February 22, 2019

Employee satisfaction trends show a decline over the past two decades. Gallup’s recent State of the American Workplace Report shows 66% of American workers are either not engaged in their jobs or have become actively disengaged. Meanwhile, data collected across thousands of organizations provides an interesting snapshot. Those with the highest employee engagement experience 17% higher productivity, 20% higher sales and 21% higher profitability. With employee engagement scores at an all-time low and increasingly complex organizational strategies, it’s clear that among the best leaders, success only comes to those bold leaders with heart.

As the best leaders know, the key to any business success is making sure employees are engaged.

The Significance of these Alarming Trends

Gone is the age when the stereotypical boss – callously shouting orders while workers scurry about – can be considered essential for success. In fact, nowadays, among the metrics used to gauge business success, is employee engagement. Which means the best leaders are the ones who engage with their employees.

The millennials of today’s workforce require that their work is meaningful, connected to a greater purpose and reflective of their values. They expect to establish personal, one-on-one relationships that show someone cares and appreciates the work they are doing. Leaders are vital in creating this connection. And only the best leaders are able to strike the right balance between driving results and building interpersonal bonds.

At this same time, business functions have only grown more complex. Driven by the speed of technology, emerging digital capabilities, increased competition, the way work gets done is impacting the ability of many organizations to execute strategy. There is a multitude of dimensions required to create alignment with business objectives and control for performance variability, both critical in achieving positive organizational outcomes.

Take one example. Two-thirds of c-suite executives believe customer preferences will be a major impacting force in the next 2-3 years on growth.* (IBM Institute for Business Value: Global C-Suite Study, 19^th Edition). CEOs are emphasizing customer experience over product innovation and organizations are scrambling to deploy personalized customer experience strategies. All the while, employee engagement is a key predictor of service delivery and reported levels of customer satisfaction. And with over 70% of engaged employees believing they can positively affect customer satisfaction, it begs the question…what are the best leaders doing to create connections with employees and prioritize a culture of engagement?

Characteristics of Leaders with Heart

Gone are the days when leaders can sit in their corner office and direct the organization from afar. The best leaders do two things really well:

Show up with intention: The best leaders project a sense of responsibility and commitment to their employees, own the culture and role model the behavior they want people to follow. They have congruence with the organizational values and their own. They strive to build credibility and gain the respect of others.
Invest in workplace moments. Every interaction can have an impact on engagement and ultimately performance. The best leaders demonstrate an interest in their employees and get to know them personally. They get to the core of what inspires, motivates, connects people individually – and what touches their heart.

You don’t need to be hard-hearted to win respect and expressing emotion is not a sign of weakness. Leaders with heart – those who model the behaviors they expect and know what employees need to feel fulfilled – will get the return on investment, in employee engagement and increased performance.

Leaders with heart understand that the best leadership is less about barking orders and more about engagement.

Bold Leaders Out in Front

You don’t have to look much further than Fortune’s “World’s Most Admired Companies” list to find great examples of organizations that have cracked the code. Two companies who have stood out as having the best leaders who lead with heart:

Southwest Airlines: The heart logo on the belly of every aircraft and the “Heart sets us apart” tagline says it all. People are at the heart of everything Southwest Airlines does internally and externally. They boast some of the highest engagement scores in the industry and continue to raise the bar on leadership behaviors that matter. In this culture, employees collaborate on uniform design and the CEO sends a personal weekly shout out recognizing employees who are living their values. Founder, Herb Kelleher set the tone, not just focusing on the work product, but each employee personally. Southwest Airlines has some of the best leaders who invest time, energy and resource into proving to employees they care every day. The result – a culture of caring that has persisted for over 30 years.

Salesforce: Overly protective and proud of their OHANO culture rooted in philanthropy, diversity, and community, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has a 97% approval rating among CEOs most loved by employees* (Glassdoor’s 2018 Top CEOs list). Over 30,000 Salesforce employees are successfully rallied around a common goal as a result of V2MOM – vision, values, methods, obstacle, and measures – a framework designed to directly align their vision all the way down to the work of the lowest level employee. And because it is people executing this vision, their best leaders often gather employees together to express feelings, to be heard and to be respected for diverse points of view. The result – a highly engaged workforce with a belief the work they do every day will change the world.

There’s more to business success than just dollars and cents – for leaders with heart, there’s employee engagement.

Reversing the Trend

The best leaders have a presence, are present and show concern for individuals on their team. They are bold leaders with heart – they listen to employee needs, show compassion, create shared dreams for the future and have a direct effect on increased performance and decreased employee turnover.

So many companies rely on speed, productivity, and cost innovation to grow their business. Only those who invest in cultivating personal human connections will experience differentiated business success.

Rather than “checking your emotion at the door”, consider striking the appropriate balance between driving business results and demonstrating care and connection with individuals on your team. The beauty is in the AND!

Massive amounts of data are created daily across the planet. By 2021, the annual global Internet Protocol (IP) traffic is predicted to reach 3.3 zettabytes. You may be asking, what is a zettabyte? It is a major data milestone that analysts have tracked for some time. It is two to the seventieth power bytes, also expressed as 1021 (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes). To match this huge data environment, the data center industry is anticipating unprecedented growth. New data center technologies are, in fact, in the pipeline to help different industries face the growing demands of businesses. So, what’s the big deal about data center technology trends? Why is this such a big business for companies and the cities which are becoming the data center hubs?

The Evolution of Data Center in a Nutshell

A quick look at the history of data centers and how a modest “server” ushered in data center technology trends, one after another. The boom of data centers coincided with the dot-com bubble of the 1990s. During this era, personal computing took over most businesses. As companies started connecting to the internet, the need for systems that would help manage IT resources better also grew. Soon, businesses began setting up microcomputers—now called, servers—inside old computer rooms and referred to them as “data centers.”

As companies started connecting to the internet, the need for systems that would help manage IT resources better also grew.

The location, layout, and dependability of these “onsite data centers”, were not designed to match its needs. Consequently, businesses had to deal with unreliable power supply, inadequate cooling system, and insufficient space to accommodate the expanding demand for data centers. To curb costs, businesses began subcontracting third-party providers for this requirement. Essentially, outsourcing per se became one of the data center technology trends that transformed computing. Thus, as our use of data in business evolved, the means of how we could efficiently manage data also changed—which eventually led to the development of data center technology trends.

Dave Crowley on the reality of emerging new data center technologies

The impact that the New Role for Data Centers has on Communities

There are many cities worldwide that are striving to become homes for these large data centers. These include global locations such as Sweden, London, Singapore, and Beijing. In the United States, Phoenix, Northern New Jersey, Dallas/Fort Worth, Atlanta, and Northern Virginia are long term players. There are also newer locations such as San Antonio, Denver, Seattle, Salt Lake City, and Chicago that are also now into the thick of the industry.

Cities are interested in hosting datacenters for various reasons. It means landing a brand name in their community. They also create new jobs although typically not a huge number. More important is the energy and water consumption needs to support them and the business those generate. Energy consumption normally makes up a large amount of the overall cost of a data center, typically over 50%.

As the world continues towards data expansion, the fourth industrial revolution and urbanization with smart cities, even more, data center locations will be required. These will take on a new role for data centers as the requirement for the Internet of things, data storage, and computing power rising. These will require a closer proximity between the data centers and the customers who are using their capabilities.

New Data Center Technologies Trends: What is on the Horizon?

Without a doubt, data plays a vital role in our lives, and data centers are at the epicenter of all the developments within the digital sphere. The data center industry is likewise going through transformations. Here are some of the data center technology trends that are already taking shape.

The Cloud hovers and companies go “serverless”.

Onsite data centers and its upkeep can be resource-intensive. Data center management requires an uninterrupted power supply, a reliable cooling system, an extensive network system, and a security mechanism. That is why more companies are now choosing to utilize the services provided by hyperscale cloud computing companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.

Alternatively, some businesses are opting to utilize colocation spaces to house their servers. The responsibility of maintaining a data center now rests on the service provider. The agility and flexibility that these service providers offer are making companies reevaluate their IT strategies.

Switching to cloud computing and going “serverless” is indeed one of the significant data center technology trends. The increasing demand of consumers will require providers to continually evaluate their capabilities to support the market’s growing needs.

Data Center Expansion and Transformation is on the upswing.

The surge in the construction of mega data centers in strategic locations all over the world is seen as one of the major data center technology trends that are sweeping the industry. The world’s top three biggest data centers—China Telecom’s Inner Mongolia Information Park, China Mobile’s Hohhot Data Center and China Mobile’s Harbin Data Center are in China.

While in Japan, @Tokyo Corporation built a 1.5 million square feet data center that caters to major businesses within the country. In the U.S., there are about 3 million data centers as of 2014. However, experts predict that the country needs an additional 4,000 data centers by 2020 to keep pace with market needs. Industries in the periphery are benefiting from this growth spurt. CBRE Data Center Solutions, a premier property management company even created a subsidiary that caters to data center property investments.

As one of the emerging data center technology trends, edge computing is bringing the cloud closer to its users.

Edge Computing will gain momentum.

Latency—the delay before a transfer of data begins—has been one of the challenges carried by a centralized cloud platform. This delay is bound to happen when the data is physically far from the users who access it. Consequently, the user experience for applications like gaming, analytics, and real-time communications can be negatively impacted by this delay. Cloud service providers, like Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, are addressing this concern by building gateways at the edge of computing spaces. We are seeing up-and-coming players such as Limelight join the edge computing game. As one of the emerging data center technology trends, edge computing is bringing the cloud closer to its users.

Artificial intelligence will usher in self-managing data centers.

While AI has enabled smart homes, driverless cars, and smart factories, artificial intelligence is seen as one of the new data center technology trends. Artificial intelligence processing such as algorithm and deep learning will help analyze power consumption, plan data center capacity, and monitor security and delivery of critical processes to its customers. Google has begun tapping on this capability through the acquisition of AI startup, DeepMind Technologies Ltd.

David McCall expresses one of his expectations for what will come about from artificial intelligence as part of the new data center technologies

Laws and regulations have a substantial impact on data centers.

Directives from government agencies and regulating bodies will push businesses and data management leaders to plan and implement compliance measure or face a steep fine. But more than the cost of penalties, noncompliance to regulations exposes businesses to more dangerous threats such as a breach or loss of data, and cyber-attacks. For instance, the EU’s Data Protection Act 2018 requires European customer data to be kept within the European Union. Hence, the location of servers is critical for the cloud services companies to be compliant with.

Data security has become a top priority.

Given the number of security breaches that recently occurred and the degree of damage it caused to business and consumers, it’s only expected that data security has become a top priority. Data center technology trends on security are aimed at two areas—physical and virtual.

New data center technology trends on physical and space security include the use of extended perimeter protection, video analytics and security portals like “mantraps”. Virtual security, on the other hand, will use a unified approach. Besides virtual perimeter security such as firewalls, data centers will start to use behavioral threat detection. Simply put, data centers will be using machine learning to monitor overall user behavior, notice unusual activities, and, ultimately, combine all data to assess and preempt attacks. Big players such as Amazon and Google and upcoming companies like Darktrace already have had their sight on this as one of the data center technology trends.

Here’s where the growing business of new data center technologies headed?

Data centers are moving toward green energy consumption.

Climate change is a compelling reason for data center businesses to look for more efficient energy consumption for data centers. Data centers are huge energy hogs. In 2016 alone, global data centers gobbled up a total of about 416 terawatts. This energy consumption is predicted to double by 2020 which strengthens the pressure to look for a cleaner energy source. IT companies and data centers are responding positively to this call by looking for a green energy source. For instance, Google is aiming at modifying its data centers to 100 percent green energy on a 24/7 basis.

Michael Terrell, Google’s Energy Market Development head shares, “Achieving 100 percent renewable energy is just the beginning. We’re keeping our eyes on the prize, and that is getting to carbon-free for every hour of the day for every location.”

Concurrently, data centers are finding alternative ways to cool servers. Green Revolution Cooling, the company which patented the liquid immersion cooling technology, provides a more energy-efficient cooling system for data centers.

cartoon of a man with a laptop working on harvesting data while standing in a room full of new data center technologies — In the middle of data center technology trends, data is the new oil. And just like oil, to become useful, data needs to be “extracted or mined”.

New Data Center Technologies and Beyond

Data is the new oil, so says economic experts and marketing gurus. It is true that just like oil, to become useful, data needs to be “extracted or mined.” Still, data is several times more potent than oil. While oil is a limited resource, data, on the other hand, has a limitless supply and can be reused infinitely.

The derivatives of data such as predictive analysis, artificial intelligence and automation are all proofs of its transformational power, impacting various aspects of our life.

Nevertheless, whether it is the “new oil” or not, data and the value that we derive from it cannot be denied. From education to healthcare and business—there are countless ways we can use data to improve lives and tackle prevailing concerns. Our journey in the digital age has just begun. And businesses must prepare for the challenges and developments that lie ahead—including data center technology trends—and utilize necessary strategies to efficiently make the most of data in an ever-evolving digital world.

Day: February 22, 2019

The Boldest and Best Leaders Lead With Heart