MS Teams with Colaborative Apps

 Makes good sense.   Especially apps that aid in bringing in multiple opinions, decision and task oriented views.  See some of the work we did in this space, well before the focus now being seen with apps like Teams and Zoom.  See 'Business Sphere' tag.

Microsoft wants Teams to be your go-to for collaborative apps  in Engadget

What if Teams could be the Windows for real-time apps?

You may not have noticed, but Microsoft Teams is slowing evolving from a Slack-like workplace chat app to a collaborative platform of its own. In addition to just talking with your coworkers, you can also install apps within Teams to manage Asana projects, or build a custom app that's specifically tuned to your company's needs. At Build 2021, Microsoft is making a bigger push to make Teams a platform for collaborative apps.  ... " 

Robots in the Boardroom

A place we experimented with, see a number of tags below for more.

Research by HBS, with a number of related topics, some examples:

Robots in the Boardroom    by Sean Silverthorne HBSWK

Understanding cloud technology was the No. 1 imperative for executives this decade. Next up: How does artificial intelligence change business and management?

Steamships, electricity, the railroad, airplanes, the internet—technology and business have always been intertwined. Now a new tech revolution is pushing forward as organizations figure out how to use artificial intelligence to help them make faster, smarter, and more productive decisions. This recent research from Harvard Business School faculty marks the possibilities and pitfalls that could occur along this digital transformation.... " 

A Good Place to Start
Ethics Bots and Other Ways to Move Your Code of Business Conduct Beyond Puffery
Digital technologies allow companies to create more effective codes of business conduct. But technology isn't the only answer.

Why Artificial Intelligence Isn't a Sure Thing to Increase Productivity
As companies adopt artificial intelligence to increase efficiency, are their employees skilled enough to use those technologies effectively?  ... "

Demystifying AI for Execs

Yet another piece to de-mystify AI for execs.  Used to be what I did.  Not bad, a useful description that is worth reading.  Good that it is mentioned that it is about how people and machines will ultimately work together.  But I have a number of problems with it.    First, hardly a mention of decisions and process.    And ultimately that is what it is all about.  If we don't know how people and decisions interact, we don't know much.  Also no mention of goals, which is another key component.  What are we trying to do?  Risk too is not mentioned.  What happens if the result is wrong, or poorly applied to real decisions?  Not much about operations. 

Also, more fundamentally, the article talks mostly about components of  'AI' like image recognition, or classification or clustering.   There is no doubt we can do these much better than we every could.  Great progress.  But AI is much more than that.  These things are newer, faster, sharper tools.  But without the process of taking data, knowledge and process and embedding them in business,  you don't get much.  Please make that clear when you talk to execs. .

" ... Demystifying AI and machine learning for executives

In this interview, Tamim Saleh cuts through the hype around artificial intelligence with guidance for executives about where and how to employ AI in their businesses. ... " 

Executive Decisions

I have used the article below again for a presentation, so I am repeating it's reference below:

Can Artificial Intelligence Replace Executive Decision Making?
Big Idea: Competing With Data & AnalyticsBlog 
By Sam Ransbotham

For the time being, countless decisions still require human engagement.

Awash in data, executives dream of a time when the Jetson utopia finally manifests — and they find themselves sipping coffee and cashing checks while machines slave away for them, uncovering unexpected business insights and learning optimal ways to manage organizations.

Despite improvements in cognitive technologies, that dream managerial scenario is still far from reality. Decisions that executives face don’t necessarily fit into defined problems well suited for automation. At least for the time being, countless decisions still require human engagement. ... " 

AI Platforms Extracting Corporate Knowledge

Quite a considerable claim.   Can we extract all the knowledge of a company for easy use? We developed and tried systems with similar goals.  Looking further.

Can This AI Platform Make You A Better Leader?
Half of executives fail within the first 18 months of being promoted or hired. Could software fix the problem?  By Lydia Dishman in FastCompany

A robot might not directly take your job, but chances are that automation will force you to learn new skills. In fact, according to experts at McKinsey, as many as 375 million workers globally may need to switch fields and learn new skills soon. That’s because at least a third of tasks in about 60% of jobs can be automated.

High-level thinking and creativity are beyond the capabilities of artificial intelligence. So how can a software platform claim to make executives and managers better at leading? After all, aren’t qualities like optimism,  empathy, and emotional intelligence rooted firmly in human behavior?

They are, but there are others that plenty of people struggle with like setting and keeping individual and organizational priorities. Enter Indiggo, a platform powered by a proprietary AI tool called “indi” that launched earlier this month.  According to Indiggo’s CEO and cofounder Janeen Gelbart, indi is a brain that has consumed all the knowledge the company has gathered in its 15 years of operation. That’s a massive data set of situational analysis, advice, and guidance for different types of leaders that Gelbart says is quite powerful and can provide a “return on leadership” much like ROI. .... " 

Impact of Innovation from Surveyed Execs

From former correspondent Paul Gillin, always a good writer.  Not sure there is a sharp divide though,  it's more the how and when this will happen.  And how much it is to replace versus augment our skills.   We also interviewed top execs in a previous AI go around, and found both enthusiasm and caution.   But realization it would be a future.  And it was, though mostly deeply embedded in things like smartphones. 

Survey finds executives are sharply divided on the impact of automation
By Paul Gillin in SiliconAngle

 Will robots, artificial intelligence and other smart technology drive new highs in business productivity? Or will it steal jobs from human beings by the millions?

It turns out the consensus is yes.

Or at least that’s what business executives think. A new survey of 3,800 of them from around the world, conducted by Dell Technologies Inc. and the Institute for the Future and released Jan. 30, has found that although people broadly agree that humans and machines will increasingly work in integrated teams, they’re also sharply divided on whether that’s a good or a bad thing. .... " 

Lifelong CEO Learning

For a while was responsible for answering questions from execs on technology, and connecting them to broader resources, this blog was part of that, but it does make sense to schedule learning more formally.  Even making sure the questions are formulated in a timely and useful manner is not a given.

Putting lifelong learning on the CEO agenda
By Amy Edmondson and Bror Saxberg in Mckinsey

In an open letter to business leaders, a Harvard Business School professor and a learning engineer at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative present an emphatic case to make learning a corporate priority.

If you are anything like most corporate leaders we know, you say (and mean) the right things when it comes to learning, such as “Our people are our most valuable asset, and their development is a top priority.” But if you are honest with yourself, you also know that your actions often emphasize financial over human capital, and you may leave it to individuals to find the learning opportunities they need. That worked, sort of, when people spent most of their time “doing” rather than “thinking,” “creating,” or “deciding.” .... " 

Bloomberg Terminal

Data Science in the Bloomberg Financial Terminal

A good example of how financial data is being analyzed and utilized in online, real time interactions. Mention of their current work using deep learning techniques.  Reminds me of some of our own attempts to track and visualize data and analytical results.   See tags.   You need strong buy-in and use cases.

Executive Overview of AI

A not bad, non technical overview of AI, provided in Data Science Central.    But again, I would like more about linking it to specific business process.  Say with bot applications.

Executive Guide to Artificial Intelligence
Posted by Amith Parameshwara  ....   " 

Salespeople and Executives

Worked on executive information systems that linked sales people and executive decisions.

Executives and Salespeople Are Misaligned — and the Effects Are Costly
Frank V. Cespedes, Christopher Wallace

U.S. companies spend over $900 billion on their sales forces, which is three times more than they spend on all ad media. Sales is, by far, the most expensive part of strategy execution for most firms. Yet, on average, companies deliver only 50% to 60% of the financial performance that their strategies and sales forecasts have promised. And more than half of executives (56%) say that their biggest challenge is ensuring that their daily decisions about strategy and resource allocation are in alignment with their companies’ strategies. That’s a lot of wasted money and effort. .... "  

Executive and Digital

Interesting thoughts.  Our own work with executives showed that the good approaches were to give execs direct access to the capabilities that are part of digital.   That requires new design, access to data, integrated corporate knowledge, virtual assistants, 'Business Sphere' and more.   I have written about that here, see the tags below. And in the coming decades this will evolve towards augmentation by cognitive AI to be available at every level.

Executive Development Programs Enter the Digital Vortex: I. Disrupting the Demand Landscape
by Mihnea Moldoveanu and Das Narayandas

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY — The informational and computational “tectonic shifts” of the past decade—enabling sharing, transacting, collaborating, and learning online—have created new challenges for executive development programs, in part by making visible to both buyers and sellers the specific objectives of participants and their organizations. Drawing on interviews with sponsoring organizations and participants in executive education at Harvard Business School, this study examines what learners and organizations want from executive development and maps the sources of value and drivers of demand for executive development. ... " 

Innovation and the Language of the Corner Office

 Reminds of work we did to enhance executive information systems.   Back then and then later when we had more technology and live data to leverage.  Language is a big deal. And finally when we started to leverage AI concepts.   More digital now than ever.  Lots of threads in this blog on this, see tags below.   In Sloan Review:

When Innovation Meets the Language of the Corner Office  by Dave Rochlin

What are the best ways to tailor the language of innovation to the executive suite?

We have learned that innovation executives often feel poorly understood by their fellow executives. In turn, functional executives are often baffled by what they see and hear from their innovation teams.

This isn’t a big surprise. As with other business disciplines, innovation experts have their own language. Innovation processes now include journey mapping, need-finding, technology-scouting, business model canvasing, prototyping, design sprints, and more. While these processes and terms are becoming more widely used across organizations, they are not always fully embraced at the executive level. ... " 

Better Digital Work Methods Needed

Again, I would point to some of our work on this to first and foremost getting all the right data to people as they need it to both support decisions and make constraints clear.   Further supported by analytic/cognitive agents.

  See Business Sphere.   Sadly, I don't think this was taken forward very well,  It sits stagnant,  except perhaps in the financial industry.  I am struck by observations that we still start with a big pile of Lego blocks, looking for new data and new solutions, repeating this each and every time.   Done often even in 'modern' data science.   Very wasteful.

Can we achieve a better, more effective digital workplace?
As a confluence of new apps and devices steadily flow into the enterprise, they're encountering a growing sense that the digital workplace has become too complex and fragmented to be properly effective. What can organizations do? .... by Dion Hinchcliffe   ... 

AI Replacing Executive Decision Making?

It remains a big question what kinds of decisions AI will be able to replace in the short and longer term. For the executive, it is not too much different than other 'assistant' roles, but with different focus and scope of data.   Might be a time to look at some of the work we did with executive information systems.   More understanding of the risk behind decisions,   Better forecasts.  Better collaboration, inside and outside the enterprise.   Security.  Better simulation of choices.   Very clear explanation of analytics used. Clear measurement.

 MIT Sloan takes a look. .

Forgetting Organizations

An executive once told us as we sought to create expert systems: " ... You don't want to record and save my expertise, you want to forget it to make room for new creativity ... " .   Related, from K@W: Digital Transformation: Becoming a ‘Forgetting Organization 

Executive Guide to Machine Learning

In McKinsey: An executive’s guide to machine learning
It’s no longer the preserve of artificial-intelligence researchers and born-digital companies like Amazon, Google, and Netflix. .... " 

Future of the Chief Data Officer

In SiliconAngle:  Don't in particular like the idea of labeling things with 'Chief', better to have a team of experts, closely connected.  Its the Information - Data - Knowledge progression.  Everyone should understand that.

Executive Machine Learning Jargon

Pointer to a reasonable background overview of machine learning that aims to look at origin of topics and jargon less explanations.  Via Alice Zheng in O'Reilly.   These kinds of resources are always useful to base explanation on to interested executives.  I always have had a library of these kinds of things ready for any number of technology topics for the enterprise.   You should be able to explain these yourself, in elevator segments, but it is always useful to leave something behind, especially if you tailor it to industry and local data context.

An Executive's Guide to Machine Learning

We did machine learning at Procter & Gamble starting in the mid 80s, and they continue today. This is a nice mostly non tech overview for execs I could have used most any of those years,  with anyone interested in learning.  via Kirk Borne, piece is from McKinsey.

An executive’s guide to machine learning
It’s no longer the preserve of artificial-intelligence researchers and born-digital companies like Amazon, Google, and Netflix ... 

Machine learning is based on algorithms that can learn from data without relying on rules-based programming. It came into its own as a scientific discipline in the late 1990s as steady advances in digitization and cheap computing power enabled data scientists to stop building finished models and instead train computers to do so. The unmanageable volume and complexity of the big data that the world is now swimming in have increased the potential of machine learning—and the need for it. .... " 

Chief Analytics Officer

The Ultimate Big Data job?   I don't know many of these positions around.  The article does a good job in describing what they could be.  Also a look at the differences between Chief Data and Chief Analytics Officer,  but there is considerable overlap today in Big Data.   And how these roles might exist alongside the CIO.

Key would be a good interaction with corporate decision processes at a strategic and operational level.   Innovation in fast moving technologies in context also needs to be considered.  And in a services world an understanding of  technology that is available and how it is evolving.

If anyone wants to talk to me about developing this role, contact me.