App overload: The silent productivity killer

Technology is supposed to help employees become more efficient, but according to Pegasystems, it’s actually making them less productive. The software vendor reported that the average Global 2000 employee uses 35 different tools a day, switching back and forth more than 1,100 times. It’s as if there’s an application for everything, the study contends and…

IDG Contributor Network: The hidden challenges undermining the customer experience

He traveled all around the world and everywhere he went He’d use his word and all would say there goes a clever gent —Lyrics from “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” In the movie Mary Poppins, everyone’s favorite nanny shared with the world “the word to say when you don’t know what to say.” Today’s business equivalent of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is…

IDG Contributor Network: How to recover from SaaS stack bloat in the enterprise

Agility is highly sought-after in today’s business environment. As such, enterprises are now aggressively leveraging the efficiencies brought about by technology to drive their processes. And why not? Digital tools empower future-facing companies to perform better than laggards. A Harvard study shows that “digital leader” organizations enjoy a three-year average gross margin of 55 percent,…

How McGraw-Hill identifies at-risk students

For the past several years, McGraw-Hill Education’s user research department reported an issue with the company’s Assessment and Learning in Knowledge Spaces (ALEKS) offering. The web-based, artificially intelligent assessment and learning system was great at assessing students and creating customized learning paths based on their individual needs, but instructors were deluged with data. “In our…

IDG Contributor Network: Enterprise no/low code platforms: A golden phoenix has risen

Over time, all software technologies find their place in the IT world. Some technologies, like CODASYL hierarchical databases, become an indispensable part of the software development toolkit and seemingly overnight give way to more advanced components, in this case relational databases. Some programming languages, like Pascal, contained dramatic, even revolutionary, technological advances and quickly fall…