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All aboard the express train to the cloud

“All aboooooaaaaard!” Whether you love to watch the big freight engines rumble by, or you just ride a commuter train to work, the safety rules around trains are pretty simple for most of us. Look both ways before crossing the track, and never try to beat a train, for example. If you’re a rail operator, however, safety is a much more complicated challenge—such as making sure you always have the right people on the right positions, and ensuring that the crew is properly trained, rested, and has up-to-date safety certifications.

Helping rail operators tackle that huge challenge is CrewPro, the railroad crew management software from PS Technology, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Union Pacific Railroad. The original versions of this package run on mainframes and still are used by railroads ranging from the largest Class I freight operators to local rail-based passenger transit systems in major US cities.

Those railroad operators use CrewPro to handle complex staffing issues on the engines and on the ground. The demands include scheduling based on availability and seniority; tracking mandatory rest status; and managing certifications and qualifications, including pending certification expirations.

Smaller railroads, though, don’t have the sophisticated IT departments needed to stand up this fully automated crew management system. That’s which is why PS Technology launched a cloud version that saw its first railroad customer online in April. “There are more than 600 short line railroads, and that is our growth area,” says Seenu Chundru, president of PS Technology. “They don’t want to host this type of software on premises.”

Learn more about this in my story for Forbes, “Railroads Roll Ahead With Cloud-Based Crew Management.”

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Knowledge requires context

Knowledge is power—and knowledge with the right context at the right moment is the most powerful of all. Emerging technologies will leverage the power of context to help people become more efficient, and one of the first to do so is a new generation of business-oriented digital assistants.

Let’s start by distinguishing a business digital assistant from consumer products such as Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Echo, and Google’s Home. Those cloud-based technologies have proved themselves at tasks like information retrieval (“How long is my commute today?”) and personal organization (“Add diapers to my shopping list”). Those services have some limited context about you, like your address book, calendar, music library, and shopping cart. What they don’t have is deep knowledge about your job, your employer, and your customers.

In contrast, a business digital assistant needs much richer context to handle the kind of complex tasks we do at work, says Amit Zavery, executive vice president of product development at Oracle. Which sorts of business tasks? How about asking a digital assistant to summarize the recent orders from a company’s three biggest customers in Dallas; set up a conference call with everyone involved with a particular client account; create a report of all employees who haven’t completed information security training; figure out the impact of a canceled meeting on a travel plan; or pull reports on accounts receivable deviations from expected norms?

Those are usually tasks for human associates—often a tech-savvy person in supply chain, sales, finance, or human resources. That’s because so many business tasks require context about the employee making the request and about the organization itself, Zavery says. A digital assistant’s goal should be to reduce the amount of mental energy and physical steps needed to perform such tasks.

Learn more in my article for Forbes, “The One Thing Digital Assistants Need To Become Useful At Work: Context.”