Farewell IBM Watson Health
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that IBM is looking to potentially sell the Watson Health Platform (consisting of AI and companies like Merge, Truven, Explorys, and Phytel).
Why did something so promising end up becoming a failure for the company?
This video explores the ups and downs of Watson Health:
News You Can Use: 12/18/2019
Photo by Antonino Visalli on Unsplash
- Administrative assistant jobs helped propel many women into the middle class. Now they’re disappearing.
The United States has shed more than 2.1 million administrative and office support jobs since 2000, Labor Department data shows, eroding what for decades had been a reliable path to the middle class for women without college degrees.
The job losses affecting administrative assistants, bookkeepers, clerks, data entry specialists, executive assistants and secretaries have largely continued even as the economy recovered from the Great Recession, suggesting these jobs aren’t coming back.
- Tech recruiters were once welcomed on campus. Now they face protests
At universities across the country, including Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Georgia Tech, Duke, Carnegie Mellon and Brown, students have staged protests at recruiting events and demonstrated against tech companies that do business with ICE or U.S. Customs and Border Protection, including Microsoft, Palantir and Salesforce. They have called out Amazon for marketing its facial-recognition technology to immigration authorities and hosting Palantir on the Amazon Web Services cloud.
Some 3,000 students from 30 schools signed a document pledging they would not work at Palantir until it severs its contracts with ICE; roughly 800 people signed a petition calling on the dean of UC Berkeley’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department to drop its partnership with Palantir.
It’s not clear whether these tactics are having a significant impact on recruitment.
- What skills will set you apart in the age of automation?
- 6 lies you probably tell yourself about giving feedback at work
You only need to begin documenting notes for legal purposes if you’ve given the person much face-to-face feedback for several months, and they show no sign of improvement. In my research as a performance coach, I’ve learned 95% of employees can (and will) improve any skill with your honest, frequent coaching. Just talk to people! Be open, be honest, and give them helpful examples and ideas. When they realize you’re on their side, they’ll ask for more feedback. Have confidence in yourself. If you provide feedback to everyone all the time, it will be much easier to prepare written documentation that you might need later.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90436990/6-lies-about-feedback-that-you-need-to-stop-believing
- How to Insult Your Enemies More Effectively
The more creative you’re getting, the easier you can slip up. Years ago, I wrote a bad blog post, and commenters were roasting it. I retorted that they were misreading it. I didn’t want to tell them “learn to read” because it didn’t quite fit. So I came up with “Learn to parse.” That, of course, is lame as hell, something that kid from the “you frickin fricks!” video would say.
I’d just made things much worse for myself. If your insults become illegible, overwrought, or sloppy, you’ll lose. And that’s not the only way you can self-own here.
https://lifehacker.com/how-to-insult-your-enemies-more-effectively-1839501124
Supplier Report: 6/28/2019
Photo by Craig Sybert on Unsplash
Automation and artificial intelligence will likely change the world, for both good and bad.
The dark side of automation is making itself known through robocalls. We all get them, including hospitals. Many help lines are getting clogged with robocalls which are preventing people with urgent care needs from getting through.
Meanwhile, Oracle is on a roller-coaster ride this month. Their financials are up, but people are calling out financial engineering due to $36B in stock buy back.
Acquisitions/Investments
- Blue Prism acquires UK’s Thoughtonomy for up to $100M to expand its RPA platform with more AI
Blue Prism, which helped coin the term RPA when it was founded back in 2001, has announced that it is buying Thoughtonomy, which has built a cloud-based AI engine that delivers RPA-based solutions on a SaaS framework. Blue Prism is publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange — where its market cap is around £1.3 billion ($1.6 billion), and in a statement to the market alongside its half-year earnings, it said it would be paying up to £80 million ($100 million) for the firm.
The deal is coming in a combination of cash and stock: £12.5 million payable on completion of the deal, £23 million in shares payable on completion of the deal, up to £20 million payable a year after the deal closes, up to £4.5 million in cash after 18 months, and a final £20 million on the second anniversary of the deal closing, in shares. Thoughtonomy had never raised outside funding, although that was not for lack of interest.
Artificial Intelligence
- Microsoft PowerPoint gets an AI presentation coach
Microsoft’s AI can’t tell you if your jokes will land, of course, but the new coaching feature gives you real-time feedback on your pacing, for example, tells you whether you are using inclusive language and how many filler words you use. It also makes sure that you don’t commit the greatest sin of presenting: just reading the slides.
After your rehearsal session, PowerPoint will show you a dashboard with a summary of your performance and what to focus on to improve your skills.
Security/Privacy
- Robocalls are overwhelming hospitals and patients, threatening a new kind of health crisis
“These calls to health-care institutions and patients are extremely dangerous to the public health and patient privacy,” said Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (N.J.), the Democratic chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who has put forward legislation to try to clamp down on robocalls. “The FCC and Justice Department need to go after these criminals with the seriousness and urgency this issue deserves.”
The absence of immediate relief spells particular trouble for medical professionals. Scammers often adopt a technique known as spoofing to cover their tracks, a practice that results in people receiving calls from numbers that look similar to their own. For a hospital, that often can mean calls appear to come from local area codes, tricking health care workers into thinking it’s a nearby patient in need of care.
- Your used Nest camera could be spying on you
A member of the Facebook Wink Users Group discovered that after selling his Nest cam, he was still able to access images from his old camera—except it wasn’t a feed of his property. Instead, he was tapping into the feed of the new owner, via his Wink account. As the original owner, he had connected the Nest Cam to his Wink smart-home hub, and somehow, even after he reset it, the connection continued.
We decided to test this ourselves and found that, as it happened for the person on Facebook, images from our decommissioned Nest Cam Indoor were still viewable via a previously linked Wink hub account—although instead of a video stream, it was a series of still images snapped every several seconds.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90366910/your-used-nest-camera-could-be-spying-on-you
Software/SaaS
- Oracle shares rise on bullish earnings report
Good numbers: Oracle Corp. shares rose 7.5% to $56.63 Thursday after the business software maker reported a bigger-than-expected 14% rise in quarterly profit driven by growth in its cloud services and license-support business. The shares closed Friday at $56.12.
http://www.startribune.com/market-recap-oracle-shares-rise-on-bullish-earnings-report/511662182/
Oracle investors breathe a sigh of relief on rising sales“We are focused on our star products and our star products are now driving the top line higher,” Ellison said on the call. “We have these other businesses that are melting away and we just don’t care.”
Cloud licence and on-premise licence sales increased 12 per cent to US$2.52 billion, suggesting that Oracle is doing a good job of signing on new customers. The company said that revenue from NetSuite grew 32 per cent, and Fusion HR and financial suites gained by the same amount.
https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/technology/oracle-investors-breathe-a-sigh-of-relief-on-rising-sales
Oracle spent $36 billion in one year buying its own stock back, and it raises some uncomfortable questions about how it’s spending its cashFor example, in contrast to the $36 billion spent on stock buybacks, Oracle spent $1.66 billion on capital expenditures in 2019, down from the $1.73 billion it spent in 2018.
Remember, Oracle is trying to build itself into a cloud computing giant to take on the likes of mighty Amazon Web Services and, more importantly, keep itself relevant in an age where its customers want the cloud.
https://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-stock-buybacks-growth-cloud-investors-2019-6
The New Oracle Looks Like the Old IBMOracle is an aging tech company that lacks real growth engines and repeatedly props up its earnings with buybacks. It’s stuck in the same downward spiral as IBM used to be, and it lacks the motivation of IBM under Ginni Rometty to break the cycle. Therefore, I’d avoid Oracle and stick with stronger tech companies — like Amazon or Microsoft — even though they trade at higher valuations.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/06/20/the-new-oracle-looks-like-the-old-ibm.aspx
Other
- IBM CIO Focuses on User Experience to Keep Staff Happy
New employees expect that the IT services they use at work will be as good as or better than the technology they use at home, he said. To be competitive and attract talent, “we have to create an environment where talented engineers want to work,” he added.
To that end, Mr. Previn and the design team have created new ways for employees to get and set up new devices. Device provisioning, or the act of assigning employees laptops, desktops and mobile phones with the appropriate encryption, email and productivity software, can be costly and time-consuming for IT departments.
Mr. Previn’s user-research team oversaw a monthslong project in which they observed how much friction was involved for employees setting up their laptops. Many of the steps are now automated and cloud-based, similar to the way a consumer would be able to set up a device out of the box. “That’s materially different from an experience standpoint,” Mr. Previn said.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-cio-focuses-on-user-experience-to-keep-staff-happy-11560984488
News You Can Use: 8/22/2018
- Will vendor rankings replace magic quadrants? HfS Research thinks so
We’re done, the whole quadrant craze is starting to smell pretty bad and we know the industry is fed up with it. Increasingly, many of these 2×2 matrices are missing several of the market leaders (who refuse to participate) and having them all stacked in the top right just smacks of pay-for-play (even if the analyst has fair intentions). Let’s be honest, noone trusts these matrices and they are harming the entire credibility of the analyst industry. Sure, there are many honest, quality analysts with integrity, but their craft is being soiled by several quacks who are basing their vendor placements purely on vendor briefings, whether they like a particular vendor, and whether some vendors pony up for their research services. There are many “analysts” out there who do not bother to do sufficient customer research and we all suspect who these characters (and their employers) are…
- Transactions without conflict
It’s possible to negotiate a substantial contract in a few minutes by email—if both sides care more about forward motion than they care about the last decimal point. Or, to be more honest about it, if they care more about the benefits of the future than they care about the narrative of treating their partner like an opponent.
In an economy based on connection instead of scarcity, the ease of those connections, the reliability built into them, our confidence that the future will match promises made–all of these benefits dwarf the narcissistic narrative of the deal maker who simply seeks to win today, at all costs.
- How Brexit could create a crisis at the Irish border
- Talking about your team’s success too much in an interview could cost you the job
“If it kind of comes out in part of your interview where maybe you were part of a team and you’re really only talking about the accomplishments of the team and not necessarily your individual contributions and what they did, I think that’s something that can hold people back,” Salzer, who is a solutions architect at Amazon Web Services, told Business Insider.
Instead, make it clear that you were a key contributor to your company. Emphasizing your individual accomplishments in a team is a key way to sway hiring managers.
https://www.businessinsider.com/interview-tips-amazon-jobs-2018-8
- We need to talk about organizational change management
We know, for example, that 70 percent of change programs fail to achieve their goals, largely due to employee resistance and lack of management support. We also know that when people are truly invested in change it is 30 percent more likely to stick. While companies have been obsessing about how to use digital to improve their customer-facing businesses, the application of digital tools to promote and accelerate internal change has received far less scrutiny. However, applying new digital tools can make change more meaningful—and durable—both for the individuals who are experiencing it and for those who are implementing it.
https://diginomica.com/2018/08/16/we-need-to-talk-about-organizational-change-management/
Photo by Josh Blanton on Unsplash