Kastle Systems Awarded 2020 Pandemic Tech Innovation Award

Our vision ahead

Technology continues to evolve at an exhilarating pace. For those in the technology industry, existing IT skills are important; however, being able to adapt to this dynamic landscape is just as critical. At TransUnion, our goal is to provide insights to businesses and consumers to make informed decisions, while enabling trust within the marketplace. Our vision is a technological evolution in a global setting where we work in an integrated way to support our associates and deliver innovative solutions.

To accomplish this, we’re focusing on training and development, because an investment in technology goes hand in hand with an investment in our technologists. The journey ahead requires an atmosphere that provides everyone with the tools to learn more about the essential programming applications to rapidly respond to customer needs. That’s why our associates will be equipped with enhanced technical skills while building a fulfilling career through hands-on skill development.

Teedra Bernard, Vice President of HR Global Technology, shares more on our philosophy, “We’re committing to skill development that builds on the capabilities of our associates to enhance the existing operational expertise. There are several ways to adapt to the future of technology, at TransUnion; learning by doing is one of them. This environment gives everyone the opportunity to do their best work and provide industry leading products to the communities we serve.”

As a result, we’ve implemented an interactive online training portal that is accessible to all associates across TransUnion. On this platform there are various learning paths covering programming languages such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and other functional concepts commonly used in cloud computing. Through this partnership, over 2,000 of our technologists have taken advantage of the resources and initiated over 400 labs. From interactive sandbox environments to step-by-step objective-based scenarios, all learning styles are supported on this platform. This focus on training has allowed us to concentrate on creating products that solve our customers’ toughest challenges. Having the foundation of a collaborative environment where everyone can bring their ideas to the table is what sets the stage for a great workplace atmosphere.

First-hand experience

The outcomes of our products and solutions are powered by our acceleration towards speed and scalability. Skill development on our team gives everyone the opportunity to find new ways to build tomorrow’s solutions at the continuing rate of technology. To remain ahead of the curve, Michael Catuara, Director of Systems Engineering and Programming, recently became a certified AWS Associate Solutions Architect after completing the required courses through the online training portal. Michael shares his first-hand experiences:

How do you think this focus on training is setting you up for success here at TransUnion and beyond?

By leveraging a cloud training platform, TransUnion is setting all associates up for success because technology is not only evolving in one area, rather it’s changing all around us. It’s inevitable that everyone in the technology space will need to learn new operations and protocols as they continue to change each and every day. Using these resources, I’ve been able to advance my skills within the functional programming languages we use to ultimately bring new products to the market. These learning paths promote a growth mindset, and being around that each day makes work an exciting place. I’m thrilled that the organization continues to cultivate an innovative culture that supports the technology team, as well as all associates who want to learn more.

What surprised you about the certification exams you took?

I recently became certified as an AWS Associate Solutions Architect which has given me a better perspective on how to operate in our cloud enabled programs. The course included a deep-dive into the most frequently deployed AWS services, determining how to monitor metrics, configure security, leveraging various cloud storage services and much more. Overall, studying took about three months and now I have a certification that I can apply in my day-to-day activities and beyond. The most surprising function of the cloud portal is how much information each section provides. The step-by-step demonstrations make it much easier for me to take those teachings and implement into my daily product integrations.

What do you plan to learn next?

As a Technical Service Owner for Analytics at TransUnion, my team is continuing to drive key projects into their next phase and it requires an out-of-the-box mentality. Using the real-time lab has allowed me and my team to build our products with an emphasis on end-user capabilities. With this in mind we’re concentrating on ways to take the experience and functionality of our products to the next level. To continue this progression, I have started the coursework to prepare for the AWS SysOps certification exam. The additional knowledge will prepare me for “Day 2” in our implementation lifecycle, focusing on maintenance, uptime and support for TransUnion products.     

Do you want to redefine technology?

As technology evolves, we’re focused on thriving by creating a dynamic, fast-paced environment where the growth of our products is driven by our imagination and what we envision for the marketplace. This is not only an evolution, it’s an opportunity to design the path ahead and make a meaningful impact on the world around us. Our associates have the tools they need to turn roadblocks into solutions, together we’re redefining the capabilities that will exist tomorrow.

Learn more about careers in Technology @ TransUnion.

Find your next technology challenge here.

Learn more about TransUnion’s culture here.

To stay in the loop for all TransUnion career updates, register here.

Help support the next generation of UX Practitioners by putting them to work on your unique business challenges. Sign up to participate in General Assembly’s Client Project Program today!

How It Works:
• Clients are assigned a small team of UX design students, who collaborate with them to provide research and design for an app, website, or product in 3-week sprints.
• Your participation will give our UX Design students the opportunity to scope and execute work for real companies with real business needs.
• As a client, you get deliverables and valuable insights free of charge; our students get to apply their skills to real business needs.

If selected, you will be required to attend two virtual meetings (via Zoom) for project kickoff and project delivery:

• Project Kickoff: Tuesday, September 8, 2020 (1-2 hours, exact time TBD)
• Project Presentation: Monday, September 28, 2020 (1 hour, exact time TBD)

Additionally, you’ll need to be available via email and phone approximately 3–5 hours a week for your design team. For the kickoff and final presentation meetings, you are more than welcome to invite members of your own UX, Front-End Development, and Stakeholder teams.

You will also need to provide the following:

• Existing metrics and analytics
• Design files and assets (style guides, fonts, etc.)
• Access to the site, product and/or feature in development

For more information and submit your company for consideration, please click here!

Looking over this year’s Best Places to Work winners, it’s hard not to get nostalgic for the office, pre-COVID. Talk of tricked-out breakrooms, birthday celebrations, impromptu happy hours and rooftop decks has us pining for the days of interacting in real life with co-workers.Today, most of us are still working from home, unsure when office life (or any part of life) will be back to normal. It will happen, of course, and when it does, these companies are showing the way: providing employees with the perks, amenities, pay and benefits that keep them happy and productive.

A record 14,522 employees participated in our survey about their workplaces this year, well before the virus took hold. Read more about the top companies in three categories—large, medium and small.

Centro was named the 25th Best Places to Work in 2020 by Crain’s Chicago Business. Among our benefits cited were our 401K match, and unlimited PTO. Here is the full list in the URL below. I’m sure other ITA member companies are on the list too.

To see the entire list of companies, visit the original post here.

In 25 words or less, what is Karat all about?

Karat’s mission is to make every interview predictive, fair, and enjoyable. This lets engineering leaders make quality hires, reduce bias, and deliver exceptional candidate experiences.

What problem do you solve and how do you solve it better than the competition?

Software engineers are essential for business growth. But, most interview processes tax engineering productivity, fail to achieve diversity and inclusion goals, miss hiring targets, and produce new hires that don’t meet technical expectations. This often occurs when companies lack the time and/or expertise to conduct the interviews needed, creating what we call an “Interview Gap.”

Karat is the only company that offers remote, human interviews for software engineers at scale. In terms of competition, clients usually bring us in to either fix their internal process, or to replace some kind of automated code test that is usually riddled with inconsistency, cheating, bias, or poor sign-up rates.

What makes Karat stand out?

The human touch! Being a human-centered company is key to creating enjoyable interview experiences for candidates. I love the empathy we have across our company–from top to bottom. It would be easy to treat job candidates like numbers, but then we’d be no different from the automated code tests that we’re replacing.

How did you get started?

Our co-founders, Mohit Bhende and Jeffrey Spector, were both approaching the problem of interviewing from different sides.

Mo was a product strategy leader at Xbox and couldn’t find the engineering time to interview enough candidates to fill his open roles. They had an Interview Gap! So Mo ended up hiring a bunch of retired Microsoft engineers to conduct the team’s interviews. At Karat, we used a similar approach to professionalize the interviewer role. Now we have a global community of dedicated Interview Engineers.

Jeff was the Chief of Staff to Melinda Gates at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They were conducting research on how people get jobs, and how interviews are such a critical moment in peoples’ lives. The empathy behind that led Karat to treat interview candidates like customers. So we built an unbelievable network of customer experience managers and a top of the line coding/interview studio to make sure our candidates are as comfortable as possible and ready to highlight their strengths as engineers.

And that’s how Interview Engineering was born.

What are the biggest challenges you face as you scale your business?

One early challenge we faced as we expanded into different industries was learning how to align our interviews and results with each company’s unique hiring bar. Karat ended up inventing an entirely new discipline called Alignment Engineering.

The team is led by Shannon Hogue. Shannon is a Chicago-transplant living in San Francisco (but you can still catch her accent slip on the occasional video, it’s amazing). Shannon’s team goes into each enterprise account, meets with the engineering leaders, reviews job descriptions, identifies the competencies that hiring managers need to assess, and works with our content team to develop interview formats and questions that match the client’s needs.

We’re also able to use the data and feedback from onsite interviews and hiring decisions to refine our questions and hiring bars over time, so as our clients’ teams improve and mature, their interviews grow with them!

What’s the number one thing on your to-do list?

We’ve been talking a lot about fairness over the last few months. It’s really heartening to see so many business leaders making commitments to change, and we realize that as a company that sits at this pivotal moment in peoples’ lives and careers–the interview–there is a lot that Karat can, and must, do to help improve diversity in tech.

Earlier this summer, Karat shared our commitment to the Black community. One of the things that our partnerships and research have taught us, is that people get better with interviews the more they practice. But at the same time, less than 40% of computer science students who graduated from Historically Black Colleges and Universities, have exposure to technical interviews before entering the job market.

So last month we kicked off a $1 million practice interview initiative that is designed to make sure the engineers coming out of HBCUs are coming into their first job interviews on equal footing with the kids coming out of traditional top-10 CS schools. 

What’s the coolest perk Karat’s office has?

That it’s empty!

We were actually getting ready to open up a big new headquarters in March, but as COVID-19 hit, our leadership team didn’t hesitate to pull people back from the field and go to an all-remote culture.

We got to tour the office once as a company back in February as we were getting ready for it to open. It looked amazing, so I’m sure it wasn’t an easy decision. But really do live our core principles, so instead of moving in, Karat added a bunch of WFH benefits to help employees set up our home offices, and here we are for the foreseeable future.

It will be nice to see people again, though…I miss all the dogs (we’re pet-friendly) and the group lunches!

What motivates your employees to come to work every day?

Technical interviews are broken. And we get to fix them!

Also, I love how quickly we are able to help drive results. Not only with our clients by saving them tons of time and money, and helping them hire quality engineers, but also with the candidate experiences. We have a feedback loop where every candidate has the opportunity to review their interview experience, and some of the responses there are really incredible to see–even from candidates who didn’t perform particularly well on their first try.

It’s so rewarding to see how quickly we are able to make a difference from both a material, and human standpoint.

What is the one thing Karat cannot live without?

We pretty much live on Slack. For better or worse. Sometimes worse. For instance, I’m not looking forward to seeing how many DMs I have after this interview!

What are the growth and scaling opportunities within Karat’s industry?

I love that question! Honestly, it feels like we’re barely scratching the surface. To date, we’ve conducted 70,000 technical interviews for companies hiring software engineers, but it’s easy to imagine the concept of Interview Engineering expanding to other roles, other industries, and other geographies.

What’s most exciting for me is that our mission isn’t to make every “technical” interview predictive, fair, and enjoyable–it’s to make every interview predictive, fair, and enjoyable. We’re changing the way every company interviews!

UI Health, Chicago Medical Society and PhysIQ Collaborate to Protect Frontline COVID-19 Health Care Workers and High-Risk Patients with Advanced AI

CHICAGO, IL – June 16, 2020 – The University of Illinois Hospital and Health Sciences System (UI Health), Chicago Medical Society and AI healthcare tech pioneer physIQ announced today that physIQ’s pinpointIQTM continuous remote patient monitoring (cRPM) system will monitor the vital signs of the health system’s frontline health care workers and high-risk patients with COVID-19 for early signs of disease exacerbation. 

The pinpointIQ system is an FDA-cleared AI analytics platform that monitors the vital signs through a wearable biosensor detecting changes in physiologic indices of health status.  The system then notifies clinicians charged with monitoring data produced by pinpointIQ for clinically-relevant changes in vital signs. This allows an early plan of care to be developed that may prevent complications or hospitalization.

“Our top priority is protecting and promoting the health and safety of our patients and staff, and COVID-19 has created an urgent need for innovative, tech-driven solutions,” said UIC’s Dr. Terry Vanden Hoek, Chief Medical Officer at UI Health and Head of the Department of Emergency Medicine at the College of Medicine. “We are excited to partner with the Chicago Medical Society and physIQ to offer home monitoring options to some patients and staff with COVID-19 that could help us detect physiologic changes of illness progression that may indicate a need for early follow up with their physician.”

Through this collaboration, the University of Illinois Hospital will have access to the technology and monitor certain staff and patients with COVID-19 with risk factors such as obesity and heart or lung conditions and who are isolating at home. “Continuous monitoring of patients using physiological modeling with AI offers an opportunity to detect a virus exacerbation early. Early intervention may prevent the body from initiating the ‘cytokine storm’ that we think causes the most severe complications of COVID-19,” Vanden Hoek said. “We hope this technology will help us to closely follow the health of our staff – in partnership with their primary care providers – and patients while they are at home with COVID-19.”

The potential utility of pinpointIQTM for use with COVID-19 patients is supported by the work physIQ has done with USAID, the CDC and Scripps Health in patients with Ebola, as well as in clinical studies conducted with Veterans Affairs in patients with severe congestive heart failure. 

The pinpointIQ system comprises a Vital Connect wearable biosensor, pulse oximeter and smartphone streaming of physiological data to a HIPAA compliant cloud-based server, which uses FDA-cleared analytics to produce clinically actionable insight. For homebound UI Health patients, the system will be prescribed by an emergency room physician and shipped directly to the patient’s home without requiring direct physical contact from a clinician. For health care workers who choose to participate, the system will be deployed at the hospital, through UI Health’s employee health program.

“To make a life-changing impact, we need to be at the front line of health care,” noted Gary Conkright, CEO of physIQ. “We are proud to support homebound healthcare workers and patients who are high risk for COVID-19 exacerbation with our remote physiologic monitoring technology.  This opportunity also allows physIQ to support UI Health in its mission to reduce and eliminate the health disparities experienced by vulnerable communities, which have recently seen disproportionate rates of COVID-19 infection and death due to COVID-19 complications.”

“PhysIQ is alone in offering deep analytics and AI to monitor the health of patients and their healthcare providers,” said Ted Kanellakes, Executive Director for the Chicago Medical Society. “The Chicago Medical Society is proud to support this important collaboration. As a provider to underserved communities, UI Health and physIQ together will make a real difference to the people of Chicago.”

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Staying connected while remotely can be tough. But that doesn’t mean creative collaboration has to stop.

For the last several months, Forte Group, a Chicago-based custom software services company, has published a series of videos called Forte Connect. Forte Connect is a series of conversations with business and technology leaders to share ideas, collaborate, and stay connected.

“Working in technology allows us to share ideas with a lot of really smart, insightful people,” C.J. Montano, Partner and Managing Director at Forte Group, said. “When we started working remotely in early March, we wanted to keep those conversations going, even if they were now over Zoom calls. We decided to call it Forte Connect because we wanted to stay connected and share ideas with technology industry thought leaders. It’s been a really enjoyable and educational experience.”

Here’s the latest episode, where members of the Forte panel speak with digital transformation expert, Amit Ainapure. Amit, who is also a business agility coach and Director of Program Management at TIAA, shares his thoughts on how organizations should reprioritize their key initiatives–including digital transformation–in 2020.

https://fortegrp.com/digital-transformation-2020/

On the page, you can also check out each of the seven recordings the Forte Connect team has published since March. Topics include remote work and employee engagement strategies, how technology is helping the supply chain, how to maintain product vision through challenging times, and more.

Interested in participating in an episode of Forte Connect? You can reach out to their team at news@fortegrp.com.

As companies expand their search for top talent and remote work becomes more widespread, many technology teams end up with colleagues working all over the map. The best ideas stem from communication and collaboration among individuals with diverse backgrounds and skillsets. But how do we support a culture of new ideas when our teams aren’t physically all in the same place?

We’ve faced this challenge at CSC Corptax®. We have a large remote workforce, and we’ve taken steps to make teamwork and communication part of our values and culture. To further support innovation, we also embrace career ownership and team members raising their hands to take on new challenges.

Ryan McCullagh a CSC Corptax software engineer since 2017, says the company has found ways to make remote work, well, work. “Groups are never isolated, and we’re encouraged to reach out within and outside our teams for support. We use Microsoft Teams® so anyone can feel free to communicate with any other developer or team,” he says.

CSC Corptax’s culture of sharing knowledge includes everyone, Ryan says, and management is very approachable. “No one is intimidating. You never feel uncomfortable reaching out to a person just because they’re not on your team.”

The relationship between the software and product teams are also different than what can be found in other companies. Typically, one team will gather requirements which are sent to the software developers for implementation. “At CSC Corptax, we have a dedicated Product Team that can provide direction to software developers when there’s a new feature that needs to be implemented or other enhancements to the core product. The Product Team is a huge resource and benefit that makes sure our software is delivered on time and as expected,” Ryan says.

CSC Corptax software engineers spend most of their time coding, but a good amount of research is also necessary. Ryan has learned so much about CSC Corptax systems and code, he’s become a resource for other developers. “We have a lot of code and every team member can’t know every part of the code. With the experience I’ve gained learning our systems and code, I can share my knowledge with colleagues and new hires,” he says.

New hires at CSC Corptax aren’t expected to know everything that comes their way either. “We document everything, so when a new member joins the team, they get a document that tells them exactly how to set up their computer to run our code,” says Ryan, adding that new hires are encouraged to make notes and enhance the document so that the next person has an updated version.

The new team members are also encouraged to ask questions, which is part of the CSC Corptax culture of teamwork and collaboration. “When people ask the right questions, they can learn a lot faster and not get stuck spinning their wheels when another team member might have an answer,” he says.

Since CSC Corptax has been around for more than 45 years, there are processes in place for code reviews and coding standards. This benefits new team members so they pick things up faster. It also benefits the work-life balance for all the teams.  “All of our code goes to code reviews so we can catch bugs before they make it to production. This means I’m not up at 3 a.m. trying to fix something,” Ryan says.

Everyone, from new hires to those firmly established in their careers, should volunteer for projects at work. “Have an open mind when it comes to working in new areas. This applies to me at CSC Corptax, but also for any project, team, or company you work for,” he says.

CSC Corptax is fortunate to have a history of remote employees and teams being successful. For others, this change in working environment is a drastic shift, one we don’t see ending anytime soon. It all comes down to a culture of open communication that runs throughout the organization. When people know they’re free to ask questions and collaborate with others to solve a problem, good things happen.

MxD team

Each year, Connected World compiles nominations that are submitted by industry and researched by the editorial team. The Women of Technology entries are judged by a panel of past winners who determine the new winners based on established criteria including involvement with technology, how each individual has helped a company prosper and progress, how she has contributed to the growth of technology, and how she has mentored other women and goes above and beyond to support other women in business, technology, transformation, and her local community.

This year, MxD CEO Chandra Brown was named a 2020 Woman of Technology/IoT.

Read more here.

MxD is excited to announce the release of several open project calls. We invite you to review the requests for proposals (RFPs) on several subjects including cybersecurity assessment, emerging technology and cyber research, and supply chain risk management.

If you have questions regarding any of the projects below, please send your questions to the MxD Projects Team at projects@mxdusa.org.

20-11 Emerging Technologies in Manufacturing and Cybersecurity Research in Manufacturing – Deadline to submit is September 3, 2020 – View RFP here

20-05 Achieving Resilience through Proactive Supply Chain Risk Management – Deadline to submit is October 15, 2020 – View RFP here