Adopting AI Responsibly to Prevent Risks to Your Brand and Customer Experience
For years, AI has been successfully used in a variety of sectors, from
chatbots to the automotive industry. The easier question to answer would be:
Where is AI not being used yet? The challenge is how to place ethics above
boardroom priorities, which put profit ahead of people. I wish I could say
this is a thing of the past, but many companies still have this goal, even if
it’s not intentional. I am not saying that profit is not or should not be the
aim of businesses. I mean that fairness toward customers should be considered
above any self-interest. Profit is often the result of substantial and
desirable ethical work for employees, customers, partners, and stakeholders.
Unfortunately, we still have companies that unintentionally (?) break customer
trust, and in some cases, had even been aware of the issue. This can seriously
affect any past efforts to develop a brand people trust. Even if your CX is
perceived of as great, with one breach of trust, you will lose your key
assets: employees and customers. Customers oftentimes love AI and machine
learning (ML). Both businesses and customers alike reap the benefits of this
complementary technologies. What we all want – based on a recent BCG survey –
is something quite simple.
Why Is Cloud Governance Critical for the Success of Cloud Adoption?
The objective of cloud governance is not to limit access to cloud resources
but to streamline it and manage it more efficiently. An intelligently-designed
cloud governance policy lays the foundation for the success of your cloud
adoption. ... The absence of a cloud governance framework usually means that
an alternate governance policy, typically a more centralized one, exists. Such
a centralized approach inhibits fast decision-making, which works against the
organizational goals like agility and flexibility in adding new revenue
streams, expanding to new markets, reducing time-to-market, and so on. It
impedes the company’s responsiveness against the market dynamics, giving the
competition more room to meet the customer needs. A comprehensive cloud
governance framework complements an organization’s goals without compromising
its resource utilization objectives. ... Cloud service providers recommend
their customers to move their multiple-tenant workloads that reside in a
single account to different cloud accounts. This allows organizations to offer
precise control to users for only the workloads that are relevant to them.
Such a siloed management of access drastically limits the financial and
security fallout resulting from an issue – be it a technical issue or a
security issue.
Implications Of AI On Everyday Documents
Industries generate millions of documents every month as a byproduct of
business processes. And each of these documents contains meaningful snippets
of information that are hidden deep inside. Once the datasets are identified,
collected, and cleansed, it was time to move to the next step. The next step
includes providing meaning to text extracted from digital assets such as
documents, text files, and scanned images and use these datasets to feed
downstream business apps, set up workflows and optimise business processes.
All previous attempts of using AI to understand documents have failed because
it focused on the co-occurrence of individual words and phrases existing in
individual business documents. It was time to move beyond that by creating
tools that could understand different portions of the document and their
unique usage in any organisation. Therefore, the result is an intelligent
model that can look for specific entities such as dates, contract numbers,
purchase order numbers, etc. in different documents in minutes to generate
meaningful insights and accelerate business outcomes. Think itinerary
processing, financial compliance, auditing, renewal follow-up, invoice
processing, and so on, all reviewed, identified, and automated.
The digital revolution: eight technologies that will change health and care
Wearable devices are in a newer category of technologies encompassing
smartwatches (eg, an Apple Watch), activity trackers (eg, a Fitbit) and
connected patches (eg, a smart bandage or smart plaster). These are generally
in direct contact with the wearer for long durations, generating large
quantities of data on specific biometrics or behaviours. Many large technology
companies are positioning these devices as health or wellness devices not
medical devices – currently side-stepping regulatory requirements. However,
there is potential for these devices to be widely used in health and care, as
well as by individuals to improve their health and care. For example, a
wearable sensor measuring heart rate can give a truer indication of a person’s
heart-rate at various stress levels (sitting, standing, walking, etc) over
time instead of a single one-off measure in a surgery which could be erroneous
due to patient anxiety or stress. App stores already feature thousands of
health and wellbeing apps, encompassing everything from diet diaries and
mindfulness guidance to period trackers and musculoskeletal rehabilitation
support. However, the uptake by the health and care system has been patchy due
to a range of issues including quality, evidence, clinician knowledge,
confidence and skills, and integration into pathways.
Diversity and inclusion make IT stronger
“Diversity at its core takes advantage of people’s unique backgrounds and
skill sets and makes for richer content and discovery of what we do,” says
Darren Dworkin, senior vice president and CIO at Cedars-Sinai; the healthcare
organization was ranked No. 3 for D&I on the 2020 Best Places to Work in
IT list. “The IT group spends a lot of time working closely with all sorts of
departments and stakeholders … and having folks with different backgrounds and
skills reflects that and helps us relate and translate so we can be a
department that contributes to the mission of the organization.” For Erickson
Living, diversity & inclusion has long been a core value, exemplified
through one of the three pillars in its Employee Transformation initiative,
which includes curiosity, competence, and community. Erickson, which ranked
No. 1 for diversity on the 2020 Best Places to Work in IT list, maintains a
robust D&I council made up of employees and leadership and offers D&I
training at all levels to instruct managers, directors, and rank-and-file
employees in such issues as how to overcome unconscious bias in the workforce
and how to promote civil treatment among colleagues.
The Season for Nonprofit Cybersecurity Risks to Reach New Heights
Nonprofits and charities frequently outsource a lot of their day-to-day IT work
or make use of cloud-hosted solutions, such as software-as-a-service (SaaS)
options. However, there’s a growing trend among threat actors to exploit
third-party providers in order to gain access to their customers’ data assets.
As the past year’s high-profile breach of Blackbaud should remind us, nonprofits
may be at extra risk from these types of attacks. It’s vital to examine the data
privacy and security policies that your provider has in place, as well as to
check that all relevant compliance audits are up to date. Cloud use has grown
across industries over the course of 2020. This, in turn, puts increased
pressure on managed service providers, who are challenged to find the talent
they need to manage their data in the cloud. (Cloud environments require more
specialized skills because they’re so complex.) Finally, it may be worthwhile to
purchase cybersecurity insurance if you don’t already carry it. A well-chosen
policy can absorb many of the financial risks that come with collecting
donations online.
Digital Transformation: The Key To Tackling Climate Change
The starting point is to understand how and where energy is consumed, lost or
wasted and here digital technologies are key. Sensors that can monitor
performance, software that can connect operations with IT systems, automation
and analytics will equip organisations and individuals alike with the ability
to better manage and optimise their environment whether at work or home. The
good news is that most of the energy and digital automation technology already
exists to enable us to do so. Consider data centres. According to a report by
the International Energy Agency in June, there was an increase in global
internet traffic of 40% between February and April as the use of the cloud for
remote working became more prevalent. The physical aspects of work across many
industries have changed, and we can expect digital channels and e-commerce to
remain the default for the ways things are done for the foreseeable future and
long after the pandemic has been consigned to history. Yet far from being like
the ‘dark satanic mills’ William Blake wrote about in the first industrial
revolution, data centres can be carbon neutral, carbon positive,
even. EcoDataCenter in Sweden is the world's first climate-positive data
centre.
Top Digital Banking Transformation Trends for 2021
Financial marketers were thrust into the spotlight with the COVID crisis, needing to respond to unforeseen circumstances in an instant. Instead of selling services, marketers were being asked to customize communication to help customers deal with the financial impact of the pandemic. Blanket communication around branch closures quickly needed to transform to personalized messages around loan payment deferrals and how to use unfamiliar digital tools. The coming year will bring the next evolution of financial marketing, leveraging data and advanced analytics to provide predictive personalization. This use of AI and machine learning will result in tailored websites, real-time financial recommendations, and a level of test and learn capabilities far beyond what was imagined just a few years ago. For the vast majority of financial institutions, this level of personalization is playing a game of catch up in meeting consumer expectations. Accenture found that nearly half (48%) of consumers abandoned a purchase process when the website did not personalize the experience, with nearly all consumers (91%) saying they are more likely to do business with brands that know them, look out for them and reward them.
8 Soft Skills That Make You an Even Better Leader
Emotional intelligence (EQ) is defined as “the capacity to be aware of,
control and express one’s emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships
judiciously and empathetically.” Those with high EQ are better able to handle
high-pressure situations, conflict resolution, constructive criticism, and
more. This ability is highly sought-after for teams, especially ones made up
of differing backgrounds. According to a survey conducted by CareerBuilder,
75% of hiring managers valued EQ over IQ. Hard skills and intelligence are
more easily taught to employees while EQ takes more time and understanding to
grasp. ... Overwhelm is something many entrepreneurs must deal with. That’s
the world we live in today. That’s where self-motivation comes into play. We
must all learn how to manage our energy. Energy comes not just from having a
balanced diet, but also from our personal drive to achieve, resilience, and
commitment. A personal drive to achieve is directly linked to our mindset.
Research shows that those with a growth mindset are far more like to succeed
in the endeavors they engage in because they believe they can improve.
Resilience is born out of courage to overcome challenges.
Data Distribution in Apache Ignite
Inevitably, the evolution of a system that requires data storage and processing
reaches a threshold. Either too much data is accumulated, so the data simply
does not fit into the storage device, or the load increases so rapidly that a
single server cannot manage the number of queries. Both scenarios happen
frequently. Usually, in such situations, two solutions come in handy—sharding
the data storage or migrating to a distributed database. The solutions have
features in common. The most frequently used feature uses a set of nodes to
manage data. ... The problem of data distribution among the nodes of the
topology can be described in regard to the set of requirements that the
distribution must comply with: The algorithm allows the topology nodes and
front-end applications to discover unambiguously on which node or nodes an
object (or key) is located; The more uniform the data distribution is among
the nodes, the more uniform the workloads on the nodes is. Here, I assume that
the nodes have approximately equal resources; and If the topology is changed
because of a node failure, the changes in distribution should affect only the
data that is on the failed node. It should also be noted that, if a node is
added to the topology, no data swap should occur among the nodes that are
already present in the topology.
Quote for the day:
"If you find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn't lead anywhere." -- Frank A Clark
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