Using hard data as a starting point, we explore the changing world of hybrid work. Guided by our own experiences of neurodivergence and disability, we debate how a more collaborative and accessible approach can drive efficiency across the public sector. In most cases we find that it can be done using technology that governments already possess.  

As a former policy advisor with hands-on experience of shaping equality legislation, these issues are all very close to my heart. 

Aligning leaders and teams to make hybrid work, work

The first episode of the Public Sector Podcast Series, season four, is The Future of Work – Facing the Hybrid Challenge. In it, Microsoft’s Henry Rex, industry advisor, and Rakhi Sachdeva, modern workplace specialist, discuss findings from the latest Work Trends Index report. The numbers reveal a significant disconnect between managers and teams around attitudes to remote working. 87 percent of remote employees reported feeling confident in their productivity at work, while only 12 percent of managers felt the same way about the performance of their remote teams.  

Managers can benefit from investing more trust in their teams and using soft skills to ensure that everyone gets access to the vision and culture of the organisation, which is key to productivity. Helping staff learn new skills ‘on the go’ improves both retention and productivity. We also discuss how a more flexible approach to work can empower individuals who have differing needs to be more effective. Building trust between management and staff enables everyone to align around the public service mission; as Henry Rex points out, people often join an organisation for the money, but stay there for the culture.

Neurodivergence and the innovation challenge

In episode two, Innovate Together, Microsoft account technology strategist, Andrew Boxall, talks about managing change in government and how it can enable staff to embrace more productive and collaborative ways of working. Along the way we discuss our shared experiences of being neurodiverse in the workplace, which provides insights into the challenges of data-driven innovation. 

Addressing bias and differing learning styles enables public servants to collaborate better across organisations. The Innovate Together initiative, supported by Microsoft, aims to accelerate innovation and best practice sharing across the public sector. Trailblazers like Norfolk County Council provide an inspirational example of how advanced techniques such as robotic process automation can drive efficiency.  

Success depends on leaders who set an example and have the initiative to share their learnings. All our guests agreed that making better use of existing tools is a great way to achieve incremental efficiency gains in government, and start building confidence. 

Extending accessibility and inclusion to drive productivity 

In episode three, Accessibility, Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion, I speak to Maria Grazia Zedda, senior EDI manager at HS2, who is severely deaf. Maria Grazia speaks movingly about overcoming the challenges of disability and hardship when she arrived in London as a young woman. London is also where she found support on her career path and discovered her vocation, improving accessibility in the workplace for everyone. These uplifting experiences are captured in her first novel which is to be published in her native Italy. 

Maria Grazia welcomes the adoption of new technologies that enhance accessibility and inclusion, such as minicoms and auto-captions (Live Captions in Microsoft Teams), the use of which was accelerated by remote working. The momentum now needs to be maintained so that inclusion becomes a fundamental principle of the workplace and the built environment. 

Explore episodes from our previous series 

Our previous three podcast series provide fascinating insights into how efficiency in the public sector could be improved with fresh thinking.  

Public Sector Podcast Series – Season One

In Public Sector Podcast Series – Season 1, guests discuss how citizen services can be enhanced using new digital technologies. Further episodes explore the challenges of managing security across government in a digital world, and overcoming the barriers to legacy estate reduction. Hindsight is also explored as a means of understanding past mistakes and improving government performance in the future.

Public Sector Podcast Series – Season Two

Public Sector Podcast Series – Season 2 builds on these themes, looking at how citizen identity in government can be managed simply and securely. The challenges of hybrid work, and the uses of geospatial data science in the context of the government’s levelling-up agenda, are also up for discussion. A highlight from series two is the episode that draws lessons from the Environment Agency’s experience of digital transformation. Cross-government data sharing also comes under scrutiny.

Public Sector Podcast Series – Season Three

Public Sector Podcast Series – Season 3 digs deeper into data sharing and how citizens engage with government. We assess the government’s Green agenda and the challenge of data literacy in driving innovation across the public sector. And what, we ask, do young people think about entering public service? We devote an episode to figuring out the changing face of apprenticeship in a hybrid world.

Find out more

Successful trial of the Microsoft and Socitm Change Agent programme

Our innovation – Norfolk County Council

Microsoft 365 Collaboration Blueprint for UK Government – Microsoft Industry Blogs – United Kingdom

How the public sector can streamline operations and innovate with intelligent automation – Microsoft Industry Blogs – United Kingdom

About the author

Aaron has worked at Microsoft as an industry advisor for central government for the last four years. Before that he spent twenty-five years in the public sector across a number of departments, in both central and local government, leading on technology policy and strategy. Most notably, he worked on the creation of the Equality Acts (2006 and 2010), the Public Sector Equality Duty and the translation of the EU Accessibility Regulations over to the UK. Outside of his day job, Aaron lectures on accessibility, inclusion and neurodiversity at local institutions and across the wider tech sector.

The post How to make government more effective in a hybrid world: podcast series appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

At Microsoft, cybersecurity is one of our highest priorities. This goes back to Bill Gates’ Trustworthy Computing Initiative almost 20 years ago. It’s steered the company’s direction ever since. In the UK, security is at the heart of all we do. We recently expanded our security teams, doubled our investment in partners and created a new Security business group to further help our customers protect themselves against cyberthreats.   

It’s never been a better time to build cyber safety. Here’s some tips to build your security strategy:

Understand your security posture to build cyber safety

To understand where you are in your journey, it’s important to understand your organisation’s security posture – Microsoft Secure Score can help you find your next steps and priorities.

We also want to help you ensure your employees have the security skills to support your goals. That’s why we have a range of resources to help everyone build confidence:

• Get employee training
• Join a cybersecurity workshop
• Take a cybersecurity learning path

And what are we doing to help? Over the next five years, Microsoft has quadrupled its investment and has committed to a $20bn investment to help our customers become secure and trusted, enabling growth and innovation.

Find out more

3 ways Microsoft helps build cyber safety awareness for all

4 ways to build cyber resilience

About the author

Paul leads the Security, Compliance and Identity business for Microsoft UK and is passionate about helping organisations protect themselves from cyberthreats. The risk of financial loss, data exposure and reputational damage has never been higher. Paul and his team are dedicated to the role that Microsoft technologies can play in helping organisations protect themselves, their people and their data.  

The post 4 ways to build cyber safety in your organisation appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

In a recent webinar, held by The Institute of Engineering and Technology, we spoke to other industry leaders about the recent shift of digital technologies from ‘nice to have’ to essential. We discussed the re-emergence of IT as a business enabler. Additionally, we talked about how manufacturers can use it to build resilience.

Digital technology as an enabler of resilience

From what we’ve seen in our work in the sector, it’s not about implementing digital technology for the sake of it. It’s about ensuring the technology is aligned to business use cases and outcomes, both for today and for the future.

For manufacturers, data is an asset and they can leverage IoT or Industrial IoT, data analytics, AI and digital twins for resiliency. However, where the sector has been lacking is developing the right data strategy across the business, as well as standardising and sharing open data. Also, there needs to be more understanding of the business models that data and digital technology can enable.

The organisations who are successful in this take an agile approach to digital modernisation. They adapt quickly not just to the changing needs of the sector, but also to external circumstances and the expectations of an increasingly digital native workforce. To do this, we’ve seen many manufacturers approach digital modernisation through smaller projects instead of taking a wider waterfall approach. This can help build champions and leadership support, as they see the positive effects quicker.

Sustainable operations

Manufacturers need to continue to operate their assets as reliably and efficiently as possible. Additionally, as we head to a net zero future, manufacturers need to look at more sustainable ways to operate. This is where digital technology can help. Using a secure cloud platform, manufacturers can connect data across offices, factory floors, and more to create holistic views of their business.

Manufacturer Ricoh uses Azure Machine Learning and AI across all areas of its factory to manage costs, and access greater insights to optimise operations and reduce costs. Ricoh uses AI to adjust machines in real-time to respond to changing demand, and to predict maintenance. And by connecting this data to HR and financial systems, they can manage labour needs, track costs and more.

Create an agile supply chain

Data helps embed visibility and intelligence into supply chains. A connected supply chain will predict disruptions, enhance visibility, improve planning, and maximise asset productivity. This, in turn will reduce waste and can deliver data that will help build a sustainable circular supply chain.

Bel Fuse manufactures electronic circuits products globally. As part of a larger supply chain, they rely on small parts from suppliers before passing their components onto other manufacturers that create the finished products. Therefore, they need to ensure that they do not become a bottleneck in the process. By using Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Bel Fuse now has a deeper, more precise view into its supply chain.

“Our system quickly shows us when parts haven’t arrived on time, and we can pivot to load our production with parts that are available,” says Stefan Naude, General Manager. “With Dynamics 365, we streamlined our planning and have flexibility to adapt to our vendors and adjust our inventory—all while remaining a reliable supplier.”

Personalise customer relationships

To be resilient you need to ensure you’re meeting your customers’ expectations in new ways. You need to engage with them throughout the relationship lifecycle. By connecting data silos, manufacturers can gain new insights into customer behaviours. They can also use AI and machine learning to predict, support, and improve customer relationships.

Malvern Panalytical designs, develops and commercialises analytical instruments for material analysis across a wide range of industries and applications. To help customers optimise their instruments, they built a digital solution that streamlines data capture – effectively offering them a ‘cloud-based control room’. Customers can use performance metrics to optimise assets. At the same time, Malvern Panalytical can use the data to understand how customers use their products. This allows them to offer better post-sales support and develop improved innovations.

Build the right culture for resilience

Whether on the plant floor, the office, or mobile, your people need to be empowered to drive resiliency. Investing in your existing talent and attracting the right talent is important. Not only does this help your organisation to take advantage of digital tech, but it is also key to building innovation and new business value.

Organisations need the right data and digital skills, plus a more agile culture to maximise impact. Manufacturers are clearly exploring these areas, but there is some way to go. Partnerships can support manufacturers here. At Microsoft, we have a range of learning resources available to help build technology competencies. The High Value Manufacturing Catapult is also working on data and digital skills programmes for the sector.

Use digital to innovate and build resilience

Finally, as manufacturers bounce back, using digital will be key to innovating and creating new business models and opportunities. For example, using technology to optimise and automate time-consuming manual tasks, giving employees more time to spend on value-adding work. At Phlexglobal, they use AI to automate the indexing and management of vaccine trial master files, improving time savings by 25-30 percent.

To be resilient, manufacturers also need to build partner ecosystems – not just within industry but across digital technology companies and other sectors. Open data and data sharing will help build resilience by driving new business models and innovations and creating more robust supply chains. We saw this in 2020, when British manufacturers united to build 20,000 ventilators in 12 weeks with the help of technology – something that would normally take 20 years.

For manufacturers, resiliency and digital modernisation go together. Embrace data and empower your workforce with the right skills to adopt an agile approach to implementation. Look for partnerships that support your goals and values to not only share expertise, but also innovate and drive new and current business models.

Find out more

Watch the webinar

The future of supply chains: Unlock sustainability through innovation

Build resilience today

About the authors

Rik leads Microsoft’s industry strategy across manufacturing, energy and resources in the UK. Responsibilities include working with the government and regulators, industry bodies, industry partners, and largest customers to ensure Microsoft enables sectoral needs. Rik sits on multiple industry boards for energy, manufacturing, research, digital twins and digital skills. His focus areas include the energy transition, sustainability, cyber security and digital technologies for operational environments.

Prior to Microsoft, Rik worked at Cisco for 13 years, with global lead roles in energy and resource industries, IoT and security, and digital transformation. He has been a member of multiple industry standards groups and consortia, is a published author, has written multiple industry white papers, and has spoken at conferences all over the world. He has an MBA in international leadership and is currently studying sustainability and green economies.

Lizzie works with a number of Manufacturing, Aerospace and Defence customers and partners in the UK, working closely with business leaders to help drive the use of digital technologies to achieve industry-focussed outcomes and unlock innovation. It is a pivotal time for both the Manufacturing and Aerospace industry to transform, with sustainability, factory of the future and connected supply chain being at the heart of many customer conversations, as well as the future of Manufacturing/work.

The post How digital tech can help manufacturers build resilience appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Turning great customer wins into bottom-line results and satisfied customers takes coordination, collaboration, and insight across every aspect of the end-to-end business. Organisations must rely on faultless management of both operational and project management processes.

So how can construction businesses get ahead, and stay ahead, in an industry that has traditionally been slow to optimise? How can they mobilise their IT landscapes to break down operational boundaries and remove information silos?

Project management complexities

It’s hard to imagine a project that is more complex and fragile than a large construction job. The path from initial estimate and quote to final approval and delivery is long. It is littered with potential pitfalls and bottlenecks. The critical components of the project itself – including resources, skill sets, physical materials and costs – need to be orchestrated across the foundational operational processes of the business. It draws in cross-department expertise such as finance, HR, sales, procurement, supply chain, logistics, project management, quality assurance and legal.

Typically, the interface between daily project management and business operations extends across multiple, disparate IT systems. Often, the consolidation of information across these systems is only possible with a lot of repetitive, manual work and some rather hefty Excel spreadsheets.

At best, this manual process is time-intensive and error-prone. At worst, the lack of real-time insight can mean that the process can go off the rails before the project team is even aware that there is an issue. The result can be missed deadlines, reduced profitability and dissatisfied customers. Not to mention stressed and frustrated employees.

Connecting operations and project management

Connecting the entire business in one cloud-based solution enables a free flow of business and project information across departments and functions. It also promotes a new level of collaboration and knowledge sharing across extended project teams.

Once implemented, the positive effect of truly joined-up solution like Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Project Operations will be seen and experienced across every area of the business.

Joined-up systems align daily activities and processes with operational practices and corporate goals. This, in turn, gives each employee a shared baseline from which to collaborate, share knowledge and leverage skill sets.

With IT and collaboration barriers removed, construction organisations can enable significant improvements. They can see this in the way they handle the daily task of monitoring, managing and delivering on project expectations. Improvements that can be seen and felt in the business every day in the complex and large-scale orchestration that is at the heart of modern construction.

As Paul Fryer, Construction Industry Account Executive at DXC*, a Microsoft partner states: “Project operations comes in multiple ‘flavours’. DXC helps customers decide how best to take advantage of project ops and get the most business value from it.”

Four real-world benefits of removing organisational silos

1. 1. More flexible and intuitive project management: Base your planning on accurate and actionable project information from across the organisation. Additionally, document and surface planning with familiar Microsoft Project capabilities and visualisations. Project managers can then spend less time building plans and more time on ensuring that projects are running smoothly. And the whole business can easily stay in the loop.
   2. More effective and satisfied employees: Scheduling the right people with the right skills at the right time will help you to avoid classic workload issues. You will also get the most from your project teams. Add in simplified processes for time tracking and expense management and reimbursement and you have a great baseline for optimising resource usage. It will also help find and keep the best talent in the industry.
   3. A more predictable and healthier bottom line: Discover more accurate, experience-based estimating, quoting and forecasting, more effective use of materials and resources, and more informed and compliant project accounting.  Your project profitability will reflect every cost you have saved and deadline you have nailed.
   4. Improved collaboration and insight: Make data-driven decisions in real-time and collaborate easier with an organisation-wide collaboration platform – such as Microsoft Teams. Each new decision is based on experience from previous engagements. This can be aligned to support business goals and changing market demands.

Build agility and resilience in project management

In the ultra-competitive and dynamic world of construction, success is dependent on the ability to react quickly to changing industry, economic, legislative and cultural factors. Retaining and building on this success relies on the ability to consistently make business decisions. These decisions must not only be sound. They must also more insightful than your competitors.

Construction is an industry where fortunes can be made and lost based on the success of a few key projects. Therefore, it is essential that the IT systems deployed by construction companies are more like the final brick and mortar solutions they deliver for their customers. Practical, accessible and built to last.

*Note: DXC is one of the Dynamics partners we have at Microsoft to help us deliver on this proposal. DXC has many years’ experience of rolling out multi-country professional services deployments, supported by close alignment with the Microsoft Product Team for PSA and now Project Operations, enabling us to stay ahead with product developments and ensuring deployments with security and best practice baked in.

Find out more

Learn more about Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations

Take a guided tour of Dynamics 365 Project Operations

Discover Dynamics 365 Project Operations capabilities

About the author

Toby is a Technical Specialist for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, focussing on Professional Services and the Construction industries. Critically, since the launch of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations, Toby has been the UK Field Lead for Project Operations working on global projects across a multitude of different industries. Toby has been working in the technology and ERP space for several years. He is passionate about driving and providing business and digital transformation by realising the business value through transformational systems. He enjoys empowering organisations to get that ‘competitive edge’ over their competitors.

Toby has been working with the Project Operations Core Engineering and Marketing teams to develop the GTM strategy for the new products and drive new revenue from customers adopting the new platform.

The post How digital modernisation can help innovate the construction industry appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

The English regulator has stated that “the solutions of the past will not be enough to continue to deliver the services of the future.” Amid this, there is also uncertainty about levels of demand, changing weather patterns, population growth, lifestyle and demographic shifts. For the current regulatory period, the Water Industry Commission for Scotland has already adopted the principles of Ethical Business Regulation.

As we work to build back better and reduce our impact on the world, the water sector must not wait to act. It must find better ways of doing things and must start looking for solutions now. Here we review the broader landscape of opportunity for insight-led sustainability in the water sector and five areas of consideration.

Water companies need to build technology partnerships

Last month, we discussed how the water industry could learn from oil and gas as it reinvents itself. Emerging technology such as analytics, AI, IoT, machine learning and smart metering have enormous potential to reduce utilities’ water footprint. Additionally, these technologies can improve productivity, cost-effectiveness and deliver remote solutions to hybrid and frontline workers.  Fundamental to building sustainable approaches is the need to increase the use of digital technology, the alignment of water industry domain expertise with cross sector collaborations and the pursuit of a comprehensive internal reskilling/upskilling programme.

Partnering with transformation companies allows for collaborative innovation ecosystems to harness these emerging technologies and drive the sustainability agenda forward.

Reducing the leak lifecycle in water companies

For the current regulatory period, Ofwat has tasked water companies to cut leakage rates by 16 percent and reduce mains bursts by 12 percent. When comparing to the improvements demanded over the last decade, this is a quantum leap. Water companies cannot simply continue to pursue strategies that have struggled to deliver typically single-digit improvements in recent years. Harnessing data and analytics is key to meet these targets. Microsoft’s cloud technology provides the foundations for organisations like EY to analyse and visualise massive quantities of data collected by sensors and pumps. Combining that data with historical information enables proactive, predictive and even prescriptive maintenance scenarios.

We believe there are five key data and analytics capabilities water companies must establish to enable effective leakage management, and step-change operational performance:

1.     Leak detection – accelerated awareness

By combining existing and long-standing data from SCADA sources with IoT and other distributed assets such as bulk meters and critical pressure points, water companies can analyse and understand pressure and flow anomalies in the supply network. Add in machine learning, and organisations can quickly identify and validate leak events. They can do this at a pace that is unrecognisable in comparison with enduring net nigh-time flow methods, which commonly require days or even weeks to elapse before catalysing on-the-ground investigations.

2.     Leak location – increased accuracy

Knowing you have a leak is only part of the problem. To fix it you must first find it. Here, the opportunity is to extend the data landscape to incorporate operational maintenance, network asset and other open and acquired datasets such as weather, soil type, council works registers, CCTV networks, utility groundworks datasets and even satellite image data. Additionally, there is substantial value and insight in establishing a segmented view of network ‘leak propensity’. In our experience, this vastly accelerates the ability of on-the-ground leakage teams to pin-point leaks up to 70 percent faster and significantly reduce the number of interventions resulting in dry holes.

3.     Intervention optimisation – enabling a digital workforce

With faster leak detection and more accurate leak location, you can rapidly make risk and priority-based decisions for human or automated job ticketing and allocation. Coupled with field-force digital enablement that combines engineers with location and asset information, the latest information is placed directly in the hands of on-the-ground teams for faster, smarter and better-informed decisions and outcomes.

4.     Network pressure – limiting collateral damage

With a focus on reducing service interruption and improving customer service, the rapid post-repair re-pressurisation of the network can often lead to destabilisation of other vulnerable assets in the area. This can create a domino-effect of leak repairs causing further outbreaks. Automated pressure balancing is increasingly common. However, to reduce destabilisation, the speed and level of recommissioning a post-repair segment of the network plays a significant role. Taking an insight-led approach over an extended period can provide support in post-repair decision making; further reducing unwanted additional leak events.

5.      Network renewal – better targeting capital investment

Traditional water and wastewater utility systems are not built for the dramatically changing stresses of climate change and rapid urbanisation. Typically, less than half of one percent of the underground asset network is replaced annually. Putting that into context, it’ll be around 200 years before the current network is refreshed in full. Yet the average pipe lifespan is considered to be around 30 years. The risk that this aging infrastructure brings – both in terms of potential failure and poor environmental compliance – is a key concern for water utilities and highlights the opportunity to embrace digital modernisation.

Therefore, an effective asset replacement strategy is informed by clearly understanding network condition and weak points. The insights common to leak detection and location can be applied with equal success to drive condition-based network replacement priorities and associated value for operational KPIs.

EY has worked with several UK water companies and have extended practical experience creating and implementing analytics-driven solutions including leak detection. In our experience, organisations pursuing an analytics-led augmentation of leak management processes can achieve:

• 25-50 percent reduction in leak awareness lead times
• Up to 70 percent precision in identifying DMA leak locations
• Up to 75 percent reduction in leak location duration
• Over 10 percent reduction in severity of I2S leakage impacts

Adapting operations and demand for efficiency and energy cost reductions

Approximately half of typical water companies’ energy spend relates to pumping clean and wastewater. Yet, many pumping head operations continue to run at fixed and highly conservative schedules aligned to peak demand.

EY found that using demand insights to optimise pumping head operation can reduce the volume and cost of energy. At the same time, it negates the impact of Triad and other punitive tariffs. Software running on Microsoft Azure’s highly scalable Platform as a Service (PaaS) optimises pumping head daily schedules. This allows them to meet customer demand while aligned to operational, safety, regulatory and water quality constraints. As a result, there were significant energy cost reductions for optimised pumping stations enabled by the integration of demand insights across seasonality, weather and external events, using advanced analytics and AI.

In our experience, organisations pursuing an analytics-led approach to clean water pumping optimisation can achieve on average:

• 1-5 percent reduction in energy consumption
• 20 percent average reduction in energy costs

These digital solutions for improved sustainability outcomes are a result of innovation ecosystems and collaborative approaches. For instance, a team from Microsoft, alongside data experts, conducted a water leakage hackathon as part of Northumbrian Water’s Innovation Festival. Analysts worked on data relating to leaks, soil types, water pressure, pipe materials and other elements that impact the likelihood and location of leaks.

Business sustainability in water companies

Sustainability is not just a subject for now. It also means investing for the future and beyond. Today, water companies have spent the bulk of sustainability investment on ODI targets and carbon reduction. They’ve focussed on the operational efficiency of assets and the workforce, leakage, and reducing environmental impact. However, we are already seeing many organisations seriously look to the future. These organisations are developing new business models that drive new revenue streams and business diversification. This is in addition to broader factors around process lifecycle emissions, operational and supply chain circularity, and community engagement.

Historically sustainability innovation initiatives have been more science projects or POCs. This is changing with a transition targeting new profitable sustainable business models and business diversification.

For example:

• Sewage sludge extraction can provide a large part of the nitrogen and phosphorous for crop production.
• Recovering ammonia from wastewater and turning it into green hydrogen fuel.
• Turning heat recovery from purification process into energy.
• Making fertiliser products from production carbon exhaust.
• Creating oxygen for commercial sale from sustainable hydrogen electrolysis.
• Extracting cellulose from the waste stream.

In addition, newer technologies such as AI and digital twins provide more efficient and sustainable ways for the industry to plan, model, simulate, and operate.

Building collaborative innovation ecosystems in water companies

As Ofwat increased sustainability standards in PR19, so did the estimation that the UK will need an extra 3.4 billion litres of water daily between 2035 and 2050.

Human-managed water systems degrade as they’re used. Circularity has the potential to achieve resource efficiency, reduce waste production and to improve environmental, economic and social sustainability. This can be achieved in the transition of wastewater treatment plants to resource recovery facilities, to recover materials and energy. Additionally, circularity can enhance resources via the use of alternative water sources such as rainwater or stormwater harvesting.

This restructuring is an opportunity for UK water companies to be a beacon for sustainability. They can drive progress in the water sector worldwide as we collectively push towards UN Sustainable Development Goals. However, for there to truly be a sustainability revolution in the water sector, we need to collaborate. This is not just between utilities, but regulators, transformation companies and other stakeholders as well. By working together, water companies can improve environmental performance, keep their assets safer, reduce costs, and deliver greater efficiencies.

Therefore, collaboration with transformation companies can play a key role. The right insights at the right time can put utilities on a path to reduce water usage and reach their customer service and sustainability goals. At the same time, technology has become more accessible, with the cost of tools like AI, IoT and smart devices decreasing. There has never been a better time to take a great leap forward to achieve a true digital transformation. Together, we can create a resilient, digital water utility for the future that embraces sustainability.

Find out more

Intelligent Energy Management Systems

Microsoft’s commitment to sustainability

Resources to empower your development teams

Sustainable software engineering

About the authors

Rik joined Microsoft at the start of 2020, with responsibility for Microsoft’s strategy across manufacturing, energy and resources in the UK. He is Microsoft’s lead when working with regulators, industry bodies, industry partners, and our largest customers to ensure Microsoft enables the needs of industry. Since joining, Rik has become a board member in techUK’s Smart Energy & Utilities working group, techUK’s Digital Twin steering board, UK Research & Innovation Manufacturing Made Smarter board, and the BIM4Water Digital Skills steering group. Prior to Microsoft, Rik worked at Cisco for 13 years, with global lead roles in energy and resource industries, IoT and security, and digital transformation.

He has an MBA in international leadership and is currently studying for a Masters in Green Economy.

Mark is a director of Ernst & Young’s insight-led transformation services in the UK. He also leads business development for the UK data and analytics practice and is an analytics subject-matter expert for the UK power and utilities sector. He works across all sectors with a focus on UK power and utility clients providing services in support of insight-led operational optimisation.

The post How water companies can reach their sustainability goals through digital modernisation appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

The role of technology is growing across all sectors. Therefore, it’s no surprise to find a corresponding surge in demand for technical skills. According to TechNation, tech jobs now make up 10 percent of all job vacancies. Despite this, many organisations often struggle to find candidates with the experience and knowledge they need. This is especially the case for advanced and specialist skills, such as data analytics, network security and AI.

The shortage of suitably qualified professionals for existing roles – let alone the estimated three million new UK tech jobs by 2025 – poses a major challenge to our economic recovery, productivity and growth.

Addressing the skills gap and creating new learners

To help tackle the widening digital talent gap, Microsoft launched Get On 2021 last October. Our five-year commitment focusses on driving technology adoption and increasing access to tech skills. As a result, we aim to empower more learners and boost the UK’s productivity and competitiveness.

Our specific commitment is to help 1.5 million people build tech careers across all industries, by empowering them with in-demand skills. We are also focussed on connecting 300,000 people to tech job opportunities through programmes such as the Microsoft Apprenticeship Network.

Living the life of a learner

At the heart of our Get On 2021 commitment is a belief that every person in the UK – whatever their background, life stage or career history – should have access to the skills, knowledge and opportunity needed to achieve more in a tech-enabled world.

It’s this conviction that underpins our new campaign to widen access to learning opportunities and empower more people to build in-demand skills.

We wanted to better understand the challenges and opportunities faced by learners across the UK. So, we recently set out to learn ourselves from people who are building tech careers. In our new campaign, #OwnYourStory, we share the tales of Amelia, Enrique and Poornima; three individuals with experiences that will resonate with learners and provide food for thought for leaders seeking to empower their workforce.

Enrique is at the very start of his tech career, having completed a digital apprenticeship after his GCSEs. Amelia has switched to a new career as a data analyst apprentice after working in care. And Poornima is a developer with a clear passion for lifelong learning and professional development. All three are in 10 of the most in-demand roles today.

Owning their story

Enrique, Poornima and Amelia have taken bold steps to start new chapters at different stages of their lives. They share a united passion for technology and, in reimagining themselves, they offer inspiration to others who may seek to unlock their own potential.

They also remind me why it is so important for organisations to think differently about attracting and developing diverse talent. It’s through a digital apprenticeships that Amelia and Enrique are unlocking their potential in a technology career. Additionally, Poornima reflects that she is often underestimated as a woman in her industry. Their personal experiences will resonate with many and may provide further inspiration for leaders on why it’s important to place diversity and inclusion at the heart of talent planning as well as sourcing talent from non-traditional pools such as through apprenticeships.

Above all, it’s hard not to feel inspired by Enrique, Poornima and Amelia’s zest for learning and development. They show that learning is a journey, not a destination. They show the potential that can be achieved with the right skills, knowledge and opportunity. It’s their enthusiasm and personal ambition that I see every day amongst other learners. And it’s a constant reminder of what can be achieved when we invest in learning and development.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll share more thoughts on how we can close the digital talent gap and empower more learners across the UK to own their story. In the meantime, I’d like to invite you to view Enrique, Poornima and Amelia’s stories. I would love to hear how learning has empowered you, or your team, in the comments below.

Find out more

Meet our learners: Discover how digital skills helped unlock their potential and how you can get started

Discover the report: Unlocking the UK’s Potential with Digital Skills

About the author

Simon is passionate about unlocking the potential in every person and organisation and has been with Microsoft since 1999. In his role as UK Chief Learning Officer, Simon is responsible for leading the learning culture and skilling strategy in the UK and driving the execution for customers, partners, employees, and future generation skilling. Prior to this, Simon has held several senior positions at Microsoft, leading several businesses across the UK and EMEA.

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According to the 2020 Ponemon study, The Cost of Insider Threats, the average cost of an insider risk has increased 31 percent since 2018 to about £8.2m per incident. Due to the rise of hybrid working, leaders and IT teams must have visibility over insider risks. Also, employees need to be educated and become security champions to reduce the risk of insider threats.

Two years ago, a team of Microsoft engineers asked Microsoft’s CISO: “What keeps you up at night?” To the surprise of many, the response was not the ever-growing sophistication of external threats. Instead, it was insider threats. Fast forward to March 2021 and Microsoft now has a comprehensive and fully functional UEBA solution. Insider Risk Management helps leaders identify insider risks and mitigate accordingly in Microsoft 365. In addition, it’s important that leaders foster a security culture that empowers employees with the knowledge and the tools to stay secure, no matter where they are.

What is an insider risk?

Firstly, let’s discuss what an insider risk is. It can come in many forms; the scale is vastly widespread. Common insider threats can be:

• Accidental/malicious data leaks
• Workplace harassment
• IP theft
• Falling victim to fraud
• Insider trading
• Policy violations
• Regulatory violations

Insider risk can surface as anything from a download and accidental public share of sensitive information from a new employee, to a malicious actor who has taken a bribe from an external adversary to install malware into the corporate network. Moreover, insider risk is more common than everyone thinks. In a 2020 study, Insider Threat Statistics: The seriousness of insider threats, intentional or not, 19 percent of people say they have been involved with an insider data breach.

Sometimes, insider risk can be purely from frustration. What happens if you don’t have the right tools in place to ensure employees can do the work they need to? They’re more likely to look at workarounds such as downloading unchecked third-party software. Here’s an interesting early observation for malicious cases of insider risk. More often than not, each case starts with a large increase of profanity used across Microsoft 365. This would indicate that organisations could identify a disgruntled employee and address their needs before there is a wider issue.

These incidents can be addressed with training and/or automated direction to an organisation’s policy page. However, without real-time insight, it’s hard for any leader to ascertain the activity levels associated to insider risk and subsequently how to mitigate them.

1.      Give employees the right tools to reduce insider risk

Ultimately an organisation needs to do everything they can to limit its liability. Similarly, employees need to feel they can be as productive and creative as possible to complete their daily tasks. Therefore, an important factor to reduce insider threats is to ensure your tools are working for your employees. For example, using apps that connect, such as Microsoft 365 means you can implement single sign on with biometric or multi-factor authentication. That means your employees can access everything they need from anywhere, while using the tools that help them stay productive and collaborative.

Microsoft has privacy considerations built into the cloud portfolio as a key principle. Privacy settings are turned on by default for the Insider Risk Management tool. Therefore, you can individually investigate cases without bias by pseudonymising identities. This reduces the risks to the data subjects and help organisations meet data protection obligations.

2.      Empower employees with knowledge and skills

To ensure a strong security culture, consider having on-demand or virtual training to equip employees with the knowledge and skills to spot insider threats, such as a phishing email, or odd behaviour. By taking a human-first approach, your security culture will be empathetic and reflective of your values and goals. And don’t forget – this approach needs to come from the top down. Leaders should take an active part in training and sharing information. They should stay transparent and honest with employees and be open to feedback.

3.      Let AI and machine learning help you spot insider risk

In an increasingly digital world, it is overwhelming to figure out how to start addressing insider risk from a technical point of view. Insider Risk Management, found in the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center uses analytics to accelerate the identification of potential risks, and help you quickly take action. Machine learning helps you detect, investigate, and act on malicious and inadvertent activities. You can set policies to define the types of risks you want to identify and detect in your organisation. This makes it easier for your risk analysts to quickly take appropriate actions needed.

Insider Risk Management gives you an audit trail so you can identify potential red flags. For example, why was a particular user removed or added to a policy, or why was a high-risk alert dismissed without further action?

Build your security culture

A recent study by Microsoft shows that 93 percent of CISO’s and Data Protection Officers are concerned with insider risk. But by building a people-first security culture, and using Insider Risk Management, you will be able to ensure your users and data stays safe in a hybrid environment, while ensuring your employees stay productive and collaborative.

Read more

Read the technical blog to learn how get started with Insider Risk Management

Learn more about the new features of Insider Risk Management

See our Insider Risk Management supporting documentation

Listen to our podcast: Uncovering Hidden Risks

About the author

Dan is a Product Marketing Manager for Microsoft 365 Compliance. He focusses his time on the go-to-market strategy for the UK. He is passionate about driving cybersecurity and compliance awareness across both commercial and public sector organisations, so they can improve their cyber posture and reduce their risk.

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But how do you run these sessions remotely while creating that same energy? How can you maximise productivity and return on investment of time and resources? Virtual meetings tend to require more thought and planning to enable and drive business results in an engaging and inclusive way.

We consider some of the underlying assumptions around working in the same physical space to map to a fully virtual way of working model for remote creative thinking sessions.

Moving on from traditional creative thinking sessions 

It’s a general assumption that the investment of time (including travel), focus and energy is offset by generating innovative ideas. This leads to workshops and agendas which are coarse-grained, to maximise the investment in time people have set aside to contribute.

Being somewhere physically can lend itself more naturally to creating serendipitous moments and the feeling of connectedness. Yet, when organised correctly, these moments can be designed into a virtual event.

And when you factor in those other ideas such as travel, and focus, hosting a virtual event can improve those. A major benefit of virtual events is that there is reduced cost and no travel time – there may even be a reduced carbon footprint. This increased flexibility can result in increased attendance, allowing people to carve out the time and get themselves in the right headspace.

Now we have the digital tools to support virtual ways of working, it makes sense that people’s expectations have changed, and they’re more likely to expect virtual events in the future. A virtual event has the potential to be just as good as, or even more successful than a physical event.

What makes a good facilitator for a creative thinking session?

It’s important to remember that often ideation session attendees are diverse and in a lot of cases do not have close and pre-established working relationships. This means you need a good facilitator to help drive the session.

They will ensure that everyone is briefed on ground rules, agenda, objectives and required tools. Ongoing active facilitation manages the energy and focus of the group. When all are in the same physical location the facilitator can read visual cues. This needs to be done differently for virtual ideation sessions. Visible or declared accessibility needs can also be more explicit and actively catered for. We’ll go into some depth about how to manage these in the virtual environment.

How to flip from physical creative thinking sessions to virtual effectively

Examine your assumptions

• Video conferencing fatigue is real: Agendas should be much more granular in a virtual setting to ensure breaks.
• Introduce small breakout rooms to ensure everyone can share ideas.
• Establish ground rules.

Virtual accessibility

• Planning is key: Ensure you have accessibility factored in, such as automatic captioning.
• Consider everyone: Use the Accessibility Checker in your presentations and documents to ensure everyone can access them.

Virtual engagement

• Actively plan engagement: Use digital engagement tools to gamify sessions.
• Facilitate creative thinking: Implement warmups, games, and quizzes during breaks.

Virtual tools and processes

• Effective meetings take planning: Share a pre-brief of the tools and processes you will use so participants can familiarise themselves.
• Mistakes happen: Allow time in your agenda in case something doesn’t work right away.

Examine your assumptions for creative thinking sessions

When everyone joins remotely, we need to examine our assumptions of physical meetings. For example, we shouldn’t assume that all attendees have blocked out the half-day or whole day to collaborate. Conversely, we should be mindful that many will be sitting in their home office or living space. Agendas should be much more granular in a virtual setting. Allowing people the time to get away from their desk is a key part of this.

We should challenge our assumptions that workshops must be in a whole or half day event. Consider breaking up your agenda into ‘bites’. Make sure to include recap time to warm people back up. This also allows real time for consolidation of previous sessions and presentations of feedback and insights to guide the group forward.

This approach might mean more facilitation time is needed – potentially filling the time of two facilitators where one was previously enough.

Virtual inclusion

We all make assumptions of how we want to collaborate. Even if we’ve identified strategies to address our subconscious biases, inclusion requires extra consideration in a virtual setting. Virtual meetings have the potential to be a great leveller, where everyone is starting from the same place.

One useful strategy for driving inclusion in diverse groups is to task attendees to write an ‘about me’ slide which is shared ahead of the session. This can outline things such as:

• How I like to work
• My areas of expertise
• What I am hoping to get out of the session
• How I prefer to communicate

Facilitators can also use this to look at the balance of perspectives, objectives and experiences in the team. They can also allocate individuals to breakout groups to maximise diversity or concentrate expertise (as appropriate).

Another useful approach to drive inclusion is to structure your agenda around smaller group breakouts, followed by share backs with the wider group. Smaller groups still need an element of facilitation. However, generally the smaller the group the more opportunity everyone has for their voices to be heard.

Ground rules are also important to establish. Brief attendees to try to be more self-aware and to actively give each other airtime. Establish the use of the ‘Raise hand’ feature in Teams when they want to speak, for example.

In some cases, we have even seen virtual meetings become a cultural leveller, as they flatten organisation hierarchies – for example by reducing deference that team members might have for their boss in a physical setting.

Virtual accessibility

We need to actively plan for specific accessibility needs in virtual settings. In a physical setting visual cues may make accessibility needs more present. Yet, a remote setting may even be an enabler through the use of accessibility features in digital tools such as live captions. Like in physical settings, planning is key.

Virtual engagement for creative thinking

Engagement needs to be more actively planned. Warmups and ice breakers need to be more part of the agenda. Digital tools can help defend against distractions. Asking people to be present is a start. But techniques such as regular voting and gamifying participation can drive engagement. It can also help deliver feedback to facilitators on the level of group engagement and attention, and where help and coaching may be needed.

Consider side challenges – for example quizzes or cryptic puzzles, with prizes awarded to inject purpose. Creativity is your only limit. Make things fun! Equally, actively encourage breaks more regularly than you would with a typical set of back-to-back meetings.

Virtual tools and processes

There are many established design practices and tools to utilise which will help you establish the right methodology, tools and templates. Yet, we should be mindful of how these need to be modified, extended or changed for virtual meetings. Effective physical meetings require preparation. So do virtual meetings.

You’ll need to standardise the overall working method and toolset ahead of time, sharing this and encouraging people to try it out before the meeting. From a process perspective, a small working group should define the process based on objectives and create things like required templates, breakout meeting groups and process guides. And for the first time you try this, allow for things to go wrong by with extra time in your agenda – as they probably will.

Creating engaging experiences for everyone

Where do we get our best ideas from? Diverse groups where everyone has a voice to share their thoughts. That’s why ideation sessions are an essential business tool to solve the problems of today and create the opportunities of tomorrow.

And because we’ve moved more to virtual meetings, this means more people can take part, solving challenges quicker and building new ideas. When done in a clear and structured way, they can maximise human creativity and drives business results.

Creativity never needs to stop – even in a hybrid or remote working environment.

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About the author

Terry Room is currently a Managing Architect for Microsoft Consulting Services in the UK. With over 20 years of technology industry experience, he leads a cross disciplinary team of consulting architects and digital advisors, with a focus on driving large scale business and technology transformation with strategic enterprise customers through the design of compelling business cases, resilient technology architectures, and transformation programmes which deliver sustainable business value.

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I recently joined in a panel discussion with business leaders in the telcom and tech industries who spoke about how organisations can start planning thier own customer experience transformations.

“In an industry where you have a lot of competition and very low switching costs; products and services are becoming increasingly commoditised. Telcos need to differentiate in customer experience to grow,” says a telecom industry lead.

The future state of customer experiences

Customer expectations have outpaced their present experiences. This makes ensuring positive experiences vital for a brand’s reputation and profitability.

A 2018 PwC report into customer experiences found that 43 percent of customers surveyed would pay a premium for greater convenience, while 42 percent would pay for a more friendly experience.

Pair with this the importance of telecoms updating their infrastructure and moving to 5G – now has never been a better time for organisations to reduce silos and create unified data streams. An organisation needs to ensure all their employees have access to and can understand data to provide these pivotal customer experiences.

However, what we are seeing is a lag between business strategy and the technological upgrade needed to support it.

“You can spot all the exciting opportunities in the horizon, but it’s difficult to execute those given the current tech and infrastructure that telcos are operating on,” says an industry expert. “There is a real job to be done around modernisation within IT and within architecture.”

So how do telecoms modernise and develop better customer experiences?

A truly integrated customer journey

“Designing and delivering innovative new products and services that create demand, reasons to stay beyond switching costs, and then reasons to recommend means not just meeting – but exceeding – every single interaction,” says a telecom industry lead.

They add that omnichannel has gone further, into opti-channel – where each touchpoint has a thoughtful role to play in the customer experience. However, the challenge is the handovers – where critical information gets lost between agents or touchpoints and the customer gets frustrated.

Take advantage of a solution such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 that integrates data from across all silos – sales, marketing, supply chains, and more into the customer journey. When the customer is at a certain touchpoint, all the information needed to help that customer is there. It can even provide predictive insights, so you can help the customer before they realise they need assistance. This means your employees can focus on providing quick, reliable and personalised service.

Engaging customer experiences that generate trust

Telecom firms handle a lot of unique data around customer identities. And security is highly important to customers and your reputation. “When we look at identity across any industry right now, it’s about the security and privacy of the end consumer and the trust that you have. That is part of the experience,” says an industry expert.

There’s still a stereotype that privacy and security hinder employee productivity. But with solutions that have built-in intelligent security, you can actually enable productivity. AI and automation take over low-level monitoring, so IT teams can focus on more important tasks. Integrated security that authenticates users and endpoints works in the background. This means employees can get on with their work, while data stays protected.

Empower customer experiences with AI and analytics

“The focus has morphed from [analytics] being an afterthought to ‘I need to do this because it’s important for my business,’” says an industry partnership leader.

AI and analytics are helping telecom firms build new data-driven operation models within their organisation. It can help augment customer touchpoints and create stronger brand experiences. A chatbot powered by AI, for example can answer frequently asked questions. An app can help a customer onboard and activate new products and services instantly. Putting this data into your employees’ hands means they can provide better and more personalised experiences. It also can be used to streamline operations. This gives employees more time to spend with customers or more time creating innovative services.

“If you can reduce the call handling time, if you can give more specific and relevant service more rapidly, that is a huge improvement on your customer satisfaction score or NPS score. That translates directly into revenue,” says an industry expert. “Giving sales associates access to those kinds of data points is absolutely critical. There is a significant area here of augmenting the physical experience.”

From there, you can use the data collected to start turning insight into value and discovering where business opportunities lay.

A 360-degree customer view

For employees to provide the best customer experiences, they need to have a full view of customer data. Reducing silos and unifying data is the best way to do this.

“The single customer view and the customer data platform project are absolutely critical,” says an expert. “Effectively building the single customer view and then having a way to have systems and data visualisations to be able to democratise that across the business.”

Our industry partnership leader agrees. “I think the most important point is democratising data,” they say. “Standardising data and making it simple to use in the form of APIs.”

Solutions that present data in easily digestible ways, like Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Power BI ensure your employees are confident interacting with and understanding it. Power Apps empowers your people to be able to build low and no code apps and solutions.

Part of democratising data is to ensure that your employees have the skills to do this. Make a digital literacy programme available, leveraging a mix of self-service, on-demand and online training to ensure everyone gets re- and up-skilled.

Effective customer experiences are the new premium services

“The limiting factor to innovation and the customer experience used to be our own imagination. But we can literally design and build anything we come up with today,” says a telcom business leader.

Reduce silos, unify business data and integrate secure solutions that provide 360-degree customer views. You can then easily create experiences that delight and engage customers throughout their lifecycle. This data can be used to drive real value, turning telecom firms into real drivers of business and create new partnerships, innovative products, and build sustainable growth.

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About the author

Passionate about the transformation technology can bring, Stuart is an Industry Lead for Media and Telecommunications within Microsoft, where he relishes any opportunity to offer his entrepreneurial spirit and natural storytelling ability to challenge organisations to ‘refocus the lens’ in order to create a successful impact through the adoption of innovation.

He is a lead spokesperson for innovation within the media industry and has played both sides of the fence. Stuart started his career as a BBC Journalist before moving into a number of roles in media production. From here, the pull of technology innovation took him into development and R&D, then corporate strategic management and change consultancy for some of the biggest media brands around the globe.

Over the last 20+ years, Stuart has helped deliver major business transformation having held significant change roles at companies ranging from the BBC, Endemol Shine Group, to Sony.

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