Tech & Innovation Blog
My Career Journey: Learn and Grow Together at ADP
Voice of Our People, Career Insights, What We Do
“At ADP, the doors to learning are always open. We work and win as one. All it takes is one’s curiosity to learn.”
My Career Journey: Learn and Grow Together at ADP
Viplove S. is a Senior Architect responsible for Architecture, Standards, Governance, and Talent Management, supporting products for National Accounts Services clients in Hyderabad, India. To him, happiness means spending time with family, giving his best at work, and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Outside of technology, Viplove enjoys exercising, singing, dancing, reading, and writing stories. He once walked the entire Manhattan Island length, around 18 miles!
Viplove enjoys running marathons during his free time.
Coming to ADP
Since I stepped into the Information Technology (IT) industry, ADP has been one organization I was always curious about. What appealed to me the most was ADP’s strong focus on people. After fifteen years of working with multiple service organizations, I decided to knock on the door I had walked by all these years. An opportunity to learn about a new industry and its leading products was too exciting for me to pass.
I joined ADP a little over two and a half years ago. As I look back at my enriching journey, two contributory factors stand out: People and Learning. Without People, there would not have been much learning. I have worked with many amazing people in my career, but here at ADP, every day gives me reasons to thank a fellow associate. Whether developers, testers, Site Reliability Engineers (SRE) members, managers, architects, or senior leaders, I am grateful for learning with them every day.
My Career Journey
I initially started as part of the Global Enterprise Technologies & Solutions (GETS) department, which supports IT operations for ADP. The teams I work with are responsible for developing and maintaining 50+ applications used by ADP associates and 100+ integrations among internal ADP systems and external vendors. It is easily one of the most complex systems I have ever worked with, and my job was to transform it digitally. I was fortunate to have people around me who were not only knowledgeable but also extremely helpful.
Two years ago, my team and I moved to the Global Product & Technology (GPT) business unit as part of the Product Development organization that supports large national accounts. For me, this move opened a world of opportunities. My manager helped me seize one of those opportunities. He challenged me to reach beyond my scope of work and help another team. Sometimes, saying “yes” is all it takes.
And it did. That “yes” triggered a domino effect for me. That door opened another, and I worked with multiple product teams across ADP. Because of that, I am proud that my journey has led me to become a Chief Architect for our GPT National Account Services team in India. In this role, I’m responsible for the architecture and quality of ADP’s top products in HR, Payroll, Time, and Talent for our largest clients.
Viplove and his family
Architect Mentorship Program
Another part of my new responsibilities is helping other associates grow. We recently kicked off an Architect Mentorship program for my business unit, the National Account Services Architect Academy (NASAA). As a part of this program, we shortlisted 11 talented associates who have demonstrated excellence in their projects and aspire to be architects. Each of the mentees is assigned a mentor who is currently in an architect role within the organization. The mentorship is multi-fold:
1) The mentees go through a hand-picked Udemy curriculum that covers the fundamentals of being an architect, the various technologies that support our products, and the soft skills essential for the architect role.
2) Mentee and mentor connect weekly. The mentor guides the mentee on their learning, shares real-world experiences, helps solve problems, provides feedback, and more.
3) The Academy meets monthly where a senior Architect Leader (from outside the business unit) shares their career journey with the mentees and how they solved large-scale business problems.
4) The program culminates with the mentees picking a real-world business problem, working on architectural artifacts to solve it, and presenting their work to senior leaders.
Mentees graduate from the Academy in a grand ceremony. After graduation, they are assigned architectural responsibilities within their projects as on-the-job training. The idea is to produce well-equipped architects through this program within one year. Having benefited hugely from my mentors and colleagues, I am excited and committed to the mentorship program’s success.
Designing for People
ADP has taken giant leaps in its transformation into a Technology company. One of the things that makes it possible is our commitment to people. Domains and technologies are out there for anyone to learn. But the 59,000+ ADPers helping 920K+ clients in more than 140 countries give our company the foundation to stand tall among its competitors. Our network is strong and built on core values, including “Each Person Counts” and “Integrity is Everything.”
Viplove (first on the right) and his team at ADP Hyderabad
Supporting & Learning Culture
At ADP, the doors to learning are always open. If you are curious, nothing can stop you. What makes ADP stand out from the other organizations I have worked with is our culture of “learning and growing together.” Despite being a multi-national company, we don’t have boundaries separating us.
Our excitement and cooperation are the same whether speaking to an associate in India, the U.S., or Europe. We work and win as one. If I need information or to learn something, I can reach out to anyone, whether I’ve worked with them before or not. All it takes is a quick ping on our collaboration platform. We are all connected! All it takes is one’s curiosity to learn.
I’m endlessly excited and curious about our vast HCM industry and all the exciting technologies we use as part of our products. Between that and my ever-helpful colleagues, I keep learning.
Learn more about working at Hyderabad and visit Who We Hire.
ADP Tech, Hyderabad, Integration Architecture, Mentorship, Career Growth
Tech & Innovation Blog
Women Engineer Magazine Top 50 Company.
Recognition, Awards, Women in STEM
ADP is thrilled to earn a place on this year’s 30th Annual “Top 50 Employers” in Woman Engineer Magazine for a second year in a row.
Readers of Woman Engineer Magazine chose top US companies they would most like to work for and/or whom they believe would provide a positive working environment for women engineers.
They chose ADP as one of the Top 50.
ADP is proud to build diverse teams that represent the diversity of our clients to drive innovation. At ADP, we focus on inclusion and reflect a diversity lens within our products.
Our focus on such programs as our partnership with Girls Who Code and our Women in Technology Leadership Mentoring Program has led to distinctions such as AnitaB.org naming ADP a 2020 Top Companies for Women Technologists Winner in the Large Technical Workforce category.
AnitaB.org recognized ADP for making the most progress toward women’s equity among companies with large technical workforces. We know that having a more diverse organization makes us stronger, and we are proud of supporting women in technology.
Our Global Product and Technology (GPT) organization stays close to industry benchmarks and has adopted measures to continue to drive progress. ADP also supports philanthropic organizations that nurture the career development of girls and women in the technology field, helping them fulfill their potential as future tech leaders.
Our technology leaders are committed to driving diversity, including recruiting and developing women technologists while providing opportunities for them to grow their careers.
Some recent product examples include the ADP DataCloud Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) Dashboards to help companies see real-time workforce demographics. Some other products to promote a diverse workforce include our Candidate Relevancy tools and the award-winning Pay Equity Explorer.
We strive to offer personal development opportunities through self-driven platforms, and our International Women’s Network and our Empower Committee focused on Women in STEM. Regardless of your role, we offer opportunities for women technologists. Meet Some of the Women of ADP DevOps and how they drive data-centric development.
Some recent product examples include the ADP DataCloud Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) Dashboards to help companies see real-time workforce demographics. Some other products to promote a diverse workforce include our Candidate Relevancy tools and the award-winning Pay Equity Explorer.
Visit us at tech.adp.com and learn more about what we do.
Tech & Innovation Blog
ADP Wins 2020 Breakthrough AI Award
Recognition, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science
Accessible Video Controls
Video: AI and machine learning to help our clients
[TEXT] Welcome to ADP DataCloud
[DESCRIPTION] In animation, a man speaks.
[TEXT] Hi, I’m Jack. I’m excited to share some of the recently launched DataCloud Features that are helping our clients navigate the Dynamic Workplace.
[DESCRIPTION] The word “Start” on a screen. Underneath it, the numbers 1 through 4. Jack touches number 1.
[TEXT] We’re helping Organizations Understand how their workforce has been impacted by Covid-19. How? Data Mashups. Data Mashups – Covid Workforce Impact. Data Mashup refreshes daily, displaying the # of Covid-19 cases documented by Johns Hopkins. This has helped organize and understand how their workforce has been impacted by Covid-19.
[DESCRIPTION] Jack presses 2.
[TEXT] We’ve identified Millions in tax credit opportunities for our clients. How? Say Hello to Storyboards. Storyboards – Employee Retention Tax Credit. Storyboards helps clients easily identify if they are eligible for Employee Retention Tax Credits. The platform will automatically calculate the tax credit opportunity based on eligible employees. E.R. T.C. has proactively surface to millions and tax credit opportunities for our clients.
[TEXT] 3. We are helping millions of Practitioners monitor employee sentiment about returning to the workplace. How? Meet Return to Work. Return to Work – Readiness Survey. Practitioners can now send short surveys to collect worker Readiness and sentiment about returning to the workplace. Surveys are delivered to workers through the easy-to-use a. D. P. Mobile app. Practitioners are monitoring employee sentiment about returning to the workplace.
[TEXT] 4. We’ve helped Practitioners Answer key questions about their organization. How? With Organizational Benchmarks. Benchmarks – Organizational Benchmarks. Clients can take a deep-dive into their organizational data and benchmark their company against peers. Uncover organizational questions like what percentage of labor cost do my peers spend on sales and marketing. Discover how their head count breakdown compares to their industry. ADP DataCloud, Learn, Get Inspired, Join the Conversation
Congratulations to our DataCloud team! Recognized for its impressive capabilities and significant value it brings to businesses, ADP’s DataCloud won a 2020 AI Breakthrough Award in the “Best AI-based Solution for Data Science” category. Watch the video.
In a constantly shifting world of work, businesses, now more than ever, are looking for a solution that helps them make informed decisions about their organization. Enter ADP DataCloud, a powerful people analytics solution.
Utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI), the solution analyzes aggregated, anonymized HR and compensation data from over 30 million workers in more than 730,000 organizations to allow companies to benchmark and compare compensation data, turnover rate, and overtime. Endless possibilities open for better managing a global workforce when pairing this empirical data with the power of machine learning (ML) and AI.
The AI Breakthrough Awards recognize the top companies, technologies, and products in the Artificial Intelligence industry today. As more and more companies join the growing global AI market, this awards program honors those that stand out among a crowded field of competitors. In other categories, winners included IBM, Capital One, NetApp, and others.
Congratulations to the team for all your hard work to deliver amazing solutions and real-time trends to our clients. Way to break through!
Tech & Innovation Blog
Next-Gen Payroll Captures the 2020 Top HR Product Award
Recognition, Awards
ADP’s products continue to earn awards at a time when our clients need our innovative products the most. We are proud to be named a “2020 Top HR Product” by HR Executive.
ADP’s products continue to earn awards at a time when our clients need our innovative products the most. We are proud to be named a “2020 Top HR Product” by HR Executive.
ADP’s Next-Gen Payroll Platform enables companies of all types – from local small businesses to global conglomerates – to pay their employees their way. This real-time global payroll platform gives clients and their employees unprecedented transparency into how they are paid, along with predictive insights and suggested actions. Companies no longer need to guess the impact of regulatory changes but can proactively model these changes in real-time and plan for the future. At the same time, employees, contractors, and gig workers all have complete visibility into how their pay is calculated along with actionable tips on improving their financial wellness. Who couldn’t use that?
Built natively on the public cloud, this real-time global payroll platform:
- Gives practitioners and employees unprecedented transparency into how they are paid;
- Empowers practitioners to more easily understand the effects of regulatory and policy changes, enabling a stronger strategic partnership with business leaders by demonstrating bottom-line impact; and
- Delivers a breakthrough employee experience with predictive insights to model and understand the effect of potential life changes.
Winning solutions at the HR Technology Conference are selected based on several criteria, including their level of innovation, value-add to the HR professional, intuitiveness for the user, and ability to deliver on what they promise.
Tech & Innovation Blog
Meet The Team Who improved our Year-End Testing for 401K Clients
Voice of Our People, Why ADP
Meet one of our teams who helped build a better customer experience through cross-functional collaboration
Why did you choose ADP?
Karen H. (Tech Lead; 21 years at ADP): I joined ADP because of its reputation in the industry and as an employer. I saw the opportunity to grow my career with a company that is among the best.
Gina G. (Product Owner; 7 years): After earning my master’s, I heard about an awesome graduate internship program at ADP. ADP’s mission, vision, and values aligned closely with my personal interests—and that’s still true today. We have a constant focus on ensuring the client experience is best-in-class, and we offer endless career opportunities to our team; we want everyone to grow and remain passionate about what we do.
David Z. (Director, Application Development; 17.5 years): Back in the early 2000s, a few former co-workers told me that ADP’s retirement services business was growing quickly and that the company was positioned to grow market share. And that’s certainly been true—our client base has tripled since I joined. The role was also a chance to bring my experience designing, creating, and testing similar processing for healthcare plans for our retirement products.
Bhargav A. (Scrum Master; 5.5 years): As a software engineer, I’m passionate about adopting new technical skills. ADP offered a rewarding career, with challenging opportunities to understand our core business and develop products with the latest technologies.
Pradip P. (Principal QA Engineer; 5 years): ADP is a growing organization with many opportunities. I knew the role would be challenging and that I’d learn a lot.
Karan N. (Technical Lead; 4 years): I was looking for a role that would help me grow my technical skills and personally. Luckily, I met someone from ADP who shared his experience and told me about the fantastic culture. That’s exactly what I’ve found here.
Damodhar M. (Manager, 13 years): I’m very excited to work for ADP. It’s an excellent company with plenty of opportunities to learn and grow. The business model ADP follows (Simplify-Innovate-Grow) provides me opportunities to work on multiple technologies.
Vasudeo J. (Consultant, 6 years): I heard about ADP from my friend, and he told me that ADP is the best place to work among all IT companies and suggested that I join. My decision was correct. I love working with ADP because of culture in every sense, i.e., work, fun at work, family day, and all other mega-events that happen when we are working in the office.
Shivani K. (Senior Member Technical, 5 Years): This is a super cool company to work for, and it’s been great to get a job here.
Gyan S. (Member Technical, 3 years): ADP has a fantastic work culture. It values its employees as much as the customers. Every day at work brings new challenges and learning.
Sunil K. (Member Technical, 1.7 years): It offers an excellent opportunity to learn and implement innovative ideas. I like the ADP work culture.
Preeti R. (Member Technical, 1.6 years): When I got hired, I felt my skills are particularly well-suited to this position. But I like ADP’s culture too.
Tell us a fun fact about yourself.
Karen H.: I love to ski. During the winter, I teach skiing in my spare time.
Gina G.: I’m a thrill seeker! I once sky-dived, and you’ll often find me hiking the mountains in Hawaii. I find thrills at work, too. I love being a part of digital transformation efforts that simplify client experience and streamline our internal business processes.
David Z.: Nineteen years ago, I formed a team in the Metuchen Softball League, and we finally became league champions. I also play on a 50 and over team that has won the Middlesex County champions a couple of times, and for the past three years, we’ve won the state championship.
Bhargav A.: I’m always eager to learn new things and implement challenging solutions. But when I get some free time, I love to disconnect from the world to visit wildlife.
Pradip P.: I like sports—watching them, but also like getting outside and playing them myself.
Karan N.: I love playing badminton and exploring new places with my friends.
Damodhar M.: When I’m off work, I love to follow current events across the world to stay updated.
Vasudeo J.: I love sleeping. A few months back, I got a call from my friend at around midnight, had a conversation, and had no memory of it the next day. I guess I made sense, he didn’t realize I wasn’t awake.
Shivani K.: Reading a new book or creating a craft.
Gyan S.: I try to add and refine my skills so that I can become more productive at work. I take time to analyze how can we improve as a team, raise the bar and have fun too.
Sunil K.: If the world is facing a big problem, I imagine myself as a hero who saves the world.
Preeti R.: I have a huge sweet tooth!
There you have it!
Team, thanks for sharing your ADP experience, and congratulation for a job well done!
Tech & Innovation Blog
Team effort: Building a better customer experience through cross-functional collaboration
How We Work, Voice of Our People, Team Collaboration
At ADP, every milestone is achieved–and celebrated—together. The work by Sachin Ghag and his team to improve the year-end testing experience for 401(k) administrators is no exception. Along with the Architecture Group, the “Agile Archers” and the “Avenging Explorers” worked across time zones and collaborated with other ADP teams to bring a brand new user experience to life in four short months. Hear from Sachin about how his team got it done.
By Sachin Ghag, Senior Manager, Global Product Development and Technology, Retirement Services
At ADP, every milestone is achieved–and celebrated—together. The work by Sachin Ghag and his team to improve the year-end testing experience for 401(k) administrators is no exception. Along with the Architecture Group, the “Agile Archers” and the “Avenging Explorers” worked across time zones and collaborated with other ADP teams to bring a brand new user experience to life in four short months. Below, hear from Sachin about how his team got it done.
****
At the start of every new calendar year, retirement plan administrators at millions of companies across the U.S. add the same pesky item to their to-do list: year-end testing. To ensure their businesses are compliant with federal law, they must confirm that their 401(k) plans are within a half-dozen or so Department of Labor standards, which cover everything from which employees qualify for a plan to how much they contribute. If administrators discover any issues, they must resolve them relatively quickly.
For years, this process was largely manual. Test results came in a single PDF, and companies that needed to take corrective actions had no online option to track whether those issues had been marked as resolved. Instead, administrators had to call ADP for a status update. But we saw an opportunity to save our customers time and better use our resources. It was clear that we could offer a better experience.
We’re always looking for ways to optimize our processes, so a self-service dashboard for year-end testing had long been on our list of projects to tackle. And the timing was perfect: ADP had just started accelerating digital transformations across the company. Our plan was ambitious: We wanted to give clients not just a real-time view of their status, but a central hub for every resource they’d need to resolve any issues. By September 2019, our team in Global Product and Technology (GPT) was ready to dive in. But we knew that the GPT team would need help from our colleagues along the way.
To kick things off, we held a discovery session with the dashboard’s product owner and the UX team, who had already created a mock-up of the end-to-end user experience. Once we made sure we fully understood what we needed to build, we broke the desired product down into features, created user stories for each one, and developed a timeline based on three-week sprints. We wanted to leave plenty of time to test every scenario before the January 10th launch, so we set a target date of December 12.
The first step, we knew, would also be the hardest: Before we could build the APIs and UI that would make our self-service dreams a reality, we needed to move data from a highly complex mainframe system—which most of the Retirement Services GPT team had never worked with before—into SQL. So once our chief architect had offered some invaluable initial feedback, including new processes for transferring the mainframe VSAM data into SQL, we turned to ADP’s subject-matter experts: the Mainframe team. Together, we decided they would extract the millions of records we needed into a text file, updated daily, which we would then import into the SQL site. And of course, updates had to go both ways; we also needed to figure out how to send changes back to the mainframe—re-running tests as soon as possible after users completed corrective actions to ensure the two sources were synced.
Throughout the development phase, collaboration was key. A challenge with the time difference, when our India Global Product and Technology team was half a day ahead of our Mainframe colleagues in the U.S. Being flexible and thoughtful, we managed to meet jointly for an hour or two nearly every day, and were even able to turn the time difference into an advantage. Because our U.S. teammates worked while we slept, they would often have suggestions and solutions ready for us by the time we started the next day.
Once the initial development work was done, yet another phase of collaboration began. We asked our colleagues in Service Operations, who work directly with clients, to help us test the dashboard. Sure enough, their real-life experience helped them find issues we hadn’t—especially around ADP’s 401k Sponsor site, which is used by plan administrators. If a user clicked on certain links within their ADP Task Tracker, for example, we wanted to send them directly to the new self-service dashboard—but many of those links still needed updating. The Service Ops team recorded each issue they found in a spreadsheet, and we fixed them, one by one.
In the end, thanks to hard work from our team and our colleagues across UX, Mainframe, Service Ops, and beyond, what started as an ambitious plan turned into a success story for our teams and our clients. In early January, we launched smoothly, on time, and with a warm welcome from tens of thousands of happy clients—whose reviews ranged from “I love how easy this was to navigate” to “You made my freaking day!” ADP’s leadership team also recognized our work with an award of appreciation.
The new year-end testing dashboard.
Since that first release in January, we’ve already built out some additional features—and we have plans to add more for 2021, including web identification of data integrity issues, which will allow our clients to visualize and modify data within their web session. But even when we aren’t actively working on the dashboard, the experience of building it continues to benefit the GPT team every day. We’ve been able to use the technical knowledge we gained to improve our work on several other projects, both within and outside of compliance. And most importantly, we’ve built relationships with other ADP teams that will help us better serve our clients for years to come.
Given all the things 2020 has given us, our clients will have a smooth year-end. A nice gift after everything that has happened in the world.
Want to Meet the Team?
Women in STEM Profile: ADP’s CTO, Urvashi Tyagi
At Urvashi Tyagi’s first job after college, there were no other women in the company. None. ADP’s Chief Technology Officer knows first-hand how challenging the path can be for a woman in STEM.
Urvashi Tyagi grew up in India. She and her three sisters are all engineers; her oldest sister paved the way. When her sister told the family she wanted to become an engineer, Urvashi’s parents, aunts and uncles were worried no one would want to marry a woman engineer. And besides, it wasn’t even a good career choice with barely any job opportunities for female engineers. After an extended family meeting resulted in an unfavorable outcome, her parents had a change of heart and let Urvashi’s oldest sister join the engineering program. When it was Urvashi’s turn, no one questioned the decision. (And she and her sisters are all happily married and enjoying their professions.)
The Only Woman
While both technology and culture had changed a lot, there were still many challenges for women engineers. When Urvashi was a college undergrad, she was one of only four women in a class of 90 engineering students.
As she was graduating, most companies were not interested in recruiting women. So, she didn’t get a job from campus interviews. But Urvashi noticed an ad in the newspaper at a company that developed machine tools and wanted to hire college grads with design and computer numerical control programming experience. She was invited to interview and was delighted to get the job.
Show up, keep learning, and often it works out better than you could have imagined.
– Urvashi Tyagi, Chief Technology Officer at ADP
When she showed up on her first day, there were no other women in the company. There had never been a women’s bathroom. “Someone printed out a sign that said, ‘Women Only’ and taped it to one of the bathrooms for me,” She says. Grateful, Urvashi overlooked the fact her bathroom was in a different building than where she worked. “I had to figure out how to co-exist on the shop floor and focus on the work. Most of the time it was good. I learned a lot about solving complex engineering problems.”
Urvashi Tyagi
Later, she found out the hiring manager never had the permission to hire her. He sent the offer letter because she was one of the top two candidates selected based on test scores and interviews. His boss was not entirely pleased. “I got the job because of one individual who did not see things in a stereotypical way and was focused on finding the right person for the role.”
While working full time, Urvashi went back to school to earn her MBA. From there, she decided to teach operations management and information systems. As an academic associate for a couple years at the premier Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, she had the opportunity to work and connect with top professors all over the world. But she realized she enjoyed solving problems more than being in a classroom. One of her colleagues encouraged her to apply to a master’s of science program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in Worcester, MA. Urvashi wasn’t sure she wanted more school or how she was going to pay for it, but she looked up the program. The customizable curriculum and the focus on applied learning swayed her. She learned that the deadline to apply had already passed, but after speaking with a professor at the school, she submitted her application and was admitted.
Her family didn’t want her so far away. Once again, her older sister supported her and encouraged her family to let her go. Urvashi’s sister was also moving to the United States with her husband and promised to keep an eye on Urvashi. Her parents scraped together the money to purchase their first-ever airplane ticket and a couple months of living expenses. She arrived in Massachusetts with two bags, one full of snacks.
Learning and Solving Problems
Since graduating from WPI in 2001, Urvashi has worked for many of the big names in technology, including IBM, Microsoft, and Amazon. She’s led global engineering teams doing product strategy, architecture, and development. When you download an audiobook or send an Outlook email, know that Urvashi was involved with the engineering and teams that made that possible.
Lockdown birthday celebration at home (left to right): daughter Riya, husband Shishir, Urvashi and son Tanish.
Today, she is ADP’s Chief Technology Officer, taking on that role in 2019. “I had no idea that I would be a CTO three years ago,” she says. “I didn’t plan it. I try to live in the moment and put all my energy into what I am doing and the problems I am working to solve. That drives the next things that happen.”
Urvashi’s approach is to make sure she is always learning and delivering in her role. “While the foundations of engineering and technology may not change that often, the applications are evolving constantly,” she says. “The only way to keep up is to be a lifelong student.”
It’s also essential to understand your own value to the organization. “Always know how the work you do will impact the company’s bottom line and how your work is adding value and taking the company forward.”
This can be challenging for women of color who often experience more scrutiny of their work, more criticism, and less credit for their accomplishments. “The one area where I have experienced unconscious bias is with criticism,” Urvashi says. “I have to listen carefully and know when the feedback is genuine and when it is more about the person giving the feedback. When I understand that, I can embrace the situation and not take it personally.”
Urvashi’s best advice is to live in the moment. “Things don’t have to be planned or the way you think they should be. Show up, keep learning, and often it works out better than you could have imagined.”
Ready for more?
Explore the stories of these and other ADP Women in STEM, and learn about careers at ADP.
Related Video: How ADP Walks the D&I Talk
One way ADP encourages diversity and inclusion (D&I) among its associates is through business resource groups (BRGs). ADP’s iWIN BRG is the company’s largest with 5000+ members (male and female) from 19 countries across the business. Learn how iWIN engages, equips and empowers its members to achieve personal and professional success through networking, professional development, and other educational opportunities.
Creating human-focused solutions in today’s product strategy
ADP Business Anthropologist Martha Bird sat down with Daniel Litwin, the Voice of B2B, at CES 2020, discussing a wide range of topics related to how her anthropological work and research impacts businesses and consumer needs.
Bird has worked for numerous companies in the field of business anthropology since the early 2000s, working to create human-focused solutions to business needs.
Bird and Litwin touch on their CES experience, a modern focus on human-centered and human-responsive products and how those concepts affect consumer product development, consumer longing for personalized experiences, and more.
How to select, gather, clean, and test data for machine learning systems
https://explore.adp.com/spark3/how-data-becomes-insight-the-right-data-matters-454FC-31577B.html
How Data Becomes Insight:
The Right Data Matters
By SPARK Team
What goes into selecting, gathering, cleaning and testing data for machine-learning systems?
It’s not enough to have a lot of data and some good ideas. The quality, quantity and nature of the data is the foundation for using it effectively.
We asked members of the ADP® DataCloud Team to help us understand what goes into selecting, gathering, cleaning and testing data for machine-learning systems.
Q: How do you go from lots of information to usable data in a machine-learning system?
DataCloud Team: The first thing to figure out is whether you have the information you want to answer the questions or solve the problem you’re working on. So, we look at what data we have and figure out what we can do with it. Sometimes, we know right away we need some other data to fill in gaps or provide more context. Other times, we realize that some other data would be useful as we build and test the system. One of the exciting things about machine learning is that it often gives us better questions, which sometimes need new data that we hadn’t thought about when we started.
Once you know what data you want to start with, then you want it “clean and normalized.” This just means that the data is all in a consistent format so it can be combined with other data and analyzed. It’s the process where we make sure we have the right data, get rid of irrelevant or corrupt data, that the data is accurate and that we can use it with all our other data when the information is coming from multiple sources.
A great example is job titles. Every company uses different titles. A “director” could be an entry-level position, a senior executive, or something in between. So, we could not compare jobs based on job titles. We had to figure out what each job actually was and where it fit in a standard hierarchy before we could use the data in our system.
Q: This sounds difficult.
DataCloud Team: There’s a joke that data scientists spend 80 percent of their time cleaning data and the other 20 percent complaining about it.
At ADP, we are fortunate that much of the data we work with is collected in an organized and usable way through our payroll and HR systems, which makes part of the process easier. Every time we change one of our products or build new ones, data compatibility is an important consideration. This allows us to work on the more complex issues, like coming up with a workable taxonomy for jobs with different titles.
But getting the data right is foundational to everything that happens, so it’s effort well spent.
Q: If you are working with HR and payroll data, doesn’t it have a lot of personal information about people? How do you handle privacy and confidentiality issues?
DataCloud Team: We are extremely sensitive to people’s privacy and go to great lengths to protect both the security of the data we have as well as people’s personal information.
With machine learning we are looking for patterns, connections or matches and correlations. So, we don’t need personally identifying data about individuals. We anonymize the information and label and organize it by categories such as job, level in hierarchy, location, industry, size of organization, and tenure. This is sometimes called “chunking.” For example, instead of keeping track of exact salaries, we combine them into salary ranges. This both makes the information easier to sort and protects people’s privacy.
With benchmarking analytics, if any data set is too small to make anonymous ― meaning it would be too easy to figure out who it was ― then we don’t include that data in the benchmark analysis.
Q: Once you have your initial data set, how do you know when you need or want more?
DataCloud Team: The essence of machine learning is more data.
We want to be able to see what is happening over time, what is changing, and be able to adjust our systems based on this fresh flow of data. As people use the programs, we are also able to validate or correct information. For example with our jobs information, users tell us how the positions in their organization fit into our categories. This makes the program useful to them, and makes the overall database more accurate.
As people use machine-learning systems, they create new data which the system learns from and adjusts to. It allows us to detect changes, see cycles over time, and come up with new questions and applications. Sometimes we decide we need to add a new category of information or ask the system to process the information a different way.
These are the things that both keep us up at night and make it exciting to show up at work every day.
Learn more by getting our guide, “Proving the Power of People Data.”
Lifion at ADP’s cloud transformation journey
https://eng.lifion.com/lifions-cloud-transformation-journey-2333b7c0897d
Lifion’s Cloud Transformation Journey
On moving to managed services in a microservice architecture
Since Lifion’s inception as ADP’s next-generation Human Capital Management (HCM) platform, we’ve made an effort to embrace relevant technology trends and advancements. From microservices and container orchestration frameworks to distributed databases, and everything in between, we’re continually exploring ways we can evolve our architecture. Our readiness to evaluate non-traditional, cutting edge technology has meant that some bets have stuck whereas others have pivoted.
One of our biggest pivots has been a shift from self-managed databases & streaming systems, running on cloud compute services (like Amazon EC2) and deployed with tools like Terraform and Ansible, towards fully cloud-managed services.
When we launched the effort to make this shift in early 2018, we began by executing a structured, planned initiative across an organization of 200+ engineers. After overcoming the initial inertia, the effort continued to gain momentum, eventually taking a life of its own, and finally becoming fully embedded in how our teams work.
Along the way, we’ve been thinking about what we can give back. For example, we’ve previously written about a node.js client for AWS Kinesis that we’re working on as an open source initiative.
AWS’s re:Invent conference is perhaps the largest global cloud community conference in the world. In late 2018, we presented our cloud transformation journey at re:Invent. As you can see in the recording, we described our journey and key learnings in adopting specific AWS managed services.
In this post, we discuss key factors that made the initiative successful, its benefits in our microservice architecture, and how managed services helped us shift our teams’ focus to our core product while improving overall reliability.
Why Services Don’t Share Databases
The notion of services sharing databases, making direct connections to the same database system and being dependent on shared schemas, is a recognized micro-service anti-pattern. With shared databases, changes in the underlying database (including schemas, scaling operations such as sharding, or even migrating to a better database) become very difficult with coordination required between multiple service teams and releases.
As Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels writes in his blog:
Each service encapsulates its own data and presents a hardened API for others to use. Most importantly, direct database access to the data from outside its respective service is not allowed. This architectural pattern was a response to the scaling challenges that had challenged Amazon.com through its first 5 years…
And Martin Fowler on integration databases:
On the whole integration databases lead to serious problems becaue [sic] the database becomes a point of coupling between the applications that access it. This is usually a deep coupling that significantly increases the risk involved in changing those applications and making it harder to evolve them. As a result most software architects that I respect take the view that integration databases should be avoided.
The Right Tool for the Job
Applying the database per service principal means that, in practice, service teams have significant autonomy in selecting the right database technologies for their purposes. Among other factors, their data modeling, query flexibility, consistency, latency, and throughput requirements will dictate technologies that work best for them.
Up to this point, all is well — every service has isolated its data. However, when architecting a product with double digit domains, several important database infrastructure decisions need to be made:
- Shared vs dedicated clusters: Should services share database clusters with logically isolated namespaces (like logical databases in MySQL), or should each have its own expensive cluster with dedicated resources?
- Ownership: What level of ownership does a service team take for the deployment, monitoring, reliability, and maintenance of their infrastructure?
- Consolidation: Is there an agreed set of technologies that teams can pick from, is there a process for introducing something new, or can a team pick anything they like?
From Self-Managed to Fully Managed Services
When we first started building out our services, we had a sprawl of supporting databases, streaming, and queuing systems. Each of these technologies was deployed on AWS EC2, and we were responsible for the full scope of managing this infrastructure: from the OS level, to topology design, configuration, upgrades and backups.
It didn’t take us long to realize how much time we were spending on managing all of this infrastructure. When we made the bet on managed services, several of the decisions we’d been struggling with started falling into place:
- Shared vs dedicated clusters: Dedicated clusters for services, clearly preferable from a reliability and availability perspective, became easier to deploy and maintain. Offerings like SQS, DynamoDB, and Kinesis with no nodes or clusters to manage removed the concern altogether.
- Ownership: Infrastructure simplification meant that service teams were able to develop further insight into their production usages, and take greater responsibility for their infrastructure.
- Consolidation: We were now working with a major cloud provider’s service offerings, and found that there was enough breadth to span our use cases.
Evolutionary Architecture
On our Lifion engineering blog, we’ve previously written about our Lifion Developer Platform Credos. One of these speaks to the evolutionary nature of our work:
- Build to evolve: We design our domains and services fully expecting that they will evolve over time.
- Backwards compatible, versioned: Instead of big bang releases, we use versions or feature flags letting service teams deploy at any time without coordinating dependencies.
- Managed deprecations: When deprecating APIs or features, we carefully plan the impact and ensure that consumer impact is minimal.
When we started adopting managed services, we went for drop-in replacements first (for example, Aurora MySQL is wire compatible with the previous MySQL cluster we were using). This approach helped us to get some early momentum while uncovering dimensions like authentication, monitoring, and discoverability that would help us later.
Our evolutionary architecture credo helped to ensure that the transition would be smooth for our services and our customers. Each deployment was done as a fully online operation, without customer impact. We recognize that we will undergo more evolutions, for which we intend to follow the same principles.
