Is iBPMS the Secret Ingredient for Agile Digital Transformation? fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Enterprises that are in the throes of digital transformation are quickly beginning to realize that agility has become a key factor for success. Nowhere is this truer than in the arena of DevOps, where digital transformation often means recoding applications, incorporating the cloud, leveraging APIs, and supporting the burgeoning mobile and remote markets.

Perhaps the secret to solving those challenges comes in the form of low-code or no-code application development tools, something that Appian Founder, Chairman & CEO Matt Calkins fully believes. Calkins said “Developers are embracing Low-Code Platforms to collaborate with business owners to deliver sustainable apps faster.”

Naturally, Calkins has a vested interest in the low code ideology, after all Appian is a Business Process Management (BPM) platform provider, seeking to topple the apple cart, with Appian Quick Apps, a product that transforms how applications are built, deployed and modified. Calkins added “The goal with Appian Quick Apps is to keep users from getting bogged in specifying granular actions when building the core app while maintaining customizability.”

Calkins isn’t alone in his observations, both Forrester and Gartner, well known research houses, agree with Calkins assessments, offering that BPM tied with agility is the key for digital transformation success. However, there is a lot more to the story of low-code & no-code solutions than drag and drop simplicity. It all comes down to the creativity that such a development environment can deliver.

Calkins added “Low-Code Platforms free up software developers from mundane tasks like adding fields to forms or testing mobile apps so they can do more of what they love: creating and inventing.” Capabilities that bring experimentation and agility to the forefront of BPM. Interestingly, BPM has become a bit of a misnomer in this arena, as low-code platforms can do much more than just automate business processes, something that adopters are starting realize.

Case in point is operational advantages that major wireless carrier Sprint-Nextel discovered by entrusting their digital transformation to low code ideologies. Sprint-Nextel was able to quickly rework how they deploy and manage their growing wireless network. The company turned to an ideology of deploying some 70,000 “mini-macros”, small amplifiers to boost coverage. Which proved to be a complex legal, regulatory, technological and overall program management endeavor.

In the past, provisioning something along the lines of a new cell tower could take up to 30 days, simply because of inefficiencies found in process and data management. Sprint switched to a BPM solution, more specifically an iBPMS (intelligent business process management suite) to improve and accelerate the 8,000 business processes involved in provisioning a new cell site. Thanks to a low-code, no-code ideology built into the iBPMS, Sprint was able to reduce data collection, analysis and reporting times from 30 days to 7 days, with a solution that they were able to deploy in just 3 weeks.

Sprint isn’t alone in the race to innovation, countless other organizations are turning to iBPMS to realize the agility needed today for successful digital transformation. One such organization is Sanofi, the 4^th largest pharmaceutical company in the world. Sanofi’s goal was to achieve faster clinical trial start-ups, a key competitive advantage for getting new drugs to market. Sanofi approached the ideology of digital transformation by looking at ways to automate the numerous steps involved for getting a clinical trial started.

Adopting an iBPMS solution that leveraged a low code approach enabled Sanofi to reduce clinical trial startup times from six months to just two months. What’s more Sanofi was able to reduce exposure to risk, by making sure every procedural step met the strict filing deadlines for compliance with regional governing bodies.

While Sprint and Sanofi prove the value of iBPMS with low code methodologies, the applicability of iBPMS is much broader. Most any organization can benefit from the agility provided by low-code solutions, agility that is magnified when coupled with BPM. It is that realization that makes iBPMS the secret sauce for digital transformation, simply by liftng the constraints of high-code environments and manual tasks and transforming process creation into something akin to plug and play simplicity. After all, organizations are better served by their developers focusing on logic and not the particular nuances of a complex development environment.

 

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The Future of Immersive Environments: Virtual Home Design, “Backcasting” the Future and a Look at How VR/AR Get Social fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

At the Gigaom Change conference in Austin, Texas, on September 21-23, 2016, Dr. Jacquelyn Ford Morie (CEO of All These Worlds), Melissa Morman (Experience Officer at BDX), Liam Quinn (CTO of Dell), and Doreen Lorenzo (Director of UT Austin’s Center for Integrated Design) talked about empathetic design in virtual space and the future of augmented reality.

The future is already here, but there is much more to come in terms of more fully immersive environments. Virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) will proliferate in digital spaces, taking us from a two-dimensional interface to three-dimensional virtual spaces. But once these virtual and augmented environments are ubiquitous, what will we do, how will we react and what new things will we learn?

One of the areas where we’ll see some of the biggest changes is the home.

Melissa Morman, Client Experience Officer at BDX, is looking at ways homebuilders can adopt and deliver more digital experiences for their customers. Mormon said she is scouting new technologies for the homebuilding industry by asking questions like, “How do you attract customers digitally?”

Currently, prospective homeowners are given floorplans to help them evaluate (and visualize) a new home. But when the home isn’t built or significant changes are being made, floor plans can’t do the job. Smart builders understand this and are looking at ways of using virtual and augmented reality tools to help clients see the possibilities.

Donning an Oculus Rift headset, customers are digitally immersed into the virtual home and are able to make adjustments to colors, materials and even the physical configurations of the rooms. Need to make a hallway wider for wheelchair access? Want to see what your countertop looks like with another color of granite? All of these changes can be visualized in great detail.

Once inside these immersive environments, how might we react though? What will our emotional responses be and how can those be used in creative ways?

Dr. Jacqueline Ford Morie said that “VR let’s you experience walking a thousand miles in someone else’s shoes. It’s powerful as a tool for empathy.” She cited a project called “Hunger in LA” which recasts the participant in a reconstructed scene of a real-life man who has collapsed in line at a food bank. This project was ground-breaking as a journalistic approach to creating empathy and understanding.

The panel moderator and director of the UT Austin Center for Integrated Design, Doreen Lorenzo, agreed that there is a huge opportunity for designers to use VR and AR to “step inside” the world of the user and really understand what they need — whether you’re designing for someone with disabilities or understanding the specific needs of a group. Morie agreed, saying, ”We’re starting to use a lot of VR for health reasons so it can be life-changing. That’s coming.”

But this is all a single-person experience. The perception of VR is that it’s anti-social. Can we expect to see social, virtual experiences?

Morie mentioned a project called Placeholder as a great example of some of the earliest social VR work ever done (the project is led by Computers as Theater author and researcher, Brenda Laurel). Filling the role of different spirit animals, you and a group of your friends can talk to one another and leave each other messages in the larger scope of the game. There are also opportunities to have richer, more immersive experiences — diving under the water as fish or soaring in the clouds as a bird. “VR is social, not anti-social,” she said.

If VR is temporary immersive experiences, then AR is always with us. We can imagine this as constantly accessible informational overlays. Imagine a mechanic working on a part with a virtual manual right in front of them. But further in the future, AR has the potential to go beyond simple overlays. In a world that merges AR and VR, they’ll create a mixed reality (MR) that is seamless and fluid.

Quinn said they were already starting to see aspects of this vision with Dell’s Smart Desk for creative professionals. Dell is developing business applications for augmented reality that will allow IT departments do things like remote technical support with augmented overlays. They’re also working with automotive and airline partners to create mixed reality environments for their customers, creating ever-richer experiences for engage.

By Royal Frasier, Gryphon Agency for Gigaom Change2016

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Enchanting Products and Spaces by Rethinking the Human-Machine Interface fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

At the Gigaom Change conference in Austin, Texas, on September 21-23, 2016, David Rose (CEO of Ditto Labs, MIT Media Lab Researcher and author of Enchanted Objects), Mark Rolston (Founder and Chief Creative Officer at argodesign) and Rohit Prasad (Vice President and Head Scientist, Alexa Machine Learning) spoke with moderator, Leanne Seeto, about “enchanted” products, the power of voice-enabled interactions and the evolution of our digital selves.

There’s so much real estate around us for creating engaging interfaces. We don’t need to be confined to devices. Or at least that is the belief of Gigaom Change panelists, David Rose, Rohit Prasad and Mark Rolston, who talked about the ideas and work being explored today that will change the future of human-machine interfaces creating more enchanted objects in our lives.

With the emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) and advances in voice recognition, touch and gesture-based computing, we are going to see new types of interfaces that look less like futuristic robots and more like the things we interact with daily.

Today we’re seeing this happen the most in our homes, now dubbed the “smart home.” Window drapes that automatically close to give us privacy when we need it is just one example of how our homes and even our workspaces will soon come alive with what Rose and Rolston think of as Smart-Dumb Things (SDT). One example might be an umbrella that can accurately tell you if or when it’s going to rain. In the near future devices will emerge out of our phones and onto our walls, furniture and products. We may even see these devices added to our bodies. This supports the new thinking that devices and our interactions with them can be a simpler, more seamless and natural experience.

Rose gave an example from a collaboration he did with the architecture firm Gensler for the offices of Salesforce. He calls it a “conversational balance table.” It’s a device that helps subtly notify people who are speaking too much during meetings. “Both introverts and extraverts have good ideas. What typically happens, though, is that during the course of a meeting, extraverts take over the conversation, often not knowingly,” Rose explains, “so we designed a table with a microphone array around the edge that identifies who is speaking. There’s a constellation of LEDs embedded underneath the veneer so as people speak, LEDs illuminate in front of where you are. Over the course of 10 or 15 minutes you can see graphically who is dominating the conversation.”

So what about voice? Will we be able to talk to these devices too? VP and Head Scientist behind Amazon Alexa, Rohit Prasad, is working on vastly improving voice interactions with devices. Prasad believes voice will be the key feature in the IoT revolution that is happening today. Voice will allow us to access these new devices within our homes and offices more efficiently. As advances in speech recognition continue, voice technology will become more accurate and able to quickly understand our meaning and context.

Amazon is hoping to spur even faster advances in voice from the developer community through Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) and Alexa Voice Service (AVS), which allow developers to build voice-enabled products and devices using the same voice service that powers Alexa. All of this raises important questions. How far does this go? When does voice endow an object with the attributes of personhood? That is, when does an object become an “enchanted” object?

At some point, as Mark Rolston of argodesign has observed, users are changed in the process of interacting with these objects and spaces. Rolston believes that our digital selves will evolve into entities of their own — what he calls our “meta me,” a combination of both the real and the digital you. In the future Rolston sees our individual meta me’s as being more than just data, but actually negotiating, transacting, organizing, and speaking on our behalf.

And while this is an interesting new concept for our personal identity, what is most interesting is using all of this information and knowledge to get decision support on who we are and what we want. The ability for these cognitive, connected applications to help us make decisions in our life is huge. What we’re moving toward is creating always-there digital companions to help with our everyday needs. Imagine the future when AI starts to act as you, making the same decisions you would make.

As this future unfolds, we’re going to begin to act more like nodes in a network than simply users. We’ll have our own role in asking questions of the devices and objects around us, telling them to shut off, turn on, or help us with tasks; gesturing or touching them to initiate some new action. We’ll still call upon our smartphones and personal computers, but we won’t be as tethered to them as our primary interfaces.

We’ll begin to call on these enchanted devices, using them for specific tasks or even in concert together. When you ask Amazon’s Echo a simple question like “what’s for lunch?” you won’t be read a lengthy menu from your favorite restaurant. Instead, your phone will vibrate letting you know it has the menu pulled up for you to scroll through and decide what to eat. Like the talking candlestick and teapot in Beauty and The Beast, IoT is going to awaken a new group of smart, interconnected devices that will forever change how we interact with our world.

By Royal Frasier, Gryphon Agency for Gigaom Change 2016

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Artificial Intelligence: It’s Not Man vs. Machine. It’s Man And Machine fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

At the Gigaom Change conference in Austin, Texas, on September 21-23, 2016, Manoj Saxena (Chairman of CognitiveScale), Josh Sutton (Head of Data & Artificial Intelligence at Publicis Sapient) and Rob High (CTO for IBM Watson) talked with moderator and market strategist, Patricia Baumhart, about the next frontier in artificial intelligence and how the race to win in AI will soon reshape our world.

Artificial intelligence is a field with a long history starting as early as 1956, but today what we’re beginning to see emerge is a new convergence of 6 major technologies: AI, cloud, mobile, social, big data and blockchain. Each of the panelists agreed that as we enter into the next digital frontier, AI will be woven into each of these areas causing a “super-convergence” of capabilities.

Saxena predicts that “this age of the Internet is going to look small by comparison to what’s happening in AI.” It’s true. The proliferation of AI creates a new world of application and computation design, including embodied cognition in concierge-style robots that help when we need assistance.

Cloud will become “cognitive cloud,” a ubiquitous virtual data repository powered by a “digital brain” that understands human needs to help us engage with information seamlessly in work and life. Big data will evolve from being about understanding trends to understanding and predicting outcomes. In combination these developments will disrupt enterprise IT and other business models across the world.

But as we move from a “mobile first to an AI first” landscape, how do we differentiate the winners from the losers? And how can investors know where to place their bets?

Trust and transparency are going to be the two most critical pieces of winning applications. Imagine a hedge fund manager using AI algorithms to develop a financial strategy for their portfolio. Before placing millions of dollars at risk, that manager will need an explanation of why the AI chose a particular solution.

We’re seeing companies like Waze do this already. Beyond being a great way to navigate, Waze is a contextually aware, predictive computing platform that anticipates what information you need next based on your location and route. More applications in different industries — from healthcare, to retail, to personal finance — will soon act like Waze, using cognitive computing and context to constantly learn and anticipate what we need.

The businesses that will win are the ones that apply AI capabilities not just to automate their processes, but that use AI to run their business in a fundamentally different way.

First, we have to understand the areas that AI can best be applied. The challenge in cognitive computing is interpreting and understanding the oftentimes imprecise language we use as humans. As High pointed out in the panel, “our true meaning is often hidden in our context.” AI needs to be able to learn from these conditions to gain meaning.

It’s not a question of who has the best technology, but who has the best understanding and appreciation of what the technology can unlock. The people who will gain the most from AI are the ones who are rethinking their business processes, not just running their existing businesses better.

As more of our lives are aided by intelligent systems in our homes, at work, and in our cars, other questions arise. Will AI get so smart that it replaces us? Sutton, High and Saxena all agree “no,” but they say that some tasks will certainly become automated. They believe the more important change will be the creation of a new class of jobs. According to Forrester, 25% of all job tasks will be offloaded to software robots, physical robots, or customer self-service automation — in other words, all of us will be impacted in some way. But while that may sound disparaging, the same study states that 13.6 million jobs will be created using AI tools over the next decade.

The nature of work will change dramatically with AI. We’ll have technology that augments our skills and abilities — perhaps something like a “JARVIS suit” that allows us to be superhuman. We’ll work alongside robotic colleagues that help us with our most challenging tasks. In terms of cognitive computing, we’re talking about amplifying human cognition, not replacing the human mind. There is so much to be gained when we uncover ideas and solutions we wouldn’t have been able to do on our own.

Today 2.5 exabytes of data are being produced every day. That number is expected to grow to 44 zettabytes a day by 2020. Like an actual brain — a super-complex network of biological components that learns and grows with experience — these interconnected data points, along with the machine learning algorithms that learn and act upon them on our behalf, are the building blocks of our AI-powered future.

By Royal Frasier, Gryphon Agency for Gigaom Change 2016

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Millennials and the Workplace fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Recent research undertaken by Dell and Intel explored a wide range of issues regarding the changing landscape of the modern workplace. In this post, I explore a number of the study’s findings that focused closely on the wants, needs, and concerns of Millennials and the workplace.

One of the major findings of this research was that Millennials’ attitudes toward technology in the workplace are quite different than other cohorts. It turns out that Millennials are about 10% more tech-oriented and collaborative than the norm. But that’s just the starting point.

The Research

Penn Schoen Berland, on behalf of Dell and Intel, conducted 3801 online interviews across nine international markets between April 05 and May 03, 2016. The respondents included 2050 men, and 1751 women, and segregated those as Millennials, 1412, and Non-Millennials, 2389.

Millennials are like everyone else, only more so

Millennials believe the workplace is becoming more collaborative, and they are willing to use new technologies at a higher rate, such as virtual sharing, augmented and virtual reality. They are more inclined to believe that face-to-face interaction will become obsolete — a finding that I disagree with in part, because it is contradicted in other studies where Millennials have expressed a higher than average desire for f2f meetings over other forms, for example. Nonetheless, these findings collectively show a strong lean forward toward adopting future technologies. (And I wonder if we will see an additional 10% difference with Gen Z workers, just starting to join the workforce? Or will they head in a different direction?)

The rightmost comparison in the chart above shows a sizeable minority of Millennials would consider quitting a job if the technology was below their idea of acceptable, again, at a rate of 10% above the baseline. And when contrasted with the 35 and older cadre, the difference is even more stark:

Likewise, as you would expect, workplace technology has an even bigger influence on Millennials’ decisions regarding accepting a job, with 82% saying it would have an influence:

There is little doubt that Millennials are eager to embrace new technologies.
The research discovered that four in five Millennials feel that having access to technology at work makes it easier for them to perform their duties:

The research showed that there is about a quarter (28%) of Millennials who believe they are much more collaborative than they used to be, but 79% believe workplaces are more collaborative than in the past:

Millennials have strongly futures-leaning perceptions about technology’s role in the workplace, with a strong majority looking forward to higher levels of virtual sharing (73%), smart offices (70%), and virtual/augmented reality (67%):

Conclusions and Takeaways

We’ve seen in this research strong evidence for the notion that Millennials’ attitudes toward technology are more positive across the board, and that they believe in the promise of future technology to increase collaboration, make it easier to do their jobs, and decrease the reliance on face-to-face interactions.

Therefore, companies — and their leaders — have an implicit need to support the technological hunger of Millennials. We’ve seen in several of the findings from this study more explicit implications for leadership. Specifically this: to attract and retain the best and brightest Millennials, companies will have to make better than average investment in new technologies… or else. Clearly, Millennials will reject companies that fall short in this area.

We shouldn’t forget the other workers, like the over 35 year-olds. While they are somewhat less over the top about new technologies, large numbers still want higher levels of productivity, collaboration, and smarter workplaces.

So management must find ways to push the level of technology so that all the cadres of the workforce — Millennials and non-Millennials alike —  benefits from workplaces that are smarter, more collaborative, and more productive, for all involved.

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The future of retail will need people, and this blog post shows why fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Cotswold Outdoor is a hiking and outdoor retailer based in the UK. It also happens to be the place of work for a sales assistant, who goes by the name of Big Dave, and who went beyond the call of duty for a blind customer and his helper. You can read about it yourself – it’s on the Facebook page for the store.

Now, sure, we all love a good story with a happy ending. But this goes deeper, particularly when we consider the tribulations retail has been facing over recent years. Going beyond the call of duty might be precisely what enables some stores – certainly those who differentiate on service rather than margins – to survive. Deeper still, it goes to the heart of questions about the nature of work and whether many jobs, in particular customer service jobs, will be automated out of existence.

On this latter point, the prevailing mood is currently pessimistic – a fact which led me to jot down ten reasons why nobody would be out of a job. That post spawned some great comments, notably from Kirby who argued the opposite. I believe, however, that Kirby missed the underlying point to the ten reasons. Simply put, it’s that we help each other because we are programmed to do so as a race, and we are also programmed to expect something in return. Money simplifies this but doesn’t change it.

Since I wrote the post I have been speaking to industry expert Vinnie Mirchandi, who has been spending considerable time cataloguing jobs and looking at the impact of automation for, and who has been kind enough to send me a review draft of the resulting book. I have yet to read it all but if I could capture the conclusion in a two words it would be expect augmentation – as Vinnie says, “The end result is an optimistic read on the changing nature of work, a celebration of outstanding workers, and the machines which are making them even better.”

We are descended from a heritage of outstanding workers, an ancient truth which has taken a bit of a hit since the industrial revolution kicked off the automation game. Work gives us meaning, and makes us feel valued, and we probably couldn’t stop doing so even if we wanted to – ask any retiree who ended up volunteering, writing their memoirs or otherwise pursuing a worthy endeavour.

Will work change? Of course it will, and already, profoundly has. Re-skilling will become the norm, rather than the exception. But to suggest we face a future where work is no longer a thing, is to fail to understand what makes us human. And just as we will always have work, so will we always have outstanding workers such as Big Dave to celebrate.

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Microsoft gives up on Band? fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Various sources — including Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet — report that Microsoft has pulled all references to the Band fitness devices from the Microsoft Store online. She reports that the company responded to questions about the product with this:

We have sold through our existing Band 2 inventory and have no plans to release another Band device this year. We remain committed to supporting our Microsoft Band 2 customers through Microsoft Stores and our customer support channels and will continue to invest in the Microsoft Health platform, which is open to all hardware and apps partners across Windows, iOS, and Android devices.

I spoke with Christina Chen, then Microsoft’s General Manager, Emerging Devices Experiences, back in February. Reviewing my notes, we spoke almost exclusively about watches, and the Band never came up. She left Microsoft in April, and is now product director at YouTube gaming. Hmmm.

At any rate, it looks like Microsoft is regrouping on wearables, although maybe it’s just doubling down on sectors where it has a real play, like Hololens.

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The Internet of Things is yet to arrive at the starting blocks of innovation fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

“We are but puny dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. We see more and farther… not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic structure.” Bernard of Chartres, died c.1124 (via John of Salisbury, 1159)

It may seem strange to trace the origins of the digital age back 900 years, but humanist and philosopher Bernard of Chartres nails it. Not only did he foresee the main tenet of the Platform Economy but he offered a useful framing of the potential of the Internet of Things, based on the relationship between eternal ideas and material objects.

Stretching a point? D’ya think? It’s worth reviewing how far we have got with the with the IoT so far. While we’ve seen a considerable amount of effort to standardise in the platform level, we are still a long way from providing the ‘giants’ upon which the broader section of us lowly creatures can innovate.

That’s not to understate the considerable effort that has already been made. In the Platform as a Service layer, Amazon AWS IoT, IBM Watson and Microsoft’s Azure IoT Suite, Zebra and a host of smaller players such as Thingworx and Evrythng offer massively scalable and open integration, streaming, storage and analytics capabilities.

In industry, the likes of Fujitsu (with GlobeRanger)  and Bosch have things going on; meanwhile Intel has an IoT Platform reference architecture to which a number of vendors have subscribed, including GE with its Predix industrial IoT framework and services. How easy and unfair it is, one might say, to suggest that such efforts are not already substantial.

But while such platforms and standardisation efforts are taking us way beyond where we have been, they are yet to arrive at a point where the real innovation explosion will take place. Solutions are currently domain-specific, frequently proprietary and a long way from the adoption levels seen by, say, social media.

Perhaps the closest is Xively or even IFTTT, but none have the immediacy of their social networking. In wearables for example, Garmin, Strava et al continue to fight their corners. Apple just added a ‘home’ icon to its mobile device screens, but it may have left many scratching their heads as to what it was for (as did my wife). The challenges currently faced by Nest reflect the ‘solution without a problem’ stage we are in.

This isn’t a complaint. If I had a concern at all, it’s whether we are prepared for the wave of joined-up connectedness that will inevitably hit. Today’s ‘advances’ will be seen as a world-spanning gestation, a global laying of smart infrastructure upon which the next two decades of innovation will be built.

No user-facing ‘smart’ portal has been adopted to any extent — while some (such as Fluke) have mentioned a ‘Facebook of Things’, we are yet to see a billion-user go-to page to access and control our smart devices, either in work or at home. But we will, as sure as birth follows pregnancy.

Of course, this suggests that such an opportunity is sitting on the table. Why the Googles, Facebooks, Microsoft and indeed, Alibabas aren’t ripping their gloves off and fighting tooth and nail to gain this position is quite astonishing. Once they do (and are joined by whichever next-upstart-to-become-a-household-name in the process), we will enter a new phase of innovation, thrilling and downright scary in equal measure. Lives will be saved, even as the rights of individuals significantly undermined.

For we are but puny, in the face of such developments. But we will see more, and farther than the giants themselves. The relationship between eternal ideas and material objects is about to get a significant run for its money.

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