DXCTechTalk

What a great question. We are seeing the emergence of AI ethical audits which is a sorely needed approach to ensuring the potential bias doesn't create risk.

Just recently Amazon found that their cv screening bot was filtering out women, because it had the bias in recruiting men, as that was the majority of the gender recruited recently. That was a poor outcome.

@GlenPRobinson So this has to do with ML and training and retraining the AI. But I have a feeling that, just like the news, there will always be some amount of bias even though the aim is to be neutral/balanced.

@GlenPRobinson so that's the reason why we have so few women in IT! :-)

I think that the best that you can do is continue to audit to find the gaps and then reinforce. Machines Learn from the data given so we may need to train with some change intentional data?

This is where Sociology meets Technology. There is a need to understand the Diversity Bias as you train.

I think that there's also a need to recognise the amount of bias already built into organisations and the decisions that they take. We tend to forgive ourselves as humans and judge the machines more harshly.

@sukhigill Agreed, I think that there are huge opportunities for those with sociology and psychology skills in the future platform world.

@GrahamChastney Interesting point...judging the machines more harshly. Indeed we call come with biases.

I was reading "Ethical by Design - A Manifesto", which raises that very point: Not only deploying biased AI, but also letting it drift because we're not continuously monitoring its performance is an ethical issue (https://goo.gl/V4KiQR)

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Natalie, I can think of five horrible reasons there is not enough gender equality in IT, and my colleague Caitlin Macdonald and I will be putting out a piece on diversity it Tech very, very soon.

Thanks for that link, @Frederic. Looks interesting.

I was talking about this recently at a customer event in Vienna. Some of the problem comes from our (natural) language, and the fact that it carries many biases (e.g. patriarchy)

@BillMurray500 looking forward to that! we can think about plenty of reasons... but how do we solve it?

Frederic, can I commend a thoughtful piece by my colleague Caitlin McDonald ...The Winter of AI discontent!
https://leadingedgeforum.com/publication/emergent-...

@GrahamChastney totally agree on organizations innate bias... reasons the next challenge which is understanding the need for dimensions in which you evaluate diversity

https://dxc.facebook.com/groups/1539049852805176/p...

Interestingly Natalie the Norwegians just experimented with quotas and it went well. It's not just an issue of fixing the pipeline; the leaders are fixing progression, retention, pay equality and representation all at once.

communicate openly about what's going to happen. Don't ruin expectations by changing directions without any explanation.

@cpswan good point, direction + reasoning to enable employees to join in/drive the change

Better to inquire what is most important to your employees for building trust, ask how they prefer to be recognized, find out how they like to receive feedback and prefer to communicate.

create inclusive experiences to make them feel like part of the journey

@cpswan How do you change culture across the enterprise... beyond the tech community?

is this about using community collaboration tools to enable this shift - how do we create inclusion at scale?

@HHigginsDXC my favourite definition of culture is 'the way we do things around here' so culture change for the whole org involves everybody being brought along and changing their day to day approach

@cpswan @HHigginsDXC People need to change behaviours, which means they need to form new habits. Enforcing an old culture, is basically people doing things the way they've always been done. You need to measure people differently, to drive new behaviours.

Seems that culture change is both top-down & bottom-up. Leaders must demonstrate the desired change(s) & at the grass roots level, employees must do the same & learn from each other. Probably spreads faster that way. But as Dan once said, culture change is emergent.

there are ways to bust past Dunbar's number (e.g. Workplace), but we also can do more to grow communities that stay tight and still share learning

@GlenPRobinson but not measure too soon, because people in pathological and bureaucratic cultures will game the system and ruin the culture change

@cpswan agree, but I do believe that #DevOps and #SRE + 2PBTeams become interesting intersections for the culture change ground game?

@cpswan Indeed, which is why top down support is essential for any wholesale org change.

I also agree. At the same time, you need to be mindful of cliques that form, and you need a process to ensure great org wide collaboration. You don't want the 'jocks vs the nerds' type situation.

indeed - there's an intersection between what the team does, and how the team's organised. I've found myself referring to https://web.devopstopologies.com/ a few times today already

@GlenPRobinson this is where double deep organizations w/ deep business & engineering skill, operating skills, and innovation skills can each be valued

.@GlenPRobinson Great point. Even as adults, we have to remember the "sand box" effects especially in today's connected world that can create "disconnections" https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-technology-can-le...

@cpswan the awareness there is more than one model is important, then picking a model which suits your business is key, one size may not fit all.

Changing culture as well as mindset is important.

not sure they are locked technically, i think the inertia is the $ & human investment in the current landscape.

@Max_Hemingway how do we measure the culture change?

mindset/culture... on a day to day basis they are basically peoples behaviours which are driven through habits. So you need to find a way to change peoples habits, which will change their behaviours, which will develop a new mindset, which should align support culture.

re-imagine the business. Wardley Mapping can help as an aid to this.

@danhushon I think you measure cultural change by the behaviors exhibited.

@DanHushon Culture is a soft concept so measuring on actions and behaviours is a start but its different for each company

@nichosteve1971 I struggle with the performance based side (what does the top 10% look like) vs. the shift of the bell curve towards good?

My thoughts on Having the Right Digital Mindset - https://maxhemingway.com/2017/12/04/having-the-rig...

@DanHushon IMHO there are a set of leaders at the front of any movement, a set of followers and set a resisters (drag anchors). The real problem is with drag anchors.

By getting Enterprises to understand the full value chain all the way to the actual user/consumer and how an Enterprise could be disintermediated can be a useful scare tactic to drive fight or flight!

https://blogs.dxc.technology/2018/11/01/secret-to-...

those high-level dare i say Standards! are important, we don't specify the specific, but what would the world look like if everything developed had to talk through an API. The value of analysing Logs provides an insight in the service operation.

I think so at least why they get started.

I don't think so if we consider the agile methodologies enabling digital transformation. All these principles or partial of them will stand as obstacles in the journey.

With a multiple services based ecosystem, the combining of log data provides a unique lenses of the operation of the system which Ops and Security can act on.

perhaps, but they should watch @bcantrill's 'Principles of Technology Leadership' first to avoid some pitfalls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QMGAtxUlAc

Do you think that some of the "hard principles" will work there way through as regulations in the future, and hence table-stakes?

sure but the harder part is business + technology leadership. It's hard for companies to lead if not double deep!

@GrahamChastney funny that I was watching an #AI platform - showing the value of logging for predictability. To this extent, I can only imagine regulations emerge to provide transparency