Listen: Next in Tech | Episode 91: Fostering inclusivity in technology

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Presentation

Eric Hanselman

Welcome to Next in Tech, an S&P Global Market Intelligence podcast where the world of emerging tech lives.

I'm your host, Eric Hanselman, chief analyst for technology, media and telecom at S&P Global Market Intelligence.

And today, we're going to be discussing inclusivity in technology, a topic that we've touched on but haven't really gotten to some of the deep technical aspects. And joining me to talk about it is Sonal Sakhardande, the Technology Group Director at Markit Digital.

Sonal, welcome to the podcast.

Sonal Sakhardande

Thank you so much, Eric. I'm excited to be here today.

Eric Hanselman

Well -- and it's great to have you because this is something that is a conversation that we've started, I guess, across a number of episodes talking about thoughtfulness and mindfulness in language; really thinking about aspects in technology that, a lot of times, I think, don't get really as much focus as they could. And I think, in a lot of times, we think about technology as this entirely technical discipline that doesn't touch more than sort of the technical pieces we're dealing with, but in fact, there's a lot to it. And I want to dig into those aspects, but first, I wanted to get a little bit of background on your role within the greater S&P universe. What are the things that you're working with day in, day out?

Sonal Sakhardande

Thank you.

So my name is Sonal Sakhardande, and I'm the Technology Group Director here at Markit Digital.

A little bit about my company. Markit Digital is a leading provider of SaaS-based market data and investment analysis tools that help customers access, understand and act on complex financial information. We have the expertise, data and infrastructure that's needed to create custom financial technology solutions that are intuitive, fast and scalable.

Question and Answer

Eric Hanselman

Well and especially when you start thinking about dealing with the various aspects of data and technology. I mean one of the things that we've talked about in previous episodes are some of the different ways in which we need to really expand our focus and think about the -- leveraging language. I mean the interesting thing when you start thinking about delivered technical capabilities, the implementation of technology is really that the expression into the form that we're interacting with, with that data. And I guess, in a lot of your work, what are areas that you typically consider around inclusivity?

Sonal Sakhardande

That's a great question, Eric. So if you look at today's dynamic software development environment: Fostering an inclusive workplace is a requirement, right? So not only is that the right thing to do, but not doing so can be detrimental to our business, so one of the first places to start is by committing to hiring diverse candidates. I believe that the workplace culture should retain and ensure the ongoing development of diverse teams. And likewise, managers must ensure that they create an open culture that gives a voice to underrepresented talent. Once this is established from this point on, ensuring integrity of an organization's data and software delivery can start to take shape.

So now programmatically, software teams have a life cycle that they follow, right, collecting the data, cleaning and classifying it then writing code that uses this data and testing it to deliver outcomes that meet both business and customer needs. If, however, you only have non-diverse data set and software, your products and services will only cater to a specific group of people and under-serve another. And let's admit that most engineers and maybe even data scientists encode their beliefs, their conviction when they design software, so having a diverse set of people working throughout every step of life cycle will help organizations avoid some of these pitfalls.

Eric Hanselman

Well, this is an area that I think we've talked about the idea of expanding one's lens, but you pointed out that really you've got to begin ensuring that you've got as broad a set of voices, as expansive a constituency that's part of that team, to begin with. But that's an aspect when we start thinking about how we're actually building teams, opening our eyes to the possibilities of building a team that extends beyond what have been, especially in tech, historically a pretty narrow viewpoint in where that fits. Some of that's got to come from actually ensuring that we've got connections to those broader communities to be able to build some of that, to begin with. Is that something that you look at fostering across your teams? Is that something that you're able to integrate into that the process of team building, to start? I'm curious about what aspects of that you engage with and how that shakes out.

Sonal Sakhardande

Yes, that's another great question. So there's 2 ways to look at this, right? One is a pure technology perspective, right? Like my idea will be -- or advise will be to embrace cloud-ready thinking, to reimagine the way we work and collaborate. My other suggestion would be to continue to hone in on inclusive software development practices, but we have to broaden our thinking if we truly want to empower underrepresented communities, right? And there's a few different ways to do this, especially for a tech- and data-driven company like ours, right? It starts with recruiting more underrepresented minorities into different roles within the organization, participating in external events with community partners, practicing internal outreach to encourage more participation from underrepresented minorities and allies. So for instance, start creating internal newsletters to get some of those thoughts and ideas out. And finally, you can launch a mentorship program which connects underrepresented minorities with mentors who could range from people managers all the way to executive leadership.

Eric Hanselman

I'm interested in the outreach part of -- because that's one of those things that I think -- some of the discussions we have focus around challenges in expanding that community base, but so much of that, you've -- is something that you can tackle by starting the outreach internally, especially working with groups locally. I'm guessing that the kind of things you're talking about are reaching out to local communities, whether or not those happen to be tech communities or communities of interest. Those are things that -- I know that our teams wind up looking at a set of different special interest groups, aspects that are externally focused but also looking to build from some of those voices that exist within the company as well, so it'd be interesting to think about hiring practices and how you manage that and how you ensure to integrate inclusivity into hiring as well.

Sonal Sakhardande

Yes. So I guess I'll take a step back, right? Like if we truly want to address issues of unconscious bias at every stage of our product life cycle, right, starting from strategy; product definition, requirements; user experience; engineering; marketing, we have to ensure that organizations are creating diverse teams, diverse team members at every step of the way. And one of the ways to do that will be inclusive hiring practices. Make sure that the hiring team is an accurate representation of the kind of candidate pipeline that you're trying to recruit or attract towards your organization, ensuring that, beyond just like hiring, right, there are processes and practices in place that will ensure that retention of these diverse teams and candidates long term is [ thought out ].

Eric Hanselman

So it sounds like really it's something that you've got to think not only about your processes to expand inclusivity within those teams today, but you've got to consider how that's going to shake out in the way in which your teams are run to ensure that this is something where you're building a team that not only is inclusive, brings in diversity but also is able to maintain and support that community and all of its constituents over time. That sounds like maybe that's the bigger challenge. And maybe it's one of those places that organizations sometimes struggle with.

Sonal Sakhardande

Yes. If you look at technology in general, right, inherent bias can be hard to root out. A tech tends to reflect the people who create it, so it's their perspectives and experiences that shape how products are designed and developed. And in my mind, technology leaders play an active role in reengineering the way ideation, design and development is done within their organizations.

Eric Hanselman

Well, I think that's sort of one of the difficulties when we think about -- I mean the nature of unconscious bias is that it is conscious, so being able to ensure that you've got a team that's broad enough to ensure that you've got viewpoints that will start to reflect that broader focus, it seems like one of those things that has got to be a key point towards really thinking more mindfully about technology. And I guess that's a key point when we think about being more mindful about how we're actually delivering technology. Hopefully, that's something that starts to derive from having a sufficiently broad and diverse team, to start, but are there other aspects that we should be aware of in terms of being more mindful about delivering technology?

Sonal Sakhardande

Yes, absolutely, absolutely. So if you want to intentionally design your products to be inclusive -- I know that's the intent for most organizations at least. You want to make sure that you're designing your products with excluded and diverse communities, so essentially the idea is to bring everyone into the process as much as possible and early on. At the user experience stage, it's critical to think about cultural factors, gender gap, disabilities that might affect usage of your product. My other advice is to be inclusive in your development and testing practices, so for software developers, this means building products that address not only a singular use case but an entire user profile, which is a mindset shift in a lot of ways. If you have a data strategy, you have to maintain data models that are based on diverse set of data. And another example would be voice recognition software. So if you're building something a process around that, a product around that, teams must consider various languages, dialects and even speech impediments.

Eric Hanselman

Well and that's something that we've talked a little bit about some of the concerns not only about speech and expression but also interpretation, which I thought was fascinating. We've had a previous guest on who was talking about being able to work with neurodiverse participants who are going to see some of the language that we're using for the engagement, even the things that we're using to collect data, some of the question sets, the way in which we phrase of -- questionnaires for studies, those sorts of things. We've got to be a little more thoughtful in terms of ensuring that what we're getting upfront is actually going to be reaching that much broader community effectively and then delivering what, hopefully, is a much richer data set.

Sonal Sakhardande

Agreed. I could not agree more. And I think this is the one section of society that gets overlooked more often than not, so personally for all of my technology teams -- and our teams -- just to caveat: Our teams create a lot of financial tools. And we want to make our tools accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities, right, so at the bare minimum, the criteria is that every solution that's launched follows the best practices laid out in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which covers things like color contrast and keyboard-only usage. And for testing this, my teams use a software called screen reader.

So if you're not aware. Screen reader is a software that enables those who cannot see the screen to access information. And our engineers will essentially close their eyes and use screen reader to try and use what they make, so it's critical to be hands-on when we are developing and testing things and really empathize with our user base and truly try and fit into their shoes as much as possible, to design the products that they can leverage and use to the best of their abilities.

Eric Hanselman

Oh, wow, but -- being able to actually think about vision-challenged and vision-impaired use by actually leveraging the tools, so that means you've really got to start thinking about expanding what that user experience evaluation process is going to look like. Is that something where things like screen reader are part of a tool set that typically gets leveraged? Or are there other aspects? I guess I'm curious how development teams can find some of these capabilities and what they should be looking for to actually ensure that they've got a broad-enough set of tools to help evaluate their -- the full set of experiences their end users are going to have.

Sonal Sakhardande

Yes, that's a great question. So in house, we keep a variety of test devices, right? So various phones, tablets, computers with different operating systems. Again the screen reader capability might differ across devices. And the end goal is to make sure that, no matter what device the user has, our content is accessible across each one of those. And it's being tested out by our development and QA engineers day in and day out to make sure that what we've designed and what we have developed is the same experience that our user is going to get and nothing short of the best.

Eric Hanselman

I think, from an app development perspective, being able to do device testing is fairly standard, but it seems like you've really taken that up an additional degree to not only understand representation across different devices, how does this particular app look beyond mobile context, how does it look on a web context, those sorts of things, but now starting to really think about assisted devices, assisted software and how it's going to be represented through that. And that really seems to be a step-up in expecting what that larger end user community is going to look like.

Sonal Sakhardande

Exactly, exactly. And we take it a step further. So this is just our development and testing phases, but once the solution or the app is launched, we proactively analyze the usage patterns; and see how attributes like languages, currencies, locations, even physical disabilities can limit the use of a product. The good thing with software development is that iterative process gives teams the opportunities to continuously course correct as they see issues with either software or data and constantly make adjustments.

Eric Hanselman

It seems like adjusting around data could be more complicated than user interfaces, especially in terms of identifying any integrated bias or concerns about the data itself. Do you use similar techniques to be able to look at and assess data? And is that something you look at upfront or -- and you analyze data once you've got it? I guess there must be both sides of that coin in terms of ensuring that you've got a sufficient view into both how it's collected and what those results look like.

Sonal Sakhardande

Yes. So in general, a lot of businesses need to reengineer the way we collect data; we manage it; more importantly, the way we analyze it; and make sense of it on the final UI, right? Like so I think I would encourage teams to ask questions like what does good look like in this data set, right? Where could there be biases? Or what populations are we under-serving as we are analyzing this data? And more importantly, how can we continue to deliver equitable outcomes? Once you start asking those questions through your ideation and design phases, I think you have a better chance of creating a software or a product that meets more needs.

Eric Hanselman

It's really ensuring that you've got a wide-enough lens upfront and managing that through the development process to ensure that you're building teams that are -- that have diverse-enough perspectives and actually coming up with an end result that's going to be broad enough to be able to handle what is a much more diverse and, hopefully, more inclusive environment in which to deliver them.

Sonal Sakhardande

Exactly, absolutely.

Eric Hanselman

So in terms of being able to manage that data, it sounds like you've built some significant tool sets in terms of being able to understand both the development environment itself and understanding some of the data. I'd be curious. Are there aspects that you're working on that you're looking to be able to expand or do more with? I guess, on a certain level, as part of this process, if you had a development superpower, what would it be or what would you like it to be? Given some of the challenges you face, I guess, sort of what kinds of things would you like to do more and better at?

Sonal Sakhardande

Yes. I mean that's something that I've been thinking about. If ever I could have a development superpower -- some of it exists in personality, but I guess for me it's going to be curiosity. And I believe curiosity drives both learning and innovation. Technologists and leaders who are insatiably curious about the world around them readily acknowledge what they don't know, but they don't just stop there. [ When ] they recognize they don't know something that is important to what they care about, they plunge in and learn everything they can about it. So in my experience, I feel that people with the superpower are constantly asking questions and listening generously to the answers that they get. And I truly believe that insatiably curious people continue to learn, grow and get better at what they do throughout their careers. So that would be my wish for a superpower.

Eric Hanselman

That's a wonderful insight. So often in tech, as in many other aspects of life, we're pushing for a result. We're pushing to get done. And that can narrow our focus, but if we can tap that inherent curiosity to ensure that we continue to seek out, to continue to explore, to continue to keep that lens ever wider open to be able to look at what we're dealing with and the environment around us, hopefully, that continues to open doors and allows us to be more thoughtful, to be more inclusive and, hopefully, a little bit more mindful about projects. That's a great insight. Thank you.

Well, this has been great, Sonal. I appreciate you coming on and offering these insights. And hopefully, these are some things that technology teams can consider when they think about what are some of the tougher problems that we're looking to tackle. I know dealing with a lot of data in complex environments as we do, it's easy to move relatively rapidly through just simply accumulating data sets, managing that data, but I think the points that you've made about ensuring that we're really considering with some depth where this fits are those things that can help teams really expand and be more inclusive about not only the technologies they're working with but what they're actually delivering for their end users.

Sonal Sakhardande

It was wonderful to talk about these insights with you, Eric. I truly enjoyed this.

Eric Hanselman

Well, many thanks. And this, of course, is a conversation that, hopefully, will continue, so hopefully, we'll get a chance to have you back on and talk about some more of the details of really what we fit around this, but we are at time for today. Thank you very much. That is it for this episode of Next in Tech.

Thanks to our audience for staying with us. And thanks to our production team, including [ Caroline Wright, Ethan Zimman ] on the marketing and events teams; and our studio lead, Kyle Cangialosi.

I hope you'll join us for our next episode. We're going to be digging into digital devices, one more piece of the end-user technology experience. And we'll be looking at some of the perspectives around what some of our data around digital devices is really speaking about from a macroeconomic perspective as well as just the tech pieces. I hope you'll join us then because there is always something Next in Tech.