Tied Together: Recent Episodes
Cohaesus Group
A wide ranging innovation podcast brought to you by Cohaesus Group. We explore what's out there in digital innovation, and what the future holds. Always an interesting and informative listen, learn about how digital changes the world.
In the Western world we often take for granted how seamlessly much of our healthcare links through technology when compared to areas in greater need of medical assistance.
Simprints is an NGO transforming the fight against poverty, and its CEO - Toby Norman - exudes an infectious passion for improving the lives of the 2.1m patients they’ve helped to date.
Join us on Tied Together to learn how technology is increasing transparency, speed and efficiency in rolling out global health campaigns.
This episode of Tied Together covers:
- The core mission behind Simprints
- How they use unique biometric identifiers in place of traditional ID
- The accelerated frontline response achieved by their technology’s efficiency
- Tackling the challenge of data security, privacy and stigma
- Transparency in how charitable donations are used
Just 5 years ago, UX sounded like medical photography to the uninitiated - now for those within the profession like Helena Hill, it’s an indispensable tool with a myriad of disciplines.
We bring Helena, a keynote speaker who runs her own consulting firm, onto Tied Together this week to share how the industry has progressed from simple web & mobile design into an asset that’s now integral to any business looking to offer a top tier customer experience.
This episode of Tied Together covers:
- The shifting perception of user experience in recent years
- UX’s many disciplines, and the increase in specialism
- Future trends in the space, from big screen optimisation to design-led approaches to UX
- Routes into the industry, and which qualifications are best suited to a UX career
Links and references: https://bit.ly/3jAo8bD
Finding the best talent is hard to come by at the moment. As a specialist in building high-performing software teams, Beata Green can break down why.
As Commercial Director of HeadChannel for 12 years, she’s well versed in understanding a team’s needs and maximising their potential. Beata chats with Richard Bundock on Tied Together this week around what’s causing this talent shortage, and how you can overcome it.
This episode of Tied Together covers:
- Beata’s background and path into the tech industry
- The main accelerators of the talent shortage we’re seeing
- Flexibility as an imperative part of any role in today’s market
- Tips on retaining and engaging your existing talent
- How to maximise your team’s potential when home working
Links and references: https://bit.ly/3jAo8bD
2020 presented a huge challenge for air travel, perhaps more than most. But where we saw other sectors finally catching up with their technology, aviation has always seen its tech evolving.
With a 30+ year career in air travel, spanning BA and Qatar Airways among many, Simon Talling-Smith is in a perfect position to observe the industry’s digital advancements.
In Tied Together this week, Simon shares the gradual development of the sector, whether we’ll return to a pre-pandemic experience, and the interoperable & sustainable future of air travel.
This episode of Tied Together covers:
- The newest technologies in the airline industry, from facial recognition to back-end processing systems
- How end-to-end maintenance systems are some of the most vital aspects of aeroplane safety
- Unifying standards internationally to achieve greater interoperability
- Whether we’ll return to pre-2020 in terms of customer quantity, flight cost and more
2020 may have changed the events space forever, but the technology at the forefront of the new age of virtual events has been a long time coming.
Developing their platform since 2008, Social27’s offering has the ingenuity to fulfil the needs of customers like Microsoft, SugarCRM, and facilitating COP26’s complex needs in 2021.
Discover from their CEO, Ike Singh Kehal, how their use of machine learning is tailoring experiences to attendees, the potential for this to create more engaging experiences, and why the bane of digital events - the dreaded Zoom Fatigue - might not actually exist…
This episode of Tied Together covers:
- Social27’s essential role in facilitating COP26, managing the needs of over 2,000 attendee types
- The real underlying issue behind what we dismiss as ‘Zoom Fatigue’
- How machine learning can streamline events and connect attendees, leaving more time for engaging, constructive content
- Differing responses to the technology facilitating online & hybrid events
- The future of events, and integration with the Metaverse
Product feedback is an indispensable tool for Product Managers, so the power that digital tools are providing to capture that feedback shouldn’t be overlooked.
UserVoice is a platform looking to hone in on the customer experience, and their CEO Matt Young is steadfast in his commitment to prioritising and streamlining the feedback capture.
Matt joins us on Tied Together to discuss how digital tools help filter and analyse feedback, how to integrate software most effectively, and the connected future of Product Management tools.
This episode of Tied Together covers:
- Breaking down silos and sharing relevant information throughout a business
- How digital tools are enabling more accurate, relevant analysis of customer feedback
- Keeping feedback capture tools readily available to solve customer issues
- The future of Product Management
- Tackling the core issue of validating the problem you’re solving
Links and references: https://bit.ly/3jAo8bD
Online learning has been turned upside down over the past few years, and with an abundance of content it takes special systems to incite active, engaging learning.
Eduflow is a powerful platform to manage social learning at scale, and their CEO - David Kofoed Wind - is the bright mind heading up their desire to harness the power of social motivation.
In this week’s Tied Together, David shares the LMS platform’s take on providing a unique learning experience that’s useful in schools and businesses alike.
This episode of Tied Together covers:
- How Eduflow’s near-universal appeal broadened their customer base
- Incorporating social, active and collaborative features to engage students
- The evolution of Massively Open Online Courses
- Demand for greater integration between tools
Links and references: https://bit.ly/3jAo8bD
The innovation we see in systems permeating every industry so often originates with the manufacturing sector, and Fulcrum are pushing their clients to achieve more through their ERP offering.
Their Founder & CEO, Sunny Han, is bringing digitisation and acceleration to Fulcrum’s customers. We chat to Sunny on the latest episode of Tied Together to hear how he sees the parallels between machine learning and human intuition, their ambitions to connect businesses together, and the power of system integration.
This episode of Tied Together covers:
- Trust in intuition, and how machine learning algorithms follow similar principles
- Fulcrum’s approach to understanding the end user & customer’s needs
- The future potential for Fulcrum to link an entire supply chain
- Why bespoke solutions might not always be better for the user
- The power of integrating with other, purpose-built systems
Links and references: https://bit.ly/3jAo8bD
As the hospitality industry continues to find its feet again after a tough two years, there’s a lot of solutions that technology can offer to help them work at their very best - namely OpsAnalitica.
Their Founder, Thomas Yionoulis, has an incredibly rich and varied career path taking him from a budding standup comedian to creating Quiznos’ audit software to uphold standards across their 5,000 locations at the time.
Katrina Logie talks with Thomas about the potential gains that technology can bring to the sector, how they design UX to cater to busy hospitality staff, and the future prospect of combining staff, robots, sensors and real time data.
This episode of Tied Together covers:
- Tommy’s illustrious path to founding OpsAnalitica
- The ability to break goals into small steps, and how it translates into their platform
- How customers are expanding the system’s functionality
- Benefits of handling the backend yourself as opposed to cloud services like Azure & AWS
- Technology’s role in the operations side of hospitality
Links and references: https://bit.ly/3jAo8bD
On Tied Together we’re always looking at the future of digital, and one of the most unique implementations of Artificial Intelligence might come from an unexpected source - psychics.
We’re joined by Raven Storm, an expert in extrasensory perception (ESP), whose work with AI is making readings more accessible to us at home. Raven shares all, from the prospect of new, novel expressions of our aura in the Metaverse, to creating the ‘Uber for Psychics’.
This episode of Tied Together covers:
- How technology has developed since its early adoption in psychic readings
- The microservices architecture behind Raven’s psychic database
- Accessing wider markets through social media integration
- Potential enhancement of the Metaverse interface through innovative representations of ‘aura’
Links and references: https://bit.ly/3tWYSlV
The incredible array of tools helping energy customers navigate the complexities of the market now are a far cry from those available when the market opened 20 years ago.
With the supply of energy moving to more renewable sources, we hear from Energy Ogre’s CEO on how they’re using innovative technology to pair consumers’ demand profiles with the right suppliers.
Jesson Bradshaw brings his expertise to Tied Together this week, as we hear about how proprietary systems are rapidly processing huge amounts of data, the cloud computing and database tools essential to their offering, and much more.
This episode of Tied Together covers:
- How the move towards consumer choice presented an opportunity for Energy Ogre to simplify a complex process for consumers
- What the US energy market can learn from developing industries around the world
- The technologies enabling a cost-saving marriage of demand profiles with suitable supplier profiles
- Cloud computing and database tech that’s been essential to Energy Ogre’s offering
Links and references: https://bit.ly/3tRtpll
Two years ago the country’s healthcare response to Covid was immense, and wouldn’t have been possible without the digital advancements made in recent years.
At the forefront of these changes as CEO of Digital Health and Care Wales is Helen Thomas, advocating the need to create a smoother care pathway that signals an end to outdated systems.
Helen joins Katrina on Tied Together to consider how we integrate digital without limiting access to those less adept with tech, the data processing tools enabling Wales’ community pharmacies, and more on connecting healthcare services together.
This episode of Tied Together covers:
- Healthcare providers’ shift away from dependency on paper
- Balancing digitisation with the need to maintain access for the less tech-literate
- Which tools are enabling the NHS to handle the huge amount of data required
- How the pandemic accelerated the focus on areas of improvement
Links and references: https://bit.ly/3CLJdbQ
Glovo has seen monumental growth in the delivery sector, expanding its innovative tech solution into 23 countries, so how do they manage data to match their ever-increasing demand?
Narek Verdian is Chief Technology Officer for the Barcelona-based startup, and he joins Katrina Logie on Tied Together to discuss how machine learning and AI are essential as they breach new territories, and what tools we need for the future of hybrid work to live up to its potential.
This episode of Tied Together covers:
- The future tech solutions needed to improve the hybrid workflow
- Building a unique delivery platform with customer service at its heart
- Glovo’s innovative use of AI, machine learning and data science
- Handling the complexity of a multi-category service
- The essential tools Glovo rely on to measure customer demands
Links and references: https://bit.ly/3Hu1knC
The key to nailing seamless UX design across territories is closely tied to both the incredibly complex world of psychology, and a global awareness of cultural differences.
This is typified in the approach taken by this week’s podcast guest, UX Practitioner Thomas Watkins, who considers himself more of a Design Psychologist.
The founder of UX design agency 3Leaf joins Lynsey Brownlow to break down how consistency helps keep experiences predictable and smooth for users, the importance of considering tone of copy in different regions, and how vital it is that we continue to research shifting trends in UX preferences.
This episode of Tied Together covers:
- The role of social cognitive neuroscience in user experience design
- Priming, the stroop effect, and other psychological quirks you should account for
- How simple language translation can break designs
- Key cultural differences that global UX designers need to consider
- Finding the right tone based on industry
Links and references: https://bit.ly/3gMX0oH
Whether or not they’re aware of it, businesses of all sizes are gathering a wealth of data with which they can make invaluable observations.
Joining us on Tied Together this week to discuss how organisations are maximising this data to their benefit is Matt Nixon, Founder of data & analytics consultancy Molzana, who recently became the latest, exciting addition to the Cohaesus Group!
We dive into the origin of Matt’s expertise in data analysis, the channel agnostic approach that allows Molzana to work effectively in diverse sectors, and how they make such an influential impact through the insights they provide.
This episode of Tied Together covers:
- The source of Matt’s keen focus on data analytics
- Handling the breadth of clients’ challenges and their unique tech stacks
- The differences between trusting gut instinct and following the data
- How Molzana bridges the gap between creative marketers and data analytics professionals
- Staying flexible and channel agnostic to work with clients in varied industries
Links and references: https://bit.ly/34pAO0L
The opportunity to spend time with your customers is the most valuable thing a business can do. Put that time to good use - it can make or break experiences.
Sky’s Flavio Lamenza has observed the best and worst in user experiences, from sites implementing simple feedback tools to halting an eCommerce funnel the moment you set foot on a site.
We hear from Flavio, Senior UX Designer, who joins us to offer his fabulous insights into the hurdles you can remove from your user experience, how you can spend more quality time with customers, and why it’s vital to take a holistic look at UX rather than rely purely on data alone.
This episode of Tied Together covers:
- Whether the widespread use of ‘feedback drawers’ is actually effective
- The importance of carefully considering when you ask for feedback
- Examples of feedback collection practices to avoid
- Why interoperability between steps in UX is key to solving issues
- Tips for anyone breaking into UX
Links and references: https://bit.ly/3GJGxwO
Learn more with our 'The Problem with Feedback Survey's' Whitepaper: https://bit.ly/3slAzMH
Health & Wellbeing is an area with far more focus than ever before, evidenced by the slew of apps and services jumping into the space within the past few years alone.
So where does Tictrac’s James Henson see the most effective outcomes for end users, and how can we achieve it? Interoperability between platforms promises to unlock new experiences greater than the sum of their parts.
Learn how Tictrac are traversing the digital health space, and the bright future they’re working to bring businesses, on episode 23 of Tied Together.
This episode of Tied Together covers:
- The driving force behind an explosion of wellness services
- How much data is needed behind the scenes of health tracking apps
- Collaboration and interoperability, and how they could evolve the sector
- Creating a research-backed, useful UX for customers
- The future of digital wellness
Links and references: https://bit.ly/32QIbho
Marketing spend is an essential growth tool in business and brand transformation, so why is such a huge proportion of it reportedly ineffective?
For those looking to grow their brand, simply throwing money at the problem is unlikely to yield the success that The Thread Team’s Richard Calvert fosters with their clients.
Richard joins us on Tied Together this week for a dive into why it’s not enough simply to obtain a tool without properly applying it, and how modern marketing’s focus on digital touchpoints doesn’t elude the same issues that remain relevant to any business in any era.
This episode of Tied Together covers:
- Details on the vast MarTech spend, and why so much of it is ineffective
- How ‘modern marketing’ primarily focuses on digital touchpoints
- Data as the catalyst for driving change
- Ways that businesses can maximise what they have before investing in new solutions
Links and references: https://bit.ly/3yP7YSE
Long gone are the days of physical job boards and drive-by CV runs; the systems for hiring talent are more powerful than ever, but with great power comes great responsibility.
With an overview of how technology in the recruitment sector has progressed over the past 10 years, talent.io’s Tom Morgan features on this week’s episode of Tied Together.
He and host Katrina Logie discuss revitalising lesser-used platforms, the growth of A.I. & automation, and where future platforms could perfect the recruitment experience for businesses and candidates alike.
This episode of Tied Together covers:
- The evolution of recruitment in the past decade
- The art of combining older technologies with new platforms and approaches
- How digitisation is driving a need for creative marketing in recruitment
- A.I. and automation’s growing role in talent acquisition
Links and references: https://bit.ly/3ycrIzh
The DAP Strategy is a fascinating new book, by Raj Sundarason, which takes a look at the rise of the need of digital adoption platforms.
https://www.dapstrategist.com/
Katrina Logie talks to Mohamed Ait Si Brahim, Chief Technology Officer at Profile Pensions about how digital has changed the course of financial services and how it has improved and how it could be better. What tools they use; what's new, what's different and what's the future of Financial services
Katrina Logie begins by introducing Thomas, Head of Digital at The Club Company. As makes sense when talking about how things have changed in hospitality in the past few years, the talk naturally moves to Covid, and the huge effect that that had. As Thomas says, it's really forced hospitality to make some changes; changes that we hope to see snowball into something new.
Thomas tells us about the importance of building a community online, and what software they felt it important to create themselves, and what they relied on existing for.
Hospitality should be doing more, and Thomas has a dream about what the future might look like, and a couple of ideas about how it might get there.
Perhaps in a year, we'll catch up with Thomas again, and find out if we're any closer to his dream hotel.
Katrina Logie, guest host of Tied Together, interviews Roberto Hortal, Head of Innovation at RM Plc. Innovation being what we’re all about at Tied Together, we thought it important to get a look at how digital affects the educational sector with an expert.
In this episode Kaustav Bhattacharya mentions Mach Alliance and Julian Browne talks about the IT Strategic Impact Matrix from Nolan and McFarlane.
Rich and Toby mention quite a few things in this episode that you may be interested in reading more about.
- Cohaesus Group website
- Secure Delivery website
- NIST 2020 vulnerability analysis
- OWASP Top 10 (as of time of release)
- ICO report on British Airways case
- Rework, by Jason Fried
- Zdnet article about Microsoft's study into two-factor authentication
- OWASP Application Security Curriculum (Appsec)
- OWASP Membership
And remember, you can contact Toby at enquiries@securedelivery.io, and Richard at tiedtogether@cohaesus.co.uk. if you have any questions about the content of this episode.
Stepnell is a complete construction partner. Robert Speirs BSc (Hones), ICIOB is one of the Directors at Stepnell, responsible for leading the Southern operations.
Richard Bundock is the CEO of the Cohaesus Group of agencies.
In the episode Rich mentions a drywalling robot. A video can be found here.
Join us for episode 13 of Tied Together, where we discuss the pros and cons of remote working, and what models could be available to organisations in the future.
A fresh look at home working from Christian Turner, blogger and Senior Customer Marketing Manager at British Business Bank.
Links to studies and pages mentioned in the episode:
Cohaesus company - www.cohaesus.co.uk
British Business Bank company - www.british-business-bank.co.uk
Christian Turner's Medium article -www.christianturner.medium.com
BBC article explaining how working from home erodes trust amongst colleagues - www.bbc.com
Microsoft brain study - www.microsoft.com
HSBC having Zoom-free Fridays - www.bbc.com/news
Alex Lee works at https://www.cohaesus.co.uk
Matt Scaysbrook works at https://www.weteachcro.com/
Join us for another episode of Tied Together from Cohaesus.
In this episode we talk with Fraser Meikle, Head of Business Development at Cohaesus. Fraser talks us through what experience inflation is, how it permeates everything.
We also talk about too much experience! how organisations get it wrong, and how some make it a game.
If you have any questions, comments about this or any other episode. Please let us know via tiedtogether@cohaesus.co.uk.
Bios
Fraser Meikle
https://www.linkedin.com/in/fraser-meikle/
Richard Bundock
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rbundock/
Google page experience is a new metric that Google is adding to their algorithm, in terms of how they how they present search results.
This isn't about SEO. It's a technical challenge that will change how you think about your technology stack.
Join us as we breakdown in lay terms what you need to think about, and what you need to do.
Key Highlights
"This is something that really needs to be implemented by a tech team. It's rarely something that can be contributed to and addressed by an SEO team."
If you have any questions, comments about this or any other episode. Please let us know via tiedtogether@cohaesus.co.uk.
Bios
Pete Robinson
https://www.linkedin.com/in/pete-robinson/
Richard Bundock
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rbundock/
Join us for episode 9 as Julian Brown (NED @ Cohaesus and CTO to the stars) walks through the A-Z of digital strategy.
“I have never seen a digital transformation with a multi million price tag on it actually deliver anything of any value remotely at all.”, Julian Browne NED @ Cohaesus
At the end of the episode we come up with quick lightweight actionable strategy that you could use today.
We also talk about lemons, sandwiches, feature factories and lickable icons.
If you have any questions, comments about this or any other episode. Please let us know via tiedtogether@cohaesus.co.uk.
Bios
Julian Browne
https://www.linkedin.com/in/julianbrowne
Richard Bundock
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rbundock/
If your organisation is stuck, siloed, blocked or just unfocused on human needs this episode is for you.
Our Head of Experience and Design explains how anyone can put their organisation on the journey to customer delight. We talk through the tools, processes and know how required to develop a clear concise roadmap for any organisation struggling with the move to the experience economy.
We talk about the changes in expectation all around us, how those changes might impact the future and how to take the first steps. The conversation then turns to the structure of discovering what needs to change and how to get the business on-board with the changes. We end talking about how to lock in change and ensure that the work happens.
If you have any questions, comments about this or any other episode. Please let us know via tiedtogether@cohaesus.co.uk.
I remember the first time I met Hedley Smith, founder and CEO of Homebox, during a venture programme four years ago. His energy and passion to transform the energy switching market was palpable. Using data to improve customer experience has always been a constant for Homebox and in this episode of Tied Together we look closely as how Hedley has cleverly used data to power the transformation of Homebox and its services. At Homebox, they use analytics tools such as Amplitude to measure customer interactions, drop off rates, and identifying all those customers who are having trouble, such as spending lots of time trying to complete an action, which could be a journey through an energy switching process. This focus on data empowers Homebox to form insights on long term trends on how their customers are setting up energy accounts and where the switching process is slow or fast. Using data to analyse how customers switch between energy suppliers is very complex and the UK energy regular OFGEM is trying to introduce a rapid supplier switching framework in 2021/22 that could potentially allow customers to switch supplier every 24 hours which is an exciting proposition and it is one of the many reasons why data and the API economy is central to the future strategy and success of Homebox. As Hedley puts it, if you're not using data to constantly focus on conversion rate optimisation to provide the best possible service to your customers, using techniques such as A/B testing and customer feedback, then other competitors will steal a march on your success.
Property technology, or proptech as the industry calls it, has been around for decades. However, a new breed of data driven startups in the proptech space are starting to disrupt the proptech industry that has traditionally been dominated by the incumbent, legacy platforms. Individuals looked to build their own portfolio of properties as a side income or a main livelihood have never had it better with platforms enabling developers to make fast, intelligent and insightful choices on where to buy land or build properties. Larger companies who are in the property building and land development space are also reaping the benefits of proptech where they are able to respond faster to economic and climate change and therefore maintain that dominance in their niches.
In this episode of Tied Together, we speak with Ro Sharma who owns an established property portfolio and is also a proptech enthusiast who is connected with some of the leading startups. With his experience in the property markets and love for proptech, Ro shares his insights into how new proptech platforms are disrupting their industry and shares his thoughts on the possibility of developing an ecosystem based solution that brings together many of these startups and established players in the proptech field.
We live in a world drowning in data, yet all too often, companies and their leaders have not fully realised the transformative power of data to help them make strategic decisions, grow their products and services and ultimately create new, revenue generating opportunities. In this episode of Tied Together, we speak to two leading data experts - Hanan Belarbi and Helen Blaikie. They explore what it takes for organisations around the world to build data literate workforces and dive in to the challenges and opportunities in driving lasting cultural change within organisations that lead to the adoption of a more data first mentality and approach to developing solutions and making business decisions.
If you'd like to find how Cohaesus can help your company develop a strong data vision and deliver a convincing data strategy to your board, please do contact us.
Welcome back to another episode of Tied Together brought you by Cohaesus. I'm Kaustav Bhattacharya, Chief Technology Officer at Cohaesus and in this episode I have the immense pleasure of having our CEO and founder, Rich Bundock on the show. As a tech entrepreneur, Rich has seen the good, bad and ugly of building digital services. In todays episode Rich and I dissect the many examples of great and bad digital experiences and shed light on how businesses can deliver compelling solutions that keep customers engaged.
Raj Krishnamurthy is the CEO and founder of Freespace, a company that has created an intelligent buildings platform. We explore how the internet of things (IoT) and the explosion of data that IoT devices produce has enabled startups to help building developers and the tenants of buildings leverage insights from data to start designing and using buildings in far more efficient ways. From solving the problem of never being able to find a free meeting room to exploring how open API's are allowing third parties to combine data from HR systems and integrate building occupancy data in to digital twin projects, we dive in to the details of how intelligent building technology is disrupting the market and what the COVID19 pandemic means for this burgeoning, new market of intelligent buildings.
If any of the topics in this episode of Tied Together interests and you'd like to get in touch, please contact us as we'd be delighted to discuss needs.
Coheasus provides expert, technical development, systems integration, data strategy, experience design and continuous improvement services to businesses across the globe.
First there was the hype around chat bots and then came voice assistants. The latter learned from the mistakes of the former, although they're both very different mediums. Chat bots are text based where as voice assistants by their very nature use voice for interaction and collectively chat bots and voice assistants form a category of user interaction called conversational interfaces. Testing conversational interfaces is complex and requires a different set of testing and quality assurance skills. In this podcast, we speak to Lucian Stroie, an industry expert in the field of testing and quality assurance and learn about the best approaches to testing conversation interfaces so that they achieve business objectives and really click with the end user.
Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is a system for increasing the percentage of visitors to a website that convert into customers. When used for the right purpose, CRO can complement the experience design of your digital project, ensuring your service or product is connecting with your customers in a way that's mindful of their needs and driving success for your key performance indicators.
If any of the topics in this episode of Tied Together interests and you'd like to get in touch, please contact us as we'd be delighted to discuss needs.
Coheasus provides expert, technical development, systems integration, data strategy, experience design and continuous improvement services to businesses across the globe.