A Sensible City is a precursor to be a Smart City……

Last week I participated in the eGov symposium at Tirupati, hosted by the Government of Andhra Pradesh. As part of the program, I listened to several speakers on the subject of ‘Smart City’, where the common theme was deployment of sensor-based technologies for predictive smarter solutions. Anyway, ‘Smart City’ is now a well-accepted jargon in India and more so through the recent selection of first 20 cities for investing into Smart City concept, by Ministry of Urban Development. Next day was Saturday and I visited Tirumala, a city on top of the hill, known as ‘Devasthanam’- abode of Lord Balaji; the most visited religious place in the world.

The visit to Tirumala city is an experience apart from ‘Darshan’ of Lord in the temple, that shows you how the city is kept spick and span with no spitting and smoking; how the transport and parking bays are managed reducing pollution; how the speed of vehicle is regulated both climbing up and down the hill; how the crowd is managed with amenities providing convenience and comfort to the visitors. Even the local citizens participate in voluntary services. The Trust (TTD) has deployed technology including online facility for several services including tickets, donations, and accommodation booking to tackle the volume and velocity of visitors. One can easily see through the underlying mission of the city, which is to be a sensible one where all economic, social and cultural activities converge into a single vision ‘Darshan’. Tirumala city is a ‘Sensible’ city more than a ‘Smart’ city, and thanks to the administration and governance of the TTD Trust. And that should be a lesson for the selected Smart Cities to endeavor to become sensible ones first before deployment of any IOT sensors and big data analytics.

Only one thing that pinched me personally is that too many VIPs and VVIPs in shorter queues. Tirumala should have only one VIP, i.e. Lord Balaji himself and rest others, whoever they may be, should be treated as ticket holders, maybe of different denominations and queues. I am sure that with the forward thinking TTD Trust, this will also change soon. 

Details are must while Aggregate is smarter….

‘Customer Id’ is a system generated data filed that is supposed to identify the customer in a unique way for any transaction with the business-   banking, insurance, telecom, utility, retail store, even ecommerce applications. The ‘Customer Id’ helps the business to capture details about a particular transaction and the depth of the details is designed in a way to complete the transaction seamlessly across business processes and futuristic need for retrieval. From the viewpoint of single-point data capture and internal audit, these details are a must.

However, its claim in identifying the customer across business has failed most of the times and the business ends up with a maze of ‘Customer Id’s for the same customer depending on the product or service the customer purchased and channels through which the customer interacted e.g. service center, branch office, internet, mobile, call center or social media.

Thus mere ‘Customer Id’ does not help rather makes the business struggle to identify the customer as a unique and real entity; which is needed by the business to understand customer’s needs and feedback so that the business can effectively work towards better service, loyalty, retention, potential cross/up sell and referrals. What the business needs is aggregation of all transactions and interactions of the customer across business and across its channels, either online or offline, to know the customer better. Aggregation can provide business a 360-degree profile of a customer in terms of demography, interest areas, past purchases, past feedback, networks, and connections. Single Customer View (SCV) is the concept that helps business achieving such aggregation through its methodologies around data cleansing, data standardization, data integration, de-duplication and analytics; thus makes business a smarter one delivering enhanced & personalized customer experience, and increasing level of customer acquisition & retention. 

Stay young and Stay fit...........

IT industry with its myriad solution and service providers across the globe is an exciting place to be; though this industry is still in its young days radiating ebullience coupled with childlike fun in trying out new things everyday; bespeaking courage to meet the challenge in solving all kind of solutions, be it for Defense or Government or Enterprises or Consumers without fear of failures and at the same time not ashamed of celebrating success, be it small or big.

What makes this industry still remaining young?

Answer is constant “Change”. Here the underlying technology is on a continuous change path, always impatient to come up with something more for less and bringing the computing power with convenience in everyone’s hand including children. Competition landscape in this industry changes faster than the weather in England, with possibilities of smaller fish eating up bigger fish. Based on the technology adaptation, market does shift; in a way that we have seen it has moved to the consumer segment from erstwhile defense or government sector within a decade. This industry is not limited to developed nations alone; in fact we are seeing that developing countries adapt and deploy technology faster than others. And the most visible move is the people, who are ever hungry for newer horizons, newer challenges, newer perks and newer bosses.

The industry is interesting for everyone, for young ones to old experienced hands, as it makes one unlearn and learn everyday; as long as they have an open mind to attune and experiment. The industry moves on with a simple mantra- “ stay young and stay fit”. 

Estimation........a ritual?

Have you ever watched reactions from different teams whenever a new opportunity arrives on the desk to respond to? And I am talking here in a typical software service provider environment.

First reaction is from Sales…” It is a great opportunity. We have to win it anyway and price is the deciding factor here. Let us go with very aggressive pricing.”

At the same time Delivery team says …”It is little riskier one. Let us not compromise on schedule. Also we need experienced resources to tackle customer expectations. It is better to go with conservative estimate rather to cut a sorry figure later.”

Quality department says …”Customer expects higher quality of deliverables and let us ensure that sufficient cushion is built for project management, quality assurance, documentation and testing.”

Estimation Group tries to put forth their estimation models & experiences to justify accuracy in estimation with sufficient buffers and validations by delivery team so that no one can point a finger to them tomorrow if anything goes wrong.

Management depending on their style either goes with sales or finds a mean between sales & delivery calls.

All discussions happen around “how much it costs”, “how long it takes”, “how many resources and what skills do we need”.

Is that the right approach? No.

Rather the Estimation Group should take a breather and sit across the table with all concerned i.e. Sales, Delivery, Quality and others involved, discussing first:

-Why the customer wants the project in the first place

-How the contour of the project is defined by the customer i.e. what are included and what are excluded, often an amorphous one

-Why customer wants us to participate in the bid

-Why should we participate …what is in for us

Once the above is fairly understood, then the estimation model and number crunching can happen to come up with reliable and sale-worthy estimates. Estimation is part of the sales process and not a back-office ritual. The onus is on the Estimation Group to see that sales happen in a way to have a win-win scenario for the customer and the firm.

(Blog 2)..IoT....Internet of Things

In my last blog, I promised to talk about some more examples where IoT will influence our environment and us.

Let us take our personal life i.e. living at home, our movements, our shopping of provisions including medicines and our spend on utilities like fuel, gas, water, electricity, cable TV, phone etc. We are already seeing cars equipped with multiple sensors for safe driving, voice enabled navigations, dialing phone numbers from car panel and other infotainments. Our cars are becoming smarter and greener with the help of microelectronics and sensors that are communicating with each other and making our driving experience richer.

Living at home basically necessitates our human needs around comfort and convenience. Comfort is associated with personal safety; automated alarm for unwanted events; smart spending by monitoring utilization of gas, water, electricity; alerts for maintenance of household equipment; automatic control of equipment for lighting and heating. Sensors around our gadgets at home, garage, swimming pool etc that can continuously monitor air, heat, humidity, and control themselves will help in providing necessary comfort at our desired level while ensuring optimal spend on utilities.

Smarter equipment like our refrigerators, dishwashers, set-top box TV have potential to monitor our preferences, inventory of food items and pattern of consumption. With this kind of knowledge the smarter equipment can monitor and arrange our provisioning like grocery, cleaning liquids, household consumables and even preferred movies or TV shows. Most important is that our health records and medication will be digitized to sense the need and provide alerts to us, our doctors and our pharmacists for real-time attention. Such a platform where all the gadgets and things that can be digitized are connected will bring convenience through smarter provisioning.

Here comes the IoT eco-system that I talked about earlier. IoT has more influence on our daily personal life than anything else. In fact we may see that IoT will scale up at consumer front faster than the enterprise front, owing to the comfort and convenience that it promises to make our life organized and hassle-free. IoT throws endless possibilities for a smarter  well-being……