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Why IT leaders need to meet the needs of the hourly worker

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This post was also published in CIO.com. Hourly employees are frequently overlooked in IT strategy — but often present the highest case for return on investment. In IT decision making, the core stakeholder of a business system is typically the business function. The finance department selects the finance system, the human resources department selects the HR system, and so on. Downstream from these decisions, regular employees are then frequently confronted with Byzantine systems. This issue is particularly pronounced for hourly workers, who are rarely considered when building and investing in work systems. At many large and midsize companies, hourly workers use a variety of non-intuitive legacy systems to perform functions like submitting timesheets, scheduling shifts, and looking up inventory. The business challenge of integrating hourly workers Hourly employees are usually the most underfunded in terms of IT spend, but often present the highest case for IT return on i

Seven tech trends that will destroy globalization

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This post was also published in CNBC. Over the past few decades, globalization has bound countries together into a global supply chain encompassing finished products, parts, agricultural products, food products and energy. But a commingling of seven well-known tech trends will soon make it inconceivable to manufacture a product in China , ship it 7,000 miles to Long Beach, and then truck it 700 miles to Salt Lake City to be placed onto a Walmart shelf. With projected continual improvement in each of these seven tech trends, a large majority of global trade could cease very shortly. 1. Automated manufacturing A fundamental basis of outsourcing manufacturing is that decreased labor costs outweigh the shipping cost. But thanks to more automated assembly lines, we are very close to the tipping point in employee productivity where the shipping cost will outweigh the labor savings of offshore manufacturing. It's not a coincidence that multinational companies are suddenl

From federated identity to consolidated identity: a look at the past, present and future

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This post was also published in CIO.com. It’s time for a better way to maintain identity in the enterprise. Let’s explore a new identity model, Consolidated Identity, that will simplify how employees authenticate into systems, access data and complete workflows. Today, it is common to use your Google, LinkedIn, or Facebook identity to log into a website. However, in the first generation of the commercial Internet, this was not the standard experience. Virtually every internet service required users to create an account with a username and password. For services that were only used occasionally, having to create this account and remember all the associated passwords often created friction for new users. The invention of federated identity for the consumer Internet I worked for Sun Microsystems in the early 2000s and was fortunate enough to be the technical lead for a new concept called federated identity, which presented a way for separate online entities to share identity

Why disrupting government pot policy is so much harder than the taxi commission

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This post was also published in VentureBeat. The recent legalization of recreational marijuana in California and other states now totals to 45 states that have legalized some form of marijuana . However, the federal government has never endorsed even medical marijuana. The Obama administration created rules known as the Cole memo where they decided not to enforce federal marijuana laws if states legalized it. Recently, Attorney General Jeff Sessions reversed this course and stated that marijuana laws would be enforced. A raft of startups are operating in this tenuous legal gray area, including Eaze, Baker, and Pax Labs. Much like Uber and Lyft flouted taxi commission regulations, these startups are betting that public sentiment and user traction will overcome the existing legal and regulatory environment. Indeed, all of the state legalization efforts were passed by millennial-driven voter ballot initiatives in both red and blue states rather than by entrenched legislators. The ci