A recent study has found that 62 percent of organizations are still using Microsoft Office 365 applications on-premises rather than in the cloud, a rather shortsighted decision that can potentially cost an organization millions of dollars a year.

The study was conducted by Softchoice, an IT managed services provider headquartered in Toronto. In a recent interview, I discussed the study with Chris Woodin, director of the Microsoft business unit at Softchoice, and I asked him for the backstory behind the idea to conduct this particular study on Office 365. His response indicated that there was a strong business case for it:

The backstory is that Softchoice and our peers have sold a ton of Office 365 over the last six to seven years, and we were selling it on the benefit that when you move these productivity applications and servers into the cloud, you would increase strength of security and decrease operational costs. We’ve been surprised to see that customers aren’t adopting Office 365 in the cloud at the rate you would expect, given those potential benefits, and in many cases they were still only utilizing Office 365 as a licensing model to continue to operate the environment the way they had traditionally done on-premise. So we wanted to understand whether that observation is accurate, and if so, where specifically it’s most pronounced and what companies like Softchoice can do to help those customers gain the benefits that were originally intended when they made the investment in Microsoft Cloud.

Woodin went on to explain the overarching reasons why so many organizations are still using Office 365 apps on-premise rather than in the cloud:

The first is that these are organizations who have been operating those applications on-premise for decades, and what that means is they’ve got other dependent applications that work with those Microsoft productivity workloads on-premise that may not work effectively in their current state when you move them into the cloud. They’ve also spent decades administering that environment on-premise. So they don’t have the skills or capacity in their IT department to manage those workloads in the cloud. Traditionally, there were also concerns about the security ramifications of moving your data and applications into the cloud and outside the direct scope of your hands-on control. That hesitation has largely gone away as the industry understands that Microsoft can secure your data and your applications better than you can. And I would also say there’s a short-term cost associated with a migration. Typically, you’re going to want to work with an integration partner like Softchoice and our peers to help plan, deploy, and potentially manage the first few months of your experience in the cloud. So those are some of the reasons why we’ve seen customers reluctant to make the transition to cloud. One thing, though, is that very few customers, if any of them at all anymore, would say that they don’t see the value in moving their Office 365 applications and data into the cloud. And they’re not saying they don’t eventually intend to do so. It’s more about the fact that they haven’t found the ability to do it right now. But the benefits of doing it are mounting very quickly, and so we think the survey is timely, because we do think there’s going to be — and we’re already seeing it — a big pickup in the pace of migrations to the cloud.

I asked Woodin if the study found that any particular industries are any more or less likely to use Office 365 on-premise than other industries are. He said the two industries that have been least likely to move their Office 365 applications into the cloud are health care and legal:

The main reason for both comes down to having a lot of workloads that depended on Office applications that those industries were not ready to adapt for the cloud. For example in health care, many of our customers utilize [electronic medical records] systems that are dependent on locally installed Office applications and servers. That’s starting to change as the EMR companies are getting much more modern and adaptable for 365 applications. Same thing with legal. They use a lot of legal-centric applications that tie in to Office applications that until recently didn’t play well in the cloud. Those issues are starting to be overcome. The other reason, particularly as it relates to health care, is that the health care industry is probably the most risk-averse industry when it comes to technology, and so they took a much longer wait-and-see approach to the cloud than I think most other verticals have. But we’re now seeing more health care organizations all across the United States and Canada start to make large migrations into the cloud with both Office 365 and server applications on Azure.

So are there circumstances under which an organization would be well-advised to use Office 365 apps on-premise rather than in the cloud? Woodin said there are:

The most common reason right now would be if you’re utilizing applications that depend on Office functionality, and those dependent applications haven’t been modernized to coexist with Office 365 applications in the cloud. The other reason is that, if your business is operating in an environment where internet bandwidth is unreliable, that can create a risk for Office 365 adoption. So one of the services that Softchoice and its peers often provide in preparation for a 365 migration is an assessment of network performance and capacity, and in some cases bolstering network capacity before we plan the migration so that no one experiences a degradation in performance or availability after the migration. For what it’s worth, if we’d been having this conversation 18 months ago, I would have said security concerns are an issue; I don’t think that’s the case today. Our experience has been that our customers who operate Office applications and the productivity servers that support them, such as Exchange and SharePoint and Skype, on-premise are actually more prone to risk from a security perspective than they are when they move them into the cloud.

Finally, I asked Woodin what incentive Microsoft has to encourage its customers to use Office 365 in the cloud rather than on-premise. He said Microsoft’s number-one incentive is more reliable recurring revenue:

Here’s the issue: If I operate Office on-premise, I’m not really dependent on Microsoft for that technology to continue to operate. And at any time I could essentially end my subscription with Microsoft, and as long as I still own perpetual licensing rights to the technology, I could operate without having to pay Microsoft anything further going forward. But when I utilize Office 365 in the cloud, and I purchase it through a subscription for that, the chances of me just dropping Microsoft as a vendor go way down.

A contributing writer on IT management and career topics with IT Business Edge since 2009, Don Tennant began his technology journalism career in 1990 in Hong Kong, where he served as editor of the Hong Kong edition of Computerworld. After returning to the U.S. in 2000, he became Editor in Chief of the U.S. edition of Computerworld, and later assumed the editorial directorship of Computerworld and InfoWorld. Don was presented with the 2007 Timothy White Award for Editorial Integrity by American Business Media, and he is a recipient of the Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for editorial excellence in news coverage. Follow him on Twitter @dontennant.

The post Not Using Office 365 in the Cloud Can Cost Millions, Study Finds appeared first on IT Business Edge.

We’ve all probably seen it: When the IT organization is directed to cut costs, one of the first things to go is the training budget, and learning and development fall by the wayside. The reason is simple: Training tends to be seen as a cost, rather than as an investment.

It’s difficult to fault business executives for that. Any investment needs to be tied to business objectives, and deliver business results, and the return on investment of learning and training can be murky, at best. But according to Patti and Jack Phillips, CEO and chairman, respectively, of the ROI Institute, it doesn’t have to be that way.

In their new book, “The Business Case for Learning: Using Design Thinking to Deliver Business Results and Increase the Investment in Talent Development,” the Phillipses discuss how to demonstrate learning and development ROI to even the most skeptical business executive. Here’s an encapsulation of their eight-step process:

Start with why: Aligning programs with the business. We’ve heard “start with the end in mind” many times, but the end is not having great programs that participants see as valuable. The end is important business measures in the organization. The business measure is the “why” for the program. Whether the payoff need is to bump up growth, improve safety records, boost inadequate customer service, or something else, it needs to be expressed as a specific measure. The task is to identify the specific business measure that must change so that the program delivers business value.

Make it feasible: Selecting the right solution. With the business need clearly defined, the next step is to decide on the solution to improve the business measure. What should target employees be doing or stop doing that will have the appropriate influence on the business measure? This sometimes requires only a few questions. In other situations, additional analysis is needed, using techniques such as problem-solving, brainstorming, fishbone diagrams, records review, focus groups, nominal group technique, and others in an attempt to understand what’s causing the business problem or what’s keeping the business measure from being what it should be, if this is an opportunity.

Expect success: Designing for results. A major outcome from the needs assessment is a clear definition of the objectives. The objectives define the success that’s needed at each level. At the payoff level, the ROI objective is the minimum acceptable return on investment. At the business impact level, it’s the minimum amount of business improvement required to be successful. At the application level, it’s the minimum amount of action, the use of knowledge, skills, tools, and processes. At the learning level, it’s the minimum amount of knowledge and skill that must be learned. And at the reaction level, it’s the minimum level of perceived value. Specific objectives are important to the success of the program, and they define the expectations for everyone, from content designers and developers to facilitators, participants, and managers of the participants.

Make it matter: Designing for input, reaction, and learning. The key to make it matter is to develop a program with content that is relevant, meaningful, important to the individuals and the organization, action-oriented, and something that they will use. This requires prospective participants to decide if this is the right program for them, making sure that they are attending at the right time and the right place, with the proper support. This helps the developers provide examples, activities, and exercises that reflect not only what the participants are learning, but what they will do with what they’ve learned and the impact it will have.

Make it stick: Designing for application and impact. The reality is that if people don’t use what they’ve learned, then it has failed for the organization. Just because participants learned something doesn’t necessarily mean that they will actually use it. Unfortunately, much research continues to show that a lot of what is learned in formal talent development programs is not used on the job. Some studies put this percentage in the range of 60 percent to 90 percent. This is a huge indictment for the learning profession, to admit that so much of your budget is wasted, because participants don’t use what they have learned. Transfer of learning is a process that occurs over time and involves all the stakeholders. Yet there really are some very simple things a company can do that have a big impact. For example, research shows that it takes only about 30 to 60 seconds for a manager of a participant to make the transfer by having a brief discussion to set expectations with the participant before attending the program. And then have another brief discussion when they return to reinforce the expectations and offer support. Making it stick is not as difficult as it seems.

Make it credible: Measuring results and calculating ROI. This step can be one of the most rewarding parts of the process. The first action is to sort out the effects of the learning program from other influences. Simple, easy-to-use techniques are available for this action. It’s where you (and others) clearly see the connection of the program to business measures. If the evaluation is needed at the ROI level, three more actions are needed. The impact measures are converted to money, the costs are tabulated, and the ROI is calculated. This can be accomplished with fourth-grade mathematics. The challenge is to overcome the barriers to moving to this level of evaluation and evaluate at this level only when programs are expensive, important, strategic, and attract the interest of top executives. Net benefits are program benefits minus costs. This formula is essentially the same as the ROI for capital investments. For example, when a firm builds a new plant, the ROI is developed by dividing annual earnings by the investment. The annual earnings are comparable to net benefits (annual benefits minus the cost). The investment is comparable to fully loaded program costs, which represent the investment in the program. The principal barrier here is fear of results, and this should be tackled in a very proactive way. If a program is not successful, you need to understand why it’s not working and correct it. If you are proactive, your various stakeholders will accept this easily, even if the results are very negative. But if you wait to be asked for the impact or ROI, then it places you at a disadvantage. This should be tackled from the mindset of process improvement, making programs better, even if they’re not delivering the desired results.

Tell the story: Communicating results to key stakeholders. The presentation of results can range from executive briefings to blogs. The content can range from a detailed report to a one-page summary. The important point is to tell a story with results. Storytelling is very effective, and it’s the best way to get the audience’s attention and have them remember the results. The outcome data represent a compelling story with very credible, executive-friendly evidence and anecdotes.

Optimize results: Using black box thinking to increase funding. It is helpful to think about the power of the evaluation completed in the previous steps. The results are there, and you know what caused success or failure. If the results are disappointing, you know how to correct it. Black box thinking is needed at this step. In the airline industry, black boxes point to the cause of a crash of an airplane. Investigators analyze the data with the goal to prevent the accident from occurring again. The analysis usually reveals the cause and identifies the actions to be taken to prevent this type of accident in the future. Learning and talent development professionals can take the same approach. In this final step, the programs are evaluated and the data are used to make them better. When this happens, results will improve, and ultimately the ROI is enhanced.

A contributing writer on IT management and career topics with IT Business Edge since 2009, Don Tennant began his technology journalism career in 1990 in Hong Kong, where he served as editor of the Hong Kong edition of Computerworld. After returning to the U.S. in 2000, he became Editor in Chief of the U.S. edition of Computerworld, and later assumed the editorial directorship of Computerworld and InfoWorld. Don was presented with the 2007 Timothy White Award for Editorial Integrity by American Business Media, and he is a recipient of the Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for editorial excellence in news coverage. Follow him on Twitter @dontennant.

The post How to Demonstrate ROI to Avoid Slashing the Training Budget appeared first on IT Business Edge.

Within the next decade, the customer experience in obtaining goods and services will be dramatically altered by the emergence of bots that communicate with each other, leaving nothing for us humans to do in the process other than letting our personal bots know what it is we want.

That’s the vision being championed by Adam Fingerman, chief experience officer and cofounder of ArcTouch, a mobile app designer and developer in San Francisco. In an interview earlier this week, I had the opportunity to discuss this bot-to-bot phenomenon with Fingerman, and I opened the conversation by asking him what the difference is between today’s chat bot, and the business bot he envisions in the coming bot-to-bot world. He said the main difference is that today, there’s a person involved:

All digital interactions right now are very person-driven: I download an app; or I go to a website; or I go into Facebook Messenger and I initiate a conversation with a chatbot; or I ask my Alexa to do something for me. But in the future, we believe that we’ll all have bots working on our behalf who we give ambiguous instructions to, and then they initiate the interactions with the other bots. So people will still be part of the equation, but they won’t necessarily be the focal point in all of the transactions.

Fingerman went on to explain that our personal bots will be the future evolution of the likes of Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant:

Already today, a lot of these kindergarten-level bots have a tremendous amount of context around who you are, where you are, and what’s going on around you. Think of your phone: It has a dozen different sensors on it that can sense everything from your location to your body metrics — your heart rate and things like that. It knows if you’re lying down or standing up, and how fast you’re moving. Those are the explicit sensors, but if you’ve signed in to something like your Google account, there’s information about your contacts, your calendar, your mail — there’s quite a bit of synthesis that can go on. There’s already a lot of information that we give permission to our devices to have access to, and they’ll use that information, hopefully, in positive and proactive ways.

The role of marketing will inevitably change in a bot-to-bot world, Fingerman added:

We have marketers today; in the future, marketing is going to have to focus more on the whole product experience. It used to be that marketing sat on the periphery of an organization — the product was built, and plans were made, and then marketing was told “OK, now go market it.” But marketing becomes central to the whole process, because they really have the pulse of the customer at their fingertips. If you make a great product and focus on the whole product experience, everything takes care of itself, in my mind. You get positive reviews, you don’t have pricing pressure, you can ensure that you are not commoditized.

Finally, I asked Fingerman what problems have to be solved before bot-to-bot goes mainstream. He said more industries need to more actively adopt structured data:

Structured data has become very popular in the past few years as a way to describe information on websites for non-humans to consume. We look at a website and we see the words and the pictures and everything, but really behind the scenes, what people who run websites want is for Google and other search engines to really see and understand that website quickly. So the industry adopted structured data, which is like a taxonomy to describe people and places and things and products and services, and it’s caught on pretty well in the last few years. There’s a Web organization called Schema.org that’s [working on shared vocabularies], but it’s very basic information right now. It’s not really rich enough to allow any one business to differentiate itself from any other business. If you were a car manufacturer, sure, you could add structured data to your website that says “We make cars,” but it doesn’t really go into the nuances that a bot would need to know to make an educated buying decision, such as the fuel efficiency or the decibel level of the interior cabin — lots and lots of information you could add behind the scenes for a bot to consume. I think proactive industries will take this idea of structured data and expand it so that bots can know what they need to know about a particular brand.

A contributing writer on IT management and career topics with IT Business Edge since 2009, Don Tennant began his technology journalism career in 1990 in Hong Kong, where he served as editor of the Hong Kong edition of Computerworld. After returning to the U.S. in 2000, he became Editor in Chief of the U.S. edition of Computerworld, and later assumed the editorial directorship of Computerworld and InfoWorld. Don was presented with the 2007 Timothy White Award for Editorial Integrity by American Business Media, and he is a recipient of the Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for editorial excellence in news coverage. Follow him on Twitter @dontennant.

The post Future Customer Experience Will Be Bot-to-Bot Interaction, Tech Guru Says appeared first on IT Business Edge.

I’ve been around IT pros long enough to know that being in such a high-stress profession can tax a leader’s ability to stay positive and optimistic, which can only have a negative impact on the IT team. Fortunately, there’s a new book out that can help even the most pessimistic IT leader turn things around.

The book, released just last month, is “The Power of Positive Leadership: How and Why Positive Leaders Transform Teams and Organizations and Change the World,” by leadership consultant Jon Gordon. He has come up with what I found to be excellent advice and guidance on how to lead in a way that inspires positivity and optimism. Here are some of his tips:

Stop complaining and blaming. If you’re complaining, you’re not leading. Leaders don’t complain. They focus on solutions. They identify problems and look to solve them in order to create a better future for all. Positive leaders don’t attack people. They attack problems.

Don’t focus on where you are; focus on where you’re going. Lead your team with optimism and vision. Regardless of the circumstances, keep pointing others toward a positive future. Even when Clemson football lost the national championship in 2015, head coach Dabo Swinney believed they would return the following year, and kept pointing his team toward a positive future. He didn’t see the loss as a challenge. He saw an opportunity to come back and win it the following year — and that’s what they did.

Lead with love instead of fear. Fear is draining; love is sustaining. Fear divides; love unites. The key to leading without fear is to provide both love and accountability. Negative leaders provide a lot of fear and accountability, but no love. If your team knows you love them, they will allow you to challenge them. But love must come first. Former CEO Alan Mulally turned Ford around with both love and accountability. He said you have to “love ’em up,” and you have to hold them accountable to the process, principles, and plan. He was able to save Ford and help the economy with a lot of love and a lot of accountability.

Be demanding without being demeaning. Many people think positive leaders are Pollyanna positive people who just smile all the time and don’t care about results. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Positive leaders pursue excellence. They believe in a brighter future, so they take the necessary actions with excellence to create it. Positive leaders are demanding, but aren’t demeaning. They lift others up in order to accomplish their goals, rather than tear them down. They don’t talk at you — they walk and run with you.

Create positive change inside-out. Don’t let your circumstances and outside events define you. You define your circumstances with your vision, beliefs, and action. Many leaders believe they are victims of circumstance. They have an external locus of control. But positive leaders believe they can influence events and outcomes by the way they think and act. Coach Donna Orender is a great example. When she served as commissioner of the WNBA, she saw a lot of negativity amongst those in the corporate offices. There was a feeling that no one cared about women’s basketball, and a lack of belief that the organization could be successful. But Orender saw the passion and optimism in the coaches and players, and she believed in them and in the future of the WNBA. She began building an optimistic belief system and inspired her colleagues to believe in the WNBA’s future as well. By focusing on one success at a time, she helped create a new reality for herself, and changed the organization from the inside-out.

Encourage instead of discourage. Positive leaders are also positive communicators, in that they make people around them better and feel encouraged, instead of hopeless or discouraged. They also spread positive gossip, listen to and welcome new ideas, and give genuine smiles when they speak. Finally, they are great encouragers who uplift the people around them and instill the belief that success is possible. Detroit Pistons coaches Chuck Daly and Brendan Suhr say, “Shout praise, whisper criticism.” Shout praise means recognizing someone in front of their peers. Whisper criticism means coaching them to get better. Both build better people, and better teams.

A contributing writer on IT management and career topics with IT Business Edge since 2009, Don Tennant began his technology journalism career in 1990 in Hong Kong, where he served as editor of the Hong Kong edition of Computerworld. After returning to the U.S. in 2000, he became Editor in Chief of the U.S. edition of Computerworld, and later assumed the editorial directorship of Computerworld and InfoWorld. Don was presented with the 2007 Timothy White Award for Editorial Integrity by American Business Media, and he is a recipient of the Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for editorial excellence in news coverage. Follow him on Twitter @dontennant.

The post Leadership Guru Offers Tips on How to Become a More Positive Leader appeared first on IT Business Edge.

A study of thousands of leadership experiences over the course of three decades has yielded an enlightening conclusion: While the experiences leaders have and the challenges they face over time may change dramatically, what constitutes great leadership doesn’t change significantly at all.

The study is the work of Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, who have just released the sixth version of their book, “The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations.” Here are five key practices that Kouzes and Posner say their research has shown to be time-tested hallmarks of the best leaders:

Model the way. Titles are granted, but it’s your behavior that wins you respect. Exemplary leaders know that if they want to gain commitment and achieve the highest standards, they must be models of the behavior they expect of others. To effectively model that behavior, leaders must first be clear about guiding principles. They must clarify values. Leaders must find their own voice, and then they must clearly and distinctively give voice to their values. Eloquent speeches about common values, however, aren’t nearly enough. Leaders’ deeds are far more important than their words to determine how serious leaders really are about what they say. Words and deeds must be consistent. Exemplary leaders set the example through daily actions that demonstrate they are deeply committed to their beliefs.

Inspire a shared vision. In the study, people talked about their personal-best leadership experiences as times when they imagined an exciting, highly attractive future for their organization. They had visions and dreams of what could be. They had absolute and total personal belief in those dreams, and they were confident in their abilities to make extraordinary things happen. Every organization, every social movement, begins with a dream. The dream or vision is the force that invents the future. To achieve a shared vision, people must believe that leaders understand their needs and have their interests at heart. Leaders breathe life into the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of others, and enable them to see the exciting possibilities that the future holds. Leaders forge a unity of purpose by showing constituents how the dream is for the common good.

Challenge the process. Challenge is the crucible for greatness. Leaders venture out. None of the individuals in the study sat idly by waiting for fate to smile upon them. Leaders are pioneers. They are willing to step out into the unknown. They search for opportunities to innovate, grow, and improve. Exemplary leaders also know that innovation and change involve experimenting and taking risks. One way of dealing with the potential risks and failures of experimentation is to approach change through incremental steps and small wins. Life is the leader’s laboratory, and exemplary leaders use it to conduct as many experiments as possible. Try, fail, learn. Try, fail, learn. Try, fail, learn. That’s the leader’s mantra.

Enable others to act. Grand dreams don’t become significant realities through the actions of a single person. Achieving greatness requires a team effort. It requires solid trust and strong relationships. It requires group collaboration and individual accountability. Leaders foster collaboration and build trust. The more people trust their leaders, and each other, the more they take risks, make changes, and keep moving ahead. This sense of teamwork goes far beyond a few direct reports or close confidants. They engage all those who must make the project work — and in some way, all who must live with the results. Leaders make it possible for others to do good work. They work to make people feel strong, capable, and committed. Exemplary leaders strengthen everyone’s capacity to deliver on the promises they make. When leaders enable people to feel strong and capable — as if they can do more than they ever thought possible — they’ll give it their all and exceed their own expectations.

Encourage the heart. The climb to the top is arduous and steep. People become exhausted, frustrated, and disenchanted. They’re often tempted to give up. Genuine acts of caring uplift the spirits and draw people forward. Recognizing contributions can be one-to-one or with many people. It can come from dramatic gestures or simple actions. It’s part of the leader’s job to show appreciation for people’s contributions and to create a culture of celebrating values and victories. Recognition and celebration aren’t about fun and games, though there is a lot of fun and there are a lot of games when people encourage the hearts of their constituents. Encouragement is, curiously, serious business. It’s how leaders visibly and behaviorally link rewards with performance. When striving to raise quality, recover from disaster, start up a new service, or make dramatic change of any kind, leaders make sure people see the benefit of behavior that’s aligned with cherished values.

A contributing writer on IT management and career topics with IT Business Edge since 2009, Don Tennant began his technology journalism career in 1990 in Hong Kong, where he served as editor of the Hong Kong edition of Computerworld. After returning to the U.S. in 2000, he became Editor in Chief of the U.S. edition of Computerworld, and later assumed the editorial directorship of Computerworld and InfoWorld. Don was presented with the 2007 Timothy White Award for Editorial Integrity by American Business Media, and he is a recipient of the Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for editorial excellence in news coverage. Follow him on Twitter @dontennant.

The post Research Shows Hallmarks of Great Leadership Unchanged over Three Decades appeared first on IT Business Edge.

For all I know, HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the two companies that comprise the former Hewlett-Packard, are bastions of diversity and inclusion. But if they are, they would have to have undergone a remarkable cultural transformation over the last eight years. Because as of 2009, “the culture of HP was not an inclusive culture. In fact, many people there didn’t even want to talk about what the culture was.”

That’s the assessment of Linda Sharkey, who served as HP’s chief talent officer and VP of people development from 2006 to 2009. In a recent interview, Sharkey, now an organizational and leadership development strategist and co-author of “The Future-Proof Workplace: Six Strategies to Accelerate Talent Development, Reshape Your Culture, and Succeed with Purpose,” spoke candidly about her experience at HP, and about her efforts to change the “good ol’ boy” culture there.

Those efforts, Sharkey said, involved finding white male leaders who were open to change:

Let’s be honest, at the top of HP — and since I’ve left I’m not sure that this is still a truism, but I’d be shocked if it wasn’t — it was predominantly white, and male. Even with Meg Whitman [as CEO], it’s still predominantly white and male. In areas where we were able to find some white males who had a global and inclusive attitude, we were able to move the needle considerably. We made it part of their whole promotion and hiring approach. The guy who we put as the czar of diversity was European, and I don’t believe he’s with the company anymore, but we worked with him to create a place where people would get to know the diverse talent, and build relationships with the diverse talent, so that when jobs became open, they knew these individuals, and they were willing to put them in the role. And actually during that period, we increased the number of women who were promoted from mid-level professional positions to higher-level professional positions by 36 percent. That’s because those leaders had what I would call a trans-global leadership perspective of the workplace, and not every leader did. We also had leaders there who were intractable [whose attitude was,] “It’s a natural phenomenon, and it’s going to happen, and I don’t want to look at the stats and how we’re doing at the senior level.” In a couple of places I had to really twist somebody’s arm to hire a woman as a senior vice president who was on the slate and was as qualified as everyone else. And you know what? They drummed one of them out of the corps — she ultimately left the company because she wasn’t like the good ol’ boys. That’s what drove it back to my recognition that it’s an organizational culture issue. If you have a culture that is aggressive, that’s non-inclusive, that really doesn’t believe in collaboration, you’re not going to have a culture that embraces diversity.

Sharkey went on to highlight a secondary factor that she explained this way:

You walk into any company in the world, unless you’re in China or Japan, you see diversity at the lower levels everywhere. The issue is not that we don’t have diverse work forces, we do. The issue is the promotion factor, the career factor. And the root cause, in my mind, is unconscious bias that people carry with them. At HP, we had the traditional approach, where every six months or whatever, you had to report how many diverse direct hires you had within the organization. And it was a numbers game — a quotas game — and if you didn’t meet your quota, you got nicked. That was the common way that companies did it. I think GE [where I had previously worked] had a more focused approach, and I carried that GE experience to HP. But the culture of HP was not an inclusive culture. In fact, many people there didn’t even want to talk about what the culture was. The fallacy was, as we started peeling back the numbers, sure they were meeting quotas, but all of the women were in administrative positions. Businesses were patting themselves on the back and saying, “Isn’t this great, we’ve increased by 3 percent the number of women we have in our organization.” But look at the jobs they were in. So what I started to do was use real data analytics, which most of these companies don’t have. You’d ask them who’s on their list of diverse top talent that’s ready for the next promotion, and they’d look at you like a deer in the headlights. They didn’t know that, because they hadn’t been paying attention to it. They’d just been paying attention to their quotas — they hadn’t been making it a value of the company, and holding the leader accountable for the value of having a diverse and inclusive work force. I think it’s more about inclusion than it is about diversity.

Sharkey said that because the issue of diversity globally is more about gender than it is about nationality or color, she focused on creating a women’s network:

Managers and leaders came to those network meetings, talking about aspirations, career next steps. Then, the leaders created hiring councils in their regions, where they had a regular list of all the women who were at a certain level in the organization, and at a certain performance level — all the women who were ready for promotion. And rather than just allowing the hiring manager to make that decision, the candidates were brought before these hiring councils. The councils would get to know the various candidates, and the slates were put together with women that were ready for promotion. That made it a lot more personal — people knew who these women were, and it really made a huge difference. But it required a lot of energy, a lot of work, and people who were willing to do that. And there were parts of HP that were not willing to do that.

I mentioned to Sharkey that I was editor in chief of Computerworld at the time, and that I editorialized that Ann Livermore was the right choice for the CEO position, rather than Mark Hurd, who had taken over as CEO in 2005. I asked her if she thought her experience at HP would have been different if the board had appointed Livermore rather than Hurd. She said often, very senior women won’t support diversity efforts, and that she wasn’t sure why that’s the case. Sharkey said she therefore didn’t think it would have made any difference:

I think Mark supported diversity — he was not anti-diversity. He could have been more aggressive about it. But I think Ann was a product of the culture at HP, and I don’t think she would have handled it any differently. Evidence seems to show, from my experience, she wouldn’t have handled it any differently.

A contributing writer on IT management and career topics with IT Business Edge since 2009, Don Tennant began his technology journalism career in 1990 in Hong Kong, where he served as editor of the Hong Kong edition of Computerworld. After returning to the U.S. in 2000, he became Editor in Chief of the U.S. edition of Computerworld, and later assumed the editorial directorship of Computerworld and InfoWorld. Don was presented with the 2007 Timothy White Award for Editorial Integrity by American Business Media, and he is a recipient of the Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for editorial excellence in news coverage. Follow him on Twitter @dontennant.

The post Former HP Talent Chief: ‘The Culture of HP Was Not an Inclusive Culture’ appeared first on IT Business Edge.

The United States is seemingly oblivious to looming massive job losses that will inevitably occur as smart machines take over more and more functions that are currently performed by humans. We can’t wait any longer to break out of denial mode, and to begin focusing our attention on career paths and ways of working that require uniquely human skill sets.

That’s the assessment of Ed Hess, professor of business administration at the Darden Graduate School of Business and co-author of the new book, “Humility Is the New Smart: Rethinking Human Excellence in the Smart Machine Age.” Hess has come up with a list of five conversations that we all need to be engaged in as a first step toward redefining the work we do, and how we do it:

CONVERSATION 1: What can I do to stay valuable and employable in a world where jobs are scarce? Simply put, you must start today upgrading your skills so that you can excel at tasks that smart machines won’t be able to do well. Those skills involve thinking critically and creatively, diagnosing and solving non-routine problems, and rendering customized personal services that involve emotions to other human beings.

For example, learn a trade skill that requires real-time complex problem solving and complicated human dexterity; train for a service job where you have to emotionally engage one-to-one to meet people’s individual needs; train to repair smart robots; learn to excel at working as part of a team thinking creatively to solve problems; or get into a technology job and upgrade your skills every year. Start today building your lifelong learning toolbox, because technology will keep advancing and you will need to excel at constantly upgrading your skills to stay ahead of it.

CONVERSATION 2: What can I do to raise kids who will be viable workers in the Smart Machine Age? It can be very tempting to parent your kids the way you were parented. But now that the world has changed, you need to be very conscious of the messages you are sending. Role model a love of learning and data-driven thinking, teach kids how to think critically, how to manage their emotions, and how to iteratively learn every day by trial and error and to not be afraid of making mistakes so long as they learn from them. And teach them how to work in teams rather than going it alone — in the Smart Machine Age, this is how work will get done.

CONVERSATION 3: Why are school systems, which are built on the Industrial Revolution model, still forcing students to conform to the old definition of “smart”? To thrive in the future, employees will need to be willing to make mistakes. Yet our educational system discourages mistakes simply by forcing students to get the answers right in order to get the highest grades. This also drives competition rather than cooperation, which is antithetical to the needs of tomorrow’s workplace. There are many institutional, political, economic, and personal reasons why many of our public schools are stuck in the Industrial Revolution model of educating. They will have to change because they are vital to the creation of opportunity for every child in our society. That is what our country has stood for from its founding. We can’t lose that.

CONVERSATION 4: What do organizations need to do differently in terms of culture and leadership? The Smart Machine Age will require most businesses to make four big transformations:

• Installing smart technology in every part of their business and training their employees to use it effectively.
• Creating a humanistic people-centric work environment (culture and processes) based on three psychological principles: positivity; self-determination theory; and psychological safety. This will enable the highest levels of human cognitive and emotional performance in concert with technology.
• Transforming leaders and managers from directing and commanding people into enablers of human excellence. You can’t command and control or direct humans to excel at the higher-order tasks that technology won’t be able to do well.
• Transforming their employee training programs into human development programs focused not only on teaching specific job skills, but also on teaching workers how to think; how to use data to make decisions; how to quiet their egos; how to be non-emotionally defensive; how to reflectively listen; how to relate and emotionally engage with others in ways that build positive regard and trust; and how to create and work effectively in teams.

CONVERSATION 5: When 80 million jobs are lost to technology, it stands to reason that a lot of people won’t be working. In the absence of work, how can they live meaningful lives? This will be one of the biggest existential challenges the Smart Machine Age will lay at the doorstep of the United States. We are a culture dominated by individualism and the survival of the fittest. We will need a different approach that promotes a “we all are in this together” community mindset if we’re to maintain social tranquility and our way of life. We must answer this question: In a world of smart machines, what type of society do we want to be? We will need a new story — an American Dream 2.0. That will require leadership and an inclusive national conversation. That conversation needs to start now because the smart machines are coming soon.

A contributing writer on IT management and career topics with IT Business Edge since 2009, Don Tennant began his technology journalism career in 1990 in Hong Kong, where he served as editor of the Hong Kong edition of Computerworld. After returning to the U.S. in 2000, he became Editor in Chief of the U.S. edition of Computerworld, and later assumed the editorial directorship of Computerworld and InfoWorld. Don was presented with the 2007 Timothy White Award for Editorial Integrity by American Business Media, and he is a recipient of the Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for editorial excellence in news coverage. Follow him on Twitter @dontennant.

The post Looming Massive Job Losses Demand New ‘Human’ Approach to Work, Professor Says appeared first on IT Business Edge.

After Caterina Balcells graduated from the University of Barcelona, she took a traditional career path as a language teacher. Today, she’s no longer teaching language to humans. She’s teaching language to computers.

Balcells is the chief linguistic officer at Inbenta, a cloud-based natural language processing and semantic search technology provider in San Mateo. In a recent interview, she said she took the position at Inbenta with no background or training in artificial intelligence. Now that she is immersed in the world of natural language processing as a computational linguist, Balcells has become an expert in training “chatbots,” the voice that’s often on the other end of the line when you call customer service. I asked her if some chatbots are easier to train than others, depending on what language or languages they speak, and she said some languages are inherently more difficult than others:

For example, we have been working for some years now with German, and these very long, compound words that they have can be challenging for us. Chinese and Japanese don’t have spaces between sentences, and that’s also a bit complicated for us, because we have to know where a word starts and ends. So there are different things in different languages that are easier than others.

Another key factor, Balcells explained, is that there are far more open source tools available for some languages, like English, than for others:

Here at Inbenta we support over 20 different languages, so we’ve had to develop a lot of the tools ourselves. For example, there is nothing for Catalan, for Basque; now we are working with Norwegian, Swedish, and Asian languages. Most of the tools are available in English, but that doesn’t mean that English is easier than other languages — I don’t think English is easier than Chinese, for example, although they have many things in common. I just learned that recently, because we have our expert in Chinese here, and she said there are things that are very similar. For example, in both languages the same word groupings can mean different things — in English, “ship a book” and “book a ship” have entirely different meanings. The same word can be a noun or a verb, and the same thing happens in Chinese. This is complicated — it can be difficult [to teach a computer] when a word is a noun, and when it’s a verb.

Speaking with Balcells was especially interesting for me, in that I’m a graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Languages and Linguistics. My own experience in that realm was that a large percentage of students were females who went on to become language teachers. When I brought up the gender topic, Balcells said most of the linguists at Inbenta are indeed female:

Most of us have a linguistics background, so we have studied languages at the university level. Some of us have focused on linguistics, others come from the translation field. These are studies that attract a lot of females — I don’t know why. But we also have some male computational linguists here — some of them may have a more technical background. But we don’t notice a big difference here, because all of us have this linguistic background, and we all have studied something similar. That said, computational linguists can come from different fields — not all of them have a linguistic background. Some of them have a technical background — and in those cases, yeah, they are mainly male.

Given that the teaching profession is largely female-dominated, at least on some levels, I asked Balcells what it was like for her going from that profession to the very male-dominated technology sector. I mentioned that I couldn’t help but notice that she’s the only female among the 12 people shown on Inbenta’s website as being on the leadership team. She laughed and said that was “kind of weird” for her:

At the top level of companies, you notice that those roles are mainly filled by males, that’s true. But here in our company, the team as a whole is half male and half female, so we don’t really notice that. For me, changing from teaching to working with computers was kind of like changing from teaching human beings to teaching computers — my feeling is that I am teaching computers here. I used to teach languages to children, and now I’m teaching languages to computers. So it wasn’t such a big change, because I’m still teaching languages.

I wrapped up the conversation by asking Balcells what advice she has for young people who are interested in entering the field of computational linguistics and pursuing a career in artificial intelligence. She said first of all, don’t be afraid:

Sometimes people who apply for a job here say, “I know how to handle a computer, but I’m not an expert.” Don’t be scared — this is one of the things you can do if you study languages and linguistics, and you like computers and technology. This is a field that changes a lot, so you can learn and invent a lot of new things — there are many things that are there to be invented. Even if you don’t have great programming skills, you can find a company like ours where we work hand-in-hand together with developers and engineers. It’s a fascinating job — you’re building things, and then you see them online and see that they’re helping people, and helping companies sell more. It’s very satisfying to see that what you do is helping other people.

A contributing writer on IT management and career topics with IT Business Edge since 2009, Don Tennant began his technology journalism career in 1990 in Hong Kong, where he served as editor of the Hong Kong edition of Computerworld. After returning to the U.S. in 2000, he became Editor in Chief of the U.S. edition of Computerworld, and later assumed the editorial directorship of Computerworld and InfoWorld. Don was presented with the 2007 Timothy White Award for Editorial Integrity by American Business Media, and he is a recipient of the Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for editorial excellence in news coverage. Follow him on Twitter @dontennant.

The post The Fine Art of Teaching Language to Computers appeared first on IT Business Edge.

Anyone who has been diagnosed with autism is likely to have more experience with unemployment and underemployment than those who aren’t on the spectrum. Now, a startup that launched in Los Angeles earlier this month is determined to help change that.

The startup is Coding Autism, and I had the opportunity last week to speak with Austen Weinhart, its cofounder and COO. Sharing the backstory of how Coding Autism came to be, Weinhart noted that cofounder and CEO Oliver Thornton — along with Oliver’s two brothers — had been diagnosed with Asperger’s. He said Thornton always wanted to start a business that would give back to the autism community, and help enable people on the spectrum to find success.

“He came up with the idea for Coding Autism during college, and after graduating, he got in touch with me,” Weinhart said. “I’ve known Oliver all my life — we were childhood friends, and I have some family on the spectrum, as well. I had been working as a web developer and had previously completed a boot camp similar to the one he was trying to create. We saw a lot of ways to collaborate, so we eventually decided to go in on it together as cofounders.”

Weinhart explained there is no fundamental technical difference in how code is taught to people who are and aren’t on the spectrum. He said the difference in Coding Autism’s approach lies in how the students are accommodated and supported on the career preparation side.

“One of the differences is our classes are a lot smaller than similar boot camps — we have a maximum of 15 students per class,” he said. “We also have an occupational therapist on staff who works with the instructor to tailor the class for the specific needs of different learners. Autism manifests itself in different ways. Some people have sensory issues with light or sound, so there are ways that we try to make sure that each class accommodates all of our students.”

Weinhart said Coding Autism also focuses very heavily on soft skills, such as interview preparation and teambuilding.

“A lot of times, the problem with people on the spectrum getting a job isn’t necessarily their technical ability — it’s actually a lot of soft skills, like looking the interviewer in the eye and working with other people as a team,” he said. “We’re selecting students that we feel confident can keep up with the material, and that we can get employed after the program is done. And then we’re also building connections with large companies that either have autism hiring programs, or are willing to hire and train for the specific roles that they’re looking to fill.”

Having written about this topic quite a bit in the past, I’ve learned that there has been a lot of discussion around whether autism should be considered a liability or an asset, so I asked Weinhart for his thoughts on that. He said under the right circumstances, and with the proper accommodation, it can definitely be an asset.

“A lot of conversations that companies are having about diversity also include cognitive diversity, or diversity of input, the idea being that people with different perspectives have unique ways of looking at problems and contributing to a team,” he said. “The stereotype is that people on the spectrum tend to be very direct and very meticulous with detail, which tends to lend itself very well to something like coding. They generally don’t mind repetition, they don’t mind doing things on their own and then coming back together when they need to.”

I found it interesting that Coding Autism has started a crowdfunding campaign to fund itself, so I asked Weinhart why they went that route rather than, say, seeking corporate sponsorships from companies like Microsoft and SAP that have autism hiring programs — and others that don’t, for that matter.

“We’ve been in conversations with some of these companies, too, but the general response that we’ve gotten is, ‘This seems like a great idea, but we want to see an example first,’” Weinhart said. “That’s what we’re crowdfunding for — we’re raising money to pull off a prototype class that we can then use to get sponsorships, so we can say, ‘Hey, we’ve done this, and it works.’”

A contributing writer on IT management and career topics with IT Business Edge since 2009, Don Tennant began his technology journalism career in 1990 in Hong Kong, where he served as editor of the Hong Kong edition of Computerworld. After returning to the U.S. in 2000, he became Editor in Chief of the U.S. edition of Computerworld, and later assumed the editorial directorship of Computerworld and InfoWorld. Don was presented with the 2007 Timothy White Award for Editorial Integrity by American Business Media, and he is a recipient of the Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for editorial excellence in news coverage. Follow him on Twitter @dontennant.

The post Startup Aims to Help Adults with Autism Gain Employment as Coders appeared first on IT Business Edge.

Steven Pruden has some impressive tech experience under his belt. He’s been a lead architect at Intel; worked as a Web developer, integration project manager, and director of IT at other large corporations; and served in VP roles heading up operations from CRM to mobility and crowdsourcing at Appirio, an Indianapolis-based cloud services provider that was acquired by the Indian IT consulting giant Wipro last year. Today, he’s Appirio’s SVP of human resources.

I recently spoke with Pruden and asked him how somebody with that background ends up as the HR guy. He laughed and said, “I ask myself the same thing every day.” He explained it this way:

You’re right, it is definitely not a well-worn path that I’ve taken to the HR world. My background has really been in technology, everything from software development to project and program management. When I joined Appirio, and for most of my time here, I was running our Salesforce.com consulting practice, which is our largest consulting practice. I took a few turns along the way, just to round out my experience, with crowdsourcing and mobility, partnering with Apple, and some strategic partnerships with Amazon. I also did some corporate strategy work, which led to Appirio being acquired by Wipro.

Pruden went on to cite the need for Appirio to have someone heading up HR who was already entrenched in the company:

As that acquisition happened, we were looking for an HR leader who had a history with Appirio, with the DNA that we have built over the last 10 years and an appreciation for the different groups inside of Appirio, not only on the revenue-generating side, like our consulting business, but also in G&A. I knew how to network inside the executive team at Appirio, and was deeply involved in the integration of Wipro and Appirio. One of the things I had been doing before taking over HR was helping to lead our integration office between the two entities. If you combine all of that, and if you think about what Appirio does as its business, which is bill hours, the revenue-generating engine of the company is our people, and it’s also what differentiates us in the marketplace. Who better to lead all those people functions than somebody who has the background to get things done inside of Appirio, and who has also networked well inside of our parent company? So all of those things came together, and that’s the path that I’ve taken and why I’m in this role now.

Pruden had highlighted some of the advantages of having someone with a tech background in the top HR role, so I asked him what some of the disadvantages are. He said it’s more a matter of risks than disadvantages:

Maybe I can talk about how we’re mitigating some of those risks. I am not an HR practitioner by trade, especially when it comes to complex international matters. And as Appirio continues to expand internationally, there’s a changing regulatory landscape, you’ve got cultural differences, you have workstyle preference differences. HR practitioners have very tried and true ways of tackling those things. I definitely do not have that background, so that adds a lot of risk to what we’re doing here. The way that we mitigate that risk is we have kept a very strong HR leadership team here. We have these HR practitioners that are my direct reports, who know this stuff inside and out, probably some of the best in the industry. So if I can provide stable leadership of that team, we’re going to be in really good shape. That’s how we’re mitigating against the risks of having a non-HR practitioner coming in to lead the team right now.

I wrapped up the conversation by asking Pruden how the culture of Appirio has changed since it was acquired by Wipro. He said the short answer is it hasn’t changed much at all, which is by design:

We define corporate culture as how the company works — how we do our day job, how we work with our customers, how we work with our peers and other consultants. How we get that work done has not changed for what I would say is the vast majority of legacy Appirians — the 1,300 folks who were Appirio employees before the acquisition. Their work hasn’t changed much. But we know it is going to change over time — that’s inevitable. There will be ways that work changes as Appirio becomes more global and gets to take advantage of shared services inside of Wipro — that will probably change the way we get some work done. The jury’s still out on exactly what those changes are, but it hasn’t changed much at all yet.

A contributing writer on IT management and career topics with IT Business Edge since 2009, Don Tennant began his technology journalism career in 1990 in Hong Kong, where he served as editor of the Hong Kong edition of Computerworld. After returning to the U.S. in 2000, he became Editor in Chief of the U.S. edition of Computerworld, and later assumed the editorial directorship of Computerworld and InfoWorld. Don was presented with the 2007 Timothy White Award for Editorial Integrity by American Business Media, and he is a recipient of the Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for editorial excellence in news coverage. Follow him on Twitter @dontennant.

The post How One Tech Exec Made the Transition to HR appeared first on IT Business Edge.