Industry News Archives - Page 35 of 51

October 19, 2016October 4, 2016

News You Can Use: 10/19/2016

6 Ways to Convince Your Boss That Traveling is Important

The potential ROI gained from the trip is greater than the trip’s cost:
For anyone who wants his or her boss to approve a business trip, it’s a good idea to map out the specific costs in advance, then estimate the potential ROI that could be garnered if you attended the event.

Ensuring you keep all your business expenses related to the trip low — though many trips are tax deductible — will help create an optimistic view of the revenue potential and what positive gains could occur that could become the leverage for future business trips.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/282904
Rock ’em Sock ’em Telecom Services

In telecommunications, acquisitions have strong influences on pricing structures, service offerings, and overall capabilities. The competition for these services continues to boom with more localized suppliers playing against the big wigs. Going for the “popular” name does not always result in the best fit for your company. When choosing a provider whether through a formal sourcing engagement or going to the market direct, you need an unbiased opinion and should focus on the facts versus fiction.

http://www.strategicsourceror.com/2016/09/rock-em-sock-em-telecom-services.html
How To Manage Your Anxiety During Tough Times At Work

When paranoid thinking creeps into your work life, you tend to look for evidence to prove your thinking right. It’s a cognitive function called“confirmation bias.” When you have a belief, for example, that someone is trying to keep you from getting promoted, you look for evidence that confirms that belief. In this case, you believe your colleague is blocking your promotion. When he doesn’t respond to your email, you see that as evidence of your belief.

Instead of jumping to this conclusion, ask yourself, “What if the opposite were true?” What if he wasn’t blocking your promotion? What other reasons could there be for not responding to you?

https://www.fastcompany.com/3063975/work-smart/how-to-manage-your-anxiety-during-tough-times-at-work
How Wells Fargo’s Work Culture May Have Cleared The Way For Scandal

The key ingredients that foster a hostile work environment, according to Faas, are unreasonable expectations put on employees, an acceptance of questionable practices, and reluctance to complain out of fear of retaliation. “If what we hear in the media about the treatment of whistleblowers is true, Wells Fargo has a much bigger issue than the fraudulent accounts—they have a culture of fear,” he says. “If this is validated, it puts to question the credibility of their leadership’s response.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/3064175/how-wells-fargos-cross-selling-scandal-grew-out-of-workplace-culture
New Ernst & Young Report: Supply Chain Data “Overwhelms” Businesses, Stunting Automation, Efficiency

Managing the data growth dilemma: The growing tsunami of data is both a boon and bane to businesses in the digital age. Limitless oceans of data, often reflecting customer experience as it happens, have the potential to remake supply chains and business models. These models can and should be more efficient, productive, flexible and responsive. But right now, data is a mess. The current period of hyper data growth leaves most companies in a position where their ability to uncover business insights is effectively hidden within an increasingly complex and often unfathomable amount of data.

http://www.scmr.com/article/new_ernst_young_report_supply_chain_data_overwhelms_businesses_stunting_aut#When:12:53:00Z
Supply Risk and Compliance are Disconnected — That’s a Problem and an Opportunity

So, you’re stuck in the supply risk swamp and bogged down by compliance regimes. And you know there is waste everywhere and opportunity all around. So, as a supply professional, what should you do? You need to align risk management and compliance management with not just each other but with performance management (including continuous improvement) — and tie them all into your value chain processes. As those processes go upstream and external, this is where procurement and supply chain groups feel this problem — and need for alignment — more than anyone in the enterprise.

http://spendmatters.com/2016/09/27/supply-risk-compliance-disconnected-thats-problem-opportunity/

Photo: JD Weiher

October 12, 2016September 28, 2016

News You Can Use: 10/12/2016

Is Job Hopping Really Just A Basic Human Need?

The idea that you learn quickly at the beginning and your progress slows later on is what we call the learning curve, and it’s real. It’s also motivating at first; it feels great to know that your skills are growing so fast that you can see a difference from week to week. It can be much more frustrating to be stuck in a rut later on, feeling like you’re making incremental gains at best.

One thing that job switching provides is lots of opportunities to pull yourself up the steep part of the learning curve. It can actually be addicting to continually place yourself in situations that force you to rise to new challenges. You might like that experience so much that you find yourself job hopping over and over again as a result.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3063817/is-job-hopping-really-just-a-basic-human-need
Here’s what makes IBM, McKinsey, and 12 other big companies some of the best places for moms to work

Working Mother magazine just identified the 100 best companies for working moms to honor those organizations that are setting the standard for work-life practices in the US.

To compile the list, which is now in its 31st year, Working Mother surveyed hundreds of companies with more than 400 questions about their paid time off and leave policies, workforce profile, benefits, women’s issues and advancement, flexibility policies, and company culture, among other things.

http://nordic.businessinsider.com/best-companies-for-working-moms-2016-9/
I actually wrote an article about IBM’s pro-mother position over at BabyCenter:
http://blogs.babycenter.com/mom_stories/03072016-would-you-take-your-baby-to-work/
How to pull workers back from the brink of burnout

Unfortunately, simply working longer hours doesn’t lead to better work. As CNBC recently reported, a Stanford University study found that employee productivity falls off a cliff after 55 hours per week. After 20 years of working in Silicon Valley, I understand that this can be hard to accept. I didn’t accept it myself until recently, when, for the first time in my career, I took a position where I am not expected to be always-on. In fact, I’m encouraged to be off, and I’ve never been more productive. But I struggled with the shift. I pushed back hard. It took time for me to assimilate to this “new normal.”

https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/25/how-to-pull-workers-back-from-the-brink-of-burnout/?ncid=rss
How organizations enshrine collective stupidity and employees are rewarded for checking their brains at the office door (thanks for the suggestion KS)

At least $14 billion gets spent every year on leadership development in the US alone yet, according to researchers such as Jeffrey Pfeffer at Stanford, it has virtually no impact on improving the quality of leaders. In our own research, we found that most employees in knowledge-intensive firms didn’t need much leadership. People working at the coalface were self-motivated and often knew their jobs much better than their bosses did. Their superiors’ cack-handed attempts to be leaders were often seen as a pointless distraction from the real work. George, a manager in a high-tech engineering firm, told us he saw himself as a very ‘open’. When we asked his subordinates what he actually did, they told us that he provides breakfast in the morning and runs an annual beer-tasting.

https://aeon.co/essays/you-don-t-have-to-be-stupid-to-work-here-but-it-helps?preview=true
While this article had me shaking my head in agreement a few times, it is lacking in actual facts to back up the perception. But an excellent rant none the less.
Reality check: Philly’s cloud ambitions grind to a halt after transition

Outdated and overly complex IT procurement processes also impact the city’s ability to transform. Rather than trying to outline every possible requirement to squeeze into one enormous procurement for a completely new system, the city should look to more agile development, like its FastFWD program. FastFWD focused on problem-based procurement and tested applicability and feasibility before moving to wide-spread enterprise procurement. Finding more flexible funding options is the key for moving towards more flexible development and deployment models. Tech companies can be advocates for agile development and procurement by being realistic in their proposed solutions with measurable and attainable goals and timelines.

http://statescoop.com/reality-check-phillys-cloud-ambitions-grind-to-a-halt-after-transition

Photo: Noah Siliman

October 5, 2016September 18, 2016

News You Can Use: 10/5/2016

Here’s What It Takes For Your Company’s Culture To Survive An Acquisition

Start small. Talk to your employees to identify their top concerns over an acquisition. Brainstorm some ways to keep the best aspects of both cultures intact, always looking for points of commonality. And over-communicate—every employee needs to understand what goes into an acquisition and what they should expect, and as those details change, team members need to know how and why.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3063644/heres-what-it-takes-for-your-companys-culture-to-surive-an-acquisition?partner=rss
Why healthcare needs to care about Google’s acquisition of Apigee

Healthcare has been relatively slow to adopt open API standards. Unlike social media and e-commerce, healthcare is mostly a closed ecosystem of proprietary software, notably electronic health record (EHR) systems that do not permit the free exchange of data. This has been the subject of much discussion and debate and has drawn the attention of the Office of the National Coordinator of Healthcare IT (ONC). The ONC has been pushing for more open standards to unlock the value of digitized medical records sitting in proprietary systems that can unleash innovation in healthcare and positively impact costs, quality and experience (the triple aim) in healthcare.

http://www.cio.com/article/3120434/healthcare/why-healthcare-needs-to-care-about-googles-acquisition-of-apigee.html
How To Manage Technical Teams When You Don’t Share Their Credentials

Whenever you lay out a plan that affects the work that technical team members will have to do, figure out what’s most important to you and do that first. You may find that the things others push back about aren’t especially critical to you, and that you can satisfy everyone’s interests without too much pain.

But that means you need to distill whatever the ultimate goal is in your mind beforehand. Decide what’s absolutely crucial, and what’s negotiable will be come clearer. This way you can also give technical employees as much leeway as they need to figure out the “how,” which they’ll likely appreciate.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3063554/lessons-learned/how-to-manage-technical-teams-when-you-dont-have-their-tech-credentials?partner=rss
HPE Aruba Unveils Flexible Network Procurement Models Enabling Enterprises to Innovate at the Rapid Pace of Mobile and IoT

To remove unpredictability in IT operations and spending, Aruba is taking a software-based approach with its Mobile First Platform, enabling IT organizations to quickly respond to new requirements as they emerge, minimize capital expenditures, and maintain a competitive edge. Customers benefit from customized options for obtaining and managing their networks with Aruba’s portfolio of programmable IT networking products for Wi-Fi, BLE, wired and wide area network (WAN) connectivity, and consulting, support and technology services from its key alliances.

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160912005258/en/HPE-Aruba-Unveils-Flexible-Network-Procurement-Models
Worst.Headline.Ever
How to Strengthen Your Personal and Executive Presence

Here’s an example: Martha is the CIO of a large financial services firm. After discussing her personal brand and talking to some of her colleagues, boss and staff, it became clear she was respected by the people she worked with. However, her current executive presence wasn’t sufficient for her mandate to transform the way technology was implemented and used within the business.

In short, Martha’s current brand was seen as being “a manager who effectively problem solves and is known for hands-on implementation.” Not a bad brand, but insufficient for the task entrusted to her.

How did Martha change her brand?

One of the projects involved a series of town hall meetings designed to get her team excited about the IT transformation and buy in to supporting it. In alignment with her goal, Martha created a fun and inclusive agenda for the meeting and a highly visual presentation — the opposite of the usual boring, text-oriented presentation staff were used to.

So… a “fun” meeting got the job done? No.
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/278159

Photo: Finn Hackshaw

September 28, 2016September 18, 2016

News You Can Use: 9/28/2016

Indian workers staged one of the largest strikes in human history and no one in the USA noticed

The strike came after Modi began a push for increased foreign investment and privatization of some state-run industries. Unions fear these policies will undermine both wages and employment.

The size of the strike alone forced the government to offer concessions prior to Friday in an attempt to avert it, offering a boost in the minimum wage for some non-skilled workers and the unfreezing of some public employee bonuses.

The unions were not persuaded by this offer. “Prime Minister Narendra Modi said his fight is with poverty, but it seems his fight is with the poor in this country,” Indian National Trade Union Congress Vice President Ashok Singh said prior to the strike.

http://boingboing.net/2016/09/08/indian-workers-staged-one-of-t.html
Three Helpful Techniques to Ease You Into Talking With Strangers

Use “triangulation”: Triangulation is the process of talking about something in the environment that both you and the other person can see. The book they’re reading, a street performer playing a song, or even a beautiful sunset can be a great opener.

http://lifehacker.com/three-helpful-techniques-to-ease-you-into-talking-with-1786019077
Gartner study highlights disparity between supply chain leaders and staff

Ken Chadwick, Research Director at Gartner, said: “To adapt and response on the fly to challenges their organisation faces, supply chain leaders must develop the organisation’s change capabilities. Being ‘change agile’, having the ability to design and adopt new ideas and changes quickly and completely should be the goal of supply chain leaders in the digital era.

http://www.manufacturingglobal.com/lean/951/Gartner-study-highlights-disparity-between-supply-chain-leaders-and-staff
Eight Proven Strategies for Better Remote Work

One way to measure your progress is by using the X-card technique. (Some people call this the “Seinfeld Technique,” named after comedian Jerry Seinfeld who committed to working every day to hone his craft, without breaking the chain.)

The technique is simple enough: start by creating an “X-Card,” an index card divided into a 7×7 grid of 49 boxes. You could also use a dedicated app like 7 weeks or a good old-fashioned calendar.

On top of each card, write the habit you want to stick with. Every time you stick to that habit, you mark it with a big X in one of the boxes.

http://lifehacker.com/eight-proven-strategies-for-better-remote-work-1786346960
Coupa IPO: Is The Unicorn Dead?

However, with yesterday’s announcement that Coupa has filed the preliminary paperwork to take the company public by way of a $75 million IPO, the purpose of this post is to help you to avoid getting caught up in the usual analyst speak and blogger assessments.

In the new age of the commoditized cloud – where technological differences between one provider and the next are becoming increasingly indistinguishable, it is the people behind the company that matter the most. In particular, those in positions of leadership.

https://procureinsights.wordpress.com/2016/09/09/coupa-ipo-is-the-unicorn-dead/

Photo: Joey Kyber

September 21, 2016September 18, 2016

News You Can Use: 9/21/2016

Salesforce announces new role: Chief Equality Officer

This move, while notable for its diversity efforts, reflects Benioff’s continued contribution to community. TechCrunch noted Salesforce’s 1/1/1 charity program, which has over the years given “over $128 million in grants” and allowed employees to volunteer more than 1.6 million hours in their communities.

http://www.hrdive.com/news/salesforce-announces-new-role-chief-equality-officer/426278/
Is Technology Making Procurement Professionals Lazy?

More astute procurement professionals may be compelled to move towards more sophisticated technology which may be overly complex for the issue you are trying to solve. If you are trying to get adoption across your organisation versus a subset of power users, then make sure your specification is fit for purpose in order to maximise the impact across the organisation. Broad adoption is highly correlated to ease of use and buying a “spreadsheet on steroids” will likely mean you need an analyst to answer every executive’s question about your procurement spend.

One of the great challenges procurement leader’s face is that they are often compelled to use procurement tools affiliated with their ERP provider. Most of these tools were born during the days of “Feature Wars” where more and more complexity was added to the tool until it became almost unusable without heroic manual effort. Where leaders have the influence to pull it off, they should explore best of breed, built for purpose tools.

http://www.procurementleaders.com/blog/my-blog–guest-blog/is-technology-making-procurement-professionals-lazy-639415
How Long Until Hackers Start Faking Leaked Documents?

Forging thousands—or more—documents is difficult to pull off, but slipping a single forgery in an actual cache is much easier. The attack could be something subtle. Maybe a country that anonymously publishes another country’s diplomatic cables wants to influence yet a third country, so adds some particularly egregious conversations about that third country. Or the next hacker who steals and publishes email from climate change researchers invents a bunch of over-the-top messages to make his political point even stronger. Or it could be personal: someone dumping email from thousands of users making changes in those by a friend, relative, or lover.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/09/hacking-forgeries/499775/?utm_source=feed
This is a great question, I have to imagine it has already happened.
Why Supply Chain Managers Are Psychopaths

A study of 261 corporate professionals working in supply chain management found that 21 percent of those individuals had clinically significant levels of psychopathic traits, such as insincerity, lack of empathy or remorse, egocentric behavior, and the ability to be both charming and superficial.

The study found the supply chain management professionals had similar levels of psychopathic traits to the broad prison population.

http://www.sdcexec.com/news/12256445/why-supply-chain-managers-are-psychopaths
Difference Spin on the same study:
One out of five American CEOs might be a psychopath

“A really interesting question is whether psychopathy can be a positive thing. Some psychologists would say yes, that there are certain attributes like coolness under pressure, which is sort of a fundamental positive. But Robert Hare would always say no, that in the absence of empathy, which is the definition in psychology of a psychopath, you will always get malevolence,” Ronson told Forbes.

“Basically, high-scoring psychopaths can be brilliant bosses but only ever for short term,” he added.

http://www.zmescience.com/science/psychology-science/psychopathic-executives/
Do You Have A F*cking Problem With Swearing At Work?

But be careful who you swear around. The Wrike study revealed that of the 43% of those who do not use profane language in the workplace, 36% are bothered when others drop the F-bomb, and 20% would consider filling an official complaint in regards to their colleagues’ language. On the other hand, 33% of respondents would not consider a position at a workplace that strictly banned swearing, so you can’t f*cking win either way.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3063775/do-you-have-a-fcking-problem-with-swearing-at-work?partner=rss

Photo: Ian Schneider