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Tasktop nabs $100M to turn DevOps metrics into visualizations at scale

April 8, 2021 Big Data

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Value stream management (VSM) platform Tasktop today announced that it raised $ 100 million, bringing its total raised to over $ 129 million. The company says it plans to use the funding to accelerate growth while expanding the size of its customer base.

As traditional businesses pour billions into digital transformation initiatives, they often struggle with the complexity of the teams, tools, and metrics at the core of those investments. Technical leaders deeply understand the software development process and business leaders know the investment strategies, but the two aren’t always aligned. In a study, Geneca found that 75% of executives surveyed admitted that their projects were either “always” or “usually” doomed right from the start.

Vancouver, Canada-based Tasktop, which was founded in 2007, offers a VSM platform designed to reduce time to market and increase the velocity of software development. Sitting above the software development toolchain, Tasktop integrates with software development tools like Jira Software, ServiceNow, Azure DevOps, and more to allow organizations to see potential blockers.

VSM was born out of the frustration that most enterprises aren’t adequately adaptive. According to Forrester, only 16% say that they can release software more than once a month. For Tasktop’s part, the company asserts that VSM allows organizations to break down silos as well as identify and remove bottlenecks, eliminate waste, and accelerate delivery.

Tasktop’s platform overlays the value stream to provide abstractions, visualizations, and diagnostics that measure all types of software delivery work. Connectors let customers send work between different dev tools, eliminating duplicate data entry and automating traceability. And Tasktop’s testing regimen runs 500,000 tests daily over 300 tool versions to ensure they work properly, handling tooling and API changes to minimize outages and delays.

Coinciding with the new funding, Tasktop this morning launched a dashboard within its Tasktop Viz product — VSM Portfolio Insights — that rolls up analytics generated at the individual product value stream level to the executive plane. The dashboard presents consolidated insights into the performance, quality, value, and impact of delivery, including:

The progress of the shift from project to product-based IT
The ability to respond rapidly to the market
The business processes capable of acceleration
The value creation and value protection areas currently lacking appropriate
investment

Since the birth of VSM, the market category has grown exponentially compared with the longer-tail development of agile and DevOps. The expansion speaks for itself with players like ServiceNow, IBM, Digital.ai, and of course Tasktop joining the fray. Last December, Tasktop announced record year-over-year growth with a 30% uptick in both revenue and customers. The company now claims to serve leading brands, including over half of the Fortune 100.

Sumeru Equity Partners led Tasktop’s latest funding round, a strategic investment. Management and existing investors also participated.

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Dave Chappelle To Buy Ohio Fire Station And Turn Into Comedy Club

December 25, 2020 Humor

YELLOW SPRINGS, Ohio (WDTN) – Comedian Dave Chappelle is set to open a comedy club in what was formerly the Miami Township Fire Station.

The Yellow Springs Development Corporation (YSDC) said Monday that they finalized an agreement to sell the fire station to Iron Table Holdings, LLC, owned by Chappelle.

YSDC said the agreement came after a several-month long process during which interested buyers were first asked to submit a preliminary development plan to the YSDC Fire Station Subcommittee.

Interested parties later toured the facility and presented detailed business and architectural plans for the building. The presentations were evaluated on several criteria including job creation, local impact, environmental impact and diversity.

YSDC said Iron Table Holdings, LLC ranked highest in the criterias of profits/wages/taxes, environmental impact, local impact, diversity and COVID-19 considerations.

The agreement is the first community-based transaction the corporation has carried out.

The OWN Channel To Air John Legend Hosted Special Titled ‘Revisiting Underground’

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The Humor Mill

Turn D365 into a Customer Relationship MAXIMIZING Solution

June 2, 2020 CRM News and Info

What do we really want out of customer relationships? Yes, we all want to ensure customer satisfaction. Yes, we all want to keep customers engaged with our brand and products.

But let’s cut the malarkey: we mainly all want revenue. (And satisfied, engaged customers are the revenue drivers.)

Today, we’ll share a few tips on tweaking the “M” in CRM from management to maximizing. And it starts at the very first touch point.

“We have received your inquiry and will get back to you shortly.” Talk about a missed opportunity.

D365 (Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Field Service, et al) gives you every means imaginable to fire off an email to people who have downloaded a whitepaper, signed up for a webinar, filled out a contact form, or otherwise interacted with you. And there’s no better time to get an open for an email, so why do so many businesses waste what’s basically a guaranteed open with a robotic reply?

Make sure every autoresponder you create in D365 is relationship maximizer: did they download a whitepaper on economic trends? Send them a link to a webinar on economic trends. Did they contact you for a demo? Send them a link to a one-pager or other “demo-primer.”

Don’t just thank them for reaching out to you. Build on why they reached out: give them more than they expected, and you’ll eventually get more in return.

Have you integrated your Dynamics 365 CRM with your ERP system, connecting marketing info (contacts, geo’s, etc.) with critical financial info? Have you connected LinkedIn Sales Navigator to provide “career context” for every customer communication? Have you created compelling customer journeys in D365 Marketing that feed data to customer service and sales reps in real-time?

Microsoft has a greater depth and breadth of tools and platforms than ever before, and they’re almost all centered around empowering a business with a completely automated, instantly available 360-degree view of every customer. If you’re using only D365 CRM to understand your customers’ needs, wants, and behaviors, you’re getting only a sliver of the big picture.

Yes, technically, you’re “managing” those customer relationships. But once you roll in the data of, for example, each customer’s website and social media behavior, career details, and other demographics data the Microsoft stack can provide, you move from customer relationship management to customer relationship maximization.

As stated, in the end (and usually the beginning and middle, too) customer relationships are all about maximizing revenue possibilities. Which means your sales quotes are one of the most critical communications you have with a customer.

Yes, a sales proposal is, in many ways, just another customer communication… just like a contract is just another communication. I.e., it’s important.

Not only that, but in many cases, your sales quote will be the first communication you send your customer that reaches a wider audience of decision makers, so ensuring it’s a relationship maximizer is absolutely critical.

You want the quotes you send to both build your brand and reflect your customer’s as well. You want the product and pricing configurations in your quotes to be priced optimally for you, and fairly for your customer. You want to dot T’s and cross I’s and ensure no detail is missed and no reply is late. You want a system dedicated to these features and functions, and within D365, which is why companies are adding CPQ to Dynamics.

CPQ maximizes every quote, making it more professional and more targeted, and optimizes the quote tracking process as well.

If you’re serious about customer relationship maximization, it’s time to get serious about how you’re creating, sending, and tracking the most critical step: the sales proposal.

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

Three Ways to Turn SMS Marketing into Sales

April 20, 2020 NetSuite

Posted by Austin Caldwell, Senior Product Marketing Manager

Over the past decade, ecommerce website traffic has rapidly shifted from desktop to mobile devices. In 2018, mobile overtook desktop as the predominant global online traffic source. Mobile usage skyrocketed during the 2019 holidays and for the first time ever, became the primary ecommerce revenue source from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday. In today’s mobile-first ecommerce environment, marketers should strive to invest in strategies that optimize user experience on smartphones.

One of the most effective mobile marketing strategies is implementing a Short Message Service (SMS) program. With 98% of text messages read within two minutes, 36% average click rates and 45% average conversion rates, SMS marketing has unparalleled engagement rates compared to other channels. These metrics aren’t surprising considering the text message inbox is one of the least saturated; especially compared to email inboxes and social media news feeds.

Get Started with SMS

SMS allows marketers to reach their customers in a more personal way, in the right place, at the right time, and on the device they can’t do without. In order to help get started with SMS marketing, here are some leading practices businesses can utilize to start acquiring mobile contacts, design engaging messages and automate personalized campaigns.

Mobile Contact Acquisition

Similar to email marketing acquisition strategies, marketers must promote their SMS marketing channel if they hope to grow subscribers. Luckily, SMS and email marketing are easy to promote together and leverage similar tactics to optimize sign-ups across web and digital marketing channels. Offering an incentive to sign-up like a coupon or special offer is the top tactic to help boost subscription conversion rates. Businesses need a contact’s mobile number and their opt-in consent to receive SMS text messages.

It’s becoming more ubiquitous to see print advertising and physical signage inside retail stores promoting SMS sign-ups. Simple directions enable users to opt-in with a text to join, followed by an automated SMS message asking to provide their mobile number to opt into the program. Subscribers then receive their initial welcome SMS campaigns. This efficient process makes it possible for shoppers to easily sign up while they’re in the store. Marketers should place text-to-join signage at the front entrance and throughout the store, so shoppers can sign up before heading through the check-out line; eliminating the need for staff to annoyingly collect shoppers’ phone numbers at the register.

Designing SMS Campaigns

SMS communication is more intimate than email and must be used thoughtfully. SMS subscribers expect SMS messages to be timely, personalized and deliver value. Since SMS unsubscribe rates are nearly three times higher than email marketing opt-out rates, designing exceptional SMS interactions are vital to keeping well-earned sign-ups.

In order to be timely, plan SMS campaign send times when shoppers are on their phones. Sends between 6-9 p.m. result in the highest engagement as people have time to shop. Don’t schedule campaigns during the early morning or rush hour commutes. SMS campaigns sent on Fridays have a 44% higher open rate compared to any other day of the week.

Keep SMS content short and sweet. With a 160-character limit that includes website URLs and mandatory unsubscribe language, it’s best to lead with an offer and reinforce a call to action without wasting words. Save fine print for the website landing page and shorten URLs to save character count. Personalized dynamic content such as first name, local store, loyalty program status, order details and one-time use coupons can be used to stand out from generic promotions. Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) content like video, images, animated gifs or scannable barcode offers can be utilized to help grab attention and drive engagement.

Automated Mobile Interactions

SMS requires exceptional marketing automation in order to scale. Using behavioral triggers rather than gut intuition takes the guesswork out of sending the right message at the right time. SMS adheres to established customer lifecycle automation strategies like welcome, website abandonment, transactional order status and post-purchase.

Shoppers expect an immediate response upon sign up. It’s unacceptable to not receive an initial welcome campaign until the next day when a back-end process decides to run. Text-to-join strategies will quickly fail if shoppers don’t receive their sign-up offers while in the store. Make a great first impression with a multi-touch welcome series that provides shoppers with a reason to keep receiving your SMS campaigns.

Marketers can recapture lost sales by monitoring website browsing activity and triggering abandonment messages when shoppers bounce. By being mindful of timing and frequency, shoppers will be open to receiving SMS reminders if they don’t become annoying. It’s useful to send an initial SMS cart abandonment campaign within the first few hours of their session and follow up the next day with an email campaign containing the full details of their shopping cart. Limiting SMS frequency prevents unsubscribes and allows the more non-pervasive email channel to handle reminders.

Even if shoppers aren’t interested in receiving promotional SMS campaigns, many are willing to opt in to receive order status alerts like order, shipping and delivery confirmations. With workflow triggers for when an order is added or marked to ship, you are able to send order and shipping confirmation messages with dynamic variables such as order number, order total, shipment tracking and projected delivery date. These transactional messages are intended to give shoppers peace of mind, reassuring them their order was successful and on the way.

Start Engaging Customers with SMS

With NetSuite’s Bronto Marketing Platform, marketers can take advantage of today’s mobile-first ecommerce environment. Bronto’s integrated SMS capabilities make it simple to start seamlessly engaging with shoppers through multiple channels including mobile, email, web and social to drive sales with consistent messaging throughout. Bronto has helped many businesses find omnichannel success using a single fully integrated, unified marketing platform.

Learn more about SMS marketing capabilities with the Bronto Marketing Platform and how marketers can use SMS to reach their VIP customers.

Posted on Mon, April 20, 2020
by NetSuite filed under

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The NetSuite Blog

Giving Tuesday the Right Time for Nonprofits to Turn to Outcomes Measurement

November 14, 2019 NetSuite

Posted by Courtney Kang, Nonprofit Industry Marketing Lead

With the holidays around the corner, the most charitable time of the year is approaching for nonprofit organizations. However, for some it can also be the most stressful, as nonprofits begin competing for donors’ attention amid a hectic fundraising environment.

Tis’ the season to be generous

According to the Nonprofit Source, 30% of annual giving occurs in December and 10% of annual giving takes place in the last three days of the year. Kicking it all off is Giving Tuesday, a movement founded in 2012 as a response to the hyper-consumerism of post-Thanksgiving holiday shopping. With a global reach, immense social media presence and the backing of corporations such as Facebook and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, this annual day of giving has generated over $ 1 billion since its inception and is expected to garner even greater participation this year.

While creating a Giving Tuesday social media strategy and email campaign is a standard and almost expected effort, going beyond the usual fundraising tactics is key in standing out from the crowd and creating opportunities for a nonprofit that can extend beyond the end of the year.

Communicating impact for year-round engagement

For starters, nonprofits can effectively navigate Giving Tuesday and create awareness around their mission and the benefits of extra donations by measuring and communicating the financial outcomes of programs year-round. By directly linking donations to mission impact in key messaging, nonprofits are more likely to attract donors who are putting the time into researching where they should be giving. Informed donors want to know how their money will be used—sharing meaningful metrics will help cut through the noise and draw them in.

And while Giving Tuesday is undoubtedly an influential movement and a powerful celebration of generosity and giving back, it is not free from criticism. One of the main arguments is that the day encourages episodic one-time gifts. That means it’s up to nonprofits to convince first-time donors to make follow-up gifts or even pledge longer-term commitments. When donors are able to see the impact and tangible difference their previous donations made, it’s likely they will be inspired to give again—whether that be on a future Giving Tuesday or another time in the year.

This should give rise to both more rigorous and robust outcomes measurement, but also more frequent, clear and engaging communications with donors on how their donations were spent and to what end. Measuring outputs is the first step, and one many organizations do well. Measuring outcomes, on the other hand, can be quite complicated.

To link an organization’s activities to outcomes for an affected community involves causal relationships, theories of change and logic frameworks. However, because the sector has turned away from determining effectiveness purely based on low overhead costs and hitting basic outputs, organizations have the opportunity to re-think how they are measuring and communicating their work in a longitudinal way.

Luckily, there is a growing number of resources and tools available to help nonprofits understand and adopt more meaningful success metrics. The recent Connecting Dollars to Outcomes survey highlights the challenges nonprofit finance executives face in measuring financial outcomes; and how new technology, measurement tools and funding models are helping address the evolving infrastructure needs of nonprofits.

Not only is Giving Tuesday and the overall giving season an important fundraising period, but it’s also a pivotal moment for nonprofits in terms of raising awareness, demonstrating effectiveness, and setting up opportunities for longer term success. By building efforts upon a foundation of outcomes measurement metrics, nonprofits can avoid the post-holiday/giving season blues and use the charitable time as a launchpad for further successful fundraising.

Posted on Tue, November 19, 2019
by NetSuite filed under

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The NetSuite Blog

Never Turn Your Back On Your Kid

March 21, 2019 Humor

Garage door joy ride.

“Having a kid must be terrifying.”
Image courtesy of https://imgur.com/gallery/qGly57i.

Thingstream uses Flogo to Turn IoT Data into Real Business Value for Customers

March 19, 2019 TIBCO Spotfire

In today’s technology-driven world, connectivity is everything, from the edge to the enterprise.

So when Thingstream, a company that builds IoT connectivity platforms to deliver an intelligent network of connected ‘things’ to customers, needed a solution for helping customers get data from their connected devices in order to make effective business decisions, it turned to TIBCO.

Most of Thingstream’s customers require constant, real-time updates, oftentimes from devices enduring a number of harsh conditions. To meet this growing need, Thingstream is able to provide secure, easy-to-configure, cost-effective solutions by embedding TIBCO Flogo® and TIBCO® Messaging in its devices. “We have a lot of customers who are moving product across national borders or oceans, and they’re tracking not just position but vibration, temperature, and humidity to describe environmental conditions for their customers,” said Bruce Jackson, CTO at Thingstream.

Some customers even require devices to remain in the field for as long as a decade and they need the power to send and receive messages constantly. Flogo’s lightweight model was the perfect fit, allowing Thingstream to strike the ideal balance between processing power and battery life. “You really want something that will compile down into something that’s small and efficient but platform independent at the same time, and that’s really the goal of Flogo,” said Jackson.

With TIBCO’s assistance, Thingstream is able to help its own customers deliver on a very important promise: that products being shipped all over the world are being well-handled and will arrive safe and sound with no surprises. “You can’t sell the ability to move goods from A to B at a certain temperature with a minimum vibration and low humidity if you can’t track and measure those things for the duration of the journey,” Jackson explained.

For the full story on how TIBCO Flogo and TIBCO Messaging help Thingstream succeed, check out the customer success case study here.

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The TIBCO Blog

Asset Operations Companies Turn Digital Twinning Into Digital Winning

August 23, 2018 BI News and Info

This is the fifth blog in our Network of Digital Twins series. Read our previous post to explore what manufacturers can achieve with innovative digital twin technology.

Today, many asset operators are struggling to take advantage of the digital opportunities of new technology. They see their sister lines of business in manufacturing, sales, procurement, and supply chain transforming faster.

With a historic focus on efficient operations and maintenance processes, the digital foundation for asset intelligence is missing. Operators don’t know the status or condition of their assets and cannot track changes over time as an asset is installed, maintained, updated, or re-engineered.

But operating in the digital age is transforming this and allowing companies to look at assets differently, not just as physical entities that need maintaining, but also as a digital representation that can provide the intelligence for advanced decision making and new automated processes.

The idea of a “digital twin” is not new, however companies can leverage today’s technologies to make it a reality. These include graphical 3D visualization and virtual reality, sensor-based monitoring technology, advanced analytics, networks, and geographic Information systems including satellite positioning, to name a few.

Enabling a ‘network of digital twins’

The Internet of Things (IoT) is driving the ability for real-time, sensor-based monitoring of assets. It’s not a new topic, but one that is rapidly being enabled across more of an asset portfolio and beyond just high-value, sophisticated assets. Many new assets are equipped with sensors by design and it can be cost-effective to retrofit sensors for existing assets. Also, the IoT makes it easy to connect and share those data feeds.

With advances in data handling and analytics, including approaches such as machine learning and material science simulation, real-time data feeds from equipment sensors can be used for improved and automated maintenance decisions. Importantly, not just in an engineering analysis office after the fact, but as real-time intelligence in the front office of asset operations.

If we then consider that such assets involve many different organizations across their lifecycle, networks and new approaches to collaboration can improve and even automate the creation of digital twins. We can move beyond the traditional world, where digital design/CAD data was constrained to the R&D/engineering department, and share that downstream across organizations through manufacturing, operations, and service. It can be combined with different types of digital data, such as maintenance and commercial intelligence, to create complete digital packages for an asset twin that can evolve over time.

The result is the ability to maintain a digital twin that truly reflects the physical asset. To enrich it and keep it accurate over time, to make it available across a network of stakeholders, and to make it “live” with real-time sensor feeds. Such a network of digital twins can enable winning efficiencies and new business processes.

Three benefits of digital twin networks

Assuming many organizations have already adopted low-cost maintenance processes, further benefits will increasingly require digital transformation and the ability to utilize intelligence from digital asset data. Those benefits can be considerable, in terms of automation and efficiency of operations, cost avoidance, improved service, and new revenue generation. Let’s consider three examples.

Extending asset life: Asset life, such as for expensive assets or structures, is often predetermined using assumptions with estimates and safety margins. If we can instead base decisions on reality, on an accurate, live digital twin, we could potentially and safely extend an asset’s life. If the vibration pattern of a structure (such as blades on a wind turbine) changes, maintenance could be accelerated before undue stresses occur. With real-time structural simulation, the actual stresses caused by unexpected events (including incremental weather effects) can be used to determine stress and fatigue over time at any given point in the structure. The same can apply to many asset categories, e.g., the life of a submersible pump may depend on assumptions about corrosion or abrasion, which could be made more accurate based on intelligence about actual fluid conditions over time.

Reducing maintenance costs: Many companies spend small fortunes maintaining assets on planned maintenance schedules. These costs can be dramatic when asset downtime is costly or assets are remote, difficult, and potentially dangerous to inspect (like submersible pumps or wind turbines). With digital twin-based intelligence of assets that are connected, companies can adopt sensor- and condition-based monitoring strategies, detecting problems as early as possible and using predictive or machine learning algorithms to anticipate failures. Maintenance can be done when it’s needed considering the criticality of the asset.

Creating new business models: Digital twins provide opportunities for organizations across the supply chain to create new business models and generate additional revenue. A manufacturer could offer to provide its products as a service, enabling new revenue models and the ability for operators to more easily adopt new assets. Further, where assets are connected across business networks, new software applications and services can be offered, and increasingly the revenues from aftermarket operations will grow beyond just spare parts into new value-added offerings. Third parties can differentiate their businesses by offering content and maintenance services, collaborating through the network of digital twins.

Putting assets at the heart of your operations

Traditionally, operations companies focused on efficient operations, the resources needed to do a job, and supporting processes and work-order execution drove many day-to-day management tasks and decisions.

Today, digital twins enable businesses to put their assets at the heart of their operations. The asset itself determines the future, and operators with a rich digital foundation can provide the intelligence for better decisions now and in the future. Customer service is enabled by the asset, the asset is intelligent and at the heart of the operation, and with it companies can continue winning for years to come.

To learn more about the Network of Digital Twins, register to read the Infobrief by IDC.

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Digitalist Magazine

How to Turn Finance into a True Business Partner to Help Drive Growth

August 15, 2018 NetSuite

Posted by Thomas Sutter, Financial Centre of Excellence

The term business partnering has been in the finance lexicon for a number of years now.

It’s one of those phrases that you might associate with the most sophisticated organisations – with lots of resources to invest in developing accountants to support the business and supplemented with all the bells and whistles of the latest data mining, analytics and dashboard tools.

Thankfully, the cloud – along with automation and burgeoning consciousness of AI – means that the opportunities for finance to truly partner with the rest of the organisation are now in reach for lots of businesses.

And that’s not even just the next rung of corporates. Nascent, growing businesses’ finance teams can easily use business development and support-focused technology.

Before we move into the whys and hows, there’s a fundamental question that, as a CFO, you might be asking: Is this finance’s responsibility?

The short answer, is yes. The longer version takes in finance’s evolution.

The finance function has traditionally focused on gathering historic information, then auditing and verifying this data for use in either management and financial reporting, or to pay tax and payroll. Finance has also helped produce budgets and forecasts, though often to limited success. It has also, of course, managed cash flow.

The resource-intensive processes around ‘tidying up’ financial information, plus making sure all the relevant parties then gain access to that information, created a compliance-focused and backwards-facing department.

But new technology has enabled many finance processes to be automated. The verification of data can be reduced to checking exceptions. The information can also be manipulated more and moulded as required. And this all takes place more rapidly.

Ultimately, the answer is that highly-qualified and curious by nature, finance staff are brilliantly placed to be able to understand how different teams and units work – and then match their requirements with the information being produced in their systems.

High-growth organisations typically focus on making sales, generating cash flow, developing products, expanding market reach – so finance professionals can provide clear, level-headed advice on the financial implications of strategic and operational decisions in a fast-moving and stressful environment.

There is work to do to make this all possible. For starters, you could describe this blog as the older sibling of my previous article – which discussed how you get to grips with structuring your systems and teams prior to developing business partnering.

And once this path is set out, it’s vital to ensure you have the right team members who will venture forth from behind their finance desk.

I strongly believe that most finance professionals will leap at the opportunity to develop both their soft skills and broaden their operational experience. And with many basic tasks being automated it’s a sensible move.

Becoming a business partner requires development and experience. As a CFO, the planning effort you have put into setting up your systems and processes must be matched by how you approach talent management.

When recruiting finance professionals for high-growth companies, soft skills and attitude are as important as technical know-how. Then you will need to plan their development through finance before moving into other business roles.

But it is an exciting prospect. To ‘turn’ finance around from looking backwards to looking forwards. From compliance function, to integral business support. From bean counter to strategic advisor.

Learn more about NetSuite’s financial management.

Posted on Tue, August 14, 2018
by NetSuite filed under

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The NetSuite Blog

How To Turn Your Sales Team Into An Innovation Engine

April 4, 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 To Turn Your Sales Team Into An Innovation Engine

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.

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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.

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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 To Turn Your Sales Team Into An Innovation Engine 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.
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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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