Tech For Good - Issue 22

SAM JERMY Managing Editor

Welcome to the first Tech For Good issue of 2023. We’re getting the new year off on the right foot by showcasing a wealth of content. Our front cover case study is all about Amref Health Africa. The NGO has worked to improve healthcare in Africa for decades and has taken a remarkable step forward in digital capabilities with the support of long-time backer GSK and Cognizant. Meanwhile, we take an in-depth look at how one of the biggest counties in the UK is transforming its digital capabilities with a steadfast commitment to organization-wide design thinking.

Elsewhere: Lenovo’s Ian Jeffs talks to us about the company’s new Data for Humanity report, which details how the

correct use of data can help businesses achieve their ESG targets meaningfully; James Freed, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Health Education England, talks to us about the significance of digital skills and culture in carrying out successful change; Lab-grown meat hits our radar as a technology set to help transform the battle against climate change and world hunger; Executives from some of the world’s highest profile companies give us their tech predictions for 2023. Thanks to all our interviewees for their time this month.

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06 CASE STUDY

Amref How healthcare in Africa was digitally advanced with help from GSK and Cognizant

20

PUBLIC SECTOR

James Freed, Health Education England CDIO, talks about the digital tomorrow

28 ENVIRONMENT

Exploring the status of the lab-grown meat industry

38 SOCIAL GOOD

Lenovo discusses its Data for Humanity report TechSoup on cleaning up the non-profit sector

PREDICTIONS

Experts weigh in on the technology trends for 2023

AMREF HEALTH AFRICA

A DIGITAL LEAP FORWARD

The COVID-19 pandemic further exposed the challenges to healthcare in sub-Saharan Africa. Amref Health Africa was already digitally astute, but now its capabilities have leapt ahead thanks to the combined support of GSK and Cognizant.

AUTHOR: Sam Jermy

Community Health Worker Mariam smiles in front of the Amref Kibera Health Centre © Brian Otieno

Amref Health Africa has been working for more than 60 years to advance access to quality healthcare in sub-Saharan Africa. They partner with communities in 35 countries to sustainably strengthen health systems and improve access to vital care and services. This work is at all levels; from the grassroots with communities on the ground to influencing policy at the highest levels of national government and in global policy spaces. They enrol and train thousands of community health workers, establish health facilities, deliver treatment, direct investment in health infrastructure, and engage with health ministries throughout the region to drive progress.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, exposed the scale of the task they continue to face.

“The pandemic reminded us of the challenges that were already existing,” says Amref’s Diana Mukami from the organisation’s headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya. “One of them is in terms of access – whether that’s basic awareness of healthy living, affordability, facilities and infrastructure, or to health workers delivering good services.” A perennial challenge facing health systems in the region has always concerned its healthcare workforce, a fact exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. Mukami says that most nations within Amref’s reach fall a long way short of the World Health Organisation’s minimum recommended ratio of health workers to population size.

“How do you get the right number of health workers, even with a growing population in Africa? We have about 1.4 billion people currently, and that’s projected to

Health workers using the Leap mobile learning platform across communities in Kenya © Amref Health Innovations

double in the next couple of decades. So how do you actually make sure that you have enough health workers and how do you make sure that they have the right education and training? How are you going to determine what the right education and training is?” she adds.

“And then there’s the management. You have hundreds of thousands of healthcare workers in a country – how do you measure what they are doing and if they are deployed in the right place?”

As Digital Learning Director, Mukami has witnessed a transformation over the last 10-15 years in Amref’s ability to leverage rapidly expanding mobile connectivity in the region. Amref has achieved notable

success with three digital platforms that together have helped them overcome issues of a lack of physical training facilities. Jibu (meaning ‘answer’ in Swahili) is a training service delivered to smartphones. Leap is another, but geared towards the lower-end devices commonly used throughout the region; it uses SMS and interactive voice recordings. Finally, M-Jali is a data collection tool health workers use on the ground can use to patch information such as referrals into government Health Information Systems.

But as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in 2020, Amref began to understand a vital weakness in its digital capabilities: none of its tools talked to each other. Essential data

Diana Mukami

It was just a beautiful marriage I think - when the three organisations came together to do something pretty special”

Fiona Smith-Laittan

concerning the substance, quality and distribution of its training services was not integrated with healthcare data collected within the communities it served. As the outbreak stretched resources further, gaps in their knowledge became a pressing concern as they sought to target and measure the effectiveness of their activities and flatten the curve of the disease’s spread.

GSK + Cognizant

Biopharma company GSK has been a prominent supporter of Amref’s mission for more than 30 years. For the last decade, GSK have partnered with Amref and ministries of Health to train frontline health workers in prevention and treatment of infectious disease, immunisation, maternal and child health and hygiene/sanitation, connecting the often low-income communities they serve to the public health system. The arrival of COVID-19 hugely increased demand on Amref, so when it approached GSK for further support, the company responded to help find solutions. While GSK’s pre-eminence is in developing and manufacturing medicines and vaccines, it focuses considerable effort on building the systems for their delivery around the world. As Fiona Smith-Laittan, Head of Global Health Strategy and Operations at GSK, tells Tech for Good, innovating treatments without thinking about how they get to the people who need them is “pointless”.

Health workers using the Leap mobile learning platform across communities in Kenya © Amref Health Innovations

Amref Health Africa has worked for six decades to improve access to quality healthcare in some of the most underserved parts of Africa. When the onset of COVID-19 brought a gap in its digital capabilities into sharp focus, its long-term partner GSK brought in Cognizant to help.

Upgrading Amref’s digital infrastructure to help it manage surging demand became an immediate objective. But, as SmithLaittan readily admits, GSK isn’t a technology services provider: “It was clear to us that we didn’t have the capabilities to do this on our own. We are not tech experts. But we did know a lot of tech experts.”

A hackathon was organised by Amref and GSK to develop the problem and potential solutions further, and Cognizant, one of GSK’s longstanding strategic technology partners, took part. Its team would emerge from the exercise with a mandate to proceed on a basis much broader than the immediate priority of flattening the COVID curve. What they would go on to do would transform Amref’s digital capabilities for the long term.

Cognizant assembled a multitalented “A-Team” of product managers, analysts,

and engineers who had worked on similar projects in the past, focused on the public good. They were led by Chief Architect Sathish Kumar Manickam.

“It was an interesting challenge that was thrown at us,” he recalls.

“The challenge was to flatten the curve of the COVID outbreak, but when we got closer to the problem we understood Amref doesn’t only take care of COVID. They work in the public health sector in 35 countries.

“They have a training platform, they have a service delivery platform that takes care of what they do on the ground, but they didn’t know what’s the demand and supply that they manage. All the tools they had were working in silos, so they weren’t able to correlate the data they had and make meaningful inferences and make better decisions.”

Midwives in training check the eLearning module during tuition, Uganda © Sam Vox

Cognizant’s team imagined a “single pane of glass” for Amref. A system that would integrate all Amref’s tools, but do so with a relentless focus on ease-of-use and cost effectiveness. Beyond the integration, Grafana was used as an open-source platform for data analysis and visualisation that would not burden Amref with ongoing technical or financial overheads, while engineered to provide the NGO with the intelligence they needed.

Impact

The work is already making a significant difference to Amref on the ground.

Radhika Ghambir, a key member of Manickam’s ‘A-Team’ at Cognizant, summarises what Amref is now able to achieve: “They can predict their training requirements, they can predict how well it will work. They can make more strategic decisions, which is driven by data now –they are solving various problems based

on what particular communities really need, so they can have targeted volunteers working in the places that need them.

“The solution we have developed is scalable, secure and open source. So the platform can be rolled out in all the countries that Amref is operating in. It can be easily used to extend functionalities by whoever wants to do it. We hope it holds a great future.

Mukami is clear that the partnership between GSK and Cognizant on the organisation’s behalf represents a step-change in their ability to meet the many challenges they face. Now the platform is in Amref’s hands, onboarding by Cognizant has given them the tools it needs to extend it independently according to its evolving needs.

“What it has done is to create a one stop shop that’s able to tell us different things. We will be looking at taking those learnings to a level where we’re advocating with governments to influence policy and practice. For me, this is what I think is really exciting about the work we’re doing with Cognizant and GSK,” she says.

Cognizant’s single pane of glass brings together multiple forms of differently structured data into one dataset, accessible via a dashboard, closing the loop to tell Amref a powerful story about the effectiveness of training materials and how well they’re being used in practice at both the individual and national level. From that, Amref can glean best practices and challenges, and adapt training content, processes and systems.

Sathish Kumar Manickam

The M-Jali household level data was integrated with government health information systems, adding enormous value in drawing insights at the individual health worker level, as well as aggregated, in real time. This feeds into planning for training systems, and project learning for the future.

The work represented a labour of love for Cognizant’s team, involving long hours working at a frenetic pace. “These are a talented bunch of people that I got to work with. I feel grateful and lucky I got to work with such a great team on this,” adds Ghambir.

It’s the sort of high-impact work that Cognizant is seeking to undertake on an

increasingly significant scale, says the company’s Head of Life Sciences UK and Ireland, Rohit Alimchandani. He talks to Cognizant’s mission of – improving lives by engineering outcomes – and the fact a simple brief from Amref and GSK was developed and expanded into something with which his team could make a larger, lasting impact.

“When GSK approached us and said that this is a great opportunity for you to come in and engage and really make a difference in the world, we took on the challenge with gusto,” he says.

“That’s our focus - we work very closely with organisations and focus primarily on

Betty Nagudi and her daughter Victoria, midwife at Jinja School of Nursing at Jinja Regional Hospital, Uganda © Sam Vox

PODCAST MEET THE TEAM

Tech for Good sat down with leaders from GSK, Cognizant and Amref Health Africa to discuss the a remarkable collaboration,

COVID-19 pandemic, that is set to create

it seeks

Listen on

how we can collaborate to solve problems. And when you see what the team have done here, it’s mind-bogglingly cool.

“As far as I’m concerned, the team are now looking at how can we do more of this, and we certainly want to be engaged in healthcare,” he says.

Smith-Laittan sees the work GSK has done with Amref with Cognizant as a powerful testament to a purpose that is core to the company’s mission to “get ahead of disease”. GSK aims to reach 2.5 billion people over the next ten years, a very large proportion of whom are currently underserved in their communities.

“At GSK we use our science, technology and people alongside long-standing partnerships to address the world’s greatest

spawned in the heat of the

a lasting digital advantage for Amref as

to transform healthcare on the continent.

Romily Broad Tech for Good • Fiona Smith-Laittan Head of Global Health Strategy and Operations, GSK • Rohit Alimchandani Head of Life Sciences, Cognizant • Sathish Kumar Manickam Regional Practice Head - Resilience & Reliability Engineering, Cognizant • Diana Mukami Digital Learning Director / Head of Programmes, Amref Health Africa

It is about the services that these health workers will provide to millions of people across the region towards our vision of lasting health change in Africa”

Diana Mukami

When you see what the team have done here, it’s mindbogglingly cool” Rohit Alimchandani

health challenges and improve health globally. We are very proud at GSK of our 34 year partnership with Amref Health Africa. Together, we have contributed to building stronger healthcare systems, training healthcare workers, and improving treatment and diagnosis of high burden diseases. But we’re always looking at ways of improving things and getting further ahead, particularly with the new opportunities now available through more improved technology,” she says.

“It was just a beautiful marriage I think - when the three organisations came together to do something pretty special.”

Mukami concurs: “This partnership is more than just about training health workers and collecting data. It is about the services that these health workers will provide to millions of people across the region towards our vision of lasting health change in Africa.”

Nurse midwife checks modules on the Amref mobile learning platform, Uganda © Lillian Namusoke

BUILDING A DIGITAL TOMORROW IN HEALTHCARE

AUTHOR: James Freed

James Freed, Health Education England CDIO, on the importance of building and leading a digital workforce to create a better tomorrow.

Iwork in the health and social care world in the UK. While it’s a slightly unusual place to work in comparison to a lot of CIOs, the National Health Service (NHS) is the fifth largest employer in the world - it’s a big organisation. That said, it’s not a single organisation. It’s a complex collection of many smaller organisations, all with different roles and responsibilities, in different places, providing care for all the people of the nation.

Today’s challenges are many, and how we tackle them all comes down to this:

How do you do better tomorrow than you did today? It applies as much to the NHS, offering more value for the taxpayer in the public sector, as it does to a private-sector company seeking to be competitive.

The NHS can’t function without its workforce, and it is facing an extremely difficult time. The impact of the cost-ofliving crisis alongside ongoing pressures caused by COVID and staff shortages is affecting every part of the system, and by extension the rest of the nation itself.

As we work through these challenges

and try to make sure we do better tomorrow, there are - very broadly speaking - two ways in which we can do it: Do more, and do it differently.

‘More’ means doing the same things, but just doing more of them.

In the NHS, that might be more nurses, more hip surgeries, more diabetic retinopathy scans. You can do that, but it’s a geometric progression: You add one more person, you’ve increased your workforce, you get more output. But what you don’t necessarily get is an increase in productivity.

That’s why we must also always be interested in ‘different’. Doing things differently offers the promise of productivity increases,but to get things done differently, you need to be a bit clever.

I’d argue that more than 90 percent of ‘different’ is now underpinned by what we call ‘digital’. We have seen an average productivity increase yearon-year in the NHS of one percent for almost 15 years. That might not sound a lot, but despite its challenges the amazing people in the NHS have managed a higher productivity growth than any other sector in the UK – public or private. Much of this growth has been associated with an increased focus on the role of digital.

At Health Education England (HEE), through our NHS Digital Academy programmes, we are aiming to give the workforce the skills to do things differently. For example, our Digital Boards programme, delivered by NHS Providers, is helping Boards to understand the potential and implications of the digital agenda and increase their confidence and capability to harness the opportunity that digital provides.

In the health service, we’ve got something called a Quadruple Aim. These aims drive us to help make sure patients are treated in safe environments, that they’re receiving satisfactory care and outcomes, and have good experiences. This is a set

of universal priorities that underlay an effective health care system. Efficiency – reducing the overall cost of healthcare or adding value - is one of the four quadruple aims, with the others encompassing improving the health of the population, enhancing the patient experience of care and the wellbeing of the workforce.

If the workforce is your most important asset in meeting your aims – as it certainly is in the NHS - and digital is a vital tool in helping to achieve the productivity that can make our tomorrow better than our today, then question becomes: how do you create a workforce that’s able to leverage digital change?

If your staff are not happy, then they just don’t deliver”

We know that by 2030, we need to have recruited about 32,000 more digital, data and technology professionals into the NHS. We know that needs to be in the clinical-information and analytics space in particular, and we have been working with educators and apprenticeship providers to help bring that about. In the next two years, we will see pipelines for getting early years staff into digital, data and technology roles, and will see a democratisation of decision making in services leading to frontline staff taking much more of a leadership role in end-to-end service redesign. This will see us genuinely measuring and improving the value that we provide to our patients

and service users on a day-by-day basis.

Through the NHS Digital Academy our goal is to support the entire workforce to upskill, but we are also developing a pipeline of future digital leaders, who are able to create the right environment and make the right decisions with regard to their digital and data estate and implement the change needed within their organisations and local systems. Our Digital Health Leadership Program will have trained over 500 senior digital leaders and aspirants within the NHS by the end of the current cohort.

Evidence demonstrates that about 70 percent of digital initiatives fail, meaning an initiative doesn’t reach its stated objectives. It’s a startlingly high number.

In part that failure rate is due to the fact digital programs are usually extremely complex things to manage. But, if you look at the data, the single biggest reason why digital initiatives fail is down to organisational culture.

That includes a culture that allows siloed decision making, where you have multiple teams jointly responsible

for delivering success, who just don’t work together. It could also be poor governance in hiring or procurement or a ‘computer-says-no’ culture where perceived risk always trumps progress. Fundamentally, this is all symptomatic of a lack of digital leadership.

It’s easy for large organisations to err so far on the side of safety that they

We know that by 2030, we need to have recruited about 32,000, more digital, data and technology professionals into the NHS”

stop moving, while digitally native start-ups can take so many risks in innovating that they can, and often do, fail. Finding a balance between the two cultures is very important, and requires strong leadership.

Times are undoubtably hard, but continuing to grow these strong digital leaders will provide us with vital tools

in our efforts to meet the Quadruple Aim, and in doing so build a healthier, happier, more productive workforce –this will make tomorrow better than today.

This article was written by Tech For Good in conversation with James Freed, CDIO, Health Education England.

Can cultivated meat help save the planet?

Is lab-grown meat the ultimate example of technology used as a force for good? Tech For Good investigates the environmental benefits ‘cruelty-free’ products can bring to the market.

AUTHOR: Sam Jermy

The meat industry is finally starting to be recognised for the environmental problem it is, and some are starting to tackle the issue head on with new technology. For context, the average new car sold in Europe (2019) emits 122.4 grams of CO2-eq per kilometre travelled. But production of one kilogram of conventional beef produced 100 kilograms of CO2-eq. This means one beef burger is equivalent to driving 185 kilometres, the distance between London and Birmingham. A more sustainable solution is needed to abate the effects of climate change.

This is where ‘cultivated meat’ could help save the planet - there is a way we can still enjoy eating beef, but produce vastly lower emissions doing so. The production process to grow meat in a lab requires a small cell from a live animal, so no animals need to be slaughtered either.

Potential for progress

A huge part of what makes the argument for cultivated meat compelling is the impact it could have in the battle against climate change. According to research by CE Delft, the difference in environmental impact of cultivated meat versus conventional beef is stark: Cultivated meat produces 92 percent less emissions, uses 94 percent less land, and uses 76 percent less water. Even if produced with conventional energy, cultivated meat would

Cultivated meat is similar”

Rich Dillon (Ivy Farm Technologies)

score lower than beef on the ReCiPe single score, which measures overall environmental impact including the carbon footprint measured in greenhouse gas equivalents. However, cultivated meat using sustainable energy requires less energy than all traditional meat.

The cultivated meat industry also holds the promise of greatly increasing food security around the world, particularly

You can grow a bigger plant if you take a small sample and put it in ideal conditions with soil, water and sunlight.

in parts of the world most reliant on imports. At home in the UK, the cultivated meat industry could contribute up to £523 million in tax revenue and provide £2.1 billion to the economy by 2030. Research by Oxford Economics suggests the industry can also create almost 16,500 jobs, including 8,300 highly skilled jobs over the next decade.

Oxford University spinoff Ivy Farm Technologies is one of a number of early-stage companies looking to rapidly

scale artificial meat manufacturing. Its CEO, Rich Dillon, expects the positive economic impact to be felt everywhere the technology is industrialised.

“To fix animal agriculture, and to achieve the speed and scale at which this problem needs to be addressed, we need innovative solutions. Meat is the solution to the meat problem, and we are innovating our way to an exciting solution,” he says.

“While cultivated meat is addressing many global issues, including climate

Rich Dillion, CEO (left) and Azamat Kokov, CFO (right)

Russ Tucker

“Russ Tucker, Ivy Farm founder, is the son of a butcher. His family has a long history of rearing animals and selling meat in the UK. His firsthand experience of the meat industry, which was developed further in a number of advisory roles for the UK’s biggest supermarkets, teamed with his academic background in biomedical engineering at Oxford University, put Russ in a unique position: to find a way to produce great tasting meat that is better for the planet, people, and animals in a truly sustainable way. After meeting Cathy Ye, an Associate Professor in Engineering Science at Oxford University and leveraging IP developed there, Ivy Farm was born to realise Russ’ mission.”

change, land and soil health, antibiotic resistance, disease outbreaks, food security, animal cruelty, famine and human health, there are some challenges that our industry is and will face. These include getting regulatory approval from major global markets, accessing large-scale investment, and reducing costs of production.”

Last year Ivy Farm opened a 18,000 sq ft pilot plant in Oxford, which includes a 600L bioreactor they’ve named Betty. The pilot will enable the creation of 2.8 tonnes of cultivated meat a year and provide

a testing ground for the company’s end-to-end manufacturing process. The solar-powered pilot plant is the largest of its kind in Europe and first of its kind in the UK, which it says will soon help make affordable, sustainable and guilt-free cultivated meat a reality. Ivy Farm is also working on designs for a manufacturing facility to scale up its production. This new plant will feature fermentation tanks with a 200,000L capacity that will be able to produce at least 12,000 tonnes of cultivated meat each year - the equivalent of over 300mn hot dogs.

“We aim to develop a product that will help us to innovate our way out of the environmental and ethical problems industrial farming presents. By bringing cultivated meat to market, we can drastically reduce carbon emissions, while using much less land and water compared to traditional meat processing.”

Ivy Farm ambitions

Dillon explains the process they use to create their guilt-fee meat: “We compare our production process to taking a plant sample - you can grow a bigger

plant if you take a small sample and put it in ideal conditions with soil, water and sunlight. Cultivated meat is similar. We take a cell sample from an animal - a very small amount, about 1cm in size. We then feed the cells the nutrients they need, including carbohydrates, fats, protein, minerals and vitamins, to grow them quickly and efficiently. When they’re ready, they undergo a production process in one of our bioreactors and, in only three weeks, we have delicious tasting, healthy meat.”

“We hope to have our products available in small-scale, premium restaurants by 2025, followed by the aim of reaching supermarket shelves for all consumers to enjoy, in later years. In a few years we’ll be ready to produce 12,000 tonnes of cultured pork a year – saving the lives

of 170,000 pigs. To achieve this and make the biggest impact in the most effective way, we will be focusing on a launch market, such as the USA or Singapore, where there is a regulatory environment conducive to bringing cultivated meat to market.”

Even though the company has not sought approval from the UK Foods Standards Agency yet, this did not stop a Sunday Times journalist eating a research-phase meatball as part of a recent article. The cultivated meat was made in the steel vaults at Ivy Farm and fed nutrients and oxygen before being moulded into the correct shape. It was the first time the cultivated meat had been tasted beyond staff members and investors, and it got the thumbs up from the Consumer Affairs Editor. Winning over apprehensive and sceptical members of the public is going to be a key challenge for companies such as Ivy Farm moving forward. Given lab-grown Ivy Farm meat is something nobody will have tried before, it is a battle of the hearts and minds to tackle any preconceptions.

The chasing pack Ivy Farm isn’t alone in pursuing the rich rewards of cultivated meat at scale. Azhar Murtuza is founder of North-

Meat is the solution to the meat problem”

Rich Dillon (Ivy Farm Technologies)

ern-Ireland-based bioengineering startup Born Maverick, which has developed a series of products - ranging from vegan prawns and scallops made with seaweed, to plant-based eggs and adaptogen lollies. The company has also attracted funding from both Invest NI and Innovate UK. Biotech scientist Murtuza is aiming to take Born Maverick to the forefront of food innovation with a unique singe-cell suspension method, together with using plant-based ingredients using 3D bio-tissues.

The company is still in the early stages of scoping and has spent much time

building a collaborative network of expertise to help it attain these solutions quickly. Having done that, it is now focused on raising grant funding to get its minimal viable product launched.

Murtuza says: “To achieve a sustainable future, the food innovation industry needs to pursue all viable avenues and solutions – cultivated meat is one key part of a diversified whole. We, as consumers, can’t be shifting from the dairy and meat industry only to overexploit certain crops to create plant-based food. A wide variety of viable options and solutions are needed, and we need to

We, as consumers, can’t be shifting from the dairy and meat industry only to overexploit certain crops to create plant-based food”

Azhar Murtuza (Born Maverick)

keep in mind the preference of many consumers for a ‘flexitarian’ diet.

“There are already a few companies that have started to build the infrastructure to commercialise cultivated meat in the UK. Lab-grown meat is likely to gain market momentum fairly quickly once the relevant regulatory bodies take the necessary steps to allow it. Singapore and the US are already leading the way in this sector and there’s no reason why the UK can’t follow suit and promote a whole range of sustainable food options to consumers.

“Following that, it’s likely to take around two years, as a minimum, for consumers to adopt cultivated meat in a major way and bring it into the mainstream.”

LENOVO

The international technology group recently released an extensive report on how businesses can balance profit with purpose.

AUTHOR: Sam Jermy

Lenovo has shared how big data holds the key for large businesses looking to use their influence as a force for good. Its new report, Data for Humanity, involved interviews with more than 600 executives working in organisations with revenues between $500mn and $5bn and shows many companies believe data sharing and analytics will play a fundamental role in addressing future global crises.

Although profit margins remain the primary objective, meaningful Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) activities are becoming increasingly important strategic imperatives as boards seek to satisfy shareholders they are invested in

sustainable enterprises for the long term. To help achieve this, most companies in the Lenovo report are planning to increase their investment in data storage and AI.

Ian Jeffs, UK & Ireland General Manager of the Infrastructure Solutions Group at Lenovo, reflects this sentiment. He says: “Companies don’t want to do these things for nothing in return, obviously - they want to grow their sales. You’ll see in the report, return on investment remains a top target, and these companies are looking to spend £3 million on average over the next 12 months. However, if you look at why they’re doing it, other elements they are focused on are much more non-profit

orientated. Energy consumption and ESG targets are now very much part of it, and the kinds of areas they look at with datasets.

“Nowadays, it’s about how you move data around the company, to then take advantage of it. If you’re having a consistent approach to data - how it looks, how it feels – and how it is managed across internal and external departments, or even with government, it is much easier to work collaboratively to share data in a certain way.

Jeffs says companies are investing in their data capabilities to help confront their own energy usage as the cost of energy soars, as well as to help drive the narrative when it comes to shaping themselves in bids for government tenders and reporting to the financial markets. “Using data to help drive outcomes around that is crucial to customers now,” he adds.

Real-world impact

Using big data to drive non-profit metrics isn’t simply a newer way to improve organisations’ public relations, it has a direct impact on the financial health of companies. On average, companies questioned by Lenovo anticipate their investment in data technologies and data-led initiatives increasing their revenues by 50 percent over the next five years, equating to an additional $1.5

A lot of our customers really want to start making a difference”

Ian Jeffs

UK & Ireland General Manager of the Infrastructure Solutions Group at Lenovo

billion per company over that period. However, when this finding is applied to the top 100 listed firms in each country surveyed, it translates to $8.5 trillion in additional revenues globally by 2027.

The figures are particularly striking because the research was conducted during a period of economic uncertainty and widespread predictions of a global recession.

The research paints a clear picture that investment in data capability is a vital tool for achieving financial resilience, while at the same time becoming key to being a force for good. More than 70 percent of companies interviewed are already using data to underpin a mix of ESG and financial goals. But according to Lenovo, there is scope to go even further.

“I think you’ve got to start with the facts of what happens if companies don’t start to use data properly,” says Jeffs. He points out at that, of the 600 companies quizzed for Lenovo’s report, the 15 percent of those that were classed as ‘data leaders’ were growing at 75% on average, in contrast to ‘data followers’ who were growing at 50%.

“So if you don’t start to take advantage of data, you’ve got less ability to then go impact ESG and many other things, because your business isn’t growing as fast as it could. Therefore, if you’ve got more data, then you have more power to help in those varied areas.

“Without taking data seriously, you will impede your ability on a pure business level firstly. A lot of our customers we talk to really want to start making a difference. If your business is growing faster thanks to your handling of data, you will be getting more investments naturally as a result, further increasing your capacity to take advantage.”

Potential challenges

Geopolitical tensions, collapsing supply chains and economic instability means many companies are facing challenges

on a business level as well as a humanitarian one. Respondents to the Lenovo report identify the current energy crisis as their biggest threat over the next three years, with 71 percent expecting it to have a moderate to severe impact on their businesses. Global warming and income equality are the next biggest challenges companies believe they face (59 percent and 52 percent respectively). But they are also facing other macro trends such as lingering pandemic issues, talent shortages, rising operational costs, and a move towards more hybrid working.

But while companies are facing an extremely challenging mix of ongoing and future crosswinds, less than half of the 600 companies have near-term plans to address these issues. Fewer than 40 percent are taking steps in the next three years to address challenges from the energy crisis, for example. The figure falls to 33 percent for climate change and 18 percent for income equality.

“It is all about how we help our clients get to that position beyond these challenges as fast as they possibly can, in a safe and secure manner. Edge

computing, which is all about how you move away from the data centre and closer to the end user, is becoming a big topic in the arenas we work in. Today, everybody talks about security, and with the data centre we all know how to do that. You can put your arms around it, you can lock it off, you will know how that works. But if you want to take advantage of data, you’ve got to put the computer closer and closer and closer to where that data is. Often that’s not going to be a data centre.

“In the future it is going to be a retail store, it could be on the wall at the supermarket, it could be that you may

not have a data centre in the small office that you’ve just opened up somewhere. But you might want to collect data, do something with it, analyse it, change the business outcome.

Jeffs says securing computing on the edge is vital to companies being able to seize the opportunities it presents, especially as they move to new connectivity technologies such as 5G to stitch their information flows together.

Creating a brighter future

As datasets and analytical capabilities grow, senior executives believe a collaborative approach to data will be funda-

mental to improving global stability and security. The starting point is building data maturity internally, but doing so in a way that’s geared towards collaboration beyond the corporate walls.

Internally, investment in data can lead to significant upsides fast, from scientific discovery to product design.

Data is already helping researchers make strides in genomics, thanks to the development of solutions like GOAST (Genomics Optimization and Scalability Tool)2. This innovative software can efficiently analyse large volumes of data at high speeds, allowing scientists to process the human genome 188 times

faster than before. This has rapidly reduced the waiting times on results which in turn speeds up the rate of scientific discovery. Another example could be in product design – data-driven design leads to leaner turnaround and products that are more efficient and greener.

“It starts with sharing internally, but some companies want and need to go further. By having your data in a standardised format, then you can do that much easier. There might be sharing of data with government entities as part of fact-finding or ESG reporting, or there are companies that work in groups within their own industry to add further insights back to themselves. But to do all that, you’ve got to have a data set, you’ve got to manage your data properly, and you must collect data properly and consistently,” adds Jeffs.

“A framework must be built and started from an internal point of view, then thought about how that can be used externally. There’s lots of positive possibilities here. For example, we work with a transportation company which shares some of its data with the government to help with the flow of traffic, vehicle emissions and that type of thing. It is fraught with considerations, but as long as the framework makes sure you understand what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, it opens up a world of benefit.”

TECHNOLOGY PREDICTIONS

As a new year is upon us, Tech For Good talks to five senior technology leaders about their 2023 technology predictions.

AUTHOR: Sam Jermy

As 2022 recently ended, CISOs and other security personnel are likely to be feeling exhausted. The year was unrelenting on the cybersecurity front and adversaries are only becoming more sophisticated and adopting more advanced techniques and technologies to circumvent organisations’ security measures.

Ransomware remained the most dangerous, costly and prevalent cyber threat to EMEA organisations in 2022 and will continue to be the most damaging cybercrime tool of 2023.

According to CrowdStrike’s 2022 Global Threat Report, there was a terrifying annual increase of 82% in ransomware related data leaks costing the companies concerned €1.72 million on average.

It’s easy to understand the enduring appeal of ransomware to cybercriminals: it is increasingly easy to use and wildly lucrative. Over the course of the last two years, obtaining and using ransomware tools has become simpler than ever, with an ecosystem of criminal suppliers offering Ransomware-as-a-Service, with other elements of the operation, from stolen credentials to payment services and money laundering, also available as third-party services from a growing range of providers. Getting started as a cybercriminal required no more than a working credit card in late 2022.

Zeki Turedi, CTO EMEA, CrowdStrike

Cybersecurity: threats proliferate but best practice still works

This coordination of criminal service providers to provide specialisation and automation is sadly only likely to grow over the coming year. Ransomware will continue to grow until such a point that most organisations have adopted advanced tools that make other criminal tactics more profitable.

The 2023 battlefield

Over the course of 2022, we witnessed some evolution in adversaries’ ransomware tactics. The extraction of sensitive data and extortion attempts based on the threat of the sale or publication

of this stolen information has seen a marked rise. Indeed, we have seen several cases over the course of the last year in which the traditional encryption of victims’ data has not been part of the attack, with the adversary moving directly to threatening exposure of the data, with all the legal, regulatory and reputational damage such leaks would entail. The extortion tactic is potentially worth millions of Euros for every attack and can be repeated without any additional effort on the part of adversaries, so long as the data retains a value for its rightful owners.

Like previous years, we continue to see the successful and most sophisticated adversaries no longer using malwarebased attacks but focussing on non-malware based techniques. As companies continue to focus on malware, these interactive attacks have begun to provide a higher success rate for cyber attackers. They now account for 71% of successful breaches, up 50% on the previous year. Ever the pragmatists, cybercriminals are now focused on identity-based attacks, whereby, rather than hacking their way into a victim’s system, they can just simply log-in, using genuine but stolen credentials available on the underground markets of the dark web or through other techniques.

This continued move to malware-free attacks, growing strongly since 2019,

puts identity protection at the heart of cybersecurity in 2023. Alongside established, well-understood policies around strong passwords, organisations need to adopt new technologies developed specifically to make it harder for criminals to succeed with identity-based attacks. Security departments need to establish zero-trust policies and the technologies to support them if they have not already. They need to interrogate every identity on the network and use a variety of techniques to validate whether that identity is legitimate. Their chosen technology partner must offer

several ways in which this legitimacy can be established (or not). Data in the organisation needs to be split, according to the needs of different roles in their organisation. A salesperson might legitimately need access to customer records, for example. Someone working in production probably does not.

Alongside identities, APIs became a part of the cybersecurity battlefield in 2022 and is a trend we will see continue this year and beyond. Gartner® predicts this will become the most common attack vector before

long. Many cloud and SaaS services are accessed and controlled through APIs that allow their functionality to be extended and the flow of data through different applications. This is key to the power and popularity of cloud and SaaS, but like any other fast-growing technology, it has attracted the attention of bad actors. We’ve seen several successful attacks in this domain, and security-conscious organisations will have already adopted solutions that can ingest and assimilate signals from many different parts of their IT estate, as well as endpoints.

The right way forward - partners not technology

Technology moves very quickly and that won’t change in 2023. Anyone who has worked in the domain knows this: the tools and processes that were best practice in 2022 may be considered dangerously antique by the end of this year. This has important implications for your choice of vendor. It doesn’t make much sense to focus entirely on a particular product or technology, since these inherently have a short shelf-life. Rather, you should choose a vendor who will become a partner through the uncertain times ahead, which will adapt and continue to support you as technologies and threats evolve. A partner organisation

will have evidence of high, sustained levels of support for its customers. It will be transparent about its current capabilities and its roadmap.

Hopefully, your choice of partner will lead you to a happy and safe 2023.

by Sam Attias, Director of Product Marketing at Celonis

Predicting the future with process mining

Over the next year, we will see the rising adoption of process mining as it evolves to incorporate automation capabilities. Process mining has traditionally been a data science done in isolation, helping companies identify hidden inefficiencies by extracting data and visually representing it, acting as an X-ray for businesses to see where inefficiencies exist within their operations. However, it is now evolving to become more prescriptive than descriptive and will empower businesses to simulate new methods and processes in order to estimate success and error rates, as well as recommend actions before issues actually occur. It will fix inefficiencies in real-time through automation and execution management.

Furthermore, process mining is undergoing a major step-change in the field by incorporating a revolutionary new object-centric process mining technology. Businesses that utilise the technology will now have a multi-dimensional understanding of processes and all related business factors and dependencies. Rather than just identifying single inefficiencies, process mining will act as an intuitive and powerful way for companies to easily analyse complex interconnected processes and see where an initial inefficiency has metastasized to other parts of the business.

Commentary

Data sharing and collaboration

Today’s macroeconomic challenges have put a greater emphasis on the need for companies to share their data as well as give easy access to insights. Across departments, offices and regions, sharing data has traditionally been difficult and inaccessible for businesses, leading to lack of visibility at a time when companies can least afford it. Inflationary pressures and supply chain issues have encouraged business leaders to share and benchmark data within their own company, which is why data sharing and collaboration will be

crucial to businesses over the next year. Companies will increasingly look to harness technologies and platforms that allow data to be shared within their organisation and across their ecosystem in both a seamless and secure way.

By developing broader datasets, businesses in 2023 will use process intelligence to reveal which best practices should be adopted internally, drive innovation, and create better business outcomes. As data sharing and benchmarking increases, it will also create healthy competition across internal departments and teams.

by Gabriel Aguiar Noury, Robotics Product Manager at Canonical

The evolution of social robots

In 2023, social robots will be back. Late in 2022, we saw companies like Sony unveiling robots like Poiq. This set the stage for a new wave of social robots. Powered by natural language generation models like GPT-3, robots can create new dialogue systems. This will improve the robot’s interactivity with humans, allowing robots to answer any question. Social robots will also build narratives and rich personalities, making interaction with users more meaningful. GPT-3 also powers Dall-E, an image generator. Combined, these types of technologies will enable robots not only to tell, but also show dynamic stories.

But this is not only about the novelty effect. Dall-E will keep pushing research to help robots define their behaviour

based on their surroundings. As image detection and context generation merge, robotics scene awareness and social intelligence will take a new leap. By generating a detailed textual description of an image, robots will soon be able to understand the room they are in or what people are doing. This is another step towards real autonomy.

However, we cannot be blind to the misuse of technology. The war in Ukraine has made it clear that robots have a market. The Institute for the Study of War has signalled drones as essential as shells. Their large-scale deployment makes this the biggest “drone war” we have seen. Autonomous vehicles have also found a niche in the conflict, allowing armies to transport equipment. Underwater drones as well. Outside this war, China’s Kestrel Defense has also posted videos of a quadruple robot launching munitions or carrying a machine gun. Unfortunately, in 2023 we may confirm that the world has started a new arms race. Gone are the days of the EU’s ban on killer robots. This war has likely set the stage for what is to come.

Commentary

We’re poised at the start of a renaissance in software development where developers will bring their applications to central combined sources of data, rather than the traditional approach of copying data into applications. Every single application category, whether it’s horizontal or specific to an industry vertical, will be reinvented by the emergence of new data-powered applications — leveraging massive amounts of data to personalise their products and optimise their services. This rise of data-powered applications will represent massive opportunities for all

different types of developers, whether they’re working on a brand-new idea for an application and a business based on that app, or they’re looking for how to expand their existing software operations. Platform providers will take on much of the burden of security, governance, privacy, distribution, and monetization, leaving developers and entrepreneurs free to focus on innovation around their primary differentiators.

Commentary by

Christian Kleinerman, SVP of Product, Snowflake

Business applications will see the beginning of a rebirth in favour of their new data-powered versions

The advent of easy-to-use low-code or no-code platforms are already simplifying the building and sharing of interactive applications for tech-savvy and business users. Based on that foundation, the next emerging shift will be a blurring of the lines between two previously distinct roles — the application producer and the consumer of that software.

Application development will become a collaborative workflow where consumers can weigh in on the work producers are doing in real-time, for instance, by commenting on code.

Effectively, application creation will follow a similar path to other digital artefacts such as documents, diagrams and presentations where collaborative and iterative workflows enable two-way peer collaboration through tools such as Google Docs, Google Slides, and Figma. Taking this one step further, we’re heading towards a future where app development platforms have mechanisms to gather app requirements from consumers before the producer has even started creating that software.

Social media ‘influencer-coders’ will exert a greater impact on boosting the popularity of open source technologies. We live in a time when enthusiastic and charismatic influencers can significantly shape opinions and tastes through their recommendations and activities on social media. Open source is fast becoming an ecosystem impacted by social media influencers. For instance, Data Professor, devaslife, George Hotz, and Primeagen already regularly live code on Twitch and YouTube showcasing their favourite open-source projects. I expect this trend to continue and to play a stronger role in helping to make some open-source projects rapidly popular and more widely adopted. It’s not only brand-new technologies that will benefit. Influencers will also appreciate the beauty of older

Commentary by Adrien Treuille, Head of Streamlit, Snowflake

Application development will become a two-way conversation between producers and consumers

open-source code and bring it to the attention of brand-new audiences. An important new success metric for open source will be not only how cool a project is, but also the coolness factor and the social media reach of its hip influencer fans.

AI pair programmers will fundamentally transform software engineering. Machine learning technologies have changed and made the process of software development faster for some time - particularly in decreasing the number of characters needed to express an idea in code. What’s different and exciting about the new AI pair programmers such as GitHub Copilot

or TabNine is that we’re witnessing the invention of a new and fundamentally more expressive language. These new tools, trained on billions of lines of code, can use that learned context to auto-generate the code a developer is writing, thereby transforming their workload. The more code available about a project, the faster it is to write in that project. We’ll see many more developers creating an entire application by writing a single line of natural-language English, and then watching the AI pair programmer complete the rest of the work. This technology offers developers one of the most profound advancements in software engineering in the last half-century.