Episodes
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The entertaining Genworth Financial team joins us from OPEX Week 2020 to tell us their enterpriseâs transformation storyâor journey, more accurately. Kathleen starts off by explaining her view of the company 15 years ago: âIt was a very siloed organization. It was very much command and control; very hierarchical. We were focused very much on our processes, like manufacturing, because we came from GE.â Sometimes, as Martijn is quick to interject, they were focusing on the wrong processes. Their new goal was to focus on the customer and increase associate empathy. The leadership team achieved this with some creative physical props that mimic certain hardships their clients experience. However, leading by fear negatively impacts the service a customer receives as well, so Genworth devised a new workforce strategy. âIf you really truly believe that the customer is the most important person--because he or she pays your salary--then the front line employees are the most important people, and therefore, your team leaders are the most important leaders. Most people leave their leader. They don't leave the organization.â The team details how they achieved this monumental task.
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McDonaldâs senior director of innovation, Deena John, joins us to talk about digital transformation. While definitions vary, Deena describes digital transformation as âtransforming through integration of technologyâ with the goal of generating maximum value for the customer. End-to-end disruption means looking into the future and creating a transformation road map that leads to a new operating model. Deena discusses the differences and similarities between agile and lean, and the iterative process that makes scaling sustainable. Deena frames her key points with specific examples. Next, she asks and answers the question, âIn an innovation culture whatâs the importance of failing fast?â Ultimately, this insightful conversation with Deena focuses on the future of the enterprise and what needs to happen now to ensure corporations can keep up with the ever-changing landscape that technology brings to business.
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Episodes manquant?
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This BFSI Panel features key industry experts who share their strategies around pushing their organization into the future. They note that the technology available is user-friendly and rarely the barrier to entry. It is the mapping, the process, and post-implementation that makes or breaks a digital transformation. Agile development and change management are both initiatives that work. Automation has the potential to save time, money, and improve the customer experience, but if it isnât applied in a purposeful way, it is useless. The panelists share their personal journey through transformation, offering insights and advice along the way.
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Max Just is accompanied by a special guest on this episode of Future of Work. Julie Seitz is an expert on all things workspace, which makes her the perfect partner for the topic ofâyou guessed itâthe future of workspaces. While she notes that an enterprise canât necessarily futureproof themselves in this regard, she encourages them to get out of their insular spaces for the sake of spotting trends in how people are working in universities, airports, etc. Flexibility and simplicity in a workspace make more practical investments than technological ones that will become outdated. Julie also reflects on the evolution of the public school classroom and how examining that process helps illustrate how different generations work differently. Max jumps in with the ah-hah moments he had while working with Julie, including the importance of providing collaborative workspaces for collaborative work. Ultimately, Max and Julie agree: workspaces matter.
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Roland Haefs, with Henkel, discusses enterprise evolution and the shift from having purely transactional relationships to becoming a true business solutions provider. It takes strong leadership and an entrepreneurial spirit to pull off such a transformation, which Roland details. In order to demonstrate his point, Roland lays out Henkelâs approach to the shared services process of master data management. Next, the conversation turns to RPA and AI more specifically, including its role in shared services and how to make sure it is being deployed effectively. Further, Roland discusses Henkelâs four business priorities: fund growth, drive growth, excel at digitalization, and increase agility.
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Dmitri Popov, global service management lead for Mann + Hummel Group, joins us today to discuss scaling RPA. Dmitri himself admits that such a process is painful, in part because of the few successful enterprise examples for which to model after. Dmitri points to IBM as a company who has done it well. Next, Dmitri discusses how to leverage shared services in the most efficient way, exemplifying R&D and certain purchasing aspects. One of the most difficult components of implementing RPA across the workflow is acceptance and adherence. Dmitri doesnât mince words when it comes to what it takes in a personânot just an enterpriseâto accept change, no matter how positive that change may ultimately be.
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Deepak Subbaru joins us again, this time, to discuss unstructured data. The recent explosion in technology inputs has raised the bar for customer expectations. They want more, and they want it now. Requests are coming via phone calls, social media, emails, etc. The product of this feedback is unstructured data. Deepak goes in depth on three actionable steps to take in order to leverage the power of unstructured data: know your data, know the sources of your data, and prepare your data. Next, Deepak discusses the importance of defining outcomes for your data, as opposed to cramming data into an algorithm and receiving an output that has no use case. As Deepak reiterates throughout the conversation, context is key.
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Heather King is the managing director for both the Shared Services & Outsourcing Network and the Intelligent Automation Division for the Americas. She oversees a team that puts on the dynamic events of relevant content for the industries of the same name. Having been in her role for the past seven years, Heather gives a brief timeline of the creation and growth of the IA series that was born out of SSON. The term RPA first presented itself in 2014 during a panel session and kept cropping up until Heatherâs team decided to give it its own plenary session. It was just a matter of time before it became clear that automation needed its own home outside of SSON, and IA was born. Next, Heather goes into detail about the other conferences her team puts on each year, including the largest shared services event in the world, Shared Services & Outsourcing Week. Her passion for the importance of conferencesâand the act of conferencingâis as clear as it is contagious.
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Dr. Ayanna Howard is a chair of the School of Interactive computing at Georgia Tech, an academic, and a startup founder. While her talents are as vast as her pursuits, she sums up their relation as interactive computing. In her words, âInteractive computing is really this theme that the human is center to everything that we do when we think about computing and artificial intelligence.â Dr. Howard pursues interactive computing for the greater good, including robotics in healthcare and education. She also discusses ethics in computing, including privacy and security.
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BitCherryâs Paul Bao explains the blockchain process behind the platformâs commercial applications. Working similar to Amazonâs eCommerce model, BitCherry will offer a platform to buy, sell, and network goods using digital currency. Regulatory roadblocks make penetration in the U.S. difficult, but BitCherry has over 2 million members and 120,000 active daily users. Currently, these users simply buy and sell digital currency in anticipation for BitCherryâs retail applications. Bao expects the retail platform to go live in Q1 of 2020. Next, he details the brainstorming process behind BitCherryâs unique independent investor philosophy and marvels over the future implications of blockchain. While he may be a little ahead of his time, BitCherryâs users prove that there is a lot of faith in the future of eCommerce and digital currency.
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Malta, a small European island, is quickly becoming a blockchain hub, and thus, accurately nicknamed âBlockchain Island.â This panel discussion delves into blockchain developments, standards, and laws. Maltaâs progressive, global view of blockchain implications has allowed Blockchain Island to progress in a healthy, robust, safe way, complete with governance and legislation. The panel shares the infrastructure that has led to its success in the hope that others will implement a similar solution. With an end goal of international blockchain standards, a panelist sums up this discussion nicely: âWe anticipated the need to regulate blockchain technologies, and that was while everyone else was focusing on the cryptocurrency aspect.â âThe ISO standard is starting. So, the ISO standard is anticipating other jurisdictions, and it's starting to look into what it means to regulate blockchain technologies or standardize blockchain technologies.â
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Tom Trowbridge is the former president and one of the founders of Hedera Hashgraph, a distributed ledger technology. He is also an avid investor and advisor in the technology space. Hederaâs governing council consists of companies like Nomura, Deutsche Telecom, IBM, Boeing, and Swisscom. Tom notes that Hedera met with the Facebook Cayenne team in 2018âthey did not join. A year later, Facebook announced the digital currency Libra and its accompanyingâbut separateâdigital wallet, Calibra. Tom has studied and followed the digital currency phenomena in great depth and puts blockchain technologies in perspectiveâincluding the strategy Facebook may deploy in order to get users on board with its digital currency. Will the Zuckerberg Reserve give the Federal Reserve a run for its money? Tom has thoughts on that as well.
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Kexin Xie is a data scientist for Salesforce. Among other things, Kexin is responsible for building the engineering infrastructure, services, and frameworks that makes the Salesforce marketing cloud so powerful. In this conversation, Kexin discusses how the power of predictive analytics is leveraged in businesses for ânext-best-actionâ interactions. While these tools drive more engagement and revenue from the customer side, which Kexin touches on, he dives deep on how data science makes this possible. Kexin makes the intangibles tangible by describing the process by which algorithms are designedâincluding some pitfalls to be aware ofâand recognizing âvaluable noise.â Kexin is a realist, though, saying, âThere's the use case part, there's the data part, and we're trying to build a bridge between the end solution and how we get there from the initial raw form. Eventually, weâll start to understand the raw data more and start to build even more pipelines and then see how they connect with each other; their commonalities. And eventually, I think the bridge will be formed, and then building new things will be much easier than the initial use case.â
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Kenneth Farrugia is the chief business development officer with the Bank of Valletta. Kenneth starts this conversation off with a bang, making the case that if banks donât stay on top of the technological revolution, they run the risk of becoming irrelevant. Next, Kenneth, perhaps counterintuitively, labels legacy financial operations whoâve jumped on board with Industry 4.0 as FinTechs, while the up-and-comers are TechFins. Of course data and security is a big part of the conversation as well. Balancing the convenience of turning over oneâs data with the risk of data breaches and/or privacy concerns is on the forefront of every financial institutionâs mind. Kenneth discusses additional pain points to the future of banking, both for the client and corporation, and potential solutions for those pain points.
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Rida Moustafa is an experienced data scientist with a demonstrated history of working in the retail industry. Rida covers a lot of ground in this concise, informative conversation. He shares his story with us, beginning in 1995 with the big data mining movement. Walking us through the way data mining has evolved, Rida hits on neural networks, deep learning, and expert systems. Today, however, AI technology has evolved enough to render some of these old processes moot. Of course, new obstacles present themselves, such as AIâs black box and its influence over regulatory decisions and prediction models. The last half of the conversation is reserved for Ridaâs involvement with Walmart and the work he is doing with AI to automate processes and generally improve Walmartâs workflow and profits.
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David Orban, founder of Network Society Ventures, discusses the rapid acceleration of technology and its consequences. How we live, work, organize, and grow a business has changed. Decentralization is now a common path forward. David gives examples, including solar energy, digital manufacturing, personalized health, and peer-to-peer learning. Next, David discusses the volatility of Bitcoin and why thatâs to be expected: we donât yet fully understand its potential. David exemplifies the past while offering solutions for the future. The rest of the conversation focuses on blockchain more generally, including future applications and implications. Davidâs technologically futuristic views donât seem all that outlandish after this conversation. In fact, his optimism is contagious.
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Dr. Timothy Renick with Georgia State joins us to talk about his implementation of predictive analytics within the university, including an AI enhanced chatbot. Since the deployment of these technologies, Georgia State is graduating 3,000 more students a year than it did seven years ago. Dr. Renick explains the universityâs approach to finding solutions for problems over innovation for innovationâs sake. With a change in demographics, including a larger low-income population, the university felt it necessary to increase access to support and identify issues before students found themselves in dire straits. Dr. Renick discusses the process of finding a vendor to help them identify and build the perfect solution. Itâs working, as shown by the examples he discusses during the rest of the conversation.
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Dario Izzo joins us from the World Summit AI to talk space. As the scientific coordinator the Advanced Concepts Team out of the European Space Agency, Dario is tasked with some serious undertakings. First, Dario summarizes ESAâs mission for us. He humbly describes some of his accomplishments since 2003âsuch as swarming missionsâbut, as Dario says, his goal is to stay focused on the future. Currently, energy efficiency is a major area of focus for Dario. He also discusses asteroid deflectors and cube satellites. The remainder of this sci-fi-meets-reality conversation covers AIâs contribution to space endeavors and why theyâre worth our time, money, and cooperation.
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Maneesh Kumar Verma is the team leader and head of operations at Lunar Zebro. Heâs also a lead robotics at Stellar Space Industries. In this conversation, Maneesh talks about the future of space exploration. In order to thoroughly explore places like Mars, a high level of autonomy must be given to the devices sent there. On top of that, the devices must be agile, plentiful, and inexpensiveâcompared to a Rover, for example. Maneesh calls these futuristic devices "artificial ants." He then gets into the nitty-gritty of the moonâs role as home base in the future of space exploration, diagnostic technologies, and pilot programs for future missions.
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The CIO of Amsterdamâs Spectral, Stephen Donnelly, joins us to talk energy. Spectral is âon the bleeding edge of the energy transitionâ as a tech developer and systems integrator. Steven outlines the pros and cons of each renewable energy resource and also discusses smart cars and smart cities. He then offers solutions to these problems using AI. Before Spectral, Stephen was with the European Commission at the Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators. He describes what that level of upper bureaucracy is like.
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