At Perficient, our commitment to fostering an inclusive and supportive environment for all employees is exemplified through our active Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). The Women in Tech ERG, is dedicated to empowering and uplifting women within our tech community. This Mother’s Day, we celebrated in a unique and meaningful way by hosting a “Working Moms Career Panel” – an event that highlighted the experiences, challenges, and triumphs of working mothers in the tech industry.

The Event: A Tribute to Working Moms Across Different Phases of Parenthood

The idea behind the Working Moms Career Panel was to create a forum where the voices of working mothers could be heard, and their journeys shared. The panel featured a diverse group of women from various tech roles within Perficient, each bringing their unique perspectives and experiences to the table. From single moms and co-parenting moms to moms from different countries with varying parental leave benefits, these women shared stories of balancing career aspirations with motherhood.

Key Highlights from the Panel:

Supportive Work Culture:

A supportive work culture was underscored as crucial. The panelists shared personal stories of how Perficient’s culture has supported them through various challenges, including miscarriages, difficulties with pregnancies, and postpartum struggles. Knowing that the workplace is understanding and accommodating during these tough times makes a significant difference.

Flexibility of Remote Work:

Panelists emphasized how remote work has been a godsend, especially given long commute times and childcare waitlists. The ability to work from home has provided them with the flexibility to manage their schedules better and be present for their children while meeting work demands.

Panelists shared that they feel empowered to “log off” to take care of sick littles whenever that phone call comes in. They feel empowered to make autonomous decisions to manage their workload while prioritizing their family. This is a top-down culture that is not common in the industry. Remote or flexible work options allow our global teams to continue work at home while taking care of their families. In-office mandates can prevent colleagues from being able to finish work at home when family needs call.

Diverse Parenting Phases:

Each panelist represented a different phase of motherhood, providing a rich tapestry of experiences. We heard from a single mom navigating the demands of work and solo parenting of a teenager, a co-parenting mom balancing shared responsibilities, and moms from different cultural backgrounds dealing with varied parental leave policies. Some parents are navigating newborn and toddler seasons of parenthood, calling out that each season has different demands, some more physical, some more mental and emotionally demanding. This diversity highlighted that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to managing work and motherhood.

Career Growth and Development:

Despite the challenges, the panelists also spoke about their career growth and how they’ve navigated promotions and professional development. They encouraged other working moms to advocate for themselves, seek out mentorship, and continue to pursue their career goals without hesitation. A key message from the panel was that you can’t and should not being trying to “do it all.” Building a support village is crucial to career growth. Team members encouraged one another to lean more on their partner to carry the load. Hiring out help at home for things like housekeeping and grocery shopping can allow team members to dedicate more mental space to work, furthering their career progression.

Perficient’s Supportive Benefits and Culture:

Perficient offers a range of benefits that support working moms including remote work options. These benefits help employees balance professional and personal lives effectively. From parental leave policies that cater to different needs to counseling services and flexible time off, Perficient is working to ensuring that all parents feel supported to parent out loud and have the autonomy to balance prioritizing their families alongside work commitments.

Moving Forward:

The Mother’s Day Working Moms Career Panel was a resounding success, shining a spotlight on the remarkable women who balance the demands of career and family. It served as a testament to their strength, resilience, and the incredible contributions they make to our company and the tech industry at large. While work is being done to distribute the demands of work at home, more focus needs to be allocated to this area. The more we can evenly distribute the mental, physical, and emotional workload of unpaid home labor, the more we enable working parents to remain in the workforce, especially working moms.

A heartfelt thank you to Olivia P., Carolina C., Jessica Zink, Marcela Landaeta, Samantha Ziegel, Elizabeth Vanover, and Kate Feltman for their unwavering support for fellow working parents. We also extend our gratitude to Perficient’s leadership for their commitment to creating programs and fostering a culture that uplifts and supports working parents.

Check out Samantha Ziegel’s LinkedIn post for more details and join the conversation!

Data ethics and security have been around a long time – as long as data. Constantly evolving. But, continued tech advancement has made a profound impact. So, data security and data ethics is more important than ever.

1. Magnified Relevance

Tech has enabled an exponential increase of data. We know this. The more data, the more relevant is security and ethics. Why? Because of the sheer scale. Same problems but bigger potential bang (Big Data Ethics, 2019). We might call it the big bang.

About 80-90% of new data is unstructured (Webopedia, 2019). So, it is harder to manage (Covata, 2015). Further, this is magnified because tech has enabled inferences drawn from unstructured social media data. Often, the data is then sold or shared. As well, all the parties have new and different objectives (Asadi, 2016). Therefore, new tech is highly sensitive to subtle ethical issues (Hand, 2018).

Certainly, new tech has increased the importance of ethics and security concerns. This topic is valid. Maybe, you’ve seen more mentions in the news about privacy, breaches, or laws that are out of date (Frederick; Frederick, 2019).

2. Transformed Responsibility

Secondly, tech has changed who is responsible. In the past, only stat and computer folks were focused on data things (Hand, 2018). Security and ethics concerns were limited to librarians, archivists, and IT. But now, data is also concerned with brokers, governments, corporations, data gatherers and data governors (Wikipedia, 2019). The involvement includes more and different people. Are they ready?

Also, it’s not easy to be ready. True enterprise preparedness applies to the broader org. Chiefly, people, processes and principles should be reviewed. A new formal business competency is needed (Groopman, 2018). Data security and ethics has become a community effort. It’s not just an IT issue anymore. We all have a stake in this now.

Technology has magnified the relevance [of data ethics] by enabling much more, less managed data that is being moved and exercised in unexpected ways. Further, technology has transformed the responsibility [of data ethics] by extending the sphere of influence to new and unprepared stakeholders.

Together, we can navigate this era of rapid change. This is digital transformation.

Sometimes, the difference between winning deals with your customers or walking away empty-handed involves one critical element – trust. If you haven’t earned your buyer’s trust, how likely are they to invest their company’s dollars in your product or solution? Not very.

In fact, as stated in LinkedIn’s The State of Sales 2017 report, “77% of buyers said they wouldn’t engage with a salesperson if they didn’t do the necessary homework to learn insights or knowledge about their business.”  

That can make the roads to earning a prospect’s trust bumpy. If your client base is in the B2B space an average of 6.8 people will be involved in the decision-making process. That means you need to develop relationships with a broader range of prospects. Now, your road to earning that trust has now become bumpy and winding!

So how do you stay the course to overcome these challenges and build strong, deal-winning relationships?

Here are 3 ways to leverage Microsoft Dynamics 365 to improve your relationship selling swagger and grow revenue:

Eliminate the cold calls

With the integration of Dynamics 365 and LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can now view LinkedIn Account Profiles from Navigator, all within the Dynamics 365 for Sales platform. So you can see people within your company who are connected to your customer contacts or prospects. By viewing prospects connected to colleagues within your company, you now have a clear path to a warm introduction. Say goodbye to those cold calls!

Connect with the right prospects

We already discussed how many people are involved in the decision-making process – 6.8 on average! That means you need to be branching out and making more than just one contact. With LinkedIn’s TeamLink, you’ll be able to map related leads within an account, enabling you to identify key stakeholders and develop a broader range of relationships. Plus, keep in mind that 20% of decision-makers change roles every year. The integration between Dynamics and LinkedIn enables you to keep track of pertinent job changes – so you never miss a beat simply because one member of the team leaves the company.

Personalize your interactions

Perhaps the most important element of relationship selling is knowing your audience. The integration between Dynamics 365 and LinkedIn Sales Navigator allows you learn about new customers and their industry, as well as stay up-to-date on news and recent activities within current accounts. By leveraging these tools, you can provide meaningful, customized interactions with your key prospects. Think of how you might leverage recent news involving one of your accounts, especially if that news is somehow relevant to your product or solution!

There  are a myriad of ways that Dynamics 365 can improve your relationship selling to build trust and close deals. Our Dynamics experts within our Gold-Certified Microsoft Practice have helped hundreds of clients, across a broad spectrum of industries, attain their sales goals while improving business processes.  To learn more about our Dynamics 365 for Sales Quick Start Program, click here.

Tickets for Dreamforce 2018 Available Now

The biggest software conference on the globe is back. With over 2,700 sessions aimed towards every job role in every industry and helping them succeed, there will several ways to connect with Perficient and other Trailblazers this September 2018.

Don’t miss Dreamforce in San Francisco, CA on September 25-28, 2018. Perficient will be hosting several gatherings aimed at Salesforce enthusiasts, so check back for the latest Dreamforce details.

BONUS: To save money on your Dreamforce ticket, register by June 11 and lock in your spot for $1,899. Register Here

How Many People Attend Dreamforce?

Dreamforce is quite the experience. Whether it’s your first time or you’ve been going for years, there is an excitement in the air surrounding this incredible conference. Perficient has been a big supporter and sponsor of Dreamforce in the past and is excited to be there in full force this year.

Source: Salesforce

Rumor has it Dreamforce will sell out, so be sure to register today. Will you be attending? Tweet us at @PRFTSalesforce and let us know!

The season of spring symbolizes renewal through spirit and business. In between cleaning out their homes and enjoying the fresh air, many are also reflecting upon how their goals are doing through the first quarter of the year.

One area business leaders are looking at this year is how to improve their customer experiences. With omni-channel experiences now front and center, keeping attention while driving revenue is a formidable challenge that brings down even the savviest of organizations.

IBM has been in the customer experience realm for the past decade and a half, pioneering the WebSphere platform. As a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, the platform is used through a variety of industries and verticals.

If you’re looking to transform your organization’s customer experience this year, download our guide below, 3 Reasons to Upgrade to WebSphere 9. Let us know what you think and where you are in your priorities at sales@perficient.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

IBM Connect 2017 provided insights into the future of IBM Connections known as Connections Pink.  Jason Roy Gary, Director of Engineering and Distinguished Engineer and Baan Slavens, Senior Offering Manager provided insights as to what is to come in the future.

The upcoming version of Connection will be a complete rewrite and not using any existing code.  Pink is about the journey and not the destination.  The premise how it is going to be done, not what is going to be done.

Key Messaging

• There are no closed code repositories – Any IBMer can pull down code and edit it
• Customers can join sprint reviews
• Pink will still embrace things from the past – capabilities will not be sunset
• There will be a single code base that will not have versions, CRs, fixpacks etc.
• Pink allows your data to stay where you want it – e.g. profiles could stay on premise but wikis could be in the cloud
• Fault tolerance will be built into the platform, e.g. automatically restart services it recognizes are down
• Pink is cognitive – it will be everywhere
• It will be API driven – APIs will be available for everything, no feature will be available without an API

Connections 6 – The beginnings of Pink

To move to Pink, you must first be on Connections 6.  There are some great innovations in 6.

• Orient Me – redesigned home page – Implemented completely Agile and customers participated in sprint reviews
  • Important people and communities always in view
  • Prioritized updates based on your behavior and interactions
  • Updates grouped by person, community or content
  • Notification center is pervasive
  • Modern focused activity stream
• Modern Communities
  • Provide community owners more design options
  • Owners can copy existing layouts to use as a template for new ones
• On-boarding Experience
  • Drive adoption by welcoming new users
  • New users are guided through steps to capture relevant info
  • Users can select people and communities to follow through recommendations
  • Guided tours to quickly start with files and community apps
• Before you can take advantage of Pink, you must upgrade to Connections 6

Technology Behind Pink

Pink will be developed with entirely open source tools and technologies

• Modern CI-CD framework
• StrongLoop / IBM API Connect (node.js/express)
• SWIFT / Go
• React.js
• MongoDB
• Redis
• Ngnx
• Docker
• No WebSphere, Java, Rational etc.  All components are open source

Three Things to Remember About Pink

• How – “We are not going to build software for our customers and partners, we are going to build software with them.”
• Omnipresent – “You choose your deployment model and where your data goes.  You can integrate in, and out, with other systems.”
• Disruption – “Now is the time to change everything, integrate with today and define tomorrow.”

And one last message, Pink is a journey, not a destination.

Facebook has long been an icon in the world of digital transformation.  I can’t remember all the conversations I’ve had with business people who want a solution that is “like Facebook” even when they don’t really know what that means.  Facebook was one of the original companies that demonstrated to all of us the importance of consumerism and mobile apps and personalized marketing.  But Facebook has (almost) always been for your personal life – to share with family, friends and sometimes publicly.  Over the years businesses jumped onto Facebook to use it as a marketing tool or just to be “on Facebook” since everyone one else is there.

Now Facebook has a new product called Facebook Workplace.  What Facebook brought to our personal lives, they now want to bring to our workday lives.  You find it frustrating that you can post wonderful news about your recent accomplishment to your friends, but you can’t do that at work?  My daughter just invited many people to a birthday party via Facebook, but you can’t set up an event at work and figure out who’s coming? You can snap a photo and instantly share it with the world, but at work you can’t get your phone connected to the network?  The list goes on and on.

Facebook Workplace is Facebook for employers.  While Facebook claims not to be an Enterprise Social Network, like IBM Connections, Microsoft Yammer, Salesforce Chatter, etc, it is essentially an Enterprise Social Network (ESN).  With Workplace, employees can post to news feeds of other employees, you can like posts, you can upload photos and videos, you can search for people, you can chat or video chat with others, you can host events, and many more regular Facebook or enterprise social network actions.

However, there is a separation between Facebook and Facebook Workplace. Employees using Workplace are specifically shielded from their personal Facebook accounts, so when you post to friends or family on Facebook, those don’t show up on Workplace and vice-versa.  Workplace doesn’t have all those annoying Facebook ads in your news stream either.  Business can brand Workplace so it looks like part of the business, not a separate entity.

Facebook Workplace

Workplace comes with features that are not available on some other enterprise social networks.  For instance, video chat and video presentations are available on Workplace, but not all ESN’s have this feature.  You can also have multi-company groups to connect employees with outside partners. Some ESNs make this easy while others don’t have this feature.

Security is another interesting feature of Workplace.  It offers integrations to many security platforms used by corporations, including Active Directory, Ping, Okta and others. It also includes administrative capabilities to manage user accounts and disable or delete employee accounts when they leave.

The published price for Workplace is $3 per active user per month for the first 1,000 users.  Then the price drops to $2 per active user for the next 9,000 users and finally to $1 per user for more than 10,000 users.

Should you care about Facebook Workplace?  Well its new, but built on the very familiar Facebook platform.  It comes to market with a lot of features that existing Facebook users – all 1.4 billion of them – are used to using. If you remember back when Facebook was new, many people said “Why would I use that”, or “Its only for college kids”.   We see what Facebook has done in the social media space over the years and could be just as transformative in the workplace.

If you already have another enterprise social network, you would have to weight the costs and benefits to moving to Workplace.  If you don’t have good adoption of your existing system, then maybe having the Facebook name would help.

If your company doesn’t have a social network at work, Workplace should be something to look into. You could finally have a system that is “just like Facebook”.

The webinar combines one of my favorite speakers, Luis Benitze, with a topic that has been core to me for some years now: business collaboration and specifically IBM Connections. Luis is teaming up with Badgeville, a business partner focused on gamification and driving additional user engagement.

IBM has been focused how work is changing and how it can change further. This infographic comes from the research done by outside, independent thought leaders. This IBM site is where IBM is driving the discussion with the #NewWaytoWork hashtag. There are a variety of assets from ebooks to the ever present blogs and I encourage you to spend some time on the site. Based on the research, there are compelling reasons with a strong ROI to changing employee’s behavior. 

My experience is that gamification requires thoughtful planning . One needs to ensure that the desired behavior that is being supported by the challenges and goals in the gamification product. I’ve seen some cases where the activities promoted superficial use vs. changing how colleagues interact. From my perspective, utilizing Organizational Change Management (OCM) practitioners in with both deploying a social tool and gamification is a natural combinations. I have unfortunately seen social deployments that focused on training users on how to use the platform, treating it as another IT project. I believe that the why of social is more important than the how and OCM can ensure that the reason for change is clearly communicated.

Here is the registration link to tomorrow’ webinar with Luis and Badgeville. Whether you are an IBM customer or not, I am sure there will be great information on how to engage employees and drive additional value for your company.

March is one of my favorite months. It’s a time of renewal, hope, and rejuvenation, with clocks being pushed forward an hour alongside the arrival of Spring. Being a sports fan, March is a great month for college basketball and March Madness, as well as the arrival of the professional baseball season.

Around this time, the writers at Forbes like to release their roundup of cloud computing forecasts and market estimates, collected from industry thought leaders, research firms, and cloud computing vendors. These statistics are important because they outline the direction that cloud computing is taking, and enable Perficient to communicate the best directions our customers should take to adapt to new technologies.

The latest numbers appear to corroborate the themes of March and communicate the upward trajectory of cloud computing as we head into the second quarter of 2016. Here are some examples:

• The worldwide cloud computing market grew 28% to $110 billion dollars in 2015 according to Synergy Research Group. Market growth was led by public infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas) and platform as-a-service (PaaS) solutions.
• The global market for platform-as-a-service will reach $7.5 billion dollars by 2020, according to consultancy firm Global Industry Analysts.
• Research firm IDC predicts cloud information technology infrastructure spending to grow to 53.1% in 2019 and account for 46% of total expenditures on IT infrastructure spending. Additionally, the research firm also predicts external cloud computing will increase 22% in 2015 to 32.1% in 2017, or a growth rate of 45.8%. Finally, they also discovered that 70% of those surveyed indicated a heavy interest towards a hybrid cloud deployment.

From these numbers, it’s clear that interest in cloud is continuing to increase at a feverish pace as organizations discover how it can enable digital transformation and increase competitive potential. What stands out to me as I look at these numbers is the increasing interest in IaaS and PaaS solutions and the many opportunities that DevOps and engineering teams will have available when examining solutions on the market. With IBM recently being named a leader in the hybrid cloud space by research firm Gartner, IT organizations will have many solid choices to pick from.

Stay tuned as the market evolves!

IBM announced the formation of their Cloud video unit before IBM Connect. While there are a number of announcements and observations from Connect, I wanted to get this post out.

The acquisition of Ustream caused IBM to announce their Cloud Video Service Unit and as the graphic shows, this business unit ties together several acquisitions as well as IBM’s own intellectual property. IBM is providing video on demand, live streaming and allowing companies to manage video as another other content type.

Video on the internet isn’t new, YouTube will be 11 years old this month and was acquired by Google nineteen months after being launched. We see video in our healthcare portals with doctor video bios, in manufacturing, in retail and short videos have overtaken traditional training at many of our clients. Personally there are many times before purchasing a product I not only use the manufacturer’s video but I find un-boxing and review videos on YouTube, to round out the recommendations and social feedback that I also use. This unit fills a clear need and one that will become larger as mobile networks and contracts encourage further mobile video consumption.

IBM has a good track record of integrating and support various Content Delivery Networks (CDNs); this Unit is not only providing their own CDN, which is software defined, but also exposes those services via IBM Bluemix. Analytic and content management integration were discussed in the announcement. Not part of the announcement but I am sure it is on the roadmap is Cognitive with Watson.

Between Connections, Verse, IBM Digital Experience and Web Content Management, IBM’s cloud approach, story and components gathering attention and for a number of our clients, it is a very good fit. I am looking forward to the early case studies and customer success stories.

IBM Connect 2016 kicked off today (February 1st) with a two-part opening general session. The second part focused on new product capabilities, demos and product direction.

The first demo was IBM Verse, mobility and Connections as an integrated and seamless experience. The interface has been streamlined to include some great productivity capabilities.  Some of the items demonstrated are.

• Sort emails by Connections communities
• Integrated activity streams in a dashboard view
• Analytics driven content
• Simplified sharing tools which integrate security
• Single source of truth for documents (Emails in a thread all point to the same document, not multiple versions emailed around)
• Box integration (image attachments)
• Watson integration into email (Scan an email prior to sending to look for negativity)
• Calendar inbox capabilities

The next part demonstration was around mobility including the the Mobile Action Center. This was a single app that brings together Connections and Verse.

• Personal assistant that automatically prioritizes email and makes it actionable, e.g., it scans an email text and looks for actionable text such as “send me the file” and provides recommended actions.
• Meeting initiations.
• “Long press” on devices to open multiple options, e.g. share with box, Connections, etc.
• Quick reply to automatically send messages much like texting.

The demo was pretty interesting overall, particularly how analytics are used to help predict and streamline work functions and activities. If you are a Connections / Verse customer or prospect, these new capabilities are certainly worth looking at.

Living in Chicago means that winter isn’t a surprise; it may come later than expected (this year) or arrive with such fury that it shuts down the city (many years) but it arrives. Although it hasn’t been as consistent as winter, preparing for IBM Connect is something that has been occurring for several decades and has similar rhythm to winter.

I am currently working on my presentation for the upcoming IBM Connect conference. Connect, or Connected or Lotusphere as you may know it, returns to Orlando this January albeit to a new location, the Hilton Orlando. I have the privilege again this year to be speaking, which I am excited about. One of the things that I appreciate about my role at Perficient is that I get to work with clients developing the solution. This allows me to share both my experiences as well as experiences from the architect, developers and designers who work at Perficient.

This year I am presenting “SI-1433 : Great Technology isn’t enough, – a proven approach to a successful social adoption”. The goal is to impart some of our experiences in helping customers deploy Social and Digital Experience solutions. I hope attendees will take away ideas and an approach that will improve their deployments.

For some reason IBM thinks I am an early riser, often giving me a morning speaker slot. This year it is Wednesday February 3rd, 8:00 AM-9:00 AM in Florida 1.

As in past years Perficient is exhibiting and bringing a top notch group of employees well Versed in Digital Experience, Social, Portals and Content Management. I look forward to seeing our existing customers and meeting new people. Apologies for the pun.

More information and registration here and I look forward to see both you and the sun, soon.