Month: January 2019

Recommended for: Chief Learning Officers, Chief Human Resource Officers, Chief People Officer, Chief Talent Officer, Learning & Development Directors and Managers, Corporate Trainers, Content and Learning Product Managers, Hiring Directors, Hiring Managers, Human Resource Directors, Human Resource Managers.

On Tuesday, February 5, 2019 2:00pm EST, join the most cited  and referenced learning scientist in corporate learning, Todd Maddox, Ph.D.  as he presents on the psychology of corporate training with Dr. B. Price Kerfoot, Co-Founder of Qstream. 

 

On December 22, 2018, the longest government shutdown in American history began. Approximately 800,000 employees have been affected with roughly 380,000 workers being furloughed and another 420,000 working without pay. Many of the 420,000 employees being required to work without pay make important, and often split-second, life or death decisions.

This includes the Coast Guard, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and air traffic control, to name a few. While these employees are attempting to focus on their job (without pay), they are also pondering how to pay their rent or mortgage and whether to buy food, medicine, or gas.

With each passing day and missed paycheck, the shutdown is causing increased stress and anxiety. It creeps into the workers’ consciousness whether they like it or not.

From a brain science perspective, the likelihood of a major accident increases significantly every day mission-critical government workers are required to perform their jobs without pay, and with no clear indication of when their next paycheck will arrive.

Brain Science for Routine Behavior

From a brain science perspective, the effects of stress on decision making are well understood.  Well-established, routine behaviors such as swabbing luggage for bomb-making material or maintaining buoys and lighthouses is only moderately affected. Behaviors such as these are learned and initiated by the behavioral skills system in the brain that encompasses the basal ganglia, and is best learned and performed without “overthinking it.”

Situational Awareness Is Weakened By Shutdown-Driven Stress

However, cognitive processes and to a higher degree situational awareness are seriously hampered by shutdown-driven stress. Cognitive processing such as routing planes in flight and maintaining defense readiness in ports and on the oceans is strongly affected. Cognitive processing involves the cognitive skills system in the brain that recruits the prefrontal cortex and medial temporal lobes and relies heavily on working memory and attention. Stress and anxiety engage emotion centers in the brain that appropriate cognitive resources (working memory and attention) from the task at hand.

Situational awareness is especially affected by shutdown-driven stress. Situational awareness involves effectively processing and comprehending the situation around you, and projecting the future state. Situational awareness relies on cognitive, emotional and behavioral skills systems in the brain and involves knowing “what to do, when.”  Situational awareness is critical to Coast Guard, TSA and air traffic control operations because these operations require constant diligence to effectively evaluate the current and future situations that often require split-second decisions and projections into the future. It is this ability to “think on one’s feet” and to make the right split-second decision that is at serious risk when these employees are attempting work and simultaneously deal with the stress and anxiety of going unpaid.

Conclusion

With each passing day the likelihood of a major accident increases. Critical decision-making centers in the brain that are central to the mission of the Coast Guard, TSA, and air traffic control are operating at sub-optimal levels because shutdown-driven stress and anxiety are holding important cognitive and situational awareness processes hostage. This is only going to get worse. Putting politics aside, and focusing exclusively on the psychological and brain science of decision-making, the only solution is to end the shutdown and allow these workers to do their job with pay, and with their full brain processing capacity focused on the job.

EDITOR’S NOTE:  Todd Maddox, Ph.D. has more than 200 published articles, 10,000 citings, and $10 million in external research funding in his 25+ years researching the brain basis of behavior.  Maddox is available for comment on this topic and can be contacted via media@amalgaminsights.com

In a recently published Market Milestone, Todd Maddox, Ph.D., Learning Scientist and Research Fellow for Amalgam Insights, evaluated Skillsoft’s Technology and Developer Learning Content from a learning science perspective—the marriage of psychology and brain science.
This involves evaluating the training content and delivery to determine whether it engages psychological processes and learning systems in the brain effectively.

Amalgam’s overall evaluation is that Skillsoft’s Technology and Developer Learning Content is highly effective. Skillsoft’s Technology and Developer Content portfolio meets the need for continuous adaptability and effective engagement of the task appropriate learning system in the brain with their “watch”, “read”, “listen” and “practice” content and delivery methodology. Delivering the Technology and Developer Content portfolio with Percipio’s ELSA ensures that the portfolio is efficiently organized, is easily accessible on any device, is searchable and is seamlessly integrated into the employee’s flow of work. Finally, Skillsoft’s newly developed “Aspire” offering helps the employee realize their aspirations and desires by building an “Aspirational Persona” and developing a digital learning journey to support career advancement.

For more information, read the full Market Milestone licensed for distribution by Skillsoft at http://learn.skillsoft.com/Website-AR-Amalgam-Leveraging-Learning-Science-Why-Skillsofts-Tech-Dev-Learn_LandingPage.html.

Technology Expense Management, analyst firm says, can help companies adopt a “more careful approach…and a cost-efficient working environment.”

A new report from industry analysts Amalgam Insights warns that this year will represent what it calls a “change for companies that have managed digital transformation & technology investment in bull markets” of the previous several years. But it says several sectors within the technology expense management (TEM) environment remain posted for significant growth, with the telecommunications industry leading the way, with a projected 15-20 percent spending increase.

Amalgam Insights chief analyst Hyoun Park authored the new report, saying the enterprise mobile sector spend will be a key driver. He says spending in this area should increase by as much as 15 percent in 2019, driven by what he calls “the incessant demand for mobile data from apps, video, music, and other persistent and constantly updating workloads.”

He also predicts that Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google Cloud Platform will continue to rake in more revenue, with an estimated run rate of $30 billion this year; he projects that amount could easily hit $50 billion in 2020.

Other predictions from the new Amalgam Insights report:

• Software as a Service (SaaS) will be a $75 billion market by next year;
• The Internet of Things (IoT) market will continue to be in flux, due to its complexity, with companies challenged to monetize the two billion non-cellular Internet of Things devices to be created for industrial, commercial, and enterprise; and
• Most importantly, the technology expense market will double to more than two billion dollars over the coming year.

“Over half of enterprises do not have basic technology spend practices in place,” Park says. “The most frequent mistake these companies make is assuming that they’ve assigned a person to processing telecom invoices, so those people know how to manage and optimize telecom bills and contracts, which is usually not true.”

The full Amalgam Insights report is available for download at: https://www.amalgaminsights.com/product/analyst-insight-7-key-technology-expense-management-predictions-for-2019

On January 9th, 2019, Vena Solutions announced a $115 million round of equity financing led by JMI Equity and joined by prior investor Centana Growth Partners. Based on Amalgam Insights’ discussions with Vena’s executive team, this funding will be used to expand Vena’s product, customer support, sales, marketing, and operations teams as well as to expand the customer base in the mid-market, where Vena has been successfully winning business over the past several years.

Amalgam Insights’ Market Milestones highlight and contextualize key announcements in enterprise technology markets. This Market Milestone provides guidance on why this funding round is an important milestone for mid-market FP&A in context of the red-hot FP&A market as well as important trends in Enterprise Performance Management product development and venture capital investment. To access Amalgam Insights’ perspective at no cost until Friday, January 19th, click through to read our perspective on this important milestone.

On January 24, 2019 at 3 PM Eastern, Amalgam Insights’ DevOps and Open Source Research Fellow, Tom Petrocelli will be sharing his perspectives on the importance of containers in multi-cloud management on the DM Radio episode Contain Yourself? The Key to Hybrid Cloud

This episode will be hosted by Eric Kavanagh, CEO of The Bloor Group and Petrocelli will be accompanied by Samuel Holcman of the Pinnacle Business Group and Pakshi Rajan of Paxata.

Don’t miss this opportunity to get Tom Petrocelli’s guidance and wisdom on the current state of containers and cloud management!

Vendors and Organizations Mentioned: IBM, Ose, WindRiver, Velodyne, UV Partners, TDK Corporation, Chirp Microsystems, Qualcomm, Intel, Zigbee Alliance, Thread Group, Impossible Foods

The CES (Consumer Electronics Show) is traditionally known as the center of consumer technology. Run by the CTA (Consumer Technology Association) in Las Vegas, this show brings out enormous volumes of new technology ranging from smart cars to smart homes to smart sports equipment to smart… well, you get the picture. But within all of these announcements, there were also a number of important announcements that affect the enterprise IT world and the definition of IT that will be important for tech professionals to think about in 2019. Amalgam Insights went through hundreds of different technology press releases and announcements to find the most important announcements that will affect your professional career.

Come along with me as we look at Quantum Computing, Gender Equality, Autonomous Vehicles, Disinfected Smartphones, Low Power Virtual Reality, Neural Net Chips, Internet of Things Interoperability, and, yes, the Impossible Burger.

Quantum Computing

On January 8th, 2019, IBM announced IBM Q System One, the “first integrated universal approximate quantum computing system” designed for commercial use. From a practical perspective, this will allow R&D departments to actually have their own quantum computers. Today, the vast majority of quantum computing work is done based on remote access either to quantum computers or quantum computing emulators, which provide limits on the experimenters’ abilities to customize and configure their computing environments.

To create a quantum computing system, IBM had to bring together hardware that provided high-quality and low-error rate qubits, cryogenic equipment to cool the hardware and quantum activity, as well as the electronics, firmware, and traditional computing capabilities needed to support a quantum environment. Of course, IBM is not new to quantum computing and has been a market leader in this emerging category.

Quantum computing fundamentally matters because we are running up against the physical limits of material science that allow microprocessors to get smaller and faster, which we typically sum up as Moore’s Law. In addition, quantum computing potentially allows both for more secure encryption or the ability to quickly decrypt extremely secure technologies, depending on whether one takes a white-hat or black-hat approach. But the ramifications mean that it is important for security organizations to both start understanding quantum computing and to either stay ahead of black-hat quantum computing efforts or provide white-hat security answers to stay ahead.

Gender Equality at CES

At CES, a woman-designed sex toy originally given an innovation award (Warning: may not be Safe For Work) had its award revoked. The Ose vibrator designed by Lora DiCarlo was entered in the robotics and drone category based on its design by a robotics lab at Oregon State University and eight patents pending for a variety of robotic and biomimicry capabilities.

The product was undoubtedly risque. But CES has previously allowed virtual reality pornography to be shown within the show as well as other anatomical simulations designed for sex.

Given CES’ historical standards for other exhibitors to present similar products and objects, the revoking of this award looks biased. This is an important lesson that the answer to providing a gender-equal environment is not necessarily to simply remove all sexual content. The goal is to eliminate harassment and abuse while providing equal opportunity across gender. As long as sex is a part of consumer technology, CES needs to provide equal opportunity for all genders to present.

Autonomous Vehicles

There were a number of announcements associated with Lidar sensors and edge computing innovations. Two that got Amalgam Insights’ attention included:

WindRiver’s integration of its Chassis automotive software with its TitaniumCloud virtualization software. This announcement hints at the need for the car, as computing system, to be integrated with the cloud. This integration will be important as car manufacturers seek to upgrade car capabilities. As we continue to think about the car both as an autonomous data center of its own and set of computing and processing workloads that need to be upgraded on a regular basis, we will need to consider how the operational technologies associated with autonomous vehicles and other “Things” integrate with carrier-grade and public clouds.

Velodyne announced an end-to-end Lidar solution that includes both a hemisphere Lidar sensor called VelaDome as well as its Velia software. This launch reflects the need for hardware components and software to be integrated in the vehicle world, just as it is in the appliances and virtual machines we often use in the world of IT. This is another data point showing how autonomous vehicles are coming closer to our world of IT both in creating integrated solutions and in requiring IT-like support in the future.

Disinfected Smartphones

UV Partners announced a new product called the UV Angel Aura Clean & Charge, which combines both wireless charging with ultraviolet light disinfection. This product matters because, quite frankly, mobile phones tend to be filthy. That’s what happens when people are holding them for hours a day and rarely wash or disinfect the phones. So, this device will be useful for germophobes.

But there is also the practical aspect of being able to clean phone surfaces with this object more easily. This may lead to being able to use the phone to detect biological matter or changes more effectively without additional dirt and biocontaminants. This could make phones or other sensors more accurate in trying to detect trace elements or compounds and increase the functionality of both phones and “Things” as a result.

Low Power Virtual Reality

TDK Corporation announced its work with Qualcomm through the group company of Chirp Microsystems to improve controller tracking for mobile virtual reality and augmented reality headsets (). Most importantly, the tracking system used for these devices is only several miiliwatts, which is a small fraction of the total power within a standard smartphone battery. This compares to several hundred milliwatts for a standard optical tracking system. With this primary technology in development, both AR and VR experiences become more usable simply because they will take significantly less power to support.

This change may not sound exciting, but Amalgam Insights believes that one of the key challenges to the adoption of AR and VR is simply the battery life needed to use these applications for any extended amount of time. This breakthrough could significantly extend the life of AR and VR apps.

Artificial Intelligence

Intel made a number of chip announcements. Amalgam Insights is not a hardware analyst firm, so most of the mobile and laptop-based announcements are beyond our coverage. But the announcement that got our attention was the Intel Nervana Neural Network Processor. This chip, developed with Facebook, is developed to accelerate the detection of inference associated with the algorithmic processing of neural nets and will drive higher performance machine learning and artificial intelligence efforts.

At a time when every chip player is trying to get ahead with GPUs and TPUs, Intel is making its mark by focusing on the detection of iterative inference, which is a necessary part of the “intelligence” of AI. Amalgam Insights looks forward to seeing how the Nervana processor is made available for commercial use and as a cloud-based capability for the enterprise world.

Internet of Things Interoperability

The Zigbee Alliance and Thread Group announced completing the Dotdot 1.0 specification, which will improve interoperability across smart home devices and networks made by different vendors. By providing a standard application layer that works across a wide variety of vendors and works on an IP networking standard, Dotdot brings a level of standardization to application-level configuration, testing, and certification.

This standard is an important step forward for companies working on Smart Home devices or related Smart Office devices and seeking a common way to ensure that new devices will be able to communicate with existing device investments. Amalgam Insights looks forward to seeing how this standard revolutionizes Smart Buildings and the Future of Work.

And, the Impossible Burger

The belle of the ball, so to speak, at CES was the Impossible Burger 2.0, a soy-based protein held together by heme with iron and protein content similar to beef.

So, this is very cool, but why is this relevant to IT? First, this burger reminds us that food is now tech. Think about both how interesting and weird this is. A company has made custom proteins to build a new type of food designed to replace the taste and role of beef. Or at least that’s where they are today.

Meanwhile in the IT world, identity is increasingly based on biometrics: eyes, fingerprints, facial recognition. It is only a matter of time before either protein or DNA profiles are added to this mix. There will undoubtedly be some controversies and hiccups as this happens, but it is almost inevitable given the types of sensors we have and the evolution of DNA technologies like CRISPR that rapidly sequence and cut up DNA.

So, as we get better at replicating the nutrition and texture of meat with plant-based proteins at the same time that our physical bodies are increasingly used to provide access to our accounts… yes, this gets weird. But we’re probably five-to-ten years away from being hacked by some combination of these technbologies as the DNA, protein, and biometric worlds keep coming closer and closer together.

For now, this is just cool to watch. And the Impossible Burger 2.0 sounds like a great vegan alternative to a burger. But putting the pieces together, identity in 2030 is going to be extremely difficult to manage.

Key Stakeholders: CIO, Enterprise Strategists, Enterprise Architects, Software Asset Managers, Software Developers, Open Source Maintainers

Why It Matters: Open Source is an increasingly important part of the enterprise software portfolio and yet the support, maintenance, and contributions to open source projects are often haphazard, risky, and poorly funded. Tidelift provides a channel to allow organizations and enterprises to effectively fund the founders and maintainers of strategically important open source projects.

Key Takeaway: With this round of funding, Tidelift is well positioned to continue supporting the mission of supporting open source developers through the Tidelift Subscription of security, maintenance, and licensing commitments, through 2019 and beyond.

On January 7, 2019, Tidelift, an Open Source subscription and maintenance company, raised a $25 million Series B round co-led by General Catalyst, Foundry Group, and former Red Hat executive Matthew Szulik. This round came only seven months after an initial $15 million A round and will be used to help Tidelift continue to support Open Source developers, creators, and maintainers seeking financial support so that they can focus on the Open Source projects and packages that they work on with a professional level of support.

Continue reading Market Milestone: Tidelift Raises $25 Million B Round to Improve Open Source Business Models