Topic: AI to Predict Consumer Behavior Globally
Paper Presented at 2021 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE on ELECTRO/INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Shopping without Boundaries: Challenges for Digital Transformation
Abstract:
This post starts by reviewing major retail industry trends and implications for the businesses. Blurring of traditional boundaries for shoppers has sprung new challenges for the digital journey undertaken by retailers. This paper provides actionable insights for the CIOs and business technology professionals.
Note: The slides above are from one of my recent presentations. Comments and feedback welcome!
Demystifying APIs and Microservices
(Paper presented at MuleSoft Connect Conference 2017, San Francisco)
Reducing the time to innovate products and services and increasing IT assets access through APIs and microservices has been identified as key priority for the customer-facing organization (Forrester 2016, Deloitte Tech Trends 2015, 2016). In the age of customer, it is becoming even more important as customers demand better experience across channels, and market competition forces organization to innovate and provide better products and services at lower price.
This Point of View paper identifies and addresses key challenges faced by organizations that are embarking on the journey to expose IT assets via microservices and APIs. It explains that microservices are granular business oriented services that are combined to produce higher level process and experience services. APIs are different from the old approach of SOA in that APIs are more amenable to discovery, access and reuse by a large developer ecosystem of internal and external partners. The three-layer architecture of data, process and experience microservices is discussed and corresponding lessons learned are explained.
The paper further discusses the elements critical from strategic point of view, namely, ownership of leading the innovation and technical implementation, holistic approach, organizational change management, inherent trade-offs, relationship to DevOps, governance etc. Lessons learned and leading practices identified for building distributed systems are reviewed with specific focus on MuleSoft Anypoint platform features that facilitate quick and efficient delivery of microservices and APIs.
An example of financial retail company is given to correlate concepts with a real life scenario. It is expected that organizations implementing microservices and APIs will benefit from this paper.
Overcoming Disruption and Sustaining Innovation with Lean, Six Sigma, and Change Management
Healthcare, like many rapidly changing and complex business environments, is presenting unique challenges and opportunities with ongoing disruption and innovation, both externally in the industry and internally within the organization. This environment requires a new mind-set and dynamic thinking for leaders responsible for projects. A comprehensive approach with a strong project management foundation, along with lean, Six Sigma, and change management, presents the only alternative for a sustainable and successful project delivery strategy.
At the conclusion of this session, participants will be able to:
(1) differentiate between project management, lean, Six Sigma and change management practices for their optimum application;
(2) discuss how to manage strategic goals and requirements in a fast-changing project environment typical of disruption and innovation.
Note: This paper was presented at PMI Global Conference, October 7, 2018, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Enterprise Technology Roadmap: How to handle the complex decision process?
Enterprise Technology Roadmap represents the exercise focused on charting the course for your company’s future.
Like any exercise that involves dealing with long term planning decisions, technology roadmap or IT roadmap is a complex problem. By definition, any decision covering long time horizon is fraught with uncertainty leading to complexity and ambiguity.
The main reason for complexity lies in the conflicting goals of the main players (CFO, Business and IT) involved a shown below:
The solution lies in getting to a stage where CFO sees the priority and ROI from the IT program being pushed by business, and IT is able to deliver the products or services without ‘gold plating’. This requires working with all the main stakeholders and detailed investment analysis and planning is required for adding any IT initiative to the roadmap.
Application Rationalization is usually an integral part of the roadmapping exercise. It allows stakeholders to analyse the application landscape in view of current and future needs. It may involve following:
- Adding new applications to the IT landscape
- Enhancing the existing application to provide new features
- Maintaining existing applications with no change
- Replace existing application with new one
- Retire the existing application without any replacement
- Re-platforming the application on cloud
Further, in view of businesses pushing for digitalization, building of digital platform is gaining momentum as a precursor to building portfolio of digital applications and other IT assets. Building digital platform is not a easy task and requires long term commitment for investment and cultural change that are needed to enable digital business. This is the next topic of our discussion.
Author’s Note: I will continue to add more thoughts on digital journey to my blog. in the meantime, let me know of your feedback or comments.
About Vivek Varma, Ph.D.
Vivek Varma is seasoned business technology professional with over 20 years of demonstrated success in Big4 global consulting and industry with special focus on Business Technology Alignment, Strategic Planning, Artificial Intelligence, Analytics, Enterprise Architecture, Product Development, Program Management, and delivery of mission critical business solutions.
Goal of this blog are:
- Share my experiences and thoughts with others
- Learn from other practitioners in the field of my expertise
Feel free to reach out to me with your suggestions, questions or concerns.
Tech Trends, Business Technology, Leadership & Artificial Intelligence 