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Showing posts from January, 2018

Digital, the new found hope!

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Like many others, I was always fascinated by the technology and very optimistic about its effects on humanity. Technology until digital revolution, was very personal. The impacts were felt only by the closed circle, to a person or company benefiting from the product. Digital transformation changed the whole perspective on how you view technology. It is impacting end-to-end ecosystem. It is directly impacting human lives. We still need to address ethical issues on usage of data, biased data, privacy, security etc., and there is concerted effort on that front globally. But the effect of digital is largely positive for the human kind. That’s what enthused me to do research more, unearth use cases, and apply cross functionally. I wanted to share some of the amazing use cases that is transforming healthcare. Digital technologies, AI, Machine Learning along with wearable, drones, mobile apps etc. are transforming emergency care. An AI that listens in on 911 calls in Denmark will diagnose

Digital Transformation and the role of ITIL (ITSM)

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Every company is a technology company. Period. And every company has an IT department, often out of sync with business. Digital revolution is changing the game. It is becoming a great leveler and barriers are disappearing. You must have watched global leaders at Davos this week (World Economic Forum), every leader was talking about AI, Machine Learning, Fourth Industrial revolution etc. and no one wants to miss the boat. This is a great “leap frog” moment for many who missed the boat in earlier technology transformations and is a level playing field once you leap. So what are we doing internally within our (traditional) companies? Are we still enforcing policies and procedures to route one incident from one place to other, and supported by so many mails, with nearly a company of the size of a typical startup in cc? Are we still arguing with business to raise the service request in a certain so-called “structured” way, while world is analyzing unstructured data making predic

Machines can buy insurance for themselves!

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There is a lot of buzz around cryptocurrencies. It intrigued me, so I did some research. While sifting through various articles and reports, I stumbled upon an interesting use case for cryptocurrency, thought of sharing here. Coming together of technologies – IoT, Machine Learning, blockchain - is changing every industry and creating new business values. Insurance industry is not immune to this. There are enough publicly available articles about transformation at GE and then how they created business value by extending the platform – Predix, outside their four walls.  The IoT devices now can diagnose their own state and predict their potential failure, without any human intervention. Digital transformation does not end just by transforming existing way of doing things, but by continuously creating value from the core assets. If the devices can predict their own state, why can’t they buy insurance automatically? Add blockchain and crypto currency to the mix, it is very much poss

Human bot or Intelligent human, choice is yours!

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With the advances in technologies around us, I keep thinking what will be our role in the future? Humans don’t have to think, perhaps only when to make the machines more smarter, otherwise going to be like a dumb terminal connected to mainframe! Is this analogy unsettling? Look around us. IoT, ML, AI, DL, NN, BC (there is a technology for every combination of alphabets.. not to mention Alphabet itself is googling to create more of these!), are all ganged up together, vying for supremacy over human. A day in a life of a human - there is a wearable tracking your sleep, another "thing" wakes you up and greets you with good morning, reminds you of all the appointments, forces you to make breakfast, guiding (instructing) along the way, and the intelligent “thing” in the bathroom reads you all the things happened in the world while you were sleeping! Now it is time to office … now all the sensors in your dwelling wakes up and pushes you out of the door to a connected car, and t

Digital Transformation: #1 criteria for success – Establish Digital Organization

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Yes there is a race, but often we do not know where to start!!!  Company executives understands the opportunity digital transformation provides, but in most companies there is no clear vision established and communicated across. There are startups, who are trying to leverage all the current and futuristic technologies, and there are established companies who are very conservative in their approach. In both the extremes (and in between) , transformation from “caterpillar to butterfly” happens when there is a common vision established across the company. It all starts with leadership – digital leadership. Most of you must have watched, Amazon Web Services ( AWS ) CTO Werner Vogels in AWS re:Invent 2017 . If not you can watch it here : You will realize, one thing that is driving the company to new heights - the continuous ask “What can I do next leveraging my core assets?!” The story is the same, if you look at similar success stories cutting across industries. You have to self-disrupt

Employee Training Transformation In This Digital Age

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In this digital world, we have been spending our efforts to train machines and make them intelligent. While focusing on machines to improve productivity, predictability and sustainability, we are challenged with an important aspect – change. Making humans aware of the change, understand the change and equip them to handle the change. We have done enough automation at the IT infrastructure level, application level and process level. Impacted workforce are either knowledge workers or who sits at the desk executing so called mundane repeatable tasks. They could re-skill themselves on other expert level tasks, and continue their journey. There are enough training available to up-skill and re-skill the desk-side workers. In the age of Fourth Industrial Revolution aided by digital transformation, what about the workers at the manufacturing floor, lob technicians at a healthcare firm, seasonal workers etc. directly impacted by this change? Attrition of employees in this segment is