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But most organizations don’t have the resources, financial and human, to build and train their own domain-specific models from the ground up. Fine-tuning existing LLMs requires considerable time and skills beyond the capabilities of mid-size enterprises, even though it needs less compute power and data than building from scratch. Prompt tuning and prompt engineering are the most common and straightforward approaches. Rather than modifying model parameters, these techniques consume far less resources and, although specialist skills are required, can be adopted relatively easily. In the real world Some early LLM deployments trained on internal data have come from the larger banks and consulting firms. Morgan Stanley, for instance, used prompt tuning to train GPT-4 on a set of 100,000 documents relating to its investment banking workflows. The objective was to help its financial advisers provide more accurate and timely advice to clients. BCG has also adopted a similar approach to help its consultants generate insights and client advice alongside an iterative process that fine-tunes their models based on user feedback. This has helped improve outputs and reduces the chances of hallucinations more common in consumer-facing GPTs. We’re now starting to see less technology-intensive, service-oriented firms customizing LLMs with internal data. Garden-care company ScottsMiracle-Gro has collaborated with Google Cloud to create an AI-powered “gardening sommelier” to provide customers with gardening advice and product recommendations. This has been trained on the firm’s product catalogues and internal knowledge base, and will soon be rolled out to its 1,000 field sales associates to help them advise retail and market garden clients on prices and availability. It’s anticipated that, depending on results, it’ll then be available to consumers, with the aim of driving sales and customer satisfaction. source

Atento is one of the world’s leading business process and transformation outsourcing companies and serves over 400 clients across 17 countries. With a workforce of 150,000 employees, Atento’s growth has scaled with impressive speed. However, this rapid expansion presented significant challenges in maintaining consistency and efficiency across its global operations. To address these challenges, Atento turned to Avaya, leveraging the flexibility and innovation of Avaya’s solutions to scale its environment seamlessly as the business grew. At the core of Atento’s challenges was difficulty managing the disparate technologies and customer processes that emerged from their organic international growth. Without a strategic plan in place to create uniform and flexible environments and workflows, this growth revealed limitations in how Atento delivers innovation to its customers. They needed a solution that could not only standardize their operations but also provide the scalability and flexibility required to meet the diverse needs of their global client base. The Avaya Experience Platform™ (AXP) – both public and private cloud deployment models – and its AI-driven capabilities proved to be the perfect fit for Atento’s needs. By implementing AXP across public and private clouds, Atento created a uniform, scalable infrastructure that could be tailored to the specific requirements of each client. This flexibility allowed Atento to optimize resources assigned to each market, reducing complexity, and mitigating the geographic risks of business disruption that often accompany such vast global scaling. One of the standout aspects of Atento’s partnership with Avaya was the integration of AI and automation capabilities into their customer engagement strategies. Atento implemented AI-powered Avaya Conversational Intelligence and virtual assistants to handle simple, routine inquiries, resulting in a significant reduction in call handling times and post-call work for agents. These AI-driven solutions not only improved efficiency but also enhanced the quality of customer interactions, leading to a 65% increase in conversion rates and a 5% improvement in service quality. The standardization of processes across the globe was another critical component of Atento’s transformation. By adopting a staged approach to rolling out standard processes and configurations, Atento was able to unify and align its global operations, reducing costs and complications. This standardization, combined with Avaya’s advanced analytics tools, enabled Atento to transform vast amounts of data into actionable insights, further optimizing their workflow, business processes, and improving overall customer engagement. Avaya’s solutions also empowered Atento to infuse new levels of agility and efficiency into their operations. The deployment of AXP yielded tangible and positive results, including a 20% reduction in average call handling times, a 65% reduction in after-call work, and a 30% increase in team productivity. These improvements not only enhanced operational efficiency but also contributed to a 25% reduction in attrition rates among call center agents. Atento’s relationship with Avaya has fundamentally transformed its global operations, enabling the company to scale its infrastructure as its business grew internationally. The flexibility and innovation of AXP empowered Atento to meet the evolving needs of their customers, delivering exceptional customer experiences while driving significant efficiency gains and cost savings. As Atento continues to expand its global footprint, the ongoing relationship with Avaya and its solutions will remain a key driver of its success, ensuring that the company remains at the forefront of customer experience management and business process outsourcing.  By standardizing processes, integrating AI and automation capabilities, and leveraging advanced data analytics, Atento successfully and efficiently scaled its operations while maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction – a true testament to the power of innovation and collaboration in driving business success on a global scale. Visit Avaya’s website for the full story of Atento’s successful transformation. source

“This is for people in the organization who have data and want to drive insights for the business and for their clients,” Beswick says. “I want to provide an easy and secure outlet that’s genuinely production-ready and scalable. The biggest challenge is data. It’s very fragmented, ownership is often unclear, quality is a variable, but we have teams really working on that and generating data faster than we can possibly catalog and clean up.” Marsh McLennan has been using ML algorithms for several years for forecasting, anomaly detection, and image recognition in claims processing. With Databricks, the firm has also begun its journey into generative AI. The company started piloting a gen AI Assistant roughly 18 months ago that is now available to 90,000 employees globally, Beswick says, noting that the assistant now runs about 2 million requests per month. Beswick is also preparing for extensive generative AI activity within the company based on Microsoft’s implementation of OpenAI, which offers security to his liking. The CIO is quick to point out that Marsh McLennan’s gen AI platform — like its development and analytics platforms — uses industry-standard products but its interface, tooling, core services, and enhanced capabilities, which go “beyond what the model can do on its own,” were built by MMTech at the company’s innovation center in Dublin, Ireland. source

They are, she said, “widening their Talent Intelligence Hub to allow for every skill and skill tech vendor or third-party solution to create an open skills ecosystem and have a single view of skills. The third-party providers that they have listed will feed the SuccessFactors skills system, and there will be more to come. Also, by creating a massive open system like this, large customers may not have the need to use some of these other third-party products, as they will not partner with SAP.” When it comes to creating modern ways of career pathing, or succession planning, or talent development, said Lopez, “the key stakeholders are really CHROs and CIOs, and they are going to be looking to software vendors to offer a modern comprehensive solution, instead of piecemealing their own custom skills solution, when they neither have the capacity or right subject matter expertise to do so.” ROI of Joule updates? However, the announcements around Joule, Bickley said, “are less compelling in terms of real ROI. SAP is rapidly expanding its copilot/chatbot features across its vast product lines, like every other enterprise vendor. This falls into the productivity enhancement camp, at best, as it relates to the payroll/paystub query functionality. I do not see that feature moving the needle on anything material. More of a ‘bells and whistles’ feature.” source

In 2020, 11:11 CEO Brett Diamond noticed a gap in the market. Virtually every company relied on cloud, connectivity, and security solutions, but no technology organization provided all three. Diamond founded 11:11 Systems to meet that need – and 11:11 hasn’t stopped growing since.  Leaders across every industry depend on its resilient cloud platform operated by a team of industry veterans and experts with extensive networking, connectivity, and security expertise. “Our valued customers include everything from global, Fortune 500 brands to startups that all rely on IT to do business and achieve a competitive advantage,” says Dante Orsini, chief strategy officer at 11:11 Systems. “We provide enterprises with one platform they can rely on to holistically address their IT needs today and in the future and augment it with an extensive portfolio of managed services – all available through a single pane of glass. We believe that IT teams, and the operational leaders and business functions they support, need a partner like 11:11 Systems that is capable of modernizing, protecting, and managing their entire IT estate.” Orsini notes that it has never been more important for enterprises to modernize, protect, and manage their IT infrastructure. He points to the ever-expanding cyber threat landscape, the growth of AI, and the increasing complexity of today’s global, highly distributed corporate networks as examples. “Many organizations are at an inflection point where they see the value in AI and realize it may have the potential to radically improve their business, but they need an experienced partner to guide them to modernize the systems that effective AI programs require,” adds Orsini. “They also know that the attack surface is increasing and that they need help protecting core systems. They are intently aware that they no longer have an IT staff that is large enough to manage an increasingly complex compute, networking, and storage environment that includes on-premises, private, and public clouds. We enable them to successfully address these realities head-on.” 11:11 Systems offers a wide array of connectivity services, including wide area networks and other internet access solutions that exceed the demanding requirements that a high-performance multi-cloud environment requires.  It also delivers security services and solutions – including best-in-class firewalls, endpoint detection and response, and security information and event management – needed to address the most stringent cyber resiliency requirements. Notably, the company’s extensive cloud solutions portfolio, including the 11:11 Public Cloud and 11:11 Private Cloud, draws on those offerings and includes numerous services, such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Backup-as-a-Service, Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service, and full multi- and hybrid cloud capabilities.  These ensure that organizations match the right workloads and applications with the right cloud. Orsini also stresses that every organization’s optimal cloud journey is unique. “We look at every business individually and guide them through the entire process from planning to predicting costs – something made far easier by our straightforward pricing model – to the migration of systems and data, the modernization and optimization of new cloud investments, and their protection and ideal management long-term,” he says. “We also offer flexible month-to-month bridge licensing options for existing hardware, giving customers time to make informed long-term decisions for their business. And throughout all of this, we enable them to draw on the VMware assets they know and trust.“ Justin Giardina, CTO at 11:11 Systems, notes that the company’s dedicated compliance team is also a differentiator. It offers oversight capabilities that exceed the requirements of industry bodies like the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, and Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation. “At 11:11 Systems, we go exceptionally deep on compliance,” says Giardina. “We encourage customers to look at our data centers, review our compliance controls, and see how our support tickets are processed – a key point in data sovereignty – all while using a platform that delivers incredible visibility.” A network built by architects for architects “In addition to centralizing cloud, connectivity, and security offerings, we built our platform to address the needs of organizations with thousands of applications,” adds Giardina. “It also offers exceptional transparency. So, if a customer wants to monitor or see everything that is happening across their locations, like CPU ready times or latency, that intelligence is readily visible.” Giardina notes that VMware by Broadcom technologies are used throughout the platform. “VMware’s technologies are at the core,” he says. “Administrators often take things like high availability that are native to VMware’s offerings for granted. Even out of the box, they enable incredible resiliency, which is why some customers move to our platform from hyperscalers. It’s also far easier to migrate VMware-based systems to our VMware-based cloud without expensive retooling while maintaining the same processes, provisioning, and performance.” 11:11 Systems offers Catalyst, an application it developed that allows customers to look at their existing infrastructure, identify what workloads need to migrate to the cloud, and complete an analysis that identifies any challenges that must be addressed upfront, including how long it will take to move the data, and other variables. It’s another way that Orsini believes a VMware-based infrastructure supports success in the cloud. “Many are not yet familiar with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), but you won’t find a better environment in which to run a production application,” he says. “At 11:11, we offer real data on what it will take to migrate to our platform and achieve multi- and hybrid cloud success. For customers who are unprepared to upgrade and are considering exiting the data center business, our expertise and platform can help navigate the transition effectively and drive the proper outcome. In Catalyst, they can see what a successful plan looks like. And while we believe we’ve built the best platform, we also thrive helping customers that need to use hyperscalers. We enable them to bring everything together so that their multi-cloud infrastructure addresses the most demanding business continuity and cyber resilience requirements.”  For more information on 11:11 Systems visit here. Look to CIO.com for stories about the industry-leading providers in the Broadcom Advantage Program and

During my career I have developed a few mottos. For example, my change management motto is, “Humans prefer the familiar to the comfortable and the comfortable to the better.” Thus, to help humans embrace the better, I need to make the better both familiar and comfortable. To recognize technical debt, my smart aleck motto is, “Technical debt is something I did more than five years ago or something that someone else did more than six months ago.” The topics of technical debt recognition and technology modernization have become more important as the pace of technology change – first driven by social, mobile, analytics, and cloud (SMAC) and now driven by artificial intelligence (AI) – increases. At a time when technology innovation cycles are getting shorter, we will struggle to keep pace if we have to navigate around legacy systems that act as barriers to speed and agility. I once inherited a legacy ERP system that was so old that anytime we attempted to upgrade one of the systems that communicated with the ERP system, the ERP would break. Over time the speed and agility barriers associated with the ERP spread to other systems as they, in turn, formed an expanding wave of technical debt. I suspect that most organizations have some level of technical debt, but how do we deal with and modernize our legacy systems? This is the process I use: Build an inventory of existing systems: Scan, survey, search for, and document what is in your technology portfolio. Assess the existing systems: On the basis of degree of difficulty, which are the potential candidates for modernization? Which are obsolete? Which are not longer an architectural fit? Which are a nightmare to support? Which require rare skills? Prioritize the list of candidates based on the potential value of the modernization: To what extent does each modernization candidate get in the way of technology and organizational speed, agility and innovation? Evaluate the level of effort to modernize the systems: Before building your modernization plans and road map, you need to understand what modernization each candidate will require. Determine the best approach to modernization: For each prioritized modernization candidate, you need to understand which approach makes the most sense. This step introduces the concept of the “R” and “D” approach of modernization. The “R” Approach The “D” Approach Replace (with something new) Decouple/decompose and replace the decoupled/decomposed elements Retire (but do not replace) Decouple/decompose and retire the decoupled/decomposed elements Retain but contain (no enhancements or improvements) Decouple/decompose and retain but contain the decoupled/decomposed elements Retain but fix (just enough to keep it alive) Decouple/decompose and fix the decoupled/decomposed elements Retain but refactor/enhance Decouple/decompose and refactor/enhance the decoupled/decomposed elements The “Ds” of modernization can be important if the modernization candidate is complex. The “Ds” define ways to “divide and conquer” the modernization candidate. For example, a legacy, expensive, and difficult-to-support system runs on proprietary hardware that runs a proprietary operating system, database, and application. The application leverages functionality in the database so it is difficult to decouple the application and database. However, it is possible to run the database and application on an open source operating system and commodity hardware. By decoupling the database and application from the operating system, the company can modernize the rest of the stack, reduce operating costs, and avoid the challenge of the increasingly rare skills needed to support the operating system and hardware. Define, communicate, and implement a modernization road map: It is common for modernization to require an ongoing commitment. Remember my definition of technical debt: something I did more than five years ago or something someone else did more than six months ago. The evolution of technology (and providers) requires a modernization road map that shows not only what is needed now but the ongoing, longer-range modernization needs. This shifts the organization’s thinking for modernization as an event — or a crisis — to an activity that keeps the organization’s technology fresh and never a barrier to speed and agility. We are entering a new phase of digital transformation — this one driven by AI in all its forms. This phase brings with it rapid changes in technologies, processes, and roles. In this environment it is critical that technology leaders reduce the footprint of and remove the legacy systems that are difficult to change, do not fit with future architectures, and that trend toward obsolescence. Legacy modernization is a strategic imperative, and technology leaders must persistently allocate resources, attention, and plans to enable it. In addition, technology leaders must exert the influence needed to ensure that the entire organization understands and supports the delivery of the modernization road map. Learn more about IDC’s research for technology leaders OR subscribe today to receive industry-leading research directly to your inbox. International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the technology markets. IDC is a wholly owned subsidiary of International Data Group (IDG Inc.), the world’s leading tech media, data, and marketing services company. Recently voted Analyst Firm of the Year for the third consecutive time, IDC’s Technology Leader Solutions provide you with expert guidance backed by our industry-leading research and advisory services, robust leadership and development programs, and best-in-class benchmarking and sourcing intelligence data from the industry’s most experienced advisors. Contact us today to learn more. Niel Nickolaisen is an adjunct research advisor for IDC’s IT Executive Programs (IEP). He is considered a thought leader in the use of Agile principles to improve IT delivery. And he has a passion for helping others deliver on what he considers to be the three roles of IT leadership: enabling strategy, achieving operational excellence, and creating a culture of trust and ownership. source

Understanding and aligning the tribes of the digital economy is a key CIO capability — especially when it comes to allocating scarce IT resources for maximum business value. source