Ashis Panigrahi Pandemic

World is more connected than ever: COVID-19 and beyond

Each nation and individual needs to act responsibly; honesty, transparency, and trust are the discipline areas we need to work more and more. A strategy of reskilling programmes for workers in COVID-19 affected industries will be the key exercise immediately in hand to redeploy workers once this crisis is over. This may lead to a new way of working or doing business; and public-private partnership is utmost important. Gratitude and admiration shown towards caregivers on the front lines of the coronavirus outbreak is well appreciated across the world. This demonstrates our emotional attachments during this crisis time, strengthens our unity and manifests, this not a war fought by a single nation, but all. We will overcome this situation. We are Stronger Together. Stay Positive.

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Ashis Panigrahi Technology

Contactless Transactions

Summary

Now, considering the spreading pattern of COVID-19 where ATM stations including physical cash (paper/plastic notes and coins) will carry the infections up to an alarming number of hrs or even days will expedite each countries journey towards contactless payments. At the same time, we need to plan ahead and try to leverage the existing ATM network by repurposing them to provide new services to mankind.

Looking forward to hear thoughts from all of you. thanks.

For details please visit LinkedIn page 

Ashis Panigrahi Technology

Where to start with Blockchain Journey

There are blockchain platforms available as SaaS options where you can quickly establish and grow your network without worrying much about the underlying infrastructure. But, you need to pay attention into long term plan for Blockchain platform, because once Cryptographic hashes are generated for transactions and blocks, the same can’t be recreated if you change network platform. Hence much attention to be given on deployment aspect of the network at the beginning considering the future plan. It is recommended to perform proof-of-concepts on the same platform where you plan to productionize the network.

Getting it right in terms of use case selection, network participants, agreement between parties, network protocol selection and hosting option means that success is more likely to follow….

For details please visit LinkedIn page

 

Ashis Panigrahi Technology

Centralization vs Decentralization: A Healthcare use case

In a permission Blockchain network, the patient will have control over own medical data and decision on sharing which part of the data with which parties in the network. In addition to data security, data privacy, data immutability, Blockchain solution will also enable ‘right to be forgotten’ where individual’s personal data will be removed from the network when she/he exits the network. This can also incentivise individuals when they are willing to share their medical data (post data anonymization) with research organisations or Pharma companies. The biggest advantage it will provide is the data portability, where individual will have access to their data all the time (changing jobs, changing countries, changing insurance etc..). Decentralised Ledger Technology along with support of decentralised Application (dApps) architecture will encourage individual developers and start-ups to come forward and create patient centric and doctor centric utilities applications for efficiency improvement and better user experiences which will incubate innovation and new revenue models for individuals. #blockchain #dApp #healthcare

For details please visit LinkedIn page  

Ashis Panigrahi Technology

Distributed vs Decentralized Transactions

One good thing in Distributed Apps (dApps) is that, it disperse the economy by incentivising the participants. For example, knowledge management apps like Lunyr, where each participating node is incentivised to contribute articles, and peer-review articles. Using trust engine nature of  blockchain protocol, contents can be kept up-to date access can be controlled if required. 

For details please visit LinkedIn page  

Ashis Panigrahi Technology

Blockchain as Simplified

Blockchain is digitized, is de- centralized, transactions are tamper-proof (meaning if you want to update a record, it is a new transaction and has to be agreed by all parties involved), it enforces the transparencies. Participants must be identified/identifiable, Networks to support high transaction throughput performance and low latency of transaction confirmation. The participants in a network may be competitors in the same industry and may not 100% trust each other; but the defined governance model such as a legal framework to handle disputes can bring required level of trust between participants, Privacy and confidentiality of transactions is the key. If we consider the same supply chain use case we discussed earlier, some suppliers might be given preferred rates as a means of either solidifying a relationship, or promoting additional sales. If every participant can see every contract and transaction, it becomes impossible to maintain such business relationships in a completely transparent network – everyone will want the preferred rates!

For details please visit LinkedIn page  

Ashis Panigrahi Technology

Automation: What is this anyway?

Automation

Automation is not new. This has been around for years. Many of the retailers have automated their ordering process using touch screens. In airports we see self check-in kiosks; and the immigration process in major airports are completely automated now. These are called Industrial automation which addresses the manufacturing processes automation by deploying set of robots in assembly lines to perform assembling all parts, activities in an automated fashion. We have seen automated mining, video surveillance in public places and many other examples.

Primary aim for automation is to speed up the production at cheaper cost by automating (using robot) physical or monotonous work, even tasks performed in hazardous environments. Classic example is, robots used in Fukoshima power station to fix the radioactive reactors.

 

Recently, automation is in news because leading IT vendors across the globe are focusing on improving efficiencies by automating repetitive tasks which can be used across the projects and stay competitive at the marketplace.

For an Industrial client in late 90’s; we had automated sales order process by developing  an interface to ‘emulate MFGPro systems call’; which returns parts data back to order management system. Similarly, for a Telecommunication client in early 2000’s; we had automated “customer creation” process in Siebel CRM by reading data from an excel file and logging into Siebel system using screen scraping Software. But, these examples are limited to backend process automation only.

What is the automation we are talking about? Cognitive, Self-healing and Continuous Learner.

  • What about an organization able to allocate the right resources/staffs into projects without any human interventions by analyzing structured and unstructured data available in various IT systems?
  • Also what about bringing automation in call centers to provide faster, better and consistent customer experiences?

 

So, Automation in IT services world is more than back end process automation and it deals with “end to end” solution starting from infrastructure, to back end processes and processes extended to end users. We do not require a large IT team to “keep the light on”. In this age of cognitive, automation solution should be able to identify problems in IT environments by continuous monitoring, analyzing the symptoms from various log files; and automatically fixes them before they occur.

Use of Analytics will help in determining the success of automation and will identifying new use cases for future automation. There would be continuous feedback mechanism to automation initiative to perform course corrections as the IT environment matures.

One of the challenge would be “over engineering” of automation agenda. Trying to automate processes which takes longer development time/cost resulting into –ve ROI (Development cost is more that savings).

 

While automation brings higher efficiency and productivity; this also pose a threat of lowering of revenue for the IT vendors.

I would like to hear your views.

 

Author:

Ashis Panigrahi: Business Process Management and Automation Expert (in.linkedin.com/in/ashispanigrahi/)

Ashis Panigrahi Technology

New rules for IT Service Providers

 

Labor Arbitrage is no more a differentiator in IT outsourcing

Screen Shot 2016-05-04 at 10.08.00 PM

Labor arbitrage is a global economic phenomenon where jobs move to nations; where labor and the cost of doing business is inexpensive.

But, in current scenario, IT service providers are expected to offer more than just cost benefits. Clients expectation is very different as it was couple of years ago.

 

They expect IT service providers to:

  • do much more with less; as technology budget is shrinking over the years
  • transform rapidly; as current environment is much more disruptive
  • move away from traditional service model and adapt to outcome based model (as a service)
  • strengthen their capabilities in emerging technology and futuristic areas of technology innovation.

 

Hence discussion is NO more around headcount; but it is about business outcome which is customer-centric. In a fast changing marketplace we all are into; we don’t have the luxury of moving slower. So SPEED and AGILITY are the key.

 

Another visible trend among large corporation surfacing clearly is “Insourcing”. Large organisations have started realizing that their IT services providers are not able to change as market demands. Traditional IT vendors are slow and find difficult to drive change in their organization. Clients are looking for flexible contracts, pay as you go, no lock-up period, easy termination policy etc..

Hence, large organizations want to have their innovations plays delivered out of their ‘in house’ team; where they have more control.

 

An IT initiative should take self course corrections as it moves from conceptual stage to implementation stage. This kind of market drivers create demands for PaaS (Platform as a Service) services. Platform like IBM’s Bluemix and Force.com provide a ready to use environment for end users to build quick PoC, test the market and launch product in couple of week time.

More and more organizations are preferring to use these kind of platforms which bring features quick with minimum development effort to beat the competition. These kind of ‘fast mover’ organizations no more look at cost savings but they focus on ‘Time to Market’ to stay ahead of their competition. This strategy may not work with IT vendors doing product development for them.

Please leave your comments.

 

Author:

Ashis Panigrahi: a Business Process Management and Automation Expert

(in.linkedin.com/in/ashispanigrahi/)

Ashis Panigrahi Technology

Agile delivery is NOT new to us

AgileThe real benefit from Agile Delivery comes from faster “time to market”, as teams develop the features most important to business. It is universally accepted that the requirements shouldn’t be completely defined upfront as they get stale and hence are bound to change.

While idea-ting for new IT initiatives as part of the CIO’s team in of one the largest manufacturer and service provider in USA; we agreed to start a project to implement ‘centralized customer database’. Business requirement was to “cross sell products and services to existing customers across Line Of Businesses of the company”.  When Power division sells a generator to a new customer; then Services division should have visibility/access to these customers for services sales; and so as other units of the organization.

During initial years of my IT career in late nineties, there was no sophisticated Master Data Management (MDM) solution available in the market. Neither, my customer had commitment to park huge budget for this project. To have single truth of customer data, we decided to put together a simple solution where customer data can be created and managed in one system/place. We started small by setting up a team of 4 members comprising of one database developer, two web developers and one business analyst. We had kept the name of the project as Customer Master File. We had a bi-weekly call set up to show the project progress, seek advice from business and take corrective actions. Me being a database developer and integration specialist; I started designing basic entity relationship (ER) diagram to host customer data.

Phase 1 project scope was to upload customer data received from all Lines of Business into the centralized database and provide a web interface for query purpose.  When we showed our phase 1 output to Business team, they were happy but expressed interest to have ability to take that customer record into their own CRM and other system of records to see real value.

This discussion set-up direction for Phase 2 scope. We built integration to downstream applications for smooth flow of data. In order to address data quality challenges; we had to integrate zip code and address validation tools to sanitize address data.

While we were working on various iterations to bring new features; there was a parallel effort going to make Oracle Financials as corporate standard.  In order to make Oracle Accounts Payable and Receivable successful for all business units; we had to work closely with ERP implementation partner on customer data. We took a design decision to take out CREATE customer functionality from Oracle modules and get Customer data feed from centralized Customer Master File. This was a huge decision and change management effort; but entire project team was committed for success and one team culture was already established.

The project started with a single database instance with a simple user interface website, got converted into enterprise wide application showing 20% increase in sales number in first year itself.

I can summarize the KEY characteristics of the project we delivered incrementally to business as follows:

  • Start Small
  • Iterate to show incremental business values
  • Build what is required by business (nothing less, nothing more)
  • Get feedback from business users or customers
  • Take corrective actions

And guiding principles are: One Team, Openness/Transparency, Trust, collaboration.

Culture of Agile delivery is NOT prevalent, where higher importance is given to legal aspect of the project delivery; “what happens if things does not go as per plan?”. In this case, team from customer side and vendor side shall be contractually committed to deliver a scope upfront which may not be addressing the current business need; and both parties will be fiercely defending their stated positions…. This is what both customer and vendor should avoid to be in.

Would like to hear your thoughts!

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Ashis Panigrahi Technology

Software as a Service (SaaS) got to grow than expected

payPerUse1Flying with Airlines use case can be considered as a close analogy to explain a SaaS model; where Airlines is able to leverage the same set of infrastructure (physical aircraft, Reservation systems, Agents, check in, boarding gates etc.), still differentiating services based on what packages a user buys or pays for. Airline’s value-added services in check-in points, on-boarding gates, airport lounge, inflight services all are decided which travel class an user is traveling with.

Similarly, SaaS model allows users to consume selective services from available set of services. This could be as simple as accessing only few set of ERP functions for a specific time period and required number of registered users. In addition, customer can buy support services such as Platinum, Gold and Silver depending on resolution time and time coverage. Features like Multitenancy where many customers can share a single application instance helps the SaaS vendor to bring efficiency in operations. Multitenancy allows vendors to apply patches and update infrastructure for many customers at once and get more mileage out of the underlying infrastructure, therefore providing a competitive price to their customers.

According to Gartner forecast; the SaaS market will grow up to 22 billion USD by end of 2015. Expectation is that SaaS business will grow at 20% which is almost 3 times as fast as software overall.

Key reasons for buying SaaS by corporate customers:

  • Easy access via the Internet,
  • Converting capex into opex which allows organization to spend diligently
  • No need to have internal team to manage complex software and hardware systems
  • New product features are rolled out every now and then (every month)

Organization started seeing this is not a set of technology; but as fuels for business growth and outcome; with quick Return on Investment.

Critical to Success

  • Win together: As there would not be any existing distribution channel, hence SaaS vendors (especially startup or new in the market) leverage existing distribution ecosystem. Ecosystem of Reseller, Channel Partners, consultants, licensed trainers, System Integrators is the key
  • Portability: Focus on 3rd party APIs to feed into SaaS product rather than building everything into the product.

Establishing developer community, product certifications, distribution via channel partners, and portability to open APIs increases the attractiveness of a SaaS product especially for enterprise customers.

Known Revenue Streams

  • Revenues from subscription (primary): Subscription fees collected from customers accessing SaaS offerings.
  • Professional services (secondary): Related implementation services like product configuration, process mapping, project management, training etc.

SFDC revenue over 4 billion USD for the FY’ 14 with year on year growth of more than 30% tells the story. Similarly, Workday has posted a revenue close to 470 million USD for the FY’ 14 up 71% year on year. One common characteristic observed in both of these SaaS vendors is; spend on product development. Workday has spent close 180 million USD for product development; which is close to 40% of the revenue earned in FY’ 14. Similarly, SuccessFactor the leader in Human Capital Management (HCM) SaaS offering has built over 20 million subscribers across 3,700 companies.

SaaS model allows organization to focus on their strength leaving behind Software and Hardware complexity for SaaS vendor to manage. Pay as you go model also allows organization to try out various IT enablers/adoptions with clear business outcome KPIs which can be switch off any point of time without any significant penalty or losses. This perfectly suits to the current economic scenario; there is a fierce competition among all players (big and small) to provide business values at a very thin margin and stay relevant.

Please share your thoughts!