I have witnessed many organizations buying and renewing their licensing agreements from international vendors, without gaining any value from it. This always led me to question why they would continue to do so, despite suffering a loss.
When I was younger, my favorite holiday was Christmas. I loved waiting to open my presents, frequently playing guessing games to guess what I had gotten this year. As I got older, some of the excitement ebbed away. I felt the familiar flicker of that excitement recently when I saw the ad for the new iPad Pro. It left its mark on me, and I had been impressed with the iPad Pro for quite some time, waiting anxiously for months to receive it. You can imagine my disappointment when I discovered that despite all its cutting edge technology, it was of no use to me when it came to the job I required of it.
On one such occasion, I had been expressing my frustration to a friend. Explaining how the device I had purchased was not able to perform the tasks I needed. During this conversation, she recommended a new method from the start up. Granted, it wasn’t as expensive as the iPad Pro; but the question remained, why should I invest in another device when I already have an iPad equipped with the latest technology today has to offer?
As the days passed, my task remained uncompleted. The responsibility lay before me, a persistent taunt to all the money I had spent and the inconveniences I had to deal with after. A part of me knew I was stuck, but a more significant part of me refused to accept it. I had already invested too much.
One day, I incidentally paid a visit to a shop that exchanged devices. I happened to see the device my friend had mentioned to me before, the device being offered by a start-up. I asked to test the device first, and much to my delight, it was exactly what I had been looking for! The price was reasonable too; so generous in fact, that I thought about exchanging it with my iPad. However, there would still be a price gap, which would put me in a loss. It was more expensive to buy the iPad than to exchange it, which stopped me from proceeding. I had already paid an excessive amount of money for the iPad. Now, I would be spending more money, for a device that didn’t have the quality insurance backing of an iPad. But then I remembered the age-old saying, “Don’t judge a book by its cover”. If it could complete the tasks I needed, then it would only be benefitting me. Making up my mind, I decided to exchange my iPad for the start-up device.
Was exchanging the iPad the right decision? Yes, I believe it was the best decision for me. For the future, I learned that before making an expensive purchase, make sure you know what you want and need. For me, the iPad was unable to complete the task I had needed it for, which made me aim for purchasing it in vain. If I had known before, I would have bought the device from the start-up company, cutting down on my financial and time losses. I took the initiative and found a solution to my problem, ending my woes of a substantial investment with no result.
We are all scared of change and how it impacts our carefully constructed lives, even if we are at a standstill. I have witnessed many organizations buying and renewing their licensing agreements from international vendors, without gaining any value from it. This always led me to question why they would continue to do so, despite suffering a loss. Although this is happening at a larger scale compared to mine, I understand that they too are scared to exchange their iPad. It is far more comfortable and safe to stay in the known than to take a risk and venture out into the unknown.
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Originally published Feb 17, 2019 10:45:37 AM, updated July 24, 2019
Topics: Digital Transformation
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The Enterprise Digital Canvas is a comprehensive and structured blueprint of your Digital Enterprise. This article summarises learnings from effective Digital Workspace design for COVID-19 response, using the Digital Canvas model.
See how it works here:
Architecture Is The Foundation Digital Workspace
A successful workspace for recovery and growth requires you to have a 360-view of your operating capabilities. This is only possible by effectively leveraging The Digital Canvas (World’s leading framework for Digital Design).
For more information, visit our Partner Arqitek.
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We live in a time that is characterised by a major technology takeover, a time experiencing the 4th industrial revolution. Companies that want to survive and evolve must keep track of technology breakthroughs, because as we’ve come to know, technology can make or break a company’s success.
In light of that, it is imperative to always look forward in anticipation and not just wait for a trend to start “trending”. We have created a list of what we speculate to be the major technology trends of 2020 that everyone should keep an eye out for.
No matter how much technology advances, it is agreed that no single tool can replace humans. Most organisations out there are already familiar with automation, which involves automating simple tasks that require processes with predefined rules and structured data. The idea of HyperAutomation, on the other hand, involves a combination of tools that together result in the creation of an organisation’s digital twin, which allows for the automation of more complex work.
According to Gartner, combining robotic process automation, intelligent business management software, and AI enables organisations to visualise how functions, processes, and key performance indicators interact to drive value.
Allowing this digital twin to become an integral part of the HyperAutomation process as it provides real-time continuous intelligence about the organisation will enable more informed decision making. Successful automation involves several key factors: discover, analyse, design, automate, measure, monitor, & reassess.
An example of a tool that is designed based on these factors would be Exceed’s ESP.
While Blockchain was first developed back in 1991, it came to life with the introduction of Bitcoin in 2009. The idea of bitcoin mimics printed currency in the transactional sense, but instead of being regulated by a central bank or government, bitcoin is regulated by a network of computers. Blockchain is the protocol on which bitcoin is built.
In the simplest terms, Investopedia defines Blockchain as “a distributed, decentralised, public ledger”, which translates to digital information (blocks) that are stored in a public database (chain). While blockchain is beneficial in peer to peer transactions and small-scope projects, it remains immature for enterprise deployments due to technical issues.
However, market speculations anticipate it to be fully scalable by 2023. According to research conducted by Gartner, “true blockchain will have the potential to transform industries, and eventually the economy, as complementary technologies such as AI begin to integrate alongside blockchain.”
Can Machines Think?
AI involves designing “human-like” machines that are able to perform tasks requiring intelligence. Machines are built to mimic processes and tasks that involve recognition of images, speech, or patterns & decision making. Those processes include acquiring information and rules, using those rules to reach conclusions, & self-correction.
Unlike traditional coding, the computer creates instructions for itself using machine learning algorithms rather than having humans write those instructions. To demonstrate the effect of AI, take google translate for an example.
When it first went live, google translate used to have more than a million lines of code (human-created instructions). Currently, google translate has 500 lines of code due to machine learning. However, while it is expected to overtake every industry, one must understand its limitations.
Knowledge in AI comes from data, and for the machine to be accurate, it must read from accurate data. While businesses have been understanding what AI can and can't achieve for the past few years, it expected that the future points towards a time where machines are appointed not only all of the physical work, as they have done since the industrial revolution, but also the mental work involving planning, strategising, and making decisions.
Sources:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/blockchain.asp
https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartner-top-10-strategic-technology-trends-for-2020/
https://www.simplilearn.com/top-technology-trends-and-jobs-article
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You see the end product but we’re bringing you closer to the people behind it !
Among our recent partnerships, we joined forces with Ubility.
To bring the service provider closer to YOU, we sat down with their CEO Khaled Dassouki, to gain firsthand insight on the things they do and the types of human capital profiles that drive their success.
Khaled is a Lebanese national with an engineering background and PhD in Artificial Intelligence & Security obtained at Université de Technologie de Troyes, France.
As a result of over 20 years in the field, Khaled decided to establish Ubility in France and build it on a base of Artificial Intelligence in Customer Experience, which was considered to be highly innovative as it was a niche field.
Khaled was quick to notice that there had been a shift in the way business was carried out, the shift had been made to be more customer-focused. With that came new challenges, the ease with which customers can connect with the business led to a huge influx of queries and requests for support, which was very time consuming, tedious, and required businesses to grow their customer support teams leading to higher costs.
While growing their teams did solve some challenges momentarily, organisations were quick to realise that the complexity and average time required to resolve customer challenges was growing which eventually led to dissatisfied customers. Not only that, customer service agents were quickly burning out as they were answering an ever-growing list of routine questions rather than helping solve complex problems and offering innovative solutions.
Taking all that into account, Ubility offered an AI-powered platform that learns from interactions between an organisation’s customers & their customer care team to enable quick suggestions of appropriate solutions that could solve a customer’s challenge in seconds rather than minutes.
In addition to that, Ubility also offers AI training for professionals in the IT industry, a sales chatbot that is based on a recommender system and knows the sales cycle, and AI Consultancy in which they are recruited to build and implement AI services in response to an assessment of an organisation’s processes.
Success Story
Ubility was commissioned by a Telecom operator in the gulf to assess and analyse their IT processes. After a thorough analysis done by their team of experts, it was concluded that a huge portion of their IT processes had an opportunity for automation.
After studying the best ways in which they could automate their processes, they determined that incorporating AI would allow the elimination of a manual process by looking at historical data. Instead of their operational costs raking up to 50,000 USD a month, they were now cut by 80% to be only 10,000 USD.
Intrigued and want to learn more?
The Enterprise Digital Canvas is a comprehensive and structured blueprint of your Digital Enterprise. This article summarises learnings from effective Digital Workspace design for COVID-19 response, using the Digital Canvas model.
See how it works here:
We live in a time that is characterised by a major technology takeover, a time experiencing the 4th industrial revolution. Companies that want to survive and evolve must keep track of technology breakthroughs, because as we’ve come to know, technology can make or break a company’s success.
You see the end product but we’re bringing you closer to the people behind it !
