Blockchain: A Gamechanger or a Passing Fad ?

Blockchain is being widely viewed as a highly disruptive technology that is likely to impact  both industries and  governments alike in the near future. The Blockchain (and Bitcoin) technology was invented by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. Interestingly, even to this day, no one truly knows the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto although an article published a few days ago argues that Satoshi Nakamoto was in fact computer scientist  Hal Finney who passed away in 2014! 

So what is the core idea behind blockchain ? Well if a picture is worth a thousand words, a video must be worth many more. I would like to invite the reader to view the following short video tutorials to get a good conceptual grasp of blockchain and related concepts.

1. What is Blockchain ?   [ Also This video ]
2. What is a smart contract ?
3. 19 industries that the Blockchain is likely to disrupt ( this video has names of startups that you can further explore on the internet) 
4. What is Bitcoin ?

Blockchain holds immense promise to fundamentally redefine our ideas of money, economy, business and society opening up possibilities to create entirely re-imagined  workflows leveraging the full potential of global collaboration mediated by digital networks. Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott, authors of the book Blockchain Revolution, describe Blockchain as follows:

"Blockchain is a vast, global distributed ledger or database running on millions of devices and open to anyone, where not just information but anything of value — money, but also titles, deeds, identities, even votes — can be moved, stored and managed securely and privately. Trust is established through mass collaboration and clever code rather than by powerful intermediaries like governments and banks".

The disruptive nature of this technology is due to the fact that it is immutable i.e. it cannot be tampered with because it is decentralized, is in full public gaze and has no single central authority and therefore no single point of failure. Most importantly, it creates a transparent trust mechanism for unknown people to interact with each other without an intermediary. Reflecting on this trust mechanism, Professors Dirk Baur and Niels Van Quaquebeke explain[1]:

“The blockchain does not create or eliminate trust. It merely converts trust from one form to another. While we previously had to trust financial institutions to verify transactions, with the blockchain we have to trust the technology itself. When you make a traditional money transfer the bank will first verify that you have sufficient cash, and then debit your account and credit the recipient. Think of the blockchain as a decentralized version of this process. Rather than all of this information being held and verified by the bank, it is done on an open public ledger”.

Many believe that Blockchain holds immense promise in transforming Government services. An interesting article published by the Wharton Business School explains this in some detail.

Blockchain and Bitcoins are sometimes confused. Someone has nicely elucidated the difference by drawing and interesting analogy: Blockchain is the operating system, Bitcoin is one app running on that operating system.

So are blockchains and bitcoins going to live up to the above promise and change the world? As always, there are skeptics. Paul Ford, entrepreneur and technologist in an article titled Bitcoin is Ridiculous. Blockchain is Dangerous differs. There are also concerns about the negative impact of blockchain and bitcoin technology on the environment particularly due to the amount of electricity required to 'mine' bitcoins. It has been reported that Iceland uses more energy to mine bitcoins that it uses to supply power to its households. A recent article in economic times titled How is the growth of bitcoin affecting the environment? also highlights this issue. Many Governments around the world are opposed to the cryptocurrency idea.  The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) last year banned cryptocurrency in India and the matter is currently being heard in the Supreme Court of India.

Skepticism aside, I would like to conclude on a positive note with a sanguine quote from Don Tapscott:

"The first generation of the digital revolution brought us the Internet of information. The second generation — powered by blockchain technology — is bringing us the Internet of value: a new platform to reshape the world of business and transform the old order of human affairs for the better".

 What say reader ?

The Rise and Rise of eCommerce

Eddie Machaalani and Mitchell Harper, co- CEO of BigCommerce made an intresting statement. They said - "By 2022, brick and mortar retail spaces will be little more that showrooms".  What Eddie and Mitchell alluded to is known as the "Amazon Effect" - the disruption that brick and mortar stores are facing competing with eCommerce companies. Just three days ago, the Amazon Effect took its latest toll - retail outlets of car companies in the USA.

The global growth of eCommerce  has been nothing short of phenomenal. According to Statista, in 2018, global e-retail sales stood at USD 2.8 Trillion likely to go up to USD 4.8 Trillion by 2021. The Indian eCommerce story is no different. Ecommerce has seen amazing growth in India. According to India Equity Brand Foundation in its Indian eCommerce Industry Report 2019, the eCommerce market in India is likely to grow from 38.5 Billion USD in 2017 to around 200 Billion USD in 2027.

Apart from other things, one of the big drivers of eCommerce adoption has been the emergence of a new category of eCommerce software called the eCommerce platform available in Software as a Service or SaaS mode. The essential idea behind the eCommerce platform comes from the organic need for front and back office services integration. Oracle Netsuite nicely explains the eCommerce Platform idea in this interesting post. Another good explanation of eCommerce Platforms and their business benefits can also be found here.

So what's the road ahead for eCommerce in the time to come ? T.J. Welsh, VP Marketing at Stryde, in this short insightful post on Forbes, lists some key eCommerce trends in 2019 and how they are likely to influence digital marketing strategies.

While eCommerce has had a phenomenal run in India so far, it is probably facing its biggest challenge yet. There has been a significant development in the last couple of months that, according to some observers, has the potential of dampening eCommerce growth in India. The government has announced the new FDI rules for eCommerce primarily intended to create a 'level playing field' between eCommerce companies and brick mortar shops. As reported widely in the media, this is a move that in intent, proposes to benefit offline shop owners and traders by preventing eCommerce companies to offer deep discounts to consumers. A recent article in India Today provides a synoptic overview of the new rules and how they are likely to impact eCommerce companies and consumers in the time to come.

To conclude this post, I would like to mention that recently, Amazon has taken the 'Amazon Effect'  to a whole new level, redefining the very concept of a brick and mortar store by opening 11 Amazon Go stores in Seattle, Chicago and San Fransisco California USA. To shop in these stores, all you need is the Amazon Go app on your mobile phone. You just walk into the store, pick whatever you like and just walk out of the store. The store runs without human assistance and when you pick something off a shelf, it is detected automatically and charged to your account. Watch this video to experience the Amazon Go store yourself. Pretty amazing stuff by any standards !

In conclusion, these are exciting times and with higher internet penetration, eCommerce will break new ground in the time to come. It still has a long way to go when you look at the total share of retail selling, but as Cushla Sherlock of Credit Suisse  says, "The eCommerce industry is a force that no investor can afford to ignore".

Odoo : An Awesome Open Source ERP

One must take time out to be grateful for the good things in one's life. Well teaching MIS, I surely count Odoo as a blessing. It's a wonderful open source ERP software, generously provisioned online in the demo mode and magnanimously shared with the teaching community (as Odoo education) by its developers. The software started it's journey in 2005 when it's was called TinyERP. Subsequently, TinyERP was renamed as OpenERP and then renamed again as Odoo. More information about the Odoo ERP can be found here.

For those who wish to get their hands dirty with some practice, the online demo version of Odoo is available from demo.odoo.com. Do not be afraid to experiment and peek around pushing buttons. Some good video tutorials are available here. Also check out these helpful user guides.

Go on then. Try it.

😊

Artificial Intelligence : The Concerns (Part 2)

Image Credit: Gerd Leonhard

In 1900s London, there used to be a job which went by the name of knocker-upper. The job of the knocker-upper was to knock at your bedroom window with a long stick and wake you up so that you could reach your workplace in time. When alarm clocks became a common commodity, this vocation was lost. Fast forward to 2019 and it appears that we are revisiting the 'Knocker-Upper' story - the only difference is that the alarm clock has been replaced by 'Artificial Intelligence' and the knocker-upper is us. All of us. 

One of the biggest concerns surrounding the 'commodification' of Artificial Intelligence or AI is the impending loss of jobs. Studies after studies have forecast job losses with robots or algorithms or some such flavor of AI  driven tech replacing what people are currently doing to earn a livelihood. The 2019 AI Newsreader story from my previous post (and an automated news content generator called Wordsmith), for example, has created an understandable scare of job loss among journalists. Well the key question is - 'is it for real ?' and the safest answer is that the opinion is currently divided.  Some experts sound alarmist, some sound optimistic while some other say -  we really don't know. If you ask me for an opinion, I would like to say that large scale job disruption is inevitable and governments around the world would be wise to take a serious note of it given the already high rates of unemployment.

The other fear, of course is , that AI could turn rouge and destroy the human civilization. If you feel this might be far fetched and improbable, read this story about the Microsoft's Tay Chat bot and why it had to be shut down.  Similar alarm was created in the media when chat bots in an AI experiment invented their own language to communicate with each other, a language that humans could not understand. Luminaries like Elon Musk and the late Stephen Hawking have repeatedly echoed this concern in no uncertain terms. A much talked about documentary - Do You Trust this Computer highlights similar views. The bottom line is that while benefits of AI technology are huge, so are the concerns. So should it be halted. No. Should we move ahead with caution ? Absolutely yes.

Well there it is. What say reader ?

Artificial Intelligence : The Promise of a New World (Part 1)

Image Credits: Gerd Leonhard

If there is one thing that can be said with certainty about the fascinating field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), it has to be an unequivocal acknowledgement that AI is on the cusp of opening possibilities that the human civilization has not experienced before. To get a flavor of what's coming, lets take a quick look at three intriguing stories. 

The first story comes from Boston Dynamics, a US company pioneering the field of robotics. Since the last few years, they have been working on the development of Atlas, an autonomous robot or humanoid. A few months ago, they released this video showing Atlas autonomously doing Parkour. This is not a special effect in a Spielberg movie. It's for real and its implications in military, industry, law enforcement etc. are not hard to see. 

The second story is more thought-provoking. Go to this website and you will see the face of a person. Looking at the face you might think - 'so what's so great about this face ?'. The thing is that this person does not exist ! This face has been entirely created by AI ! And while you are still grappling with intrigue, China has already started using this to broadcast News using world's first AI generated digital news anchor who can work 24x7 all 365 days a year without salary!

The third story might warm the hearts of all those who are trying (maybe unsuccessfully)  to get rid of those extra pounds acquired with nutritional support from the likes of  McDonald's, KFC and Pizza Hut. Well you can forget listening to the doctors now - the A.I. Diet , generated specially for you by an AI algorithm, is here and you might quite like what it advises you!

With all these remarkable possibilities that AI is opening up, we are now entering what many people are calling  the algorithm economy. An interesting article titled How AI Will Change Everything in 2019 further brings out some interesting insights into this fast changing landscape.   

We are truly at the cusp of something transformational that is likely to transfigure the world like never before. In fact I would like to stick my neck out to say that in a few years time, we will be embracing World 2.0 which is going to alter many existing paradigms in ways that have not been imagined before. This transmutation is unstoppable but it is, by no means going to be easy. 

In part 2 of this post, I will highlight some societal concerns related to the rise of Artificial Intelligence. 

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One key technology that is powering a number of exciting AI applications is Artificial Neural Networks or ANN. While understanding ANNs is not exactly intuitive, I invite the reader to watch this wonderful video for a good conceptual overview of ANN and deep learning.

There is Lots to Learn from ERP Failures

While it is nice to hear about ERP success stories, it is equally instructive to analyse stories of ERP faliure. It might come as a surprise to many that ERP failures are quite common. This is in spite of the fact that for the past two and a half decades, ERPs have been implemented year after year in many enterprises around the world and stories of success and faliures, widely shared. If the sheer number of ERP failures (partial or total) are anything to go by, the learning is that ERP implementations cannot at all be taken for granted and organisations going in for ERPs would be well advised to keep their guard up at all times if they wish to have any fair chance at success.

In this backdrop, I would like to share a 2018 monumental ERP faliure story of SAP Implementation at Lidl. Lidl, a large German retailer, spent many years and 580 million USD in installing an ERP and ended up getting nothing ! An abridged but concise account of the Lidl ERP faliure is available here.

Lessons from Lidls SAP faliure provides some additional insights into how such faliures can be avoided. 

It is said that failure is a great teacher. Quite true. It's just that in the context of ERPs, the lessons are quite expensive and there is no telling if you have learned them well enough to avoid disaster !

What say reader ? 

Indian IT Act: Part 2 – What Managers need to Know

In my last post, I encouraged readers to familiarize themselves with the provisions of the Indian Information Technology Act (2000). I would like to carry forward that conversation in this post and highlight some other sections of the ITA (2000) that might be of particular interest to managers [1] :

1. Section 43 of the act (Chapter IX) outlines penalty  and  compensation for  damage  to  'computer' & 'computer  systems'. 
2. Section 43 A deals with compensation to be paid by a corporate entity or company for negligent loss of sensitive personal data in its possession.
3. Section 70 B of the ITA designates the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team or CERT as the national agency to respond to computer security related incidents. 

Interested readers can browse the IT act 2000 to know more about the provisions of the above mentioned sections.

Currently, the IT Act (2000) does not specifically cover new computing paradigms like 'Cloud Computing' and  'Virtualization' which could pose interesting legal questions. For example, does the definition of 'Computer System' or 'Computer' in the IT Act include a Virtual Machine ? Similarly, while the IT Act (2000) provides power to confiscate a computer, how would the IT Act stand up to a situation when a virtual machine (VM) is moved to a different host just before seizure ? 

Likewise, while the IT Act (2000) and other acts like the Indian evidence act 1872 (Section 65B) recognize electronic records and permit them to be used as admissible evidence in a court of law,  electronic discovery or eDiscovery [1] as practiced in the USA and some other countries is yet to find roots in India. As more and more information gets exchanged digitally, creating and strengthening the legal framework for eDiscovery requires urgent attention of Indian lawmakers.

In the near future, managers would probably have to be much better informed about the legal dimensions of digital information interchange and would have to review storage, organization and dissemination of information on enterprise IT platforms based on eDiscovery best practices.   

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[1] Watch an instructive video on the eDiscovery concept and eDiscovery Resource Model by Travis Cornwell and Tom Clippard.