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Torn between profit and sustainability
The first activist investors, as with several other financial innovations of the past few decades, sprang up in the US. Although their shift in priorities towards ESG goals has recently pushed them into the limelight, they have been around since at least the 1980s.
The tactics of activist investors or – as they’re also called – shareholder activists is reminiscent of hostile takeovers in terms of aggressiveness and outcomes. Where they differ, though, is that they can get CEOs ousted, companies broken up and severed arms of the organisation sold without gaining a majority stake in the targeted company.
Activists come in two shapes and sizes
Most activist investors are asset managers investing the funds of large asset owners such as pension funds, endowments and foundations, while hedge funds – actively managed investment pools – play a secondary but equally key role.
With trillions of dollars under their management, leading asset managers can bring about step changes in a relatively short time, enabling them to make a difference on a global scale. Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock – the world’s biggest investment management company – is a staunch supporter of ESG investment that aims to make a positive impact on climate change, working conditions or the diversity of boards in general.
In Fink’s case, a positive stance on impact investments means that trillions of dollars will stand a good chance of ending up in renewable energy generation and storage or carbon capture projects.
Nevertheless, if BlackRock’s CEO doesn’t believe in divestment from fossil fuels, which happens to be the case, then the company will doggedly leave some billions of dollars in assets connected to coal.
Torn between short- and long-termism
Opinions vary regarding whether the appearance of activist investors on the corporate horizon is a boon or a curse. Studies have shown that the financial performance of companies knocked into shape by their shareholder activists will improve during the 24 months following intervention, but there is no evidence for any long-lasting positive effect beyond that.
Thanks to their balancing act between profits and sustainability, activist investors have been condemned by environmentalists and corporate leaders with traditional profit-first perspectives.
While their mission is mainly to inject ESG-driven long-termism into the minds of CEOs and board members blinkered by short-term profits, sometimes they can also undermine the noblest sustainability efforts that don’t bring about immediate results.
Criticism that he was more interested in saving the planet than saving the firm was levelled at Emmanuel Faber, who was CEO and Chairman of Danone until he was ousted by small shareholder activists. Faber went on to serve as the Chair of the International Sustainability Standards Board, set up last November.
In the UK, Unilever, an acclaimed pioneer of net-zero emissions battered by overambitious acquisition plans, saw the price of its consistently underperforming shares rise by 6 per cent in January when news broke that Elliott Management, an activist hedge fund, had built a stake in it.
A 2020 study also suggests that those who have sleepless nights dreading sustainability supplanting profits as the top priority have as yet no cause for great concern. While believers of top-down change may see the current popularity of SDG investments as the long-term benefit of the Principles of Responsible Investment – the 15-year-old UN initiative – the study has found otherwise. Asset managers who signed on to the United Nations principles did not on average improve the social and environmental performance of their investments and “overall, a reasonable reader may perceive [the study’s] findings as consistent with PRI funds’ greenwashing.”
The study also points out participants’ fervour to widely advertise their PRI affiliation on company websites, marketing materials and fund documents, which is a sign of an attempt to maximise short-term profits rather than being held hostage to long-term investment horizons.
Activist investors on this side of the pond
In response to low UK share prices, US activist investors have set their sights on a couple of UK conglomerates that have been underperforming for some time – GSK, a targeted pharmaceutical company, for example, has fallen from third to 11th place by revenue in two decades.
Compared to the US, the UK’s corporate legislative framework is more empowering for shareholders to promulgate their views among members of the board and become drivers of strategic change. There is also less state and family ownership in public companies that could stand in the way of shareholder activists’ shake-up plans.
To accommodate this new, more conducive environment, activist investors eyeing UK companies seem to have given up on the hardball they play in the US. However, a somewhat softer tone and less public attacks against CEOs in the media doesn’t mean we won’t see boards and activist investors lock horns on British soil.
On the upside, what we can also expect is the improving performance and share prices of British public companies that, in a best-case scenario, also have ESGs incorporated into their growth strategy.
There are challenges but also potential benefits of digital distractions
We are in the midst of a battle for our attention. Our devices have hijacked our brains and destroyed our collective ability to concentrate – to the extent that we’re even seeing the emergence of a “goldfish generation”. That, at least, is the story that’s increasingly being told. But should we be paying attention to it?
Journalist Johann Hari’s new book, Stolen Focus, has just joined a chorus of voices lamenting the attention crisis of the digital age. His and other recent books reflect, and perhaps fuel, a public perception that our focus is under attack.
Indeed, in new research by the Policy Institute and Centre for Attention Studies at King’s College London, we found some clear concerns.
Faced with the kinds of findings that arose from our research, it is easy to be nostalgic about a past that existed before the digital revolution. But new technologies have been blamed for causing crises of distraction long before the digital age, so how should we respond to the current challenges?
An attention crisis?
We surveyed a nationally representative sample of 2,093 UK adults in September 2021, asking about their perceptions of their attention spans, their beliefs in various claims about our ability to focus, and how they use technology today.
Half of those surveyed felt their attention spans were shorter than they used to be, compared with a quarter who didn’t. And three-quarters of participants agreed we’re living through a time where there’s non-stop competition for our attention from a variety of media channels and information outlets.
The distraction caused by mobile phones in particular appeared to be a real issue. Half of those surveyed admitted they couldn’t stop checking their phones when they should be focusing on other things – and this wasn’t just an issue for the young. Despite the generational stereotypes of teenagers glued to their screens, a majority of middle-aged people said they struggle with this too.
And although many recognised that they spent a lot of time on their phones, they still hugely underestimated just how much. The public’s average guess was that they checked their phones 25 times a day but according to previous research, the reality is more likely somewhere between 49 and 80 times a day.
There has long been a worry about the threat to attention brought by new cultural forms, whether that’s social media or the cheap paperback sensation novels of the 19th century. Even as far back as ancient Greece, Socrates lamented that the written word creates “forgetfulness in our souls”. There has always been a tendency to fear the effects new media and technologies will have on our minds.
The reality is we simply don’t have the long-term studies that tell us whether our collective attention span has actually shrunk. What we do know from our study is that people overestimate some of the problems. For example, half of those surveyed wrongly believed the thoroughly debunked claim that the average attention span among adults today is just eight seconds, supposedly worse than that of a goldfish. There’s not really any such thing as an average attention span. Our ability to focus varies hugely depending on the individual and the task at hand.
Attention snacking
It’s also important to not overlook the many benefits that technology brings to how we live. Much of the public surveyed recognised these, so while half thought big tech and social media were ruining young people’s attention spans, roughly another half felt that being easily distracted was more to do with people’s personalities than any negative influence that technology may or may not have.
That aside, is "dispersed” attention always a bad thing?
Two-thirds of the public in our study believed switching focus between different media and devices harms our ability to complete simple tasks – a belief confirmed by psychological studies. Intriguingly, half of the public also believed multi-tasking at work, switching frequently between email, phone calls, or other tasks, can create a more efficient and satisfactory work experience.
So what if we explore the benefits of distraction as well as the negative impacts? Might we find a more balanced picture in which distraction is not always in and of itself a bad thing, but a problem in certain contexts and productive in others? In other words, what if those lamenting a crisis in attention are not wrong, but only represent part of the picture?
For all the challenges we experience in having our attention toggle between tasks, in some scenarios, this might help refresh the mind, keep us alert, and stimulate brain connections and creativity. Unified attention may be an ideal, but it may not always be a realistic good for the type of animal that we humans are.
We hear about the benefits for the body of “exercise snacking” or circuit training, so perhaps we need to ask how we might harness the potential benefits for the mind of “attention snacking”. The brain is, after all, a physical organ.
There is no question that we need to figure out how to live better with the “attention economy”, and that the monetisation of our attention is challenging us in fundamental ways. However, our electronic gadgets are not going away and we need to learn how to harness them (and the distractions they pose) for individual and social good.
Our attention has always been the only real currency we have, and for that reason, it has always been fought over; this is not a new problem, but in the digital age it is taking new forms. We need a better response to this situation – one that understands the risks but is also bolder in asking questions about the opportunities.
Marion Thain, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, King's College London
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Powering treasury insights through digitisation
The idea of treasury digitisation predated the pandemic. But the need for greater automation in treasury processes and access to real-time data has been accelerated by the fact that organisations need to visualise past and future financial data from all of their markets with no delay. Treasury organisations and their access to information have never been more in the spotlight.
For treasury teams, the crisis has repeatedly highlighted the importance of process automation and access to real-time data. Remote working patterns have necessitated the collaboration in centralised processes enabled through technology to ensure security, efficiency and a high level of automation. At the same time, the heightened focus on pinpointing sources of liquidity across the organisation has underlined the need for rapid, accurate data. And with cybercriminals and fraudsters becoming more sophisticated, treasurers not only master financial data but also have to ensure they protect processes and data more effectively.
Many of these trends were reflected in Serrala’s Future of Finance Survey 2021, which identified manual processes that have been identified as risk factors in the area of finance. For treasury and cash management, the top hurdle was a lack of access to centralised information, cited by 35 per cent of respondents. But the survey also revealed that overcoming these challenges is not always straightforward: for example, 54 per cent of respondents said it was difficult to change existing processes to achieve a greater level of digitisation.
So how can treasurers overcome these challenges, increase their importance as business partners and take advantage of the opportunities brought by digitisation? In particular, treasurers should be focusing on the following points to digitise their processes:
Armed with accurate, real-time data about corporate cash, treasury teams will be better placed to centralise their cash, make timely decisions and forecast future cash flows and positions more precisely.
As such, the best treasury management system (TMS) is one that not only provides visibility into bank balances, trading portals and market data but also integrates effectively with internal and external systems and solutions that can lead to better-informed decisions.
To find out more about how to significantly improve your business, visit Serrala’s virtual event series: The Finance Compass
By Christoph Dubies, Chief Operating Officer, Serrala
INDUSTRY VIEW FROM SERRALA
Social media: a force for good in the fight against hate around the world
With nearly 98 per cent of the population online, Saudi Arabia is one of the most digitally connected societies in the world. Similarly, however, every country’s cyberspace has the potential to become an echo chamber of fundamentalist rhetoric if left unchecked. With this in mind, according to the Muslim World League (MWL), a Mecca-based NGO that promotes moderate and peaceful Islamic vales, good is winning over evil in the online world.
Since Alissa became Secretary General of the MWL, the NGO has done much to combat extremism, hatred, injustice and oppression both within and towards the international community. In 2019, the organisation was responsible to the conception of the Charter of Makkah, which saw Muslim leaders from 139 countries agree on 30 key principle points of modern Islam, including the need for equality, religious harmony and female empowerment. Most recently in March last year, MWL launched the #RejectHate campaign, inviting supporters to sign an online petition urging social media companies to do more to combat bigotry and anti-Islamic sentiment online.
According to the campaign’s Change.org page, one in every thousand posts from one major social network violates the company’s rules on hate speech but more than three-quarters of this content is allowed to remain on the platform, even after it’s been reported and investigated. “Muslims continue to suffer personal abuse, threats, and physical violence fuelled by content spread through social media,” the webpage reads. “Now is the time for [these networks] to impose a zero-tolerance policy towards hate speech targeting any religion. These companies must introduce more robust procedures to see it quickly removed.”
But while pushing for social media companies to take more responsibility for the content on their platforms, Alissa, a Saudi religion leader and the Secretary General of the MWL, says the #RejectHate campaign and other educational tools are ensuring the social media platforms billions rely on are doing more good than harm across the world. “Extremists and terrorism have benefited from social networking sites, yes,” he admits, “but powerful voices in the worlds of religion and thought leadership are now active themselves online in ways which limit the likelihood of unfounded speech dominating the conversation.”
He credits social media with having brought people from all walks of life, closer together, removing the barriers of distance while dispelling myths and facilitating important conversations between neighbouring but diverse communities. He believes social networks have also empowered the people of the region to become more discerning with their media consumption, allowing access to raw, unfiltered data and marginalised voices. “Innovation in offering users ready access to candid dialogue, relevant local networks, the ability to fact check and other personalised connections have not only worked to benefit society but, in many ways, reorder its ability to communicate with itself,” says Alissa.
The other edge of that sword, however, is when online communities blindly stick within their own belief systems and narratives, creating online echo chambers that breed negativity and dangerous ideas. “Once the conversation is tainted with hate speech and general negativity, society suffers the result,” says Alissa.
While he supports regulations that would see social media platforms act as stewards for the information on their platforms, the Secretary General is staunchly against ironclad censorship, saying such an approach would go against the very lifeblood of social media – its openness. He is instead calling for more education and thought leadership campaigns to follow in the footsteps of #RejectHate.
“By strengthening the manner in which society engages with social media via public awareness campaigns, a continued adherence to high moral values will prevail,” he hopes. “Hate speech and extremist hate are outliers within the wider world of social media engagement, a truth which our awareness campaign has sought to leverage in offering a continued optimism for healthy engagement.”
While the protection against overuse and the stamping out of misuse have never been more important, we must not let these dark spots eclipse the light of social media’s great potential, says Alissa. “I don’t think those blemishes outweigh the benefits of social media, nor are they obstacles that can’t be overcome.”
Written by Crystal Reid
INDUSTRY VIEW BY THE MUSLIM WORLD LEAGUE
The future of marketing is influence; the future of influence is behavioural science
We now live in an Influence Economy.
Consumers are losing patience with a deluge of paid-for advertising. Ad-blocking, commercial-skipping and cookie-clearing are at all-time highs, while trust in mainstream publishers and tech giants are at all-time lows.
Brands that are still paying for attention stand almost zero chance of reaching people’s hearts.
All that trust and attention – that influence – now resides with real people consumers elect to follow on social media. That’s unsurprising: we’re wired to listen to real people, not be force-fed the same tired promotional jargon we’ve all heard before.
We now live in a world where individual influencers wield huge clout, and the biggest broadcasting reach is online, not on TV. New influencer brands are reaching nine-figure revenues at unprecedented speed, putting pressure on traditional “faceless” brands. Marketing, commerce and brands are all going people-first to thrive in the Influence Economy.
New game, new rules
But succeeding in the Influence Economy isn’t easy. Indeed, the typical brand will see more than 90 per cent of their influencer collaborations fail to generate a positive ROI.
Why are so few successful with influence? Bluntly, because so few understand it. Most brands use superficial metrics such as followers, engagements and demographics to select their influencers. This data only tells you what people do – not why they do it. To wield influence effectively, you must dig into the behavioural science underlying commercial outcomes.
Behavioural science is the key
One sign of how behavioral science will level up influencer marketing effectiveness is the power of values. Great influencer marketing might feel more authentic, but what does this really mean? Authentic sponsored content comes from creators who actually believe in what the brand believes in. Knowing this, a typical marketeer might scan an influencer’s content and make a gut decision whether their values fit the brand, a choice fraught with bias and the constraints of cognitive load.
We at Tailify decided to test this intuition and were stunned by what we discovered. When we made values tangible by asking brands and influencers to complete tests backed by decades of empirical behavioral research, we found that almost all high-ROI content came from influencers who shared most of their core values with the brand, while the performance of almost all who didn’t was middling at best.
And we didn’t even need to ask influencers to take tests. Instead, we trained AIs to understand an influencer’s values by weighing each word they’ve said online, listening just like an attentive psychologist. This approach can enable any brand to find which of the more than 100 million influencers online authentically shares their values and has potential to deliver extraordinary results.
Values are but one of more than 100 behavioural drivers of influence that we’ve discovered determine ROI. For instance, Instagram images which feature the influencer’s left cheek receive higher engagement than images in which the right cheek is facing the camera. This left-cheek bias is complemented by the eye contact effect, mood effects, and other drivers which can be measured with machine vision. These visual factors pale in relation to the many other things we can learn about people from language, such as their personality, tone of voice and needs. Further, each driver’s impact can be amplified when dynamically mapped within and between the influencer’s social networks.
People first, by science
The winners in this new Influence Economy will be those who best apply behavioural science and partner with people who have the trust and attention of their customers.
Like any natural resource, there is a limited amount of influence to go around, as once an influencer has aligned themselves with a brand, they rarely switch loyalties within the same category. There is a gold rush of influence on the horizon, if only brands know where to stake their claim and gain their share of influence. Ultimately, those who learn the rules of the new game and go people first will win.
For more information visit www.tailify.com/guide-to-influence
By Ian Randolph, Head of Product and R&D at Tailify
INDUSTRY VIEW FROM TAILIFY
Top tips for marketing agencies to increase growth in 2022
With more than 25,000 marketing companies and agencies in the UK, there is no shortage of competition in the market. With so much choice for potential clients, it can be hard for marketing agencies to find their cut and establish themselves within the industry. There are a number of elements posing a threat to marketing agencies’ ability to grow. The plethora of options as well as the large amounts of churn from clients, in addition to struggling to turn one-off projects into long-term clients, are some of the main pain points.
However, there is no better time than now for marketing agencies to expand their business offering and grow their bottom line. Covid rapidly accelerated the demand for digital transformation across industries worldwide. Even those who once rejected technological advances have had to learn to move many of their day-to-day activities online.
Diversifying their offerings
Diversification to a complete business offering means a one-time client becomes a loyal and lasting one. The more services the marketing agency can offer, the more revenue streams it can generate. Not only that, offering additional services will keep marketing agencies at the top of their clients’ minds by closing the loop and becoming a comprehensive solution to their clients’ needs. This will allow the marketing agency’s solution to become an integral part of their clients’ day-to-day operations, increasing stickiness and reducing churn.
In addition, diversifying offerings helps marketing agencies elevate their services and stand out among their competitors. Many clients want the full package when it comes to marketing services, and having the ability to answer their needs means further growth.
Focusing on clients
By knowing their target audience, marketing agencies can better understand which services to expand into. However, it can be tempting for an agency to start adding services that may not be relevant to their audience, causing them to lose out on money and time wasted marketing those services to deaf ears. Instead, focusing on their clients’ needs will help agencies hone in on their services and better personalise their offerings to their crowd.
This goes hand in hand with diversification. While diversifying their offerings, it is imperative that marketing agencies focus on the tools and resources their clients are asking for and which will support them in their daily business operations. By offering complementary solutions that easily integrate with their core services, agencies can go beyond lead generation to help their clients convert more leads into paying customers and increase stickiness and customer loyalty.
Expanding through partnerships
For many marketing agencies, expanding offerings and growing business overall will seem like a steep challenge, even a cumbersome process that adds work without the promise of a bigger bottom line – training sales teams, learning to market their new services, nurturing their clients while seeking new ones, all on their own. Instead, marketing agencies should explore partnerships such as the one vcita offers, where marketing agencies can gain access to a wide array of new services, such as online booking, CRM, invoicing, email marketing and more, all on their own platform.
Marketing agencies would do well to use the help of a company that has the experience and the knowhow, as well as a dedicated success team. This will help them to sell and upsell services while also offering out-of-the-box capabilities, ultimately streamlining their time to market and allowing them to better serve their clients without the hassle of having to develop their own products.
Devising an upsell strategy
Upselling allows marketing agencies to focus on the clients they already have and grow their bottom line with them, instead of constantly trying to find more clients, which is five times more expensive than nurturing existing ones. To upsell successfully, marketing agencies need to know their clients’ pain points well and be able to explain their products and services in a way that assures the client that they cannot go without them.
It is in marketing agencies’ best interest to consider their service offerings and see how they can upsell to clients. Upselling helps increase stickiness and loyalty with clients by following them throughout their journey and supplying them with what they need when they need it.
Marketing agencies should seize the day
With the pandemic having propelled digital adoption and digital marketing, now is the best time for marketing agencies to diversify their offerings, focus on their clients’ needs, become a partner with a strong, complementary solution such as vcita, and devise a successful upselling strategy. Running a marketing agency is exciting, but it doesn’t have to be exhausting in the search for new clients. Using what they have and expanding proportionately will help marketing agencies grow in 2022.
By Itzik Levy, CEO, vcita
INDUSTRY VIEW BY VCITA
Why people, not compliance, will set the course for the future of ESG and responsible business
It’s no secret that regulatory compliance plays a significant role in driving behavioural change among big businesses. The threat of fines, reputational risk and in extreme cases, the need to halt operations, are major disincentives to most. However, when it comes to ESG – environmental, social and governance – as of today in the UK, there is no single, overarching piece of legislation or regulation to enforce its management within businesses.
Legal, financial, moral?
Most ESG policies focus on avoiding reputational risk, such as shunning “Big Oil”. Beyond this, while many industry leaders and consultants are trying to create a framework around ESG, a lot is still left to interpretation. Yet there’s clear evidence that a significant majority of companies are looking to address this area within their operations. One theory gaining traction is that of compliance culture – rather than complying for regulation’s sake, businesses are starting to be driven increasingly by their culture and values.
While this is promising, it’s of course important not to overlook the widely reported financial potential of more sustainable business.However, this undersells a significant and growing portion of brands who go beyond seeing ESG as a savvy way of improving profitability. They see the big picture: that by protecting the health of the world, they allow society to continue thriving, at home and at work. And right now it is this people focus that is driving much of the ESG consideration of business leaders.
Top down and bottom up
Taking a look at the disparity between the attitudes of leaders and employees is revealing. Studies have shown that employees value purpose-led business for bringing meaning to work and building a stronger sense of community. Meanwhile, leaders recognise the strongest benefit of purpose is supporting a reputation for growth and innovation, as well as providing a point of differentation. On paper this may appear as two sides of the same coin. While incentives for focusing on purpose may differ, the net result is largely the same. What’s good for you is good for me. A focus on purpose makes for a happier business, inside and out.
But it’s also clear that creating a fulfilled team isn’t as simple as being seen to do the right thing. The C-suite is under pressure to bridge the gap between climate aspiration, action and achievement. If they fail to understand the issues within their own organisations before introducing new initiatives, the risk of greenwashing is high. There’ve been a number of singificant influences in recent years thrusting this topic into the limelight. From the Black Lives Matter movement to the Great Resignation, the potential for ESG to not just protect people at work, but to help them thrive, is being recognised.
In the office and outside of it, people are the driving force for change, by holding corporations and executives accountable. By cancelling brands, leaving their roles, and boycotting whole nations in the pursuit of choosing “better”. The leaders who recognise the opportunity of working with – rather than fighting against – those who seek to challenge their operations stand the best chance of succeeding in the future.
The leading role of accurate data
Having established that sustainable business is influenced by more than just the bottom line, regulatory compliance and even CSR commitments to employees, the bigger challenge for many is measuring what “good” looks like. Securing and processing accurate data is absolutely critical for ensuring companies can meet their ESG goals. Putting rubbish data in will get rubbish insights out.
The challenge for the vast majority of companies is that ESG and sustainability are either brand new strategies trying to be embedded, or there simply aren’t enough resources committed. It can mean that there is a lack of know-how, people, technologies, systems, processes or – critically – culture to call upon, both in setting targets and then measuring progress towards them.
The data that companies choose to collect and the way in which they collect it, will only ever be valid if all functions and individuals are engaged and aligned. Responsibility can’t simply sit with one or two people to tick a box. Partnerships that allow businesses to leverage ESG and sustainability expertise will save a lot of time, pain, and cost: firstly in setting up the right systems and secondly in ensuring that disclosures, impacts and risks are reported in a clear format. As external ESG auditing becomes increasingly common, allowing the accuracy and quality of data to be assured, it will become easier to satisfy the demands of regulators, investors and the community at large.
Success comes from ensuring the quality of the data a business collects and holds – and then properly preparing this data for regular reporting cycles.
In conclusion
Accusations of greenwashing plague a number of higher and lower profile brands. And yet behind all this, there’s a reassuring tide of companies and executives taking a more holisitic and meaningful approach to sustainability. An upthrust which puts the simple ambition of “doing better” at the heart of how businesses are run and profits are made. Consumers are rightly to hold industry to account when it comes to how their money-making affects the world in which we all live. Leaders in turn need to listen and respond with both heads and hearts.
Want to know more about enabling a sustainable future for your business and your people? Download the Emex ESG & EHS Buyer’s Guide.
Check out our latest Inside Emex newsletter to learn more about our latest product improvements and platform insights.
By Daniel Gribbin, VP Sustainability and ESG, Emex Software
INDUSTRY VIEW BY EMEX SOFTWARE
The invisible powerhouse that marketers overlook at their peril
Almost half of British adults (47 per cent) are aged over 50. While that number alone indicates the social and cultural significance of this group, what’s even more notable is their spending power.
People aged 50 and over control more than half of total UK household expenditure: a figure set to rise to 63 per cent by 2040, when they will the biggest spenders in every category, from technology to fashion. But society in general, and advertising in particular, has a myopic approach to older adults, often treating them as an undifferentiated and economically inactive mass. While marketers have been aware of this problem for some time, it’s an issue that’s yet to be resolved.
UK advertising tends to misrepresent or, worse still, entirely ignore this group. According to recent Channel 4 research, only 12 per cent of UK ads feature someone aged 50-plus in a lead role, and those roles are often highly stereotyped. Think about the last advert you saw featuring an older person. Was it for life insurance, a cruise, or maybe a walk-in bath? Cheerier still, perhaps it was for a funeral plan. Yet over-50s are the people most likely to shop in some of our major retailers.
At MullenLowe Group, we’re making moves to better understand the invisible 50-plus powerhouse. In partnership with Kantar, we’ve done cluster analysis on beliefs, attitudes and behaviours to create a picture of Great Britain’s 55-plus population. We have identified seven distinct groups, the smallest of which represents almost three million people: they are the “Social Progressives”, the “Accountable Citizens”, the “Experience Lovers”, the “Savvy Spenders”, the “Carefree Hedonists”, the “Caring Conformists”, and the “Security Seekers”. Different segments have very different attitudes to sustainability, technology, travel, health and finance, and they behave, spend, relax and consume media differently.
Uploading these segments back into the Target Group Index (TGI) database has enabled us to explore how each interacts with brands, categories and platforms, driving sharper insights and more effective targeting. Further nuance has been added through qualitative research to uncover the views of each segment to the communication that is theoretically aimed at them.
With this research, we aim to unlock more value for brands and achieve better, more relevant communication, while also addressing the ageism that is so apparent in our industry.
Debunking the media habit myths of the Invisible Powerhouse
Our research demonstrates that several outdated myths about older adults’ media habits are in urgent need of debunking. For example: “They’re not digitally savvy”, “They’re media-sceptics”, “The only social media they engage with is Facebook”. Such statements misrepresent the 50-plus consumer generally, but if we dig into the behaviours of different segments, it becomes very apparent that some groups significantly outperform not only the rest of their age cohort, but also their younger counterparts.
Since 2019, the way the over-55s watch TV has changed, and the proportion of them saying they now watch more TV because of online streaming has doubled in this time.
While 81 per cent of under 55s now use on-demand services, older consumers are catching up fast – 73 per cent of those aged 55-plus are now using on-demand, and two of our segments use BBC iPlayer even more than under-55s: Social Progressives (74 per cent) and Experience Lovers (72 per cent), versus only 51 per cent of under-55s.
This is also the case with ITV Hub, which is most likely to be used by Experience Lovers (47 per cent) and Accountable Citizens (46 per cent), compared with just 30 per cent of under-55s.
While those under 55 are still more likely to have a current Netflix (56 per cent) or Amazon Prime account (49 per cent) than the 55-plus (31 and 32 per cent respectively), penetration is growing among older adults and there is clearly an opportunity to drive subscriptions by targeting segments already highly familiar with on-demand. Also, while older adults generally watch a wider range of programming than under-55s, key segments such as the Social Progressives are drama addicts for whom Netflix’s offering is likely to hold high appeal.
While there are clear differences when it comes to media and entertainment habits, our research also showcased some universal truths that span all segments:
Adland’s challenge is to remove the age filter
What’s next? It’s time for Adland to remove the age filter and stop overlooking the over-50s. Understanding the interests, attitudes and lifestyles that traverse age is an essential first step in targeting and communicating more effectively, and we hope our latest research will enable such understanding. This Invisible Powerhouse has lots to offer us. It’s time we started listening to what it has to say.
Stay tuned for the full Invisible Powerhouse report, which will be launching in March. Until then, you can keep up to date with all the biggest news from MullenLowe Group by visiting our LinkedIn page.
Ayesha Walawalkar, Chief Strategy Officer, MullenLowe Group UK
Image - Courtesy of Alex Thorogood
INDUSTRY VIEW FROM MULLEN LOWE GROUP
Operations experience management: your brand’s number one customer retention strategy in 2022
The pandemic has greatly enhanced e-commerce growth. More people are shopping online than ever before, and these customers are expecting the same personalised experience that they receive in store. But what is the state of online retail in the UK and US as we go into Q2? And why should post-purchase communication be a priority customer retention strategy?
Customers want to be updated on their order. In fact, our recent research found that 66 per cent of consumers want regular updates throughout delivery. A further 65 per cent want to be notified immediately if there is a delay. That doesn’t sound too complicated, does it? Sadly, most of the world’s leading brands fail to do this.
parcelLab is on a mission to change this. Enter operations experience management (OXM).
What is operations experience management?
Imagine the following: you buy a product online, checkout, receive the order confirmation and dispatch and then... nothing. A total absence of updates about your order from the brand you just purchased from. Perhaps you get some communication from the carrier, but not always. Sounds awful, right? Well, this happens every day when consumers are shopping online with the world’s biggest brands.
OXM is the combination of operational processes and customer experience, further enhanced by personalisation and relevant value-led touch points.
How OXM benefits customers
Delivery is the most emotional part of the customer journey, and many customers are left in the dark about the whereabouts of their order. Here’s how OXM changes that and benefits customers during last-mile delivery.
Accurate and easy-to-access tracking during delivery is a basic requirement when shopping online – but many retailers don’t provide this. In fact, our latest research found that just 21 per cent of UK retailers communicate with their customers after dispatch. By taking control of post-purchase communication and sending branded, proactive updates, the customer knows where to go to find the tracking information and there’s no confusion around who the package is arriving from.
A live tracking link allows the customer to stay up to date on any changes to delivery. Once the parcel is in the delivery truck, a host of factors can affect the final delivery time. Traffic jams, closed roads, poor weather conditions... the list is endless. And any one of them can change the course of delivery in a second. That’s why providing live tracking is so important. Plus, by sending event-triggered notifications, brands can manage expectations so their customers are kept informed and don’t wait around for their parcel.
How OXM benefits brands
Customers are their most engaged during delivery, and many brands don’t capitalise on this. By owning the end-to-end customer experience, brands can create a fully personalised communication flow in their own branding. Here’s how OXM changes that and benefits brands during last-mile delivery.
By sending branded tracking emails, retailers can create a recognisable experience. This not only creates an engaging end-to-end journey for customers, but also means there is no confusion when each parcel will be arriving. Plus, if the customer has a good last-mile experience, they will remember who it was! OXM allows brands to add branded details to their delivery notifications such as fonts, logos and graphics to stand out.
By keeping customers up-to-date during delivery, WISMO enquiries will no longer be such a time-consuming problem. The customer doesn’t need to call up to find out where their parcel is, they can track it on the order status page. This means customer service agents have the time to answer more serious customer enquiries – a huge saving to businesses!
Having control of post-purchase communication means brands have new opportunities to cross-sell and upsell to customers. For example, brands can include embedded product recommendations in delivery notifications or on the order status page, based off the item the customer has bought. This is a low-cost, low-effort way to improve retention rates and increase traffic back to the retailer’s store.
OXM provides brands with unique reporting and access to delivery data. Brands can identify trends in performance and improve their ability to forecast delivery times. The data provided also allows brands to understand a carrier’s efficiency and compare this with other providers. They can establish first-hand if carriers are meeting agreed SLAs and flag areas of improvement if required.
When post-purchase notifications are sent by a brand, customers will remember them. Take the opportunity to request feedback at this moment, when customer satisfaction is at its highest. OXM allows brands to send automated, event-triggered feedback messages to customers within the first few hours of a product being delivered.
Why you should invest in OXM
Through OXM, parcelLab wants to help brands improve the most crucial stage of the customer journey: shipping, delivery and returns. By transforming every transaction into an experience and every touchpoint into a personalised and memorable interaction, customers receive an exceptional end-to-end branded customer experience.
When a brand owns their end-to-end customer experience, customers receive relevant, reliable, personalised and branded communication directly from the retailers, which actually adds value to their experience. OXM gives brands the opportunity to share relevant content, cross-sell and upsell to customers and create a community among their buyers.
Above all else, OXM enables brands to be more efficient. They can better manage customer expectations without manual work. Plus, for their customers, this means increased visibility into their parcel’s journey, creating a streamlined, worry-free experience.
Read parcelLab’s latest research on the post-purchase performance of the top 200 retailers:
By Tobias Buxhoidt, CEO and Co-Founder, parcelLab
INDUSTRY VIEW FROM PARCELLAB
The smart revolution of artwork proofreading
Sophisticated wording and relevant content play a huge part in a business’s success and reputation. For any documents – from important contracts and business proposals to product packaging and web copy – the presence of typos and thoughtless errors can reflect poorly on the quality of a company’s services and demonstrate a lack of attention to detail. It can even result in widespread delays, product recalls or legal repercussions. Documents and artworks originating from multiple languages and frequent changes within the design process – such as in packaging – mean mistakes are almost inevitable.
Errors and misprints can not only harm a company’s reputation but are also costly to fix. Thorough proofreading and correction are crucial. However, attention to detail and intense focus are challenging if done manually. EyeC – the expert in vision systems for print image control and sample inspection – leads the way in modern proofreading solutions.
The new and innovative EyeC ProofText is a highly automated web-based artwork proofreading system that prevents unnecessary errors as early as possible within the print and packaging value chain. The system-independent SaaS web application compares various text sources with other files, such as the PDF of the initial artwork file or proof. No matter how complex the briefing documents are, an intelligent algorithm finds and evaluates deviations between documents, including text content and font style, regardless of position, structure and style – in just a single process step. It is specifically designed to help agencies, design studios, marketing departments, regulatory departments and suppliers reduce laborious revision cycles and speed up the artwork creation and pre-press process.
With the help of EyeC ProofText, jobs can be checked efficiently and time can be saved by inspecting multiple documents and different languages simultaneously. The intuitive usability of the system, the intelligent algorithm and the innovative user interface in combination with the easy-to-use tools enable every user to efficiently check and evaluate complex documents regardless of location – a huge plus when a significant part of the workforce remains remote.
Minor errors or typing mistakes are quickly highlighted, so gross errors can be avoided and money is saved in the long run. ProofText offers up to 75 per cent faster overall review time than comparable systems on the market thanks to its highly automated text-matching, first-class usability and efficient evaluation.
As a result, error-prone, time-consuming manual checks of text-heavy artwork, package inserts, brochures and flyers are now a thing of the past. EyeC ProofText can increase productivity in an unprecedented manner and help maximise the potential of an error-free and resource-saving digital economy.
For more information about EyeC ProofText, visit eyec-inspection.com/products/eyec-prooftext
By Dominique Elsen, Product Manager, EyeC
INDUSTRY VIEW BY EYEC
Humans v AI: here’s who’s better at making money in financial markets
Artificial intelligence (AI) has now closely matched or even surpassed humans in what were previously considered unattainable areas. These include chess, arcade games, Go, self-driving cars, protein folding and much more. This rapid technological progress has also had a huge impact on the financial services industry. More and more CEOs in the sector declare (explicitly or implicitly) that they run “technology companies with a banking license”.
There is also a rapid emergence and growth of the financial technology industry (fintech), where technology startups increasingly challenge established financial institutions in areas such as retail banking, pensions or personal investments. As such, AI often appears in behind-the-scenes processes such as cybersecurity, anti-money laundering, know-your-client checks or chatbots.
Among so many successful cases, one seems conspicuously absent: AI making money in financial markets. While simple algorithms are commonly used by traders, machine learning or AI algorithms are far less usual in investment decision-making. But as machine learning is based on analysing huge data sets and finding patterns in them, and financial markets generating enormous amounts of data, it would seem an obvious match. In a new study, published in the International Journal of Data Science and Analytics, we have shed some light on whether AI is any better than humans at making money.
Some specialist investment companies called quant (which stands for ‘quantative’) hedge funds declare that they employ AI in their investment decision-making process. However, they do not release official performance information. Also, despite some of them managing billions of dollars, they remain niche and small relative to the size of the larger investment industry.
On the other hand, academic research has repeatedly reported highly accurate financial forecasts based on machine-learning algorithms. These could in theory translate into highly successful mainstream investment strategies for the financial industry. And yet, that doens’t seem to be happening.
What is the reason for this discrepancy? Is it entrenched manager culture, or is it something related to practicalities of real-world investing?
AI’s financial forecasts
We analysed 27 peer-reviewed studies by academic researchers published between 2000 and 2018. These describe different kinds of stock market forecasting experiments using machine-learning algorithms. We wanted to determine whether these forecasting techniques could be replicated in the real world.
Our immediate observation was that most of the experiments ran multiple versions (in extreme cases, up to hundreds) of their investment model in parallel. In almost all the cases, the authors presented their highest-performing model as the primary product of their experiment – meaning the best result was cherry-picked and all the sub-optimal results were ignored. This approach would not work in real-world investment management, where any given strategy can be executed only once, and its result is unambiguous profit or loss – there is no undoing of results.
Running multiple variants, and then presenting the most successful one as representative, would be misleading in the finance sector and possibly regarded as illegal. For example, if we run three variants of the same strategy, with one losing -40 per cent, the other one losing -20 per cent, and the third one gaining 20 per cent, and then only showcase the 20 per cent gain, clearly this single result misrepresents the performance of the fund. Just one version of an algorithm should be tested, which would be representative of a real-world investment setup and therefore more realistic.
Models in the papers we reviewed achieved a very high level of accuracy, about 95 per cent – a mark of tremendous success in many areas of life. But in market forecasting, if an algorithm is wrong 5 per cent of the time, it could still be a real problem. It may be catastrophically wrong rather than marginally wrong – not only wiping out the profit, but the entire underlying capital.
We also noted that most AI algorithms appeared to be “black boxes”, with no transparency on how they worked. In the real world, this isn’t likely to inspire investors’ confidence. It is also likely to be an issue from a regulatory perspective. What’s more, most experiments did not account for trading costs. Though these have been decreasing for years, they’re not zero, and could make the difference between profit and loss.
None of the experiments we looked at gave any consideration to current financial regulations, such as the EU legal directive MIFID II or business ethics. The experiments themselves did not engage in any unethical activities – they did not seek to manipulate the market – but they lacked a design feature explicitly ensuring that they were ethical. In our view, machine learning and AI algorithms in investment decision-making should observe two sets of ethical standards: making the AI ethical per se, and making investment decision-making ethical, factoring in environmental, social and governance considerations. This would stop the AI from investing in companies that may harm society, for example.
All this means that the AIs described in the academic experiments were unfeasible in the real world of financial industry.
Are humans better?
We also wanted to compare the AI’s achievements with those of human investment professionals. If AI could invest as well as or better than humans, then that could herald a huge reduction in jobs.
We discovered that the handful of AI-powered funds whose performance data were disclosed on publicly available market data sources generally underperformed in the market. As such, we concluded that there is currently a very strong case in favour of human analysts and managers. Despite all their imperfections, empirical evidence strongly suggests humans are currently ahead of AI. This may be partly because of the efficient mental shortcuts humans take when we have to make rapid decisions under uncertainty.
In the future, this may change, but we still need evidence before switching to AI. And in the immediate future, we believe that, instead of pinning humans against AI, we should combine the two. This would mean embedding AI in decision-support and analytical tools, but leaving the ultimate investment decision to a human team.
Barbara Jacquelyn Sahakian, Professor of Clinical Neuropsychology, University of Cambridge; Fabio Cuzzolin, Professor of Artificial Intelligence, Oxford Brookes University, and Wojtek Buczynski, PhD candidate / consultant, University of Cambridge
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Underfunded, undervalued and misunderstood – how businesses can accelerate the adoption of Agile
Every business wants to be more agile and resilient. The ability to rapidly launch new products or quickly adapt business models is key to success in today’s businesses, as organisations have more competitors and external pressures to contend with than ever before.
For many, the answer is capital-a Agile. Once the preserve of nimble tech start-ups, all manners of businesses are excited at the prospect of a discipline which can deliver quicker and better results through iterative, innovative development, rather than static waterfall projects.
For energy giant Chevron, it’s all about keeping up with and enabling change. “Change is the only constant,” says Maxim Danilevsky, former Digital Consultant on Chevron’s IT Foundation Platform. “Large technology replatforming, movement to the cloud, increased usage of the agile frameworks, the shift from project-based to product-based, to delivery systems and increased focus on customer centricity: all of these are very important catalysts for change. For Chevron, the big catalyst was cloud migration.”
As with any new development, it’s a race to see who gets there first. Agile adoption is up from 37 per cent in 2020 to 84 per cent in 2021, according to the 15th Annual State of Agile Report. Businesses that can make the full shift ahead of their competitors stand to reap the benefits.
Yet despite the benefits of Agile, widescale adoption among large businesses remains slow. This is because Agile is usually underfunded, undervalued and misunderstood. To adopt it successfully, businesses need to first gain a full understanding of where and how they should do so, and then find the frameworks and tools that improve and accelerate adoption.
The importance of self-assessment
The initial challenge holding back effective adoption of Agile is that it’s often misunderstood, and businesses don’t know where to start. Agile is a radical departure from the industry-standard project method, which requires fundamental change and is no mean feat. To overcome hesitancy or poor implementation, businesses need to first to properly assess how they are set up to start implementing Agile and identify what changes are needed to enable it.
In approaching this challenge, Capgemini and technology business management company Apptio have identified two areas businesses should assess themselves on: firstly, enterprise Agile maturity, or how well set up they are for Agile at an enterprise level in terms of leadership, culture and tools; and secondly, their lean portfolio management capabilities, which cover how prepared they are at an operational level to run Agile initiatives while aligning with and reporting against strategic objectives.
Apptio and Capgemini’s Agile Maturity Assessment provides businesses with an instant report on their capabilities in these areas, allowing them to benchmark themselves against their peers. This insight is vital in helping Agile to succeed, as high enterprise Agile maturity with poor lean portfolio management capabilities often see Agile projects struggle as teams can’t prove their value and impact to management, while the inverse results in unrealistic and undeliverable expectations placed on Agile teams. Understanding the current balance between both is key to knowing where to start with Agile implementation and what changes need to be made to support this.
Move fast but don’t break things
Even after getting management and Agile teams on the same page, the biggest challenge organisations face is in accelerating adoption. Delays often come about because Agile is at odds with the waterfall method of project management traditionally used by upper management and finance, meaning it takes time and effort to match value from one model to the other.
Management and finance teams are used to making a plan, investing in it throughout development, launching, and then assessing value. The Agile process of flexing as a team to go on Sprints, learning from releases and then going back to rework and Sprint again breaks with this model, requiring value to be measured more regularly and then translated into something that can be measured against strategic goals.
This challenge is further exacerbated by the fact that many decentralised Agile teams in different regions may all be working on different elements of a larger initiative. Collating these disparate assessments of investment and value make it hard for management to get a clear, unified picture of how Agile implementations are proceeding.
A change is needed to overcome this problem. Through to 2024, software engineering leaders who use tools and methods to support remote Agile work as the default are likely to see 20 per cent gains in productivity and 50 per cent lower attrition. However, many of the traditional tools used by Agile teams to enable their work, remote or otherwise, don’t by themselves provide the right data to match value with business goals.
Finding the right tools and frameworks
Chevron found that the solution was twofold: adopting an Agile framework that provided clear processes and governance so teams’ work was fully aligned with overall business value; and leveraging a tool that would enable them to pull the relevant data concerning labour, investment and outcomes from existing Agile tools so that this value could be provided to the rest of the business. This would in turn allow the business to make more informed decisions about funding for future Agile projects.
In Chevron’s case, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) provided it with a structure to organise its teams’ operations, while enterprise Agile management tool Targetprocess allowed it to gather data from a range of other tools, process this data and then deliver digestible insights to upper management that fed into their own planning systems.
It’s this ability to connect data and teams using a common language that’s important, says Danilvesky – Chevron’s previous tool was IT-centric, but the company needed greater capabilities in programme and portfolio management practices. “We now have business users, our traditional engineers and IT and digital folks, all working in the same environment,” he explains.
With enthusiasm for Agile only gathering pace, it’s important that businesses take steps now to accelerate adoption. Those who can effectively develop an understanding of their preparedness, and then use frameworks and tools to ensure effective value delivery and funding for Agile teams, stand to overtake their competitors in the future.
Visit apptio.com/lpmsurvey to assess if your organisation is ready to embrace the benefits of scaled agile and lean portfolio management in today’s digital world.
INDUSTRY VIEW FROM APPTIO EUROPE
Empowering enterprise digital transformation
Digital transformation is one of the most critical priorities for many organisations today. However, a lot of businesses struggle to make the necessary changes to keep up with the competition. Businesses need to focus on three key areas – culture, technology and structure – to empower digital transformation.
Creating digital culture
The first step is to create a culture that is open to change and innovation. A digital culture is one that encourages employees to be creative and experiment with new ideas. It also means establishing clear goals and expectations and support employees in their efforts.
What are the hallmarks of digital culture?
How can organisations empower a digital culture?
The key is to provide the necessary resources and support to employees. This support includes training, mentorship and access to technology and tools. It’s also important to create a positive environment that encourages risk-taking and innovation.
Enabling enterprise digital transformation
Once the culture is in place, businesses need to focus on the technology solutions that will enable them to succeed. This step includes choosing the right tools and platforms and ensuring they are integrated with the rest of the organisation. It also means developing a robust digital strategy and roadmap aligned with the overall business strategy.
This includes adopting new technologies and platforms and redesigning processes to make them more efficient.
What are some of the challenges with enterprise digital transformation?
Technology solutions
What are some key considerations when choosing technology solutions?
Structuring for success
The final step is to ensure that the organisation is structured for success. This includes creating the right teams and appointing the right leaders. It also means defining clear roles and responsibilities and establishing processes and protocols.
What are some of the challenges with structuring for success?
Challenges to enterprise digital transformation
No-code technologies are becoming increasingly important as businesses strive to become more agile and responsive. These technologies allow businesses to create applications without the need for coding expertise. This makes it easier for non-technical employees to get involved in the development process and helps to speed up the deployment process.
No-code tools boost all three pillars of digital transformation: culture, technology, and structure. They make it easier for businesses to adopt new technologies, redesign processes and collaborate across teams.
How can businesses take advantage of no-code technologies?
What lies ahead?
Businesses need to invest in the right tools and platforms, develop a robust digital strategy and roadmap, and structure success. Enterprise digital transformation will move towards:
To find out more, get in touch with EasySend.
Tal Daskal is the CEO and co-founder at EasySend. Tal is an expert on all things digital transformation in banking and insurance and is a passionate advocate for the paradigm shift towards no-code application development in the financial sector.
INDUSTRY VIEW FROM EASYSEND
Large motors and generators can power the way to net zero
Energy efficiency is so important in the world’s journey to net zero that the International Energy Agency (IEA) has labelled it ‘the first fuel’. As part of this initiative, industrial electric motors are a key target area for energy efficiency improvements. There are more than 300 million industrial electric motor-driven systems currently in operation, and if they were replaced with optimised, high-efficiency equipment, global electricity consumption could be reduced by up to 10 per cent.
The world’s use of energy by electric motors is in the form of four major applications compressors (32 per cent), mechanical movement (30 per cent), pumps (19 per cent) and fans (19 per cent). There is rightly a considerable focus on improving the energy efficiency of small to medium electric motors. Yet it is large motors, rated at greater than 375 kilovolts (kV), where some of the most significant savings are being achieved. While these motors comprise just 0.03 per cent of the total stock, they account for about 23 per cent of all the energyconsumed by motors.
As an example of what is possible, ABB recently recorded the highest ever efficiency for synchronous motors with a value of 99 per cent, resulting in a new world record. This is good news for customers, as it limits their energy costs and lowers overall operating costs. But it is even better news for our planet, since every increase in efficiency means a reduction in energy usage and lower CO2 emissions.
Over 20 years, the higher efficiency of just one of these motors will save more than 5,900 tons of CO2. That’s the equivalent of more than 3,000 round-trip flights across the Atlantic from London to New York. If we can replicate the carbon and energy savings from this motor across all similar motors in operation globally, the energy savings would be enormous.
Energy efficiency initiatives extend far beyond motors. In shipping, our new in-line shaft generator enables operators to benefit from the efficiency, performance and reliability advantages of permanent magnet technology. The innovative design offers better efficiency at both full and partial loading. This will help cut fuel costs for large vessels such as container ships and ferries by between 3 per cent and 4 per cent, as well as significantly reducing emissions.
Pioneering decarbonised power
Meanwhile, for utilities, the quest for decarbonisation calls for power grids to quickly transition to renewable resources such as wind and solar instead of large, centralised fossil-fuelled generation plants. That helps reduce carbon emissions, but it also brings new challenges in maintaining grid stability. This is because switching off traditional plants reduces the level of system inertia vital to resist sudden changes, such as when a generator trips offline.
Power grids rely on their inertia to keep them stable. However, wind turbines and solar panels are not able to contribute inertia to the grid. This is where synchronous condensers, which are large rotating machines, can play a key role by restoring the missing inertia.
Synchronous condensers are proving to be a cost effective and reliable way to increase the level of renewables connected to grids while maintaining stable and reliable operation. They are finding applications in locations as diverse as the Lister Drive Greener Grid Park in Liverpool and the isolated Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic.
Innovation is at the heart of the solutions that will deliver net zero. Motors with enhanced energy efficiency, more efficient generators and new approaches to grid stability are all coming together to pioneer a new breed of decarbonised power.
To find out more, watch ABB’s YouTube video: Leading with Technology with ABB’s Large Motors and Generators.
by Heikki Vepsäläinen, Division President – Large Motors and Generators at ABB
INDUSTRY VIEW FROM LARGE MOTORS AND GENERATORS AT ABB
Digital transformation does not start with technology
A staggering percentage of digital transformations provide meagre returns for their organisations. Where does the blame lie and what can be done to ensure the best chances of success?
Perhaps you are reading this and thinking, “I know exactly how to embed digital across my business” or you have just embarked on a transformation and are extremely confident of success.
Sadly, the cold reality is that the vast majority of organisations fail to realise the benefit from digital transformation.
To flip the odds, organisations must understand that no technology offers a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution – a crucial reality often overlooked in favour of speed or assumed convenience. Simply automating a bad process does not fix its underlying issues.
The first step is to understand where value can be generated – this will help identify the right technologies for the organisation to deliver and sustain excellent outcomes, whether that is increased production, improved revenues or growth in new markets.
Our firm defines digital value transformation as the process of leveraging the right digital technologies to achieve high performance that delivers and sustains excellent outcomes (revenue, growth or operational results).
Finding the value
Perceptions of value vary greatly and there is an industry-wide misconception around why organisations need technology.
Not every business will require the same solution, and none should leap into action until they have fully defined their needs. This is easier said than done for organisations bombarded by vendor promises of the ‘perfect solution’ and media pronouncements of new advancements that will cure all ills.
To make your organisation a success story, do less and do it really, really well. Simplify technology by first clearly defining the tangible benefits to the organisation. Begin with a focus on understanding the root causes of operational inefficiencies and key cost drivers and how to better serve consumers to generate higher margins and capture greater market share. Only then can you determine the right technology that is fit for purpose to optimise across cost levers while improving processes and customer experience.
To get a clearer picture, engage the frontline – those who are doing the doing, every day – to understand their pain points and end-user needs. This critical first step is key to thoroughly evaluating how, and if, vendor promises will deliver to both organisational and customer needs.
Further, it lays the foundation towards building the organisational alignment needed to drive change as understanding needs and selecting value-focused technology is only the first phase of the transformation journey. The next phase, integrating new solutions effectively into established operations, is often the greatest challenge.
Talent and culture, not technology
If an organisation would rather take the path of least resistance, it may feel that the latest technology is a silver bullet – that it can somehow implement a digital process without the necessary initial pangs of change.
It cannot. Undertaking a digital transformation is about talent and culture, not just technology.
All too often, technology is implemented before procedures and processes are fully aligned to realise maximum value, if altered at all. For example, a sophisticated AI-enabled reporting tool is implemented, but the information output follows the legacy process of exporting to an Excel worksheet and manually emailing to a manager; or an advanced customer management tool with chatbots is rolled out but the information gleaned from interactions with customers is not fed back to operational teams to drive improvements.
Successfully embedding your new technology requires processes to be adapted and behaviours changed. Typically, this requires new procedures and adjusted targets, as well as intensive team training to ensure they can adopt and sustain the new technology to its full extent.
In our experience, the most successful digital transformations have begun with thorough introspection to gain understanding. To the outside world, their success may look easy. In reality, their ‘seamless’ transformation required a layered and comprehensive approach, ensuring the right steps were taken, at the right time, toward the right application of technology.
Today, industries that best weather disruption in terms of short-term liquidity, and that maintain a largely positive outlook on future profitability, are the ones that have the largest means to successfully digitise their organisations.
While prospects for success can seem daunting, organisations that successfully transform, and then continuously improve, will be built on technology solutions that generate value, are fit for purpose and are powered by forward-thinking leadership and an inspired frontline.
Partners in Performance is currently enhancing its research on the importance of digital transformations to organisations. To receive industry-wide results, including emerging challenges, insights and best practices, take part in our Digital Value Transformation Survey
By Ali-Reza Moschtaghi (London) and Juan Ferrara (New York), Partners in Performance
INDUSTRY VIEW BY PARTNERS IN PERFORMANCE
The UK fires up full fibre – and not a moment too soon
Successive governments in Britain had made a lot of noise about prioritising broadband access, but the movement found great momentum lately. According to Zen Internet, as recently as 2019 up to one-third of all homes in the UK were located in so-called ‘not spot’ areas where internet access was not up to scratch. Now, as part of a government initiative to connect 85 per cent of households to 1 GBPS-capable broadband by 2025, these rapid developments have arrived not a moment too soon.
The blight of ‘not spots’ was a strange contradiction for a country that has great technological prowess. Over the past few years, the UK has inarguably managed to maintain a formidable reputation for R&D, science, technology and a powerful start-up scene.
However, many of these ecosystems have tended to be concentrated in certain areas, such as the Southeast, London and other major cities. Full fibre, though, promises to unlock the whole country’s digital potential and more than 1 million hard-to-reach homes and businesses will be connected by next-generation gigabit broadband in the first phase of a £5 billion government infrastructure project.
The implications are enormous. As two years of restrictions to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic have shown, digital is the only way businesses will be able to build a competitive edge, and these infrastructure projects are the essential backbone of enabling that digital-first mindset.
Already, 8 million UK homes are connected with full-fibre broadband, with an impressive 750,000 new homes moving to the service in that year alone. However, some barriers remain – and, perhaps surprisingly, one of them is consumer awareness. Although household data usage continues to trend upwards, fewer than 2 million were actually taking advantage of the fibre services.
But to realise the full potential of these digital inclusion programmes, it’s absolutely critical that households and businesses take advantage.
Digital networks will shape everything from GDP and industry momentum to inclusion and equal opportunity. As a society, we need to invest in developing fibre-powered broadband highways that reach every corner of the UK and the rest of the world. The digital sector contributes £149 billion to the UK economy and currently employs 2.9 million people. According to McKinsey, improving infrastructure could add $13 trillion to global GDP by 2030, transforming billions of lives in the process.
While 5G adoption is growing at present, the rollout of this next-generation mobile networking technology is expected to bring about wider benefits. It’s crucial that the full-fibre rollout continues without delay, because a strong optical fibre architecture is what provides the high capacity and bandwidth necessary for functional 5G networks. To handle this data, service providers are upgrading their backhaul networks with fibre technology to truly deliver on offering unlimited bandwidth to their customers.
At the same time, there’s movement towards open, disaggregated, programmable networks, with agreement on standards and an open blueprint for networking equipment. This is another essential component to shift Britain away from reliance on proprietary, closed ecosystems that stifle innovation.
That’s why initiatives such as the UK government backing a £1 million high tech lab to accelerate the adoption of Open RAN and the push for industry standards for telecom equipment are so important.
Looking forward, Britain has also launched a £30 million R&D funding competition to accelerate Open RAN adoption, to ensure that the country positions itself as a leader on next-generation connectivity: the beating heart of a modern, digital economy.
With its heart and digital initiatives at the right place, the UK is firing up on full fibre – exactly at the right time.
STL is an industry-leading integrator of digital networks that enables telcos, cloud companies, citizen networks and large enterprises to deliver enhanced experiences to their customers. Visit stl.tech.
By Ankit Agarwal, Managing Director, STL
INDUSTRY VIEW BY STL
Why businesses need to move on blockchain
For years, blockchain has been touted as the technology that can revolutionise the world. By now, most people in the corporate world have probably heard of blockchain, but many would struggle to accurately describe what it is, or the potential benefits it could bring to their business.
But this is a topic every business leader needs to understand sooner rather than later, if they are not to find themselves in the same position they likely were when Covid-19 hit: woefully underprepared and forced to overhaul their processes almost overnight to ensure their survival.
Business benefits of blockchain
There are several ways in which organisations could potentially make use of blockchain. One of the most obvious is through the transparency and traceability it offers, courtesy of the distributed ledger technology on which it is based. This enables transactions and data to be recorded in multiple locations, and for all authorised people to see the same information in real time.
From a supply chain perspective, this offers huge benefits, including seeing exactly where components are and where they have come from – something that will be increasingly important as the need for full transparency in sustainability grows. For example, transparency and traceability throughout the supply chain enable companies to demonstrate their sustainable and ethical credentials for net zero claims.
The decentralised nature of blockchain also makes it inherently tamper-proof, as all members in the network have a copy of the same data. This means it can act as a single source of proof around which businesses can operate, overcoming the issue of multiple sources of recording information and complex supplier networks.
This can give businesses the confidence to release payment to suppliers, for instance, in the knowledge that items have been despatched, and for the greater use of smart contracts, allowing businesses and their partners to automate aspects of an agreement when certain conditions have been met without the need for manual intervention.
“This can change a lot of business processes, streamline overheads and ensure fulfilment,” explains Lone Fønss Schrøder, CEO of blockchain firm Concordium. “Smart contracts enforce the terms of a contract via code, ensuring commitments are fulfilled transparently, traceably and irreversibly. It’s now possible to do this without the need for specific coding capabilities which will expand the use of such contracts to more businesses.”
The immutability of blockchain data can also help in other areas where trust is vital, such as the use of autonomous vehicles, decentralised finance applications, demonstrating rights ownership in art or music or voluntary carbon markets. Taken together, all this can create a sense of trust and accountability between different entities, leading to simplified and more effective business relationships.
Blockchain blockers
Yet despite the obvious benefits, many businesses have so far failed to take advantage of blockchain. There are a number of reasons for this. Perhaps the biggest deterrent is the lack of clarity to the regulatory and compliance implications of deployment, as well as questions of ownership and interoperability with other technologies.
Many blockchains allow users to operate under pseudonyms, meaning some platforms and cryptocurrencies have come under scrutiny for money laundering and terrorist financing. Regulators are increasingly concerned about its potential use for tax evasion, meaning there is a need for applications and services to be built on blockchain infrastructure that readily complies with both existing and potential regulations.
Businesses may also find it hard to identify blockchain’s best potential use case or be unsure as to which platform will provide the best match in areas such as security, privacy, scalability, integration and customer experience. Some will have practical concerns too, relating to performance, data governance, enterprise architecture, change management or business process design. It can also be difficult to make the first move in creating a consortium, or deciding whether to join an existing one.
Some organisations have also been through expensive and complex technology projects recently – such as overseeing a migration to cloud applications – and lack the corporate desire to go through such a process again, particularly if there are concerns that this may not be a long-term solution. The fear of the amount of communication, interaction and change management involved can be a mental barrier for many.
Facing the future
The next generation of blockchain, though, is already upon us, with a greater focus on enhancing security, scalability and load-balancing to create a more robust and business-focused platform. It also incorporates an ID level at the protocol layer and guarantees privacy through Zero Knowledge Proof cryptography, going above and beyond current regulatory requirements.
Embracing blockchain is not something that can be done overnight, so it’s important businesses start to think about it now. “We all know, especially in the corporate world, how long it takes to implement new technologies into our roadmaps,” says Schrøder. “There’s a long learning curve, and this will transition the industry over the next five years. Businesses need to be front and centre of that.”
Concordium’s open-source, decentralised blockchain technology is the first with layer-one ID built into the protocol to ease regulatory compliance. This offers unrivalled security, privacy, transparency and peace of mind to forward-thinking businesses and application developers.
To find out more about how Concordium blockchain could help your business, visit Concordium.
INDUSTRY VIEW BY CONCORDIUM
It’s time to stop stalling and address data integrity
The European Parliament’s resolution on the integrity of online gambling called on member states to make harm reduction and fraud prevention top priorities. The resolution concluded that online gambling “combines several risk factors” that make protecting players especially important, and called for thorough investigation. I couldn’t agree more. Responsible gaming is an immensely consequential issue. There’s only one problem: that EU resolution is dated Tuesday, 10 March 2009.
Thirteen years of stagnation leads to frustration. In that time, millions of people have been harmed. In the United Kingdom alone, it’s estimated that more than five million people have experienced harm related to problematic online gambling.
Much of this harm, research shows, can be prevented through technological intervention and regulation that protects players from themselves and prevents fraud. It’s quite amazing how player data can be analysed to identity problematic behaviour before it escalates, preventing harm and promoting a healthier industry. Governments and gaming organisations have been working together to investigate these data-driven regulation strategies, and for far longer than a decade. We’re heard tales of countless committees, review boards, regulatory departments, slap-on-the-wrist fines, and more investigations than a police department.
Now, I don’t want to sound cynical, but you’ll notice frustration in my tone. Because the tools and technologies to solve these challenges are already available. Regulators just need to agree to their use. And we may hear misinformed concerns about the cost of implementing new technologies, but we shouldn’t forget that the cost of inaction is measured in human suffering – addiction, depression, economic strife, and suicide.
At the heart of this prevarication is a data challenge that’s rampant across industries. For years, we have believed that data would save the world. If we could just stall a bit longer, collect a bit more data, we would have models that enable near perfect decision-making. Unfortunately, if unsurprisingly, that hasn’t happened. Every week we read about another company investing in the latest AI-powered analytics tool, acquiring a hot new start-up with “data” in its name, or announcing how successful its data management and governance framework has been. How is it then that most decision-makers report that they are likely to disregard a data-driven insight that conflicts with their own intuitions? We’ve invested billions in data and analytics, but in the end the boss still goes with their hunch. The reason is not a lack of data, it’s a lack of data integrity. If we don’t have complete confidence in the data we rely on, it’s effectively worthless.
Simply put, data integrity is the reliability and trustworthiness of data throughout its lifecycle. It is a measurement of our confidence that data hasn’t been changed, corrupted, abused or manipulated. Even perfectly valid and verified data can’t be trusted if it isn’t managed, stored and shared using systems that prioritise trustfulness and immutability.
Data integrity challenges explain the stagnation in online gambling industry regulations. For one example, regulators want gaming operators to prove their compliance with standards for how, when and how much they communicate with players about potential markers of harm. How could an operator do that? A promise surely wouldn’t suffice. The operator could keep a log of those communications, but that’s open for manipulation. It could use a third-party to store evidence of that communication, but that too holds potential for bribery, abuse or fraud. The answer is to store the evidenced records of that communication on an immutable ledger. Externally auditable, decentralised and trustworthy, an immutable ledger can create true data integrity.
The only way to trust data is to use systems that don’t require you to. This is not just true for online gambling. It also rings true across industries.
Data is a tool for better decision-making. However, until we address data integrity in a real and sweeping way, data collection and analysis are a waste of time and resources. Unless, of course, the goal itself is this pantomime of progress we see play out in headlines and interviews.
Given my criticism is of rampant inaction, I’d like to be as action-oriented as possible. When it comes to data integrity, I believe there are several ways for business leaders to identify the issue in their own organisations and to take steps towards overcoming it. First and foremost is accepting that data integrity is a fundamental challenge.
Decision-makers must turn a critical eye towards their own organisations. Ask how important data is for your decision-making. How often do you find the data “coincidentally” matching your gut instinct (a potential sign of confirmation bias)? How often are you ignoring data you think is questionable and setting a course based on your own personal beliefs? Difficult questions to answer honestly, but those answers will certainly be revealing. Studies show that business leaders having full confidence in their data insights is exceedingly rare. So there’s no shame in recognising a truth that also plagues most, if not all, of your peers.
It may appear that the solution is working to identify and correct existing errors in your data. But with the acceleration of its collection and its increasing complexity, that has become a near-Herculean task. Instead, you have to integrate systems for managing data that remove the chance for manipulation or corruption at a foundational level. To avoid the risk of exposing my bias, I won’t speak to the work we’re doing at nChain to solve these exact challenges, the products we have in the market right now, or the successes we’ve had. Instead, I would encourage you to reach out to multiple firms that prioritise data integrity and see whether they, like too many firms, are also stalling with promises of what will one day be possible.
My last piece of advice is to avoid a trap. Don’t let “investigating” immutable ledger technology be the way your business stalls. Invest in running a pilot programme instead. Don’t expect your work to replace industry regulations overnight, but do understand that they will run in parallel to existing systems until proven by undeniable results.
For the online gaming industry, as for so many others, until your decisions are founded on data you can truly trust, the only valid decision is to stop stalling and invest in data integrity.
Find out more about nChain: nchain.com
By Sergio de Mingo, Chief Product and Marketing Officer, nChain
INDUSTRY VIEW BY NCHAIN
Energy efficiency can lead the drive to net zero
The decarbonisation movement has three key thrusts: developing clean, renewable energy sources, converting carbon intensive applications and improving energy efficiency. Because it’s less tangible, this third factor can sometimes be overlooked. However, it’s arguably the area with the most untapped potential. Most importantly, significant improvements in energy efficiency can be achieved by using existing, readily available technology, such as variable-speed drives (VSDs) paired with high-efficiency electric motors.
Energy efficiency is critical in the fight to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and adopting energy efficiency measures can have an almost immediate impact.
One area where energy efficiency can make a very significant difference is the millions of electric motors that drive machines, compressors, fans, pumps and conveyors in virtually every industrial sector, consuming around 45 per cent of the world’s electricity. Too many of these motor driven systems are based on outdated and inefficient technology that wastes energy unnecessarily.
A simple and very cost-effective measure is to use a VSD to match the motor speed to the actual demands of the process. Without a VSD, the motor runs constantly and uneconomically at full speed, regardless of need, or has to be slowed down by mechanical controls, which wastes energy. Typically, a drive will reduce energy usage by 25 per cent, yet currently only about 23 per cent of the world’s motors are paired with a drive. Addressing this gap is particularly important as the number of motors is expected to double by 2040.
High-efficiency technology to step up energy savings
Further energy savings are realised when a VSD is paired with a modern, high-efficiency motor. In 2021, the EU’s Ecodesign Directive set IE3 as the new minimum efficiency standard for a wide range of industrial motors. However, it is already possible to take the next step to the even more efficient IE5-rated technology.
For example, an Australian aquatic centre upgraded to ABB VSDs packaged with IE5 synchronous reluctance motors and is quickly finding its investment is paid back with energy savings. By replacing old motors and drives used in the pool filtration and water circulation system, HVAC central plant and greywater system, the centre now expects yearly energy cost savings of $36,000 AUD and a reduction of 77 tonnes of carbon emissions.
To support energy efficiency initiatives, it is important to take advantage of the latest developments in sensors, data analytics and connectivity. This enables the real-time monitoring of motor and drive performance for informed decisions regarding the condition of assets. Data driven decisions also help to maximise resource efficiency and energy usage, contributing to a low carbon future.
Raising energy efficiency awareness
A recent study highlighted that if the world’s 300 million industrial motor-driven systems were replaced with optimised, high-efficiency equipment, global electricity consumption could be reduced by up to 10 per cent. That roughly covers more than 90 per cent of the annual consumption of the entire EU.
ABB launched the Energy Efficiency Movement in 2021. This is a multi-stakeholder initiative to raise awareness of the benefits of energy efficiency solutions to accelerate the transition towards decarbonisation. Highly efficient motor and drive technology will give the industry a head start.
To learn more, visit energyefficiencymovement.com.
by Tuomo Hoysniemi, Division President, Drive Products at ABB Motion
INDUSTRY VIEW FROM ABB MOTION
Cyber-security risk: a growing ESG issue
Ransomware and cyber-attacks increased by an alarming rate of 105 per cent last year, sparking concern among companies and investors. With the Russia-Ukraine conflict adding more fuel to the fire, companies are facing acute challenges in addressing enterprise cyber risk exposures. With these factors in play, companies need to evaluate cyber-security risk as a critical part of their ESG strategy in order to sustain shareholder value and investor confidence.
Cyber-security across the pillars of ESG
Cyber-security risk impacts all parts of an organisation and should be considered a boardroom concern similar to other ESG risks. As cyber-attacks increase in size and frequency, the direct and indirect damage to companies touch all aspects of ESG, including loss of customer confidence, reputational damage, potential impact on stock price and possible regulatory actions or litigation. Data breaches can pose a threat to the social and environmental pillars of ESG. Hackers have successfully targeted critical infrastructure, pipelines and healthcare systems, causing harm to society and the environment. Companies need to integrate cyber-security into their overall ESG strategies to ensure such risks are viewed through an ESG lens to promote and maintain enterprise-wide cyber-resilience. This will assure investors that these cyber-security risks are being managed.
Resilience through cyber-security hygiene
Cyber-security planning is a critical part of any existing ESG programs. A robust and clear cyber-response plan can help any organisation promote cyber-resilience across its business and technical teams, while managing and mitigating cyber-exposures proactively.
Cyber-security hygiene involves proactively supporting a best common risk management practice to protect an organisation from debilitating cyber-attacks. Continuously assessing an organisation’s security posture to ensure that its networks are protected from potential intrusions is imperative. Another way to gain insight into an organisation’s cyber-hygiene practice is to use cyber-risk ratings that provide a view into the external risks to their network. Using a similar approach to a potential hacker testing the technical defences of an organisation, cyber-risk ratings are used to identify vulnerabilities across public-facing networks.
Managing third-party supply chain cyber-risk
How organisations manage and mitigate their supply chain cyber-risk is equally important to investors. Third-party risk and resilience are key issues that keep company executives up at night. This challenge extends to the management of cyber and privacy risks involving data shared with an organisation’s supply chain partners, who are often the weakest link in security. By applying the same ESG standards to their supply chains, companies can ensure that risks posed by the vendor ecosystem are addressed at the same high level.
"The United States’ SEC has proposed rules that address how public reporting companies assign board oversight, report material cyber-security incidents, disclose cyber-security risk management plans and governance."
Proposed rules and company cyber-risk management
The United States’ SEC has proposed rules that address how public reporting companies assign board oversight, report material cyber-security incidents, disclose cyber-security risk management plans and governance. The recent rules are designed to help inform investors through updated periodic disclosure a company’s cyber-security exposure and ability to manage and mitigate its risks.
With the continued rise of ransomware and cyber-attacks threatening companies globally, investors need to evaluate their portfolio companies through an ESG lens, including enterprise-wide cyber-security risk management and transparent disclosures about how the organisation is mitigating these risks.
To discover how ISS Corporate Solutions helps companies design and manage their ESG programs to align with company goals, reduce risk, and manage the needs of diverse stakeholders by delivering expert advisory, data, and software solutions, visit: isscorporatesolutions.com.
ISS Corporate Solutions, Inc. (ICS) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. (ISS). ICS provides advisory services, analytical tools and information to companies to enable them to improve shareholder value and reduce risk through the adoption of improved corporate governance and executive compensation practices. The ISS Global Research Department, which is separate from ICS, will not give preferential treatment to, and is under no obligation to support, any proxy proposal of a company (whether or not that company has purchased products or services from ICS). No statement from an employee of ICS should be construed as a guarantee that ISS will recommend that its clients vote in favor of any particular proxy proposal.
© 2022 | Institutional Shareholder Services and/or its affiliates
INDUSTRY VIEW FROM ISS CORPORATE SOLUTIONS
The rise of personalised and adaptive learning
Learners are a lot fussier these days about what they learn. And why shouldn’t they be? We’ve all got so used to technology personalising our everyday experiences – from streaming services to shopping – that we now expect it in all walks of life, learning included.
Fortunately, most L&D teams and business leaders are also in favour of personalisation, recognising the value of highly targeted, relevant learning that helps people do their jobs better rather than putting the entire workforce through a sheep dip exercise.
What is personalised learning and adaptive delivery?
This has led to the emergence of personalised learning, which is when content and training are tailored to learner profiles. Learning is personalised to the individual, such as a feed of content that will help an employee do their job better. Adaptive learning is more sophisticated and dynamic, going a bit deeper. It’s an extension of personalised learning that is largely AI-driven, tailored to what a person knows and their level of capability and, as that knowledge and those capabilities change, adapts in real-time. Adaptive learning understands where an employee is at on their learning journey and can provide personalised learning at scale in organisations.
Both types of learning are data-driven. They take data on an individual’s existing skills and knowledge and use it to suggest and deliver learning that will move them on to the next level. That process then keeps repeating throughout the employee’s learning journey.
One of the real beauties of personalised learning is that employees don’t need to repeat information they already know. In the past, employees often had to sit through training material they’d already learnt, which was a waste of time and resources and a real turn-off for learners. With adaptive learning, content is targeted, relevant and timely.
Macro-adaptive and micro-adaptive learning
At Rise Up, we think there are two approaches to adaptive learning: macro-adaptive and micro-adaptive. Macro-adaptive focuses on personalised training pathways, while micro-adaptive focuses on personalised training content.
New research is being conducted all the time into L&D trends, and personalised learning and adaptive learning have been near the top for a few years now. But it took a while for learning teams to get to grips with personalised and adaptive learning, largely because L&D wasn’t sure what to do with the data it was collecting.
Benefits of personalised and adaptive learning
Organisations with effective adaptive learning practices know how to interpret data and use it to drive learning forward. By making good use of data, learning professionals can make informed decisions about what learning is needed, where and why – and they can track its effectiveness.
Even before the pandemic hit, it was generally accepted that the old approach to learning – the one-size-fits-all, bums-on-seats approach – was outdated and didn’t deliver the best outcomes. This has enabled blended learning to flourish, facilitating a highly personalised and adaptive delivery. It allows people to learn through a variety of different mediums and channels according to their needs and preferences and those of their organisation. The move to remote working during the pandemic and then to hybrid working broke down barriers to digital learning. With the rise of the hybrid work environment, it’s even more important that employees have access to personalised learning, wherever they are based.
What now?
Learning teams need to push ahead with ensuring employees have a really engaging, personalised learning experience. An organisation’s people are its best asset and they need to be looked after, with their skills nurtured and developed. Employers need to help employees do their best work by giving them access to the right learning, when they need it, while also fulfilling their career aspirations. Personalised learning is the key to achieving that.
L&D proved its worth during the early days of COVID-19, helping organisations and employees in the shift to digital ways of working and learning. Business leaders realised the pivotal role that learning plays, particularly through times of change and uncertainty. In 2021, it shifted from being a ‘nice to have’ to becoming a ‘need to have’, and learning budgets are looking pretty healthy – lots of L&D teams expect their budget to increase this year. So L&D teams need to think wisely and creatively about their spending, how to bring about change and how to keep hold of that seat at the top table. Providing employees with personalised, adaptive learning experiences has been a top priority for long enough – now is the time for it to become a reality.
Rise Up delivers a dynamic and impactful learning experience through an all-in-one training solution that facilitates personalised employee learning. With an AI-driven adaptive learning capability, Rise Up is leading the way to incorporate experience, culture, need, impact and agility. To find out more, book a short demo with an L&D expert and watch an exclusive webinar exploring what adaptive learning means, how companies are successfully using it today, and what challenges it is helping to solve.
INDUSTRY VIEW FROM RISE UP
Can automation solve the manufacturing paradox?
By now, neither Industry 4.0 nor the smart factory need any introduction. We all know they offer great opportunities to increase competitiveness through new technologies. However, if you walk into an average factory these days, there is still a very high chance you’ll find outdated systems, error-prone manual work and operators scribbling things down on paper. Despite vast amounts of technology that have become accessible, many manufacturers are still dealing with yesterday’s problems. The question is, why?
Lagging in digital transformation
After the third industrial revolution, factories moved into a phase of automated production that focused on capital-intensive machines and robots. These relieved workers of physical labour and boosted productivity. Since that revolution was so successful, manufacturers have started to myopically focus on operational technology (OT), neglecting the opportunities of information technology (IT).
And what opportunities they are! Going into Industry 4.0, manufacturers can digitise production processes and streamline their operations. There is a vast amount of new IT solutions available, ranging from artificial intelligence and machine learning to augmented reality, digital twins, the internet of things, machine vision, robotic process automation, AMR, virtual reality and more.
It’s a lot to take in, and going digital can easily become a challenge. In its 2021 Quality Emerging Technology Roadmap, research firm Gartner identified 31 emerging technologies that paint the picture of the smart factory. The stream of new tech continues flowing: state-of-the-art devices and systems are invented faster than most factories can deploy them.
Faced with the overwhelming task of choosing, it’s understandable that many manufacturers are struggling to determine what would work best for their factory. Or even where to begin. There is even confusion as to how technology differs per manufacturing type. Discrete manufacturing for instance, seems much more focused on machine vision, while for process manufacturing, sensors and IoT appear to be more relevant.
What happened to “start with the basics”?
More often than not, digital transformation is used as a synonym for looking at the most advanced “toys”, such as the technologies mentioned above. But that’s skipping way ahead.
Investing in the most advanced tech makes sense only after digitising core processes first. For example, manufacturers using a paper- or spreadsheet-based approach to collect data don’t have the capability of turning that data into insights. Picking advanced technology such as IoT, edge computing or AI, they won’t see immediate improvements. Instead, this will add an additional stream of data that most likely won’t lead to progress.
In fact, in its 2021 Quality Emerging Technology Roadmap, Gartner classified AI, machine learning, predictive analytics, augmented reality and digital twins as high risk. Other technologies mentioned in the report are much more embedded in existing processes and are therefore better candidates for digitisation.
The manufacturing paradox
Despite the discrepancies that we see these days – factories working with both outdated systems and high tech – manufacturing has been an example for many other industries for decades. For instance, Kanban boards, invented by Toyota, spread to IT and software teams and through the Agile movement even into banks and insurance companies.
While there are indeed exemplary cases, there are even more examples of manufacturing not leveraging what it already has. Take statistical process control (SPC) for example. SPC rivals both the statistical foundations and benefits of AI and ML. It has been around for almost a century, yet the data gathering for these advanced and proven methods is done on paper and Excel sheets. Sadly, as SPC sits in the quality control domain, it is often overlooked as a potential spearhead for digital transformation.
This highlights once more that while there is not one way to start with digitisation, there are many gains in starting with the basics. Manufacturing leadership must embrace and promote digitisation and create an achievable roadmap for it.
Six important takeaways
So, can automation solve the manufacturing paradox? We believe it can as long as manufacturers cover their bases. Here are six important takeaways that will help in your decision-making:
To find out more, please visit the AlisQI website.
By Otto de Graaf, CMO and Co-founder AlisQI
UK businesses reap the benefits of remote hiring
The past two years have seen an exodus of talent from the UK. That has stung companies needing to recruit, but it has also pushed many to look farther afield for employees and improve their international talent-hiring capabilities now they no longer need to be constrained to the UK.
The changes to the job market in the UK brought about by Brexit and COVID-19 have been substantial. The number of EU citizens seeking work in the UK since Brexit has fallen by 36 per cent since 2019, while 70 per cent of UK companies surveyed by the British Chambers of Commerce said they have faced problems recruiting. The problem is particularly acute in the UK’s tech sector, where cybersecurity, big data and data architecture are all experiencing major shortages of talent.
“Business leaders are realising that they need to look outside of the usual channels to find great new talent,” says Nadia Vatalidis, VP of People at Remote, which has carved out a specialism in helping employers hire overseas. “A core part of this is the realisation that employment doesn’t need to be restricted to geographical location, and hiring strategies can be evolved to be much more inclusive. Fortunately, the tech sector is perfectly suited to remote work.”
Looking further afield
At first glance, the process of hiring overseas talent looks burdensome, with companies forced to contend with a range of local labour laws that can slow and complicate the acquisition process. There are substantial fees involved, with companies required to register local legal entities. They must determine how best to secure efficient cross-border payroll and be sure that the status they give to employees – whether employed, self-employed or otherwise – aligns with the local taxes they pay. They also need to navigate the different languages of each of the countries they hire in.
However, there are options to make the entire process straightforward and efficient.
UK companies are increasingly looking to employers of record (EORs) to enable remote hires. These third-party organisations act as go-betweens for a client and a local employee, taking care of background checks on candidates, the drawing up of contracts, filing taxes and many other functions that a company without a local footprint needs to carry out.
In short, it acts as a local employer – and a good EOR will save a company significant money, as well as ensure it avoids the risks that can come with recruiting talent outside of its own borders.
“Employers can now find talent so much faster than before,” Vatalidis says. “By removing geographic barriers to hiring, a huge international talent pool opens up, creating opportunities for talented people wherever they are in the world.”
There’s also the matter of local knowledge. Even something as seemingly straightforward as benefits that workers should receive in each country could prove to be a stumbling block if not approached carefully. Health insurance is one example. If the scenario were to be flipped and an overseas company were to hire a UK citizen, there would be no need to consider health insurance for that person. But if a UK company were to hire someone in the US, where state-provided healthcare is minimal, then health insurance would more than likely be an expectation. Further afield – for example, in India – there might be the additional matter of a remote employee expecting that the health insurance package they’re offered includes cover for their parents.
Local knowledge is therefore vital, and a strong EOR can help to illuminate how social norms and expectations influence the decisions a candidate makes about which company they choose to work for.
Taking the headaches away
But how does a company know which EOR to go with? And how can it gain a better understanding of the complex processes involved in overseas hiring?
Remote has a saying: “Think global and act local.” Long before the pandemic atomised the global workforce, it was busy developing extensive open-access resources for companies, both UK-based and international, who were looking overseas for talent. Covering topics ranging from tax and compliance to data security and global payroll – and including a country explorer page that highlights key information for each country – its output has continually emphasised the need to understand local issues.
“Businesses seeking to hire distributed teams must consider local nuances and expectations across different markets and ensure they meet local standards,” Vatalidis says. “We offer customers this level of local support to ensure salaries and working hours are in line with what is typical for that market. If these do not match, we cannot hire the employee, and businesses simply won’t be able to attract the employee to begin with.”
Remote has designed one of the most sophisticated and wide-ranging EOR models on offer. With it, UK companies can connect with local entities whose skill in managing the range of HR administrative work required has been carefully vetted.
If homegrown talent is in short supply and companies have little choice but to look overseas, developing efficient and effective processes for hiring remote workers could be the thing that ensures their survival.
“Talent is distributed all over the world, and in a completely digital work environment, there is no longer a need for companies to restrict themselves to recruiting only local candidates,” says Vatalidis.
“Hiring distributed teams provides businesses with endless opportunities, while also allowing employees an opportunity to live the life they want, where they want.”
INDUSTRY VIEW BY REMOTE EUROPE
Tackling the digital skills drought
The Covid-19 pandemic has seen companies around the world scrambling to embrace digital technologies, as businesses found themselves forced to adopt remote working almost overnight. Suddenly, projects that had previously been seen as too difficult or expensive became the number one priority, accelerating the pace of digital adoption by years in one fell swoop.
The problem for many businesses, though, is that there is a distinct lack of digital talent, something that was already evident before the pandemic hit. According to a study by Microsoft, 69 per cent of UK business leaders said their organisation was facing a digital skills shortage in 2020, a shortage that has only widened since.
As organisations now look to further adopt digital technologies to improve ways of working – and often revisit solutions that have accrued significant technical debt when they were thrown together in haste – a shortage of skills is being keenly felt. “It’s a real problem in terms of the opportunities that businesses or public sector organisations can’t take,” says Ash Gawthorp, Academy Services Director at IT consultancy Ten10. This has also created an inflationary effect in terms of salaries, with existing talent being snapped up by competitors who can afford to pay more.
Training people up internally brings challenges, too. “Businesses don’t necessarily have the infrastructure and architecture to support training and ongoing support themselves, and the pace of change means that you have to constantly refresh that training to keep it effective,” explains Gawthorp. “It’s also hard to assess capabilities and cultural fit, and even if you successfully bring them in and train them up – which can take a good deal of time – retention rates of entry-level tech employees are often low.”
At the same time, the use of contractors is usually prohibitive, due to the high cost and the temporary nature of assignments. “Contractors are short-term fixes. You don’t keep their knowledge inside your organisation like you do when you build a permanent workforce. You should always look for the three-to-four-year solution rather than one for six to 12 months,” says Gawthorp.
This was an issue Ten10 itself faced back in 2013, when it was struggling to source the talent it needed for its consultancy business. The solution was to set up the Ten10 Academy, which from 2013 has also sought out individuals – usually in cohorts of 25 – with the potential to work in the digital space. It then hires them and trains them up before placing them on projects with Ten10 clients. In 2016, Ten10 changed the deployment model so organisations could hire individuals permanently after these projects were completed.
To date Ten10 has taken on around 500 people from all backgrounds, including school-leavers, university graduates and career-changers, using tried and tested selection processes, including its own aptitude test framework, to determine an individual’s aptitude for tech without them having any experience in the subject.
“We don’t hire people into predetermined roles, such as software developers or business analysts,” explains Gawthorp. “We hire them to be technologists and then we put them through an initial technology training programme, which covers a little bit of everything. That allows the individuals to work out what they’re best at. After completion, they go through specialist training aligned to the roles that they have the strongest aptitude for, and also what they have enjoyed.”
There’s a strong emphasis on matching candidates with the right employer, too. “It’s about matching the personality of the individual to what the client is looking for in terms of their values and culture,” he says. “We work with charities at one end of the scale and investment banks at the other, and they require very different personality types.”
Many businesses have benefited from the Ten10 Academy, including one healthtech company who had historically been heavily dependent on contractors and looked to Ten10 to provide eight Academy Engineers. The company was so impressed with the Academy Engineers, who rapidly became integral and invaluable members of the team, that they were able to release the contractors in the first year, replacing them with Ten10’s Academy Engineers.
Ten10’s consultancy background also means it’s able to offer a hybrid solution, for instance where clients are looking to develop a new digital proposition. This can see junior staff supported by a Ten10 senior consultant, who can provide skills and expertise in the short-term. All recruits continue to have ongoing access to the consultancy network, meaning organisations can tap into the experience of senior consultants as and when needed.
Training people from a broad range of backgrounds and experiences can also help companies meet diversity and inclusivity ambitions, in areas such as gender, ethnicity, culture and social inclusion. “Most businesses are trying to build a workforce which is more representative of the country at large,” points out Gawthorp. “Take the gender balance of your team, for example. If you want to increase the number of women in your technical teams, you can’t do that by hiring people with computer science degrees because there just isn’t a great number of women taking those courses. That may change further down the line, but the digital skills emergency is here today.”
As businesses find themselves with an ever-increasing digital skills gap, the traditional approach to tech hiring is no longer viable. It’s time for companies to rethink their tech recruitment strategies and look to solutions such as Ten10’s academy model: a wealth of talented Academy Engineers, carefully selected, trained, and supported by experienced practitioners.
To find out more about how Ten10 can help your business, visit www.ten10.com
INDUSTRY VIEW FROM TEN10
Packaging for the future
According to a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the amount of plastic waste has doubled globally since 2000, with 353 million tonnes produced in 2019 alone. Concerningly, just 9 per cent of this is currently recycled.
A separate study by the Environmental Investigation Agency suggests the threat posed by plastic pollution is as great as that of climate change, warning that by 2040 some 70 million tonnes of plastic will be in the world’s rivers and oceans.
Packaging produced by businesses is a major contributing factor – and one that all organisations will have to get to grips with. In the EU, the Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive has set firm targets for 70 per cent of all packaging to be recycled by 2030, including 55 per cent of plastic. Other countries, including France and Spain, have taken steps to ban the use of plastics altogether on specific products.
Charlotte Le Coz is the product marketing manager at software firm Trace One, the world’s largest collaborative retail business platform for consumer-packaged goods. She says legislation is one factor driving more organisations to assess their packaging requirements and take steps to improve the environmental impact it has. “The timeframe is very tight, and it will come around very quickly,” she says. “Businesses need to think about this now. The other driver is customer expectations, as it’s now common for consumers to ask a lot more questions about the packaging.”
However, knowing where to start is not easy, and the topic is more complex than it may first appear. “Consumers do not always have all the information they need to ask the right questions,” Le Coz says. “They can make out that plastic is the bad guy, but some plastic could be entirely recyclable and might be better than complex packaging with several components that can’t be recycled.”
Nor is it straightforward to simply replace a particular element of packaging, as any method also needs to do the job of protecting a product, such as food. “You need to know your product will be safe, so something like paper may not be suitable for some products,” Le Coz points out. “You’ll also need studies to be done to work out what impact it will have on your production. You may need to change machinery or adapt production lines.”
The first stage in any process of assessing and improving packaging options is to work out where the business is today. “You need to do an inventory across your whole product portfolio,” says Le Coz. “If you don’t have packaging experts in your industry, you can use the regulations as a first step because you will be forced to comply with them. After that, you can work out what you can do to change things.” Trace One’s Packaging Management Software helps businesses to quickly identify products with materials that may need improving or eliminating for greener packaging.
Identifying where to apply initial attention is an important next step. “Focus on the quick actions that will present you with the best return on investment,” she advises. “It may be better for you to focus on changing the packaging of a product you sell a lot of initially, because in terms of tonnes of materials on the market, that could be really impactful. Then you can look at areas where you might have more complex packaging but where you don’t have a lot of sales.” Practical steps could include changing the size of a product, switching out a particular component in the design of the packaging or identifying an entirely new method of protecting products altogether.
For most retailers or manufacturers, this will involve working closely with suppliers and even the packaging providers of suppliers. “Often retailers want to make changes, but they cannot do that if the supplier is not ready,” points out Le Coz. “We do a lot of work with the supplier community to help them understand what is expected of them and how they can engage with their own packaging suppliers.” This will create a virtuous circle, creating a community of engaged retailers, manufacturers, suppliers and packaging providers that have all agreed to meet certain standards and local and international guidelines.
Being able to measure the impact of any strategy is also essential and can help organisations communicate how they are doing to customers, as well as investors and other stakeholders. “They can show how many tonnes of plastic they have reduced or a percentage improvement over the year,” says Le Coz. Trace One’s dashboard can help demonstrate this.
Acting now, before new regulations mean there is no choice, can be used to enhance a company’s reputation as well as win customers, particularly among younger age groups. “Younger consumers are very focused on packaging, so the more you can do in this space the better,” Le Coz concludes. “Taking action early will give you an advantage over your competitors and ensure you are well placed to meet the requirements of new laws coming into force.”
Trace One helps consumer packaged goods retailers, manufacturers and other industries transform their packaging challenge into an opportunity for growth. To find out more, visit traceone.com/en/packaging.
INDUSTRY VIEW FROM TRACE ONE
Make the future of work a strategic competency
Contrary to popular belief, the future of work isn’t something that happens to you or your firm. It’s not merely some new technology your organisation will eventually get around to adopting. In fact, there’s no single future of work – there will be many, built in the context of specific problems. But here’s the key: the future of work is a strategic imperative that you must actively create for your company, your employees, and your own career. It’s a strategy you build and a set of actions you take – continuously. And like all strategic imperatives, it requires elevating the discipline to a strategic competency, an initiative with a vision, a strategy, and a plan.
Think of the future of work as a constellation of innovations that address new or accelerating challenges for organisations aiming for customer-obsessed outcomes. You can dip into these innovations as you see fit. Some are technological, such as robotic process automation (RPA), where bots or software entities take on some of the more repetitive and predictable tasks that human workers conduct digitally. Other future of work innovations are organisational, such as Chinese manufacturer Haier’s use of micro-enterprise teams that elect their own leaders.
Often, technological and organisational innovations will go hand-in-hand. Deploying RPA bots will be a powerful tool to automate some tasks, but they depend upon an organisation’s automation strike teams – business-responsive but technologically savvy organisational units that help provide guidance and expertise – or similar centres of excellence. Creating a distributed workforce as an organisational tool can diversify your talent base, but will depend upon successfully deploying remote collaboration software to help far-off colleagues work together. Technology and organisational structures are intertwined.
Considering the future of work an ongoing innovation initiative places agency in your hands. Turning it into a strategic competency will drive investment at three levels. First, you must prepare yourself, personally, to have the underlying attitude and inclination to succeed. A world in which bots and AI are becoming ever more common requires every employee – from leaders to technologists to non-technical employees – to bring curiosity, collaboration and adaptability to the table.
Second, you must help every employee increase their understanding of how to interact with automation, AI and other technologies. Today, most employees aren’t ready. Forrester’s Business Technographics data reveals that only 21 per cent of information workers agree with the statement “I know when to question the results of an automated technology”, while only 18 per cent agree that “my career path in a world of automation is clear to me.” Why? Because learning and development programmes haven’t begun to train employees about advanced technologies. Only 17 per cent agree that “we have established a structured training programme for working with automation technologies.”
Third, you must create a strategic plan. The influx of AI and automation into the workplace will change its composition: the automation economy will eliminate some jobs while creating others. Your five-year plan should forecast which roles you’ll need fewer of, like employees performing administrative tasks. These workers must be trained for new positions or not be backfilled as they depart. You must also gain a whole host of technical and business skills in AI and automation. These are workers you must cultivate through training or hiring – training can take years, and hiring is competitive, so you must plan ahead.
Succeeding in the future of work requires a commitment to longer-term (up to 10 years) thinking, which can be challenging. Yet companies and leaders that successfully invest in elevating the future of work to the status of a strategic competency are the ones most likely to thrive over the next decade.
Find out more about Forrester’s research on the Future of Work here.
by JP Gownder, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Forrester
Effective cybersecurity is the cornerstone of modern hyperconnectivity
The modern digital economy is evolving quickly. With the rise of online shopping, challenger banks and fintech innovation, as well as the likes of cryptocurrency and blockchain, new transformative technologies are rapidly changing the way organisations do business and how consumers make everyday payments. Of course, some recent developments have been accelerated by the financial services industry, where these technologies present a future of a frictionless digital economy. However, such an economy relies on increased hyperconnectivity and exposes users to a whole new range of threats, from potential ransomware to phishing scams to ‘shady’ transactions. With an increasingly digital economy, cybersecurity will of course become ever more important. As revealed by the Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2020, the frequency and sophistication of cybercrime is rising steadily year on year. Almost half of businesses (46 per cent) and a quarter of charities (26 per cent) reported cybersecurity breaches or attacks in the past 12 months. Those reporting cyber incidents are also experiencing more frequent attacks this year, with some being targeted at least once a week. To deliver a safe digital economy, consumers and businesses must ensure they are fully cyber-secure, starting with the basics and everyday authentication.
Passwords remain the de facto mechanism for authentication. However, the problem with passwords is that when they are leaked or captured by a third party, they can be used to gain unauthorised access to an account or system. This has driven many organisations to add an additional layer of security or authentication. Many sites, for example, now ask users to associate a mobile phone number with their account. The premise is that two-factor authentication does not allow anyone to log in to an associated account without access to the phone and the updated password. This should in theory prevent any third party from hijacking that account as they do not have the registered phone that generates a code to log in.
It is possible that biometric authentication will become the standard form of providing credentials in the future, although it should be combined with multi-factor methods. Many smartphones already have biometric readers or sensors incorporated into their hardware and the full deployment of interoperable biometric solutions should significantly reduce identity theft, benefitting the economy greatly with more reliable authentication solutions. That being said, while there are numerous biometric solutions, none can be considered a silver bullet and one size certainly does not fit all. The accuracy of facial recognition varies greatly due to factors such as lighting, angle and camera sensitivity. Likewise, fingerprint readers are affected by temperature and other factors and are not necessarily a ‘hackproof’ solution, as we leave fingerprints that can easily be copied on every surface. When fingerprints are scanned the finger is flat and will therefore be different when it is misaligned, wet or dirty, leading to issues when signing in with two-factor authentication. There are, of course, hardware security keys that are excellent for protecting accounts – however, hardware security tokens involve additional costs for the device and require users to carry the token on their person, proving cumbersome.
Voice recognition is becoming another viable biometric technique for authentication. However, it must be measured against both the ambient background, such as when speaking in a bar, on a train, on a street or at a sports arena. There has not been much movement in trying to implement voice authentication, but it does play a part in some multi-factor systems. The main barrier to any widespread adoption has been the problem of aural eavesdropping. This is where casual or malicious bystanders may overhear private information spoken by screen readers or users.
The objective of biometric identity authentication is to establish a bond of trust between a system and the user who is requesting system access. More specifically, identity authentication ascertains a level of trust regarding who the user claims to be. It follows that the more accurate the chosen authentication method the user can present to prove their identity, the stronger this bond of trust becomes.
To conclude, while biometric, authenticator apps or hardware token solutions may not provide us with the complete authentication solution businesses and consumers need to more fully secure their accounts and systems, they will play an increasingly important role in the future. Until some superior mechanism is created, proper multi-factor authentication via hardware security keys is the gold standard and will offer a strong line of defence.
Kevin Curran is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and Professor of Cyber Security at Ulster University. To find out more on the rise of cybercrime, visit the National Crime Agency.
Kevin Curran is a Professor of Cyber Security, Executive Co-Director of the Legal Innovation Centre and group leader for the Cyber Security and Web Technologies Research Group at Ulster University. His achievements include winning and managing UK & European Framework projects and Technology Transfer Schemes; however, he has also made significant contributions to advancing the knowledge and understanding of computer networking and systems, evidenced by more than 800 published works.
Previously the founding Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Ambient Computing and Intelligence, Kevin was the recipient of an Engineering and Technology Board Visiting Lectureship for Exceptional Engineers. He has also served as an adviser to the British Computer Society in regard to the computer industry standards and is a member of the BCS and IEEE Technology Specialist Groups and various other professional bodies.
How IT and OT could spark increased digital productivity
With the new industrial revolution that is “Industry 4.0” already underway, many different terminologies for technologies are being circulated. Information technology (IT) has, of course, technically been around since the days of the abacus, but a new term that’s being frequently mentioned is operational technology (OT) – the hardware and software that sits in the background, constantly monitoring systems.
Both have different functions, yet both IT and OT are essential contributors in ensuring the transition to the fourth industrial revolution is as seamless as possible. Nonetheless, with their functions being so different, there is a gap emerging between the two, and it is crucial that this is closed or bridged as soon as possible.
Historically, the functions of both IT and OT have been clearly defined, but as operational technologies are being brought online, with data analytics and higher connectivity, it is becoming progressively essential that the two converge.
To paraphrase the Peter Parker principle, with great connectivity comes great control. However, a supposed cause for the still existing gap between IT and OT is the fact that more connections and networked devices means a greater risk of security gaps, and new security breach scenarios are being created which could have detrimental effects on both. This risk must be dealt with by increased levels of cyber-security, which in turn also aids the shift into Industry 4.0.
In the most simplistic of descriptions, IT deals with the digital flow of information and OT with the operation of physical processes and the machines used to carry them out. It is important for IT to start “thinking” like OT and vice versa, and in order to work in parallel, the two must understand one another. The introduction of the industrial internet of things (IIoT) has created a mutual concern between the two in employee and customer safety, while maintaining control of their systems and machinery.
During a February 2020 roundtable, the GAMBICA Industrial Automation Council discussed ongoing advances in technology from participants’ own experiences, the most significant impacts of technology seen in the past decade, and what they expected to see in the decade ahead. While the importance of bridging the gap between IT and OT was a key topic of conversation it was agreed that technologies such as cloud and industrial edge are closing the gap, and that the flow of data is helping to break down the barriers between the two.
The gap between IT and OT certainly needs to be closed – during the discussion the idea that a change towards a smart factory also means a change in mindset within the factory itself took hold. Skillsets from both technologies need to co-exist and we need to establish how they can work together for this convergence to be successful.
Coinciding with this mindset alteration is a bridge between IT and OT being formed by more external factors. There is increasing demand, driven by customers, for controlling machines that use mobile phones, meaning machines are more “user-friendly”, for example, as well as requirements to achieve environmental targets such as net-zero plants. “Past industrial revolutions have all consisted of two changes,” observed one participant at the roundtable. “One is a technology change, but each time there has also been a societal change.” This is certainly key if Industry 4.0 is to transform the “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” mentality to a “we can get a lot more for just a little bit more” ideology.
Being a master of IT and OT requires not only two different skillsets, but also a new way of thinking to see how the disciplines intersect, and specialists in both are currently rare. However, the emergence of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has set the stage for a union of these technologies, which is likely to unlock a new realm of competitive advantage in almost every industry.
by Nikesh Mistry, Sector Head – Industrial Automation, Gambica
Do you agree that we need to see a convergence of these skillsets? Have you seen similar bridges in your corporation? If you want to discover how similar companies feel, get in touch with us at www.gambica.org.uk to find out more.
Hybrid work doesn’t have to be emotionally exhausting
Hybrid work – a model of working partly at the office and partly remotely – gives us a chance to radically upgrade the workplace. However, going hybrid is a complex undertaking and most companies are still figuring it out as they go.
For now, what we do know is that a successful move to hybrid requires a delicate balance between company goals and employee needs. That’s why we believe that flexibility, personalisation and collaboration should be at the heart of this new work paradigm. In other words, we should try to blend the best of office work (collaboration and networking) and remote work (flexibility and personalisation).
There’s no universal recipe for making that happen, but we can lay a few fundamental ground rules. Some of these are already embraced by huge companies, while others are based on our experience as a company powering flexible work for years. On that note, here are our top pillars for making hybrid work a success.
Encourage flexibility and personalised schedules
Hybrid work doesn’t have to mean the same schedule for everyone, e.g., three days at the office a week. One of the biggest perks of hybrid working should be the opportunity to tailor your work schedule to your professional and personal needs.
That’s why companies such as Amazon allow important decisions about hybrid scheduling to be made at a team level. Others, such as Salesforce and HubSpot, have created various work options that individuals can choose from.
Besides wellbeing, such flexible options are also crucial for productivity, as they let people choose how to work based on their job’s requirements, rather than conforming to everyone else’s.
Promote in-person collaboration
Community is the biggest benefit of coming to the office. Having face-to-face contact with others is invaluable, so it’s vital to encourage in-person collaboration in an organisation.
Companies can do that by letting team members decide which days to come to the office, based on when their colleagues are there. Everyone can collaborate in person and then work from home when they need seclusion to get their tasks done. Face-to-face collaboration happens naturally, when people decide it’s necessary, instead of being forced through policies.
And again, no one has to commute every day or feel trapped by a top-down enforced schedule.
Manage app overload
We all know about Zoom fatigue – the feeling of tiredness or anxiety induced by the overuse of video conferencing tools. However, video conferencing is only part of the bigger app overload issue.
If you’re managing a hybrid workplace, you’ll likely need a desk booking app, especially if you have more employees than desks. You can manage desk booking in spreadsheets, but as your company grows, the process becomes increasingly time-consuming and tedious – and most of us are already drowning in spreadsheets.
In short, it’s better to use a specialised desk booking app. However, no one wants yet another app just to go to work.
As a company building a hybrid workplace solution, we know that from experience. That’s why our product integrates with Slack, Google Calendar and the Microsoft Suite (including Teams and Outlook). As a result, companies and individuals can manage the hybrid workplace in their everyday apps.
Office RnD’s free webinar, How To Simplify Hybrid Work Through Scheduling & Integrations, will discuss how to minimise uncertainty and help everyone in your organisation embrace hybrid work. Find out more about OfficeRnD at officernd.com.
By Evgeni Yordanov, Content Marketing Manager, OfficeRnD
INDUSTRY VIEW BY OFFICERND
Cultivating trust in partner ecosystems
Everyone is talking about ecosystems: what they are, how they will evolve and who will own them. When it comes to operationalising ecosystems, the day-to-day reality will be one of co-marketing, co-selling and co-delivering. Channel partners and consulting companies of all shapes and sizes will either become an ecosystem on their own or will join an ecosystem to access additional skills and services for their customers.
So while ecosystems may be new, what is not new is how partnerships will function in this new world. Important things will remain important. Successful partnerships are based on trust more than anything else and it will be no different in ecosystems. Especially in sales, being willing to trust other sales teams with your data and sharing leads and funnel information can be a difficult mindset shift to make.
Building trust in partner ecosystems
At its core definition, trust is a belief that someone or something is reliable, effective, good and honest. Companies build trust by fostering transparent communication where possible, showing proactive mitigation of risk and developing an operational framework based on ethics.
When giving another company direct or indirect access to a client, we need to be able to rely on them staying true to their words and following through on their promises and your mutual agreement.
The most obvious factors are being transparent and doing what you say you’re going to do. Having a strong track record of projects that went well and are relevant to your own customer base and portfolio is important, too. You should also:
How can data be shared?
Usually, data is shared in three dimensions: customers, opportunities and prospects.
Of course, you’re not making your entire data available to your partners. But it needs to be enough data to identify where you have overlapping accounts, where you need to avoid conflict and where opportunities are coming up that you can go after together.
Thanks to emerging software platforms such as Crossbeam, P2P Global and PartnerTap, you no longer need to tediously work through spreadsheets but can now handle data in a very secure yet dynamic way.
Instead of having long email chains with spreadsheets going back and forth, these tools let you tap into your CRM and other data you already have and use daily. They protect your data so that it stays private and let you share the minimum amount necessary with potential partners to build meaningful relationships.
By mapping accounts and identifying overlapping opportunities, networking with partners who have the skillsets you’re looking for and leveraging marketplace infrastructure, SaaS tools are drastically lowering the barrier to enter ecosystems.
Knowing a partnership is built on trust
Bestselling author and sales expert Tony J. Hughes gave a strong example of a partnership that was built on trust during his session at the Alinea Partners EvolvingChannels Summit.
He spoke about a deal being negotiated between the customer and two co-selling companies, where the customer wanted to sign with only one of the partnering companies. In the executive meeting, the partner who got offered the deal alone declined it and managed to organise an arrangement that got the company he was co-selling with involved in the project – just as was planned and pitched.
The lesson here is clear: partnerships work only if you can rely on each other. If you can build strong partnerships, you’re creating an ecosystem that can lead to sustainable growth and future-proof your company for years to come.
Watch the full session on demand at evolvingchannels.com
By Alinea Partners
The language of globalisation in a post-Covid world
Is globalisation in decline? By some measures it seems to be. The pandemic has caused a sharp decrease in the movement of physical goods and people across borders. And even before the pandemic, there was a strong movement towards onshoring and shorter supply chains.
But the reality is that globalisation isn’t weakening as a business trend. It is changing, driven by digital technology.
In a world of digital trade, globalisation is not about having a physical presence in other countries. Online assets are now more important. And, in the absence of local structures dedicated to each market, it’s essential that businesses communicate effectively in each of the territories they wish to trade in.
But how can a business communicate effectively in countries where a different language is spoken and consumer behaviour is influenced by different values, beliefs and cultures?
Only around 5 per cent of the world – about 360 million people – speak English as their first language. And while many more can understand English (there are 1.5 billion people who are learning it), people are much less likely to buy products if descriptions are not in their own language: in fact, 76 per cent of online shoppers prefer to buy products with information in their native language.
Finding the right partner to adapt and localise their products and ensure a clear and accurate communication in international markets is key for any growing business. One company that has been helping businesses communicate effectively with their audiences worldwide and delivering effective messages in a large variety of languages is Acolad. A top-five content and language services provider, Acolad employs a global network of 20,000 language experts, and is able to handle more than 300 language “pairs” (such as English to German, or French to Italian).
The company’s size is a reflection of its success. Working with some of the most renowned companies in each field has given a unique translation capacity across 15 different industry verticals, from bioscience and e-commerce to financial services and high-tech, with experts who can understand the specific problems and jargon of these different industries.
Strengthening global communication with culturally adapted content
For global brands, translation isn’t a simple question of turning a word in one language into a word that means the same in another language.
A simple example is seen in the differences between British, American and Indian English. In Britain people generally talk about the “boot” of a car. In India it’s the “dicky”, and in the USA they have a “trunk”. Any translation of “boot” needs to take account of the translated word’s context.
There are lots of examples like this, and while they won’t necessarily cause complete confusion in different markets, they are likely to weaken the effect of a marketing message when someone comes across a word they aren’t immediately comfortable with. Different channels and audiences need different content.
This is where Acolad steps in. They have local subject-matter experts that can help to localise the meaning of the message for the local audience. More than simply trying to find the right words in another language, they focus on the intent of the message and how it should be perceived by its audience. This gives a strong competitive advantage to companies that are exporting goods and services, even when they don’t have detailed knowledge of the export market.
Effective localisation requires local insights into what is relevant to the target audience in that territory, including an understanding of how a brand is used locally: for example, whether it is considered a luxury or mid-market brand, or the age of the target market. In addition, the cultural context must be considered: colour, icons and humour may all need careful localisation.
A well-known example of this is KitKat, which became extremely successful in Japan because KitKat sounds like “kitto katsu”, Japanese for “you will surely win!” Parents would give children the snack before exams, and the company leveraged this with a local campaign that allowed people to write a good luck message on the wrapper and then send the chocolate bar through the post. Japan is now the KitKat capital of the world.
Content of all types can be localised in this way. For example, as well as marketing content, it’s important to localise software, product instructions, internal communications, e-learning content, and even multimedia such as graphics and video.
Non-linguistic aspects of localisation are also important. When translating documents such as flyers or whitepapers, formatting can be a problem because some languages take up more space than others. For example, German is 30 per cent longer than English. In this case, localisation needs to consider the layout of the document as well as the message. This may mean that parts of an English document that is being translated into German may need rethinking completely.
Driving efficiency through technology
With a workforce that includes 200 technologists, Acolad has been also leading through technological innovations, especially in the fields of connectivity and integration.
The use of connectors that integrate with existing content management systems allows all new content created online (for example, on a website or intranet) to be automatically translated to all target languages through an efficient, centralised process.
This type of approach is extremely effective for companies that manage large and rapidly changing sets of content, such as retailers. In addition, global brands that deal with dozens, sometimes hundreds, of different languages can also benefit strongly from the increased speed and savings that Acolad’s innovative technology can bring.
Optimising for search engines by understanding local language use
Sometimes localisation demands that translation doesn’t take place at all. Accepting this is important for search engine optimisation (SEO), an important part of any marketing activity.
Finding the most effective search terms for the local language will affect the success of marketing campaigns. But it isn’t always right to assume that keywords need translation. The English version of some technical words is sometimes more frequently used than the local term. For instance, in Taiwan the word “dropshipping” has more searches than its Chinese equivalent.
That’s why it is important to understand local behaviour when localising content. Local search engines like Baidu in China, and language versions of global operators like bing.fr – have different indexes that reflect these differences in behaviour. So when optimising keywords, it’s important to check out the volumes on local search engines too.
Global advertising campaigns that work locally
Perhaps the most sophisticated element of localisation is transcreation – the adaptation of creative assets such as advertising slogans to a local market.
A great example of transcreation is Haribo’s slogan. In German it is “Haribo macht Kinder froh, und Erwachsene ebenso”. In English, a direct translation would be something like “Haribo makes children and adults happy as well.” This loses the rhyme, however, so it was adapted for English-speaking markets market as: “Kids and grown-ups love it so, the happy world of Haribo.”
Choosing the right global content partner
Business is continuing to globalise, and as a result translation services and language technology are becoming increasingly important. However, translation is far more than turning a word from one language to another. It involves translating meaning, tone and emotion as well as words. And it involves adapting any translation for the local markets where it will appear.
This is why choosing the best global content partner is important. Acolad combines translation technology with human expertise to offer high-quality language and content solutions.
High-quality localised content delivers a better user experience for audiences and more effective marketing campaigns for exporters and companies reaching into new markets. By combining the strengths of technology with the deep insights that native industry experts provide into local markets, Acolad is helping to assure the successful future of global business.
With Acolad as your global content partner, your organisation will be empowered to optimise its international marketing opportunities, reaching new markets and delivering a better user experience.
INDUSTRY VIEW FROM ACOLAD
Artificial intelligence can discriminate on the basis of race and gender, and also age
We have accepted the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in complex processes — from health care to our daily use of social media — often without critical investigation, until it is too late. The use of AI is inescapable in our modern society, and it may perpetuate discrimination without its users being aware of any prejudice. When health-care providers rely on biased technology, there are real and harmful impacts.
This became clear recently when a study showed that pulse oximeters — which measure the amount of oxygen in the blood and have been an essential tool for clinical management of Covid-19 — are less accurate on people with darker skin than lighter skin. The findings resulted in a sweeping racial bias review now underway, in an attempt to create international standards for testing medical devices.
There are examples in health care, business, government and everyday life where biased algorithms have led to problems, like sexist searches and racist predictions of an offender’s likelihood of re-offending.
AI is often assumed to be more objective than humans. In reality, however, AI algorithms make decisions based on human-annotated data, which can be biased and exclusionary. Current research on bias in AI focuses mainly on gender and race. But what about age-related bias — can AI be ageist?
Ageist technologies?
In 2021, the World Health Organization released a global report on aging, which called for urgent action to combat ageism because of its widespread impacts on health and well-being.
Ageism is defined as “a process of systematic stereotyping of and discrimination against people because they are old.” It can be explicit or implicit, and can take the form of negative attitudes, discriminatory activities, or institutional practices.
The pervasiveness of ageism has been brought to the forefront throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. Older adults have been labelled as “burdens to societies,” and in some jurisdictions, age has been used as the sole criterion for lifesaving treatments.
Digital ageism exists when age-based bias and discrimination are created or supported by technology. A recent report indicates that a “digital world” of more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is produced each day. Yet even though older adults are using technology in greater numbers — and benefiting from that use — they continue to be the age cohort least likely to have access to a computer and the internet.
Digital ageism can arise when ageist attitudes influence technology design, or when ageism makes it more difficult for older adults to access and enjoy the full benefits of digital technologies.
Cycles of injustice
There are several intertwined cycles of injustice where technological, individual and social biases interact to produce, reinforce and contribute to digital ageism.
Barriers to technological access can exclude older adults from the research, design and development process of digital technologies. Their absence in technology design and development may also be rationalized with the ageist belief that older adults are incapable of using technology. As such, older adults and their perspectives are rarely involved in the development of AI and related policies, funding and support services.
The unique experiences and needs of older adults are overlooked, despite age being a more powerful predictor of technology use than other demographic characteristics including race and gender.
AI is trained by data, and the absence of older adults could reproduce or even amplify the above ageist assumptions in its output. Many AI technologies are focused on a stereotypical image of an older adult in poor health — a narrow segment of the population that ignores healthy aging. This creates a negative feedback loop that not only discourages older adults from using AI, but also results in further data loss from these demographics that would improve AI accuracy.
Even when older adults are included in large datasets, they are often grouped according to arbitrary divisions by developers. For example, older adults may be defined as everyone aged 50 and older, despite younger age cohorts being divided into narrower age ranges. As a result, older adults and their needs can become invisible to AI systems.
In this way, AI systems reinforce inequality and magnify societal exclusion for sections of the population, creating a “digital underclass” primarily made up of older, poor, racialized and marginalized groups.
Addressing digital ageism
We must understand the risks and harms associated with age-related biases as more older adults turn to technology.
The first step is for researchers and developers to acknowledge the existence of digital ageism alongside other forms of algorithmic biases, such as racism and sexism. They need to direct efforts towards identifying and measuring it. The next step is to develop safeguards for AI systems to mitigate ageist outcomes.
There is currently very little training, auditing or oversight of AI-driven activities from a regulatory or legal perspective. For instance, Canada’s current AI regulatory regime is sorely lacking.
This presents a challenge, but also an opportunity to include ageism alongside other forms of biases and discrimination in need of excision. To combat digital ageism, older adults must be included in a meaningful and collaborative way in designing new technologies.
With bias in AI now recognized as a critical problem in need of urgent action, it is time to consider the experience of digital ageism for older adults, and understand how growing old in an increasingly digital world may reinforce social inequalities, exclusion and marginalization.
Charlene Chu, Assistant Professor, the Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing, University of Toronto; Kathleen Leslie, Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Health Disciplines, Athabasca University; Rune Nyrup, Senior research fellow, History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, and Shehroz Khan, Assistant Professor (Status), Institute of Biomaterials & Biomedical Engineering, University of Toronto
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