Wilder Voices

I decided to kick off my Future of Work (Work’s Future) research by interviewing Genevieve Bell, who is an Intel fellow director of Intel Corporations Interaction and Experience Research.

Click the play icon below to hear the interview:

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In 2010, Bell was named as one of the top 25 women in technology to watch by AlwaysOn. I was fascinated by some of her previous interviews (see below for a list) and wanted to talk to someone from Intel, a company that is obviously going to play a big role in the future.

When Genevieve told me that she found her job when she met a man in a bar in Palo Alto, I knew I was in for a great discussion. She said, “He (the man in the bar) challenged me to think about how to make what I did more accessible to a wider group of people and introduced me to the people who would become my colleagues at Intel.”

She said Intel realized that her coworkers knew that the people using their products would not look like them in the future; (This made me wonder if other companies have really embraced this), so they hired cognitive psychologists, social scientists, and cultural anthropologists.

While other companies have hired these sorts of individuals, they tend to hit a glass ceiling, or some sort of ceiling, in the company where they cannot influence the final decisions about a product.

This hasn’t been an issue, however, at Intel, where she has a seat at the table with the company’s key decision makers. (I have to say that most of the company’s I have worked at have excluded the researchers and the ethnographers from important product related discussions).

The conversation was especially interesting when we looked at the role of women in technology. While I knew the prevalence of women in technology is staggering, I was amazed at some of the statistics she recited. They each indicated that companies, especially technology companies, need to really to pay attention to women.

Genevieve believes that even though companies have done a decent job in developing products for women, there has been a real disconnect that has been taking place. When women take over certain areas of technology, those areas become devalued.

I think where the disconnect exists and where I think there is great reason to have urgency and attention is that while it is certainly the case that women have achieved parity and in some place dominance of the use of certain kinds of new information and communication technologies, they are nowhere as well represented in the places of the people who make them and design them.

I think those are places that companies reasonably should pay attention, because there becomes a much more interesting question about, “What would it look like if you actually pushed on those spaces and said it’s probably not good enough that women are 17% to 20% of people getting graduate degrees in computer science?”  That’s kind of a shame.

I then asked if she thought it was true that even though men seems to be early adopters of new technology, (think Everett Rogers Diffusion of Innovations)   or Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm, women tend to later adopters to new technologies. (Men start using smart phones before women for example, but then women seem to be impact the market more).

Genevieve cited three reasons:

1. Women will not use technology unless it saves time, labor, space, or money.
2. It has to be neutral or subtractive to whatever they carry around with them (think handbag).
3.  The product has to work perfectly the first time out of the box (think about when you use an Apple product).

According to her, Men in the West are proud of when they can master technology, even if it takes an extensive period of time. Women, on the other hand, want it to work right away and work flawlessly. For women, the stories of mastery don’t exist.

We then discussed the importance of taking a holistic approach in developing products (I think most companies talk about understanding the customer, but they attempt to do this from a product perspective and not from a customer service perspective for example).

Genevieve explained why it is important to measure in terms of its “service infrastructure.”  What she meant by this phrase was that “It doesn’t just mean that the screen turns on.” “It means that there’s content.”

Again, I think this is a place where Amazon and Apple, in very different ways, have understood the market well.  They’ve understood that devices are really front ends to services. It the same way, people buy televisions because they may esthetically be appealing? Ultimately what makes a television a good thing is that it’s got content.

Although part of my Future of Work research is looking at the differences between multiple generations, Genevieve recommended that it might be better to look at individuals from a life stage lens or lenses, like when how people change before and after they have kids.
Probably the most fascinating comment of the interview was when I asked Genevieve about what countries are providing the most insight into the future of technology.

I asked this because the US is not always ahead of other countries as illustrated in the case of mobile technology. It was very much to my surprise when she said “Indonesia.”

Interestingly enough Indonesia is Facebook’s second biggest market and was once Blackberry’s second biggest market. It has nearly 300 million people and has an 85% literary and long tradition of adapting technology

Talking to Genevieve Bell was an amazing experience and was a great way to kick off the Future of Work series. The only disappointment of our discussion is when Genevieve told me that I would probably still be creating PowerPoint slides in 2012.

• Transcript of Interview
• Recording of Interview
• Wikipedia Information 
• YouTube Talks

Interview originally conducted on April 20, 2012,

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

As I surfed the web and prepared for my interview with Maria Klawe, President of Harvey Mudd College and Microsoft Board Member, I found several photographs of her skateboarding around her college campus.  I asked her about this and as I listened to her speak about her skateboarding hobby, I realized it was a good metaphor for several trends we would discuss:

1. Second Careers: She took up Skateboarding when she turned 55, indicating the importance of adapting one’s skill sets later in life in order to evolve with this ever changing world.
2. Reverse Mentoring: She saw it as a great ‘reverse mentoring’ opportunity, where her students could sit down and teach her how to board.
3. Desire for (self) Improvement: She has always challenged herself as illustrated with her unique blend of academia and business experience: Working in management at IBM Research, connecting with key business leaders in her role as Chair of the Computer Science department at University of British Columbia, being the dean of engineering at Princeton University, being on the Microsoft Board, and being the President of Harvey Mudd college.

A great deal of our discussion focused on education. (I think we both believe that you can’t really talk about the Future of Work without taking our current educational system into consideration).

When asked about what needs to be reformed in this country—the United States—and more broadly in the world, Klawe replied, “It’s really more about science and engineering education than it is about science and engineering research.”  “We’re (USA) still very strong in science and engineering research, but I think there really is a need for change in the way we do science and engineering education, both in K – 12 as well as at the undergraduate level.”

She continued, “Traditionally, the way we educate people in both K-12 and then in University, is that we tend to expose them (first) to the basic building blocks of Math and Science before we actually let them see applications, which means students will not get to the application courses like artificial intelligence, computer graphics, human-computer interaction, databases, etc. until their junior year.” “So, it’s important to get students to what I would call hands-on technology as soon as possible.”

“Another key change is creating interactive learning environments, especially for those who do not have access to such great campuses such as Harvey Mudd.”

So, Maria seems to be on a mission to change the way technology is taught in K-12 and in college. She believes society is at a real inflexion point. Thanks to improved broadband access, which has made the web more accessible, there is a real opportunity in education and technology as well as in machine learning and other data techniques. This improved access allows educators to better understand on how to design data analysis techniques, which can improve the overall design of learning activities.

We also discussed another trend or need in corporations, which is diversity training whether it is dealing with minorities and women in the United States or business partners and customer overseas.

In several of my discussions with corporate executives, there seems to be a big gap here.  Klawe mentioned how she thought IBM was still a leader in this area – in helping integrate women and minorities into their organization, as well as help its employees participate on an international level. (IBM is one of 60 Fortune 500 companies to have a female CEO. A survey of 60 major companies by McKinsey shows women occupying 53% of entry-level positions, 40% of manager positions, and only 19% of C-suite jobs).

Some reasons for this cited by Klawe were that women have more interests, so there’s more to life than their work. Another reason is that it’s a challenge to be a women working in a group that consists mainly of men. Finally, women tend to focus less on building their network of “who they know” to get ahead.

We also examined how men and women might use technology differently. Maria said, “One of the things we know about young males and young females is that young males, whether they are young men or boys, are much more likely to get totally immersed in a particular game, and learn every single thing about the intricacies of that game.”

“So, whether it’s World of Warcraft, or StarCraft, or, you know, Final Fantasy – some type of thing – Assassin’s Creed, and so on – you know, they tend to get completely – they get immersed in the culture and knowledge of that game, an extent that is rare for females.”

“You know, there are lots females who are counterexamples to this, but on average that’s true.” “ So, females are more likely to play games socially.”  “They’re more likely to play games on mobile – on phones or on iPads than on, you know, game platforms like Xbox or PlayStation, and so on.”

“In terms of the amount of time that they spend on them, I think we’re – we don’t actually know a lot about that yet, because, you know, the fact that so many women are playing games on their phones and on iPads—my sense is, they often do it, you know, while they’re waiting for something to happen or, you know – and so on and so forth.”  “They’re less likely probably to go and spend three hours playing nonstop, but they may be playing three hours over a day.”

Maria is known as one of the more dynamic leaders and personalities in her field. After talking to her for forty-five minutes, I could see why that’s the case. In fact, after our talk, I wanted to jump in my car and drive from San Francisco down to the Harvey Mudd campus in Claremont, California, and sign up to join her in the cause to improve technology in education. After all, Harvey Mudd’s mission is to educate scientists, engineers, and mathematicians and to be well versed in the social sciences and humanities so that they better understand the impact of their work on society.

Final note: PBS did an interview with Maria Klawe on “Bridging the Gender Gap; Why more Women are not scientists or engineers” the same week of our interview.

• Interview transcript,
• Interview Podcast
• For Wikipedia Info
• Recent New York Times article on Maria Klawe Giving Women the Access Code

As a part of this series, I decided to take a look at what is going on with Liberal Arts education and technology, and interview Nancy Ide from Vassar College.

Click the play icon below to hear the interview:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Nancy was my computer science teacher back in 1982. At the time, she was doing computer-assisted analysis of semantic patterning in William Blake’s The Four Zoas, which involves identifying semantic / text patterns and considers the way in which these patterns contribute the structure and the meaning of the work.

If this sounds a bit “nerdy,” then it might be important to point out that this was a precursor to text analysis, which data analysts love to do these days. Since Nancy has been in the Computer Science field since the 1970s, I consider her a real pioneer.

Nancy is part of a lineage of great female computer science teachers at Vassar. She eventually replaced Winifed Asprey , who had replaced, Grace Hooper, who many consider the mother of all computing. Grace was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, and developed the first compiler for a computer programming language.

When asked about the changes that have taken place in Computer Science in the last 30 years, Nancy said that even though the core parts of computer science are the same, there have been some significant shifts in computer languages and operating systems in terms of the Future of Computer Science and how it is taught. Nancy stated that while the fundamentals will always be the same, but there’s now a big shift towards parallelism; distributed computing; and, of course; cloud computing. This influences how schools teach computer science, especially in the areas of application-oriented courses.

One of the interesting areas we discussed was remote teaching, which is something Stanford and MIT seem to be pushing more and more. Nancy felt liberal arts schools recognize that this trend could impact their ability to attract students, but right now academic institutions are in a ‘wait and see mode.’ At Liberal Arts schools, the computer science classes are more oriented towards the hands-on-research.

Other shifts have been that there are more women majors in computer science at Vassar these days and that they don’t feel like they are some sort of “geeky weirdo” that’s outside the broad circle of normal people.

I get the feeling though that these women don’t actually have a role model at this time, and as a result, there is no “regular female” model that works for them. Everything is either Barbie, or Butch–not much in between.” (Note: I first asked about the term ‘Butch-Femme,” which I discovered in the book, Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming).

We also discussed some of the differences between the two sexes when it comes to computer programming. Nancy stated that “men are like Windows PCs and soon to be Androids and women are like Apple’s devices”. Maybe my next book should be called ‘Men are Androids and Women are i-Devices;” Men tend to be more ‘hackers,’ working from the bottom up verses women who tend to first design what the structure of a programming language should be.

In terms of Future of Work, Nancy implied that students need to be better prepared for the different career options. Even though companies send their recruiters to campus, there’s an opportunity for the universities to get more alumni to share their work experiences, and for the companies to bring others besides the recruiters to campus.

As Human 1.0 learned from other research, students want to meet employees who do similar jobs to the ones they will be doing after graduation. We found that some companies are hesitant to do this because of the time commitment. Let’s just say this is another area for them to treat even prospective students as key assets.

Final note: One of the themes of this series is the importance of looking back and learning from one’s past to chart out their future. As such, I will be reaching out to people from my past that have provided me with some valuable guidance and learning. Who would have thought in 1979 when I was learning PL1, I would be so heavily involved in the Internet today.

• To listen to the interview
• To read a transcript of the interview
• To read papers by Nancy Ide

• Co-editor-in-Chief, Language Resources and Evaluation
• Book series Editor-in-chief, Text, Speech, and Language Technology, (Springer)
• Founder, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)
• President, the Association for Computational Linguistics Special Interest Group on Annotation (ACL SIGANN)
• International Expert, Institut de Linguistique Francaise, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
• Member, Scientific Advisory Committee, Swedish National Data Service.
• Member, Hercules Science Commission, Brussels.
• Member, International Standards Organization (ISO) TC37 SC 4 (Language Resources Standards)
• Convener, International Standards Organization (ISO) TC37 SC 4 WG 1 (Language Resource Management, Descriptors and Mechanisms for Language Resources)
• Co-organizer, Collaborative Resource Development and Delivery, held in conjunction with The Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012), Istanbul, Turkey, May 27, 2012.
• Co-organizer and Program Committee Co-chair, The Sixth Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW VI), held in conjunction with The 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Jeju, Republic of Korea, July 12-13, 2012.
• Scientific Committee, The Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012), Istanbul, Turkey, May 21-27, 2012.
• Program Committee, The 2012 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Montreal, Canada, June 3-8, 2012.
• Program Committee, The 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Jeju, Republic of Korea, July 8-14, 2012.
• Invited speaker, Linked Data in Linguistics, March 7-9, 2012, Frankfurt/Main, Germany.
• Plenary speaker, 6th Brazilian School of Computational Linguistics (EBRALC) and 11th Brazilian Corpus Linguistics Meeting (ELC), Sao Carlos, Brazil, September 11-14, 2012.
• Program Committee, META-RESEARCH Workshop on Advanced Treebanking, held in conjunction with The Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012), Istanbul, Turkey, May 22, 2012.
• Program Committee, Merging Language Resources, held in conjunction with The Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012), Istanbul, Turkey, May 22, 2012.
• Program Committee, Challenges in the Management of Large Corpora, held in conjunction with The Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012), Istanbul, Turkey, May 22, 2012.

Projects:

• American National Corpus
• Manually Annotated Sub-Corpus (MASC)
• INTEROP-SILT: Sustainable Interoperability for Language Technology
• XCES : XML version of the Corpus Encoding Standard

Digital Marketing 2.0.Com: Where Big Ideas Meet Big Data

DataXu Sponsors New Editorially-Independent Marketing Community

Andover, MA – February 22, 2012 – Human 1.0, an international business innovation firm helping clients understand, adopt and execute social business strategies, together with DataXu, provider of the industry’s only fully-integrated digital marketing management platform and number one ranked DSP current offering, are pleased to announce the launch of Digital Marketing 2.0, an editorially-independent thought leadership community for digital marketers.

Living in an era of ubiquitous digital devices is changing consumer behavior and, in turn, driving a paradigm shift in marketing. CMOs unanimously cite that they are underprepared to handle the data deluge generated by consumer interaction with digital media, and are uncertain what tools, technologies, partners and resources they will need to develop new strategies for interpreting the data and making real-time business decisions based on the insights it provides. In response, DataXu decided to launch and support an industry-wide conversation, backed by a research study, on how companies can tap into the power of the customer intelligence derived from a fully digital world.

Digital Marketing 2.0 is edited by Stacy Williams, who for 20 years has helped companies develop and implement their marketing, positioning, and internal and external communications strategies. Along with Williams, there are four main contributors including Dan Greller, an IT executive and former CIO at Legg-Mason, Ian Gertler, Chief Marketing Officer for online advertising Pioneer Cursor Marketing under Lexos Media, David Rogers, the Executive Director of BRITE at Columbia Business School and the faculty director of the school’s Executive Education program on Digital Marketing Strategy and David Allen Isben, a 25-year market-driven business strategies veteran in both the consumer and technology spaces.

“Our community discussions will focus on the promise of Big Data and the ability to create actionable insights that come with digital marketing. The community aims to deepen and drive the conversation and uncover ways in which the entire ecosystem can benefit through shared information and expertise,” said Williams.

The site is sponsored by DataXu and produced by Human 1.0.

 So you want to build out a robust social media analytics program for your company, eh?

This process should be very similar to the approach you took in building out your digital analytics program. Follow the same trail to the summit.

Like any good journey, you need to make sure to focus on the basics first, such as:

1. Getting internal alignment from you key stakeholders on your business objective (Hopefully, one objective!)
2. Obtaining sign-off on the key metrics you want to look at
3. Understanding your organizational constraints and resources
4. Identifying and setting up the right tools/technology

But before launching a program, there are some important steps along the way that you should seriously consider:

1. Work closely with your IT group because they usually set the standards for bringing technology into an enterprise environment
2. Work closely and meet often with your financial partner (usually there is a finance guy assigned to your team) to show them that you are working on driving the business forward, that you understand what you are doing.
3. Establish a baseline to measure from and know that every so often you might have to ‘move the goal line’ of desired results as well as the original baseline because your growth my skewed in the early stages of the program
4. Incorporate Share of Voice vis a vis your direct competitors, your indirect competitors (if you are selling financial software to small businesses, excel can still be viewed as a competitor)
5. Understand that there can be multiple ROIs for the whole organization since different groups have different objectives in using social media.
6. Know that if you have an international focus, the same tools might not always work as the ones you use domestically
7. Build in a mobile component to your social media analytics because as we all know, it is here to stay.

Most of the above applies to an enterprise type or Fortune 100 company. Ideally, the individuals working on measuring your success would be part of a Center of Excellence. Note, however, that this is more than the hub-spoke model, where your social media team resides in the middle with representatives from multiple groups.

One of the challenges with this model is that the groups representing the spokes are not funding a full time or part time person to look at social media, but rather having someone ‘just attend the meetings.’ Secondly, the Hub, the social media team tends to still be influenced by where they sit in the organization. If they sit with the public relations team or corporate communications team, those groups business objectives might not support others divisions. Ideally, I think Social Media today should be a true Center of Excellence, completely funded independently, and set up like finance or human resources, where the group assigns individuals to support others in the organizations.

This Center of Excellence idea is not completely new. The big difference here is that I am recommending it be treated like finance, legal or HR. Not in terms of being more of an operational role, but rather focused on a stand alone entity that embeds its own people into each group and pays for those people vs. having it be someone from a business group’s part time job. After talking to many companies about how they address social media in their organization, many wrestle with either a) individual groups doing their own thing or b) they only have a few hours a week of a business person’s time.

More on the center of excellence next time I blog here…

Oh yea.. Yes, your data jockey (s) should be part of this team too. : )

Mashable’s Ben Parr called it Cloudgate to describe what happened when Amazon’s Elastic Could Computer (EC2) went down leaving some major websites in the dust, such as FourSquare, Quora, Wildfire, and more. I think this caught everyone off guard because there had been numerous articles about Amazon’s lead in the Cloud Computing space. The company has been at it for a while and has a head start in learning how to build an efficient cloud infrastructure.Last week, though, we had a friendly reminder that even the good can die young. That we have to always be prepared for the unexpected. (Yes, that’s one of my mottos). Some valuable lessons:

• Build redundancy – and if your hosting partner can’t provide it, go find another partner to act as your back up.
• Take service level agreement seriously – some of my friends tell me they were not very stringent
• Employ some of your own monitoring tools just so you don’t loose any time to be notified about your site being down
• Cloud Disaster Recover Options — Look into third parties to help you with this
• Leverage Twitter to send out alerts and let people know what is going on.
• Follow up with customers and let them know what happened, that you apologize and that you want their suggestions of how to be notified in the future (I only heard from one company who was impacted)
• Impact of new features and functionality — when you add new i-candy to your site or backend functionality, make sure to conduct complete end-to-end testing

Related articles:Amazon cloud crashes endangers federal websitesIs your favorite website down today? Blame AmazonAmazon takes down the DOE

When building a new community or functionality on a social network, one of the first questions I ask is ‘tell me about the people who will use it.‘ I want to learn more than just their demographics, their psychographics or even what we called at Intuit, their firmographics (how many employees are at the company, how much revenue have the generated, or their occupation such as purchasing agent or IT professional).

And I also want to know where on the technology adoption curve the target audience(s) reside. And I want to know about the words and phrases they use in their ever day business.

A few years ago, when we introduced Podcasts on the Intuit Community website, nobody clicked on the word ‘podcast.’ So we did some tests in usability and learned that our users — who tend to be older and not residing on the cosmopolitan coasts of the USA — didn’t know what that term meant. Instead, we learned that they related better to more common phrases, such as Radio-on-Demand, so we used that term. We also learned (a few years ago) that they had no idea what a blog was and they had no interest in blogging.

So, it’s important to understand where your users (the people) are on the adoption curve.

As the above chart shows, Geeks started using Blogs a lot sooner than Small Businesses. Sound obvious, right?

It was until we started talking to people that manage online communities and social media activities. At that time, everyone wanted to build a blog, write a blog, and ‘do the blog.’ But we resisted at Intuit because our typical Small Business owners were not ready at the time. Today, they might just be ready. However, Business.com recently did a survey listing out the top social media tools for different vertical/industry segments. And at the top of some of the lists were Webinars. Who knew that something so old web school could still be popular?

I am working on compiling a list of examples like the ones above. So, feel free to send them my way.