deal architect

Burning Platform: Diversity Trends in Tech

Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here. Last couple of weeks, we have had several guests like Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant and Dennis Howlett of Diginomica.

The BLM movement this summer has brought more urgency for HR and procurement groups to diversify employee and supplier bases. Related to this, I did interviews with two prominent African-American tech executives, Tony Prophet, Chief Equality Officer at Salesforce  and Charles Phillips, Chairman at Infor. Also a presentation by Barbry McGann of Workday on their new VIBE product which allows companies to better visualize employee diversity from multiple dimensions.  The Tech sector should be proud of its efforts.

While the recent intense focus is nice to see, it would be remiss to not point out we have been making steady progress for a long time. I invited Cindy Jutras, President of Mint Jutras to talk about her 45-year career at software vendors and analyst firms, and draw from her experiences on how gender and ethnic-based diversity have evolved in the industry. I add my own experience as an immigrant and someone who has worked in and traveled to 70 countries and seen the US "from the outside in" in the video below.

I particularly liked Cindy pointing out the movie, "Hidden Figures" about a team of female African-American mathematicians who served a critical role in NASA during the early years of the U.S. space program. As she says "we have come so far"

We also touch on age discrimination. Silicon Valley and outsourcers tend to be focused on young recruits, but even corporate IT tends to be ambivalent about older employees. The pandemic has resulted in many older employees who are traumatized or those who finally having spent more time at home with families and have relished the experience. Both categories are opting for early retirements. These accelerated (and unplanned) exits may also bring more of a focus on the age attribute as companies refine their diversity policies.

It is a not a "woke" conversation. It is a realistic discussion about why a system of meritocracy, more enlightened executives and driven individuals work better than forced mandates for diversity.

New Normal: A conversation with Stephany Lapierre of TealBook

I have been doing video interviews with a number of C-level execs and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews. 

This time it is Stephany Lapierre, Founder and CEO of TealBook. The Toronto based company is helping companies with what they call "Universal Supplier Profiles". Traditionally procurement has mostly relied on portals to collect information directly from suppliers and that gets stale quickly. With TealBook, the data layer is constantly maintained through AI and machine learning (harvesting data from 400 million websites), so customers don't have to spend so much time maintaining their data, relying mostly on supplier-provided data or searching for new vendors via their own web searches.

Matt Palackdharry, VP of Strategy had presented here in the Analyst Cam series about Discovery, Diversity, Sustainability and other use cases they help many of the Fortune 100 customers and many other organizations with.

Stephany has many examples of heroics. In the first few weeks of the pandemic she describes how the UK government, desperate for PPE supplies and looking for choices beyond China, leveraged TealBook for information on 60,000 ISO certified PPE makers. She describes 170 other requests in the first 3 weeks from around the world to help source N95 masks or their components (Matt shows that use case in the video above)

During the BLM crisis and the many diversity initiatives since customers have leveraged TealBook's 800,000 certificates for black and minority owned businesses. More impressively they have helped a number of smaller businesses self-certify (she says 95% of them find formal regulatory certification too cumbersome or too expensive) and become more visible to companies. As a result, companies have reported they found $30 to $100m in spend with minority businesses they had not identified from their existing records.

The focus is next switching to sustainability initiatives and similarly finding suppliers with appropriate focus and certification on green matters.

We also talk about shifting global chains - the "China +1 initiative" in many companies. She says it is "China +2 or 3" for some customers.

We next talk about trust in data. While in enterprise world, we routinely talk about "single source of truth", the reality is Mark Twain's comment today would be about 'Lies, Damn Lies and Big Data". The person on the street has little faith in data because so much of media has cherry picked data to suit its narrative. She has some thoughts about how to build trust.

Finally we talk about data science and careers for our young. She says "we are just beginning" and clearly is a role model and recruiter for a number of young data and ML graduates.  

She is a very impressive entrepreneur and we cover a lot of ground as you can see below.