Author: Misra GOZ

PEAKUP WORKING FROM HOME GUIDE HAS BEEN RELEASED!

In Turkey most workers are following their work from home because of the pandemic, just like in the whole world. This obliged employers to switch to remote working on digital platforms and to adapt. PEAKUP has prepared a guide for both people who work from home and the employers. Here are some interesting points of the guide…

The Importance of Digital Workplace notion has increased

We had to quickly adapt to working from home with the corona virus pandemic. Companies who didn’t want to put people’s lives into danger but still had to keep doing their work started to sustain their work with different platforms. And this reminded us the “Digital Workplace” notion that we started to hear a lot. The way companies did their work changed with the sudden change to remote working. One of the most important topics during this process was making the communication between employees continuous and constant and to keep their motivation alive.  PEAKUP told about how right and efficient work will be on online systems with the Velocity and Microsoft Teams experiences and included recommendations about sharing files, video call, chat rooms and teleconference in their guide.

What features are we looking for the most while working from home?

PEAKUP COO Kadircan Toprakçı stated that first the most waited features on digital platforms should be detected and sorted those out like this: “An activity field where notifications are received and filtered, a chat room where files and images can be shared, accessing archived files easily, co-authoring on files with teammates at the same time, video call, sharing announcements and organizing meetings. What is need to do all these correctly is a good internet connection and a secure computer, tablet or phone. Tips and tricks start from right here.

Computer: If your personal computer is not protected well with a good system we recommend you to use your company computer. Using Wi-Fi or 4G/5G connections on a weakly protected computer might let you down. If you believe that your office computer is not safe enough either, it is better to contact the IT department right away. If not, all your company information might be accessed and your archived files might get damaged. The password security of company accounts you connect on your office computers is very important for your data. You need the keep you password security as high as possible, update as much as possible and avoid simple passwords.

Internet connection: The most unpleasant part of digital workplace is internet going down or slowing down in the middle of an important meeting. Increasing the upload quota of internet packages of people who need to share files a lot or video call might be a solution. Apart from that, it is possible to activate the “Personal Hotspot” feature of 4.5G internet access via mobile phones in case of a problem with WiFi networks. The safest way to access resources containing accounting, human resources and similar company data would be choosing the Virtual Desktop applications provided by the IT departments. You have to use VPN for the whole team to connect to the corporate network securely and for the network traffic to go through one tunnel.

Operating Systems: Always prefer to use the latest versions of operating systems and applications. The latest operating system will provide protection against cyber threats with new updates as well as being efficient with new features.

Archiving: You might need to access a file on your work computer or you might have deleted a necessary file while working from home. Your files need to be transportable anytime and anywhere while working remotely. You can securely store all your files with cloud storing solutions like OneDrive and take important actions like going back to previous versions or recovering a deleted item.

Common workplace: You could work with your colleagues while working at the office. But now while remote working, you cannot physically  be together if you need to get something done together. Applications like MS Teams help you out during this process. You can move all your office environment to a common workplace, co-author on documents and files with your colleagues, track a lot of actions that were in your daily routines like video call, chat, office documents through one single platform.

Security for the little ones: This one is especially for the workers with kids. To prevent your curios child deleting the files you are working on when you are on a break, you need to put a screen lock and a password. You can use the free Dynamic Lock feature that comes with Windows 10 at this point. Dynamic Lock you have synchronized with your phone will lock your computer the moment you get away from it.

Meetings: Meetings, activities and trainings have started to be cancelled with switching to online working. But meetings or trainings necessary for you workflow getting sidetracked might cause problems for your work. You can sustain your work program without any ado with video meetings and live activities on MS Teams. For example, you can join the meeting from your phone, tablet or computer, chat during the meeting and share a file or your screen.

Socializing with colleagues: This one is both for the workers and the employers. During this process where we are home all time and cannot socialize, it is important to increase the motivation of your workers with platforms that keep the intranet strong like MS Teams or Velocity, not just to keep doing your job. You can create groups where you can recommend movies and make video calls, and have some coffee together. You can make your communication sustainable and fun on digital platforms.

Free Distance Learning: The guide doesn’t end with all this. PEAKUP offers free remote lectures for everyone to facilitate remote working where we learn something new everyday and come across a lot of problems and questions. PEAKUP offers “Working from Home Practices” training every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and is open to new education content. You can ask questions to the lecturers during the lectures and get support by sharing your screen.

You can follow the trainings here.

The Duo that Opens the Doors of the Future: Data and Algorithm

British economist Ronald Coase say: “If your torture the data long enough, it will confess.” And the way of ‘torturing’ the data goes through algorithms. As long as you don’t know how to use and what actions to take, data is condemned to stay as a value you keep under your hand and don’t use. And the algorithm that defines the action is the place under which the real value lies.

“WE WILL ACHIEVE A DATA SIZE OF 143 ZB IN 2024”

Peakup COO Kadircan Toprakçı stated:” In the projection of 10 years, parallel to ever-increasing data size and complexity of problems to be analyzed; the value of human resources with experience about statistics, data-science, machine learning expertise and deep learning will keep increasing. We can say that genetic algorithms, election forecasting algorithms, financial recommendation algorithms and early diagnosis in health algorithms are trends worth being worked on alongside with the algorithms like convolutional neural network.”

One of the things that have the share of everything digitalizing rapidly after the pandemic is the malls, the vital point of the retail economy. According to PEAKUP COO KadirCan Toprakçı, the malls around the world will become technology bases where artificial intelligent is used and that give contactless services. And shop-lovers will be like Sims players. Even though the change in malls remind us of sci-fi movies, it is pretty soon for these movies to become reality.

Malls, a must of shopping and the representer of socializing, where the retail economy revolves have gone through a lot of changes after the pandemic. We entered a new era where in the entrance our temperature is taken, where we have to walk on lines and cannot get out of circled areas, where we are kind of guided like robots. Technology, the definer of our life standards in the new normal, have taken the leading role in malls and introduced us to a lot of new things we didn’t see much before. PEAKPUP COO KadirCan Toprakçı believes that we are just in the beginning of the road. Malls that will concentrate on technological investments will become advanced space stations soon. Here is what we will see in the future Malls…

Contactless Malls

Today, online and offline shopping go together. In the future, this will leave its place to online shopping only. Online usage that will develop with the zero contact concern will be with us from the enter to the exit of the mall. We will see the condition of the mall on all our smart devices with artificial intelligence and virtual reality based developments, and manage and guide ourselves in the mall like an avatar.

Malls will be managed with separated sections

The quality of air we breathe indoors have a great importance. It is vital to sterilize the air inside in order to make malls go back to their old days the safest way possible. Thanks to the artificial intelligence to be used in malls, the quality of air density of each point, air temperature and other changes will be analyzed momentously. There will be an automatic management system to optimize the environment by keeping track of the density of harmful gases in the air and airflow. This system will be managed by the authorities on their cell phones and also the warning and guidance systems for alarming areas will step in with just one button. It will be possible to quarantine the risky zone in the mall and to stop the contact with the other zone automatically.

Video processing technologies will go into the pocket

It is possible to take people’s temperature contactless with video processing technologies. But in this new age, it will be possible to send the body temperature information to registered phones of clients and store authorities with facial recognition systems. But this system that is very beneficial concerning taking precautions fast and minimizing the interaction will be used when social distance is not applied. System will activate the alarms in case of suppressing the limit by counting people inside the defined zone. Shift systems and entries-exists will be controlled with video technologies and will be sent to the employees’ phone by being managed by the artificial intelligence.

Robot security staff, hologram store workers

Images taken by the security camera will be analyzed with smart software, risky situations among the images will be send to authorities in the remote monitoring center, it will be possible to interfere threatening situations with drones or robot security guard will accompany the suspect. Stores in the malls that want to give service 24/7 will be represented with hologram sales personnel.

Our temperature will be taken when we are washing our hands 

Shared areas in malls like bathrooms, praying rooms and cinema saloons have higher risk compared to the other areas. With technology, it is possible to eliminate contact completely from door handles to light switches, from taps to all other contacted areas. It will be possible to track the crowdedness in the bathroom, last cleaning date and clean air. Smart mirrors will take the temperature of the person washing their hands.

Physical stores will stand up with integrated systems

Stores will stop physical contact thanks to payment technology without a cashier and virtual fitting rooms, and augmented reality supported mirrors. This shows that physical stores will be facing different experiences. There will be a lot of cameras strengthened with artificial intelligence, it will be possible to track what clients have taken from she shelves with the artificial intelligence system, money will be taken from the registered credit cards automatically as they exit the store. Since physical stores will be preferred just to touch, look, choose and compare the products; brands will be in a race concerning service.

Attention, you might become a Sims player

PEAKUP COO KadirCan Toprakçı who said “In this new order, shop-lovers feel like Sims players” stated that these changes will take place in Turkey soon. Toprakçı told that they are producing new solutions concerning this with the Nova IoT Platform as Peakup and that there are still a lot of projects on which their R & D department is working on and that they are developing artificial intelligence programs for a lot of places from malls to offices, houses and even shelters.

PEAKUP COO Kadircan TOPRAKÇI: “During these times we are going through, in order to make everything we learn permanent and sustainable we have to internalize them first.  This internalization is critical since it triggers the process of trying, failing, overcoming mistakes and obtaining personal experiences and than conveying it to other people.Because most of the digital tools we use are created to address to general audience and they need personal experiences to be able to customized for your needs.”

Most of the work will be followed remotely

PEAKUP COO Kadircan Toprakçı indicated that most of the workers in Turkey, just like in the rest of the world, follow their works from home because of corona virus. He said that this situation makes remote-working system on digital platforms necessary and added: ” Especially foreseeing that the pandemic will spread rapidly caused a radical change in the education system. Face-to-face education at school gave its place to TV and internet.”

Toprakçı who stated that when we analyze the process we are going through a lot of solutions that already exited were put into use said: “Even some large scale companies products that have been bought but haven’t been used become to be used. We can say that the main reason of this is the hardship of adaptation to the new technological tools beyond deciding and buying the right product. In a manner of speaking, it is very important to manage the change correctly. Because of the pandemic users have become ready themselves and this actually shows us how intense and nonstop this process is.”

Advantages of Remote Working

Toprakçı commented on the benefits of remote working for companies and educational institutions: “Remote working caused a basic benefit for companies and educational institutions, and this caused to save time. Since time spent in traffic decreased, this saved 2-3 hours of time for people going to work or school especially who live in a city like Istanbul where traffic is a big problem.

This situation seriously affects efficiency when we add up reasons like preparations for working at home being minimal. It is pretty obvious that with Covid-19, a new technology era has begun. It is very critical to know this process with all its advantages and disadvantages, internalize it and design new processes in accordance with it. For example, as a society we love to communicate face-to-face, drink coffee together, go on breaks at school with our friends. There are some situation that these things not being possible affects individuals’ motivations negatively during this process.  When people stay away from each other, gaining back motivation is left to the hands of each person but not everybody is able to handle this well. Thus in educational institutions the teachers, and in corporations human resources and managers have very important responsibilities. ”

Kadircan Toprakçı made these evaluations about keeping all this process sustainable: “Like we talked about before, most of the technological tools we need already exist, what we need to do is to do the implementation correctly and then provide awareness, will, and ability that will cause our users to adapt well to this remote working process and in long term to support people correctly. A lot of domestic and national products support this process with success. For example Velocity, intranet portal solution, creates a copy of physical office environment for companies and enables you to share all the information in the company with your workers, celebrate their birthdays, follow other procedures and access documents from a common area through one single portal.And for the school, all students are having distance education but communication with students and teachers at the school is not going efficiently. Velocity can enable the students to be together, follow education calendar and announcements, to see their friends’ contact information and make communication more effective for schools.”

IT  Departments have a lot of responsibilities on their shoulders

All digitalization processes bring along a lot of workload to the IT departments. In Turkey, only around 1% of all the workers are technology workers which is way under the average of Europe, in order to sustain this it is very important to concentrate on supporting IT teams. For example, when employers forget their user information like e-mail address or password or when they got reset because of security -which is one of the most common problems among workers-, they request support from the IT departments. Workers being able to deal with this situation automatically through a simple SMS that they are used to without needing anyone with PassGate solution developed in our R&D center accelerates the adaptation we talked about in the beginning and helps IT teams handle this extraordinary busy process with success.

Our Internet Infrastructure Passed a Hard Test

According to Toprakçı, Turkey’s internet infrastructure passed a hard test during the pandemic. There was no big disruption despite the business in the net. Thus we can say that Turkey has a good internet infrastructure and general issues concerning speed should be fixed. It is obvious that especially children and teenagers use more internet because of schools switching to distance education. Education materials being online is another reason of this increase. As a result of virus spreading rapidly and “stayhome” shout-outs, being online and the time we spend on the internet increased even more.

Companies, some governmental institutions and independent organizations started to offer their paid or restricted contents free. Toprakçı who stated that most companies spent the first weeks of the crisis trying to understand how remote working functions added: “Basically companies did a needs analysis during this process. We can say that the most basic needs are common work platforms that enable continuous communication, self-service IT application that would enable users to go to IT help desks with problems concerning their user ids, and cyber security solutions that would enable us to do processes like all this communication, remote access and sharing files securely. Within this scope we see that investments are for software apps and security solutions that the users can easily adopt to rather than physical equipment. For the last few weeks we have been getting a lot of requests for using these systems or getting new applications. The important thing here is that not only companies, organization will not concentrate on technology investments. Governments themselves will them be doing these investments too. It is necessary to decrease internet service provider fees or postpone the bill due date. Especially highly used high download and low upload capacity packages should increase this upload limit. This is very important when overcoming this process with minimum damage when we think about video call and cooperation tools used during these ties. It is necessary for the individuals to access these opportunities equally for distance learning and remote working to be extensive.”

Equality in accessing Digital Tools is a must

About the steps of what we need to do to eliminate inequality and to make the education efficient, PEAKUP COO Kadircan Toprakçı told:” “Distance learning existed in TRT School and Anadolu University distance learning applications  and was in use for a long time on TV and on the internet but they were not able to control participation rate efficiently during this process and there was lack of interactivity. We can say that these things are among the essential requirements of a permanent digital education process.We think that it is better to look from the window of teachers and managers rather than the window of students and employees in order to analyze this process correctly. The market research done by our marketing team member Damla Kızanlık shows that the basic issue in adaptation has to do with teachers and managers coming across this process unprepared. Because most of the workers and almost all the students are people who were born into this technology so they adapt themselves easily, but for teachers and managers above a certain age this situation becomes a situation that requires one-to-one support.

During these times we are going through, in order to make everything we learn permanent and sustainable we have to internalize them first.  This internalization is critical since it triggers the process of trying, failing, overcoming mistakes and obtaining personal experiences and than conveying it to other people.Because most of the digital tools we use are created to address to general audience and they need personal experiences to be able to customized for your needs. Thus the first steps to be taken to create an efficient digital work place should be in this direction.

Equality in opportunity is a must in individuals and businesses accessing to digital tools. I think that during these times public institutions should provide support for digitalization as much as the health-based supports for Covid-19.  Especially institutions like Small and Medium Enterprises Development Organization and Ministry of Commerce affect a lot of businesses. During this process even low-budget supports for expenses of businesses in digitalization would be a great contribution to economy. As a matter of fact even if budgets for fairs etc. get rearranged the way I told, at least a sustainable transition period can be achieved.”

Digital transformation will speed up

Toprakçı remarked that we live in a time that digital transformation has sped up. Toprakçı stated that with the transition to remote working; the number of applications that support a lot of features like activity fields where you receive notifications and filter, Chat rooms where you can share documents and images, accessing files in the archive easily, working simultaneously on files with your teammates, video call, sharing announcement and organizing meetings and than added: “The choices of pretty much all organizations are cloud technology focused for on the one hand obligation of remote working, on the other hand making correct investments.We saw that cloud technologies would affect all IT choices before the pandemic as well but we can say that this process has been brought 4-5 years forward. Actually a lot of notions like artificial intelligent, block-chain have become more intense with the cloud technologies. As a result we will see more IT infrastructure technology, necessary communication and cooperation applications for remote working  in the first 6 months of this pandemic. This process is going to be followed by digitalization of paper-based tasks we did in the physical environment and work analytics systems.

This transition I am talking about will prepare as for topics like artificial intelligence, block-chain, IoT and in general terms we will see the benefits of these technologies when they become solutions integrated to our work processes. For example, systems that analyzes the correction of accounting documents shared digitally while remote working with image processing and artificial intelligent applications will increase efficiency drastically or make the change of recruitment and contracts processes possible with block-chain. When we take a look at all these technologies from the perspective of both educational institutions and especially human resources management we expect technologies like virtual reality and mixed reality to reconstruct the learning process. Both for schools and new employees to execute and accelerate distance learning, redesigned learning methods with especially mixed reality will affect the efficiency of processes positively.

Security will be in the forefront during the process

PEAKUP COO Toprakçı evaluated the security risks brought along with remote working and education systems like this: “Cyber-security field will continue to become the main attention factor as remote working keeps being the reality of our lives and digital fields take the place of our physical work environment. When companies are trying to take fast steps to maintain business continuity during this process, security is a very important topic that should not be overlooked. Having the mindset of “let’s deal with this first and then we will move onto security” and approaching this situation imprecisely can bring along a cyber attack when we haven’t even overcome the pandemic. For this reason it is important for the companies to evaluate the remote working applications from the security perspective and consult with the experts they work with.

We need to choose application that enable business continuity

Having no time to lose while choosing applications that enable business continuity would cause stress in these situations. The smartest choice here is to choose solutions that already have international security criteria. It will also be very beneficial for the IT Teams. With the remote working and distance learning brought along with pandemic brought the digital identity notion to the focus of all cyber attacks. What our identification cards, credit cards mean our daily lives is what user name and password information that is the base of accessing all our information is in the digital world.Considering that our users names are relevant with e-mail addresses, we are only left with our passwords. First of all, the most crucial thing her is to create the password in scope of certain standards, and changing it in a certain period of time or in some security situations. Thus the primary matter -for individuals and corporations- here is creating a password that consists of more than 8 characters, numbers, letters, and special characters like question marks and parenthesis. Businesses and educational institutions can choose SMS-based password management solutions like PassGate in order to enable users to deal with this process without going through any obstacles. Our second topic after achieving a strong password is creating a well designed security surveillance and action system especially for businesses. Cyber attacks always renew themselves like viruses and attack the weakest points by evolving. Thus it is possible for these attacks to go beyond the precautions we take to protects users. At this point what matters is early detection of security breaches and application of security procedures defined in advance automatically by systems. For instance, when a unauthorized access is done to a user’s account, systems alarming and putting that user in quarantine and restrict his/her access to the company data is a subject that we have been recommending for years and give education on its application, and that we work with companies.

Precautions must be taken against cyber attacks

We see the thin lines in the process when we think about the spreading speed of cyber attacks. Security precautions should be managed by systems that give smart reactions to pre-designed situations with the contribution of artificial intelligence as much as possible. Because we both go through situations that we cannot realize and when we realize these situations we don’t have enough time to call IT teams and request support.”

Digital workplace platform Velocity, developed by PEAKUP, was chosen as one of the top 8 applications in the world. Velocity that has been chosen among thousands of apps uploaded to Microsoft Teams Store is the only Turkish application chosen. A lot of criteria from user-friendliness to prevalence were taken into consideration in the evaluation done by Microsoft Corp. that has its center in Seattle, USA.  

One of the top 8 application among all apps integrated to Microsoft Teams in global was evaluated as the strategic app that is believed to create highest amount of benefits, the app that has authority in digital marketing and the app that has the greatest potential to achieve global prevalence.

The notion of “digital workplace” that everybody is talking about gain more importance day by day in terms of the cloud services it contains, getting rid of geographical barriers with mobility and artificial intelligence apps and enabling access to information 24/7. Increasing employee commitment, making a difference in terms of working together and efficient, content/document management and facilitating work processes are among the most important goal of digital workplace applications. Velocity that has been developed in order to achieve these goals, claim to interaction between workers thanks to its collective structure and provide efficiency in the corporations.

The first step of adapting workers who are biased to working on digital platforms fast goes through intranet platforms. Intranet platform Velocity that digitalizes communication processes and makes the use as simple as possible, is one of the most helpful tools in the digitalization process of the companies.

Today Microsoft Teams that has 75 million daily single users and hosts 200 million meeting participants can be ingratiated with digital workplace platform Velocity. Velocity helps you to access a lot of information from your files to announcement, from LPPD to clarification texts and work procedures, from your documents to horoscope and service hours when used on Microsoft Teams. This way you can reach out to all your workers at the same time and at the same speed, and maintain your communication from one center.