{"id":2145,"date":"2020-05-04T09:00:29","date_gmt":"2020-05-04T09:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/svam.reinventmedia.in\/?p=2145"},"modified":"2023-08-25T07:01:27","modified_gmt":"2023-08-25T07:01:27","slug":"coronavirus-crisis-spurs-it-innovation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/svam.com\/blogs\/coronavirus-crisis-spurs-it-innovation\/","title":{"rendered":"Coronavirus crisis spurs IT innovation"},"content":{"rendered":"The coronavirus crisis sees CIOs accelerating their adoption of automation, analytics and new processes to cope with the pandemic\u2019s disruptions and steer the enterprise forward in uncertain times.\r\n\r\nAs the coronavirus began ravaging New York\u2019s Suffolk County in March, desperate health department officials turned to CIO Scott Mastellon for help processing citizens\u2019 lab tests for COVID-19. But with the state averaging 400 COVID-19 cases a day, compiling, printing and sorting reports for health-care staff proved unwieldy for the 12 people who were manually moving data between systems.\r\n\r\nHis staff overwhelmed, Mastellon turned to robotic process automation (RPA). Within 11 days, Mastellon had deployed three bots to extract data from the state\u2019s website, move it into a database, then push it into the health department\u2019s case management application with a high degree of accuracy, Mastellon says. The staff who were entering the data are now working on other COVID-19 support services for a county buckled by the pandemic. \u201cEverything is electronic today,\u201d Mastellon says. \u201cIt really is a home run.\u201d\r\n\r\nSuffolk County\u2019s story is just one example of an emerging trend across many industries. Although there is currently no vaccination for COVID-19, the pandemic has been a booster shot, spurring organizations to abandon deliberation and accelerate innovation, CIOs and experts say. Sixty-one percent of 414 IT and business experts surveyed by IDG in April are accelerating their digital transformation efforts.\r\n\r\n\u201cA lot of organizations are viewing this as the shock to the system that has accelerated everything that they\u2019ve been doing,\u201d says Scott Snyder, who heads the digital and innovation practice for Heidrick Consulting.\r\n<h3>The drive for more data<\/h3>\r\nThis is the case as well at gaming developer Unity, which fields technical support requests from 3,500 employees through help-desk bots running in Slack, says CIO Brian Hoyt. There, employees engage Ninja Unicorn, a bot that uses natural language processing (NLP) software from Moveworks. Identifying nuances in human language, Ninja Unicorn quickly sorts through help-desk requests, provides employees answers where possible and ferries them onto support personnel as needed.\r\n\r\nOnce a luxury, bots have become a necessity as Unity\u2019s help ticket volume has soared 89 percent since employees began working from home in March, Hoyt says. Moreover, Unity has logged a 600 percent spike in questions related to company policy and COVID-19.\r\n\r\nRequests for data analytics reports have also soared at Unity, as business executives and developers seek more operational data, and sales and marketing executives seek insights into performance, Hoyt says.\r\n\r\nAnother hot list analytics item: Information about employee productivity and engagement to make sure that nothing is getting in the way of workers doing their jobs, Hoyt says. Taking action on that data is something Unity is still working through. \u201cHow we want to address that is more of an art than a science,\u201d he adds.\r\n\r\nThe imperative for greater automation and data analytics is no surprise, as HR, legal, finance and other business lines are seizing the opportunity presented by the pandemic to transform, says Snyder, who co-authored Goliath\u2019s Revenge: How Established Companies Turn the Tables on Digital Disruptors. \u201cDigital is everybody\u2019s job,\u201d he says.\r\n\r\nSince COVID-19 struck, SurveyMonkey CIO Eric Johnson has also increased his attention on data analytics to ensure that executives have a \u201cclear line of sight on the company.\u201d\r\n\r\nPredictive modeling has always helped anticipate customers\u2019 propensity to purchase, renew and churn, but executives haven\u2019t always regularly sought such information. Now executives are asking for data about everything from the company\u2019s exposure to industries decimated by COVID-19 to data points about pricing models, feature sets and renewal rates. And they want it in days or hours. \u201cIt\u2019s the new, new normal and it\u2019s going to become a permanent feature,\u201d Johnson predicts.\r\n\r\nAccess to data can also help newly remote workforces feel moored to their companies and colleagues. Previously quarterly meetings among vice presidents now convene monthly at SurveyMonkey; the company also polls employees bi-weekly to get the pulse of its workforce.\r\n\r\n\u201cMental health is such a huge focus because if your staff is unproductive because they\u2019re demoralized it has a massive impact on the business,\u201d says Johnson. \u201cIf we don\u2019t ask how they\u2019re doing we will never know.\u201d\r\n<h3>Silent meetings make the most noise<\/h3>\r\nWith the pandemic shaking up operations, corporations don\u2019t want to run the risk of reverting back to pre-pandemic processes that may have been suboptimal, Snyder says.\r\n\r\nThis is the case at Iron Mountain, where new work-from-home policies have helped CTO Kim Anstett overhaul how she runs meetings. Previously, two or three people would do most of the talking for 45-minute meetings, with inevitable side conversations popping up after the meeting concluded. But there was no real dialogue, no consensus-building or agreement that staff had accomplished its objective for the meeting. Having several such meetings over the course of workday was draining, Anstett says.\r\n\r\nRecently IT staff have congregated, albeit remotely, in \u201csilent meetings.\u201d In this construct, staffers co-write a few questions into in a Google document. Staff spend 25 minutes answering the questions and co-editing the document after which a meeting facilitator guides a 20-minute conversation through a Google Meet videoconference. This open, collaborative process has energized the team, making meetings more meaningful and productive, says Anstett, who cribbed the concept after reading about it in Bruce Daisley\u2019s Eat Work Sleep Repeat: 30 Hacks for Bringing Joy to Your Job.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe will absolute use this as a new way of working coming out [of the pandemic],\u201d Anstett says. \u201c[COVID-19] was just the forcing factor to try something different.\u201d\r\n\r\nDitto for Suffolk County, where the bots Mastellon\u2019s created with UiPath\u2019s RPA software are now processing more than 850 COVID-19 case reports per day for the county, which has reported more than 30,000 positive COVID-19 cases. Mastellon plans on investing more money in maintaining and supporting the existing bots, though he says the potential for automating more manual tasks in the municipality is \u201cendless.\u201d Emboldened by the success of his COVID-19 case file automation, county workers are asking him to automate various tasks to serve the municipality.\r\n\r\n\u201cThis will go down in history as the worst emergency we\u2019ve had in a long time,\u201d Mastellon says of the pandemic. \u201cBut if I can take one positive thing it\u2019s that it\u2019s challenged us in technology to come up with innovative solutions quickly and efficiently.\u201d\r\n\r\nThis innovation or bust mindset is the right one, says Snyder, who adds that CIOs should use the crisis to educate non-technical leaders on the importance of digital leadership. \u201cIt\u2019s a great time to raise everyone\u2019s game on the digital side,\u201d he says. \u201cDon\u2019t let them go backwards.\u201d\r\n\r\nSource :\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.cio.com\/article\/3540748\/coronavirus-crisis-spurs-it-innovation.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">click here<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The coronavirus crisis sees CIOs accelerating their adoption of automation, analytics and new processes to cope with the pandemic\u2019s disruptions and steer the enterprise forward in uncertain times. As the coronavirus began ravaging New York\u2019s Suffolk County in March, desperate health department officials turned to CIO Scott Mastellon for help processing citizens\u2019 lab tests for &hellip; <p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/svam.com\/blogs\/coronavirus-crisis-spurs-it-innovation\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Coronavirus crisis spurs IT innovation&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2146,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blogs","category-collaboration-solution"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Coronavirus crisis spurs IT innovation - SVAM INTERNATIONAL INC<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"COVID-19 pandemic tells us about how crisis spurs innovation and how Silent meetings make the most noise. 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