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Want to Monetize Your Energy Transition Efforts? Heres How
2021-04-29 10:00:00| OGI
Experts discuss how emissions factor into profitability in the era of energy transition and the need for standardization in how to measure them.
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MTN Nigeria payment platform access restored but for how long?
2021-04-09 02:00:00| Total Telecom industry news
Last Thursday, Nigeria’s commercial banks disconnected MTN from their banking platforms, leaving its 77 million customers unable to purchase credit for their phones using apps, Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) codes, and even debit cards. The move came after MTN took the decision to cut the commission it pays to banks from 4…read more on TotalTele.com »
Agriculture needs to band together. Heres how.
2021-02-24 22:52:00| Beef
Here are five tips for being a positive, factual and approach voice for agriculture when you are out in your communities.
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AI and machine learning are revolutionizing modern businesses heres how to get ahead
2021-02-04 22:08:23| The Webmail Blog
AI and machine learning are revolutionizing modern businesses heres how to get ahead nellmarie.colman Thu, 02/04/2021 - 15:08 Fierce competition means every business must adapt to succeed. AI and machine learning have emerged as modern, vital ways for organizations to get ahead. Many businesses today prioritize data, analytics and AI/machine learning projects to power new business models, enhance product and service offerings, improve efficiency, drive revenue and deliver superior customer experiences. But analyst figures on project implementation make for sobering reading. Gartner predicts that under half of modern data analytics and machine learning projects will be successfully deployed in production by 2022. Less than a fifth will move piloted AI projects into production without delays caused by a range of problems from technical skills gaps and lack of IT/business process maturity, to insufficient organizational collaboration. For example, these businesses may not have expertise in mathematics, algorithm design or data science and engineering. Or their data may not be in a unified data lake infrastructure for ready access. These conditions create challenges for any organization looking to advance in the market and derive value from AI and machine learning. This combination of pressure and challenges can overwhelm your business, especially if youre at the start of your AI and machine learning journey. So lets dig into why your business should make the effort and how doing so might require different skills sets and data from what you might think. What are AI, machine learning and deep learning? Lets start with the basics. When a machine completes tasks based on a set of stipulated rules that solve problems, were into the realm of artificial intelligence. This might include understanding and interpreting natural language, recognizing when objects move and providing intelligent answers. Business benefits follow, such as analyzing data sets that are too large for humans to process, answering questions in real time that draw from existing data and experiences, and automation that can reduce costs and boost productivity. Machine learning is a discipline within the AI domain. It enables machines to learn by themselves using data. They use this knowledge to make increasingly accurate predictions and drive actions. For this to happen, you need a model thats trained on existing data, after which point it can process additional data and make predictions. Throughout the process, its important to track and understand your model, building quality and eliminating bias. Finally, deep learning is a subfield of machine learning. It structures algorithms in layers to create an artificial neural network that can learn and make intelligent decisions on its own. The many use cases of AI and machine learning Weve so far explored AI, machine learning and deep learning in the abstract, but in what specific ways can they benefit your business? Answering questions, thereby improving customer support and buying journeys, through faster, higher-quality answers and experiences. Speech recognition, including text-to-speech and speech-to-text translation, enabling you to work with voice/audio data more widely and productively. Document summaries that effectively extract key concepts to use in countless ways, improving productivity and document data use. Image recognition for biotech, satellite/drone imagery and face recognition, to quicken emergency responses and prevent crime. Image processing to improve the presentation and utilization of images through enhanced resolution and colorization. Data classification in medicine, to yield better diagnoses, faster and more targeted treatments and health preservation. Superior search to get customers to what they want more rapidly, whether thats a product recommendation or a web page. Strategic analysis that can be a boon to the games industry, driving more challenging and educational entertainment. Financial and logistical forecasting to improve financial management, planning and resource allocation/utilization. AI and machine learning require skills and data, but not what you think If youre looking to machine learning and deep learning but have concerns about your existing data, be mindful that they dont always need massive data sets. While completely new models with no data nor training do require tens of thousands to millions of data points, trained models exist that can give a project leader a head start. Even if you have just 100 or so examples for a specific use case, building on a general models foundation could yield more accurate results than human experts would provide. Additionally, its worth thinking differently about hiring for the delivery of AI/machine learning enabled applications and solutions. Theres an assumption you need PhD-level data scientists. Although they do add value and can be necessary in some circumstances, existing staff can often be trained in about 100 hours, building on high-school math and a year of coding experience. With modern tools on AWS or Google Cloud including AutoML, they can build the solutions you need. In all, its as much about changing your mindset as anything else. You must think about what AI and machine learning can bring to your business and the most effective way to achieve that, thereby keeping your company ahead. Machine learning is today driving change in thinking of data as code where machine learning uses data to write the program, which is the output. This methodology coupled with the tools and education I mentioned earlier set the stage for many more people collaborating to fashion a new generation of intelligent solutions that will revolutionize business for years to come. For more information on AI and machine learning, check out our panel discussion, which dives deep into these topics. The discussion covers: toolsets and methodologies; capabilities and constraints; data, computer and expertise requirements; examples of successful applications; and how to get started. AI and machine learning are revolutionizing modern businesses heres how to get aheadDiscover why AI and machine learning are worth the effort, and why they require different skills sets and data from what you might think.Discover how businesses are using AI and machine learning.https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/17680/420320Watch the presentation
Build a career path for your technical individual contributors heres how
2020-08-03 14:18:12| The Webmail Blog
Build a career path for your technical individual contributors heres how nellmarie.colman Mon, 08/03/2020 - 07:18 Not everyone wants to manage people, but many companies dont provide alternate pathways to progress a career in tech, leaving technical individual contributors (ICs) stuck. This is a dilemma if youve spent years building skills to become a tech expert, says Rackspace Technology Principal Architect Product Architecture Nicholas Garratt, who sits on the Rackspace Technology Technical Career Track (TCT) board. If your only option is to manage other resources, skills atrophy. You become less competitive through moving away from the skills that brought you to a company in the first place. You lack time to do what you once enjoyed. Garratt explains experts often want to mentor people, help companies transform and be public advocates what they see as the good parts of a leadership role but without being estranged from hands-on skills. This is why some large tech companies develop TCTs. These initiatives identify and nurture technical ICs, providing them with a path to a technical leadership role thats the equivalent of executive-level leadership within an organization. They drive the business forward, but dont have to manage people nor leave the technical work they love behind. Its about empowering and promoting them to help them become leaders without a move to management, says Garratt. But what benefits does this bring to your organization? And can this model work for companies with smaller, more specialized technical teams and less opportunity for growth? Why highly skilled, technical ICs are vital to every organization Rackspace Technology has over 6000 staff and yet only around 50 are TCT members. The program is fastidious in its selection process, choosing only the best technical people whove reached the pinnacle of their traditional tracks. These professionals have great technical skills and leadership potential, and a desire to do more. As Garratt notes, smaller organizations have a more limited pool of resources to draw from, and tend toward simpler organizational structures. Developing highly specialized technical IC roles is something thats not going to be as practically possible for them, he says, adding that its therefore hardly surprising TCTs are far less common in smaller companies. However, David Porter, Principal Engineer at Rackspace Technology and another TCT board member believes similar structures nonetheless have the potential to bring key benefits to smaller organizations. Retention is the most obvious, he says. If your company has fewer than 100 people, you might still have the original engineers. So youll want to keep them to train people up and share critical knowledge. For medium-sized businesses, Porter suggests fostering technical leaders is more about retaining talent to get maximum velocity for change and to involve them in mentoring and evangelism. In short, try to keep the people who represent the business. Garratt adds morale is a factor: When people leave, thats a poor signal. Oust a respected, trusted individual through a lack of care and attention and that can cause lasting damage to subsequent recruitment efforts. By contrast, technical ICs in leadership roles strengthen organizations by being seen as positions to aspire to that other tech resources look up to for leadership and guidance. How to identify technical leaders and help them thrive Creating a technical career track is easier said than done, though, and the specifics will vary depending on your organizations size and the composition and disposition of your teams. But four fundamental tips should help get you started. 1. Identify your top technical resources Spotting technical ICs with leadership potential might not come naturally if your company has centered on traditional promotion routes, or doesnt have a history of identifying such individuals. Garrett says they must be discovered organically. Within every tech team is that person others turn to, who can provide answers, opinion and thought-provoking conversation. Dont force anything. Their status must be organically earned. 2. Get buy-in According to Porter, its vital any program you pursue goes all the way to the top. He warns against delegating programs like the TCT, because relevant policy cant be made if peoples hands are tied. Also, get buy-in from the participants themselves. That might seem obvious, but some companies miss this step. Have a dialog with them, says Porter. Find out what they want to do, and dont force people into roles theyve no interest in. 3. Create a plan Porter says you must offer people more than a pay increase and a fancy title they might just use to get a job elsewhere: There needs to be a plan a set of roles that describe what your technical leaders need to do. Individuals can measure their efforts accordingly, and the company can monitor their progress and promote automatically based on key milestones. Ensure you have a clear path, to retain people and keep improving them until they reach the highest possible level, he adds. 4. Be flexible and balanced Garrett reasons many people who manage tech resources lack direct experience in managing the career paths of technical ICs, and so shifts in thinking might be required. An important one is to balance their schedule, leaving time to accommodate ad-hoc requests and investigate things. But he says its counter-productive to impose a rigid structure on how and when to engage, and that the technical ICs must be flexible, too, since theyll have many conversations that arent core to their role. Maximize value from people for success Whether you enact a full TCT program or put in a more modest system to define, develop and empower your technical ICs, the result will add value to your company. As Porter notes, too often the reasoning behind TCTs is about good people not wanting to be managers, but he asks: What if a company loses a persons value by making them a manager? What if someone would otherwise have been a more effective contributor at accomplishing the businesss goals? For medium-sized and smaller companies alike, this is critical. When resources are stretched, make optimum use of them. You want best-of-breed talent, and so must empower your technical leaders and ensure they dont get stuck in a rut or leave because you offer them no other choices. And as Garratt says: Just because someone doesnt go down a path to directorship that doesnt mean they lack valuable insight into improving an organization. Failure to appropriately engage with your distinguished technical ICs can lower morale and job satisfaction, potentially driving attrition in a challenging technical skills market. Engage and encourage your high performers who, as Porter says, manage nothing more than doing the best possible work for your customers, and youll move faster, transform your organization and have the best possible advocates for your business inside and out. Our TCT Rackers help us move fast and help our customers to move fast too. Check out our customer stories to hear how our top technical staff can make their expertise work for you. Build a career path for your technical individual contributors heres howOur experts explore why highly skilled, technical
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