Glimpzlt will be used along with Forrester's analytics engine in the CX Cloud.

Forrester said it has acquired two companies--feedback now and Glimpzlt--in a bid to create a real-time customer experience cloud.

The company, best known as a research firm, has been heavily focused on monitoring and improving customer experience, or CX. FeedbackNow makes physical buttons and monitoring software to measure and analyze CX. Glimpzlt is an artificial intelligence and machine learning company.

According to Forrester, the plan is to combine the acquired companies with its own effort to build what it calls a CX Cloud. This CX Cloud will include instant customer feedback from devices, social, apps, mobile and Web, tools to analyze the feedback and deploy tweaks.

FeedbackNow is best known for its feedback boxes with smiley faces to gauge customer satisfaction. FeedbackNow's boxes are well established in Europe and collect more than 200,000 pieces of feedback a day. FeedbackNow boxes can be deployed in retail, transportation, workplaces, hospitals and anywhere satisfaction can be measured.

Here's a look at how FeedbackNow hardware is typically deployed.

George Colony, CEO of Forrester said the bet on CX is timely since it "can be a powerful and operational weapon."

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The Department of Human Services (DHS) is currently undertaking a handful of technology-driven projects and has revealed building out an "elastic" private cloud as part of its overall digital transformation.

Speaking at IBM Think in Sydney on Friday, DHS head of enterprise architecture Garrett McDonald said the private cloud sits across x86 and IBM Power Systems hardware.

"What we've been looking at in the immediate term is how do we establish a private cloud that we can stretch across hyper-converged infrastructure, bare metal x86 -- how do we stretch that across Power, and how do we stretch that onto the Z platform," McDonald said.

"Within our environment we have an elastic private cloud where we can use a single pane of glass to spin up environments and workloads on a platform where we might need horizontal scalability, vertical scalability, it could be that we'll use particular platforms for accelerated machine learning or do we need that higher performance and the ability to make concurrency and throughput go elsewhere."

The approach makes sense, given DHS has already made a "significant" investment in IBM's Power platform and also big blue's Z mainframe platform, McDonald said.

As a government department, DHS is subject to data sovereignty and other requirements from government on the accreditation of the facilities it operates, how the infrastructure is run, and even the systems in place.

"The approach we're taking, the tools we're using support a hybrid multi-cloud approach so that where we have cloud providers on the government accredited panel, where the workload type is well-suited to one of those providers, where the economics and the security of the workload we're looking at makes sense, we do have the option of stretching out from a private cloud within our datacentres out into the commercial providers as well," McDonald explained.

DHS is undergoing a digital transformation in the social welfare space, and McDonald said the "elastic" cloud is just one factor being considered as the department heads into that transformation.

"Our existing systems have been with us for the better part of 30 years; it was around the mid to late 1980s that the social welfare system really started to take off in an electronic form," he explained. "While it's served us well, we recognize that the needs of government and the needs of citizens are changing, it's also time for that generational uplift."

The Welfare Payment Infrastructure Transformation (WPIT) program is a billion-dollar project to overhaul Australia's 30-year-old payment system which processes over AU$100 billion in Centrelink payments each year.

Labeled the biggest digital transformation the government has embarked on to date by former Minister for Human Services Alan Tudge, WPIT is expected to take seven years to complete.

"So in approaching this transformation, we're making sure we take in this in terms of, this isn't just about upgrading technology and it's certainly not about digitising existing business processes ... [it's about] making sure this is a true transformation in how do you push the envelope, how do you re-imagine the possible for transformating citizen interactions with government," McDonald continued.

"This is a program where the existing capabilities have been in place for 30 years, odds are it will be 30 years before we undertake another transformation of this size, you are talking about a 5-7 year window within a 60-year period where you're trying to undertake both a significant systems re-development and a transformation of how the organisation works."

DHS also put over 400 of its staff through scaled agile training, with "agile coaches" embedded within the department's teams.

Human Services has been on a procurement spending spree, just this month handing out over AU$50 million-worth of cash to third-party vendors.

IBM received two separate contracts valued at $6.6 million and AU$1.87 million for communications devices and accessories-related software until March 2019, and AU$10.2 million for desktop hardware.

Telecommunications service provider Ethan Group was awarded four contracts totalling AU$27.4 million, for "desktop hardware", while application monitoring firm Dynatrace was given AU$14.8 million for IT software until March 2021.

SOURCE BY ZDNet

United Technologies launched a digital accelerator in Brooklyn a year ago with a $300 million investment aimed at developing software that spans the company's various units such as Otis, Pratt & Whitney and Carrier to name a few.

Vince Campisi, chief information officer at UTC, is overseeing UTC's digital efforts with the aim of connecting software, analytics and the Internet of things to drive the company's products and services and improve customer operations overall.

We caught up with Campisi to talk shop and digitization. Here are a few highlights of our chat.

The intersection of IT, data science and business. Campisi noted that classically IT groups focused on operations, but the move to digitization is bringing more groups into the mix. He said:

Data science and analytics is absolutely an important piece of that, but it also includes things like product management, user experience design, software development ... So, folks who live in a command line are welcome here again, at least within the digital technology organization.

Is UTC now a software developer? Campisi said that UTC is an industrial company first that uses software to enable the future. He said:

Our strategy is very focused, and we sort of know what we're good at and we want to use this to make us better at it. We're not over rotating to sort of use it as redefining ourselves as a chic new, sort of software company.

It's really sticking to our knitting and our industrial roots and using data and analytics to make us even better at the things that have made this company successful.

The importance of data governance and prep. Campisi said one data structure is critical. The guiding principle is to come up with the platform and architecture to ingest massive amounts of information and analyze it.

Artificial intelligence. Campisi said he thinks of AI in terms of use cases. He noted AI applies to connected products where machine learning enables us to "reason over the information and identify opportunities to improve key processes a lot faster." One AI and machine learning use case revolves around servicing equipment for customers, but the technology can also be applied internally too.

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The cloud strategy. Campisi said the cloud has made it easier to get the infrastructure to even try projects. Grabbing that infrastructure used to take months. The cloud enables speed and agility. UTC also takes a multi-cloud approach. Campisi said:

Clearly, there's usually one you start with and they get kind of get bit of a head start, but we have two on tap right now and we'll figure out whether a third makes sense. Some use cases are better suited for certain scenarios or a customer sort of environment may be better suited for somebody they're more comfortable with. Having that flexibility is important for us, but also important for the interaction that we expect to have with customers in the future.

Campisi added that he's watching how the cloud providers develop their AI platforms and machine learning tools, but vendors are largely chosen for infrastructure today.

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The digital transformation journey. Campisi said that focus is critical in any multi-year digital transformation effort. He said:

Our three priorities are very simple. It's how does this translate to redesign the experience for our customers; how does it translate into empowering our employees to work differently at speed and pace they haven't before; and how do we take friction out of their lives in order to do that. And then how does this translate into how we run the flywheel of the company faster to help the company operate at a new level.

Secondly, we are being pretty bold in how we think about talent. Historically, the reputation of IT here was really known for three disciplines, information, security, infrastructure services, and business systems. Any three letter IT acronym. CRM, ERP, PLN etc. We've broadened that to say that there is four that we haven't been as known for, but need to be and that's product management, user experience, design, software development, and data science and analytics.

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In 2010, Australian enterprise software provider TechnologyOne identified a change that was coming to shake up the way organizations consumed software and services.

As a result, TechnologyOne jumped on a plane and headed to Seattle to meet with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to see what a future in cloud looked like for the Australian Securities Exchange-listed company.

Boasting 1,200 customers in six countries, TechnologyOne considers Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle its main competitors; consequently the space the Australia-based company plays in is very competitive.

Speaking with media at an AWS roundtable on Wednesday, Edward Chung, TechnologyOne's long-serving COO cum CEO, detailed the company's transformation.

Chung noted that the speed at which people demand services was one of the main drivers behind the company's shift. He said, as a result, TechnologyOne started transforming its entire business to respond to the "digital revolution".

"We've transformed from a traditional software provider that used to install software on-premise, to being full software-as-a-service (SaaS) and it's been a wild journey," he said. "The only way is to be cloud-first and a SaaS provider.

"We've rewritten our whole software base to keep up with different phases of the industry.

"A huge transformation for a company which today is 30 years old, coming from on-premise to full SaaS -- SaaS is the only way customers are procuring."

Chung said it wouldn't have been possible without the cloud and AWS in particular, as eight years ago there was no cloud vendor to help here in Australia -- AWS itself only launched its Sydney region five years ago.

According to Chung, the hardest thing about changing the business model to a cloud-based one was that the company was breaking new ground in Australia, with the shift also requires a re-engineering of the company's offering.

"Our customers have rapidly gravitated to SaaS," Chung told ZDNet.

"We were thoroughly impressed with how quickly the government sector has adopted our SaaS -- it's beyond what we hoped for. This meant that we scaled the business even faster than we initially planned to meet their needs. We love that they push us -- because all of our customers benefit from this."

Speaking with ZDNet in November, founder, former CEO, and now chairman of TechnologyOne Adrian Di Marco said the massive market that is enterprise cloud in Australia is continuing to pick up the pace.

"The cloud is a new paradigm for customers. The market is actually massive in Australia, there are government departments, which we've seen huge demand from federal government, state departments, local governments, universities -- they all want to go into the cloud and they really all want it delivered how we're offering, software-as-a-service, not as a hosted thing," he said.

"The cloud is growing exceptionally fast. It's a business that's on a massive trajectory up."

SOURCE BY ZDNet

When sending understudies an offer for a position, staff at the University of Western Australia (UWA) would physically draw up letters, repetitively entering each line of data for around 23,000 letters every year. 

The letters have 90 distinct fields, and, when made physically, would take staff at the college up to 30 minutes to finish only one. 

Acknowledging there was a need to upgrade different manual procedures like this one, UWA Solutions lead Julie Millais swung to Oracle around a year and a half prior, inspired by utilizing cloud innovations to computerize at first the offer letters process. 

"At any college, you'll see that an offer of acknowledgment is that center business work since we're all getting our understudies come in," Millais clarified. "Around a similar time, they've all finished year 12 and it's an exceptionally aggressive space - we need to get our offer letters out as quick as possible, and furthermore the sooner we can get an offer letters out, the sooner they can acknowledge, and on the off chance that they haven't acknowledged their offer letter then we can develop and do a few exercises around offer change." 

UWA additionally needed to beat alternate colleges to conveying offer letters, particularly as it is affected topographically as of now by being three hours behind the eastern states amid summer. 

Tired of paper-based, manual procedures - and even Excel spreadsheets - Millais revealed to ZDNet the college is likewise losing a piece of the pie. 

"We knew whether we could mechanize a great deal of those procedures, we could get data progressively, and we could help those confirmations officers make those letters utilizing cloud-based innovations, yet in addition we will lessen our blunder rate, and we're additionally going to have the capacity to get our offer letters out sooner," she included. 

Such an apparently basic errand was dependable the last procedure educated to new staff, Millais stated, as there was so much included and it was inclined to human mistake. By means of computerization, it's presently one of the primary errands educated, which means staff have more alternatives for broadly educating. 

"Presently we can get them on the phones, we can make them help understudies who are stuck all the while. We would now be able to draw in with our understudies, our potential understudies, and have that one-on-one relationship beginning a considerable measure prior," Millais said. 

Subsequent to sending the undertaking to live in September, the letter age process is presently down from 30 minutes to five. 

Rather than setting out on a college-wide change, UWA chose to rather upgrade the torment focuses staff individuals are gotten up to speed with. 

"However, what we gained from the offer procedure was the means by which to utilize the Oracle mix cloud and we figured out how to utilize Oracle Policy Automation (OPA), and we've possessed the capacity to apply that to another site that we've quite recently discharged called UWA Accept," she included. 

An online entryway, UWA Accept enables understudies to tap the "acknowledge" catch, as opposed to experiencing what Millais said was beforehand an excruciating, drawn-out acknowledgment process. 

"Once more, we're utilizing OPA to decide the tenets and where they are in the acknowledgment procedure. What's more, now it is clear for them how to acknowledge their offer and prepare to the last acknowledgment for enrolment," Millais clarified. "So I've figured out how to computerize that also. Better end-client encounter for the new understudies, since it looks more instinctive and it just speeds the procedure up for them too." 

With "advanced locals" the college's intended interest group, Millais said there's no reason for sending them to a telephone number through a paper-based strategy. 

"They need to go on the web, they need to self-serve, yet in the meantime, being computerized locals, it's second nature for them to go to a site and do these procedures," she told ZDNet. "They would prefer not to complete a paper-based frame - they would prefer even truly not to get on the phone and address some individual unless they're extremely stuck - and, to be completely forthright, they don't telephone up, they have a tendency to send an email which arrives in our CRM so now we're following them through our CRM." 

The venture, Millais clarified, enabled groups to work cooperatively. 

"We weren't simply working in peculiarity - we were working with different groups," she included. 

"Being a collective undertaking, it's somewhat hard when you have various groups chipping away at a task. You need to have an extremely communitarian workplace, and from past to that, we'd all kind of worked in storehouses. 

"So now we're uniting groups and we're broadly educating our colleagues, we're sharing innovations a great deal." 

With a rich learning base of around 3,000 FAQs, UWA is additionally taking a gander at executing chatbots for its understudies and its uni-begin group. 

"We're finding that once more, that is a channel that end clients, particularly youthful understudies, are occupied with. They need to get onto visit advancements so they can rapidly simply make inquiries that they have on the fly," Millais clarified. 

"In advanced education, there is an immense move towards cloud advances and we're additionally contemplating the new age that is getting through, these carefully local understudies, who need to have data introduced to them in the way that they pick. 

"So we must be light sufficiently footed to have the capacity to keep over the innovation to exhibit data in the way that they need it."

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The US Air Force, amidst a progression of cloud relocations intended to redesign its maturing IT framework, has granted a $1 billion contract to Dell EMC, Microsoft, and General Dymanics. 

The USAF moved center administrations, for example, email over to the cloud not long ago, yet the equipped administrations branch is presently venturing things up with what's depicted as the biggest ever government cloud-based bound together correspondences and joint effort contract. The innovation will serve up to 776,000 clients in the Air Force, Defense Logistics Agency ,and US Army Corps of Engineers. 

The Air Force propelled its IT change endeavors in 2015 with the $296 million Collaboration Pathfinder contract. Dell, Microsoft, and General Dynamics Information Technology were likewise granted that agreement, and from that point forward more than 140,000 clients have been relocated to Microsoft Office 365. 

This most recent, far bigger contract is named the Cloud Hosted Enterprise Services (CHES) program and is viewed as a follow up to Collaboration Pathfinder. Under CHES, data, interchanges, email, coordinated effort administrations, office efficiency, and records administration cloud programming will be taken off finished the following year. 

Notwithstanding operational productivity, the USAF is likewise utilizing CHES as an approach to diminish costs through the solidification of its server farms.

SOURCE