We now have the world in our pockets. Our TVs are smart. Our cars soon to be driverless.

We live in the tech futures of 1970s futurists, or at least partly.

Along with predictions of technological development came ideas of utopias and dystopias. The technology we craft creates new use cases, opportunities, and dangers. The tech and its application cannot be separated.

This brings us to larger questions of how we should employ technology, what risks new tech may bring, and what the arrival of these new futures means to us as humans on our little ball of dirt.

This is the sphere of digital ethics.

Process Street was invited to the inaugural World Ethical Data Forum, and it has set our minds rolling over some of these questions and the discussions of what may lie ahead.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• What is digital ethics?
• 3 current hot topics in digital ethics
• 3 challenges discussed at the World Ethical Data Forum
• What to look out for in the future of digital ethics

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The best techniques and technology in the world won’t help you if you don’t know how to use them. Annoyingly, with it being so new, it’s hard to tell what machine learning marketing use cases there are to base your efforts on.

In other fields, the breakthrough tech is being used in medical diagnoses, spam filtering, fraud detection, translation and more. All you need is some inspiration to get started with your own uses.

That’s why this post exists.

I’ll cover, in detail, the key ways machine learning is affecting marketing, and how it can be used to handle some of your business process automation, provide actionable data insights and predictions, and even win $1 million on Jeopardy.

Before that though, if you don’t know what machine learning is (or want a refresher), check out our other posts on the topic below:

• An Introduction to Machine Learning in Business: Analyzing Your Success
• 6 Useful Applications of AI & Machine Learning in Your Business Processes

Let’s get started.

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Bitcoin, Cryptocurrencies, Blockchain.

Together, these various buzzwords form a distributed ledger of hype!

The potential for a new decentralized world has led investors, writers, bankers, entrepreneurs and more to herald various versions and aspects of this new technology as representing the future of humanity.

A World Economic Forum survey even suggested that 10% of global GDP would be stored on the blockchain by 2027.

There is a lot of excitement about the direction the technology is heading, but the tech behind Bitcoin has existed for a while now and we’re yet to see much mainstream integration of it.

Which begs the question: what can the blockchain be used for?

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:

• What is the blockchain?
• 5 use cases where the blockchain could thrive
• How the blockchain could be utilized in business process management

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Marketing your product to a wide audience is a real challenge for many businesses. Acquisition costs can be high and effective optimization of approach requires bucketloads of data.

According to research from Aberdeen Group, users of marketing automation software are 17 times more likely to track all their data than those who don’t employ these platforms. This drives improvement and is one of the primary reasons that users of marketing automation decrease customer acquisition costs year on year at over twice the rate of their competition.

Modern marketing methods mean that multiple in-depth campaigns can be run without all the unnecessary administration and time-consuming efforts of the past.

There are many automation tools to choose from on the market and in this article we’ll run through 10 of the best, giving you a breakdown of what each offers.

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“Without IT process management, there is no way to assure [cost-effective IT services]” – Casper van der Kolk

Whether you’ve been in the IT business for years or are just starting to make your mark, there’s no question that managing your processes is vital.

With processes, you can you do more with your current resources by standardizing and optimizing your work. And, when your team knows exactly what to do for each recurring task, they can greatly improve their productivity and motivation.

However, the benefits don’t just stop at a happier and more efficient team.

Integrating these recurring workflows into your IT management resource basket can reduce incident response times, increase customer satisfaction, ensure security compliance, manage department stock and – perhaps best of all – enforce consistency, to give you peace of mind that everything is running as expected.

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If you want a large team of enterprise developers to collaborate effectively, you need to find a suitable place to host your code. Choosing a repository hosting service might not seem like a big deal. But the repo host you choose can have serious consequences for your developers’ productivity and ability to build great products.

Both GitHub and Atlassian’s Bitbucket offer paying customers an unlimited amount of private and public repositories. What distinguishes them isn’t their core hosting function. It’s how they affect your project in different ways. So, in this piece we’re going to examine:

• Extension tools
• Community involvement
• Pricing

The difference in how Bitbucket and GitHub approach these categories might seem trivial. But variance in these features impact an enterprise’s workflow, open source access, and scale.

Let’s compare these two services and see where your enterprise should host its code.

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The following is a guest post submission from Federico Pascual, co-founder and COO of MonkeyLearn.

Customer feedback doesn’t just come in through your site’s contact form – it’s everywhere.

You only have to search the Twitter handle of any product with more than a few hundred users to see that customers love to offer their opinion – positive and negative. It’s useful to be monitoring this and learning from it, but casually collecting feedback on an ad-hoc basis isn’t enough.

Startups thrive on feedback as their ‘North star’, and are constantly evolving based on what their customers request, break, and complain about. Enterprises also can’t overlook the fact that customers are what make any company tick, and must struggle harder than startups to stay relevant and innovate.

So, if you’re just collecting feedback ‘as and when’ it comes in, you’re missing out on data that’s just as important as page views or engagement. It’s like deciding not to bother setting up Google Analytics on your homepage, or not properly configuring your CRM; in the end, you’re deciding to not benefit from data that will have a transformative effect on your product strategy.

With a dataset of feedback – whether that’s from customer reviews, support tickets, or social media – you can dig into the words your customers are using to describe certain parts of your product and get insights into what they like, and what they don’t like. In this post, I’m going to show you how.

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At Process Street, we’re always asked about the best ways to construct, track, and analyze processes.

There are loads of techniques in the school of business process management to help you with these three concerns but in this article, we’re going to give you an introduction to process mining; a data driven way to create, understand, and optimize your processes.

We’ll cover:

• What is process mining?
• 9 process mining tools to automate your analysis
• How to act on your mined results to optimize your processes

We cover solutions for enterprises all the way down to basic approaches for startups. Jump in!

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Staying safe and secure online has always been important but now more and more people are waking up to the fact that we need to take extra steps to protect our various accounts.

Banking online. Shopping online. Communicating online. Running a business online.

These have all rapidly become standard in today’s world. Given how embedded the internet is in our lives we need to take the necessary steps to stop people taking advantage of our online presence.

I recently put out a post explaining how to enable two factor authentication (2FA) across your accounts, including this handy checklist for enabling 2FA with Google and Slack.

Today, we’re going to look at password managers. 1Password vs LastPass vs all the rest!

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:

• Why you should use a password manager
• The Challenge: Can third party password managers be better than your inbuilt systems?
• What do the 6 leading password managers offer and which one is right for you?

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It feels like certain areas of tech are booming at the moment.

Everyone and their nan seem to be incorporating the blockchain into their startup pitches, voice interface devices are sweeping the globe, and chatbots are popping up left right and center.

It feels like part of the rise of chatbots is predicated on the long term potential behind the idea of a smart assistant who can effectively communicate by chat. But the reality of a proper AI assistant is still some distance away.

Nonetheless, chatbots have real world uses already. For some use cases, chatbots are proving to be an effective and affordable alternative to previous practices.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:

• What are chatbots good for?
• How KLM boosted customer interaction 40% with chatbots
• What we do at Process Street with Intercom’s chatbot features
• How to set up a simple chatbot with Chatfuel
• 7 chatbot tools to check out today

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