Torry Harris Business Solutions

By Chris Hughes, Business Architect at Torry Harris Business Solutions

 With today’s focus on the role of ecosystems and the Internet of Everything, Integration, API management and Big Data are all key tools. We can begin to combine data from these new devices with existing sources of data to build new services, based on this combination of ecosystem and device. We can also provide a way to allow other organisations to find and use those services that have been developed.

Ecosystems?

First, just to describe what I mean by an ecosystem. All organisations have an existing set of functions, capabilities and data that describes them. Much of this is supported by standard applications that are common today: ERP, customer management systems, supply chain management. But it's rare that an organisation will own all the functions that they use themselves. They are much more likely to have certain functions supplied by one or more specialist providers, so the organisation needs to have access and insight into the activities of their partners and suppliers. By using interfaces to access them, the organisation can treat these as an extension of their core business. What we can propose is to extend the same approach to connected devices and objects, anything in fact that can create data may be useful. When device data is combined with existing data sources you can create something new with its own value and use it to build a new service. This might be only of use to the organisation themselves, but may have the potential to be part of a product offering that can be sold as a capability to others.

By Chris Hughes, Business Architect at Torry Harris Business Solutions

When you go to any specialist, a doctor for example, the quality of the advice you’ll receive will depend on how much relevant information you share. If there is a level of trust between the two parties, sharing correct and up-to-date information will increase the chance of the best result.

As part of the case for Open Data as a part of the wider API based economy, it will not be enough to only share data with public bodies or commercial partners, but there will also be the need to verify the quality of data and to ensure that the correct permissions to access someone's data has been given and that these take into account where and when that data is used or combined with other sources of data.

A business collects many types of data from a customer and they may consider that to be their own asset, but that business may need to get permission to use and share that data, particularly when that is related to health or personal financial matters. This could be data that is generated by a customer over time through the usage of a service and from the interactions they have with different organisations, including recording their location.

By Rishu Srivastava, Business Unit Head at Torry Harris Business Solutions

The telecommunication industry may seem like a giant making easy money, too big to be bothered by their modern rivals. The traditional Telcos have approximately five billion customers worldwide, equating to 70% of the world population (Mogg, Dahlke, Wimmer, & Hoffmann, 2012).

However, when you look closely, you will realise that Telcos globally are constantly battling to stay competitive. The challenges Telcos face have evolved through the years, and the battle for survival is only becoming harder.

Telecommunication companies today are struggling to find their identity. They are at a crossroad, with one path leading them towards becoming a sheer backbone or a pipeline and another towards adapting and playing a pivotal role in digital transformations. For the latter, Telcos find themselves in a unique position of competitive advantage, since mobile technology is the core of the digital ecosystem. Telcos have the most direct access to the consumers who are the most reliant participants of the digital ecosystem. While they have access to the voice of the customers most of them are still struggling to have a place in their hearts.

On the other hand, who would have ever imagined that a non-Telco, like Google, would launch its own broadband services in the US! Or that a company like Twilio would open up the Telco services as Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and piggy back on the network which is provided by the Telcos, eating into their revenues! Globally, the telecommunications industry is under pressure to rationalise players. OTT Players like Apple and Google are posing serious threats to Telcos, edging them into the abyss of customer ignorance. In an era where Mobile Wallet, Apple Pay and M-Pesa are posing threats to the BFSI Industry, and Netflix has disrupted the traditional CD/DVD industry, Communications Service Providers (CSPs) need to quickly identify the threats and act to build an ecosystem which enriches the customer experience and puts it at the heart of their digital evolution. Let’s try to find an answer as to whether the Telcos are really facing a lot of competition from unknown quarters by doing an industry analysis.

Porter’s Five Force Model (Porter, 1980)

The analysis for the communications industry is done using “Porter’s Five Forces Model” (Porter, 1980). Figure 1 below illustrates Porter’s five forces.

Figure 1- Porter's Five Force Analysis

By Karthik TS, Head of the Centre of Excellence at Torry Harris Business Solutions

Digitization or digital transformation is the most important element of any business evolution. When we use the term “digital” we refer to the term Digital Economy using APIs as a means. People often ask the question, “What is the revenue potential of APIs?” If we look at the numbers below, we will have a clear idea of the major role that APIs play in revenue generation:

Source: Harvard Business Review, Jan 2015

So, what will Digitization do for your business?

Digitization will help you change the arena of competition

Digitization will help you offer a bigger umbrella of services and products woven together by APIs

Digitization will help you be seen as a platform on which third-party businesses can add their products, services and customers

By Shuba Sridhar, Vice President - Strategic Initiatives at Torry Harris Business Solutions

Out of the 8 or 10 Jugaad solutions (simple work-arounds) I’ve seen in my immediate environment, I can vouch to have “actively contributed” to atleast one or two such unconventional fixes. Some of the bizarre but fit-for-purpose, creative (!) work-arounds include:

Around the house:

Packing mango pulp and milk into an air-tight container and shaking it till it’s beaten into a juicy mango milkshake! This, in the absence of a blender or mixer when travelling.

Using the room heater to dry out your hair, in the absence of a hair-dryer.

Using the motor of a motor-bike to pump water to your fields by night, while using it as a bike by day.

Image: Motor by day, bike by night (Modified image sourced from Scoop Whoop)

In huge, tech-heavy projects:

The Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) by ISRO – The least-expensive (apparently cost less than making the Hollywood blockbuster ‘Gravity’) interplanetary, unmanned mission to Mars that was inserted into the MARS orbit in 2014. The Jugaad involved in this launch was well deliberated by top scientists and a very conscious decision was made on aspects like: The “Goal” of the mission, played a key role in helping decide what “trade-offs” could be made in order to achieve success.

The use of the less-powerful PSLV (Polar SLV) instead of GSLV (Geosynchronous SLV) as a launch vehicle

Creating a multi-step transition path across the earth-orbit and then to the MARS orbit, making it cost and fuel efficient

Deliberately keeping the payload small, accelerating the testing cycles, reduced ground tests and taking calculated risks with certain components meant for use at the test phase rather than production-quality components that would have bumped-up the costs

By Arun Vasudeva Rao, PMP®, Regional Manager - Technical Services at Torry Harris Business Solutions

Often, the CxO community of large multi-national firms approach THBS seeking help not just in planning for maintenance and life-cycle management of their IT estate, in other words - managed-services, but also in implementing such managed services using scientific techniques & frameworks that guarantee a phased RoI. A major part of such a managed-services initiative is constituted by ‘application support’, which forms the subject of discussion in this post.

Typically, we start with a ‘knowledge sharing’ initiative, to help our clients understand the relationship between support models and service levels. The idea is to clearly model the relationship between required service levels and cost, so the application owners take an intelligent decision on the service levels vs. cost. You will agree that the main cost for IT applications support today is directly proportional to the number of support staff deployed. This is very unlike a cloud hardware model, where resources can be ramped up or down based on real-time demand. In this article, we explore the characteristics of a support model and its similarities with that of a waiting line situation we face in everyday life. We apply queuing theory to help with optimal decision making.

We can visualize a set of issues or incident tickets being raised by application owners or end users to the application support team. The support team consists of a set of “servers” who resolve the issue and change the incident status to “fixed”. However, not every incident can be attended to immediately since all the support staff may be busy with an existing incident. Hence, the new incident gets into a queue. Queues or waiting lines form because people or things arrive at the servicing function, or server, faster than they can be served. However, this does not mean that the service operation is understaffed or does not have the overall capacity to handle the influx of customers. In fact, most businesses and organizations have sufficient serving capacity available to handle their customers in the long run. Waiting lines result because customers do not arrive at a constant, evenly paced rate, nor are they all served in an equal amount of time. Customers arrive at random times, and the time required to serve them individually is not the same. Thus, a waiting line is continually increasing and decreasing in length (and is sometimes empty), and it approaches an average rate of customer arrivals and an average time to serve the customer in the long run. For example, the checkout counters at a grocery store may have enough clerks to serve an average of 100 customers in an hour, and in any particular hour only 60 customers might arrive. However, at specific points in time during the hour, waiting lines may form because more than an average number of customers arrive, and they make more than an average number of purchases.

In this blog, we discuss the metrics that are critical to determine the relationship between service levels and cost to serve (or staffing levels) and describe the “Discrete event simulation” model to model incident management so that appropriate staffing levels can be arrived at depending on the required service levels.

An example:

When a banking customer visits a branch, a dispatcher helps categorize the request and direct him or her to the right counter where the request is serviced.

By Shuba Sridhar, Vice President - Strategic Initiatives, Torry Harris Business Solutions

Having been born and raised in India, I have had the opportunity to experience and marvel at some really quirky and very original works of design that uniquely cater to the Indian senses. From a steaming cup of 1 by 2 coffee served in South Indian restaurants (that allows you to pay for one coffee but serves two!) to the controversial marriage portal iitiimshaadi.com, which claims to unite people in matrimony, with a degree from a prestigious alma mater such as an IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) or an IIM (Indian Institute of Management), these enterprises have done their due-diligence concerning the needs and wants of their end-users and accordingly tailored their product/service. Going by their popularity, they are here to stay!

Recollecting the definition of User-Centered Design, from Wikipedia:

“User-centered design (UCD) is a framework of processes (not restricted to interfaces or technologies) in which the needs, wants, and limitations of end users of a product, service or process are given extensive attention at each stage of the design process.”

User-centered design tries to optimize the product /service/process around how users can, want, or need to use them.

To be noted in this definition is the fact that the end-users could be of a Product, Service or Process…and perhaps going forward, would include the entire ecosystem, given the availability of information and digitalization.This methodology of design is very different from designing to certain specifications handed to you.Here, you literally spend time in the end-user environment, understanding and relating to how and why the end-user would need your product/process/service and involve the end-user on an equal footing in the design and feedback mechanisms iteratively, to come out with an offering that is meaningful in the end-user context.

By Rishu Srivastava, Business Unit Head at Torry Harris Business Solutions

Let’s face it - Today’s consumers are not deprived of options. They no longer like to be advocated to, by sellers. They are well informed, tech savvy and want to stay empowered. These increasing consumer expectations are reflected by a shift in their preferred mode of engagement with the seller, through digital channels whether it be online, over mobile, or through wearables. With this shift, organisations are being challenged to adapt, forcing Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) to look for competitive advantages outside the traditional business model, to implement newer, more creative strategies for customer retention and loyalty. CMOs are now being tasked with driving the top-line of organisations and not just making the most efficient use of marketing budgets. With this increasing bargaining power of consumers, organisations today are making ‘digital customer experience’ (DCX) their primary competitive advantage. CMOs now have the daunting task of constantly exceeding customer expectations while at the same time having to add more shareholder value by providing quantifiable results.

Posted by THBS Insights 

We're living in a connected world. We associate with people world-over through social media channels like WhatsApp, Facebook, Blogs, etc. This is Web 2.0 and we will run into plenty more options to 'Connect' with people.

You must also be getting familiar with a world where you get connected to ‘things’ around you and they have begun to 'understand' you, 'think' for you and 'react' the way you 'like'! When we say ‘things’ it could be your car, watch, oven, lights, fans, gates and even the water sprinkler in your garden! Yes, the sci-fi movies that we grew up with are possibly going to have a rerun, only this time, as a part of our own lives – what with the age of 'Physical Computing' or the 'Internet of Things' (IoT).

Gartner predicts around 26 billion ‘things’ will get connected by 2020. A lot of electronic sensors will be installed in and around 'things' which will send informative data for further processing, so as to take appropriate actions. As more and more ‘things’ get connected, the data generation will correspondingly increase; resulting in a huge data pool coming from different quarters. To make sense of this data and to be able to use it productively, we will use systems to store it, analyze it and generate predictable data before taking further actions.

By  Manjunath G.K. - Business Unit Head at Torry Harris Business Solutions

In the age where billions of records of information are created every day, there is a need to effectively use information, as it could potentially be a powerful tool. In the case of Governments, for good governance, information is to be used strategically for public good. Good governance requires, amongst other things, decisions based on "sets of information" or knowledge. Digitization of this information and making it available on a network which is accessible to all individuals opens up possibilities for use of this information by everyone - paving the way for Digital Governance or e-Governance. Digitization of information minimizes human intervention thus making the administrative process more efficient and transparent. The biggest benefits of e-Governance would be the elimination of delays in rendering services and giving its citizens fair and equal access to the Government services/products that make the process more transparent and inclusive.

Mobile phone adoption, as per a survey conducted in 2014, shows the ratio of mobile phone users to 100 inhabitants at around 95% as shown in the graph below (Ref.: http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Pages/stat/default.aspx )

Authored by: Joffey Chandy - Business Unit Head, Torry Harris Business Solutions, UK

Retail is no longer about “where” the customer is shopping, but “how” the customer is shopping. -Accenture

Empowered and informed through digital technology, shoppers today have access to multiple non-store channels to make their purchase decision. These channels are growing rapidly, threatening the existence of the physical store.

With an increase in online-only stores such as Amazon, eBay, Alibaba etc., traditional retailers are under threat, as they offer customers personalized deals that undercut the high street prices. Most shoppers however, still visit the store to touch, feel or try a product before using their smartphones to search for the cheapest deal online. The retailers should adapt their strategies to take advantage of this and convert this threat into an opportunity.

Smartphones and super-fast connectivity is making customers more digitally connected than ever - retailers will need to rise to the challenge of engaging the new connected customer across the different channels. This new omni-channel shopping experience is redefining the boundaries of retail and is driven by the below key customer trends:

Digital Enablement

Digitally enable your business, Use Digitization products and API enable your back-end with Torry Harris Digital team for a great customer experience.

What a fantastic response to API-O-Blocks! Improve sales reach; digitize your processes step by step

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API-O-BLOCKS

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