Archives for April 2017

According to Baker McKenzie, 49% of senior execs at financial businesses expect to use Artificial Intelligence for risk assessment within 3 years. Do you have a robot managing your portfolio?

Check out these 10 cool services that use Amazon Web Services to redefine how we interact with and use data.

How would you describe the culture of your company? Do you use it as a selling point to entice potential hires? Has word gotten out in your community that your business is a great place to work?

Each business, large and small, has its own culture. It’s something both taught and absorbed when working with each other. Hopefully, it’s a feeling among employees that helps each individual work as a whole to achieve corporate goals. The culture of your company dictates what is possible and what can’t be done. Your culture can help or hurt your efforts to be a digital innovator. If you find that the mumblings around the break room have the feeling of “we can’t do that” in terms of digital transformation, it’s time to make a cultural change! Here’s how:

1. Understand that people are averse to change. Transformations feel painful: growing pains. We may even think of change like an illness without realizing our attitude about it. How many books have you read about changing your habits? When you’re wanting to make a change in your culture towards being more innovative with technology, remember it’s the thought of change that people are really pushing back on, not the technology.
2. Know that we can make the decision to purposefully seek out change. When we want the struggle because we know of the awesome potential for growth that can come out of it, we will actively seek the painful change. Embrace that idea and foster it so employees will feel encouraged to get outside of their comfort zones.
3. Push your leaders to be entrepreneurs. As Brad Smith, Intuit CEO put it in “The Lean Startup,” “When you have only one test, you don’t have entrepreneurs, you have politicians, because you have to sell. Out of a hundred good ideas, you’ve got to sell your idea. So you build up a society of politicians and salespeople. When you have five hundred tests you’re running, then everybody’s ideas can run. And then you create entrepreneurs who run and learn and can retest and relearn as opposed to a society of politicians.”
4. Focus on outcomes instead of “traditional” measurements. Stop measuring how closely teams stick to the initial GANTT chart. Adopt a more agile approach where the measurements are driven by different measurements such as successful product demos every two weeks.

In what ways have you changed your culture to encourage digital transformation and agile achievements?

Any concerns about your security for your CRM software? Here are some good pointers on what to ask your vendor.