Intel’s Steven Remsen made the cross-country trip from Portland, OR to Orlando for OPEX Week. We caught up with him to discuss process mining. Steven starts out with a quick history of a few special algorithms before noting the strengths of traditional mapping methods. As a practitioner, he understands the three basic steps of process mining from the academic space: discovery, conformance, and enhancement. Steve’s science background sets him apart from some other data scientists who see the blac...
Feb 25, 2020•22 min
Reka Mishra is the managing director of the transformation office for the SVB Financial Group. She lays out the basics of mergers and acquisitions before diving in on operational excellence. For M&A, it is imperative to have a target operating model in place. That model must consist of four key elements: people, process, technology, and data. Change management, communication, and HR must also be involved from the onset in order to best address the concerns of the employees. When M&A happ...
Feb 24, 2020•24 min
Heather King is the managing director for both the Shared Services & Outsourcing Network and the Intelligent Automation Division for the Americas. She oversees a team that puts on the dynamic events of relevant content for the industries of the same name. Having been in her role for the past seven years, Heather gives a brief timeline of the creation and growth of the IA series that was born out of SSON. The term RPA first presented itself in 2014 during a panel session and kept cropping up ...
Feb 21, 2020•18 min
The entertaining Genworth Financial team joins us from OPEX Week 2020 to tell us their enterprise’s transformation story—or journey, more accurately. Kathleen starts off by explaining her view of the company 15 years ago: “It was a very siloed organization. It was very much command and control; very hierarchical. We were focused very much on our processes, like manufacturing, because we came from GE.” Sometimes, as Martijn is quick to interject, they were focusing on the wrong processes. Their n...
Feb 19, 2020•25 min
Joe Jordan joins us from OPEX Week in Orlando. As the director of operational excellence for Edward Jones, Joe sought inspiration from the hit TV show Shark Tank to give a platform to the innovative minds of Edward Jones. If anyone across the firm’s workflow has an idea about how to transform their part of the business, they are given the opportunity to present it to the C-suite. If the idea ultimately increases Edward Jones’s ROI, the C-suite signs of on funding the technology that bring the id...
Feb 18, 2020•32 min
Adrian Terry, VP of GM Financial’s OpEx function, discusses their unique approach to IT and RPA. Initially, IT had some processes they wanted to automate. From there, a pilot was developed. It soon became clear that the broader organization could benefit from similar processes, so GM onboarded their own RPA business automation talent. Now, IT and RPA have been conjoined. While each department still has their direct leadership, the “two headed monster” reports to a governance function. Next, Adri...
Feb 17, 2020•29 min
Dr. Ayanna Howard is a chair of the School of Interactive computing at Georgia Tech, an academic, and a startup founder. While her talents are as vast as her pursuits, she sums up their relation as interactive computing. In her words, “Interactive computing is really this theme that the human is center to everything that we do when we think about computing and artificial intelligence.” Dr. Howard pursues interactive computing for the greater good, including robotics in healthcare and education. ...
Feb 14, 2020•34 min
James Dodkins, Customer Experience Expert and heavy metal enthusiast, discusses the parallels between the two. First, he touches on the cyclical nature of refining a product to please its audience. Whether it’s music or tech, improving upon the output based on feedback about the original product moves the needle forward. At the same time, innovation flourishes in a space void of customer input. The secret to balancing these two conflicting strategies is interpreting feedback to anticipate an una...
Feb 12, 2020•28 min
Angie Fearn comes to us from OPEX Orlando to discuss diversity of thought and its importance for enterprise. While diversity has become a loaded buzzword, Angie refocuses its compass around the way different people come with their own set of skills and capabilities. As a leader—and a human—it is natural to want to hire people who look and think like you. It takes an insightful leader to actively diversify their talent in order to fill in the gaps that exist within the leadership team and the ent...
Feb 11, 2020•34 min
Barbara Hodge reflects on 2019, identifying the trends that shaped the decade. Data, self-service, and automation has affected us all. A new awareness of personal data and its power—for good and for evil—came to light, for example, with the Cambridge Analytica scandal. At the same time, all of that data that has been given and taken has made surprisingly little headway within industry, as enterprises grapple with how to funnel it into tangible action. While it’s easy to sensationalize the negati...
Feb 10, 2020•14 min
BitCherry’s Paul Bao explains the blockchain process behind the platform’s commercial applications. Working similar to Amazon’s eCommerce model, BitCherry will offer a platform to buy, sell, and network goods using digital currency. Regulatory roadblocks make penetration in the U.S. difficult, but BitCherry has over 2 million members and 120,000 active daily users. Currently, these users simply buy and sell digital currency in anticipation for BitCherry’s retail applications. Bao expects the ret...
Feb 07, 2020•17 min
Malta, a small European island, is quickly becoming a blockchain hub, and thus, accurately nicknamed “Blockchain Island.” This panel discussion delves into blockchain developments, standards, and laws. Malta’s progressive, global view of blockchain implications has allowed Blockchain Island to progress in a healthy, robust, safe way, complete with governance and legislation. The panel shares the infrastructure that has led to its success in the hope that others will implement a similar solution....
Jan 31, 2020•22 min
Tom Trowbridge is the former president and one of the founders of Hedera Hashgraph, a distributed ledger technology. He is also an avid investor and advisor in the technology space. Hedera’s governing council consists of companies like Nomura, Deutsche Telecom, IBM, Boeing, and Swisscom. Tom notes that Hedera met with the Facebook Cayenne team in 2018—they did not join. A year later, Facebook announced the digital currency Libra and its accompanying—but separate—digital wallet, Calibra. Tom has ...
Jan 24, 2020•20 min
Kexin Xie is a data scientist for Salesforce. Among other things, Kexin is responsible for building the engineering infrastructure, services, and frameworks that makes the Salesforce marketing cloud so powerful. In this conversation, Kexin discusses how the power of predictive analytics is leveraged in businesses for “next-best-action” interactions. While these tools drive more engagement and revenue from the customer side, which Kexin touches on, he dives deep on how data science makes this pos...
Jan 17, 2020•35 min
Max Just is accompanied by a special guest on this episode of Future of Work. Julie Seitz is an expert on all things workspace, which makes her the perfect partner for the topic of—you guessed it—the future of workspaces. While she notes that an enterprise can’t necessarily futureproof themselves in this regard, she encourages them to get out of their insular spaces for the sake of spotting trends in how people are working in universities, airports, etc. Flexibility and simplicity in a workspace...
Jan 15, 2020•12 min
NASA’s Pam Wolfe joins us to discuss their RPA journey, which started over two years ago in their Shared Services Center. Establishing RPA governance across NASA has taken time, strategy, and strong support across the agency. In many ways, NASA’s move to RPA is very similar to the typical enterprise, but let’s not forget—NASA sends people to space. In fact, a recent decision was made to send astronauts to the moon and Mars by 2024. In order to reach their goals, NASA went through a cultural and ...
Jan 14, 2020•33 min
In this episode, IEEE’s Lee Coulter discusses the notion that the future of every successful company will depend on its transformation into a technology services business—even the local pizza joint. This far-reaching conversation covers the entirety of the current “data chasm.” Lee kicks the discussion off by justifying his aversion to the term RPA. He notes that organizations start with task automation before moving onto intelligent automation, a process that gets lost in the blanket term RPA. ...
Jan 13, 2020•50 min
Kenneth Farrugia is the chief business development officer with the Bank of Valletta. Kenneth starts this conversation off with a bang, making the case that if banks don’t stay on top of the technological revolution, they run the risk of becoming irrelevant. Next, Kenneth, perhaps counterintuitively, labels legacy financial operations who’ve jumped on board with Industry 4.0 as FinTechs, while the up-and-comers are TechFins. Of course data and security is a big part of the conversation as well. ...
Jan 10, 2020•31 min
Juan Araya discusses structuring for scale from the eyes of the disruptor and disruptee—both of which Juan knows well. Juan reminds us that before making any actionable change, an end goal must be set. Next, Juan discusses the role speed plays in structuring for scale. Some industries need to move faster than others, which affects their decision making. In the case of Uber, Juan understood that transformative technology supported the speed of change Uber strived for, even more than the other sca...
Jan 08, 2020•16 min
Robert Welborn joins us again for the second part of autonomous vehicle myths. During this discussion, Robert compares the vast and critical differences between the capabilities of today’s math and the necessity of developing tomorrow’s math before fully autonomous vehicles are a safe, mainstream option. He parses out the weakness in today’s autonomous vehicles. For example, converting visual information into digital information and then trying to extract features from that before making a decis...
Jan 07, 2020•11 min
Dmitri Popov, global service management lead for Mann + Hummel Group, joins us today to discuss scaling RPA. Dmitri himself admits that such a process is painful, in part because of the few successful enterprise examples for which to model after. Dmitri points to IBM as a company who has done it well. Next, Dmitri discusses how to leverage shared services in the most efficient way, exemplifying R&D and certain purchasing aspects. One of the most difficult components of implementing RPA acros...
Jan 06, 2020•31 min
Rida Moustafa is an experienced data scientist with a demonstrated history of working in the retail industry. Rida covers a lot of ground in this concise, informative conversation. He shares his story with us, beginning in 1995 with the big data mining movement. Walking us through the way data mining has evolved, Rida hits on neural networks, deep learning, and expert systems. Today, however, AI technology has evolved enough to render some of these old processes moot. Of course, new obstacles pr...
Jan 03, 2020•41 min
Robert Welborn discusses common myths surrounding autonomous vehicles. He starts with three TV shows that have skewed perception around AVs. Next, he sets expectations around the maturity model of AVs by describing the stages as childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Today’s data presents itself in three-dimensional forms, and Robert is realistic about the struggles and opportunities within this new model of data. It is the engineers behind AVs who are tasked with making things work, and Robert ...
Jan 01, 2020•10 min
Deepak Subbarao joins us again, this time, to discuss unstructured data. The recent explosion in technology inputs has raised the bar for customer expectations. They want more, and they want it now. Requests are coming via phone calls, social media, emails, etc. The product of this feedback is unstructured data. Deepak goes in depth on three actionable steps to take in order to leverage the power of unstructured data: know your data, know the sources of your data, and prepare your data. Next, De...
Dec 31, 2019•9 min
Roland Haefs, with Henkel, discusses enterprise evolution and the shift from having purely transactional relationships to becoming a true business solutions provider. It takes strong leadership and an entrepreneurial spirit to pull off such a transformation, which Roland details. In order to demonstrate his point, Roland lays out Henkel’s approach to the shared services process of master data management. Next, the conversation turns to RPA and AI more specifically, including its role in shared s...
Dec 30, 2019•23 min
David Orban, founder of Network Society Ventures, discusses the rapid acceleration of technology and its consequences. How we live, work, organize, and grow a business has changed. Decentralization is now a common path forward. David gives examples, including solar energy, digital manufacturing, personalized health, and peer-to-peer learning. Next, David discusses the volatility of Bitcoin and why that’s to be expected: we don’t yet fully understand its potential. David exemplifies the past whil...
Dec 27, 2019•25 min
Molecule is an open market based platform that incentivizes the development and co-creation of pharmaceutical IP. Molecule’s CEO, Devon Krantz, discusses the dire state of pharmacological R&D and its cost—literally and figuratively—to patients. Molecule, on the other hand, encourages a patient-centric approach to pharma. How? Devon puts it this way: “We are focusing more on bio-techs, on smaller research labs, on academia. [What we] want to incentivize is for researchers, scientists, and aca...
Dec 25, 2019•26 min
Hendrik Boehmer is the People Experience & Operations Lead for Unilever. While such a title is a few syllables longer than its counterpart, Hendrik explains that Unilever’s HR transformation involved a complete reimagination of the role. First, hand-picked roles that were once outsourced were brought back in house in order to achieve HR’s new goal: more simple, more impact, and more human. What this entails is increasing automation and the role of human talent simultaneously. While it sounds...
Dec 24, 2019•25 min
In this episode, Kai-Eberhard Lueg, Global Business Solutions expert with Siemens, discusses the future of automation. Specifically, commerce is experiencing a new type of customer expectation that involves an increase in personalization and speed. While these two concepts seem counterintuitive, digitalization and shared services make it possible. Digitization is only as effective as the foundation it was built on, however, so Mr. Lueg details the best way to move forward on firm ground. Finally...
Dec 23, 2019•25 min
Dr. Timothy Renick with Georgia State joins us to talk about his implementation of predictive analytics within the university, including an AI enhanced chatbot. Since the deployment of these technologies, Georgia State is graduating 3,000 more students a year than it did seven years ago. Dr. Renick explains the university’s approach to finding solutions for problems over innovation for innovation’s sake. With a change in demographics, including a larger low-income population, the university felt...
Dec 20, 2019•32 min
