Spoiler alert; no.

Low code vs Traditional Dev

My colleague, friend and SogetiLabs Fellow Daniel Laskewitz and I frequently talk about this topic. His field of expertise as Microsoft MVP covers the Microsoft PowerPlatform including low code systems like Power Automate (formerly Flow).

All too often people see a division between low code and traditional development using languages like C#, Java, TypeScript and Go.
In the real world however, these systems work together perfectly.

Most of the times, you cannot solve a problem with only low code. Think about scenario’s where you should link to old legacy systems or complex API calls. In those cases low code without any enhancement cannot natively connect to those systems.

Behold custom connectors

In the Microsoft ecosystems, custom connectors allow you to bridge this gap. This way, the low code system can interact with any system you write a connector for. This may be common knowledge, but the fact is that most developers do not see how big this really is.

This means you can link any PowerApp, Microsoft Flow, or LogicApps to your custom connector, and reuse those within your entire organisation.
You could even publicly publish these if you have a service you want to expose. So if you are an ISV, this can help you get more traction on your product.

Bridging the gap

In the end it all comes down to developers of any system and language understanding the capabilities of the platforms they and their companies are using. For low code developers this means sometimes calling in the help of traditional developers. And more importantly, this also means traditional developers should learn that these low code systems can help you simplify (and thus speed up!) your development by using ready-to-roll systems and connectors available to you.

As there are over 325 connectors available, that should really speed making connections up!

Get started!

Want to explore custom connectors? Look at these resources or feel free to contact me or Daniel, we strongly believe bridging this gap between low code and traditional dev is key for succes in the future of development!

The post Is low code replacing traditional development? appeared first on SogetiLabs.

Software automation takes time. It takes time to investigate the to-be-automated system, learn how it functions and how it can be programmatically operated. Maybe you have to install some new software to bridge communication between systems, maybe you have to write that yourself. Getting well-versed in the underlying systems and their data pipelines and their toolchain management can be extremely time-consuming, even if you don’t have to know everything about their inner workings.

But after that, automation is a breeze. When you have your library of automation keywords done, automation should be as simple as giving instructions. Of course, you will probably have to write some more keywords as the automation progresses and you encounter some edge cases. And giving instruction might not be as simple as it looks. So, when your library of automation keywords covers all the basic operations of the system, you can start eyeing the real goal – how to describe the process as a series of automation keyword steps.

Translating the process into a series of automation steps might sound like a simple task, but in practice, it can be complicated. Failed automation attempts happen when the developer misunderstands the process requirements. Maybe the automation process failed because the automation didn’t know what to do when an external service stopped responding to its queries? Because the developer didn’t think about that and so, didn’t program the automation steps required.

But what was the real reason for the failure? There never were any process requirements presented to the developer. Because there was no process definition document (PDD).

The process definition document describes the needed automation steps in detail.  It is a communication tool for sharing the same vision of the automation process. The level of detail should be such that there is only one way the automation step can be understood. A bad example would be: “Moderator deletes a post”. A good example could be: “Moderator navigates to post detail page. The moderator clicks the ‘Delete post’ button. A popup opens asking ‘Are you sure you want to delete post?’ with buttons ‘Yes’ and ‘No’. The moderator clicks ‘Yes’. The post is deleted and is not visible in the index.” The less there is ambiguity the better.

Different program paths should also be documented. What happens when a user clicks ‘Next’ but the user detail form is only half filled? Should there be a popup saying, ‘Please fill this information’? Visualize the program paths with a flow chart. Try to think about the happy path and then diverge from it. What can go wrong? You can divide possible exceptions into two categories: logic exceptions and system exceptions. Logic exceptions are errors in program logic, for example, off-by-one errors. System exceptions happen when the system has failed or is out of reach, for example, in the case of a network connection failure. The automation must be prepared for system exceptions and have pathways around them, in order to continue the automation process. Logic exceptions must be fixed, system exceptions prepare for.

Having a process definition document makes work delegation easier among the team members. The business analyst could be responsible for translating business requirements into the process definition document that is then handed over to the automation developer. The automation developer gets to concentrate on the technical perspective and the business analyst gets to concentrate on the business perspective.

The post Process Definition Document is a Communication Tool appeared first on SogetiLabs.

Take a look at our most read and shared blog posts from June 2020

Industry best practices to reduce Azure consumption cost

Many organizations are migrating workloads to the cloud, and cloud costs are becoming a large part of IT budgets. In this blog, you will learn about 6 areas where you can optimize the cost.

Zooming in on zoom-fatigue

Feeling exhausted after a video call? That is not surprising at all! How you do prevent that? Our VINT team shares insights on how to make digital meetings less tiring.

Finding Our Common Voice

Here’s everything you need to know about Mozilla’s Common Voice – an initiative to help build voice assistant, create assistive, accessible technology, or simply use it in systems to create more natural, pleasant to hear voices for interaction.

Kubernetes Auto-Scaling

Take a look at a high-level overview of different scalability mechanisms that are available for Kubernetes and the best ways to make them serve organization needs.

Machine Learning service for comments sentiments analysis

Here’s a step-by-step guide to use ML.Net (Machine Learning framework for .Net developers) to create an API service that will analyze the positive or negative sentiment of a comment.

The post Top 5 SogetiLabs blogs from June 2020 appeared first on SogetiLabs.

Even then, unforeseen circumstances will shake your organization’s foundations. So, prepare, react, recover and reimagine

Reading time: 3 minutes.

A strong purpose proposition requires agility and resilience. Because a positive impact today, can turn into a negative impact tomorrow. Therefore, it’s challenging to stay in the “green zone”. The context changes constantly and when it does, you want to be ready to absorb the shock and recover with ease.

This post is part of a series about technology and organizational positive impact

1. A guide to organizational positive impact, tech edition
2. Doing good drives profitability
3. Major events and big statements
4. Be consistent about your positive impact
5. A strong purpose proposition requires agility and resilience
6. Agility and organizational complexity, beware of the present
7. How to create positive impact with technology? Foster critical thinking
8. Technology as an accelerator for positive impact
9. Assess how technology shapes your organizational positive impact
10. Reframe technology’s purpose and strengthen organizational alignment

The Royal Shakespeare Company

How good does a company need to do, to be perceived as a positive force for planet and society? The bar is constantly moving. Consider the actions of the Royal Shakespeare Company. And their consequences.

One of the goals of the Royal Shakespeare Company is to share their work with a wide audience. To accomplish this, the theatre offers tickets at a reduced fee to 16 to 25-year-olds. The difference in price is paid for by a sponsor. Given this information, one might assume that the theatre and sponsor are seen as organizations that contribute positively to society. Such is not the case. A fragment from an open letter:

“If we, as young people, wish to see an affordable play at your theatre we have to help a company that is actively destroying our futures by wrecking the climate”.

Your theatre is the Royal Shakespeare Company. A company is British Petroleum who sponsored the 5 British Pounds tickets. This open letter along with actions from artists, the public and environmentalists, pressured the theatre in terminating the sponsorship deal. Both the letter and the decision by the theatre are covered by mainstream media and put the theatre and BP in an unfavorable light. Interestingly, the theatre meant to do good. But given the backlash didn’t do good enough.

Staying in the “green” zone

This example isn’t an outlier. It proofs to be difficult to stay in the “green zone”. There are several reasons for that. Over time public opinion changes, awareness grows, new insights arise, and innovations emerge. What was once regarded to be best practice, now is mediocre. Or worse, as Optum found out.

Optum is a major software provider for the health industry serving 9 out of 10 US hospitals and reaching 128M individual consumers. Optum, in their own words, aspires to improve experiences and outcomes for everyone they serve while reducing the total cost of care. One of their products applies risk analysis to predict patients in most need of special intervention. Which to me is amazing. And I do see how this simultaneously improves experiences and reduces costs. The journal Science, however, found a strong bias in Optum’s algorithm. Many black patients were given “strangely low” risk scores, despite their deteriorating health conditions.

The importance of agility and resilience

Being able to face unexpected changes to your organization’s context is of paramount importance. These two examples show that it’s vital to be agile and resilient. Even more so because large-scale natural events can present your organization with the unthinkable.

This is clearly demonstrated by the Covid-19 crisis, for example. In the words of the International Monetary Fund: “The Covid-19 pandemic is inflicting high and rising human costs worldwide, and the necessary protection measures are severely impacting economic activity. As a result of the pandemic, the global economy is projected to contract sharply by –3 percent in 2020, much worse than during the 2008–09 financial crisis”.

Specific industries, businesses and households are strongly affected. Leading to bankruptcies and high levels of unemployment. These effects will ripple to other sectors of the economy affecting even more companies and households.

Natural large-scale events have an unpredictable impact on your business. You can’t plan for it. The same is true for “staying in the green zone”. So be ready for the unexpected. The journey to a positive impact is influenced by many variables. It’s paramount that you can respond quickly. In my next post, “Agility and organizational complexity, beware of the present“, you can read my number one tip on agility and resilience. You’ll find my posts and more at SogetiLabs.

Tips

Embrace the shifting context.

Your organization will be presented with unforeseen circumstances. Nothing you can do about that. But you can be ready with a strong purpose proposition, solid roadmaps that involve all layers of the organization and high-performance teams. This will help you to prepare, react, recover and reimagine.

Prepare to be ready for the unforeseen.

Form a permanent quick-response team with organizational key-players across the board: c-level executives, communications, operations, legal. Cover both the communication and content perspective. Put in place basic procedures for and means of secure collaboration. Practice periodically to grow and learn as a team. Evaluate and improve after each real-life incident.

React to stop the fall-out.

Whether it’s a racist remark by an employee, reported abuse, compromised customer data, a crashed plane, a devastating storm or a leaking oil tanker. Your first response matters. It will leave a lasting impression on your stakeholders and impact leeway and future opportunities. Your response is as much about tone of voice as it’s about content.

Resolve underlying issues and mitigate negative impacts.

After successfully reacting, it’s time to be pro-active. Widen the scope of the quick-response force and include professionals that can deal with the specificities of the incident. Put in place specific metrics and tools that will keep the team informed and aligned. Determine the root cause and alternatives to come to a resolve.

Reimagine your role and approach.

Some incidents will have a lasting impact that make it advantageous or necessary to fundamentally change your organization. Think of Boeing and the 737 MAX, Volkswagen and Dieselgate or the Covid-19 crisis and the hospitality industry. Revisit the value generated by your business model. See the tips for that in a previous post, “Doing good drives profitability”.

In general

Leverage on and deepen stakeholder collaboration. Choose a human-centric, co-creation approach. Keep looking for opportunities to display and reinforce your values, strengths, brand and purpose proposition. This leads to expected, predictable organizational behavior. It is this predictability that will generate stability and create trust amongst your stakeholders. Trust, build over time, will provide your organization with unique opportunities both during an incident and in day to day business.

The post A strong purpose proposition requires agility and resilience appeared first on SogetiLabs.

Over the past ten years, the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store have played a key role in the birth of multiple billion-dollar industries. Obvious examples include ridesharing companies like Uber and Lyft along with delivery services like InstaCart, GrubHub, and Postmates. The app stores have transformed gaming, social media, health/fitness, and entertainment to name a few. With so much riding on these two app stores, changes to policies and procedures can have large consequences.

Types of Policies

There are a number of different policies that the app stores require developers to abide by. The main categories include how applications are bought and how in-app purchases are made, privacy and security policies that must be followed, as well as policies on the quality and content of an application. From very specific guidelines such as showing specific keyboards for different types of inputs, to more broad requirements like having a high quality user interface and unique content within your application.

Specific Examples

• Permission must be asked before apps can use device sensor data (GPS, camera, Bluetooth)
• Targeting children requires special consideration when collecting analytics/personal information and when displaying ads
• Applications cannot be a simple wrapper around a website, they must make an effort to use native functionality and follow certain mobile app user interface standards

Policy Enforcement

Apple and Google review all new app submissions and app updates before iPhone and Android users can download them. The review process, which can take as little as 12 hours and as much as 2 weeks, is the primary way policies are enforced. Apple’s review process typically takes longer and appears to be stricter than Google’s, with 40% of app submissions being rejected by Apple for various reasons. Applications that require a password must give the app store reviewers access so they can test as much of the app’s functionality as possible. If an issue is found developers have an opportunity to provide an explanation, appeal their case, or submit another update to fix the problem.

The Balancing Act

As with all platforms, things change and evolve over time and the app stores are no different. The thing to remember about changes in the app stores is how many companies and independent developers stand to be affected. Entire industries can be approved or rejected during the review process based on changes to these platform policies. Both app stores are aware of this issue and so they regularly tweak their policies to reduce the impact.

Family Apps

Both app stores have made changes to more tightly control apps that target kids. Apple announced new policies which would ban the use of all external analytics and advertising software. Panic set in throughout the development community for a short time because most developers use these types of libraries in their applications. Over the next couple months Apple revised their rules to allow a specific set of advertisers with child approved ads as well as allowing some external analytics libraries as long as personally identifiable information is not collected.

Template Based Apps

Apple has always required new applications to contain unique content and a unique user experience as much as is possible. They decided to implement a policy banning all templated applications and app-generator services. These types of app builder platforms are often used by small business and non-profits. They are a low cost option that often requires little to no technical expertise. Once Apple realized all of the local churches and small business that this change would actually affect, they decided to clarify the rules by only banning the templating services from submitting the application on the company or organization’s behalf.

Daily Fantasy Sports

In 2014, the first daily fantasy sports applications showed up in the Apple App Store. Apple allows these types of applications as long as the entity publishing the app has a gambling license and they must restrict the app from being used in areas where gambling is illegal. One year later, days before the NFL season started, the Play Store quietly allowed two of the most popular daily fantasy sports platforms to publish full versions of their applications even though Google’s policies stated that they did not allow gambling at the time. Today the Play Store has adopted similar policies to Apple.

There are many more examples of the app stores evolving over time and the effects this can have on certain industries or groups. Whether positive or negative, developers and companies must keep a close eye on policy changes that might affect their mobile applications and their business. Companies that heavily rely on the app store ecosystem to get access to their customers, companies in controversial industries, or those that are not building fully native applications must pay particularly close attention. Having enough time to react can make the difference between getting kicked out of the app store and ensuring that your application continues to be available to the billions of users around the world that these two massive platforms support.

The post The Delicate Balance of App Store Policies appeared first on SogetiLabs.

In an era of cyber intrusions, security is an essential priority for every business. You own Windows 10, you implement the updates as they are released and you refresh your systems every 3 to 4 years. Are you ensuring you have taken the necessary steps to secure your workplace systems?

We all know that security is not absolute—even with an unlimited budget there is no guarantee that an organization won’t suffer a breach. Hackers are getting smarter, and advanced persistent threat (APT) hackers with state affiliations have the resources and time to breach any network or organization.

We see that the nature of security needs to evolve as today’s hackers continue looking for ways to take advantage of attack surfaces to create zero-day exploits. Current tools can only help protect against attacks that happen at the software application, operating system and virtual machine level. Today we are beginning to see the threats get more sophisticated as hackers continue to evolve their techniques and move towards the hardware infrastructure, making the compromised components more difficult to detect. A compromised PC can offer up access identity, encryption keys and password in addition to sensitive data.

Why hardware based security graphic

These types of attacks have unfortunately become part of our daily reality and our technology, and our experts must get smarter as well. This is why businesses need to invest in better technology with the hardware capabilities that help ensure security from the core to the application layer. This way security is present not only in applications, security tools, and perimeter firewalls, but embedded in the operating system as well.

Security is needed at all layers

SECURITY TECHNOLOGIES: MICROSOFT

Windows 10 has introduced, improved, and continually enhanced essential security features, and with each semi-annual channel of Windows 10, security remains on the forefront of its design. Identity and credential protection, application protection, and storage protection all protect against existing and emerging threats. Many of these technologies rely on hardware, and because of this, Microsoft has partnered with leading PC manufacturers to create an industry standard hardware root of trust, coupled with the security capabilities built into modern hardware.

A Secured-core PC is a modern Windows device that comes with the highest level of hardware, software, and identity protection features. It helps minimize the risk of malicious code injection by locking down firmware when software is running to help prevent planted malware from compromising the OS. Secured-core PCs require specific configuration to fully enable the highest level of protection against attack. Secured Core PCs provide a hardware-isolated operating environment to help prevent advanced attacks on Windows from the firmware level.

SECURITY TECHNOLOGIES: Intel

Hardware Shield is Intel’s commitment to providing security on Intel 10^th Generation Intel® Core^TM vPro^TM  systems. Business class devices based on the Intel® Core^TM vPro^TM processor family provide the hardware- enhanced security that enterprises need, and adhere to the Microsoft Secure Core PC industry specification. New security features of Windows 10 take advantage of the hardware security enhancements and make a compelling case for businesses to continually refresh and update their investments in Windows 10 and workplace hardware.  With the launch of 10^th Generation of Intel® Core^TM vPro^TM  Processors, business systems will contain Hardware Shield, and this set of hardware security features are built into the silicon. Devices with Intel Hardware Shield allow organizations to fully utilize security features included in Windows 10 and provide more support for to address today’s security issues and threats.

Intel Hardware Shield

Endpoint security decisions start at the PC. To fully protect your organization, you need to protect your PC endpoints. It is imperative that organizations continue to update and patch their Windows 10 systems, and evolve from traditional antivirus protections but that’s only half the story. In addition to software-based attacks, hackers have begun targeting firmware, which can serve as a conduit to system memory and the virtualization-based security environment. Enterprise businesses need fully integrated software and hardware solutions, which is where Intel® Hardware Shield comes in.

Windows 10 Security with Intel Hardware Security

As technology advances, so do the skills of cyber intruders. It is prudent to take advantage of safer and more efficient technology, and for that we need to adapt to change.  Every day there is a new test on the security of your infrastructure, as hackers look to take advantage of zero-day exploits, and work down the hardware stack to compromise systems in harder to detect ways.  

To combat these threats, technology experts have to get smarter as well, and need to expand their focus from more than just perimeter security to include endpoint security in their overall strategy. Maintaining your Windows 10 systems and refreshing your PC fleet with Intel® 10^th and 11^th Generation Core^TM vPro^TM business equipment increases security to protect your valuable systems, data, and, ultimately, your business.

The post Strengthen the Security of your Workspace appeared first on SogetiLabs.

Help your stakeholders to understand, trust and strengthen your organization

Reading time: 4 minutes.

Did your organization communicate their ambition to help our planet and society? You can show that this ambition is core to the organization by being straightforward, visible and consistent about your positive impact. As a result, you will help your stakeholders to understand, trust and strengthen your organization.

In contrast, stakeholders will be confused and alienated by company’s commitments and behaviors that can be deemed intermittent, arbitrary, incongruous or perhaps even opportunistic.

This post is part of a series about technology and organizational positive impact

1. A guide to organizational positive impact, tech edition
2. Doing good drives profitability
3. Major events and big statements
4. Be consistent about your positive impact
5. A strong purpose proposition requires agility and resilience
6. Agility and organizational complexity, beware of the present
7. How to create positive impact with technology? Foster critical thinking
8. Technology as an accelerator for positive impact
9. Assess how technology shapes your organizational positive impact
10. Reframe technology’s purpose and strengthen organizational alignment

It’s costly to be inconsistent

The National Basketball Association, the NBA, wants to expand and they see an opportunity in entering the Chinese market. A billion-dollar deal was signed. NBA teams would play off-season in China sponsored by Chinese firms. Television rights to NBA’s season games where sold. But then early October 2019 a general manager of an NBA team posted a message in support of protests in Honk Kong. China threatened to rip-up the deal.

Forced to respond, the NBA had to navigate between an emerging and their traditional American home market. This has proven to be very difficult. The result is a broken partnership and a financial loss that is, by an estimation of the NBA in February 2020, “probably less than $400 million”. What’s considered as a positive action in one country, might be considered as an attack on one’s values and aspirations in another.

Choosing a wider lens

The “customer is king” mantra no longer works. Instead, consciously define your own direction. And align the aspirational, strategic and operational level. Start top-down. Formulate your core values and purpose proposition using input from all levels and selected stakeholders. Then go bottom-up. Empower your organization to translate values and purpose into day to day actions.

It is also important to include all relevant stakeholders. Most importantly, make sure you reach beyond the usual suspects such as current shareholders, investors, customers, employees and suppliers. Include also future stakeholders and stakeholders that are indirectly one way or the other linked to your value chain/proposition. This helps to ensure a more systemic approach. The broader the lens, the more likely you’ll find a new path to jointly drive value.

Rubicon, using technology to optimize collaboration and end waste

Rubicon is a good example of applying a wide lens, providing consistency and having a positive impact. Rubicon’s mission is to end waste, in all of its forms. Because, as they notice, waste is unsightly, dangerous and expensive.

Their main tool is technology. Rubicon provides digital waste, recycling, and smart city solutions.

Another key success factor is collaboration. Rubicon helps their partners find economic value in their waste streams together. And in the process, facilitate and advance innovation to further waste reduction.

For instance, by connecting fast-casual restaurant chain Chipotle to a startup specializing in plastics recycling. Together, a process was developed to convert single-use gloves into a high-quality resin. This resin is used to manufacture garbage can liners. During the last 9 months of 2019 this process was put to the test in a pilot program that ran in 25 locations. During the pilot more than 625,000 gloves were recycled that otherwise would have been disposed of in a landfill. Chipotle plans to expand the program to all of its 2.580 locations.

Rubicon also shows consistency beyond their products. For example, by offering in-office composting. Since 2017, their Atlanta headquarters has diverted 28,147 pounds of food waste from the landfill, creating 7,037 pounds of compost. They also tick positive impact boxes outside the waste domain with actions such as paying 100% of health insurance premiums.

Patagonia, going above and beyond

Another company to turn to for inspiration is Patagonia, arguably the ultimate example of an activist company. Consistent to the core. They advocate for the protection of the natural environment, for increased awareness about how profits and losses are directly linked to Earth’s health and for a sustainable transformation of the industrial model.

Patagonia has managed to deliver on its activist ambition. Since 1985, they have pledged 1% of sales to the preservation and restoration of the natural environment. In 2002 they co-created a non-profit corporation to encourage other businesses to do the same. Since then, that corporation has grown to over 2,700 business members.

Patagonia is also consistent in marketing their products. In 2011 they ran an ad in The New York Times on Black Friday with a headline that read “Don’t Buy This Jacket” accompanied by a photo of one of their jackets and text explaining the need to address the issue of consumerism.

In 2016 Patagonia donated 100 percent of global Black Friday sales from their stores and website. Total sales accumulated to 10 million US dollars. This money went to grassroots organizations, working in local communities to protect air, water and soil for future generations.

Consistency is key

Patagonia’s and Rubicon’s actions aren’t random. They are well-thought-out and consistent. Their choices and actions have become part of their organization’s DNA. Leading to loyal and supportive stakeholders that understand how they can individually contribute to their mission.

Being consistent about your positive impact is key for a strong, resilient purpose proposition. So is an agile mindset. Read more about that in the next post, “A strong purpose proposition requires agility and resilience”. You’ll find my posts and more at SogetiLabs.

Tips

Consistency in the wide sense of the word

A strong purpose proposition touches everything your company does. Whether it’s the CEO launching a new product or a barista serving a customer. Whether it’s the Tokyo or the London branch. Online or offline. A billboard or annual financial report. Today or next year. Your stakeholders expect that your purpose proposition shows itself and does so in a consistent manner. And consistent in a wide sense of the word. So, over time, geographically, through different organizational levels and through different points of contact.

Be consistent

For stakeholders to see consistency, you actually have to be consistent. Therefore, it’s important to drive your own course. Manage expectations and prepare your organization and stakeholders for the next normal. Be vocal about your “why”, set the right fundaments and make that part of your organization’s DNA.

Demonstrate consistency

For stakeholders to see consistency, you have to show your consistency and let it speak for itself. So, be sure to display and celebrate your accomplishments. Also, stay ambitious and keep moving your goals to ensure you are consistently having a positive impact.

Including stakeholders

When selecting stakeholders to include in your purpose proposition, you might want to take a decision on including competitors. Should you be good to your competition? Or should you smash and obliterate them? And if so, are there red lines in your actions?

For some selected stakeholders you want to go beyond inclusion. You want to collaborate to ensure successful execution and to further optimize positive impact. Involve your best and brightest employees on both an executive and technical level. The change will never happen to go alone or going mediocre.

Unilever, providing visible consistency

A good example of an organization providing consistency in a visible manner is Unilever. During the Covid-19 crisis, Unilever donated €100m worth of soap, sanitizer, bleach and food. Unilever shared this news via a press release. Part of the press release is a statement of the CEO, Alan Jope. The first two lines are: “We are deeply saddened by the terrible impact that coronavirus is wreaking on lives and livelihoods everywhere. The world is facing its greatest trial in decades”. The press release and the donation are tightly aligned with Unilever’s purpose proposition which is “a new way of doing business – one that delivers growth by serving society and the planet”.

In depth

Learn more about the non-profit organization co-founded by Patagonia.

For more information on Rubicon, you could read their Environmental, Social and Governance report (ESG), entitled: “Toward a future without waste”.

If you want to find organizations with a positive impact in your own region or industry, you could use the B Corp directory.

The post Be consistent about your positive impact appeared first on SogetiLabs.

Today, we can’t rely on the magic of cloud computing to deliver better resources.  In short, it is unfortunately inescapable that “long WAN latencies are a fundamental obstacle. Even trivial user-application interactions incur these delays in cloud computing.”  Beyond those trivial apps, we already have mobile apps trying to deliver advanced, computation-intense capabilities like speech recognition, NLP, assisted vision, machine learning, and augmented reality. Those apps suffer because cloud computing isn’t powerful enough to support them seamlessly across a WAN like the public internet.

MAUI researchers believe that “Rather than relying on a distant cloud, the resource poverty of a mobile device can be addressed by using a nearby resource-rich cloudlet.” 

A bit of a stretch? Let me explain.

The number of users using mobile phones to connect with the internet is rising continuously. In addition to the server hardware and static client, mobile hardware is recognized as a necessary resource. Compared to static servers and clients, there are many drawbacks associated with mobile devices. The computational resources of the mobile device are limited by memory, battery life, and weight and height dissipation.

ENTER CLOUDLETS…

Cloudlets are a way of moving cloud computing capacity closer to intelligent devices at the edge of the network. It is a small-scale data center or cluster of computers designed to quickly provide cloud computing services to mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and wearable devices, within close geographical proximity. The goal of a cloudlet is to increase the response time of applications running on mobile devices by using low latency, high-bandwidth wireless connectivity, and by hosting cloud computing resources, such as virtual machines, physically closer to the mobile devices accessing them.

This is intended to eliminate the wide-area network (WAN) latency delays that can occur in traditional cloud computing models. It was specifically designed to support interactive and resource-intensive especially for mobile applications, such as those for speech recognition, language processing, machine learning, and virtual reality because cloud computing could not provide full support to mobile scenarios, especially for the high-speed vehicle-mounted network environments, in which drivers must quickly learn about the road conditions and traffic flow in real-time.

Cloudlets is a technological innovation implementing AI and IoT. Many enterprises and organizations in the industry have begun to deploy the ecosystem of cloudlets, including communications vendors like Cisco and Huawei, as well as many cloud computing and IoT enterprises like Zhiyun and Gizwits 4.0. On November 19, 2015, Cisco collaborated with ARM, Dell, Intel, Microsoft, and Princeton University to create the OpenFog(Cloudlets) Alliance, aiming to develop fog computing-related technical standards and promote technical transformation in the industry.

Bit of History…

A prototype implementation of a cloudlet was originally developed by Carnegie Mellon University as a research project, starting in 2009. The term cloudlet was coined by computer scientists Mahadev Satyanarayanan, Victor Bahl, Ramón Cáceres and Nigel Davies. These researchers define cloudlets as the middle tier of a three-tier hierarchy: intelligent device, cloudlet, and cloud.

Why we need Cloudlets…

Cloudlets are beneficial because they allow their users to instantiate custom virtual machines rapidly on the running cloudlet, which requires software in a thin client fashion. A novel architecture for a carrier-managed WLAN network that leverages the virtualization of network functions and concepts. It was concluded that the WLAN cloudlet solution offered different advantages in terms of agility, flexibility, and costs. The benefits of cloudlet-based WLAN include the following

1. reduced equipment cost
2. decreased access latency
3. flexibility
4. network management
5. faster configuration of new services
6. new revenues
7. possibility of introducing new services.

What is different with Cloudlets than other Public Cloud Data Center you ask…

Before going into differentiation, we need to understand that Cloudlet is considered a form of cloud computing because it delivers hosted services to users over a network.

 First, a cloudlet is self-managed by the businesses or users that employ it, while a public cloud data center is managed full-time by a cloud provider. Second, a cloudlet predominantly uses a local area network (LAN) for connectivity, versus the public Internet. Thirdly, a cloudlet is employed by fewer, more localized users than a major public cloud service. Finally, a cloudlet contains only “soft state” copies of data, such as a cached copy, or code that is stored elsewhere

Conclusion and Future Work…

The cloudlet provisioning mechanism for our current working prototype to enable lower energy consumption on the mobile device, place fewer requirements on mobile devices, and simplify provisioning in planned environments.

Future work on this is related to security, establishing the initial trust between mobile devices and cloudlets, which can be:

• As a mobile device, is what I discovered really a “friendly” cloudlet?
• As a cloudlet, did that offloading request really come from a “friendly” mobile device?

The goal is to explore solutions for establishing trusted identities in disconnected environments with the advantage/constraint that computed cloudlets are not meant to be long-lived, meaning that they are pre-provisioned and eventually deployed to support a mission.

This blog has been co-authored by Abhilasha Srivastava

Working as a consultant with Sogeti India, OneDeliver from last 1.9 years and actively contributed to projects in the area of cloud assessment, infrastructure and migration. Currently supporting cloud run services for multiple customers and passionate technology advocate who looks to discover ways to transform/automate businesses functions. Area of interest is DevOps which includes IaC and infrastructure management.

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Organizations promise to deliver on positive impact

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We are increasingly exposed to large-scale events that impact our planet and society and that make us aware that our current actions aren’t sustainable. As a consequence, the expectations we have for the businesses we work for, invest in and turn to for our products and services are changing. In this context, it comes as no surprise that more and more businesses are now making big statements about their ambition to do good.

This post is part of a series about technology and organizational positive impact:

1. A guide to organizational positive impact, tech edition
2. Doing good drives profitability
3. Major events and big statements
4. Be consistent about your positive impact
5. A strong purpose proposition requires agility and resilience
6. Agility and organizational complexity, beware of the present
7. How to create positive impact with technology? Foster critical thinking
8. Technology as an accelerator for positive impact
9. Assess how technology shapes your organizational positive impact
10. Reframe technology’s purpose and strengthen organizational alignment

Major events and stark warnings

In the last two years or so we’ve seen quite a lot of large-scale events that show us how important and fragile our planet and communities are. A lack of drinking water in India, rising poverty in the UK and the USA, the global #metoo movement, massive fires in Siberia, California and Australia, deforestation in the Amazon, droughts in Europe, police brutality, plastic in our deepest seas and most pristine mountains. Just to mention a few. And at this very moment, we’re fighting the Covid-19 crisis.

We’ve also seen distressing predictions and stark warnings from the United Nations, governments, the Doomsday Clock scientists, the World Economic Forum, national intelligence agencies, and central banks. Urging us to speedily address environmental and societal risks. For instance, as stated by the United Nations and the European Commission, “There is only one planet Earth, yet by 2050, the world will be consuming as if there were three”.

Increased awareness and big statements

These large-scale events and warnings have been widely covered by mainstream media and have made people aware and active. So, they start to ask more from their favorite brands, employers, pension funds, and banks. Specifically, they ask them to take good care of our planet and society. And business is listening. Especially since doing good drives long-term profitability.

In August and September 2019, BIG statements were released by three different groups: 181 American multinationals, 32 key players in the fashion industry and 130 banks representing more than 47 trillion USD in assets. Last January, Microsoft made a big statement about going carbon negative by 2030 since carbon neutrality is “not enough”.

The commonality between these statements is that businesses of prominence and influence promise to do good for the planet and society. The response from media, stakeholders, and some of my friends was somewhat skeptical. This is the headline in the Harvard Business Review: “Is the Business Roundtable Statement Just Empty Rhetoric?”. Any skepticism will be amplified by the Covid-19 crisis. Because many fear its fallout will severely delay or diminish execution on aspirational goals.

Positive impact

Simultaneously, I see organizations, cities, and national governments move forward. To illustrate, take the response of businesses to the same Covid-19 crisis. Leveraging their resources, supply chain, and technology to contribute in a moment of need and vulnerability. Just a few out of an abundant number of examples.

Hertz offered their idle rental cars to health care workers in New York City. Nike and Gap produced personal protective equipment. Unilever donated €100m worth of soap, sanitizer, bleach, and food, also offering €500m of cash flow relief to support livelihoods across its extended value chain. Tesla engineered respiratory systems. Apple’s product teams worked with suppliers to produce millions of face shields. Corendon has made their hotel rooms available for free to health care workers in the Amsterdam region.

I’m hopeful that businesses are getting serious about improving their impact on the planet and society. Which requires making conscious choices and being consistent. More about that in my next post, “Be consistent about your positive impact”. You’ll find my posts and more at SogetiLabs.

Tips

Go beyond your big statement

If you decide to make a big statement yourself, then demonstrate there’s more to it than aspirational words. Embed your proposition in your business canvas and create a roadmap with actionable insights. Ensure you can show some results in the very near future and then continue to deliver on long-term fundamental improvements.

Setting the right foundations is paramount whenever defining purpose, values and aspirational goals. So, it is worth investing time and resources to create a clear, robust and somehow unique purpose proposition that stakeholders can relate to and you can deliver on.

Choose consciously the starting point and direction of your journey. The why. Recognize those involved and help your stakeholders to co-create and embrace your aspirations. Make it a mutual opportunity. Not a burden.

Understand your stakeholders

Obviously, it’s vital to have a deep understanding of your stakeholders. Especially when their context is changing due to large-scale events. Because those changes will affect their understanding and expectations of your organization. Leading to different behavior. Will they turn away and stop buying from, investing in, supplying to and collaborating with your organization? Or will your stakeholders become your most powerful ambassadors? So, a deep level of understanding of events and the impact on your stakeholders can play a crucial role all throughout the design and execution on the purpose proposition of your company.

Equally important, monitor developments and steps taken within your industry such as new initiatives to protect planet and society, to prevent or accelerate regulation and to influence public’s opinion.

Monitor regulators too. Be aware of proposed and ongoing investigations and of proposed changes to regulations. The actions by your competitors, industry-wide bodies and regulators most likely will raise the bar for your organization’s impact on planet and society. If left unattended, this will reduce your autonomy and profitability.  

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is fast becoming a crucial competency for organisations however, its adoption poses many challenges. Companies want to leverage the power of AI but they are not sure where to start. Top reasons why AI adoption can be difficult is because companies don’t have the required skills, proper infrastructure, or they struggle to identify a good use case to start with. Implementing AI solutions within an organisation is a long-term transformation journey as it requires companies to have the right data, platforms and infrastructure to be deployed sustainably. Every company is in a different stage of maturity and requires different approaches when implementing AI solutions. Sogeti helps its clients along this AI transformation by meeting them where they currently reside in the journey. Some clients are further ahead than others and that is why Sogeti has created a methodology of AI implementation that fits every road map. Whether you are an organisation that is contemplating bringing AI into its processes or an organisation that has already experimented with AI or an organisation that is quite advanced in their AI journey, Sogeti can help bridge the gap between where you are and where you need to be. Our philosophy towards AI is simple, we believe in delivering value through AI.

Download the whitepaper to learn more.

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Microsoft has still positioned SharePoint 2019 On-premises environment for custom solutions and applications that can be migrated over from business.

Majorly there are three different workflows supported in SharePoint 2019:

1. Microsoft Flow: Microsoft Flow is a new cloud-based workflow platform. It has two limitations:
   – Each related user must have a PowerApps Plan 1 license which is not part of the SharePoint Server license.
   – Microsoft Flow is currently optimized for non-interactive workflows.
2. SharePoint 2013 Workflow: This platform is the recommended workflow platform where Microsoft Workflow Manager is used to integrate workflows into SharePoint Designer.
3. SharePoint 2010 Workflow: This platform is supported for backward compatibility, it has a limitation custom action cannot be migrated over.

On the bright side, SharePoint supports Microsoft Workflow Manager, which is based on Windows Workflow Foundation.

We can Develop Custom workflows using these Visual Studio tools 

• Visual Studio: Visual Studio is used to develop Sequential & Parallel workflows with custom actions and tasks that can interact with any custom application.

The end-user interacts with workflows via modern web browsers like Edge, Firefox, or Chrome.

Building SharePoint Workflow Services using Client-Side Object Model, Microsoft has introduced an entirely new workflow architecture and platform that reflect fundamental shifts in the product direction.

The most prominent change in the new architecture is that workflow execution in SharePoint no longer takes place in SharePoint. Instead new execution engine: Workflow Manager 1.0.

Workflow Manager hosts the Windows Workflow Foundation runtime and all the necessary services required by Windows Workflow Foundation. When a workflow is published, or a new instance of a published workflow is started, SharePoint notifies Workflow Manager, which in turn processes the workflow episodes. When the workflow access information in SharePoint, such as list item properties or user properties, it authenticates using the OAuth support and communicates over new and improved REST APIs.

Using Visual Studio 2017 we can develop Workflow projects and add our Activities, Custom Activities, and deploy on SharePoint 2019 as a feature. 

1. Project Explorer where you can view the project structure and files
2. Activity Toolbox to add-in tools and custom activities
3. Activity Designer allows to drag & drop from toolbox where the business logic flow is drawn
4. Activity Properties to view the in/Out parameters
5. Variable Toolbox allows you to define variables for the workflow activity

Example project module that can be easy to start up your custom workflow on SharePoint 2019

Reference & add references to core SharePoint CSOM libraries:

· Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.dll
· Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Runtime.dll
· Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.WorkflowServices.dll
You can utilize the power of CAML query inside custom activity
CamlQuery camlQuery = new CamlQuery();

Copy CustomActivity.dll from the release folder and paste it into the following two locations.

Edit the AllowedTypes.xml file into the above two locations.

• Open a command prompt to restart the “Workflow Manager Backend” service.
•  Type net stop “Workflow Manager Backend” and Type net start “Workflow Manager Backend”   
• Compile and deploy the “WorkflowActivity” Feature from visual studio 2017

That’s all…. You have done the custom code activity workflow in SharePoint 2019. 

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Are you constantly tired during the pandemic time when everything is done remotely? Chances are we’re not doing it properly.

A recent article on BBC described that while we can connect to one another via technological means we are still doing it by imitating the normal connection that we have.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote many books about his patients in his lifetime. In his book “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat”, he talks about a patient losing her proprioception. Proprioception is commonly known as kind of a “sixth sense” and it basically lets a person know where their limbs and digits and other things are from one another without actually looking at them. This means that when you close your eyes you can still sense where your hand is.

The losing of proprioception caused the woman to have to consciously do everything. If she wanted to pick up a coffee cup she would have to concentrate on the cup and concentrate on actively bringing her hand towards it. While carrying the coffee she would at all times have to concentrate on not dropping the cup. If she were to smile she would have to separately set a “smiling face”. All in all, she’d have to imitate a lot of things that would otherwise come automatically.

The remote meeting software we use is kind of like that. It tries to imitate the human connection but we are still missing out quite a lot of cues, especially if we turn off the video. To connect to one another we must actively keep the discussion going because a silence between people in the same room still shows that we exist together. On a remote Teams meeting everybody else just “disappears” if nobody is talking.

So we use a lot of energy just to keep things going. When we subtract all the traveling we do during the day from one room to another and put meetings right after another we keep piling on the extra work.

No wonder we are completely drained.

So how would we tackle this? First of all, we should take breaks. After a meeting, your ears and eyes should have at least fifteen minutes just to recover from what you just did. We should add blocks of time where we are not available for meetings and keep that time to ourselves.

Most importantly when not on a computer we should do something tangible. Move around. Take walks. Look at something else than screen. Even reading a book is better because you’re not gazing at a screen that is bombarding your eyes with light.

Finally, let’s be merciful to ourselves and others. We’ll get through this.

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