BetaNews Staff

When talking about digital transformation, the emphasis is largely on how a business can be reimagined through technology. But, regardless of cutting-edge tools or best-in-class processes, companies need to transform the culture at the same time -- if they don’t do this, digital transformation simply won’t work in practice.

Cultural transformation underlines all the changes established by digital transformation initiatives, ensuring these changes are implemented and embraced. This requires enterprises to completely shift their way of interacting with employees, partners, and customers -- which is far more difficult than technology adoption alone.

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In a lot of companies, observability or monitoring are words that only the technical groups understand. Perhaps the legal team is involved because there are SLAs that products must not breach, or it costs the company money in penalties. This is the wrong way to look at observability though -- it’s not simply a tool that verifies your application is performing properly and lets you avoid penalties. Instead, think of observability as a magnifying lens that helps all of the teams in your company understand how to increase revenue, by understanding the complexities of your product.

There are a couple of different ways to think of proper observability: It quantifies things that weren’t measurable previously. If something is measurable, it can be improved. Secondly, it’s a way to measure an entire, complex system -- both, portions which technology teams traditionally think about ("their code"), and third-party dependencies that no one thinks about until there are customer complaints.

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Innovation calls upon us to challenge existing paradigms. Women in technology understand this all too well. Many of us have stepped into roles that were traditionally dominated by men. We’ve had to swim upstream to establish our bona fides.

Personally, I’m proud to have achieved a host of "firsts" in my career, and today I’m surrounded by creative thinkers who are applying new technology to approach old problems differently. In my world, challenging existing paradigms is par for the course.

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It’s no secret that cyber threats are constantly evolving and morphing -- new risks are appearing every day. In Q2 2022, cyberattacks increased by 32` percent compared to Q2 2021. Furthermore, over 10 billion IoT devices were connected as of 2021, which will rise to 25 billion by 2025. The natural consequence of more gadgets connected to the internet is that hackers will have more chances to take advantage of any vulnerabilities.

When you factor in more organizations automating their processes, there is a surplus of online data. This opens up a Pandora's box of internet security dangers, such as data breaches and theft, which are frequent for organizations of all types and sizes. In fact, in Q1 2022, hackers were the cause of more than 90` percent of data breaches.

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Cloud technology has been gaining momentum in the last couple of years.

It threw a lifeline to companies by making remote work at the start of the crisis possible, enabled scaling for a reduced cost, and made information that much more accessible. However, all of these benefits also come with security risks for organizations that haven’t adequately protected their new infrastructure.

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Business adoption of AI is on the rise in the UK. According to a Government report, roughly 15` percent of all UK businesses have adopted at least one AI technology, with a further 10` percent planning to do so. Adoption is really taking off in larger firms, with more than two-thirds (68` percent) of them having used AI.

But what practical benefits can AI bring? Use cases seem to be emerging daily from many different business departments, but arguably, its HR teams that should be sitting up and taking notice more than others.

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As AI is used more often for several purposes, issues of bias -- often injected unintentionally -- have become more apparent. On a broad level, bias tends to stereotype people. Customers should have useful and positive experiences with AI, but sometimes, these unexpected biases can sour that interaction, leaving customers feeling frustrated or marginalized. As customer service drives customer loyalty, and loyalty drives revenue, this can negatively impact the business as a whole.

Bias in AI can manifest itself in many ways. A sizable percentage of executives polled by Speechmatics found that voice-recognition software struggled to understand some voices.

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With regions across the world confronting record-high temperatures this past summer, the call to action on climate change has never been greater. According to the United Nations’ latest climate report global temperature increases will surpass the danger threshold of 1.5°C unless efforts are made to significantly reduce carbon emissions across all sectors.

Sustainability has long been a focus for businesses in every industry, including tech. Many have stepped up efforts, for example, pledging to reduce their carbon footprint and adopting more renewable energy sources. But these actions aren’t enough, and the quest for more energy-efficient innovation must be at the top of every company’s agenda.

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Over the past few years, we’ve seen a growing number of law firms driving differentiation through technology. Some legal companies are seizing the opportunity to achieve greater efficiencies and competitive advantage by adopting the latest tech, but this is still far from the industry standard. 

Data from PWC’s annual UK law firm survey shows the average spend as a percentage of fee income on legal technologies continues to be low, at 0.5-0.9 percent. Despite this, the research shows 'improving the use of technology' ranks as the top priority for legal businesses over the next year. So, law firms are keen to implement new digital solutions that support legal functions, but they’re simply not investing the necessary resources.

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Enterprises investing ample time and money in secure email gateways are still seeing fraudulent messages being delivered to their users’ inboxes undetected. In fact, phishing attacks are the origin of most breaches today.

Many organizations have therefore turned towards user security awareness programs; training staff to recognize and avoid the threats that make it into their inboxes. Why then, despite these efforts, have the number of breaches originating from phishing attacks grown every year since 2017?

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The last three years have presented particularly unsettled waters for eCommerce leaders to navigate. eCommerce was already transforming, but the pandemic led to a period of massive growth that forced rapid change. At the same time, the fallout from events like Brexit caused operational challenges for many organizations. To cope, eCommerce leaders had to accelerate their digital plans -- meaning many discarded existing strategies and condensed three to four years of digital transformation into a matter of months.

In the short term, this "kneejerk" digitalization allowed businesses to spin up an eCommerce website or app quickly. But in the longer term, many risk being left with a technology stack that is neither futureproof nor fit for purpose. In fact, despite the increase in spend, our research finds businesses lost an average 10 percent in revenue due to downtime and website performance issues in the last two years. That’s the kind of loss that cannot be absorbed more than once.

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Staying competitive in the eCommerce landscape requires agility and flexibility to pivot business strategies and adjust to changing consumer preferences and economic conditions.

Alternative data from websites, desktop/mobile applications, and other online sources gives managers the critical information they need to make effective decisions. While once confined to investors, eCommerce businesses are also adopting alternative data to refine their marketing strategies, improve product offerings, obtain demographic insights, track brand mentions, and improve SEO rankings.

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When things are going right in an organization, it’s easy to put supplier data on the back burner. When things go wrong in an organization, most people hesitate to invest in quality supplier data tools. In a world where most of the population has access to technology, it’s easy to assume that the large procurement technologies are working with accurate and up to date supplier information. However, this assumption is wrong, and when procurement technology fails to deliver promised results, supplier data is usually the point of breakdown. Companies of all sizes require better supplier data, and up until now, doing this has been a demanding endeavor without much success. Thankfully, there are tools on the market that can help take the burden of supplier data off the hands of employees and countless working hours working on manual tasks.

Once this conversation starts, those presenting should highlight how poor supplier data has held the company back. Oftentimes, the ROI for better supplier data is hidden within increased compliance on other modules. Adding specific examples of how insufficient supplier data affects the company and sharing how each of those situations could have been avoided can share a viewpoint that has possibly been looked over in the past. Here are three tips to get c -suite leaders on board with improving the company’s supplier data platform.

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The birth of the Internet in the 1990s and its subsequent expansion into every aspect of our lives began a digital revolution that has since refused to slow down. With it has come unimagined functionality, equipping us with instant access to information and communication. Those born before the Digital Enlightenment could never have imagined the power to cast aside unanswered questions with a mere "Google". Gazing across the digital expanse with our infantile stare, we failed to notice another set of eyes looking back at us. Those eyes belong to the world’s largest companies -- Big Tech giants like Facebook and Google -- who are continuously monitoring our movements across the Internet.

Every time we open a website or App, our journeys are tracked and hunted down by a pack of algorithms designed to determine our interests -- products, ideas, and brands that we may feel positively towards. This data is coveted by advertisers; it is the elixir that enhances their powers of persuasion and consumer targeting and, inevitably, sales. This insatiable demand has propelled Big Tech’s rampant profiteering and extraction of consumer data.

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When the likes of Meta and Microsoft spend billions to kick-start what they see as the next big tech gold rush, it’s worth taking notice. We are, of course, talking about the Metaverse, a prospect so compelling that it prompted Facebook’s corporate rebrand alongside an investment in the region of $10 billion per year.

According to their launch content, the money is going towards the creation of a "hybrid of today’s online social experiences, sometimes expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world. It will let you share immersive experiences with other people even when you can’t be together."

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