Epic Feature roadmap planning

From Desktop Automation to Artificial Intelligence - A journey

In my previous post i.e. Do you really need RPA in your Business? I stated the high level criteria for any enterprise automation seeker to classify  a process as eligible for automation or not. 

Automation can also be classified into various stages. Some process automation only require partial automation or automation of certain steps within a workflow which is now popular by the name of desktop automation or RDA (Robotic Desktop Automation), Where as other business cases are more of enabling the organization wide systems with power to take autonomous rule based decisions which is popularly know as AI or Artificial Intelligence. 

The objective of this post is to understand the stages in the journey from RDA to AI and what are the criteria to achieve each state. 

1.     RDA (Robotic Desktop Automation):

The basic need for any enterprise that is very new to automation is that it wants to reduce the redundant work for its work force or increase the output of the workforce. This need is generally answered b automation of certain steps in the tasks which are conducted by the workflow. These steps may still need human intervention as the decision making is done by human beings. 

• RDA is process driven
• Manual intervention is needed as trigger is human initiated
• Decision making is done my humans
• Some steps in a workflow are automated to reduce tasks which were earlier done by human beings
• Examples are copy pasting data from excel to form or vice versa

2.     RPA (Robotic Process Automation): 

The next obvious step is to allow the process to take decision to trigger the event so that human intervention is reduced even further. Thus this level of automation intends to automate not just few steps but move towards increasing the level of automation in the entire workflow or process to achieve a final state of complete process automated with minimal or no human intervention

• ·          RPA is also process driven
• ·          Triggers are digital and self serviced
• ·          Intent is to automate the end to end workflow
• ·          Triggers are rule based
• ·          Examples are digital customer journey for opening of a new bank account

3.     ML (Machine Learning):

The next successive state for any enterprise in this journey is to allow the system do make decsions based on previous decisions made by humans. The in the previous two states we have seen that the triggers or decision are either made by humans or based on rules made by humans. This state however takes it to a new level where the decisions are made based on the data and decision rules are selected by machines based on the data.

• ·          ML is data driven
• ·          Perspective analysis and decision engines are at the heart of this stage
• ·          Triggers are based on historic data, rules are made based on historic data
• ·          Its not focused on one workflow but is capable of enterprise wide transformation
• ·          Examples are running decision engines and data analysis on customer journey’s and repeat purchase to come up with decision on product positioning and marketing mix

4.     AI (Artificial Intelligence):

The ultimate state for an enterprise is to be able to create intelligent systems which can not only make decisions but are also able to assist its stakeholders in making intelligent decisions. Intelligent systems can not only make decisions based on historical data but also are capable to deducing future events based on current set of steps and information from past.

• ·          AI data driven
• ·          Deductive analysis is the heart of this stage
• ·          System is intelligent to guide humans to take certain steps
• ·          Examples which I can think of “Jarvis” from Age of Ultron

Do you really need RPA in your Business?

Irrespective of which business vertical you are working in, process automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence are the words which you would come across day in and day out. Every business today is looking for ways to reduce cost and maximise revenue by using these technologies. However not all business processes and operations are fit for automation. This articles intends to cover the aspects which should be considered before jumping to conclusions on implementing automation for a particular business process.

Do I really need it?

• Would this automation reduce man hours? The main aim of any RPA implementation is to reduce the human efforts and increase efficiency. Thus an business which is considering RPA as a solution should work out n th number of man hours this implementation would reduce. The more the merrier. This can also be in terms of number of employees which are currently deployed to complete the process.

• Is the process based on business rules or on human judgement? Processes which are based on business rules are ideal candidates for automation. For example “if customer has provided a copy of the passport then issue air tickets else not”. Rule based processes can be converted into algorithms high can be understood by bots. Some processes may or may not be fully business rules driven and thus may be good candidates for attended automation.

• Are human inputs in binary formats or standard templates? Machines understand the language of 0 or1. If the process requires standard human inputs or human inputs are captured in standard formats such as forms, then the process is a good candidate for automation. On the other hand of inputs are non standard and require human judgement, such processes are not good candidates for automation.

Other factors? Other factors which determine the feasibility of RPA implementation include factors like how soon the process under consideration is expected to change.  Processes which are expected to change in next couple  to  months are not good candidates for RPA. Also if the number of exceptions are high in a process then it would need human intervention and thus RPA implementation would not be as fruitful/

Conclusion : RPA technology has huge potential for all industry sectors but businesses need to take a cautious decision while choosing which processes should be automated 

RPA and its applications in banking sector

Robotic Process Automation although is not a very old term but it has its roots in process automation which has been around since quite some time. Process automation also has its roots in process management and myself being in business process management field for quite some time now (10 years to be precise) can clearly understand how things have evolved from business process management to process automation to RPA.

RPA today a buzz word in the market and is touching almost every industry vertical, BFSI finds RPA very relevant in various business types may it be Retail, Invoice Finance or Dispute handling. 

For the scope of this blog I would discuss how RPA is influencing some of the manual processes

•  Customer Onboarding : Although globally, retail banking is moving towards digital customer onboarding and making the process paperless, there are still many areas where a document is submitted b customer or a handfilled form is submitted by customer which needs to be processed manually by a human and the data is fed into the system. This is where RPA is helping banks in a big way as the tasks which was done by humans is now being automated and robots are able to do such taks by reading the hand written forms or by scanning and evaluating the documents submitted by prospective customers. For examples documents submitted by individuals can be scanned and ots can verify if these documents are as per the compliance needs
• Processing claims : Claim processing is often one of the most human intensive process as it requires human intervention at various levels. However there are many subprocess in the entire claims journey where humans are being replaced by bots. For example, customers are often required to submit various third party documents such as third party inspection certificates, id proofs, etc. Bots are now processing the documents and entering the values on behalf on humans 
• KYC and Due diligence: KYC often requires customers submit their identification documents and banks processing these documents to ensure that they have enough data to make the customer KYC compliant. KYC is one area where RPA is making big changes buy allowing banks to process thousands of records parallely and thus becoming more independent of the human workforce

These are some of the major areas where RPA is helping banks and financial institutions by helping them reduce the dependency on workforce and thus giving them ability to scale up  the operations and reduce processing time for various processes. 

From Mass Production to Mass Customization : Data to the Rescue

Challenge:

Today since we are at the cusp of digital transformation across every possible interaction with a product and service offering, it is becoming more clear that digital transformation has started disrupting the affection of standardization across industries. Consumer today wants “tailor made” interaction with any product or service and industry want to achieve the cost benefit of with a standardization. These two are opposite forces, their fore  “customization” today is expensive and “standardization or mass production” causes customer dissatisfaction. 

Winners in this era would be those players who would be able to integrate these two i.e. “Mass Production” + “Customization” = “Mass Customization”. 

Deck:

Digital transformation of businesses, wide spread adoption of sensors and analytics are today transforming every industry. There was an era starting mid 1920s when the term Mass Production was popularized on correspondence with Ford Motor Company (Source). The idea was to mass produce using assembly lines to get cost benefits. Same was applied to services where standardized services such as insurance products, banking products, telecom plans, bus fares, road tolls were offered on a standard rates.

The emerging digital transformation and ever increasing use of sensors today is indicating that future would be flooded with data and insights. These insights derived from data gather by various sources of data such as sensors, data gathering software would help organizations gain insights into consumer behavior and thus offer “Mass Customization”.

Categorizing Social Media presence enablers

If you are a small business then it is highly likely that you would have thought of  putting your business on social media. As discussed earlier, this can be done in a variety of ways, in this post we will discuss how can we categorize various in which a business can be social media enabled. Broadly these can be classified into 3 possible categories

1. Direct Social Media Channels
2. Channel Consolidators
3. Channel and Account Consolidators

Moving away from Apps towards Atomization

Creating a smartphone app is becoming more of a hygiene factor in today's world. Pick up any industry vertical and you will find that top player in this vertical are vying for client attention on his/her smartphone screen. That said, as per the Dunbar number there there can be only a limited number of apps which a user uses on his/her phone. Thus true winners in this space are those businesses who are atomizing their services, it is clear that business can not meet the ever increasing and changing expectation, thus atomization of services means providing interfaces for other services or businesses to interact with digital platforms and thus create various new and contextual user experiences. 

Return on investment for digital transformation initiatives

The dynamic technology environment today has left the CXO in a midst of a quagmire as the CXO has a limited technology budget and endless potential investment opportunities in the field of technology which could improve the performance of the bank. Clearly there is a need to get at least some guideline on the kind of returns on investments which the bank would be getting for any investment made in the field of technology. 

In this rapidly digitizing ecosphere businesses are still at a nascent stage where most of the industry verticals although now realize that the future is digital but they are either not yet technologically ready to embrace it or have just started assessing the impact of this radical shift in the business models is impacting them and started reacting, there are exceptions though. Banking vertical being most technically inclined to digitization as compared to vertical like Energy or Manufacturing, becomes the obvious choice for this white paper. Every well-known bank today has at least one substantial size project in pipeline where it is trying to improve its digital footprint in one of the three areas i.e. Customer Relationship, Operations or Partnering with Other players in its ecosystem.

It clear that any digital transformation initiative is fruitless unless there is a clear buy in from the top management, in fact most successful digital transformations initiatives have been the ones which have been initiated from CXO down. It is imperative for any organization to transforms its operations into a more digital state in this rapidly digitizing economy. The next question which challenges a CXO is “Which initiatives would give the best results in terms of Returns of Investment?” and/or “Where should the IT dollar be invested to get maximum bang for the buck?” and/or “What kind of returns the top management can expect from these initiatives?”. In order to enable CXO understand the results and ROI, it becomes imperative for a digital transformation advisor to evaluate to identify variables which factor to the success of these initiatives. 

Social Media and Retail Banking, are they compatible?

What do you mean by retail banking? The banking services which you and me use, that is depositing money, withdrawing money, using ATM, fixed deposits, credit/ debit cards, etc.

I initially through what would a bank do on social media?!, Bank can not use broadcast media like social media to do any of the above mentioned jobs, right?

But there is more to retail banking then just above mentioned tasks, here are some of the things which retail banks like HSBC, Barclays, Citi Bank are doing on Social Media

1. Level 0 Customer Service : Banks have established country specific accounts / pages on social media and are providing first level of customer service on these, this level of service does not include any personal or financial information, some very good examples are @BarclaysOnline, @citibankau
2. Recruitment / HR tasks : Since Social Media is one of the best ways to connect to individuals, banks are using social media to connect and recruit work force., some of the best examples are @BarclaysRoles, @BofA_Careers
3. Marketing and Sales : Banks are also using social media as every other industry to do the ususal sales/ marketing online

So basically apart from three pillars of CRM, i.e. Marketing , Sales, and Service, Banks are also using social media as a platform for finding talent. And why not? after all "Social" in Social Media is nothing bit the human element and that's what is required here. :)

Outsourcing Social Media presence - myth or reality?

Before you start reading this post, I want you to Google following "social media presence maintenance"

The result you see is a proof that it is possible to outsource social media presence or at least this is how it appears.

Before jumping to any conclusions, lets first understand what is meant by outsourcing social media presence for a business. Lets take an example of a small business as they are easier to understand and visualize. Say I own a coffee shop, I sell gourmet coffee, cakes etc. I do most of my operations on my own and this do not get time to ensure that my brand is actively present on various social media or may be I do not know how to handle my brands presence on social media.

One day some one comes to my shop and asks me if I would like some help on making sure that my brand is actively present on social media, he/ she also tells me that by doing so I would be able to do the following things which would help my brand

1. Marketing of new / existing products

2. Sales and promotions

3. Maintain relatinship with my clients and gain feedback on my products

I say yes (obviously :D ), he/ she then tells me what all he can do for my brand and what would be the price of the same.

I agree and get into a contract, now this person makes sure that my brand is actively posting on Twitter, Facebook, etc. by making accounts on these websites and representing my brand on these sites. He/ She actually logs into FB as administrator of the Pages and posts latest about my brand. How does He/ She comes to know about what happening in my coffee shop? He calls me daily and asks me about what’s happening in the coffee shop? what are the cakes we are selling today? which products are on discount etc.

After some time as the number of followers for my brand increase and they start interacting with my brand it becomes difficult for this person to make sure that he is answering all the questions and thus he has to hire more people to do so and so he increases the price of hi services to me.

After some time i realize that i can do it inhouse if my wife learns to handle social media presence and does it for my coffee shop and thus my wife takes a training on social media presence and starts doing it for my coffee shop. I no longer take service from this person. My wife act as the page administrator now.

After some time I realize that it would be better if my wife helps me in preparing coffee, making cake etc. as we have no loads of customer in our shop so I call up this person and ask for his services again.

End of story...

So what I could understand from this example is that answer is "Yes" and "No"

it depends on what you want to do with your brands social media presence. Please share your views in comments below!

CRM, Social Media and Social CRM L0

What is CRM?

In three words : Marketing,Sales and Support

All the big names involved in developing CRM software, implementing CRM systems and using CRM systems play around these three words. Each activity, task, functionality in a CRM system touches one or more of these three aspects i.e. Marketing,Sales and Support

What is Social Media?

If your are reading this then probably you know this, so I am not wasting time on this one.

What is social CRM?

The integration pf a traditional CRM system with social media platforms is called Social CRM (Duhh.....)

So why do we need it? again the three magical words(Marketing,Sales and Support)  Brands can integrate CRM and Social Media to ensure better sales, marketing and support opportunities. How?

Customers are active on social media, companies can gain knowledge about them using social media sites and thus can offer them related products, offers, etc : Say a 19 year old would be interested in knowing venues for parties where as a 30 year old would be interested in knowing more about how can he reduce is car insurance cost. Targeted action can be taken using social media to focus marketing and sales efforts towards these individuals or demographics.

All brands need to provide customer support, no matter is you are a technology giant or a small coffee shop. Social CRM provides one of the quickest and engaging channels for customer support.

So again going back to the basics, social CRM stands on same three pillars : Marketing, Sales and Support

B2B enterprises going social in India!

Would love to share with you two live examples of how B2B enterprises are coming up with innovative ways to interact with individuals over the web, what is the motto behind their initiative, may be you can understand this better once you see their pages.

First example is Commtel Networks, a B2B enterprise in the telecom field which turnkey provider of converged communication, surveillance and related technology solutions based out of Mumbai, They have their own Facebook page, this page updated on average of around 2 times a day with posts ranging from latest news in telecom, whats happening at Commtel, trivia and useful tips.Till date they have received 841 likes which is a substantial number considering that it is a B2B enterprise.

Another example of B2B enterprise going social is Telemeet, which offers conferencing solutions to businesses, they too have their Facebook page and keep updating it with News, Trivia and other updates, they also have around 34 likes. Here is there FB page 

I am sure there would be many more examples of B2B going social but here in India, the trend is just catching up! Sure businesses in India have started understanding the potential of going Social :)

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GP VS FB (Faceoff)

With Google+ more than a week old.. how is it making it in the virtual world. people are joining in from all sides as its very simple to add new friends to your circle and the best part is that GP suggests more and more every time you log in , that two very promptly.

No Doubt GP is  much more clean and less clustered as compared to FB, but is it the FB killer? Now matter how crappy a social network is, people tend to join it just for the heck of it at the first go, these are the early adopters, now if these people find it interesting then they tend to bring in more folks to the Social Network,

Thus the crowd which is currently joining GP is the first wave, it is up to them to decide if GP is better or FB, if they like it better than FB then they will bring in more followers.

I personally feel that it is more like a Rock band, in the beginning only a few followers, but if your stuff is good, you would be talked about, moreover, when your band name Starts with "Google" you are bound to fly :)
I personally feel, GP would have to do a lot to stand against a giant like FB!

Which sectors are benefiting the most from social media!

According to Nielsen 85% of the world’s online population has used the internet to make a purchase - increasing the market for online shopping by 40% in the past two years (Source)

84% of internet users in Asia Pacific have made an online purchase as compared to 92% in North America and 93% in Europe. (Source)

 As per another Nielsen report on Internet users in India (Source)

• 26 % of online discussions mentioned brands
• 92% have read online product reviews in the last one year
• 77% visited the product website after reading the review on social media
• 58% of all social media users have made buying decisions by using online reviews as their main source of information

Now let us further magnify the trend in context with different sectors.

Retail: As per the report retail sector is the most benefited sector from online purchase sales. Books, Shoes, clothing and accessories are the most sought after products which are purchased online and the trend in Asia Pacific is in line with the global trends. In Asia Pacific Region 38% of the users in surveyed said that they have bought Clothing, Accessories or shoes on the Internet in the last three months as compared to 39 % in North America.

Travel and Hospitality: Travel and Hospitality is one sector which has the second highest degree of exposure on internet. Increasingly more and more people are planning their travel first on the internet and then on road. None of us can think of planning a vacation or business trip in absence of internet access. Indian Internet users have highest number of air tickets online, more than any other country in the world. 70% of the users surveyed said that they have bought airline tickets/reservations on the Internet in the last three months,

So all the above mentioned facts bring us to a conclusion that online purchase is becoming a reality with every passing year and trend is common across the globe.

The mind boggling number!

As per the 2009 data 5.12 people out of every hundred use internet in India. The total population of India in 2009 was 1,166,079,217 as per CIA fact book. So the total number of internet user comes to 0.0512 X 1,166,079,217 which equals to a whopping 59703256 Or 59.70 million users!!


Another report on FT (Source) says that India’s 1.1bn people currently take just 0.03 flights per person per year so that brings us to a whopping 34.98 million flight tickets!!


Now if we want to see how many of these tickets are booked online, let’s multiply this number by 0.70 as 70 % of people say that they booked flight tickets online in last three months (Source).


This brings us to a number which is mind boggling. As you can see from above calculation, approximately 24.48 million people book air tickets online.


And this is just one sector we are talking about, what if we combine all sectors!

Social Media Market Overview

As per Forrester’s report on “US Interactive Marketing Forecast 2009 to 2014” the spend on Social Media Marketing to grow at an annual rate of 34 percent – faster than any other form of online marketing and double the average growth rate of 17 percent for all online mediums. Forrester estimates that online advertising will grow from 12 percent of total marketing spend this year to 21 percent by 2014.

Number of people on social media platforms is increasing by the minute, if we have a look at the most popular social media platform i.e. Facebook®, it had 350 million users in January 2010 out of which 102 million were from USA and only 5.6 million users were from India where as if you compare the population of these two countries the trend is exactly opposite i.e. In 2010 India’s population has reached 1.18 billion and that of China has reached 1.34 billion where that of USA is 0.31 billion people.

Giants like IBM, SAS, Google and Accenture have jumped into the game with both feet and offer solution offerings ranging from SPSS Modeler data mining and text analytics workbench, Social Media Analytics to Social CRM. There are huge numbers of smaller player which offer more customized solution and number of such players is increasing exponentially.

The hidden potential of Social Media in Asia Pacific

As per Gartner’s press release on Social Software predictions, Social networking services will replace email by 2014 as primary method for interpersonal communication for 20% of business users. This means that more and more enterprises would depend on Social networking services for business communication services. These services would not only act as a mode of business communication but would act as an asset for management to deliver both external as well as internal messages. Social media today has reached a point where it is no longer a mere fad but it has proven the potential it has and what it can do to transform businesses.



Let us have a look at two major economies in Asia Pacific region which are India and China, As per International Telecommunication Union (ITU), out of every 100 inhabitants 28.3 inhabitants use internet but only 7.7 inhabitants are broadband users (Source), where as in India the numbers are as low as 5.12 and 0.65. These figures are for 2009. Considering the total population of 2.48 billion people in these two countries, the potential for growth is implausibly high.

Social media consulting as a career

Since now we have read about how to drive traffic to your blog http://madhurdhawan.blogspot.com/2010_09_01_archive.html and how can businesses generate sales leads using LinkedIn http://madhurdhawan.blogspot.com/2010_08_01_archive.html , lets now understand that if you have limitless passion for social networks and even tweet about what time you went to the loo today, you convert this passion to a career!

Just imagine how much fun it would be if you get paid for being on facebook or just for tweeting :p.

I am not kidding. In today’s internet active business environment, every business understands the importance of Social Media and the impact of web presence on the business. Management understands the importance of social media but on the other hand do not have dedicated experts to work on the same. Organizations are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with the fast paced social media scenario and the amount of time required to maintain their web presence.

You, yes you can be the solution! How? Just read along to know...

Businesses today look for one stop solution to maintain and upkeep their face on social media world, freelance consultants are best solution for this as organizations find it easier to hire them and get expert advice without taking them on their payrolls :)

So it does not matter if you are an internet junkie or are a master in business studies, you can choose to be a social media advisor or social media jockey for a business. This business might be your own college or a coaching class.

The only thing I would like to highlight is that you would have to prove your worth before you start earning on per hour basis, so don’t mind doing a couple of projects for free ;)

cheers!

6 Simple Steps to drive traffic to your blog!!!

This post is dedicated to all the effort I have made to make my blog attract more and more traffic. Here are some of the things which I have done to make my blog “FAMOUS” …well…or simply….how did I get more and more traffic to my Blog!

So here are the things which I did

1. Allow Blog site to list your blog: Allow you blog site to list your blog in its blog directory. For example If you use Blogspot, when you publish your blog , it would ask you if you want to publish the blog in its directory? You can select “yes” at that time. This would list your blog on the directory.

2. Associate appropriate tags: Tags are the list of words which you associate with your blog or posts. So in order to make sure that more and more people are able to find your blog if they search for a word that has been tagged with your blog then associate the same with your blog. For example: If your blog talks about “how to make sugar free cakes :P” then make sure you include words like cakes, bakery, sugar free, diabetes, diabetics etc in you tags.

3. List your blogs on various Blog directories: There are many blog directories which are available and which offer blog listing services for free. Ensure that your blog is listed. Here is a list to start with http://www.avangate.com/articles/blog-directories-95.htm

4. Submit your blog to Google and other search engines: Search engines like Google, yahoo allow users to submit blogs to be listed on their blog directories. Here is a link to submit your blog to Google http://blogsearch.google.com/ping . and here is a tutorial to submit your blog to Yahoo http://googlewebmasterblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/submit-blog-to-yahoo.html

5. Submit your Blog to news site like DIGG, REDDIT : You can bring more visibility to your blog by submitting your blog on sites like Digg ™ www.digg.com and www.reddit.com , these sites help you to publish your blog in front of world wide audience.

6. Publish your blog on other social media platforms : you can also post link to your blog on all the other social media platforms like face book, LinkedIn, twitter and so on. Also blog sites like www.Blogspot.com Allow you to link your face book account to your blog.

Ok, Enough of talking , now let me do all this with the post which you have been reading …
Cheers!
Madhur Dhawan