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.

As a head, it’s the manager’s role to encourage his employees to surpass their expectations by taking responsible risks.  An efficient leader can either embrace diverse thinking to measure one’s talent to innovate or distract the whole team to fall down.  Never undervalue an employee’s ability as it will break the employee to perform. Have proper understanding before you evaluate or test your employee's abilities and potential.

A manager or a head should carry the skill to motivate his employees; as this is one of the greatest skills an entrepreneur should hold while leading a process or a team. Every organization goes through some tough growing pains, and this may be because of many reasons; like lack of infrastructure, resources, or cash would also make it extremely difficult to improve the company morale, but cash should not be a reason to discourage your employees. Even if you are wealthier, don’t show the money, which will not work.

Let us look at some better ways to boost the morale.

Be Kind & Praise

Everyone wants it and this is one of the greatest and easiest things to give. A praise from the CEO goes a lot beyond then you might think, but a small appreciation from the head is a good gesture to any employee. Praising every improvement that you see in your team members make them happy for sure, but it also increases their confidence and love towards their work.

Get Divest of the Managers

Can we not think any project without a project manager in any organization? That doesn’t seem to be happening also? But can we try it? Putting aside a project lead or a manager and empowering your staff to work together as a team rather than everyone reporting to one individual can do wonders. But which organization will think about it? The question here is what’s worse than letting your supervisor and your team down?

A manager or a supervisor will help or make the people to work together as a team, and this will often produce better projects faster. If the team is strong and united all the team members will enjoy the work and like to  come in early, stay late, and devote more of their energy to solving the problems and deliver the project as estimated.

Respect their Ideas

Instead of always being the boss and telling people what they need to do. Make them share their ideas and see if that may work well. People hate being told what to do; they like others to respect their ideas and this has also worked well in many scenarios.  You can add your idea to what they say to mix the ideas and promote them or proceed.

Do Not Criticize or Correct

No one will be ready to take criticism or corrections in their work. This will not only de-motivate them but also pull them down, which is not a good task for any organization. Try different options to explain to them why it will not work. Or you can even take an indirect example to get people learn and improve, from their mistakes, and fix them at the earliest. Ask, instead of pointing them for the mistakes you can ask them the best way to approach the problem and how best you can fix it.

Treat as Leaders

Making everyone leaders may sound different, but it’s not making them leaders, but making them feel that you give importance to their decision and respect it. Have top performers’ get introduced in the teams and organization and highlight their performance and strengths to let them know that because of their excellence, you want them to be the example for others. Set-up appreciations and calculation bars to show-up their performance; which will motivate them to live up to their reputation as leaders.

Give a Surprise

Take your team out and have a good talk. Introduce new policy which will help them and company grow.  This is an easy way to remind them that you notice and appreciate their work and this may also help others to be close to the team and think what they are missing out.  

Rewards & Recognitions

Both of them play a vital role in motivating your employees. This is an old technique, but believe me, it works wonders. When an organization thing or recognize their employee's performance and it is rewarded its self-makes your employee feel positive about their company. Announce their performance in front of teams, or stick on whiteboards or treat them with goodies. You can do this every quarter or by the half of the year. Start reward and recognition policy which will help the organization to walk closer with their teams.

Have Company Get Together

Doing things as a group will not help in many scenarios, instead, plan for a company get together once in a while; as this can go a long way. Have a company picnic or anniversary. As many companies are even missing their anniversaries due to lack of time. Holding happy hours is a good idea now and then; don’t wait for holidays to do such activities. Organize events once in a year or the time your project is out will remind your staff that you’re all in it together.

Share the Rewards

When your company does well or your project is success start celebrating it. Do not postpone your reward as this will be the best time to let everyone recognize your efforts. You can share the project in and out and if you have any disappoints too with the teams.  share your future plans how you want them to support you.

Search has become integrated into the fabric of our society. With more than 197.9 billion searches performed worldwide each year since April 2014, more or less 6.6 billion web searches will be performed every day.  That means on an average about 7,500 searches are performed every single second of a day. Moreover; users have grown to wait for that the responses to their search queries will be returned in less than one second. 

If you have ever come across, the various “SEO is dead”,  that claims to make the rounds play periodically in the digital marketing world, rest assured — SEO is both alive and well — and has not as many feared and been killed by social media marketing as a driver of web traffic.  However, in November 2014, Twitter announced that by renewing its focus on SEO, it has increased the numbers of visitors coming to the site tenfold — from 7.5 million to 76 million visitors in a month. 

The demand for search continues to be high; because of the people can now obtain in mere seconds information that 20 years ago would have required planning a trip to the nearest library, the usage of card catalog and the Dewey Decimal system and a physical search through halls of printed volumes — a process that could easily have consumed two hours or more. Through the new channel of search, people can now conduct many of their favorite searches, shopping, banking and personal transactions online—somewhat the things have changed the way our global population lives, interacts, and connects to each other. 

The dramatic shift in behavior represents what the investors are likely to label a disruptive event – an event that has changed something in a fundamental way. Search Engines have been always the center of this disruptive event, and having businesses on website con-tent appears highly in the search engines when people try to look for the service, product or for any resource that business provides is critical to its survival. This is the situation for every business now and then; as most of the paths to success, obtaining such prime search results in real estate is not a simple matter. However, this is how the search engine optimization works in promoting your business.

The Mission of SEO

Web searches are free to use and yet very informative; as there are many available search engines to find what they are seeking, so the burden is on the search engines to develop a related, fast and fresh search experience. Most of the part search engines achieve this by being professed as having the most relevant results and delivering them the fastest, the users will search thinking that they will get them to what they are looking in for and want it in the least amount of time.

As a result, search engines invest an incredible amount of energy, time and capital in improving their significance. Thus, this includes performing wide studies of user responses to their searches, comparing their search results against those of other search engines, and conducting eye-tracking through a click- rate studies and constructing PR and other marketing campaigns.

How will SEO help businesses to Grow?

The recent survey says that the digital market and marketing through search engines is adequately grown as never compared.  The basic marketing strategy is always helpful for many businesses to grow, but is it that enough or do they still need to spend more time on marketing strategy is the big question in many organizations, companies or businesses.

Here is the answer— you can generate good revenue primarily with the help of Search engines through paid advertising; though the majority of this revenue will come from pay-per-use or cost-per-click models, in which the advertisers pay only for users who click on their ads. As we know that the search engines’ success depends on the relevance of their search results, manipulations in search engine rankings result in non-relevant results, and these type of results are generally referred to as spam, and should be dealt very seriously. Each major search engine employs a team who focuses solely on the result or eliminating the spam from their search results; this is generally referred as “web spam” teams. However, this matters to SEO professionals as they use more tactics to promote the products or service, and they should not land the spam by the search engines, as this would carry more risk of incurring penalties for the websites they work on.  

The Human Goals of Searching

When we need some sort of information, or to know something it all depends on upon your search. The basic goal of any human search is to obtain the information relevant to a specific set of keywords or phrases you enter into the search field; which is also known as a query. A searcher may invent the query as a question, but the majority of searches are performed by simply entering word combinations, and leaving the search engines to do their work of determining the “objective.” One  of the  most  important essentials to build an SEO strategy for a website is developing a thorough understanding of your targeted audience, and  how they use  combined words and  concepts to obtain information  about the  services or products you  provide. Once you know how an average searcher or more specifically your target market utilizes query-based search engines, you can more efficiently reach or retain those users.

Search engine usage has increased over the years; however, the major principle of conducting a search remains largely unchanged. Let us understand the following steps most of the search engine consists:

1. Understand the user experience and the need for information, what they are looking in for, on the specific website, or for any navigational search; they might want to buy something, or it may be about the transactional query also; or about any course relates thing – as in informational query.
2. Most of the users formulate their need by using a string of words or phrases comprising the query. The need and the use of the search may use for longer queries to generate more specific results more quickly.
3. Users execute the query, check the results and if they seek additional information, they will try a refined query again.

When this process results in the acceptable completion of a task, you can create a positive experience for the user by the search engine, and the site providing the information or the result.

We learn more on Digital Marketing strategies and how to determine Searchers Intent and the challenges for Search Marketers and Search Engines in our next blog.

When your customers value your business propositions, what should be the next is the question to be asked to every business entrepreneur today.  As per the recent survey, 80% of you do, but only 8% of your customers actually come back to you and agree that you provide superior value.

Now it’s not going to help you out as it is a sad state of affairs, for you and for your customers too. It’s self-evident that great customer satisfaction drives customers loyalty as well a wish to repeat your business levels to more or to next stage; this will, in turn, help you to grow fast and more generously with expected revenues.  Best example:  When you follow up on your sales leads and identified by your loyalty surveys that your revenue increases of more than you expected.

Since we know that everyone today is more cautious about keeping their date safe, collecting it, or using it to improve and maintain their customer relationship for as long as they can. But, back then there are still constraints on server and storage capacity, which leads to lack of high-scale software tools, limited companies’ ability to understand their customers.

Today, all that has changed, using the resources are available in the cloud, but how far, as you know that virtually unlimited amounts of cheap storage, complicated analytics, and gadget learning, to name a few is possible now to gain of detailed and actionable insights as never before; and you can truly know our customers.

Take an example: A famous sports franchise captures every interaction the championship team has with its fans from the website to online merchandising to mark on social feeds and grabs more attention towards its brands.

If you want to implement such advanced techniques to your business growth then there are tools available in the market such as Dynamics Online, Dynamics Marketing, Microsoft Office 365 and Power BI for Data Visualization.

Many businesses do not use application analytics for improving their customer relationships. According to Forrester, it’s more likely to use analytics first and foremost to monitor and improve the performance of your applications.  That’s a good thing to do- but if performance is all you need to monitor, as you are leaving your money on the table; make sure that your priorities in digital marketing must include by improving your customer engagement, your customers wants, which makes you too easy the work and measure convenience, personalization and trust.  

Successful companies including your competitors are increasingly aware that they are all inevitably becoming software and analytics companies.  All the data is in use or the data they collect from their customers can be analyzed to maximize your relationship and of course your profits. That means that software which is not ready must become a core competency for your company.

MARC ANDREESSEN famously remarked as venture capitalist a few years ago marked — Software, is “eating the world.”

The value proposition of Cloud computing — the delivery model for digitalization and innovation has evolved from cost reduction and scalability to mobility and cognitive computing.  However, the other benefit is a path to improve customer loyalty using cognitive services through a cloud to create personalized promotions and interactive customer support.

This thinking has extended the idea of a cloud assessment beyond traditional and advanced IT analytics that aimed to improve the customer experience and expectations. The purpose of this customer-centric approach is not which cloud is the best fit for any application; instead, it should, which cloud is the most innovative in adding to hosting services.

The cloud suitability assessment in traditional approach is to evaluate the IT systems using prearranged criteria and to identify the best suitable cloud hosting environment. By implementing such environment you can evaluate cost reduction, agility, scalability, and flexibility. However, such assessments often result in creating a hybrid cloud (private and public) for enterprise-level customers.

While based on every organization’s IT need and policies, it is crucial to tailor assessment criteria which are typically included on latency (performance), accessibility, hardware dependency, data security/privacy and demand certainty. Thus, the end result is to migrate your application to the cloud, but that is not enough to be competitive in many markets today.

However, these assessments are like foundations to new analysis which aims to transform traditional IT systems into cloud-based systems to enhance the customer based services. 

This new cloud assessment requires added evaluation criteria’s, such as cross-platform compatibility, integration involvedness, open technologies, and cognitive computing applicabilitys. These criteria’s can overlap with architectural design principles, and enable innovative services through IT systems running in the cloud.

Here are some questions that may help you to make out any gaps and achieve your innovative goals that go beyond legacy cloud migration.

• Is the cloud environment hypervisor sceptic to application portability?
• Is the cloud environment able to exchange in that it uses open technologies as OpenStack, Cloud Foundry or Spark?
• Will cognitive computing help you learn imperceptible patterns and enhance your services?
• Can the application architecture be converted into microservices with REST APIs; so each service can be separately updated as well as scale out on demand?
• Can APIs for multiple applications and services be centrally managed in the cloud?

This comprehensive assessment will make your systems or applications land in a cognitive ready cloud environment so you can speed up the design and implementation phase to innovative services.

The potential for these services is every time unlimited, so you need to consider the new insights made possible by cognitive computing. With the help of cognitive services process, you can see the tremendous amount of structured and unstructured data generated by billions of mobile devices every day.

It’s time to go beyond migrating your applications and systems into the cloud, and also look into its readiness for innovations how cloud and cognitive services could revolutionize your customer experiences.  By doing so you could drive your digital transformation.