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How COVID is Changing Technology Futures

Accenture released its Technology Vision 2020 report in February, but then COVID hit. Here's how the pandemic is changing technology futures according to the company.

Remember February? The world was still normal then. At that early point in 2020 your enterprise, your community; your family were all planning for the year that you had expected. Maybe it would get a little exciting with a presidential election and the Summer Olympics. But essentially you laid out plans and executed them, and you didn't expect anything major to get in the way.
Back in February, Accenture published its Technology Vision 2020 report, talking about the "techlash," a clash between the digital products and services companies had created and the differing expectations of consumers, society, and business ambitions.

But then the COVID-19 pandemic hit and everything changed. Everybody's plans got put on hold or canceled as the world reacted to this major crisis.
In the wake of that shockwave, Accenture has come back to revisit its Technology Vision 2020 report and how this crisis has changed what enterprises, society, and individuals are doing this year.
"It's changing things, but in a different way than we expected," Michael Blitz, managing director of Accenture Technology Vision, told InformationWeek in an interview. "Usually when you look at big changes you are looking at a shift to a downward economy. While we have those things that are happening now, too, they are happening in a different way. We've got a rapid amount of change happening all at once in a bunch of different places."
For instance, consumers are rapidly changing their behaviors with social distancing and masks. There are new question marks around how people work, Blitz said, pointing to China's vast drop in the use of public transit, even though public transit is considered an essential part of how people get to work and get around in cities around the world. Those are just a couple of examples of the many consumer behaviors that are changing, all at the same time.
While that's going on, you are also going from a world where most economies were growing to one where they are all rapidly contracting all at once.

Technology whiplash and a Rubik's Cube
"It feels so different because it all happened so fast," Blitz said. That's turned things upside down. In the last 20 years companies were leading the way with new products and services and technologies that were introduced to consumers for the first time, according to Blitz, but suddenly consumers and economies have changed much faster than businesses. "Now we are in this unique place where basically companies have to catch up."
In a normal economic downturn, you'd see companies getting conservative. However, in this one, companies are realizing that they are behind in the game, and they need to respond to a new situation.
"This will turn into a real innovation accelerator," Blitz said. First, it's changing where investments are going. For instance, at grocery stores a percentage of the workforce will be regularly spraying and sanitizing surfaces. There will be infrastructure changes like the addition of Plexiglas guards. Floor tape has been added to show people where to stand. Plus, there have been so many changes to the supply chain, Blitz said. He noted that over the last 4 months there's been a 60% increase in store pickups, and a lot of business moving forward will be conducted digitally and via mobile devices. How does it look for Accenture's clients?
"We've got a bunch of companies that say the way they do business needs to change," Blitz said. "They need to innovate to figure out how to Rubik's Cube the new way to do it."
Thankfully, over the last 10 years most companies have already been heavily investing in their own digital transformations.
"This rapid change is almost a stress test for that," Blitz said. "Companies had been trying to make themselves more agile."

Course corrections
Some companies are noticing the areas that they wish they had moved faster on, so there is an uptick in interest for things such as robotics and cloud computing. If they haven't already invested in those areas, they are jumping in now.
Overall, organizations have done fairly well responding to the crisis, Blitz said. For instance, many retailers were able to pivot quickly to home delivery and shipping goods. Also, with a few notable exceptions like hand sanitizer and toilet paper, the supply chain responded well, too, so there weren't a lot of shortages of essentials.

The rise of digital
Organizations have realized that the faster they can react to the market changes, the better off they will be, Blitz said. Consumers, also, were more patient with problems at the beginning of the crisis.
"Right now companies have a little bit of a free pass" with customers, he said. On the flip side, consumers that have been more reticent with technology adoption are getting on board. Blitz said his parents are now ordering meals through Grub Hub and watching movies on Netflix.
"They're suddenly becoming a lot more technology savvy," Blitz said. Plus, everybody has a lot more time to invest in learning new things and putting up with a host of minor inconveniences. But that patience won't last.
"I don't see that bandwidth lasting forever," Blitz said. Consumers will lose patience with waiting and shortages. Yet they will still expect to be able to do most things digitally.
Among the technologies that organizations wished were farther along are autonomous cars and drones for contactless delivery of food and goods to consumers. But even though it wasn't ready, the pandemic proved the case for the potential of these technologies.
Most organizations right now are still at the stage of trying to react to the magnitude of change.
"I think we are at the early stages of people realizing that this is something that is going to be very long term," Blitz said. "COVID-19 is likely to be around much longer than we all expected, and the economic ramifications are going to be around, too. We don't know when it will let up."
That's leading to new questions and conversations. One person's comfort level with going out to the movies may be different from another person's comfort level.

Corporate introspection
For businesses, this aspect of the pandemic has created a new focus.
"It's not just my products and services I'm providing, but rather what do I owe my customers and my workforce, and what values am I pushing in society," Blitz said. "Companies were getting there before COVID, but this has put a spotlight on it."
All the B2C changes will ripple through to B2B changes, too, as we see disruptions in the supply chain, the need for greater agility, and other improvements. Maybe the company needs to add some new suppliers or add a new machine to the factory.
Some initiatives that companies moving towards slowly will now be accelerated such as the use of robots -- not just for manufacturing plants -- but also for jobs like taking inventory of store shelves at the local Wal-Mart. New UV lights will arrive in healthcare settings. Blitz said that these improvements won't be new technologies coming out of left field. Instead, these will be a huge acceleration of all the technologies that have just started to mature.
"In a number of years we are going to look back on this time as a period of massive amounts of change," Blitz said. "And I think a lot of it is going to be for the good. COVID is a terrible thing. But for the first time we see a fire lit across companies in every industry that is about making things better for the customers they serve."

How Technology Drives Smartness in Students

Technology is now integrated into almost everything. From our kitchen appliances to classrooms, it is undeniable that technology has revolutionized the world in ways that a lot of people cannot even comprehend. One of the biggest industries that technology has changed and revolutionized is the education sector.

Technology has revolutionized how the education sector works, how teachers do their jobs and how students attain the knowledge they get. Technology has become an important part of education and with the advantages it provides, it is difficult to see how one could manage without it.

How Do Students Benefit From the Use of Technology in Education?
Students are one of the biggest beneficiaries of the advantages that technology provides regarding their education, be it inside or outside the classroom. Technology has changed the game for students entirely. Be it first-grade students learning math or English or university students working on a complex equation, the use of technology is now widely implemented and is being used in many different ways.

There are many methods that students can use Essay writers UK to implement and utilize technology for education. One of the most obvious ways to utilize technology for education is smartphones. Smartphones are something that has now nearly become more of a need than a necessity. Nearly every person, especially those of the younger generation, are constantly on their phones and connected to the internet.

The information is the biggest and most vast source of information there is. Anything you need, you can find within seconds by just entering a few keywords or by performing a Google search. All the information in the world is available at your fingertips and not utilizing this resource would be foolish.

What Other Technologies Can Be Used to Help and Benefit Students?
One of the technologies that are rapidly being developed and implemented in the field of education is augmented reality and virtual reality. Both of these have multiple different uses depending on the field they are being used in. Augmented and virtual reality provides an interesting and unique learning experience. Since it is different from the traditional methods of teaching, it is also interesting to students and helps hold their attention span for longer periods of time.

As found by studies, students show an increased interest and willingness to learn and also retain the information they learn for longer periods of time. The use of these technologies is prevalent in fields such as medicine and science.

Using Mobile Applications To Promote Student Learning
This is something that is already being used and has been implemented by quite a few schools and universities. Mobile applications can be of different types and be used for multiple purposes. They can be used to promote learning, help students practice for exams/tests or even aid in their curriculum with things like their schedule for classes or helping them catch up on any lectures they missed.

This saves time for students and is very easy to use as every student is bound to have a smartphone. The time saved can be valuable for a student and can be invested elsewhere such as studying or working on assignments which can be quite lengthy and time-consuming.

Social Media and its Advantages
One of the most common uses that smartphones have is social media. These websites and applications are responsible for an overwhelming number of clicks and views on the internet. Universities, schools, and other institutions have started using social media to promote themselves and reach out to the student.

The mass appeal of social media makes sense for educational institutions to make use of it as students are more likely to check a university’s page on social media rather than log onto their website and check for any updates. It is also faster and easier to manage through websites like Facebook, Twitter, and even Instagram.

Artificial Intelligence and the Promise it Shows.
Artificial intelligence is nowhere near its full potential but it is still being used to aid in the educational sector and has some impressive benefits it offers. One of the biggest advantages artificial intelligence offers is custom lessons for students.

Not all students are the same and some learn faster than others. Different students excel in different areas and artificial intelligence is something that can help us capitalize on that. Artificial intelligence offers the ability to provide custom lessons and learning plans for students. This allows students to learn at their own pace and keep up with their lessons instead of trying to compete and keep up with other students. It can even help with university assignments which are quite difficult such as dissertation writing in UK or writing a thesis.

Does The Use Of Technology Actually Have The Potential To Make Students Smarter?
Technology has the undoubted potential to make learning, teaching, and education as a whole smarter, faster and efficient. The processes can be streamlined and refined to save cost and time which can be invested elsewhere.

Studies have found that the use of technology has provided a marked improvement amongst students which includes how invested they are in the Assignment help online classroom as well as how much effort they put in. The use of technology is not only beneficial for students but can also help shape better teachers and revise teaching methods to make them more cost and time-efficient.

There are also some negatives and downsides as is the case with almost everything. One of the main downsides of using technology such as smartphones is that students are prone to using their phones for things like surfing the web and social media. This is something that needs to be regulated to ensure that a student is actually using their smartphone for the proposed purpose and not using it for social media or any other distracting activities.

However, the advantages of using technology in the education sector outweigh the disadvantages. The disadvantages can also be countered by placing certain protocols to ensure that students do not use mobile applications and other technologies in the wrong sense. Technology has incredible potential and has revolutionized the world as we know it. It can also revolutionize the education sector as it continues being developed and fine-tuned for the particular use it is intended for.

Data in the Age of COVID

This crisis is teaching us a ton about the dissemination and use of data. But we must remember to use it in a way that maintains the quality of data and protects privacy rights.

Until the last decade or so, the lack of computing power was the most significant hurdle to addressing complex problems. Even if the required data was available, we did not have the computing power to enable artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze and learn from large data sets. The situation has changed with the improvement of computing power generally and the migration to cloud computing. An organization is no longer required to make the overwhelming substantial investment to buy a mainframe computing system in order to run programs making massive amounts of calculations. Rather today, any organization can run highly complex programs using massive amounts of data on the cloud, only paying for what is actually used.

The COVID data story

The positive stories of how enhanced data sharing has helped to fight the coronavirus are numerous. One simply has to go to the Johns Hopkins University website that tracks real-time statistics on the spread of COVID. The dashboard uses data from a number of sources, including the World Health Organization (WHO), various countries’ centers for disease control, media reports, and health departments around the world. It has been such a useful tool that as of early April the dashboard had already been cited by scholarly journals over 79 times.

Another example of how opening up data sets has helped the COVID-19 response is the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC). The INSDC is a tripartite collaboration between Japan, the United States and Europe. For more than 30 years, it has been committed to sharing DNA sequence information among scientists free of charge. These databases have allowed researchers worldwide to identify genetic mutations and causes of numerous diseases (and ways to treat or prevent them), including COVID-19. In fact, over 300 genetic variants of the SARS-CoV-2 have already been uploaded. The fact that these datasets are publicly available has allowed scientists from all over the world to start working on a vaccine, research the origins of the disease, and assess whether it is mutating to become more or less virulent. Much of this research is being done using AI. The more data that become available, the better the AI is able to function.

These are only two really good examples of how “open data” is working to help combat a world crisis. At the same time, there are countless other instances where greater access to data could help solve important problems. Could global hunger be significantly reduced by increased sharing of data? Could opening up datasets help fight corruption? The short answer to these questions is “yes.” The problems that additional data sharing could help improve are countless. This is why a number of companies and organizations have started initiatives pushing for actually opening up data and improving policies that help this cause.

Getting policies right

Incentivizing organizations, governments and even individuals to share data is clearly important. As I have opined on before, there are a number of other policy implications that should be considered in order to ensure that everyone benefits from the data revolution. The COVID crisis has brought many of these issues to the forefront. A good example is contact tracing, the process by which public health officials identify persons who have been in contact with individuals known to be infected with a disease. In the case of COVID-19, contact tracing is imperative to slowing the spread since the disease is transmitted so easily and many individuals who have contracted it are asymptomatic. The concept of contact tracing is simple: When public health officials find someone who tests positive for the disease, they attempt to find everyone that person has been in contact with and alert anyone who may have been exposed.

Cell phone location data can be very helpful in doing this effectively. In other words, the use of massive amounts of data owned by various telephone operators and ISPs are needed to run an effective tracing program. This obviously presents a number of policy concerns, including ownership and usability of the data, as well as privacy. Policymakers are starting to propose solutions, but we are a long way from enactment, much less implementation. The COVID health crisis will hopefully be under control sooner rather than later, but the need to develop policies for ensuring we get the most out of data will continue.

How Technology Improves Workplace Productivity? 

So, how do you improve workplace productivity? It’s no secret that companies and organizations today find technology to be a valuable asset. Why wouldn’t it be?

Provided that the company is equipped with the right tools, this can dramatically improve the efficiency and performance of the firm. What’s more? Technology can improve individual employee productivity, communication, collaboration, morale, and engagement.

Let’s find out how technology is improving workplace productivity.

1.Using time-tracking integration tools to improve productivity
2.Ways technology is improving workplace productivity
-Chatbots are changing customer service
-Connecting and collaborating with a mobile workforce
-Time tracking and management
-Experts are a Click Away
-Use of focus tools
-Networking tools
-Personalized marketing

5 Ways Information Technology in Construction is More Important Than Ever:

There was once a time when IT and construction didn’t mix. Now, information technology in construction is absolutely vital. Here’s why.

The construction industry in the United States is a 1.73 trillion dollar industry. With so much money at stake, it is only natural that a switch towards technology was inevitable.

In the past, this industry was considered one of the least likely to embrace information technology. However, all of this is changing as the construction industry has started to embrace all the benefits that can be gained from the inclusion of technology.

Here is a deeper look at why including information technology in construction is now a must if you want your construction project to progress smoothly.

1.Project Management Software
2.Management of Mobile Devices
3.Upgrade and Share Designs
4.Building Information Modeling(BIM)
5.Final Thoughts on Information Technology in Construction

What Developers Need to Know about Cybersecurity:

Have you ever considered developing an app for your business? Well, statistics show that customers are increasingly using mobile devices to access crucial information about various companies. By 2020, it’s estimated that approximately 284 billion mobile apps will be in use.

Based on the projections, you’ll opine that it will be a great loss to operate a business without a reliable app in the future. However, its development and implementation may expose your organization to cybersecurity threats.

If you doubt your ability to develop a safe app for your business, then this article will guide you through all the vulnerabilities that you should avoid during the process.

1.Top 4 Vulnerabilities All Developers Should Know About
-Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
-Client-State Manipulation
-Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
-SQL Injection
2.Never Stop Learning