Support As A Technology
 
Month: March 2018

Automation

29
Mar
2018

Service Automation

There was a news recently, “Automation will reduce 70% of IT jobs”. Being an IT guy, this sounds terrible and raising lots of questions. If I am jobless now, obviously it wouldn’t matter to me much and may be those who are not in IT field will even bother about it, however for all those who are either in IT field or planning to join it, will certainly be tensed.

If we look back in early 90s, when the banks had decided to migrate all their manual systems to on-line automated systems. There was huge crowd agitating against banks for their decision and making hue and cry. Many of them even said that all the information will leak or the companies which will involve in this transition may take all your money. The story doesn’t end here, there were more rumors and concerns.

Now we all know what happened at the end. Think for a moment of not migrating the banking system online today, we might still be wasting hours and hours in the queue for depositing and withdrawing the money, money transfer to other banks will be difficult and business would not be even possible today.

Similarly if we see around us, we’ll see almost everything is on-line and computerized, even in the hospital the computerized machines are performing critical operations, keeping person alive on ventilator. On the other side, we are now having a driverless bus running in New York’s busiest street.

If we had not migrated, then we might be living in the Stone Age today. Hence we should take this news in positive way and should not be panicked. This will make our life easier down the line. Keep in mind, in case if it reduce the IT jobs, then again it will open the opportunities for those, who can get things automated and the best part of human is that it is keep on learning and upgrading itself, which computer may not be able to do it by its own!!

 

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/info-tech/automation-to-kill-70-of-it-jobs/article9960555.ece

 

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Facebook Startup Training Hub

29
Mar
2018

Training by Facebook

Recently the Facebook has started the “Startup Training Hub”. It is available at https://startups.fb.com

The Facebook id can be used to login and choose the lessons from the provided itemized list, which you want to learn. Since it is just started so not much data available there, however as a startup it is sufficient. They are promising to share more data shortly.

Unlike the other training portals, which are providing training sessions in the animation of video format, the Facebook is giving these trainings in readable format as of now. It is good for those who wants to read and learn. The catch here is, that if you don’t even read the full lesson and simply scroll down till end, you’ll get the training completion note with “start next training” option.

The Facebook is also giving an opportunity to those who want to create their own training plan, so by clicking the “create lesson plan” one can select the kind of training he/she want to go for. It will ask few basic questions before we can continue and based on the answers, it will provide a list of training lessons for you.

Again since it is Facebook and I think that is the reason why it’s idea is different than other training portals. It is quick, easy to load and as you read the complete lesson, the training will be marked completed.

I strongly recommend it to be explored by you at least once.

Happy learning Guys!!

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Add over LinkedIn

29
Mar
2018

LinkedIn Marketing

Almost everyone now a days is trying to earn by advertisement so do the LinkedIn and Facebook. LinkedIn is providing an option to bid for the ads. The one who wins the bid, gets an opportunity to show their ads. The good part here that LinkedIn is giving us an option to start whatever the budget we want to go for. It is not mandatory that we have to go for a higher amount only. This flexibility encourages the bidder to start as and when he/she want to. Also at any point of time, one can stop the services.

Here is the marketing URL https://business.linkedin.com/ where one can start as per requirement.

In terms of the investment, we can control it by setting a daily budget, a total budget, and maximum bids along with, whenever we want to start it and stop it.

There are 3 ways, which LinkedIn is offering us to control our expenditure over ads.

1- Total budget

If we want our ads to visible ASAP for a specific budget, then we can go for this option

2- Daily budget

If we want to set up a campaign that is always on, then this option is for us.

3- Setting bids

Set the maximum amount we are willing to pay for clicks, impressions, or delivered InMails. By this option we’ll never pay more than the price we bid for.

 

Once we’ll decide what option we should go for, we need to decide the pricing options. Again LinkedIn is proving 3 options there;

  • CPC – Cost per click – when people clicks our ads
  • CPM – Cost per 1000 impressions – when people sees our ads
  • CPS – Cost per send – when they receive the ads in mail

I believe at this point only two action left for us;

  • Decide about the ads
  • Give our credit cards details to LinkedIn
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Disaster recovery

28
Mar
2018

 

Disaster Recovery

“Disaster” is among one of the most hated word in this world. People scared & panicked whenever this word “disaster” is pronounced. There are various negative vibes coming in our mind as soon as we even think about it. The first question, which usually appears, do what now?

On the other hand we can treat this word as a teacher, who teaches us how to fight in such situations. It also makes our mind ready for such scenarios. This boosts our confidence by planning how to fight against the disaster.

The bigger companies are spending so much of amount to keep their DR (Disaster Recovery) environment ready parallel to the live environment. They are frequently testing the time of recovery of the system in case of disaster. Companies are more serious now, about the BCP (Business Continuity Planning).

For any IT company, their data is always very critical along with the availability of the application. The cloud has made this a lot easier for all the IT companies especially for the smaller companies, who can’t afford the hudge cost of big data centers and willing to maintain their DR environment. Even if we notice, our smart phones data can also be backed up over the cloud (Google/Apple/Azure), so that if our phone gets damage or if we want to change it, we can simply do it.

Today’s systems became much smarter to fight against the Disaster so do we! Now disaster has think, how to prove himself to be a real disaster.

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Google Lens

28
Mar
2018

Google Lens

A much needed app by Google has been recently released, called “Google Lens”. It is basically designed to bringing up relevant information using visual analysis, which means it is another form of system intelligence to allow us to know more about the new place and things etc.

Most of the time, while visiting to new places we used to go through many changes, such as time zone, environment, language and culture etc.  This includes many challenges as well, like what to eat, how to room around and identify the places. Here either we look for someone to guide us or the signal strength in our smart phone. J

Google has initially helped us a lot to solve these basic problems by allowing us to use their various free apps. Some mostly used are Google assistance, Google map and Android O/S. As per Google, now a day’s people are spending 1 billion hours every day on YouTube, every day users are navigating the Google maps for around 1 billion kilometers and now the Google Android has crossed 2 billion active devices in the world.

So get back to our transit duration, these apps assist us a lot to make every moment easier and memorable. On the same line, Google is now presenting the Google Lens, which will be a boon for everyone to help them pulling the information about the places and things what they are looking for. All we need to do is just open the Google Lens see via it. More details are here;

https://www.xda-developers.com/try-google-lens-launcher-google-photos/

 

Cheers!!

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Work from home

28
Mar
2018

Work from home

It was common for people to work more than 12 hours a day and 365 days in a year before the labor law came into its existence. This change has helped to achieve a balanced life for the employees. Business further developed and allowed their employees to take leaves, enjoy company paid holidays along with decreasing the number of working hours and working days. The next step for the employees’ betterment and business continuity plus cost saving was Work From Home policy.

 

Work from home policy allows the employee to connect remotely to the company and perform their day to day activities. Many big companies, especially the IT industries and media industries are allowing their employees to WFH. In most of the cases it does beneficial to the company, where as in some cases, employees are abusing it.  The WFH policy is a mutual agreement between both, employee and the employer, where the managers are playing a very critical role to make WFH as success or failure.

Let’s take an example of a manager who mostly interested in micro management. There are chances that he’ll keep on checking by e-mails, phones or chat, whether the employee is available or not. He might want to satisfy his ego by assuring that as soon as the employee moves out from his seat, will inform him or take permission from him, even for a cup of tea. Whereas couple of managers are letting team free and owning everything on his own shoulders. In both the cases, company will be at the loss side, as the employee will not as productive as it was expected during WFH.

 

If we talk about the benefit of the WFH, I think the beauty of it is, 24×7 availability, especially for the managed support projects. Employee does have the pressure of the severity 1 issues though. On the other hand if we talk about the drawback of WFH, then the major one is communication and discussion gaps especially for the development projects.

 

I believe that if any company is allowing the WFH to their employees, employee should give more respect to that company because it is allowing their employee to be free from the 9 to 6 regress physical availability in the office premises. On the other hand company is blindly trusting their employees by providing WFH facility. Those who are taking WFH for granted, may loss self-confidence and prefer to always be in their comfort zone, which means they might be out dated soon.

 

Thanks!!

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Your Service is No Longer Required

27
Mar
2018

How does it sounds, when one fine day, your office management calls you in front of HR and say “Your Service is No Longer Required”? Well it sounds terrible!! It feels like all hell broke loose. Earlier you were taking everything easy but now it will be all over the map.

Usually we do talk about our future, we do see many brands are promising to redefining our future, lots of policies are securing our future, however there is no one who can save us from the pink slip. We keep on living in the illusion of securing our future but at some point we lose our present.

No doubt, there are many, who really think and plan their future, however in general we live in our comfort zone. For me retirement and layoff are just two faces of same coin. In IT language, it is like Graceful restart or hard boot. In both scenario the mental situation is pretty much the same with same question, do what now? At the end many broke and looking for a hand.

In my personal opinion, no matter what situation is, two things we should religiously continue

  1. Regular exercise
  2. Keep ourselves engage in anything.

No matter we like above two points or not but I am positive that these two points keep our services required more than earlier!!

At some point the employees are aware of the situation of the company or the management, many are able to secure the position in the same organization, where as many in other organization. The question is, what happens to those, who has to face this sentence?

Eventually, if we notice, since from the beginning at every stage, we are getting trained for this situation. Don’t believe it?

Well it’s kind of true and we are practicing this every day. We are even saying this sentence many times in a day. Let’s analyze what all we have done today;

Woke up and said to the alarm, your service is not required today, left the bed, said same thing to it, done from the breakfast etc, again said the same sentence, took the public transport and reached to the destination, done with the work and left for home. The whole day, numerous of times we had repeated this sentence, so what’s so special when the same sentence will be told to us.

It’s just the matter of how have we planned our routine life. If we had planned it well, then this sentence will boost our confidence and if not then it will make ourselves drowned in the ocean of depression.

Choice is totally ours, so plan wisely!

 

Cheers!!

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Recruiter and the Candidate

27
Mar
2018

 

It is common to hear about the clashes between the recruiter and the candidate’s views, where candidates are blaming to the recruiter for taking them for granted and on the other hand recruiters are not happy with the candidate’s behavior and attitude.

It is a two way game, where both parties are equally responsible for their actions. In most of the cases, we are getting complains against the recruiters about wasting candidate’s time due to various reasons, where waiting time is the biggest culprit. This usually triggers the panic button of the candidate. They feel themselves as an object, which is waiting for its turn for the quality check. Hence they used to search for better options not giving importance to the company which had selected them.

Eventually the recruiter is making all the possible effort to assure that they are hiring the right candidate for the required position. Not just hiring but also assuring that the candidate will meet the company’s norms and full fill the requirement. In order to get it right, they usually align all the rounds, booking the location. During all these arrangement, they sometime overlook the wastage of candidate’s time.

Some recruiters are resolving this issue by taking appointment from both parties and keeping gap between the interview round. Up to some extent this helps, however still it needs to be mature.

The candidate should also take responsibility to be transparency about their options and if they get better option post offer letter. That’s the only way to change this game into better relationship.

Good Luck!!

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Service Unavailable

27
Mar
2018

Service Unavailable

We are talking about the driver less cars, drone airplanes, robots etc, however are we really thinking about “Service Unavailable” issues. What if the driver less bus runs into this scenario or may be a drone, what will be the solution then?

Today while visiting a job portal, I got this error message “Service Unavailable”, which is kind of unexpected. It is normal though. It happens to many times while navigating different sites. It could be due to various reasons, let’s not get into that details but this is a bit annoying. Sometimes if you refresh the page, the error will be resolved, whereas sometimes you need to wait to get it resolved for few minutes. These things are a bit technical for a lay man to understand. From a lay man prospective this is a bigger issue, no matter why did it happen.

The good part is that most of the companies are spending a bigger amount on monitoring and alerting their systems along with educating their customers. They are implementing the ITIL process to capture these incidents and providing immediate / permanent solutions along with RCA.

To conclude, these issues will remain be there, no matter how smart our systems or machines will be. However the duration and the occurrence of these issues will certainly be decrease as we go along.

 

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Artificial Intelligence

27
Mar
2018

We used to hear about many personality that they are very intelligent or brilliant, some are knowledgeable and some are taking wise decision. In the upcoming world, we may not listen these as we are getting more and more dependent over the artificial intelligence.

We are now more focused towards the data analysis. We are taking decisions based on the captured data, lesson learnt and historical data. Especially while purchasing any product, we used to see its detail, such as who is the manufacturer, what are used to get the product to get it’s shape and the most important user’s review, star rating.

All these are part of artificial intelligence and helping everyone to take wise decision.

There was saying, “If you are not wise then at least have wise people around you” now the wise people’s advance form is artificial intelligence.

 

We used to watch lots of videos and movies, however do we remember each and every scenes from all those videos or movies?

Whenever some part of the movie or a clip of a video shown to use, we used to recall the whole movie, which we might have seen a while ago but if someone ask at what point that particular scene was in the movie, it may be a bit difficult for us to recall.

Usually we remember part of any movie or recall it as a story instead of a time line. At some point of time if we will be asked to search a particular scene from a 3 hour movie, we may find it as a tedious job. And imagine if we will be asked to search a particular action performed by an actor from all of his movies J well we may take ages to first search the list of movies he had worked on then finding that particular action. Good part is that here AI will helps us.

Recently Google had made it easy for us. They has developed there system and trained it so well that this kind of search is possible now. It is totally based on the data analysis and return precise results in a fraction of second. All we need to do is, use their APIs to make it happen for us. Here is the URL for the same https://cloud.google.com/video-intelligence/

 

Cheers!!

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