Technology to Boost Sales
Sales and Marketing executives are collaborating more and more with CIOs to find technology that will improve their sales numbers. Technology can provide real data insights that help increase visibility around why some departments or salespeople perform better than others. This helps organizations to standardize their best practices and benchmark performance better than arbitrary sales projections.
Our View: IT must stand ready to support and collaborate with Sales. Armed with a robust technology enablement strategy, IT must provide Sales with the applications, data, and supporting human resources to efficiently and effectively carry out their operations. A proactive and corrective program for sales data quality must be implemented and managed by IT. Learn more with our research Develop an IT Strategy to Support Sales.
Increasing AI Talent Budgets
Firms are now paying more than $650 million in annual salaries to get the most talented in artificial intelligence (AI). Amazon is spending the most on AI talent, but a quick glance at several firms’ AI talent budgets illustrates just how serious firms are about artificial intelligence.
Our View: We’ve identified virtual digital assistants (VDAs) as one of the top trends CIOs need to explore and adopt right now. Enterprises are increasingly deploying VDAs – AI-based conversational bots – to evolve their digital customer service delivery. Explore this trend, and seven others, in our 2017 Applications Trend Report to find out why it is trending, what's in it for your organization, and how you should take action.
Breach at Singapore Universities
The National University of Singapore and the Nanyang Technological University were breached in April 2017. According to Singapore’s Cyber Security Agency, the attacks appear to be APT actors(and not casual hackers) looking to steal information related to government or research.“ Universities hold valuable personal data, including intellectual property that can bring about financial gain. Today, we can no longer prevent attackers from gaining access. We are almost fighting a losing battle if we only focus on prevention. It is more important to be able to detect a breach and quickly neutralize it,” said Bill Taylor-Mountford, vice-president at LogRhythm Asia Pacific and Japan.
Our View: Advanced persistent threats (APTs) are becoming more and more prevalent, targeting any and all organizations that have some valuable intellectual property or are laterally connected to a target organization. APTs are a real risk to most organizations, regardless of size, and most don’t properly know how to defend against one. Identify your risk posture that identifies the likelihood an advanced persistent threat would be carried out against your organization,and build the necessary layered security to defend, respond, and investigate an attack.
The Lift: Goat Yoga
You’ve probably heard of a few different types of yoga such as beach yoga (yoga practiced on the beach) and Bikram or hot yoga (yoga practiced in heated yoga studios), but you’ve probably never heard of goat yoga. Goat yoga was pioneered by Lainey Morse just last August in Willamette Valley, Oregon. Morse owned goats as pets and got the idea to use strolling goats in yoga class because she believes “it’s impossible to be sad and depressed when there are baby goats jumping around.”
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