IT Visionaries

The United States Patent and Trademark Office wants to modernize its technology stack, but to accomplish its ambitious goal, Jamie Holcombe, the CIO for USPTO has two main objectives: snapping out of a spell that binds people to age-old projects, and scaling its current way of doing things.“What I saw was the ability to actually outsource a lot of our infrastructure, and that means not actually having the data center that we currently do in Alexandria, although it's very efficient. What we need to do is have resiliency. And so what I'd like to do is create the ability for our applications to work in the cloud on the internet, instead of having to come to the USPTO data center. And so that's what we're doing right now. We've stabilized our core applications to the point where in COVID-19 we've been able actually to increase our productivity metrics. It's unbelievable how great we're doing in this limited environment.”On this episode of IT Visionaries, Jamie details how his office is bringing its technology stack into the 21st century and how they are expediting the time it takes for a patent to get approved through the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques.Main TakeawaysYou Better Check Yourself: The discovery process is integral when you are looking to deploy any kind of artificial intelligence or machine learning techniques. Before deploying these algorithms, you need to make sure that you are creating the necessary feedback loops and understand what the data is telling you and where your deficiencies are in your algorithms.Clean-Up Your Room: Before you embark on any digital transformation that affects your customer, you have to make sure that your house is in order first. This can mean updating your network’s infrastructure and finding new ways to manage your data. Same Old Song and Dance: Just because your department or office has been around for hundreds of years, does not mean your processes are perfect. When you have employees that stick around, that’s great! But make sure you are continuously challenging your team to think about new ways and processes to streamline your approach.---IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform -- Brightspot is the leading content management platform built for modern teams. Your content lifecycle - from ideation to archival - moves faster, handling any volume, variety, or velocity with ease. Unlike legacy platforms that demand heavy dev work and struggle with scale, Brightspot is user-friendly, endlessly customizable, and enterprise-ready. Think dynamic, modern experiences, shipped in minutes—not months. Trusted by some of the world’s leading tech organizations, Brightspot reduces total cost of ownership, boosts productivity, and gives you the governance, security, and performance your teams need. Visit brightspot.com/ITVisionaries to learn more.---This episode was produced by the team at Mission.org and brought to you by Brightspot.

The old saying, “look good, feel good,'' fits Stitch Fix perfectly. The direct-to-consumer, online personal styling service has boomed due to its ability to not only match consumers with trendy and comfortable clothes, but to make it a personalized experience for each buyer.“At the end of the day, we want to be rooted in personalization. First and foremost, it's important for us that [consumers] not only come to Stitch Fix to complete a transaction, but that you really think about us as your partner style.”From curating stylish experiences, to matching each individual with their own personal stylist, Stitch Fix and taken eCommerce and the subscription model to the next level. On this episode of IT Visionaries, Tatsiana Maskalevich, the Director of Data Science at Stitch Fix, takes listeners into the algorithms that help curate those experiences and the science behind it all.Main TakeawaysKnow Your Data: With so many avenues to collect data on the internet, the collection process is not the difficult part. The hardest part is how you turn your data into actionable insights that can benefit your customers’ experience. In order to manage your data appropriately, you must be constantly creating feedback loops so you can best understand what is working and what is not working.It’s a Preference Thing: The customer experience is the number one pillar for any successful company. When you are creating curated experiences for your customers, you need to constantly be listening to what works for them and what does not work. Create a great experience by constantly giving your customers reasons to engage with your platform through quizzes and games or other interactive features.Rooted in Data:  One of the keys to building a successful data-centric platform is through the individuals constructing it. The algorithm you construct has to accomplish two things: It needs to continuously be learning about the person inputting that data, and it needs to continuously be relaying information back to the source. Focus on the foundation and infrastructure of your algorithm first, then experience second.---IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform -- Brightspot is the leading content management platform built for modern teams. Your content lifecycle - from ideation to archival - moves faster, handling any volume, variety, or velocity with ease. Unlike legacy platforms that demand heavy dev work and struggle with scale, Brightspot is user-friendly, endlessly customizable, and enterprise-ready. Think dynamic, modern experiences, shipped in minutes—not months. Trusted by some of the world’s leading tech organizations, Brightspot reduces total cost of ownership, boosts productivity, and gives you the governance, security, and performance your teams need. Visit brightspot.com/ITVisionaries to learn more.---This episode was produced by the team at Mission.org and brought to you by Brightspot.

What if there was a software that could take the guesswork out of finding a career or an employee? And what if that software could not only analyze your technical skills, but also those that could lead you to leadership positions down the road? That would be great news for the hiring managers and everyday Americans who struggle with and feel anxious about the complexities of completing a job search. Lucky for them then, that Eightfold.ai is working to make those worries a thing of the past through artificial intelligence.“What we are doing is using the latest advances in deep learning and machine learning to really understand, not what people have done, but what they are capable of being next. What is their learning ability for a certain skill? If you know statistics and signal processing, you can learn machine learning very quickly. If you are good in programming, you can learn Python quickly. So really trying to understand the learning ability of each individual and using that to assess and understand who can be a great fit in what enterprise, in which function.” With more than 100 customers, including AT&T, Cisco and Liberty Mutual, Eightfold.ai is using the power of data to solve the complexities that come with hiring thousands of employees. On this episode, Ashutosh Garg, discusses how A.I. can be used to identify which candidates are an ideal fit for an organization, and he gives an inside look at their process and the variables they look at to identify that perfect candidate.Main TakeawaysIt’s a Problem Rooted in Data: When you’re building any application that’s rooted in A.I., the number one priority needs to be data collection. The more data you have, the more inferences you are able to make. When Eightfold.ai launched its platform, it only worked with companies that hired more than 10,000 employees over a few years. The idea is that for every 10,000 employees hired, more than 1 million people were called, screened, etc., thus making the data sets they are able to pull from very large.It’s About Fit: Finding the right employee should never be based solely on a candidate's skills. Instead, when you are going through the hiring process, think about how this particular person fits within a role and within your organization as a whole. Just because someone works at Google, does not mean they will fit at Facebook. Instead, evaluate an individual on all the variables a job requires, cultural fit included.The Art of Possibility: Artificial intelligence is unlocking the possibility of not only creating a more diverse workplace, but providing opportunities to people who might not have the traditional background, but who have still found success. The technology unlocks for them the ability to find and pursue many more opportunities.---IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform -- Brightspot is the leading content management platform built for modern teams. Your content lifecycle - from ideation to archival - moves faster, handling any volume, variety, or velocity with ease. Unlike legacy platforms that demand heavy dev work and struggle with scale, Brightspot is user-friendly, endlessly customizable, and enterprise-ready. Think dynamic, modern experiences, shipped in minutes—not months. Trusted by some of the world’s leading tech organizations, Brightspot reduces total cost of ownership, boosts productivity, and gives you the governance, security, and performance your teams need. Visit brightspot.com/ITVisionaries to learn more.---This episode was produced by the team at Mission.org and brought to you by Brightspot.

For years, marketers and technologists have envisioned a world where technology would be advanced enough and smart enough, that they could reach consumers on a deeper and more emotional level. Turns out, through the power of automation, that world may now exist.“I'm really talking about designing your digital channels so that they are cognitive. So you're reacting to what a customer might be feeling or thinking, being compassionate. So you're responding to the customer situation with a genuine effort to help. So we talk about implementing bots. It's not just about trying to impersonate a real-life human being. You really shouldn't try to do that, but we're about creating these solutions around automation that's very much attuned to the customer's emotions, their motivations, their challenges that they're facing.”Robots in the workplace are not new, but automation as a driver of empathy and not a way to accomplish repetitive tasks is a game-changing advancement. Virgil Wong, who you just heard from, is the Chief Digital Officer for HGS Digital, a company focused on making empathy a driving force behind the customer experience. Virgil joins IT Visionaries to discuss how artificial intelligence, machine learning, and intelligent automation are more than just buzzwords. In fact, they are actionable pieces of technology that can drive brand loyalty and create the optimal customer experience.Main TakeawaysLet’s Be a Bit More Empathetic: Whether your customer is interacting with you on a website, mobile app, or via chatbot, the experience they have with your technology must be based on empathy. When customers are working with bots, that automation needs to be able to identify that customers' pain points, and then react in a compassionate manner.Walk Before You Run: When it comes to implementing sweeping customer experience changes, it’s important to start slow and discover what the pain points are, the processes involved, and how the technology can better serve the customer. Time to Upgrade: Your data sets should be driving your roadmap and how you interact with your customers. When you have millions of conversations, take time to digest the themes of those calls and where some of your customers’ common pain points are. Then use that data to drive a better, more empathetic experience.---IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform -- Brightspot is the leading content management platform built for modern teams. Your content lifecycle - from ideation to archival - moves faster, handling any volume, variety, or velocity with ease. Unlike legacy platforms that demand heavy dev work and struggle with scale, Brightspot is user-friendly, endlessly customizable, and enterprise-ready. Think dynamic, modern experiences, shipped in minutes—not months. Trusted by some of the world’s leading tech organizations, Brightspot reduces total cost of ownership, boosts productivity, and gives you the governance, security, and performance your teams need. Visit brightspot.com/ITVisionaries to learn more.---This episode was produced by the team at Mission.org and brought to you by Brightspot.

If there is one thing 2020 made abundantly clear, it’s that the way in which workers operate will never be the same. As employees rushed to set up monitors and home offices in their new environments, businesses across the world were recognizing an inevitable reality:: that this new lifestyle was here to stay.“As this progresses, the next normal is going to be about mobility and flexibility. We've got a taste of this working from home thing that [we’ve] never had before, and they're going to want to do both, which is going to bring on new challenges.”Welcome to the “Next Normal,” where new remote working demands are establishing a host of lifestyle changes for employees, and concurrently creating a larger list of challenges for their employers. On this episode of IT Visionaries, Kim Huffman, the VP of Global IT at Elastic, opens up about distributed workforces and why Elastic believes strongly in them. But she is honest about the obstacles that work from anywhere creates when it comes to managing the endpoints of your fleet, and she discusses how IT leaders can handle the transition.Main TakeawaysKnow Your Fleet: For distributed teams, having an understanding of your endpoints is critically important. You need to always be thinking about where you are most vulnerable at those endpoints, and the points of attack they may be opening themselves up to to understand how they can be as secure as possible. Managing your endpointDrink Your Own Champagne: One of the more important operating principals  at Elastic is its ability and willingness to test its own products in-house. When you beta test your apps with your own team, it affords you the opportunity to fix bugs or breakdowns within the system prior to that product ever reaching the customer.Is This Secure? Just because you are operating on a VPN network, does not necessarily mean your network is secure. Even when you are on VPN, the user is still subjected to various forms of cyberattacks. As IT leaders, it’s important to constantly be evaluating the incoming information from your devices and managing them at their endpoints.---IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform -- Brightspot is the leading content management platform built for modern teams. Your content lifecycle - from ideation to archival - moves faster, handling any volume, variety, or velocity with ease. Unlike legacy platforms that demand heavy dev work and struggle with scale, Brightspot is user-friendly, endlessly customizable, and enterprise-ready. Think dynamic, modern experiences, shipped in minutes—not months. Trusted by some of the world’s leading tech organizations, Brightspot reduces total cost of ownership, boosts productivity, and gives you the governance, security, and performance your teams need. Visit brightspot.com/ITVisionaries to learn more.---This episode was produced by the team at Mission.org and brought to you by Brightspot.

It is only fitting that Sylvie Veilleux’s current adventure finds her wandering the backroads of the continental United States, cruising across America’s highways in search of her next stop. It’s an odyssey that’s reminiscent of her career path: From a start-up, to Apple, with a pitstop in financial services in between, before finally landing at the powerhouse that is Dropbox as its CIO, Sylvie’s career has been anything but linear.“As an individual, I can get pretty bored easily. And if there was ever a moment that I felt bored, that's when opportunities came to me. I love adventure. I love being challenged. I love being busy. And if I can combine all those things together, then why not? It's been quite fun. This last experience, where I've been working virtually in an RV, is just another place that I've done something so new and different that's kept me going.”While Dropbox is known for its file-sharing prowess, the company, like Sylvie, has expanded its horizons and its footprint in order to aid distributed workforces. On this episode of IT Visionaries, Sylvie discusses her personal journey, the work she’s doing now at Dropbox, and why Dropbox is proving that remote work is here to stay.Main TakeawaysA Remote Worker, Living in A Virtual World: The COVID-19 pandemic has allowed companies to be more agile with their workforces. Just because your team is distributed, doesn’t mean simple company values like culture and team building don’t matter. Time to Unplug: Remote workers shouldn’t be accessible 24/7. Sure, an employee has the ability to be connected to their device at all times, but that does not mean the company should exploit that. When utilizing a remote workforce, find ways to allow employees to disconnect from the company on their days off so they don’t feel required to check things such as emails, or answer calls.Ready, Player One: The ways employees and teams meet in the future will change from the way they are meeting today. CIO’s and technology leaders need to constantly be evaluating the technology they use amongst their teams. This includes taking a hard look at it if it makes the overall experience better for the employee and if it’s not, finding a better solution.---IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform -- Brightspot is the leading content management platform built for modern teams. Your content lifecycle - from ideation to archival - moves faster, handling any volume, variety, or velocity with ease. Unlike legacy platforms that demand heavy dev work and struggle with scale, Brightspot is user-friendly, endlessly customizable, and enterprise-ready. Think dynamic, modern experiences, shipped in minutes—not months. Trusted by some of the world’s leading tech organizations, Brightspot reduces total cost of ownership, boosts productivity, and gives you the governance, security, and performance your teams need. Visit brightspot.com/ITVisionaries to learn more.---This episode was produced by the team at Mission.org and brought to you by Brightspot.

When you’re labeled by Forbes as a “Billion Dollar Start-Up,” the expectations are set pretty high. But for Truepill President and Co-Founder Sid Viswanathan, the goal was never about earning accolades, it was about re-energizing and modernizing an aging healthcare system. “As consumers, we live in a world that's driven by [the fact that] you can order something on your phone and it shows up in that same hour, or that following day. Behind the scenes, that's been really hard to do in healthcare because of all the different interconnected dependencies, and all the complexities of our healthcare system in America. For us, it was really important to simplify that because at the end of the day, the consumer cares about getting their medication on time or getting that lab test in their home. So it was critical for us to make sure that we built our entire infrastructure with that consumer in mind.” The journey from the idea of simplifying the healthcare system to established start-up doing that and more wasn’t an easy one — but Sid knew it wouldn’t be. On this episode of IT Visionaries, Sid discusses how his first entrepreneurial adventure helped pave the way for Truepill, and he explains why the healthcare industry has been slow to implement new technologies. Plus he reveals that oftentimes you might not know your company’s true mission until a few years down the road. Main TakeawaysAdopt and Adapt: In healthcare, the adoption of new technologies has been extremely slow. While the industry as a whole has implemented new measures and techniques, the underlying issue for the lack of adoption centers on the fact that there is no real incentive for pharmacies to change their practices.If You Build it, They Will Come: When you’re first launching a platform, start with the mindset of doing the entire project yourself - no contractors, no DevOps personnel, or software engineers. When you develop the platform yourself it sets your team up to have a longer runway to success and allows you to build longer because you are not taking on the front-end cost of development.Customer Centric: One of the biggest challenges the healthcare industry has faced is the process has not been designed with the customer experience in mind. Regardless of which industry you are in, when you begin to build your products and services with the customer experience in mind, it provides you with the ability to streamline processes that dampen the overall experience.---IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform -- Brightspot is the leading content management platform built for modern teams. Your content lifecycle - from ideation to archival - moves faster, handling any volume, variety, or velocity with ease. Unlike legacy platforms that demand heavy dev work and struggle with scale, Brightspot is user-friendly, endlessly customizable, and enterprise-ready. Think dynamic, modern experiences, shipped in minutes—not months. Trusted by some of the world’s leading tech organizations, Brightspot reduces total cost of ownership, boosts productivity, and gives you the governance, security, and performance your teams need. Visit brightspot.com/ITVisionaries to learn more.---This episode was produced by the team at Mission.org and brought to you by Brightspot.

What if instead of saying, “There’s an app for that,” the saying was, “There’s a bot for that?” And what if, instead of spending hours of your day performing repetitive tasks, a bot beneath the surface of your screen was doing the work for you?“With RPA, you're able to make the lives of people at work much, much easier. It improves their own lives, and improves the end customer's life. It improves their business. It improves the value prop they provide. So that is the way I think about it. when you bring [RPA] together and say, I won't sell you A.I., or I won't sell you a cloud-native product. What I will sell you is an experience that allows you to do the things that you want to do in a way that makes sense to you and will be a delight for you to use and your end-user.”That’s Prince Kohli, the CTO of Automation Anywhere, a global enterprise RPA solution  platform that brings robotic process automation to industries worldwide. On this episode of  IT Visionaries, Prince discusses how RPA is changing the game when it comes to office efficiency. Plus, he details the future of RPA and whether we’ll see a future where everyone eventually will have a digital assistant.Main TakeawaysiRobot: Robotics Process Automation is not about physical robots completing tasks. Instead, RPA is automated software that builds off a set of rules in order to complete repetitive tasks, such as invoicing. The software works in the background on computers, allowing employees to be more productive and creative with their time.Discovery and Auditing: There are two core functions the Automation Anywhere teams follow when they begin working with a client. The first is the discovery process, when they go in and observe what processes could be automated. The second is through auditing, when they gather insights and data in order to build a secure botThere’s a Bot for That: In the future, most employees will have a digital assistant in some capacity, whether that is for filling out calendars or answering emails the technology is already there. It’s adoption that is the issue.---IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform -- Brightspot is the leading content management platform built for modern teams. Your content lifecycle - from ideation to archival - moves faster, handling any volume, variety, or velocity with ease. Unlike legacy platforms that demand heavy dev work and struggle with scale, Brightspot is user-friendly, endlessly customizable, and enterprise-ready. Think dynamic, modern experiences, shipped in minutes—not months. Trusted by some of the world’s leading tech organizations, Brightspot reduces total cost of ownership, boosts productivity, and gives you the governance, security, and performance your teams need. Visit brightspot.com/ITVisionaries to learn more.---This episode was produced by the team at Mission.org and brought to you by Brightspot.

Since the early days of dial-up internet, messenger services have been connecting people around the globe. What started as simple instant messenger text conversations have evolved into an entirely new language filled with emojis, gifs, and videos. Without question, the internet has forever changed the norms around how people communicate.“I was at Facebook at the time, loving Facebook, and the Facebook [ I was at] was unrecognizable from Facebook today. This is back in 2013. The reason I joined when I was at Facebook, I was working on social products and at the time Facebook was seeing explosive growth as people were starting to use the messenger and go talking to their friends on the platform. So we're seeing these new changes in how society communicates because of these new technologies, like Facebook, Twitter, et cetera.That’s Paul Adams, the Senior Vice President of Product at Intercom, a company that took those same ideas and implemented them with the goal of making communication between customers and businesses a two-way street. Paul joined IT Visionaries to discuss why Intercom views its product as a relationship-based platform and what that means for businesses in today’s world. Plus he talks about recognizing the need to pivot when necessary, and the evolution of the chatbot.Main TakeawaysMore than a Bot: In order to engage with your customers in a way that is both effective and scalable, you have to deploy a strategy that is three things: proactive, automated, and human. Proactive in the sense that you are thinking about ways to reach customers, automated in that your system utilizes some form of a chatbot, and human so when the conversation needs more attention, someone is there to assist.Competition Breeds Success: Never look at competition within your space as a negative. Instead, use your competitors as a source of validation that your product is on the right track. Then use that same inspiration to find ways to ideate your platform.Building Relationships: A conversation platform must focus on building relationships — not just with clients, but also with customers. Messaging platforms should integrate ways that users can have a personal and intimate relationship with the end-user, which will ultimately help to drive their engagement.---IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform -- Brightspot is the leading content management platform built for modern teams. Your content lifecycle - from ideation to archival - moves faster, handling any volume, variety, or velocity with ease. Unlike legacy platforms that demand heavy dev work and struggle with scale, Brightspot is user-friendly, endlessly customizable, and enterprise-ready. Think dynamic, modern experiences, shipped in minutes—not months. Trusted by some of the world’s leading tech organizations, Brightspot reduces total cost of ownership, boosts productivity, and gives you the governance, security, and performance your teams need. Visit brightspot.com/ITVisionaries to learn more.---This episode was produced by the team at Mission.org and brought to you by Brightspot.

We can all agree with Ben Hood when he said this about electricity: “Electricity hopefully should be like an Apple product. It just works and you don't have to think about it.”The problem, though, is millions of Americans do have to worry about their electricity. From high energy bills, to understanding the complexity of  switching to solar and wind power, consumers around the world are struggling with the burden of not knowing the best and or cheapest alternatives to their current electricity providers. Ben is hoping to bring some answers to the table for those folks. Hood is the co-founder and CTO of WattBuy, a platform that helps people take charge of their electricity, and on this episode of IT Visionaries, he explains why deregulation is helping to solve some of the problems consumers have faced for quite some time.  Plus, Ben talks about why the data WattBuy is gathering now will benefit consumers in the future.Main TakeawaysRegulate This: When it comes to electricity, there are a few states within the U.S. that do not regulate electricity. This means that consumers have the option to choose their provider. WattBuy works to streamline this process by providing consumers with estimates on what electricity providers are best for them.The Answer Lies Within the Data: When you are trying to solve complicated problems, such as estimating the cost of electricity, the more data you have, the easier it is to solve your problem. Utilize as many third-party vendors as possible in order to gather the best information possible.1.21 Gigawatts? What the Heck is Gigawatt?: You must always be educating yourself and your consumer. If your goal is to help consumers save as much money as possible, you have to educate them on why the prices are the way that they are.---IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform -- Brightspot is the leading content management platform built for modern teams. Your content lifecycle - from ideation to archival - moves faster, handling any volume, variety, or velocity with ease. Unlike legacy platforms that demand heavy dev work and struggle with scale, Brightspot is user-friendly, endlessly customizable, and enterprise-ready. Think dynamic, modern experiences, shipped in minutes—not months. Trusted by some of the world’s leading tech organizations, Brightspot reduces total cost of ownership, boosts productivity, and gives you the governance, security, and performance your teams need. Visit brightspot.com/ITVisionaries to learn more.---This episode was produced by the team at Mission.org and brought to you by Brightspot.