RPA Robots in Digital Transformation

Software Robots mimics human interactions not just Mouse Clicks, Key board Navigation's, Application Logins with Web, Desktop application but much more are often called Bots that are programmed to do repetitive or sequential tasks of Workplace Business Process Operations 24/7.

These Bots are not only cost effective and time enabler but support many of the Organizations digital transformation initiatives to achieve profitability and remain competitive. Global spending according to Gartner will pace a total of $2.4 billion by 2022 and nearly 85% of large and very large organizations will have deployed some form of RPA.

The biggest early adopters included Banks, Insurance companies, Utilities, Telecommunications and Transportation companies. Moreover any Industry's Workplace Business Operation which knits its Business Processes with different applications and platforms, or work involves mundane tasks performed manually are excellent candidates for RPA.

The ever growing adaptation of RPA by Industry is on account of its Low Code/No Code features with Drag and Drop features using robust framework and thousands of Library of Functions for Task Events while facilitation Monitoring & Scheduling thousands of Bots from a Control Room. 

Compare this with all the nine yards involved in Coding efforts which requires extensive Business Process requirements gathering and spending enormous time in search for highly skilled developers to build Robust, Modular and Scalable solutions.

Today’s Bots are easily built using Robotics Process Automation (RPA) tools offered by different vendors to support and improve accuracy and efficiency by automating repetitive tasks using Desktop Applications, Custom and Native application seamlessly. Some products also have Cognitive supportive capabilities like Machine Learning and AI with various degrees of maturity. 

RPA is now a new branch of IT Specialization area in the World of Automation euphoria and that is here to stay and is maturing very fast to meet demanding Business Workplace Process needs. 

Selecting an RPA Vendor tool from among the current offerings, one needs to focus on its features that are already build and its ease in building & deploying Bots along with support for its Maintenance, Monitoring, Scheduling and Reporting. One of my common thumb rules as well a proven one is to favor products which have Open Community Support with larger base that potentially would have well rounded features coming from the ground zero and also would have higher staying power in this fast-newer emerging technology.

An RPA tool should also have support for multiple platforms like Windows and Linux which are common workplace OS platforms to support various Desktop applications such as MS Office and Google G Suite. 

Many medium to large Organizations have either a large Offshore/Onsite support folks for their Business Process activities and hence any RPA product should also fully support VDI infrastructure products such as Citrix, Amazon WorkSpaces, IBM Cloud, VMware Horizon Cloud and other major VDI products.

RPA Bots Utilization

RPA Robots are game changers that can automate and perform very large repetitive transactions in simple or complex Organizational Business Operational processes. Robots can also be built to automate and streamline complex business interactions by integrating various operational tasks with multiple applications systems and channels. 

Here are some simple to complex RPA activities that can be automated   

1. Opening user emails to download specific attachments into a network folder
2. Moving files from a source directory/folder to another target source including from and/to FTP server
3.  Logging into ERP or Native or Web applications and updating specific forms using data from files including CSV
4.  Scrapping data from Websites to extract selective data such as Stock or Ticker Prices or in its entirety data sets
5. Scanning PDF including support for OCR to convert them into text or hand written documents
6. Selecting specific fields from Contract documents using AI based pattern matching
7. Connecting to ODBC, JDBC supported Databases like Oracle, SQL Server to perform CRUD Operations
8. Streamlining and supporting seamlessly major and key Business Operations by building workflows across multiple native custom applications using virtual user concept in the absence of API’s

Some key Industry Use Cases

1. Data Intensive Operation Companies that Extract & Capture data by Scrapping the Web sites and converting data from different media types & formats including PDF with OCR requirements
2.  Finance Organizations benefiting by accelerating their Mortgage Processing, Fraud Analysis tasks, Configuring and building business rules for Loan Origination, Automating tedious tasks like Bank Reconciliation reporting from different applications
3. Facilitating faster Clinical trials and drug approvals oversight of Pharmacovigilance (PV) cases by reducing errors and enhanced compliance in a reduced process cycle time
4. Automating Transportation and Logistical & Business Operations, Shipment Scheduling & Tracking by collating data and building Workflows thus increasing efficiencies and reducing costs
5. Retail industry integrating their Invoice Processing and Credit Collections to streamline End to End Order-to-cash processes
6. Telecommunication industry many manual repetitive rules-based processes
7. Utilities Industry's highly traditional regulation driven marketplace rule driven process
8. Lastly any Organization whose Business process are Rule based driven and are manual or Process interweaves through manual extraction of data data from many Native or Custom Applications including Web with tedious tasks can be automated using RPA Bots

Major RPA frameworks have fully functional GUI studios to build Robots using Drag and Drop features with enriched library in much shorter time window with Low Code No Code development efforts. One could also build Self learning Intelligent Robots that learn from repeatable actions using ML & AI features.

IT Automation Implementation- Data Points

In today’s world, the word Automation conjures lot of confusion as well scares many workers as a disruptive technology that aims to eliminate ones jobs. The fact is its going to redefine the roles and process of their job functions rather than targeting them towards its elimination.

There is an interesting article by McKinsey's "Four Fundamentals of Workplace Automation" which states ALL jobs are bound to be impacted with various degrees of process automation at workplace from a CEO to Clerical Jobs.

Because of its negative bias opinion, Organizations need to tread cautiously and comfort its workers that an IT Automation effort is not aimed at individuals rather than redefining their tasks and activities that they perform in reducing and automating mundane ones.

To implement any automation of Business Operations, we should first rationalize its Operations in its entirety and identify and remove/modify redundant and inefficient process steps rather than simply build automation scripts on the top of its Standard Operation Procedures (SOP). It is not enough just to replace human interactive operational steps which is frown with many exceptions coupled with lack of standard documentation and thus difficult to program and handle.

Efforts spent on understanding and streamlining the business processes will certainly help not only to avoid costly and redundant operations but also enables to build manageable building blocks like Lego blocks.

Also, any initiative if not properly thought through, can spiral into chaos, business disruptions, cost and worst frowned upon by employees with distrust resulting in higher attrition. Needless to say any unplanned automation without Goals & Objectives and proper identifiable measures and with right skills and tools is fumbling at the starting block.

IT Automation Implementation - Data Points
Here is my small attempt to identify some data points that could help Automation stakeholders and managers to help them place the right foot forward and avoid costly mistakes where they don’t have experienced Automation Czars or Evangelists to help them implement and navigate.

• Define Automation Journey with Strategies
• Identify Pressure points that are currently dragging productivity
• Identify Challenges and potential bottlenecks for improvement
• Get the biggest payback
• Identify low lying fruits with its value
• Do not try to automate every part of the Process at one GO
• Validate Automation feasibility
• Build POC’s as required and build and identify necessary steps to scale
• Identify Complexities and time required to execute them while keeping a shorter window of weeks rather than months and years
• Identify building blocks & framework for readiness in Automation
• Rationalize and fine tune bulky or miniaturize monolith process steps
• Build automation capabilities with skills & tools to manage the new Business Outlook Operating Business Model
• Identify meaningful test with regression tests and recovery strategies
• Identify and avoid any business disruptions as these can be costly
• Group similar automation initiatives under automation Evangelists & Stewards
• Identify feasibility of Automation within Product's platform
• Identify Time based workflows, Trigger or Event based automation within the Platform, Application
• Build with minimal wiring from external Software agents to trigger Automation work rules or notifications
• Design & Build Automation efforts that are sustainable, maintainable & repeatable
• Build manageable process steps with proper exception handlers
• Build process steps that are configurable with external inputs and can be executed in parallel
• Define Operating Model and Governance along with Goals
• Raise awareness, get an alignment with folks impacted with Automation and address any negative and unfounded assumptions
• Rationalize initiatives and identify Growth or Process improvement Opportunities and identify factors with measurable units towards Goals

Automation is a Journey and not a 100 meter dash and hence measure them at regular interval its benefits. Also, as McKinsey article indicates, Automation is not all about targeting low-wage roles but all ladders of workplace jobs including the highest paid occupations in the Organization.

Consortium Blockchain a Right Step

Blockchain is a very disruptive technology and if industries do not keep in pace both in terms of its understanding and impact, experimentation and adaptation with changing ecosystem could potentially lead its enterprise leader's fear of missing out (fomo) psyche becoming a reality as it did for brick & mortar companies when they missed the opportunities with the advent of Internet in the early 90’s.

Today, to be on the safer side many enterprises are forming or joining the Consortium and testing their feet not to be left out. Global financial companies lead the way followed by Cross Sector and Life Sciences & health care enterprises.

The significance and ripple effect of Bitcoin Cryptocurrency tsunami which is based on Blockchain made Industry leaders to pay attention bit more closely to its underlying technologies. Blockchain technology is not new, but how the Distributed paradigm of hardware (nodes) including the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) has been leveraged coupled with removing the fear of security on identity and the need for an intermediary of controller’s oversight to validate the truth of the transactions.

Smart Contracts implementation on the blockchain with a semi-trust control on transactions validity with heighted identity security by different niche platforms like Ethereum Consotium, Hyperledger Fabric Consortium (from Linux foundation), R3’s Corda, Quorum, Chain Core made it much more enticing for the industry leaders. Not to be outdone, major Cloud vendors including IBM, Microsoft, AWS made these platforms available on their portals along with development toolsets to build and deploy enterprise based applications.

Consortium Blockchain features

1.       Platforms support Privacy and Confidentiality for all the participants in the network

·         It is built on trust where participants know that all of their transactions can be traced

·         All network participants identities are backed with cryptographic certificates that are tied to its Organizations, network components and end users or client applications

·         Blockchain supports all business exchange of assets of tangible (Cars, Whole foods) to intangible ones like Futures, Intellectual properties etc

·         Only known participants can participate in the transactions thus it is private and permissioned system

2.       Distributed Ledger records transactions are built in a decentralized and collaborative way

·         Transactions Assets are defined using a collection of key value pairs (JSON) with digital signatures of every endorsing peer node with values that can be encrypted

·         Ledger is a sequenced, tamper-resistant record of all state transactions chained together in blockchain with one ledger per channel and making it immutable

·         Each participant will have their own replicated copy of the ledger besides being shared with its participants

·         There is a single place of Origin for all transactions in the blockchain to provide provenance for the transactions

3.       The ledger functions and control are implement using Smart Contracts to automate and execute mutually agreed upon by the participants

·         Privacy is key for B2B model and this is implemented using Smart Contracts and Channels

·         Smart contracts are written in chaincode which enforces the business logic in defining assets and transactional logic

·         Channel’s ledger contains a configuration block defining policies, ACL and other pertinent information

·         Major programming languages like C++, GO, Java, JavaScript are used to program the chaincode

4.       A process called Consensus is used to commit the transactions only on approval by the appropriate participants

·         Consensus allows for transactions to be synchronization across network thru this process with shared data ledgers as well shared programs that update them

·         Transactions are written in the order in which they occur in this consensus process to avoid any malicious entries

·         Transactions are committed only when the block’s transactions have met the explicit policy criteria checks and balances dictated by the members and endorsed, validated and versioned checked

·         Consensus mechanism utilizes different technology messaging brokers like SOLO, Kafka, Simplified Byzantine Fault Tolerance (SBFT)

Use Cases

There are many uses that are identified in various industries including Capital Markets, Financial Services, Healthcare, Government Legal/Regulatory, Insurance, Supply Chain Logistics, Anti Counterfeiting, Travel and these are in various stages of implementation, development, design and PoC’s. Here are some:

Healthcare: 

1. Large Pharmaceutical companies are using Consortium blockchain platform for their clinical trials to overcome its higher cost and meet Government regulations. Clinical trials involves data collection and its management in timely fashion from patients, physician offices, recruiters and research centers spread around vast geographical areas.
2. Medical Insurance claims is a 3 trillion dollar US healthcare market but still utilizes 40 year old EDI paying value-added services in validating the transactions along with a significant percentage of clerical staff processing the paper input to service long tail of small scale providers.

Supply Chain Logistics:

This use case is an ultimate for Blockchain implementation. There are two key dimensions that are required in any Supply Chain from its creation to end-delivery. 

• End-to-End traceability with ability to trace back to its Origins which potentially increases with complexity of the product in varying degrees 
• Identifying passage and impact of laws and regulations influencing the product’s journey

The complexity can further compounded when supply chain has to trace assembly of these products into SKD’s and into final product. Imagine If I extend the thought process to trace including installation issues, repairs, upgrades, warranties etc. 

Capital Markets:

Currently 26 member Japanese financial institutions have successfully implemented Internationally OTC (Over –the- Counter) derivatives using blockchain to apply master agreement without a need to renegotiate with counterparty thus improving transparency and simplifying data management.

Recently Credit Suisse and ING completed the first live securities lending transactions valued EUR 25 million using R3’s Corda Blockchain platform.

Conclusion:
A methodical study, evaluation of a disruptive and revolutionary paradigm such as Blockchain Technologies to its current landscape of ecosystem has more promises than failures.

FHIR a Strategic Initiative for Healthcare Providers to build Clinical Data Repositories

Today’s Hospitals are collecting vast  amounts of data from their day to day operations on Patients like Clinical Observations, Conditions, Encounters, Medication, Pharmacy, Imaging including vital signs using sensors to support both Operational and Research requirements. They are also looking at ways and means to map their internal data with external data which conform to some standards for ease of mapping and contextualize the data.

However the major problem they face is in their inability to combine the data from multitude of silos created by different applications for any meaningful and well-rounded analysis either for research perspective or to support any policy decision making or provide better and cost effective analysis to improve Patient care.

Many major hospitals have built healthcare data storage repositories in their native format with metadata tags to identify the context of the data what they call Data lakes which can be queried and extracted based on questions they wish to answer.

The success and utilization of these Data lakes depends upon how lighter they have been designed and built in comparison to dark data silos and to minimize its inherent drawback limitations to address questions such as; how the data was brought in; how and where it can be found; how to explore; and what and how it needs to be transformed to be of use. This task of identifying, preparing, combining several data sets from different hierarchical depths is equally challenging for a NON-IT-STAFF members like Researcher and Business users if not equally easy for the IT folks without Health Domain knowledge.

What and How FHIR (FAST Healthcare Interoperability Resource) an Open Industry Standard from HL7 comes handy to elevate such and many other bottlenecks?

HL7 a Non Profit Organization accredited in building Healthcare Standards, introduced FHIR (pronounced as “FIRE”) www.hl7.org/fhir/ . 

Healthcare providers have been using various HL7 Open Standards for Exchange of Information in the past since 1987 like HL7 V1, V2, V3, CDA, CCDA. FHIR Framework standards were written to address various pitfalls of their earlier specifications and standards and also keeping in view advances in IT technologies that can be leveraged for its effective implementation.

FHIR is the new Open standard getting lot of traction in the Healthcare Industry that has defined more than 180 Granular and Normalized Entities with attributes with defined formats. These “Containerized” entities are called Resources and in NoSQL World called Collections and its rows as Documents. FHIR also provides RESTful API protocols for exchanging of information between legacy healthcare systems and for integrating with different application systems. 

The common data format standard used in FHIR are XML and JSON. The concept 80/20 rule is applied when Industry identified these distinct resources in the current draft of HL7 Version 3.x from value proposition to mean 80% of the Clinical data needs can be accomplished using 20% of the Resources identified by the Industry.

These FHIR Resources are grouped under various heads such as Individuals (Patient, Practitioner, Person, Group), Diagnostic (Observation, Specimen, ImagingStudy), Medications (Medication, Immunzation, MedicationRequest),  Care Provision (CarePlan, ReferralRequest, RiskAssessment), Management (Encounter, EpisodeOfCare), Workflow(Appointment, Schedule, Task) for Clinical data sets and many more to support Financial Domain Coverages like Billing, Payment and various Specialized Health Research domains.

FHIR Specifications and Standards are exhaustive and detailed and provides standards how Profiles and Extensions for Elements and Data Types can be extended for attributes in Resources and to combine Resources for different Use Cases.

The most conspicuous benefits of FHIR is the ability to  build a conformed standardized yet unified view of common data sets/documents that are interoperable and shared with precise definitions both internally and with external systems and vendors.

The other benefits includes its support for Clinical Terminologies and Ontologies for SNOWMED, ICD9/10, LOINC and other Open Standards thus avoiding to design a separate Terminology Services with Codes for Lab noting’s, Diagnostics, Medications, Imaging and others.

Lastly, the most important one for me, FHIR Resources can also be presented in an RDF format (Linked Data) specification by serializing property information using Turtle format or as JSON-LD and presenting data in RDF (Resource Description Framework) data model to support Graph DB. A RDF Graph DB(SPARQL)  can help and enhances Healthcare provider’s ability to identify complex patterns of relationship in real or near real time that could save lives and decrease costs to Patients.

FHIR Implementation

FHIR can be implemented in a phased manner depending upon how many different domain repositories and areas of interest that Healthcare provider intends to build and leverage insights. HL7 also provides HAPI pronounced “happy” a JAVA based health care package library to enable adding FHIR messaging to your applications in building different FHIR Resources.

NoSQL Database

Todays, Key Value store are the norm for its flexibility in building a schemaless and horizontally scalable databases that supports object oriented paradigm. To this add performance compared to RDBMS as you scale up data volumes into billions of rows or terabytes/petabytes data and also to meet high demand throughput with low latency traffic there is no next best alternative to NoSQL.So In my opinion, a NoSQL data store is a perfect match for FHIR.

Conclusion: Containerizing data using FHIR Standards as Resource Types (Collections/Documents) from Data Lakes, HL7 Messaging into a NoSQL Database work as a self-contained, documented, standardized basic building blocks which can be readily utilized by both Research and Business Users to meet their Operational and Research needs with ease.

Connected Sensor Cars

When I bought my semi-upper end Toyota Prius Prime last month, I was surprised that the Car was build with many sensors that it could do self-parking, alert me when I am wavering into another lane and even more automatically adjust the speed on cruise control when another Vehicle moves into my lane or its sees danger of collision with another slow moving one.

These were all possible because it leveraged different kinds of sensors built into the Car. There are many luxury and top-end cars which has more features than this one. The point I am trying to make is current and future’ cars are likely to have 100’s of different kinds of sensors for Safety, Ease of Use and more truly to be called Connected Cars a phase before Automatic Cars takes on our roads and have a paradigm shift including using Car As a Service (CAaS).

A quarter of 100 million cars produced a year globally, have sensors providing functionality ranging from Personal Health Monitoring ( Impaired Driver Check to Emergency services), Vehicle Care ( Vehicle Remote repairs, Breakdown Mgmt), Digital Marketing (Location based Offers, Couponing), Connected ADAS (Road Sign Detection, Road Condition Warning), Safety features (Stolen Vehicle Tracking) and other services like Concierge, Infotainment and other Customer focused support features.

Connected Cars are leveraged to support Community based sharing of information from curb side parking availability to providing assistance in traffic movement metrics on Speeds and Congestion information on any given road to local authorities. A good example of that is Waze a Google owned Free Navigation support mobile software that has revolutionized GPS navigation with real-time traffic alerts on congestion, obstacles and even Cops nearby during one's drive using this Community Sharing paradigm.

INRIX is another major traffic information aggregator providing travel information in real-time as well traffic patterns on the highways and local roads including intersections 24 X 7 to several private, municipalities and public institutions using its own GPS support navigation systems equipped in millions of Cars as well support from 3^rd Parties and Community globally. Navigation features enables it to provide Smart routing, Live traffic information besides providing Traffic prediction.

The one major feature that is radically changing and getting highly visible is with regards to Parking. Last year Waze has teamed up with INRIX to provide a feature called “Where to Park” to the customers enabling them to identify optimal parking spots as they drive off to their destination. Customer can select from any of the Parking Spots including Commercial and updated Curb-side Open spots in near real-time by weighing in the walking distance info to their destination provided by the app.

Last year 2016, Federal US DOT (Department of Transportation) has funded more than $45 millions in 3 major US cities of (NY, Florida, Wyoming) to operationalize cutting edge mobile and roadside technologies to reduce environmental impacts designed to save lives and improve personal mobility. In my opinion with millions of Connected Cars on the road, these vehicles would become the game changer and present a more viable option to address the desired goals of many such initiatives in place of permanent fixtures.

The next generation Autonomous (Automatic Cars) will have much more radical and paradigm shift in how we use travel modes from point A to point B with ease besides opening up the congested roads, infusion of Warehouse parking options, reduction of car ownership, garage space requirements and so forth.

It’s no more a futuristic trend, but real. We are in exciting time period to watch this travel mode unfold before our own eyes opening up opportunities and challenges with its adaptation.

IoT Silhouette

It is an exciting period for UX (User Experience) with more and more IoT (Internet of Things) getting launched each day. Last month, Netherlands and South Korea become the firsts' two countries to have launched dedicated IoT networks in the world. More than 4 million IoT devices are likely to be connected by 2017 in South Korea alone.

The highlight of this low powered wide area network (LPWAN) is in its ability to transmit data between battery operated devices over many miles while using little power.

These IoT gadgets from consumer perspective can range from home devices, wearable's,  medical/wellness fitness devices, Connected cars with gadgets and Urban systems  like Parking meters, air quality sensors devices etc.

A user friendly UX design and functional capabilities to a large extent can differentiate a competitors products from each others. This is not to be confused with our IT terms as UI but much wider a term providing a holistic perspective of different design principles in creating a better product(useful, usable, aesthetically pleasurable). Experts estimate that by 2020 there will be almost 50 devices.

Most IoT are embedded devices which either have sensors that convert physical world (e.g. motion, light, air quality, contact, location, proximity, humidity, orientation etc) into digital or/and actuators which convert digital instructions into mechanical actions (e.g. start a motor or turn/off a device) besides services provision for smarter communication.

How does manufacturers IoT differentiates one with the other. We can view it from 3 basic parameters a) Acquiring connectivity, b) Sensing abilities and c) Computing power and all these rolled in with better UX design.

A connected IoT device is one which is connected to a network (cloud) whose behavior is controlled by the host programs to deliver a User experience.Today's IoT instruments are asynchronous just to preserve the battery power and does the sync with bit of latency with the host called system model.

This may be one area that could change with advances in power storage technologies. The other main beauty about IoT is in its ability to control, monitor and configure remotely using mobile and web applications.

IoT is a great product to integrate Customer experience (see my earlier blog on Customer Experience Alignment) because IoT Service is not necessarily like purchasing one-off the shelf product but rather it requires an ongoing service with a minimum of Internet to keep things running and customer support. So a delightful CX experience would make all the difference between you and the competitor.

A simple IoT service might serve only one or two devices like single or couple of connected light bulbs) but with a hub/gateway you could add many more edge devices and complex gadgetry's like . a security system using motion sensors, cameras, lights, alarm system and so forth.

This feature of mixing and matching of different products from IoT vendors throws up challenges as well opportunities. In this nascent stage of IoT development,  there are still no common standards between  different platforms to communicate with each other.

There is an ongoing effort by major companies to bring in some semblance and to bring some level of standards in the IoT ecosystem as they collaborate with each other. Secondly the potential market size of a trillion dollar plus perhaps could also force them to think collectively to build some open standards.

In fact there are some enterprises who are building a smaller footprint ecosystem that can talk to each other like Nest (Thermostat, Smoke detectors, Lights), GE & Honeywell (lighting and power sockets), Sonos (home audio), Schlage and Kwikset (door locks), Philips, Hue,Belkin, Withings (home connect products).

IoT network connectivity is bit more complex than our digital PC's or smartphones. IoT connected devices use different types of networks and patterns of connection and more over these devices are not constantly connected to provide an instant response thus resulting in being out of synch and with latency issues in the ecosystem.

In the basic System Architecture of IoT,  there are two different types of devices. There are IP based devices that are connected to Internet and they typically translate IP based communications. On the far end there are local Non IP based devices connected to a gateway also called edge devices.

The big advantage with these gateways is that they can work with different communication protocols of IoT devices and have built-in rules that can run even when the Internet is down. The major fault with Gateways is the single point of failure besides lack of technical standards and the need to customize with different products in the ecosystem.

The advent of low powered wide area networks (LPWAN) and technologies like LoRA (a proprietary of South Korea Service) or LTE-M a machine-to-machine communication technology to transmit data between battery operated devices over miles with little power could provide the required boost to overcome some of the challenges with gateways.

There is another major challenge of limitation in providing addresses to all the IP based gadgets in the IPv4 with its 32 bit addressing system and max addressable space of 4 billion devices.

This issue is addressed with incoming standards IPv6 which has a size of 128 bits. These new address format overrides all the limitations of Unicast identification networking addressing issues, Anycast address issues for group interfaces as well Multicast addresses for multiple hosts issues. This new addressing system number is so large that it is said that it would take 38 billion years to scan all the possible addresses at million addresses per second speed.

Going by today's adoption rate and acceptance in the market for IoT products in general it appears to be attracting more the early adopters market and for some good niche products appealing to the mass markets too.

The common thread among these successful products line appears to be great value proposition that these IoT products are able to provide to the customers. Experts believe that there are 3 key ingredients for any successful IoT products. RELEVANCE, SPECIFIC BENEFITS AND EASE OF USE.

To expand the market from early adopters to mass market,  the product needs to meet the requirements of different people and has good affordability price point for the expected value proposition. I am sure there are many more discussion points and topics across different types of products and different markets that can be penned. I will pause the discussion here and opt writing on those areas in my future blogs.

In today's market, there are some cool products out there which I would like to broach here briefly.

Belkin makes WeMo Home product series and many of them can be controlled, configured and monitored remotely using your smartphones such as electrical lights, sprinklers, blinds, crock-pot and other electronic DC devices.

Amazons Echo product provides hands free voice activation to several compatile WeMo, Philips Hue, Samsung Smarthings, Wink and other Smartdevices besides reading news, weather & traffic and playing music on its Alexa voice service.

Mimo smart baby products embedded in baby's kimono can allow parents to track baby's sleep, movements, temperatures and provides relief and feel secured and connected albeit remotely even in day care centers with their smartphones.

Nest  thermostat is another product line that I like which stands out among other such products both in terms of design, usability and intelligence and above all user experience. There are also several geeky gadgets like Ambient Umbrella which has light integrated into its handle that glows different lights when rain, snow or thunderstorm is forecasted.

The trend of interoperability and above all the collective synergies where the sum of value of each IoT product being greater than its individual values for a customer is encouraging buyers to adopt IoT devices with enthusiasm and building fan followings.

Some major manufacturers like Belkins (WeMo), Samsung (SmartThings), Philips (Hue), Qualcomm (AllJoyn)  have built  Open platforms and hubs that work with many of their own products and cross company products. There are others who have built Home Automation network protocols like ZigBee, ZWave, Insteaon, Lutron Clear Connect that plug with products with their Hubs for edge products. Amazon's Echo, Lowes Iris, Staples Connect are good examples of IoT product that works with majority of the platforms and hubs/gateways.

There are many companies seeking to become the de facto gateway/cloud integration platforms for different IoT ecosystem

Xively Connected Product Management is one such enabling platform for Enterprises. Xively provides a rich set of API's, Libraries, SDK, Services to Connect, Manage and Engage IoT products.

Here is a listing of 15 other major companies in today's perspective showing greater investment and product, services and technology maturity offerings in IoT arena.

Amazon, Bosch, Cisco, GE, Google,  IBM, Hitachi, Huawei, Microsoft, Oracle, Philips, PTC, Samsung, Siemens and Qualcomm in this game provide products and solutions in areas such as Network Connectivity, IOx and Fog Applications, Data Analytics, Security, Management and Automation and Application platform for IoT.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is still nascent, but growing quickly. Research firm IDC predicts it will become a $1.46 trillion international market by 2020, up from $700 billion last year 2015.

The potential big market is obviously the replacement market to swap the legacy house hold products from these niche manufacturers. Second there could  be new services enabled by IoT devices that are not available today like  diagnostic devices that could monitor before your gadgets fail (example Water boilers/heaters).

The most important IoT product category for me is the bio and wearables one that has the potential to change the quality of health care of human being from being reactive to being proactive and importantly being aware and in command with knowledge.

Customer Experience Alignment

Why do we as Customers prefer to buy branded products or obtain services from already known places. The answer seems very simple that these products or services could meet our perceived expectations. On the flip side of this question to Producer ask them what makes them tick with their customer, the answer is definitely not so simple.

Today most companies are trying to answer this question and also stay ahead of it by trying to understand their Customers with emphasis on 4C's paradigm besides their age old 4P's approach.

The 4C's approach keeps the Consumer at the center of the sphere with "Outside in" approach rather than  the "Inside out" which was more evident in 4P's approach. In fact even 6 decades ago, Peter Drucker the Management Guru in his "The Practice of Management(1954)" has said "There is only one valid definition of business purpose: To create a Customer."

The Customer centric approach emphasizes that Value creation is a bidirectional and enterprises have to create a mindset to listen to their Customers from as many touch-points as possible and to collect their interactions of experiences expressed by them across many of their channels.

The Social media and Enterprise multi-channels needs to be tapped into 360 Customer view to enable and see a holistic picture as well at a granular level of their Customer with different lens/views created with # of Customer profiles for their different functional business departments.

The task of building a Customer 360 Experiences Engagement hub is not an easy project. The major challenges for any enterprise needs to be addressed not from a technology perspective but rather first clearly understand what is the objective, goal of building one.

In a siloed state of many Business functional units of an Enterprise, the first and foremost act is to undertake an assessment exercise to identify the state of  Customer Journey identifying concerns, issues and processes in play across their multi-channels. Second align the assessment findings with Corporate's objective which could be either Cost containment, Improve Revenue or Improve Satisfaction or even meet regulatory compliance requirements.

Customers in any large organization come in various hues and colors of their expectations and requirements. Identifying the personas of these customer with proper segmentation to bring the granularity level of understanding to individual customer level would enable enterprises to align with Customer expectations.

Involving, engaging, training and motivating employees who man the front office of these multi-channels is also crucial in building and improving customer experience.  Forrester Research in their 2011 has indicated that  CXPi (Customer Experience Index)  in some large global brands companies who have moved their needle up from below average to above average CXPi have seen an increase of $1.3 billions, I mean billions in their revenue bucket.

From a technology side, depending upon their level of maturity and IT support, there are some good options. One could embrace CRM + Social media suite of Products or engage Consulting vendor who have already  built similar hub on a Big Data platform.

However the former may not provide a Complete and True Customer 360 Engagement hub for the following reasons. It may not be able create data piping from all your traditional multi-channel sources and second, it may not able to beef up with 3rd party data with appropriate connectors and build different hierarchical views required by different functional business units. One of the other significant drawback also appears to be in their analytical platform offerings with embedded engines to process Unstructured & Semi structured of Text & Speech data sources and contextualize them. This option may not also meet your demanding and individual specific requirements for comprehensive Predictive Analytics in Real-time to monitor and provide better experience.

Nevertheless it does provide a good first step to move in the right direction for companies who currently don't have common Customer Center platform to bring in Customer interactions to club with transactional data overlaid with common denominator analytics.

The Vendor option does not go without its own challenges and problems. The major challenges appears to be articulating clearly what is to be delivered or what will be delivered that meets your requirements in a phased manner with a clear Road-map.

One needs to understand that you are actually building a System of Systems as Gartner calls it for building Customer Engagement hub. In the paper on "The Top 10 Strategic Technologies for Customer Experience" Gartner indicates that there are more than 50 Technologies that can be used to build a good orchestrated Customer Engagement platform.

Here is the conceptual view of a Customer 360 Engagement

Objective of the Blog:
The objective of this blog is to emphasize the importance of alignment of Customer Experience. Enterprises could build an expensive and real-time platform in-house or in cloud, but if the Customer's experiences are not aligned, then we are trying to knock at doors which may open and pave way to a myopic solution.

Identifying and laying out the efforts for a greater benefits for Customer and Business needs to be the ultimate goal. There are Strategic and Operational steps that needs to be undertaken to convert a Discrete Customer into a Trust based relationship Customer.

Building a Customer relationship should be the utmost important one and this need to build as continuous process. Here is how we can visualize it in converting a Discrete Transaction to Relational one with relationship maturing from Symmetry to Trust relationship

Second, building a Value-Centered design by taking all Customer interactions in the Organization and trying to realize the benefits out of them. These mapping can be built either by using Service Blueprints, Customer Journey Maps, Experience Maps, Mental Model and Spatial Map diagrams.

These maps irrespective of the choices provide Chronological, Hierarchical, Spatial story line with their interactions to show case actions of individuals and appropriate process involvement of the Organization. Care must be taken that these visual diagrams are not meant as colorful wall posters but important diagrams to bring in right conversation about creating values.

Thirdly, bringing in Employees into the center stage by training, engaging them for insights and keeping them motivated because they represent the front office folks in the Customer Engagement in building progressive and positive relationship.

Fourthly, frequently, enterprises should be able to unearth Voice of the Customer (VoC) using Surveys, Feedback or employing 3rd parties to gather such information.

Lastly,  building appropriate analytical models and utilizing them their Analytical engines to contextualize the interactions to view as connected pieces rather than as isolated measures.

But here is a common approach followed and advised by all: Start Small, but aim Big or Sweat the Small Stuff