Speak just ideas!!

Retail in the cloud - ARTS

2009-12-22T14:08:00.000-08:00

ARTS Releases Cloud Computing For Retail Report

Original news at ARTS website:
http://www.nrf.com/modules.php?name=News&op=viewlive&sp_id=803

Washington, October 15, 2009—The Association for Retail Technology Standards, the standards division of the National Retail Federation, is pleased to announce the release of the draft version of Cloud Computing for Retail that will provide unbiased guidance for achieving optimum benefit of this computer technology. Cloud Computing, which effectively lowers IT costs for retailers, is an emerging computing model by which users can gain access to their applications from any location, through any connected device, making the infrastructure transparent to the user.

The whitepaper follows in the footsteps of the highly successful SOA Blueprint, used by retailers as a guide for SOA implementations, to become an essential companion for retailers implementing Cloud Computing. Developed by an ARTS member committee of leading retailers and vendors chaired by The Kroger Co. and IBM, the whitepaper provides information on best uses of Cloud in retail, maximizing security and reliability, avoiding vendor lock-in and achieving a rapid ROI. The whitepaper is based on extensive research and actual experiences of the committee members.

******Click here for more details.*********

Business Service Realization

2009-12-19T05:36:00.000-08:00

A Key Phase in SOA Programs Business Service Realization
— Today, every IT enablement and business transformation task has an element of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) embedded in it. However, even with matured SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle) processes for IT execution, the gap in identifying business services for an SOA implementation still remain. Architects and business stakeholders are generally found struggling with questions such as “When should we identify a service?”; “Who should be identifying them?”; “What should be a service and why?” Service identification in enterprise architecture involves realizing the enterprise's business vision.

Green Retailing Idea - Digital Receipts

2008-09-25T06:56:00.000-07:00

SAVE more than 15K trees/year per large retailer

I would like to present an green retailing idea, describing how the retail sector can reduce crucial amount of carbon footprints by setting up infrastructure for distribution of electronic form of transaction receipts, product guarantee and warranty cards against purchases done by customers at the Point of sales tills.

The current approach of disbursing PAPER receipts, warranty and guarantee cards (proof of purchases) for the products purchased at point of sales tills demands heavy production of papers which in turn calls for deforestation.

How the idea supports green computing?
As we all know, trees most importantly are natural sink to pollutants especially carbon dioxide. Today deforestation is done for production of papers for various usages in different industries. The deforestation has resulted decrease in the number of trees that could have otherwise absorbed great deal of carbon dioxide from air thus reducing carbon footprints.

Other Benefits of the idea
In addition to the saving trees, the digital data of transactions can be used in several ways and can be source of different business opportunities.

Most of the insurance claims, good returns and office expenditure claims require reproduction of proof of purchase in a valid format. But many of us fail to save and store the (proof of purchase) in paper form i.e most of the time we lose them. We lose extra money due to unavailability of proof of purchase in a format that is reproducible digitally and that could have been confirmed as from a trusted source.

In most of the cases, we as a consumer fail to save this paper form of proof of purchases for the life of the product, due to which we fail to reproduce it when it is actually needed.

If the transactions would have been available in an electronic form and with a trusted source format, the above claims, returns would be successful with no hassles whatsoever, more than that the process of returns and claims would be automated.

Some calculations:
1 tree makes 16.67 reams of News Print paper - Source: Conservatree.

A branded super store with 1000 branches in a developed country may have on an average 10 tills per store.

With the minimum numbers possible, 13,000 trees/year or even more are cut for producing paper receipts for a single brand of super store in a single country. We have not included the carbon footprints that go in manufacturing these paper receipts.

Furthermore, paper of especially high quality and size is used to produce warranty cards and guarantee cards.

(The figures are illustrative and a detailed calculation to prove the numbers can be made available)

This number will increase exponentially if we include all the basket transactions across all brands of super or non-super stores and point of sales tills where the paper receipts are produced. Additionally, this is similar for all brands of product manufacturers that require producing paper warranty and guarantee cards.

By setting up a the digital receipt solution these numbers can drastically reduce or even vanish. These trees saved, will continue to absorb CO2 from the air thus helping the earth to go green again.

Common Concerns & Questions
Q 1. What if receipts are required by customers with no internet access?
Ans: They still will have an option to ask for paper receipt. The digital
receipts may not completely replace the paper receipts.

Q2. What if the customers ask for paper receipts as well as digital receipts?
Ans : An option of printing receipts on low quality paper should be available at the tills, this quality of paper may not have enough life but satisfy the customer needs to review the items for that day.
Also an SMS service can be made available to extract all the items for a receipt (on a particular day) from the online service to the mobile. This can also be used to review the items purchased at any time.

This solution also builds a trustworthy relationship between the retail-store brand, product brand and the customer as he/she will feel more confident about purchasing goods with this facility since they need not worry about storing the paper formats as a proof of purchase and can easily be reproduced as an electronic document.

Semantic Standards + Artificial Intelligence in future!!

2007-12-10T21:46:00.000-08:00

Web 2.0., Enterprise 2.0 -- What Next???

I would like to present some thoughts around the next generation of enterprise systems that I feel will soon radically change the Business-IT engagement in a more expert manner.

Analyzing problem domains – If we are able to abstract entities, processes, and boundary interactions in our problem domain, it is very much possible that we can map the “problem under investigation” against an “already solved problem” thus helping us in reusing available solutions.

To add more, the problems can be abstracted or patterns can be identified only if you give a meaning for every "thing" in the problem domain and apply levels of abstraction to the same, hence it is very important for the modern enterprise to be domain driven!!. With a clear domain model one can prepare reliable semantics for sharing data and the service contracts can be understood uniformly through Common Business Model, thanks to SOA who made this approach implicit through its integration pattern.

The sharing of data with uniform understanding of domain objects, is unlike the traditional solutions where the data was stored with a meaning in silos, and when shared or marshaled it was just a set of meaning-less values and used to take its own meaning in different systems when stored.

Web 2.0 - With the modernization of data exchange, the data is now flowing around the enterprise with attached meaning (meta-data), not just the enterprise but also through the web, i.e. web 2.0 which is not just about blogs, wiki, mashups and collaboration, but it is primarily originated from "semantic web that allows integration through common understanding of meta-data", i.e. the content on the web may not remain just a set of plain HTML tags but will have entity structures (meta-data) with uniform semantics (domain language).

Enterprise 2.0 - Just like semantics in WEB has made a big move in terms of uniform understanding and collaboration of data, the enterprise distributed applications will also now have the data with its own common meaning. PIDX, HL7, ACORD etc. are just to name a few that has supported standardization in defining and sharing data in their respective industry, there will be more to get introduced and endless collaboration/integration of enterprise applications will follow with standard industry specific integration patterns.

So what next?!!

Web 2.0 + AI, Enterprise 2.0 + AI, should we see this in future?

Self healing, Self understanding, Self improving systems !!!

To support web 2.0, "Contextual Search engines" is on its way. These search engines understands the patterns in which the user searches data, records the patterns and then replay/reuse the patterns for similar searches in future to deliver accurate and fast results.

Artificial intelligence is not new to us but how it can leverage the strong semantics in our enterprise is something to look at.

Where business agility is the prime need, and now when SOA makes it easy, it’s all about reducing the time to configure it.

Model Driven Architecture and Domain Specific Language pushes us to move towards developing product line architectures i.e. with the software factory approach! It is all about supporting domain models with patterns to deliver software solutions repetitively without much effort.

So can we expect more intelligence from our Enterprise applications?

1. Can the business processes tune themselves by understanding the data and its meaning and the stages it passes through?

2. Can the application services on their own find the most suitable service on the service bus which satisfies the required non/functional or functional requirements and then self configure to use it in future?

3. Can the service discovery not just publish web services contracts but also its average performance, thus helping other services dynamically consume the best performing service on the bus?

4. Can the market movements, surveys once fed in the enterprise application gives the application enough information to automatically self configure new products (e.g. banking/insurance and publishes it on a “Business Dashboard” for moderation. Rolling out of a product in IT will then be matter of minutes.

To build an smart enterprise application, integrated with many others, it is mandatory to have a very strong and clear (meaningful) domain model which can then form a knowledge repository of various patterns in which the data + meaning is shared, modified, transformed and consumed. These patterns will form the base of the intelligent applications in future!!.

All this is possible only if we have a perfect domain model with good abstraction levels and either closer to or same as the standard structures. If we fail to do this then such applications may not be able to participate in the next intelligent IT era, the "Enterprise.I" & "Web.I".

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Please drop-in your comments.

Next Wave in Indian IT, oops!! Global IT

2007-10-01T23:48:00.000-07:00

The rising rupee against dollar has made the Indian IT industry to think and relook at fundamentals of their business model. Indian IT primarily has been hosting outsource work was mainly because of its cost effectiveness for execution of large projects involving large number of resources. Time has changed, Indian IT has gained a lot of expertise in this area to now provide solutions that are not merely an outsource work.

The next wave of Indian IT will be one of the most exciting phase, Indian IT will have to re-introduce themselves as IT solutions provider for business problems and not limit just to execution of IT design done in the west. This level of engagement actually asks for premium rate and will help the Indian IT to move up the value chain.
There has been discussions happening around sustaining Indian IT by introducing IP, patent based solutioning so as to receive returns repetitively on a the one time developed solutions. I absolutely advocate this and is the most obvious step to move from where Indian IT is today.

If Indian IT wants to enjoy the Next WAVE, it need to add following features to their Surf boards,

IT companies should leverage their existing domain knowledge to produce innovative products with self-owned IP. The self-owned IP reduces a lot of efforts for producing new solutions in same domain by reusing the development. This makes it very cost effective and will produce huge returns more than that of general service providing business.
Diversify in domain expertise, identify domains that the company can best deliver solutions in, target resources and train to raise their expertise in respective domain so as to make them understand business and not just technology. This will ensure that what will be produced will be a complete solution and not get restricted to only IT execution.
At times it is quiet possible that there is not enough amount of domain expertise to back the technology solutions for a particular domain, in this case it is a smart thing to acquire small players with good domain knowledge to act as catalyst in raising your own expertise and also to gain some ready clients.
Innovation will be a key to success in future of Indian IT, as IPs and patents will be something that will be banked upon, a world class innovation (R&D) center is the need of coming IT era. The job of this team will be to constantly study the global market and be part of global research wherever possible, be an active participant and closely watch global IT, then just acting as a recipient. Retrospectively make changes to the development of IP such that IP quality meets latest market requirement and standards so as to avoid any sudden competition.
The above tasks if executed correctly, the IT companies can then mark themselves as “Expert” in specific domain and get engaged at early stage of the projects providing premium services at premium rate.
Indian IT should be now more proactive to movements in the market e.g. they should be part of web 3.0 then to just act as user of the same. They need to be part of technology incubation then just using it.
They should get involve in development of electronic business communication standards (B2B) in their domain e.g. HL7 in health sector, PIDX in petroleum etc. It will be easier to market products developed in a specific domain if one is involved in developing standards for the same.
Indian IT company has always been sceptical about outsourcing work to another local company with smaller stature, this mindset has to change, to make up for lack of specialised resources it will be better to outsource work to company that has experience and specialization, thus truly acting in a service oriented fashion.
If the companies now start closely watching and are part of global IT research, they will be well aware of immediate and future need of skills. With this information, a collective effort should be made to positively influence Indian education system at various streams to align the academic curriculum with improved syllabus and or courses that can produce job ready workforce. Parallel to mainstream graduation cycle a parallel recognised and specialized courses and certification should be introduced, e.g. just like we have Charted Accountant Courses and exams, Enterprise IT Architect should also be introduced.
Research oriented/focussed education will also be a key in growing Indian IT in future. Even small academic institutions (schools and/or universities) should be encouraged to host research oriented curriculum’s to compete with world class education. The idea should be to host IT research that will impact global market. Current IT research happens in universities in west and hence they are first to introduce new technology in most of the cases. The Local private sector company should actively fund this types of research at various levels.
Concentrate on local market opportunities, use it to prove required expertise and develop enough IPs as it will cost low at this engagement and reuse the same for global markets at higher rates. Use more entry level resources in local market engagements with enough guidance from higher level resources thus using it as a training ground.
Change the employee attitude from “just THINK or Just EXECUTE” to “THINK and also EXECUTE”, increase employee capability to allrounders, reduce extra dedicated resources, providing with more challenging environment.
The companies should actively build frameworks for solutioning, technology, governance and processes that will provide platform for rapid development and execution of new projects thus ensuring involvement of less number of resources.
Engage only small and expert teams to deliver high value projects, this will ensure satisfactory compensation for individuals. It is very important now to encourage self-development in every employee by providing time allowance. This shall be in addition to the occasional trainings. The employee should spend his/her allocated time for self learning and self research, this will motivate them and help revive their skills in ideating and enhance their creativity.

Now that the guidelines are all available, it is important to identify what domains can the IT companies gain expertise, and come up with innovative solutions. Following are just a few examples,

Green Business, any solutions that will reduce the global warming.
i. Monitoring to allow low pollution zone
ii. Carbon Credit Trading
Artificial Intelligence in web, Semantic web 2.0 + AI, context based search engines etc.
Use of Graphics on web to reach less educated people.
Content analysis to produce self understanding systems, pattern recognition in business process resulting in auto optimization.
Mobile gateways for every business interaction.
Wireless solutions in sectors like Retail, using RFIDs.
Education in rural areas through IT.
Gaming – Produce applications supporting Alternate Reality Games e.g. SecondLife.com.
Applications for semantic web and or social networking sites that can produce mass impact.
Health sector - Application faclitating distance treatment.
Financial - Asset management.

The idea is to not just try and sustain Indian IT but more than that we need to sow the IT seeds here in India for the next IT era. Every Indian IT company and academic institutions should share common vision: INDIAN IT to influence GLOBAL IT and let the world get inspired from us.

Must Read Resources:

http://www.techtrails.com/features/an-opportunity-for-indian-it.aspx
[The Rising Rupee: An Opportunity for Indian IT, By Sudhakar Ram - Chairman and MD Mastek Ltd.]

http://dst.gov.in/admin_finance/rs_210/sq103.htm
["Innovation in Science Pursuit for Inspired Research (INSPIRE)" is to prepare the Indian science and technology for a possible leadership position in 2020.]

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2007/09/11/stories/2007091150340800.htm
[Time for IT cos to change tack ]

http://www.techtrails.com/interviews/new-paradigms-for-the-third-wave-2.aspx
[New Paradigms for the Third Wave, Interview with Sanjay Deshmukh - Head-AMO at Mastek]

Want to share something? Use your mobile to contribute to the Internet, its now easy and friendly.

2007-09-19T22:21:00.001-07:00

Internet is mainly used for searching and getting results, the popularity of internet is primarily because one can find anything and everything on the net. The irony here is that the frequency by which people search is way too less than the frequency of them who post content. Only 1-5 people in 100 would be actively contributing to the internet, while the rest will be just using it as a search engine (knowledge repository).

My Idea is to get more closer to the above 95 people and get them contribute content to internet while saving time to connect and then post.

I will give you an example of why 95 people above with probably better experiences to share cannot/don’t really contribute,

Limited access to internet, the people who use cybercafe are the people who use internet for a purpose, i.e keeping aside chatting and stuff they primarily use it for retrieving information by paying for time. The crowd here may have better experiences but don’t have time to post or don’t feel it as a value for money or feel its time cumbersome.
People who have access to internet connection on a regular basis, but are lazy to share e.g. People like these do search for the best cuisine in the city and enjoy the food at the place, but if they come across a better one, they don’t think of posting the same or contributing. People who search for reviews for products to buy e.g. TV, DVD player, Camera do not give a review for the one that they buy.
IMPORTANT: In RURAL Areas people have more access to mobile connectivity now than over internet and PC connections, software's etc, they have lot of things to share not only with their urban counterparts but also to the rest of the world.

My idea is using a mobile gateway to contribute to internet from people living in urban cities to remote villages.

“NEMO”- I am using this name for the service I just mentioned.

Following is how just Mobile SMS can be used to contribute to the internet whenever and wherever you can as long as your mobile connection is available.

Steps that can be followed:

SMS - > REGISTER <Your Name>
Reply -> Your Identity is <unique identynumber from NEMO service>

So next time when you have good experiences,
POST <unique identynumber> [My EXPERIENCES]

Your mobile number allows you to create an individual profile in the service.

So next time you just finish your lunch in an restaurant and you find the best in the city, country etc share the same to world by just using your mobile.

POST <unique identitynumber> GOOD Biryani a bit spicy at <City> <Area Name> < Hotel Name>

You have come across a sale providing with dead cheap shoes, use mobile to post

POST <unique identitynumber> SALE of SHOES TODAY AT <City> <Area Name> < Shop Name>

All the SMS text will be directed to an online service and form a post on a website. This content service will be registered with various search engines to deliver the content when other people search.

A whole new personalized integrated environment can be set to get feedback from consumers and post it to service, e.g The next time you swipe your card to buy a TV, this will be recorded with the product companies follow-up service. This service will then send an SMS after 6 months to you with following

SMS : Please rate the TV you bought of our brand, Excellent, Good, OK. <Any Comments>

One can just reply to the SMS which can then be again posted to the NEMO service. In this way one can get feedbacks on probably every product that one purchase via credit card, adding to some valuable content over the web from people who might have never taken pain to post it otherwise.

Ideated By,
Bhupesh Naik

Share updatable e-Visiting/Business cards.

2007-08-20T01:55:00.000-07:00

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Would you like your friends, colleagues, relatives to receive your latest contact information without you notifying them?

Would you like to auto publish your modified (new) contact information to all your contacts whenever you make changes to your contact information (email, phn no, address e.t.c)?

You don't remember people whom you have shared your contact information with, but now you want them to know your latest contact information?

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This idea answers the above questions.

The idea is to get all the contacts in our mobile and or in our email clients updated whenever needed without having to receive it from the owner explicitly.

General Info:
In today's date all of the latest mobile phones allow you to send contacts from your mobile phones as a "Business Card"
The Business Card format contains all the information that a general contact information may have, eg Name, Address. Mobile no, res no, email etc.

You can create a mobile/email contact with your name and information in your mobile contacts and then send it as a business card to any other contact/number, this gets sent via sms.

This information that you can share is static i.e. if you change your own contact information in your mobile you will have to resend it to every other contact in your mobile so they get the updated information. Also it is possible that you may have shared your contact with someone whose contact is not with you but now you wnat him/her to be aware of your latest contact information.

Following is an IDEA to solve this problem that each of one is facing, I am in the process of standardizing it and is under development, I need your inputs to make this more useful. Your participation will be highly appreciated!!

:::::::SOLUTION :::::

How this may work:

I publish my contact information via vCard (Business Card) to an Updatable vCard Service (uvCard Service, online web site).
The uvCard Service gives me a unique code (only for internal purpose) and attaches the same to my uvCard.
Now, I can send this uvCard of mine to anyone whom I want to share my contact info with.
Once the uvCard is received by the recipients, it gets stored in their mobile contacts or in their email clients.
Now, consider I change my mobile number and my home address. I update the changes online or republish it to uvCard service.
People whom I have sent the uvCard can anytime use the contact manager in their mobile or email client if aware of of the uvCard service to update all the uvCards with the latest data. As the uvCard has an unique code attached to it, the data can be retrieved easily anytime when requested by the client software from the online uvCard service.

Note: This is an idea presented by me to receive responses from people on the same, if anything like this exist or has similarity with any existing copyrights/patents is just an matter of coincidence..

Request you to please rate this idea and add your valuable comments.

Thought by,
Bhupesh Naik