Experfy Insights

Businesses have no choice but to adapt to this new environment if they want to retain any semblance of relevance for the times to come. So how fast are things evolving? How different is the new size and growth of IT and business services, and how will these take shape across technology, business process management, analytics, automation and AI?  New research from HFS examines how enterprises and service providers are coping with the immediate and future challenges brought by Covid-19. Enterprises and service providers need to focus on farming existing business verses hunting for new business.

Any change in an organization can produce anxiety and cultural shock. But digital transformation doesn't have to disable a company's operations. Using a hybrid approach can ease the transition and keep team members happy across the board. Utilizing a hybrid cloud approach provides a buffer for change-resistant employees and departments and also offers the means for swift and successful forward movement for the people who are already on board with the transformation. After taking the first step to a hybrid cloud model, enterprises can make the transition to full could in smaller steps, with less complexity.

The Database Management system is just a tool to manage databases. It does not come with intellectual properties for a specific application domain. You must develop those. You must model, design, and implement your databases with a DBMS. Similarly, you must design, model, and implement your processes with a BPMS. Enterprise reference architectures and stacks are becoming increasingly cluttered and complex. What’s needed is a pragmatic approach that focuses on process and data.

One question that is being asked in workplaces around the world is: will AI take my job? This is perhaps unsurprising given the dystopian predictions being bounced around by the media of robots outsmarting us and destroying millions of livelihoods.  While it’s clear that AI is changing the face of the workforce, we should not get swept up in the media frenzy. Indeed, if we take a step back and calmly consider the more realistic impact of AI, the picture is far less worrisome. The growing role of this technology instead holds fantastic promise.

If there's truth behind the common call to “grow your people, grow your business” shouldn’t HR be the most important department in a company? It's time to stop viewing HR reps as purely administrative and give them a seat at the board by adopting the principle of “people enablement.” At its essence, people enablement is a more holistic approach towards individual development. Together, HR and the C-Suite can shape the future of their companies, better preparing themselves for this new reality, all while supporting employees readying to be confronted by the changes. 

Marketers are relying on more integrated tech stacks combined with AI applications to increase real-time responsiveness with customers across multiple channels. Marketers who take on the challenging work of improving customer experiences using AI are 22% more likely to see revenue gains – some as high as 30%, according to Kelton Global. Marketing leaders investing in AI are making their investments pay off by enabling more consistent, coordinated cross-channel experiences, driving greater revenue as a result. 

The findings of this paper indicate that the main fields of application for blockchain technology in the financial industry are trade finance, capital markets, payments, and identity management. Innovation competence can be embedded in an organization via a centralized structure, decentralized structure, or hybrid structure combining properties of both. Furthermore, this paper has outlined the benefits of different organizational forms of blockchain projects. Banks mainly join small or large private consortia in order to share costs, R&D resources and attain a substantial market power. 

Over the past two weeks, many employers have been forced to reconsider the global mobility of their workforce and to facilitate the large-scale adoption of home working. Prior to this, despite common rhetoric around the decline of the physical office, evidence suggests relatively low levels of home working (less than 5%) with little signs of this growing considerably in the near future. Will COVID-19 represent a shock to the system that changes our ways of working moving forward, so that higher numbers of individuals work at home?

With digital technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, high-tech robotics and the Internet of Things disrupting and displacing human labour at an accelerating rate, the workers of today and tomorrow face uncertainty about job security. It is imperative that educators, policy makers and employers think carefully about how to prepare workers for the new future of work and take action before it’s too late. The exponential nature of digital technologies means we are experiencing change at an accelerating pace. The digital hyperconnectivity of all things and people, especially through the Internet of Things, means increasing interdependency.

As our technology becomes vastly more powerful and complex, ethical issues are increasingly rising to the fore. Over the next decade we will have to build some consensus on issues like what accountability a machine should have and to what extent we should alter the nature of life. The answers are far from clear-cut, but we desperately need to find them. We need a more public dialogue about the technologies we are building to achieve some kind of consensus of what the risks are and what we as a society are willing to accept.

How are business and management going to be reshaped in the future in a post-coronavirus world? As more people are forced to work online and remotely, companies and employees are developing new skills and comfort levels. Low-priority work is being ignored and may vanish. Companies will learn what jobs really need to be done and will attempt to re-engineer the workplace. This will result in many jobs being cut and redefined. As people adapt to achieving efficiency while working remotely, new economic opportunities will arise.

Many leaders were fixated on the outdated idea that ‘only certain roles’ could be done remotely. These same leaders tended to perceive people who wanted to work from home as being ‘driven by a need for balance’. As a result, remote workers were seen as lazy while more ambitious workers were ‘present and accounted for’. With this sudden and complete shift to remote work for almost all workers, leaders will be faced with a new data set from their own experience. It is one that demonstrates that many roles – including their own – can be done successfully remotely.

If blockchain is to fulfill its promise and join the Internet and AI as a major 21st century transformative technology, it must lead, over time, to the creation of innovative new applications, companies, industries and markets.  When designing the network’s path to value, organizations should consider how they can radically shift more power to the consumer or capture the long tail.  Founders of new market networks may seek opportunities to exploit underutilized assets by bringing them into the sharing economy or create new partnerships.

Spark gives memory errors a lot of times, and it is only when you genuinely work on big datasets with spark, would you be able to truly work with Spark. This article tries to summarize a few of the problems that you may face around memory issues and configurations while working with Spark and how to solve them. There are a lot of other configuration options in Spark, which this article has not covered, but hope this post gives you some clarity on how to set these and use them.

The benefit of hybrid AI systems is that they can combine the strengths of neural networks and symbolic AI. Neural nets can find patterns in the messy information we collect from the real world, such as visual and audio data, large corpora of unstructured text, emails, chat logs, etc. And on their part, rule-based AI systems can perform symbol-manipulation operations on the extracted information. Despite the heavy dismissal of hybrid artificial intelligence by connectionists, there are plenty of examples that show the strengths of these systems at work.

Technically, TLS 1.3 is the seventh iteration of the SSL/TLS protocol. SSL 1.0 was never officially released, 2.0 and 3.0 were short-lived. And then TLS 1.0 was introduced as a replacement to SSL. There were some technical differences between SSL and TLS – namely, at first, whether the connection began by port or by protocol – but the premise was largely the same. TLS 1.0 was replaced by 1.1, which was succeeded by TLS 1.2 two years later in 2008. TLS 1.3 was finalized last in 2018.

One of hottest topics among freelancers this week is the future of remote work. That’s my question this week to freelance leaders: How do you see the medium and longer term impact on your business of the current ‘shift to remote’ of your clients because of COVID-19? Overall, leaders see remote as a game changer and a win/win for freelancers, organizations and employees. But, sustainability needs a firm foundation: the right investment, good operational plumbing, smart HR systems, strong soft skills, and outstanding communication. 

New technologies are reshaping the educational sector, making it easier to create, deliver, and share course materials. And instead of expensive textbooks and software tools, students can now access free resources that save them money and provide a better learning experience. This especially benefits the STEM field, as tech-savvy students are eager to use online resources to improve their education. While they seek knowledge, students should also work on their critical thinking skills and learn how to communicate more effectively with their peers and teachers.

Companies and organisations across world are dealing with an unprecedented and serious impact­ on their ability to do work. Once the economic crisis begins­ to abate, businesses and industr­y will face a new challenge: how to quickly and flexibly rebuild their workforce, with the skills and expertise they need for the new opportunities in a transformed economy. Not only do institutions have an obligation to ensure their employees are future-ready, but it is also a strategic opportunity for them to engage in a fast-moving area of the future of work.

The Platform Security Architecture (PSA) offers a framework for securing connected devices. It provides a step-by-step guide to building in the right level of device security, reducing risk around data reliability, and allowing businesses to innovate on new ideas to reap the benefits of digital transformation. The PSA is a holistic set of threat models, security analyses, hardware and firmware architecture specifications, and an open-source firmware reference implementation. There is need to address the issues associated with developing and productizing secure embedded systems and IoT devices.

No doubt, it seems like video conferencing and remote work will become increasingly mainstream. But there are other corners of the tech industry that could be poised for transformations. One is actually Robotic Process Automation (RPA). As is the case with any technology, RPA is not a cure-all. It certainly has its disadvantages, like high license costs and difficulties with scaling. Successful implementations also require a strong focus on change management within the enterprise.

Becoming a remote organisation means that your employees should become a digital employee. This requires a shift in mindset and, more importantly, a change in culture. The idea is that building a culture with co-located teams is easier than with remote work. However, when working remote, you know that building a company culture will be hard, and hence, fully remote companies pay a lot of attention to it. However, if you all of a sudden have to switch to a remote-working culture, the challenge might even be harder.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed business and work as we know it. But, unlike the pandemic — which is temporary — the change in the way we work will be permanent. As organizations navigate the shift towards remote work, culture is what will dictate success. Businesses that are able to nurture and strengthen their company culture during this time will come out of the crisis more resilient; therefore better prepared to face the challenges and disruptions that lie ahead. As companies continue to navigate uncharted waters with the pandemic, they will mark the path for the future of work.

Blockchain, IoT and AI are innovations providing tremendous benefits for security, transparency, immutability, privacy and the automatization of business processes. However, the impact of these innovations is even higher when blockchain, IoT and AI are combined. We argue that these innovations will converge in the future, driving the digitization of the industry. This convergence will increase the quality of data management by reaching a higher degree of standardization, privacy and security of data. Blockchain technology, combined with IoT and AI, will pave the way to a new age of digitization.