Speakers:

George Nychis, Co-Founder and VP of Architecture at Soroco Rohan Murty, Founder and CTO of Soroco

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Abstract: We recently ran a research study involving 14 teams comprising 283 employees in four Fortune 500 companies. When managers were asked about their teams’ work, on average they either did not know or could not remember 60% of the work their teams do. In one extreme instance, a manager in our study could describe only 4% of their team’s work. This is a small but powerful representation of how little is known about how teams get work done and therefore how difficult it can be to make impactful changes in organizations (see our HBR article here).

In this talk we show how Scout - a machine learning system, can significantly close the gap of what is understood by managers and teams by discovering hidden patterns in a team's work. These patterns are organized and become accessible to teams as a rich 'work graph' of activities, which then characterize upwards of 75% of a team's day. This work graph is then accessed by managers to make various impactful changes that were not possible before. Organizations powered by this work graph have been able to use it to conduct better training, streamline their team's work, automate tedious work, and even use the information to improve software systems that they access to get their work done more efficiently. The future of any work environment — not just remote work environments — can be substantially improved by equipping managers with new systems like Scout to understand and manage their teams more effectively.

George Nychis is a Ph.D. graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, and is currently Co-Founder and VP of Architecture at Soroco. George's published research has spanned areas of distributed systems, security, and network communication. At Soroco, George has been building systems and algorithms that analyze billions of data points on human interactions with software systems to obtain a structured view of how work happens. These systems are deployed at Fortune 500 companies worldwide with recognition by market analysts and publications such as Gartner, HFS, and Harvard Business Review as uncovering new and unique insights in the field.

Rohan Murty has a PhD in CS from Harvard and is a former junior fellow of the society of fellows at Harvard. He is the founder and CTO of Soroco.