Author Archives: Jancarlos Ferreira

BPM On the Up & Up

With the technological advances and innovations in business continue to exponentially grow within their practices. The biggest challenge is all the pressure they face to stay afloat. From high climbing costs to having the fiercest competition with other companies. Long term, this causes danger to viability and businesses cannot afford to screw up continuously. To address these issues, a software has been implemented that eventually became the foundation of “digital transformation”, according to Digital Journal.

This is called Business Process Management (BPM), a software providing tools to quote “streamline processes, manage compliance, and adapt to shifting market conditions”. BPM is used to touch various different areas like different departments, locations, and IT systems. A revolutionary tactic has been made here, due to this process helping managers efficiently track and pinpoint errors & inefficiencies. Also for the team members, they can have a clear understanding of their goals and mission(s). 

Speaking of efficiency, this is essentially the first and most important benefit (arguably) that users hopefully will recognize. A lot more tasks can be completed in a higher-level manner. Let’s use a couple of examples: finance and healthcare. To treat and prevent illnesses, increased automation creates higher capacity. For financing, provider automation keeps secureness over companies against fraud and error. This translates to transparency, where these companies get to view their status and performance, in turn increasing accountability.

Despite the pros, all ideas come with its cons. BPM is not a straightforward process that is easily implemented whatsoever. Some businesses and organizations are limited in terms of skill gaps, fear of change and redesign complexities. In order to resolve this, companies need to broaden their vision by being open to the idea of BPM. Seeing the benefit will lead to greater outcomes in the performance as a whole.

Why is this important to discuss? The business industry is constantly changing, from the amount of businesses being formed, their structure outlines, idea creations, improving outcomes, etc. Depending on the size of the business (whether it’s yours or you work for one), there needs to be some sort of structure and process to have smooth outputs and less friction. For me personally, I knew that all businesses had their own processes in terms of how they’re run, but BPM is a new term I had never really learned or tapped into.

Moving forward, with the knowledge of programming and software development that I’m currently learning through a curriculum, I can hopefully bring a new/different perspective into a business when I am ready to delve deeper into the work field. Maintaining business process management will improve productivity, so it is not something to ignore at all. 

Source: BPM software and the move toward smarter business practices – Digital Journal

From the blog CS@Worcester – theJCBlog by Jancarlos Ferreira and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

It’s An AI Problem

AI has grown to become one of the most useful and powerful tools in the world of technology. To the point where even schools and universities are taking advantage of it and implementing AI into their curriculum, with restrictions of course. Although artificial intelligence continues to evolve, it is not what it’s cracked up to be. Reports have shown that generative AI has been having issues in quality production. It is a hurdle that puts great limits on itself according to Harvard Business Review.

According to their article “Addressing Gen AI’s Quality-Control Problem”, AI has had issues with their output. This type of technology has tendencies of creating problems like making things up, leaving certain answers out and producing limitless possibilities, making difficulties of finding efficient solutions. While companies have found different alternatives to address this matter, it has become very expensive to do. 

By bringing this topic to the forefront, we get to see the reality of how AI isn’t always the solution in terms of finding the answers to different situations. This is why I personally chose this to begin with. A vast majority of this current generation uses this tool on a daily basis, but we don’t truly understand the efficiency of it. Especially in the workplace, where problem solving is crucial. 

Amazon, for instance, uses Catalog AI as a better approach to avoid quality issues. It detects and blocks unreliable data, produce ideas for new product pages, run tests and uses feedback as a method to keep improving. The upside of this is while various organizations struggle to recieve positive results from gen AI, specifically a financial investment return, eight percent of Amazon’s suggestions recieved positive impact from sale revenue, considering it “measurable value”. 

Reviewing this information, it didn’t quite surprise me that different groups of people are using alternative methods to get results like this. Even just in using AI myself, if I notice that I’m not getting accurate answers from one AI assistant, then I turn to others like Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Google AI, etc. It’s also useful for when you want to see different outputs and compare them to each other. The point of performing all these tests is to test the effectiveness of this tool.

This especially applies to companies, who use very similar process to see if their methods work. Going back to Amazon, eighty percent of their outputted data was very unreliable. After going back and reviewing the progress and performance, they were able to make vast improvements. Now approaching to hopefully start in the computer science work field very soon, I pretty much know the do’s and don’ts of using gen AI. And having a process to heighten company data.

Article Source: Addressing Gen AI’s Quality-Control Problem

From the blog CS@Worcester – theJCBlog by Jancarlos Ferreira and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Welcome To My Blog!

This is my blog for the Computer Science Software Process Management course. Stay tuned for what’s coming next!

From the blog CS@Worcester – theJCBlog by Jancarlos Ferreira and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.