SourceCast: Episode 16: Artificially Intelligent
News You Can Use: 9/23/2015
- Slack’s Workplace Revolution
“We’re really conscious of solving problems in a way that doesn’t fetishize the purity of UI design at the expense of the user,” says Slack’s design director, Brandon Velestuk, who has worked closely with Butterfield since joining Slack in 2014. “There was always an understanding that this was a tool people were going to spend their entire day in, so we sought to bring an empathy to the design.”
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3050294/innovation-by-design/slacks-workplace-revolution
- The AI productivity opportunity
I expect AI to start to play a part in most industries over the next five years, it will start in data intensive areas such as customer profiling, but before long we will have AI customer service desks and call centres. Other areas that will be revolutionised will be planning and forecasting, where computers will soon outperform humans, and security where a CCTV images can be monitored by a machine. The CCTV pictures might be coming from a drone that has decided to the factory perimeter fence.
http://www.procurementleaders.com/blog/my-blog–thomas-seal/the-ai-productivity-opportunity-567152
- Healthcare leads all industries in data breaches
The key finding is perhaps that the healthcare industry had 34 percent of its total records breached, amounting to 84 million data records compromised, the highest rate of any industry. Government accounted for the second highest rate of breaches at 77.2 million records lost, or 31.4 percent.
http://www.govhealthit.com/news/healthcare-leads-all-industries-data-breaches
- 6 Ways to Demonstrate Kindness in Business and the Rest of Your Life
Most often, your best clients come to you by referral. Look for ways to help others succeed by referring potential business or influencers to those you know and like. If someone is struggling with an aspect of their business and asks for your advice, jump in and offer your expertise. You’ll build a deeper relationship and a trust that will provide mutual rewards for years to come.
- Hadoop, in trouble? Only in Gartner-land
Most companies don’t have “big data” — only many new unstructured or semistructured data sources — and they’d like to gain insight by aggregating them and hooking up a visualization tool. In fact, according to the study, most want to gain insight using Tableau or Excel. If they’re already using Hadoop, they are probably also working with Tableau (51 percent). If they aren’t, they’d like to use Excel (60 percent).
- 4 Warning Signs Your Team Is Working in Silos, and How to Destroy Them
The best way to avoid groupthink is to model disagreement at the leadership level. This doesn’t mean hosting debates or shouting matches, but it does mean letting your teams into the room when hard decisions need to be hashed out. It also means rewarding disagreement, celebrating differences and making it clear that you, as a leader, don’t have all the answers.
Photo: Bogdan Dum
News You Can Use: 6/15/2015
- Generation Y: A New Challenge For Travel Procurement
When it comes to business travel, these digitally-savvy employees expect a sleek, consumer-like experience from corporate booking tools: when they don’t get it they turn to the consumer applications they already have to hand, and book outside the corporate environment. Not only can this lead to irresponsible spending, and weaker negotiated rates in the future, but it poses significant risks to a company’s “duty of care” responsibility towards its employees. If you don’t know where they are, you can’t help them in an emergency. So how can procurement help to bring Generation Y back into the fold?
- IBM and Procurement Transformation: By the Numbers, Risk Management and More
[While this is interesting, I really want to know more about the AI/Watson solutions that IBM just started talking about]From a numbers perspective, IBM’s procurement performance KPIs and performance improvement metrics are more than impressive. Michael noted IBM saved $6.9B in approved and measured savings targets in 2014 compared to before the program was put into place. Payment terms now stand at close to 60 days rather than 30 days. Spend and contract compliance has increased from 50% to over 90%. Sourcing experts now look at 100% of spend compared to less than 10%. Electronic invoicing has increased from 20% to 90%. And 83% of POs never touch a buyer.
- The Basics of making small talk:
- This Calculator Will Tell You If A Robot Is Coming For Your Job
For now, those with the highest-skill, highest-paid jobs are probably safe, and low-skill workers are not. “Inequality is probably the foremost challenge,” says Osborne. “It’s not going to be a problem of there not being enough wealth. We’re fairly confident that all of these technologies will continue to generate vast amounts of wealth—we’ll be generating a cornucopia of increasingly cheap and wonderful goods that will be able to be produced for next to zero marginal cost. But those benefits we’ll see as consumers might not necessarily be realized by workers.”
- 3 Reasons ‘Casual Flex’ at Work Doesn’t Work
What’s more, one-third of workers worldwide feel stressed about work-life issues, according to a study by Ernst & Young about work-life challenges. And flexible-work policies that are merely informal may cause other systemic problems: A Boston University study found employees at a Boston consulting firm faking their 80-hour work weeks over fears that asking to use flexible-work options would cause negative reactions from management. These fears were well founded, it turns out. Employees who faked 80-hour workweeks were given excellent performance reviews, while those who openly asked for flexibility were negatively reviewed, even though they worked the same number of hours as their faking colleagues. That sort of scenario undermines trust and confidence in working relationships, to say the least.
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/246802?ctp=BizDev&src=Syndication&msc=Feedly