What ‘light loving moths’ forgot to tell you about ‘experience design’

‘Light loving moths’ and the world of design?, why this weird comparison! Yes, you may be thinking for a while. As we know there is a common belief that moths, flies, beetles are attracted towards light and that leads them to their unfortunate miseries at the candle light. When we understand that it is by their sheer inability to understand the circular light emitting behavior of the artificial light, these little insects fall prey to the candle fire and other hazards caused by artificial sources of light. Those insects are actually in search of the moonlight that has a constant angle of radiation. 

This occurrence in nature often reminds me about the hypes of nurturing and manufacturing customer experience design. Primarily design has two layers; one physical and second ideological. When physical layer of design act as the necessary act to optimize the functional and material aspects of the subject matter or the object manifestation, ideological layer act as the force that can create a demand or customer appeal beyond its actual capacities. Hence when we make all sort of fuzz about design, design thinking, truth in design we should understand the layer in which we are applying our design efforts and logic.

My article in IBM Mobile Insights: Three mathematical innovations for mobile data analytics

Mobile Signal Reflector by Wapster.
Shared in Creative Commons license

Mobile data analytics has become the business driven for various digital experience measurements and front office strategies. As mobile becomes the next enterprise ecosystem for global economy, minutest of the mobile data and its trends influence the executive decisions and customer satisfaction. Mobile device management is also overlapping with mobile data management in more number of ways. In this situation, a data science without business value discovery cannot enable the mobile enterprise. Mathematical sciences has the capability to bridge the vaguest of the problems with the most daunting challenges of the day.

Three mathematical innovations to transform mobile data and analytics:
In this article published in IBM Mobile Business Insights blog, I am exploring the role of cognitive, advanced learning and quantum physics in building big data analytics engines that can meet the contextual and the transient nature of data problems and algorithmic challenges. These are not technical revolutions alone, rather the realizations built on the strength of mathematical constructs and clarity.Read more and join me for an exciting discussion:

Do you have a digital consciousness in your enterprise?

Can we dream of an enterprise that is self aware, self organized, self prioritized and yet running on certain well defined economic and social principles? In today's world, such an enterprise must be digitally conscious all the time! 

With the emergence of semiconductor electronics, telecommunication networks and internet, technology has become the key game changer for market economy and social business. Technology has started influencing governmental and non-governmental programs in a big way. However, it was short of a comprehensive organizational transformation for long time. 

As reported in Ontology.com about data integration challenges, 99% of the businesses undertake integration projects every year. Over half of those integration projects are obsolete before completion. Again, 86% of the integration projects experience delays. Thus 25% of the IT budgets are spend on integrations. Thus the enterprise integration projects posit a huge opportunity for a system wide transformation and conscious effort.

The key steps to resolve data integration challenges were the pilot attempts at building an enterprise transformation capability within technology. WebServices, Service Orienter Architecture, Business Process Management tools, Machine to Machine communication and so on has enriched the middleware platforms with enterprise integration capabilities. Business intelligence and analytics engines were the next step in this evolution. They have added spice to the otherwise passive data stores and data marts. When I write this post today, even implementing mainframe analytics is not a daunting task for an enterprise. 

As the tools became strong enough for integration, we wanted our communication protocols and data formats to be light weight. XML has been a good document format to begin this journey. JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) has made the communication between web services and repositories further more light weight. REpresentational State Transfer (REST) architecture has been the other communication model that helped the distributed communication easier to model and abstract. Machine to machine communication protocols like XMPP, MQTT etc have helped the communication more seamless and automated. QR Codes and RFID technologies have also been highly beneficial for easier deployment of network data services and supply chain optimization. The list of innovations is not just countable. 

World information society and networked economy are no more isolated. Consumer electronics and social media networks has connected them in close knits. Thus world of business and social engagements have become digital. In this scenario, a globally integrated enterprise is possible only through a digital front office. 

Now integration is no longer tool driven. Customer experience and expectation determines the reach of technology. Down the lane, society has become more techno-centric and personalized. People and community groups began actively participating in the market dynamics. It is a kind of social business which offers 360 degree view of business processes and market dynamics. Social networks and social media centric business transactions reflected the customer sentiments in finer details. Hence customer experience and usability of products and services determined the longevity of brands in a big way. Thus information and analytics have become key components in the Enterprise architecture. Further more, when the world of communication is increasingly become digital, future enterprises need a 'digital edge' at affordable cost. 

Thus as the world marches to new terrains of digital experience and business opportunities, digital front office is a key to integrated enterprises and agile transformations to operations. The world around us demand an equal visibility of people and their data, to the say the least! We want easier access and transparency to people and their information. Thus in other words, digital eye is the key to agile enterprise. 

PS: The views are personal and does not represent any organization or enterprise.

Patent Regime and the abuses : Challenging times for creativity!

I am writing this post out of sheer fun and amazement at the coincidence of ideas and real life. Early morning today, before having my first cup of tea, I ventured to write the below blog post in Fizzog about the need for a systematic inclusion of societal thinking in the invention publishing process and Intellectual Property (IP) law. Though not on the exact lines, I could see an Economist article on the patent reform in America. This new law is mainly related to the patents pertaining to abstract inventories. 

The new Innovation law drafted by US policy makers aspire to achieve the below as per the mentioned article:

By shifting the costs of litigation on to the loser and forcing patent holder to disclose what the infringement is, the Innovation Act hopes to change this. There is probably no perfect equilibrium that protects inventors without stifling new inventions. At the moment the scales are weighted in one direction. The new act would add some balance.

This is just a scraping on the surface of the issues. The patent filing and publishing system has been maligned not only by legal issues, but by the undue greed and haste to overtake the competitor or to sabotage a fair competition.  It may be a better idea to involve the competing parties to the discussion table before awarding the patent. It may be also a good idea to think of shared patents when there is a substantial overlap in the areas of application and the invention inventories.

My article on IBM Mobile Business Insights Blog: Mobile Sense and the customer experience

Mobile applications are known for its first impression bias. As the Instagram founder says customer decides to download an app all within 30 seconds. Customers are very much task oriented in dealing with mobile apps and with their mobile usages. However 91% of the mobile users keep mobile with them 100% of the time. Hence mobile applications are at time a lucrative business opportunity and an ever challenging imbroglio. Please read more about this high profile business and technical challenge in the IBM Mobile Business Insights blog article : 

Join me in conversation in the blog and twitter @gokulgaze. Please share your likes in Facebook if you find this article informative!

How an MIT Tutorial for School kids can revolutionize cloud computing?

In search of a new topic on cloud and the various perspectives of cloud, I was going through various communities, wikis and internet for sometime. Somewhere I found the history of cloud, somewhere on the implications of private clouds in defense sector. Interesting, but not enough!

I went ahead in quest. Somewhere I found the coinage ‘Cloud plus Data’. 

Then I started hunting this keyword in Google. A few results down, I saw the link: Wiki.Scratch!: 

Wiki.scratch? This title intrigued me. Out of sheer bewilderment, I went on to read the page. The wiki page speaks about a newly developed programming language for kids and a data type called cloud data there. The surprise ended there. But the idea of ‘Cloud Data type’ persisted with me. Recently I had read about the concept of temporary social media in the MIT Review Blog. It was described as one of the top ten disruptive technologies for the year 2013. MIT Technology Review.

Temporary Social Media is a concept where content self-destructs itself to enhance the privacy of online communication and make people feel freer and be instantaneous in the world of internet. It can even be a minimal control to the current data explosion. Connecting the dots, I just began to think why can’t we think of a system of programming where cloud based variables and data types be used to create a temporary social media. Thus cloud can become the birthplace for a new mode of social media. 

Read more at my developerWorks personal blog DataVerse! and please share your comments!

Semantic Web and Social Web: Similarities and Differences !

Though semantic web and relational ontology has become a theoretical discussion among many pioneers of world wide web, it is yet to receive wider traction among the industrial use cases of internet. Yet the concept remains widely discussed in the academic circles and the research groups of enterprises focusing on online data distribution and search engines. However, semantic web as a paradigm has some differences from a social web where we can collaborate better and more meaningful.

Semantic web need to go way beyond the constructs and ambitions of autonomic computing if it should become a gateway to web socialization. Internet  should evolve to be more open web where we can create meanings and relationships within first degree of separation itself. I believe it is still very much skewed by the way search engines, resource identifiers, memory allocation architectures, data storage, binary approximation algorithms etc.

Social web is a world where society weaves a web of information around their social relationships and social use cases. It stems from the real web of information. Semantic web will be a subset of social web in this sense. If semantic web is dealing with information enterprise, social web is dealing with collaboration circles.Machines can become self aware and understand what is the cognizance of information that they process. But in social web, socialization will be the first phase and then semantic relationships will emerge. web sociology will depend on the the social coefficient that exist in various degrees of separation and the order of 'connectedness' in each collaboration circles.

The business dynamics of web sociology will depend on the market dynamics of software engineering economy as well. We cannot think of semantic or social web isolating it from the market ecosystem or software economic premises. In terms of social activities, what all are happening in web?

• Collaboration
• Conversation
• Construction
• Deconstruction
• Inspired connectivity
• Virtual sensitivity
• Cognitive mind mapping
• Symbolic learning
• Forgetting and temporary memory
• Recognition
• De-cognition
• Identification
• Crowd behavior
• Media affinity
• Informed passivity
• Social solitude
• Virtual sentiments 

This list goes on. Web sociology will need to come up with new frameworks where all these activities need to be aligned in the sociological perspective. Thus semantic web can generated meaningful association between machines and men. Semantic web can definitely write and read relationships with human beings. Socialization is something beyond communication. It is always an attempt to represent the social self and personal self to a wider audience. Only social web can aggregate and spread more meaningfulness, relationships and cognition in the collaboration circles.