Debashish Sarkar's Blogs

In my last blog I talked about how, Robotic Process Automation leads to changing job roles and it’s effect on employees and employers. I take the opportunity to highlight the great multiplier effect a successful effect RPA implementation has on customer experience. A customer journey can be simple set of tasks or a complex journey. It could involve looking up information, filling information, time taken for processing forms or those long holds on telephone. Whatever be the forms of these journeys, we had some such poor experiences. This is where a successfully implemented RPA and related investments can enhance customer experience and eliminate customer pain points. How RPA transforms Customer Experience? As an example let us consider the customer journey for Loan or mortgage origination and processing. Traditionally it will require the customer to fill up many forms and information and submit required sets of documents. These would then be sent for processing. Someone ...

A few months ago I had written about the impact of RPA on traditional back-office and rule based activities performed by humans. The key impacts that are evidenced in various industries and by analysts are:           Jobs that had been traditionally “out-sourced” or “off-shored” are brought “in-house” or “right-shored”. This is evident in many “off-shored” or “out-sourced” services being bought back “in-house” or moved back to developed countries and economies.           The skill-sets needed for fulfilling the replaced jobs are not same as those that are being replaced. The new jobs are more to support and maintain the RPA. As an example if the “bot” hits an error in the process, it alerts for human intervention. This requires task to be performed by “specialized” human support, maintenance and QA – a new set of job roles. Who benefits? ·          Employers benefit from...

In my last blog I touched upon Intelligent Automation broadly covering Machine Learning, Autonomics, Machine / Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing. I will focus on Autonomics and it’s impact on business and IT. Autonomics are intelligent systems that apply self-adapting policies to “learn” from experience and respond to new conditions, with the potential to perform more and more complex tasks. Autonomics are entering the mainstream in back-office work performing high volumes and routine tasks. It is predicted that it will completely transform the   Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)   industry. However, the current systems are not “autonomics” in the truest sense but are evolving and will reach that stage in the near future. Traditionally robots revolutionized the manufacturing industry largely in the context of assembly lines. Now Robotics Process Automation (RPA) is impacting the back office and process related work in the same way. Whereas in manuf...

By 2019, the global market for content analytics, discovery and cognitive systems software is projected to reach $9.2 billion, according to IDC, more than double that of 2014. Intelligent automation is rapidly coming of age. “Smart” machines and “smart” systems and “smart” bots are becoming mainstream. Intelligent automation which is a combination of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation is mainstream now. It is helping businesses to achieve higher levels of efficiencies. The range of applications could be from collecting simple data to making contextual decisions to guiding autonomous vehicles. Intelligent Automation broadly covers Machine Learning, Autonomics, Machine / Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing . Machine Learning – refers to the ability of systems to improve their performance by exposure to data without explicit programs or instructions. It is the ability to automatically discover patterns in data and carry out predictions. These applicatio...

Projections Gartner, Inc. forecasts that 6.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2016, up 30 percent from 2015, and will reach 20.8 billion by 2020. In 2016, 5.5 million new things will get connected every day. Gartner estimates that the   Internet of Things   (IoT) will support total services spending of $235 billion in 2016, up 22 percent from 2015. Services are dominated by the professional category (in which businesses contract with external providers in order to design, install and operate IoT systems), however connectivity services (through communications service providers) and consumer services will grow at a faster pace. Implications IoT services will become the real drivers and value add. Service providers and vendors which will provide integration to third party applications will become the critical part in the value chain. Those service providers that provide the best value in terms of customer experience will win market share. Custom...

Internet of Things (IoT) is having a huge impact on business models and systems around the world. IoT in simple terms can be explained as devices that have been given the ability to collect data and communicate with each other. It implies that devices can collect and transmit the data they capture. This means that insights can be obtained at granular level to create specific inputs or analyzed for a “larger picture” effect. Data available in public domain from analysts and industry research indicate an exponential growth in such interconnected systems and revenue impact of the same:           Cisco estimates the IoT market to be $19 Trillion           McKinsey Global Institute expects the IoT will deliver revenues of $6.2 Trillion by 2025 The financial services is largely impacted by IoT. The impact across different financial services sectors as per industry findings are shown below:    The hig...

Financial services sector has been mostly impervious to radical technical and business model changes. They have been able to maintain a relatively stable but profitable business models over the last few decades. Traditional business are now under siege from a whole host of innovators and technology changes that are forcing a re-think on the business models of traditional financial services sector. According to the World Economic Forum reports the impact is felt across all sectors of the financial services industry. Courtesy: WEF Report According to the findings today’s innovators are different from earlier disruptors in this sector for the following reasons:        Today’s innovators are targeting the intersection of highly profitable business and customer’s area of frustrations and pain. Case being example International Money transfers. I have personally experienced it first-hand. In UK, high street banks charged from GBP 17, if done at bank t...