Enterprise hits and misses - women in tech get a shout out and robotic process automation gets real
- Summary:
- This week - an epic series on women in tech brings new lessons. Plus: RPA investment gets real, while ROI questions linger. Your whiffs include robot goofs. And: I throw United Airlines under the bus for good.
Timed with International Women's Day, Madeline Bennett issued a series of insightful posts on where we go from here. Above is part two, which profiles a diverse set of female tech practitioners. Madeline closes part two with a terrific rundown list for diversifying women in tech. I can't list them all here, but here's a few that stood out (bold emphasis mine):
- Businesses need to open up more routes into technology careers for those not keen on studying computing at college or university. IBM’s Nicole Covey and Avaya’s Ella Jenkinson both had the perfect aptitude and enthusiasm for careers in tech but their education choices were not a natural fit.
- Young girls need more opportunities to meet and learn from other women working in tech of all ages and experience levels, to understand how they got to where they are.
- Find ways to convince women that being a tech whizz isn’t a pre-requisite for working in the tech sector.
You can read more profiles of kickass women in tech in Madeline's IWD 2018 - What you can do to encourage more women to join the tech sector (part one).
In these pieces, Madeline is working to fill a role model gap between teen girls thinking about tech and, say, a female CTO:
To mark International Women’s Day, I went on the hunt for women right at the other end of the spectrum: those just starting out in tech careers, on apprentice or graduate schemes, or switching from another sector.
She hits an on under-discussed issue in Why men need more consideration in the women in tech debate. That's a topic I can't do justice to in a few words, other than to say that diversity is everyone's problem - and, in a sense, everyone's solution. Men need to find a balance between airing our own imperfect ideas on how to close these persistent gender gaps, and shutting the hell up.
Beyond the import of equitable pay, Madeline shares views on men picking up the househusband role with relish, thereby helping a household to embrace flexible/work-from-home tech careers. Grab a spatula guys.
Diginomica picks - my top two stories on diginomica this week- Thinking differently – the benefits of neurodiversity - Janine hits on another diversity angle that only a small percentage of savvy companies are using strategically: "Organizations need this neurodiversity in the same way they’ve already recognized the power of diversity in areas such as gender or ethnicity."
- The Big Switch - DevOps in financial services - Angelica on why a competitive industry has seen the DevOps light: "The main upside of DevOps for financial services firms is error-proofed deployment to production environments, which results in fewer failures and unwanted rollbacks."
Vendor analysis, diginomica style. Here's my three top choices from our vendor coverage:
- Salesforce acquires CloudCraze to bring Commerce Cloud into B2B - Phil assesses one of the plays in a busy week for Benioff and co: "Apttus has since extended its platform to also run on Microsoft Azure and most recently IBM. But the thinking behind that IBM partnership gives a further clue to the importance of Salesforce’s acquisition of CloudCraze." Phil also parses the Salesforce-Dropbox news in Dropbox gets access to Salesforce customers in return for boosting Quip as Dropbox pushes to bolster its pre-IPO enterprise cred and Salesforce looks to Quip up. Which brings us to:
- Box and Dropbox both eye enterprise collaboration. A looming battle or two ends of a product spectrum? Kurt handicaps the duel between two collaboration upstarts moving up the enterprise weight class. Both have their pros and cons, but as Kurt points out: "As I’ve repeatedly stressed, cloud file sharing by itself isn’t a sustainable business, but that’s primarily what Dropbox still offers." Turns out they aren't really fighting each other yet, though, which really spoils my boxing analogy.
A few more vendor picks, without the quotage:
- Twilio Flex takes on legacy giants of the contact center - Phil
- Coupa turns in a profit as global customer footprint expands on platform play - Stuart
- Accenture on why "citizen AI" will fail without rigorous testing for algorithmic bias - Jon
Jon's grab bag - Den bothered polled rattled readers' chains in the navel-gazing collaborative ditty To push or not to push? A question for readers, and readers came through with sharp comments - do chime in. Stuart examined the slimming down disruption of health and fitness with In pursuit of health and wellness - Fitbit, Weight Watchers digitally disrupt their business models.
Over on diginomica gov, Derek hit on the issue du jour in Artificial Intelligence - EU to debate “thorny ethical, legal and societal” questions. And while we're on AI, I finally saw a machine learning keynote I actually liked at HfS FORA: "Don't do an ML science experiment" - Mike Salvino on machine learning misconceptions, and what to do about them.
Best of the rest
Lead story - RPA is officially the shiny new silver bullet: 53% of the Global 2000 are planning significant RPA investments to slash costs in 2018 by Phil FershtmyPOV: At last year's HfS FORA show in New York City, Phil Fersht of HfS revealed data that shows Robotic Process Automation isn't hype, at least when it comes to investment. This "sneak peak" into an upcoming HfS/KPMG study shows that of all the investments companies plan to make to achieve operational cost savings, from analytics to IoT to cloud, RPA comes out on top at 53 percent. That means well ahead of shiny new toys AI/cognitive (33 percent) and blockchain (33 percent). Ergo, Fersht says:
So it's abundantly clear all the hype about rampant adoption has been warranted, and we can hang our hats on our recent enterprise robotics software and services forecast, which now appears conservative, increasing with 47 percent growth to $1.46bn this year.
But as it turns out, there's a catch. All that investment doesn't mean companies are getting all the results they want. As Fersht writes in the appropriately-titled RPA often starts out like a teenage romance: a lot of enthusiastic fumbling around that ends quickly, frequently leading to disappointment:
Without a coherent, end-to-end business transformation strategy, “dabbling” with automation technologies frequently does more harm than good, at best yielding only meagre results.
Fersht runs through ten reasons why RPA is as elusive as a Tinder hookup at an enterprise event. It's worth a hard look, and gets back to change, culture, and tech as a means, not an end.
Honorable mention
- Reuters is taking a big gamble on AI-supported journalism - seems my job is still safe for a bit. This is less about replacing writers. It's about Reuters creating a "digital data scientist-cum-copywriting assistant." Hey, I could use one of those, as long as I don't have to work for Reuters.
- Toyota, Accenture tackle traffic woes with AI taxi fleet system - "AI applied to taxi services in trials have predicted demand with a 94.1 percent accuracy rate." Bonus: no self-driving regulatory hurdles.
- We love the smell of Blockchain in the morning – and I'm a sucker for an Apocalypse Now reference. David Terrar of Agile Elephant with another useful blockchain myth-busting exercise.
- The web can be weaponised – and we can't count on big tech to stop it - yes, we've seen our share of "future of web" concern threads, but this one was written by the web itself.
- Supply Chain Software Vendor Experts Discuss Trends—Part 1 - PJ Jakovljevic does a tech buzzword reality check with supply chain leaders.
- Event Report - SAP Ariba Live 2018 - Las Vegas - Sustainability and UX - Constellation's Holger Mueller has laced up his red sneakers, and he's back on the road for the spring conference season.
- Oracle’s Cloud Transition: What’s in it for Them? - Good stuff on cloud business transitions (and cloud lock-in issues) that you could extend well beyond Oracle.
- 12 questions that I get asked the most about social media - A social media maven (IBM's Vijay Vijayasankar) explains how he uses social media to make his professional life better - without falling into the productivity quagmire.
Whiffs
Let's start on the lighter side with Flippy, the burger grillin' robot I riffed on last week. Well, Flippy only made it a day in the sweaty human realm of the burger kitchen: “Flippy,” the California fast food robot, temporarily decommissioned for being too slow:He was supposed to revolutionize a California fast food kitchen, churning out 150 burgers per hour without requiring a paycheck or benefits.
And now Flippy's just another schmo who can't get a break from The Man. Now that's a robotic story we can all relate to. My colleague Phil Wainewright found reassurance in the robotic snafus exposed in this video:
Hope you saw this @dahowlett @jonerp - there’s hope for us all yet
— Phil Wainewright (@philww) March 13, 2018
Boston Dynamics Robot Dog Slips on Banana Peel pic.twitter.com/Fq2C6xZyJT
— 41 Strange (@41Strange) March 12, 2018
Phil, I dunno - I was thinking "goofy" was one of the few human traits robots might struggle with... And I would challenge Phil: can robots binge watch Netflix?
A New Netflix Test Rewards Kids With Patches For Binge-Watching TV https://t.co/9LTM7sYrAs -> maybe @Netflix can cut a deal with an online university and just cut to the chase and give the kids who binge watch the most college degrees...
— Jon Reed (@jonerp) March 13, 2018
Good to know some human skills are safe - and being handsomely rewarded. Oh, and a warning for UX writers: if you give Google UX props, you might get a bit of gift-wrapped snark from me:
What Google is learning about user experience https://t.co/Fo3rsKuIn3 -> what Google knows best is that if you're stuck on their platform they can shove a major UX re-design upon you without consequence, see: Google Calendar. Huge missed opportunity to poll users for input, etc.
— Jon Reed (@jonerp) March 10, 2018
And then we get to:
Dog dies after United flight attendant forces it into overhead bin https://t.co/cdTLLYjyPW -> this is more about a human being with soul rot who has lost the plot, but it doesn't add to my confidence in United either
— Jon Reed (@jonerp) March 13, 2018
Warning: the articles on this (including this one) contain graphic images that may upset.
Multiple pundits and PR reps assure me about the incredible power of the social customer. United does the most pet business of any airline - and they have a flight attendant that thinks it's ok to put a living thing in an airless space? Will the social customer change anything that matters? United broke guitars a long time ago, and flew right on. Den Howlett's tweet nails it down:
To all you PRs pimping your social reputation vendor stuff on the back of @United and a dead dog - FORGET IT. Remember #unitedbreaksguitars? They're still flying, still taking biz class $$ and they're part of a protected cartel. End of...
— (((Den Howlett))) (@dahowlett) March 14, 2018
I do know this:
That's it, I'm done. That's it for me and United. If I have a choice between attending an event via United or staying home, it's bunny slippers and Netflix binge for me. Nah, I don't think these profit zombies amoral card punchers frauds are going to change because of me, but I've had enough.
On a different note:
Stephen Hawking, modern cosmology's brightest star, dies aged 76 https://t.co/II6t909oth -> two things come to mind for me here: unbelievable courage and unbelievable contribution to science. A difficult live extraordinarily well lived.
— Jon Reed (@jonerp) March 14, 2018
RIP good sir.
If you find an #ensw piece that qualifies for hits and misses - in a good or bad way - let me know in the comments as Clive (almost) always does.
Most Enterprise hits and misses articles are selected from my curated @jonerpnewsfeed. 'myPOV' is borrowed with reluctant permission from the ubiquitous Ray Wang.