Women in Technology – Meet Claudia Rostagnol

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We spoke with Technical Team Leader and Senior Software Engineer, Claudia Rostagnol about women in tech and more. Claudia is based in Uruguay and has been with our organization for three years, working exclusively for a client in the financial sector as a technical team lead. We talked about how the industry is performing for women in technology, and what trends all people in tech need to pay attention to.

Worldwide, women represent 40 percent of the workforce, and only 17 percent of the tech industry workforce comprises women. We operate out of Argentina and throughout Latin America, and according to data provided by Women in Technology, only 16 percent of the people from Argentina who enroll in degrees related to the tech industry are women. And further, only 14 percent of technical roles are filled by women.

Here are highlights from our conversation with Claudia:

What work are you doing for Valence LatAm?

I’ve been working with Valence LatAm’s client, Berxi, for almost 3 years as a technical team lead. Berxi serves the insurance industry, offering policies to small businesses and professionals.

Our goal with Berxi is to migrate a monolithic system into a microservices architecture, while we keep everything working and also adding new features or products. I work with developers to help them build software; with the business analyst and product owner to identify requirements and manage the work; with the architect to define the architecture and design of the software pieces (microservices with a well-defined API – REST and event-driven,) and with the QA team to coordinate testing in different environments and bug fixing with the development team. My role is very dynamic and interesting!

How did you get started in technology?

I became interested in technology when I was just a small 8 year-old-girl in Uruguay, with a kid-friendly programming language called “Logo”. With Logo, I could program the movements of a turtle moving on the screen with very simple instructions. I’ve been interested in computers and programming ever since.

I studied software programming throughout elementary school, mid-school, and high school. Then I found it very natural to go to the Engineering Faculty to become a Computer Science Engineer.

When I finished my engineering degree, I met a few colleagues during an internship in France. One of them became my husband, Daniel De Vera, and another is Pablo Rodriguez-Bocca, who became my master’s degree tutor. We co-founded a small start-up called GoalBit Solutions and worked together for 6 years. I learned and grew a lot (academically and professionally) during that time!

What can you tell us about the people who paved the way for you? How did mentors factor into your success?

I need to recognize my family, especially my parents! They always support me even if they don’t understand this technical world.

My husband helped to pave the way for me to find opportunities at a US company named Vidillion where I started as a Senior Software Engineer. Their CTO at that time, Steve Popper, was a great mentor as well as a very kind person. He taught me a lot about technology and about remote work and the US tech industry. We continue being friends, even living 10.000 km far from each other. Thanks to Steve, I became more confident in my skills and language.

Let’s talk about what’s around the corner in technology. What trends are you seeing?

AI is used more every day and for everything. I’ve been interested in AI throughout my career. It is a very powerful tool, and we need to think about how to use it well. There is a trend toward responsible AI, which is a good thing.

Also, everything happens in the cloud now. Cloud computing powers everything, including our PCs and mobile phones, and everybody is connected and storing/publishing things on the Internet. So, I think there’s a lot happening there: social networks, crypto, mobile apps for everything, remote education, etc.

What tech does the world need now more than ever?

Data Management and Security – When we share our information, thoughts, pictures, videos, and interests, on the internet, we generate data that may be processed and analyzed in different ways and for different purposes like marketing, sales, and connectivity. All this data can be helpful, and at the same time, it can be dangerous if it is not correctly managed and used. We are sharing a lot of information, which can potentially be made public if it’s not protected. I support the call for additional security and regulations.

Cradle-to-cradle hardware manufacturing – The exponential increase in the use of technology is generating technical waste and digital trash. We frequently discard devices to have the latest or more powerful model and that trash is not biodegradable or easily recyclable. The world needs a clear policy on what to do with all that trash.

Claudia is a volleyball player, seen here with a championship cup

Let’s talk about how to improve tech for women. Do you think tech is changing for women?

Tech is changing for women in the sense that we are more accepted now, but we are far from an equitable system, and it is not changing fast enough. I see too many conferences and events about technology where most of the participants or speakers are men. Men are still accessing higher roles and salaries than women. Paternity and maternity leaves are not equal for men and women.

We need a cultural change in the tech industry, which will take time. But we are making progress. It means a lot to me when I see how our company supports women in tech with events like FemIT, and technical webinars where the speakers are women, and even interviews like this.

Several other companies also have internal initiatives to recognize women’s work and to treat us equally to men. However, I still see too many differences in the number of women being promoted to important roles, or the salary we receive for the same role, especially in LATAM.

I still hear stories about women being asked if they are planning to have children as part of their interview process with other organizations. Women are asked invasive questions that men aren’t asked, and that needs to stop. Thankfully our recruiting team and processes are invested in supporting women in tech.

One thing I like in my country (Uruguay) is that the government provides all kids attending public schools with a laptop when they start school. So boys and girls have the same access to technology at home and school. However, we still have cultural/social messages with gendered toys or games that can falsely signal to girls that boys are better than girls for some things and vice versa.

What is the one thing you wish people knew to support women in technology?

People need to know that women are equally capable if we have equal support and opportunities. We have more than technical skills to add to this technical world. We must continue encouraging girls to get involved in tech and science through messages and experiences at home, at school, and in our communities.

Women need mentors and advocates, including men and women. I wish more people understood how much they can change a woman’s life by helping them to grow in this field.

What’s one piece of advice that you’d like to share with anyone reading?

Women are not better or worse at technical jobs. It is just a matter of learning, practicing, and being supported by other industry leaders.

We need to continue working on a more profound social change that makes the world more equitable for women who want to work in technology!

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Retail Technology and Innovation – a Conversation with Michael Guzzetta

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We recently spent some time with Michael Guzzetta, a seasoned retail technology and innovation executive and consultant who has worked with brands such as The Walt Disney Company, Microsoft, See’s Candies, and H-E-B.

Tell me about your background. What brought you to retail?

Like many people, I launched my retail career in high school when I worked in the men’s department at Robinson’s May. I also worked for The Warehouse (music retailer) and was a CSR at Blockbuster video – strangely, I still miss the satisfaction of organizing tapes on shelves.

I ignited my tech career in 2001 when I started working in payment processing and cloud-based tech, and then I returned to retail in 2009 when I joined Disney Store North America, one of the world’s strongest retail brands.

During my tenure at Disney, I had the privilege of working at the intersection of creative, marketing, and mobile/digital innovation. And this is where the innovation bug bit me and kicked off my decades-long work on omnichannel innovation projects. I seek opportunities to test and deploy in-store technology to simplify experiences for customers and employees, increase sales, and drive demand. Since jump-starting this journey at Disney Store, I’ve also helped See’s Candies, Microsoft, and H-E-B to advance their digital transformation through retail innovation.

What are some of the retail technologies that got you started?

I’ve seen it all! I’ve re-platformed eCommerce sites, deployed beacons and push notifications, deployed in-store traffic counting, worked on warehouse efficiency, automated and integrated buyer journeys and omnichannel programs, and more. I recently built a 20k SF innovation lab space to run proofs-of-concept to validate tech, test, and deployment in live environments. Smart checkout, supply chain, inventory management, eCommerce… you name it.

What are the biggest innovation challenges in retail today?

Some questions that keep certain retailers up at night are, “How can we simplify the shopping experience for customers and make it easier for them to check out?”, “How can we optimize our supply chain and inventory operations?”, “How can we improve accuracy for customers shopping online and reduce substitutions and shorts in fulfillment?” and “How can we make it easier and more efficient for personal shoppers to shop curbside and home delivery orders?” Not to mention, “What is the future of retail, and which technologies can help us stay competitive?”

I see potential in several trends to address those challenges, but my top three are:

Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning – AI will continue to revolutionize retail. It’s permeated most of the technology we use today, whether it’s SAAS or hardware, like smart self-checkout. You can use AI, computer vision, and machine learning to identify products and immediately put them in your basket. AI is embedded in our everyday lives – it powers the smart assistants we use daily, monitors our social media activity, helps us book our travel, and runs self-driving cars, among dozens of other applications. And as a subset of AI, Machine Learning allows models to continue learning and improving, further advancing AI capabilities. I could go on but suffice it to say that the retailer that nails AI first wins.

Computer vision. Computer vision has a sizable opportunity to solve inventory issues, especially for grocery brands. Today, there’s a gap between online inventory and what’s on the shelf since the inventory system can’t keep pace with what’s stocked and on the shelves for personal shoppers, which is frustrating for customers who don’t expect substitutions or out-of-stock deliveries. With the advent of computer vision cameras, you can combine those differences and see what is on the shelf in real-time to inform what is available online accurately. Computer vision-supported inventory management will be vital to creating a truly omnichannel experience. Computer vision also enables smart shopping carts, self-checkout kiosks, loss prevention, and theft prevention. Not to mention Amazon’s use of CV cameras with their Just Walk Out tech in Amazon Go, Amazon Fresh, and specific Whole Foods locations. It has endless applications for retail and gives you the eyes online that you can’t get in stores today.

Robotics. In the last five years, robotics has taken a seismic leap, and a shift has happened, which you can see in massive, automated fulfillment centers like those operated by Amazon, Kroger, and Walmart. A brand can deliver groceries in a region without having a physical store, thanks to robotic fulfillment centers and distribution centers. It’s a game-changer. Robotics has many functions beyond fulfillment in retail, but this application truly stands out.

What is a missed opportunity that more retail brands should take advantage of?

Data. Data is huge, and its importance can’t be understated. It’s a big, missed opportunity for retailers today. Improving data management, governance, and sanitation is a massive opportunity for retailers that want to innovate.

Key opportunity areas around data in retail include customer experience (know your customer), understanding trends related to customer buying habits, and innovation. You can’t innovate at any speed with dirty data.

There’s a massive digital transformation revolution underway among retailers, and they are trying to innovate with data, but they have so much data that it can be overwhelming. They are trying to create data lakes, a single source of truth, and sometimes they can’t work because of disparate data networks. I believe that some of the more prominent retailers will have their data act together in a few years.

“Dirty data” results from companies being around for a long time, so they’ve accrued multiple data sets and cloud providers, and their data hasn’t been merged and cleaned. If you don’t have the right data, you are making decisions based on bad or old data, which could hurt you strategically or literally.

What do you wish more people understood about retail technology and innovation?

Technology will not replace people. In my experience, technology is meant to enhance the human experience, which includes employees. If technology simplifies the process so much that the employees become idle, they are typically trained to manage the technology or cross-trained to grow their careers. Technology isn’t replacing the human experience any time soon, although it is undoubtedly changing the existing work experience – ideally for the better, both for the employees and the bottom line.

Technology doesn’t always lower costs for retailers. Hardware innovation requires significant capital expenses when it’s deployed chain-wide. Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” is impressive technology, but the infrastructure, cloud computing costs, and computer vision cameras are insanely expensive. In 5 years, that may be different, but today it is a loss leader. It’s worth it for Amazon because they can get positive press, demonstrate innovation, and show industry leadership. But Amazon has not lowered its operating costs with “Just Walk Out.” This is just one example, but there are many out there.

Online shopping will not eliminate brick-and-mortar shopping. If the pandemic has taught us anything, online shopping is here to stay – and convenience is extremely attractive to consumers. But I think people will never stop going to stores because people love shopping. The experience you get by tangibly picking something up and engaging with employees in a store location will always be around, even with the advent of the Metaverse.

What are some brands that excite you right now because of how they use technology?

Amazon. What they have been doing with Just Walk Out technology, dash carts, smart shelves, and other IoT technology puts Amazon at the front of the innovation pack. Let’s not forget that they’ve led the way in same or next-day delivery by innovating with their automated fulfillment centers! They have the desire, the resources, and the talent to be the frontrunner for years to come.

Alibaba. This Chinese company is another retailer that uses technology in incredible ways. Their HEMA retail grocery stores are packed with innovation and technology. They have IoT sensors across the stores, electronic shelf labels, facial recognition cameras so you can check out with your face, and robotic kitchens where your order is made and delivered on conveyor belts. They also have conveyors throughout the store, so a personal shopper can shop by zone, then hook bags to be carried to the wareroom for sortation and delivery prep – it’s impressive.

Walmart and Kroger. Both brands’ use of automated fulfillment centers (AFCs) and drone technology (among many others) are pushing the boundaries of grocery retail today. Their AFCs cast a much wider net and have expanded their existing markets, so, for example, we may see Kroger trucks in neighborhoods that don’t have a store in sight.

Home Depot. They have a smart app with 3D augmented reality and robust in-store mapping/wayfinding. Their use of machine learning is also impressive. For example, it helps them better understand what type of projects a customer might be working on based on their browsing and shopping habits.

Sephora. They use beacon technology to bring people with the Sephora app into the store and engage them. They have smart mirrors that help customers pick the right makeup for their skin tone and provide tutorials. Customers can shop directly through smart mirrors or work with an in-store makeup artist.

What advice do you have for retailers that want to invest in technology innovation?

My first piece of advice is to include change management in the project planning from the start.

There are inherent challenges in retail innovation, often due to change management issues. When a company has been around for decades or even more than a century, they operate with well-known, trusted, and often outdated infrastructure. While that infrastructure can’t uphold the company for the next several decades or centuries, there can be a fear of significant change and a deeply rooted preference for existing systems. There can be a fear of job loss because of the misconception that technology will replace people in retail.

Bring those change-resistant people into the innovation process early and often and invite them to be part of the idea generation. Any technology solution needs to be designed with the user’s needs in mind, and this audience is a core user group. Think “lean startup” approach.

My second piece of advice is to devote enough resources to innovation and give the innovation team the power to make decisions. The innovation team should still operate with lean resources, focusing on minimum viable products and proofs of concept, so failures aren’t cost-prohibitive. The innovation team performs best when it has the autonomy to test, learn, and fail as they explore innovative solutions. Then, it reports its findings and recommendations to higher-ups to calibrate and pivot where needed.

In closing, I’d say the key to innovation success is embracing the notion of failure. Failure has value! Put another way; failure is the fast track to learning. Learning what not to do and what to try next can help a retail company to accelerate faster than the competition. Think MVP, stay lean, get validated feedback quickly, and iterate until you have a breakthrough. And always maintain a growth mindset – never stop learning and growing.

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3 Reasons Companies Advance Their Data Journey to Combat Economic Pressure

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By Danny Vally

Have you updated your organization’s data journey lately? We are living in the Zettabyte Era, because the volume, velocity, and variety of data assets being managed by companies are big and getting bigger.

Data is getting more complicated and siloed. Today’s data is more complex than the data a typical business managed just twenty years ago. Even small companies deal with large data sets from disparate sources that can be complicated to process. Each data set may have its own unique structure, size, query language, and type.

The types of data are also changing quickly. What used to be managed in spreadsheets now demands automated systems, machine data, social network data, IoT data, customer data, and more.

There are real economic advantages for companies that take advantage of the data opportunity by investing in digital transformation (often starting by moving data to the cloud). Companies that take control of data outperform the competition:

40% more revenue per employee
50% higher average net income on revenue
$100M in additional operating income annually

Common data journey scenarios that motivate data-driven investments include:

Understand and predict customer behavior in real-time
Cut costs and free up resources with simplified data analysis
Explore new business models by finding new relationships in data
Eliminate surprise and unnecessary expenses
Gather and unify data to better understand your business

A data strategy is more than a single tool, dashboard, or report. A mature data strategy for any business includes a roadmap to plan the company’s data architecture, migration, integration, and management. Building in governance planning to ensure data security, integrity, access, quality, and protection will empower a business to scale.

That roadmap may also include incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning, which unleashes predictive analytics, deep learning, and neural networks. While these once were understood to be tools available only to the world’s largest businesses, AI and ML are actually being deployed at even small and midsized businesses, with much success.

We work with organizations throughout their data journey by helping to establish where they are, where they want to go, and what they want to achieve.

A data journey usually starts by understanding data sources and organizing the data. Many organizations have multiple data sources, so creating a common data store is an important starting point. Once the data is organized, we can harness insights from the data using reporting and visualization, which enables a real-time understanding of key metrics. Ensuring data governance and trust in sharing data is another important step, which is often supported by security. Lastly, advanced data can use artificial intelligence and machine learning to look for data trends or predict behaviors and extract new insights. By understanding where your organization is in its data journey, you can begin to visualize its next step.

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Women in Tech – Meet Tanya Faddoul

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“Women in tech catalyze a focus on pay equity, gender diversity, race diversity, thought diversity, and more. We also keep pushing to invest in the candidate pool by advocating for youth access to education that we did not have, so we have more representation in the future.”
Tanya Fàddoul, Vice President of Product Management and Engineering, DocuSign

We sat with Tanya Fàddoul, VP of product management and engineering – incubations at DocuSign. Tanya is an experienced and passionate leader with plenty of experience in corporate technology, often as the first or only woman in the room.

DocuSign’s incubations team builds and operates solutions that cross cultures, and legal jurisdictions, and impact people around the world. Like Valence, the group is chartered with designing and developing never-been-done-before solutions.

Here are excerpts from our conversation about women in technology.

It’s so great to connect with you! Why don’t we start with what you are doing today – what work are you doing for Docusign?

I’ve been with DocuSign for eight years, and since joining the company, I’ve worked on everything from sales to operations, to product management – I took a very non-linear path to where I am today!

I lead a phenomenal customer-obsessed product engineering group called Incubations, which is focused on cutting-edge and innovation. Our goal is to continuously learn from customers, co-develop with them, incorporate new capabilities, and pursue new market opportunities so people can realize innovative experiences as they go. We experiment with and on behalf of customers, and push the limits of what the platform can do.

I think a lot of women in tech can relate to your unconventional path. How did you get started in technology?

As I mentioned, it’s been very nonlinear! The short of how I got this start is customer obsession. I always go back to the customer and figure out how technology could catalyze a solution for a problem. I don’t have a programming background and don’t know how to code, but I am interested in how to solve customer problems, and how to lead people with the knowledge to solve them.

My family is made up of first-generation immigrants from Lebanon, and my parents fulfilled our American dream by starting out as entrepreneurs who also served SMBs.

My first job was an internship for a real estate company, and I was their fax girl. I would literally fax documents. Could you imagine having a fax person full-time in this day and age?

When I graduated from college, I sold advertising for a local CBS affiliate and worked in television. In 2010, a colleague from the CBS corporation made the move to Amazon and encouraged me to do the same. We felt that I could make an impact on the sales program since it was like a media advertising sale. So, I helped amazon launch Amazon Local which was a Living Social competitor that supported small businesses. I’ve been in how tech can change the world, ever since.

What can you tell us about the people who paved the way for you? How did mentors factor into your success?

Mentorship played a huge role in my career! Some of my heroes are my family, my heritage, those who came before me, and my community.

A standout mentor is Tom Casey, Docusign’s SVP of technology. He was a fierce advocate, sponsor, and mentor for a lot of my career growth. He put me in rooms and gave me a seat at the table when I didn’t have one. He recognized that someone like me, who can see every part of a business function, would add more value to product engineering. He told me that I don’t need to know how to code, I need to get the engineers jobs to do. He recognized that knowing how to get our technical team the most valuable engagements with customers would be my strength.

From there, my next hero is Leah McTiernan, GVP of Solutions Engineering. She partnered with me to make customer-related inputs from the field accessible and structured. She’s been a 10-star business partner and a female leader who challenges me, supports me, and gets creative with me. Together, we bring the collective bright minds together to solve problems and empower successful outcomes.

I think women have a hard time saying this, but I am my own hero. I often struggle with imposter syndrome, so I challenge myself to step back and acknowledge that I was resolute, resilient, curious, and an advocate to get to where I am. I paved the way for myself in an environment where women often struggle, which is in corporate technology. And while many things have changed for the better, a lot has stayed the same. So I am my own hero and I have lots of work to do!

“I’m a fierce advocate of movement. Moving mind, body, and creating community.”

Let’s talk about what’s around the corner in technology. What trends are you seeing?

The average person wants to be able to build, decipher, drive, and manipulate data so it enables them to do something, whatever it might be. So low-code and no-code is a huge trend. AI-assisted experiences will be everywhere, and consumers will learn to expect them. We will just interact with things that anticipate our next move that guide, nudge, and communicate with us.

I’m very interested in biometrics for identity verification. Gone are the days of passwords. We can already go to an airport and never use our photo identification. How does that impact industries like government, retail, and banking?

One trend that’s easily overlooked is in healthcare technology. What was achieved with COVID vaccines was achieved through technology. There’s now talk of a COVID pill – think about the speed in which this happens! Drug trials will accelerate, and technology will influence how we think about and deliver health and wellness, supplements, substitutes, and vaccinations.

Remote and hybrid work are here to stay, so we need to improve the way we work and be thoughtful about how this impacts women. Women often give up their at-home workspace so male partners can use the better workspaces. This is partly because men make more money than women, so pay inequity explicitly factors into remote and hybrid work strategies. When the breadwinner always gets the good desk, what does that do to us? It takes us ten steps back unless we have the tools to change it! Bringing technology to empower anywhere work is happening is a game changer.

What tech does the world need now more than ever?

My belief is that the world is at a sustainability turning point and technology is part of the solution. The business community needs to make sure that tech is used responsibly and sustainably. Tech needs to be developed and deployed to make the real world more sustainable by reducing Co2 emissions, developing cleaner and more reliable transportation, focusing on healthcare, energy consumption, and reducing waste in industrial production.

We need to use the power of technology not just for entertainment and consumerism, but to impact tangible progress in the real world.

Let’s talk about how to improve tech for women. Do you think tech is changing for women?

The percentage of female STEM graduates is about 19% and women hold only 24% of computing jobs. Women leave the tech industry at a 40% higher rate than men, and now women are trying to perform without the right workspace, which is not sustainable.

There is so much room for progress, but there is a pay gap that holds us back. Pay equity has become more of a focus, and companies are more regulated in reporting on equitable pay structure. The more we talk about the pay gap, the more balance and benefits women will be able to receive in the workplace.

What is the one thing you wish people knew to support women in technology?

We have so many organizations working to bring the curriculum to K-12 systems, federally and locally. Get involved, donate, and get kids involved in Code.org and their Hour of Code, which is offered everywhere. Make STEM interesting to girls early on.

There is an infinite amount of space for all working women in the workforce. Women set an example by supporting women, amplifying voices, mentorship, and sponsoring women. And as we support one another, we must realize that men are a part of this journey. Make people aware, and bring in allies and advocates that are part of this mission. Everyone can encourage women to invest in themselves when they are fighting for that seat at the table.

You spoke a lot about women supporting each other. Does being a woman leader in tech come with additional responsibilities?

Yes. Being a female leader in tech is a huge responsibility that I hold near and dear. Paving the way for others is what I owe to those who paved the way before me. Being a sponsor to people who are high potential, and opening doors are my obligation and responsibility. If a young person, woman, or underrepresented person wants to engage with me to learn from me and my network, I will make time for them because this is my commitment to the community and women. It’s incredibly important, and a way to continue to influence change.

What’s one piece of advice that you’d like to share with anyone reading?

It’s corny, but it’s important. Bring your authentic self everywhere you go. If you are goofy, then be goofy. Not everything has to be taken so seriously. If you are an over analyst, then analyze! You need different kinds of people in a room for greatness. Malcolm Gladwell talks about this in his book, “The Tipping Point”. Everyone has unique strengths that can ultimately cultivate some powerful ideas when used together. Bring your authentic self and invest in your education, invest in yourself, and continue to feed your strengths. We need your authentic voices to make change.

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3 Keys to Unlock Healthcare’s Digital Front Door

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The digital front door has become the common name in the healthcare industry for a mobile website or application that unifies the patient experience and connects patients to care across the continuum.

In short, a digital front door connects and scales the virtual care journey to give patients what they need, when they need it.

The trend toward self-service in healthcare was already underway when COVID hit, and the pandemic sharply accelerated the demand for digital access to healthcare information. Appointment scheduling is one important aspect of a digital front door experience, and studies find that 40% of appointments are booked after business hours, and 67% of patients prefer online booking. Further, $150 billion annually is estimated as the annual loss from missed medical appointments. (source)

Some of our company’s earliest and most enduring clients have been healthcare organizations, and we’ve noticed three keys to success when developing and deploying a digital front door.

Key to success: Get the right stakeholders involved

“This is more than a digital shift – the shift to a digital front door requires a culture shift within the organization,” says Yuri Brigance, Valence’s director of software engineering.

Experience has taught us that having the right people in the room can make all the difference in the success or failure of a major initiative. Especially considering the role that change management plays here – People don’t resist change, they resist being changed. So you need to engage stakeholders from all impacted groups, from frontline workers to back-office operations. This will improve requirements documentation, roadmap planning, and buy-in as the work rolls out.

Key to success: Users Drive the Design Strategy

“While a digital front door is a technology solution, it’s ultimately about humanizing the patient experience,” says Sam To, designer at Valence.

In the case of a digital front door, the users may be patients, families of patients, or healthcare providers. In nearly all scenarios, people value products that are easy to use, simple to set up, and have a logical progression. This is especially true in a healthcare situation, which may be hypercharged by personal and situational stressors.

Equitable design should be at the forefront of design decisions because the healthcare organization needs to design for a wide array of users and needs. You can read more about our approach to equitable design here.

The design phase of the digital front door project should include user interviews, feedback sessions, prototyping, and more. Giving the UX design team access to users early in the process can help to identify the best-case rollout strategy, reveal opportunities to differentiate from competitors, and deliver precisely the right content to users when they need it – all leading to better patient satisfaction scores.

Key to success: Develop a feature roadmap and strategy for rolling out updates

“When embarking on a digital effort in healthcare, it’s important to start by understanding which changes you need to see in the organization. Are you pursuing improved patient satisfaction scores? Physician satisfaction? ED/Urgent Care wait times? Quality and safety scores? Each area targeted for improvement may influence priorities differently,” says Malia Jacobson, healthcare content strategist at Valence.

Many healthcare providers are leaning into digital solutions to address patient satisfaction, reduce service demand, and reduce administrative overhead. In addition to standard features of a digital front door experience, providers should consider designing for experiences such as:

Bill pay
Self-scheduling and care coordination
Provider communication
Information libraries
Find a provider
Imaging library
Patient outreach
Capacity management
Census management
Forecasting
Infectious disease tracking
Discharge planning
Privacy and security to safeguard patient data
Strategies to increase adoption, such as gamification and push notifications
Support for population health initiatives
Analytics and insights to derive more value from data
AI features, such as chatbots, to reduce clinical burden and improve patient flow
Support for healthcare information exchange in compliance with FHIR standards and best practices.

It’s important to understand how these features interplay as part of a big picture roadmap with a rollout timeline and strategy. You don’t have to release everything at one time to be successful, and adding features as the platform develops and collects user feedback will future-proof the effort.

In closing, healthcare has always been heavily impacted by technology, but the patient experience lagged behind other healthcare innovations. That is changing.

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Data Mesh Architecture in Cloud-Based Data Warehouses

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Data is the new black gold in business. In this post, we explore how shifts in technology, organization processes, and people are critical to achieving the vision for a data-driven company that deploys data mesh architecture in cloud-based warehouses like Snowflake and Azure Synapse.

The true value of data comes from the insights gained from data that is often siloed and spans across structured, semi-structured, and unstructured storage formats in terabytes and petabytes. Data mining helps companies to gather reliable information, make informed decisions, improve churn rate and increase revenue.

Every company could benefit from a data-first strategy, but without effective data architecture in place, companies fail to achieve data-first status.

For example, a company’s Sales & Marketing team needs data to optimize cross-sell and up-sell channels, while its product teams want cross-domain data exchange for analytics purposes. The entire organization wishes there was a better way to source and manage the data for its needs like real-time streaming and near-real-time analytics. To address the data needs of the various teams, the company needs a paradigm shift to fast adoption of Data Mesh Architecture, which should be scalable & elastic.

Data Mesh architecture is a shift both in technology as well as in organization, processes, and people.

Before we dive into Data Mesh Architecture, let’s understand its 4 core principles:

Domain-oriented decentralized data ownership and architecture
Data as a product
Self-serve data infrastructure as a platform
Federated computational governance

Big data is about Volume, Velocity, Variety & Veracity. The first principle of Data mesh is founded on decentralization and distribution of responsibility to the SME\Domain Experts who own the big data framework.

This diagram articulates the 4 core principles of Data Mesh and the distribution of responsibility at a high level.

Azure: Each team is responsible for its own domain, and data is decentralized and shared with other domains for data exchange and data as a product.

Snowflake: Each team is responsible for its own domain, and data is decentralized and shared with other domains for data exchange and data as a product.

Each Domain data is decentralized in its own data warehouse cloud. This model applies to all data warehouse clouds, such as Snowflake, Azure Synapse, and AWS Redshift.

A cloud data warehouse is built on top of a multi-cloud infrastructure like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), which allows compute and storage to scale independently. These data warehouse products are fully managed and provide a single platform for data warehousing, data lakes, data science team and to provide data sharing for external consumers.

As shown below, data storage is backed by cloud storage from AWS S3, Azure Blob, and Google, which makes Snowflake highly scalable and reliable. Snowflake is unique in its architecture and data sharing capabilities. Like Synapse, Snowflake is elastic and can scale up or down as the need arises.

From legacy monolithic data architecture to more scalable & elastic data modeling, organizations can connect decentralized enriched and curated data to make an informed decision across departments. With Data Mesh implementation on Snowflake, Azure Synapse, AWS Redshift, etc., organizations can strike the right balance between allowing domain owners to easily define and apply their own fine-grained policies and having centrally managed governance processes.

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5 Ways to Build Digital Trust

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By Malia Jacobson

Combating online misinformation and building digital trust are increasingly important for organizations doing business online. Here are a few ways that our developers and content producers work together to improve access to reliable, trustworthy content for our clients.

The Internet is filled with impressive technology platforms that we use every day. But should we trust their content? For years, content platforms evolved to focus on the technology itself, not the content within. The result: Wary consumers who distrust much of what they read online. False online information costs the global economy $78 billion each year, and three-quarters of Americans believe online misinformation is a big problem. Let’s not forget the “infodemic” of public health misinformation that researchers believe contributed to the spread of COVID-19.

Per the International Data Corporation (IDC), false information destroys the trust that fuels our digital economy. Simply put, if website visitors don’t trust your organization’s digital content, they won’t stick around long enough to become a customer.

Organizations can win and keep users’ trust by creating trustworthy, reliable content. How? As developers and content producers, we help organizations improve content quality, clarity, and accuracy with these steps.

1. Include content producers and stakeholders in platform design.

At the beginning of a project, bring stakeholders, content producers, and developers together to identify the platform’s key audiences, desired user experience (UX), and the internal process through which content will be vetted, approved, moved through QA, and posted. Defining a process to validate and approve content prior to publication helps inform the development of the right back-end content management system. This ensures that the finished platform supports the publication of content that’s worthy of users’ time—and trust.

2. Help organizations use and optimize owned media channels.

An organization’s digital marketing efforts include paid, earned, shared, and owned media channels—the organization’s own website, blog, and other outlets within its control. While earned media (press mentions) and shared media (social shares) are exciting, many organizations learn the hard way that information published on external media platforms isn’t always accurate, and fighting misinformation is a draining, costly battle. Organizations with robust owned media channels can build and keep digital trust by carefully and consistently publishing reliable, accurate content on their own platforms to serve as a source of truth for users.

3. Address racial and gender bias in content platform design.

Poor platform design can invite discrimination and reduce the integrity of digital content. Take AirBnB’s efforts to create a more transparent platform by removing anonymity for both guests and hosts during the booking process. Researchers found that revealing a potential guest’s photo before a booking request was accepted allowed hosts to discriminate based on race. To create more equitable, trustworthy, transparent platforms, consider withholding sensitive information that could enable discrimination; build awareness of algorithmic bias; and measure the effectiveness of different platform design choices. (Find more information here: Harvard Business School: How Online Platforms Can Thwart Discrimination.)

4. Bridge language barriers.

Online misinformation disproportionately targets users with language and learning differences. Organizations can work to combat online misinformation by using plain language online and addressing language barriers by integrating language translation APIs like Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, and Smartling.

5. Make digital content user-friendly.

The most sophisticated platform will inhibit trust if users can’t follow along. We learned how this is especially critical for healthcare organizations, public agencies, and firms operating in the health and wellness industry during the COVID pandemic. Creating platforms that support user-friendly visual aids, symbols, and a clear pathway through complex topics helps users find and understand reliable, trustworthy information they need.

Prioritizing content quality and accuracy may be new for organizations used to focusing on platform design. But when content producers and developers work together to publish trustworthy, reliable content, organizations and their audiences win.

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14 Ways to Design and Develop a More Sustainable Website

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By Deborah Keltner

Could you have a more sustainable website?

While the shift from analog to digital content has kept trees out of paper mills, it has undoubtedly contributed to the climate crisis because of the carbon footprint of technology. Whether it’s e-waste or energy needed for computing, the tech sector has a huge opportunity to lessen its impact on our earth’s climate.

We need to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century to keep the global temperature below 1.5 degrees Celsius. You can learn more about Earth Day and its supporting events & initiatives here.

In honor of Earth Day, we are sharing a list of ideas, tips, tricks, and insights to help website designers and developers deliver more sustainable websites. We are still learning more about how to deliver more sustainable technologies, so if you have additional tips and tricks, we want to hear from you!

Let’s get started!

You are reading this on the internet! Did you know that the use of the internet alone causes emissions of approximately 2,330,000 tons of carbon and consumes 2,340,000 MWh of electricity every day? If you found this article via a web search, your search consumed about 0.3 Wh of energy and released 0.2g of carbon into the environment. It’s not much on its own, but it adds up.

Do you want to reduce your website’s carbon emissions?

Did you know: Offsetting the carbon from our website requires the work of 12 trees every year.

You can reduce the carbon emissions associated with your website by reducing the amount of electricity used to load, send, and view a web page, and then ensuring the resulting electricity required to access and use the site comes from clean, renewable resources.

Designers and developers have a lot of influence over the energy efficiency of the websites they design and create. Here are 14 tips for you to design and develop a greener an more sustainable website:

Get rid of unnecessary code, which uses computing power without benefiting users. If you have large blocks of commented-out code, don’t let it slip into production. Keep code clean and simple, avoid duplication and write efficient queries. This doesn’t just apply to the code you write, but also to the code you borrow. If you use existing frameworks and libraries, ensure that they are also refined and tailored to efficiently deliver the functionality you need and that you are not using over-built code. In cases where you are using a CMS like WordPress, avoid unnecessary plugins that add bloat and choose plugins that minimize server load and don’t add unnecessary weight on the front end.
Use compression. Some compression techniques can save data without compromising quality.
Consider programming language efficiency when choosing between programming languages. Less efficient languages have a higher carbon footprint.
Run computations on the server side. Data centers are more efficient than end-user devices.
Choose green cloud vendors. Ask whether your cloud provider uses sustainable energy sources.
Keep digital efficiency top-of-mind. Every day is Earth Day when you are prioritizing energy-efficient decisions. Our site is run on renewable energy, which helps offset our impact.
The goals of SEO are aligned with the goal of reducing energy consumption. When optimizing a website for search rankings, we help people find the information they want quickly and easily. When SEO is successful, people spend less time looking for information and visiting fewer pages that don’t meet their needs. This means less energy is consumed and the energy that is consumed is used to deliver value to the user.
Copywriting also impacts the amount of time people spend browsing your site. We don’t want people to waste time sifting through content that offers them little value, so clear and efficient copy can reduce wasted time and in turn reduce wasted energy.
Good user experience makes using the web easier and reduces the amount of energy wasted navigating to pages that don’t serve the correct purpose and trying to decipher what they should do next. Obviously, our UX Design team is here to help!
On most websites, images are the single largest contributor to page weight. The more images you use and the larger those image files, the more data needs to be transferred and the more energy is used. Regardless of any technical optimizations, designers and content creators should think carefully about their use of images.
- Does the image genuinely add value to the user?
- Does it communicate useful information?
- Could the same impact be achieved if the image was smaller?
- Could we reduce images that are not visible to the user, such as in carousels?
- Could we achieve the same effect with a vector graphic (or even CSS style) instead of a photo?
Video is the most data and processing intensive form of content. As with images, ask yourself if videos are necessary. If they are, reduce the amount of video streamed by removing auto-play from videos and by keeping video content short. A website with video playing can be one or even two orders of magnitude heavier than a website without video in terms of page weight and creates much higher load on the users CPU, resulting in vastly greater energy consumption.
Web fonts can add significant file weight to the websites on which they are used. A single font file could be as much as 250kb, and that might only be for the standard weight. If you want bold, add another 250kb. To reduce the impact on custom web fonts, designers should consider the following options: Use system fonts where possible. Fonts like Arial and Times New Roman can be used without loading any font files at all as they are already on the user’s device, and try to be frugal in the number of typefaces you choose and in the number of different weights that you use for each typeface.
Build static web pages. CMS-powered websites make queries to the website database and dynamically generate pages, so the webserver has to do work thinking about what information to send back to the user each time someone tries to load a page. That causes the server to use more energy. In some cases, it may be possible to simply server static web pages with no database at all by writing the web pages as static files in HTML, CSS, and JS, or by using a static site generator or specialist static web host to convert your CMS-powered website into static files.
Consider reducing white space and embracing dark mode. Dark websites were one of the first techniques popularized for saving energy on websites many years ago and it faded away with the advent of LCD screens, which had a permanent backlight, using the same energy regardless of the color actually visible on the screen. However, with the advent of OLED screens that light up each pixel individually, using darker colors is once again a viable technique to reduce energy on end-user devices.

If you’d like to estimate the carbon footprint of your website, this tool is easy to use. In fact, it’s how we learned that our website needs improvement (we’re currently running dirtier than 78% of similar websites and producing 2.14g of carbon every time someone visits our site). https://www.websitecarbon.com/.

You may not be able to do every single one of these things, but every action you take to produce a sustainable website adds up, so lean into greener design and engineering on Earth Day and every day!

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Women’s History Month – Let’s Make Tech More Inclusive

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By Deborah Keltner

We may be preparing to wrap up Women’s History Month 2022, but we aren’t done working to make tech inclusive. Women’s History Month provides education on how women helped shape the nation and empowers children by introducing them to historical role models. It also inspired us to share practices that make our company and our industry more inclusive to women.

While the month is over, our effort to bring gender equity to our company and our industry is ongoing.

Women have played a key role in the advancement of technology and computer science since its creation. For example, computer pioneer Grace Hopper devised the theory of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the creation of COBOL. And while women are an ever-growing part of the tech community, inequality in pay and opportunities persists.

No matter your gender, here are ways every person can make our industry more inclusive and better for women:

As a professional

Mentoring. It’s important that both men and women mentor women in technology. Letting women and girls know that they have a future in technology helps to increase the number of women pursuing careers in computer science. This pillar of support can be offered through professional groups or one-on-one. If you are a woman in tech, making yourself visible will inspire other women and girls. And men in tech should evaluate who you seek out or offer mentorship to, so you can make sure you are doing so equally.
Educate yourself. Read books and blogs for, by, and about women in tech. This reading list has some great recommendations. Follow Women in Tech on social media – searching the hashtag #womenintech can get you started.
Speak up. Point out non-inclusive behavior, even if it comes from someone above you in the leadership chain.
Evaluate your professional circles. Do you find that your network isn’t as diverse as you’d like? Start building professional relationships with women and people of color so your network looks more like your community.

As a manager

Eliminate bias in the hiring process. Look for ways to attract qualified candidates from a variety of backgrounds. Our recruiting team uses several techniques to make the process inclusive to women, including anonymizing applicants, monitoring job descriptions for gendered or exclusive language, encouraging applicants to include their personal pronouns, and setting system reminders to be inclusive while reviewing applicants or completing interview feedback.
You can take the Parity Pledge here.
Visibility is a serious challenge faced by many women. Women are often tasked with “invisible work” – such as day-to-day tasks and maintenance work – and therefore get credit for being diligent, but not strategic. Managers should make sure that everyone has equal access to strategic projects and that everyone is equally tasked with invisible work.
Address pay gaps – female tech workers make anywhere from 10% to 33% less than male counterparts, depending on seniority level. Ask about equity when setting the pay scale for a role so you do not perpetuate unequal pay.

At Work

Amplify women’s voices and do your part to ensure women are heard. To amplify a colleague who has shared a good idea in a meeting, speak up, name and credit the woman, and repeat her idea.
Use Inclusive language. Favor gender-neutral terms whenever possible. Here’s a guide:

Replace This	With This
He, she	They/them
His, her	Their
Guys	Folks, friends, team, y’all
Ladies, gals	Women, folks, people, you all, y’all, friends
Chairman	Chair, chairperson
Man, mankind	Humanity, humankind
Grandfathered	Legacy status, preexisting
Right-hand man	Counterpart, indispensable
Man hours, manpower	Person hours, engineer hours, level of effort, hours
Middleman	Mediator, liaison
Housekeeping	Maintenance, cleanup, overview
Male or female connectors/ fasteners	Connector and receptacle, plug and socket
Man (verb, “I will man the desk”)	Staffing, working
Manpower	Workforce, human effort
Preferred pronouns	Pronouns, personal pronouns
Sexual preference	Sexual orientation
Gay (as a generic term)	LGBTQIA+
Virgin	First run, first launch

Challenges within the tech industry make it harder for women to pursue a career in our field, and even once women join tech, they are less likely to stay in it – both because of lack of role models and because it’s often male-dominated and gender exclusive. Valence is working to improve things for women in tech and raising awareness about this issue is one way that we can contribute to progress.

What else should we do to make tech inclusive? We’d love to learn more from others who are supporting women in tech.

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Cloud Migration and Cloud Services

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By Luca Junghans

A look inside these cloud capabilities

By joining forces, Valence and MajorKey offer an even greater set of cloud services for businesses that want to power their digital transformation with cloud technologies.

MajorKey works with clients to migrate business applications to the cloud, and Valence builds services on the cloud. This is one reason these businesses are such a powerful combined force.

The cloud refers to software and services that run on a (usually) regionally located server owned by the cloud service provider, instead of on an on-premise server owned by a customer. Cloud servers are in data centers all over the world. By using cloud computing, companies don’t have to manage physical servers or run software applications on their own machines.

It’s big business. In fact, one of our partners, AWS contributed 14.5% of revenue to Amazon’s overall business in 2021, which would have operated at a $1.8 billion loss in Q4 without it – and AWS revenue was up nearly 39% compared to 2020.

There are many ways to use and understand the business impact of cloud technology. We are breaking down the distinction between cloud services and cloud migration for you here!

Cloud Migration and Cloud Services

Simply put, cloud migration is what happens when a company moves some or all of its software onto cloud servers.

In other words, cloud migration is moving your software to a managed server operated by the cloud provider; and cloud services are technology solutions built on top of those managed servers. There’s a whole range of capabilities bridging the two.

Let’s take a closer look.

Cloud services range in how much they abstract away from the customer. A good example is Amazon Cognito, which is a user management cloud service. Amazon Cognito has implementations of basic user functions such as login, logout, sessions, and security, so a customer doesn’t have to worry about a deeper technical implementation of these features and can focus on managing users.

Cloud services are so flexible that there are seemingly infinite ways to deploy them for a business. Cloud services are the infrastructure, platforms, and software hosted by cloud providers, and there are three common solutions:

Infrastructure as a service: The renting out of virtual machines and space to customers, while providing a way to remotely manage the resource. When a company migrates to the cloud, they are using this service.
Platforms: Providers like AWS and Azure build specialized software on top of their own cloud hardware and offer the software to customers as a service. These are specialty services and can provide patterns for things such as Data Analysis, Compute, IoT, APIs, Security, Identity, and Containerization. We wrote about Digital Twins in a previous post, which referenced Digital Twin platforms offered by AWS and Azure.
Software as a service (SaaS): Software can be built on top of the platforms offered by the cloud providers. Software developers can also partner with other third parties to provide fully built instances of software that typically come with subscription rates, customer support, and personal configurations of the software. Examples of this include Atlassian Jira and Confluence, Dropbox, Salesforce, and G suite.

These services can be transformative for businesses in general, but it’s not always easy to know the best way for your business to use them. The added benefits to this migration range per case, and here are four examples:

Scalability: Cloud services often offer on demand scaling options that can satisfy unexpected or planned growth. Depending on your product, this can be a lot easier than upgrading on-premise hardware, but not always cheaper.
Cost: Although we expect the costs to be passed to the consumer in some way, the logistics of maintenance and upgrades to the cloud systems is handled by the provider. In many cases this can translate to a huge amount of money saved for the customers.
Performance: Performance-enhancing services like CDNs and regional hosting, when understood and configured properly, can have tangible and positive performance impacts.
Local Management: Being on the cloud means access to the digital portals to manage the services (most times). This creates a lower bar of entry for employees to manage and observe the resources.

Many businesses start their digital transformation journey by migrating infrastructure or applications from on-premises servers to the cloud. Notably, cloud migration can also refer to a situation where a business needs to bring the cloud resources they manage into an on-premises environment. It can also describe a situation where a business moves its data resources from one cloud provider to another.

Cloud migration to use cloud services is a process that presents many upsides, and is worth investigating! The process will add additional complexities – specifically, security and governance will generally be instituted upfront as a base for the rest of the migration. We design and engineer performant, scalable, and maintainable applications that save businesses money, fill in knowledge gaps, and provide users with a positive experience.

Here are two examples of cloud services that we’ve built for clients:

Building cloud applications with AWS lambda: We have bridged the gap between multiple third-party APIs and created new databases that consolidate data and deliver it to a web application. Cloud services remove the need for our clients to interact with these multiple services, which saves them time and money. At the same time, we used AWS Cognito to help our customer manage roles and users in a secure and trusted way. This removed the need for our engineers to write our own user management software, a cumbersome task.
Data pipelines: We identify problems in our customers’ current database providers and migrate data to a more performant and better structured database in cloud-to-cloud migrations.

We will continue to build and migrate while we investigate the future of the cloud. What are the new services and platforms? Who can benefit the most from them? How can we do it right? We will be prepared for the cloud migration and services needed from the real world to the metaverse, and beyond.

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