BYOD, Enterprise IT, flexible working, Opinion

The flexible working phenomenon – what’s holding us back?

Business people working together in officeWe live in a world where the 9-5 office job is rapidly becoming obsolete. The office worker is no longer chained to a desk, thanks to the rapid rise and swift adoption of technologies which enable work to take place at home, on the move, or anywhere with an internet or mobile connection.

At least, that’s what the world would have you believe. According to the latest research from UC EXPO, many workers still aren’t aware that they have the right to request flexible working from their employers. Even more worryingly, many office-based workers say that not all employees have access to these seemingly universal policies. So what’s going on at an employee level? Is the flexible working revolution really as advanced as it seems?

A flexible revolution – embracing new working ideals

It can’t be denied that the workplace and attitudes towards the traditional office-based role is changing. In a sharp increase on previous years, 27% of UK office workers now regularly work outside their base, and just under that (22%) say that they have worked at home, remotely, or elsewhere with flexible hours more in 2015 than they did in previous years.

It’s clear that the option to work flexible hours is seen as a right nowadays, but interestingly, so is remote working. The right to request flexible working became law in 2014, but 74% of the UK’s office-based workforce think that requesting remote working should be a right too.

It’s not just the ability to ‘be your own boss’ which makes flexible working so attractive. 82% of UK workers are much more likely to take a job that offers flexible working benefits than one that doesn’t, which presents an issue for businesses that don’t adhere to this. Whilst some workers are excluded whose job roles do not require a strict 9-5 policy, the benefits of flexible working are more widely recognised than a year ago, with a whopping 90% of those surveyed citing flexible working as essential to maintaining a better work/life balance. So much so, in fact, that it is valued higher than any other benefits, including a season ticket loan and daily free breakfast!

What’s stalling the flexible phenomenon?

Despite the widespread acknowledgment and appreciation of flexible working policies, it seems that total adoption is still a long way away. The concerns of recent years are still prevalent, including questions around BYOD security and the ability to trust employees to actually work when they are out of the office on company time. 67% of UK office workers, in fact, believe that productivity levels either increase or stay the same when working remotely.

Dear Future Im Ready, message on paper, smart phone and coffee on tableAlthough the concerns around productivity and security are decreasing, thanks to increasingly secure technologies available, a worrying number of UK office workers are still not aware of their right to request flexible working. In 2015, 50% of workers were unaware of this law, whereas in early 2016, around 39% are still unaware. So, despite a decrease, it’s still a significant proportion of the workforce who are potentially missing out on adopting the work style that suits them best.

The future of UC

Unified Communications technologies are helping to stimulate the growth of flexible working culture – most of us have used video conferencing at some point, in addition to other cloud-based collaboration tools. This is starting to become more sophisticated, and eventually, we will see a much more fluid working policy for the majority of UK businesses. As UC EXPO exhibitor Tim Bishop of Unify comments: “The office as we know faces an uncertain future. According to our research, 69% of knowledge workers say that having a single office as a physical workplace is less important than it was in the past, and 49% report that their organizations operate through technology and communication (such as virtual teams) rather than through offices and locations”.

Whilst Unify, and many others, argue that this will be a good thing, until the concerns around security are truly resolved, and we have a foolproof method of ensuring productivity and security when employees work remotely, there will always be something holding us back to some extent. That said, it’s clear that this is the future of the workforce – time for businesses and technology providers alike to get on board and embrace the change.

Written by Bradley Maule-ffinch, Director of Strategy at UC EXPO

 

 

 

 

About UC EXPO

 UC EXPO is Europe’s largest unified communications & collaboration (UC&C) event, for those looking to find out how the latest unified communications can drive and support their business. The event showcases brand new exclusive content and senior level insights from across the industry. UC EXPO 2016, together with Unified Communications Insight (www.ucinsight.com) and the world’s largest UC&C LinkedIn group delivers news, insight and knowledge throughout the year. Attending UC EXPO 2016 will help to ensure business decisions are being made based on the latest best practice for improved communications and collaboration, and organisations are able to continue, or start their journey in enabling workforce mobility.

 UC EXPO 2016 will take place on 19-20 April 2016, at Olympia, London. 

 For full details of the event, or to register for free, visit www.ucexpo.co.uk or follow UC EXPO on Twitter using the hashtag #UCEXPO.

AI, Artificial intelligence, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, News & Analysis

AI forms backbone of Facebook’s 10 year plan

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook has seemingly positioned artificial intelligence as one of the catalysts for innovation for the company over the next 10 years.

Outlining its technology roadmap for the next 10 years, the company highlighted artificial intelligence, as well as virtual and augmented reality, as technologies to drive new features and user experience. New features highlighted include translation, photo image searches, ‘talking pictures’ and real-time video classification.

“Artificial Intelligence will power all kinds of different services with better than human level perception and we’ll see the emergence of the next major computing platform in virtual and augmented reality,” said Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg during his opening keynote at F8. “These are all elements of our 10 year roadmap to connect the world and each of these elements is in service of our mission. It’s about bringing people together, that’s what we do here.”

The company has been making efforts in recent months to bolster its position in the artificial intelligence space. Recently, the company announced a string of new hires for its artificial intelligence research team, including a number of acquisitions from Microsoft’s R&D team, another company who have been making strides to perfect AI. The new staff members bring experience to the team in the fields of causal inference in learning systems, computer vision, cost-sensitive learning, speech recognition and syntactic parsing with approximate inference.

Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, Director of Applied Machine Learning at Facebook

Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, Director of Applied Machine Learning at Facebook

On the company blog, Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, Director of Applied Machine Learning at Facebook outlined a number of use cases which are a reality today. “We built an AI backbone that powers much of the Facebook experience and is used actively by more than 25 percent of all engineers across the company. Powered by a massive 40 PFLOPS GPU cluster that teams are using to train really large models with billions of parameters on huge data sets of trillions of examples, teams across the company ae running 50x more AI experiments per day than a year ago, which means that research is going into production faster than ever.”

The company has already applied an AI-based automatic translation system, claiming that an off-the-shelf translation program would not be adequate as they trained on a general corpus like appliance manuals. As language on Facebook is far more colloquial, the systems would not be effective. The company claims that its AI capabilities have the ability to learn and recognize new expressions, regional differences and the various uses of emojis.

In terms of pictures, Facebook claim its AI can understand the content of the image at a pixel level to make classification and searching of image simpler. “This is called image segmentation, and it allows us to recognize individual objects in the image as well as their relation,” said Candela. “Using image segmentation we will be able to build more immersive experiences for the visually impaired with “talking images” you can read with your fingertips, as well as more powerful ways to search images. In one case here, we have the ability to search for ‘a photo of us five on skis on the snow, with a lake in the background and trees on both sides’.

“AI is central to today’s Facebook experience, and, with our research pushing the state of the art, we’re just getting started on this journey. I’m excited to see where it takes us next.”

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Industrial Internet of Things | @ThingsExpo #IoT #IIoT #DigitalTransformation

Throughout history, industrial revolutions have hinged on the power of automating processes. While automation today offers many benefits, imagine if you could automate thousands – or even millions – of processes simultaneously? This is the next potential wave of innovation, and it’s the organizations that are “geographically dispersed” or “automation heavy” that will benefit the most.
While long-range communications and connectivity have become increasingly easier to attain, businesses need to be able to break down their isolated islands of automation in industry to achieve comprehensive and connected automation at scale. For example, there always has been a clear line dividing operations technology (OT) and information technology (IT) networks. The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) blurs that line as industrial operations head in the direction of complete connectivity for all devices on a network – including those remotely located in the field. With new dedicated access layer platforms, IoT data can be analyzed, acted upon and transmitted from anywhere in an Industrial IoT (IIoT) network.

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Four Questions to Ask Before Adopting IoT | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: there’s another side to the Internet that isn’t just about connecting people. The Internet of Things (IoT) is about connecting virtually any “thing” or machine. They could range from personal wearables to smart homes, smart cities’ infrastructure, utilities, transportation, and manufacturing. You’ve probably heard by now; the IoT is far bigger than the Internet of people, and it’s growing fast. Gartner says the IoT will grow 30 percent in 2016, reaching 6.4 billion devices, with more than five million new devices connected daily. It’s expected to continue growing to 20.8 billion devices by 2020.

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What Is #DigitalTransformation? | @CloudExpo #Cloud #IoT #M2M #BigData

In the rush to compete in the digital age, a successful digital transformation is essential, but many organizations are setting themselves up for failure. There’s a common misconception that the process is just about technology, but it’s not. It’s about your business. It shouldn’t be treated as an isolated IT project; it should be driven by business needs with the committed involvement of a range of stakeholders.

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Asymmetric Warfare Includes Cyberwarfare By @JamesCarlini | @CloudExpo #Cloud

This is an excerpt of some concepts from his upcoming book, NANOKRIEG: BEYOND BLITZKRIEG, a book covering the changes in Military Infrastructure, Strategies and Tactics needed to win the War on Terrorism. It includes chapters on cyberterrorism and cyberwarfare.
With the latest terrorist occurrences in Brussels, Belgium, and Paris, France, on hard targets, we tend to equate terrorism with overt acts of small groups in shootings, stabbings, and bombings of people in order to disrupt their day-to-day lives and create fear in a region’s economy.

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Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Cloud (But Were Afraid to Ask) | @CloudExpo #Cloud

Over the last few years, more and more businesses have been embracing the cloud-based technologies for their CRMs, customer service, project development and management, accounting, etc. The reasons of the trend are pretty obvious – all you need to access cloud services are web browser and Internet connection, what allows cloud-based companies to minimize maintenance costs and to boost productivity.

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How New Technology Trends Disrupt the Very Nature of Business By @Dana_Gardner | @ThingsExpo #IoT

Major new trends in technology are translating into disruption, and for the innovative business — opportunity.
The next BriefingsDirect technology innovation thought leadership discussion focuses on how major new trends in technology are translating into disruption, and for the innovative business — opportunity.

From invisible robots, to drones as data servers — from virtual reality to driverless cars — technology innovation is faster than ever, impacting us everywhere, broadening our knowledge, and newly augmenting processes and commerce. We’ll now explore the ways that these technology innovations translate into business impacts, and how consumers and suppliers of services and goods can best prepare.

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Emerging IoT Markets | @ThingsExpo @UnigmaApp #IoT #M2M #DigitalTransformation

Managed IT services wasn’t even a phrase until the early 2000s and, today, there are over 75,000 IT service providers in North America alone. By 2020, there are going to be 50 billion connected devices, and managed IT services might cease to be a phrase again. Unless the MPSs adapt to the new, connected world, we are going to see diminishing returns in that space.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Kirill Bensonoff, CEO of Unigma, will discuss the different opportunities IoT will create for MSPs and IT service providers – from on-site services, to monitoring, managing and consulting.

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AI, Bot, DropBox, Facebook, News & Analysis, Salesforce

Salesforce and Dropbox launch on Facebook’s messenger platform

facebook botSalesforce and Dropbox are two of the first to launch service offerings on Facebook’s new messenger platform.

According to Facebook, Messenger is one of the industry’s fastest growing apps, increasing user rates from 500 million in 2014 to 900 million today. The company have now introduced a number of bot services on the app, allowing businesses to communicate with their customers providing anything from automated subscription content like weather and traffic updates, to customized communications like receipts, shipping notifications, and live automated messages.

“Using Salesforce, businesses are now able to engage with their customers on Facebook Messenger in a whole new way – in fact, Salesforce enables each Messenger interaction to be specifically tailored, based on the context of the entire customer relationship,” said Paul Smith, GM of Salesforce Marketing Cloud in EMEA. “When you remember that most companies are now competing primarily on the customer experience they can deliver, you can begin to see the massive impact of opening up this new channel to businesses: brands will be able to create deeper, more personal 1-to-1 customer journeys within chat. It’s another way in which we’re helping companies to succeed in the Age of the Customer.”

Powered by Salesforce Lightning, the platform will enable customers to deliver personalized engagement at scale with CRM data. The company claims that each message can be linked directly to a customer’s history in the Salesforce CRM platform, enabling brands to deliver personalized messages to customers. The news builds on trends within the industry as vendors aim to create increasingly personalized experiences for customers as a means of meeting the expectations of increasing demanding consumers.

“Now with Messenger, Facebook is inviting companies to engage their customers in new ways on its platform at scale,” said Alex Dayon, Chief Product Officer at Salesforce. “With Salesforce for Messenger companies will be able to easily connect their businesses to Messenger, creating deeper, more personalized and 1-to-1 customer journeys within the chat experience.”

Dropbox has also taken advantage of Facebook’s new platform to increase its own offering. As part of the proposition, users can share files stored on Dropbox’s cloud-storage service directly through Facebook’s messenger app.

“We want people to communicate just the way they want to on Messenger, with everyone they care about,” said Stan Chudnovsky, Head of Product for Messenger at Dropbox on the company’s blog. “Giving our users the ability to share their Dropbox videos and images in Messenger threads with just a few taps will help them bring more style and personality to those conversations.”

While the news has grabbed headlines in a very effective manner, it remains to be seen whether Facebook can police the platform in a way that satisfies consumers. The platform could essentially be seen as an upgrade on SMS advertising which was received coldly by consumers after the initial enthusiasm declined.

The cloud news categorized.