News

Can Gamification Drive Employee Retention?

Posted in: gamification, gamification tools, IT Strategy - Jun 03, 2021

Employee turnover costs employers more than $630 billion annually, according to The Work Institute’s 2020 Retention Report. While CIOs search for solutions for retaining great employees and keeping their companies successful, gamification may offer concrete strategies that can show measurable results.

Gamification is sometimes oversimplified as reimagining one’s mundane tasks as fun goals or exciting challenges. However, in addition to making daily work more entertaining, gamifying work encourages engagement in activities and improves the memories of those participating. 

Is Gamification the Right Step?

The 2020 Retention Report notes the drive for career development caused 20 out of 100 employees to quit in 2019. The report separately states that “Career Development has been the #1 Category for ten straight years,” and that the opportunity to advance would have kept them with the company. 

Considering the primary importance of career development in retention, gamification can play a critical and cost-effective role in connecting employees with the skills and industry knowledge they need to excel within the company and their career fields.

Gamification and upskilling

TELUS International’s CIO Michael Ringman points to gamification as the key to quickly and effectively upskilling employees.

“The various learning programs we offer, such as our Global Language Academy and MyGrowth are offered virtually and in many cases are accessible on mobile devices to enable our global team to access them from anywhere at any time.”

“By evolving words on a page into engaging, multi-sensory experiences such as simulations, virtual role playing and leaderboard scoring, gamification encourages employees to complete training modules more quickly while also gaining a deeper understanding of the subject matter by experiencing it at their own pace and in a more immersive fashion. 

“When we allocate badges as rewards, give employees the ability to create their own avatars, and provide real-time visualized progress bars, we have seen impactful boosts in engagement and productivity that ultimately drive career progression and employee retention.”

“In 2020, we achieved world-class employee engagement scores of 86% and continue to consistently achieve 50% lower attrition rates vs. our competitors.”

“Gamification is an important factor for employee retention in the digital environment, where they earn points, status, and rewards as they improve their skills to achieve company goals and objectives,” says Caroline Lee, co-founder of CocoSign. On-the-spot learning is a powerful tool used to “make the workplace more exciting and increase employee retention.” And gamifying employee retention can be broadened through a whole structure, or tailored to improve a specific department. 

Managing a team of 70 software designers and engineers, ISBX president Arthur Iinuma says that interactive leaderboards create friendly competition in his company to “increase employee productivity and foster more engagement in the workplace.”

“We have found that gamification has incentivized problem-solving in terms of developing new products and meeting customers’ needs. Gamification has offered intellectual stimulation, encouraging increased employee engagement and performance. Team-based gamification has forged stronger bonds between team members.” Iinuma estimates overall productivity has increased “in the region of 20 percent due to gamification.”

Gamification and retirement savings

“Our employees are an extended family, and we want to do as much as we can to retain them,” said Bruce Watkins, founder and CEO of Cal Preserving, Inc.

“We previously offered our employees a 401k plan. We found the experience was horrible because of the complexity of administering it.  So we recently moved to a new provider, Xiggit. It’s a low-cost, simple web-based IRA program that handles the ongoing retirement savings administration for us.

“We didn’t set out to offer any gamification to retain employees but the app has a gamified tool (Learn ‘n Earn) that informs employees about our company’s benefits and improves their financial knowledge. They earn a little in the daily game but, more importantly, it’s improved their money habits.

“Some employees can’t believe how much money they’ve saved in such a short period of time. Our workers feel differently about our company because of these benefits and their financial stress is lower. We know that employee retention will improve.”

Any CIO mulling some sort of gamifying strategy should make sure that they ask the right questions: Does this new approach prompt greater yields in employees? Does the gamified aspect reduce training and upskilling to a relentless slog to beat a point system?

To be a worthwhile return on investment, gamification must grow the team member’s overall skill set, in a way that is both engaging and that leads to enhanced job satisfaction.

The post Can Gamification Drive Employee Retention? appeared first on CIO Insight.

top

End-to-End Encryption: Important Pros and Cons

Posted in: Big Data, Mobile, Security - Jun 02, 2021

According to the 2020 Cost of a Data Breach Report by Ponemon Institute and IBM Security, data breaches are costing enterprises $3.86 million on average, and they’re taking an average of 280 days to discover the problem. Clearly, hackers can and already do easily identify and access both corporate and personal information when files are transmitted from device to device unless certain cybersecurity measures are put into place. End-to-end encryption is the easiest solution for protecting this data so it doesn’t get into the wrong hands.

End-to-end encryption is the practice of encrypting data and information as it passes from device to device. The sending and receiving devices can see the original contents, but no other interceptors have the correct keys to decrypt the message. This approach to cybersecurity offers many benefits to companies and users that implement the protection, but there are still some drawbacks in areas like consumer-provider relationships. Read on to learn more about how end-to-end encryption works, as well as some of the pros and cons of end-to-end encryption security.

“The total number of records compromised in 2020 exceeded 37 billion, a 141% increase compared to 2019 and by far the most records exposed in a single year since we have been reporting on data breach activity.” –Risk Based Security 2020 Year End Report 

Read Next: 2021’s Most Successful Phishing Ploys (So Far)

What is End-to-End Encryption?

• How it Works
• The Pros of End-to-End Encryption
• The Cons of End-to-End Encryption
• Apps & Software that Use End-to-End Encryption

How it Works

But how does end-to-end encryption keep data encrypted while it travels? Two cryptographic keys, a public key and a private key, are generated on the sender’s device. The public key is public, in the sense that a public key can be generated by anyone.

However, the paired private key can only be generated by that particular sender and can only be used to decrypt data for the designated recipient device. Hackers can theoretically intercept the message in transit and service providers can access the encrypted message in order to store it, but it will remain completely illegible until it is received and decrypted by the recipient device. This practice ensures that the data can only be viewed in its true form on the sending and receiving devices, and nowhere in between.When end-to-end encryption is applied to data in transit, the data is first encrypted, or jumbled, on the sending device. The message cannot be decrypted by hackers, service providers, or anyone else until it is received by the end device.

The Pros of End-to-End Encryption

Protection of Privacy

With end-to-end encryption, private communications and other details, like timestamps and significant locations, are not easily read if intercepted by hackers or service providers like Google or Apple. When end-to-end encryption is enabled, you can rest assured that personal privacy prevails and consumer data is protected from outside viewers.

Integrity of Data

In other security setups, outside users can potentially gain access to a piece of data and manipulate its contents before it reaches the recipient (or worse, they can stop its delivery entirely). End-to-end encryption means that these malicious actors do not have the necessary key to access data in transit, so the integrity of data is maintained.

Highly Sensitive Data Exchanges

Whether it’s due diligence for a high-profile M&A transaction or the sharing of sensitive government intelligence data, end-to-end encryption is one solution that makes sure that no one outside of the sending and receiving parties can spread highly sensitive information. The reasons are twofold: 1) The key system in end-to-end encryption prevents unauthorized devices from opening the message. 2) If users maliciously or accidentally come across the message, end-to-end encryption has made it indecipherable to them.

Device Level Over Server Level

Other types of encryption focus on encrypting data at the server level, but if a malicious actor or other outsider gains access to that server, they can decrypt any information in that server fairly easily. Overcoming end-to-end encryption requires hackers to perform device-level hacks to get the information that they want, which is considerably more difficult and time-consuming to do, leading most hackers to avoid those types of attacks altogether.

Avoiding High-Cost Attacks and Reputation Damage

Let’s take a look at the biggest data breach in history: Yahoo’s 2013 breach that compromised approximately 3 billion user accounts (all of their customers’ accounts at that time). Yahoo claims that no clear-text passwords or financial information were compromised in the attack, but experts believe that Yahoo’s “outdated, easy-to-crack” encryption still exposed those records—billions of records—to malicious actors.

Needless to say, this attack damaged Yahoo’s reputation with customers, but it also damaged their negotiation powers with other major businesses. In 2017, Yahoo was in acquisition negotiations with Verizon, and after this news came to light, they were forced to lower the price of their assets by at least $350 million.

Making Security Affordable: 8 Low-Cost Ways to Improve Cybersecurity

The Cons of End-to-End Encryption

Although end-to-end encryption offers many high-value benefits to enterprises and users, the security practice still suffers from several shortcomings and has led to some public safety concerns:

Ledger is Still Available

End-to-end encryption jumbles all of your data’s contents in transit, but it does not hide the fact that data is being transferred. The ledger of communication remains, so people can still find records of transactions and possibly deduce the contents, based on sending and receiving parties.

Unreliable Receiving Devices

End-to-end encryption does not guarantee the protection of data once it reaches the receiving device. If there’s a security problem on that device or if that device falls into the wrong hands, the data has already been decrypted on the receiving device, leaving it susceptible to outside parties who gain access to the device.

Law Enforcement and Surveillance Concerns

One of the most important and highly controversial issues with end-to-end encryption is that it’s almost too successful at protecting data from third parties. This is a great feature as far as protecting private information against hackers, but what about for law enforcement and intelligence officers who need to conduct a serious investigation? 

With end-to-end encryption, they cannot access evidence that has been encrypted, and neither can service providers if they are asked to cooperate in the investigation. Only participating devices can provide the information they need. In serious cases related to allegations like terrorism, murder, and physical abuse, this data protection becomes a major hindrance to public safety and national security.

Many national governments and international committees have fought against end-to-end encryption in personal devices and applications for this reason. One of the most recent end-to-end encryption ban coalitions includes India, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, the UK, and the United States. In their International Statement on End-to-End Encryption and Public Safety on October 11, 2020, they called for a ban on end-to-end encryption in apps like WhatsApp and pushed for technology companies to allow greater data access to international law enforcement forces.

Learn More About Security at CISA: Cyber Agency Launches Security Awareness Campaign

Apps & Software that Use End-to-End Encryption

Several major companies have added end-to-end encryption features to their offerings over the years, and while some have experienced great success, others have become embroiled in controversy. 

Zoom	-Arrived in late October 2020 as a technical preview for free and paid users -Zoom's traditional GCM encryption remains, but with public key cryptography and meeting participant key distribution -Users can enable on meetings so that only participants have the decryption key (not even Zoom servers have access with this approach) -Users can confirm that they are using end-to-end encryption by looking for a green shield on their Zoom window -In November 2020, Zoom came to a settlement with the FTC regarding allegations that they had misled customers into thinking they offered end-to-end encryption since 2016. Their previous “end-to-end, 256-bit encryption” still gave Zoom full access to meeting data.
Whatsapp/Facebook	-End-to-end encryption fully launched in April 2016 -Designed to secure messages, photos, videos, voice messages, documents, status updates, and calls -Whatsapp changed its privacy policy in early 2021, now allowing it to share metadata on users with Facebook, its parent company -Millions of users moved away from Whatsapp after finding out how their metadata could be used
Amazon Ring	-Video end-to-end encryption launched in January 2021 -Only enrolled customer mobile devices can decrypt security footage -Launched in response to several security breaches and concerns in previous years
Microsoft Teams	-Announced end-to-end encryption plans at Ignite conference in March 2021 -Functionality is expected for both personal and business use cases, on Signal, Skype, Jabber, and Teams -Expected to secure 1:1 meetings and communications between users on Microsoft Teams

Data breaches are costing enterprises around $3.86 million per year, and that number only seems to grow, particularly in key areas of infrastructure. Although there’s some controversy and concerns surrounding how end-to-end encryption works, it’s clear that the solution is a valuable security investment for the enterprises that select it and the consumers who benefit from it.

More on End-to-End Encryption from IT Business Edge: Enterprise End-to-End Encryption is on the Rise

The post End-to-End Encryption: Important Pros and Cons appeared first on CIO Insight.

top

Unlocking Insights from ERP Data

Posted in: Business Intelligence - May 26, 2021

Join TDWI’s senior research director James Kobielus on this webinar to explore how to extract maximum business value from self-service analytics on ERP and other data sets in the cloud. He will discuss how the cloud’s on-demand, fully managed, subscription-based service model enables knowledge workers to rapidly access powerful ERP insights without having to engage internal IT staff.top

Why Most Data Platforms Fail (And How You Can Succeed)

Posted in: Business Intelligence - May 24, 2021

The co-founders of Monte Carlo discuss the challenges -- and solutions -- to operationalizing data at scale.top

AI & Machine Learning: Substance Behind the Hype?

Posted in: AI, Innovation, machine learning - May 22, 2021

It’s become inevitable in IT. Something new appears on the horizon and the hype machine ramps up to warp speed as it drafts a new term into its sales and marketing patter. In some cases, companies relabel their existing wares to align with the new term without making any actual change to the product.

Sometimes the hype is justified, often it is not. How about artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)? Gartner believes they are over-hyped according to its recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Science and Machine-Learning Platforms.

Case in point: a recent interview with a software vendor led to the confession that the “AI capabilities” spoken about in their brochures weren’t there yet. In other words, they were taking advantage of the hype to get more eyes viewing their software.

Gartner doesn’t dismiss AI and ML as being without wholly substance. In fact, it goes on to name the top 20 candidates, explaining their strengths and weaknesses. These platforms are already proving valuable to data scientists and analysts in sourcing data, constructing models, analyzing data, and spotting trends.  That value is translating into sales. Gartner reports heavier investment in AI during the COVID-19 pandemic. The analyst firm’s best advice on how to see beyond the glowing marketing promises is to tightly focus ML and AI into actual use cases that deliver tangible business value.

Read more on COVID-19’s impact on IT spending patterns.

And IT has to be cognizant of how the hype may be influencing top management. CEOs and board room members are being assailed on all sides by the wonders of this or that AI platform. This may cause them to demand the replacement of existing analytics and business intelligence tools at once!

Before going all in…

Calm heads must prevail for a number of reasons. Here are five to keep in mind.

1. Changing platforms may be expensive and may not add that much functionality or value.
2. Your existing vendor may offer add any missing features at a fraction of the cost and on a timeline you dictate. You never know until you ask.
3. The new functions drooled after by top management may sound good. But will they add much value to the bottom line? And will the new platform alter ongoing and successful organizational sales processes?
4. Does any proposed new platform integrate well with existing cloud platforms and BI tools?
5. Are users being considered? All too often, management buys into features that make their lives easier such as enhanced reporting. One example from many years ago: a new post office was loved by management and hated by front line workers as it actually slowed their ability to complete transactions.

Choosing the Right AI and ML Tools

If real value can be gained, push ahead with AI and ML investments. Gartner noted that the market generated $4 billion in 2019 and is growing at 17% per year. But not all tools are the same. Some platforms are focused on the data scientist and require highly trained personnel. A few can afford such personnel, but many can’t. Other tools aim to democratize AI and ML. That may work for some organizations and not others.

Gartner listed the usual suspects as its leaders in the Magic Quadrant such as long time BI pioneers SAS, IBM Watson, and MathWorks. SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning currently rules the roost, according to Gartner, with the two others not far behind.

But beware the incursion from the cloud giants Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. The latter was late to the party and is now coming on strong. There are also a lot of others competing in a crowded market. Those earning high markets from Gartner include Dataiku, Databricks, Tibco, Alteryx, DataRobot, KNIME, RapidMiner, and H2O.ai.

The question remains: Will SAS, IBM, and MathWorks be able to maintain their grip on the market? Or will they be overwhelmed by the cloud brigade? Amazon SageMaker is making a big play right now and is gaining major traction. Not to be outdone, the launch of a unified AI platform from Google is imminent.

Regardless of the hype, this market is primed for major growth in the coming years. Those who win will be those who see through the marketing blitz to direct AI and ML initiatives towards the attainment of strategic business objectives.

The post AI & Machine Learning: Substance Behind the Hype? appeared first on CIO Insight.

top