Economics in Information Technology. Хрестоматия для студентов бакалавров направлений «Бизнес-информатика», «Прикладная информатика»

and government start-ups in tech-advanced countries such as Britain, France, Canada and Israel. Govtech startups are not only a new way of providing new technology services to government. These tech-based, data-driven start-ups are gradually shifting the prevailing paradigm of policymaking and service delivery.

Technology has become transparency’s greatest ally to anchor integrity in the public sector. Coupled with political resolve, the digital revolution can disrupt corruption in ways we never imagined possible. — Carlos Santiso

UK well equipped to protect data after Brexit, says new ICO head

https://www.computerweekly.com (By Warwick Ashford, Senior analyst Published: 10 Aug 2016)

The UK is well-equipped to deal with the changes to data protection after the Brexit vote, according to the new information commissioner.

Elizabeth Denham made the observation in the first newsletter to be published by the Information Commissioner’s Office

(ICO) since she took up the role on 18 July 2016.

me, though, that the UK is well equipped to navigate the changes ahead successfully.”

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Indicating that she means to continue her predecessor Christopher Graham’s policy of engagement with stakeholders,

Denham said data protection was a “team sport”.

“Effective regulation requires engagement with the public sector, with industry, with civil society and with the public at large,” she said. “We all have an important role to play in this.”

Although Graham left the ICO on 28 June 2016 after seven years, there was a delay in Denham taking over because of a failure by government to obtain the Queen’s consent for the appointment in time.

Graham’s deputy, Simon Entwistle, was acting information commissioner until Denham was able to take over the leadership of the ICO, which regulates the UK’s Data

Protection Act, Freedom of Information Act and the rules around marketing calls and texts.

Denham was shortlisted in April 2016, and was approved for the post of information commissioner by the Parliamentary Committee for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport on 27 April.

She was appointed for a five-year term as information commissioner after holding senior positions in privacy regulation in Canada for the past 12 years.

Since 2010, Denham has been the commissioner at the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia, Canada.

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“Over more than a dozen years in this sector, I’ve seen the pace of the privacy regulator job quicken, and the scope of the work grows wider every day,” Denham wrote in the newsletter.

“Access to information and privacy touch nearly all aspects of public and commercial life and our work is at the centre of some of the most compelling issues of our time.”

ICO makes a difference

Denham noted that the ICO’s work makes a difference to citizens and consumers, employees and other rights holders.

In addition to helping navigate the changes necessitated by the Brexit vote, Denham is the first UK information commissioner since the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Network Information Security (NIS) Directive and EU-US Privacy Shield framework were approved.

Referring to these challenges, Denham said there was “a lot happening this side of the pond” but that the coming weeks would enable her to become more familiar with the work of the

ICO and “get to grips” with the challenges ahead.

Denham, who has a track record of taking a proactive approach to enforcing data protection law and tackling government on privacy issues, will also have to deal with implications for UK business of the controversial Investigatory Powers Bill, which is well on its way to becoming law.

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Here's how to manage people you've never even met

https://edition.cnn.com (by Kathryn Vasel, CNN Business December 3, 2020)

John Gulnac has never met his colleagues in person.

He started his new job as a vice president at staffing company Adecco in mid-March, right when the pandemic pushed states into lockdowns.

The initial plan was for him to fly to the company's US headquarters in Jacksonville, Florida, and spend a week meeting with executives and some team members and then work from the Austin-based office. But that never happened.

Instead, his computer was shipped to him and he met everyone virtually.

Gulnac was brought on to rebuild Adecco's direct hire department, assessing the current team and making organizational changes -- including layoffs and bringing in new talent.

Coming in as a new manager charged with overhauling a department is hard enough during normal times. But in a global pandemic, when many employees are working remotely, the task becomes even more challenging. There are no face-to-face meetings, lunches to get to know co-workers, or office drop-ins to ask quick questions.

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"There was a moment or two of anxiety," Gulnac recalled. "That first week, I was sensitive: Are they going to rescind my offer? Am I going to be unemployed?" But after getting reassurance from his bosses, he refocused that energy on the task at hand.

The first thing he did was set up one-on-one video calls with his new team.

"I made myself immediately available. But not being able to read people's body language was tough for me at first," he said. He asked about people's roles, any pain points and what can be done better.

He went over previous performance reviews, historical sales data and created anonymous surveys to get to know his employees better.

He also made it a point to have multiple conversations with workers. "You can't rely on one interaction. Everyone, at first, was a little awkward with the whole video conference thing. But by two or three weeks in, people were getting more comfortable with it."

Creating trust should be a top priority for new managers, advised Denise Rousseau, a professor of organizational behavior and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University. "Once familiarity exists between people, trust can be sustained and good communication can be sustained."

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To help forge relationships, new managers should go on a listening tour.

Hold one-one-one video meetings with everyone and ask about their role and responsibilities, what the team and company could be doing better, unresolved pain points and what they need to be better workers, recommended Barbara Larson, executive professor of management at Northeastern University's D'Amore-McKim School of Business.

"Do minimal talking, then go back as necessary to have more directive or movement-oriented types of conversations."

From Gulnac's conversations, he learned there wasn't enough transparency in the past when it came to priorities and goals. So he erred on the side of over-communicating.

"I tried to be very transparent with them, I also tried to be fair with them," he said. "I was honest when I didn't have the answers."

Talking and sharing a lot is good, but managers should also be clear and concise.

"If people know you, they don't read between the lines as much, but if they don't, they may well search for more information because trust is lower. Lower trust, more vigilance, higher trust less vigilance," said Rousseau.

When setting goals and an agenda with a new team, be sure to illicit feedback and input. Setting pie-in-the-sky goals could create anxiety among the team. Talk to employees to get a

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sense of any circumstances, limitations and other factors that could determine what can realistically be done.

"You want to feel people out on what they think is possible before a goal is formalized," said Rousseau. That doesn't necessarily mean employees set the goals, but provide information to set reasonable goals.

Employees want to put their best foot forward when a new boss comes in -- but that can be hard for some workers to do while they are also working remotely and juggling childcare and online education with their kids.

To help diminish any anxiety workers might have, Gulnac shared snapshots of his own personal life. His four-year-old daughter would make appearances on video calls and he'd take calls during school pickups.

"I let them see behind the monitor, there was a mess. I let the dog bark," he said. "I just thought it was important for them to see I was in the same situation."

Big IT sector reform! Permanent Work From Home will boost global competitiveness

https://www.businesstoday.in (November 6, 2020)

Much needed changes to the Other Service Providers (OSP) framework brought in by the Telecom Ministry will not only ease compliance burden, but also result in greater efficiency, non-urban job creation and global competitiveness.

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What started out as a temporary solution for the Indian IT & ITES companies to facilitate work from home, has now become a structural change which could result in Indian BPM (Business Process Management) industry becoming further competitive in the global markets.

The latest guidelines issued by the Telecom Ministry have done away with several compliance and operational redundancies such as registration, bank guarantee, curb on interconnection between OSP centres, penalty and audit provisions alongside retaining security related obligations to protect against unlawful content, calls or messages carried on through the network.

Welcoming the move, IT industry body Nasscom in a statement said that it will result in tremendously reducing compliance burden of the BPM industry. The new framework now allows for infrastructure sharing between international and domestic OSPs over VPN along with interconnectivity of OSPs, facility to work from anywhere. Nikhil Narendra, Partner, TMT at Trilegal says, "The definition of the term OSP has been limited to voice-based BPO service providers removing the data-based services entirely from the ambit of the regulation."

The new framework primarily contains certain security obligations with additional high-level protections to prevent toll bypass, he added.

Keshav R. Murugesh, Group CEO, WNS and Immediate Past Chairman, NASSCOM is also of the view that this move will enable the Indian IT-BPM industry to progress to the next level of growth and drive global impact, job creation and

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development of Tier 3 and 4 cities allowing effective operations of hybrid model of work.

"The biggest advantage of this policy change is that it will open the doors for us to tap into new talent pool such as the young workforce and retired people with domain knowledge who want to work for few hours remotely. Also, the 110 million strong potential workforce of women with secondary degrees can find employment," he said.

"At WNS, we are working towards building this hybrid model and we are calling this the 'Hub, Edge and Spoke' model. In this model, we are looking at what has to be done from the office (HUB), what can be done from home (EDGE); and what can be done from smaller satellite offices (SPOKE)," added Keshav.

Firms that exploit the dark side of technology will find it leads to losses as well as gains

https://theconversation.com (September 1, 2015)

Has technology enabled us, or enslaved us? This is a question posed by recent coverage of the apparently unsettling working practices and work culture at Amazon, among others. The employee monitoring, long hours and continuous performance measurement reported in the New York Times wouldn’t be possible without modern information technology. It seems for some the world of office work has become, as the article states: “more nimble and more productive, but harsher and less forgiving”.

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The irony is that the very qualities of modern technologies that we find helpful and increasingly cannot do without – constant availability, reliability, mobility, speed and user-friendliness – also cause a number of negative effects. We like that technology-enabled flexibility allows us to work from home when our child is sick, but the same flexibility and reach make us contactable at all hours on all days, and may turn us into email addicts if we are not careful.

The near-infinite options and capacity for customisation offered by today’s app-driven devices leads us to tinker, experiment and discover ways to use them that may not be good for us – individually, or collectively.

It giveth, and it taketh away

One of the examples given for the Amazon work experience was of emails arriving past midnight, with subsequent emails asking why they were not answered. Recent research shows technology causes “technostress”, which reveals itself in a number of ways.

Because information comes at us so from so many sources, we feel forced to work faster to process it all, and take on more than we can handle. Because our colleagues might respond immediately, we feel the pressure to adapt and increase our pace. Keep this pressure up 24/7 and we find ourselves working during holidays, during family time and social engagements, and our lives are invaded by the same technology we value.

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