tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84737194449035297162023-06-21T10:06:54.441+05:30Says Murali...The world’s a canvas we have the opportunity to paint and the picture that emerges is limited only by our thoughts. I believe the values we live by, the thoughts & ideas we bring forth, define us. Learning is perpetual & happens best when those thoughts, ideas, views & opinions are shared. I’ll endeavour to share mine, no holds barred. It’s my privilege to have you here. The icing on the cake would be if you leave a part of you behind by sharing your valuable thought & opinion.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11771426589052531861noreply@blogger.comBlogger17125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8473719444903529716.post-87752701285400547942012-11-05T14:58:00.000+05:302012-11-05T14:58:12.965+05:30Talent Acquisition – 8 things you just can’t ignore.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;">Talent acquisition in organizations, independent of the industry, society or geographies they operate in, has and will continue to pose one of the biggest challenges to its success. How much can you decipher out of an hour, half-hour or quarter-hour that you spend with a prospective employee? For all those that wince at the idea of an arranged marriage – spending a lifetime in marriage to a partner that they spend similar amounts of time to understand – this is the exact situation in work life. There are zillions of points of view and checklists on what to look for and pitfalls to avoid and there is enough literature you will find on the topic. Yet the results continue to be disturbing still. I am trying to put together my own flavor of the dos and don’ts that I do not see covered often. Some of these might be pertinent to only a specific section of the organization (perhaps a bias towards leadership talent acquisition) while others may be more generic and I have jotted them down as they came to mind, so here goes. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">-</span><span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Trust the ecosystem that has produced the candidate in front of you</span></i></b><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">. Career progression, rewards, recognition, awards are all better indicators of consistent performance than anything you might discover about a person in the minutes spent on a discussion.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">-</span><span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Darwin’s theory of evolution is a strong one – trust it always</span></i></b><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">. Two of the cornerstone thoughts that shape the theory of evolution and natural selection are the survival of the fittest and the struggle for existence. Not every high school or undergraduate drop-out will go on to win the Nobel Prize or create the largest organizations of the world – those fairy tales sounds good only in retrospect – they can’t be treated as an example to follow for employing the prospective candidate in front of you. Strong academic performance, reputation of the alma mater(s) and the organizations that the candidate has been a part of are critical pointers to what the candidate brings on the table.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">-</span><span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Beware of the glib talking smooth operator</span></i></b><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">. It is so often easy to get carried away by the way a person comes across and has the gift of the gab to sway the audience with their articulation and mannerisms over a short period of time. To demonstrate capability and credibility, all you need is the conviction and commitment, not the flowery language, though the art of articulation would be an added plus. Look for these qualities in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">content of the conversation rather than the manner of it</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">-</span><span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Beware of the over-achiever profile</span></i></b><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">. Our image of superheroes is that of someone that wears undergarments over their clothes. While that makes them easy to identify, everyone who dresses up so, do not become superheroes purely by virtue of doing so. That would be comic-book naiveté! It is fairly normal for people to have the misconception that they were the only factor in a success story. Taking the credit for what a team delivered and with the backing of a sound ecosystem is a norm with the majority. The wiser ones would know what worked in a situation and what their contribution to it was. They would be able to articulate all factors that contributed to a success. And by virtue of that, how they stand out.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">-</span><span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">A leader that’s always right but never the first</span></i></b><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">. A common mistake that everyone makes is to think that a successful leader has to always, or at least most of the time, be right. That is considered beyond compromise. Look for someone who has taken the initiative, taken the first tentative step, even if nervously for they were stepping into the unknown, but with the tenacity to be able to learn from their mistakes and stay the course. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Leaders are thus because they lead, not because they are always right</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">-</span><span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">You need the right fit, not the biggest size</span></i></b><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">. Put the role that you are hiring for into perspective when you start judging the person across the table. More often than not, the base competency required for a role is exactly that – very basic! What you need is a steady head on a level shoulder. You seldom need someone, who can rattle off the value of ‘pi’ to the 100<sup>th</sup> decimal or multiply two 13 digit numbers mentally within a minute, to do double-entry bookkeeping! You do not need an IQ of 150+ to understand the average business processes and systems and solve potential business problems. A phone operator does not need to know Alexander Graham Bell, your travel desk folks do not need to know the Silk or Spice route and it is ok if your Chief Technology Officer does not know the exact charge or spin of a positron.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">-</span><span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">You do not have any points to prove, so steer clear of bullying</span></i></b><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">. This is the most common mistake people make. When you have a smart person sitting across the table, do not feel either intimidated or succumb to the urge to outsmart the person at one topic or another. On the contrary, get the person to talk more and more. What you need talent from the outside for, is to generate newer ideas, not to impose your old ones on. Remember the old adage, you are smart if you hire folks smarter than you, you’re stupid if you do the opposite. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">-</span><span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Avoid the checklist trap</span></i></b><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">. This is the classic one that dilutes the purpose of having a conversation. For this kind of an exercise, you might as well administer a questionnaire instead. When you approach a discussion with a checklist in hand, you are not<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> listening to </i>but<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> listening for</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;">In summary, when you are trying to hire someone, either for a specific role or otherwise, you can’t be too clouded by the interview or discussion process that happens over few to several minutes. There is a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">pre- and post- process that could be equally effective</i>. And during the process of interaction, you need to make sure that you are grounded – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">neither overbearing, nor overwhelmed</i>! Last, but not the least, be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fully involved in the process</i> and go in with the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">right, read appropriate, expectations</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 8pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Note: The views expressed here and in any of my posts are my personal views and not to be construed as being shared by any organization or group that I am or have been associated with presently or in the past.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11771426589052531861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8473719444903529716.post-4333644846911399392012-10-29T17:41:00.001+05:302012-10-29T17:41:15.100+05:30Leadership – 9 imperatives to success.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;">What makes a good leader? What are the leadership qualities that are most relevant to the current socio-economic and socio-political context? And what are qualities that are essential in a leader independent of the era, geography, culture, organization and the teams they lead?</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;">The efficacy of a list of leadership qualities and whether they stand their ground on any test is when you take any of the qualities out and the success of the leader is decidedly questionable. Here’s a handy list of 9 leadership tips that you would find everywhere if you didn’t look for it but may not come across searching…<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">1.</span><span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Leadership by command. <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;">You cannot demand respect as a leader, you need to command respect. And that does not come from your business card, the office you occupy or the title of your role. It comes from consistently appealing to the values that drive people to work together and achieve common goals. It comes from walking the talk and delivering on the promises.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">2.</span><span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Leadership on demand.<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;">Successful leaders are seldom the ones who breathe down the necks of their teams. They are usually the ones that provide you with the independence and space to operate by yourself and are available to offer advice when sought. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">3.</span><span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Leadership from the high moral ground.<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;">Integrity, honesty and impartiality are imperatives in any role and in every walk of life. It is even more important as a leadership quality since a leader cannot effectively drive organizational behavior without being a practitioner of what one expects from the organization.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">4.</span><span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Leadership is architecture and not management.<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;">True leaders shape organizations, they do not run them. They build and mould teams, not structure and supervise them. They create ecosystems for success, not plans for wins. They inspire and invigorate, not control and investigate. They create dreams, vision and strategy to achieve them <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">5.</span><span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Leadership through reciprocal trust.<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;">A leader, who cannot trust others, does not trust oneself. Plain and simple. If a leader has exercised the choice of putting folks (s)he thought were right for the task in hand and then is immersed in doubt about those choices, the leader lacks self-confidence and trust in one’s own ability. And nor do people find such a leader trustworthy. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">6.</span><span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Leadership is exploratory.<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;">Leaders do not have all the answers. They know it. They also know that they are not leaders because they know all the answers. They are so because they know how to find the answers. They are so because they can navigate the course till the answers are all found. They have the veracity to see reality for what it is, they have the spark to seek and explore, they have the strength and spirit to endure and the urge and will to conquer. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">7.</span><span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Leadership is secure in team’s greater skills and their empowerment.<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;">Success of leadership is a greater factor of the combined strength of the entire team being led and its output than the individual brilliance of the leader. Successful leaders build teams with individuals potentially stronger than themselves (and are secure in doing so), ensure synergies that make the team stronger than the sum of strengths of individuals in it, share any knowledge they may have that could fill gaps or enhance the team’s potential, and believe in sharing the outcome with their teams. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">8.</span><span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Leadership is being decisive.<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;">Leadership, by nature, is a direction-loaded function. If the choice were obvious, it would not be a choice anymore. Leadership is most often summoned at the precipice or the juncture where the path forward is not obvious. The ability to decide, decide fast and a later vindication of the decision made, is what differentiates a good leader from the average one. When presented with all the data required to make a decision, any competent person would make the cut. It is in the absence of the complete picture, when the data does not lend itself to the decision and when delay means denial and denial means death (okay, agreed, that was dramatic!), when intuition takes preeminence in the making of a decision, that the good leader comes into one’s own.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">9.</span><span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Leadership touches, impacts and, at times, transforms lives.<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;">I am yet to come across a good leader, whose purpose is not strong by itself to be appealing to the people they lead. I am also yet to come across successful teams that are not bound together by anything beyond the immediate goals of the teams; or for that matter, individuals in a team that are inspired only by professional skills of their leaders. I have not seen customers that cannot appreciate a good leader conceiving or designing a product or service for the value its usage brings to the customer’s business rather than all the features stuffed into it. Leadership in its true sense leaves the person experiencing it, touched, impacted and changed; for the better.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It is not as if you would not find leaders or their teams tasting success in the absence of one, many or all of these aspects of leadership. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The unfortunate point is, the success in such cases, are despite the leadership than because of it!</i></span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11771426589052531861noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8473719444903529716.post-21576138276050076442012-10-12T17:18:00.000+05:302012-10-12T17:18:58.685+05:30What’s new with Agile or XP?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">To start with, I would like to acknowledge that there are several views and interpretations of what Agile as a thought, methodology, process, model and framework for software development or maintenance is. To pick one and/or comment on what is the correct view is not the intent of this discussion. The underlying principles that represent Agile, in my words –</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">-</span><span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Seamless, in-the-face and short-cycle communication across all stakeholders to ensure faster decision-making and homogeneous understanding of all project and product aspects</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">-</span><span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Rapid and iterative approach to software solution building that facilitates a ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">completed product view’</i> despite being in-process so everyone sees it in the same light and are able to contribute tangible value-added changes instead of a virtual and imaginary idea that takes shape much later</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">-</span><span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">People-centric rather than process-centric action allowing great deal of flexibility to focus on the what, when, where and which rather than the hows and whys</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">Extreme programming or XP advocates a similar line of thinking vis-à-vis the methodology adopted in Agile though it has the added ‘no-frills’ approach to core programming on how functionality is coded and features kept to the bare minimum et al.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">So now that we have set the ground on what we are discussing about, let us turn our focus to the question I posed to start with. So what’s new about Agile or XP? </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">I have vivid memories, from more than a couple of decades back, of groups comprising some pretty tech-savvy business users and power users sitting alongside a bunch of programmers and programmer analysts (I must admit whatever that role or title means has always intrigued me!) who understood a bit of the business, a lot of the functionality, had limited analysis or design exposure but were solid to awesome programmers sitting together and doling out mid-sized enhancements to large applications and building small applications by huddling together for a few hours, days and weeks. And the folks that I considered granddads of the trade then had told me the same tales from a decade further back, which sounded pretty similar! </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">A lot of us have had experiences of sitting together with a business user or power user and building apps from scratch without writing the BRDs, SSDs, URSs, HLDs, LLDs, ABCs, PQRs and XYZs! Many of these apps are still in use, are robust and have since been modified a zillion times over by future generations beyond recognition. So what’s all the fuss about? That was, essentially, as Agile and XP as anyone would care. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">It is amusing to see the Sprints and the Scrums and the Scrum Masters, extreme programmers and the whole tribe and its rituals. And the fact that there is a solid commercial value attached to the jamboree not just on doing software development and maintenance in this manner but also on learning how to do so (there are certifications galore to prove the point and your worth, if you care)! </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">In summary, there is no novelty in Agile or XP. There is merit in choosing to go that path when the situation demands increased velocity and when the torque factor on requirements is a lot more than usual. And it’s been done for donkey’s years. There are multiple ways in which a software development or maintenance project could be carried out. There are multiple methodologies and models to choose from, all with their inherent advantages and disadvantages. The folks on the ground are the best judges of what is required in a given situation and for them to choose one model over another, the least we can do is to keep it simple to understand and demystify the myth rather than creating more of them!</span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">You may also find some interesting perspectives on this and related themes in </span></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.academia.edu/399957/Historical_Roots_of_Agile_Methods_Where_Did_Agile_Thinking_Come_From"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">http://www.academia.edu/399957/Historical_Roots_of_Agile_Methods_Where_Did_Agile_Thinking_Come_From</span></a></div>
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<a href="http://213.250.125.18/ttt/Downloads/Old%20Wine%20in%20A%20New%20Bottle.pdf"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">http://213.250.125.18/ttt/Downloads/Old%20Wine%20in%20A%20New%20Bottle.pdf</span></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: 8pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Note: The views expressed here and in any of my posts are my personal views and not to be construed as being shared by any organization or group that I am or have been associated with presently or in the past.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11771426589052531861noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8473719444903529716.post-15298624636883421732012-09-21T16:10:00.000+05:302012-09-21T16:10:31.883+05:30Prudent investments – Knowledge management and the CKO.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">There have been multiple views on what the role of a Chief Information Officer in an organization ought to be. In a previous article I had shared some perspectives on how that role has panned out over the years and why it was critical to revisit the agenda and purpose of the CIO. While the focus of the CIO, and in turn the CIO organization, has to be around how the business boundaries can be expanded - a Contribution to Value Creation (CVC) view rather than the limited TCO view - it still revolves around innovation based upon the usage of technology to accomplish what was hitherto not possible within the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">information gathering, storage, analysis and deliverance domain</i>. That is the information management ecosystem.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">Like all other assets that sit on the balance sheet of an organization, data from its most raw form to the most refined one, is an asset that needs to be managed optimally to derive maximum returns from it. While the data pyramid and the nomenclature applied to different layers of it may vary from person to person and organization to organization, the essence of data refinement and the views to take on it are broadly defined by the value that comes out of its usage as an asset. I take a simplistic 4-layer view of the data pyramid through the rest of this article and this is not sacrosanct, everyone can have a different view and that may not be incorrect at all, but the essence of the takeaways that I focus on, would remain the same, whatever the view. I simply view the 4 layers as data, information, intelligence and knowledge.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">The first 3 layers and the nomenclature and semantics thereof have been in use for a long time and have been extensively used. I believe that these layers of the pyramid warrant no further analysis to gain any deeper understanding than already exists and will be touched upon only to provide relative references. What interests me, therefore, is knowledge, and we will discover why.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">It pains me no end to hear people talk of almost all the ‘knowledge’ in the world being available at their fingertips within the World Wide Web. Name the thing and you can learn about it by typing it into any of the decent search engines out there and the best part is that you don’t even need to know how to spell it correctly. What we do have access to, is a plethora of information, neatly stacked and delivered for our consumption, about almost anything in the world, real or virtual, with a thousand more views and opinions thrown in. It even has many how-to procedures and instructions to carry out almost any activity that one may need on day-to-day basis. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">Well, here is the twist. There are so many books written on ‘how to become a millionaire in x easy steps’, ‘how to get rich in y steps’ et al. If one could follow those instructions and procedures and get to become millionaires and rich, why is everyone not rich yet? Loads of spiritual literature tells us the path to nirvana – reading them and getting there should be a piece of cake, right? There is all the literature in the world on how to build ships, cities, nuclear reactors, particle accelerators, jet aircrafts, social networks, recipes for the best spreads, smartphones, steel making, name the thing! If reading these could have helped someone create them and do so at optimal costs and find the right markets for them, the world would not be what it is today. Here is why…</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">Structured data is information. Information doled out meaningfully to help analysis and understanding of what the information is about, provides intelligence. Intelligence, in this sense, has the encapsulated knowledge of the person(s) who designed this pre-defined view of the information to make it meaningful in a given context. All of this could still be potentially available to anyone who buys that intelligence, since it has been built into a product that delivers that intelligence.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;">Knowledge is in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">interpretation</i> of the data, information and intelligence that can be put to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">useful ends</i>. In a business context, it is that crucial element of understanding that helps trigger and enable concrete action to produce tangible and viable results. This needs <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">people and their intellect</i> at the core, and, perhaps a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">structured approach to how the analysis, hypothesis and resultant interpretation</i> are arrived at. The approach can be likened to the purpose-hypothesis-experiment-observation-analysis-inference cycle in a laboratory experiment context, for instance. Knowledge management deals with the people, methodology, processes, frameworks et al that are required to drive that all-important interpretation-to-action cycle. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">Often, the world has been so obsessed and mired with the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">information management ecosystem</i> that it has blundered by mistaking it for the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">knowledge management ecosystem</i>. When you see knowledge management frameworks in organizations, very mature ones in some cases, you actually see a framework for submission, storage, retrieval and sharing of information and some static intelligence (the how-to, procedures, work instructions et al in the best case scenario). The content of such knowledge management systems is hardly unique except for the name of the organization and could easily be found in similar forms (if not the same) in the public domain.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">The knowledge that resides in an organization, and by virtue of which the organization differentiates itself in the marketplace, is (or rather ought to be) the total <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">intellectual capital</i> of the organization (not just the ones patented or copyrighted and not confined to the final product or service only!). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">It is the most valuable asset of an organization</i>. Since it largely resides in people and the ability of the KM framework to facilitate structured interpretation to action cycles, it is a humongous challenge to precisely value this asset. So you do not see it in the balance sheet or any other financial statement for that matter. The importance and criticality of managing this asset is slowly gaining ground and organizations are investing in knowledge management teams and a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chief Knowledge Officer</i>. There has never been a more compelling argument for the existence of any other role in the core group of an organization as this.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">There are some businesses that might think that they aren’t much of a ‘knowledge’ organization and that the nature of their business does not need knowledge management in the elaborate way that is described above. The fact that an organization differentiates itself from other players in the same space and does business in an ecosystem of internal and external stakeholders through its own signature products and/or services inherently means that there is knowledge in the organization. It is upon organizations to acknowledge that and to appreciate the fact that the least tangible of their assets is the one that truly helps build the rest of the tangible ones.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">You may also find some interesting perspectives on this and related themes in </span></span></div>
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<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_management"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_management</span></a></div>
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<a href="http://www.skyrme.com/insights/27cko.htm"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">http://www.skyrme.com/insights/27cko.htm</span></a></div>
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<span style="color: #0066ff;"><a href="http://www.moyak.com/papers/chief-knowledge-officer2.ppt"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">www.moyak.com/papers/chief-knowledge-officer2.ppt</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0066ff;"><a href="http://it.toolbox.com/wiki/index.php/Chief_Knowledge_Officer"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">http://it.toolbox.com/wiki/index.php/Chief_Knowledge_Officer</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0066ff;"><a href="http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.194.9646"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.194.9646</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0066ff;"><a href="http://www.jps-dir.com/forum/uploads/13352/Kok.pdf"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">http://www.jps-dir.com/forum/uploads/13352/Kok.pdf</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0066ff;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 8pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Note: The views expressed here and in any of my posts are my personal views and not to be construed as being shared by any organization or group that I am or have been associated with presently or in the past.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11771426589052531861noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8473719444903529716.post-34070416146733963832012-09-06T19:56:00.003+05:302012-09-06T19:59:11.469+05:30The POWER age!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">The world and human history, has often been viewed as being made of various eons, eras, periods and ages. In the very distant past, the view of the world and different periods in history was largely geological. So we had the Hadean, Archean, Proterozoic and Phanerozoic Eons. The last of these Eons constituted three eras – the Paleozoic, the Mesozoic and the current, Cenozoic Era. The Mesozoic Era made up of the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods spanned 250-65 million years ago and were ruled by the dinosaurs. The Cenozoic Era is divided into the Paleogene, Neogene and the Quaternary periods. The Quaternary (beginning of which dates back to around 2.6 million years) is further sub-divided into the Pleistocene and the Holocene stages, the latter the current one that we live in and is approximately 11,700 years old. The quaternary also marks the period of ascendancy of the human race and its future dominance leading to the current day. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">I would like to bring into focus this period of human history where each phase or stage in history was defined by one element or the other that determined what would be the prominent or dominant force (and hence who would have the advantage of that dominance) and changed the natural order of things and paved the way for a new order. I do so with a view to take a sneak-peek into what the future holds in store for us. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">From the time that living beings came into being on earth till the beginning of the quaternary period, the physically fittest and strongest being was simply the dominant one and ruled that era. The quaternary also roughly coincides in time with what we call the Stone Age. The Stone Age refers to stone being used as a tool that helped the human race dominate the other beings and also extract the maximum out of the environment. Hence the use of tools for hunting to start with and for farming and agriculture, building structures for living etc by the early stages of the Holocene. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">This was followed by the Copper, Bronze and Iron ages and the nomenclature derives from the usage of the specific metal or alloy during that phase for building tools, implements and weapons, if you please. The first ones to discover these elements and invent tools that could put them to use far more effectively than the prominent/primary element of the previous era, gained ascendancy and dominated that era. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">Fast forward to the recent past of the past 200 plus years and we had the advent of machines. The folks and civilizations that invented these gained prominence and dominance over the rest. There are other references in public domain literature about the Industrial age, the Oil age, the Atomic age and most recently, the Information age. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">The point worth noting is that each of these ages is named after the element, the usage of which resulted in power. The power to determine the new order of things, the power to do different things, the power to do things differently and to determine what the world would do and how it would do it. So the Stone Age, Metal Age, Industrial Age, Information Age and so on. When the have-nots were doing things manually, the haves would use machines. When the machines needed fuel, Oil changed the pecking order. Nuclear capability determined the pecking order for decades. When one playing field was leveled, another was discovered to create the imbalance. The Information Age, though acknowledged widely, is probably defined by the subtlest element of all the ones that determined the period and where the power would reside. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">As you would have noticed, the ages are not all mutually exclusive and sequential. There are overlaps and there are periods when many might co-exist. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">So, what’s next? What is/are those elements that would determine the new pecking order? Which elements are likely to bring power and prosperity to those who possess it and change the dynamics of how the world currently functions?</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">Well, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>the power is likely to be in power</strong></i>. Literally. With most of the current sources of energy and power being from exhaustible sources and the consumption of energy perpetually heading north, this is inevitable. To give a sense of the size of the energy economy, the total energy consumption of the world was around 12275 mtoe (million tonnes of oil equivalent) in 2011. The total electricity generated was around 22000 TWH (tera watt hours) which from a calorific value equivalence standpoint would be around 1835 mtoe. The approx size of the energy economy is around $8.7 trillion or ~12% of the world economy. Only around 8% of this is from renewable and hydro sources. Rest is technically exhaustible (primarily coal, oil, gas & nuclear) though the time to last is a moot point. Having said that, the cost of extraction is likely to go up exponentially after a point on the exhaustible sources.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;">There are quite a few other elements, like everything in the healthcare space, from medicines and pharmaceuticals to infrastructure and equipment, data and doctors, that would have a crucial role to play in shaping the future and gain eminence; or for that matter, all elements that are critical to subsistence like food and water. These always were and will be evergreen elements but their very nature keeps them from assuming the pride of place of being <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the element</i> to make a difference and define an age or era. Also, as mentioned earlier, there will be overlaps. The Oil and Atomic Ages shall continue. So will the Information Age. Or for that matter, the Industrial or Machine Age. My view is that (other than elements that contribute to total world energy – produce and consumption) these will have lesser and lesser currency and say in the new order.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">Folks dominant in the Oil and Atomic Age paradigm will certainly be up in that new order. They have had and will continue to have, at least for a while, prime place under the sun. But that is going to be turned on its head the moment there is a commercially viable alternative energy choice amenable to mass production (and a lot of folks are focusing on the last word in the previous sentence for the answer!). And that isn’t too far in the future. There are several players who are just round the corner on that pursuit, have recognized this opportunity and are positioning themselves for the new order. And for a lot of the folks that are desperately holding on to a machine-age and information-age dream lasting a lifetime, well, time to wake up. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><strong><span style="color: #0c343d;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The power is finally back in the power</i>. And the new order is emerging as we speak!</span></strong></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">You may also find some interesting perspectives on this and related themes in </span></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.ons.no/index.cfm?event=downloadfile&famid=307332"><span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">http://www.ons.no/index.cfm?event=downloadfile&famid=307332</span></a></div>
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<a href="http://www.economist.com/node/11580723"><span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">http://www.economist.com/node/11580723</span></a></div>
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<a href="http://www.iwoe.unisg.ch/de/IWOE+News/2012/20120504_NewsRolfEsprit.aspx"><span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">http://www.iwoe.unisg.ch/de/IWOE+News/2012/20120504_NewsRolfEsprit.aspx</span></a></div>
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<a href="http://www.ausinnovation.org/articles/the-sixth-wave-of-innovation.html"><span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">http://www.ausinnovation.org/articles/the-sixth-wave-of-innovation.html</span></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: 8pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: black;">Note: The views expressed here and in any of my posts are my personal views and not to be construed as being shared by any organization or group that I am or have been associated with presently or in the past.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11771426589052531861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8473719444903529716.post-10842598053353525902012-08-24T11:00:00.001+05:302012-08-24T11:00:51.189+05:30The myth around niche.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;">The idea of a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">niche</i> product by itself is slightly flawed. The intent of this post was certainly not to be mired in the meaning of the term <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">niche</i>. Nevertheless, I do so with the intent of drawing upon the different definitions that reveals some interesting connotations of how the term has come to be used in the context of products and companies. Here are some of the definitions (only the noun form) – <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">-</span><span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A shallow recess especially one in a wall to display a statue or ornament<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">-</span><span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A cranny, hollow or crevice, as in a rock <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">-</span><span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A position particularly well-suited to the person who occupies it<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">-</span><span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A situation or activity specially suited to a person’s interests, abilities or nature<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">-</span><span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A focused, targetable part of a market<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">-</span><span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A special area of demand for a product or service<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;">The sequence of the definitions above, tells us the rough evolution of the term over the years. It is evident from the very words and phrases that are used to describe the word, that the last few definitions are fairly recent.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;">Now let us take a look at the way the industry has used the term niche. We have niche players in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant that attributes a relatively lesser ability to execute and a lower completeness of vision with respect to one market segment, to companies that fall in that category. On a different note, it beats me why I should be talking about folks who neither have a complete vision nor the ability to follow a strategy through with action!<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;">Somewhere in the entire scheme of things (read parlance and thought process) that the industry has gotten used to, every small player with a small footprint of product installations and customers is christened a niche player. Well, there is nothing wrong if a niche player is small. But there is everything wrong when you start talking about every small player as a niche one!<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;">In this era in the evolution of organizations and businesses (why even in our personal lives for that matter), the number of brick-and-mortar products that are available to cater to each aspect of the business and the choices they offer is, mildly put, large. Despite this backdrop, it is somewhat surprising that the entire business application products space comprises much fewer large players than one would expect. A look at the evolution of these large companies reveals some really interesting facts. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;">Most of these products evolved, first time around, from robust and comprehensive home-grown automation solutions for rather generic business processes. These were packaged and taken to the neighborhood market with the promise of shorter time-to-market and lesser cost of implementation. These were obvious advantages of a ‘second sale’. With the buyer community latching on to the idea, the footprint grew to an installed base of, at best double digits and at least 5-6 instances and the market itself grew beyond the neighborhood and even across borders aided by a globalization agenda. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;">In parallel, the number of acquisitions in the space grew dramatically and the smaller companies with their products got cannibalized. The core reason behind the consolidation was as much aspiration as economics. Well, this is all very fine because that is the precise way businesses evolve. But what may turn out to be more interesting is to look at the company that had implemented the product from the smaller (and so called niche) product company in the first place. This company now, is pretty much at the mercy of the larger product company and their strategy to retain or retire the product and brand it acquired. And then, there are the other niche product companies that haven’t sold out and continue to live with the ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">niche</i>’ they have made for themselves. The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">niche</i>, however, for these companies, has begun to take on the first two of the definitions presented right at the beginning!<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;">At the other end of the spectrum, the larger product companies which started with less than 40-50% coverage and hold on the entire spectrum of business processes that an organization typically has, have continually grown that coverage to over 70-75% through organic and inorganic expansions. Much can be said and debated about what is the core competence of an organization and if or not their customers would see a product or service differentiation if three-fourth of their processes are standardized and pretty much the same as the rest of their flock! But that is a slightly different point. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;">It is clear that a strategy that is built around adoption of a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">niche</i> product and company ought to be carefully evaluated against the long-term goals of one’s organization and the sustenance of the strategy over a longer time horizon. And if one does go that path, would it not be prudent to have an option open to transfer ownership of the product and its support to your organization, is well worth consideration.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">You may also find some interesting perspectives on this and related themes in </span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><a href="http://www.atkearney.com/index.php/Publications/a-dangerous-time-to-be-a-niche-player.html"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">http://www.atkearney.com/index.php/Publications/a-dangerous-time-to-be-a-niche-player.html</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 8pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Note: The views expressed here and in any of my posts are my personal views and not to be construed as being shared by any organization or group that I am or have been associated with presently or in the past.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11771426589052531861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8473719444903529716.post-26657783629867933052012-08-14T16:08:00.000+05:302012-08-14T16:08:49.849+05:30Supplier collaboration in ICT a poor shadow of its brick & mortar cousin!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">One school of thought recommends that when advice comes free (the connotation of free advice here and through the rest of this write-up is advice volunteered and not explicitly called for, not a monetary view of free), think twice before you take it. Well, that’s what all of us were taught and that’s what most of us do. Now here is something to chew on - taking free advice is obviously not the same as implementing it blindfolded. Then what is the cost of taking free advice? It is the time you take to understand it and the time you take to evaluate it. If someone finds that far too expensive, it might be prudent to ask what they think they ought to be doing with their time. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">None of us can think of an occasion when we had some funds to put aside in our personal lives and did not agree to meet up with someone who had an idea or two on where we should invest those funds to find the best returns. The more ideas, views and options, the merrier. Inexplicably, we do not wear the investor hat when carrying out business. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">Just ask the people who invest on ideas if they would find the time spent listening to, digesting and evaluating an idea, worth its while. In this era of carrying out business collaboratively across multiple partner ecosystems, ideation and innovation cannot be carried out in silos. There is nothing new about that thought given that stuff like CPFR (supply chain collaboration) has been in existence for eternity and supplier (read partner) collaboration is fast catching on, right? </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">Yes and no! The very folks that have made collaboration a reality within business ecosystems by providing the platform and tools to make it work, and I mean the IT community, is where you would find the least partnership in ideation. I know there are a few organizations that have used their partner ecosystems in information and communication technology effectively to maximize ideation and manage their techno-commercial investments towards realization of their business goals, but these are few and far between. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">In fact, there are few planned, systematic, voluntary and periodic interactions in the ICT supply chain, where ideas are sought from ICT partners on the basis of business data, challenges, issues and problems that are shared with them. Even where it exists, more often than not, this isn’t initiated where it ought to be. Even where it is, the focus is on the TCO theme and very little, if at all, focuses on the CVC (Contribution to Value Creation) theme. The appetite and intent to ideate, contribute and make a difference is there. And on either side of the stream. It’s time 'the partners' crossed the stream. It’s time they collaborated.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">The cost of ideation, to the consumer of the idea, is inconsequentially disproportionate to the potential value to be derived from it! Partner collaboration provides a unique opportunity for the ICT community to drive business behavior and set examples, for a change, than just being the passive enabler. This could well be the long due impetus required in the business outcome alignment roadmap that is imperative for the next era of ICT growth. </span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">You may also find some interesting perspectives on this theme in </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><a href="http://www.pwc.com/en_GX/gx/operations-consulting-services/pdf/outsourcingcomesofage.pdf"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">http://www.pwc.com/en_GX/gx/operations-consulting-services/pdf/outsourcingcomesofage.pdf</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><a href="http://isbm.smeal.psu.edu/library/articles/general-interest-articles/Supplier-Customer-Success-Stories.pdf"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">http://isbm.smeal.psu.edu/library/articles/general-interest-articles/Supplier-Customer-Success-Stories.pdf</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 8pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Note: The views expressed here and in any of my posts are my personal views and not to be construed as being shared by any organization or group that I am or have been associated with presently or in the past.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11771426589052531861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8473719444903529716.post-37514325506701786862012-08-07T10:32:00.000+05:302012-08-07T10:32:37.708+05:30Big…Bigger…Biggest! - making sense of world data.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">There have been numerous articles and publications on the volume of data across analog and digital forms that exist in the world and how these could be put to constructive use. The estimates are that the total volume of data stored by the end of this year would be in the 2.7 zettabyte range and growing at a rate of just under 50% year-on-year. To the uninitiated, a zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes (GB) and a billion terabytes (TB). Now that sure sounds like the next biggest business opportunity that everyone should latch on to, right?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The answer is yes, but with a note of caution. Here is why.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Over 90% of all the data that exists (and over 99% of the new data that is being created or will be created in the future) is unstructured media data including video, audio and images. Take this out of the equation and we still are talking about around 220-230 exabytes of existing data and another 170 exabytes being created additionally through to 2017. </span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Analog data, in one form or the other, was around 6% of the total data of 220-230 exabytes that was available in 2007. However, that would only be growing infinitesimally, so we will take the total analog data as around 3.5% of all data, on an average, and take that piece out of this calculation!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The new denominator is therefore in the 375 exabytes ballpark!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">A closer look at this data would reveal a whole bunch of realities that are mind-boggling and help you put the numbers in the right perspective. We will, over the course of this discussion, make some assumptions to help the math, some of which may be incorrect (though no one would be able to prove it one way or the other, despite big data!), but will not thematically challenge the hypothesis. Here’s one. The total amount of storage for non-user data (system and application software, for example) is assumed to be around a third of the total data. That seems a fair assumption when you take the Forrester view that we will have around 2 billion computers in the world by 2015 and that the minimum that each such device would need is around 50 GB only for OS, office, security and networking tools. That would throw a further 125 exabytes out of the window (no pun intended!). That leaves us with around 250 exabytes of user data!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Now that media files and system/application software are out of the equation, we will assume that 90% of the total remaining data is corporate in nature (the other 10%, or 25 exabytes, is not necessarily personal data, it could even be, for instance, data generated in Office tools, mail data etc). And I cannot think of a corporate that does not back-up its data. So the minimum redundancy at the transaction data level itself would be 50%. Take that out of the equation because the same data analyzed twice over would not yield any greater intelligence than doing it once! That would take out 45% of the total data we started with at the beginning of this paragraph. Also, most organizations of a size where the data volume should matter for this calculation would have a data warehouse, an operation data store or a bunch of denormalized data stores at the least to introduce a further 50-67% redundancy. That would translate to another ~30% of the data not to be considered in the equation. This leaves us with 25% of the 250 exabytes of data or ~60 exabytes. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">A significant part of the non-corporate data (the 25 exabytes) is essentially generated and consumed with a view to sharing and communication with other data/information stakeholders. I cannot think of someone creating a file locally and sending it to someone for consumption and then diligently removing the redundancy of storing it in their file systems and again in their mail folders. This also happens at the receiver’s end. And not all communication is one-on-one. I cannot think of communication that ends with the first receiver either! Assuming a two-step average communication and a storage redundancy of 50% at each of the 3 players, we are talking of a mere 16% of the data that is unique. It would be significantly lesser in personal data given how much of what you send in your mails is stuff you generated – think about the number of forwarded mails and messages in all your personal mailboxes, accounts etc!! Giving a benefit of doubt and taking a conservative 20% of the non-corporate data as being unique, this part of the data only contributes 5 exabytes taking the total data that we can derive intelligence from down to 40 exabytes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Assuming there is not much of information worthy of analysis in data that is over 5 years old, effectively the amount of data we are likely to deal with over the next few years, with a view to extracting intelligence and drive decision making is closer to a 30 exabytes magnitude. Now, to put this into perspective, half of this data would be residing in transaction or operational systems and the rest would be in one or the other form of data warehouses already. That would mean around 15 exabytes of data or around 15 million terabytes of data. Imagine the above in the context of what your take on the number of existing relational and dimensional data stores and what your take on the average size of an installation is. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><em>That surely should help put Big, Bigger and Biggest data into perspective<strong>. </strong></em>The need is to be pragmatic about what is the real volume of data that we are dealing with and how effectively we could use the intelligence we can derive from it and put it to profitable use. And how far does it push the current data paradigm, therefore! </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">You may also find some interesting perspectives on this theme in </span></div>
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<a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/05/01/big-data-the-hidden-opportunity/"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/05/01/big-data-the-hidden-opportunity/</span></a></div>
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<a href="http://www.fastcompany.com/1811441/why-big-data-won%E2%80%99t-make-you-smart-rich-or-pretty"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">http://www.fastcompany.com/1811441/why-big-data-won%E2%80%99t-make-you-smart-rich-or-pretty</span></a></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/news/427786/is-there-big-money-in-big-data/"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">http://www.technologyreview.com/news/427786/is-there-big-money-in-big-data/</span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt; line-height: 115%;">Note: The views expressed here and in any of my posts are my personal views and not to be construed as being shared by any organization or group that I am or have been associated with presently or in the past.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11771426589052531861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8473719444903529716.post-29336824967725724662012-08-02T09:05:00.000+05:302012-10-11T12:39:40.689+05:30Back to Basics – the CIO rediscovered.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">Those were the times! Majority of the CIO’s time and in turn, the behavior the CIOs drove within their IT organizations, was focused on the next big possibility for the business to expand. What was hitherto not possible was being made possible thanks to the advances in information and communications technology. From green-field automation for increased capacities and throughput of the business to enabling the globalization of economies and business operations, the CIO organization was a critical enabler to business growth and expansion. They did so with a never-seen-before speed to market that made mega-businesses nimble-footed and agile from strategy to execution. And in the entire scheme of things, the fact that they did so at increasingly lower costs was an added plus.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">This was, arguably, the golden phase when the ICT spend of organizations leaped from the fractional existence of yore aligned to running data processing departments (some old dinosaurs would remember this) to the single-digit percentages that are the norm today.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">Somewhere down the road, however, the original purpose, though not entirely lost, got sidetracked. The entire emphases started moving towards optimizing this spend. This was hardly surprising given that now the ICT spend was a meaningful percentage of the total costs of running the business and was being viewed exactly like all other business functions and processes that existed as an enabler or support function and not directly involved in the larger cause of doling out the service or product the business was meant for. Instead of being treated like a R&D, business innovation or value engineering function, the function was being likened to business enabling functions like the HCM, F&A or the MRO. In fact, in many businesses, the CIO function was being rolled up or aligned into the CFO agenda. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">The CIOs and their organizations, ever so imperceptibly, started optimizing their resource supply chains to source globally, focus on TCO optimization projects that cut down cost of operations and sustenance (run the business, keep the lights on, whatever you want to call it!) and even the little bit of money that was indeed being spent on a new initiative started being in areas like governance, security, risk, compliance et al. Nothing wrong with that unless that is the only thing on your agenda! In the midst of all this, the cost of storage, processing power and communication dipped exponentially making it an extended comfort zone for optimization initiatives. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">Life, proverbially as well as in reality, goes a full circle. Any bit of optimization today based on the overarching themes of the previous paragraph, and indeed the past decade and a half, would ring in infinitesimally small incremental benefits that would not sustain the interest of businesses to pump in investments with the same enthusiasm and vigor as in the past. There are some exceptional applications of those themes that still do carry the whack, especially where the order of magnitude of the requirement of those dimensions is humongous. These are in a minority in the larger context of this discussion and, well, prove the rule anyway.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">This has necessitated a revisit of the objectives and the larger purpose of the CIO organization, perhaps even to the extent of a need to rechristen the function and the roles thereof. Like any change of this nature and magnitude, this will be evolutionary and may play out over a good part of this decade. But, it is inevitable. An inward focus on ICT optimization would be a self-centered and self-defeating strategy. The urgent need is to realign to the business expansion and growth agenda and what better time to embark upon it than now, when businesses and the larger world economy are at their lowest in decades. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">It is a welcome ‘back to basics’ for the CIOs and my take is that the vast majority of them and their larger teams are resilient and fully capable of rediscovering their true roles. It is only their acknowledgement of this situation and urgency to act on it that will separate the boys from the men. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">You may also find some interesting perspectives on this theme in </span></div>
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<a href="http://www.cioupdate.com/careers-and-staffing/the-cios-role-morphs-yet-again.html"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">http://www.cioupdate.com/careers-and-staffing/the-cios-role-morphs-yet-again.html</span></a></div>
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<a href="http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/tech-manager/the-cio-is-dead-long-live-the-cio/1416"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/tech-manager/the-cio-is-dead-long-live-the-cio/1416</span></a></div>
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<a href="http://www.cio.com/article/603965/The_New_New_CIO_Role_Big_Changes_Ahead"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">http://www.cio.com/article/603965/The_New_New_CIO_Role_Big_Changes_Ahead</span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt; line-height: 115%;">Note: The views expressed here and in any of my posts are my personal views and not to be construed as being shared by any organization or group that I am or have been associated with presently or in the past.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11771426589052531861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8473719444903529716.post-46785854922497377492012-07-17T20:07:00.000+05:302012-07-17T20:08:06.399+05:30<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Sounds a no-brainer to invest during troughs and reap dividends during peaks?</span></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">There is enough historical and mathematical evidence to prove that return on investment is maximized when the investment is made at the troughs of the business cycles instead of at the peaks. Mathematically, this must sound fairly obvious considering that returns come from business benefits that are directly or indirectly a function of the business volume. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">Why then, do some parts of the investor and business leadership community get overly obsessed with bottom-line improvement in a downturn? When there is a dire need to generate cash on a day-to-day (ok, that was an overkill, read short-term) basis because of an intent to cash-out at the earliest or you’ve already made the mistake of investing at a peak, you are likely to have no choice but to focus on the bottom-line. The latter is reality that you can live with if you have a long-term vision and a sound strategy for volume uptake beyond the market on a revival but the former could be a real danger if the underlying reason is that you have run out of ideas to improve volumes beyond the market even on revival.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">You would be surprised just how many people and organizations demonstrate this behavior and what their underlying reasons are. I recommend trying this hypothesis out in your own ecosystem or with businesses you watch closely and see the results for yourself. </span></div>
</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11771426589052531861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8473719444903529716.post-83452447071249052332012-07-13T16:11:00.000+05:302012-07-13T16:11:04.538+05:30<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Am extracting some stuff from my blog <a href="http://saysmuraliaboutlife.blogspot.in/">http://saysmuraliaboutlife.blogspot.in/</a> that are more relevant in a business scenario than otherwise. Here's one...</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;"><strong><em>THE IMPORTANCE OF GREY</em></strong></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">The first and most important step towards building consensus in a multi-party scenario is to establish the presence of grey. If the view remains binary till a decision is to be made, the only way to decide would be to have the majority prevail if the process is to be kept democratic. That is, often, the worst outcome in a multi-party discussion or negotiation since all parties in the minority have been provided infinitely more time to prove the decision wrong, and that too at the time of carrying out the action following the decision!</span></div>
</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11771426589052531861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8473719444903529716.post-2609582786703058972012-07-11T15:25:00.000+05:302012-07-11T15:25:33.415+05:30<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Leadership lingo and mindset – the most common faux-pas</span></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">A job well begun is half the job done. If the leadership mindset is incorrect or its messaging is unclear, it puts at risk the entire task at hand. Right posturing and positioning, they say, is the all-important first step to a product’s success. Putting together a winning team to work towards organizational success is no different. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">I am attempting to call out some of the most obvious leadership mindset and messaging faux-pas that one comes across in routine day-to-day corporate lives. I know there would be countless others, more commonly used and starker in their incorrectness. I am just attempting to kick-off the topic with a small list of five – would really appreciate if readers could contribute their own observations and stuff they have experienced or come across, that are along similar lines.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">So here goes…</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Employee engagement</i></b> – I am sure the original semantics of the phrase was centered on the concept of making the entire process of running a business, participative, by involving more and more people that make up the organization from ideation to implementation. However, the latest interpretation of this phrase is akin to co-curricular activities in academics. Employee engagement in most organizations has become the generic buzzword for cultural, social, sporting and similar activities involving a cross-section of employees.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Inclusive growth</i></b> – This is another classic case of trying to convey the participative culture and that the employee is a key stakeholder in the business and its growth. It is all very well till you start contemplating the corollary - what would non-inclusive growth mean? That your contribution is not seen as worthwhile or that you contribute and I grow!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The 30-60-90 day plan </i></b>– There are some who would have us believe that if there is no 30-60-90 day plan attached to a piece of work, independent of it being creative or demure and routine, it cannot be meaningful and relevant to the organization. More often than not, if you can put something into such a plan, it is likely to be something that ought to have been done anyway, plan or no plan, because you could think through every bit of what needs to be done!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Empowerment</i></b> – Another term used in leadership messaging which means everything and nothing all at once! You constantly hear that you must feel empowered to make decisions and conduct your business in your own way. Well the only catch is, you have to keep the leadership ‘informed’, you should ‘operate within the set boundaries’, you should seek ‘approvals for exceptions’, et al. The operating word in actual empowerment is ‘trust’. If trust is at a premium and found lacking, there is no real empowerment. It is like ‘you can decide alright, but you can act only after I have approved’!! Empowerment, in such a scenario, would be the delegation of decision-making and not the delegation of work. Real empowerment would be to provide the flexibility to influence process changes, at times even work around them on ‘exception’ basis without compromising the goals, values and the fabric of the organization.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Comfort zone</i></b> – You would often find leaders propagate the mindset and message that when folks get into a comfort zone, their productivity and creativity would suffer. Hence the mantra for organizational efficiency and effectiveness is to prevent anyone getting into a comfort zone – the corollary being everyone should operate in a zone of discomfort. This is the biggest faux pas you would come across. It is a simple law of nature that resonance is constructive and has the characteristic of enhancing the combined output beyond the sum of individual outputs. This is true with humans and teams in resonance as well. Put folks in a comfort zone and you are likely to find greater productivity and enhanced outcomes.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 8pt; line-height: 115%;">Note: The views expressed here and in any of my posts are my personal views and not to be construed as being shared by any organization or group that I am or have been associated with presently or in the past.</span></div>
</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11771426589052531861noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8473719444903529716.post-61768541584472764152012-07-03T16:33:00.000+05:302012-07-03T16:33:54.009+05:30<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Business reviews – how much is not too much?</span></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">This is a question that all leaders must have asked themselves at some point in time in the process of conducting business. The entire business cycle - ideation, simulation, conception, planning, execution, delivery, feedback and back to ideation – must be reviewed periodically along multiple themes and viewpoints and across multiple levels of detail – strategic and tactical down to transactional. Reviews could be for financial performance, customer satisfaction, employee productivity, sales forecasts and fulfillment planning, name the thing.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">It is important to take a step back and understand the fundamental need for business reviews. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">It could be to –</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">track and monitor progress and status against a plan (review of performance), for e.g.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Courier New";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">o<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">business plan for the organization, a function, a process, a charter, a project</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Courier New";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">o<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">employee performance</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Courier New";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">o<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">customer experience / satisfaction</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">review the output of a business process (review of a deliverable), for e.g.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Courier New";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">o<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">proposal, quotation, contract review</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Courier New";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">o<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">design review</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">ensure compliance to procedures, statutes, rules, policies et al, for e.g. </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Courier New";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">o<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">process quality reviews</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Courier New";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">o<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">legal/statutory audits</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">Well, the intent was not to put together an exhaustive list but to give insights into what kind of reviews are typically done in any organization and to zero-in on the particular category that we are trying to address here. For the purpose of this discussion, we will confine ourselves to the first sub-bullet of the first category and just call it, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">business reviews</i></b>.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">At one end of the spectrum, there are people and businesses that just believe in and focus on doing things. They do not have formal review mechanisms and are fairly ad-hoc in their method and periodicity of reviews. Not all of them summarily fail in their businesses but the element of predictability, sustenance and people-independence of such a business’ outcome and results is suspect. At the other end of the spectrum are people and organizations that are, simply put, either ‘control freaks’ or ‘consensus committees’. There is, in such cases, an elaborate process to review with set periodicity, not only the business and its performance, but the review process themselves, the policies, procedures, people, everything! There are preventive reviews and when they fail, corrective ones; proactive and reactive reviews, reviews of the review process where its effectiveness and efficiency is reported, consolidated and reviewed!!</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">There are many organizations where business metrics like revenue forecasts, sales and opportunity pipeline, hiring performance etc are measured, reported and reviewed on a weekly basis. There are systems being built to have a general ledger view across businesses and geographies on a daily basis. There are monthly account reviews and quarterly business performance reviews with 30-60-90 day action plans which are reviewed, you guessed it right, every 30 days. There are week-long annual business strategy and planning meets, a month of preparation before and another month of communication after, quarterly employee performance feedback, annual performance and compensation reviews. The entire business reporting cycle is on a weekly basis with the preparation, review and action plan spanning a day. Such organizations spend more management time reviewing what was done and the plans of what is to be done, often more than 50% of their time! And they would report their low productivity numbers periodically, review them, have an action plan to improve it and review that diligently all over again!!</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">So, jokes apart, what is the ideal periodicity of a business review? Is there an absolute answer across businesses, organizations, cultures, and the product-process-people ecosystem? How do you determine what to review, when to review and how to review? </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">There are no absolute answers but here are some pointers to what may or may not work for you…</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">1.</span><span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Try to find a correlation between action items that emerge from your reviews and their significance to the business. If there is a positive correlation, the review is a value-add.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">2.</span><span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Recap what was reported in the previous review – if the numbers, issues, line-items, trends haven’t changed much, you should revisit the periodicity of your reviews – it is, perhaps, too often?</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">3.</span><span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Drop into the reviews conducted by your direct reports – if the content (and indeed, the template) of the report is similar to your reviews, ask yourself if there is any value in the same facts being reviewed twice and at what level in your organization are the action items owned. One of the reviews is, obviously, redundant!</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">4.</span><span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Revisit the objectives and process of your reviews – are you using these as mechanisms for you to understand what’s happening in your business? Does everyone just run through the data in standard reports that are brought into the meeting or is there an opinion, perception, value beyond the data? Could you be gathering this information offline? Do you really need a meeting to comprehend data?</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">5.</span><span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In the worst case, if you are unable to figure out if there is a value-add or otherwise, cancel a review but still call for and track the data. This will be most revealing! </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">6.</span><span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The 10-20-30 rule</b>. And finally, as a golden rule – if you are spending more than 10% of effort at any level of the organization in reviews (of any kind), you’ve tipped over. If you are spending more than 20% of that review effort in tracking and monitoring business that has already been conducted (as a corollary, at least 80% of your reviews have to focus on business that is likely to come in the future), you’ve tipped over. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you are spending more than 30% of that effort in audit-mode or finding-holes-mode of reviews, you’ve tipped over.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 8pt; line-height: 115%;">Note: The views expressed here and in any of my posts are my personal views and not to be construed as being shared by any organization or group that I am or have been associated with presently or in the past.</span></div>
</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11771426589052531861noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8473719444903529716.post-64671884933753334862012-06-29T13:03:00.000+05:302012-06-29T22:45:48.136+05:30<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="font-size: 16pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">The Great Mobility Magic Show – abracadabra!</span></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">Some of the predictions and estimates about the size of the mobility market are so grand that the average eye would pop-out at the suggestions. There are claims of the mobile apps market being a $30bn market (again contestable if you take the published numbers from Apple’s AppStore and do the math given Apple and iOS has an approx 20% market share, in which case the market size would be half the number we have assumed) that will grow 250% by 2015. The total mobile user base is likely to equal the world population, approx 7bn by 2017. Total smartphone sales are tipped to touch 1bn in 2015. The number of app downloads that happened in 2011 is upwards of 10bn! The average number of apps in a smartphone is ~65. Well, there are ever so many numbers to this equation that someone would have you believe that this is all that will happen in one’s life 5 years down the line.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">I wanted to take a closer look at some of these claims and hence size up the market. The mobility market could be broadly divided into </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">-</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Hardware or device-related spend (note that this would included all bundled software)</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">-</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Ongoing communication services spend </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">-</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Mobility apps spend (these are non-commercial, non-enterprise software apps typically available for downloads)</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">-</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Enterprise mobility apps spend (commercial and enterprise applications tailored to mobile devices)</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">The average cost of a smartphone is $135 today and to be able to make the claims that the smartphone market will be 70% of the total mobile phone market within 5 years, the price point will need to be significantly lesser than $135. Let us assume that the average smartphone will be priced at ~55% of what it is priced today and hence will be priced at approx $75. The sales figure is supposed to be a billion phones a year in 2015, so the total smartphone market is likely to be $75bn that year (and more beyond!). The Total Cost of Ownership of a smartphone device needs to take into account around $100 per month (actually much more if you go by current averages) of rentals et al that you pay for the voice and data communication services. So this translates to a total of $1,200bn on communication services spend. The mobility paid apps downloaded statistic puts the current size of that market at approximately $15bn. This constitutes around 40% of gaming, entertainment and sports apps and the rest being 60%. This contests the $30bn figure we started with but let us run with a $20bn current market size and with the 250% growth projection, this is another potential $50bn market. The last of the claims is that the enterprise mobile apps market would be in the $165bn ballpark in the same timeframe.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">Now, that’s a big market with significant upside potential for everyone to be seriously interested, right? Well, let us take a look at some of these numbers from a different perspective altogether. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">From the above calculations, the average cost of ownership of a smartphone device without any apps would be around $1275 a year in 5 years or approximately $3.50 per day. The total world population is just over 7bn and is growing at around 1.4% annually. This would translate to the world population being 7.5bn, 5 years from now. As on date, 5.1bn of this 7bn population (72.8%) earns less than $10 a day. More than 3.1 bn folks among them earn less than $2.50 a day. Assuming these folks would focus on eating, drinking, clothes and shelter, before using a smartphone; this shrinks the potential customer base by around 45%. I am also making a small assumption here that the 500 million folks we would add to the population over the next 5 years would all not be the privileged few but would be in the same ratio as the current distribution of the population. Seemingly the least amount of money you would need on a PPP basis to stay above the hunger (read starvation) line is $1.25 a day. This is the precise point where I would like to hazard a guess on what percentage of the population that earns between $2.50 and $10 a day would spend the $3.50 per day on owning a smartphone. My take is 0 but for the benefit of the hardcore optimists (HOs), let us say 10% of these folks would actually own a smartphone, whatever it takes. That would still shrink the potential base by a further 26%. This leaves us with a solid 29% customer base! There are around a billion folks out of the 7bn who are under 7 years of age. I know the kids are really getting smarter, they would probably be using smartphones during these particular ages, but I am not sure all of them would have a dedicated smartphone with a mobile (voice + data) connection in their individual names! Again, for the sake of the HOs, let us assume 10% of this lot would also contribute to making up the market! That still rules out a further 13% from participating in this relentless mobility march. So we are down to some 16% of the folks that make up this world that is the potential market! So 1.2 billion folks would keep buying 1.2 billion smartphones on a yearly basis 5 years from now to make the numbers we assumed. For the product, that is a 100% market penetration with a 100% annual churn! I hope I could take these kinds of ideas to investors and get some funding for my next whacky dream!</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">The best 4G connections seem to be giving around 20mbps data rates as we speak. Let us assume everyone has them for this analysis. The average mobile app of the future is likely going to be sized at 50-100 MB and we could assume that the average download times for an app would be in the 1 minute timeframe. Assuming the total number of downloads goes up to around 50bn paid apps (assuming a dollar an app and the size of the market we assumed). Paid apps make up for around 12% of the total apps downloaded, so the total number of downloads would need to translate to 825bn to achieve the magic mobility dream! That is 825 billion minutes to download stuff. Assuming 16 hours of waking time for an average person in this world and take some ablutions out of the way, half a million people would spend their lives downloading stuff!! The average smartphone user spent around 11 hours each month playing games!! This would increase to about 20 hours a month to support the download stats in the end-game scenario for our time range.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">Now, let us turn our attention to the claim that the Enterprise mobility apps market is seen to be at $165bn in the same timeframe. The services and software spend within the ICT spend currently adds up to approximately $1200bn. Over $300bn of this spend is in the Infrastructure Management space and another $300bn on system software, internal FTE costs et al. The growth of the software and services spend has gone down dramatically and in the past 5 years averages an annualized 4%. The denominator representing the total market therefore is around the$ 730bn ballpark. To hit the $165bn market size, the mobility spend would need to be a fourth of the total software and services market! </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">Somewhere, in the midst of all this, I am sure the implication is that people around the world, 5 years from now, would do pretty much everything on the go, no matter where they are headed! <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pretty much every 2<sup>nd</sup> person above the poverty line will carry a smartphone. At least 10% of all kids born would take to the smartphone within a couple of years of leaving pre-school. People are likely to be spending a day each year downloading and 20 days each year playing games on their smartphones. And this loss of productive time will have zilch impact on the economy or the affordability of the smartphone itself. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d; font-family: Calibri;">Well, I do not bite this as it appears at face value. There certainly is a market out there for mobility. It is far closer to saturation than one may want to believe. I would tend to look at some business case claims far more closely than the industry currently does. In my view, customer base expansion is likely to be less of a play than re-cannibalization of the existing base itself through more value in the product and services offered.</span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="color: #0c343d;">Till we have greater clarity and the story unfolds to reveal the reality, let’s WATCH THE MAGIC SHOW, ON THE GO! ABRACADABRA…</span></span></i></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><em><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Note: The views expressed here and in any of my posts are my personal views and not to be construed as being shared by any organization or group that I am or have been associated with presently or in the past.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span></em></span></div>
</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11771426589052531861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8473719444903529716.post-35783091463788624342012-06-22T11:38:00.001+05:302012-06-22T11:55:24.229+05:30<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><em>Innovation directed at business expansion key to IT survival and growth</em></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Current estimates of support spend as a percentage of total applications spend hover around the two-thirds or 67% mark. General opinion is that this is what the entire industry should focus on since that is where the whack is! </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Much as everyone would like to spend more and more time and effort on the support space because it offers the comfort of the known paradigm, this is counter-productive in the longer term given that logically this would end up shrinking the total IT spend and consequently the industry. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Here are some interesting points to ponder…</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">The average application lifecycle in the era of legacy systems, by popular opinion and analyst research was in the 10 year ballpark. Contrast that with the current era of mobility applications being dumped every 3 months (admittedly a rather extreme example), the average web application being retired in the 5 year ballpark and enterprise applications going through a 7 year revamp cycle. Also taking into account the share of each of these category of applications in the overall pie, and we could realistically run with an average application lifecycle of 6 years. The next variable in this equation is the cost of development compared to the cost of maintenance of an application in its lifecycle and there is a plethora of data gathering and analysis that has happened on this with development to support cost ratios ranging from 1:1 to 1:2, the latter being for longer lifecycles and the former for the shorter ones. The current ratio of support and development spend, as reported by multiple analysts having polled more than a representative sample of buyers each, seems to be in the 2:1 range. If this ratio has to be maintained over two and a half average life-cycles (15 years down the line), all the development effort and costs would only be redirected towards rewriting what already exists!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">It is a comfortable state of equilibrium, but one that folks in this business must dread. One can contest any of the numbers above (below, and everywhere in between), have their own take on what the numbers should be, but the trend and consequence does not change with the math. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">This also lends itself pretty smoothly to the TCO vs CVC discussion from my previous post. The development spend has to be towards expanding the total pie and not just rearranging spends within the pie. This can happen only when most of the IT discretionary or development spend is focused towards top-line growth and not bottom-line optimization for the business. The former has non-linear and structurally far-higher returns compared to the latter and hence the overall risk is proportionately higher. At the risk of digression, I wanted to touch upon the topic of the hyperbolic reactions of stakeholders when cost optimization projects get delayed. Since these projects do not have a take-to-market element, the primary impact is in the cost reduction being delayed by the same amount of time as the project delay. This should not adversely impact the overall return on investment outlook if the returns were pegged appropriately above the hurdle rate. Anyway, this is a topic I will touch upon at a later date, but for now, suffices to understand that this category of development projects focusing on bottom-line improvement through cost optimization are at relatively lower risk levels and lower returns. In the context of the current discussion, these are spends that have fallen or will soon fall directly into the scope of the ‘law of diminishing returns’. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">The world has grown at approximately 6.1% and 5.4% in the past 10 and 5 years respectively, while non-communication IT spending has grown at 5.8% and 4.8%. Gartner’s view of categorizing the spend into what is done to ‘Run’, ‘Grow’ and ‘Transform’ the business reiterates the same fact and the percentage spend in each category, 19-20% and constant for ‘Grow’, ~66% and down a couple of percentage points over the past 5 years for ‘Run’, 14-15% and up a couple of percentage points over the past 5 years for ‘Transform’, reflects an awareness, albeit slow in the IT community that the game will soon need to be changed towards innovating in the business expansion space and embarking on aggressive application development initiatives to fuel growth rather than focusing on TCO and a support optimization and consolidation model that is currently in vogue. There is a temporary blip (at least that is the way I would like to see it!) in the 2010 Capex to Opex ratio, which has come down from 3:7 (steady over 4 years) to 1:4, but I would like to see this as exactly what I called it, a temporary blip, given this was the year immediately post the worst year for the economy in recent times.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">In conclusion, the IT community, now more than any other time in the past, needs to focus its energy towards finding ways and means through which business expansion happens on the back of information technology innovation and not the other way round. There are avenues to explore, both charted and uncharted. What is required is organizational resolve to invest and do so in a structured way. There is a lot to learn from the other industries which have seen many such cycles in their lifetimes. The organizations that have survived, in fact thrived, are the ones that spent their time, effort and money investing in innovation to define the future rather than fall in line with changes brought about by someone else. </span></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Note: The views expressed here and in any of my posts are my personal views and not to be construed as being shared by any organization or group that I am or have been associated with presently or in the past.</span></span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11771426589052531861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8473719444903529716.post-24476951012013778352012-06-11T10:46:00.001+05:302012-08-25T13:41:43.336+05:30Time for burial – the TCO play has run its life – enter CVC<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="color: #073763; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">The dominant theme of the past two decades in IT and operations services spend has been to bring down the Total Cost of Ownership. The businesses were riddled by a plethora of operational inefficiencies ranging from sub-optimal business processes and automation to an ineffective and localized human capital supply chain. While the early adopters spotted and fixed this, largely within the last decade of the 20<sup>th</sup> century itself, the bulk of the folks got onto the bandwagon between the mid-90s to the middle of the last decade. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #073763; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">While there were a range of new products, services and solutions that came into the market, few focused beyond the TCO and cost optimization themes. Almost every large enterprise had their time, effort and money spent in implementation of ERP products, embarking on collaborative B2B and B2C commerce, et al. And all the while, as an aside, the cost of implementation was also being driven down through optimal sourcing leveraging the benefits of cost and labor arbitrage. Every conceivable component of ‘cost of ownership’ from people to infrastructure to application underlying the business process was optimized to achieve maximum TCO reduction. Make no mistake, this yielded some fantastic business results with actual annual budgets for many of these enterprise cost elements coming down anywhere between 10-30% and the cost of implementation anywhere between 20-50% depending on where each company was on the operational efficiency curve. Even the latest technology or service management trends being adopted like the cloud and shared services et al, merely redistribute the pie within the service providers and optimize the TCO for the buyers. Check the services spend numbers as a percentage of sales for organizations and as a percentage of GDP for the larger economy and you would know where this play is headed.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #073763; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">The TCO play, stark as it sounds, has run its life. It is, in fact, on life-support! The incremental benefits of this play and the effort and costs required to realize them, soon shall make no economic sense. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #073763; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">So what is in store? I deliberately used the preposition ‘few’ instead of ‘none’ when I referred to where, buyers and sellers alike, were focusing in the recent past. There are quite a few areas, for that matter, where technology or process investments have pushed boundaries for the business to be able to expand beyond its current boundaries. The ability to service a global consumer base 24x7 on voice or data is an example. The advent of the web as an alternative channel to take products and service to market is another. The ability to slice and dice enterprise-wide data and carry out data analysis and analytics hitherto not possible, is yet another. These are the areas where technology and operations spend has effectively ‘Contributed to Value Creation (CVC)’ for an enterprise, organization, and at a different magnitude of generalization, the world. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #073763; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Again, be warned that this is a much tougher route to take. Not just because it is not a much trodden path, but also because the number of experiments and ideas that would actually translate into a viable business proposition would be dramatically lesser than the TCO play that everyone has been used to. Also, measuring CVC is not likely to be straightforward. This would mean, exactly determining the contribution of IT or process driven initiatives, to the business benefits and realized returns-on-investment by broadening the business horizon, will be much tougher than the TCO regime.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #073763; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Yet, this is inevitable. This is what, in the next decade or more that unfolds, will deliver quantum benefits to the business, revive/sustain/grow business interest and investment mindshare in technology and process services. But most importantly, this will take the CIO and COO agenda of enterprises beyond budget and TCO management to the realm of driving business direction and creating business value, and the outsourcing players back to the heady days of hefty double-digit percentage growth.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span><br />
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<span style="color: #073763; font-size: x-small;">Note: The views expressed here and in any of my posts are my personal views and not to be construed as being shared by any organization or group that I am or have been associated with presently or in the past.</span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11771426589052531861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8473719444903529716.post-29412115631862349742012-06-09T14:04:00.001+05:302012-06-09T14:04:28.101+05:30Players in the IT industry - Chicken Little or Chicken DoLittle?<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The overall pie (World IT spend as a percentage of the World GDP) is, lately, nearly stagnant. If technology (read IT) spend as a percentage of revenues is not growing, the growth rates are going to be a reflection of the overall rate of growth of the economy. Learning from the past, it is only when positive disruptions in the form of technology inventions or innovations have brought in a significant opportunity for business to be done differently (and better), that the overall pie has grown. This was directly reflected in the ‘percentage IT spend’ metric, and in turn, the growth rates of the industry.<br />
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Hardcore optimists have been and remain in denial of the above fact despite the data demonstrating it ever so clearly. They would call the folks who see and urge everyone to see this phenomenon as the ‘Chicken Little’ of the world. One alternative is to acknowledge the problem, see it in the eye, and act in pursuit of the next disruption which could ‘expand the pie’. The other is to continue being in denial, play within the boundaries, try and get a ‘bigger share of the pie’, feel good about the incremental growth if you succeed, or put up a price tag around your neck if you don’t. This is the bunch of ‘Chicken DoLittle’ of the world.<br />
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<strong>The choice is ours to make!</strong></span></span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11771426589052531861noreply@blogger.com0