Raktim Singh

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The Amazing Little Perks and Challenges of Internet of Things (IOT)

Raktim Singh
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The Amazing Little Perks and Challenges of Internet of Things (IOT)

The Internet of things (IoT) is turning many imagination and fiction work into a reality.

With just a clap, you can switch on your living room’s lights or close the fridge with a button while sitting on a couch.

With the surge of several device usages, now you can connect them and send information across. 

What makes it possible to connect?

The Internet of Things (IoT) 

IoT, in simple words, is connecting things through the Internet. Connecting hardware items, sensors, or devices to the Internet brings efficiency to the user.

The name “Internet of Things” was coined by Kevin Ashton in 1999. Now, IoT is used in almost every industry.

IoT’s prominent applications are cars, voice-activated assistants like Alexa, Siri, health-monitoring devices, security devices, smart meters, fitness and health trackers, road sensors, and many more.

The devices work using sensors by exchanging data to a computer or software, allowing them to perform the required task.

Due to the “smart” utility and increasing automation level, there’s a surge in IoT use among various devices.

It’s been reported that around 127 objects are synced up every second.

Perks of Internet of Things (IoT)

Devices connected to the Internet allow data collection, transmission, and automation.

For instance, devices can collect information, send it to the user, receive information, and act on it. If not, IoT can help with doing both of these things.

Here are some of the substantial benefits of IoT:

  1. Access to More Data, Leading to Better Decision

Due to the built-in sensors, the devices can collect large amounts of data in different areas.

For instance, apart from knowing which food has expired in your smart refrigerator, you can also know additional information like power consumption, average time spent on opening the doors, temperature, and much more.

Not just for the customer, IoT can help companies to analyze a particular device design based on the data for improving features.

IoT allows farmers to understand when’s the right time to water the plants while also informing the soil’s state.

This is possible through an automatic watering system with added sensors put in the soil to measure its moistness and convey other information, helping harmers to act better.

Companies have started to realize this technology’s power, leading to a significant increase in the market.

The market value of IoT is suspected to increase to over $3 trillion annually by 2026.

  1. Efficient Ability to Track and Monitor

Data is the new oil. Tracking the customers’ data helps the company understand its consumers better and create items based on their buying patterns.

People can track the quality of the goods at their home, and by monitoring its state, they know when to replace an item. You can efficiently use the resource by tracking your assets.

Businesses also benefit significantly by active tracking and monitoring, especially in the MRO industry.

The manufacturing industry uses expensive machinery, where single damage can result in high downtime.

By real-time insights and visibility of your assets, IoT helps improve predictive maintenance on critical machinery, ultimately enhancing the production quality.

  1. Effective Resource Utilization and Cost Savings

IoT allows excellent use of assets and results in cost savings.

For instance, whenever you leave your room, the lights will automatically turn off, keeping your electricity bill pretty light.

Connected devices come with various benefits and implementations.

The IoT system helps with machine-to-machine (M2M), Machine to physical Entity (M2E) communication, causing better and more durable efficiency for both the company and user.

So, a physical bridge can tell, traffic status on the bridge, weather condition near the bridge, the health of bridge & whether this requires immediate attention or that can be done later.

Also, all devices will be able to talk with each other and exchange useful information.

In the case of self-driving cars, each car can communicate and suggest which route to take, avoid accidents etc.

In offices, earlier there was always a problem of, improper usage of air-conditioner, lights. On a floor, these devices, used to run, even if no employee is there.

Even at home, there is laziness to switch off fans, once we move between rooms.

Now with IOT, these devices will sense, whether anyone is there in room, floor and switch off accordingly

IoT Still Needs Work : 

With the plethora of perks, IoT is proven to possess severe safety and security vulnerability.

Due to widespread connectivity, almost every device is susceptible to attack or misuse.

A minute attack can bring down the entire system, causing significant loss.

Another major issue with large amounts of data storage can also result in personnel misuse.

If every device stores data it’s collecting, then there’s a chance for someone to access all this data and use it for their means.

Hackers can violate the right to personal privacy.

With IoT, everything will be connected to the Internet, so every bit of information stored in each device is easily accessible to the hacker.

What you keep and eat in your fridge, what’s your heartbeat through your smartwatch, and what’s on your phone can be under anyone’s reach.

The infamous ransomware attack called Wanna Cry affected computers in 150 countries.

People have expressed the detriment of how easy it is to hack and exploit devices nowadays.

Researchers have also illustrated how simple it is to hack cars, power plants, and even voting machines.

Safety violations and security vulnerability are the most significant issues for every individual. And there’s no real solution offered by IoT yet.

Also, as now everything is connected, a virus can bring down, the whole system.

During COVID time, the virus spread to all countries as each country is connected & everyone was traveling and hence, spread the virus.

The same can be true for IOT. A virus, on one device, can infect other connected devices & bring down the whole system.

Although several security methods are released to put an end to such issues, the biggest challenge for IoT is strengthening its security and safety level.

Also, we still don’t have, one standard protocol, by which each device, will talk with others. It’s like a toothbrush. Everyone needs it but no one wants to use the toothbrush of others.

Lack of an agreed common standard will create a lot of siloed clusters in the future.

Presently, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Standards Association lists many standards available and being worked on for several different devices.

Microsoft, too, considered these issues and built up its system – IoT Central. The system allows businesses a central platform to set up their IoT device.

Conclusion

Lastly, by all means, IoT is a revolutionary technology that is capable of significantly impacting people’s lives.

However, being aware of IoT’s challenges and issues can help us only to improve and fix those problems to leverage its advantages without any risk.

What are the Important Pillars of Agile ?

Raktim Singh
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What are the Important Pillars of Agile ?

AGILE : Important Pillar

1.   Agile doesn’t mean that you need to do work faster. Agile says that you should be able to respond to ‘changes ( requirement change, schedule change..)’, faster.

I have seen many groups, who are ‘supposedly agile’. They have done the work breakdown, they deliver on a continuous basis. But they are not able to handle any change request. That defeats the purpose of agile.

Remember, Agile came into the limelight once, we moved towards the Software industry. In the manufacturing industry, “Six Sigma” and “Just In Time” were good practices. But in the software industry, the output expected is very different. In the manufacturing industry, you produce a car, a very tangible thing. You can always create a well proto-type of car and a good assembly line will produce, cars at scale.

Now, you have to deliver software code. No physical output here. In the initial era of the software era, we used to work in the waterfall model. That is, we used to take requirements from clients, do design, coding, testing as per our/vendor’s understanding & deliver software code to clients. There used to be a big mismatch between what the client had asked and what got delivered. Many times, lot of rework was required, which used to be painful ( and costly), both for the client as a vendor.

The reason being, it was very hard for the client to fully & clearly explain the requirement & it was equally difficult for a vendor to understand each permutation/combination of requirements.

To resolve that problem, Agile came into the picture.  The main aim of this is that client should see the system ( say banking system), continuously working with new software, and tell what changes should be done. This rework should cost a bomb to neither client nor vendor.

To emphasize again, If you are really agile, you should be able to respond to changes, faster ( and not necessarily work faster).

2.   Understand the difference between Agile team vs agile enterprise.

3.   When the process is King, ideation will take a back seat.

4.   Innovation requires ‘relaxed focused’ mind. This means that when you plan to do something, be clear what you will NOT do.

Structure & Roles

    1. Understand the strength of our team members & bring work to him as per his strength. Don’t just add more team members in a project. ( That is don’t bring person to work but bring work to person)
    2. Define the Agile career path for your team members.
    3. Remember, each company goes through four phases. Entrepreneur, Visionary, Operator & Pragmatic.

First entrepreneurs start the journey. They are risk-takers, can sell & sometimes they ignore the fact that they can fail ( and hence they succeed). After that visionary phase comes. They put the proper framework to scale that idea. In the third phase, Operators come. They make sure that that with the established framework, the output is produced without any issue. The last phase is the pragmatic phase.  By this time, the original idea has either lost its relevance or there are too many companies in the market, who are able to produce output by that idea. This is most important phase & many times, companies get hung on/don’t accept the fact it’s time to shut down. Correct action in this phase is to do the fire-sale , minimize the loss and move to the next idea.

Leadership & Culture

1.      Trusting & empowering team vs Command & Control model

2.      Managers should clearly articulate the ‘Value” added by them

3.      Remove blockers

4.      Continuous feedback loop from real customer

5.      More frequent & flexible planning.

6. It’s easier to fool people than convince them that they have been fooled.

Un-learning & Learning in Digital world

Raktim Singh
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Un-learning & Learning in Digital world

Getting ready for the future:

  1. Importance of Learning & un-learning

 One of the most important traits, which is required in today’s world is the ‘Habit of continuous un-learning & learning’. This is very important for all IT industry workers. They are doing software projects, which mainly involves automating the work of other industry. Like, automating, inventory management, banking operations, etc.

So that naturally beg the question that these IT industries workers, should automate their own internal work also.  It means, none of the software engineers, should do work, which he was doing say, six months back. He should have automated that work.

So, what next for this software engineer.

This is where un-learning & learning comes into the picture.

(              (2) Current challenges

I see a big problem in our current system. In almost all our colleges, lot of emphasis is given on learning hard skills ( Math, Science, Commerce….). Though these are important, almost no coaching/mentoring happens on soft-skills.

And it’s very hard ‘To learn how to unlearn’.

I will go to the extent of saying that learning math is easy but learning, how to work in team ( where team members are getting changed ) is very difficult.

That is, you know that 2+2=4. It’s always true. But when you are working in a team, you have to adjust your working style based on other co-workers. If your team is always constant, you are lucky. But many times, it is not true.

Your team members will keep on getting changed. The methods you used in your last team, may not work. You may have to learn new skills & change your style, based on new work & based on new team members.

  1. Skills to focus upon

According to me, these 3 skills are most important. That is ‘Self-awareness’, ‘Learning attitude’ & ‘Pattern finding’.

Self-awareness: Do you really know, yourself?

So If I take my example, I will say that I ( Raktim) am sleeping with Raktim for last 45 years. I know, how I passed my 10th exams, how I prepared for IIT, how I behaved with various persons, incidents where I was telling the truth or hiding the facts. Yes, you get coached by your parents/teachers/mentors/managers.

But think of it. In my 45 years of life ( that is around 4,00,000 hours), together my parents/teachers/mentors/managers may have spent maximum of around 40,000 hours with me. That is, only 10% of my total life. So, I only can be the correct judge of knowing, how Raktim is. The same applies to each one of you. You only can know, things which you are good at, things which you enjoy/hate, your strong areas or areas of importance.

Once you introspect & know yourself, you can decide how you want to spend the rest of your life. Now if you want to perform some task, you know, whether you alone can do this or you want to take help from someone because you are not an expert in that area. Remember, no one is perfect. The difference between successful & unsuccessful people is that a successful person knows himself, takes up work in which he is good at and takes help in areas, where he is not good at.

Learning attitude: You need to have curiosity & the ability to learn. Let me give one example here. Say, there are two-person, John & Robert. Both want to learn music. John spends 9 hours daily practice. Robert also spends 9 hours. But he spends 6 hours practicing & the rest 3 hours taking (brutal) feedback from his mentor, doing retrospection of his work & plan for the next day. Now, as per you, who will succeed in the future? I believe, the answer is Robert. The reason is, that Robert is spending time in learning, doing retrospection of what is going right, what is going wrong & planning accordingly.

Pattern finding: You can call this connecting the dots also. Let me give one example here. There are 3 friends, say Ram, John & Sreeni. They felt hungry on Saturday Night. So they drove to search for a good restaurant. While driving, they saw that restaurant named ‘Tasty Foods’ was open. So they went there and ate.

As part of this, Ram learned that the restaurant ‘Tasty Foods’ remains open late at night. So in the future also, he can go to ‘Tasty Foods’ and eat.

John realized that ‘Tasty Foods’ was near ‘railway station’. So he concluded that shops/restaurants/hotels near ‘railway station’ normally remain open, late at night. So if he goes to another city, if needed, he can go near the railway station in that city & can get a restaurant.

Sreeni realized that the ‘railway station’ is a transportation hub. So, I go to any other transportation hub ( say ‘bus station’ or ‘airport’..), he can get a restaurant, which remains open, late in the night.

So according to me, Sreeni is good at finding patterns and he will be more successful in life.

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