Connecting to Roots… Hypermedia REST calls.

This post deals with me connecting to the roots as well. My past is so much tangled with web, its kith and kin. Yea I am going to talk about trends of web in this current post. Web seems to grow at an unimaginable pace. Six months past, things that were considered to be breakthroughs are no longer cutting edge. Emergence of disparate platforms (in the form of mobile devices, tablets etc,) is pushing back to adopt technologies that are agnostic, prevalent and is acceptable to the norms of all the systems aforementioned. As a result industries are embracing HTTP as the default protocol and tweaking in granular ways to come up with myriad of technologies that are fundamentally, the one and the same. The era of web/SOAP services got supplanted by era of REST and now increasingly we are heading towards hypermedia REST calls.  Isn't that what HTTP supposed to do?  We will get the answer below- Extract from wiki: “Hypermedia is used as a logical extension of the term hypertext in which graphics, audio, video, plain text and hyperlinks intertwine to create a generally non-linear medium of information. 

What are hyper media systems?” – Systems that transacts hyperlink over application protocol, which represents the resource in the server (a resource can be html file or xml file or unit of data storage etc.,), to the client and in consequence maintains a collation of links.

What are the advantages? Is this a seminal work? – The argument here is, the client need not keep track of the links, and rather, the server updates the client with adhoc hyperlinks, as when the request is made. I remember few years back, hard coding workflow of certain operations in the client system. This can be effectively avoided using the hypermedia rest services.

Example format:

<order xmlns=″http://schemas.designnutcracker.com″>

<location>sanfrancisco</location>

<item>

<name>kappi</name>

<quantity>1</quantity>

<milk>whole</milk>

<size>small</size>

</item>

<cost>2.0</cost>

<status>payment-expected</status>

<payment>https://designnutcracker.com/payment/1234</payment>

</order>

Art of Storytelling

This is a lightweight blog post for holiday read.

Christmas break is the time to indulge in great fables and stories. Now through my extra sensory perception, I can intuitively guess the readers feelings…. Why the darn thing Chellam is talking about story telling in a professional blog of this nature. Hold your horses before you jump to conclusions.  Any concept or method has a story, a logical sequence of events that when discoursed in a certain order/sequence of events is powerfully conveyed.  Yup talk about fission of atom, migration of tadpoles, evolution of human beings, the big bang theory, complex scientific backed concepts etc. All have interesting stories behind which when delivered appropriately makes whole lot of sense. When these stories are propped or regulated by premises and assumptions, results in compelling theories. This theoretical (like theoretical physics) can be validated through experiments and converted into proven axioms. Now when these conceived stories (multiple solutions for the parameterized problem) when weighed against the constraints set by the problem, turns into stunning products, scientific theories, mathematical axioms, ground breaking business models etc.  So next time you tell or hear a story, don’t belittle it. It might be a skill thats the source for bigger business means and ends.

Organizational culture that inducts design thinking

Organizational culture is the key driver behind design thinking. I for one always believed in bottom up cultural transformation, but I beg to differ in the process of inducting a change in culture in regard to design thinking in corporate bodies. The question here is- “what are the factors that will induct a thriving organizational culture of design thinking?”

A culture which is free of prejudice and open minded for change is the seed for adopting design thinking corporate wide. I remember working for this multinational company who were complacent, hesitant to push the envelope and lacking the will and appetite to grow and evolve. As a consequence they declined any new ground breaking ideas from workers and were rigid in the operational methods and shrugged ideas. This seems to be the status quo in all the corporations with a toxic acidic culture that erodes and corrodes the spirit in a slow cook fashion. That’s why I believe ideas and change are uninvited in multitude of corporations and hence, they fail to reinvent. We need managers who, are visionaries, have the right balance of EQ/IQ and kill the mores that degrade them. We need forward thinking leaders who can draw flexible contours that can guide, adapt and advocate design thinking process in the minds and actions of its’ employees.

Four things that suppresses design thinking:

1. Espousing a culture of opaqueness and secrecy.
2. Being complacent and draw narrow roles and operational boundaries.
3. Fault finding as a way of life and shooting down ideas without giving proper feedback.
4. Bashing the messenger.