You can’t really blame most people for thinking employee surveys are a lost cause. Survey fatigue is a real thing, and every organization has its unique red tape when it comes to data collection and HR policy. If you can even manage to convince your employees to respond to that well-crafted questionnaire, how do you separate the signal from the noise and operationalize this information for ITOps?
Good IT Support is harder to pin down than you’d think but deciding which technology is better than the next is pretty straightforward for most of us. Who wouldn’t pick the latest iPhone or Android device over a flip-phone? Actually, most senior citizens—but to their credit flip-phones never really die, they just regenerate into larger flip-phones. Bad example. Point is we can rate, compare, trial, and study just about every digital technology on the market.
You probably don’t know who Claude Shannon is but you have much to thank him for. He was by all accounts a bona fide genius that dreamed up the underlying concept of digital computing back in 1948—decades before Wozniak, Jobs, and Gates sprung onto the scene.
A few weeks ago I attended the Digital Workplace & Employee Experience Summit in Berlin hosted by Platinum Edge. I’ve been to hundreds of conferences in my professional career but none like this one. Surprisingly, the attendees and speakers weren’t just IT engineers like myself, but instead a mix and mash of human resources, change management, content marketing, and digital analytics professionals—all with skin in the proverbial workplace experience game.
Like a slow-moving tsunami, millennials have seeped into every nook and cranny of the modern workplace. I must admit, I’m one of “them”. Just your everyday beany-wearing, meme-sending, coffee-roasting, emoji-speaking, all-entitled millennial. Ok, not all of those stereotypes are true but some do fit.
Experience NYC hosted several quality speakers but one in particular stood out to me for his unique message: Andrew Hewitt, a leading IT Analyst from Forrester. Probably the last thing you would expect to hear at an IT solutions conference is a captivating talk grounded in human psychology. Feelings? Perceptions? Beliefs? These topics don’t seem to fit nicely into bits and bytes. They’re perceived as foreign, un-engineer speak.
Gartner once wrote that by 2020, “the average person will have more conversations with bots (chatbots) than with their spouse”. That prediction might seem a bit farfetched and probably more of a sign for relationship disaster, but there is some truth there: for many people chatbots are already an integral part of modern-day life. From turning on the lights, to picking our favorite songs and ordering food—we use chatbots for almost everything and expect them to work all the time.
