For decades, writers and filmmakers have imagined dystopian futures where AI displaces and tries to destroy humanity. So, it’s understandable that people are apprehensive about generative AI’s foray into the workplace. It’s important to acknowledge AI’s transformative effect on workplaces, industries, economies and everyday life in ways we’re just starting to envision.

Even before ChatGPT came on the scene, researchers projected AI would displace 85 million jobs by 2025, but that same study also predicted 97 million new jobs will be created. Organizations that embrace and develop AI, provide incentives for employees to use it and create a human-centric culture where AI helps employees succeed at work will win the future.

As CTO of a team that recently launched a successful AI product for the global employer of record market, I’m optimistic — not only about the value of the technology but also for the employees whose knowledge and expertise AI will augment. Here’s a closer look at how employees and AI complement each other’s strengths and can work together to create business value within a human-centric company culture.

AI Should Augment Human Capabilities Rather Than Replace People

To address the elephant in the room, AI won’t replace human knowledge workers. It requires our insight into what’s happening in the real world to grow and learn to accomplish new tasks. According to some studies, approximately 90% of content online is predicted to be AI generated by 2026, i.e., synthetic data. In some scenarios, synthetic data is useful for training specific models. In fact, a 2021 leveraging synthetic data to refine AI-powered fraud detection tools.

But past a certain point, synthetic data can corrupt large language models due to LLMs depending on unique, creative insight related to real-life events, systems and trends to produce reliable answers. Models like ChatGPT may curate and repurpose existing content, but they also rely on human knowledge and creative thinking that transcends linear reasoning. For example, if companies are trying to hire, recruit and pay international talent, turn to AI for the latest HR best practices, which often change in response to new legislation and emerging trends, they’d need to use an AI model that incorporates human expertise to ensure accurate answers.

Some of the most exciting applications of generative AI are solutions that combine proprietary business expertise with LLM platforms to create a generative AI chat interface. This type of knowledge base can expedite delivery of information to internal and external customers and become a more valuable business asset over time as it learns and improves. But that’s only the case if company leaders think of employees not just as people who help administer the technology but as partners in a sociotechnical system, where people and AI work together, each making contributions to generate value.

Redefining Employee Roles in AI-Powered Industries

The best way to create a system where interactions between humans and technology create value is to build AI solutions in collaboration with employees, not as a separate project to replace them. This is especially important in industries that offer expertise and knowledge as their primary product.

A productive AI-human partnership will require new ways of thinking about how to deliver knowledge to customers. For example, in some jobs, employees apply expertise by responding to emails, submitting helpdesk tickets or collaborating with customers on phone calls. A new role for those employees might be analyzing emerging trends, writing content and training models, bringing the same expertise to solve customer problems in a novel way.

To develop AI solutions that augment employee expertise and knowledge, technology leaders will first need unfettered access to company data — including information that might be difficult to reach due to the use of legacy systems. They’ll also require AI-specific talent to help build out the solution, a blend of expertise from the software engineering and data science disciplines. That’s a commodity already in short supply, so finding people with the right skills should be a priority for an AI project.

Equally as important, building AI solutions will require incentives across the workforce to fine-tune the generative AI solution after launch. As the model ingests more and more information, it learns and becomes more adept at solving problems. Employers who bring more people into the conversation with AI will create additional value by providing multiple perspectives. So, if a customer has a question, the AI chat interface can provide an initial answer that can later be refined by human partners to create a solution that includes well thought-out strategies.

Building a Human-Centric Culture

So how can companies create a generative loop where humans and AI work together to constantly improve output? My AI project team created a chat interface that automates some of the mundane and time-consuming aspects of our knowledge workers’ jobs, and this has proved to be a powerful motivator for employees to keep engaging with the system. It frees staff from tedious tasks and gives them more time to focus on higher level work. That benefit answers the “what’s in it for me?” question that employees naturally ask themselves.

Other real-world examples of ROI from our AI project include employees getting instant answers to questions, when before they used to have to wait hours or days for a subject matter expert to weigh in so they could resolve an issue for a client. Another internal user called the chat interface a gamechanger because it can instantly access data across multiple systems that a person would have to laboriously assemble by consulting several different applications and datasets.

If you can create an architecture that seamlessly accesses data companywide and put together an innovation team that’s encouraged to experiment and explore new possibilities with emerging AI technology, you can build a solution that adds value immediately. And if you operate within an environment where people are adaptable and motivated to access AI to fulfill your company’s mission, you can leverage that human-centric culture to transform the business.

Every business will adapt in its own unique way, but being transparent about how AI will affect roles, encouraging employees to embrace change and instituting a more collaborative approach are essential across the board. Ready or not, generative AI will continue to transform the way companies operate, and an AI-driven business transformation, that leverages human capital, can offer exciting opportunities for businesses to serve customers better and gain a competitive edge.

Duri Chitayat is CTO of Safeguard Global

The post Leading the Evolution Towards Human-Centric AI Work Cultures appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Reportedly, a single replacement part, such as a keyboard, costs nearly half the cost of a complete Chromebook. As a result, many school districts are buying extra devices to serve as spare parts.

This is just one example of the technological dilemmas facing school districts today. What’s more, limited capital prevents them from buying the newest hardware or upgrading to the latest software versions. With technology rapidly changing, how can educational institutions keep up?

For school districts, a hardware purchase will need several years to get a substantial return on investment (ROI). Unfortunately, this comes at the cost of students using older technology.

The Wave of Device-Agnostic Systems

A growing wave of educators also allow learners to use their existing smart devices when attending remote classes—a so-called Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) policy. Instead of providing the required equipment or specifying specific operating systems (OS), they run systems that accommodate devices regardless of OS or hardware configurations. As long as they meet minimum requirements, any smart device will do.

While this benefits many students, some school districts may have trouble implementing this system. Even if they don’t have the funds to provide students with ideal devices, they’re also unable to maintain the necessary system that accommodates virtually all types of devices.

In addition, when class hardware requirements get more complex due to evolving software, many students become marginalized as their devices can’t keep up. As a result, schools either abide by the lowest common denominator or require students to make costly upgrades.

Unlocking the Power of DaaS: How It Can Revolutionize Education

Can school districts actually implement a digital transformation strategy that doesn’t involve hardware purchases? Yes, through a Device-as-a-Service (DaaS) approach.

Schools usually operate on the premise that students log into the system through either school-issued or personal devices. However, advancements in software development often require users to ensure their hardware keeps pace. For cost-conscious organizations such as school districts, it’s a never-ending cycle of hardware and software upgrades.

A DaaS service provider solves this problem by supplying the computing environment students need and giving customers the choice to upgrade their hardware.

Instead of getting stuck with their initial investment—even when it turns obsolete—DaaS ensures users always have the latest hardware to go with their software. In return, clients pay a fixed subscription that covers hardware and software costs and maintenance and management tasks.

Planning for Change: Steps to Develop a Digital Transformation Strategy for Schools

As you develop a digital transformation strategy, there are a few things to consider:

• The needs of your school, teachers, and students: What are your pain points, and where could you use more support?
• Your current technology: Is there anything you can keep? What gaps need to be filled?
• Key stakeholders: Your digital equipment must serve students, teachers, and IT administrators, so get buy-in from each group.
• The technology you actually need: Don’t just follow trends. Look for solutions that meet your needs now and can be scaled up or down as things change.

For school districts, enacting a digital transformation strategy means going beyond the cycle of sticking to what they can afford. School districts typically mandate their IT department to keep using existing equipment until it breaks down or becomes unusable. But the DaaS model enables schools to acquire new technology regardless of whether funding is available.

DaaS also reduces the time your IT team spends evaluating and purchasing devices, making them work together, and then keeping them in line with user needs. This frees them to look toward the future and propose systemic improvements to the learning process.

Maximizing ROI: Evaluating the Benefits and Costs of DaaS in Education

A DaaS digital transformation strategy provides many benefits. For instance, school districts won’t have to manage hardware or get stuck with old equipment until achieving an ROI. Additionally, administrators will no longer accumulate obsolete hardware in their storage areas or be tasked with disposing of old devices cheaply and ethically.

Instead, school administrators can breathe easier knowing that, regardless of how computing requirements change from year to year, their tech budget will remain fixed. In fact, they won’t have to worry about capital expenditures every time better and more powerful technology arrives. DaaS provides predictable operational expenses.

Common Challenges and Solutions in Implementing a Digital Transformation Strategy in Schools

To keep the school district’s entire device fleet synced with each other, you’ll need powerful and reliable device management software. Modern cloud technology can maintain secure, encrypted, and reduced-latency connections when monitoring or updating devices.

For this purpose, outmoded software that uses legacy protocols should give way to platforms that harness modern solutions like Amazon Web Services (AWS). This way, even the smallest IT staff can perform remote updates, fixes, and installations to a single device or the entire fleet with just a few button clicks.

The platform should be OS agnostic to easily connect to and manage all allowed devices. What’s more, the task of protecting each connected device means better management and security options. Forget device access as a yes-or-no equation; the ideal device manager should have no problem creating different user access levels that match their job descriptions.

In addition, security means having the capability to remotely disable units or erase data from compromised devices.

Prioritize DaaS Providers Using a Central Device Management Platform

A DaaS approach enables school districts to build a digital transformation strategy that maintains the most updated hardware and software while keeping costs static. Look for a partner that can help your IT team manage, maintain, and secure all subscribed devices.

When choosing the right DaaS vendor to support your digital transformation strategy, choose the one that places a premium on superior device management capabilities. A central device management platform should be easy for your team to use, OS- and device-agnostic, and built for multiple users under one account. It should also enable app and device management, remote support, monitoring and analysis, and automation.

Nadav Avni, CMO of Radix Technologies

The post Preparing for the Future: Why Schools Need a Digital Transformation Strategy With DaaS appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Networking in and with the cloud involves managing the interconnections of a wide array of devices, services, and applications: VPC containers, gateways, load balancers, controllers, firewalls, routers, switches, servers, clients, IoT endpoints, controllers, service meshes, load balancers, firewalls, edge services, probes, and more, not to mention the many application integrations. These distributed networks present unique challenges but, if correctly managed, can provide highly scalable, robust, and available applications with a competitive ROI.

With over two decades of experience in networking at scale, I’ve had the privilege of working with on-prem, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud networks and transitioning between these architectures. In this piece, I will first explain what I see as the main promises, both fiscal and technological, of using the cloud, and what costs these promises can cover up.

Promised cost reductions with cloud networking services

Proponents of cloud architectures maintain that their managed infrastructures keep personnel and networking costs down, all the while promoting high-velocity software development. So, the logic goes, cloud networks are cheaper to build, operate, service and secure.

Managed cloud networking, hardware, and storage

With functions, instances, clusters, and connections disappearing and reappearing in mere moments, many integral cloud network components (service meshes, API gateways, controllers, VPCs, etc.) have strong automagic components that abstract the pain of an ephemeral network away from the network engineer. This managed networking allows for more network elasticity, and provides an easy way to store, backup and secure data, all while reducing costs with more granular, on-demand pricing that eliminates idle or over-used resources.

Security, maintenance and advancement of hardware are also abstracted away from cloud customers, reducing CAPEX and IT personnel costs.

High velocity development

Agile software development is a byproduct of allowing software development teams to iterate quickly in their architectural choices to best fit their business demands.  The virtualization available via cloud services enables this agility by allowing engineers to deploy services with highly customized, decoupled architectures. These cloud-based architectures can be updated regularly and independently of their larger application context, especially with the help of CI/CD tools, removing many common deployment bottlenecks from the development cycle.

This accelerated delivery of software changes in the cloud allows for faster turnover of features, bug fixes and security updates, and is more likely to drive customer adoption, satisfaction, and ultimately, revenue generation.

The hidden costs of cloud networking

I just covered what I consider to be some of the common, high-level cost reduction promises of cloud providers and proponents. But moving to the cloud can’t be a perfect, pain-free solution. Unfortunately, cloud provider marketing tends to leave out some significant production realities for teams considering the move to cloud-centric development.

The cost of complexity

In a word, cloud-based development is complex. The myriad of services, applications, devices, regions, policies, access privileges, protocols, security threats, architectures and deployment strategies makes the scale of complexity in cloud networks a truly unique challenge.

While cloud providers and associated SaaS companies do their best to abstract away a lot of the pain of this complexity, this can make cloud-native organizations strongly dependent on the fiscal and engineering choices of the service providers.

Cloud-based pricing models

In a research paper published in the International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, tracked pricing strategies of cloud businesses and clearly illustrates why runaway cloud spend is such a threat for engineering teams. With so many concurrent pricing models at play, keeping track and optimizing for cost is a tall order.

Network engineers often have to take into account a cocktail of variable pricing strategies, including but not limited to:

• Time-based
• Volume-based
• Resource-based
• Service-based
• Content-based
• Location-based/edge
• Priority
• Subscription
• Dynamic

The cost of monitoring complexity

For distributed networks at scale, monitoring becomes a daunting expense if not handled well.

Consider the massive amounts of data, for every instance, with multiple copies, and often millions of data points between metrics, labels, traces, flow logs, etc., and the costs that this data incurs:

• the cost of the services used to instrument, aggregate, move, transform, store, and analyze this data
• the cost of the teams required to build and maintain these monitoring platforms and tools

The cost of dependency

Cloud-native development is rife with dependencies: the cloud providers, the SaaS and open source development, deployment and monitoring tools.

Takeaways

For simple, standalone applications, the cloud can offer quick wins and cost savings:

• Easy delivery of items like static web pages
• Easy storage and backup of data
• Reduced personnel
• Increased development agility
• Shifting from capital to open expenditures

As applications and their networking demands become more complex, the cloud can present high costs that are difficult to predict, control or optimize. But, with network observability principles and strategies, the cost of these complexities can be managed and ultimately provide significant improvements to your organization’s bottom line.

The post The Hidden Costs of Cloud Networking appeared first on My TechDecisions.

According to Gartner, organizations with diverse IT-business collaborations will deliver business outcomes 25% faster than their competitors.

Automating processes is often key to accelerating these business outcomes. Process automation – i.e., digitizing processes with dedicated business applications that enable task and workflow automation – thus becomes the low-hanging fruit for digital transformation, allowing CIOs to better align IT with the organizations’ business strategy.

Related: How to Achieve Alignment Between Business & IT for Your Automation Projects

For organizations, business process automation is critical to ensuring business continuity, lowering costs, increasing margins, and reducing errors and risks. It can also improve staff morale and creativity due to a reduction in chaotic and inefficient processes. But what about the impact on the CIO and the larger IT team?

While the benefits of process automation for organizations are abundant, pursuing automation projects can deliver direct benefits for the CIO too, including:

#1 Gaining business user allies through tactical task automation

Today’s business users often need help automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks; the sort of things often handled using emails, spreadsheets, or physical paper clutter.

Though some business process automation projects are indeed pushed from the top down as part of the organization’s global strategy, a large number of them are driven bottom-up by the needs of these business users.

The “citizen development” movement – encouraging non-IT-trained employees to use low-code / no-code platforms to create business applications – seemed attractive but has proved difficult to make work and has often fallen short of expectations.

Very few citizens have the talent – let alone the desire – to build applications, and the ones who do often find it conflicting with their primary duties. When it does work, it’s usually short-cycle, short-lifespan efforts for personal tasks. Projects beyond that small, short scope require greater skills and/or access to curated resources.

In other words – it’s almost impossible to bypass IT. But it is possible to improve and augment them. And it is possible to optimize their efforts.

While IT continues to work on shared-value projects, CIOs can have them coordinate and orchestrate those small, personal, short-term tactical efforts users can do for themselves.

Procuring and promoting the use of the right tools, so IT is seen as the facilitator of citizen activity, not its nemesis, produces quick wins, yields goodwill, and whets appetites for larger-scale efforts.

That’s important because those large-scale efforts will only succeed through the collaboration of users and IT.

#2 Showing tangible evidence of productivity

Regardless of the IT project, business leaders always want to know: how can we determine, deliver on, and measure the key business outcomes of this project?

While it can be difficult to quantify the successes of simple task automation and data management efforts, process-oriented solutions typically have outcomes that are highly measurable, and thus reportable (the volume or pace of loan applications processed, for instance). Simply put, business process automation empowers CIOs to demonstrate ROI.

When the road to success on long-term, strategic IT projects (whether related to IT infrastructure, the ERP exchange, or something else) gets bumpy, being able to present process automation quick wins that positively impact the overall business becomes an ace up the CIO’s sleeve.

#3 Turning “can’t” into “can”

Building and maintaining business applications doesn’t have to consume a large number of up-front resources or require orchestrating a cacophony of otherwise-disconnected moving parts before a single step can be taken.

When CIOs treat business applications as process automation projects, they can begin with the work to be done, not the assets to be managed.

When approached with an agile mindset based on continuous feedback, business process automation enables the CIO to quickly deliver applications that are consistent, maintainable, and can evolve over time to include ambitious assets.

But along the way, such efforts yield regularly expanding positive results. That persistent positive sentiment is invaluable to gaining trust among business stakeholders.

#4 Delivering more value to the C-Suite

The modern CIO is ultimately responsible for not only creating a healthy IT infrastructure, but also efficient information dissemination that empowers the C-suite to make better decisions faster and execute them effectively.

Often processes are assumed, inferred, and ad-hoc. While a process might exist, it might have inconsistent outcomes and be poorly understood – which means efforts to improve it might be doomed before they begin.

Often, a benefit of automating a process is to formally document it for the first time – which then starts the journey toward better efforts and outcomes.

With workflow automation, processes become visible, transparent, well-governed, standardized, and auditable, meeting that requirement by providing management with strategic insights, indispensable to corporate growth.

This solidifies the CIO’s role as not just a valued member of the strategic leadership team, but a change instigator, turning digital transformation strategy into reality to create a modern workplace that improves how people work and how the company operates.

By stepping outside the confined IT role, the CIO can help drive true innovation and transform the company into a data-driven enterprise.

In conclusion

I never need to hear about “saving time and money” or buzzwords like “streamlined efficiency” again. It’s not that those terms, and those goals, don’t matter – they do – but at this point, they’re a baseline expectation.

What matters is where you’re saving time and money through streamlined efficiency, how you’re choosing to do it to, and what long-term cumulative cultural changes will happen within your organization as a result.

Only CIOs who balance business and technical skills are in a position to get this right.

The post 4 Ways Process Automation Pays Off for the CIO appeared first on My TechDecisions.

This technology is designed to make your organization function seamlessly and effectively regardless of if your workforce is working in the office or remotely.

These solutions help streamline workflow and productivity within your organization and can bring some truly sizable returns on your investment. That collaboration technology ROI can be summed up in three main areas: cost savings, productivity gains and the ability to innovate.

Cost Savings

Particularly for collaboration solutions and videoconferencing platforms like WebEx, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Slack, the most apparent benefit is dramatically reduced travel costs.

With this technology, end users can replicate those valuable and personal face-to-face meetings from anywhere in the world, reducing the need to travel across the country to meet with a new client, customer or business partner.

Collaboration technology accomplishes the same thing when recruiting for an important job. Rather than pay for travel expenses to interview candidates, organizations can hold virtual interviews.

According to Carl Wiese, vice president of global collaboration sales at Cisco, organizations can also use these collaboration tools to offset some building costs by holding virtual meetings. That can help eliminate the need for costly office space like training or meeting rooms.

Remote work was becoming a popular trend long before the COVID-19 pandemic forced millions of workers into their homes, and collaboration solutions became extremely popular and helped organizations continue to serve their customers. Now, research suggests that those organizations that realized the benefit of these solutions are now considering reducing their office footprint.

Productivity

Collaboration solutions also give end users a significant boost in productivity, since the technology can accomplish simple tasks in a fraction of the time it would normally take.

For example, if you need clarification on a project but you aren’t sure where your supervisor or coworker are, you can send an instant message, email or video call right from your workstation – wherever that may be.

Collaboration technology also helps take planning and logistics out of the equation when working in a group. With platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, GoToMeeting and others, organizations can collaborate effectively and efficiently without even having to meet in person.

This can cater to each individual employee’s preferences especially as the flexible workplace culture becomes more mainstream, says Mark Strassman, senior vice president and general manager of unified communications and collaboration at LogMeIn, GoToMeeting’s provider.

“Efficient workflow and open communication channels are the only way to make this type of work possible,” Strassman says.” Collaboration tools improve employee efficiency by advancing communication, promoting common goals, fostering shared values and building relationships.”

Innovation

According to Wiese, collaboration solutions and technologies are transforming virtually every industry as the world becomes more connected.

“Collaboration tools help companies enter new markets; build new business models; accelerate innovation cycles; and make faster, better decisions,” Wiese writes.

For example, the healthcare industry has made great use of collaboration technology to help diagnose and treat patients more quickly and accurately. They’re even using teleconferencing platforms to communicate with patients who aren’t able to get into the doctor’s office.

Educators are using the technology to communicate with students in new ways, including remote learning.

Collaboration technology can arm your customer service representatives with the information they need to help solve customers problems much quicker than they could before.

Read Next: Tips for Buying Collaboration Technology

Aaron McArdle, CEO of conference room installation firm RoomReady, says every company doing business right now is first a technology company.

For example, successful banks are technology companies that are in financial services. Successful plumbers are technology companies that deliver plumbing services.

“Technology is the foundation of how all great companies grow and innovate at scale, and if you don’t embrace that, then you’re going to be at a serious disadvantage to somebody who does,” McArdle says.  “People talking to people is the most important part of your business, so anything that you can do to facilitate that is going to is a secret weapon for you.”

The post Three Returns You Should Expect with Collaboration Technology Investment appeared first on My TechDecisions.

But the fact is that a digital signage system costs money – in the initial purchase of hardware and software; the work hours to install, test and deploy; the work hours to maintain the system, as well as creating and scheduling content.

You also might have subscriptions for automated content or a cloud-based system, which have annual costs associated with them. Then there’s training, maintenance, updates and so on. And though costs continue to fall each year, it all adds up.

But are you stuck with only intangibles in return for all this outlay? Not at all.

There are a number of ways to offset your hard and soft costs, and even turn your digital signage into a profit-making component of your business. To answer Mr. Miller’s question below, the way money makes money is through the creation of opportunity.

And your digital signage value presents a number of opportunities.

Digital Signage Advertising

“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” – British advertising tycoon David Ogilvy

Your digital signage messages are, essentially, headlines. You might have a couple of data points on there, or connect several messages together to present a longer, more detailed campaign, but they are short, to-the-point bits of information.

Digital signs are also highly visual, and pairing a pithy message with a high-quality image can not only communicate a lot, but entice the audience to action.

This makes your digital signage value a natural fit for for-profit businesses, either inside your facility or nearby. It doesn’t matter if you have onsite facilities that you own (like a cafeteria or coffee shop), or you have onsite facilities you rent to outside parties; you can easily drive traffic to those places using digital signage messages.

If you own them, then the increase in sales will directly benefit your organization. If someone else operates them, then you can charge them for advertising on your digital signs.

If you’re a corporate hub and you know employees often have lunch at a nearby restaurant, consider reaching out to that restaurant and creating a strategic partnership. They advertise on your signs, and you charge them a fee for access to your audience.

Related: Want More Engagement? Use Digital Signage Gamification to Your Advantage

The only real caveat here is that what goes up on your screens should be relevant and valuable to your audience. Don’t just turn your digital signage into an advertising free-for-all.

That’s a sure-fire way to make them lose digital signage value to your core audience. For example, you might think you wouldn’t partner with a local car wash at a K-12 school since children don’t drive.

But maybe you would, only displaying those messages when you know parents will be at the school, or only on staff-facing digital signs. And, of course, 16-18-year-old students are most likely driving.

You also want any messages that go on your screens to fit in with your brand and identity. You could either offer to create ads for businesses, or create branded templates that fit in well with your overall look. These ads could be somehow tailored to your specific audience as well, making them feel more relevant.

Pricing & Digital Signage ROI

Certain digital signs will have more traffic moving past them than others, or at certain times of the day, a particular sign might see a larger audience.

You could have a sliding price scale, with higher-visibility signs or ads displayed during high-traffic times costing a bit more. Creating loyalty programs with local vendors can also be another way to guarantee revenue.

“Money makes money, but what makes money make money?” – Henry Miller

Static, single-message ads could be at one price point, while video ads could be at a higher one. A series of connected ads, like a campaign, could be at still another price.

But, again, it needs to be enticing to your audience. Suggest to advertisers that they offer something – a discount using a special code, a frequent customer program – that is unique to ads placed on your digital signs.

People will be more likely to attend the local Oktoberfest, and be less like to find the ad intrusive when it comes around in the playlist, if they know that they get a special 20% discount off admission fees, or a free drink by taking a smartphone snap of the ad, or something similar.

Local events, community businesses, special sales, bookstores that offer discounts on books and publications specific to your industry, swag, local food and refreshment providers – just about anyone might find it worthwhile to pay a bit to advertise on your digital signs.

Good digital signage value involves a system that is a bit like a community board in a small-town square – everyone walks past and looks at it, and it’s also anonymous. You keep control of your audience’s information, so there’s no chance for a business to spam them.

And by offering unique discounts, products or services that are tailored to your audience, both you and the advertiser have built-in ROI.

One way to approach potential advertisers is to show them some figures, and base your pricing on those. Things like:

• Audience volume (including visitors)
• Number of displays
• Frequency of advertising

Example:

1. Total audience population: 600

2. Total number of integrated displays: 20

3. Ad runs per day: 3

4. Average number of days of operation per month = 20 (M-F)

5. 600 x 20 x 3 x 20 = = 720,000 potential exposures per month

Menu Boards

Interactive screens and kiosks offer even more possibilities. Take menu boards as an example. Food and drink items are displayed, along with nutritional and allergy information, and a high-quality, enticing image.

People can scroll through at their leisure, looking at food on offer today or later in the week (“Oh, Taco Tuesday is tomorrow!”).

Menu boards can also be integrated with POS systems, so people can not only see the menu and additional details, but actually order right there on the screen. This reduces queues, streamlining the

entire process, which leads to cost-saving efficiencies. In fact, restaurants that get an interactive menu system like this report they make back the initial costs within the first 18 months. That’s perfect for a facility that has onsite services.

This can also work for off-site establishments. Include an online reservation form (or connect with a reservation system the restaurant already uses), add in some wayfinding directions, and suddenly your menu board becomes a truly valuable resource for your audience.

A menu board is really just software showing a list of offerings. It doesn’t have to be about food; it could be for anything. A spa, a movie theater, a local shop, a public swimming pool, a nearby bank – honestly anything. Anything your audience might find interesting and useful.

You’ve already spent the money on digital signs, so why not make some of that money back by making them available to others?

Done right, this sort of program can benefit everyone: your organization (regular income), the establishments who advertise (increased business) and your audience (special deals and local information that’s interesting to them). It’s a win-win-win for digital signage value.

The post Digital Signage Value Proposition: How to Make it More Profitable appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Something our colleagues over at Commercial Integrator – the trade pub for A/V installers – have noticed in recent years is that there’s an increasing number of technology decision makers attending InfoComm, the A/V industry’s largest American trade show. The show is responding by encouraging integrators to exhibit or bring along their best decision-making clients.  

The following audio visual products and services – which were on display at InfoComm 2019 and were buzzed-about by integrators — are ideal for technology pitches because they have a very clear demonstration of ROI: 

Mersive Solstice 

Mersive recently expanded its Solstice wireless collaboration platform to improve meetings and add value to the spaces themselves, even when not in use. This includes: 

• The capability to allow any display to be used for collaboration 
• Providing Miracast support to increase collaboration participation 
• Developing an analytics solution that provides both meeting room monitoring and in-depth meeting analytics to aid stakeholders in optimizing space planning, workforce scheduling and more. 

Mersive Solstice also added cloud-based software tool Kepler which collects data from Solstice Pods installed in meeting rooms and huddle spaces to provide insights into levels of user content sharing, device usage, meeting statistics, and room usage such as peak hour tracking, room popularity, average meeting length and more. 

Learn more here 

Intel Unite 

This collaboration solution supports most common devices, operating systems, and business plugins and is priced similarly between on-premise and cloud-hosted models. 

More competitively, though, the Intel Unite solution offers IT managers the ability to view telemetry data on connections, presentations, and average meeting times. With Unite, IT can measure the usage of hardware, software, and room utilization to inform planning. 

Learn more here

VisibilityOne 

This monitoring software for videoconferencing “eliminates troubleshooting by 90%” and saved one company over $1 million, says VisibilityOne. 

The VisibilityOne platform provides real-time data and system health status information across vendors and cloud services. After downloading and installing the VisibilityOne app, which is supported by the Microsoft Windows workstation and Server operating systems, companies only need a single app per building or location. Some features include: 

• Call disconnect information 
• Site-to-site quality of service (QoS) 
• 24-hour meeting schedule viewer 
• Live performance data, including network throughput, jitter and packet loss 
• Video conference device health statistics 
• Remote reboot 
• Microphone and camera disconnect alerts 
• VIP user priority video conferencing monitoring on cloud services 
• Management reports supporting ROI 
• Incident detail reporting 

Learn more here 

Logitech Sync 

The new Logitech Sync allows the IT department to remotely monitor, manage, and gain insight from Logitech devices in the conference room. Logitech’s recently announced Tap product is a good example. 

It’s a touch-panel device that plugs into a PC and works with Google, Microsoft, or Zoom, with a consistent user interface. Sync fits into this story by addressing the market for scale – not hundreds, but thousands of devices. 

Related: How-To Guide: Tracking ROI for IT Projects

The management works through a browser interface, and IT admins will be able to cut back on-site visits and trouble tickets thanks to the insights gained from the platform. Remote monitoring and management also simplify tasks like firmware updates, while the architecture readies users for new insights. 

AVI-SPL Symphony aaS

Tech managers can leverage AVI-SPL Symphony as a Service (SYaaS) to monitor and manage collaboration spaces and devices. 

Building off of their success with Symphony (for monitoring, managing, running diagnostics on AV systems), integrator AVI-SPL aims to provide an alternative consumption model for organizations to conduct proactive monitoring and management of their collaboration estate via Symphony. 

The as-a-service solution benefits tech managers it a couple of clear ways: 

• It enables integrated collaboration workflows, providing a single pane view into the supporting technology estate. 
• It delivers real-time, actionable business intelligence around network performance, room utilization, device functionality, and usage trends. 

“It creates a single-pane view into total enterprise technologies and it provides real-time access to actionable business intelligence to help our users make more informed decisions with respect to their technology purchases,” says senior VP of service operations Tim Riek. 

Learn more here 

The post Recent Audio Visual Products & Services That Will Help Your Technology Pitch appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Features:

Tracking the Return on Investment Metrics for Technology Projects is Essential

Before you invest in new technology or implement a new program, figure out why you’re doing it and what you’re hoping for the return on investment, and track those metrics.

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The post Week in Review: ROI, Write for TD, Power Technology, etc. appeared first on My TechDecisions.

But too many technology managers and those with whom they work get caught up in the idea of having the latest gizmo and don’t think as much about why they need it or what they’re going to do with it, says consultant Bryan Payne, who’s worked with business owners of all sizes to help them track ROI on their technology investments.

When tracking the ROI, “it needs to be either qualitative or quantitative,” says Payne. Qualitative metrics would measure something like a room temperature going from warm to cold or the color of a wall going from red to blue, while quantitative metrics explain that sales are down 5 percent this year.

“The question is why you’re doing it,” says Payne. “The why will bring you to the metrics. If you don’t have metrics, you don’t do it.” Tech managers should define a particular period of time they want to measure or the scope of a project they want to track before deciding if it’s worth the investment at all.

Time, money and scope represent what Payne calls “the iron triangle,” and at least two of the three metrics should be improved as a result of the investment, he says.

“If it’s too vague to measure, I don’t want to do it,” says Payne. That’s true whether Payne is dealing with a small business owner or the CEO of a $3 billion global business, whether he’s talking to clients in corporate America or school officials or executives in life sciences, high tech or automotive industries.

“When people don’t have something to measure by, they don’t have a good handle on their business or idea,” says Payne. He provides his clients with charts, graphs and narratives to help them better understand what he’ll do for them and what he’s done for them once he starts.

“The more you’re investing to understand the business, the better equipped you’ll be to provide guidance,” he says.

Tracking Return on Investment

To justify the investment, “you need to understand the problem you’re trying to address,” says Payne. Sometimes, the measurement isn’t immediate and necessitates a little bit of patience on your part to allow the results to be meaningful.

Depending on the type of metrics and the type of investment, Payne has a variety of techniques and methods he advises his clients to follow, ranging from Lean Six Sigma to Gardner to Forrester. All of them are largely similar but take different approaches to helping customers measure their investments and understand whether those investments were worthwhile.

There’s no standard time frame when it comes to tracking metrics, says Payne. It’s important for the customer to see a progression and watch the metrics measuring toward whatever goal they set for the investment before making it, he says.

“Sometimes, you expect it to take six months and the ROI comes in three months,” says Payne. “There can be soft savings you didn’t even think about when you made the investment that are realized as a result of the new technology or the new approach you’re using.”

Whether you’re tracking actual hours spent on a project vs. quoted hours, as suggested by Synergy Media Group president Bill McIntosh, or bookings, bookings margin and project margin, which Adtech Systems’ Dustin Campbell says are the most important, be sure you understand what you’re tracking and the result you’re hoping to achieve.

Verrex VP of operations Richard Mebane says it’s most important to track customer satisfaction along with financial metrics. The company does that through surveys, he says. Cenero CEO Chris Henry says the company relies on surveys to know whether they’re meeting customers’ needs too.

Related: Understanding the Planning Process for Project Management

It Doesn’t Happen Overnight

One thing tech managers need to remember is to be diligent and consistent when it comes to tracking ROI of their investments. While most are conscientious about it and do it regularly in the first few weeks or months, “as it goes longer, it sometimes can get lost or people just forget about it,” says Payne.

That’s why having a designated person in charge of tracking the metrics and updating others who are affected by them about the trajectory is a key to the process, he says.

“Do it often and document the outliers,” says Payne. “Set the expectations up front and remember to figure out ahead of time who will be doing the measurement. You have a business need; it’s about managing that need.”

Robert Gag of Tierney Brothers says the company created a benchmarking report that tabulates key company metrics and initiatives along with financial milestones every other week. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at all levels of the company, he says.

“If you want to track it, you have to develop some way of measuring it,” says Campbell. “This varies by metric. Then, you have to discuss what the metrics are telling you, because metrics help inform judgment, but don’t replace it.”

Profit is the easiest way to know whether the ROI was worth the cost of a project, most integrators say.

“Pretty much, if we come in on or under budget, we’re happy,” says David Riberi, VP of LightWerks Communication Systems.

The post Tracking the Return on Investment Metrics for Technology Projects is Essential appeared first on My TechDecisions.

The term ROI focuses on money – the ratio of net profit to investment cost. And that makes a lot of sense when looking at actual costs of physical things. But think about something like a digital signage system – does it make sense to think about it in terms of finances? It can if you’re trying to offset the costs of deployment (the hardware, the CMS software, the labor-hours employees spend creating and managing content, etc.) with income generation techniques (like charging local businesses or internal groups to advertise on your digital signs). But is that really all you want to measure?

If you have a digital signage system in place, why did you get it? And if you’re considering getting one, ask yourself why you want one. Even with income-generating schemes in place, and factoring in cost savings a digital communications platform brings, you might break even or possibly make a small profit, but your organization isn’t going to get rich using digital signage for communications. Monetary gain is not the point.

Most likely you want to communicate more effectively with your audience – whether that’s internal employees, event attendees or the general public. You’re using something tangible, digital signs, to positively affect something intangible, human minds. So, a term like ROI just doesn’t really fit the bill.

Return on Engagement, on the other hand, does. It looks at brand strength and strategy, and knitting together a disparate group of individuals into a community. The digital signs themselves, and the content they display, are tools you use to attract and engage people, and get them take certain actions, or change the way they behave, or change the way they think about things. That’s a very different thing than simply measuring money in and money out.

But how do you measure something intangible like engagement? What does it even mean? There are three ways to look at media you have:

• Owned media – assets that are yours, like your website
• Paid media – things you pay for, like advertising
• Earned media – value added to your organization and brand through participation in things like social media pages, content marketing, etc.

Engagement means people are actively involved in your communications. They are following your calls to action, they are talking about what they see on the screens with others, they are actively following the advice the digital signs present, and they are talking advantage of opportunities being offered. This is the earned media aspect of your communications efforts.

One way to think about how engaging your digital signage is would be to think of things in terms of other digital communication methods that are already commonplace and in everyone’s lives on a daily basis – websites and social media pages. Taking inspiration from these forms of communication can help you decide what to measure and how to measure it.

Time and Action

One important thing to look at is how long people look at your screens. This is known as dwell time on websites, and means the length of time people spend on a webpage before going back to the search results that got them to the page in the first place. The idea is that, the longer people spend on a page, the more engaged they must be with it. And when people click through to another page from that page, rather than going back to the search results, that’s even more engagement.

Your digital signage messages display for a set amount of time (hopefully 7-10 seconds), so dwell time doesn’t correlate exactly. But there are a couple of things you can measure that are similar. One is simply this: do people look at the screens? If people just walk past without paying any attention, then they obviously aren’t engaged with your content. You can measure this by simply standing near a digital sign and watching people. Do they slow down, or maybe even stop, when a message gets displayed? Was there an attractor used – like local weather or traffic? What’s their reaction when they see the content? Do they smile, or if they’re with someone else, do they comment on it?

You can also ask your audience. Have frequent, short polls and surveys asking if people remember seeing a digital signage message recently. If they answer “yes”, then they not only saw it but remember it. Which means they were engaged.

The clearest indication is if they follow your call to action (sort of the equivalent of clickthroughs on a webpage). If a message asks people to go a webpage for more information (by offering a short URL or QR tag), you should see an increase in traffic to that page. If a message asks people to sign up for something, you should see more registrations. If it’s a deal on muffins at the on-site café, you should sell more muffins.

Shares and Downloads

Websites often measure how many times a particular piece of content is downloaded in order to judge its popularity. On social media, an important metric is how often a particular post is shared. This is part of active participation.

In digital signage, this again correlates to how often people follow your calls to action. When people download something from a website, they find it valuable and want to keep it. When people see something valuable on digital signs, they will want to participate.

Sharing in an organization can be something as simple as water cooler chatter. No one spends all day just talking about work. Break rooms are filled with discussions of the newest streaming tv series or news items of the day. If you’re making engaging content, some of that talk will also be about your digital signage messages.

You probably have a digital sign in the break room, so pay attention to what people pay attention to in that room. While deep in a discussion about Daredevil’s motivations and moral shortcomings, do they suddenly stop and comment when your message with a sleeping kitten comes up on the screen? If so, then you are engaging them.

The questions you want to ask yourself about your content are:

• Does it generate positive reactions?
• Does it generate influence?
• Does it confirm authority?
• Does it make people want to participate?

Comments and Feedback

Because people today live immersed in a world of digital communications of all sorts, digital signage is inherently interactive, even if some of the screens themselves aren’t. People see the content and react to it in some way.

What do people say about your digital signage messages? Pay attention, but also ask them directly. Encourage your audience to interact with your organization in as many ways as possible – post and comment on your social media pages, fill in surveys, participate in polls, attend events, etc.

Gamification is another great way to get people involved and also measure how engaged they are. Using your digital signage to help create experiences for your audience is the surest way to engage them. Regular gamified communications also give you regular numbers you can compare over time, giving you still more data on how your Return on Engagement is going.

You’ll have to gauge your organizational culture in addition to engagement. Sometimes this can just be a feeling, but there are clear indications of an engaged workforce. Studies categorically show that engaged employees are more productive, work harder, work longer, have more ideas, and report a good work-life balance. When measuring items such as these, make sure to include questions about your digital signage to see how instrumental it is in the culture of the place. Use that feedback to fine-tune future messages, and adjust ones that don’t make a positive impact.

Loyalists and Cheerleaders

An engaged organization just feels more positive and energized. But that can be difficult to measure. The trick is to create a positive environment and then see who rises to the top, who goes the extra mile, who gives more than is expected. You want to pay attention to people who don’t just like working there, but who are loyal. This means they often participate in things, frequently follow your calls to action, attend events, participate in training opportunities, and so on. Pay attention to these people, and solicit their opinions on your digital signage efforts.

And loyalists who become cheerleaders – who not only regularly participate in the organizational culture but encourage others to do the same – are invaluable. They aren’t just highly engaged themselves, but are raising engagement levels across the organization.

Marketers of products and services love these kinds of people, and there’s a lot of talk in the PR world these days of attracting influencers. Well, your organizational digital signage strategy also needs influencers.

The thing is to create content that is attractive (so people look), interesting (so people engage) and connectable (so it’s easy for people to participate). Make sure your digital signage contributes and encourages an atmosphere of trust and reciprocity. Being authentic and transparent goes a long way to encouraging trust. Reciprocity in digital communications translates into co-creation, which means not only that people take the actions you suggest, but encourage others to do so.

And when you find some loyalists and cheerleaders, tap them for content ideas. They already love your signage, and their enthusiasm can get others to love it as well.

The post Advice for Measuring Return on Engagement for Digital Signage appeared first on My TechDecisions.