take action on it. Empower your users to make them feel as though their feedback is contributing to the direction of the system. They will be more likely to embrace the change versus fight it.

Building Momentum

We can now do ‘X and Y’, but ‘Z’ is still an issue. Once your organization hits this stage the executive sponsors are in a great position to keep focusing on the positives and evangelize the successes realized from the new CRM system. Often these successes will be in a certain department or in the form of a solution to a once challenging business function. But it’s these isolated successes that will start spreading to other parts of the organization. Celebrate all successes, both large and small. It keeps people engaged by illustrating how the CRM system is helping other user and groups. This oftentimes gets the wheels turning. Soon other users may come forward with innovative solutions to problems by leveraging aspects of the new CRM system.

Full Steam Ahead

Your organization has now become that well-oiled machine and your new CRM system is the very core of your corporate operations, and more importantly, part of your corporate culture. People, process and technology are unified and no one questions the value of the CRM system. This stage often takes years to reach, but it is well worth the journey.

But things don’t stop once you’ve attained this level of CRM adoption. Even a well-oiled machine needs maintenance and business systems are no different. Your CRM system and the user base will require an ongoing process of encouraging behaviors and solving that “next challenge” by leveraging the information in the CRM system and defining new operational processes to further streamline your organization. Just as your organization changes, so will your CRM system. Organizational growth yields great rewards and having a CRM system to support that growth is instrumental in maintaining your well-oiled machine.

As an organization embarks on a new CRM implementation (or re-implementation), you need to start the project with the right mindset and internal leadership. You also need experienced advisors to guide you through the CRM implementation process and set you on the right course to move full steam ahead.

The Crowe Horwath CRM team has been implementing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems for over a decade and we understand the psychology, methodology and “key ingredients” necessary for a successful CRM implementation and high CRM user adoption. Our people first, software second approach has been the keys to our customer’s success; and that’s how we measure our success.

We can guide your team through these four stages of CRM user adoption, so that you can go full steam ahead. Contact us today.

Interested in moving to Dynamics 365? Check out our offer “Moving CRM to Dynamics 365: 3-Hr Assessment”.

By Ryan Plourde, Crowe Horwath, a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Gold Partner www.CroweCRM.com

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Can you survive without PDF-Docs?

April 23, 2017 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Most organizations want to present a corporate image when they communicate externally, so that all their communications are instantly recognized. The most common documents are quotes, orders, invoices, and service agreements. These documents are designed with Microsoft Word, and Emailed as PDF attachment to clients.

With Dynamics Docs and Dynamics PDF-Docs, CRM users can create impressive Word Templates and insert fields from CRM entities and related entities. With one click of a button the document is PDF and attached to Email or the record’s Note. This process can be scheduled with CRM Workflow, which will create the PDF file and attach it to an Email.

Think again: can you survive without PDF-Docs?

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invoice 3 pages 1 Can you survive without PDF Docs?

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Why machine learning will decide which IoT ‘things’ survive

January 9, 2017 Big Data

No billion-dollar machine could replace a doctor. But a $ 25 machine can tell you when you need one.

In 1996, the ER at Cook County Hospital of Chicago used an algorithm to determine when a patient with chest pain was in danger of having a heart attack and was thus worth one of its scarce hospital beds. Using a systematic, flowchart-based approach of basic tests, the algorithm proved not only to be quick and efficient, but accurate: It sorted 70 percent more patients into the low-risk category, but caught a higher percentage of heart attacks (95 percent) than human doctors (75-89 percent). And this was before any deep computing was involved.

Now consider that there are around 6.4 billion IoT devices in use this year — nearly one for every living human. If even one percent could analyze people for medical conditions, by collecting data on pulse, diet, or sleep, it would extend the reach of the world’s doctors by a factor of five.

But the real magic comes from machine learning. Beyond just applying singular algorithms in more places, data collected at this scale is already finding patterns in conditions that even human doctors couldn’t see after decades of experience. Imagine, for example, a Fitbit noticing fluctuations in your pulse that correspond strongly to a heart condition, sending you to a hospital for treatment. Machine learning means solving impossible problems with household devices.

But machine learning stopped being a question of potential when IBM’s Watson and Google’s DeepMind started outperforming humans in domains like Jeopardy and Go. Now the question is this: If a Fitbit could save your life and a Nike+ Fuel Band couldn’t, which would you buy?

The real value of “smart”

Among swarms of “smart” gadgets and gizmos, it’s no wonder the ones leading the way are doing so with machine learning. Take Nest, the quintessential smart device, for example. Nobody buys it so they can turn up the heat with their phone. They buy its energy-saving capabilities, the intelligent way it solves a problem that couldn’t be done before, automating a home’s temperature based on people’s presence and needs, not a simple timer.

Yet most manufacturers just chase convenience. Phillips HUE lights, while nifty, earn their “smart” label because you can control them with your phone. It’s not a problem that needs solving. You wouldn’t call a human smart because they can flip a light switch on their own. So why give that label to a device?

The lack of true smart features in consumer IoT is also what’s holding back adoption. Remote access door locks or a radio that turns on when you get home are nothing more than luxuries, consumed with the exclusivity of fine dining or cruise ship packages — earning revenues almost exclusively from the upper class.

Machine learning turns the wants into the must-haves: thermostats that keep you warm while saving you money, sleep or fitness wearables that give you personalized tips, or environmental monitors that diagnose and treat sources of pollution before they get a chance to harm your family.

Machine learning will define the winners — permanently

Products with machine learning features look sexier on the shelf than ones without. But the nature of machine learning means that among competitors, the ones that goes the furthest in machine learning get to keep their advantage for a long time.

Thanks to the cloud, building machine learning into a device isn’t a design problem (all it takes on the device is connectivity) nor is it a hardware problem (the heavy processing can be done remotely). It’s somewhat of a talent problem since capable engineers are rare, but this is always solvable with enough funding. More than anything, it’s a data problem.

For a computer to reliably study patterns, the data set needs to be enormous. It needs to consider a multitude of factors, ranging from user preference to use cases, environment, and much more. But many or even most of these factors are time-dependent: frequency of use, frequency of behaviors, frequency of conditions, changes to user behavior over time, seasonal changes to the environment, data accuracy over the lifespan of the sensor, etc.

Time is doled out democratically; a hundred million devices on solid connections won’t make a company’s clock turn faster. A six-month lead on a competitor can’t be closed with more users or funding. Your data will be fundamentally better than theirs, shown in the accuracy of your readings, and the number of features you support as earlier features become reliable enough to finalize and ship. For as long as you stay active, you’ll be the leader and the competition won’t be able to catch up.

Not just for the big boys

Yet it’s still just the IBMs and Googles that ship machine learning products with any frequency. It’s as if machine learning was too expensive for startups. But this simply isn’t true.

The trick is to do the heavy lifting on other people’s computers. Again, this is possible because of the cloud. Startups can pay by the hour to get access to some of the most sophisticated machinery out there with reasonable and manageable investments, most of which aren’t up front. With a few lines of procedural code, you can even queue up many batches in a row to keep things efficient.

More importantly, as there is little required hardware on the device itself to make machine learning possible, you don’t need to commit to machine learning when shipping your first batch, when design and tooling upfronts still weigh heavy on margins.

Even Nest wasn’t so smart at first; a phone-controlled thermostat roughly predicting how long it takes to heat your house through simple algorithms. It wasn’t learning much about you. But to upgrade user homes with its defining features, the company only had to send packets, not packages. Machine learning can be added at your financial convenience (as long as you do it before your competitors do).

Democratizing expertise

It’s scary to think of machine learning as a chopping block for complacent startups. But there’s much more reason to be optimistic than afraid. Machine learning adds more value than we ever imagined. It puts a doctor in every fitness band, a detective in every smart lock, a health inspector in every environmental monitor, and a butler in every luxury device.

Machine learning is where smart devices stop being convenient and start being powerful. We’ve seen the early adopters, the Nests and the Echoes, rise to the top and add serious value to our lives. When hundreds of other tech companies follow suit, the world will never be the same.

Jacques Touillon is CEO of AirBoxLab, maker of consumer smart device Foobot.

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Not Every CIO Is Ready

About the Authors

How Grocery Retailers Can Survive Digital Disruption

From Self-Help to Self-Skills

Being More Human Is Hard

Human Skills 101

How Knowing One’s Self Helps the Organization

Human Skills Are the Constant

About the Authors

How to Survive the 4 Stages of CRM User Adoption

Can you survive without PDF-Docs?

Why machine learning will decide which IoT ‘things’ survive

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Machine learning will define the winners — permanently

Not just for the big boys

Democratizing expertise

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5. Understand Process Design

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8. Understand the True Cost—and Speed—of Data

Not Every CIO Is Ready

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From Self-Help to Self-Skills

Being More Human Is Hard

Human Skills 101

How Knowing One’s Self Helps the Organization

Human Skills Are the Constant

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Machine learning will define the winners — permanently

Not just for the big boys

Democratizing expertise

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