Friday, December 8, 2017

11 technologies of next decade

11 technologies of next decade:

1 #AI (machine/deep learning, NLP)
2 #IoT⌚️
3 smart robotics πŸ€–
4 3D print πŸ–¨
5 mobileπŸ“±
6 autonomous cars πŸš™
7 mobile internet πŸ’»
8 #blockchain ⛓
9 mixed reality VR/AR πŸ‘“
10 wireless power πŸ”Œ
11 quantum computing πŸ’‘

Why 90% of startups fails ?

Why 90%of startups fail:

1 no market need
2 no cash
3 wrong team
4 competition
5 price
6 poor product
lacklustre business model
8 poor marketing
9 ignore customers
10 mis-timed
11 lose focus
12 disharmony
13 pivot gone bad
14 lack passion
15 bad location
16 no financing/ investor interest
17 legal challenges
18 no advisors
19 burn out
20 fail to pivot

How to reduce your project stress

How to reduce your project stress:

1 don't respond to negativity
2 go for a walk, be active
3 be honest to your timeline
4 read, write more
5 give without expecting a get
6 breathe deeply
7 forgive first
8 write thank you notes
9 be a better friend
10 you are not your job
11 complain less
12 laugh more

Thursday, July 20, 2017

Enterprise Collaboration - Industry Trends and Best Practices

Enterprise collaboration is at the heart of radical transformation and necessity in modern business. It creates value by modifying social tendencies and communications that are prevalent in the non-work environment and applying them to the professional sphere. Doing so captures the benefits of increased efficiency, cost savings, and more effective distribution tasks among employees. Web and mobile-based collaboration tools and methods seek to capture human social interaction within a technology-based solution to business needs. Perhaps one of the most well known examples of this is the International Space Station (ISS), which is a result of 15 nations working together. People have lived in space every single day since the year 2000. The space station has become a home in orbit from where people do research, which cannot be done on Earth.
No matter if you’re a large enterprise or a small startup, live in Shanghai or San Francisco, work from home or the ISS, we all face the same challenges. We need effective collaboration to achieve magic together.
In a raging disruptive world, it is difficult to distinguish signal from noise. That’s the exact reason why we IT team sat down to think about what trends we believe might shape the year ahead at the organisation. We wanted to use these insights internally for ourselves, as well as share it with all at organisation!

Current Trends in Industry

1. Collaboration tools move beyond social

The last many years we have seen a disruption of social collaboration tools. Apps such as Yammer have done a tremendous job in connecting people. But while connecting people was an obvious first step to go, all our work processes remain highly siloed and disconnected.
Many of the apps we use today are limited by structure and technology. They have been developed to work individually and in silos. The result is broken work processes and a productivity potential waiting to be realized. A software development team might be using one system for tracking bugs, another to invoice clients and a third to track time.
Trying to stitch legacy apps together has previously been time-consuming and required lots of development hacks. But open API’s and a standardized cloud are making integrations of different software apps much more easier than before.
The next step will be to connect broken work processes and apps.
Instead of having work processes existing in closed apps, we’ll see new platforms emerge, converge and work together in unimaginable ways. The collaboration market will effectively become an ecosystem in its own right. Poject management apps will integrate to task management apps. Task management apps will integrate to invoicing apps. Invoicing apps will integrate to time tracking apps etc. Connecting work holds a promise of higher productivity waiting to be unleashed

2. BYOS - Bring your own collaboration tools to the office

The boundaries between work and home are blurring, so collaboration software must allow people to work seamlessly across platforms, devices and locations. Many of our peer companies now allow users to bring their own device to the office (BYOD). If you walk into any modern enterprise, it’s not uncommon to see all kinds of phones being used and governed by IT and users – something previously not allowed.
In a similar way, we foresee that 2017 will be the year when Bring Your Own Software (BYOS) to the corporate workplace will kick off. People are already using a variety of software to collaborate. From Dropbox to BoxGoogle Hangout to SkypeWrike to AsanaSlack to SkarplineTrello to Pivotal Tracker and the list could go on.
Most of these products offer simple transparent pricing plans, which are easy to administer and govern. Instead of having IT dictating what to use, why not let users become strong ambassadors, manage their own software and decide what’s fit for their role?
Using software to access BYOS has several benefits to the user and company. The user will often have access to a wide range of services. Is Lync down? Use Skype or Team Viewer. And companies enjoy solutions that come with freemium packages in most cases.

3. The collaborative organisation


Many organisations have invested heavily in technology over the past decades. These investments are often pursued top-down and measured on ROI. But how do you measure ROI when implementing a collaboration tool?
The next step for technology organisations is to become collaborative organisations. Collaborative organisations implement tools buttom-up. Instead of looking at ROI, they look at usage. Are our employees actually using these tools? Do they provide a better fit for the individual employee and his or her work process? Do these tools ‘almost’ implement themselves using smart onboarding and intuitive interfaces?
Research shows that productivity growth only happens when technology is accompanied by concurrent changes in how we work. In fact, technology adoption alone, without the accompanying changes in work practices, have little or even a negative impact on productivity.
Don’t pursue collaboration tools for the sake of cool technologies. Pursue it with an intention to improve how you work. Most solutions offer freemium or trial version to get you started. Measure the usage. If people are using it, you’ll see an increase in performance, productivity and happiness at work.

4. Bots everywhere
Bots are ‘conversational software robots’, which have exploded in usage the recent months. They are mostly found in messaging and chat applications, but given their collaborative nature, we expect to see them across a variety of collaboration tools in the near future.
Bots help us automate conversations and tasks. They can help us get started with an app, reserve dinner appointments, schedule meetings or pay online. Without interacting with another person. Instead of you typing a command, a bot is typing commands for you. All you do is having a conversation with what seems like a real person, but in fact it is a ‘bot’.
2017 will bring us a variety of new use cases centered around bots, and some will come to feel like artificial intelligence. We’re already now seeing several open platforms offering platforms for other platforms. It truly is an open world of collaborative platforms!

5. VR and Visual Collaboration

We’ll increasingly see new collaboration tools experiment with new user interfaces to simplify and make collaboration more intuitive.
The next wave of usage onto less technical people will bring a new wave of user experiences to the market. Many collaboration tools have been embraced by technical communities. But just as Windows took over MS-DOS and became an intuitive operating system for a larger audience, we’ll see collaboration solutions do the same.
Imagine using virtual reality headset to collaborate. Or gigantic touch screens in every office room from where you can manage your project with a single touch. Several products are already highly visual and capable of this transformation. From project management solutions such as Trello and Asana, roadmap and process solutions as Aha! and ProductPlan, recognition tools as DaPulse to communication tools as Skarpline.
Improved visualization and usability will lead to companies not only purchasing online collaboration software but an increased number of employees actually using the software and hence achieving the benefit of a higher productivity.


Best Practices and Way Forward









1. Tightly integrate people for resultant productivity

Introducing SharePoint online, Microsoft Teams, Yammer and Lync at workplace gets you rich picture of the people behind the work and rich productivity dividend. The way work gets done is by people working with people, “bouncing ideas” off each other, tapping into each other’s expertise, leveraging each other’s knowledge and insights, repurposing each other’s output. Yammer gives a rich picture of the people behind the work and Microsoft Teams enables you to gauge self-productivity at work place. It connect people and give them a full picture of each other. When people have the context of the who, what, when, where and why of the others they are working with, it builds the level of trust they have in each other and results in greater teamwork and higher quality work.

SharePoint Online: Sharepoint Online of Office 365 helps you to access intranet anywhere, anytime with seamless collaboration, enables intelligent insight along with enterprise grade security compliance
Microsoft Teams: A hub of team work. The chat-based workspace in Office 365 brings together all the people, conversations, files, and tools your team needs to be more effective
Yammer: Connect people across your organization and keep teams engaged. Helps in Crowdsource ideas, tap into collective knowledge, and get the pulse of your company. The group feed fosters open discussion and encourages team members to collaborate and share best practices. Actionable updates and alerts keep everyone up to date and involved in the process.

2. Make sure it fits the way people work

Email Integration: Putting Outlook and Active Directory together on Office 365 gives a great opportunity to reduce your investment and maintenance cost heavily. Since employees rely heavily on email, email integration is critical. Office 365 solution allow users to easily create a tasks from email for team member, share information on personalised mysite
Mobile Support: Today’s workers rely heavily mobile devices. People are accustomed to being able to get work done on the go. For a collaboration solution to get high adoption, it needs to work seamlessly with mobile devices so people can continue to collaborate on the go. Office 365 gives immense one stop solution for such road warriors.
Office 365 outlook, AD and Lync: All these tools together can create a workplace magic for any organisation. Keeping all of them on Office 365 cloud, gives a clear organisational edge for collaboration, accessibility and high user experience with very less cost of ownership, zero/low maintenance activity, heavy reduction in overheads on managing on-premises assets, resources and heavy datacenters.