AI research suggests B2B businesses better believe the hype

Venture capital is flowing into the enterprise artificial intelligence space, but just a fifth of companies are ready to make full use of AI opportunities

Artificial intelligence (AI) is still more hype than reality in the enterprise, but AI investment is growing rapidly, and nearly all technology providers accept it is critical for gaining market share and building customer loyalty, according to new research. However, only about 20% of companies have the technology infrastructure in place to fully exploit AI’s potential.

Why Data Scientists Should Follow Software Development Standards

As the organisations have started to recognise the value of data, the need for data scientists has seen an exponential rise since then. Unlike traditional methods, crucial decisions among organisations are now mostly data-driven.

4 Truths Of Digital Transformation: Keeping CX At The Center Of Your Digital Strategy

 Everyone wants to be able to interact seamlessly and digitally with their favorite brands, and these days, we’re all programmed to expect it. New technologies have made it easier than ever for companies—big and small—to digitize nearly every facet of CX. But if you’ve ever found yourself on hold for customer service, then you already know there’s nothing quite like a human touch.

Machine Learning for Data Management

Data impacts nearly every part of our lives and is critical for companies to stay relevant. It has transformed almost every industry to drive efficiency, better insights, and business growth.

However, managing this data can take an enormous amount of time and expense. Between security, auditing, organizing, and more, managing data sets can create a significant strain on employee time and energy. In fact, most data scientists and business analysts spend around 80% of their time finding, cleaning, and reorganizing data sets. This leaves just 20% of their time to spend on value-generating activities.

Data Engineer vs Data Scientist: What’s the Difference?

The data engineer equips the business with the ability to move data from place to place, known as data pipelines. Data engineers provide data to the data science teams.

The data scientist consumes data provided by the data engineers and interprets it to say something meaningful to decision-makers in the company.

In this article, let’s dive a little deeper into the roles of data engineer and data scientist.

7 Mistakes to Avoid When Hiring IT Talent

With the continuing digital shift in the workforce, competent IT specialists are in higher demand than ever. Unfortunately, many recruiters haven't caught up with the shift in hiring, leading to avoidable mistakes.

Currently, the most significant success barrier most sectors face is a stifling lack of IT talent. According to Gartner, a lack of qualified team members directly halted the adoption of 64% of new technologies.

With the continuing digital shift in the workforce, competent IT specialists are in higher demand than ever, yet there is an ever-widening skills gap. Korn Ferry found that, by 2030, the U.S. could lose out on at least $162 billion in revenue per year if nothing nges.

This means recruiters need to rethink how they scout top talent. There's no room for missteps or blunders. One wrong move can cost a company massive amounts of profit. Unfortunately, many recruiters haven't caught up with the shift in hiring, leading to avoidable mistakes. Let's look at seven instances where recruitment tends to fail.

1. Focusing too much on your own needs

It's easy to become self-absorbed when hiring IT talent. Companies are often so laser-focused on what they need that they rarely pause to think about what their potential candidates might need.

You can think of it using the "fitting a square peg into a round hole" analogy. Recruiters have to consider more than just the fact that a candidate sounds right on paper. Will they mesh with company culture? Are they looking for non-financial motivators? If something isn't right, don't try to fit the talent into the job opening. There will be others.

2. Hiring for KPIs

Some companies are handing out bonuses for finding and onboarding new talent. While this can be a good incentive, the truth is that it can also be a hiring disaster.

For example, hiring someone to close a KPI often means that the talent gets left behind once the quota is filled. It's sadly common for nobody to take an active role in talent development when KPIs are the primary focus.

3. Overlooking candidate expectations

This is a massive problem that the current hiring market has shone a glaring spotlight on. Previously, when companies believed candidates should be courting them, most felt little need to cater to what the talent might expect or need.

However, in this new market where the talent has more power, it's a mistake to assume candidates will just "take what they're given." Top talent has plenty of options, and they won't simply stay out of need or obligation if their work situation is different than advertised.

In a December 2021 poll by SHRM, 65% of executives said they were "extremely concerned" about their company's ability to recruit new talent.

Part of this problem is that many organizations don't have compelling, accurate employee value propositions. When it comes to IT recruitment, this is a death knell for a business, because there is such a shortage of qualified talent.

4. Over-communicating

Becoming like the clingy friend or significant other in your potential hire's life is the quickest way to destroy any rapport you may have built.

There's a fine line between staying in touch and smothering your talent. Conventional wisdom states that you should constantly be in contact to "keep candidates warm" throughout the process. However, most experts say it's best to stick to a single, meaningful daily reach-out unless there's a specific need for more. Talent won't appreciate a constant stream of calls, texts and emails. Doing this can sour your candidate's perception of the company.

Instead, during the initial contact phases, ask how they want to be contacted (phone, email, text, etc.) and how much information they'd like. This is an easy way to inform your communication strategy and signal that you're thinking of the talent as a person.

5. Using money as the only motivator

Is money a powerful motivator? Absolutely. However, it's not as important in today's hiring market as it once was. Qualified IT specialists can pull substantial salaries anywhere. What else can your company offer?

Get to know your candidates. Find out what's important to them. Do they have longstanding family obligations that require regular time off? Do they like spontaneous travel? Do they want easy access to health or fitness programs?

Understand that most workers aren't looking for their careers to be an integral part of their self-identity. The idea of a "fulfilling career" doesn't hold much weight anymore, so the siren song of a high salary and basic benefits package is no longer enough. Take the time to discover what other things motivate your talent, and see if your company culture meshes with them.

6. Being inflexible

The Covid-19 digital pivot has permanently transformed the way we work. Now that employees understand how to effectively work remotely, most expect employers to deliver a certain level of flexibility, even if they have to return to the office.

There's no place for rigidity in today's hiring market. This applies to how, when and where your talent works, but it also applies to the rest of the recruitment process. Understand that the "rules of recruitment" may not apply in the same way they used to, especially since companies are often trying to attract top talent instead of vice versa.

Decide ahead of time which requirements are negotiable and which aren't. Be open-minded to flex time, telecommuting and hybrid work. HR consulting expert, Rey Ramirez, told CNBC that companies that don't offer flexibility are missing out on up to 70% of qualified candidates, which can be truly disastrous for businesses.

7. Lacking true diversity

It's no secret that diversity in the workplace is critical to corporate success. However, candidates note which organizations are only giving lip service to the cause and which put action behind their words.

This goes deeper than gender and race. For instance, some companies may hire a superficially diverse range of people, but then candidates find they're all Americans with old money connections and Ivy League degrees.

True diversity means looking holistically at a candidate's qualifications, motivations and personality. Talent comes in all forms, and there are far more important traits than a college degree or a specific background.

Companies need all the help they can get in finding the broadest possible talent pool, especially for IT recruitment. There is intense competition across all sectors, and it's no longer simply about who can shell out the biggest salary.

If your company falls victim to any one of these mistakes, there's no way for you to reach your full potential as an organization. Businesses and talent both deserve the very best, but the only way to achieve this is to avoid the mistakes outlined above.

Looking to hire skilled software developers? Contact TP&P Technology - Leading Software Outsourcing Company in Vietnam Today

Article resource: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/425729

Growth: Why You Need A Minimum Viable Business (MVB) Before Adding New Offerings

Whether startup or established business, the most common growth strategy for entrepreneurs is to create new offerings. Most attempt to create minimum viable products (MVPs). However, no business can grow merely by creating new products or services. Even if the market clearly indicates a gap and need for a new product or service and the entrepreneur can easily make or provide it, a business that has not already built efficient sales processes will not grow. Even a business with a great product can perish without enough sales. What is required to take a product and make a viable business that can then grow and take on more?

Here are some truths we all know:

- Ideating new products or services is easy. One can even persuade oneself or others to finance production.

- "If you build it, they will come" is a myth. Selling products or services is not easy, even if they’ve won awards.

- If selling one or two products or services is difficult, then selling three or four at scale is much more so.

- Making a profit or having enough margin is a matter of reducing fixed and variable business costs while increasing sales volume. Breaking even takes time.

So, what is a good way to grow if adding new offerings could overwhelm the business? Most product or service people just hope for the best and fail to understand the business dynamics required. They focus on just production and might even implement MVPs. However, they cannot possibly grow until they establish a minimum viable business (MVB)

An MVB is a business that has a repeatable sales process and enough sales momentum with the existing product or service portfolio. Break-even or profit may yet be in the offing. Exponential growth might still require external financing. However, seasoned VCs and angels expect to see a picture of sales momentum and profitability before they will write checks. An MVB has steady growth because it has both a viable product or service and viable sales processes that bring in a reasonable margin or profit when you discount costs.

Investing additional attention, effort and financing on a new offering is only justifiable after establishing such an MVB.

For startups, it is paramount to take an MVP and start establishing viable sales processes. Even though popular startup lore lauds the idea of an MVP, creating efficient and profitably repeatable sales processes around the MVP is much more important. Expecting growth or even additional financing without sales processes is silly. The first step to growth after establishing an MVP is to put it in the market and create operations and sales processes that establish an MVB.

If you are not a startup, adding potential new offerings begins with asking how new offerings should be staffed, produced, financed, marketed and sold. The simplest answer is to allocate some fraction of existing capacity to the new offering. However, is there sufficient capacity for this additional task? If your current business is an MVB as defined above, you could justify this division of capacity. If not, diluting your efforts to accommodate a new idea risks dissolving your existing business momentum. Even if you had an MVB to begin with and found the extra capacity to start a new offering, it behooves you to go through the process of establishing an MVP and then an independent MVB for the new offering.

The crux of growth is establishing an MVB with efficient and profitably repeatable sales processes. Startup or otherwise, if your processes for sales are not clearly understood, cost too much or are too complicated to repeat, then you do not have a foundation to expand in any manner.

Without an MVB under your belt, your current business is incomplete and probably not very stable. Starting on new ideas is unlikely to manifest the business discipline needed to succeed, and you are unlikely to inspire the investment you might need from anyone.

So, the first step to growth or expansion is to ensure that your current sales processes for the existing products and services are profitably repeatable. This means that the entire chain of the sales process must all be clearly understood and practiced, and bring you margin:

- Marketing and lead generation: How does one create a sufficiently large funnel? Are the appropriate types of customers being convincingly messaged?

- Qualifying prospects: How is the lower end of the funnel made skinny and efficient by ensuring only leads with need, budget and urgency are given attention?

- Sales approach, negotiation and closing: Is the sales effort prepared with appropriate collateral, objection handling and alternative offers?

- Cost: Does the cost of all of the above in addition to production cost leave you a margin?

If you have all this to a point where you can guarantee sales and margin, then you can train new salespeople and produce enough revenue to finance some growth yourself. Is such margin only possible after production at scale? It might be true, but the food industry, in particular, is a great example of margin via production at scale still failing. There are few exceptions.

Being rigorously disciplined about the sales process gives you, your business and any expansion endeavors a much more key skill set than merely producing new products or services. It forms the most important part of viability even without a great product or MVP.

A profitably repeatable sales process and MVB leave you in the comfortable position of needing to just train and scale sales efforts (all other efforts in a business except research are much easier) to take your current business to ever-increasing heights. You then have a foundation for growth by making the choice to enhance existing offerings or build entirely new ones.

Looking to hire skilled software developers? Contact TP&P Technology - Leading Software Outsourcing Company in Vietnam Today

Article resource: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2020/04/22/growth-why-you-need-a-minimum-viable-business-mvb-before-adding-new-offerings/?sh=5891119b88cb