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The construction industry was one of the first affected by Sweden’s recent economic deterioration, and housing construction has also slowed down over the past year.

“We notice the macroeconomic effects with both cost inflation and higher interest rates,” says Peab group CIO Klas Antoni. “That means we generally have an increased cost focus now and are keen that investments in IT are made in the right places and in the right way so we get results within a reasonable payoff time.”

This means, among other things, an increased focus on impact recovery, and that projects and various development initiatives are prioritized with more scrutiny.

“We’re more short-term oriented,” he says. “The business has to adapt more quickly because we have a little less patience, and we have to push out new things in a little less time.”

Difficult processes to digitize

If you look at the industry more long-term, it’s long been singled out for having a low degree of digitization because of a multitude of players and processes that aren’t easy to digitize, according to Antoni.

“All industries have different conditions, but the challenge in construction is it needs to be industrialized to a greater degree to get away from projects where things are being done for the first time,” he says. “A higher degree of standardization and process orientation makes it easier to digitize, thereby increasing productivity.”

But that doesn’t mean the construction industry and Peab stood still. On the contrary, a lot has happened and digitization is reaching further into the business.

“Today we have good digital tools that support us in many different parts of our production,” he says. “From advanced map systems and aerial scanning with drones, to very good tools that support our employees in their daily work both in planning and production.”

Structure the data

More machines and measuring points are also being connected to the network, and Peab sees a great deal of work to structure all data as a means to be more data-driven in the long term. To cope with this, the company’s data warehouse is in overdrive.

“We consolidate, wash, harmonize and normalize large amounts of data that come from our various systems,” says Antoni. “The data is then analyzed and presented in reports for different needs so it also creates value for the users.”

And although Peab has come a long way, there’s still a lot to do to create well-functioning infrastructure around the area. Not least, it’s a challenge to maintain good quality of all data over time.

Reporting requirements

In addition to being able to use data proactively in one’s own operations, there will also be increased demand for external reporting, requiring the construction industry in general to get its data in order.

“Against a background of new regulations, the construction industry also needs to take big steps to be able to report, for example, environmental and climate data in a good and uniform way,” Antoni says. “Then the data needs to be standardized and structured from the source all the way until it’s reported. That’s challenging because we have very long subcontractor chains. So we need to help each other in order to work uniformly and efficiently. Not cooperating on these issues will drive unnecessary costs for all of us, so the need for common standards is great.”

A generational change is also underway at Peab, where old legacy systems have been gradually replaced for a number of years.

Recently, a new salary system for the entire Swedish operation has been put into operation—an extra complex task in an industry with many collective agreements and some special forms of compensation that are unique to the industry. And old financial and follow-up systems for the entire contracting operation have been replaced.

A time and place for investment

Some investments must be made, but they shouldn’t be done all at once and preferably not while being held to ransom. “Instead, own the timetables, says Antoni. “There are many dependencies between different solutions, which make the whole thing even more challenging.”

Changes to things like payroll systems and financial systems are often largely driven by necessity, when they’re so old they’re no longer supported, or don’t work at all. This often means significantly increased costs with new systems compared to consistently low operating costs of the old ones, considering solutions sold today are often delivered only as cloud solutions based on subscription models.

Going toward the cloud

At the same time, all points lead to the cloud, and Peab essentially has a cloud-first strategy but will continue to live in a hybrid environment for the foreseeable future, says Antoni, before adding that the development is simultaneously moving toward the cloud environment regardless of what strategy is in the foundation.

“We’re moving more toward cloud deliveries,” he says. “Suppliers of course see advantages based on how solutions are developed and operated, but it’s in their interest for financial reasons as well. In some cases, there are good reasons for us as a customer to have a solution on-prem, whether for operational reasons, business-critical data, or third-country issues. But it’s less often as a customer that you have that choice.”

Of course, replacing some decades-old systems doesn’t always have to do with the fact they’re bad, but more simply approaching end of life.

Provide concrete support

At the same time, new systems don’t always add much new functionality more than replacing old ones. Older systems need to be managed, but Antoni would rather focus on getting new digital support that really creates value for employees and customers.

“We want to get good support for the employees,” he says. “It shouldn’t only be about new systems for reporting time, but that they receive more concrete support for planning, project management and project follow-up. Those parts have lagged behind with us, and that probably applies to many construction companies, not just Peab.

The company also announced last year it would start using solutions from solutions provider Dalux, where entire projects can be managed from beginning to end.

“It’s a good example of a tool that’s about to be rolled out to our employees—something that really makes their jobs easier, creates order, and contributes to our working more efficiently,” he says.

Automation and AI

Peab already uses a lot of automation in its administrative processes with relatively low threshold costs. And AI is, of course, something the company follows with great interest and Antoni follows developments with great interest. But AI still needs proper oversight in order to process data accurately and efficiently.

“We’ve previously done some evaluations of tools for predictive analyses, but we didn’t achieve the results we wanted due to the data quality we had to work with,” he says. So the fight is fierce for competence in historically new areas, and it’s both about changing and raising competence internally and recruiting over time, he states.

Consultant dependency can be broken

There may be another movement in the market where consultants look for more secure jobs when the economy fluctuates—something favorable for companies like Peab that would like to have greater in-house competence in certain areas.

“In recent years, many companies have been forced to build up a consultant dependency they didn’t want,” he says. “And although it may be easier to hire today, the economy as it stands means we’re waiting to hire.”

For the construction industry in general, it’s also important to broaden the base for recruitment by breaking the prejudices that exist and getting more people to apply there.

“It’s a matter of survival for us,” says Antoni. “We need to get access to the entire supply of available labor, which means we need to get more women into our industry. We still have some way to go in our production, although I’m happy we have a relatively good balance in our IT operations.”

CIO, Construction and Engineering Industry, Digital Transformation, IT Leadership

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When Arvest, a regional bank operating in Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma, hired Laura Merling as chief transformation and operations officer in 2021, one of the first things she changed was its digital transformation plan.

The 60-year-old bank, formed from the successive mergers of 14 regional banks, was planning to launch a neobank, an online-only service with national ambitions, as a way to ensure its future growth.

When Merling arrived in October 2021, Arvest had already begun the transformation process: conducting the first in a series of annual “Driving Change” surveys of staff attitudes and experimenting with the new core banking software around which it planned to build the new bank.

But there were challenges.

“Everybody was creating a retail neobank,” says Merling. That made for a competitive market in which the cost of acquiring a new customer was around $1,000. “You’d spend all your money on customer acquisition and not on building infrastructure,” she says.

On top of that, there was a degree of resistance — or at least indifference — to change within the company. Merling summarized the internal survey findings about staff readiness to change as one-third “Sure, I’m in,” one-third on the border, and one-third “I’m not really ready.”

It’s hard for staff to support change when it’s not clear what that change will be, she says.

Study, study, study

To get a clearer picture of where Arvest was, and where it wanted to go, Merling’s first moves were to commission one study of the company’s entire tech stack, and another of its data landscape. “We looked at them in parallel,” she says. “They’re related but also different: how easy is it to get to the data, and what data do we have?”

At the same time, she says, Arvest also conducted studies of its vulnerability to customer defection, and of the strengths it could capitalize on to build its new strategy.

“We did a lot in the first few months I was here,” she says.

The upshot of all that corporate introspection was a change in direction for the bank — or, rather, a return to what it had done best before. The plan for a neobank was dropped, and instead, says Merling, “We set forth a new mission. We wanted to be the leading community-focused bank serving commercial and small businesses.”

That didn’t mean the bank was turning its back on retail customers. By supporting local employers, “If you’re successful there, you’ll get the retail as well,” she says.

That meant building new applications and processes around its commercial loans — and making some changes to its core IT infrastructure.

A move to the cloud

A few months after Merling’s appointment, the bank announced a five-year partnership with Google Cloud as it prepared to digitize its contact center and move out of its two data centers.

“We can’t scale and be innovative if we’re just all waiting for on-prem,” she says.

Around this time, the results of the second Driving Change survey rolled in. Some of the transformation skeptics had drifted toward the “on the border” middle ground, but in the IT department — one of the first to see the clear direction as infrastructure changes began to take effect — resistance actually increased.

“It was all fear factor,” she says. “‘I’m going to lose my job,’ or ‘I don’t know this technology and I’m not going to get a chance to learn it.’”

Staff comments on the survey showed they didn’t feel their skills were valued, or even known, by management.

That prompted Arvest to create a program to help staff upskill or reskill. “We actually borrowed it from one of our partners,” she says. “They created it for their company internally.”

The upskilling program, called me@arvest, began in February 2022 with training for the IT team on Google Cloud as the company prepared to move its on-prem workloads there. “We needed people to know those skills,” says Merling. But creating the next wave of learning journeys took longer than planned. By the time it eventually happened in July, people were getting nervous they weren’t going to get the education, she adds.

The turning point was a full day of training around Google Cloud in November, with 500 people in the room and another 500 online. “We had our executives there, the bank presidents, the whole technology team plus,” she says.

Initially offered to the IT team, and later to operations staff, me@arvest will soon open to the marketing department.

Along the way, Merling decided to hire someone within the IT organization to run the program, which previously ran through HR. This plan enables her to meet the IT team’s skills needs up to ten years out.

A new purpose

One part of the original strategy Merling kept was the new core banking software from Thought Machine that Arvest had already experimented with — but now instead of redefining retail banking, it’s underpinning the modernization of the bank’s commercial lending processes.

“We’re basically rebuilding the entire technology stack for the bank by assuming a banking-as-a-service construct, whether we choose to use it or not,” she says.

By that, she means drawing on Thought Machine’s cloud-native, microservices-based approach, building new products and services that can be accessed through its APIs.

With the move to Thought Machine just beginning, the old core banking software won’t be going away just yet, so Arvest is using Google Cloud to deliver a single view of its customers. “It’s a key part of being able to serve customers going forward,” she says.

Merling brought in external help to stand up Google Cloud, training her own staff in parallel to ensure ongoing maintenance. “The Thought Machine work we did ourselves,” she says.

Under her transformation and operations umbrella are the CIO responsible for the existing core software, and the CTO building the new software. The development team was initially small, but is expanding through a mix of new hires and, as people learn new skills, internal transfers.

“My commitment to them was to make sure to bring everybody along for the ride,” she says. “I didn’t want to create an ‘us versus them’ situation. That’s super important to be able to grow the bank for the long term.”

Money talks

It’s a truism, but “90% of change management is communication,” she says.

To that end, each month she holds skip-level meetings with the second-level managers in her team, as well as “transformation talks” where the changes are presented to staff. Alongside the slow burn of rebuilding the banking core, these talks are also a chance to discuss “quick wins”: smaller technology changes that make a difference, such as the recent introduction of pre-authentication for customers calling the contact center. “That saved a minimum of 200 to 300 hours a month in call time,” says Merling.

Business Process Management, Cloud Management, Digital Transformation, Employee Experience, IT Leadership

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ACS (Australian Computer Society) is the professional association for Australia’s technology sector. With 35,000+ members, ACS is dedicated to growing the nation’s digital skills and capacity.

ACS members benefit from professional training and skills certification, networking and events, liability insurance cover and access to technology and innovation hubs.

In addition, ACS has developed a Professional Partner Program (PPP) to enable Australian organisations to be more proactive in gaining the benefits of employees’ ACS membership.

Partner organisations pay for ACS membership for appropriate employees, at a discount on the individual rate. Each partner is assigned an ACS account manager who works closely with the partner to help them maximise their partnership.

PPP has more than 300 member organisations across government, business, industry, research and academia.

This brandpost will outline the ACS Professional Partner Program, summarise the benefits to employees and the specific advantages for partner organisations.

ACS membership benefits

ACS membership presents many benefits for IT professionals. In turn, this benefits the organisations that employ them. ACS members can gain training and certification in the skills they bring to their roles, and valuable networking and knowledge from over 600 events a year.

ACS is also a voice for Australia’s IT professionals. It engages with policy makers and the media on issues relevant to the technology sector. And provides resources for educators and industry to boost Australia’s digital capabilities and competitiveness.

Education

ACS offers a wide range of learning pathways, qualifications and certifications to Australia’s IT professionals. The aim is to create a pipeline of talent to ensure Australia has the 1.2 million high-skilled and diverse IT professionals Australia needs by 2027.

ACS’s Continuing Professional Development (CPD) program encourages members to maintain, improve and broaden their knowledge, expertise and competence – to advance their professional standing by completing CPD hours each year as part of their membership.

In addition, ACS’s workforce development team can design customised learning solutions tailored to an organisation’s strategy, environment, challenges, and desired outcomes.

ACS also accredits courses offered by other institutions after evaluating their capacity to produce graduates who have the knowledge and skills required of an IT professional. Forty-five Australian universities offer ACS accredited degrees designed to ensure students are tech-ready when they graduate.

Career development

The Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) is a skills development framework used to benchmark the competences of IT professionals worldwide. By meeting SFIA standards, technology workers can demonstrate their abilities to employers anywhere in the world.

ACS members can take advantage of advanced self-assessments against competencies in SFIA to create a precise skills profile, and identify potential career paths and the skills they need to help achieve their goals. ACS membership can also provide members with access to mentors who can help guide their careers and open-up career opportunities.

Certification

ACS members can apply for ACS professional certifications, which recognise transferable skills and competencies and, unlike vendor certifications, are technology agnostic. They are based on the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) and offer the following certifications:

• ACS Certified Professional
• ACS Certified Technologist
• ACS Certified Cyber Security Professional
• ACS Certified Cyber Security Technologist
• ACS Certified Safety Critical Systems Professional

Networking

ACS hosts over 600 events and attracts some 48,000 attendees each year, providing an opportunity for ACS members to come together, learn and network. Two hundred of these events are designed to help members upskill and stay relevant. ACS also supports several boards and special interest groups that help to educate and inform. Members also get opportunities to engage with state and federal politicians at political engagements held around the country.

In addition:
• ACS members gain access to a digital library with more than 44,000 digital assets, including exclusive training videos, recorded webinars and insights from technology leaders.

• The ACS Career Platform offers career advice, job seeking content, profiles of working with specific organisations and details of available opportunities.

• ACS limited liability insurance offers professional indemnity coverage for members that invoice less than $100,000pa for IT services.

• All ACS members can access and use ACS Technology Hub facilities in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

ACS Professional Partnership Program

By becoming an ACS Professional Partner your organisation can offer, and pay for, ACS membership for IT staff at a discount of 20 percent. Membership gives employees access to all membership benefits listed above.

Partnerships are annual and your organisation will be assigned an ACS account manager who will work closely with your nominated representative, conducting regular meetings to help you make the most of their partnership agreement.

Partnership also brings other benefits. ACS offers a range of partnership development opportunities to help you keep up to date with industry trends. These provide opportunities to display your organisation and its IT talent. Also, the growth opportunities available to individual staff members through their ACS membership contribute to job satisfaction and help with retention.

Members of the ACS Partnership Program include all Australian State Governments, the Federal Government and leading companies such as Coca Cola and Woolworths.

About ACS

ACS champions the technologies, people and skills critical to powering Australia’s future growth, diversity and security.

ACS is Australia’s largest community of technology professionals from all sectors of industry, government and academia.

It is a platform for industry, government and academia to connect, collaborate and shape policies.

ACS takes an evidence-based approach to the development of standards and skills for all technologies, ensuring Australia stays secure and future-proof.

And delivers programs and pathways to develop a diverse, high-skilled pipeline of trusted technology professionals, to meet Australia’s technology needs now and in the future.

Next steps

Contact ACS today for more information on the benefits of the ACS Professional Partnership Program, and how tailoring the program to your specific requirements can benefit your organisation.

Professional Services

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A significant number of organizations are operating in a hybrid model — and expect to continue with that hybrid environment for the foreseeable future.

Global analytics and advice firm Gallup has found that the percentage of remote-capable workers working in a hybrid environment increased in 2022, moving from 42% in February to 49% in June. Gallup also found that only 20% of remote-capable employees were working fully on-site while 30% were fully remote in 2022. Furthermore, the firm had predicted that the number of hybrid workers would continue to increase, hitting 55% as we enter 2023.

Other reports confirm that hybrid work is here to stay. In its Future of Work predictions for 2023, IDC called hybrid work “a mainstay for our global future work landscape,” adding that “hybrid work will drive new technology solutions across functions and industries alike.”

Technologies cited by IDC include intelligent space and capacity planning tools, which the firm predicts 55% of global enterprises will use to reinvent office locations by 2024. IDC also predicts 65% of G2000 companies will consider online presence to be at parity to real life across their engaged workforce by 2025, with 30% of those same organizations adopting immersive metaverse conferencing tech by 2027.

While metaverse adoption is a ways off, CIOs are making significant investments in technologies aimed at improving the hybrid work experience. For example, Foundry’s 2022 State of the CIO survey shows that IT executives are investing in cybersecurity improvements and collaboration platforms better suited to their organizational needs as well as network reliability and performance improvements.

With competition for talent still tight and pressure on organizations to maximize employee productivity, Anthony Abbatiello, workforce transformation practice leader at professional services firm PwC, says CIOs should focus on what and how they can improve the hybrid experience for users.

He advises CIOs to partner with their counterparts in HR to identify the worker archetypes that exist in their organizations to understand how they work and what they need to succeed.

“CIOs should be asking how to create the right experience that each worker needs and what do they need to be productive in their job,” Abbatiello says. “Even if you’ve done that before, the requirements of people in a hybrid environment have changed.”

Hybrid workers today are looking for digital workplace experiences that are seamless as they move between home and office, Abbatiello says. This include technologies that enable them to replicate in cyberspace the personal connections and spontaneous collegiality that more easily happen in person, as they seeking experiences that are consistent regardless of where they’re working on any given day.

Here is a look at how some CIOs are bolstering their technology offerings to improve the hybrid working experience of their IT and business users.

Consistent, high-quality digital experiences

As senior vice president and CIO at Nutaninx, Wendy M. Pfeiffer says she’s seeking to do just that — deliver consistent, high-quality digital experiences that drive productivity and efficiency whether team members are working remotely, in the office, or a combination of the two.

Wendy Pfeiffer, CIO, Nutanix

Nutanix

“The solutions going forward required some innovative technology but also process updates; it’s a mix of those things,” Pfeiffer says, adding that fully remote workers, always on-premises employees, and those that alternate between remote and in-office each face unique challenges in a hybrid environment.

To ensure she and her IT team deliver the right tools for every worker type, Pfeiffer co-developed with other executives the company’s “Principles for Effective Hybrid Work.” She says these helped her, her colleagues, and IT better understand workplace dynamics and requirements so IT can best address them.

“These principles form the basis of our prioritization, our choice of technologies, and are reflected in our [objectives and key results],” Pfeiffer explains. “So now whenever we do something in IT, like release a capability, we have these principles in mind. And we say what we’re doing, the principle it’s related to, and here’s how we measure it.”

Those principles, along with lessons learned during recent years, have helped Pfeiffer sharpen her tech strategy for supporting hybrid work in 2023.

To start, Nutaninx IT has decided to go with applications that perform, act, and look the same whether being accessed in the office or from a remote location to eliminate any confusion or extra layers that workers might have to think through as they do their work. The same goes for any hardware (e.g., laptops) being used. This, Pfeiffer says, will also help minimize or even eliminate lost productivity from context-switching — the shifting from one task to another unrelated one.

As for new tools heading into 2023, Nutaninx IT is rolling out Lucidspark, a virtual whiteboard for real-time collaboration from anywhere. Pfeiffer says her team worked with Zoom, which her company uses, to add Lucidspark into that platform so Nutaninx employees can seamlessly access it even when in those virtual meetings.

IT is also launching a tool from Huddle that uses artificial intelligence for note-taking to support teams that are working asynchronously and need to share ideas and conversations. Pfeiffer says she expects this tool, which workers can also access through the company’s Zoom application, to bring more efficiency to information hand-offs — a critical advantage for employees who, thanks in part to virtual work capabilities, are now often working at different times.

Another addition will be 360-degree cameras and microphones from Owl Labs, which will be deployed in company conference rooms and integrated with Zoom to make those joining meetings remotely feel more like they’re in the room.

Pfeiffer says IT also has a big focus in 2023 on bringing in technologies that enable a consumer-like experience, as employees who have been working from home “are using consumer tech like mobile phones and comfy chairs and gaming computers, and consumer tech runs circles around traditional enterprise technology” in terms of experience. For example, IT is bringing in the Discord voice, video, and text chat app so that workers can have multiple synchronous conversations in parallel, from wherever they are, just as they would in an office environment.

“Everywhere we can, we’re taking lessons from the consumer experience and bringing that to the office,” Pfeiffer adds.

Refining the hybrid work experience

Michael Error, vice president of IT and CIO for Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota, is likewise looking to advance his company’s hybrid work experience with the tech investments he’s making.

Michael Error, VP of IT and CIO, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota

Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota

“Early on, it was good enough to get our employees home and that they stayed safe and they had the capabilities to get on [company systems],” he says. “Since that time, we have moved to ‘What’s the experience?’ That has meant regardless of where you are, do you feel like it’s all the same. And it’s not just having same from the technology whether you’re remote or not; it’s about making the people all feel they’re part of a team regardless of their location.”

He adds: “We’re trying to drive the same experience whether you’re in the office or remote and driving consistent, high-quality experiences.”

To do that, Error says he and his IT team have been educating employees about using and maximizing existing capabilities, whether its conference room cameras or the whiteboard features in Microsoft Teams.

Error is also rolling out new software-based phones that he says will provide a “less clunky” feel, more flexibility, and a more consistent experience as workers move between in-office and remote locations.

And IT is deploying a collaboration platform from Miro to better meet the needs expressed by hybrid teams, Error says.

Moreover, IT is working with the various business-side groups “to see what’s of interest to them, to evaluate products, and to see if those [products] could benefit the entire organization.”

Error adds: “In 2023, IT will be focused on refinement, what are the little things we don’t have today that will fill in the blanks.”

Turning to tech for seamless continuity

Abhijit Mazumder, CIO at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), is similarly looking to how his IT team can improve the hybrid experience it has already enabled.

Abhijit Mazumder, CIO, Tata Consultancy Services

Tata Consultancy Services

“With things inching back to normalcy, our aim right now is to ensure that employees work with seamless continuity whether from home or the office,” he says, adding that TCS has been investing in technologies — including collaboration software and cloud-based applications — to support a hybrid workforce for more than five years.

“Basic amenities such as provision of huddle rooms linked to other TCS centers have made remote collaboration across the globe possible in a matter of minutes. We are continuously working to ensure a seamless transition to our employees and customers, independent of their physical location,” he adds.

For 2023, Mazumder says the focus will be on “tweaking, sustaining, and scaling our secure borderless workspaces [SBWS] solution and enabling additional capabilities in our offices to enable collaboration.”

He also plans to continue his investments in cloud collaboration, organizational resiliency and cybersecurity as well as the personnel to support all that.

“As a consulting and IT services organization, evolving technologies means scaling talent development. Though we have invested significantly in building a culture of agility within the organization, I think there is more to our journey. Our key focus would be scaling talent development in hybrid work model,” Mazumder adds.

The end-user device as office

Other CIOs are also focused on deploying technologies that can step up their company’s existing hybrid work environment.

Thomas Phelps, CIO, Laserfiche

Laserfiche

Thomas Phelps, CIO at Laserfiche, for example, says his company decided in early 2020 to create a tech stack that would support employees being independent from any specific workstation.

“My philosophy is your office is your laptop and everything you need to be productive is enabled through that laptop,” he says.

That strategy enabled the company to quickly pivot to remote work when the pandemic sent workers home that March and then hybrid as restrictions eased.

Still, he says there’s room for improvement. For example, existing digital platforms aren’t great at fostering ad hoc sessions and replicating spontaneous interactions — in other words, the proverbial “watercooler conversations,” Phelps says, noting, “It is still easier to have those when someone is physically present.”

Phelps is now searching for technologies that can help with that, and as part of that he’s deploying the Miro online whiteboard platform to support hybrid collaboration.

Phelps is also rolling out a new conference room videoconferencing system with zoom cameras, auto framing, streaming options, and other features to create a better, more equitable experience for remote attendees.

Similarly, Laserfiche is enabling captioning on Zoom, including captioning in multiple languages, to support equitable communication quality for all attendees. And he’s focused on ensuring whatever technologies IT deploys can be used on whatever devices workers want to use.

“Enabling work through different devices not just your typical laptop but also your mobile devices is going to be key, as is supporting work from anywhere through the right security architecture centered on zero-trust principles,” he says.

Upgrades and improvements

Ramon Richards, SVP and CIO, Fannie Mae

Fannie Mae

Today, as organizations enter their fourth year of providing remote and hybrid work to many or most of their workers, CIOs often speak about the need to bring continuous improvement — a longtime IT principle — to this space.

For example, Ramon Richards, senior vice president and CIO of Fannie Mae, where most employees can choose where to do their day-to-day work most of the time, talks about improving and enhancing the hybrid work environment.

His plans include evolving the organization’s conferencing capabilities “to create a more immersive experience using new camera solutions and virtual reality.” As Richard explains: “This will further enhance the overall employee experience to securely collaborate remotely and on-site with people both inside and outside the organization.”

He also plans to enhance existing IT support capabilities by adding modern end-user contact channels, such as crowdsourcing to troubleshoot common IT issues so that employees will have additional options to access and receive tech support.

And he is simplifying the organization’s device management capabilities by completing the migration to a common cloud-based intelligence-driven digital workspace platform for unified endpoints, virtual desktops, and mobile application management.

Morever, IT “is focusing on the end-user experience for all service deliveries in 2023, leveraging automation, when possible, to proactively detect and resolve device issues with self-healing capabilities and provide more effective self-service information,” he says. “Coupled with this effort is a cohesive change management process to ensure effective employee communication and adoption of new technologies.”

Bart Murphy, chief technology and information officer, OCLC

OCLC

Bart Murphy, chief technology and information officer of OCLC, a library technology and research organization, says he, too, is continuing to look at technology investments that can improve the hybrid work environment that his company adopted in April 2022 after working almost entirely remotely through the first two years of the pandemic.

“This includes continually upgrading WiFi access points, conference room technology, and meeting spaces for improved in-office connectivity and collaboration. We are in the process of moving to Teams for our phone system to provide more efficient ways to connect both internally with associates and externally with customers,” he says. “We continue to invest in our VPN capacity to ensure those working from home have all the access and performance they need to be productive.”

He adds: “We will continue to be intentional about creating events for all associates intended to experience and build on the strong culture that exists at OCLC and seek input from associates.”

Collaboration Software, Remote Work, Staff Management

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Society 5.0 was proposed in the “5th Science and Technology Basic Plan” as a future society to which Japan should aspire. It brings together concerns for people, planet, and profit equally in order to build a better world. In Society 5.0, we believe everyone can have an abundant and balanced life. A “new wisdom” will be developed from the data being collected about every aspect of our lives, which should enable companies to remove mundane mindless activities from our lives.

Our world is already moving to a more human-centered society. You can see it in news articles and in our conversations. In the future, technology will be based on human needs, not only on new technology as it has been for decades. This will change what we deliver to our customers.

To prepare for this new future, it is imperative that we align our organizations to deliver work as seamlessly as possible. We need to focus on how we build our products and transform our processes so that we can focus on the product redesign in the future. The true goal of Value Stream Management is to align the business so work can flow from idea to customer feedback.

Agility is the basis and foundation for flowing work. If you didn’t implement true agile practices and principles, now is the time. Next, good DevOps practices and alignment are needed to get product into the hands of customers more quickly. If you didn’t implement these processes well, now is the time. Make sure you have the data coming out of both your development cycles and DevOps cycles that you need to know if there are bottlenecks or silos and work to remove them.

Next focus on program-level planning. You have to understand what work can be done. Strategic estimations are always wrong, and you don’t get to a real plan until the people creating and delivering the product reply—they do so in the form of capacity plans at the program level. This program-level plan ties your strategic plans to sprint plans and gives a framework for data to roll back up. I have never seen a company successfully take a strategic plan for 9-12 months and break it down into 2-week sprints. You need to have intermediate stages.

Next focus on streamlining the strategic planning steps. Lean Portfolio Management allows you to determine the correct detail of your strategic plans to optimize the planning cycles and eliminate wasted effort.

Overall, keep an eye on removing bottlenecks and silos. Map the data you need at each level and the transparency into the process that you need all along the way. Status reports should be created by software and dashboards, not by people. We have seen organizations eliminate up to $100M spent on creating status reports against strategic plans by aligning their organizations and tools to create consistent data and dashboards.

Conclusion

It is essential that we align our organizations so we can flow ideas and innovation to our customers. Value Stream Management enables you to align work, eliminate silos and bottlenecks, and have the data you need to run your business as a natural outcome of standard processes. By focusing on improving how you create products today, you will be able to focus on new types of innovation in the future. Will you be ready for Society 5.0?  

For more information on Value Stream Management, please visit https://enterprise-software.broadcom.com/valueopsvsm.

Collaboration Software

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The modern hybrid workforce is composed of employees working in a variety of settings, from home, on the road, in the office, and just about everywhere in between. The help desk teams who support these dispersed employees are often in mixed working environments themselves and require enhanced contact center software with robust features to adequately serve their customers’ needs. Many companies are now exploring omnichannel solutions that combine contact center platforms, IT support systems, and video communications to address these new working environments.

With 83% of workers preferring a hybrid work model, and 63% of high-growth companies adopting a “productivity anywhere” workforce model, employees need to be as productive as possible no matter their location. IT professionals tasked with supporting these employees must be confident they can get all employees up and running as quickly as possible to avoid long stretches of downtime.

Getting assistance from IT help desks can include submitting tickets via email, online portals, calling them on the phone or using an on-site kiosk. While many enterprises have geographically dispersed IT help desk teams to support a global workforce, it’s now more likely these staffers are working from home or have their own hybrid schedule – which can make it difficult to deliver a more personalized help-desk experience.

Now, with an omnichannel, video-optimized contact center, companies can equip their IT Help Desk teams to deliver the same empathetic and supportive experience internally that is offered to external customers. IT help desk functions are just as important as external customer support, because an employee’s productivity and uptime depend on reliable technology that works. Adding visual engagements to your contact center allows for face-to-face communication that enhances support between an employee and the IT help desk team member.

Having relied heavily on tools such as Zoom for the past few years, many employees are quite comfortable with being on camera, which provides a human element that makes IT support more effective. For example, a video call allows help desk staff to provide a more personalized and caring experience for a frustrated employee who can’t get their work done. Screen and file sharing during the interaction lets IT staff solve problems faster and more efficiently. Video also can be used to quickly verify an employee’s identity, which can add another level of security with employees working from home or remote locations.

Many interactions require expertise beyond the contact center, so it’s important that IT staff have easy, real-time access to back-office experts while helping an employee. A modern platform that combines the contact center and unified communications creates a more seamless experience for help desk staff to interact with fellow employees and reduces costs while improving operational efficiency for IT staff. This also reduces research time, helps in locating answers to solve a given problem, and leads to higher employee satisfaction. What’s more, the department now has one less product to install, train on, administer, and maintain. Additionally, companies save money by eliminating the need to work with multiple vendors for various tasks.

An open platform that can integrate with the critical business applications that IT help desk staff use, such as Zendesk and ServiceNow, is essential to improving efficiency and streamlining the interactions with employees. Through integration, help desk staffers no longer need to switch between their contact center app and service ticket application, and instead, work directly within one application. This enables more automation capabilities and saves time from manually entering in the ticket and employee information.

Learn more about how Zoom Contact Center can assist IT help desk professionals with faster and more personalized support for a hybrid workforce.

Data Center Management

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It’s hard to imagine where today’s businesses would be without conversational AI. This technology, which powers both chatbots and conversational IVR systems, proved essential for navigating a changing service economy through a global pandemic.

Even before COVID-19, Gartner predicted that 70% of white-collar workers would interact with conversational AI platforms every day by 2022. The market for this technology is now expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.8%, reaching $18.4 billion by 2026.

This is thanks, in no small part, to how much this technology has improved in recent years. Chatbots, in particular, can now support the customer experience in many ways, enabling more customer self-service and reducing the demand on human agents.

Nonetheless, success is not a given when contact centers deploy chatbots and other conversational AI solutions. A chatbot comes with powerful AI capabilities, but it still hasn’t been tailored to fit your needs or tested in your business. Before contact centers take the plunge, they must consider what it really takes to ensure their conversational AI solutions will support and enhance the customer experience.

The growing demand for chatbots in the contact center

In large part, contact center executives don’t need to be convinced that they should adopt conversational AI in the form of either chatbots or intelligent voice assistants. Most are overly eager to bring these solutions into the mix. According to Canam Research, 78% of contact centers planned to deploy AI by 2023, with the largest portion (55%) pointing to chatbots as their primary AI solution. The CAGR for chatbots is expected to grow even faster than conversational AI in general, at 30.29% from 2022–2027.

There are good reasons for this, too. Across the board, contact center executives see the fruits of deploying chatbot solutions. A recent survey of Fast Company Executive Board members noted that adding a chatbot solution to their website enhanced customer engagement, accelerated service, enhanced personalized support, and increased customer satisfaction — just to name a few outcomes.

These positive results are encouraging, but that doesn’t mean chatbots and other conversational AI technologies are now flawless. They still fall short in many ways, from misinterpreted customer intents to delayed handoffs and security failures. And the resulting poor customer experiences can lead to customer churn and other negative impacts on a brand. These possibilities should make any contact center executive pause before jumping on the chatbot bandwagon unprepared.

The chatbot testing conundrum

That’s not to say contact center leaders shouldn’t embrace this technology — only that they should do it in the right way. As responsive and smart as AI is, it’s still limited by its programming. Ultimately, chatbot misfires still occur because bots can’t possibly account for all potential human interactions. The nuances and quirks of human communication are so vast and varied that there’s no way to prepare a chatbot for all possibilities out of the box.

Consider, for instance, how many possible ways someone could ask a chatbot to order a vegetarian pizza.  They may ask for a “veggie pizza,” a “pizza with no meat,” a “meatless pizza,” or use one of any number of other phrases. On top of that, any given person might bring their own quirks, like spelling errors, colloquial ways of saying something, limited tech capabilities — you name it. How do you know if your bot is capable of handling all these variations and nuances? You need to test it.

But truly testing for all these and the many other options for how someone could order pizza is an extensive job. Doing it manually would require many hours, or possibly even days, first to come up with the types of tests to run and then to run them. To do it efficiently, you need a solution that can accomplish all the necessary steps for you — a testing platform that allows you to quickly and efficiently expose these limitations so you can send the bot back to development and teach it new skills.

AI testing AI: the true path to flawless CX

Fundamentally, this kind of testing must cover the entire process so your testers don’t have to test your chatbots manually or spend hours developing test cases.

It means testing from end to end with automated natural language processing (NLP) score testing, conversational flow testing, security testing, performance testing, and chatbot monitoring. Ideally, the testing process should be simple and intuitive, with no coding, scripting, or programming involved.

Let’s return to the veggie pizza example. It would take a person (or a team of people) an incredibly long time to come up with all the ways someone could order their veggie pizza; and even then, they’d probably miss some. The only way to effectively come up with all possibilities would be to leverage AI to generate the test data. AI could select a question, such as “Can I have a vegetarian pizza,” and then automatically generate a list of ways to say the same thing. It could then automatically test the chatbot with those variations to see how it responds.

Going a step further, how many different ways could a person actually say each of those variations? AI can be used to further drill into the unique human quirks that different customers might bring to an interaction. For instance, AI could add layers to testing for customers who type sloppily, type in all caps, misuse homophones, add extra spaces or emojis, and more. “Pizza with no meat” could then become “pizza with no meet,” “PIZZA NO MEAT,” and any number of other possibilities.

These are just examples, but what’s important is that your testers don’t have to come up with all these options or run the tests themselves. You need a testing solution that will do it for them, with minimal manual effort. What you want is, effectively, AI testing AI so you can run these kinds of comprehensive, detailed tests much more quickly and frequently. This allows your testers to expose more chatbot weaknesses so your developers can teach and improve your bots more often and with greater precision, ultimately providing a better-quality experience for your chatbot using customers.

Contact center executives’ instincts are right: Investing in chatbots is a smart move. But doing so without adequate testing support could lead to more harm than good. Cyara Botium does exactly what we have described here and can provide the testing support your contact center’s chatbot technology needs. Learn more and try a demo to see for yourself.

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning

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Decision support systems definition

A decision support system (DSS) is an interactive information system that analyzes large volumes of data for informing business decisions. A DSS supports the management, operations, and planning levels of an organization in making better decisions by assessing the significance of uncertainties and the tradeoffs involved in making one decision over another.

A DSS leverages a combination of raw data, documents, personal knowledge, and/or business models to help users make decisions. The data sources used by a DSS could include relational data sources, cubes, data warehouses, electronic health records (EHRs), revenue projections, sales projections, and more.

The concept of DSS grew out of research conducted at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in the 1950s and 1960s, but really took root in the enterprise in the 1980s in the form of executive information systems (EIS), group decision support systems (GDSS), and organizational decision support systems (ODSS). With organizations increasingly focused on data-driven decision making, decision science (or decision intelligence) is on the rise, and decision scientists may be the key to unlocking the potential of decision science systems. Bringing together applied data science, social science, and managerial science, decision science focuses on selecting between options to reduce the effort required to make higher-quality decisions.

Decision support system examples

Decision support systems are used in a broad array of industries. Example uses include:

GPS route planning. A DSS can be used to plan the fastest and best routes between two points by analyzing the available options. These systems often include the capability to monitor traffic in real-time to route around congestion.Crop planning. Farmers use DSS to help them determine the best time to plant, fertilize, and reap their crops. Bayer Crop Science has applied analytics and decision-support to every element of its business, including the creation of “virtual factories” to perform “what-if” analyses at its corn manufacturing sites.Clinical DSS. These systems help clinicians diagnose their patients. Penn Medicine has created a clinical DSS that helps it get ICU patients off ventilators faster.ERP dashboards. These systems help managers monitor performance indicators. Digital marketing and services firm Clearlink uses a DSS system to help its managers pinpoint which agents need extra help.

Decision support systems vs. business intelligence

DSS and business intelligence (BI) are often conflated. Some experts consider BI a successor to DSS. Decision support systems are generally recognized as one element of business intelligence systems, along with data warehousing and data mining.

Whereas BI is a broad category of applications, services, and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and accessing data for decision-making, DSS applications tend to be more purpose-built for supporting specific decisions. For example, a business DSS might help a company project its revenue over a set period by analyzing past product sales data and current variables. Healthcare providers use clinical decision support systems to make the clinical workflow more efficient: computerized alerts and reminders to care providers, clinical guidelines, condition-specific order sets, and so on.

DSS vs. decision intelligence

Research firm, Gartner, declared decision intelligence a top strategic technology trend for 2022. Decision intelligence seeks to update and reinvent decision support systems with a sophisticated mix of tools including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to help automate decision-making. According to Gartner, the goal is to design, model, align, execute, monitor, and tune decision models and processes.

Types of decision support system

In the book Decision Support Systems: Concepts and Resources for Managers, Daniel J. Power, professor of management information systems at the University of Northern Iowa, breaks down decision support systems into five categories based on their primary sources of information.

Data-driven DSS. These systems include file drawer and management reporting systems, executive information systems, and geographic information systems (GIS). They emphasize access to and manipulation of large databases of structured data, often a time-series of internal company data and sometimes external data.

Model-driven DSS. These DSS include systems that use accounting and financial models, representational models, and optimization models. They emphasize access to and manipulation of a model. They generally leverage simple statistical and analytical tools, but Power notes that some OLAP systems that allow complex analysis of data may be classified as hybrid DSS systems. Model-driven DSS use data and parameters provided by decision-makers, but Power notes they are usually not data-intensive.

Knowledge-driven DSS. These systems suggest or recommend actions to managers. Sometimes called advisory systems, consultation systems, or suggestion systems, they provide specialized problem-solving expertise based on a particular domain. They are typically used for tasks including classification, configuration, diagnosis, interpretation, planning, and prediction that would otherwise depend on a human expert. These systems are often paired with data mining to sift through databases to produce data content relationships.

Document-driven DSS. These systems integrate storage and processing technologies for document retrieval and analysis. A search engine is an example.

Communication-driven and group DSS. Communication-driven DSS focuses on communication, collaboration, and coordination to help people working on a shared task, while group DSS (GDSS) focuses on supporting groups of decision makers to analyze problem situations and perform group decision-making tasks.

Components of a decision support system

According to Management Study HQ, decision support systems consist of three key components: the database, software system, and user interface.

DSS database. The database draws on a variety of sources, including data internal to the organization, data generated by applications, and external data purchased from third parties or mined from the Internet. The size of the DSS database will vary based on need, from a small, standalone system to a large data warehouse.DSS software system. The software system is built on a model (including decision context and user criteria). The number and types of models depend on the purpose of the DSS. Commonly used models include:
Statistical models. These models are used to establish relationships between events and factors related to that event. For example, they could be used to analyze sales in relation to location or weather.
Sensitivity analysis models. These models are used for “what-if” analysis.
Optimization analysis models. These models are used to find the optimum value for a target variable in relation to other variables.
Forecasting models. These include regression models, time series analysis, and other models used to analyze business conditions and make plans.
Backward analysis sensitivity models. Sometimes called goal-seeking analysis, these models set a target value for a particular variable and then determine the values other variables need to hit to meet that target value.
DSS user interface. Dashboards and other user interfaces that allow users to interact with and view results.

Decision support system software

According to Capterra, the popular decision support system software includes:

Checkbox. This no-code service automation software for enterprises uses a drag-and-drop interface for building applications with customizable rules, decision-tree logic, calculations, and weighted scores.Yonyx. Yonyx is a platform for creating DSS applications. It features support for creating and visualizing decision tree–driven customer interaction flows. It especially focuses on decision trees for call centers, customer self-service, CRM integration, and enterprise data.Parmenides Edios. Geared for midsize/large companies, Parmenides Eidos provides visual reasoning and knowledge representation to support scenario-based strategizing, problem solving, and decision-making.XLSTAT. XLSTAT is an Excel data analysis add-on geared for corporate users and researchers. It boasts more than 250 statistical features, including data visualization, statistical modeling, data mining, stat tests, forecasting methods, machine learning, conjoint analysis, and more.1000minds is an online suite of tools and processes for decision-making, prioritization, and conjoint analysis. It is derived from research at the University of Otago in the 1990s into methods for prioritizing patients for surgery.Information Builders WebFOCUS. This data and analytics platform is geared for enterprise and midmarket companies that need to integrate and embed data across applications. It offers cloud, multicloud, on-prem, and hybrid options.QlikView is Qlik’s classic analytics solution, built on the company’s Associative Engine. It’s designed to help users with their day-to-day tasks using a configurable dashboard.SAP BusinessObjects. BusinessObjects consists of reporting and analysis applications to help users understand trends and root causes.TIBCO Spotfire. This data visualization and analytics software helps users create dashboards and power predictive applications and real-time analytics applications.Briq is a predictive analytics and automation platform built specifically for general contractors and subcontractors in construction. It leverages data from accounting, project management, CRM, and other systems, to power AI for predictive and prescriptive analytics.Analytics, Data Science

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“The barriers confronting organizations in South Africa that want to achieve carbon neutral status by 2030 are significant. Among them is the simple reality that most of the nation’s power production originates from coal-fired plants located in the northeastern part of the country while the greatest potential impact for sustainable approaches like solar and wind lie in the south. We can’t immediately upend the entire power grid structure, but together with a willing and enthusiastic government and strong partners like VMware, we can make a difference. We now have a framework in place to support Africa’s nascent efforts to achieve zero carbon emissions and support providers intent to achieve and apply the tenets of VMware Zero Carbon Committed program to their operations.” 

– Bryce Allan, head of sustainability at Teraco Data Environments

Sumeeth Singh, head of VMware’s Cloud Provider Business in sub-Saharan Africa, was not surprised when the region’s leading cloud solutions and services companies enthusiastically embraced the VMware Cloud Verified initiative. With an established track record of success and extensive experience with the full VMware stack, many were ideally prepared to complete the rigorous process to apply for and receive the distinction.

The VMware Zero Carbon Committed initiative was, however, a different story. Singh knew that among providers the intent and desire to decrease their carbon footprints was strong. But the requirements, difficult in areas with an already mature sustainable energy infrastructure in place, were overwhelming in sub-Saharan Africa.

Specifically, partners would be required to commit that their data centers achieve zero carbon emissions by 2030, an effort that would require the use of 100% renewable energy. For partners in Europe where significant renewable energy sources exist in conjunction with a mature regulatory system of carbon offsets and credits, the process is still difficult.

“Like their counterparts in Europe, South African companies are increasingly mindful of resource constraints and the impact of fossil fuels on climate change,” said Singh. “They are also becoming more and more aware that their data center operations are a very large contributor to their overall carbon footprint. They also know that electricity in sub-Saharan Africa is primarily sourced from coal-fired plants. They want to do the right thing and minimize their emissions, but they are also seeing a dramatic increase in demand for hybrid and multi-cloud solutions and services – a reality that means they need more power, not less.”

Singh notes that for most partners, the resulting reality is that it would simply be unrealistic to pledge to achieve zero carbon emissions by 2030 because there are not enough renewable sources of energy in place to make it feasible. When no partners signed up for the VMware Zero Carbon Committed initiative, it was both a disappointment and a validation.

“Partners here didn’t sign up for this initiative not because they didn’t want to achieve zero carbon emissions by 2030, but because they didn’t think it was a realistic goal,” he says. More to the point, they didn’t view VMware Zero Carbon Committed as a marketing effort, but rather as a genuine commitment that should only be made if they believed they could achieve what they signed up for.”

Singh had a choice. He could either accept that the requirements for VMware Zero Carbon Committed were too challenging for the region, or he could find an alternative.

“We don’t have the luxury to postpone taking action when it comes to climate change,” he adds. “We have to do something now. In our case, we could either wait to ramp up the Zero Carbon Committed initiative until South Africa’s sustainability efforts are more mature – in other words do nothing now – or we could modify the requirements to find a more manageable solution.”

That solution came in the form of Teraco, South Africa’s largest and most interconnected data center platform. With four ultra high-performance data centers in South Africa – including facilities in Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg – the company forms the core of the nation’s internet backbone, and serves as the interconnection for both local and global cloud services. Providing the connectivity for the Africa Cloud Exchange, Teraco’s carrier and cloud neutral platform is also Africa’s largest hub for AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

In addition, it serves as the direct access point for more than 300 network providers, including telecommunications, terrestrial fiber, satellite connectivity, and submarine cable carriers; as well as more than 130 IT service providers, leading enterprises and financial services companies, and innumerable Internet eXchange points. Recently acquired by Digital Reality – the world’s largest provider of cloud and carrier neutral data center, colocation, and interconnection solutions – the company’s role connecting Africa to the world’s IT infrastructure will only increase.

Teraco is also the co-location provider of choice for most VMware Cloud Verified partners. But perhaps most importantly for those organizations that want to embrace VMware Zero Carbon committed, it is also no stranger to efforts to reduce carbon emissions. In fact, it was already in the midst of Africa’s most ambitious effort to produce 100% sustainable power.

Singh saw an opportunity. If VMware Cloud Verified partners could engage Teraco for data center services that use the company’s renewable energy, they could offset their own power usage and realistically commit to significantly decrease their own carbon footprint.

It was an effort Bryce Allan, head of sustainability at Teraco Data Environments, immediately embraced.

“At Teraco we are aggressively pushing to increase our use of renewable energy sources,” he says. One of our two newest and most significant solar projects is already under construction and we’ve set aside nearly $250 million over the next five years for the development of renewable energy sources and facilities. We also entered into a development service agreement with an experienced renewable energy developer and are already working with them to build two 100 megawatt solar facilities in Cape Town.” 

Allan expects the first of those to go online early in 2023 and to produce 500 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year. Notably, this is in addition to the company’s extensive solar projects at its data centers, with the facility in Johannesburg already including a high-output solar system that is the first of its kind on the continent. Similar systems are being constructed for each of the company’s data centers, with those expected to be operational by the end of this year.

“We’re really excited to start building big solar plants that make a real impact on the region’s use of fossil fuels,” says Allan. “The fact that we can simultaneously provide motivated VMware Cloud Verified partners with the access to the power they need to make zero carbon emissions a realistic goal is another great benefit.”

Notably, Teraco committed to achieving the use of 50% renewable energy sources by 2027 and 100% renewable energy sources by 2035. Given the difficulty of achieving both goals in Africa, the decision was made to allow VMware Cloud Verified Partners who want to achieve the VMware Zero Carbon Committed distinction to pursue it in conjunction with Teraco and those metrics.

“We are years behind our partners in other areas of the world in our efforts to lower emissions,” adds Singh. “But if we can work together to achieve the use of 50% renewable sources of energy in five years, we will have accomplished something truly significant while simultaneously enabling Africa’s cloud solutions and services providers to pursue contracts that reward and encourage additional efforts to decrease emissions. That is a win for all involved.”

Within days of the partnership with Teraco being announced, five companies in South Africa joined the VMware Zero Carbon Committed initiative.

The inaugural partners in Africa’s VMware Zero Carbon Committed initiative

The first five VMware Cloud Verified partners to embrace the tenets of the VMware Zero Carbon Committed initiative – and to make the transition to renewable sources of energy a key focus with the goal of using only renewable sources of energy by 2035 –  include Network Platforms, Routed, Saicom, Silicon Sky, and Strategix. We recently asked senior leaders at each company to share why they believe it’s crucial to radically decrease carbon emissions.

Network Platforms – Servicing businesses since 2003, Network Platforms provides a host of solutions to create effective ICT business environments. Its services are tailored to help businesses grow through increased productivity, profitability, and peace of mind. Its range of world-class, innovative products and services enables businesses to connect, communicate, and collaborate.

“It is imperative for all companies in Africa to look at the big picture and how we can collectively transition to renewable sources of energy. By transitioning to the cloud and software-defined data centers enterprises are taking a positive step for the environment. If we can run the hardware required for those endeavors with renewable sources of energy, we can collectively make a huge difference.”

– Bradley Love, founder and CEO of Network Platforms.

Routed – Routed is an experienced South African specialist VMware Cloud Operator offering scalable – full or hybrid cloud – vendor neutral hosting solutions. As a VMware Principal Partner, Routed proudly boast many “firsts”: first VMware Cloud Verified provider in Africa; first Validated VMware DRaaS provider in Africa; and now also a VMware Zero Carbon Committed partner, backed by the highest levels of sales, service, and support for its partners and customers.

“Routed empowers its partners and its customers to prosper and grow, grounded by solid and secure cloud infrastructure foundations. In much the same way, the baobob tree, our company symbol, provides for people in Africa’s savannah regions – serving as the tree of life and giving them the materials they need for shelter, clothing, food, and water – all while providing the roots that serve as a strong foundation. We like to think of ourselves as the baobob of cloud infrastructure providers. That means we must safeguard our environment here in Africa and that starts with a commitment to decrease emissions.”

– Andrew Cruise, managing director of Routed

Saicom – Saicom is a leading service provider in the local market delivering a host of solutions designed to help organizations move to the cloud, improve their collaboration and deliver an unsurpassed customer experience. Saicom understands that what businesses need most, as they navigate the move to the cloud, is choice, support, and flexible solution architecture.

“The environment in Africa is one of the world’s richest and most beautiful. We must take action to ensure that we can pass it on to future generations. Climate change is a horrific danger, but it’s also a wakeup call that we cannot continue to build our businesses and our lives around sources of energy that are finite and that once used cannot be replaced. As an ICT leader, we have an opportunity to help our customers do more with less impact on the environment by embracing a software-defined approach that simultaneously delivers unprecedented computing power and potential.”

– Kyle Woolf, CEO of Saicom

Silicon Sky – Silicon Sky is a specialist IT infrastructure service provider. Silicon Sky specializes in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Silicon Sky has a vast IaaS portfolio including compute, network, storage, security, backup, recovery and disaster recovery. Silicon Sky has enterprise grade managed cloud platforms co-located in multiple carrier natural data centers in South Africa and the USA.

“ICT has transformed how companies do business and so many aspects of how we live our lives. As a cloud services and solutions leaders, we have an opportunity, and an obligation, to demonstrate in our words and more importantly in our actions, how technology can combat climate change and make a difference. VMware Zero Carbon Committed presents us with an exceptional opportunity to do just that.”

– Brenton Halsted, CEO of Silicon Sky

Strategix – Strategix Cloud Services provides flexible, scalable, secure, simplified costings easy to scale. Strategix is the only certified cloud provider as well as VMware PSO certified (Professional Services Organization), thereby offering assurances to assist customers in their digital evolution including, application modernization and digital workspace in public, private, or hybrid Clouds.

“We strive to always make an impact in a positive manner in our work with customers and our interactions with each other. That same philosophy applies to imperatives like sustainability and efforts to address climate change. Action and positive impact begin with making a commitment. For Strategix, that begins with pursuing the VMware Zero Carbon Committed distinction.”

– Jaco Stoltz, CEO of Strategix

For more information on VMware’s partnership with Teraco, view VMware’s “Feature Friday” video podcast here.                                                                                                                                                               

Green IT, IT Leadership, VMware

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SAP has given CIOs another reason to consider moving to the cloud: rising support costs for on-premises software.

The company will raise the cost of its SAP Standard Support, SAP Enterprise Support, and SAP Product Support for Large Enterprises contracts for existing customers from January 1, 2023. Prices will rise in line with customers’ local consumer price index (CPI), with the increases capped at 3.3%. The changes will come into effect when customers renew their annual support contracts for the second time, affecting those who signed up before January 1, 2021.

The ERP vendor laid out its plans in a document entitled “Adjustment of SAP Support Fees,” which it finalized at the end of August.

SAP blamed the change on the higher costs of energy, labor, and third-party services, which are affecting the company just as many other businesses. It said it had kept the price of its support offerings broadly stable for almost a decade, even waiving adjustments during the pandemic.

The price increases only relate to support contracts for existing on-premises software, and the list price for support for new purchases of on-premises software will not increase, SAP spokesman Martin Gwisdalla told CIO.com in an email, meaning that users of SAPs cloud software and services will not be affected by these particular increases.

However, SAP’s cloud users may not be sheltered from the increases, as the company is also considering ratcheting up the price of its cloud software by 3.3% every year, CEO Christian Klein told German newspaper Handelsblatt in late July.

The German-speaking SAP Users Group, DSAG, is unimpressed with the company’s plans: “It is trying to establish mechanisms here that increase the costs for cloud services far above inflation,” Thomas Henzler, DSAG board member for licenses, service, and support, told CIO.com.” This is absolutely unacceptable and also incomprehensible.” With the service price rise and the threatened increase in cloud prices, SAP’s oldest on-premises customers could find themselves in a bind. SAP has been touting its cloud services as a way to keep licensing, maintenance and hosting costs under control, particularly with its “Rise with SAP” all-in-one offering, and has longstanding plans to move users of its previous software generation, ERP 6.0 and Business Suite 7, to a higher-paying support tier after standard support ends in 2027.

SAP