06Jun

“Hate” might be too strong a word, yet that’s how CIO magazine chose to describe the relationship between the IT department and the rest of the business.

Headlining a lead article “4 tips for getting the business to stop hating IT,” CIO magazine said, “Long seen as back-office problem solvers and the department of ‘no,’ IT still has an image problem with business executives and users alike.”

Why that is so goes back to how IT departments and projects were organized. When technology improvements and upgrades were needed, in-house teams might take months or even years. That prompted business units to go around IT, bringing in vendors then expecting the in-house team to support the technology.

Historically, IT was positioned as a service with the rest of the company as its customer. That problem-solving approach didn’t encourage a holistic view of the organization.

“IT has been in the business of fixing problems, and when you’re only in the problem-solving business you can easily get a bad rap,” Ciena CIO Craig Williams says. “But there’s an opportunity to have a different culture.”

The IT culture and “waterfall” approach to projects is changing, if slowly. The road though, is long, says the article. To hasten the process, CIO magazine consulted IT leaders asking them what they do that’s been successful, coming up with four general tips.

  1. Think of users as colleagues, not “customers” — IT departments need to move to a product-centric model, which means taking a holistic view of the business and how the product helps the user and adds value. Says Gartner VP Suzanne Adnams, IT leaders need to “demonstrate the value they deliver, rather than the service they offer, and that’s a big difference.”
  2. Go all out to build up trust — Explains Adnams, “There has to be trust from the executive suite. They have to be able to trust the CIO to tell them what they need to hear and give them real information.” It’s important to be “curious about the business”… and it takes a willingness to listen,” the article says.
  3. Look beyond the executive suite – As important as it is to build relationships with the C-suite, it is equally essential to build trust with end-users. You do that, says CIO, by making sure the tools and information they have is what they need, and learning what it is they desire. One of the most powerful ways of building trust is when rolling out new technology. As a survey showed, the majority of IT leaders think their innovation efforts are successful. Only 41% of employees agree.
  4. Do as many types of outreach as you can – Brown bag lunches. Webinars. Internal trade shows. Lunch and learn events where IT does the learning. Do all these and more, say the experts. “The important thing is finding ways to interact and communicate that aren’t project-based and that get people from different parts of the organization together and speaking,” advises Andrew Wertkin, chief strategy officer at BlueCat Networks. “Bring that mentality to everything.”

Photo by Andre Hunter on Unsplash

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Anthropic Unveils Claude 3: Redefining AI Chatbots with Enhanced Capabilities

Anthropic, the AI startup backed by Google and with substantial venture capital, has just introduced the latest iteration of its GenAI technology: Claude 3. This announcement marks a significant advancement in AI capabilities, positioning Claude 3 as a formidable competitor even against OpenAI’s GPT-4.

Advanced Capabilities

According TechCrunch, “Claude 3, as Anthropic’s new GenAI is called, is a family of models — Claude 3 Haiku, Claude 3 Sonnet, and Claude 3 Opus, Opus being the most powerful. All show “increased capabilities” in analysis and forecasting, Anthropic claims, as well as enhanced performance on specific benchmarks versus models like ChatGPT and GPT-4 (but not GPT-4 Turbo) and Google’s Gemini 1.0 Ultra (but not Gemini 1.5 Pro).”

Multimodal Functionality

One notable feature of Claude 3 is its multimodal functionality, enabling it to analyze both text and images. This capability, like some iterations of GPT-4 and Gemini, allows Claude 3 to process various visual data such as, “…photos, charts, graphs and technical diagrams, drawing from PDFs, slideshows and other document types.” TechCrunch went further to note, “In a step one better than some GenAI rivals, Claude 3 can analyze multiple images in a single request (up to a maximum of 20). This allows it to compare and contrast images, notes Anthropic.” However, Anthropic has imposed limits on image processing to address ethical concerns, “Anthropic has disabled the models from identifying people…”

Claude 3’s Limitations

While Claude 3 showcases remarkable advancements, it’s not without limitations. TechCrunch reported that, “…the company admits that Claude 3 is prone to making mistakes with “low-quality” images (under 200 pixels) and struggles with tasks involving spatial reasoning (e.g. reading an analog clock face) and object counting (Claude 3 can’t give exact counts of objects in images).” Anthropic promises frequent updates to Claude 3, aiming to enhance its capabilities and address existing limitations. These updates will include improvements in following multi-step instructions, structured output generation, and multilingual support, making Claude 3 more responsive and adaptable to user needs.

As Anthropic continues to innovate and expand their offerings, the company remains dedicated to fostering a transparent and responsible approach to AI development. With substantial backing and a clear roadmap for future enhancements, Anthropic is poised to share the future of AI-driven solutions and pave the way for transformative advancements in various domains.

If you’re looking to take your career to the next level be sure to check out our IT page.

Businesses Are Seeing The Value of Blockchain Sample

Now organizations in sectors well beyond the pioneers in finance are investing in blockchain to protect data, decentralize processes and facilitate asset and data transfer.

“It’s an appealing model for many sectors, promising transparency and trust as it helps make value exchange possible,” says a SmartBrief article. Although focusing mostly on the financial sector, which is where blockchain found its earliest uses, the article mentions the steady creep of the technology into other industries and even slowly becoming commoditized as “blockchain as a service.”

“Amazon and Microsoft both currently offer BaaS, and enterprises as well as startups are taking advantage of it,” says SmartBrief. Citing a Gartner survey of CIOs, the article notes that “60% expected their firms to start or continue adopting blockchain-based technology between now and 2023.”

Earlier this year, Deloitte issued a blockchain trends report. Besides describing the evolving technology and the features each different approach offers, Deloitte found that some of the fastest growth in blockchain investments was coming in such unexpected industries as professional services – a sector that includes the staffing and employment industry – and energy and resources. In each of those 38% and 43% respectively of the firms surveyed were spending at least $5 million each on blockchain initiatives.

Not unexpectedly, the largest percentage of businesses investing in blockchain were in technology, media and telecom.

“More organizations in more sectors — such as technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences, health care, and government — are expanding and diversifying their blockchain initiatives,” Deloitte observes.

Like the financial sector, life sciences and health care deal with highly sensitive medical data they must protect or face legal consequences. Those two sectors are where blockchain “can have a more immediate and meaningful impact,” says Deloitte. They are in an industry, the report explains, “In which data transparency, speed of access, immutability, traceability, and trustworthiness can provide the information necessary for life-altering decisions.”

Interestingly, Gartner assigns a similar importance – not life or death, but still vital – to blockchain’s value to media.

“Organizations and governments are now turning to technology to help counter fake news, for example, by using blockchain technology to authenticate news photographs and video, as the technology creates an immutable and shared record of content that ideally is viewable to consumers,” Gartner said.

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