Design Thinking Practice for Business Analysts

How do you sort out when your friend is in need?

"George needs a mobile phone to establish contact with his friends and family members around the world."

If George is your friend or family member, what would you suggest? You may ask the following questions and get clarified on his needs.

1. What is the budget of buying mobile phone and preferred Operating Systems?
2. Does he have any Brand or Model preference?
3. How frequently Internet is being used?
4. What are the most frequently used applications?
5. George's expectation on Photograph and Video Quality?
6. Usage of Gaming, Songs and Social Networking requirements?
7. Expectation on Battery back-up and Storage requirement clarity?
8. What is the time frame for upgrading his next mobile phone?
9. Whether need to buy immediately or wait for a whole for latest release?
10. Phone handling mode of George whether it is soft or hard?

In my view, these answers can provide the clarity on the need of buying a new smart phone. Yeah! It must be a Smart Phone that we can decide based on the answers. It can also be a Smart Phone from XYZ Brand ABC Model which is currently available in Stores. Alright! Solution for George's mobile phone requirement is addressed or advised.

In other way, you would have suggested or insisted George to buy a Latest Smart Phone which is available in Amazon.com. It's also a kind of solution which can sometimes better than previously suggested solution.

George Only Knows!

In the first case, you are absolutely responded as a Designer or Design Thinker. Reason is that you understand the needs, budget and other parameters which are related to 'Interacting to the Solution' (Smart Phone).

Design Thinking: An Imperative Jargon For Innovators

In this article, I tried to brief about why Business Analyst Professionals can incorporate Design Thinking in their Process Improvement, Product Development and Application Services area to improve customer satisfaction through innovation. In Modern Era of Business Analysis, lot of challenges in addressing solutions for one or more requirements because of dynamic changes in customer needs. None of the solution designers can confidently confirm their ideas are the best because of frequent changes in the Context.

If Dynamic Change in Customer Needs and Change in Context are the problems, 

Design Thinking is the best solution.

In Creative Problem Solving era, Design Thinking is a process of achieving solutions and it has a human-centred core which encourages organizations to focus on the people they're creating for, which leads to better products, services, and internal processes. Business Analysts will be forced to follow the design thinking principles to innovate the best solution in dynamic customer context in near future.

Empathy — Understanding the needs of those you’re designing for.

Ideation — Generating a lot of ideas. Brainstorming is one technique, but there are many others.

Prototype — Testing ideas with few experiments.

Innovation Born!

Design Thinking: Fundamentals

What is 'Design' and who is the 'Designer'? Designing is just finding a solution to a problem and defining the prototype to function of the solution. Designer is the one who plays vital role of innovating the best possible solution in Product R&D, Service & Experience, Business Process, Leadership Management and Organizational Change. Designers are curious on the people who is directly interacting with the solution and how the solution affects the context. Business Analysts who are playing Subject Matter Expert, Business Architect and Solution Designer roles can use Design Thinking principles for Creative Problem Solving opportunities.

I have prototyped my own Creative Problem Solving pattern called '3I Design Thinking Process' which can be used as a framework to achieve an innovative solution for organization change context.

"I will describe this framework in a separate arcticle"

According to World Economic Forum, Fourth Industrial Revolution lists the Top 10 Skills in 2020. In this list, Design Thinking process can fit with top 3 skills like Complex Problem Solving, Creative Thinking and Creativity. Customer focused innovations and Context based solution designing are inevitable skill-set for Business Analysts in this era.

Yeah.. Got It!

Design Thinking - Implementations

Business Analysts are associated in Product Development and Service Industries as Designers to bring innovation on Product and Process Improvements. Most of the Software Product companies especially in Healthcare and Financial Industry, depending on Designers to provide customer centric solutions in this competetive world. They are focusing on Key and Unique problems or opportunities in these industries and create innovative solutions.

Designers are responsible for creating the strategy of releasing a minimum viable product (MVP) which can be run independently in production system. An MVP provides a limited set of core features to meet the immediate needs of a target market and MVP development is a strategy to quickly introduce limited-featured products to narrowly defined markets, to manage the risk of creating things customers don’t want or no longer need.

The following picture shows an example of how Designer can create or architect the MVP Requirements and Solutions in customer context.

Wow! It's Amazing!

Building Design Thinking Capabilities

There are many courses available to train you and your organization Design Oriented. But I personally feel, we are all Design Thinkers in nature and I have started this article in this way. We use our Design Thinking skills in our personal life for making important decisions and we must extend the scope of Design Thinking into our professional life to make better organization culture.

Journalists are extremely good in asking questions and they start practising with 4Ws. WHO? WHERE? WHEN? and WHY?

Business Analysts as Designers can ask these questions in the inception of Product Development Lifecycle to extract the users and their needs.

WHO - Who is going to use the product? What is their preferences? In which Context, they use the product the most? What do they do without your product?

WHERE - In your customer's ecosystem, where is your product going to sit? Is it a core service to the customer or just supporting service in their environment?

WHEN - "Done is better than Perfect" so Designers must find a way to identify the implementation timeline of your product and solution context. MVP modelling plays crucial role to achieve the timeline.

WHY - Why do you innovate the solution as a product and how it values the customer by creating impact in their Business?

Great! I'm no more an ordinary Business Analyst. I'm a Designer!

Summary

Apple, Honeywell, Capital One and GE are global pioneers of implementing Design Thinking approach in their organization. Apart from providing the highest chance of customer satisfaction, this approach limits the risk of developing a product no one wants, which may be an unintended consequence of a longer, more costly development targeting a broader market with extensive features and greater corporate investment. Design Thinking improves the quality of the product and our perosnal life.

Thank You! Have a good day!

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Banking Industry Revaluation - Year 2020: Technology Competencies

When entering into a restaurant, I received a call from a Bank Executive. It could be a ‘Not Interested’ call but it was not actually. I was offered with low-cost Global Banking Account with Cross-Border money transfer in real time, any-time & any-where banking with high security, supporting & exchanging Cryptocurrency and Artificial Intelligence enabled Investment & Wealth Management suggestions on my portfolio. With captivating face, I wanted to know more about their services and planned to switch all my Banking and Investment Strategy with them.

Apparently, this kind of Banking Solutions are currently not available but there is a high chance of getting these revolutionary changes before the end of year 2020. How can I predict that? More than prediction, we can analyse and conclude the required transformation in Banking Industry by focusing on financial industry market movements. Let's take a look at the following facts which gave me guts to write about this topic.

Fact 1: 81% of Banking Industry CEOs are concerned about the speed of technological change
Fact 2: 76 Years took to adopt with Telephones but Smart phones have taken only 9 years
Fact 3: Approximately 10,000 FinTech Startups present around the globe focused on a particular innovative technology
Fact 4: Only 17% of Financial Firms feel that they are prepared to face the technological challenges
* Reference: PwC FS Tech 2020

These facts are from various genre but conveying a single statement to the Financial Industry.

"Change is Inevitable but Early Adoption is Necessary"

My intention of writing this article is not to explain about new technologies in Banking and Financial Sectors rather giving a heads-up to the readers to understand the future scope and necessity of technology migration in Financial Industry. Ok! Let's move further!

Fintech is the most popular & fancy term for Financial Technology used in Banking Sector and its supporting service providers. There are a lot of new initiatives happening in Fintech and Banks started to migrate from their legacy systems to the latest & advanced technical implementations. Already few global banks like J.P. Morgan Chase and HSBC Holdings have initiated to change their business process for adopting the cutting-edge technologies and advanced infrastructure.

More Into FinTech

Hybrid Clouds: It is a cloud computing infrastructure which uses a mix of on-premises or private cloud managed by the user and third-party or public cloud services between the two platforms for achieving common business goal. As per the analysis report of IBM Banking & Financial Markets, over 90% of enterprises will use multiple cloud services & platforms by 2020 and Financial Firms with a defined hybrid cloud strategy achieve 2.5x higher gross profits.

API Platforms: It is either a financial institution or independent service provider which leads to implement Open Banking infrastructure bringing many benefits for financial institutions like providing them with more opportunities to collaborate and partner with financial technologies. Here, two or more distinct but interdependent banks can transfer information through a programmatically consumable service or an Application Programming Interface (API).

Instant Payments: An electronic retail payment solution which is available 24/7/365 and resulting in the immediate or close-to-immediate interbank clearing of the transaction and crediting of the payee’s account with confirmation to the payer.

Robotic Process Automation: As per UiPath, RPA is the technology that allows anyone today to configure computer software or a “robot” to emulate and integrate the actions of a human interacting with digital systems to execute a business process. They also confirm that RPA robots are capable of mimicking many–if not most–human user actions. Banking and Financial Firms are continuously focusing on automating their Business Process to reduce the cost and improve the customer services.

Artificial Intelligence: Problem of increasing automation is a fear of reduced loyalty due to less personal contact. But AI usage brings more personalized experience, in fact, banks are using AI to increase client satisfaction, improve efficiency and maintain customer loyalty in many ways. For example, ATMs can use face recognition using advanced features of AI and Deep Learning which helps to detect fraudulent activities.


Cyber-Security: Increasing digitalization in financial firms, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has taken a step in the right direction by realizing the inherent need for banks to strengthen their cyber-security posture in the wake of the increasingly sophisticated nature and quantum of attacks. Major financial institutions are looking for a solution to accelerate threat detection and compliance with an all-in-one platform of essential security capabilities and seamlessly integrated threat intelligence to detect the latest threats.

Blockchain: According to a PwC report, 24% of financial executives from all around the world are very familiar with blockchain technology, with North Americans significantly more familiar than those from other regions. JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America have dedicatedly placed their faith in the future of Blockchain technology for Record Keeping, Security Markets, Smart Contracts and Cryptocurrency Exchanges.

Quantum Computing: JP Morgan Chase and Barclays are two of the biggest commercial members of Q-Network which is an advanced quantum computing development framework by IBM. Financial firms tap on the high-powered processing capabilities of quantum computing and optimize for big data analytics, portfolio analysis, asset appraisal, and high-frequency trading.
Smart Machines: Smart machines offer huge potential benefits to early adopters within financial services, even with regulators barring banks from some use cases. Most banks will invest in the six main types of smart machines in 2020. They are Smart Vision Systems, Virtual Customer Assistants, Virtual Personal Assistants, Smart Advisors, NLP Technology and Smart Campus Infrastructure.

Backlogs & Priorities

Things are not going as per financial firm's implementation plan. Challenges are increasing because of dynamic growth in technology innovations and customer's expectation. In a recent Deloitte poll, just 10% of the respondents said their banks are in a state of "being digital", with another 22% only "becoming digital". Technology is almost ready to go-live especially in Instant Payments, Open Banking and Hybrid Clouds for Banking Sector but many financial firms are living with their existing systems.

What about customers? Based on a global survey, Accenture found that 31% of bank customers would consider Google, Amazon or Facebook to provide Banking Solutions. Reason is simple, Yes, it is very simple. Bank Customers expect that Banking must be simple, easily accessible, 24x7 available, extremely secure, user friendly and suggestible. As I mentioned earlier, in financial sector, early adopters will secure their valuable clients and portfolios. So, the following are the top priorities of Banking and Financial firms to compete with Year-2020.

1. Updating Business Process and Information Technology Operational Models
2. Adopting Digital-Labor (Bot) and Artificial Intelligence
3. Improving intelligence to know your customer needs
4. Connecting Anything from Anywhere with cyber-security
5. Hiring Talented and Skilled Executives to utilize all technologies

Information Technology Radar

IT firms consider on disruptive banking technologies such as Blockchain, AI & Bot and Open Banking as strong priority items. Consulting firms are mainly focusing on transforming existing operations of their banking clients towards the digital ecosystem. Many Technology and Consulting companies started investing on Start-ups because new innovations & disruptions in the banking and financial industry make the future look very exciting and technology focused.

Let's look at some interesting investment plans on new technology

 Key Takeaways

1. Gap between current financial systems and technology development is very high
2. Banks are ready to continuously upgrade disruptive technological solutions
3. FinTech Start-ups play major role on Banking and Financial Service innovations
4. Need of IT Vendors with excellent innovation portfolio is increasingly high
5. Demand is created for dynamic and skilled financial and IT consultants

Thanks for your time! Post your queries and suggestion and I will try to respond you as early as possible. Have a wonderful day!

Disclaimer: Information provided in this article are my understanding being shared for the educational & knowledge purposes only. All the information provided here is from public domain, to best of my knowledge no proprietary information is used. If any questions or concerns about the content, please contact me directly.

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Why Data Science becomes inevitable for Investors & Speculators?

“Data is a better choice than Belief & Conjecture”

In this article, I would like to share my knowledge on how Data Science becomes precious technology for Investors and Traders to increase the profit margin and reducing risks on Investment Strategies. I strongly believe that Data plays significant role in all financial market participants to construct or model their Portfolio and Hedging Techniques rather being optimistic on future economic circumstances.

Alright! Before getting into Data Science, I just want to give an overview on Buy Side firms and its roles. The main purpose of an investor goes to an advisor or a Buy Side Institution, depends on the investment strength, is mentioned in the  image. Investment Managers will always try to make their clients to be in profit zone.

Buy Side 

Most of the Asset Management, Fund Management and Investment Management Institutions are coming under Buy Side firms which commit of assets and funds with a long-term time framework to bring additional income to regular receipts and growth to the investor. Investments are generally optimistic and involves waiting for a future reward in terms of income through regular interest, dividends, premiums, or appreciation in the value of the principal capital.

FACT: Fidelity as an Asset Management Company, manages $755 billion in U.S. Equity Assets Under Management

There are many investment avenues are available where Asset Management Companies can make investments available in Investment Programs which can be constructed by the Investors who are familiar with direct investments or alternative investments. This option is available because some investments are appropriate for one type of investor and another may be suitable to another person. Left side image is considered as major clarification on Investment Avenue where Buy Side firms are working on.

Data Science

Data Science is a blend of various tools, algorithms, and machine learning principles with the goal to discover hidden patterns from the raw data. It is predominantly used to make decisions and predictions making use of Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning. Many of us are still unable to find the difference between Business Intelligence (BI) & Data Science.

Data Sources for BI are usually Structured Data and those are often SQL & Data Warehouse but in Data Science, sources are both Structured & Unstructured and Data are from Logs, Media, SQL and NoSQL. BI mainly deals with statistics and it focuses on past and present. In case of Data Science, alone with statistics approach, it includes Machine Learning & Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) to focus on future.

FACT: By 2020, about 1.7 megabytes a second of new information will be created for every human being on the planet – McKinsey 

Use Cases

Automating Risk Management: Risks for Investment Management Institutions can come, such as competitors, investors, regulators, or company’s customers. For protecting the investors, Buy Side Institutions can use Data Science for identifying risk information from pool of data, prioritizing and monitoring risks, which are the perfect tasks for machine learning. With training on the huge amount of investor data, financial information, social media data and insurance results, algorithms can not only increase the risk scoring models but also enhance cost efficiency and sustainability.

Algorithmic Trading: Fund Managers can avoid their loss from impulsive market fluctuations by using Programmable Trading with Data Science. Based on the most recent information from analyzing both traditional and non-traditional data, fund managers can make real-time beneficial decisions. And because this data is often only valuable for a short time, being competitive in this sector means having the fastest methods of analyzing it.

Recommendations: Data Science can provide personalized financial advice for Investors on how to invest money from current market condition and how to detect unusual transactions in Company Profiles. A Robo-Advisor can suggest a financial portfolio manager to match the goals and risk tolerance of a particular client.

FACT: Apparently $2.2 Trillion in Assets will be managed by Robo-Advisors by 2020 versus $0.3 Trillion in 2016. - A.T. Kearney

Implementations

According to McKinsey, Asset Management Companies wildly apply Data Science and Machine Learning techniques across the full value chain and they can create a robust client data repository includes the best of internal and external data sources. Moreover, Asset Management Companies are focusing on new sources of investment research such as Consensus Platform, Investor Relationship Platform, Sentiment Analysis and Marketplace Researches by using Data Science techniques like Linear Regression, Non-linear Modeling and Shrinkage. (I will discuss about Data Science in a separate article in detail)

Here, I bring my conceptual architecture of Data Science Platform for Investor or Speculator. This platform may not fit in all investors or fund managers but it can be considered as core components of any Data Analytic Platform using Data Science techniques. You can place appropriate software tool on each component based on your Investment Strategy.

FACT: Machine Learning techniques allow us the flexibility to create dynamic models that adapt to the data. Quantitative techniques in the past relied on more simplistic rules for ranking companies based on certain pre-determined metrics - Osman Ali, Portfolio Manager, GSAM

Great! I hope you had good reading on Data Science and I would like to complete this article with few fun facts about Data Science.

• Data is never clean
• Effort requires for cleaning and preparing data is considerably high
• None of the Data Model is approved as 100% Correct
• End To End Automation is not possible

Thank You! Have A Wonderful Day!

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Magic Apple Tree and Managing Leadership

A talented farmer who has a small land in a little mountain and he planted few apple trees in the downstream of his garden. As a hard worker, he put a lot of effort to take care of those apple trees and they started responding with sweet apples in few years. One of those apple trees was so special and it gave more apples with special taste which brought uniqueness in his garden. After couple of harvesting, farmer identified the uniqueness and he understood that it was the Magic Apple Tree. Farmer started to take extra care to the Magic Apple Tree and started to plant its seeds in the rest of the place of his garden. He was in the hope that newly planted apple seeds would be growing as Magic Apple Trees.

In this story, everything was positive and good to read. Really!!! Ok, what would happen if the farmer was imprudent? I repeat this story for this case.

A talented farmer who has a small land in a little mountain and he planted few apple trees in the downstream. As a hard worker, he put a lot of effort to take care of those apple trees and they started responding with sweet apples in few years. One of those apple trees was so special and it gave more apples with special taste which brought uniqueness in his garden. After couple of harvesting, farmer identified the uniqueness and he understood that it was the Magic Apple Tree. Farmer decided to plant its seeds in the rest of the place of his garden by hoping that newly planted apple seeds would be growing as Magic Apple Trees instead of taking extra care to the Magic Apple Tree for the future harvesting. Moreover, Farmer decided to cut down the Magic Apple Tree and other grown apple trees to create space for planting Magic Apple Tree seeds.

Greedier! No Gratefulness! It is not required now to go into the emotional thoughts rather we must think about how many times we did that in our life. Not as a farmer, we can relate this story with our social life and professional life. Until getting benefits, we take care of our family members & friends and we used to cut down once our motive is achieved without thinking about future. It may work and bring success in our motive but it will never fulfill your soul.

What’s happening in our professional life? Few organizations will never cut their long term serviced employees for the sake of cost and process because they value their service and effort. Many organizations, cut down their experienced employees by thinking that they would be able to achieve the goal from their team members or others. Yes! An experienced employee who has never created dependencies in his routine professional life, it is 100% possible. If the experienced employee who has created his dependency in his daily activities, management cannot replace his position but if still management wants to take decision, yes, they can do but it will take additional time and effort to operate without his dependency.

Points to be considered are

• Did the farmer value the Magic Tree?
• Have all planted seeds grown as Magic Apple Trees?
• Was cutting down of Magic Apple Tree good to his garden?
• Is this right decision to cut down all trees and planting Magic Tree seeds?
• What would happen if none of the Magic Tree seeds start growing?
• Does it make sense if the farmer value the Magic Tree once it was cut down?

I would like to conclude this article with this final question. “Hoping for the Best or Going with Evidence”, which one makes the organization stronger and better?

- Amalan Nagarajan

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Cryptocurrency - How Does ICO Help To Raise Fund To Your Business?

Introduction to Cryptocurrency Markets

With the enormous development of the Blockchain Technology, new opportunities are created in the field of Trading and Investing. Specifically Crypto Markets are 'Borderless & 24/7 Open' so it offers huge potential for growth in Investment and Wealth Management era. More than 2000 new Cryptocurrencies are being created and traded on daily basis, leading to high returns for many investors. The combined market capitalization of all currently available in Cryptocurrencies together is only around $300 Billion USD, which leaves lots of room to expand in future. Financial Experts confidently consider that Blockchain and Cryptocurrency have become a niche market which leads to increase in transaction volume especially to Bitcoin and Ethereum. According to Juniper research, total Cryptocurrency transaction value may surpass $1 Trillion USD by 2022.

From my title picture, you may think that I am going to write an article on how to raise huge fund or make big investment from one of the trending terms called “ICO” or “ITO”. No, this article is only intended to make people having overall picture on ICO or ITO process. Initial Coin Offering cannot not be taken as a simple and easy way to generate capital rather it has a lot of effort and hard work involved.

Now I would like to start this article with a serious advice about ICO. You might have read in news articles like ‘Huge Capital is generated or Million Dollar Fund is created within an hour from ICO’. This kind of news creates a perception to the New Entrepreneurs that ICO is the best way to create fund to their ideas or innovations. Apparently No! ICO is not the place where you can get rich quickly from your New Idea or investing on New Ideas rather participating ICO makes you strictly committed to complete your final outcome. Okay, lets move to our topic!

Tokens & Coins

Tokens and Coins are two major categories of Cryptocurrency. Tokens are the representation of a particular asset or utility which are resides on Blockchain Network. It can also represent any assets that are fungible and tradeable, from commodities to loyalty points to even other cryptocurrencies. Tokens are created and distributed to the public through an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) which means crowdfunding of project development. It is such a similar concept of how Initial Public Offering (IPO) for stocks works.

Coins also referred as Altcoins or Alternative Cryptocurrency are often used as medium of exchange because of its interchangeability in design. Coins are basically derived from either existing open source Blockchain Network like Bitcon (Namecoin & Peercoin) or native Blockchain like Ethereum & Ripple. One common property of all coins is that they each possess their own Blockchain Network where transactions relating to their native coins.

Initial Coin Offering (ICO)

An Initial Coin Offering (ICO) is a kind of fund-raising method made available by the development of Blockchain technology. Through the creation and sale of Digital Crypto Tokens and Coins, investor has the percentage of right to project and development team creates fund to their project. These rights (Tokens & Coins) can be accessed through Blockchain platform and traded in Crypto Exchanges with other digital currencies or fiat currencies.

Process of raising ICO

Risks of ICO

• Uncertain Regulations & Compliance
• Lacking of Complacency
• Bad Token Distribution
• Code Vulnerabilities
• Lack of Understanding in Crypto-Economy
• Uncertain basis for token valuation
• Lack of comprehensive due diligence
• High positive promises for guaranteed returns
• Unawareness of Project Scope and Market Analysis Reports 

Story Time

This short story is just for having better understanding on how ICO works in layman level.

One-day God has created a beautiful island in a big ocean with lot of natural resources to survey. People who found this island in the ocean were started to immigrate. God offered those people few Coconuts as a welcome gift based on their capacity. People in the island used their coconuts in hunger time and exchange with other people to get the desired stuff which others have. Life was going smooth for everyone. Great!

One guy has decided to build a house for him but his only effort on building the house was not enough so he gathered few people as workers and started building his own house. All his workers were offered with coconuts as wages and this guys came to know that coconuts were not enough to complete the work. Then he explained to all the people in the beautiful island about his House Building Design and asking their contributions to build the house completely by offering their coconuts. For return, he assured to provide a room in his house based on their contribution level. Few people believed his effort and importance of building house and contributed their coconuts to continue his work. By this way, he has successfully finished building his house and allocated rooms to the contributors. Now life is going better for everyone based on their trust on others. The End!

In this story, Beautiful Island is the Blockchain Network and God refers with the Blockchain Technology Hosting Team. Coconuts are tokens or coins which was used for medium of exchange. House Building Guy is the Founder of the Project and Contributors are Investors. The whole process can be referred to ICO.

Thanks for reading my article. Please post your queries, clarifications and suggestion.

Disclaimer: Information provided in this article are my understanding being shared for the educational purposes only. All the information provided here is from public domain, to best of my knowledge no proprietary information is used. If any questions or concerns about the content, please contact me directly.

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Have you gone through a Great Leader in your Professional Life?

In this year, I would like to start my articles from a non-technical and the most important concept called Leadership. Leadership is apparently a gift by nature and many people develop this skill from their role models as well. Role Models cannot always be a known person or a Leader rather you can adhere your leadership skills from Nature. In this article, I want to detail few leadership skills which I have come across in my life.

“Leadership is neither a position nor a title rather it’s a skill to be acted as an example”

There is chance of remembering your Boss or Leader while reading the following sections and it can be a positive or negative experience. “Not Judging People” is the top quality of leadership. From your experience, you should not judge your leader because a leader is not for a single person rather a team or organization.

Multiverse Vs Solar System

The multiverse is a group of multiple universes including the universe in which we live and Solar System is a micro-dot of a universe which has a star with planets orbiting it. Do you understand why I give this comparison here? In our Solar System, Sun is a giant and planets in variable sizes are rotating around it. Sun has enough energy to serve all planets, its moons and other flying objects. If there is no Sun, Solar System does not exist.

“I strongly believe that leadership should not be like a Solar System”

What is happening in Multiverse? There are a lot of universes, operating independently, for a common goal and the goal is continuously expanding themselves. If one of the universes has vanished, rest are contently operating on their goals. Great Indeed! Leadership is not having more people to report and manage huge number of professionals. It is ‘Believing and Empowering’ people to operate independently for achieving organization goal.
Many Leaders accept Multiverse is the best leadership but they think that it is practically impossible to have a control on organization goal. In this case, leaders must think how MNCs are operating in different geographic, culture and leaderships to achieve their common goal.

“In simple, leadership is that operating MNCs within their team or organization”

Core Leadership Skills

This diagram is pretty straight forward to understand the core skills of Leadership.

What Great Leaders Always Consider!

• Micromanagement is simply wasting everyone’s time
• “Yes Employees” are always trouble makers than bringing positives 
• Not afraid of receiving honest feedbacks and different opinions
• Appreciating Good Work without Ego
• Spending more time with Team Members than Superiors
• Believing and Investing in People
• Being Examples than Claiming Expertise 
• Money and facility cannot make everyone happy in the organization
• Handling critical situations by humor sense
• Having strong strategy for long-term goal instead of dynamic changes
• Not considering themselves as experts in everything and believe in delegating 

Finally!

Having a bad boss increases the chance of having Heart Attack by 60%, a study says. Also it says that 56% of employees stay because of their good bosses and leaders though it is a bad organization. Being a Great Boss or Great Leader is not for others, it must be for themselves. Being Grateful to the employees would definitely make a good leader than having fancy designations and powers.

Thanks for reading this article. Please post your queries, clarifications, concerns and suggestions.

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Blockchain Technology for Regulatory Ecosystem

Good Day Readers! In this article, I would like to share my idea on how Blockchain Technology helps to resolve or address Regulatory and Compliance challenges. I am confident that if you understand the Blockchain Core Concepts and Regulatory Authority Usecases, any System Architect can provide precise solution for all Regulatory and Compliance Risks. I want to start this article by elaborating Regulatory Ecosystem in Blockchain Technology and then I would like to couple of usecases.

For understanding this article, you should have basic knowledge in Blockchain Technology (You must have gone through my previous articles) and how Regulatory Body impacts various industries like Healthcare and Finance.

Ecosystem

Regulatory is a common term which is applicable for any industry which requires a central authority to monitor and control. We can broadly classify these organizations into two categories.

• Industry Players
• Regulatory Authorities

Industry Players are who running business in specific industry which is directly or indirectly consumed by common people. Healthcare Provider Organizations, Pharmaceutical Industries, Banking and Financial Firms are few examples of Industry Players. Regulatory Authorities are the board which is owned by government or private organizations. Their core responsibility is to issue regulations and compliance requirements and regularly monitor their Industry Players. Examples are Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), National Association of Insurance Commissioners and Securities & Exchange Commission.

Nature of Blockchain Technology addresses the most of the current challenges faced by Industry Players and Regulatory Authorities. For better understanding, let’s discuss further about Blockchain uniqueness.

• Blockchain removes the trust on Central Authority who can either be a person or organization by replacing Technology
• Data in Blockchain are Tamper-Proof or Immutable
• High Availability in nature comparing with other technology in the industry
• Blockchain Transactions are auditable at point of time and any level

There are lots of advantages in Blockchain but I gave few lines for understanding Regulatory related usecases. Here is my Regulatory Ecosystem in Blockchain Technology.

There are 7 regulatory components provided in this Ecosystem but why? If you have initial understanding on Blockchain and Regulatory, you may assume that Compliance and KYC components are enough to go with regulatory requirements. Yes. It is true. But the fact is little different when you consider all usecases of Industry Players and Regulatory Authorities. First we can see the brief description of all components.

Compliance	Issuing or adhering certain regulations or directives. You have to think all  modules required for compliance issuers and followers
KYC and Authentication	Any user comes into Blockchain Network needs to complete all onboarding process but data should be maintained in the Blockchain network itself as Transactions
Smart Contracts	Digital Agreement between two or more parties to automate end-to-end compliance requirements and verification on-time.
Crypto and Cyber Security	All transactions like Regulatory Reports, Verification Statements and User Details should be encrypted by Cryptography Algorithms.
Decentralization	Peer-to-Peer connection between multiple server nodes and Peer-to-Peer connection between all Blockchain Users. It means that Blockchain network does not depend on singe data source.
Digital Identity	Connectivity parameters to all Blockchain users like Compliance Issuers, Followers, Mediators and Network Administrators
Arbitration	Common authority who can be either computer program or mining organization who resolves the conflicts in the transactions

The Fact is just to revamp the entire regulatory framework using Blockchain Technology. For doing this change, the followings should be considered.

• No More Regulatory Authority – All existing and new regulations should be issues are Smart Contracts in Blockchain Network
• Public Blockchain Network – Make all transaction into public with strong cryptography algorithm which enables transparency in the industry
• Powerful Consensus – Electronic Arbitration and Verification solution is required to avoid manual influence in Blockchain Network. Few combined algorithms must be chosen like ‘Round-Robin with Proof-Of-Work’ to ensuring consensus

I am sure it won’t happen immediately to replace either Regulatory Authorities or Industry Players with Blockchain Technology. But before considering giant regulations like HIPAA, CMS, SEC and ESMA, this concepts can be implemented in small and medium level organizations with regulations like Organization Records Management, Payroll and Transaction Management and Internal Compliances. Apart from Bitcoin and Ethereum Networks, many Blockchain Software are available in the industry like Openchain and Hyperledger which can be customized based on your organization needs.

Thanks for your reading this article and please comment your suggestions and queries.

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Blockchain – First Level Implementation Guide for System Architects

Do you know why you are here? Yes! I shared this link to you and you opened it! If you are interested in designing or constructing Blockchain Network, this page may be your alphabet of your idea or innovation. Here you can also learn and understand how Blockchain can be designed for your Business Requirements.

I hope that you are already familiar with Ledger, Distributed Database, Cryptography, Hashes and Decentralization from my last article. If you don't have any idea, No Problem! I will try to explain my design by providing simple algorithms to implement Blockchain Network for adding Transactions, Blocks, Mining and Chaining.

I want to start this article with a fundamental which may answer why Blockchain will be inevitable. I start with few basic questions.

• Why are you using Coins and Currencies rather they are just metals and papers? And why are they over-valued?
• Why are you depositing your Money into Banks? Are they your relatives or friends?

Reason is that You Trust Them.

• You trust your Government
• You trust your Financial Regulatory Authority
• You trust your Bankers

Commonly you trust a system or organization. What will happen if all your trusts are replaced with technology? It happened before and it is called Evolution. Blockchain is the trust which protects data from third-party and increases the efficiency of transaction without any Government, Regulations and Bankers involvement.

This is the article for System Architects to design Blockchain Network so I want to move to the topic directly. I have already explained the core concepts in my previous articles with Cryptocurrency and please refer if you would like to.

Before Getting Started

We need to define our goal and strategy for our further sections. This step will narrow down to design and learn Blockchain Server and Client implementations. 

Usecase: 

• Creating a new transaction with Sender and Receiver details
• Adding them into Blockchain Network by verifying the transactions
• Data should be updated in all Blockchain Hosts

Technology Requirements:

• Blockchain Server: Python 3.7
• HTTP Client: Postman
• IDE: PyScripter

Technical Implementation:

• Blockchain Server Class Building with Creating Block, Adding Transactions and Mining methods
• Developing HTTP requests to communicate with Blockchain functions from Python Flask
• Blockchain API Integration and Data Decentralization

Blockchain Implementation

Blockchain Server Design

Can we directly start with code? Ok,

This is the main class of our Blockchain which takes charge on maintaining entire Blockchain Network. We will see the definition and need of all core methods and helper methods.

New Block

Block consists of Index which helps to manage or assign unique ID to each Block. Timestamp helps to get current date and time of Block Creation. Block is attached with Hash and it also has information about previous Hash. Rather very first block in the network does not have any previous Hash References.

New Transactions

Transaction is the data part which consists of encoded details of the transactions. In our usecase, each transaction must have Sender, Receiver and Amount details which should be added into New Block.

Proof of Work for Mining

Miners Proof is the core concept of Blockchain which creates artificial complexity to identify the key to verify transactions by Minors. Until identifying valid proof, miner's also continuously running their proof of work algorithm. For making this step easier, I made it to four zeros.

Blockchain API Interaction from HTTP Client

There is a framework in Python called Flask which provides facility to access Python functions from HTTP Requests. For accessing our BlockchainCore Class, I am going to create three methods or links which are for Creating New Transaction to a Block, Mining New Block and Adding New Block into Core Blockchain.

Adding New Transaction

In new transaction link, details of Sender, Receiver and Amount will be sent from HTTP Client in POST Method. As a client, we submit the required details to BlockchainCore API.

Data Mining Method

This is our PoW implementation and miners will run the script for finding Hash. Once Hash is identified, New Block is forged with transaction details and Hash details. For ensuring the chain, few basic validation has been done from Server side like Previous Hash / Last Proof.

Maintaining Chain

Chain link is requested to add the newly identified Block with Transaction into existing chain. Once New Block is created with transaction successfully then it should be added and maintained in core Blockchain network. Chain method is called to perform this task.

Running Blockchain Network

1. Run BlockchainCore.py in 172.10.20.5:9000
2. Initiate HTTP Client from Postman http://localhost:9000/transaction/new (Adding New Transaction)
3. Initiate HTTP Client from Postman http://localhost:9000/mine (Data Mining Method)
4. Initiate HTTP Client from Postman http://localhost:9000/chain (Maintaining Chain)

Result View

 "chain": [
    {
      "index": 1,
      "previous_hash": 1,
      "miners_proof": 100,
      "timestamp": ,
      "transactions": []
    },
    {
      "index": 2,
      "previous_hash": ,
      "miners_proof": ,
      "timestamp": ,
      "transactions": [
        {
          "amount": 1,
          "recipient": ,
          "sender": ,
        }
      ]
    } ]

Conclusion

I don't still talk about decentralization in this article because I just wanted my code to be worked with sample PoC transactions. Probably I will talk about Cryptocurrency implementation in my BlockchainCore class with multiple Host Systems. In the mean time, please comment your suggestions and queries for improving my base class or methods. Thanks for your time. Good Day!

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Digital Currency - Beginners Guide for Bitcoin Investors and Traders

Good Day Readers! Here I would like to share an overview of Cryptocurrency concepts which are inevitable definitions for having discussion about Bitcoin, Blockchain and Digital Asset Trading/Investing. Before reading about Trading or Investing Strategy, every Investor must understand the nature of Cryptocurrency and what are the functions available in your Exchange.

Beginners (Investor or Trader)

Cryptocurrency is a digital asset or virtual currency that uses cryptography algorithms for enabling security and artificially complicated to make difficult to counterfeit. Cryptocurrency is waving in decentralized systems based on Blockchain Technology, a distributed ledger enforced by a disparate network of computers. It does not have either any central authority to issue or regulatory authority to control.

If you would like to invest or trade in Cryptocurrency, you must know the followings to start with.

• You must have a wallet
• You should be registered and subscribed in Cryptocurrency Exchange

Cryptocurrency wallet is a digital space where your coins are stored with encrypted passwords. It is similar to your Bank Account where you safely have your Money with digital security enabled. A Cryptocurrency Exchange is a Digital Market Place where Buy/Sell happens on Cryptocurrency like Bitcoin where Cryptocurrency Trade happens for other Cryptocurrency or Fiat Currency. Coinbase Pro and Binance are couple of top service providers of Cryptocurrency Trading. You can gain knowledge on Cryptocurrency Trading by reading their Product Description and Service Details.

What A  beginner should know before starting the trades in Cryptocurrency? Because of your curiosity, you will start loosing your money in Cryptocurrency Trading of its high volatility in nature. You must start with an exchange and wallet provider with good reputation. Coinbase looks decent and it allows to trade or invest most of the popular digital coins like Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH). It is also not advised in margin trading until realizing the risk associated with it. I will come to Margin Trade later.

Understanding Wallet

Generally Wallets are Web based or Mobile based application which allows clients to invest in Cryptocurrency and Digital Assets. Wallets must have the following properties to provide better service.

User Experience: Clients can view their Cryptocurrency Investments, Performance Reports, Buy/Sell Suggestions, Risk Managements and Watch List.

Secured Wallets: The coins can be stored in secured e-wallets that are built on the blockchain to enable safe and secure storage of Cryptocurrency.

Multi-signature Wallets: Multi-signature wallet addresses require another user or users sign a transaction from the wallet which enables additional security.

Two Factor Authentication: 2FA is a method of confirming a user's identity by utilizing two different factors, Private Keys and QR Scanner.

Cryptocurrency Exchange Features

Binance or Coinbase Cryptocurrency Exchange has the following features which are considered as minimum vital features to serve Cryptocurrency Investors.

• Leverage Trading
• Margin Trading
• Order Sharing
• Matching Engine
• Multi-currency Wallet
• Payment Gateway Integration
• API Integration
• Admin Backend Panel

Also clients are allowed to trade by placing Buy/Sell Orders in the following Order Types.

Market Order: A Market Order will allow the user to trade Coins at the current price. The user can set a market buy or market sell in order to protect themselves from slippage in a volatile market.

Limit Order: A Limit Order will allow users to trade Coins by placing an order on the hopes that it will be fulfilled by someone else’s market order. The orders are not limited to slippage due to volatility in the market. The user can set a Limit Buy or Limit Sell.

Stop Order: Stop Order is a conditional market order where the user sells the order after reaching a specified price. A user can set a Stop Buy or Stop Sell/Loss thereby taking precautionary actions.

Copy Order: Copy Order is an order where a user receives updates on the top crypto-traders and copy their trades. This will help beginners to the crypto-trading. The top order would receive a commission based on the earnings of the copy trader.

P2P Trading: Peer to Peer Trading is unique and allows buyers and sellers to negotiate a price before a coin is transferred. The Cryptocurrency is stored on escrow, thereby ensuring safety of the coin. Only when the buyer and seller agree is when the transaction is completed.

We should also know about what are security features are available in Cryptocurrency Exchanges. The list is below

• HTTP Authentication
• Jail Login
• Encrypted Data
• Cross-Site Request Forgery(CSRF) Protection
• Escrow System

Conclusion

Intention of this article is to provide an overview of fundamentals for Trading and Investing in Cryptocurrency Beginners. You must also read and understand various technical and fundamental analysis techniques before putting your money into your Wallet. I plan to provide few successful trading and investment strategies for Cryptocurrency in my next article. In between, if you are curious on trading Cryptocurrency, please refer some successful technical and fundamental analysis techniques of Equity Trading. It will help you to understand my next article better. Now I would like to end this article and special thanks to you for reading and following.

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Digital Currency - Understanding Blockchain Network and Mining Process

Good Day! Hope you had a good reading on my previous article about Basics of Digital Currency. Now I would like to try to demystify Blockchain Networking and Mining Process which is apparently mandatory for understanding Cryptocurrency from Engineering & System Architecture perspective. This article deals with Blockchain Definitions, Digital Ledger and Mining Process.

Blockchain - Definition of Definition

Definition of Blockchain says that it is a distributed database that maintains a continuously growing list of ordered records called Blocks. Blockchain is also referred as a digital ledger in which transactions are recorded chronologically and publicly.

In general, we can store any transactions in Distributed Database if it is really necessary. What is transaction and why it is needed? The following are some examples of transactions.

• Withdrawing money from ATM
• Swiping your credit card in KFC
• Purchasing medicines in Apollo Pharmacy
• Claiming insurance for repairing your car
• Buying 500 AAPL stocks in your account

Do you understand why these transactions are stored or needed? Yes, it is essentially required for verification, validation and reconciliation.

Now we can move into understanding “Digital Ledger” concept. Archetypal meaning of Ledger is “A Place to Keep Something”. And, definition of ledger is an account to record, categorize and sort transactions, for maintaining the balance such as Asset, Liabilities, Revenue and Expenses to prepare Balance Sheet and Income Sheet. Digital Ledger is a database or electronic storage area where all records or transactions are stored in chronological order.

For reiterating the definition of Blockchain, it is a Digital Ledger where all transactions are electronically stored in chronological order; distributed in different locations with same transaction details called Blocks; continuously adding new transactions and available to public for processing transactions.

I hope that you have more idea on how Blockchain is organized. No?? Not Yet?? It’s Okay. I have given some usecases of Blockchain for various industries and it will help you to think through it.

Area	Usecase
Banking	Managing transactions and avoid data tampering from third-party requires advanced Business and Process solutions which can be easily solved by implementing Blockchain Network.
Trading	Distributed Ledger provides Investment Management, Order Execution Management and Clearing & Settlement Platforms to perform their Affirmation and Confirmation activities by using decentralized database to settle transactions safer.
Healthcare	Securely storing Medical Details and maintaining single version of Patient & Insurance Modules to avoid information conflicts.
Insurance	Fully automated and decentralized platforms allowing to invest in insurance and claim profits from insurance premiums as well as get insured.
Social Media	Sharing or broadcasting News or Blog and Running Reward Programs will require a decentralized ledger to manage the operations and services.

Miners - Digital Currency Engine

Now we jump into next tricky concept called “Mining” and players who are participating in mining activity called “Miners”. All Cryptocurrency transactions are intimated to all Blockchain Hosts (Also known as Miners) to validate and add the particular transaction in Digital Public Ledger (Blockchain Database) as a New Block (Transaction). One of the miners will process the transaction and update into Blockchain Network then broadcast the details to other Hosts for synchronizing transaction details. For this service, miners are rewarded with Cryptocurrency or some units of Cryptocurrency.

“Miners have a job and they are paid for that” Now you got this statement! Couple of questions must come to your mind and they can be one of the followings.

• Can anyone have the infrastructure of Blockchain Host?
• Can anyone participate to add Block into Ledger and get paid?
• If I have the complete access of Cryptocurrency transactions then I can hack the system. Can’t I?
• What will happen if all miners update a specific transaction at the same time?

Yes, anyone can have infrastructure of Blockchain and participate in adding Blocks in the network and get paid for that. There are some advanced algorithms and consensus mechanisms used in Blockchain Network to avoid concurrent update or duplicating Blocks. You can also tamper the data by hacking Blockchain Network but it is too costly.

How it is too costly because I already knew to verify the transaction as a Miner and it is very simple process.

Correct! You know how to validate transactions and add them into Blockchain Network so hacking must be simple. Yes, it is very simple but Not Easy! Have you heard about Hash? Yes, I mentioned in my last article that Hash is a type or method of Cryptography. All Cryptocurrency transactions are attached with Hashes which is known as Digital Fingerprint and then Miners have to decode or find the Target Hash (Matching Key) for validating and processing transactions.

Hashes! Does it really complicate? Yes, it is artificially complicated.

Target Hash for Digital Fingerprint (Hash) which is associated with the Cryptocurrency transaction should be identified by Miners. Target Hash is just like a random number (Nonce) by which Miners can process the transaction and add new Block.

How do Miners find the Target Hashes? As a miner, you have to either solve a Puzzle or win in a Lottery System to identify the Target Hash. Is it a difficult work? Yes, I told you already that it is artificially complicated in which miners require more effort and energy to find Target Hash.

Miners are rewarded with some units of Cryptocurrency for the time, effort and energy spent for Lottery System or Puzzle solving process for adding new Block. Miners can also make considerable amount of profit from the reward. If a miner wants to hack the system and tamper the previous transactions then miner has to put huge effort to find all Target Hashes in the ledger until the desired Block or Transaction comes. Do you know why? because all blocks are logically linked in Blockchain Network. Moreover tampered information cannot be updated to all other distributed databases without other Blockchain Host’s knowledge. This artificial complexity is considered as a main advantage of Blockchain which is the combination of Digital Ledger, Digital Fingerprint and Distributed Database. 

Blockchain Networking

There are 6 Blockchain Hosts are available in different regions and they are working for same Cryptocurrency. Gopal in USA, has advanced and high processing Blockchain Host infrastructure and he is also known as the most rewarded Miner. The rest of the Miners have medium infrastructure for Blockchain Network. Why I am talking about Blockchain Infrastructure now! Coming to the point!

Gopal’s hash-rate is high. Wait! What is Hash-Rate? Gopal can process more Hashes compare to other Miners because of having advanced Blockchain Infrastructure. Hash-Rate is the computing power of Processing Number of Hashes per Second. Now you got why Gopal is the most rewarded miner. Yes, he processed more hashes which made him to add more Blocks in Network and get more rewards as Digital Currency. Other miners have decent hash-rate and get paid for their transactions processing over the Blockchain Network.

Yuvaraj is one of the skilled Miners and he would like to hack the Blockchain Network. Reason is to modify the Blocks and Transactions in the network and add more Digital Currency into his personal or favorite Wallet. For achieving his goal, Yuvaraj has to find all Target Hashes for each Block in the Digital Ledger and update all Blockchain Hosts with new Blocks. Technically it is possible but effort is very high. This effort is as high as upgrading Blockchain Host Infrastructure and process more transactions. There are many chances to lose his infrastructure effort and energy without getting paid.

From these two cases, you can get an idea that success rate of Miners is far better than Hackers in Blockchain Network due to artificially complicated process.

Conclusion

Blockchain is the decentralized database network which helps to maintain transactions safely and securely. Cryptography and Digital Ledger idea provide more security to the transactions which is almost impossible to modify or tamper. Lottery and Puzzle Solving mechanisms are designed to consume more energy from the miners to validate and process a Block. At last, combination of above creates a solid decentralized database for maintaining transactions for Cryptocurrency.

Thanks for reading my article. Your patience & time are much appreciated. Please shoot your queries and I will try to answer as soon as possible. Have a nice day!

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