Business Lab

Businesses that want to be digital leaders in their markets need to embrace automation, not only to augment existing capabilities or to reduce costs but to position themselves to successfully maneuver the rapid expansion of IT demand ushered in through digital innovation. “It's a scale issue,” says John Roese, global chief technology officer at Dell Technologies. “Without autonomous operations, it becomes impossible to keep up with the growing opportunity to become a more digital business using human effort alone.” The main hurdle to autonomous operations, says Roese, is more psychological than technological. “You have got to be open-minded to this concept of rebalancing the work between human beings and the machine environments that exist both logically and physically,” he says. “If you're not embracing and wanting it to happen and you're resisting it, all the products and solutions we can deliver to you will not help.” Technology and infrastructure-driven AI and ML discussions are expanding beyond IT into f

The global pandemic accelerated the trend toward a work-from-anywhere, distributed workforce. As we approach a post-pandemic world, companies—and employees—expect this trend to become the norm. While IT departments are rapidly configuring and deploying devices, infrastructure, and software to support the shift in a secure and productive way, employees are likewise having to reset priorities and learn new ways to engage with their coworkers and managers, and to navigate their career goals. This shift requires not only changes in technology and IT approaches, but also culture changes for companies and employees alike. Jenn Saavedra, Dell Technologies' chief human resources officer, distills the required cultural shift through the lens of Dell’s mission to be people centered. “Our people philosophy,” explains Saavedra, “is ultimately about how to inspire people to be their best and do their best work.” To achieve this goal, Dell focuses on four core areas: (A) achievement, (B) balance, (C) connection, and (D) di

Hackers around the globe are smart: they know that it isn’t just good code that helps them break into systems; it’s also about understanding—and preying upon—human behavior. The threat to businesses in the form of cyberattacks is only growing—especially as companies make the shift to embrace hybrid work.   But John Scimone, senior vice president and chief security officer at Dell Technologies, says “security is everyone's job.” And building a culture that reflects that is a priority because cyber attacks are not going to decrease. He explains, “As we consider the vulnerability that industry and organizations face, technology and data is exploding rapidly, and growing in volume, variety, and velocity.” The increase in attacks means an increase in damage for businesses, he continues: “I would have to say that ransomware is probably the greatest risk facing most organizations today.”   And while ransomware isn’t a new challenge, it is compounded with the shift to hybrid work and the talent shortage experts have

From cars to planes, the future of transportation is already here—and is changing rapidly. Software engineering is increasingly central to both the development and maintenance of all kinds of vehicles. That means more people need to start thinking like systems engineers. Dale Tutt, vice president of aerospace and defense industry for Siemens Software, says this means companies must offer more training and planning for those designing and developing vehicles of the future. “As you try to address the talent gap, there's a lot you can do to help make the tools easier to use. By better integrating the tools and by bringing in technologies like AI to help automate the generation of different design concepts and the analysis of those concepts using simulation tools, you can extend the capabilities of the system so that it helps empower your engineers,” says Tutt. “Companies that are the most successful at adopting systems engineering are doing it because systems engineering and the tools being used are becoming a

The next wave of aerospace is just around the corner, and a lot of that innovation is happening thanks to new, faster methods of development. “What's happening now is that companies are trying to understand how they take the lessons from Agile software development and apply those to Agile product development,” explains Dale Tutt, vice president of Aerospace and Defense Industry for Siemens. With Agile software development, you can build software and test it relatively quickly. “When you start talking about an airplane or an air taxi,” Tutt says, “it's expensive to build a prototype and test them, so you have to think about it in a different way and take a different approach. It really takes good program planning.” This new type of product development, where planes and other kinds of air transport are developed faster than ever, still needs to incorporate safety as a top priority, which creates new kinds of challenges. These kinds of products are different than smartphones or other consumer electronics, Tutt e

Companies across all industries are faced with the urgent need to transform the way they do business, including financial services, but changes abound with governance, security, and culture. A shift in mindset and perspective away from “the way things have always been done” is key to a successful digital transformation and to providing the frictionless customer experience banks and other financial services businesses strive to offer. To stay competitive in the wide-ranging fintech landscape, says Michael Ruttledge, chief information officer and head of technology services at Citizens Financial Group, banks need to become more agile and embrace new technologies. He described the five pillars he has used to guide digital transformations at financial institutions: “The first pillar is moving to agile. Second is moving to a more modern architecture. Third is doubling down on the engineering talent at the bank, and fourth is being more efficient and transforming the technology cost structure. Finally, the fifth p

There’s probably no such thing as perfect privacy and security online. Hackers regularly breach corporate firewalls to gain customers’ private information, and scammers constantly strive to trick us into divulging our passwords. But existing tools can provide a high level of privacy—if we use them correctly, says Mashael Al Sabah, a cybersecurity researcher at the Qatar Computing Research Institute in Doha.   The trick is understanding something about the weaknesses and limitations of technologies like blockchain or digital certificates, and not using them in ways that could play into the designs of fraudsters or malware-builders. Successful privacy is “a collaboration between the tool and the user,” Al Sabah says. It requires “using the right tool in the right way.” And testing new technology for privacy and security resilience requires what she calls a “security mindset.” Which, Al Sabah explains, is necessary when assessing new technology. “You think of the different attacks that happened before and that c

In the coming years, mobility solutions—or how we get from point A to point B—will bridge the gap between ground and air transportation—yes, that means flying cars. Technological advancements are transforming mobility for people and, leading to unprecedented change. Nand Kochhar, vice president of automotive and transportation for Siemens Software says this transformation extends beyond transportation to society in general. “The future of mobility is going to be multimodal to meet consumer demands, to offer a holistic experience in a frictionless way, which offers comfort, convenience, and safety to the end consumer.” Thinking about transportation differently is part of a bigger trend, Kochhar notes: “Look at few other trends like sustainability and emissions, which are not just a challenge for the automotive industry but to society as a whole.” The advances in technology will have benefits beyond shipping and commute improvements—these technological advancements, Kochhar argues, are poised to drive an infras

In the past decade, machine learning has become a familiar technology for improving the efficiency and accuracy of processes like recommendations, supply chain forecasting, developing chatbots, image and text search, and automated customer service functions, to name a few. Machine learning today is becoming even more pervasive, impacting every market segment and industry, including manufacturing, SaaS platforms, health care, reservations and customer support routing, natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as intelligent document processing, and even food services. Take the case of Domino’s Pizza, which has been using machine learning tools created to improve efficiencies in pizza production. “Domino’s had a project called Project 3TEN which aimed to have a pizza ready for pickup within three minutes of an order, or have it delivered within 10 minutes of an order,” says Dr. Bratin Saha, vice president and general manager of machine learning services for Amazon AI. “If you want to hit those goals, you hav

What if managers and leaders at companies focused on a new goal: to elevate the human experience? This paradigm shift is something Amelia Dunlop, chief experience officer at Deloitte Digital, advocates for. She and her team have worked hard to measure the amount of humanity in the workplace—a measurement that often depends on how much trust exists between workers and leaders. Dunlop’s team focused on four signals of trust that leaders can track: capability, reliability, humanity, and transparency. Using these four measurements, which make up Deloitte’s HX TrustID solution, the team was able to predict future behaviors with high accuracy. It can appear far-fetched to measure seemingly intangible concepts with hard data, and Dunlop acknowledges that many remain skeptical about her use of the word “love” when it comes to work. “There was part of me that wanted to be deliberately provocative, to say that there is, in fact, a role for love in the workplace. And the way it connects is that worth can be either intri

Quoting John Lennon, Bill Kanarick describes the tectonic industry shifts brought on by the pandemic: “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” After months of hunkering down at home, consumers got used to online shopping, telehealth doctor’s appointments and contactless and curbside pickup, effectively doubling e-commerce sales in the last 18 months. “So just in a one-year period, what you saw is the intensification of commitment to an investment in digital transformation driven by the pandemic in part,” says Kanarick, EY’s global chief transformation architect for consulting. “Because you had to have a distributed workforce, you had to better meet the customer where the customer needed to be met.” These new consumerist practices are here to stay, Kanarick predicts—and that means businesses have to reinvent themselves. He discusses how companies are rising to the challenge of new consumer needs and differentiates businesses that will thrive from those that will stru

Artificial intelligence holds an enormous promise, but to be effective, it must learn from massive sets of data—and the more diverse the better. By learning patterns, AI tools can uncover insights and help decision-making not just in technology, but also pharmaceuticals, medicine, manufacturing, and more. However, data can’t always be shared—whether it’s personally identifiable, holds proprietary information, or to do so would be a security concern—until now. “It’s going to be a new age.” Says Dr. Eng Lim Goh, senior vice president and CTO of artificial intelligence at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “The world will shift from one where you have centralized data, what we've been used to for decades, to one where you have to be comfortable with data being everywhere.” Data everywhere means the edge, where each device, server, and cloud instance collect massive amounts of data. One estimate has the number of connected devices at the edge increasing to 50 billion by 2022. The conundrum: how to keep collected data se

Advanced cybersecurity capabilities are essential to safeguard software, systems, and data in a new era of cloud, IoT, and other smart technologies. In the real estate industry, for example, companies are concerned about the potential for hijacked elevators, as well as compromised building management and HVAC systems. According to Greg Belanger, vice president of security technologies at CBRE, the world’s largest commercial real estate services and investment firm, securing the enterprise has grown more complex—security teams must be familiar with controls and hardware on new devices, as well as what version of firmware is installed and what vulnerabilities are present. For example, if an HVAC system is connected to the internet, he questions, “Is the firmware that’s running the HVAC system vulnerable to attack? Could you find a way to traverse that network and come in and attack employees of that company?”  Understanding enterprise vulnerabilities are crucial to safeguard physical assets but investing in the

If you drive in the United States, chances are you can’t remember the last time you bought a paper map, printed out a digital map, or even stopped to ask for directions. Thanks to GPS and the mobile mapping apps on our smartphones and their real-time routing advice, navigation is a solved problem. But in developing or fast-growing parts of the world: not so much. If you live in a place like Doha, Qatar, where the length of the road network has tripled over the last five years, commercial mapping services from Google, Apple, Bing, or other providers simply can’t keep up with the pace of infrastructure change.  “Each one of us who grew up in Europe or the US probably cannot understand the scale at which these cities grow,” says Rade Stanojevic, a senior scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), part of Hamad Bin Khalifa University, a Qatar Foundation university, in Doha. “Pretty much every neighborhood sees a new underpass, new overpass, new large highway being added every couple of months.” 

For the past several years, economists and government leaders have regularly sounded alarms about the dangers of big tech monopolies. On her 2020 campaign website, for example, Senator Elizabeth Warren said “big tech companies have too much power, too much power over our economy, our society, our democracy." In the months since the election, politicians on both the left and right have expressed concerns over how to encourage competition and innovation among the big tech leaders, and even how to hold onto democratic ideals in the face of digital misinformation and conspiracy theories.  The challenge with a company like Facebook is that its business model actively encourages tribalism and anger, which is not the way markets usually work, says Paul Romer, an economics professor at New York University who previously served as the chief economist of The World Bank and was the co-recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics Sciences. “When economists defend the market, we have this very simple idea in mind, where

Executives need to clearly communicate risks but also bring context to data. Tech talk is out: speaking the same language will win the day. It’s drilled into the heads of board directors and the C-suite by scary data-breach headlines, lawyers, lawsuits, and risk managers: cybersecurity is high-risk. It’s got to be on the list of a company’s top priorities. But how many directors get lost in the technicalities of technology? The challenge for a chief information security officer (CISO) is talking to the board of directors in a way they can understand and support the company. Niall Browne, senior vice president and chief information security officer at Palo Alto Networks, says that you can look at the CISO-board discussion as being a classic sales pitch: successful CISOs will know how to close the deal just like the best salespeople do. “That's what makes a really good salesperson: the person that has the pitch to close” he says. “They have the ability to close the deal. So they ask for something.”  “For ages,”

During the past few months, Microsoft Exchange servers have been like chum in a shark-feeding frenzy. Threat actors have attacked critical zero-day flaws in the email software: an unrelenting cyber campaign that the US government has described as “widespread domestic and international exploitation” that could affect hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. Gaining visibility into an issue like this requires a full understanding of all assets connected to a company’s network. This type of continuous tracking of inventory doesn’t scale with how humans work, but machines can handle it easily. For business executives with multiple, post-pandemic priorities, the time is now to start prioritizing security. “It’s pretty much impossible these days to run almost any size company where if your IT goes down, your company is still able to run,” observes Matt Kraning, chief technology officer and co-founder of Cortex Xpanse, an attack surface management software vendor recently acquired by Palo Alto Networks. You might

In a recent survey, “2021 Thriving in an AI World,” KPMG found that across every industry—manufacturing to technology to retail—the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is increasing year over year. Part of the reason is digital transformation is moving faster, which helps companies start to move exponentially faster. But, as Cliff Justice, US leader for enterprise innovation at KPMG posits, “Covid-19 has accelerated the pace of digital in many ways, across many types of technologies.” Justice continues, “This is where we are starting to experience such a rapid pace of exponential change that it’s very difficult for most people to understand the progress.” But understand it they must because “artificial intelligence is evolving at a very rapid pace.” Justice challenges us to think about AI in a different way, “more like a relationship with technology, as opposed to a tool that we program,” because he says, “AI is something that evolves and learns and develops the more it gets exposed to humans.” If your b

There’s nothing new about conspiracy theories, disinformation, and untruths in politics. What is new is how quickly malicious actors can spread disinformation when the world is tightly connected across social networks and internet news sites. We can give up on the problem and rely on the platforms themselves to fact-check stories or posts and screen out disinformation—or we can build new tools to help people identify disinformation as soon as it crosses their screens. Preslav Nakov is a computer scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute in Doha specializing in speech and language processing. He leads a project using machine learning to assess the reliability of media sources. That allows his team to gather news articles alongside signals about their trustworthiness and political biases, all in a Google News-like format. “You cannot possibly fact-check every single claim in the world,” Nakov explains. Instead, focus on the source. “I like to say that you can fact-check the fake news before it was eve

The digital revolution is here, but not everyone is benefiting equitably from it. And as Silicon Valley’s ethos of “move fast and break things” spreads around the world, now is the time to pause and consider who is being left out and how we can better distribute the benefits of our new data economy. “Data is the main resource of a new digital economy,” says IT for Change director Parminder Singh. Global society will benefit because the economy will benefit, argues Singh, on decentralization of data and distributed digital models. Data commons—or open data sources—are vital to help build an equitable digital economy, but with that comes the challenge of data governance. This podcast episode was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not produced by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. “Not everybody is sharing data,” says Singh. Big tech companies are holding onto the data, which stymies the growth of an open data economy, but also the growth of society, education, sc