Digital Bulletin - Issue 40

FINDING AI’S HUMANITY WOMAN OF THE YEAR

MEDIA TRANSFORMED

Avanade CEO Pam Maynard

ROMILY BROAD Chief Executive Officer

Iwas looking for role models, and all the leadership were men,” says Lindsay Hua.

Speaking of her earlier career, Afiniti’s VP of Global Deployment is clear that while progress has been made, much remains to be done to secure equal representation for women at tech’s top tables. In this issue of Digital Bulletin we’re once again proud to contribute a quantum of visibility to female tech leaders.

Pam Maynard was appointed CEO of Avanade in 2019 and within weeks was leading the company into the COVID-19 pandemic and the unrest following the death of George Floyd. In a revealing and intimate conversation for the Digital Bulletin podcast, we discover someone delivering success with an empathetic and deeply human approach to leadership.

In an article written for us, Vodafone’s Jennifer Didoni discusses the importance of building resolutely human-centric organisations and doing so in the context of AI. Meanwhile, Blue Prism’s Emma Kirby-Kidd is leading the rollout of the

RPA pioneer’s all-new Robotic Operating Model – a hugely influential framework governing the implementation of one our era’s most transformative technologies.

Media Transformed: Our cover story for this issue considers the rapid transformation of the media industry from its resolutely offline and linear roots to the multifaceted, high-volume beast it is today. Virtusa and AWS are delivering change across the industry, and we travelled to New York to find out how.

Elsewhere, RPA – and indeed Blue Prism - is making a huge impact on frontline policing in the UK; Pluralsight’s Greg Ceccerelli tells us how to make – and retain - happy engineers and win the war for talent; Christie Group

CIO Alex Farr takes us through his Life In Tech; and Dario Betti of the Mobile Ecosystem Forum discusses the longterm consequences of growing distrust in Chinese technology. Enjoy!

Can we ever truly trust AI?

Learnings from the complex world of technology and ethics

AUTHOR: Jennifer Didoni, Head of Cloud, Edge and Mobile Private Networks at Vodafone Business

Over the past 10-20 years, the relationship between technology and society has become increasingly intertwined and complex. We now live in a highly digital world, with technology infused into practically everything we do at home and at work.

At the heart of this is artificial intelligence, which is increasingly being used by people and businesses alike to automate tasks, provide personalised experiences and generally make life easier for us all.

Such innovations have the potential to really improve people’s lives, and help build a digital society that enhances socio-economic progress and embraces

everyone. But while powerful technologies like AI can have a profoundly positive impact, there is still an underlying current of concern and anxiety as to what a future with AI will look like.

Just as innovations in areas such as AI and Machine Learning are becoming ever more ubiquitous, stories of AI gone wrong are also increasingly filling the headlines, with AI blamed for everything from worsening bias in recruitment to false arrests. So, it’s not hard to understand why many are concerned that, left unguided, these technologies may end up creating a less fair world.

The benefits of AI in driving efficiency and productivity mean companies will

continue to give more control and decision-making to AI. But this raises important questions they need to answer: how can they be held accountable when computer programs, rather than humans, are making decisions? And how can businesses reassure customers and employees that they’re still being treated fairly? Can we ever expect AI to have a heart?

Fears over the advancement of technology

Humans have always expressed an element of fear regarding the advancement of technology - from the Luddite movement in the early 19th century to

worries over the ‘cybernation revolution’ in the 1960s. There are even reports from nearly 500 years ago that Queen Elizabeth I denied a patent for an automated knitting machine for fear it would take jobs away from young women.

While we’ve obviously come a long way since then, the fear at the root of our anxiety towards technology hasn’t changed all that much: what happens

When it comes to AI, the heart wants what it has been programmed to want”

Jennifer Didoni Head of Cloud, Edge and Mobile Private Networks at Vodafone Business

when we let a non-human force drastically influence society?

And now that technology is in every corner of our lives, our fear has grown significantly. When we spoke to businesses about whether they thought technology would have a detrimental impact on them, 44% agreed – with 39% mentioning the negative impact it could have on equal opportunities within the workforce.

The risk of in-built bias in AI systems is one of the key ethical issues busi-

nesses need to address. If not managed correctly, bias in such systems could lead to unfair practices in hiring, lending, or even other areas such as healthcare – something which could significantly impact a company’s reputation.

Businesses may also have concerns around the cost of AI – which can be expensive – as well as its complexity, which can make any issues or problems in the system harder to spot.

Our report also found that the concerns of organisations go beyond

Businesses seem extremely pessimistic about the positive impact AI may have on society, second only to social media”

the business environment. This includes everything from the spread of misinformation (40%) and the loss of privacy due to data leaks (38%) to social isolation due to reliance on communication technology (38%).

This lack of confidence in technology’s ability to help us build a fair world is especially felt when people were asked about AI specifically. Businesses seem extremely pessimistic about the positive impact AI may have on society, second only to social media.

But the reality is that progress will continue to march on. The benefits AI tools offer enterprises, such as the ability to analyse large data sets rapidly and reduce the amount of menial work individuals have to do, are all too beneficial for businesses not to take advantage of.

So, how does a business remain competitive and continue to optimise its operations with the help of these tools, while also doing its part to ensure it’s always working towards its values and those of its people?

Trust through transparency

While the rate of technological progress continues on a steep upward trajectory, it’s crucial that businesses don’t forget they’re always going to remain accountable for the choices they make, even if they were influenced by AI.

Technology is a neutral force, so when it behaves badly, all it’s doing is exposing the will of others – from inequalities to biases that already exist. When it comes to AI, the heart wants what it has been programmed to want. This is why transparency is such a powerful cure to many of the inherent concerns people have around technology.

For instance, more ethical approaches to technology, like explainable AI - which enables humans to better understand how the system reaches its conclusions - can dispel its black-box nature. This greater transparency can be used to foster more trust in technologies like AI, as opposed to eroding it.

But companies need to remember that a major part of countering the inequities of technology falls outside the technical realm. Simple actions like ensuring everyone in a business has equal access and capacity to use technology are just as important. This is something 38% of our respondents said they are aware of.

It’s up to leaders to ensure the right

education and policies are being put in place so everyone has equal opportunity to leverage all of the many benefits technology can offer. Because when done right, technology can often be used to mitigate its own negative consequences. As much as 60% of businesses said they’ve taken such measures in some area of their business, from health to environmental impact.

This type of thinking can – and should – be extended to all areas of enterprise technology impacts. For example, with job security a key concern for many, it’s important to ensure employees have access to training that develops value-

added skillsets that can’t be replicated by automation, something which 41% of businesses say they are already doing.

As pressure from competitors and economic uncertainty continues to ramp up, it’s critical that business leaders don’t park their values when implementing AI. If AI is to ever have a heart, it will be because businesses manage to strike the balance between getting the most out of technology while also keeping people at the centre of their operations. Only at this point will people have full trust in the technology, ensuring long term success with widespread societal benefit.

Transforming the media industry

For the media industry, the opportunity of unprecedented demand meets the challenge of vastly increased complexity. Tech transformation specialist Virtusa and its partner AWS are making the difference.

AUTHOR: Ben East

icture, if you can, a time before broadband, before 5G networks, before streaming services and perhaps even before multichannel television. For television companies, studios or media organisations, their distribution job was brilliantly, boringly simple. Get their content to one device, one screen, one audience at a time.

Now consumers might have a tablet, a laptop, a phone and, yes, even a boring old television - all on the go at the same time. They might have paused a movie on Netflix to stream video on TikTok as they wait for the ad break during a live sports event on Amazon Prime Video or DAZN. Meanwhile their smart speaker in the kitchen is streaming music, and another is streaming live radio upstairs.

And they definitely expect all these devices to serve content to them in an easy to consume format in a neatly personalised, curated way.

Media producers’ biggest challengehow to create enough content and serve it to such a plurality of audiences and devices - has become too big for them to manage with their tried-and-tested, offline, and linear workflows.

“It’s become a lot more complex,” agrees Frank Palermo, Industry Business Head - Media at digital transformation firm Virtusa. “What we have to do is help these media organisations think about ways to quickly create their content, but then get it monetised and deployed globally.”

Virtusa’s solution is on - or in - the cloud. The company’s ability to perform

cloud migrations of media companies’ applications, data and content assets has already been transformative for some. “Programming schedule, ad sales, media supply chain, production workflowsthey’re all things we’ve helped organisations become more efficient in,” adds Palermo.

“There’s so much that requires automated production workflows - and what better place to automate them than on the cloud, where you can also distribute these flows across a variety of workers in disparate locations.”

The cloud has long been a place to store and deliver over-the-top (OTT) content

to audiences. In fact, media companies were among the first to embrace the cloud storage opportunity more than 15 years ago with the emergence of Amazon Web Services (AWS). The undiscovered country for many media production houses, however, is the notion that they can now shift their entire content production process to the cloud, too – and save a lot of time and money doing it.

Most companies in this space still run most of their production processes offline. Resistance to altering that paradigm is understandable- they’re dealing with huge files, and every one of them a precious,

It’s a decade of disruption… Media companies will need to leverage technology to survive and thrive”

Frank Palermo Industry Business Head – Media, Virtusa

expensive piece of original IP. Moreover, the concept that those files could be manipulated efficiently at a distance has lacked real credibility.

Until now.

Virtusa’s Technology Evangelist, Surajit Bhattacharjee, says the architecture exists for production to shoot, file, edit and collaborate in the Cloud in real time. That’s more realistic in VFX and animation workflows for now, but will be possible with human characters in studios “within two to three years.”

“It’s almost a guarantee at this point that all their production workflows are going to move to the Cloud,” he says. “It brings such benefits of speed and scale.”

Currently, if media businesses simply store their content on a server, every time they want to edit it - perhaps for a different format or market - it has to be downloaded, with huge egress costs. But if they’re working on a piece of media in the Cloud, they can transform it multiple times for its different outputs and delivery providers, without ever moving it. They can package up the content with the necessary metadata and get it out to the delivery partner as soon as possible. Having all the content in one place makes this process far more efficient, quicker, and cheaper.

“Actually, it’s a no-brainer that not just production workflows but the entire digital supply chain will move to the Cloud,” adds Bhattacharjee. “For any media business to survive over the next couple of decades,

there has to be a significant investment in quality content production. And to be able to do that, the rest of your business has to run as efficiently as possible, too.”

At the moment, that means some media businesses just use the Cloud to transcode, encode and distribute their content out to endpoints such as Netflix. But the sheer proliferation of platforms is a new issue that Virtusa helps manage, too; businesses are battling with delivering tens of thousands of content packages to literally hundreds of endpoints.

“It used to be just Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime. Supply chains were spreadsheet-driven, manual processes,” explains Bhattacharjee. “Today, to service multiple endpoints efficiently, technology needs to be front and centre. Over the last few years, we have built entire digital content distribution processes and systems on the Cloud.”

Virtusa is keen to stress it does much more than simply “lift and shift” broadcast companies’ digital assets, data payloads and IT onto the Cloud - even though that’s been easier for this sector to achieve given there’s not the regulatory framework as you might have in, say, healthcare and financial services.

Instead, Virtusa has developed an entire business around deconstructing the systems and applications media companies use and engineering them work much more efficiently in the Cloud.

Gregoire Rouyer

Global Partner Lead at AWS

“Virtusa has a strong background in software engineering,” Bhattacharjee points out. “And while the Cloud is very attractive - and an obvious choice for media businesses - you’ve got to be able to engineer your solutions on the Cloud efficiently; make your third-party products cloud native. Migrating to the Cloud is

one thing, being efficient on the Cloud is another. And that needs the deep heritage that we bring to the table.”

“That’s why I like to talk about applications that are running in the cloud, not on the cloud,” says Palermo. “They’re built to take advantage of the flexibility and scalability the Cloud offers - and deal with burstable

With Virtusa, we’ve enabled our customers to really push the boundaries on AWS”

“Virtusa invested very early in the cloud and AWS was one of our first partners in this space. AWS is a great partner in the field at clients and I think that’s really where the magic happens”

Frank Palermo

capacity. If you compare a traditional application running in a data centre, if I wanted to scale up there would be a physical step of actually going to procure servers, and literally acquire space within the racks. Then you might go back to moderate loads and have excess capacity. So the beauty of the Cloud and its elasticity is its ability to scale up and scale down and pay only for what you’re using at a point in time.”

A live example of this came with the work Virtusa has been doing with a major media client in the US. A couple of years ago, the client made a decision to move

all its applications over to the Cloud. Bhattacharjee takes up the story.

“We helped migrate all of their applications, and as a result, they were able to shut down all their data centres. 97 percent of their data-centre costs went down, and the overall infrastructure cost reduced by 47 percent. Now we’re looking at how to optimise that cost still further, and that’s possible because the Cloud has enabled us to build server-less solutions. You don’t have to pay for a high-end, idling server to be ready so that a video piece can be processed when it arrives.”

Virtusa and AWS: Strategic Relationship

A large component of Virtusa’s capabilities is derived from its tight working relationship with AWS. Virtusa is one of a few companies worldwide in the media space with a strategic collaboration agreement with AWS, a collaboration with a depth that works well for both parties, as Bhattacharjee explains.

“In simple terms, we are co-invested in helping clients adopt the Cloud. That means consumption of AWS services and hence more business to them, and on our

side it means helping clients to be able to migrate more workloads off to the Cloud, or use the Cloud more efficiently.”

Virtusa and AWS are able to present fully integrated solutions at the platform vendor and service provider level. Sometimes that means AWS and Virtusa working as one unit at a client site on everything from business-case input to solution architecture and even code delivery.

AWS has been directly involved in the transport, processing, management and delivery of video assets since 2015. Like Virtusa, is has seen a massive increase

PODCAST

The media industry has altered dramatically, and fast. In a fully converged world populated by connected media devices limited in number only by individuals’ capacity to own them, the opportunity – and the threat – is enormous for media companies throughout the supply chain.

in demand and volume. As Gregoire Rouyer, Global Partner Lead at AWS, succinctly puts it: “in terms of the supply chain, there’s a complex need to deliver the content you want on time, at the right place, on the right platform, for the right consumer… and on budget.”

No pressure, then. AWS has built a number of media and database services in that supply chain to deliver, package, transport and monetise video, but recognises that there is often an additional need for complex – elaborate, even - solutions for its customers.

“We need consulting partners who can share our passion for customers, and

essentially build the overall solution that our customers need,” says Rouyer. “With Virtusa, we’ve enabled our customers to really push the boundaries on AWS, transforming and leveraging their media libraries. This kind of complex enterprise transformation could not happen without partners like them.”

With AWS at the cutting edge of media transformation, Rouyer is perfectly placed to assess the kinds of opportunities he sees for media companies in the Cloud. Metadata is one area both he and Virtusa are incredibly excited about. Palermo calls it “content intelligence”; embedded with a piece of video will be a summary of its

Digital Bulletin sits down with leaders from AWS and tech-transformation multinational Virtusa to chart the change in the industry and ask what the future holds.

Romily Broad - Digital Bulletin

Frank Palermo - Industry Business Head – Media, Virtusa

Surajit Bhattacharjee - Technology Evangelist, Virtusa

Gregoire Rouyer - Global Partner Lead, AWS

content but also its technical details - what segments it has, what audio it has, where it is allowed to be used.

That metadata can then be used on, say, Netflix, to help with personalisation but it can also automate and drive the supply chain.

“Look at it this way,” explains Bhattacharjee. “You define what’s needed by a target platform, what specifications they need and so on. Rather than manually assembling the media package by humans at cost, you use the metadata to spec it up automatically and deliver it immediately,” he says.

“We think giving businesses the flexibility to have metadata and edit metadata in various systems and be able to tap into it on the Cloud as an aggregate view is really enriching. There is real value in being able to know everything about your content.”

Not least because streaming service providers, from the large to the local, all have their own minimum metadata standards. Without metadata, you can’t quickly fulfil the supply process.

“It’s a real gamechanger,” agrees Rouyer. “And at AWS we use a machine learning algorithm to automatically generate a lot of this metadata on a huge number of assets - you can then leverage it to create a more personalised workflow.”

Intelligent Personalisation

The work Virtusa and AWS are doing in AI, automation and metadata in the media supply chain is certainly fascinating. One of the areas Bhattacharjee sees real value in is ‘video-mining’, where AI is used to produce new content from archive and library footage existing in the Cloud. Targeting the

It’s a no-brainer that… the entire digital supply chain will move to the Cloud”

Surajit Bhattacharjee

Technology Evangelist, Virtusa

metadata, a bot would be able to resurface and repurpose old content intelligently for the specific audiences, enabling media organisations to fully sweat their catalogue.

The full functionality will come when the streaming platforms send metadata back - enabling audience insights to be incorporated into content decisions and archives. It’s this orchestration of immediately available assets and data in the Cloud which will be so important to the media organisations of the future.

And personalisation, they all agree, is the real key to success.

“It’s not uncommon to go into any organisation on the sales and marketing side and see hundreds of different applications,” says Palermo. “And I think the opportunity to converge, to simplify those platforms, unleashes an incredible amount of intelligence that can be then used to further personalise.

“I think there is no better place to do this unification than in the Cloud, as a kind of organising point around consolidation. That’s really unleashing a lot of competitive differentiation - if you think about the brands that we interact with on a daily basis, the ones really creating a highly personalised experience are the ones that are driving business.”

That highly personalised experience already includes delivering content with graphics or captions in the language corresponding to the user’s profile. It could in the future mean personally and contextually-relevant information surfacing during live sports broadcast. All of which can only deepen the viewer experience.

“That’s the next exciting thing coming,” agrees Rouyer. “You’re going to be watching easily-accessible content that has been curated and transformed for you, that matches who you are.”

In a turbulent media landscape, this vision of the future is certainly compelling. Getting there, though, will require an openminded commitment to the innovation embedded in AWS and Virtusa.

“It’s a decade of disruption,” admits Virtusa’s Palermo. “Media companies will need to leverage technology to survive and thrive in this competitive space - and we can help them deploy the tools and technologies they need to succeed.”

THE REJECTION OF CHINESE TECH

The Mobile Ecosystem Forum’s Dario Betti on how distrust of Chinese technology could lead to bifurcating standards and a rebalancing of the global economy.

AUTHOR: Dario Betti

WHAT IT REALLY MEANS

In March 2023, the short-video app TikTok was challenged by a bipartisan USA Congress committee over its Chinese ownership. TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, shared details of a $1.5 billion project with Oracle designed to safeguard the data and content of its 150 million American users from Chinese influence. But, despite this, the members of the energy and commerce committee remained unmoved.

“I still believe that the Beijing communist government will still control and have the ability to influence what you’re doing,” said democratic congressman Frank Pallone. Multiple government and legislative bodies have banned Tik Tok

usage by its employees based on fears of profiling and tracing technologies. It is not just data spying that concerns the West. Another reason is the anticipated ubiquity of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and these being used as trojan horses for attacks. With multiple connected devices in any one home, there is a greater potential to inflict damage on a national level. If every washing machine in the UK switched on simultaneously, for example, it could overload the National Grid while also causing a temporary water shortage. That being said, these new attack vectors have been widely known for a while now. Taking a step back to look at

the bigger picture, security is simply the tip of a very large iceberg. What lies underneath are issues of power and money.

In the bigger geopolitical picture, cyber security is really about cyber politics and cyber economics. Cyber security is more visible at the moment, partly due to things like spy balloons and Huawei being designated ‘high risk’ in the UK and USA (among others). Over the next decade, we will see cyber concerns change the global political and economic status quo.

The End of Globalisation

Globalisation of supply chains has been the status quo since the late 1980s. China became the world’s factory, developing its economy using cheap labour and a wealth of natural resources. The trade-off for cheap, innovative products

has been a reduction in security. As standards became globalised, imports were less closely monitored.

However, China has now reached the stage of being an affluent country with a thriving middle class. In fact, it is now the largest single market in the world, making China less interested in the global economy.

As such, there is a move away from globalisation. Prices are rising and China is starting to dominate both economically and technologically. Feeling threatened, the Western world is seeking greater protection of its economy and technology.

The current Western concern around securing networks and devices will extend outward to cover the entire supply chain, allowing countries to secure

economic and political power while still sharing in technological advances.

While it’s unlikely that we’ll return to the protectionist policies of the early 20th century, we will see a greater bifurcation of technology. We are already seeing it when it comes to things like semiconductors and applications ─ there is one set of technologies operating in the West, one in China, another in Russia, and so on.

Changing Pace of Innovation

Zooming out, it seems clear that the world moves in big cycles, shifting back and forth between protectionism

and globalisation. In the coming, more protected, cycle, consumers will still enjoy a lot of the benefits of technology but things like 6G will take longer to roll out and likely cost much more.

The growing bifurcation of technologies and protection of national interests will likely lead to a slowing of innovation. We are already seeing tech giants cutting jobs in anticipation of things slowing down, readjusting the levels of investment that delivered the tech boom of the past two decades.

And with China no longer serving as the world’s factory, products will also become more expensive. Shifting manufacturing

out of China will likely cause a lot of friction and disruption of supply chains in the near future. In the longer term, however, this shift may help rebalance job creation and wealth distribution, especially in developing regions like Africa.

The good news is that the learnings and development will still be shared; the global market won’t be closed just yet. Rather, organisations like the Mobile Ecosystem Forum (MEF) will step in to become facilitators of collaboration and development, helping manufacturers, software engineers and application developers work closely together to create technologies that work seam-

lessly across different regions, networks and devices.

Control of Standards

One of the ways globalisation has helped technology work seamlessly over the past few decades is through aligned global standards. This has helped to ensure that development and innovation have remained open yet still relatively secure.

Interestingly, China has been careful to keep itself somewhat removed from these global standards while still using them to manufacture technology. As such, there is essentially a ‘Chinese internet’ that differs from the rest of the world.

As China stops playing manufacturer and grows into a large, mature market, the rest of the world has come to recognise the power that this separation has afforded the Chinese government. In its internal market, China can control technologies, social media platforms, applications, and information centrally – something the global West is ideologically opposed to.

Yet, as technology companies have grown, so too has the need to gain some level of control over how technologies and information are used. If Facebook is bigger than any individual country and there is no control over how the company uses data, it has the potential to become incredibly powerful, as illustrated by the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

As a result, the EU and US are now going down a path of trying to control various internet players. The pushback has come in the form of decentralised Web 3.0 which provides new de facto standards. Concerned about sovereignty and security, national governments are trying to reign in Web 3.0 technologies and/or create their own.

This may end up in much more localised standards and technologies. The UK government, for example, is currently working on a central bank digital currency (CBDC), based on Web 3.0 principles. Much like other cryptocurrencies, the UK CBDC may operate using different standards to other countries.

Over the next decade, we will see cyber concerns change the global political and economic status quo”

Dario Betti is CEO of MEF (Mobile Ecosystem Forum), a global trade body established in 2000 and headquartered in the UK with members across the world. As the voice of the mobile ecosystem, it focuses on crossindustry best practices, anti-fraud and monetisation. The Forum provides its members with global and cross-sector platforms for networking, collaboration and advancing industry solutions.

It will be interesting to see whether Web 3.0 will become Chinese vs the rest of the world or whether there will be a more granular differentiation of digital standards. It already seems that the EU is challenging the dominance of US-based tech giants by developing its own standards, such as the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the Digital Services Act (DSA), to try to gain greater control and regulation of digital markets and services.

Summary

The focus on China as a malicious security threat is somewhat of a distraction. The real battle is in military and economic

power. Security, through this lens, is about protecting the entire supply chain in order to be able to protect national interests.

This end-to-end protection of service delivery will likely lead to a bifurcation of technologies and standards, potentially creating localised services tied to particular nations, regions, and/or technology providers, and a shift away from globalisation.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out on a geopolitical stage. There will likely be some short-term friction causing innovation to slow and costs to rise but which, in the longer term, could lead to a more balanced global economy.

Finding humanity with AI

Lindsay Hua wears two hats: diversity champion and deployer of AI. At the intersection of the two we find a special perspective on the importance of both to global AI companies like her employer, Afiniti, and their customers.

AUTHOR: Ben East

When the “Godfather of AI”, Geoffrey Hinton, quit Google citing concerns about the direction of digital intelligence, he once again opened up the debate everyone from Elon Musk to Rishi Sunak has been having about the regulation of this potentially life-changing technology. Governments across the world have proposed frameworks, but largely it’s been left up to the companies to self-police. Google itself has its AI Principles, though Hinton seems to think they’re no longer fit for purpose.

So you might expect a global AI and machine-learning software company such as Afiniti to brush some of these issues under the carpet. But Lindsay

Hua, VP Global Deployment, is keen to confront them head on.

“AI is obviously a hot topic,” she admits. “Any idea of Terminator-style cyborgs taking over the planet is a little bit extreme, but at Afiniti it was really key to us to have some policies that could underpin our products. So we created an AI ethics and governance committee to make sure all the products we create have no bias against race, ethnicity or gender. After all, AI is initially created by us, so if we have bias, so could AI.”

It makes sense for Afiniti to be so invested in the human impact of AI, given it’s the bedrock of the compa ny’s entire proposition. Installed into a contact centre, its technology connects

agents and customers based on data and machine-learned best fit, rather than call order and availability. That means both parties enjoy more fruitful conversations, leading to better outcomes for customers and companies.

“It is about applying AI to improve human interaction rather than replacing it,” says Hua. “That’s the core of our product.”

Which is a world away from the dangers of AI chatbots Hinton has been warning about. As Global Deployment Lead for Afiniti’s implementation programme, for Hua it’s never been a

case of just installing technology and waiting for results. Her cross functional team of data scientists, engineers and developers sit down with interested customers to listen and truly understand the requirements of the company before implementation. Then, once it’s live, there’s a very human management and maintenance of the system.

“There are so many questions we get about data, AI, how our software can integrate with their other systems, how

Lindsay Hua

VP Global Deployment, Head Of Diversity in Technology

we can help with their digital transformation programmes,” says Hua. “And untangling that spaghetti while offering value and security can only really come with human collaboration and interaction. Being in 20 locations around the world and constantly having these conversations eases these concerns. We are an AI company, but human interaction is the end game.”

That focus on humanity also plays a huge part in Hua’s other role with Afiniti, as Head of Diversity in Technology.

It was really key to us to have policies that could underpin our products. So we created an AI ethics and governance committee to make sure all the products we create have no bias”

When she first joined from T-Mobile in 2020, she was one of just two women VPs in the global deployment team.

“I made it a personal mission to bring in more women, not just in global deployment but across Afiniti,” she says.

And that mission began by introducing Afiniti to non-profit organisation IGNITE Worldwide, which focuses on bringing STEM awareness and education to young girls and gender diverse youth. IGNITE’s mission statement is in its name (Inspiring Girls Now in Technology

Evolution) - and since 1999 it has inspired over 80,000 young women in Seattle alone to pursue education or careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. There are now chapters all over the world, and as a member of IGNITE’s Executive Advisory Board, Hua is evangelical about what it means for the future of women in tech.

“At Afiniti, we do a lot of volunteering to teach these kids the basics in AI and machine learning, data design and even

product creation, because we know that in the end they are going to be our future pipeline and our future talent.

“It’s fun and interactive, and we either go to their schools or get them to come to our offices so they can see women in these tech roles and have role models they can aspire to.”

That sense of being seen or represented feels very important. Earlier in her career, Hua says there was a real block to the idea of progressing to leadership levels as a woman in tech.

“I was looking for role models and all the leadership were men,” she says. “It did provoke questions about how I would go up the ranks, how I’d get a mentor, a sponsor, an advocate who would vouch for me and see my talent.”

And how does that landscape look now?

“There’s still a way to go, absolutely. For example, when you see one woman in a leadership group of ten, you have to ask why that is happening. And if

you look at the promotion progression for people of the same skill level and certain groups are getting promoted over others, it’s possible that’s due to unintentional bias. It’s critical to educate people to overcome this kind of bias or at least be aware of it, so you can bring more equality to the workplace.”

Hua’s also found huge support with her mission to drive diversity in her membership of WomenTech Network - a group of powerful and influential women in the tech industry who work together to create changeand Chief, a similar network built to drive more women into positions of power.

“They’ve been so beneficial,” she says. “They’re full of women who look like me, speak my language, and when I have an issue or challenge that I want to overcome and can’t find a solution internally, they are like your board of advisors. They provide coaching and mentoring at that level.

At Afiniti, we do a lot of volunteering to teach kids the basics in AI and machine learning, data design and even product creation because we know that in the end, they are going to be our future pipeline and our future talent”

“Many will use Chief for job postings and applications of course, but there’s a wider support at play here, too. Chief provides a platform for people like me to speak to other women executives and understand how they’ve navigated similar challenges over their careers. It’s been incredibly helpful.”

It’s fascinating how two huge strategic goals in all companies – embracing AI and driving diversity, inclusion

and equality in the workplace - come together in Hua’s roles. She has, then, both a lot to do and a lot to be hopeful about.

“Most days now I’m really excited about women in tech and increasing diversity,” she says. “Yes, it’s a space that requires a lot of attention. Yes, there’s a long way to go, and I try to focus as much of my time and prioritisation towards that as I can.

Pam Maynard Making a genuine human impact

As CEO of Avanade, Pam Maynard has helped create one of the world’s most loved places to work. As a black, female CEO of a global tech company, she is also one of the world’s most important role models.

AUTHOR: Romily Broad

When Pam Maynard, CEO of tech-consulting giant Avanade, strode to the podium to collect her Woman of the Year award at this year’s everywoman Women in Technology Awards, it was just the latest plaudit for an industry leader who has come to stand for so much.

Digital Bulletin supported the event and was witness to the reception she received, and has now been lucky enough to spend some quality time with her for the Digital Bulletin podcast.

Maynard began her tech career as a graduate trainee at Oracle before being headhunted into EY’s consulting arm, moving with that to Capgemini on its sale to the French firm in 2000. She

joined Avanade in 2008 and quickly ascended its leadership ranks, working in a variety of senior roles during an 11-year career at the company, including as president of its Europe region and heading product strategy globally.

She was appointed CEO in the wake of the departure of long-standing incumbent CEO Adam Warby. Under his leadership the company had ballooned in size and tripled revenues to $2.5bn, but if that was a tough act to follow, Maynard’s tenure would begin with a once-in-a-generation baptism of fire.

Leading Genuine Human Impact

Maynard recalls a stroll through Houston airport with Warby as she prepared to take

There are women I speak to who say when they look up at Avanade all they see are women”

“That became really, really important.”

Maynard took the helm at Avanade in September 2019 and at that point formally introduced the company’s refined purpose to the organisation. She unveiled it publicly in a LinkedIn post in November, just 55 days before a novel coronavirus was identified in Wuhan, China. By March 2020, flying to Houston - or just about anywhere else – had become impossible.

“And a few months after that, we got the unrest associated with the death of George Floyd,” she adds.

the top seat at Avanade. They discussed the company’s core purpose. Not it’s mission, vision, or values, but rather the reason why the company and its 50,000+ people did what they did. She decided that what would “signify my leadership and the Pam Maynard era” would be to ‘make a genuine human impact’.

“I was thinking from the perspective of not just the work that we do for our clients, and therefore the impact they wanted to have on their customers, on their people, or in the communities which were important to them, but on our people. How do we ensure that the people who want to spend a chapter of their career at Avanade feel that we are creating a genuine human impact for them,” she says.

Pam Maynard

Avanade,

PODCAST

Pam Maynard, CEO, Avanade

Digital Bulletin sits down with her to discuss the childhood that formed her, the experiences that informed her, and the leadership practices that have made her one of the most important role models in the industry.

“The ‘genuine human impact’ actually served as a North Star for us in terms of guiding us to think more about the impact of the work that we wanted to have, but also the impact and the opportunity we wanted to create for our people.”

Maynard successfully led the company through unprecedented challenges by doubling down on its mission to be a place of genuinely meaningful ‘belonging’ for its people. As a rare example of a woman of colour leading a globally significant technology company, she was perfectly placed to continue championing inclusion and diversity amongst the company’s ranks, something for which her predecessor in the role was also a vocal proponent. It was

a vital component of Avanade’s ability to thrive in the face of global challenges, and validated with the company being placed in the top three of Newsweek’s Most Loved Workplaces in 2022.

Maynard says systematically driving at inclusion and diversity is crucial not only because it is morally necessary, but because a failure to do so strips organisations of an ability to innovate and adapt on the back of a rich, deep pool of diverse perspectives and experiences. It also makes it much harder to recruit and retain the best people in the industry’s ongoing war for talent.

Speaking more generally, while Maynard says a huge amount of

formed in 2000 as a joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture, is a $2.5bn tech juggernaut. Today, it is led by Pam Maynard, the daughter of a Windrush émigré nurse and a London bus driver, whose empathetic and progressive leadership has made the company officially one of the most loves places to work in the world.

work remains to be done in promoting diversity in positions of senior leadership – particularly for people of colour – she sees significant progress being made.

“I see this at Avanade. For example, 55% of my executive committee are women. There are women I speak to who say when they look up at Avanade all they see are women. So in terms of leadership, I’m seeing progress. I’m also seeing progress in terms of graduate intakes. The challenge for a lot of organisations is in the middle management layer – how do we retain

people when they take a career break, especially in technology where things move so fast,” she says.

Secrets of Success

Maynard explains that a foundational aspect of Avanade’s success in encouraging inclusion and diversity is its focus on employee networking and mentorship. The company boasts innumerable employee groups representing distinct interests, and every member of Avanade’s leadership team sponsors at least one of them. This is not just to help those groups

sustain themselves, but “because it’s a learning opportunity for us - they help us, and they help me, to understand how we might need to adjust the organisation.”

Mentorship and networking has been fundamental to Maynard’s own journey, she says. Her most important mentor remains her mother, whose determination and adventurism led her to leave her home in Barbados to travel to the UK as part of the Windrush generation.

Her mother would go on to become a career nurse (her father was a London

bus driver) and make bold decisions for her family that would ultimately position Maynard to confront and overcome her limitations. From meeting the cognitive and social challenge of being “the only black girl in the village” to conquering her overwhelming shyness, mentorship and the opportunities afforded by supportive networks are what helped enable Maynard’s ascent to the very top.

Listen to the Digital Bulletin podcast to hear more about the making of one of technology’s most influential leaders and most important role models.

A FORCE FOR AUTOMATION

Thames Valley Police’s digital transformation programme includes a pioneering approach to automation. Focused on frontline policing rather than back-office tasks, it’s already producing remarkable results.

AUTHOR: Ben East

If you want to understand the sheer size of the challenge facing policing in Britain in 2023, it’s worth spending five minutes with Mike Lattanzio.

“It’s volume of demand,” he says. “Emergency calls are up over 23 percent in the last 12 months. The complexity of crime and the systems we have to navigate increases the time taken to deal with each job.”

Lattanzio is Chief Information Officer for Thames Valley Police, the largest non-metropolitan police force in England and Wales, which serves a swathe of territory covering three counties to the west of London. The force shares its technology resources and infrastructure with the neighbouring Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary, extending Lattanzio’s remit all the way down to the

south coast. Tech For Good meets him and his team at offices in Eastleigh, just outside Southampton. It’s a hive of operational activity and home to trailblazing IT innovation that is helping the force – and perhaps the rest of the nation – meet its immense challenges.

Superintendent Rob Brind is part of the team. As Digital Silver (a senior officer in the force’s Gold-Silver-Bronze command hierarchy), he helps oversee digital transformation and innovation across both forces.

“Crime is now more complex than ever before. Our crime investigation and management unit have been inundated with an increase in the number of crimes that they needed to process. Criminals use technology to commit crime in innovative ways, and we need to maintain pace with that,” he says.

“We are working to use Robotic Process Automation – or RPA – as a good option for us to free time for officers and staff so they can focus more on investigations.”

A Force for Automation

The picture of overstretched police forces is one painted across the entire country. In proactively deploying RPA at the sharp end of policing, Lattanzio’s team has demonstrated it is a technology that can quickly and cost-effectively provide solutions.

While RPA has already been used by police forces across the country to automate processes perceived as lower risk, Thames Valley Police has been more ambitious. It saw the potential for a series

of applications that could not only make an instant difference to the way policing operates in the third decade of the 21st century, but the kind of service the public could expect to experience, too.

“We made a conscious decision to look at how we could benefit frontline policing through automation,” says Lattanzio. “And it wasn’t about automating or digitising an analogue process. It was about looking at that process and potentially reengineering it to work in a much smarter way.”

Thames Valley Police began proofof-value work with Deloitte in 2020, the partnership highlighting where the opportunities for automation were, but also

At the end of the day, policing is about peopleand it’s about implementing technology that best looks after them”

Mike Lattanzio

pinpointing the best platform to meet their requirements.

“Policing uses a lot of very specific tools,” says Tom Kempster, Thames Valley Police’s Head of Innovation Technology. “We have quite a wide and diverse application stack, more so than is typical in private enterprise, so the opportunities for automation were massive.”

Which is where SS&C Blue Prism came in. The Warrington, UK-headquartered multinational is the original pioneer of RPA and has developed vast public-sector experience over more than two decades.

“Blue Prism really understood the outcomes we were trying to derive from automation, right from the outset,” explains Kempster. “We didn’t come into it initially looking for financial savings, it was very much about being able to bridge that gap between capacity and demand. There was a collaborative approach to understanding that problem and delivering service improvement.”

One of the most immediate impacts was in Thames Valley Police’s component of the region’s Multi Agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH). This critical service exists to link a multitude of agencies together to protect children and adults at risk of abuse and neglect.

As Head of MASH, Charlotte Donahoe explains, the workload is immense.

“We are handling 14,000 tasks every month - triaging that amount of work was

taking up a huge proportion of our officers’ time, taking them away from other important work.”

RPA now works across a plurality of systems to respond to triggers and carry out much of the administrative burden automatically, from intelligently researching signals that indicate a risk may exist for a child, to notifying the schools and agencies that need to know. It is returning thousands of hours to the force’s staff.

Donohoe adds: “What’s really exciting is that we’re now using RPA to help identify repeat perpetrators, particularly around domestic abuse, helping us prevent future harm.”

As Lattanzio puts it, people come into policing to keep the public safe, not to do endless paperwork. “Our responsibility is to make that as easy and as quick as possible, so they release more of their time to focus on the things that matter, which is people,” he says.

In MASH, that meant designing a system using four robotic processes where the data regarding an individual or incident could immediately be analysed and risk assessed. In a manual process, Lattanzio reveals, it can take longer for a high-risk case to be identified and prioritised.

“RPA can automate that data comparison, do some of that risk assessment and draw out items that need to go to the top of the queue.” he says.

Head of

Technology Thames Valley Police

“Blue Prism really understood the outcomes we were trying to derive from automation, right from the outset”

Tom Kempster

Innovation

“This is really, really important, because we’re talking about vulnerable victims. The quicker we are cutting through to those really high-risk cases, that will stop people coming to harm, or even save lives.”

Donohoe reckons those at highest risk of harm are now being targeted for support within an hour of the trigger arriving in MASH. And there have been other benefits, too.

“The MASH is a really good example of where we’re able to triage information coming in through the use of automation,” adds Kempster. “It takes us to a position where we’re better prioritising risk, we’re making faster and better decisions based on quality data. We are seeing the daily positive impact of RPA on our staff and citizens we serve, because the process directly offers them a better police service.”

Charlotte Donahoe

Rethink your approach to modernisation and improve the quality and speed of your citizen services

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in the public sector is solving challenges that didn’t exist prior to COVID-19. Moving toward a long-term solution, agencies are utilizing intelligent automation as they build solid foundations for future success.

“MASH (Multi Agency Safeguarding Hub) is a really good example of where we’re able to triage information coming in through the use of automation. This means that something very high priority may have been sitting waiting until someone could have got to it, but we’re getting to those things faster than we ever did before”

Tom Kempster Head of Innovation Technology, Thames Valley Police

Automated “transactional tasking”, as Brind puts it, is being repeated across Thames Valley Police. In fact, he jokes, as soon as one department sees the benefits of RPA, another lobbies for its own digital workers: “It’s like a runaway train; we’re inundated with ideas for RPA.”

Thames Valley’s crime investigation and management unit saw its outstanding tasks reduced to zero with RPA, immediately saw improved data quality, and was therefore able to make better decisions.

“It’s a no brainer for us,” adds Brind. “We’ve released time for officers and staff to do other tasks and we can focus them to be in the right place at the right time. We’ve saved money and we’re delivering a much better service to the public”.

As far as the public is concerned, a salient impact of RPA is in how it streamlines people’s direct interactions with police.

Kempster says: “With RPA we can set protocols and initiate processes when a call is made. Through pre-determined rule sets we can send out communications, provide updates, give advice and prioritise risk. We can start really biting away at the volumes of demand that are coming through into the contact centre.”

Lattanzio isn’t alone in believing that one of the main reasons RPA has been so successful at Thames Valley Police is that the focus is on resource release and service improvement, rather than

We have a capability now that gives us the headspace to bring in policing transformation”

Tom Kempster

budgetary savings. Not least because that’s meant force-wide buy-in on what they’re trying to achieve.

“It’s never been a cost-saving exercise for our department,” says Donohoe. “It was around working more smartly. It was

around prioritising risks and implementing some standardised processes across the force.”

Kempster says RPA is now saving the force as much time in filing as would have previously required 50 full-time

employees. That’s 390,000 hours a year that can be better spent on the streets doing vital work with the public.

Leading the Nation

Thames Valley Police’s digital transformation strategy has made it the leader in frontline policing automations - which begs the question, when and how can the benefits be realised nationwide?

“I think there’s a perception out there that this is really expensive technology, or really difficult to set up,” says Lattanzio. “But it’s a lot less challenging than we anticipated.

My advice to other forces would be to start small, prove it works, gain momentum, and then gain support for further investment. That’s exactly what we did.”

He adds that the work Thames Valley has carried out already can now be lifted out, tweaked, and deployed at other forces. “We’re not competing with other forces; we can build a national portfolio in collaboration,” he adds.

Kempster is just as enthusiastic about sharing the force’s gains: “We were seeing benefits within six months, so my message to other forces is that this doesn’t have to

RPA is a no brainer for us. We’ve saved money and we’re delivering a much better service to the public”

Rob Brind

be a complicated or long journey. We’ve done a lot of that complexity for them.

The next step for Thames Valley – and other forces on the same journey – will be AI, says Kempster.

“We’re at the start of a journey. We have a capability now that gives us the headspace to bring in policing transformation. We want to be able to augment this by having controls over data coming in, creating more trigger points for efficient automation.

“And then what can we do with this data? This leads us nicely into AI, where we can make efficient decisions where it is safe and ethical to do so.”

Lattanzio has a simple example of how AI could help the forces of the future.

“Think about an environment whereby, actually, the officer doesn’t have to capture any information, because everything that victim is saying to the officer is being recorded via video.

“The AI captures that information in a structured manner. We still get what we need - but it completely changes the interaction between the officer and the victim. It means they can give them 100 percent focus, rather tapping away on a laptop or writing it down.

“It’s that sort of major digital transformation that forces should be setting themselves up for.

“At the end of the day, policing is about people - and it’s about implementing technology that best looks after them.”

ROM2 Operating Intelligent Automation

SS&C Blue Prism introduced its Robotic Operating Model (ROM) for RPA 15 years ago and it was adopted around the world. Now, however, comes ROM2 – an overhauled model for the age of AI. Emma Kirby-Kidd explains.

AUTHOR: Ben East

Sensational media splashes of the artificial-intelligence “gold rush” surround us, but for once it feels true. The lack of regulation, the allure of shiny new life-changing products, and the possibility to reinvigorate entire economies are the hills to which the prospectors are rushing. There will be a human cost as well, just as there was in 1848, as a fear of being runner-up in the race for AI riches leads to hurried decisions and a preponderance of snake oil.

Intelligent Automation (IA) is one of AI’s most promising seams. Put simply, IA is

the combination of cognitive computing with Robotic Process Automation (RPA). While RPA has long been a powerful tool to deliver efficiency and added value into business’s operations, IA juices it with the ability to examine vast troves of data and make continuous decisions.

RPA’s first Forty-niner was SS&C Blue Prism, which pioneered the concept of digital workers taking on routine tasks more than 20 years ago. It has been winning awards for the application of AI to RPA for the last seven of those and knows better than any the methods

for finding pay dirt. The secret is in its Robotic Operating Model (ROM) – a whole-organisation methodology for success, without which overenthusiastic companies can find themselves prospecting without a map.

“You do see a lot of tech companies chasing the sales of licenses in Intelligent Automation without really building any kind of framework,” says Emma Kirby-Kidd, Global Head of ROM at SS&C Blue Prism. “Our motivation is different; it’s to make companies successful. To help them grow.”

Kirby-Kidd is now leading the roll-out of the company’s updated model, ROM2, which represents a significant enhancement over the framework it first unveiled 15 years ago.

“Actually, for the early adopters, we made a virtue of the fact that it was built by our customers for our customers,” she says. “It was very much focused on the implementation of robotic process automation. So it was good - ground-breaking even - and that’s coming from someone who was once one of SS&C Blue Prism’s customers. But it began to have a dated maturity model, it wasn’t moving forward at the pace that the industry has, and it didn’t address Intelligent Automation in any way. So it needed a refresh.”

Hence, ROM2. Based on five foundations - strategy, workforce, design, development and operations - it’s striking how

It’s down to us as SS&C Blue Prism to coach our customers through how Intelligent Automation will best work for them, rather than tell them ‘ROM2 means you must do it this way. It’s a guideline, ultimately”

Emma Kirby-Kidd Head of ROM SS&C Blue Prism

Best in IA Class

SS&C Blue Prism holds Customer Excellence Awards every year to celebrate the people using IA technologies to transform companies and organisations across the planet. And it is truly global - this year there were winners from the United States, Hong Kong, Spain, Chile, Canada, and the UK.

But beyond some of the stories of huge success - the US National Grid RPA team won for hitting 100 automations and the 10 millionth item processed by digital workers - as a judge and presenter of the awards, Kirby-Kidd is just as enthused by the smaller operations.

“It’s when you get use cases which are making a real change to people’s lives,” she says. “I love all the NHS ones because they’re genuinely making a difference to things like waiting lists. It just blows my mind.”

The Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust was global winner in the Best Newcomer category for improving processes for vital clinical data

and reducing backlogs and workloads, but what Kirby-Kidd also loves about the awards is the networking and feedback loop it’s encouraging.

“It gets people to think outside the box with their own organisation,” she says, “and think about how they can apply this incredible solution in their own industry, even if it’s completely different.

“It’s even gone beyond just celebrating creativity now. We talk to people working out how they can create revenue using these ideas, which gets me really excited. I mean, if you listen to people at the awards they’re not afraid to tell you about a really tough problem, but also how they worked around it. That’s what I love about this whole community that’s built around ROM and ROM2; the shared sense that we can help each other.”

The SS&C Blue Prism Customer Excellence Awards 2023: Winners

much of ROM2’s value proposition is now in the planning and development of a bespoke intelligent automation transformation ecosystem, rather than simply bolting it onto (or indeed over) existing ways of working. Before you get to the tech, then, you need the human insight to drive the solutions.

“Absolutely you have to humanise what is not a standard software implementation,” says Kirby-Kidd. “It’s all about thinking forward, so you’re not just saying ‘we’re going to be efficient’ and then not look at your problem statement for three years. You’ve got to be more proactive than that.

“We’ve put a lot of work into gaining trust and buy-in upfront, where you can build a collaborative workforce with digital co-workers that doesn’t have the atmosphere of ‘the robots are coming to take our jobs’. And that comes with good strategy.”

It is interesting that Kirby-Kidd and ROM2 directly addresses some of the more cultural issues that come with RPA and AI, specifically in the strategy and workforce phase of the five-step process. ROM2 has an established organisational model framing roles and responsibilities, and recommends a Centre of Excellence of critical thinkers to drive both IA implementation and the upskilling of the workforce. Long gone are the days of RPA and AI projects being siloed within IT departments, with everyone else suspiciously looking on.

“The most effective way of IA implementation is across an organisation,” agrees Kirby-Kidd. “I’m passionate about this; otherwise, you just struggle with getting buy in. ROM and ROM2 both suggest roles that traditionally have worked in this process, but you can’t be prescriptive as every company is different.

“What we always say is that it’s down to us as SS&C Blue Prism to coach our customers through how IA will best work, rather than tell them ‘ROM2 means you must do it this way.’ It’s a guideline, ultimately.”

The ROM2 methodology focuses on creating a model for growth, a key area of development from the original ROM idea. It was about moving away from simply guiding implementation and towards a scalable solution for IA expansion, one which could continuously

evolve to match the pace and style of the organisation.

“Over the years we’ve gathered enough data, experience and knowledge to make this process easy for people at the start of their journey, but also meaningful for organisations at whatever stage they’re at,” adds Kirby-Kidd

“It’s about validating IA’s benefits, adding continuous improvement, scaling automation to redesign and reengineer customer and employee journeys - and

finally being able to use automation to innovate and digitally transform an entire organisation’s operations.

“But it’s a stacked maturity modelyou don’t have to do all of these things in each of our five levels. It’s about highlighting the proven ways to scale and sitting down with our customers to work out the best way of using them to make ROM2 work for their business.”

So in its very basic sense, SS&C Blue Prism works with companies to set out

It’s about highlighting the proven ways to scale and sitting down with our customers to work out the best way of using them to make ROM2 work for their business”

their vision and strategy for IA growth using ROM2, and then suggests the technologies that can help make that strategy work. It might be, for example, that chatbots do not add value, but application automation would. ROM2 simply becomes part of a toolkit for success.

“We’ve actually made it tool agnostic,” says Kirby-Kidd. “We know customers will be using technologies from other companies. They might even be compet-

itors to us - you’d expect a good head of automation to be constantly looking for the most suitable solution. What we actually want is for our customers to use our framework and maturity model to grow and evolve.”

Kirby-Kidd talks enthusiastically of organisations achieving huge savings and making a real difference to people’s lives, both inside and outside. That’s the real success of a coherent strategy for Intelligent Automation - the understanding that it can be a collaborative part of an organisation’s journey to success.

“What we do at SS&C Blue Prism - and in a sense what all companies do - is build relationships by talking to customers,” she says. “That’s something digital workers will always struggle to achieve and it’s one of our biggest skillsets as humans; we can use empathy to find a solution. The one thing I absolutely love is that our customers are absolutely passionate about their use cases - you rarely speak to anyone who is disengaged or demotivated by IA; they can see the benefits.

“So I think there’s two things going on here; you can free people up to do the creative, value-added work. But you can also get them to be more empowered, to take lead roles, to have the headspace to be more impactful for customers. Robots are actually empowering you to be more human, not less.”

HEART A new metric for measuring digital adoption

Userlane CEO Hartmut Hahn reveals a new way to help make sure IT investments meet ROI expectations.

AUTHOR: Hartmut Hahn

Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and Information Technology (IT) leaders face significant challenges as they strive to drive cost-effective digital transformation amidst challenging economic conditions. At the same time, they must also tackle challenges stemming from critical macro trends such as hybrid working and skills gaps.

At Userlane, we wanted to understand these challenges in greater depth, so we partnered with PwC on a survey of 250 CIOs and IT leaders. They represent large UK-based companies operating in key industries, including finance, healthcare, IT and telecoms, manufacturing, and retail.

According to our research, the average large organisation completes five major software purchases and implementations every year with an average cost exceeding £2,200,000. However, only 45% of these software purchases meet or exceed their expected return on investment (ROI).

As a result, the average company may be losing the equivalent of £6,000,000 annually – this is unsustainable.

We first dived into the data to understand why software purchases deliver such low ROI. With this understanding, the team at Userlane developed a

standardised model for tracking the progress of digital adoption in an organization. Here are the findings that informed the design of our new model.

Pressure on CIOs

CIOs are tasked with the significant responsibility of making investment decisions related to enterprise software purchases, subscriptions, and implementations. The expectation is that such decisions will generate business value. However, there is no standardised model for software ROI. CIOs report that they typically measure ROI in terms of:

• Productivity improvements (76%)

• New business generated (73%)

• Streamlined processes (70%)

• A reduced need for hiring (70%)

• Higher customer satisfaction (69%)

Delivering ROI under challenging circumstances places significant additional pressure on CIOs, who already have an increasingly wide-ranging and complex remit. Respondents consider their most significant area of responsibility to be digital transformation (43%), followed by digital adoption (37%). Other key focus areas include business productivity (35%), employee experience (33%) and learning and skills development (29%).

Although almost two-thirds of CIOs (65%) are concerned that the state of the economy will affect their digital transformation plans, 62% plan to

deepen their investment in technology over the next 12 months – but that may be easier said than done.

Clearly, there is a need for a standardised solution for quantifying digital adoption. It would enable CIOs to track progress over time, benchmark against others in their industry, and save time that they can spend on their variety of other responsibilities.

The role of digital adoption

Digital adoption is second only to digital transformation as a priority for CIOs. This is appropriate, as a technology acquisition or project is only successful when people make effective use of it.

According to the Userlane ‘State of Digital Adoption’ report, 88% of

decision-makers believe that digital adoption is fundamental to both employee experience and business success. This makes sense, as businesses are increasingly reliant on software for essential functions – 72% of employees use software more today than they did two years ago.

However, 96% of decision-makers report that their organisation struggles with digital adoption. This often manifests in the form of a high number of support tickets (33%) or difficulties in quickly adopting and using the new software (33%). Other problems can be found in effort – time and costs – spent on software training (28%), increased software requirements due to hybrid working (28%), or a lack of investment in tools and processes to improve digital adoption (27%).

This data confirms that adoption is at the root of many of the challenges that CIOs face. It contributes to a raft of challenges, including increased IT costs, damage to the employee experience, reduced productivity, and higher training costs, to name just a few. Each of these damages software ROI and the likelihood that decision makers will opt to reinvest, reducing the organisation’s competitiveness.

Measuring digital adoption

Our new report highlights a lack of consensus among CIOs on how best to

measure digital adoption. Many CIOs track employee happiness (73%), the number of IT support tickets raised (73%), task completion rate (72%), the number of application logins (70%) and process quality improvements (70%).

The report also found that 37% of CIOs feel their company faces a significant digital skills gap. This has noticeable effects on business, with CIOs reporting lower productivity, increased IT costs and poor employee experience – all barriers to growth. Crucially, poor digital adoption is leading to investment in new software becoming non-viable.

There is currently no single, unified measurement framework for digital adoption. Given these issues, creating this metric should be a priority. How can CIOs succeed in fostering digital adoption if they do not have a framework for measuring it?

It’s a truly difficult time to be a CIO or IT leader. Businesses are asking a lot from them, and the macroeconomic conditions mean that there is little margin for error. In fact, our research shows that 64% of CIOs feel that their organization doesn’t fully appreciate the value they provide. Despite digital trans-

formation being a priority for years, the directly measurable impact on employee productivity has been mostly a black box. Even worse, people complain about friction as they have to deal with rapid change amid a constant flow of new technologies and processes.

Understanding what works and what doesn’t is essential for a successful digital transformation. If CIOs can’t measure how employees are using new software to drive positive business outcomes, they will struggle to make the case for future technology investments. That’s why, in our report, we reveal a

new method for quantifying software usage and adoption: a single, robust framework called HEART, which aggregates data over several dimensions to identify areas for improvement and optimise IT spend efficiency. We’re excited about its potential to support CIOs in the year ahead.

HEART measures the success of digital transformation initiatives across the organisation by tracking application usage, software adoption, common support requests and employee experience.

We based this system on Google’s HEART framework for measuring user

experience (UX) and refocused it on digital adoption. Our HEART combines five metrics to produce a single score, tracking user behaviour and employee experience across multiple different software applications simultaneously:

• Happiness: Track employee sentiment across multiple applications. By looking into this data, CIOs can rapidly identify and address software pain points, improving the employee experience and maximising productivity.

• Engagement: Maintain a timely understanding of how employees are actually using software features. Quantify

whether users interact with the app, how actively, and for how long.

• Adoption: Set and measure adoption targets to ensure that software spend is resulting in business value. With a clear understanding of which features employees are not using, decision-makers can target training to ensure that every user is a power user.

• Retention: Ensure that employees maintain their knowledge over time and help them to form meaningful habits.

• Task Success: Visibility over the number and rate of completed tasks provides a concrete measure of productivity and enables CIOs to identify and mitigate potential risks. With these measures, HEART gives CIOs a solid framework through which to identify issues, increase usage and adoption, and ensure employee productivity. This helps them to reduce unnecessary training and support costs and, ultimately, improve ROI. Where they had to guess at the success of digital adoption before, CIOs can now use HEART to maintain full control and clarity at all times.

This puts them in a much stronger position to make data-driven technology decisions that support their digital transformation ambitions and ensure that employees take full advantage of the software they implement.

Wolfgang Hufnagel, Senior Consultant in Change Management at PwC, tells us: “CIOs today face the complicated task of fully understanding and optimising the return on investment on their company’s software purchases. A crucial piece of this puzzle is developing the capability to track and measure digital adoption among employees, identify areas for improvement, and tailor training and support programs to better meet their needs.

“Having a user-centric analytics tool built into a Digital Adoption Platform will empower CIOs to track progress over time and simplify data-driven decision-making to drive business growth and innovation through technology investments.”

You can find the full results of Userlane’s research and expert analysis in our free report.

IFculture<=0THEN change()ENDIF

In the face of record skills shortages, retaining happy engineers is critical to business success. Here’s how.

AUTHOR: Greg Ceccarelli, GM of Flow at Pluralsight

Engineers are the heart of every technology company. Without them, it would be impossible to bring new products to market or meet customer demands – they are the core of modern business strategy. However, in today’s tech landscape, there is an estimated shortfall of over 173,000 workers in STEM sectors, and an average of 10 unfilled roles per business in the UK. In addition, nearly half (49%) of engineering businesses are experiencing difficulties recruiting workers with the skills they need.

All of this means that workload for engineers is high, and current economic challenges are further compounding the pressure - as teams are now being asked to achieve more with less. As a result, many are experiencing burnout and the rate of engineering attrition is high.

So what are business leaders to do in this challenging environment that has left many engineers burdened with extra responsibilities? To attract and retain talented developers against this challenging backdrop, business leaders must relieve some of this pressure by creating a workplace culture with developer satisfaction at its core. A positive engineering culture will enable business success, and below I explore how leaders can create a culture that increases retention of such scarce talent, and supports business growth.

In the current job landscape, culture is king”

Greg Ceccarelli

Satisfied developers perform better

In the current economic climate, developers are facing immense pressure to ship functional code on a daily basis - and 83% report that they have suffered from burnout due to high workloads (47%), inefficient processes (31%) and unclear goals and targets (29%).

There are three key pillars to keeping developers satisfied and motivated. The first is psychological safety. It is important for developers to feel able to take risks without feeling criticism. In highly creative roles, such as software engineering, devel-

opers are often asked to create something out of nothing. Ensuring space to experiment with new approaches is crucial.

Second is dependability. If leaders trust their developers to produce high quality work in a timely manner, they are more likely to perform better and take responsibility for their part in driving projects forward. Alongside this, leadership must brief developers with structure and clarity; the goals, roles, and plan for execution must be clearly communicated.

The final pillar for cultural success is ensuring developers understand the

meaning of their work and can easily see the impact it has. The work of a software engineer is routine and can involve an exorbitant amount of time spent on small fixes and updates that seem insignificant. Communicating the value that your developers bring to the business is crucial in these instances, creating a strong positive feedback loop for outcomes and team wellbeing. If developers see that difficult work will be valued, they will be more motivated to stay at the organisation.

By keeping your current engineering teams happy and supported, you’ll likely see an uptick in engineer-to-engineer referrals, creating an organic talent pipeline from outside your organisation.

Make success visible

Another key aspect of ensuring healthy engineering teams is transparency. Using a software delivery intelligence platform is a great way for developers to see the impact they are making on the business with their contributions. And developers can’t do their jobs effectively if they don’t have insight into the workflows on their teams or don’t have context into decision-making that impacts them.

Engineering managers can use this data to celebrate developer progress on previously invisible work to demonstrate back the impact they have to the business. This leads to greater

autonomy and supports progress towards shared goals – ultimately leading to better business outcomes.

For example, Thomson Reuters needed to uncover opportunities for higher efficiency and get more insights into their engineering teams’ workflow to stay lean and agile. By using a measuring tool, they were able to track metrics and empower teams to define processes that are

repeatable, simple, and free of obstruction. With this data-driven approach, engineers were better able to showcase their performance and leaders could set more specific targets, aligned to the needs of their engineers and the business’ goals. As a result, Thomson Reuters saw the average coding days increase from 2.3 to 3 per developer, which equates to 3 weeks per engineer per year.

Remove bottlenecks by using data insights

With new technologies, programming languages and methodologies arising at a rapid pace, the role of the developer is constantly evolving and increasing in complexity. If you’re not careful, the complexity associated with a given project can stop it dead in its tracks.

Engineering leaders must prioritise helping their teams remove roadblocks to success by leaning on data-driven insights. Rather than setting targets for teams that are based on standards with no concrete backing, instead, look at the data associated with engineering teams to get to the heart of what seems like a complex issue to find a solution. Data-driven insights help organisations manage complexity more efficiently.

This will help developers to remove roadblocks that may be slowing their projects down, increasing productivity while delivering value that will make them more satisfied in the long run.

Business leaders spend a lot of time finding ways to drive business growth, and the engineering team can’t be overlooked as part of this. Increasing efficiency through data insights, satisfaction and culture can pay real dividends for the overarching business growth strategy. Engineering leaders have a huge role to play in ensuring their teams are empowered and engaged to achieve success. Without addressing the culture problem, engineers will become disillusioned with their work and attrition will be high.

In the current job landscape, culture is king. Businesses cannot afford to lose talent so it must be the responsibility of engineering leaders to change the status quo.

Alex Farr

inlifetech

Alex Farr, CIO at professional services company Christie Group, talks us through his journey from coding on a Commodore 64 to multi CIO100 Award winner.

When I joined Christie Group last year, ‘Chief Technology Officer’ was a brand-new role for them. It was about bringing in someone outside of Christie’s day-to-day operations to work with the Managing Directors and IT Directors in each subsidiary business to see how it could leverage technology to grow its conglomerate of professional services businesses - and what could be done collectively, too.

So, when people ask me what it is I actually do, I always say I try to find ways to use technology to help grow business. It’s as simple as that… in the explanation, anyway!

Growing up I had a young uncle; he had a nice house, nice cars, all the latest tech

- being completely honest I was impressionable. But we’d mess around on his Commodore 64 coding and creating our own games. My pathway in IT grew from there - basically mirroring his.

I had a decision to make when I finished my National Diploma in computer studies - go to university or get a job as a junior to an IT manager. All of a sudden there was a salary on the table and I did the latter. And that was the start of where I am today.

Would I recommend that choice?

Possibly, but I think there is a third route now; I’ve used our apprenticeship levy to bring people into the organisation and it’s great. You get to study while having hands-on experience. To me, that’s probably the better balance.

The most challenging moments of my career are where I learned the most. I was hired to be IT assistant at one company and my manager immediately left. So I was thrown into the deep end and really had to think on my feet.

At that particular healthcare tech organisation, they had a great product but were struggling to find clients to buy it. They parachuted in an MD, he saw me talking to my colleagues and immediately told me that if I didn’t have some work to do, he’d find me some. That line has stuck with me for nearly 25 years now and it shaped the kind of leader I want to be and the culture I wanted to foster.

IT has this reputation for being nerdy and solitary, but you need interaction with your colleagues and your customers. You are essentially delivering services and products to help people work better, whether colleagues or clients. How can you possibly design, develop, and implement something that will benefit others if you’re not talking to them, understanding their issues and their problems?

I would always say to other CTOs or CIOs that you really must make yourself one of the team if you want to under-

stand how you can help the business grow. You have to be the most social person in the organisation. You can’t think you know it all either; even an apprentice can teach you so much.

During my time at a transportation innovation company I had what I called a ‘unicorn’ role; it was a bit like being an IT business partner. They’d go and sit with teams across the organisation and just listen to some of the challenges preventing them from achieving some of their objectives, try to understand what

their strategy was, and then try and solve that problem using technology.

I call it a unicorn role because it certainly doesn’t exist in most organisations. But I think it’s absolutely critical; you have to make sure that you’re developing things that are going to make a difference rather than throwing technology down people’s throats for the sake of it. I was recently asked, “how can we make use of AI?” My immediate response was: “For what purpose?” Clearly, you want to look at how you can leverage it, but it has to be for a reason, to create value for staff, rather than just because everyone is talking about it.

We’ve started to explore the use of gamification at Christie Group and I really think it’s going to be huge. It’s now all about how business uses that technology to capture the imagination and inspiration of both staff and customers.

With my Apple Watch and so on, with all the fitness-based badges and rewards I can gain, I’m already gamifying my life in a way I hadn’t really considered. Unless you sit back and reflect, you forget how immersed we all are in tech.

I’ve been lucky enough to be in the CIO Top 100 in recent years, and while it’s a great honour, the biggest benefit is the networking opportunity. The number of WhatsApp groups and communities I’m on with other CTOs, CIOs and IT directors! It can be quite a lonely role but being

able to reach out to others when you have problems or challenges has been like free consultancy from some of the most senior tech leaders in the country.

I still sometimes suffer with imposter syndrome. I wonder how this average person can suddenly be responsible for the technology at a great PLC like Christie Group. It’s a real privilege.

I mentor someone and I’m always telling them to reflect, look back, take notes… but often I don’t do that enough myself! But I’ve been around some great people and I’ve made some very good choices at the right time. You can’t do that without teams of brilliant people around you.

You can’t think you know best… even an apprentice can teach you so much”