Daily Archives: May 30, 2017

DIGITIZE.AI May 30, 2017 | Views:

Digitize.AI is an investor backed start-up technology company headquartered in Charlotte, NC. We are currently in stealth mode and our team is growing quickly prior to our launch. Digitize.AI will use automation and artificial intelligence to help organizations create a digital workforce. Digitize.AI offers competitive salary, bonus and equity options.

Automation Developer Consultant role: Comprehensive and evident understanding of Microsoft Technology (VB .NET, Windows, Internet Explorer, SQL Server, Web Services) and ideally some background in Java. The ability to methodically solve business and technical problems using innovative and well-planned approaches. The ability to learn quickly and progress rapidly from theoretical exercises to real world delivery and mentoring tasks. The aptitude to contribute to the evolution of methodologies and procedures in a controlled manner to continually improve a rapid and repeatable delivery channel. The ability to work with a structured and methodical approach, combined with an enquiring mind. An understanding of, and a willingness to adhere to, formal change control procedures and disciplines.

Traits of a successful candidate: Desire to be trained in the latest automation technology and then work with clients to help them. The skills to design and author well documented, supportable and extensible developments and the ability to support and maintain the work of other consultants, partners and clients. Good communication skills with the ability to present technical details to a non-technical audience. Good written skills with the ability to produce clear and concise documentation. An aptitude for problem solving, with the ability to take a logical route to the source of an error. A self-starter who delivers high quality work and can adapt to new challenges, either on their own or as part of a team. Ability and willingness to travel as required.

To apply: Please send resume to careers@digitize.ai.

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Automation Developer Consultant - Charlotte Agenda

The Canada-EU trade agreement is "a blueprint for future ambitious trade deals in an age of automation where job security is threatened, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says.

Trudeau, in a speech to lawmakers and business figures in Rome, lauded the pact as a model in an era of protectionism. The speech comes as Trudeau faces a lengthy trade battle with Donald Trump over lumber, airplanes, steel, aluminum and the North American Free Trade Agreement.

QuickTake Free Trade and Its Foes

"Leaders who think we can hide from these changes or turn back the clock are wrong," he said Tuesday in the ornate Sala della Regina room at the Chamber of Deputies in Rome. "The pace of change has never been so fast, and yet itll never be this slow again."

The trade deal, known as CETA, has what Trudeau called "unprecedented provisions on labor protection, responsible investment, food and consumer safety, management of natural resources and environmental stewardship.

Trudeau was joined at the speech by his trade minister as Canada pushes European Union member states to ratify the trade deal as quickly as possible.

We need to make CETA real for people, Canada Trade Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne told reporters after the Trudeau speech. The best way to convince those who may not be convinced is to show them the benefits such as 9,000 tariff lines set to drop to zero when the deal is provisionally enacted, expected early this summer.

The deal comes as automation makes traditional stable jobs more difficult to find as the "twin forces" of technology and globalization remake the world, Trudeau said. "There are those in Canada and here in Italy who feel uncertain and anxious about what the world holds," he said.

CETA will soon be considered by the Italian senate, Italian Senate President Pietro Grasso said in introducing Trudeau.

Trudeau lauded Italy for recognizing same-sex civil unions and pushed for greater numbers of women to be elected as lawmakers or appointed to corporate boards, calling Canadas current ratio of female Members of Parliament "not acceptable."

Excerpt from:

Canada-EU Trade Deal Is a Model in Automation Era, Trudeau Says - Bloomberg

Enterprise investment in robotic process automation (RPA) is set to soar in Australia and New Zealand, according to new research from analyst firm Telsyte.

Based on insights provided by 302 CIOs and IT decision makers, the Telsyte ANZ Robotic Process Automation Study 2017 predicts the ANZ RPA market will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 45 percent from AU$216 million in 2016 to AU$870 million in 2020.

The analyst firm said RPA -- which enables software robots to replicate the actions of human workers for routine tasks -- is now being used or investigated by six out of 10 ANZ organisations with more than 20 employees.

Additionally, 38 percent of organisations with more than 500 employees have active RPA programs in place.

The finance and insurance industries are expected to be the fastest adopters of RPA in the short term, according to Telsyte, although RPA can also be applied to industries with large customer support and request processing requirements, such as telecommunications and government.

Telsyte managing director Foad Fadaghi said RPA is not just about cutting overhead costs; it can also change the way organisations operate.

"A proof of concept is important for organisations to first understand the nature of processes that can be best solved through RPA, before progressing to an enterprise-wide strategy," Fadaghi suggested.

"Equally important is the use of pilot programs to understand the change management requirements before a further rollout."

Telsyte also recommended that organisations assess the processes they would like to automate by their level of complexity.

"Complexity has a positive correlation with automation costs, and targeting lower-complexity processes initially can result in better initial returns," Telsyte said.

Fellow analyst firm Gartner has previously referred to RPA tools as "gateway technologies" or "surface tools", because they simply skim the surface of the larger intelligent automation services market.

"The attraction is the RPA tool just sits on top of the legacy system" such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), and there is no need for any special integration, Gartner research vice president and analyst at Frances Karamouzis told ZDNet.

"They're also easy to use and have a relatively low cost. For all those reasons [RPA] has by far the highest adoption of automation tools that we've seen," Karamouzis added.

With the increase in enterprise investment in RPA, DXC Technology, a New York Stock Exchange-listed IT services company, announced the introduction of 60 new RPA experts in Australia and New Zealand.

"Organisations are looking for a way to bridge the gap between large funded digital transformation projects and the long tail of business processes attached to aging systems. RPA can achieve this with a virtual workforce that streamlines existing processes, lays the foundation for intelligent automation, and frees up employees for more engaging work," said Seelan Nayagam, managing director at DXC Technology ANZ.

The IT services company is now actively expanding in the ANZ region to guide clients implementing RPA.

"We are seeing a shift in our client's focus from cost reduction and labour arbitrage, offered by more traditional outsourcing models, to driving business value through innovation," Nayagam said. "This includes RPA, and as a case in point, we have implemented RPA within DXC for automating our own shared service processes."

While organisations in the ANZ region are believed to be at the "basic stages of adoption", a 2016 Deloitte report indicates that enterprises internationally have begun to employ RPA together with cognitive technologies such as speech recognition, natural language processing, and machine learning to automate perceptual and judgement-based tasks once reserved for humans.

"The integration of cognitive technologies with RPA makes it possible to extend automation to processes that require perception or judgement," David Schatsky, managing director at Deloitte, previously said. "With the addition of natural language processing, chatbot technology, speech recognition, and computer vision technology, for instance, bots can extract and structure information from speech audio, text, or images and pass that structured information to the next step of the process."

Additionally, machine learning can identify patterns and make predictions about process outcomes, helping RPA prioritise actions.

"Cognitive RPA has the potential to go beyond basic automation to deliver business outcomes such as greater customer satisfaction, lower churn, and increased revenues," Schatsky said.

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Robotic process automation market to reach AU$870m in ANZ by ... - ZDNet

Automation prompts fiercedebatesat the moment. Manyof the larger conversations around automation focuson whether it will create jobs or destroy them, what it will do to our economy, and how its helping or hurting various industries. But there are manyother smaller conversations happening around automation, and many IT leaders are just looking for simple ways to improve productivity, increase speed, and reduce manual work in their day-to-day operations.

Of course, I believe that automating something is better than having to keep doing it manually. But I dont overlook the opportunity to ask the important question: should we automate or should we obliterate?

If a process can be automated, its often automated without taking a step back to ask whether you should continue doing it in the first place.

Think about how many times youve questioned a process or approach only to be given the maddening response, This is the way weve always done it. The era of automation gives us a similar problem. If a process can be automated, its often automated without taking a step back to ask whether you should continue doing it in the first place.

Taking the time to ask that important question provokes a different type of thinking kind of like a zero-based analysis. You are no longer assuming that whats in the base has to remain in the base. Sure, it can be automated, but if it doesnt have to exist in the first place, why not just eliminate it?

At CVS Health, we conduct surveys on an annual basis that ask colleagues hundreds of questions about the company, the work environment, the type of work they do, and more. We analyze their responses and choose themes that enable us to continually improve the work environment and experience year over year. One of the themes that emerged from the annual survey this year was the opportunity to reduce what is perceived to be red tape by our employees. This prompted usto put manyprocess improvements onto our priority list areas where we could automate or eliminate steps, processes, and functions in different parts of the IT organization, to reduce work and increase speed.

For instance, the time and steps that it took to get approval on staff augmentation was perceived by our employees as red tape, and they were right. We were able to reduce that time from weeks to one day. But we didnt achieve these results through automation: It was through obliteration.

Just because something is there now, that doesnt mean it needs to be there tomorrow.

We looked at these opportunities holistically, taking into consideration both the administration and the technical aspects and processes in play. We reduced the number of project approvals by 41 percent and the technical design artifacts by 60 percent. By eliminating these steps altogether, we were able to reduce friction in the administrative processes of managing staff, projects, and programs.

If we had just focused on automation as a way to solve the problem, we would have ultimately been automating work that was unnecessary in the first place. Just because something is there now, that doesnt mean it needs to be there tomorrow.

There are excellent tools to help IT organizations answer their own automate-or-obliterate questions. You can use Pareto analyses, for instance, to determine where time is spent in order to pinpoint improvement targets. Most importantly, dont lose sight of the problem you are trying to solve. Start there, and use proven methodologies to scientifically analyze where your opportunities are, whatever they are, and then act on them.

Automation may seem like your teams secret weapon to finding more time and productivity throughout the day. But, in the constant quest to find ways to move faster in IT, its important to sometimes slow down, pause, and ask yourself, Why do I even need to do this?

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CVS Health CIO: An overlooked alternative to automation - The Enterprisers Project

Technology has long been lauded as the savior of modern business, but some fear it may also hasten its downfall. Pew Research Center reported that a full two-thirds of Americans think robots will overtake most humans work over the next 50 years, inspiring feelings of both resentment and awe toward the technology we ourselves have created.

Rather than be intimidated by this looming possibility, however, entrepreneurs should recognize that this means they have more control than they realize. Technologys power puts them in a position to create value, which should reveal opportunities and fuel the entrepreneurial spirit.

The problem is that most entrepreneurs have trouble shifting their perspective to see whats overwhelming as empowering.

People are worried about machines, computers and factories taking their jobs, dwelling on whether their own positions will be threatened. Its not a question of whether its going to happen -- its a matter of when. The takeover is already underway, but were so busy staring at whats fading into the mist that were overlooking the amazing possibilities that come with technology.

Related: Top 10 Best Chatbot Platform Tools to Build Chatbots for Your Business

Here a few steps we can take to reframe technology as our ally, not our enemy:

Not that long ago, we lived without cellphones. Now, we carry powerful computers in the palm of our hands, telling us which roads to take when were in traffic, enabling us to check in for flights and letting us look up anything we need with the push of a button. They save us time, energy and money, freeing us up to spend our most valuable resource -- our lives -- on the things that really matter.

The same idea applies to our companies. Things that are time-consuming but not thinking-intensive -- aka the stuff we called busywork in school -- suck up the hours and brain cells that would be better spent on the difficult tasks we cant hand off.

A study published in Behavioral and Brain Functions concluded that a prolonged cognitive load -- too much to think about -- results in mental fatigue. That means that when you finally do find the time to devote to those high-value tasks, you dont have the energy to do so.

McKinsey & Companys 2016 Automating the Insurance Industry report assessed how automation could be applied to the insurance industrys current tasks, and it found that up to a quarter of the fields existing roles could be combined or removed in the coming decade. Machine learning could take over up to 60 percent of an insurance sales agents job, for example, but only 35 percent of an underwriters. That means that in 10 years, insurance companies will be able to dedicate more of their team members brain power to more complex tasks while handing the easier ones off to computers.

Related: This Simple Technique Trains Your Brain to Conjure Your Best-Ever Ideas

Entrepreneurs erroneously assume that everything they do for their businesses is valuable. It likely is all worthwhile to some extent, but some efforts add more value to their companies than others. Growing a company and leading a team makes it essential that you identify where youre adding the most value so you put your focus there.

Ive worked with leaders who realized their time was best spent working on developing business partnerships or on hiring executive-level positions for their companies, but they were investing their days in approving ad copy or backing up data -- things that could be handled by automation. To be sure, backing up data is vital to a company, as GitLab could tell us after experiencing data deletion, followed by a backup failure.

GitLabs incident initially occurred as a result of a system administrator accidentally deleting a folder of live production data. In the wake of this disruption caused by human error, industry professionals recommended that others use all-in-one platforms with analyzers to determine what should be backed up and then automatically back those files up. This underscores the fact that what those entrepreneurs Ive known have spent their time on could have been better accomplished by technology than by them -- and allowed them to spend time building high-revenue partnerships instead.

RELATED: 7 Ways To Add Massive Value To Your Business

We all know entrepreneurs who wouldnt have a blog on their website if it werent for a platform such as WordPress. Technology can be seen as an extension of your business that enables your company to do things and offer services or products it couldnt otherwise.

My company has consulted with businesses that have held group brainstorming sessions to determine what they should be doing but couldnt with their current technology, staff or skill sets. They were clients of ours that hoped our platform had the ability to assist them with their new efforts. In some cases, we already offered a way to do what they wanted and simply had to show them how to integrate it; in others, we discussed how we could create what they were looking for or tweak an existing feature to do so.

In both instances, my company -- and theirs -- took advantage of technology to expand our offerings and grow our businesses.

Technology may ultimately change how many of our jobs look. But this is a time of opportunity, not fear -- what our companies and roles look like in the future will be enhanced, not diminished, versions of what we do now. If you free up some brain space, identify where you add the most value and pinpoint what you want to do in the future, youll be driving the technology changes youll encounter rather than be driven by them.

Lena Requist, with her background of building startups into multimillion dollar organizations, is passionate about growing businesses and developing teams. Her current project, ONTRAPORT, has been recognized for many awards including; fast...

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3 Ways Embracing Automation and Technology Can Turbocharge Your Entrepreneurial Quest - Entrepreneur

At the World Government Summit in Dubai, our real-world Tony Stark, Elon Musk, was throwing around some big and important ideas about the future of humanity. Musk says that Universal Basic Income or an economic idea where everyone gets a paycheck from the government to spend how they wish is one of the only solutions to the rise of robotic automation.

Automation on large scales will absolutely change everything. The going term right now is the rise of the post-scarcity economy. And, while I know that sounds boring as hell, for you it means that in the not-too-distant future, money wont matter and all of our economies will totally collapse. And yeah, Im serious.

Post-scarcity is something that we should all be able to at least kind of understand. Traditional economies work because things are rare. Food, for example, isnt infinite. If it was, itd be free. After all, how could you charge for something that is unlimited? Like air? Or the sun? Theres no practical way to do that.

Thats essentially why the Star Trek universe abandoned money. After you have replicators, which are basically magical boxes that make anything from anything in seconds, stuff doesnt have intrinsic value. You cant control the supply or demand of anything because the demand is whatever and the supply is unlimited. In that system, as you can already tell, nothing about traditional economics works. Whats a supply and demand curve even mean under those circumstances?

Obviously, humanity is a long way from replicators. And, as a result, we wont have true post-scarcity systems for a long time yet. But, we are about to take a couple of major leaps forward. Here is a list of all the places robots are likely to steal jobs in the future. If you just account for self-driving cars, though, you can take as many as 20% of all jobs away in one swoop. The transportation sector employs that many people.

But thats not the only industry that will get a jolt. Many service industry jobs are easy to automate. That could wipe out tens of millions more job. Even if it takes twenty or thirty years, Musk rightly notes that no economy can sustain that.

And while many of you might think that sounds like a bunch of leftist hippie bullshit, this is actually about as politically neutral as it gets. Again, think about it if you have 30 or even 40% unemployment, then the economy, as weve traditionally structured it has nothing to do but collapse. If that many people are unemployed, they wont have enough money to buy anything, really. That, in turn, shatters demand for goods and then everyone else suddenly becomes unemployed. If this happens, inflation is screwed, money has no meaning and the entire system weve created would utterly cease to function.

Most plans for universal basic income start by suggesting a tax robots. The goal here is to replace revenue lost from the mass numbers of unemployed and keep it coming in from the bots. Plus, this is still a net gain for businesses they get money flowing into pockets so people can keep spending, and even conservative estimates suggest that robots will be able to pay for themselves dozens of times over. So companies wont really be losing any money there, either.

This is a set of ideas that Ive tossed around with friends for a while. Unless something huge changes, this is probably the only viable solution. It keeps most markets and corporations intact, while still working with the complex reality posed by infinite labor from bots. Its weird to think, but, honestly, Musk is almost certainly spot on here.

We will, of course, have some time to adapt to this. But its something we should all start familiarizing ourselves with now. Robots can replace you. No, your job is not safe. Not even if youre a doctor or a lawyer. Theres a great video from YouTuber CGPGrey above that runs through the best case scenarios here, and, honestly, its not good.

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Elon Musk: Automation Will Force Universal Basic Income - Geek.com - Geek

JOC.com

US logistics sector focuses on integration, automation JOC.com That task is taking on urgency as the number of systems, platforms, and the sheer amount of data transport operators and shippers deal with increases at a rapid pace. Cloud-based networks running more automated software linked to mobile phones and ...

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US logistics sector focuses on integration, automation - JOC.com