Tag: millennials

Posted on

News You Can Use: 6/15/2016

sn_sparkle_Jamie Street

  • Can Vendor Scorecards Cut Down on IT Project Failures?

    Besides providing performance feedback during a large project, the scorecards also are expected to be a way for the state to take into account previous performance in future procurements, something that has been difficult to do in the past because evaluations were based on requirements built into the procurement vehicles. “We had no systemic way of measuring performance and taking it into account,” Ramos said. “We saw that as a gap.”

    http://www.govtech.com/state/Can-Vendor-Scorecards-Cut-Down-on-IT-Project-Failures.html

  • AI Will not Save Procurement … It Will Only Hasten its Demise

    An AI can detect the presence of risk indicators that you have defined against known risks, it cannot identify risk indicators for unknown risks. If the algorithm doesn’t understand that a tsunami is a risk because it can damage harbours and destroy coastal plants, the risk will not be identified until it discovers a news story about how the supplier plant had to shut down. And if it does not understand that legal proceedings can bankrupt a small company, it could overlook a filing with the potential to bankrupt the supplier. If the supplier was strategic, that is something the organization would want to know about immediately.

    http://sourcinginnovation.com/wordpress/2016/06/03/ai-will-not-save-procurement-it-will-only-hasten-its-demise/

  • DAO: A Sandbox For ‘Smart Contracts’

    Smart contracts are the digital equivalent of the pen-and-paper kind which, even today, are the gatekeepers to major business relationships. Smart contracts work by executing themselves automatically under a given set of conditions, which are pre-programmed into the software that supports them. In the case of DAO, funds will be transferred based on a majority vote, which itself is executed by digital signatures. Slock.it is the company behind DAO’s smart contract infrastructure.

    Also:

    The issue is one of control. There is potential for smart contracts to put buyer-supplier relationships under significant strain if, for instance, a dispute occurs and adequate consideration has not been given to the process for dealing with this in the digital setting. In computer-to-computer purchasing, for example, with which party does the burden of proof sit? The recent and public SWIFT-Bangladesh Bank saga has already showcased the extent of the tensions caused by disagreements over who’s system is at fault.

    http://www.procurementleaders.com/blog/my-blog–harry-john/dao-a-sandbox-for-smart-contracts-620229

  • How to Keep Millennials in Procurement

    Another differentiating characteristic about millennials is that they are not as interested as previous generations in climbing the traditional career ladder, going from a junior buyer to a senior buyer, to a manager and on to procurement director, Peck said. They can be happy with lateral career moves that spark change in their daily routine or challenge them in a new way.

    Career training, too, is highly valued among millennials — something Peck pointed out was a huge positive for procurement and supply chain organizations. In her experience, Peck said it can be “like pulling teeth” to encourage other generations of employees to take training courses or continue their education. With millennials, however, this isn’t a problem.

    http://spendmatters.com/2016/06/02/how-to-keep-millennials-in-procurement/

  • The Purchase Order Is In … Now What?

    At ROYCE, we’ve been burned in the past because we were so starstruck that a luxury department store actually chose us that it blinded us from the far-reaching implications of that order. No one was asking the important questions — What’s their credit history? What are the logistics chargebacks? What the hell is a “loyalty discount?” (Side note: I will never forget the time that a prestigious UK retailer gave us a significant PO, only to subtly mention in the fine print that there were 21 percent off worth of discounts and co-op advertising costs, after already succumbing to aggressively discounted landed costs!) There’s nothing more anticlimactic than landing a career deal, only to meekly utter “thanks, but no thanks.”

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/276640

  • ‘Vendor overload’ adds to CISO burnout

    “The new CISO is more the CIRO (chief information risk officer) tasked with managing risk to data and technology,” said Dawn-Marie Hutchinson, executive director in the Office of the CISO at Optiv.

    “Five years ago, the role was buried many layers down in the organization, if it existed at all,” she said. “Today, the CISO is a business leader.”

    Diedre Diamond, founder and CEO of CyberSN, speaking at the recent SOURCE Boston conference, offered three other reasons: Lack of understanding of the role, lack of advancement potential and unhappiness with leadership or company culture.

    http://www.csoonline.com/article/3077243/it-careers/vendor-overload-adds-to-ciso-burnout.html

Posted on

News You Can Use: 5/25/2016

sn_conference_Benjamin Child

  • The Future Of HR And Why Startups Shouldn’t Reject It

    A recent Motherboard piece took a look at the impact of no HR on company culture. It found that women are more often than not the most vulnerable employees due to startups’ lack of HR and general anti-harassment procedures. The article states, “Ultimately, these structural issues contribute to one of the greatest systemic problems facing working women today: barriers to advancement, known to many as the glass ceiling.” And over the years some of the biggest tech startups have had accusations of harassment levied at them.

    http://www.fastcompany.com/3059673/the-future-of-hr-and-why-startups-shouldnt-reject-it

  • Go Deep and Go Wide with Procurement Analytics

    Data unification is a two-step process that catalogs all data sources and uses that information about data to build a global reference that shows how all of the data relates to the questions at hand. This resource is typically built through a combination of machine learning and smart sourcing of human experts, and provides three clear benefits: making exponentially more data available for analysis, eliminating the biggest contributor to analysis time overhead – data preparation, and building in repeatability so any analysis that has been done can be rerun at anytime with no repeat of the data preparation.

    http://www.procurementleaders.com/blog/my-blog–guest-blog/go-deep-and-go-wide-with-procurement-analytics-617110

  • A 40 Hour Work Week . . . Really?

    Of course, I’m being a fit facetious here but I don’t think it’s all that far from the truth. Here’s a shocking business statistic: if you or anybody on your team wastes just one hour per day — and please understand that I’m also guilty of this — it equates to six weeks of wasted time per year! Isn’t that incredible? That’s a lot of vacation time. My advice: just work hard when you are at work. Of course, we all need some down time to handle personal matters but do so sparingly because you can’t get those hours back.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/272480

  • Call me crazy (regarding conference calls)

    A conference call is over when someone uses one of the many conversational gaps, false starts, or “No, you go” truces to suggest that perhaps for clarity we should put our ideas in writing. As if to say, “Yeah, I guess flip-flops weren’t a good choice for this 5K run.” Acknowledging that we’ve engaged in the discourse equivalent of a toddler’s squiggle drawing. Hinting that next time we play Marco Polo we could try a swimming pool instead of the Indian Ocean.

    http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/hang-up-the-conference-call

  • Want to Improve Your Decision-Making? Shut up for 10 days.

    Insight meditation, also known as vipassana, is a method handed down by Gautama Buddha himself to his followers. Insight meditation focuses on maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations, without judgment. Students first take a vow of silence. They then enter into a daily routine of sitting for as many as 11 hours per day, renouncing all other religious or ritualistic practices, eating only vegetarian fare and not speaking except during a short Q&A session with the teacher.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/275536

  • How AI And Crowdsourcing Are Remaking The Legal Profession

    “If you were to download everything in the PACER system, it would cost you hundreds of millions, if not more,” says Lewis of Ravel Law, which has found an alternative by partnering with Harvard Law School to digitize its archive. “They’ve made an effort to collect every … court decision from every state and federal court over the last 200 years,” Lewis says. Ravel collects new information in real time. “The courts themselves are doing a much better job of pushing out today’s law,” he adds. Ravel has published the complete case law for California and New York. It aims to offer all U.S. federal and state law online by mid 2017, for free.

    http://www.fastcompany.com/3059725/how-ai-and-crowdsourcing-are-remaking-the-legal-profession

  • The Chinese Millennials

    We have heard the stories of changing and increasing wages. The migrant workforce in China’s eastern coastal cities is also changing. Today, young people coming to the factory towns from rural China are less open to the long working hours, constant overtime and poor working conditions. Today’s Chinese Millennials stand apart from their parents and grandparents. They have many new economic opportunities, they are focused on the present, they are interested in more work/life balance, and they have become conspicuous consumers.

    http://www.scmr.com/article/the_chinese_millennials

Photo: Benjamin Child

Posted on

News You Can Use: 3/16/2016

sn_rocketx_SpaceX

  • Two-Thirds Of Americans Think Robots Will Take Our Jobs By 2065
    sn_automationcomp_pew
    http://www.fastcompany.com/3057695/the-future-of-work/two-thirds-of-americans-think-robots-will-take-our-jobs-by-2065
  • Procurement Managers See Pressure to Reduce Costs Ramping Up

    “One clear differentiator we saw in the research this year was the recognition of the value of improved market intelligence,” says Sawchuk. “Procurement leaders are realizing that higher-quality information can help them drive greater business value. Big data has been a game changer when it comes to customer analytics, offering an unprecedented ability to quickly model massive volumes of structured and unstructured data from multiple sources. But procurement’s lack of maturity in market intelligence is a significant obstacle that must be overcome.”

    http://www.scmr.com/article/procurement_managers_see_pressure_to_reduce_costs_ramping_up#When:16:45:59Z

  • Why Do Half of Millennials Still Live With Mommy and Daddy?
    sn_1457476157_Women
    http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/272152
  • Why Millennial Women Are Burning Out

    A study from the University of Kansas found that women are burning out faster than men after looking at attrition rates of journalists. According to the research, women reported higher levels of overload and intention to leave the field.

    The author of the study “examined the numbers through gender socialization theory, which claims that society puts certain expectations on people based on their gender from a very young age. Where women are more often expected to provide the majority of family care and raise children, men are expected to be the breadwinners and put work obligations before family. That was supported by the findings showing that women experience significantly higher rates of role overload, or feel that they are unable to complete their assigned duties in the work time allowed,” notes the University of Kansas study.

    http://www.fastcompany.com/3057545/the-future-of-work/why-millennial-women-are-burning-out

  • In pursuit of HIPAA, a new compliance gap arises

    The operations team was leaning toward encrypting the hard drives, because options that are fairly easy to deploy are available. I agreed that it would be easy to do, but I objected that the method wouldn’t really be effective from a security perspective (and encryption is one thing that should be all about security). When you encrypt a hard drive, you are ensuring that anyone who comes into possession of that drive can’t access the data. In other words, the only way such encryption would protect the company would be if the hard drive were stolen. Now, the likelihood is infinitesimally small that a bad guy is going to determine where our highly secure data center is located; get past the security guards, man traps and biometrics; and then figure out which of the hundreds of drives to pull out.

    http://www.cio.com/article/3041649/security/in-pursuit-of-hipaa-a-new-compliance-gap-arises.html#tk.rss_all

  • eWorld: technology and talent trends that will shake-up procurement

    Technology and talent are increasingly part of the same sphere and this hit home over the course of the day. Artificial intelligence (AI) may reduce procurement specialists’ need for cognitive capabilities in analysing what the procurement outsourcing & consulting company, Optimum Procurement Group, call ‘hard trends’ – for example demographic data suggest the aging ‘baby boomers’ will increase the public spending in public health facilities. This would modify the capability requirements of procurement professionals.

    Certain roles and skills could be redundant in the future, yet, AI are not sophisticated enough in dealing with soft trends – i.e. something that may happen depending on several interdependencies – which requires more complex and agile analysis. Qualitative and soft skills are increasingly important capabilities in the procurement professionals.

    http://www.procurementleaders.com/blog/my-blog–aaron-mo/eworld-technology-and-talent-trends-that-will-shake-up-procurement-604735

  • HR Analytics: How Should Big Data Be Used in the Workplace?

    When employers use predictive models to decide not to train people who, for instance, are on the verge of being either fired or awarded promotions, they’re basing their decisions on what an algorithm says may or may not happen, rather than what employees are actually doing. People are unpredictable, and unknown factors can influence outcomes. Decisions that affect people should be informed by data, but made by people.

    http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/271753

  • Metrics that count

    In 2015, Gartner conducted a survey in conjunction with Supply Chain Management Review (SCMR) to address that question and to gain a better understanding of how manufacturing metrics are characterized, developed, and used to link manufacturing and supply chain performance.

    http://www.scmr.com/article/metrics_that_count#When:20:26:46Z

Photo: Space X

Posted on

News You Can Use: 2/24/2016

sn_iPhone_Luis Llerena

  • Why the FBI’s request to Apple will affect civil rights for a generation

    Apple is being asked to specifically create new software to circumvent their security controls. They aren’t being asked to use existing capabilities, since those no longer work. The FBI wants a new version of the operating system designed to allow the FBI to brute force attack the phone.

    The FBI is using a highly emotional, nationally infamous terrorism case as justification for the request.

    http://www.cio.com/article/3034229/ios/why-the-fbis-request-to-apple-will-affect-civil-rights-for-a-generation.html#tk.rss_all

    Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter And Yahoo Quietly Add Their Support To Apple’s Fight Against FBI

    The statement from RGS says: “It is extremely important to deter terrorists and criminals and to help law enforcement by processing legal orders for information in order to keep us all safe. But technology companies should not be required to build in backdoors to the technologies that keep their users’ information secure. RGS companies remain committed to providing law enforcement with the help it needs while protecting the security of their customers and their customers’ information.”

    The RGS coalition is made up of 10 major U.S. technology companies: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Dropbox, Evernote, LinkedIn and AOL.

    http://www.ibtimes.com/microsoft-facebook-twitter-yahoo-quietly-add-their-support-apples-fight-against-fbi-2312503

  • Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser on the Next Industrial Revolution

    S+B: What does it mean to have every product you make incorporate sensors and be connected in the cloud? Is this your way of approaching manufacturing in every one of your diverse businesses?

    KAESER: That’s exactly what it is. We’ve got energy generation. We’ve got energy management. We’ve got automation for manufacturing, and products for industries like oil and gas, food and beverage, mining, all that good stuff. And there are vertical software applications for certain industries. Those applications are all based on hardware that provides data through sensors. We look at that data, analyze it, and then make applications out of it. Think about turbines for a utility. We help the utility company analyze how much service its power plants need based on fuel consumption, the utilization rates, and the maintenance data.

    http://www.strategy-business.com/article/Siemens-CEO-Joe-Kaeser-on-the-Next-Industrial-Revolution?gko=efd41

  • How to Motivate Millennials, By Millennials

    1. Be liberal with trust, autonomy and creative freedom.
    Millennials seek job environments where they are trusted by their supervisors and given the creative freedom and flexibility to make decisions and find their own path to success. Millennials are not drawn to instructions like those found with Ikea furniture — just give them the plywood, glue, a vision and a due date.

    Also, one myth that should be dispelled about millennials is that they hop from job to job, because they are aimless or disloyal. Indeed, they do change jobs more often than most, but in most cases, it is because they are impatient with systems that stifle their ability to innovate, be empowered and ultimately stay happy. Gottstein attributes the fact that she has stayed with The Go Game for almost six years (a long time by millennial standards) because her bosses trust and provide her with a space to be creative and grow.

    http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/270764

  • Cover Letters Are Dead: Do This Instead

    Most companies today recruit online and receive applications through software systems that often don’t include a section for a cover letter,” she says. “Some industries, particularly those in Silicon Valley, receive a large amount of applications. The pace at which companies need talent has also grown exponentially, so finding the right person quickly is very important

    They are suggesting adding a summary to your resume and highlight accomplishments.
    http://www.fastcompany.com/3056444/the-future-of-work/cover-letters-are-dead-do-this-instead

  • Getting the most out of conferences

    I see conferences as an important mechanism for expanding the universe of smart people you can have conversations with. In fact, most conference organizers have their value proposition all wrong. The primary benefit of attendance lies not in listening to best-selling keynoters. Does one really have to fly eight hours and spend thousands of dollars for information that could be collected simply by reading a book, listening to a podcast or watching a YouTube video? No, but by attending a conference, you gain the benefit of those outside-the-lecture-hall conversations with smart people working hard on the same kinds of problems you are.

    Unfortunately, the way most conferences are designed today, the only places you can meet your peers are in the bathroom or during the overly compressed “feeding times.” Neither is the optimal venue for meaningful experience exchange or executive development.

    http://www.cio.com/article/3033809/leadership-management/getting-the-most-out-of-conferences.html#tk.rss_all

  • The Most Innovative Companies of 2016
    Buzzfeed… Really?
    http://www.fastcompany.com/most-innovative-companies