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Tag Archives: World

Reimagining a more equitable sharing economy in the post-COVID-19 world

November 8, 2020   Big Data
 Reimagining a more equitable sharing economy in the post COVID 19 world

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The first saplings of the sharing economy grew from the ashes of the last financial crisis in 2007-2008. Looking back from the vantage point of 2020, it’s easy to forget the original ideals that many of the earliest proponents of the sharing economy held. The idea was that new models of cooperation, coupled with advances in smartphone technology, would enable communities to pool their collective resources, making consumption more social and sustainable. And we would all be winners; lenders could monetize their stuff while borrowers could save money by renting rather than owning.

Most early entrants, however, found they couldn’t generate critical mass to create sustainable peer-to-peer marketplaces, whether that was for power tools, musical instruments, or anything else. Instead, what emerged is a handful of all-powerful platforms like Uber, DoorDash, and Airbnb that connect consumers to services, which are often delivered by “gig workers” in low-paid and highly precarious forms of employment. In turn, this has sparked countless conflicts between platform providers such as Uber and Airbnb and governments that are attempting to regulate their business models.

This current incarnation of the sharing economy, which has now penetrated so many aspects of our everyday lives, is arguably one of the biggest legacies of the last recession. But as we now enter the COVID-19-induced economic slowdown, it’s time to shape what we want the next chapter of this industry to look like, before conflicts worsen.

Many of these conflicts have been borne out of unintended consequences. These platforms were originally intended to be mediums of mutually beneficial exchanges between private individuals who occasionally monetize their spare time or dormant possessions. Therefore, there was little thought put into things such as workers’ rights or short-stay rental regulations.

But as platforms have become dominated by professional gig workers (in the case of Uber and DoorDash, for example) or by professional hosts (in the case of Airbnb), the negative consequences are clearly visible. Frequent news of striking gig workers and protesting local residents in cities around the world show us that existing models of participation in the sharing economy are no longer fit for purpose.

Preventing the overprofessionalization of platforms

A perfect case study in the unintended consequences of the sharing economy is Airbnb. When it launched in 2008, it was intended to be an easy way for people to monetize space they weren’t using, such as a spare room on occasion or their entire home while they were away. What we now have is a platform dominated by professional hosts, with entire sub-industries supporting it, from management agencies to shady let-to-let business practices and get-rich-quick courses run by “Airbnb business gurus.”

The impact of the professionalization of Airbnb hosting is well documented. Local residents in global cities such as Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Los Angeles have had enough. From rowdy parties every night of the week to rent price inflation and the hollowing out of local services, Airbnb’s negative consequences are real, and residents across the world are feeling them. It should be no surprise, therefore, that legislation is now being passed in many of the most affected locations in order to curtail the use and spread of this platform.

But this is not to say that there is anything inherently bad about Airbnb’s business model. Rather, it was the way the platform evolved — away from live-in hosts letting out their spare rooms to professionals letting multiple properties — that have created these issues. Therefore, a “back to basics” approach with measures to prevent the oversaturation of “professionals” on such platforms would help to lessen many of these pitfalls. Such measures could be supported by regulation and decided democratically at the local level, as we’re now starting to see in some locations.

However, preventing the oversaturation of professionals and the negative consequences of this shouldn’t be solely reliant on government regulation. If entrepreneurs entering the sharing economy space are conscious of this from the start, they can build platforms that prevent over-saturation of professionals in the first place and the myriad legal battles that it spawns. Olio, a recently launched London-based startup that connects local residents and businesses so they can share surplus food rather than throwing it away, is a good example of this, as are vehicle-sharing platforms such as Turo and RVshare, which prioritize local private owners.

Supporting localized platforms and preventing monopolies

As is the case with much of the tech industry, a handful of sharing economy platforms like DoorDash, Grubhub, and Airbnb now dominate industries such as food delivery and holiday stays. Interestingly, however, there are some sectors of the sharing economy where we’re seeing the opposite of the usual model of consolidation and monopolization.

If we take ride-sharing as a case study, instead of smaller companies being consolidated by larger competitors, dozens of small homegrown platforms are launching at the city or regional level across a growing number of countries. In many cases, these small startups are directly challenging the incumbent Uber.

Governments could act to support, or even protect, such homegrown entrants in national markets. This may be anathema to many tech industry players, but all governments act to protect some of their strategic industries through targeted support or even intervention.

The same could be applied to the sharing economy in the form of grants, tax incentives, or regulatory alignment. Governments and city councils could attach conditions to such support, including tax residency requirements to help keep profits within national economies and agreements on gig worker rights and compensation.

Exploring new models of participation

The current worker participation models of many sharing economy platforms are characterized by precarity. While independent contractor status undoubtedly provides flexibility, gig workers have little to no sick pay, no health insurance, and none of the other benefits that full-time employees typically enjoy. In other words, all the risk is passed onto the worker.

The State of California took a bold step at the start of the year by passing a new law (AB-5) that was intended to provide employee status to gig workers. But platform providers such as Uber and DoorDash have refused to comply and have used their financial muscle to challenge the law in the courts. Some of the outputs from this battle have, however, provided some food for thought. Uber and Lyft are reportedly considering creating franchises across the state that would manage and operate fleets and employ drivers. This type of service fulfillment model would help build small- and medium-sized enterprises throughout platform supply chains while decentralizing power in the process. Other platform providers could explore such models at city, regional, or national levels.

Another interesting development to come out of this legal battle is Proposition 22. With Proposition 22, platform providers are proposing something akin to independent contractor status with benefits for gig workers in lieu of full employment status and rights. Although people on both sides are intensely debating whether this is a good deal for gig workers, the essence of what’s being proposed could become the theoretical basis for future labor negotiations: a combination of flexible working conditions and improved rights.

Ultimately, the next chapter of the sharing economy should be about creating solutions that benefit both sides of the transaction, while managing undesirable externalities. The convenience of near-instant ride hailing, food delivery, and short-term holiday rentals is hard to overstate, but the frustrations people experience from these services’ unimagined consequences should not be allowed to fester indefinitely.

The future success of the sharing economy will depend largely on mutual collaboration between platform providers, gig workers, local communities, and governments. Currently, this “collaboration” is characterized by conflict — an instinct to fight back instead of work together. A more productive approach, however, would involve a change of mindset from both sides. The sharing economy can’t be rolled back, but simple steps can make the transition into its future form better for everyone.


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Why Hasn’t CRM Taken Over the World?

October 9, 2020   CRM News and Info

Throughout the early fall, analysts have been treated to a continuous stream of announcements from the CRM community, especially Salesforce and Oracle. New product availability belies the facts on the ground of an economy hobbled by a pandemic. It’s a gusher of good technology intended for a market eager to snap it up. That said, I am not sure about the market and we might be looking at a technology glut.

Glut is a strange word in software since there’s no inventory to back up as you’d see in a more conventional glut. Over the summer gas process were very low because producers kept pumping in the face of declining demand which created a glut. Software is different, especially in the cloud era. When demand happens it’s a simple transaction and users can begin almost immediately to use the technology. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have a glut.

My research this year establishes a disconnect between the wonderful features and functions of the new technologies and the realities of how companies use them — or not. In surveys of over one thousand end users from as many companies of all sizes, including multi-billion-dollar ones, the evidence shows that this technology is not reaching users.

They complain of stand-alone systems that aren’t integrated and of running as many as eight apps at once trying to do their jobs. People understandably run out of time in a day too. They work long hours, do business from their phones at the gym, their children’s school activities, and even in the bathroom.

The old hypothesis explaining this lack of adoption was that software was too costly and took too much time to install or maintain. Back in the day that was true, but no more. Cloud computing is easy to install and use, and cheap and while we’re at it, and vendors refresh apps with new features and functions multiple times per year. That’s a far cry from the annual upgrade season we saw twenty years ago.

So What’s Going On?

You might be tempted to blame economic conditions for slack demand if it exists, but that’s not it. My surveys straddle COVID’s before and after. In truth, for the two plus decades that I’ve been following CRM, there’s always been adoption reluctance emanating from the front office. Rather than accepting CRM’s different approach to doing business, many people still resist it, preferring to go with their gut or stick with manual systems, because updating CRM is tedious.

Many businesses have bought into CRM, of course. It isn’t an 80-billion-dollar industry for nothing. But for many years we’ve seen that only about a quarter of organizations use CRM appropriately. Others use it for simple record keeping, or barely use it at all. A great tell for this is that in one of my studies, CRM ranked only fourth in importance as a tool people use daily. Email ranked higher. Email.

This is important to everyone because the first decades of CRM were largely about gathering and consolidating data that people could use in their customer-facing jobs. But today, a lot of those jobs have been automated away. When was the last time you went to a website or made a call for support and interacted with a person? You could, but first you needed to get through a very good self-service system that likely solved your problem sans human.

We’ve turned a corner in CRM. Two decades ago, you could put off adoption by saying the stuff doesn’t work or it doesn’t fit my oh-so-unique business. Not so much anymore.

This fall companies like Salesforce are introducing advanced vertical industry specific solutions while Oracle continues to refine its platform, analytics and infrastructure to do much the same.

All of this is done in an effort to boost the prospects of what’s been called the digital disruption, but is increasingly becoming just business as usual, which brings us to the glut. Currently available CRM systems might now outstrip the abilities of customers to adopt them.

Training Is Essential to Progress

It’s tempting to say that customers just need to get down to work, but that ignores a pressing reality. If my data is right, the people who need CRM are already under water. They’re working too hard and spending more than the eight hours a day that they’re paid for. So there’s scarcely any time to take on something new. That’s partly why my studies indicate relative complacency with the cobbled together systems they’re using — at least they can do their jobs, make their quotas and go home.

Learning something new at work, no matter how good it is, can be a daunting task and one that needs to be supported by organizations that have used CRM to reduce their overhead. Learning might mean bringing on a few more people to spread the work around and make feasible learning something new.

This should surprise exactly no one, though business has often not been good at this kind of transition. In the 1970s and ’80s car makers went through a similar turning point. It was a time when they were converting from mostly rear-wheel drive cars to front wheel-drive. At the same time, they were obsessed with quality control, reimagining the manufacturing process, and introducing robots. They were also fighting enhanced foreign competition for the first time.

There’s a reason for new technology adoption reluctance. During that era U.S. auto makers lost about half of their market share.

That’s about where we are in CRM today. Some companies are adopting digital disruption strategies early, while others haven’t kept up. The big difference today however is that the big vendors are taking steps to protect their customers from the downside risks. They’re spinning up online training functions and bringing in expert partners to help.

Ultimately, it’ll take additional resources from both vendors and customers to bring us into the digital CRM era. So, as I look at all of the new technology available this fall, I smile at vendor creativity and I hope that ingenuity extends to new approaches to implementation, training, and even financing.
end enn Why Hasnt CRM Taken Over the World?


Denis%20Pombriant Why Hasnt CRM Taken Over the World?
Denis Pombriant is a well-known CRM industry analyst, strategist, writer and speaker. His new book, You Can’t Buy Customer Loyalty, But You Can Earn It, is now available on Amazon. His 2015 book, Solve for the Customer, is also available there.
Email Denis.

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Data Visualization and Visual Analytics: Seeing the World of Data

July 6, 2020   Sisense

Everyone wants to get more out of their data, but how exactly to do that can leave you scratching your head. Our BI Best Practices demystify the analytics world and empower you with actionable how-to guidance.

In a world increasingly dominated by data, users of all kinds are gathering, managing, visualizing, and analyzing data in a wide variety of ways. One of the downsides of the role that data now plays in the modern business world is that users can be overloaded with jargon and tech-speak, which can be overwhelming.

Data visualization and visual analytics are two terms that come up a lot when new and experienced analytics users alike delve into the world of data in their quest to make smarter decisions. In this post, we’ll dig into what these concepts are, their strengths, and how they work together.

packages CTA banners BI and Analytics2 Data Visualization and Visual Analytics: Seeing the World of Data

Data visualization: painting a picture of your data

Simply put, data visualization means showing data in a visual format that makes insights easier to understand for human users. Data is usually visualized in a pictorial or graphical form such as charts, graphs, lists, maps, and comprehensive dashboards that combine these multiple formats.

The primary objective of data visualization is to clearly communicate what the data says, help explain trends and statistics, and show patterns that would otherwise be impossible to see. Data visualization is used to make the consuming, interpreting, and understanding data as simple as possible, and to make it easier to derive insights from data. When BI and analytics users want to see analytics results, and learn from them quickly, they rely on data visualizations.

Visual analytics does the “heavy lifting” with data, by using a variety of processes — mechanical, algorithms, machine learning, natural language processing, etc — to identify and reveal patterns and trends. It prepares the data for the process of data visualization, thereby enabling users to examine data, understand what it means, interpret the patterns it highlights, and help them find meaning and gain useful insights from complex data sets.

Analytics and visualizations, the key to data-driven organizations

The relationship between data visualization and visual analytics is symbiotic. In a study for the US Department of Homeland Security, James J. Thomas, and Kristin A. Cook illustrate this relationship in what they describe as “The Sense-Making Loop” of the analytical reasoning process:

Good data visualization enables visual analytics to be more effective and to show users better insights and better insights make for more compelling visualizations. Combining the two into visual data analysis makes it easier for users to better understand their data. Together, they help organizations and individuals identify how they can be more efficient, drive revenue, and gain a competitive advantage over their competitors.

The role of visualizations in analytics

Data visualization can either be static or interactive. Static visualizations provide users with a single view of what’s in front of them. Interactive visualizations enable users to drill down into data and extract and examine various views of the same dataset, selecting specific data points that they want to see in a visualized format.

Data visualization is what provides clarity to data-driven insights and it’s what enhances understanding throughout an organization.

In this diagram, visual analytics is shown to be the foundation for interactive data, thereby demonstrating how the two are connected. Analytics acts as the source for data visualization and contributes to the health of any organization by identifying underlying models and patterns and predicting needs.

Visualizations: past, present, and future

Broadly, there are three types of analytics: descriptive, prescriptive, and predictive. The simplest type, descriptive analytics, describes something that has already happened and suggests its root causes. 

Prescriptive analytics takes things a stage further: In addition to helping organizations understand causes, it helps them learn from what’s happened and shape tactics and strategies that can improve their current performance and their profitability. A simple example would be the analysis of marketing campaigns.

Predictive analytics is the most beneficial, but arguably the most complex type. It helps users to identify patterns that suggest future situations and behaviors. Using predictive analytics, organizations can plan for forthcoming scenarios, anticipate new trends, and prepare for them most efficiently and cost-effectively. Predicting forthcoming trends sets the stage for optimizing the benefits your organization takes from them.

Using visualizations to make smarter decisions

The data drawn from power visualizations comes from a variety of sources: Structured data, in the form of relational databases such as Excel, or unstructured data, deriving from text, video, audio, photos, the internet and smart devices. This data is gathered into either on-premises servers or increasingly into cloud data warehouses and data lakes. They are transformed into data visualizations and shared via dashboards and analytic apps so that users can make smarter, data-driven decisions.

Data teams and business and analytics teams are tasked with choosing and developing the best way to visualize data and to build well-organized dashboards in order to help end-users make smarter decisions. Dashboards need to be clear, quick to interpret, and easy to drill into to find the deeper insights when needed.

sisense blog How to Design Better Dashboards a Visual Guide 20191120 bl 01 banner Data Visualization and Visual Analytics: Seeing the World of Data

To achieve this successfully, you need a data and analytics platform that offers a powerful combination of visual analytics and data visualizations; with the capacity to handle huge volumes of data either stored on-premises, in the Cloud, or both; with the flexibility to integrate data from any source; and with the scalability for future growth.

To achieve this successfully, you need a data and analytics platform that offers a powerful combination of visual analytics and data visualization; with the capacity to handle huge volumes of data either stored on-premises, in the Cloud, or both; with the flexibility to integrate data from any source; and with the scalability for future growth.

Visual analytics and data visualizations in action

Orion is a premier portfolio accounting SaaS provider for financial advisors. Previously, they had been using a static reporting solution that served up stale news with a time lag of weeks, while their customers wanted pre-configured, dynamic dashboards. By switching to Sisense, they were able to offer all of this, doubling sales revenue at the same time.

And in the fight against COVID-19, Resconsortium has used Sisense technology to map the spread of the virus across the UK on a dashboard. It provides local and regional National Health Service capacity planners with the real-time information they need to target resources to areas where the outbreak becomes more severe or where there is a higher density of at-risk patients. And the data is as granular as the patient lists at individual family doctors’ surgeries.

To get the best insights from your data, and to optimize the benefits from your BI and analytics, you need a seamless combination of visual analytics and data visualization. Both are important, but each can’t be as effective without the other. Together, they play a vital role in the analysis and understanding of your data, and your ability to shape a successful future strategy for your organization using the insights that they reveal.

Julie Zuckerman is a senior product marketing director at Sisense, bringing over two decades of experience in marketing and product marketing at tech companies. Her debut novel, The Book of Jeremiah, was published in 2019.

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Microsoft Dynamics Can Help You Adapt to Face the Challenges of Today’s Business World with Strength & Confidence

July 3, 2020   CRM News and Info

xDynamics Crisis Response CRM Blog Cover 233x300.png.pagespeed.ic.6Oikbg9 P1 Microsoft Dynamics Can Help You Adapt to Face the Challenges of Today’s Business World with Strength & ConfidenceBusinesses today are facing upheaval on so many levels, from state lockdowns and closed offices, to slashed revenue and a lack of childcare for employees. It’s hard to even know which challenge to tackle first. Such challenges require innovation at the highest levels and execution that leaves nothing to chance.

Organizations are quickly seeing that the key to survival is adapting to the current situation. Previous business models and processes simply aren’t effective. It can be daunting to reinvent these models and processes but doing so is crucial for times of crisis.

In this article, we will discuss how organizations are looking to Microsoft Dynamic Partners to help them see how their business models and processes can be adapted to fit the modern world. We are confident these ideas will help you keep your business moving forward during these troubled times.

Remodel processes through automated workflows

In recent years, there has been a push for digital transformation. Still, many manual processes have remained ingrained in business cultures. These habits have been hard to let go of…until now.

Automation, through Microsoft Dynamics 365, can streamline the most complex processes to support productivity for teams working from their living rooms. Microsoft Dynamics Partners connect data and systems to bridge departmental silos and drive common business processes through workflows.

While working remote may force the need to automate processes, the outcomes can deliver benefits that will last beyond the current crisis.

Reinvent business models to respond to change

Microsoft Dynamics Partners are helping organizations across all industries find their “new normal.” Innovation is crucial for survival.

While digital transformation has already driven big changes in consumer behavior and business operations, the COVID-19 crisis forces a whole new level of change for many organizations. As in-person activities are restricted, the digital world can fill the void to connect, educate, and sell.

Regarding this topic, Dynamics 365 Partner, BroadPoint Technologies Inc., gave this helpful tip:

“A key component of ALL successful implementations (and especially remote ones) is to work with your partner and establish a “communication rhythm”. Identify regular and consistent times for reviewing:

  • Budget, status, and risks
  • Demos of the system during construction
  • Status updates to your key stakeholders (power users, corporate leadership, steering committees)”

During times of uncertainty, innovation is crucial to survival. Microsoft Dynamics Partners are here to help your business adapt to a “new normal,” that for most of us feels anything but normal. It may be daunting to reinvent your business models and processes, but you are not alone. Many others have been able to stay afloat by using the power of Microsoft Dynamics CRM and so can you.

Would you like to learn more about how Microsoft Dynamics 365 can help your business? Read the full whitepaper at “9 Creative Ways Microsoft Dynamics is Helping Businesses Pivot During Crisis”. 17 Microsoft Dynamics ERP experts have collaborated to provide insights directly from the field.

Browse our directory to find a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Partner – by location and industry focus.

By CRM Software Blog writer, www.crmsoftwareblog.com

xCreative Crisis Response Web Banners CRM Blog Blog Post 625x90 1.png.pagespeed.ic.yn9F  N6HQ Microsoft Dynamics Can Help You Adapt to Face the Challenges of Today’s Business World with Strength & Confidence

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Nvidia researchers propose technique to transfer AI trained in simulation to the real world

May 20, 2020   Big Data

In a preprint paper published this week on Arxiv.org, Nvidia and Stanford University researchers propose a novel approach to transferring AI models trained in simulation to real-world autonomous machines. It uses segmentation as the interface between perception and control, leading to what the coauthors characterize as “high success” in workloads like robot grasping.

Simulators have advantages over the real world when it comes to model training in that they’re safe and almost infinitely scalable. But generalizing strategies learned in simulation to real-world machines — whether autonomous cars, robots, or drones — requires adjustment, because even the most accurate simulators can’t account for every perturbation.

Nvidia and Stanford’s technique promises to bridge the gap between simulation and real-world environments more effectively than previous approaches, namely because it decomposes vision and control tasks into models that can be trained separately. This improves performance by exploiting so-called privileged information — the semantic and geometric differences between the simulation and the real environment — while at the same time enabling the reuse of the models for other robots and scenarios.

 Nvidia researchers propose technique to transfer AI trained in simulation to the real world


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The vision model, which is trained on data generated by merging background images taken in a real environment with foreground objects from simulation, processes camera images and extracts objects of interest from the environment in the form of a segmentation mask. (Masks are the product of functions that indicate which class or instance a given pixel belongs to.) This segmentation mask serves as the input for the controller model, which is trained in simulation using imitation learning and applied directly in real environments.

In experiments involving a real-world robotic arm, the researchers initially trained the controller on a corpus of 1,000 frames at each iteration (roughly corresponding to 10 grasping attempts) and the vision model on images of simulated objects plus real backgrounds, as described earlier. They next collected thousands of images from a simulated demonstration of a robotic arm grasping a sphere before combining them with backgrounds and randomizing the shape, size, position, color, lighting, and camera viewpoints to obtain 20,000 training images. Finally, they evaluated the trained AI modules against a set of 2,140 images from the real robot, collected by running the controller in simulation and copying the trajectories to the real environment.

The robotic arm was given 250 steps to grasp a sphere at five fixed positions and repeat grasping five times at each position, spanning the space used to train the controller. When no clutter was present, it achieved an 88% success rate while using the vision module. Clutter (e.g., yellow and orange objects) caused the robot to fail in 2 out of 5 trials, but it often managed to recover from failed grasp attempts.

Robot grasping is a surprisingly difficult challenge. For example, robots struggle to perform what’s called “mechanical search,” which is when they have to identify and pick up an object from within a pile of other objects. Most robots aren’t especially adaptable, and there’s a lack of sufficiently capable AI models for guiding robot hands in mechanical search. But if the claims of the coauthors of this latest paper hold water, much more robust systems could be on the horizon.

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Employee Experience Matters In A Work-From-Home World

May 14, 2020   BI News and Info

Tech Unknown | Episode 7 | Season 2

Featuring guests Trish McFarlane and Meg Bear with host Tamara McCleary

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Google Play

Employee experience has been an overlooked area of corporate development for most organizations. While every department has been concerned with customer experience, the employee counterpart has largely been solely HR’s responsibility. For many, the term “employee engagement” conjures up images of casual Friday, pizza parties, or a ping-pong table in the cafeteria.

That perception is changing, however. Engaged employees are 40% less likely to turn over, 12 times more likely to be brand advocates, and potentially deliver three times more revenue as their less-engaged colleagues. It’s clear that employee experience is an organization-wide concern.

As the current crisis redefines the way we work, keeping employees engaged is even more challenging – and even more crucial to an organization’s success. 

It’s time to develop employee experience as a discipline, much as businesses have done with customer experience. We need strategic, technology-enabled employee experience planning that covers the entire employment lifespan, from pre-hire through exit and beyond. 

The very nature of work is changing, and social distancing is just one of many factors driving the change. HR can help lead the organization to new ways of supporting employees, boosting productivity, and creating a more agile and flexible workforce.

This episode, our expert guests explore how HR and departmental leaders can support employees through this current crisis, developing programs that will support a continually evolving “new normal.”  They dig deep into how technology supports employee experience, but also what new skills, processes, and mindsets are needed to make the most of the technology.

Listen to Learn:

  • How to better support and engage remote workers
  • How to engage employees across the employee lifecycle
  • How emerging trends will affect employee experience
  • How HR can set a vision for the overall direction of the organization

Need more resources to better support and engage your workforce? Learn more about SAP SuccessFactors.

About our guests:

Trish s2 e7 Employee Experience Matters In A Work From Home World

Trish McFarlane is the CEO, Principal Consultant, and Analyst for H3 HR Advisors. She also writes for the HR Ringleader blog and co-hosts the HR Happy Hour podcast.

“You know, we’ve worried a lot about engagement, but it’s about connection. Because you certainly can’t be engaged if you’re not even connected.” Trish McFarlane

Meg s2 e7 Employee Experience Matters In A Work From Home World

Meg Bear is the SVP of Product, Engineering, Operations at SAP SuccessFactors. She has more than 25 years of experience leading product and engineering teams at technology companies such as Imperva, Oracle, PeopleSoft, and Saba. She is a patent holder, change agent, startup advisor, keynote speaker, and a TEDx host.

“The pace of change is accelerating; the engagement of employees is critical…It’s not about skilling up for a single problem. It’s about building resiliency.” Meg Bear

Did you miss our last episode?

Check out our previous episode with guests Tim Crawford, Isaac Sacolick, Andreas Welsch, and Timo Elliott: “The Future of Automation: Intelligent ERP.” Click here to listen.

Episode 7 Transcript

Tamara McCleary: Welcome to Tech Unknown, a podcast to prepare your organization for the tech-centered future of business. I’m Tamara McCleary, CEO of Thulium.

Our big umbrella topic this season is data. We’re digging into how sharing and activating data across the organization can increase efficiency, reduce costs, and improve experience.

This episode, we’re talking about using data to improve employee experience. Now, everyone’s talking about customer experience these days. And we should be talking about it – in fact, we mention it on at least four episodes of the podcast – however, we also need to take into consideration how our employees feel about their work and the organization they work for.

After all, our employees are ultimately responsible for customer experience. If they’re happy and supported, they’re more apt to pass along these feel-good emotions to your customers. People need work that is meaningful and real and to see their contribution to the whole. If our employees are not engaged in their work, [are] stressed-out, unclear about their individual contribution, and perhaps even feeling alone or abandoned… well, brace yourself for unhappy customers.

Oh, and by-the-way, this isn’t just a touchy-feely soft-skills piece; you knew I’d have to back up my assertions on a podcast devoted to data. Employees who are engaged at work and reporting positive experiences at work are 40% less likely to turn over, 12x more likely to advocate for the brand, and deliver 3x more revenue. How’s that for aligning feelings to the business’ bottom line?!

So, how can your business cultivate excellent employee experience? Well, one way to do it is to empower them. Here’s Candy Wood, my chief of staff at Thulium… Candy, how do you feel about working for Thulium?

Candy Wood: Considering that I’ve been working from home in my pajamas since before it was trendy, I love working for Thulium!

Tamara: Thanks Candy! Can you tell, as a digital agency, we already had a work-from-home workforce, empowering our employees in their choice of work attire? Okay pajamas aside, you can’t solve this problem by simply throwing money at employee experience. As with customer experience, crafting a successful and productive employee experience needs to be approached strategically, as a discipline, with an ongoing plan supported by technology. 

Trish McFarlane has spent her entire career helping businesses recruit and retain top talent. She’s currently the CEO and principal consultant at H3 HR, as well as a blogger and keynote speaker. Here’s Trish on what businesses have been missing when they think about employee experience:

Trish McFarlane: For me, it’s really more that holistic look at an organization and the entire employee lifecycle. So much like a human resources leader would be thinking of the entire employee lifecycle, we need to be approaching our technologies and the way that we use them to bolster that with that same lens.

But I think what’s happened is that over the years, once someone’s on board, you know, the shine kind of wears off and we just let them flounder. And I think part of that goes back to, in different organizations, it’s sort of organized differently. And so in many, you know, there is a recruitment team and then there’s a human resources team, and so that hand-off has always been a little bit awkward, you know. Who owns that phase once someone has accepted an offer and not yet become an employee officially on day one? And so, I think, sometimes technology is starting to enhance that gap in a way that makes the person feel connected and valuable, so there’s been a bigger focus on the onboarding.

But overall, as you become an employee, I think organizations are starting to think more about, okay, all of the things that we promised you during your candidate experience, all of that wealth of information, all of those videos, all of the, maybe, you know, job shadowing, job previews, simulations, things like that that used to maybe end once you were sort of signing on the line, those things, because of the technology advancements, are now back, I guess, under the spotlight, if you will. So people who maybe had felt like they were left alone once they were hired are now feeling much more included.

And so, I think, just because people are starting to mention it more, from a technology standpoint, it’s going to gain more importance. And I think that the people who are actually making the solutions will start getting pushback from the customers saying, “Hey, you know, what can we be doing to do a better job of this?”

Tamara: Human resource leaders have always been concerned about employee experience, of course. Keeping people happy and productive is part of the job description. But the way we think about how to create these positive experiences is changing rapidly – just as the nature of work itself is evolving. Here’s Meg Bear, SVP of Product, Engineering, Operations at SAP SuccessFactors:

Meg Bear: Yeah, what we’re observing with most of our HR leaders that we talked to is employee experience is really, really top of mind for them. And in this construct, it comes to a few different things. It comes to the fact that we are now at a place where workers are our digital natives. They’re used to technology, and they have high expectations of what that technology can do. We’re also at a place where globalization has created a broad set of norms that aren’t just local or regional, but they tend to start to be accelerating around the globe. And so what we’re finding is that the employee experience becomes that linchpin that helps make business work. And so if you think about that as an opportunity, one of the things that comes top of mind is you recognize that you can lean on your workers to help you figure out not just how to get the work done today, but to co-create your processes, to co-create your your business objectives, to really maximize every worker’s potential towards the business objectives.

We’ve been working towards this for a while with concepts like strategic HR, but today we recognize that it can’t really be top-down anymore, it has to be bottom-up, culturally. And the way that people want to work is they really want to contribute because we know that when people have autonomy and agency, they are much more engaged. And engaged workers have a bigger impact on business revenue. In fact, engaged workers have at least a three-X impact on revenue for their for their workforce. And so what we’re finding is that taking employee experience and making that a priority creates an opportunity to really compete in this global workforce of change. And so that’s where we’re seeing HR organizations taking this seriously and thinking about how employee engagement can help them serve their customers better and drive better business results.

There are plenty of factors that contribute to a positive experience that fosters employee engagement: benefits, salary, managerial style, corporate culture, whether your dress code includes pajamas… But for Trish, it comes down to one key component: A sense of belonging and being valued.

Trish: Really, for me, the employee experience management is really there to provide that consistent approach to showing a person their worth in your company. The biggest disconnection is when someone is hired and either the role changes before they start, or maybe it’s a little different than what they were told or what they thought they were walking into. So the real value of an employee management experience is that connection that you have to the company because without that, I think that’s where you start seeing turnover starting within the first 90 days when someone just doesn’t quite feel that connection.

From a personal standpoint, I think also there is this sense of belonging that you have to feel. For example, you hear a lot about diversity and inclusion efforts in organizations. This goes back my entire career. So at least 25 years we’ve been talking about this. And that’s all fine because I think it’s getting us to the point we are now. But when I think about your employee experience, it really means that just because you were hired for diverse…the diverse perspective you bring, just because you are included in a team or a group, it doesn’t actually mean you feel like you are belonging to that group.

And so the difference right now with this focus on employee experience from an individual standpoint is you get that sense of belonging. Like, why am I here? How do we make money? What’s my role in helping that along? Or what’s my role in helping care for our customers or our clients? I think that’s what the focus is on now.

So I think that’s why it comes down to you really have to make sure that every single individual feels they understand why they’re there. Because, again, if I’m a manager and I don’t feel that connection, how in the world am I going to help anyone on my team, anyone that you hire for me, to feel that connection? You know, we’ve worried a lot about engagement, and I do feel like maybe that’s the shift. It’s not so much about engagement. It’s about connection. Because you certainly can’t be engaged if you’re not even connected.

Tamara: If we’re going to talk about connection here in early 2020, we must address the elephant in the room.

We would be remiss if we didn’t discuss the global crisis that is reshaping and changing, at least in the near-term, the way that people work. There’s a new norm creating fresh working paradigms. For instance, how can you keep employees connected if they can’t come into the office? The work-from-home, future of work, and the gig economy discussions were already quite the popular topics before the pandemic, but now the reality of a remote workforce is playing a major role in keeping businesses running. Here’s Meg:

Meg: I think we’re we’ve just moved to a whole new definition of what does it mean to work from home, the concept of whether you can work remotely is no longer one about technology enablement. It’s much more about the human side of working from home. And so today we find ourselves in this extreme experiment of everyone working from home and creating a sense of community, and collaboration becomes much more about the human element than about the technology element. So we are lucky to have great video conferencing, grateful for sharing great collaboration tools, an amazing amount of things that you can do remotely and digitally. And so what we’re having to add back are the human pieces. How do you connect with people? How do you understand mood and personality and cultural specifics and what’s happening in a given location? And I think what we’re finding today with our sheltering in place, is that that piece is really coming to the fore. And we’re seeing a lot of great innovation that helps us connect with each other in a way that isn’t just about business but it’s also about the human touch as well.

Tamara: Technology isn’t what keeps remote workers – or even onsite workers – it’s feeling connected and valued. Technology is an exquisite tool we can use to facilitate these human connections and interactions:

Trish: As someone who just has immersed myself in HR technology since I left the practitioner role, I still strongly believe that it’s the people interactions that are much more powerful than the technology can ever be. The technology is really just there to enhance, and enable, and empower the actual people doing the work and making these connections.

So when I think about how technology can able…can enable that, I think it really starts with looking at the various processes, that you’re having people come into your company, that you’re having them join teams, that you’re having them receive feedback or work with your customers, all of those little bits and pieces.

So, for example, it’s as fundamental as using really solid, you know, payroll and benefits technologies that are nuanced in sort of integrating how the people work, who their teams are, who their supervisors are. It also has to have a technology that will sort of allow you to have a unique sort of almost, like, customized approach to your culture. So I don’t mean, like, customized technology, but actually helping you think differently about the interactions, sort of those little micro-interactions within your organization. And I think we need to start looking at features and functions within a certain solution. That’s where you start kind of marrying those up on how that can work.

It’s definitely not one-size-fits-all, and I think, whenever I think back to being an HR leader myself when I was buying technologies, both big and small, I was really just looking for sort of that out-of-the-box solution that was going to solve all my problems. And I think now the narrative is what has changed. And maybe that’s helped by, you know, the industry itself and all of the… all the people that contribute to it. But it’s really now, I think, focused more on as a buyer.

Tamara: I’m seeing clear parallels between how marketers facilitate customer experience and how HR can facilitate positive employee experience. In both cases, it’s about using data to identify touchpoints – points of interaction where you can make a difference. Then it’s using technology to deliver customized experiences to those points of interaction, in a way that feels more human than robotic.

The parallels between marketing and HR don’t stop there. Just as marketers have to think about the entire lifecycle of a customer – from awareness to purchase and beyond – HR leaders have to be mindful of the employee lifecycle. For Trish, that cycle starts before a candidate even considers applying for a job.

Trish: So you might start saying… start by saying, “We’re going to look at our passive candidates. We’re gonna look at the pool of people that we have,” whether that’s maybe in a talent community, or maybe it’s just past applicants that were not selected. Whatever the means, right? So you’re gonna look at them first and you’re gonna say, “Okay, what can we do with the technology? Is there a new process maybe we can put in place to do outreach to them?” you know.

One of the things, I’ll give you an example, that I hear a lot about from a trend perspective this year is the idea of sort of teaching or almost up-skilling potential candidates before they ever become candidates. You know, there are a large number of people that never quite make it into your pipeline all the way, and it’s because maybe they were either self-selected out or just selected out because of the technology because they missed a certain skill or two. Well, those might be very easy to develop if you knew about it. So when you talk about measurement, measuring things like that. What are the skills that we’re consistently seeing our applicants, or passive candidates even, not having? As a company, can we offer, maybe, video content, maybe written content, just to sort of help those people along?

I mentioned active candidates. Same thing there. You can be providing, using your technology, you know, different types of interactions maybe than, as an organization, you’ve ever thought to before just because now you’re freed up. Your processes are streamlined and running more smoothly with the technology so that when they become a new hire, you can then really stop focusing so much on the things you know technology does well like filling out your new-hire paperwork, getting all the forms submitted, getting the payroll started, right?

Those things are sort of pretty easy once you’ve… once you get the person hired, but you can then shift your focus maybe to the areas you’re not thinking about, which is, how do I get someone really integrated into a team? What does that look like, you know? As an HR person for almost 20 years, that was always in the back of my mind when we were hiring people, but I didn’t quite understand or have technology at the time to enable that very easily. Now, when I’m out in the space, I see that technology can absolutely enable some of those communications, those interactions.

And that goes all the way through to, like, the alumni phase, right? So once someone has decided to leave the company or maybe even… maybe they were terminated, and it’s, you know, five years later and they’re the perfect person to come back, whatever the case may be. But it’s about that continuum of information and connection that we didn’t really focus on even five years ago.

Tamara: The changing nature of work is more than an HR issue, of course. These changes are sending shockwaves up and down organizations, through every department. Digital transformation is inextricably tied to the way people work, and how our workflows and processes evolve.

For that reason, Meg says, HR is poised to take a larger leadership role within the organization.

Meg: Yeah, you know, again, I think we’re all in an experimentation phase right now, because of the fact that this has been a dramatic shift. And so a couple of things that I’ve seen happen really well, both here at SAP and in the global HR community, is really HR taking a leadership role in not only helping to redefine processes, as it relates to doing them globally remotely, but also creating structure around both communication and systems and processes and tools. Because what we’re finding is that now that we’re all working remotely, we need a different way to access it. We need a different way to access things that we might have normally done inside the office, and so HR is stepping out in front and helping to define that.

The other thing that they’re doing in a really thoughtful way is bringing forward access to benefits and opportunities that might not have been as top of mind in the past – things like wellness and emotional health. Things like making sure that everybody understands their benefits, their ability to take sick leave, and recognizing that a lot of people have having to shift their working hours and to be able to support their families, to be able to support their children doing distance learning. 

So HR has had to step forward in being really flexible about both the policy side and the communication side so that everybody understands what’s available to them, so that managers on the ground are able to really connect with their team and offer them the kind of support that they might not personally be equipped to have to offer, and that they understand what the envelope is for both legal compliance as well as the human-interaction side of being able to support people in this period of transition. And I think what’s interesting about HR taking that lead is that this is an opportunity that the HR community has been looking to provide from the beginning, the ability to have a seat at the table and to really make a difference in business. And so this big shift in what we’re all trying to do to react to this global requirement of sheltering in place has given us our chance to show what we can really offer to an organization. And I think that this is going to be the future where HR will be directly helping to mobilize the workforce for the needs of the business, taking the human piece, taking the operational piece, and bringing them together in a way that really helps people thrive.

What I’m seeing in 2020 – and I expect in 2021 – is that this shift in HR’s role in bringing the human element back to business, but taking a leadership position in change management and transformation for companies overall. Because what we’re finding is HR is exactly the right group to do this to bring both the human element, the technology element, the quantitative element to show what’s happening in the organization. To the business to help them make good decisions, and to help them thrive in this period of change and uncertainty, to create constructs that people get, to create opportunities for people based on these changes, and to help manage the emotional piece of everybody trying to figure out how to compete in what is a very volatile time.

I think this really puts the concept of agility and how we deliver services to the forefront, thinking about not just defining the perfect process, but being able to adapt processes for the needs of the moment. And then to figure out what about those changes are things that really help the business and which things aren’t working. And that’s where you really need to bring feedback back into the mix. Having an opportunity for the voice of every employee to be directly connected to how you improve your business is what’s going to differentiate the opportunities of the near term and the long term.

Tamara: The technology that facilitates all of this, is a platform for human experience management, or HXM. It’s a solution that brings together analytics and workforce planning, talent management, payroll, employee experience – the works. With a comprehensive suite of solutions in place, you can create a positive feedback loop. You can monitor morale, solicit feedback, test new programs and optimize existing ones, and measure how your efforts are working at improving employee engagement.

The remaining obstacle, of course, is making sure employees actually take advantage of the technology to make their voices heard. But Trish feels it’s just a matter of consistency and time.

Trish: Right. And I think, you know what? When you use your technology in a way that just becomes so natural and such a part of their day that they’re not even thinking about it, that’s where you’re really going to see that impact. Because right now, we’re still…we’re still trying to figure out how do we infuse technology. I think if we fast-forward just a few years, things move so fast, I think we’re starting to get there. Because we’re seeing that infusion of technology into our personal home life day today, and so it’s just natural. Now that we get comfortable there, it will be more comfortable in the workplace.

Tamara: Once employees get comfortable with HXM technology, and HR leaders are helping steer the organization from an employee-centered perspective… where are they steering to? What’s the end goal? Here’s Meg with a look at the biggest possible picture.

Meg: Yeah, so people, if you take this to its next logical extension, and you start to think about the fact that the pace of change is accelerating, the engagement of employees is critical. You start to look out to the future and recognize that it’s not about skilling up for a single problem, but it’s about building resiliency. 

It’s about building agility into your workforce end-to-end so that you can identify and satisfy and fill skills gaps ongoing to help you compete in your market. And so the way that we’re seeing this kind of show up is really a rethinking all of the pieces that we thought were well understood in how business works and how people progress in their careers. So it used to be you would come in with a certain set of skills, you would progress through a career through a very linear path, and then eventually you would get to your top end of experience and then ultimately retire; we find that that’s not how business works today. Today, people are moving and changing roles very rapidly. And not only are they changing formal jobs, they’re creating much more informal jobs. 

They’re working in agile teams, they’re working in small groups that are not only defining the work, but helping to figure out what skills they need to get that work done. And they’re doing this in a much more collaborative way. And so we see that, in the future, work is much more driven by the employee, it’s much more self-organizing. It’s much more collaborative, and it is changing rapidly. And so what we need to think about when we think about technology is bringing that agility into the process flow. So instead of defining something, rolling it out, and then letting it run forever, like we did in the early days of technology, instead, what we’re doing is we’re testing things. We’re getting feedback, we’re co-creating it, we’re evolving it, we’re changing it, and we’re doing it again. So everything that’s part of that thought process of an agile development flow is really starting to be part of how business works, creating the idea that it’s not about making it perfect. But it’s about bringing those feedback loops and constantly having a growth mindset. How can we get better? What can we do better? And how do we as a group evolve and move with that? So it’s a big shift. It’s a big shift in what does it mean to lead an organization, and it’s a huge shift in what kinds of technologies you put in place when you recognize that what you’re really building for is change.

Tamara: Employee experience is more than keeping workers happy in the short-term. It’s even more than increasing productivity, reducing turnover, and boosting revenue – though all of these are byproducts of having engaged employees. 

As Meg observed, the ultimate goal of strategic human experience management is to transform the way your employees work – and in the process, the way your organization runs. It’s about creating a work environment that fosters and rewards creativity, agility, and innovation. 

HR leaders, now is your time to shine. 

Thanks for listening to Tech Unknown. And thanks to my guests Meg Bear and Trish McFarlane. Please subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’m Tamara McCleary and until next time: Stay sharp, stay curious, and keep exploring the unknown.

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Redefining Internal Audit Practices In The Virtual World

May 4, 2020   SAP
 Redefining Internal Audit Practices In The Virtual World

PWC’s Global Crisis Survey 2019 is cited by Peter Jones, CEO of the Institute of Internal Auditors, in his IIA News blog from April 2020: “Nearly seven out of 10 leaders (69 percent) have experienced at least one corporate crisis in the last five years, and companies with over 5,000 employees are likely to have experienced more than five crises – an average of one a year.” Clearly, we are heading for a world where crisis management will be part of the usual business function.

What I also found key in this blog is Peter Jones’ conclusion: “As businesses adapt to the crisis, internal auditors have a critical role to play in advising management on emerging risks and the implications on internal controls.”

What is clear is that the digital world is expanding at unprecedented speed, and companies are facing challenging environments that change rapidly: public health crises like the one we are currently experiencing, but also changes in regulatory environments with stringent legislation being enforced. Don’t forget changing competitive landscapes with new players entering previously untouched markets and quickly gaining market share, thanks to their ability to harness technology. Think of SpaceX, for instance. Who would have thought even 10 years ago that a private company could be a key player in an industry that required things that only governments could afford?

The new role of internal audit

As we all understand, the role of internal audit is to provide independent assurance that an organization’s risk management, governance, and internal control processes are operating effectively. But there is another facet to the role: internal audit has to act as a trusted partner to the business. As a matter of fact, some of their findings will lead to business processes improvements. In short: internal audit is not only here to act as internal regulators, so to say; they are here to identify best practices and detect early warning signals that could indicate the emergence of a threat for the organization.

And internal audit is uniquely positioned to do that since auditors see and review the organization in its entirety, without geographical or functional silos!

Overcoming the challenges

One of the challenges that internal audit faces, though, is that some of the information is not readily located in a single shared drive, nor is it well structured or even referenced. That is, there is no file called “Top Emerging Risks That No One Ever Looked At.xlsx” or “Process Failures That We Prefer Remain Hidden.doc.” The latter would simply be opened to find all the answers, but that would be too easy, right? Information is all over the place!

Looking at this issue with only a negative lens might discourage some. But what if I told you this challenge can actually be overcome with the use of technology?

Delivering continuous assurance across the enterprise

First, many organizations have now rolled out centralized internal-control solutions where controls and procedures are documented by the second line of defense and automatically sent to the users in the first line of defense. The same goes, of course, for risk assessments.

Being able to tap into these solutions helps internal audit kill three digital birds with one digital stone:

  • Review any control self-assessment of their choice. By applying the selection criteria of their choice (controls with the most issues, controls with the highest-ranked risks, etc.), internal audit can access any control result instantly – regardless of where in the world it has been performed. They can also compare the results with other business units to identify best practices and then not only raise a potential finding but also already suggest an improvement to solve the issue.
  • Go from scope to full audit. Instead of selecting a sample of data to test, auditors can have technology work for them and identify anomalies and raise them automatically. As with most departments, internal audit has limited resources. Being able to launch detection patterns and then focus on the areas that have raised most concerns will help this function focus its efforts on the danger zones.
  • Act as the lighthouse for the business. By combining information from risk assessments, key risk indicators, control results, incidents, near-misses. and many more, auditors will be able to flag those emerging risks that could threaten the organization. They could then, as mentioned by Peter Jones, suggest a new course of action to mitigate these new risks and, by the same token, suggest improvements to the existing business-continuity plans and the internal control framework. This way, issues are caught earlier and, when a crisis occurs, the organization is better prepared to face it.

Improved collaboration

The last area I want to highlight relates to collaboration. I had a brief audit experience many years ago. Those were the days where you would go from site to site with a very heavy briefcase (or a trailer with boxes in the car, more likely) and record everything on paper. This was not the best way to find the needle in the haystack and even worse, to foster collaboration between colleagues working on the same program (if you have ever seen my handwriting).

Where technology can also help internal audit is in information-sharing and consolidation. With access to the same digitalized work program, auditors can leverage the work of one another, especially the findings and test plans, to perform their audit mission. Should one auditor have performed a successful test plan, it can immediately be shared with colleagues to be applied on other audits.

The world then truly becomes a village, as they say.

As business processes will continue to evolve, technology will increasingly have an impact on driving emerging business practices, helping organizations comply with constantly changing regulatory environments, and managing future potential disruptions.

The challenge for the internal audit function will be to assess the effectiveness of internal controls that may be manually governed temporarily or permanently. With the right automation supporting internal audit, routines can be effectively automated, and efforts can be diverted to activities involving more interpersonal collaboration and judgments. This will ensure a seamless flow of data and information across the three lines of defense.

If you are interested in hearing more about this directly from experts, I recommend registering for the on-demand Redefining Internal Audit Practices in The Virtual World webinar delivered jointly by the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) India and SAP.

I look forward to reading your thoughts and comments on Twitter @TFrenehard.

This article originally appeared on SAP Community and is republished by permission.

Follow SAP Finance online: @SAPFinance (Twitter) | LinkedIn | Facebook | YouTube

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How High-Growth Midsize Companies Adapt To A World Of Widening Skill Gaps

April 20, 2020   SAP
 How High Growth Midsize Companies Adapt To A World Of Widening Skill Gaps

Part 4 of the series, “Top Trends Impacting Midsize Businesses in the 2020s”

The demand for new capabilities and expertise is growing and evolving faster than most humans’ ability to acquire them. As the gap between business needs and skilled candidates continues to widen, HR leaders are redefining the “ideal candidate” for their midsize businesses – beyond the traditional triad of college degrees, industry experience, and workplace compatibility.

Such a reassessment can become a transformational moment in how growing businesses adjust their workforce to the changing nature of work. During the webinar “Winning in the 2020s: Six Trends Every Midsize Needs to Know,” Shari Lava, research director, small and medium business at IDC, shared that more than 40% of midsize companies are poised to take advantage of this opportunity within the next two years by defining new sourcing strategies and goals.

Knowing the difference between skill-gap need and skill-building

Common wisdom tells businesses that a solid market plan makes it easier to spot the skills that are needed to deliver expected outcomes. But unfortunately for most midsize companies, the reality of spotting gaps among their talent is not necessarily so straightforward, according to IDC research. In fact, the 40% that is actively addressing it knows which skill gaps are critical. Meanwhile, the remaining 60% is still trying to figure out which skills are pivotal, let alone putting a plan in place to bridge the most important gaps.

A midsize company’s ability to evaluate its skill gaps holistically can vary dramatically, depending on the industry and the competitive nature of the marketplace. For example, a business that’s facing competition that evolves organically and incrementally typically has a more solid foundation of skills available and a better line of sight into new needs coming its way. But if the company is experiencing significant threats from disruption, the range of missing skills grows exponentially, which is more challenging to strategically determine which areas should be tackled first and in which order.

Midsize companies that take an in-depth look at what’s happening in their workforce often realize that an incremental strategy is not enough. They also need a recruiting approach focused on hiring candidates with power skills such as effective communication in a business context, innovative thinking, curiosity, creativity, and adaptability in times of continuous change. Furthermore, new hires should view business needs through the lens of customer empathy and look to resolve them with agility, collaboration, and teamwork.

In times of disruption and accelerating business challenges, businesses need to adapt quickly and efficiently to leverage these opportunities and more in order to grow. By choosing technologies that can evolve with changing workforce skills, employee behaviors, and business processes, midsize companies can shape their future with the right strategies for the sourcing, development, reward, and recognition of talent. They can even build a business culture of continuous learning, agile action, and adaptability.

Take, for example, robotic process automation and artificial intelligence. These technologies are particularly interesting for business areas with processes that are repetitive or require the ability to understand and discern patterns immediately to make decisions, trigger action, or innovate new products and services.

Accelerated upskilling can help support and maximize the potential of technology-driven advantages with capabilities such as:

  • Real-time access to customer sentiment and employee feedback to solve otherwise hidden issues and identify opportunities
  • Rapid feedback loops beyond the employee culture to identify and remove roadblocks to new business opportunities as well as refine and speed up business processes, such as the delivery of HR tasks and operational activities
  • Faster innovation cycles, product delivery, and removal of process and system bottlenecks
  • Distributed workforce that is flexible and connected enough to create cutting-edge opportunities and a globally aligned and collaborative workforce culture

So, which is more important: personality or specific business skills?

Separately, each factor can only get the business as far as the horizon. When combined, they can help the company reach edges that cannot be seen today, responding to demand for new types of skills at an accelerated pace.

To get ahead of the skills gap, midsize businesses need to go beyond just surveying current and future organizational needs on a position-by-position basis and determining which skills are becoming outdated. What’s needed is a workforce that is adaptable enough to resolve the business problems of the future – in real time – for the next two months, as well as the next 10 years.

Discover how midsize companies are bridging the skills gap and getting ahead of business change to support their growth. Listen to an excerpt of our webinar “Winning in the 2020s: Six Trends Every Midsize Needs to Know” with Timo Elliott, global innovation evangelist from SAP, and guest speaker Shari Lava, research director, small and medium business at IDC.

This article originally appeared in Forbes SAP BrandVoice.

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AI Weekly: The sudden speed of technological change in a coronavirus world

April 11, 2020   Big Data

COVID-19 waits for no one, and the speed of its spread has forced the world to act quickly.  From world governments to individual households, all of sudden everyone has had to scrap plans, make new ones, and try to hang on to some kind of new normal as the pandemic causes more unexpected and rapid shifts.

Looking at the tech world, it’s been quite a sight to watch everyone move so fast. As I wrote a few weeks ago, there’s been a digital flotilla of tech people focusing on, and turning their expertise towards, solving the problems related to COVID-19. But with increased speed comes increased noise, which is a mixed blessing.

Like (I presume) all tech journalists right now, my inbox is more full than usual. It’s brimming with endless pitches for chatbots to help give people answers about COVID-19 and even help triage who has what symptoms. There’s been an explosion in apps designed to track the spread of the coronavirus. There are pitches about robots and drones and autonomous vehicles that help in hospitals and deliver supplies. We’re being told about all sorts of AI tools that allege to help medical providers diagnose COVID-19 in patients. Pitches about just about any company, product, or service that could conceivably be related to remote work has come our way.

There are also uplifting pitches about how this or that company is giving away its product or service for free, or adapting it for a selfless purpose to help people with the struggles they’re facing in the wake of job losses or health scares, or marshaling resources to perform much-needed research.

It truly is encouraging, and at times downright inspiring, to see this wealth of new tools and techniques to track, prevent, treat, and in general fight the coronavirus.

 AI Weekly: The sudden speed of technological change in a coronavirus world

But finding the best parts and pieces amidst the unrelenting noise is a daily — hourly — challenge. As with all technology, hasty execution often invites privacy issues or poor security, like Zoom has experienced even as its daily active users (DAUs) reached the stratosphere. They can also suddenly bump into regulatory hurdles or interoperability issues. (Fortunately, rapid cooperation between governments, researchers, and tech companies, and sometimes between usually strange bedfellows such as Apple and Google, has proven possible.)

Another challenge is separating the do-gooders from the charlatans. When is a company truly being selfless, and when are they just using the pandemic to slip in some positive marketing about their widget? And when is it both? It’s always hard to tell — one should generally be suspicious any time a for-profit company proclaims altruism — but in the noise, it’s even more difficult. Of course, even if there are knock-on or hidden benefits for companies that give away valuable things for free, it’s hard not to be pleased with what IBM, Google, smaller companies like Element AI, and many others, have done to foster research and collaboration in the fight against COVID-19.

When things get noisy and change overwhelmingly fast, that’s usually a sign that we need more focus — but it may be impossible. Taking a broad example, the Gates Foundation is funding manufacturing for multiple potential vaccine trials at once because, Gates said in an interview with Trevor Noah on The Daily Show, there’s not time to evaluate which vaccine has the greatest likelihood of success. Usually a couple best vaccines would emerge from trials, and then they would throw their financial support to manufacturing the best ones — but there’s no time to waste. Instead, they’re planning to “waste” a few billion dollars in the name of urgency.

It’s a worldwide sprint and a marathon all at the same time, and it can be tough to assimilate all the necessary information — or in our case, put together all the many news and analysis stories that come our way. But finding the signal through the noise as it all speeds past us is a new skill we all have to acquire, because combatting this global pandemic is the greatest challenge any of us has faced, and it won’t wait for us to catch up.

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MIT CSAIL’s VISTA autonomous vehicles simulator transfers skills learned to the real world

March 24, 2020   Big Data

In a recent study, researchers hailing from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Toyota Research Institute describe Virtual Image Synthesis and Transformation for Autonomy (VISTA), an autonomous vehicle development platform that uses a real-world data set to synthesize viewpoints from trajectories a car could take. While driverless car companies including Waymo, Uber, Cruise, Aurora, and others use simulation environments to train the AI underpinning their real-world cars, MIT claims its system is one of the few that doesn’t require humans to manually add road markings, lanes, trees, physics models, and more. That could dramatically speed up autonomous vehicle testing and deployment.

As the researchers explain, VISTA rewards virtual cars for the distance they travel without crashing so that they’re “motivated” to learn to navigate various situations, including regaining control after swerving between lanes. VISTA is data-driven, meaning that it synthesizes from real data trajectories consistent with road appearance, as well as distance and motion of all objects in the scene. This prevents mismatches between what’s learned in simulation and how the cars operate in the real world.

To train VISTA, the researchers collected video data from a human driving down a few roads; for each frame, VISTA predicted every pixel into a type of 3D point cloud. Then, they placed a virtual vehicle inside of the environment and rigged it so that when it made a steering command, VISTA synthesized a new trajectory through the point cloud based on the steering curve and the vehicle’s orientation and velocity.

VISTA used the above-mentioned trajectory to render a photorealistic scene, estimating a depth map containing information relating to the distance of objects from the vehicle’s viewpoint. By combining the depth map with a technique that estimates the camera’s orientation within a 3D scene, the engine pinpointed the vehicle’s location and relative distance from everything within the virtual simulator, while reorienting the original pixels to recreate a representation of the world from the vehicle’s new viewpoint.

In tests conducted after 10 to 15 hours of training during which the virtual car drove 10,000 kilometers (0.62 miles), a car trained with the VISTA simulator was able to navigate through previously unseen streets. Even when positioned at off-road orientations that mimicked various near-crash situations, such as being half off the road or into another lane, the car successfully recovered back into a safe driving trajectory within a few seconds.

 MIT CSAIL’s VISTA autonomous vehicles simulator transfers skills learned to the real world

In the future, the research team hopes to simulate all types of road conditions from a single driving trajectory, such as night and day, and sunny and rainy weather. They also hope to simulate more complex interactions with other vehicles on the road.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

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