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What ‘AI Governance’ Means Inside ITX for Financial Services

A Risk Management Approach to Responsible AI Adoption

Artificial Intelligence is here to stay. But that doesn’t mean we should throw up our hands and let AI run roughshod over otherwise sound product development operations, right? The stakes are too high, and much of the technology’s potential (for good and for ill) remains unknown. 

 Since our founding nearly 3 decades ago, ITX has been committed to helping clients manage risk. In that time, we’ve learned that diving headlong into any new technology – let alone one as potentially disruptive as AI – without careful exploration invites all sorts of risks: financial, reputational, ethical, and legal. 

 We documented our approach to AI integration in a position paper, ITX’s Perspective on AI and Our Approach to Adoption. It reflects a clear statement of our current thinking – as AI evolves, so too will our assessment – complete with practical governance framework and set of rules that guide our behavior. This blog describes that framework and explains what AI governance means inside ITX. 

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The ITX Checklist for Evaluating AI Tools (Step 2)

Step 2: Best Practices for Tech, Legal & Financial Review

By Peter Sullivan

 

This blog is the second in a series that explores ITX’s approach to integrating AI tools into our product development workflows; here, we look at our internal Tools Committee and its policy-driven process for proposing, reviewing, and selecting the right tool for the job.

Introduction

ITX is a globally distributed organization with team members and clients across the United States and around the world. Increasingly complex client demands often require ITX Delivery Teams to match each new challenge with an even more sophisticated set of tools. At the same time, though, we need to protect against adding new tools unnecessarily. This may be especially true when it comes to artificial intelligence.

 

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The ITX Checklist for Evaluating AI Tools (Step 1)

Step 1: Assess competing stakeholder needs to identify the right tool for the job

By Peter Sullivan

 

This blog is the first in a series that explores ITX’s approach to AI tools integration – our proven method for vetting, selecting, and deploying artificial intelligence into our workflows.

Software product development companies face unrelenting pressure to stay ahead of tech’s accelerating pace. This is not a new phenomenon, of course. But when paired with an already volatile market environment and its ever-lower barriers to entry, just keeping pace becomes more than many companies can manage. Add artificial intelligence into the mix, and the strain can push them to the breaking point.

In the “earlier” days of AI (let’s face it: AI is still just a baby), every new tool felt like ‘a hammer in search of a nail.’ It felt like there was no job AI couldn’t do. These days, though, the calculus is changing. Tech companies that have been around for a while have figured out that specific stakeholders need specific tools with specific applications. And it takes a skilled craftsperson to choose the right tool for the right situation.

 

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What ‘AI Governance’ Means Inside ITX

A Risk Management Approach to Responsible AI Adoption

Artificial Intelligence is here to stay. But that doesn’t mean we should throw up our hands and let AI run roughshod over otherwise sound product development operations, right? The stakes are too high, and much of the technology’s potential (for good and for ill) remains unknown. 

 Since our founding nearly 3 decades ago, ITX has been committed to helping clients manage risk. In that time, we’ve learned that diving headlong into any new technology – let alone one as potentially disruptive as AI – without careful exploration invites all sorts of risks: financial, reputational, ethical, and legal. 

 We documented our approach to AI integration in a position paper, ITX’s Perspective on AI and Our Approach to Adoption. It reflects a clear statement of our current thinking – as AI evolves, so too will our assessment – complete with practical governance framework and set of rules that guide our behavior. This blog describes that framework and explains what AI governance means inside ITX. 

Read Article

Embracing Human-Centric Product Management

Can the quality of a decision be measured by the amount of data that informed it? Are emotionally intelligent products distinguishably better than their website data-driven counterparts? Product managers struggling to find their voice as they develop their careers are inundated with recommendations emphasizing one or the other, but are these poles mutually exclusive?

Recently, I had the pleasure of hosting Christian Idiodi, of Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG) on Product Momentum, ITX’s award-winning podcast. Christian’s insights into product management are inspiring and practical. As a top contender for the nicest person in product, he was generous enough to share a map to chart one’s growth that strikes a balance between the essential elements of business health and human empathy.

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How Product + Design Work Together To Build ‘A Better Future’

3 Tips from Jared Spool (Strategic UX) and Roman Pichler (Product)

Compared with other software development disciplines, product management and user experience (UX) design are still pretty young professions. That said, they’re maturing rapidly and growing more specialized every day. As their evolution continues, it isn’t always clear who’s responsible for what on a product team and how best they can work together (we offered guidance on this topic in a post last year). Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that UX designers and product managers seem to get in each other’s way on the road to success.

This post canvasses the views that Roman Pichler (PM) and Jared Spool (UX) recently shared in consecutive podcast episodes of Product Momentum. What’s most intriguing about both conversations is how they each arrive at the same desired outcome – improving the lives of end users – despite taking parallel paths.

Jared calls that desired outcome a better future, while Roman describes it as the positive change a product should create. But both agree that whatever the solution, it’s less about building shiny new features or making things look pretty (i.e., outputs). Outcomes always trump the digital knickknacks we create along the way.

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Bridging the Gap: Highlights from ITX’s 2nd Annual Product + Design Conference

ITX hosted its 2nd Annual Product + Design Conference on June 22-23 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel Ballroom in downtown Rochester. The 2023 event’s 225+ Keynote Day attendees included every fashion of product maker and leader.

They may have entered the conference as product managers, designers, engineers, QA specialists, and content strategists. But they exited as members of a product team – collectively responsible for solving one shared problem: how do we improve the lives of our users

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From Product Strategy to Roadmaps and Release Plans

In the Planning Stage, look for the ITX innovation lead to guide the product team from Vision to Strategy to Roadmap. In our recent post, we explained that Vision represents a desired future state. Strategy explains how you’ll get there, and Roadmap lists the mile markers along the journey. In this post, we examine the innovation lead’s role in navigating that path.

Building software isn’t about the features you add – the bells and whistles. It’s about helping your end users be more successful. Any notion that a product with more features is by definition better than a product with fewer features is a misguided one.

Innovation leads help their clients and teams discover the difference between adding features for features’ sake and adding features that solve problems for users and create business value for clients.

Our journey starts with Vision, which directs everyone’s effort and investment toward making users more successful. In addition to vision statement – a declaration of objective – innovation leads help teams strategically derive two additional artifacts: the product strategy and the product roadmap.

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Illustration showcasing how a Product managers starts out with a product strategy and ends up going through a product road map to end up in a product release.

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