Consumers have a complicated relationship with their energy companies, which are hardly at the vanguard of high-quality, high-touch customer service. Moreover, consumers don’t have a choice in providers, owing to regulated service territories. To buck that trend and become more friendly with consumers, Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG) is embracing virtual assistant technology and other…
When Max Schrems asked the Irish Data Protection Commissioner to stop Facebook Ireland transferring his personal information to the U.S. in 2013, he couldn’t have foreseen that it would put the personal data processing operations of thousands of other businesses in legal jeopardy. Schrems’ 2013 complaint went all the way to the European Union’s top…
When it comes to IT, change is a constant. Thanks to a wide range of maturing technologies and the threat of digital disruption, the pace of change in IT has accelerated — even in just the past year. But one facet of IT remains the same: that IT organizations continue to struggle to find enough…
Each budget cycle, CIOs are expected to reduce operating expenses even when faced with increased expenditures on key business projects or the need to increase service levels. They are often challenged with achieving these expense reductions without regard for increased business volumes. They respond with budget presentations positioning these cost drivers and offsetting expense management…
Automation has become a widely used tool for streamlining IT operations, and Mindtree is one such organization removing manual processes from its infrastructure as it moves toward delivering a more fully automated environment. The consulting and managed service provider’s strategy follows an ambitious goal prevalent in many tech organizations: To get away from the conventional…
As an Ivy League institution, Cornell University’s main mission is to “educate the next generation of global citizens and promote a culture of broad inquiry throughout and beyond the Cornell community.” A lofty purpose, and one the university found increasingly difficult to quantify and measure. Cornell enrolls more than 20,000 students and offers thousands of…
Fifteen years after President George W. Bush launched a nationwide campaign to computerize healthcare and give everyone access to their electronic health records (EHRs), the industry is finally starting to achieve some degree of interoperability among EHRs and other health IT systems. But much of the data is still locked up in documents, and the…
Information security has become such an integral part of IT that at a growing number of organizations, the two are virtually indistinguishable — from an organizational standpoint. Many companies are attempting to more tightly integrate IT security strategy with IT strategy. That can mean blending departments, changing leadership structures, and embedding security earlier in the…
When Scott Strickland interviewed for his job as CIO of Wyndham Hotel Group in the spring of 2017, the executive committee was focused on standardizing processes and technologies across 20 brands (including Ramada, Super 8, Days Inn, and Howard Johnsons), which had been operating fairly autonomously. So, Strickland took the job and spent the…
One of the more challenging aspects of emergency department (ED) healthcare is determining which patients to admit for observation and which patients to send home. One healthcare system is tackling that challenge with predictive analytics. Unnecessary hospitalizations cause numerous problems: longer wait times, a lack of beds for the patients that really need them, wasted…