Cloud and Digital Transformation

~ Danny Kwok ~ Leave a comment

Digital Transformation usually move at different stages for each application team in an organisation. This is because legacy system and old process remain entrenched for users. Cloud is a major proponent for digitalisation. What should be the practical approach to use Cloud for your Digital Transformation efforts?

Transform to Hybrid Cloud

Major applications are now offered as SaaS (Software as a service) or cloud application. Thus, your upgrade likely will be conducted in Cloud platform. Due to the timing differences in upgrades, you will encounter the hybrid Cloud approach. This is where your applications is located in both Cloud and on-premise. All digital transformation efforts will definitively result in Hybrid Cloud in your enterprise applications.

Cloud Transition Application

As your building blocks of applications transition from on-premise to Cloud, you will find a need for transitional application These type of software helps as a temporary bridge between on-premises and Cloud applications. Such software could be API gateway, integration platform or even customised applications. This application are not designed for long term. The key focus is to bridge until your application digital transform to Cloud.

Cloud and Digital Transformation will take at least 5 years. You will need to prepare for Hybrid Cloud and create your Cloud transition applications. In summary, it will not be a Big Bang approach to move to Cloud overnight.

Agile Stakeholder Analysis

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Business analysis have process that involves the understanding of stakeholder. This process is called stakeholder analysis. This process is covered with assumptions made during during projects formation in Waterfall SDLC. Similarly, these stakeholders analysis can be conducted with Agile approach.

Agile your Knowledge of Stakeholders

In traditional project, we usually set a baseline on the understanding of stakeholders. As project progress, we seldom revisit or update our understanding of stakeholders. In an Agile project, stakeholder analysis become similar to your project cycle. Your knowledge of stakeholders are constantly updated with each Sprint.

Agile in your Stakeholder Analysis

Agile is result driven and focus on positivity in clearing the backlog. There is always a bad or black spot in all stakeholders. Like Agile, your stakeholder analysis must be aligned with positive nature and definition of done. Another key area in your analysis is to seek out close collaborator among your stakeholder. Not all stakeholder suits Agile and your analysis must identify Agile stakeholders.

Stakeholder analysis differs from Waterfall to Agile approach. You will need to seek out stakeholders who suits Agile in the course of your Agile project. The stakeholder analysis requires deeper understanding and iteration similar to your Agile.

Self Service with Chatbot

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Self service technologies are getting popular with COVID-19 pandemic. This is due to a demand on contactless services. Imagine calling customer service and being put on hold for a long time “Customer service is busy…”. This brings a lot of dissatisfaction to customers. This is why many business are moving towards a self service approach using Chatbot.

How to Self Service with Chatbot

In face to face customer service, there are usually a few types of intentions. Enquiries, service requests and complaints are the key ones. Thus, you can implement such intents into your Chatbot. FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) can be supplemented for enquiries. Preliminary input gathering can be done for services requests and complaints before engaging live chat.

Advantages

Chat application is user friendly and intuitive for all groups of users. You can reduce costly complaints page and focus on developing complaint Chatbot. Subsequently, majority of common enquiries can be handled by your FAQ Chatbot. This improve your customer service responses with specific requests.

The time is ripe to invest in your Chatbot and reduce reliance in your old complaint web page or feedback form. The Chatbot will enhance your customer service with self service. Overall, this will greatly improve your customer satisfaction.

Sustainable Energy Options

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Sustainable energy is gaining traction as we move to harness these energy. In Singapore, this can be quite a challenge because consumers are faced with constraints with its usage. These are some factors that could help consumers adopt more sustainable energy options.

Consumer Carbon Tax Rebates

Many of sustainable energy options are more costly than traditional ones. There are little incentive for consumers like me to make the switch. It is a reality that profit often take precedence over sustainability. With carbon tax, rebates are offered for organisations but not consumers. If this option can extend to consumers, sustainability conscious users may make the switch.

Ease of Switching

Another push factor to adopt sustainable energy is the ease of switching to these options. Electric vehicle is one such case study in Singapore as existing infrastructure is not built for electric vehicles. It may even take a decade for the entire country to support electric vehicle usage. Instead, a realistic model will be hybrid vehicle. Consideration must be made to improve on how consumers can easily switch to sustainable energy options.

The dying earth is a reason for the push for sustainable energy options. However, there remains little incentives for consumers to make the switch. Time and cost remains the key factors why consumers rather not adopt sustainable energy options. If we continue to ignore these factors, we can continue to dream about adopting sustainable energy at a snail pack.

Changes for Management

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There are times where project implementation often require process changes or change management. The rationale for these changes will need top management engagement. Some changes are anticipated while others happens during production support. You will need to explain these changes for your management endorsement. These are some approach that you can consider.

Explain Why, not How

Management view changes differently from operations or users. Knowing why is the strongest motivation factor to understand the purpose to change. Thus, you should focus to explain why instead of telling how you do the change. These information allows management can debate the resistance of change to reasons more clearly. You will be surprise to learn that most management are not aware on the reasons that system changes bring about.

Positive Change

The users voice towards changes are usually laced with negativity. This is why you must appoint change agent or champion who are positive change drivers. These roles provide hard facts and data to support the change reasons. The data shows how the changes bring about the positive effect. It will refutes the voice of disgruntled users resisting these changes. All the positivity will provide management the confidence to handle changes with users.

Changes for management must have good justification and positivity. Focus on why rather than how. Change agent helps with data and facts to support the positive effects. Do not use the same change management from users on management. Use these tips to adopt for a successful change management.

Chatbot Channels Selection

~ Danny Kwok ~ 1 Comment

This is a continuation on the exploration of Chatbot channels. Microsoft Teams (msteams) development are based on their own adaptive cards concepts while other channels have its own characteristics. After testing a few channels, I concluded that it will be exhaustive for organisations to cover across multiple channels. This is a quick guide for you to select the 3 channels.

Top 3 Channels to Start Your Bot

I reviewed a few channels like Teams, Telegram, Web, WeChat and Facebook. These are the top 3 channels that your organisations can kickstart your Chatbot development.

  1. Web
  2. Teams
  3. Telegram

Web is the easiest as it using existing web page to embed your Chatbot. Thus, you just need to be web ready to do your bot development. Teams is selected because it is the default organisation chat application. You can replace this with other channels if your organisation is using other chat application. Lastly, the commercial and most popular Telegram is very bot friendly. This is why you can find many Telegram channel is adopted.

POC Bot Channels

It is recommended to POC (Proof of Concept) your bot channels before investing in your bot development. All channels have its strength and weakness. What works for your competitors may not work for you. The learning curve may be steep at first. Once you get the hang of your channel characteristics, it is quite simple to proceed with your bot.

Overall, channels selection can be quite tricky. If you pick the wrong channel, you will be stuck with your suck cost in bot development. This is why many switch their bot channels accordingly. Web is the standard and most easy to start. Subsequent choice will depends on your organisation default chat. To external users, the bot channel choice will be the most popular chat used in your region.

Digital Transform your Legacy System

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In the era of Digital Transformation, you will be shopping for new systems or SaaS (Software as a Service). Often, vendors may demo existing product or propose turnkey project can cater to all your needs. Today, I had learnt that a review to replace an existing application with a new application would be shelved. This is because a new system will take 2-4 years to customise or configure.

Cloud Transformation

Moving to Cloud is not a bed of roses if your legacy is heavily customised with no standard SOP across your global offices. You may consider to split your migration into two major steps rather than a Big Bang to Cloud. The first major step is to set a baseline for your Cloud. This usually involves standardisation or even conforming your SOP to the new Cloud platform. The second step is to determine your pilot site to be moved. This increase your Cloud knowledge and helps you understand the pros and cons in Cloud.

Application Consolidation

In a large organisation, it is not surprise to find overlapping applications and products. It is more worthwhile and cost effective to consolidate your applications. These applications may be spread out in different regions and you should always review existing applications before embarking on external review. You will also have the advantages of knowledge and data with your existing application.

Digital transforming your legacy system does not always translate to high cost of buying a new product. You can always opt for SaaS Cloud approach or review existing application to be consolidated. This way, you gain traction and speed to digital transform without wasting time, cost and efforts.

Utterances and Intent for ODA

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In chatbot development, you will find many new concepts that is pretty foreign to IT. One of the concept I encountered in Oracle Digital Assistant (ODA) is utterances and intent. For bot developer, NLP is essential for a good design.

Intents are comprised of permutations of typical user requests and statements, which are also referred to as utterances.

Docs Oracle
Building up your Utterances

Utterances will need time and effort to gain a rich set. This is to handle ambiguous user input that really meant the same time. E.g. “I wan to find my order” or “check my booking” will be the same thing but expressed differently. You may want to consider having engaging diverse group of users if your Chatbot is used in these locations.

Train and Test

ODA provide a feature to train and test your intents. This concept will be similar for all bot i.e. the ability to learn from a seeding set of utterances. Be prepared because you will need a lot of man hours to achieve a steady set of intents and utterances. Thus, you will need to setup your test cases and automate your test runs.

Chatbot development is about NLP and a lot of testing. Intents and utterances are some of new concepts in ODA. It is likely that similar concepts can be found in all Chatbot platform for configuring your bot and NLP.

Chatbot Development

~ Danny Kwok ~ 1 Comment

Chatbot developers will be a new breed of developers equipped with technical and social skills. After all, chat is a language based UI. Unlike typical development, Chatbot development needs constant tweaking and modification to improve bot behaviours. Chatbot developers are also required to understand social behaviour and interactions.

NLP

Coming from traditional software background, I soon realise that I will need to discard my old views of UI to develop Chatbot effectively. Your bot platform should seamlessly recognise different queries naturally and combine that information to provide and answers. It is like a conversational approach to address or solve a user query. Technically, this is called natural language processing (NLP).

Chatbot must Agile

Chatbot development must adopt Agile to deploy your bot effectively. Afterall, language comes in different flavours. It is difficult to anticipate your user responses if they are coming from diverse backgrounds and geographical locations. It is recommended to target your bot development using a fixed architecture that enable localisation deployment. This way, you can Agile your bot for different variety of products and users.

If you are starting your bot journey, it is time to approach your chatbot development approach with a different view. You will be expected to adopt NLP using Agile methods.

Adaptive Cards 101

~ Danny Kwok ~ 1 Comment

While dabbling with MS (Microsoft) Teams Chat, I realise adaptive cards are being using for their bot framework. That will explain why “\n” or CRLF is not working on its chat display. So, if you are working with MS Teams bot. You will need to look into adaptive cards UI. Now, there is another new UI framework to have fun!

Why Adaptive Cards

It seems adaptive cards will be used for the MS Teams as the standard for card object. Adaptive cards are JSON serialised object model. This model describes text with images similar like your name cards. Developers can send content in these cards in JSON format. This will mean you can use code with Adaptive card format in ODA (Oracle Digital Assistant) bot framework. The content will be rendered in the look and feel of the host applications like MS Teams. This sounds cool, right?

Designing Adaptive Cards

Adaptive cards will be in JSON format. There is a designer portal which allows you to preview the JSON codes and format. It may take you a while to familiarise with the adaptive cards because it is mainly properties and configuration. You will need a lot of trial and error to render the adaptive cards properly.

Adaptive card is a MS driven approach for target system to share cards into MS products with a better UI. In a way, this provide a richer feel for just pure text in Chatbot. This will also give you a reason to invest in Teams bot framework.