enGAge September 2019

September 2019

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

- Alan Kay

“Sometimes in the waves of change, we find our true direction.”

- Anonymous

Contents September 2019

Driving Customer Success

Digital Transformation

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Are your Customers Delighted? Identify and Implement!

Demystifying Digital Transformation

More power to Customer Success!

Earlier, the term customer satisfaction resonated heavily with enterprises of all sizes. But now,it has been overpowered by customer success.

Digital Transformation is the change associated with the use of digital technologies to enable an organization to improve and evolve.

Author:

Author:

Balaji Uppili

Sri Chaganty

Contents September 2019

WYTIWYS

Best Practices Day

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What You Think Is What You See

GArnet – Best Practices Day at GAVS

It did not look like a hospital. I did not see any of what we usually see in hospitals — narrow corridors, long queues near the elevator, heap of files at the nurse’s station, smell of Dettol, etc.

We recently celebrated Best Practices Day at GAVS with GArnet – a platform for GAVSians to exhibit their innovations/solution excellence.

Author:

Author:

Chandra Mouleswaran S Murali Babu

Soumika Das

Contents September 2019

Machine Learning

Stories at Work

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New Entrant or Best in Class?

Stories at Work – The Art of Business Storytelling

Machine Learning has become a necessity in every sector as a way of making machines intelligent while deep learning is gaining much popularity due to its superiority in terms of accuracy when trained with a huge amount of data.

As the speaker moves through the slides talking facts, numbers and strategies, you are asleep with your eyes wide open or fidgeting with your phone, scrolling through your Facebook feed or thinking about an email to answer once you get back to your desk. And then the speaker finishes.

Author:

Author:

Saranya Ramesh

Rama Vani Periasamy

“What good is an idea if it remains an idea? Try. Experiment. Iterate. Fail. Try again. Change the world.�

- Simon Sinek

enhanced processes and operations leverage emerging technologies to get better insights into how well the customer is being served. Enhanced operations will positively impact the productivity of the organization and empower employees to innovate which demands transparency.”

Editor’s Notes

Chandra Mouleswaran, Senior Vice President, Customer Success and Murali Babu, Associate Vice President, Workforce Management have written, ‘What You Think Is What You See’. They write, “Is that really possible? It’s a digital fiction, nothing more. Do you think that we should reward and invest in digital fiction? Every wonderful thing that we use today began that way. Smartphones, Internet, autonomous vehicles faced similar challenges, but they overcame those challenges.”

Saranya has written, ‘TensorFlow vs PyTorch’. She writes, “Among the choice in terms of the libraries and frameworks available for machine learning/ deep learning, these two libraries are the emerging frontrunners: Google’s TensorFlow, considered today’s best in class and the Facebook-backed Python package PyTorch, a new entrant that could compete in the field.”

Soumika Das “Every once in a while, a new technology, an old problem, and a big idea turn into an innovation.”

– Dean Kamen.

At GAVS, our mission is to create disruptive IP-led solutions. In our efforts to build an environment that encourages innovation, we relaunched the GArnet initiative. GArnet is a platform for GAVSians to showcase their innovative solutions and learn how to implement it to other projects.

The event attracted numerous nominations from both teams and individuals. The finalists got to present their solutions to a jury and other GAVSians. All the solutions were quite impressive. The top 5 solutions are summarized in the article – ‘GArnet – Best Practices Day at GAVS’.

In this edition we bring to you an article by our Chief Customer Success Officer, Balaji Uppili – ‘Are your Customers Delighted? Identify and Implement!’ He says, “It is a myth that customer success is a simple delivery of a Statement of Work (SOW). Rather the reality is, delivering customer success will automatically ensure delivery of the SOW as it is a superset of identifying and fulfilling an expectation.”

Sri Chaganty, Chief Technology Officer at GAVS, has written, ‘Demystifying Digital Transformation’. He writes, “To accomplish Digital Transformation, existing processes and operations need to transform. New and

Rama has written, ‘Stories at Work – The Art of Business Storytelling’. She writes, “A saying goes, “Success is about 99% perspiration and 1% advertising”. Telling people what we have done and how we have accomplished it is as important as the actual act of accomplishment. Business storytelling plays a role in this.”

Happy Reading!

Driving customer success

Are your Customers Delighted? Identify and Implement!

More power to Customer Success! Earlier, the term customer satisfaction resonated heavily with enterprises of all sizes. But now,it has been overpowered by customer success. Customer success has evolved dramatically over the years, transforming its need to more of a necessity. Secondary research confirms that 21% of companies consider customer success important hence, they invest time and money on the same. As a concept, customer success ensures that the customers achieve their desired outcome. It is not only about retaining customers but also adding growth to the business through a conducive relationship focused on effective client management. Such a mutual relationship between a client and the vendor can be a win-win situation for both,thus driving customer success.

In an attempt to understand the value of customer success, we conversed with Balaji Uppili, Chief Customer Success Officer in GAVS Technologies.His 25 years of industry experience and expertise helped unlock a dynamic perspective on customer success.

Customer Success – the key basics!

Balaji Uppili

He pointed out that customer success, although it may sound simple is way beyond just modest execution of individual expectations and aspirations. As a vendor, the primary concern is to focus on an individual or a group of individuals or even an organization to meet evolving expectations. He pointed out the challenge that most enterprises face in this environment is in identifying the precise aspiration or expectation – is it customer success or customer satisfaction? In most instances it is misinterpreted as customer satisfaction, which is why there is a fine gap that enterprises strive to fulfill.

It is a myth that customer success is a simple delivery of a Statement of Work (SOW). Rather the reality is, delivering customer success will automatically ensure delivery of the SOW as it is a superset of identifying and fulfilling an expectation. It, however, cannot be perceived the other way around.The success mantra for a leader is to get the demarcation right between customer success and customer satisfaction.

The ‘What’ and ‘How’ of Challenges The key aspect of customer success is not only ensuring best return on investment but to understand the customer requirement in a precise manner. The requirement must be in sync with the profile and positioning of the customer – a key attribute to ensure customer success.This entire process is a challenging task as expectations keep evolving.

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Balaji didn’t forget to mention that to a great extent customer success depends upon emotional quotient.

Hence, the focus should be on ‘how’ to transform an emotion into something tangible that is measurable.

This will enable the entire team to participate in the journey of success. He elaborated further that customer

success is a cohesive success of the entire team rather than an outcome of an individual.

The measurement scale of customer success First of all, Balaji acknowledged the importance of real time information from the customer himself to understand if the delivery met expectations.

Secondly, he highlighted the point that understanding the behavior of individuals who can influence customer success is paramount.

Magic Mantra In order to achieve customer success, one needs to add quantifiable measures and follow three basic steps.

First, it is absolutely imperative to understand the facets of basic customer success, after which one needs to figure out tangible ways of attaining that success and lastly execute the same in an efficient manner.Such a cohesive approach to tend to customer expectations in all probability lead to attaining customer success.

Balaji stressed on the fact that ‘customer success’ is the driving force and lifeline of GAVS’ existence. GAVS has a platform to enable and drive measurable outcomes and ensure critical governance to customer success. He further said, “We call our organization a customersuccess organization instead of just being deliverydriven. We have achieved this transformation over the years with great grit and an evolving mindset”.

How unique is GAVS’ approach to Customer Success?

GAVS stands strong in its approach to delight customers. To build a strong ecosystem that drives customer success, GAVS has a customer success management platform, wherein the entire process is templatized. Every facet of customer success at GAVS, whether it is baselining, capturing, to measuring and delivering success, follows an in-house standardized template. Weaving its sub aspects together into a single string ensures effective customer success management.

About the Author: Balaji has over 25 years of experience in the IT industry, across multiple verticals. His enthusiasm, energy and client focus is a rare gift, and he plays a key role in bringing new clients into GAVS. Balaji heads the Delivery department and passionately works on Customer delight. He says work is worship for him, and enjoys watching cricket, listening to classical music and visiting temples.

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What is Digital Transformation?

Demystifying Digital Transformation

Sri Chaganty Chief Technology Officer, GAVS

Digital Transformation is the change associated with the use of digital technologies to enable an organization to improve and evolve. It implies using digital technologies to do something better or to create something that did not exist previously. Digital Transformation has been in place since digital computers came into existence. For example, when mechanical cash registers were replaced with computerized cash registers, that was a digital transformation. But the technologies available today are far advanced that such transformation has shifted from evolution to revolution. A revolution to provide the most satisfying experience to the customer – either internal or external.

To accomplish Digital Transformation, existing process and operations need to transform. New and enhanced processes and operations leverage emerging technologies to get better insights into how well the customer is being served. Enhanced operations will positively impact the productivity of the organization and empower employees to innovate, which demands transparency. Naturally, innovation within an organization translates into new products and services and more engaged customers.Google stands as a shining example. Just think how many products and services we use from Google today – ostensibly a search engine company!

What is driving this need for digital transformation?

Simple answer - us. We want every transaction we are involved in to be as “smart phone like” as possible. We embraced Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, Online banking, and anything and everything that met our demand – “I want it now”. We are now turning to our workplaces and demanding such customer experience with all transactions within our organizations because we want to be more productive. Our organizations are asking us to be more productive in order provide solutions to our customers that will encourage customer engagement and loyalty.

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For us to be more productive, we need to be empowered to innovate, fail fast and recover, be transparent in pushing the envelope without sacrificing the security aspects of those being served and those that are serving.

All of this requires not just new hardware or software.

This requires optimized, enhanced, and new business processes and operations that will maximize the return on investment in those technologies.

Enablers of Digital Transformation Digital Transformation today is not evolving like it used to in the past. Digital Transformation is a revolution today. The massive amounts of cheap compute power and storage combined with ubiquitous connectivity driven by machine learning and machine autonomy is driving Digital Transformation.

Between Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Oracle, Salesforce - just to name a few - the magnitude of new compute power provided to the word annually is staggering. The massive amount of compute power that resides in your hand or in your pocket as your cell phone or tablet is millions of times more powerful than all of NASA’s combined computing in 1969, the year we landed on the Moon.

Along with massive amounts of cheap compute power, staggering amounts of “almost-free” storage space is being deployed as well in these global server farms and data centers. All the data stored is ready to be analyzed with this compute power.

If a device can have a microprocessor embedded in it, it will. If it has a microprocessor, it will be connected to the Internet and if it’s connected to the Internet, it’s going to collect and stream (lots of) data. Everything will be connected. With the Internet of Things (IoT) we are wiring up the entire planet (and everything on it). Data can be ingested from almost every corner of the planet - transforming the entire planet into a living organism of data.

All the data stored is ready to be analyzed with this massive amount of compute power.

Impact of Digital Transformation on ITOps Digital Transformation touches all aspects of the business. The most impact is felt in the IT Operations.

The reason is obvious. For reinventing and creating new processes in operations, we need to adopt new technologies.

Let us see how IT Operations is affected by the plethora of technological advances that facilitate digital transformation.

First, there is a revolution in application architectures to support quick turnaround of solution development.

Second, we are moving into a continuous integration and delivery model for new code to get into production and cut short the long QA cycles.

Third, there are languages that evolved to support the continuous integration and delivery.

Fourth, the packaging of the applications is revolutionized with containerization.

Everything now is virtualized to make sure that the resources are available for continuous delivery.

Finally, cloudification became the norm of our business processes.

All these advancements on how we develop software have a direct impact on IT Operations that need to support such fundamental technology shifts. As you can rightly imagine, IT Operations is constantly involved in issues and struggles to support the shifts we saw in software development. And those struggles have direct impact on the bottom-line of the business.

You hear about outages in Amazon, on Azure or security breaches at Target or other big organizations because those stories draw media attention. But within organizations, application downtimes in this digital age have significant impact on the bottom-line.

Outages put organizations in a crisis mode.

Repetitive problems and issues leave IT organizations with no room to innovate and be proactive in adopting new technologies. The bigger the organization, the longer the arch of adoption. The length of the arch of adoption is a reflection on the time it takes for them to be fully digitally transformed.

Modern enterprise IT operations should focus on zero outages. The target should be to eliminate outages because they cannot afford to have any if they want to be digitally transformed.

GAVS’ Role in Facilitating Digital Transformation GAVS Zero Incident Framework TM (ZIF) – an AI powered platform, can ingest streaming events from various IT operations monitoring tools and process them to identify the underlying sub sequences. Patterns are self-learned and unlearned by algorithms to provide a high accuracy in correlations. Supervised, Reinforced and Unsupervised machine learning algorithms auto-tune parameters based on the enterprise’s data streams to derive higher accuracy in correlating events generated from siloed IT operations monitoring tools. ZIF removes the alert fatigue in an enterprise.

ZIF enables proactive detection and remediation of incidents helping organizations drive towards a Zero Incident EnterpriseTM. ZIF can play a significant role in eliminating outages thereby empowering them to be digitally transformed.

About the Author: Sri is a Serial Entrepreneur with over 30 years’ experience delivering creative, client-centric, valuedriven solutions for bootstrapped and venture-backed startups.

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It did not look like a hospital. I did not see any of what we usually see in hospitals — narrow corridors, long queues near the elevator, heap of files at the nurse’s station, smell of Dettol, etc.

Spacious rooms, with sofas and decorative plants and a nice fragrance wafting through the air almost had me believing that I got into a five-star hotel.

What You Think Is What You See

I had gone to meet my friend from Nigeria, who had travelled all the way to Chennai for his wife’s heart surgery. I was about to knock the door when my phone rang. Stephen, the new ‘Employee Success Officer’ from my office was calling.

“Hi Steve, good morning. What’s new today?”

“Hi Kris, good morning. We need to talk about the ‘Define the future’ initiative.“ “Is that urgent or can it wait?”

‘It is not urgent, but it’s important” “Okay, call me after few minutes, please”.

I disconnected the call after hearing an okay from Steve.

My friend opened the door on hearing the sound outside his door. “How is your wife?’ I asked him upon entering the room. My surprise at the level of luxury in the hospital did not dwindle. It was a suite with a visitors’ room, an attender’s room, and a patient’s room.

The visitors’ room was big enough to host a two-seater sofa, a table, a TV , a coffee maker and an attached washroom. The whole concept is true to the word ‘medical tourism’.

Chandra

Murali Babu

“She is better now. She wants to eat Garri(1)”.

I smiled at her and gave him the bag that I had brought with me and said “Ma’am, I can’t get you Garri here. But I have brought some special African rice meal for you.

That’s the closest thing to Nigerian cuisine that I could get you in Chennai. But before you leave our country, I will take you to an African restaurant, if not Nigerian.”

While we were discussing their plans, facilities and treatment, Steve interrupted me again.

“Sorry Kris to bother you. Hope this is a good time to speak” “Yes, tell me. Is it about ‘Define the future’?”

“Yes, Kris. We need to share our views on ‘Brain Computer Interface’. MB, BC, and CK are very positive about it. What’s your take on it?”

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I excused myself from the room and went to the visitors’ room inside the suite.

“Steve, it sounds like fiction to me. Good for sci-fi movies, but not a reality”.

“They are very scientific about it. They say that whenever we think, electric signals are generated and using those we can detect what we think”, Steve said.

I smiled and said, “It is more imaginative and less scientific. Let us discuss later.”

I went back to the patient’s room. Upon entering my friend immediately asked: “Are you free today?”

I said, “Of course I am free for you. What do you want to do?”

“We need to go to a temple. It is just outside Chennai,” he said. I did not expect this from him. I am surprised that a man, though his ancestors were from Tamil Nadu, born and raised in Nigeria wants to go to a temple amidst his tense personal time.

‘I am surprised. Is it your wish or your wife’s or your parents?’ I asked looking at him.

“It’s my wish. And her wish too.”

The doctor came in then and we had to halt the discussion. Though I was listening to what the doctors were saying, my mind was elsewhere. I was thinking about the Brain Computer Interface (BCI) that Steve had mentioned earlier. We held a contest in our organization on the topic ‘Define the future’. The participants had to recommend a technology that would be the most sought after by CIOs in 2025. There have been recommendations for IoT, AI, Digital twins, Cloud, etc. While many have gone with what the analysts predict for the future, one team has predicted this BCI as the future. While I am very skeptical about BCI as the future, I also don’t want to dismiss it without much consideration. I am yet to come to a decision. But Steve wants to close the contest and announce the results soon. That’s why he was following up with me.

I came out of the room and called Steve.

“Tell me, Steve. Is that really possible? It’s a digital fiction, nothing more. Do you think that we should reward and invest in digital fiction?’

“Every wonderful thing that we use today began that way. Smartphones, Internet, autonomous vehicles faced similar challenges, but they overcame those challenges.”

“All those were about machines. But this one is about human and machine.”

“So what? I don’t understand.”

“In all those technologies, humans gave definite inputs for the machines to execute wonders. Here in BCI, the human mind is going to provide inputs. A human mind is unpredictable. Even I wouldn’t think and react the same way every time I think about something. How will it understand different brains, different emotions, different times?”

“You can get a breakthrough innovation for a breakthrough problem. There is no fun in working on an issue for which a solution already exits.”

“I can’t argue with you, Steve. I need to think”.

I disconnected the call formally and stepped into the patient’s room. My friend was waiting.

“Doctor said we could get discharged today. I want to go to the temple first from the hospital before going anywhere”, he said.

“Okay, we can go. Which temple, where is it?”

It is about 25KM from here. You must know about it. It is called Hrudayaleeswarar temple.”

“Sorry, I have not heard of it. What is so special about it?”

“All the ailing heart patients make it a point to visit this temple either before or after the surgery. “ “Oh, we have a temple for every disease and occasion.

Let’s go” The car was passing by Avadi. I was sitting on the passenger seat beside the driver. My friend and his wife were at the back. He just woke up from a short nap.

“The traffic here is much lesser and better than what we see at Nairobi,” he said.

“How do you say that? It’s all very subjective” I said.

“The ratio of time taken to cross a distance during peak and non-peak hours is an indicator. If that ratio is closer to one, then the traffic is good in that city” “Interesting. Is that ratio bad in Nairobi?

“From Ridgeways where I stay to Nairobi Central where my office is, I take 40 minutes during peak hours and 15 minutes during non-peak hours. It is about 10KM.” “Oh, that is interesting. For a 30KM distance in Chennai, it is about 90 minutes to 45 minutes. Chennai is slightly better” My phone rang again. I thought it was Steve. But this time it was the Chief Innovation officer Ashish. “Do you have a few minutes to speak?’ he asked.

“Yes Ash, tell me. I know it is for BCI. What’s your take on it?”

“It is not a fiction anymore. You must be aware that Elon Musk’s company is researching on Brain Machine Interface. Also, I recently read that BCI was deployed to help the differently-abled play games.”

“But what Elon Musk is experimenting on is intrusive. It implants something into the brain” “The question isn’t whether it is intrusive or not.

It’s the technology. It will get evolved to acceptable deployment.”

“Okay, but is it really possible to know what one thinks?” I asked.

“Whenever we think or feel or remember something, the neurons in our brains start working through the electric signals that flow between neurons at very high speed.

These signals indicate human thoughts. It looks like a long shot, but that’s what we need as part of our future.”

“What You Think Is What You See?” “Right. Think about it. We need to close it soon.” He hung up.

The car stopped in front of the temple. It looked ancient and the board above the entrance said ‘Sri Irudayaleeswarar temple’. Even after having lived in Chennai for the past 25 years, I hadn’t heard of this temple. But I sensed something strange here. We walked inside the temple. I asked him “Why is this God popular among devotees with heart diseases?”

“Many years ago, a devotee called Poosalar showed the then King a temple that he had built inside his heart.” my friend started narrating.

“How did he show that?” I asked him “The king saw the temple built by the devotee in his heart through the communication that happened between the mind of devotee and the eyes of the king”.

I became restless.

“You mean the King was able to see or read what was

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inside the devotee’s brain?” I asked in utter disbelief.

“Yes, that’s what this temple says” He went ahead inside with his wife.

“How was that possible?”

“The sheer devotion to GOD and the power he got through that devotion made Poosalar convey what he thought.”

“So it is not science. It is something else” “Everything is something else until proved by science” I was slowed down by my thoughts of Poosalar who had found a way to communicate to others what he had in his mind. This happened thousands of years ago. It can’t be dismissed as a story written by the ardent devotees.

There must be some truth in what this story says. If this kind of communication from one brain to other’s eyes could happen long time ago, it could in the future as well. Who am I to suspect that science or power?

I called Steve and asked him to go ahead with BCI.

(1) Garri is a Nigerian food.

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About the Authors: Chandra Chandra heads the IMS practice at GAVS. He has around 25+ years of rich experience in IT Infrastructure Management, enterprise applications design & development and incubation of new products / services in various industries. He has also created a patent for a mistake proofing application called ‘Advanced Command Interface”. He thinks ahead and his implementation of ‘disk based backup using SAN replication’ in one of his previous organizations as early as in 2005 is a proof of his visionary skills.

Murali Babu Murali is the Global Head of Talent Acquisition and Workforce Management. He has over 2 decades of experience in Human Resources functions, predominantly in Talent Acquisition spanning across the Asia Pacific, China and Japan regions. Murali enjoys playing badminton with his daughter during the weekends, passionate about evening walks over the weekends, follows cricket and current affairs.

We recently celebrated Best Practices Day at GAVS with Garnet – a platform for GAVSians to exhibit their innovations/solution excellence. We, at GAVS, strive to provide an environment that is conducive to innovation.

GArnet is one such initiative towards that.

A platform like this not only helps showcase how these innovations can be implemented in other projects but also encourages healthy competition among the teams and individuals.

GArnet – Best Practices Day at GAVS

There were over 30 nominations, from which 13 finalists were chosen to present their solutions to a jury and other GAVSians.

Read on to find out which solutions impressed our judges the most.

1. Agreement Automation: The client is a global leader in product design, manufacturing, supply chain and aftermarket services. They have been collaborating with companies around the world to transform their concepts into branded products and deliver them to the market.

The GAVS team is responsible for assisting the clients on application development and maintenance.

Soumika Das

BizTalk, an Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) middleware tool from Microsoft, is used by the clients to exchange data with external systems/third party via Agreements. However, BizTalk has no business user windows/UI for creating BizTalk artifacts and Agreements.

Creating and changing the Agreements is time consuming and exerts enormous load on the SQL server.

The team created a unique framework and a UI for creating and handling the agreements.

The implementation of this solution resulted in reducing the workload of the resources, thus allowing them to channel their efforts into more critical tasks. For the clients, this solution ensures reduction of time and risks during migration and allows non-technical people to create Agreements for EDI. 2. Next Nudge: The client is an advanced AI-powered predictive analytics SaaS platform that integrates data-driven decision making into workflow to improve healthcare affordability. The platform currently serves over 60 million members and evaluates over 100 clinical service and affordability initiatives for enterprise clients who are primarily insurance vendors.

The GAVS team is responsible for designing, developing and testing the SaaS based analytics application as defined in the

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product’s roadmap published annually.

•

The team went beyond their scope of work and advised the clients on new enhancements to address their pain points. One major pain point was that the SaaS application was not robust enough to handle more than 40,000 subscribers per program.

The team revised the software architecture to handle 500,000 members/subscribers per program.

These solutions helped in reducing the ticket volume and the time to resolve issues.

Taking on a consultative role reinforces GAVS’ role as partner to its clients. For the clients, this solution brought in 4 new customers and improved their performance by 30%.

3. Automation for a Service Desk: The client is a global communications firm that partners with businesses and organizations to evolve, promote and protect their brands and reputations. The GAVS team is responsible for manning their global service desk and monitoring their network for security and operational incidents.

In an effort to evolve their service desk to a newage digital service desk, the team implemented the following solutions: •

•

•

• •

•

Self-Service Portal DL Automation: A selfservice portal was designed to improve the success rate of DL form automation. Post implementation, the success rate improved from 60% to 95%.

Printer Mapping Automation: A self-service portal was designed for users to choose their region and printer and install it in their system themselves.

No Owner DL Automation: Any distribution list found with disabled/termer/no owner will automatically be assigned an owner and notified.

Account Extension Automation: Account extension tickets were automated, and a separate form was created in the helpdesk tool.

Landing Page for Edelman Users: A landing page was designed to be a single-stop solution to most IT support needs of the client. There are self-help documents for the most common issues which results in ticket volume reduction.

Rehire Automation: Rehire process was automated as part of New Hire workflow and resulted in reduction of the workload of the Level 1 engineers.

Machine Learning implementation in Virtual Supervisor: This solution was implemented to increase the percentage of tickets being assigned to the correct engineer. The data of past tickets is used to identify who would be the most appropriate resource to resolve an issue.

4. Serverless Computing Solution by Ramakrishnan: The client is an American home furnishings manufacturer and retailer. They supply furniture to over 6,000 retail partners in 123 countries. The GAVS team is responsible for developing the application for data integration and transformation.

The clients required data integration with third party vendors to be completed within a short span of time and at minimal cost.

The solution proposed was Serverless Computing, which brings in the advantage of Pay-per-use, zero administration and auto-scaling. It helped deliver the project within a month at a significantly lower cost. For the clients, this solution reduced hardware and OS/ETL costs by 90% and did away with server maintenance.

5. Field Search by Karthick Gunasekaran: The client develops and markets medical devices and software solutions that help advance emergency care and save lives, while increasing clinical and operational efficiencies.

The GAVS team develops an e-Patient Care Report (ePCR) product. The ePCR suite has dynamically configurable screens that is used to capture patient care data and review and edit patient care reports.

There was no search facility to navigate the fields quickly. The person entering the patient’s details had to navigate to the required fields resulting in a delay in the creation of patient care reports.

The solution implemented was a user control that helped the medics search for the required fields and enter the details quickly. The improved userfriendliness of the product resulted in satisfied end customers.

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6. Filter based on Call by Gopi Ravichandran: The client develops and markets medical devices and software solutions that help advance emergency care and save lives, while increasing clinical and operational efficiencies.

The GAVS team develops an e-Patient Care Report (ePCR) product for them. The ePCR suite has dynamically configurable screens that is used to capture patient care data and review and edit patient care reports.

The e-PCR has 650 fields that weren’t grouped efficiently and thus required a long time to fill up.

To overcome this issue, they devised an approach to filter the fields based on the type of calls and help the medic complete the PCR quickly. For the clients, this product improvement increases the

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competitiveness of their product in the market and improves customer satisfaction From integrating personal assistants for voice commands in a mobile application to implementing proactive self-healing mechanisms to monitor and resolve issues; from automating a host of processes in a global firm to creating an application that reduces manual effort by 100 man-days, there were many other remarkable solutions presented.

The winners were announced at the townhall and felicitated by our CEO, Sumit Ganguli. Ramakrishnan was awarded the first prize in the individual edition for his Serverless Computing Solution while the Agreement Automation team won the team edition. We hope to see many more innovative solutions in the next edition of GArnet.

Machine Learning has become a necessity in every sector as a way of making machines intelligent while deep learning is gaining much popularity due to its superiority in terms of accuracy when trained with a huge amount of data. Whether we apply it to business, base our next project on it, or simply gain marketable skills – picking the right deep learning framework to learn is the essential first step towards reaching our goal.

New Entrant or Best in Class?

Saranya Ramesh

Currently, the three most popular frameworks for Deep Learning are: Keras, an open source neural network library written in Python. It can run on top of TensorFlow, Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, or Theano. It is designed to enable faster experimentation with deep neural networks and focuses on being user-friendly, modular and extensible. TensorFlow is an opensource software library for dataflow programming across a range of tasks. It’s a symbolic math library and is also used for machine learning applications such as neural networks. PyTorch is an open source machine learning library for Python, based on Torch, used for applications such as natural language processing. It is primarily developed by Facebook’s artificial-intelligence research group, and Uber’s “Pyro” software for probabilistic programming built on it. Each of them is suitable for different use cases.

Among the choice in terms of the libraries and frameworks available for machine learning/deep learning, these two libraries are the emerging frontrunners: Google’s TensorFlow, considered today’s best in class and the Facebook-backed Python package PyTorch, a new entrant that could compete in the field.

“Google made TensorFlow to let you spend all your time googling TensorFlow document, and Facebook made PyTorch to let you have enough free time to browse Facebook.” – Anonymous Yes, each of them has its own challenges revolving around two general use cases: training and inference.

TensorFlow is built around the concept of Static Computational Graph (SCG), which means, first we define everything that is going to happen inside our framework and then run it. That is, in Define-andRun framework, one would define conditions and iterations in the graph structure then run it. A network written in PyTorch is a Dynamic Computational Graph (DCG). PyTorch here is Define-by-run, wherein a graph structure is defined on-the-fly during forward computation; that’s a natural way of coding.

TensorFlow implementing this static graph has two great upsides: firstly, when a model becomes huge, it’s still easier to understand because everything is like a giant function that never changes and secondly, it’s always easier to optimize static computational graph because it allows for all kind of tricks like pre-allocating buffers, fusing layers, precompiling the functions, and so on.

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On the other hand, a network written in PyTorch is Dynamic Computational Graph; and as the word ‘dynamic’ suggests, it allows us to do anything we want to do. Like having any number of inputs at any given point of training in PyTorch – Lists, Stacks, no problem!

Another interesting feature is, networks are modular.

That means, each part is implemented separately which makes debugging easier, unlike in a monolithic TensorFlow construction. Thus, making PyTorch’s imperative style of programming very appealing.

PyTorch was rewritten in Python due to the complexities of Torch. This makes PyTorch more native to developers. It has an easy to use framework that provides maximum flexibility and speed. It also allows quick changes within the code during training without hampering its performance. PyTorch is preferable even more because of its speed, efficiency, and ease of use.

PyTorch includes custom-made GPU allocator, which makes deep learning models highly memory efficient.

Due to this, training large deep learning models becomes easier.

PyTorch is known for providing two of the most highlevel features: tensor computations with strong GPU acceleration support and building deep neural networks on tape-based auto-grad systems. PyTorch is known for advanced indexing and functions, imperative style, integration support and API simplicity. This is one of the key reasons why developers prefer PyTorch for

research and hackability. Also, this is one of the many libraries that has the potential to change how deep learning and artificial intelligence are performed. The key reason behind PyTorch’s success is it’s completely Pythonic and one can build neural network models effortlessly. It is still a young player when compared to its other competitors, however, it is gaining momentum fast.

PyTorch library is specially designed to be intuitive and easy to use. When a line of code is executed, it allows to perform real-time tracking of how our neural network models are built which contributes to its excellent imperative architecture and fast and lean approach.

TensorFlow best suited for a wide range of practical purposes. It is the obvious choice for many machine learning and deep learning experts because of its vast array of features. Its maturity in the market is important too. It has a better community support along with multiple language APIs available. It has a good documentation and is production-ready due to the availability of ready-to-use code. This is suitable for organizations yearning to productize their Deep Learning models. PyTorch is relatively new and has a smaller community than TensorFlow, but it is fast and efficient. In short, it gives you all the power of Torch wrapped in the usefulness and ease of Python. Because of its efficiency and speed, it’s a good option for small, research-based projects.

About the Author: Saranya is a Software Developer and loves to learn new technologies. She believes that “Anyone can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”

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Stories at Work – The Art of Business Storytelling

As the speaker moves through the slides talking facts, numbers and strategies, you are asleep with your eyes wide open or fidgeting with your phone, scrolling through your Facebook feed or thinking about an email to answer once you get back to your desk. And then the speaker finishes. Everyone is quiet with no questions or comments. Sounds very typical? But how would you incline to the content being discussed if the presenter uses an anecdote or a story. In a typical business setting, a story is considered to coverup something that has been goofed up. Let me bust that myth for you.

So, what is storytelling in business?

Business storytelling is a way to articulate your message, weaving stories and structures in a real business situation, to increase the impact and the ability of the audience to remember. It is different from the stories that are exchanged among friends over the dining table or by the water cooler. These stories need to be based on facts relevant to the business. Storytelling in business is wrapped with data or facts and delivered with emotion.

When a story is said, things dramatically change.

Speakers find it a real challenge to inspire and engage the listeners. When jazzy PPTs, graphs and charts fail to do the magic, stories swoop in to save the day.

Presentations with data will only hit the language processing unit of the brain where the words are plainly decoded for meanings and nothing else happens. When stories are used, the sensory cortex is activated and moves us to take an action. It harnesses the 3 powers of stories - 1. Stories are easier to understand and drive home the message 2. Stories inspire action 3. Stories are easy to spread.

Rama Vani Periasamy

“Humans think in stories, rather than facts, numbers or equations and the simpler story.”

– Yuval Harari

Do you recall an incident or the moment when you look at a photograph? Do you remember where were you when you first heard about a Tsunami hitting the shores of Bay of Bengal? The date or the incident becomes significant. Milestones are created and our brain processes tiny post it notes with details. So, when someone asks you where were you on December 26, 2004, you wouldn’t be making an effort to think.

That is the power of stories. Stories stay with us. The human brain releases a hormone called dopamine that influences memory and the information that is processed. It then becomes a part of our memory, which can be recollected anytime and narrated any number of times without any flaw. Therefore, when a message is wrapped with a story rather than facts and data points, it does real magic of inspiring and increasing its memorability.

Business stories can be broadly classified into 4 types. Any story will have a main character or a set of characters, a place, time, sequence of events and a statement of message. These attribute to the classification of the stories.

1. Connection Story – This one forms a bond with the listeners through an incident narrated

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by the speaker that was part of his/her life. This speaks about the narrator’s character, values and beliefs 2. Influence Story – This category plays a role in changing of opinions. First, the listener’s anti-story is discovered, then the narrator presents his/her narrative to make an opposite point of view, brings in a new perspective and gives a call for action. The influencing narrative is not pushed to the listener, but seeds in the other’s views and makes the listener open for alternatives.

3. Clarity Story – This category has 4 components; context to a past and its results; the change and its impact; new behavioral change; actions for future and the success factors 4. Success Story – This breaks the monotony of a case study that is infused with data and facts.

It speaks about the emotions felt before and after the problem resolution.

A saying goes as “Success is about 99% perspiration and 1% advertising”. Telling people what we have done and how we have accomplished it is as important as the actual act of accomplishment. Business storytelling plays a role in this.

Ritz-Carlton, a chain of luxury hotels in the United States holds meetings to collect “wow” stories of outstanding customer service from its hotel employees thrice a week. Staff members discuss these stories and their impacts, and the top ten stories are collected each year.

Apple retail stores end each day with a discussion on Net Promoter Scores of the employees. The top scorers get applauded and are asked to share detailed stories of what happened in their customer interactions.

The art of storytelling in business is a skill which is applicable to the leaders of an organization or even to a junior level engineer. If you have ever wondered about communicating with an impact, think no further, start your presentation with a relevant story. They enable you to connect, engage and leave a lasting impression.

Remember, stories are not an instrument to cover up mistakes.

Here’s an example of how a story can help with visualization.

Imagine the words: river, bicycle, nun, cigarette and noodles. What chances are that you’d remember these words by the time you finish reading this article? But imagine if there’s a story wrapped around these words.

“One day a man was riding his bi-cycle along the banks of a river. As he was riding, he saw a nun smoking cigarette. The nun waved at the man. He stopped in front of her and got down from the bicycle. They sat down by the river and shared the box of noodles the man had in his tiffin box clamped to the cycle.”

This may be a weird and an awful story, but the words have a visual pattern now and it will not be difficult to recollect. The story becomes memorable. So, next time when you are muttering to yourself the shopping list while walking up to the grocer: Bread, eggs, bananas, oil, chillies and mustard, try creating a story around these and recollect easily at the supermarket.

When cataloguing stories becomes a habit, it will be nothing but collecting gold dust. Story banks can be built from one’s own experience, stories heard from others, business books etc. Authenticity of a story is crucial. Exaggeration and fictitious events should be avoided. Omission of critical details that may mislead or even manipulate audiences must also be avoided.

So, all you data driven people, keep aside the graphs and charts. Deliver your message with an interesting story or an anecdote. Use rhetorical elements such as ‘imagine’ or ‘what if’ scenarios and see a change in the organizational behavior, which is the fulcrum to any business. Start your presentation with “I remember this incident…” and stop. Look around and you’d find the room full of people looking at you, waiting for a story.

This article is based on the book “Stories at Work” by Indranil Chakraborty.

About the Author: Rama is that everyday woman you see who juggles between family and a 9 hours work life. She loves reading history ,fiction, attempting half marathons and travelling.

To break the monotony of life and to share her interest on books & travel, she blogs and curates at www.kindleandkompass.com.

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“The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.�

- Friedrich Nietzsche

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