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Fortune estimated that the company lost almost $100 million in revenue during the outage. As individuals and businesses around the world clamored to understand what went wrong, many began to realize that if one of the largest platforms in the world could go down, the same could happen to their business. Source: The Lessons Remote Work Leaders Should Learn From Facebook’s Service Outage

According to one survey by an IT security company, there has been a 63% average increase in the purchase of employee surveillance software since March 2021 compared to the pre-pandemic average. This is a 24% increase compared to the nine months prior. A recent report from tech media site The Information spotlighted some of the tactics tech giant Google uses to spy on employees. Taking a screenshot or looking up COBRA health insurance costs can put Googlers in the crosshairs of the company’s security team. Source: Alternatives to Investing in Employee Surveillance

We live in a fast-paced world. New technologies are emerging every day, and it seems like there’s no time to stop, but the reality is that we need to make time for these changes. Cloud computing — and the culture change it’s fostering — is not just a trend that will eventually go away, it’s a paradigm shift that we need to prepare for now.   Source: 3 Ways To Get Ready for the ‘Cloud Culture’ Transition

Ask any vendor who sells to learning and development and you’ll hear a similar theme. Organizations want tactical courses. Training on Microsoft Teams and Zoom. Upskilling and reskilling for industries undergoing major transformation. Onboarding training updates for industries hiring and rehiring thousands of employees. Which, considering all of the changes, makes sense. But what nearly everyone has said is how little organizations are prioritizing leadership development right now. That’s a huge problem. Source: It’s Time to Address the Coming Leadership Void

Internal communications has proved its worth during the pandemic, and many (but sadly not all) comms teams are riding high. Where it’s possible, teams are now turning their attention to the road ahead, a road filled with an unprecedented degree of comms complexity. With the arrival of Microsoft 365, Workplace by Facebook, Slack and a whole crop of employee apps, we now have more internal comms channels not less. What’s needed is a clear way forward. Source: A Digital Maturity Model for Internal Communications

Small Data Is Not New According to Bryan Philips Cupertino, Calif.-based In Motion head of marketing, small data is the opposite of big data. It is a term that describes data sets with fewer than 1,000 rows or columns. The term was coined in 2011 by researchers at IBM to describe datasets that are too small for traditional statistical methods. In contrast to big data, small datasets can be analyzed using estimation. Examples of small datasets include customer transactions, social media posts, and individual genome sequences. Source: Why It Might Be Time To Start Looking at Small Data

As mentioned in the introductory piece of this series, three important threads run through every organization: technology, policies and activities. How these threads are woven together create the cultural fabric that is the organization we experience, and how we shape and weave these threads as the organization transforms is what separates success from mediocrity or failure. In turn, transparency within an organization, as well as for any digital transformation effort, is a critical component to weaving those threads together in a way that leads to success. Source: Saying ‘Transparency Is Good’ Is Not Enough: It Must Be Ingrained in Your Policies, Culture and Technologies

In the enterprise, the target deployment of AI is now likely to include customers, business partners, business executives, salespeople, assembly line workers, application developers and IT operations professionals. As AI reaches a larger set of employees and partners, it requires new enterprise roles to deliver it to a wider audience. Source: Why Artificial Intelligence May Not Offer The Business Value You Think

When I consult with clients on developing a digital policy program, we almost always start by looking inward. We talk about their strategic goals, whether their current content strategy supports those goals, whether they’re exposing the business to unnecessary risks, whether their employees have the skills and resources they need, whether their IT infrastructure is sufficient, what security protocols are in place, how they maintain compliance with a hairball of laws and regulations, etc. Source: Do Your Digital Policies Include the Voice of the Customer?

The 2021 Gartner CIO Agenda (behind paywall) survey gathered data from 1,877 CIO respondents in 74 countries and all major industries, representing approximately $4.7 trillion in revenue/public-sector budgets and $85 billion in IT spending. The resulting report argues the support for remote work that the COVID-19 pandemic brought will be one of the biggest wins. CIOs now have the attention of the CEO, and they have convinced senior business leaders of the need to modernize technology. Source: Practical Tips for Digital Transformation