[Music] hello and welcome to the friday fast 15 the snacks i show where we break down big topics in under 15 minutes today we're talking digital transformation acronyms and i've asked our it practice director david stevenson back on the show to break them down for us welcome back to the show david yeah hey kim thanks for having me again now to it leaders acronyms like itsm csm cmdb have become second language but once you jump into conversations with business leaders you've got some translation work to do that's why you're here david what acronyms are essential to the digital transformation conversation yeah it seems like every day a new acronym is is coming up out of the woodwork right whether it's a a new platform a new technology um a new a new word right just in the industry suddenly generates these new acronyms but there's a core set especially nowadays and as we continue to bring digital transformation and organizations into the 21st century and beyond that are becoming more and more prevalent and and of course more important to that digital transformation strategy so we have things such as csdm rpa iot cim ml nlu if you understood about half of those you're probably well on your way um to that digital transformation journey and have a good handle on what those might be today okay so david i think i understood one of those can you define some of these new acronyms for us yeah so let me cherry pick a few of them um that are becoming really important topics of conversation um especially as we work through not only ourselves but with our customers in these digital transformation strategies today so the first one i'm going to pick actually is rpa which stands for robotic process automation this is almost a subset of artificial intelligence to where we're able to do automation of business processes within an organization and this also runs parallel with ai itself where it's looking at things such as chat bots doing different kinds of machine learning such as you're crunching a bunch of data and formulating outputs or different strategies and things like that but in the past we never really had a good way of actually automating and providing kind of this artificial intelligence back in towards business processes where we continue to look for opportunities and pitfalls in those processes that we have today another really important one is nlu so nlu stands for natural language understanding and as we start to move into this age of internet of things right that iot and we start to move in towards this artificial intelligence driven and machine learning driven type of environment to provide these great experiences for our customers within these digital transformation type of strategies annual use starts become really important in that customers and especially employees don't want to have conversations with robots it sounded really interesting and sounded really fun right when we go back we watched the old kind of science fiction movies back in the 50s and 60s but nowadays people understand when they want to have an experience with you as an organization they want to have a human driven experience but that human driven experience is oftentimes costly has a lot of manual effort in behind it and is also prone to error right so with natural language understanding we actually are able to take artificial intelligence and have it smart enough or intelligent enough within the name here to actually understand sentences and long words of information to actually have the ability to carry on human-like conversations um with employees and with customers so you see this often with right you have chat bots right you go on you need to have help support you no longer have to staff a room of say 300 people supporting an organization you may have you know one or two servers sitting in a basement in a data center somewhere it's able to service thousands of customers to have these human-like transactions and experiences with customers to provide this good experience but have the automation the lack of error-prone structure behind it so david can you recommend some good resources where our business leaders can learn more about these new acronyms yeah acronyms because they're so prevalent and they keep popping up in the industry or vertical that we work in today i have a couple of recommendations on on different target areas the first one would be look at the framework that you might be engaging with right so we take itil for example it's a very common framework that almost you know a large percentage of large majority of it organizations use today and how they define and manage right their operational strategies and structure within an it organization that's handled by the axles organization right so browsing to the organization and getting information for them is also getting that information kind of straight from the source typically right as you start to look at tooling or the processes you might have some augmented version of that definition that may or may not fit right within your business strategy today which leads to the second point right if you're implementing say a specific tool or a specific process within your organization don't necessarily automatically run for the most generic thing right start to look at that tool start to look at that process see what their definition is see what their augmentation of the definition is because it more than likely aligns better to your industry vertical or the processing goals that you're trying to achieve and then lastly look at the the organizations that are measuring right benchmarks are key performance indicators for other organizations like yours right gartner is a really good example they actually have an i.t glossary of all different terms right so a lot of these terms that i went over such as right the rpa the iot the ml for machine learning or nlus we talked about natural language understanding all those definitions are there because they're common industry definitions that more and more organizations again as they're going through these digital transformation strategies are using today so we shouldn't be afraid of all these jumbled letters thrown at us then so what if what are your final thoughts for us on this yeah you make a really good point right so so the important thing is to don't be intimidated uh by all of these acronyms right there's new acronyms coming out every day whether it's a new technology again new process new industry something right a random collection of letters and numbers and other information just thrown at us constantly um don't be afraid though to ask questions right with your conversations that you have today and for the rest of the week and forever right as long as we're in these different industries we're going to be inundated with some acronym that we have no idea what it is ask those questions right to who you think are the subject matter experts or the people that can connect you to those subject matter experts thank you david you've broken down these acronyms very well even i can understand them and thank you everyone for joining us today this has been what's with all the acronyms with david stevenson on the friday fast 15. if you'd like to learn more visit us at crossfuse.com or reach out at let's talk at crossviews.com and for more snack size conversations subscribe at apple podcasts spotify or youtube see you next week [Music]