Write a blog with three posts about a business issue of interest to you and that

Question

Write a blog with three posts about a business issue of interest to you and that provides content that is valuable to others. Ask yourself: Who am I communicating to? Who is my audience and write with that audience in mind. Also, you should develop your blog with your own career interests and desired online reputation in mind.

Each entry should be roughly 350 to 500 words, and should have 3-4 paragraphs with paragraphs each having 4-7 sentences.

Your first blog post should welcome readers, introduce yourself and provide an overview of what to expect from your blog. Your second and third blog posts are to be on certain topics that you devise (and that are meaningful to you). Think of a blog name that will interest readers (come up with an attention-grabber) and also try to come up with similar engaging and descriptive titles for your blog posts.

Explanation / Answer

First blog

Hi, let this take this moment to tell me about myself and why this blog will be useful to you. I am just like you, another brick in the wall who is a small part of big machine. Recently I discovered that my colleagues were facing a tough time at work. On detailed discussion I found out there were in fact tensed, tensed about the future, tensed about jobs and so on. I wondered why? There were no new joinees nor were there any plans to hire new staff in the short term. But there was a general fear in the office space. The same thing followed in my coffee shop. Different people but same fear. Fear of losing out to something, Something they were not sure of. No one knows the adversary.

This adversary presented itself as a friend. Someone to help and assist. That’s all I remember when I first met them. Never did I know they had this plan in mind to take over jobs and cause hysteria in minds of people. If you are still not clear of what I am talking about let me be clear about it – Artificial intelligence and it is here to stay.

I know there are many like me who do not know what to expect, how to react, how to handle this situation. Things are new to me but I am learning. Fear of the unknown is the greatest but the more I know it the more I feel at ease. It cannot replace me…yet..But in this blog I want to share my encounters with technology and how they have changed the way I work. I am just a small player in a big pool but there are many who are like me – all worried about something but not sure what they are worried about. In this series I will share few insights on what the latest technology presents and how it can impact our lives.

Second blog

Let me jump straight into how I met my first bot. It was a just another day at work when a group of consultants came in. They were lead by a young leader who has vision of automating as much as he could. He wanted to understand the existing process and our pain points. I shared them. They took notes and went back. Within few weeks they came back saying they needs set of documents, samples and all possible SOP`s for reference. They said they were making my life better. When seniors ask me to oblige, we normally do. I did just the same.

Within few months I was asked to be part of a demo. And that’s where I met it. A bot. This thing could do what my team was doing. Faster, better, higher efficiency. It looked good. Having the bot in the team would mean higher productivity from the team. But little did I know that having bot had certain costs associated with it. It was either the bots or my team. Management was clear. We were asked to reskill and few were asked to move to a different team.

Let me explain more in detail about the bot. They are called RPA bots – Robotic Process Automation. They work in a well defined set of rules. If you give them a problem within the set of predefined rules they execute them well. They have different modes using which they learn and add to their database. RPA bots need following to work well:

If the above three conditions can be met, bots can be implemented. Easily. There are various tools available worldwide which are specialized in this area. Automation Anywhere, Uipath,. Blueprism are some of the leading RPA vendors across the globe.

But what if the work involves some manual documentation. In that case, how can they be tacked. In such cases, OCR – optical character recognition is used. OCR tools have the capability to convert any image file to a readable format. The image just needs certain text in the frame. The text can be accurately converted to a document which is readable by RPA bots.

Then comes the question, what if the bots encounter areas which are outside the rules. Will a bot work then. Surely humans would be needed in such a situation. Well apparently not. The bots now-a-days have the capability to self learn. They are termed as machine learning. Machine learning provides capability to the bots to learn by itself and implement the learning to improve its internal processes. There are two ways in which machine learning systems work. Supervised learning and unsupervised learning. Supervised learning means bots are given instructions on what to look for and they use various combinations to arrive at a method to get the target state. In supervised learning, bot itself identifies the pattern and teaches itself. It is similar to how the neural network works. One neuron identifies a specific signal and shares it to the rest. Bots do the same. When given an unstructured data, machine learning systems can identify the data though multiple iterations of methods and techniques and identify the same and associate them to a process.

All this meant, these systems which were brought in to help the job can now easily take over from us. Machines were built to support humans, but we are fast approaching a state where machines can replace human work easily.

Watch –out for my next blog on blockchain and few examples of how blockchain has increased the transparency.

Third blog

Today, we will be looking specifically at another invention from geniuses – blockchain. As the name suggest, it is a chain of blocks carrying certain information.

Let me give you an example of how blockchain has come into my ecosystem. We take financial instruments and share them to customer over email or mail the hardcopies to them while doing exports business. The customer opens a financial instrument (FI) based on an agreed contract and this is done via an opening bank. The FI is shared to our bank and then to us. We meticulously go through the document and identify the amendment I require before exporting our material.

This is a labor intensive work with multiple institutions involved. Then blockchain came. Blockchain enabled all the institutions to come on a single platform and provided transparency to all the stakeholders in the supply chain. The amendments which I required and demanded are now done by the bots. These are the same bots that I mentioned about in my previous blog. They now have integrated with different ecosystems to capture all possible data and can now ensure the end to end data movement is faster than ever.

Essentially blockchain is a distributed ledger with multiple nodes that are spread across the globe. Each block in the chain has a set of information which is stored in all the previous versions of the blocks. So if one were to change the data in one block, it will be reflected to all the nodes in the chain. If one wants to make some changes in a previous block, then it will again be reflected in all the nodes which were created since the chain was deployed. How this helps businesses, is by ensuring there is no mismanagement of the data which is being used and there is complete transparency of the data across the entire supply chain to all the stakeholders. This is an area of interest in my business and one that is certain to grow.

As mentioned in my first blog, which technology is an enabler to success and growth it is also causing people to fear about the security of their jobs. With more and more systems being involved and technologies being developed and adapted, the companies prefer moving an technology based architecture with minimum intervention involved to capture higher profit from each transaction. This is the fear people have. While all technologies are good, there will come a day when humans will no longer be needed and they can be easily replaced by bots and other supporting systems.

Related Questions

Navigate

• Browse (All)
• Browse W
• Subjects

Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.