Today, customers are looking for the best than the better in everything and want it quick along with seamless digital experience, so will it happen, but how?

Let us look how digital experience and digitalization will help us improve our business.

We should thank companies like; Apple and Amazon who anticipates that every organization should deliver products and services rapidly, with a seamless user experience.  

Consumers are looking for the ablity to login to their electricity account and check their electricity consumption online. They go to the telecommunications dealer and to buys a smartphone and expecting it to activate instantly. They even looking at the banks to approve their personal or mortgage loan instantly. They expect instant approval of services whether it private/public sector.

They even wonder why they need to provide identification proofs and financial statements to the banks when their employer is crediting their pay checks every month on-time.

Customers are demanding for instinctive interfaces, , personalized treatment, persistency and  consistency, real-time accomplishment,  negligible errors and 27/7 availability. This behavior of the consumers are changing rapidly they are looking for more comforts and customizations.

It’s more than a greater customer experience, nonetheless; when establishments get it right, they can as well tender aggressive pricing because of lesser overheads, enhanced and well equipped operational controls, with less risk.

Enchant the Customer

To catch hold of their consumer expectations organizations must gear up the process of digitization of their business. But it should be more that the automating a current process. Organizations must rethink to reinvent the operations process, including a quick decision making strategy, permit the less number of required steps, speeding up the documentation process parallel efforts should be taken with fraudulent and regulatory issues.   

Operating models, skills, organizational structures, and roles need to be redesigned to match the reinvented processes.

Operating models should be accustomed and redesign to facilitate customer insights better performance tracking capabilities, and decision making abilities. The process of Digitization often requires new skills combined with that old wisdom.

Nevertheless to say that There are huge benefits by the digitizing processes, companies can save cost upto 90% and TAT (turnaround time) enhanced by several orders of magnitude.

For example one financial institution digitized its mortgage application, assessment process decision making process, which gave the organization of ability to cut the cost per 70 percent and reducing the time to preliminary documents approval from numerous days to just in minutes process.

A telecom service provider can up with a system where customers get the feasibility to activate their new phones without the involvement of the backend department. Through digitization process insurance companies automatically arbitrate a large share of its simple claims. Upgrading from paper and manual process with software allows organizations to collect the required data automatically which also improves the process performance, while reducing the cost and risks. Digitization also helps manager to address the issues before they become critical. Supply chain quality issues can be acknowledged and resolved by monitoring purchaser business activities and feedback.

Many top organizations are reinventing their processes, testing the whole lot of things connected to an existing process and renovating it using cutting edge digital technology.

This approach is done through series of process combining advanced and traditional process, like lean and agile.

Hit Factors

Companies in every sector can gain knowledge from the practices conducted by other organizations that have implemented this successfully.

The process of Successful digitization implementation starts by developing a scheme for the future state for each process keeping aside the current constraints and reducing the turnaround time from days to minutes. Once the future scheme has been developed constraints will be revisited. Organizations should always focused to confront each constraint.

Recurrently checking the consumers experiences not only boost effectiveness in definite areas but also helps to address some burning issues. But this is not a complete recipe to deliver great user experience. To enrich the user experience the digitization team should receive spport from every corner involved in user experience.

Tackle the End-To-End Customer Experience

But it will never deliver a truly seamless experience, and as a result may leave significant potential on the table. To tackle an end-to-end process such as customer on boarding, process-digitization teams need support from every function involved in the customer experience.

To achieve this, some companies are creating cross functional and start up style units, which is way to involve all the stakeholders and users concerned with the end-to-end user experience. Members are often collaborated to achieve better lines of communication and guarantee a true team effort.

Build Capabilities

Resources on Digitization are in short supply, so successful portfolios put emphasis on construction in house capabilities.

The aim is to provide excellent service with highly skilled staff with the intention that can be called upon to digitization quickly. Organizations should hunt for faculty externally to meet the requirement for new roles, and skill sets, like user-experience designers and data scientists . To achieve this, managers selected in the first wave to pilot the transformation must be carefully picked, and he/she should be ready to commit with the organization for a long time well trusted in the organization,. It is also essential that the staff has the ability to build the necessary technology components in a high proficient way so that they can be able to be reused across processes, maximizing economies of scale.

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Digitalization, digital networking, research, network automation, education and educational networks; are all these the buzz words of recent technology and for education institutions?  Why everyone is talking about digitalization and networks, how are these both interconnected; and what is network automation and education networks are what we are going to know on this blog today .

While what the smaller research say about the education networks and individual campus networks; we can say that both stand for the same aim which is implementing education through current network automation strategies and tools. Are these tools, strategies, and significant efficiencies or the network automation wave more hype than these smaller institutions?

Let us look at some of the regional networks, how they are succeeded and what are the challenges involved in this path of deploying various network automation with relatively small and outsourced staff and support. Also discussed will be the experience of working with this diverse technology and how it increased the awareness about the possible proposed value of network automation and how regional’s can assist smaller schools through this network path. 

Digital learning and collaboration have become an essential part of today’s education. From k-12 schools are implementing the methods of digital learning. These blended learning methods and one to one computing programs are reshaping the classroom studies and engaging more students to become tech-savvy’s. The higher educational institutions are announcing BYOD- which means bring your own device concept; students are also allowed to use their smart phones, laptops, tablets and other gadgets to be connected. This helps the institutions to meet the unprecedented demand for connectivity with high performance and to get recognized as highly reliable campus and data network center solution provider.

Challenges:

The hike of latest technologies, mobile devices and growing appetite for applications and rising security concerns are placing new burdens on educational networks. To meet these challenges, schools are expanding their networks to meet student and faculty expectations for high performance, highly reliable, and always-on connectivity.

The school network is always mission-critical, and downtime will be more and un-tolerable when class lectures, research projects, assignments are involved. We can see diversity and richness using these educational applications as learning is increasingly leveraging interactive curricula, collaboration tools, streaming media, and digital media. The success of the Common Core Assessments hugely depends on connectivity. The higher education, universities, and colleges that have poor quality, non-ubiquitous network access, quickly discover that this is affecting their registration/enrollment rates.

The other challenge is with the number of Wi-Fi devices and the types of devices students bring to a university or college campus; Students commonly have three or more devices like; smartphone, tablet, laptop, gaming device, or streaming media player and expect flawless connectivity. While higher education is deploying wireless IP phones for better communications, IP video cameras to develop physical security, and sensors for a more efficient environment. The projections for the Internet of Things, which will connect hundreds of billions of devices in a few short years, are nothing short of staggering.

The trends that educational networks are looking today for students, faculties and administrator expectations is that of for the connectivity which is rising and the complexity and cost of networking are also growing exponentially. In addition to this growth, the “adding on” to networking equipment for old designs is causing the network to become ever more fragile. IT budgets are tight, and technology necessities are growing faster than the funding.

What if schools took a step back and had a unique opportunity to proactively aim their networks to meet the challenges which hit today and tomorrow? What if deploying the network was simple, not a manual, time-consuming chore? What if your initial design and build could scale for years to come, without having to build configurations on the fly every time? What if networks were easier to plan and build, configure and deploy, visualize and monitor—and had automated troubleshooting and broad reporting?

The tools which are of high configurations help the educational networks are Juniper Networks, HP, CODE42, DLT, EKINOPS, Level 3, cloudyCluster, OSI and much more. It’s time to update the educational institutions towards the design, building, and maintaining the network and taking the advantage of automation and modern management tools to create scale, consistency, and efficiency.

Artificial intelligence has been spread over a very large area of computing since the beginning of the computer, but we are getting closer than ever with cognitive computing models. What are these models and why are we talking about it today. 

Cognitive computing comes from a mash-up of cognitive science which is the study of the human brain and how it functions and a touch of computer science and the results will have far-reaching impacts on our private lives, healthcare, business, and more.

What is Cognitive Computing?

The aim of cognitive computing is to replicate human thought processes in a programmed model. It describes technology platforms that broadly speaking, and which are involved in self-learning systems that use data mining, natural language processing, and pattern recognition to mimic the way the human brain works. With the goal to automate the IT systems that are capable of solving the problems without requiring human assistance the Cognitive computing is growing very fast.

Cognitive computing systems use machine learning algorithms; which repeatedly acquire knowledge from the data fed into them by mining data for information. These systems treat the way they look for patterns and as well as the way they process data so they have become competent of anticipating new problems and modeling possible solutions.

Cognitive computing is used in numerous artificial intelligence applications (AI), including expert systems, neural networks, natural language programming, robotics and virtual reality.  While computers are proved the faster machines at calculations and meting out the humans for decades; these machines haven’t been able to accomplish some tasks that humans take for granted as simple, like understanding natural language, or recognizing unique objects in an image. The cognitive computing represents the third era of computing: it from computers that could tabulate sums (the 1900s) to programmable systems (1950s), and now to cognitive systems.

The cognitive systems; most remarkably IBM and IBM +0.55%’s Watson, depend on deep learning algorithms and neural networks to process the information by comparing it to an education set of data.  The more data the systems are exposed to, the more it learns, and the more accurate it becomes over time, and this type of neural network is a complex “tree” of decisions the computer can make to arrive at an answer.

What can cognitive computing do?

As per the recent TED Talk from IBM, Watson could ultimately be applied in a healthcare setting also, this helps the administrative department of healthcare to collate the span of knowledge around conditions, which include the patient history, journal articles, best practices, diagnostic tools, and many more. Through this, you can easily analyze that vast quantity of information, and provide your recommendations as needed.

The next stage is to examine, which will be proceeded by the consulting doctor, who will then be able to look at the evidence and based on the recorded evidence the treatment options will be released based on these large number of factors including the individual patient’s presentation and history. Hopefully, this will lead to making better treatment decisions.

While in other scenarios, when the goal is not to clear and you look to replace the doctor, and the doctor’s capabilities by processing the humongous amount of data available will not be retained by any human and thus providing a summary of potential application will be overdue. This type of process could be done for any field such as including finance, law, and education in which large quantities of complex data will be in need to be processed and analyzed to solve problems.

However, you can also apply these systems in other areas of business like consumer behavior analysis, personal shopping bots, travel agents, tutors, customer support bots, security, and diagnostics.  We see that there are personal digital assistants available nowadays in our personal phones and computers like —Siri and Google GOOGL -0.21% among others, which are not true cognitive systems; and have a pre-programmed set of responses and can only respond to a preset number of requests.  But, as tech is on high volume we will be able to address our phones, our computers, our cars, our smart houses and get a real time in the near future when thoughtful response rather than a pre-programmed one.

The coming future will be more delightful for us as computers will become more like humans and they will also expand our capabilities and knowledge. Just be ready to welcome the coming era when computers can enhance human knowledge and ingenuity in entirely new ways.

• Diigo, Pocket, Evernote and Delicious are some of the famous bookmarking websites that allow the users to highlight any part of a webpage and attach sticky notes to specific highlights.  You can access to these WebPages anywhere and on any device.  By using, Diigo you can create your own personal library. Diigo is the preferred tool for educators.

• Diigo allows you to highlight the paragraphs and picture clips while you are reading.
• You can bookmark any page in your “virtual” library or online archive, even PDFs or videos.Add your own tags to search for information later.
• You can add your entire school or class in Diigo as a group, and share the resources as needed.For example, a physics class might share its content, online lessons, or practical assignments.

• Use a reader to subscribe to blogs.  You can do this through Google reader; as it allows you to manage multiple subscriptions to blogs; and you have easier access to new research.  You can also use an application like Yahoo News Social or Scribd to publically share what you read with others.
• Start your own platform. Consider establishing a blog site using Word Press or blogger.com.  A blog provides a worldwide platform to share your views, ideas and plans of education. Spread your passion and find kindred spirits, from there you can start develop lasting connections and plan new projects.  Make good followers and follow your fellow bloggers, as they will appreciate the time you put into creating significant materials. Your ideas can be then be re-shared as a link.
• Make use of Social Networks. Start sharing your ideas or content on Twitter first. You can use of technology and change anything using it, but Twitter is the most commonly used community among academics for expanding professional learning networks. Whereas,   LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+ also provide access to different types of networks; but they are into more connecting professionals, family and friends rather than learning. However, you can use other tools to further expand and manage your network, such as Skype and Google tools. Many new platforms are emerging so stay connected to the current trends or be active participate of social media news sites like, Mashable, BBC, ToI, etc.

• Power your role, by introducing new topics, write-ups and by empowering your global learning; as ‘Individual Learning’, sheds some light on learning roles. Consider your learning style when designing a specific approach to your learning network:

• Advance your learning by writing a blog.
• Be a reflector; learn by reviewing situations, and post opinions to articles.
• Prefer to learn by researching information and data, such as by creating a model.
• Pragmatist-Apply learning to real situations, such as by creating a project that uses PLNs in the classroom.

According to Wikipedia, professional learning network role can include, “searcher, assemblator, designer of data, innovator of subject matter, and researcher”.

• Aggregate resources together. Applications like Flip Toast and Hoot Suite allow you to merge all of your social media accounts into one interface. You may want to play around with different types of portals until you find the one that is right for you. Map out an organized plan for using your PLN. There is a great chart of resources for mapping out your PLN plan on this blog.
• Take a free course to learn about PLNs. MOOCs are Massive Online Open Courses that are free to the public.  For instance, this course complete with handouts shows you how to establish a PLN.  You learn actively by taking small steps to create your PLN, such as creating a blog, twitter account, and content.
• Stay current with new tools. For example, try Pearltrees. This is one of my favorite new tools for PLNs.  Pearltrees is basically a visual organizer for your links.  Pearls are collaborative and public.  You can add pearls as you browse and share them with others on Twitter and Facebook.  Customize your experience.   There are many specific tools on different applications that allow you to customize and organize your PLN to fit your own needs.  Chrome and Windows 8 have several free applications that are worth trying.
• Simplify logins. You can speed up the log in process by installing a Password management application.  To further simply your PLN, use Google to keep a shared document drive, email, chat, and Google+ networking in one place.
• Establish a classroom learning network. Share your own expertise with other educators on a website or blog.  Create a class website or teach students how to create their own PLN. You might want to design a classroom project that relies on using one aspect of PLNs.  Doing so allows you to learn new ways to use PLNs. A YouTube video, The Networked Student, does an excellent job of explaining how a student might engage in a PLN. Teach students how to establish a PLN in small steps.  For instance, they might use Google scholar to research a paper or share ideas on Google Hangouts.

Professional learning Network is a powerful change agent. And in today’s world an online professional learning network is indispensable.  Technology allows easy access to an unparalleled network of professional resources. Growing your network can lead to opportunities for professional growth and help change the future of education.

Digitalization and networking are prime forms of 21st century learning.  The world is much smaller and thanks to technology; which made learning more transforming into a globally collaborative enterprise. For example professional, networks allow the scientific community to share discoveries much faster than the others.  

The scientists of Harvard are considering that “sharing discoveries is more efficient and honorable than patenting them.”  This idea embodies the true spirit of a successful professional learning network: collaboration for its own sake.

Educators should aim to be connected to advance their craft; and on another level, they need to use networks to prepare and the teach students and make them ready with the ever changing technological needs; as this will make them available in the changing job market.  However, what is the best way to approach professional learning networks - PLNs?

The recent learning networks are based on the theory of connectivism, or learning from varied social webs.  Connectivism implies to learning that relies on communicating ideas with many people at same time. Professional learning networks facilitate learning through meaningful interactions; the advantages of these networks today are two-folded. In one way, they help to improve the classroom teaching and to develop new projects; and on the other hand, they act as a form of shared intelligence that changes communal perceptions.  

We will see more details on what are the ways to grow your PLN and improve the quality of your interactions; as there are diverse ways to build your network and many new management tools.  

• Always keep the spirit of collaboration as your driving force.Professional learning networks are all about working together, so be mutual and resourceful and never think about what you have to gain or gained, rather think what you have to give and Why? This is the right thing to do, when you are working collaboratively. By buying the process and sharing useful information, your professional network will always grow naturally. While collaboration creates a common ground which allows others to see your interests.Authentic interest builds a solid network.Social responsibility is the best kind of motivation for establishing a PLN.
• Join an online community and share ideas by contacting or connecting to people for direct feedback. As direct feedback is more effective in a community setting. The Communities such as, Classroom versions and The Educator’s professional network provide a meaningful circle of experts.These professional development resources, such as online events are a great place to start your networking and build it.
• The next thing to make your network strong is joining a meet-up group.These meet-up groups are common thread interest groups that connect the real world; and make your life easy to extend your social networks. For instance, science teachers in your city or district might create a group to share their teaching ideas; these meet-up groups take online networks and bring them into the real world. But, if in case you can’t meet online then try using Google+ HangOuts, or Skype. Whereas, some university academics even have virtual labs on SecondLife.
• Be as symbol of light.Professional learning networks rely on open sharing of information.So if you know something, then be open to share it!Start with a specific interest and then start growing your network with other topics as time goes on. Turn out to be an expert in your niche by researching current trends.This will draw larger followers on your network, and help you to provide a novel source of information.
• Ask questions; after all, PLNs are all about learning. But do not ask questions that you can easily research. Try simple searches on TED talks, Wikis, blogs, or news articles before posting a question; as these are the. Try to be specific and think of how a question might generate interest from others. For example, you may want to refer to an article or research study when asking a question. Be specific!This will generate the best answers.
• Be an active participant; as brain power is the main asset of any professional learning systems. So you need to spend valuable time to identify the specific cause to communicate on your profile.Let your knowledge be the specific cause as it helps you grow your PLN. Try updating your niche and stay relevant to it.
• Be polite and acknowledge your contributions to the rightful owner. Show respect for the people in your network.
• Designate a professional and personal account. Be active participate in your social life - Facebook and professional life on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.There can be some intersect, but its best thing to keep it least so things are easy to find.So that certain groups will appreciate different types of content. Do this in ways that are comfortable to you.You might designate accounts for each sphere of your life.
• Create a landing page; as it may be a good idea to consolidate all of your accounts on your landing page.A webpage or personal blog will make it easier for people who like to find you; and it will also create a space where you can showcase the different projects you are working on.
• Engage newbies, having this type of diversity in knowledge always allow you to increase your mentoring skills and keeps the essence of collaboration.A blogger can Collaborate, Communicate, and Create any source to be an active participate and can be proved to be the best professional to people who are seeking for connected learning networks; as PLNS trend to create new projects through the power of active collaboration.