3 Ways IT Leaders Can Save Time and Boost Productivity

Optimize time and productivity by eliminating redundant practices and adopting efficiencies in your workflow

 

Time moves unforgivingly fast in the world of information technology.

 

So fast, in fact, that keeping a well-oiled IT machine requires finding efficiencies, eliminating time-wasting approaches and taming bad habits at every juncture.

 

The following tips can help you maximize time within your organization.

 

1. Maximize Cloud Usage

The cloud is an amazingly effective tool for collaboration, allowing colleagues to view progress and make rapid-fire changes quickly. However, there are risks involved, as cloud solutions can attribute to new problems, and waste time if not properly implemented.

 

Because so many point solutions exist, organizations at times end up with application sprawl and fail to share valuable information among cloud solutions.

 

Further, caution should be exercised with shadow IT – making absolutely certain that services are secure, functional, and deliver the expected results.

 

2. Make E-Mail a Cleaner Medium

When technology wastes more time than it saves, it backfires. E-mail represents this dilemma well. The primary form of communication for most all organizations, e-mail messaging is quite hard to abandon for other forms of messaging.

 

Stress-inducing components involve scanning through endless waves of unnecessary or uninteresting e-mails, which can often distract one from seeing an important email needing urgent attention. What’s more, ineffective email practices also serve to waste your time, and your coworkers.

 

For example, cc’ing several colleagues on every email causes those colleagues to spend time opening your email, consuming the information and then making a judgment if they should take action or not – when most of these emails weren’t intended for these people anyway.

 

As a result, this bombardment of messaging creates huge inefficiencies in your organization. Add new people to a message thread with purpose – summarizing information or action points on an as-needed basis, to save the recipient precious time and provide a concise action-item.  

 

3. Expand Your Network

An often highly-underestimated tactic involves seeking out the experience of our peers. Doing so expands your professional network — and incorporates your network into decision making – that can save you loads of time and stress.

 

Avoid getting burn-out by bouncing ideas and questions around, an incredibly important philosophy in sustainable IT practices.

 

By speaking with others, we’re quickly reminded that certain problems are not unique to our own organizations – and we can collaborate, with ease, to work through similar issues and help one another.

 

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Big Data: More than a Numbers Game

Big Data capabilities are a vital aspect of identifying, assessing, and leveraging insight for competitive advantage.

 

Typically, you can rely on your IT team when it comes to everything big-data related. On the other hand, your business team is faced with the challenge to identify opportunities. Understanding how to link data to customer demands and marketplace metrics is essential for producing significant outcomes. Minding the gap between teams is one of the biggest obstacles while undergoing this process.

 

How do we overcome this obstacle, you ask? Start with acquiring a C-Level Sponsor who leads, commits and holds organizations accountable to a Big Data strategy. The three goals of the C-Level Sponsor are:

 

• First, you have to have a plan. It takes a strategy to get you there.
• Second, the plan must put together a proven set of formulas, approaches and methods to win. There is no way to luck into success. As my high school football coach used to say, “Luck is when preparation meets opportunity”.
• Third, is to establish the strategy outcomes by answering the question, “Why are we doing this?” This answer should be quantified in business value creation dollars and remain the focus and measurement of the success of the strategy.

 

CEOs are being asked by the investor community and/or industry analysts to share their organization’s Big Data strategy. The investment community is wise to the fact that organizations that deploy and adopt Big Data and Predictive Analytics provide for long term stability and value gain to the shareholders. With the failure rate at approximately 70% for Big Data projects, it is important for the C-level Sponsor to mitigate risk and dollars in establishing a successful winning strategy. A winning strategy aligns executive, operational and IT goals into a single focus for significant value gain to the organization, shared responsibility and transparent accountability.

Seek outside help with an IT Consulting Partner who earns the trust of IT, Business & C-Level to help guide your organization through the strategy, process, methods and multiple POCs that are needed. There are many advantages for partnering with an outside trusted advisor:

 

• They accelerate your organization’s adoption of proven methods and approaches that guarantee success.
• There are politics in everything these days and Big Data has Big Politics attached internally with careers made and loss on such decisions; leverage an outsider to help manage through the status quo successfully because they have done it many times before.
• Having a trusted voice that is vendor neutral and is concentrating specifically on your success. Assisting you in managing vendors and proving out their claims before investing millions of dollars.
• Your team gets immediate access to critical key talent with a proven track record that you currently do not possess internally or cannot find.
• A trusted advisor guides the building of a cross-functional team and helps create a common set of semantics for communication. Big Data problems are modeling problems, and the models you are trying to create are those of the entities on which you gather data. The dynamics of the data and the products that derive from them are so dynamic that the business and IT folks need to be part of the same discussion and accountable as a team.
• Making the project successful, will require that the cross-functional team avoids any folks that are part of the old way of thinking; otherwise, the gap will persist and widen. A trusted advisor keeps a keen eye on the team and engages the C-level sponsor as needed to guide focus and outcome.
• Most importantly, they keep the focus of Big Data directed on outcomes that support the business and valuable outcome.

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E-Commerce Trends on the Rise

Trends in e-commerce technology include mobility, digitization, customization, speed optimization, chatbots, and more

 

According to research conducted by BigCommerce, 80% of people in the U.S. make purchases online at least once a month. While the majority of people shop on large marketplace websites like Amazon, roughly 30 to 40% also purchase from online retailers like web stores, independent boutiques, and category-specific e-retailers. This year we’ll see several e-commerce trends emerge with the potential to transform how we shop and communicate with online stores. 

 

1) Mobile first

 
In 2016, mobile commerce sales accounted for over $25 billion in sales, an increase of more than 25%. This figure is predicted to continue to increase, reaching over $30 billion in 2017, and $42 billion by 2020. Mobile traffic has overtaken the desktop. Google is working on a new, mobile-first web index and marketing strategy. According to these trends, it’s critical to business to put mobile first, rather than simply optimizing for mobile.

 

2) Digital payments

 
Mobile payments are on the rise as smartphone users adjust to the convenience of contactless payments. Starbucks was an innovator in mobile payments, becoming one of the first to offer products based on an online payment model. In 2016, an increasing number of customers adopted digital payment methods, using their phones, cards and even watches to complete contactless payments. PureNet predicts that every customer will expect to be able to complete their transaction using a digital wallet in real time.

 

3) Personalization and Customization

 
The amount of data available increasingly allows content, ads, and products to be shown to the right people at the right time, across the web and social networks. The continuing sophistication of personalized recommendations will be trending for ecommerce this year. Retailers will embrace personalized experiences – even using e-mail marketing to cater personalized emails to consumers, rendering unique customer experiences. and Artificial Intelligence by starting to collect behavioral data like browsing history, geo location, and social media from website visitors and developing highly targeted campaigns based on customer segments and previous online experiences.

 

4) Fast delivery

 
Ecommerce delivery timescales have reduced drastically and become much faster, boosting customer relationships with ecommerce sites. Delivery and returns have always been one of the pain points of the online shopping experience, but improvements in technology have improved delivery significantly. PureNet predicts same day delivery will continue to rise in 2017, and more ecommerce integration with drop-off point providers such as Doddle.

 

5) Competitive Platforms 

 
Technology will continue to play a greater role in automating the retail experience. With the help of the latest technology, sales people will be able to focus on building relationships with customers to increase sales. In order to stay competitive, businesses must invest in high-performing ecommerce solutions. Providers such as Charter Global, apply leading technology tools to deliver customized ecommerce solutions to mid-size and Fortune 1000 companies. Experienced providers offer expertise across multiple, proven Cloud-based ecommerce platforms such as SAP HANA, SAP Business One, Magento, PCI DSS, Spring MVC (Framework ), Magnolia CMS/ Blossom module, HTML5, CSS3, JQuery, and Struts.

 

6) Chatbots

 
Chatbots are AI-led automated messenger services that allow your customers to engage with your brand via instant messenger via machine learning. Over the last few years messaging apps have exploded in popularity, and thanks to ecommerce personalization, artificial intelligence technology has been adopted by many large retailers. This year will see these two trends combine to deliver a new way of shopping and communicating.

 

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3 Ways to Integrate the Cloud into Your Enterprise

Designing hybrid cloud environments and their implementation strategies are top-priorities when adopting enterprise-wide cloud computing initiatives

 

Cloud computing has become an incredibly popular model for modernizing IT portfolios. With exclusive benefits like gaining agility and speed-to-market, more and more companies are turning to public cloud software.

 

Hybrid cloud systems are a means to shuttle business applications between public clouds from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and private clouds running internally, or even hosted off-site by a provider.

 

Previously, many organizations chose one cloud services provide. Yet, because this approach lacks distinctive functionality, organizations are now recognizing the benefits of multi-cloud. Improved organizational flexibility, better performance and efficiency, and avoiding vendor lock-ins, are just a few of the benefits multi-cloud offers.

 

1. Adopting a Hybrid Cloud Environment

One trend that will see continuous traction in 2020 is procuring cloud services from two or more vendors at a time. AWS is popular for customer-facing apps, while Azure for business services and GCP for analytics compliment the execution of specific business scenarios.

 

Some chose to hold apps closely using private clouds, or, shuttle apps back and forth between public and private systems. This is often in the interest of security or financial reasons, with companies rolling back apps from public clouds to internal systems, known as repatriation.

 

The big picture, however, points to an urgency for a strategy that ensures the entire ecosystem works synchronously, especially as the use of multiple clouds and on-premises cloud installations become more common.

 

2. Find the Right Fit

When your eyes are bigger than your stomach, you might put too much food on your plate. This is the case for companies who rely too heavily on the public cloud, who often lose money after the first 12-18 months.

 

Over-provisioning resources you won’t consume will ultimately backfire, as is the case with some application developers who accidentally leave cloud workloads running into the weekend. As a result, multi-million-dollar charges are incurred.

 

Governance can help mitigate these over-spending risks. Crafting a strategy that optimizes functionality across cloud network (both public and private), is one such way to ensure this risk mitigation.

 

 A solution known as “FinOps” is a combination of analytics software and business management practices that, upon migration to the cloud, monitors and calculates the actual rate of cloud consumption.

 

3. Modernize, Migrate, and go Cloud-Native

 

You’re probably familiar with the lift-and-shift approach for migrating apps to the cloud, which isn’t enough to drive agility if certain factors aren’t in place. Upgrading legacy applications, for example, is fundamental when moving your data center to the cloud if tackling speed-to-market initiatives.

 

Modernizing apps, whether migrating as-is or re-architecting entirely, is vital for the attainment of competitive, advantageous software. Containers and microservices also work to make apps portable and capable of breaking-down.

 

Cloud native systems like Kubernetes-esque orchestration services (think AWS, Azure, and GCP) automate deployment, scaling, and management of containers, and ultimately enable rapid-fire change and continuous delivery.

 

Challenging aspects of going cloud-native include the need to manage clusters of containers running in a multi-cloud schema. Stop-gap measures, like using VMware to run virtual servers in AWS or Azure, can help overcome these issues.

 

Irrespective of the architecture your enterprise chooses to build, don’t sacrifice long-term transformation goals your business needs for short-term cost savings.

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How to Perfect Your Recruitment Strategy in 2020

Utilizing Professional IT Recruitment Helps Save Time, Resources, and Secure the Right Fit 

 

You may be asking yourself, “Why should my company use a professional services agency for staffing?” The answer may surprise you. The fact of the matter is, there is undeniable value in using a professional services agency over-performing those same duties in-house for many reasons. For many reasons, staff augmentation and on-boarding new hires is not a DIY (“Do it Yourself”) commodity – especially for jobs marketed within the information technology sector. 

 

The first reason companies choose to use a professional services agency as a business partner is time savings. When a job is posted, companies may receive over 200 responses, or they may receive nothing. Sorting through a stack of resumes is time-consuming and costly to the organization because the person designated to do that is abandoning their normal duties. Advertising positions, doing reference checks, background checks, drug tests and interviewing eat up time and resources. What’s more, weeding through job candidates is a laborious, massive undertaking – primarily because of a certain demand for specific skillsets when it comes to IT recruiting. 

 

Recruiting and hiring are two different things. As the tech industry continues to see exponential growth, the ability to select the right candidate for the right role both quickly and efficiently can become problematic. Hiring managers can lack the foresight and expertise that recruiting firms and recruiting experts maintain. Enter: the second reason substantiating the need for IT recruitment: Expertise. Staffing is a huge part of many professional service agencies. At Charter Global, for example, 100% of our senior level recruiting focus is spent recruiting and placing employees. With 20 + years of experience in the staffing and recruiting arena, we know how to structure job descriptions and postings that get the results our customers want.

 

The third reason is screening techniques. Since our entire focus is finding the right candidates for each position we are entrusted with, we know screening the applicants is the key to success. Skills testing modules, interviewing techniques, employment reference checks and knowing our customer’s company culture are all critical to the process.  Yet this is just a small portion of a well-defined recruitment strategy our information technology recruiters employ. We have resources available to us that most companies do not guarantee placing top talent in the right roles.

 

The fourth reason companies come to a professional services agency is for their expertise in project-based work, on/offshore resources, contract assignments, and permanent placement services. Technology leaders know their budgets aren’t to be taken lightly. For example, there are some tasks that that don’t justify hiring an entire team for a 6 – 9-month project. Those are times when you need our expertise in on/offshore project-based professional services to save you time and money.

 

Customers are looking for a “True Business Partner” when it comes to their professional services provider, and our clients have found that a partnership with Charter Global consistently delivers great returns on their investment. The fifth reason for professional IT recruitment involves an important factor: reputation. Precautionary measures are instilled with every candidate selected by a professional services agency, which otherwise might get overlooked. Our recruiters work tirelessly to ensure the right candidates, equipped with the right soft skills and technical skillets, are placed into the right positions. 

 

If you are considering a partnership with a professional services agency, contact one of Charter Global’s Client Engagement Managers. We would be happy to speak with you about the right services for your company.
 

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User Experience and User Interface Defined

Users need to feel engaged and at ease when they visit your website.

 

By Leila Kojouri

 

User Interface Development is defined as the development of websites, web applications, mobile applications, and software. The User Interface plays a key role in the software development life cycle [SDLC]. Most people assume UI development is all about creating websites and writing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but user interface goes far beyond these technical terms. The goal of the user interface is to make the user’s interaction as simple and efficient as possible, in terms of accomplishing user goals.

 

Think about it this way: The user experiences only front end interactions, such as the look and feel of the website/application. More often than not, they don’t concern themselves with the back end – like app design, coding elements, or methodologies employed in content layout. What’s more, users need to feel engaged and at ease when they visit your website.  That’s where UI engineers come into the picture – to fulfill this task.

 

Cultivating a User Interface can be divided into two phases in website/application/software development:

 

1. Research + Design
2. Development

 

Research and Design:

 

Research and analysis are all about interviewing users & project stakeholders and gathering their input to create a requirements document that includes personas, user scenarios, user behavior, and user experience evaluation metrics. During this phase, it is also important to understand the target audience so as to better cultivate a user experience design.

 

Business analysts and a user experience team usually lead the research phase. Both teams collect all information and inputs from users and project stakeholders in order to discuss technical terms with developers and project managers. Lastly, they prepare final documentation.

 

With the help of documentation, UX teams start the design process. They first create the wireframes to bring a rough idea to the project stakeholders and users.

 

Wireframes are presented as a comprehensive screen layout consisting of black and white sketches of every screen in the application. At this point, the visual and graphic design processes dictating the visual appeal have not yet begun.

 

Wireframe Example:

 

Next, developers must focus on  creating prototypes that will simulate the real application. A prototype can contain one or more features, but it actually does nothing. It merely simulates the behavior of a real application, and users can see color combinations and minimal functionality in real time. Wireframes/Sketches and Prototypes are done by UX designers.

 

 

Tools to create Wireframes and Prototypes

 

Balsamiq Mockups

Axure

Gliffy

iPhone mockup

InDesign

Photoshop

Fireworks

Dreamweaver

 

UX Designer Role and Responsibilities:

 

• Strong conceptualization ability, strong visual communication ability, drawing skills and sketchbook technique.
• Strong working knowledge of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Fireworks and associated design tools.
• Strong working knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript/JQuery.
• Experience with user interface design patterns and standard UCD methodologies.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, especially the ability to clearly articulate design decisions with stakeholders and development teams.
• Understanding of common software development practices.
• Solid understanding of user-centered design principles, careful attention to detail, and ability to grasp complex, nuanced product requirements.
• Collaborating on user experience planning and researching interaction design trends.
• Researching technology trends.

 

Note: Responsibilities would be based on company and project requirements.

 

UI Development

 

UI development can be considered as the middle ground work by combining both design sensibilities and technicalities together. UI developers are skilled at making a smooth appearance and proper functionality in a browser/device at the same time. They have the production skills vital to communicate with backend developers and collect data from server/backend and displaying to the user. They are fully responsible for the client side/front end logics including web design and functionalities.

 

UI Developer and Role and Responsibilities:

 

• Responsible for building Web Applications using Single Page Application (SPA) paradigm.
• Develop software solutions using industry best practices and in the area of security and performance in a web and SOA architecture environment.
• Effectively develop in a clean, well structured, easily maintainable format.
• Participate in the full SDLC with Requirements, Solution Design, Development, QA Implementation, and product support using Scrum and other agile methodologies.
• World-class HTML5/CSS3 and especially JavaScript/jQuery skills and good knowledge on other major JavaScript libraries and frameworks.
• Skilled in using a CSS preprocessor to speed up development (LESS, SCSS).
• Detailed knowledge of cross-browser UI issues and hacks.
• Social technology API experience (Primarily Facebook, and also Twitter)
• Experience creating, as well as consuming, JSON-based APIs.
• Understand executing accessibility and progressive enhancement presentation.
• Ensure design consistency with client’s development standards and guidelines.

 

Note: Responsibilities would be based company and project requirements.

 

A few examples of UI Developer technologies:

 

• HTML5 and CSS3
• Bootstrap, Boilerplate
• JavaScript (OPP)
• jQuery and jQuery Mobile
• Json
• Ajax
• BackboneJS
• Underscore
• AngularJS
• EmberJS
• KnockoutJS
• RequirJS
• CanJS
• ExtJS
• Dojo
• YUI
• Grunt
• Bower
• Yeoman
• MongoDB
• NodeJS
• MySQL

 

 

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3 Trends in Enterprise Mobility

Enterprise mobility trends are seeing an uptick in cloud usage, AI, and BYOD

 

Enterprise mobility suits a wide variety of business models, sizes, and scales. Because of this, many business owners are increasingly embracing technology trends in the realm of enterprise mobility. In embracing and incorporating the top enterprise mobility trends into business models, organizations are reaping substantial benefits.

 

Increased productivity, enhanced communication, and unified collaboration throughout operations are just a few ways mobility is improving organizational landscapes. These promising factors, coupled with the era of digital transformation, are driving mobility’s surge in the global market.

 

1. Advanced Cloud-based Storage 

 

Advancements in mobility are helping businesses to sharpen their competitive edge. When integrated properly, enterprise mobility management can transform the workplace in everything from security measures to cloud computing. As it stands, cloud-based tech trends have largely dominated new releases in the marketplace. touted for ease of access, device management becomes much simpler when it is facilitated through the cloud – especially when it comes to storage.

 

As the need for more robust storage alternatives increases, so does the migration to all-things-cloud. Massive, big data stores teeming with highly sensitive information necessitate safer, better storage solutions. With advanced cloud-based tech, organizations can secure as little, or as much data as necessary. Without pesky limitations in spatial or geographical requirements, for some, the only obstacle for accessibility lies in securing a proper wi-fi connection. 

 

Because security is paramount, strict user-entitlement reviews ensure that only authorized individuals maintain credentials and accessibility to the data stores.  Mobility security makes location-based access a thing of the past, dissolving commonplace limitations in other institutional storage options, like data warehouses, for instance. 

 

2. Artificial Intelligence (AI)

 

You’ve probably noticed how artificial intelligence (ai) has gone from the stuff of science fiction to modern, every-day usage. As developments in AI tech continue to surge and grow at a rapid-fire pace, more companies seek to adopt it in their practices. AI’s highly effective instrumentation is finding it’s way into everything from customer on-boarding to optimizing call center routines of customer service representatives.

 

Most notably, AI is fueling the overwhelming need for businesses to adopt everything automation. The cost-saving benefits of automated work processes speak volumes. What’s more, consumer profiles are more easily understood and interpreted through the use of AI.

 

Targeted marketing efforts are easier and closing a sale takes less time with predictive analytics. By understanding the core behavior of customers, user experiences can also be crafted and customized harmoniously. Those reluctant or slow to adapt may soon face a rude awakening as the popularity of AI-driven solutions are infiltrating virtually all aspects of business operations. 
 

3. BYOD – Bring Your Own Device

 

Our ever-growing reliance on mobile technologies is perhaps most evident in our daily routines.  Mobile devices, like smartphones, tablets, laptops, and wearables, to name a few, take precedence in everything we do – especially in the workplace. Productivity tracking mobile apps help us prioritize, schedule, execute and repeat – on time and on schedule. 

 

Like digital life rafts, our connected devices keep us abreast of our to-do lists, and without them, we feel powerless and fettered with anxiety. Businesses are now capitalizing on our inherent need to be plugged-in – with many in recent years offering a “bring your own device” alternative to places of employment. 

 

The idea behind this methodology is that our workflow can more easily be accommodated when we’re equipped with our own items; pre-configured to our tastes, settings, and requirements. By spending less money on purchasing devices for office use, businesses can save gratuitous amounts of money. However, this can be considered risky when it comes to managing proprietary data. The risk can be curbed with a management solution that limits the use of personal equipment to proprietary apps and networks. 

 

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