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.

How IBM Watson helped me select the right mobile apps: A science fiction

How IBM Watson helped me select the right mobile apps

This is a fictional narrative on cognitive mobiles. With Supercomputers like +IBM Watson, cognitive computing has become an immediate reality. Can these cognitive computers solve our real life problems and confused mind? This article presents a dream where a man's misery with mobile app is resolved with the help of a cognitive computer! Please read more and share your thoughts at the IBM Mobile Business Insights blog! ...

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.

Digital Front Office: The Enterprise Social Bus for Digital Economy !

Watch your thoughts; they become words.

Watch your words; they become actions.

Watch your actions; they become habits

Watch your habits; they become character.

Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.’

(From the famous quote of Lao-Tze)

If we have a time machine that can watch every customer 24× 7 like the above words, it will be one of the most resourceful devices for the social business and digital consumer! How does Customer Experience Lab realize Digital Front Office innovations? What is digital front office for you: A social business hub or customer experience laboratory? … Either ways, you are right! Digital front office is a multi dimensional platform for your business needs. 

We strive to analyze, predict, and transform customer experience through a deeper understanding of customer’s thoughts, words and action. ‘Digital front office’ is the convergence of all the techno social efforts in this perspective. The synergy of social, mobile, cloud and big data innovations is realizing this perennial dream of world markets and business leaders a real social business story. The ubiquitous smart phones, spontaneity of analytics, pervasive social media and the cost effective cloud solutions have made today’s consumer truly digital. Thus the new age digital consumer expects a digital front office in the transactions and experiences. 

Realizing a digital front office requires the right mix of business and technical innovations to the life of customer. At the IBM Customer Experience lab, researches and business innovators work in tandem to envision the world class customer experiences. Located at the T.J. Watson Research Center, with additional virtual collaborators around the world, the IBM Customer Experience Lab is a partnership between IBM Research and IBM Global Business Services. 

When digital front office is a significant business value accelerator (BVA) and primary innovation hub for better digital consumer experience, at the same time it is a virtual window to the world of social business. Social Business thrives on the mobilization of social capital and new social identities. Thus a digital front office can watch the real time trends in social fragments and social identities through various modes of analytics. Innovations like ‘transformative analytics’ are progressing in this trajectory. From media and entertainment industry to micro finance institutions, we can see vivid and variant models of social business. 

A digital front office strategy with an evolutionary and adaptive approach to customer experience analytics(CEA) can realize social business platforms with global market reach and solid growth potentials. This is where IBM Customer Experience Lab meets next generation market dynamics.

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. 

Data Diary #5: Hyper Cubes of Information spaces

When, What and Where is Content ! 

3Ws of Data Science ...

When I was working on a meta data strategy for a data governance initiative, I came across the below interesting point :  

When to locate content , 

What is content and where to locate the content.

I believe these three thoughts works behind many of the search engine driven meta data strategies. They I came across a data dilemma  why do we see metadata becoming stale and stealth? And it made me to think about information spaces, their temporal properties and how to visualize them. Are they like the conventional space time conjectures and curvatures ? Then I realized that space-time is never an absolute metric of anything. 

Let's take a few information spaces. One imminent example that comes up in our mind is a library of wealth of information. Another one can be a stock market where numbers and stocks flock with finance capital. Yet another one can be a group of people assembled in a parliament or a conference.  And a very familiar example of a convenient information space is a data warehouse or a relational database. This is largely a information space sans soul of information. 

Connected Spaces

All these are information spaces and they define their metrics of content and metadata. Often information space is just associated with the needs of data visualization. This approach will provide only limited perspective of information spaces. Each information space is having a temporal or contextual aspect embedded or evolving around it. And it cannot be simplified in some relations of data structures. If data structures should meet this criteria, they should have a time variant structure associated with them.

Am I again going back to the traditional space-time? No, rather, just highlighting the necessity to accommodate  time in this situation. Every measurement system should know what it is going to measure. If this factor is not understood well, we will always witness an uncertainty or probability or chaos in measurement and results.

So if we design an information space to visualize content and metadata that locate them (When, What, Where), we need to know that all these co-ordinates themselves are manifestations of some other information spaces. Hence Information space cannot exist in silos. It exist through #Macro Connectors. The concept of macro connectors is not mine. This is proposed by MIT Media Lab. And it looks interesting. Information space thus becomes a connected space. 

So far so good. What do we achieve by extending these connections? How will information spaces work in cognitive computing / social computing environment.  Like light getting bend by gravity, I would love to say that information spaces get truncated and twisted, curled, diverged, converged by the real-time decisions of cognitive data nodes. Information overloading is just a behavior out of million possibilities in this information - cognition conjecture. 

Google: +Gokul Alex 

Twitter: @gokulgaze

PS: Content is social, Social is Me