Radiant Gains Recognition as Verizon is Named to IDG’s 2020 CIO 100
Radiant is proud to announce that it was an integral part of the team that helped Verizon be named to IDG’s 2020 CIO 100 list of innovative organizations that exemplify the highest levels of operational and strategic excellence in IT. This prestigious honor celebrates companies and award-winning IT projects which deliver business value, optimize business processes, enable growth, and create competitive advantages.
Utilizing a human-centered, design thinking approach, our team delivered digital transformation with Verizon’s Network Single Pane of Glass (nSPOG). The nSPOG is a comprehensive cross-enterprise UX framework that unifies user experience, simplifies workflows, automates repetitive tasks, enables collaboration, and allows the business to respond to customers more quickly, accurately, and effectively.
- The nSPOG transforms the day-to-day work experience of 10,000+ Network and Technology specialists.
- It promotes user efficiency and improves customer service
- The framework reduces users’ cognitive load through features such as 1) guided navigation for task-based systems that implement a variety of complex provisioning workflows; 2) field display automation features that reduce redundant inputs to lengthy systems of record, and 3) predictive analysis to provide users with guidance as they make decisions regarding work prioritization and areas of attention.
The nSPOG is technically advanced and cross-platform (web, mobile web, native); the system leverages unique features to provide additional value. For instance, in mobile contexts, the framework integrates technologies such as cameras and GPS, to provide relevant information for workers in the field, while in the desktop context the framework integrates with native system capabilities to offer a conversational interface that offers significant advantages over typical form-based enterprise application interfaces.
Network Single Pane Of Glass(nSPOG) is the culmination of initiatives in machine learning, intelligent agents, process automation, agile application development, and world-class user experience design.
Network Single Pane of Glass (nSPOG) delivers significant efficiencies and cost savings across Verizon’s enterprise IT footprint.
About the Award
The CIO 100 celebrates 100 IT organizations for driving digital business growth through technology innovation. The award is an acknowledged mark of enterprise excellence.
Reporting Solution for Fortune 500 Clients
Reporting Solution
Radiant delivered numerous reporting solutions across the globe, including Fortune 500 clients. One of our clients in financial services must audit the various clients' financial statements, analyze the reports, and assess the risk. The process involves numerous manual steps, aggregating the data from multiple disjointed and discrete systems in various formats, including spreadsheets and flat files.
Our Solution
Radiant built the custom reporting solution with the following five critical foundational components:
- Security & Regulatory Compliance: Highly confidential data must be stored and managed securely.
- Efficiency / Productivity: The solution should focus on simplicity allowing the BVI workforce to be more efficient and productive.
- Data Entry / Collection: Transactional & Historical Data must be aggregated from multiple sources and various formats.
- Workflows & API Based Open systems: Should enable multiple levels of decisions & allow to interact with legacy & lateral systems.
- Flexible Reporting and scalable solution: The solution should be dynamic and allow flexible reporting in addition to the canned reports. In the future, it can access multiple systems.
Radiant has built a flexible and straightforward solution that has the following primary layers:
- The data layer enables the data ingestion from various sources, catalog the data and search the required data elements by different users. The solution initially started aggregating the data from 4 primary sources and expanded to dozen-plus resources from other divisions.
- Reporting / Visualization layer to enable canned reports as well as user-configurable reports.
- Security & Compliance layer to comply with SOC2 and other national standards.
Benefits
- The solution allowed 100+ users to access canned reports and build custom reports to their needs.
- The majority of the manual steps were removed in the reporting process.
Robotic Process Automation for a Large Financial Services Client
Case Study: Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for a Large Financial Client
Radiant helped one of its financial services clients with process automation using industry-leading RPA tools. The factors that lead to effective automation of repetitive business process are:
- Understand and analyze business processes and their bottlenecks through lean six-sigma principles.
- Document and map process steps by applying proper queuing methods.
- Automate steps locally using relevant scripting utilities.
- Comply with role-based access controls along with system and data controls.
- Enable users to create their bots through script-less automation tools.
A large financial services organization is transforming its securitization process that impacts the entire secondary mortgage industry. Three large financial services institutions and a governing body required quality reporting on a program’s progress to have a common understanding, track and monitor the issues and make informed decisions from time to time. It was a three-year-long, half-a-billion-dollar program.
The quality reporting data has to be obtained from all three participating organizations that use five different tools: Two instances of HP ALM, Rally Dev, IBM Clear Quest, and Service Now. These tools support their custom processes and configure very differently, which resulted in the following challenges:
- How to deliver meaningful reports to all three organizations and the governing body?
- How to generate consistent, reliable, and timely reports?
- How to secure a way of reporting with proper controls in place so that underlying data is not exposed to the outside world? It can have a devastating impact on markets.
- How to absorb the changes and generate new reports at more frequent intervals?
Our Approach:
Radiant solved the problem in the following systematic steps:
Process / Data Normalization – We studied and analyzed the existing business processes of 3 different organizations and how the tools are configured in support of them. Since the business processes are tied to their other internal supporting processes, they cannot be changed without impacting the business. Hence, we developed a mechanism to fetch data from feeding organizations into a shared repository, which involved writing VBA macros, SQL scripts, and Python Programs that made seamless connections to all the tools in different organizations.
Six-Sigma Analysis to understand process bottlenecks – We analyzed and timed the 32-step process that took 4.5 hours to generate one weekly report to eliminate bottlenecks and reduce error-prone areas.
Automated Manual processes – Error-prone tasks were further automated to improve the accuracy of reporting and reduce the time taken to generate the report by 70%
Implemented Blue Prism to support more processes, implement controls to processes, support more processes, and support more intervals.
Summary
The Quality reporting is consumed by 300 stakeholders, including executives and decision-makers, and is carried out every day since February 2017 without a break, including holidays and furloughs of the client. Reporting errors are a rare scenario. New reports can be developed, implemented, and stabilized within a week. The necessity to support the late-night and weekend reporting was significantly reduced. This mechanism was humming along with process optimization and the implementation of Blue Prism.
The critical factors to success come with an in-depth understanding of business processes, applying engineering methods to optimize the processes, using the right tools and technologies such as python, SQL scripts, VBA scripts to automate small steps in the processes, documenting business rules for manual steps, tuning to the culture of an organization, securing infrastructure, establishing controls, and the ability to configure the RPA tool so that new processes can be easily supported.
Benefits / Facts
- Manual errors in reporting were eliminated. However, controls were introduced to avoid data errors, but some manual checks are still required for foolproof reporting.
- The Manual Steps involved in the process were reduced to 3 from 32.
- The number of people required to support the reporting was reduced by 80%, from 15 resources to 3.
- The number of reports increased to 20 with the same bandwidth of 3 resources.
- The need for off-peak support was eliminated.
We learned how to leverage the culture, technology stack, and infrastructure of an organization to implement Robotic Process Automation. Please contact us to discuss our RPA expertise.
Digital Network Assistant Chatbot for a Large Telecom Client
Digital Network Assistant Chatbot for a Large Telecom Client
A large telecom client’s primary objective of this project is to help 10,000+ Network and Technology specialists across the globe ranging from circuit engineers to field operators who manage extremely complex provisioning, troubleshooting, and maintenance workflows under significant time pressure with a Digital Network Assistant.
The functional goals of this solution are: (1) Improved self-service capability, (2) Simplified information search, and (3) Easy Troubleshooting. Technical solution must enable users through a conversational interface on Web, Mobile, and Instant messaging platforms, and the Digital Network assistant must be available 24X7.
The functional scope of work of this project encompassed:
- Use the conversational interface to assist users in handsfree mode
- Integrate with multiple AI / ML platforms such as Google’s Dialog Flow, Amazon’s AI, etc.,
- Enable creation of multiple Bots or multiple instances of the same Bot to serve different groups across the globe
- Build an interface where business users without the technical background can create new intents and train the Bot with new skills
The technical scope includes:
- Building a platform to centrally manage the data, intents, skills to avoid conflicts and redundancy
- Building AWS infrastructure to manage and support Bot lifecycle
- Building the components and action handlers to fetch the corresponding data and display the information through an interface
- Building CI/CD pipeline to quickly develop, test, and deploy the new skills into production
- Building a user interface to help business and operational users to develop and train the Bot with new skills with code-less development architecture
The operational scope includes:
- Mining the skills of different groups and understanding the frequency of the usage
- Prioritizing the skills for development and quantifying the benefits
- Queuing the skills for development into Sprint Backlogs
- Training the new users on how to leverage Chatbot in their day to day tasks
Our Solution:
A chatbot is a tool to retrieve information and generate human-like conversation. It is mainly a dialog system aimed to solve/serve a specific purpose. To accomplish this goal, it needs an interface where the user needs to request dialog or keyboard; it needs NLP service to understand and interpret the command; it needs action handlers to connect with applications and retrieve the information so that the Bot can respond to the request. Also, it requires secured connections; authentication and authorization; store the data, dialogs, intents; orchestration services to synchronize requests from different users; messaging platforms from where users can make requests; and channels of service.
A Chatbot requires an interface to integrate with and all the plumbing to connect and retrieve the information on the surface. Hence designing and building the framework is essential to implement Chatbot to serve its purpose. The following figure illustrates the Chatbot framework.
The solution was built on the following best practices:
- Decouple the dependency between User Interface and NLP Backend – Every NLP comes with its own interface. It is in an organization’s best interests to develop its own interface and access NLP service through APIs. This helps easily changing the NLP service without much hassle.
- Save the intents and dialogs within the local database – This improves the performance and keeps it independent of the service provider.
- Design for multiple Bot Instances – Enterprises may either use one instance to cater to different business lines or use different instances with different names. Hence it is better to design for multiple instances.
- Develop different services – When different Chatbot instances are required, it is important to develop different services for Training, Testing, etc., to comply with multiple versions of different instances easily.
Benefits:
- Our solution reduced the time taken to complete the provisioning research tasks from 20 minutes to less than 3 minutes
- Our solution helped users to train 180+ skills in a period of 90 days, which resulted in significant productivity
- For the financial year 2019, our solution saved $13M
Radiant Helps a Supermajor Increase the Quality of Learning Outcomes While Decreasing the Costs
An oil and gas supermajor engaged Radiant to provide ongoing support for analysis, instructional design, and development for global learning initiatives.
To increase efficiency in a challenging market for oil and gas companies, “a large integrated oil company required a vendor that provided a broad range of services with the ability to rapidly assess the needs of stakeholders and subject matter experts (SMEs) and deliver effective educational programs.”
The Global Training Department is responsible for all the technical training that its employees receive at all its business units worldwide. Its purview of responsibility covers such diverse areas as employee health and safety, facility maintenance, and complex geosciences.
The oil and gas company sought assistance from Radiant’s Learning & Organizational Change team to close the gaps in its ability to respond to global training needs created by reducing its staff. Radiant selected vital personnel to work as part of the instructional systems design team. This team continues to partner with our customers to create all manner of educational interventions.
OUR SOLUTION
Radiant provides this Fortune 20 company the ability to scale quickly to meet current needs while maintaining the continuity of experience necessary to build learning solutions around the highly technical subject matter efficiently.
Depending on the number of distinct interventions that are part of a given program, Radiant employs either the traditional ADDIE model or a hybrid of the SAM (successive approximation model) and layers of necessity models.
Typical engagements require services across the full project lifecycle, from analysis to delivery. Projects usually require Radiant to field multi-disciplined teams consisting of project managers, instructional designers, multimedia designers, and video production specialists. Radiant also embeds personnel directly into project teams when analysis indicates that doing so will represent a more efficient use of client resources.
RESULTS
Radiant is working with the client to focus on distance learning to reduce travel required by its employees. Radiant’s instructional designers’ design fit-for-purpose solutions focused on getting the solution into employees’ hands and then iterating based on learner feedback and objective evaluation. While traditional in-person ILT remains a large component of their offerings, with Radiant’s assistance, the company moves towards offering learners more pull educational options instead of the conventional push model. Virtual ILT, just-in-time learning options, and video-mediated self-education have all been a recent focus of these initiatives.
Working with Radiant has:
- Dramatically lowered training-related travel expenses
- Provided greater and more frequent reach; serve more learners globally
- Achieved higher learner satisfaction reported from greater access and the ability to self-pace
- Delivered learning solutions more efficiently, allowing for a more significant number of completed initiatives every year
- Greater versatility, having a scalable team experienced with oil and gas subject matter resulted in lower costs for the client and led to Radiant becoming the primary vendor for all of their technical training needs
SOME KEY TECHNOLOGIES USED
- PHP
- HTML5
- CSS3
- JQuery
- JavaScript
- Bootstrap
- Less
- Adobe Creative Cloud
- Articulate Storyline
- Adobe Captive
- SCORM
- xAPI
- WebEx Training Center
Software Development and Maintenance for a Large Telecom Client
CLIENT CHALLENGE
A large telecom client has a huge challenge managing data and provisioning services with a high level of quality and reliability. As a result, their IT needs a variety of applications and systems to manage the company's customers and its rapidly changing needs for rapid and reliable provisioning.
Along with various peers, Radiant was tasked with creating a complex data system and business support systems.
OUR SOLUTION
Using Agile/RUP Methodologies and ITL and ISO 9001 processes, Radiant has created numerous software systems and operations systems that successfully address the large telecom client IT needs. Radiant maintains data communications and business support systems that include; voice portals, call management applications, Computer Telephony Integration (CTI), and Contact Intelligence Services (CIS). These systems have a variety of unique features that are incredibly useful for their IT.
RESULTS
Radiant provided effective and impactful software development support, followed by the successful deployment of systems with on-going operational support for their IT.
SOME KEY TECHNOLOGIES USED
- Java/J2EE
- Spring
- RMI
- JWS
- JAXP
- JDBC/JPI
- Hibernate
- JSP/JSF/Jquery
- Oracle/Sybase/MySQL
- MS SQL
- HTML
- XML
- Unix
Quit4Health
CLIENT CHALLENGE
Quitting smoking is notoriously difficult; it takes the average smoker at least fourteen attempts to quit successfully. This project aims to translate and update an evidence-based interactive smoking cessation website to mobile platforms.
OUR SOLUTION
Radiant employed iterative, research-driven user experience design processes to produce a compelling, theory-driven program. End-user stakeholders were involved throughout development.
RESULTS
In an evaluation of technology acceptance, AppSPIRE was rated as appealing, easy-to-use, relevant and motivating by a cohort of college students. An evaluation of cessation outcomes is pending.
User Experience Can Quickly Drive Digital Transformation
Radiant accelerated Verizon’s Enterprise Transformation with an evidence-based User Experience (UX) project that simplified the user experience for over 10,000 workers in the Network Systems Engineering group.
This project, Network Single Pane of glass (nSPOG), garnered our Verizon customer a prestigious Digital Edge 50 award, which honors 50 organizations for executing digital transformation initiatives with significant, measurable business impact.
Radiant worked with our client to prioritize user experience, identify user interface and workflow inefficiencies that, if addressed, would increase productivity and yield significant cost savings.
Verizon’s Network Systems Engineering ecosystem consisted of +20 applications used by over 10,000 employees to provide services worldwide.
Daily tasks were arduous and cumbersome. End users juggled work between disparate applications, each having a unique user interface (UI) and user experience (UX.) Workflows cut across multiple applications, requiring users to ‘swivel chair’ between interfaces constantly. The cognitive load was overwhelming. Carrying out even simple tasks was inefficient for users.
Observations
- The dissonance between what users claim they need and what business feels they truly need (e.g., users will say they need “all the fields”)
- Extensive usability barriers around locating relevant units of information
- Spatial inefficiencies throughout UI
- Often the little distinction between passive information display components and available interactive controls
Preliminary Conclusions
- Needed: Extremely economical interface layout that maximizes usable screen real estate
- Needed: Novel approach to field retrieval and search
- Needed: Standardization of field display and formatting
- Needed: Standardization of selection/autocomplete behaviors where common taxonomies of information are in use (e.g., cable inventory numbers in Maria’s demo)
- Needed: Mechanisms to clearly surface task controls, distinguished from info display
OUR SOLUTION
Radiant implemented an evidence-based program focused on our guiding principles for next-generation user experience.
Our approach focused on increasing system consistency, predictability, and learnability. Our solution guided users through tasks with the minimum number of steps, streamlining work, and automating unnecessary manual processes. Through iterative, user-focused design, we developed a single unified interface that is:
ADAPTIVE: Bend the technology to the user; rather than vice versa
CONTEXTUAL: Account for the user beyond the interface
INTUITIVE: Focus on the task, not the process
EFFICIENT: Reduce the user’s cognitive load
ANTICIPATORY: Understand the user’s needs before they emerge
In partnership with our customer, we developed several innovative features that improved UX, such as:
- Guided navigation to lead users through workflows without overwhelming them with information
- Predictive analytics to surface status and risk information that supports decision-making
- Intelligent search to return relevant information more quickly and efficiently
- Location sensing mobile features that link workers with relevant data based on their position in time and space
- Interactive AI chat to retrieve information and feedback in a conversational way
- Process automation to eliminate repetitive, error-prone manual work
- Communication tools to improve cross-team collaboration
These features are enabled by integrating with leading-edge technologies like SOLR, RPA Automation Anywhere, IBM Clickstream Analytics, and Machine Learning. These support web-standard technologies such as HTML5, CSS2, and AngularJS.
RESULTS
The results of the project are compelling. With a completely unified and thoroughly transformed user experience, nSPOG has provided measurable improvements for the users: increased satisfaction, efficiency, and reduced errors, clicks, screens, and chair swivels.
With a completely unified and thoroughly transformed user experience, the “Network Single Pane of Glass” has provided measurable results for our customer’s business and users.
Clickstream analytics and usability studies have identified:
Up to 60% reduction in the time to perform a typical task80% reduction in chair-swivels50% reduction in clicks to complete a task50% reduction in screens visited to complete a task.
How can Radiant help your organization achieve next-generation user experience? Contact us today.
Quality Assurance and Testing Services
CLIENT CHALLENGE
USCIS, through the Office of Transformation Coordination (OTC), is in the midst of global, web-based technologies and IT support that gives direct, secure access to USCIS services by applications and petitioners.
To deal with such a monumental change, Radiant was tasked with providing systems assurance and technical services to implement solutions that support USCIS’s mission.
OUR SOLUTION
With a 5 year $4 million contract, Radiant provides numerous services to the USCIS' mission. This includes; facilitating and assessing cross-functional program-wide compliance with standards, maintaining evidence to prove independent verification of implemented processes, ensuring methodologies and product functionality meets mission requirements and providing project information. Radiant also has system assurance activities that include oversight on agile methodology and SW work products, including the sprint plans, architecture, and software design/code.
RESULTS
Radiant is successfully implementing complex technical and organizational techniques to assist with the USCIS' program.
Using Augmented Reality (AR) to Help Support a Product Launch
CLIENT CHALLENGE
A major oil and gas services company was looking to market a new oil field tool at the Offshore Technology Conference. The Azimuthal Lithodensity (ALD) tool is over17 feet long and weighed thousands of pounds. To showcase the actual tool at the conference would be a challenging and expensive task.
Having worked with the client for over ten years, they knew where to turn. Radiant crafted an Augmented Reality (AR) solution, developed and deployed it within 4 weeks for use at the conference.
OUR SOLUTION
Radiant quickly understood the goals and the unique challenges such as low or no internet connectivity in the exhibit hall, spatial constraints of the booth size, need for accurately projecting the ALD features such as size/scale, shortened development timeframe, and more.
We developed an AR app for use on iPads that was capable of working offline. The camera used a visual marker to launch the application’s content. Users could view the virtual ALD tool via a detailed 3D interactive model, gauge the scale, access vital documentation such as technical specs, manuals, and product presentation materials, including video files.
The UI was intuitive, and the functionality was simple enough for customers to interact with the AR app by themselves, or a sales professional was able to walk them through it. The application provided a mechanism to input customer names and contact information, stored in a file on the local drive until it could be uploaded later when there was a connection. The sales staff used the information as ‘warm’ lead data.
RESULTS
With an understanding of the challenges and drawing upon our highly skilled technical consultants, Radiant conceived and planned the solution. Considering the project variables, we delivered an augmented reality app that supported our client’s business development efforts within four weeks.
The application was very successful in engaging potential clients and gathering contact information for lead progression. Further, it helped showcase our client’s newly launched tool and generate awareness within the industry.
SOME KEY TECHNOLOGIES USED
- Vuforia Engine
- Unity 3D
- Blender 3D
