Volta, a new startup with a team split between two headquarters in Milan and Paris, has secured a '6 million pre-seed round ($6.3 million) to develop a new vertical software-as-a-service platform focused on B2B sales. In more practical terms, the Volta team pitches its product as an equivalent to Shopify but focused on B2B transactions. While Shopify, the ecommerce giant that helps people create an online store and easily sell items to consumers, offers a B2B commerce platform, Volta thinks there's value in creating a company specifically focused on the B2B transactions. When they go to trade shows and meet potential clients in their offices, these companies tend to juggle between several versions of their paper catalogs. Depending on the client and the context, they don't want to show the same list of items and prices. That's why Volta wants to simplify the catalog management process. However, the company doesn't want to replace the good old enterprise resource planning system. When a purchase order is signed, the transaction is then processed through the ERP....

Akira Bell is senior vice president and CIO at Mathematica, a research and data analytics consultancy. Bell was a finalist for this year's MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Award in recognition of her work at Mathematica to spearhead the launch of the data collaboration platform Mquiry, a turnkey system for onboarding and working with clients' data securely. MIT Sloan Management Review spoke with Bell to understand her role and how leaders should be thinking about their data. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Akira Bell: Mathematica is a company of subject matter experts ' social scientists, data scientists, economists ' and technologists who have a deep understanding of policies, practices, and data that impact public well-being around the world. Because of this, we're able to help our clients reimagine how they collect, analyze, and apply data to solve today's urgent social challenges. My role at Mathematica spans what we consider the traditional CIO role, in that it has all of the internal responsibilities for infrastructure, security, network, communications, enterprise resource planning, policy, and so on. But we also have some of the backbone for the client-facing teams, where technologists from my team sit in with the business units and they work in concert. Our platforms for hosting client data and solutions are managed by our team as well....

Few businesses have implemented strategies to build an age-inclusive, multigenerational workforce. Even fewer seem to be aware of the important role that workplace technologies can play in driving the performance outcomes for workers of different ages. But as labor force demographics skew older as more people work longer, business success and productivity will be increasingly tied to the well-being and job performance of workers ages 60 and older, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.1 As business technologies become increasingly complex, older workers experience a varying degree of increasing difficulty using them to perform job tasks.2 Indeed, effectively using tools such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications requires many cognitive resources that are less available for older workers because of age-related cognitive changes. Using a laboratory experiment and two large-scale surveys, I found that the job performance of older workers is hindered by the reduced perceptual speed and the technology overload that can occur if they are overburdened with an excessive number of technology demands.3 This problem is increasingly common because the pressure to keep up with ever-evolving office technologies compounds the pressure to keep up with other ongoing job responsibilities....

Renaud Fournier SM '95 joined the Institute in September 2023 in the newly established role of chief officer for business and digital transformation and is leading a team focused on simplifying business operations and systems for the MIT community. Fournier has extensive experience implementing systems and solving data challenges, both in higher education and the private sector ' most recently, leading the digital transformation effort at New York University. Here, Fournier speaks about how he and his team will work closely with members of the MIT community to chart a course for MIT's digital evolution. A: The MIT community relies on our enterprise systems for a range of activities ' everything from hiring and evaluating employees to managing research grants and facilities projects to maintaining student information. SAP is our current enterprise resource planning system for human resources, finance, and facilities management, and it's integrated with other systems that provide additional business functionality. Some of these systems are purchased, like Coupa, while others are partially or fully homegrown, like Kuali Coeus and NIMBUS. Along with SAP, our other core systems ' for example, Advance and MITSIS ' feed data into a central data warehouse to support reporting....