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.

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.

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. 

What will you say about Mobile Enterprise in 10 seconds !

In the recently concluded #IBM Redbooks Social Media Residency for Mobile Enterprise thought leadership, we had great fun taking video shoot on the idea exchange on #MobileFirst. When I was invite to speak a few words, thoughts from all corner gazed at me. I strongly believe mobile is the best social computing platform which can be the intelligent interface between simple humans and complex machines. Thus humans, mobiles and complex machines like #IBM Watson together can build a smarter planet. More importantly, we should know why are we building it. It is for a connected living in a network society.

Disclaimer: The Opinions are my own.

Transparency and Measurability :: The twin towers of Digital Economy

People and Technology: How they enrich a social network?

#Facebook, as the name goes, became this ubiquitous a social media only with a human face and a treasure chest of information. These two constitute the twin towers to build a powerful social media. These two ends should enrich each other in a social media platform. More people means more information, more information means more attractive to people. 

Without people, read & write web ( web 2.0 paradigm ) will just be a pipe dream. Social Media as a source of data opens up anew opportunities for collaboration, new insights, further more modes of communication and so on.

Yet making relevant decisions from social media remains a daunting task for many information management systems. We evolve complex algorithms and decision systems for this. We traverse the path of natural language and cognitive networks for this aim. Why?

The data formats and the metadata about people varies significantly across social media. This diversity often inspires the evolution of various ecosystems around each social networks. When #Pinterest gains momentum, the network society around it various substantially with #Twitter communes or #Google Plus hangouts.

Social Media Observatory: A step towards Digital Front Office

Beyond this multiplicity of modes of communication, a unified strategy for web intelligence from social media has a lot of challenges even today. The data exchange across social media need to be more transparent and measurable for this. Social Media Observatory concept is a landmark concept in this direction. An observatory is a platform which can access and plot the patterns and constellation of ideas and aspirations in social media.

This transformation is an imperative in making social media a viable channel for Smarter commerce, further leading to a comprehensive digital front office. This envisions the need for a front office digitization  (#FOD) strategy incorporating social media evolution as well. That will take us near the goal for a fully digitized globally integrated enterprise. A Digital enterprise cannot exist without a digitally segmented market and a digitized channel for network society. And that means the synergy of social media, big data, cloud and mobile platforms as a prelude and a stage setter.