Shrikant's Notes

Attitude matters!

2012-02-10T22:48:00.001+05:30

In a recently attended training, the trainer (Mr. Viswanathan V) used following logic to make a point that attitude matters!

If we count 1 for letter 'a', 2 for letter 'b' up to 26 for letter 'z' then we find following scores:

skills = 19 + 11 + 9 + 12 + 12 + 19 = 82
hard work = 8 + 1 + 18 + 4 + 23 + 15 + 18 + 11 = 98
knowledge = 11 + 14 + 15 + 23 + 12 + 5 + 4 + 7 + 5 = 96
attitude = 1 + 20 + 20 + 9 + 20 + 21 + 4 + 5 = 100

It's interesting, isn't it?

Takeaways from Training Program on "Giving and Receiving Feedback"

2012-02-10T21:28:00.000+05:30

A couple of weeks back, I attended one-day in-house training program on "giving and receiving feedback". Mr. Viswanathan V delivered this program extremely well. Following are my key takeaways:

Make feedback specific (e.g. "When you , it's a problem because . What I would like you to do in future is )
Take responsibility while giving feedback; let it be YOUR feedback, based on YOUR information/observation.
Give balanced feedback. Positive feedback boosts morale while negative feedback improves performance.
Avoid delay.
Make your expectations clear to your subordinates in the beginning so that you can refer to those expectations while giving your feedback.
Link your feedback to company goals and suggest actions that can contribute to those goals.
If the person receiving feedback, cries then give him/her time and space to express and then proceed gradually. If her/she gets angry then show empathy and partial acknowledgement before proceeding further.
If the person receiving feedback disagrees with the facts in the feedback then provide examples/evidence. On other hand, if he/she questions whether there is any problem itself then specify the consequences of his/her behavior.
While receiving feedback, adhere to following rules:

Try to control your defensiveness.
Listen to understand.
Try to suspend judgement.
Summarize and reflect what you hear.
Ask questions to clarify.
Ask for examples and stories that illustrate the feedback.
Never hurt their ego.
Not every feedback is correct.
Be approachable.
Check with others to determine reliability of feedback.

If you get no feedback, then actively seek feedback from everyone you interact (boss, peers, juniors, clients, etc.).
If you get feedback in public then ask for feedback in private.
If you get rambling feedback then summarize and/or ask pointed questions.
If you get vague feedback then ask probing questions.

Thanks to Mr. Viswanathan, for sharing his wisdom during this training program. Also the films shown were quite informative. I have been recommending this program to my company colleagues since giving/receiving feedback is very much integral part of our work.

How to write an effective abstract

2012-02-10T12:25:00.001+05:30

There is more than enough advice on how to write effective abstract. After all, abstract is the one which brings readers' attention to your paper or article. I follow the advice given by Kent Beck in his OOPSLA talk, "How to Get a Paper Accepted at OOPSLA". Let me produce it here almost verbatim:

"The abstract is your four sentence summary of the conclusions of your paper. ... I try to have four sentences in my abstract. The first states the problem. The second states why the problem is a problem. The third is my startling sentence. The fourth states the implication of my startling sentence."

The startling statement should communicate the key message of the paper that would catch interest of target readers. Kent Beck further advises that one should resist the temptation to argue for the conclusion in the abstract. That way the reader has more incentive to carefully read the rest of the paper to validate the startling statement

Using this advice, I recently wrote following abstract for my upcoming article on "Managing Information and Email Overload":

If you feel overloaded with lots of emails in your inbox and availability of Too Much Information(TMI), then be assured that you are not alone! Thanks to widespread use of computers and internet, the information load is going to only increase in future and would result in reduced productivity and delay in decision making.In this article, you will find 3F formula for managing information and email overload. With this formula, you can not only increase your productivity and decision-making ability but can also improve your work-life balance.

Book Review: Offshore

2012-02-10T10:43:00.000+05:30

Written by two Infosys executives, this book provides almost complete details about Indian IT services industry to an outsider. I being an industry practitioner for last 15 years also found quite few new information nuggets in this book. Besides being informative, the book makes arguments on various issues with support from good amount of quantitative and qualitative data. In all, this book is a good read for all who are concerned with IT services industry in one way or other.

Essential Seven Skills for an Information Worker

2012-01-25T12:11:00.000+05:30

I define Information Worker as a person using computer for accomplishing his/her work. Hence it is imperative for an information worker to know how to use computer. Here is my list of skills that an information worker must have to use computer effectively and efficiently.

Communicating using email and instant messaging
Using word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software
Finding trustworthy information on internet
Tracking todos/calendar
Organizing digital documents and multimedia files
Having information security awareness
Managing information overload

Your comments please!

Book Review: Bit Literacy

2012-01-23T09:50:00.000+05:30

For some books, sub-title describes the contents better than the title. This book is one of them. The sub-title of this book is "Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload". Indeed, this book describes quite a few useful tools and techniques for enhancing productivity of an information worker. Particularly, the technique for managing email overload is quite useful and I have started practicing it. If you wish to know this technique then please read this article.

Article Summary: Recovering from information overload

2012-01-07T21:44:00.000+05:30

In this article, authors argue that multitasking is not a solution for addressing information overload. They have cited various studies to make a point that always-on, multitasking work environments are killing productivity, dampening creativity, and making us unhappy. Their advice to executives is simple: use some combination of focusing, filtering, and forgetting to tackle information overload.

Title: Recovering from information overload
Authors: Derek Dean and Caroline Webb
Source: January 2011 issue of McKinsey Quarterly (available at https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Recovering_from_information_overload_2735)

Book Review: Upworldly Mobile by Ranjini Manian

2011-11-25T10:21:00.001+05:30

In less than 200 pages, Ranjini Manian has provided useful tips and insights to an Indian professional working in global business environment. Using anecdotes, she has shared her wisdom throughout the book. I would recommend this book to every Indian who aspires to convert himself/herself into a global Indian.

Book Review: Making Breakthrough Innovation Happen

2011-10-21T09:29:00.001+05:30

This is truly an inspiring book. It not only provides 11 Indian Innovation case studies but also provokes the reader on why he/she can't pull out next radical innovation. The case studies include Dainik Bhaskar, Aravind Eye Hospital, CavinKare, ITC-IBD, Bosch India, Trichy Police, Chola Vehicle Finance, Titan Edge, Shantha Biotech, Surat Transformation and Su-Kam. I would strongly recommend it to every young person, regardless of his/her age. This book could also become a great gift for your dear ones.

Notes from Book: Romancing the Balance Sheet

2011-10-07T08:46:00.001+05:30

I conduct Financial Literacy course for my company colleagues. Hence I started to read this book to pick up few ideas to include in my course. Following are my notes from that perspective:

Two Rules of Good Financial Management

Never invest your money without ensuring that the assets you acquire can generate a return which is at least equal to the cost of your capital.
Invest your money in such a way that the assets will generate an inflow of funds before the liabilities demand an outflow.

Lessons from Rule No. 2

Long-term funds should be used for long-term purposes and short-term funds for short-term purposes.
Healthy organizations may use, or should use, some long term funds for short-term purposes.
But no organization should EVER use short-term funds for long-term purposes.
Healthy organizations must maintain a current ratio of about 2:1 and a quick ratio of a minimum of 1:1.

Book Review: Romancing the Balance Sheet

2011-10-07T08:22:00.001+05:30

Not sure whether you can become champ with romancing the balance sheet by merely reading this book, but this book can help you to have a good beginning. :) Written for a layman, Dr Anil Lamba, the author this book, has explained the complex subject of finance in the simplest manner possible. The book reads as if author is having a chat with you. Though it runs more than 200 pages, you are most likely to finish this book in one or two sittings as the book holds your attention very well. As title suggests, the book covers basics of financial statement but it also covers financial topics that need to be known to people working in non-finance departments. These topics include inventory management, working capital management, marginal costing and leverage analysis. I would strongly recommend this book to every first-time manager to understand how his/her actions would affect financial performance of his/her employer.

Notes from book: Information Architecture for the World Wide Web

2011-09-23T17:18:00.001+05:30

I have started reading this book titled "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web" written by Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld. From initial chapters, I made my notes in form of following mind maps. I am yet to finish the book so more mind maps would come!

Notes from book: Business the amazon.com way

2011-09-13T09:13:00.002+05:30

I happened to glance through first edition of book titled "Business the amazon.com way". It is published in year 1999 so no wonder it looked like an outdated book to me. It's second edition is published in year 2002, which I guess would have covered the dot-com-burst phenomenon. Nevertheless reading a pre-dot-com-boom book in year 2011 was an interesting experience.

In this book, the author Rebecca Saunders has shared following 10 secrets of the world's most astonishing web business:

Live and breathe e-commerce
Fill the place with entrepreneurs (hire entrepreneurial talent for key positions)
Focus (to be the world's biggest store on the net)
Brand the site
Get and keep customers by offering great value
Develop unbeatable logistics
Stay lean (practice frugality as value)
Practice technoleverage
Constantly reinvent the business
Grow with the best (alliances, acquisitions and partnerships)

As such, they are not so much secrets as of now. Still I found this list worth noting!

Notes from book: Coaching People

2011-09-12T10:18:00.002+05:30

Following are my takeaways from reading a book titled Coaching People. The book is authored by Patty McManus and is published by HBS Press as part of Pocket Mentor series.

Coaching is a means for learning and development. It is guiding someone toward her or his goals. It it also the mutual sharing of experiences and opinions to create agreed-upon outcomes.
Coaching is NOT an opportunity to correct someone's behaviors or actions. It is NOT directing someone to take actions to meet goals. It is also NOT being the expert or supervisor with all the answers.
Effective coaching is ongoing.
Coaching Skills

Active listening
Asking right questions (both open-ended and closed-ended)
Advocate opinions (to balance question-asking mode)
Give feedback as coach
Receive feedback as coach
Build agreement

While giving feedback, focus on behavior - not character, attitude or personality; be specific; be sincere; be realistic. Give feedback early and often.
Coaching style could be directive, which is useful for developing skills and for providing answers. On the other hand, supportive coaching style is useful for facilitating problem solving, for building self-confidence, for encouraging employees learn on their own and for serving as a resource for others.

Book Review: Coaching People

2011-09-12T10:07:00.001+05:30

If you are pressed for time and want to get quick information capsule about coaching then this book is for you. In less than 70 pages, this "pocket mentor" from HBS Press tells what is coaching, describes key coaching skills and provides tools in terms of forms, checklists and worksheets. A small test near the end of the book not only assesses readers' understanding of concepts but also reinforces them. An annotated list of learning resources concludes this book. Along with structured information, this book also provides few anecdotes to illustrate concepts. Overall it is worth reading for every practicing and aspiring manager.

SARAL methodology

2011-09-01T23:34:00.001+05:30

Last week while traveIing in a bus, I thought of a methodology for delivering business technology solutions. I struggled a bit to capture its steps in specific words so as to get an easy-to-remember acronym name for the methodology. The result was SARAL methodology having following steps:

Study client's business context and IT landscape.
Analyze gap between current and desired state.
Recommend solution options.
Activate client-chosen solution option on a pilot basis for early feedback.
Launch full-fledged solution.

Yes, I agree it's old wine in new bottle! Hope new bottle is more elegant though!!

Jokes apart, there are couple of differentiators that I have tried to capture in this methodology:

Instead of studying just business requirements, study the business context as there could be some hidden requirements that we would otherwise miss.
Don't recommend "the" solution but few solution options for client to choose. Ideally we would propose three solution options which could resemble like fast-food, square-meal and seven-course-meal options!
A beta version needs to made available to users before launch to seek their early feedback.

That's for now, more later.

Shaping Customer Agenda

2011-09-01T21:15:00.001+05:30

On 23rd and 24th August, I attended training program on the topic of "Shaping Customer Agenda". It was conducted by Rhea D'Souza and Siddharth Singh from Paradigms Unlimited. The focus of this training program was to learn about approach for Customer Enchantment. Like any other behavioral training program, this program was full of activities that made me think harder and reflect deeper.

Quite a few thoughts and topics were discussed in this program. I have noted following thoughts that touched me the most and can be considered as my takeaways from this program:

Context is decisive. It decides our thoughts, feelings and action.
It is easy to miss something you are not looking for.
We carry many unexamined assumptions (e.g. I cannot draw, I am not good at talking to strangers etc.). It is needed to examine them time and again.
Only interested people are interesting.Are we interested in others?
Simplify to amplify - can we write about our business in less than 8 words?
Enchantment is defined as creating voluntary change in hearts, minds and therefore actions of customers.
Become aware of listening filters that include:

It is not possible
Judging
Looking Good
Taking it personally
I already know

Observable patterns of behavior can help us understand interaction styles of people around us. The interaction styles are:

Relater: Introvert with emotion orientation - expect trust
Analyzer: Introvert with action orientation - expect accurate and valid data
Expresser: Extravert with emotion orientation - expect something new/big
Director: Extravert with action orientation - expect competency

How to manage client expectations? Set clear expectations, stay aligned to expectations and make your progress known.
Conduct pre-mortem analysis before starting out with new project/initiative; assume the project has failed and discuss reasons for the same and then plan out ways to prevent these reasons to happen.
Actions for enchantment:

Likeability - listening, language, smile and handshake
Trustworthiness
Listening - facts, feelings, intention and filter
Become Mensch, a person of integrity and honor
Reciprocity - transactional, pay-it-forward and goodwill
Appreciate - say it when you see it

Personal Branding Statement should explain what you do and why you exists. It must be Authentic, Believable and Coherent.

BTW, I must thank both Rhea and Siddharth for two days of wonderful learning experience! It seems they delivered such training program for the first time and delivered it the best for sure.

Book Review: McKinsey's Marvin Bower

2011-08-25T10:50:00.001+05:30

This book is a biography of Marvin Bower, who is often referred to as
father of management consulting. The book weaves together many
anecdotes to illustrate vision and thought process of Marvin Bower. I
found three case studies viz. Royal Dutch Shell (1956), PwC (1979) and
HBS (1979) quite useful. The book provides quite a few lessons in
consulting hence I would recommend it to every budding consultant.

Book Review: The Social Media Marketing Book

2011-08-05T11:06:00.001+05:30

This book provides a knowledge capsule on the topic of social media
from a marketer's perspective. After an introductory chapter, eight
chapters cover each of the following social media types: blogging,
twitter and microblogging, social networking, media sharing, social
news and bookmarking, ratings and reviews, forums and finally virtual
worlds. The author provides prescription for strategy, tactics and
practice in the second last chapter. The last chapter is devoted to a
crucial topic of measurement. Well-structured information and
insightful wisdom about social media marketing makes this book useful
for everyone interested in exploiting social media phenomenon for
marketing their products and services.

Latest Forrester Wave on Enterprise Architecture Management Suites

2011-04-21T12:00:00.000+05:30

In this month, Forrester has published Forrester Wave on Enterprise
Architecture Management Suites (EAMS). The EAMS market is not so well
defined, so I guess Forrester is trying to establish this product
category through this report. It has identified 10 vendors, which
offer products that closely matches the Forrester definition of EAMS.
It has identified Mega, Troux, Software AG and Alfabet as leaders with
following comments:
1. Mega is the most advanced second-generation EA tool migrating to
EAMS with strong GRC.
2. Troux Technologies is the strongest for standards and application
portfolio management.
3. Software AG promises the best business connection to EAMS.
4. Alfabet is the thought leader and a defining force in the EAMS category

Forrester has further identified Metastrom, IBM, Casewise, Avolution
and The Salamander Organization as Strong Performers with following
comments:
1. Metastorm offers interesting technologies to become an EAMS player.
2. IBM offers a modular approach to EAMS adoption.
3. Casewise builds on its ease of use to construct an EAMS strategy.
4. Avolution is a newcomer with a surprisingly strong showing.
5. The Salamander Organization provides a toolbox and services to
build your own EAMS.

Finally there is one vendor - BiZZdesign, which has been named as
Contender as it provides a strong second-generation EA tool but lags
in the EAMS space.

Though this report would be useful for Enterprise Architects in
general, it would have become more useful if it had contained more
discussion about this product category itself.

Book review: Head First Data Analysis

2011-04-05T11:52:00.001+05:30

Data analysis is a relatively complex topic. Hence it is nice to see a
very different and welcoming treatment as used in this this book. This
book is a learning guide on topics such as optimization, hypothesis
testing, bayesian statistics, regression, etc. Each chapter uses a
case study to discuss the topic. The book makes use of a lot of
pictures and exercises to provide conceptual understanding and to keep
you awake while reading! I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book while
(re)learning otherwise complex topics. I highly recommend this book to
all those who are new to data analysis and wish to enjoy learning the
same!

I give five stars (out of five) rating for this book!

Book Review: "Psychological Testing at Work" by Edward Hoffman

2011-04-02T19:46:00.000+05:30

If you are generally interested in knowing about what kind of psychological tests that could be used in workplace then this is an excellent book to read. It provides an extensive survey of several dozens of psychological tests, classified by the purpose they serve.

What I liked the most is chapter three briefly covering history of workplace testing. Then there is another chapter (#7) that is dedicated to probably the most popular psychological test at workplace – Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Other chapters that could be of interest include the ones covering tests related to leadership and emotional intelligence.

In all, it is a book to read if you do not know much about psychological tests but wish to know the basics within few hours.

Publishing powerpoint slides on youtube

2011-03-24T20:11:00.000+05:30

It took me quite a few hours to figure out how to publish powerpoint slides on youtube. Finally, I picked up following approach for doing it. Not sure this is the best one but it has worked for me for the time being.

Save PPTs into PNG images. PowerPoint will save all slides as images in a folder.
Use Windows Movie Maker (freely available with Windows XP) to convert these images into WMV video file.
Upload WMV file on youtube.

Right now used default settings of Windows Movie Maker. Yet to figure out how to control things such as timing of slide transition.

BTW my youtube channel is at http://www.youtube.com/user/shrikantnmulik.

Freemium

2011-03-24T09:16:00.001+05:30

Today I learned a new term - Freemium. It is a business model where in
you give away a core product for free and then generate revenue by
selling premium products to a small percentage of free users.

I guess this model is well known, thanks to the companies such as
Skype that have championed this business model. But it was interesting
to see that someone has named it so well.

For more details, please check out Wikipedia article and also a blog
site at http://www.freemium.org. This site features an e-book that
explains this term in more details.

Happy reading!

Getting introduced to Liferay Portal

2010-10-12T16:15:00.001+05:30

Just finished first chapter of a book titled, "Liferay in action". It is an introductory chapter and provides useful tour of Liferay portal. It is freely available at http://www.manning.com/sezov/Sezov_LiA_MEAP_Ch1_FREE.pdf. Following are my notes from this chapter.

Liferay is an application (read: portlet) aggregator, content manager and a collaboration tool.
A Liferay server consists of one or more portals. Each portal has its own set of users and user collections.
There are four types of collections:

Role: Collects users by their function. Permissions in the portal can be attached to roles.
Organization: Collects users by their position in a hierarchy. Organizations can be nested in a tree structure.
Community: Collects users who have a common interest. They're single entities and can't be grouped hierarchically.
User Group: Collects users on an ad hoc basis. Defined by portal administrators.

Organizations and Communities can have any number of pages defined within them. Pages are organized into Layouts, and there are two types of Layouts: Public and Private. User Groups don't have pages per sé, but rather can have Page Templates. By default, each user gets a personal community, which itself has public and private layouts. This is a personal web site which the end user can configure.
Roles can be created under one of two scopes: Portal Role and Community/Organization Role.
Portlets could be either non-instanceable or instanceable. Non-instanceable portlet (e.g. wiki portlet) has its data scoped by the community or organization to which it belongs. No matter how many times you add it to a page with the community or organization, it will point to the same data. On other hand, in case of instanceable portlets (e.g. RSS portlet), since many of them can be placed on the same pages in any community or organization, they all have their own sets of data.
Liferay's Control Panel is the central location where just about everything can be administered.
While designing the portal, first step is to get answers to following questions:

Will users be given freedom to sign up on the site?
Will your user groupings be ad-hoc, static, or both? (If your user groupings will be ad-hoc, you know you'll be creating communities for your users to join and leave.)
Will some regular users have access to things others won't? (If so, you know you'll be using Roles.)
Will you be delegating administrative tasks to some users? (If so, you may have Community or Organization Administrators.)

Now next step for me is to install and explore Liferay portal!

Book Review: The Romance of Tata Steel

2010-09-02T12:19:00.001+05:30

Written by R M Lala, this book is a story of Tata Steel, running for
more than a century. The story begins in the years of 1980s and covers
the latest events such as acquisition of Corus. Tata Steel is known
for two key things: low-cost production of steel and public welfare
activities. The book focuses more on the second thing but does provide
some insights into the operations of the company. It mentions quite a
few anecdotes and portraits many personalities that were involved in
making and running of Tata Steel. In a little less than 200 pages, the
authors has been able to give a good understanding of the company
though more details in the areas of management style, operational
strategy etc., would have made this book more useful. It definitely
succeeds in increasing respect for the company among readers.

What do Software Architects really do?

2010-07-07T10:34:00.001+05:30

I came across this interesting article from Philippe Kruchten, published in the Journal of Systems and Software in year 2008. In this article, the author has recommended following time allocation for software architects:

· Internal Focus: About 50% of time focused on architecting per se: architectural design, prototyping, evaluating, documenting, etc.

· External Focus: About 50% of time interacting with other stakeholders. It has got two facets:

o Inwards: 25% time for getting input from outside world: listening to customers, users, product managers, and other stakeholders; learning about technologies, other systems' architecture and architectural practices

o Outwards: 25% time for providing information or help to other stakeholders: communicating architecture, project management, project definition

The author has also identified following anti-patterns, which can be illustrated with this ratio of [internal:inwards:outwards]

· Goldplating [60:30:10]: software architects are not engaged enough with the implementation team.

· Ivory Tower [70:15:15]: software architects have isolated themselves.

· Absent Architect [30:40:30]: software architects are spending too much time travelling the world, at the expense of their core work.

· Just Consultants [25:25:50]: software architects are engaged more in activities such as product definition

The author has not offered very strong formal evidence supporting his recommendations. But we can treat them as very valuable inputs, given the credentials of the author.

Gartner Report on “Leading in Times of Transition: The 2010 CIO Agenda”

2010-04-01T14:51:00.001+05:30

Just finished reading an executive summary of Gartner report titled "Leading in Times of Transition: The 2010 CIO Agenda". Following are my notes from this reading:

1. Top three business priorities for CIOs in year 2010 are:

a. Improving business processes

b. Reducing enterprise costs

c. Increasing the use of information/analytics.

2. Top three business priorities in year 2013 as projected by CIOs surveyed are:

a. Managing change initiatives

b. Improving business processes

c. Attracting and retaining new customers.

3. Top ranked strategic technologies for CIOs surveyed are as follows: Virtualization, Cloud Computing and Web 2.0.

4. The 2010 CIO Agenda will focus on following three factors:

a. An economy in transition places a premium on results productivity versus cost-efficiencies.

b. Enterprise strategies are shifting toward more collaborative and innovative solutions.

c. The rise of technologies such as virtualization, cloud computing and Web 2.0 are creating a new IT landscape.

Since I do not have access to full Gartner report, I do not know the rationale behind these findings/recommendations. But anyway there are no surprises here!

Survey on Essential Skills for Solution Architects

2010-03-17T11:46:00.001+05:30

I am involved in research for building capability framework for the role of solution architect. As part of this research, we have launched a survey to distinguish essential capabilities from a list of 35 capabilities. Kindly respond to the survey at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/36WZK5H if you work in the area of solution architecture. With only nine questions, this survey will take less than ten minutes of your time.

We intend to publish a series of papers in academic conferences to share the findings of this research in public domain. Your contribution will help make this happen. Thanks in advance!

Research Methods

2010-03-10T11:10:00.001+05:30

While browsing Internet, I stumbled upon a web site at http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/proj/res_meth/rmvl/index.html, which has provided useful information regarding research methods. My notes are as follows:

1. Experimental: This method is one in which a researcher manipulates an independent variable (anything that can vary) under highly controlled conditions to see if this produces (causes) any changes in a dependent variable. He has to ensure holding all other variables, variables that might also affect the dependent variable, constant. The method can help in determining cause-and-effect relationships. A major limitation is that this method can only be used when it is practical and ethical for the researcher to manipulate the independent variable.

2. Following four research methods are called as descriptive methods. Use of these methods does not allow drawing conclusions about cause-and-effect relationships but can be used where experimental method cannot be used.

a. Correlation: This method helps determine the degree and direction of relationship between two or more variables or measures of behavior. It also can be used as a basis for prediction.

b. Naturalistic observation: In this method, the researcher very carefully observes and records some behavior or phenomenon, sometimes over a prolonged period, in its natural setting.

c. Survey: Surveys are particularly useful when researchers are interested in collecting data on aspects of behavior that are difficult to observe directly (such as thoughts about suicide) and when it is desirable to sample a large number of subjects. Since it relies on a self-report method of data collection, intentional deception, poor memory, or misunderstanding of the question can all contribute to inaccuracies in the data.

d. Case Study: It involves an in-depth descriptive record, kept by an outside observer, of an individual or group of individuals. They often rely on descriptive information provided by different people. This leaves room for important details to be left out. Also, much of the information collected is retrospective data, recollections of past events, and is therefore subject to the problems inherent to memory.

The site also provides more details, which you may find useful if you are interested in this area.

Middleware Software Market Overview by Forrester

2010-02-25T09:54:00.001+05:30

Forrester has published a report on Dec 30, 2009, providing an overview of middleware software market. It has reported total market size for middleware software at $25 billion plus for year 2008. The middleware software includes business process platforms and legacy transaction servers (e.g IBM CICS, Oracle Tuxedo, Natural/Adabas etc). As per the report, IBM is market leader with 18.7% market share. It is followed by Microsoft (16.3%), Oracle (13.8%) and SAP (5.4%). These top four vendors cover 54.2% market share. Software AG, TIBCO Software and Progress Software are the leading three independent vendors focused on a middleware portfolio. Their market shares are 2.2%, 2.1% and 1.4% respectively. Red Hat is only holding 0.2% market share though "usage" share for open source software could be more.

Diamond’s Business Design 2010 Study

2010-02-23T10:36:00.001+05:30

Diamond Management & Technology Consultants, Inc. has published 12-page report on their site, based on its survey of 174 business leaders. It has revealed a couple of interesting findings:

57% of firms have market penetration as primary objective while only 16% firms have indicated innovation as primary objective.
Only 6% of surveyed managers feel they are focused on changing only the processes they view as most important in accomplishing their objectives. Almost half the respondents (46%) confess that the economic crisis has caused them to spread themselves too thin.

The authors have concluded that year 2010 will be a year of increased competitive intensity. The firms will try to hold on to their current market share while stealing customers from the competition.

Near the end of the report, the authors have made following three recommendations:

Review your growth portfolio to make sure you have the right capabilities and investments to support a market penetration or innovation strategy.
Conduct a scenario-planning exercise that can help to foster organizational agility and better planning.
Create a growth team comprised largely of line executives who can help close the thinking/doing gap and focus the organization on profitable growth.

Using Mind Maps made easy

2010-02-17T11:37:00.001+05:30

Mind Map is a well-known graphical method to take notes. Instead of taking notes linearly so that they are read like an article, taking notes using mind map as shown in the figure has many advantages.

By arranging all information around a central theme, mind map provides a visual representation of the information, which is more intuitive to understand. They boost the recall of the information presented thus maximizing the retained learning. More importantly, since the ideas are presented in a radial, graphical, non-linear manner, mind maps help adopt a brainstorming approach to planning and organizational tasks.

To use mind map, all what you need is a paper and pen. But it becomes tedious when the mind map becomes bigger and bigger. Particularly, when you use mind maps for brainstorming, using paper and pen constraints your idea generation ability. During brainstorming we tend to get many new ideas, which require us to frequently reorganize the mind map. Doing it using paper and pen makes the mind map look messy. Also as we keep on adding new ideas and information, the mind map starts collecting more and more clutter, thus stifling further idea generation ability.

Using the software tool can help overcome these problems. By using software for creating mind map, we can add/delete ideas quite frequently without making the mind map messy. Also the software can provide a view where some branches can be collapsed or expanded thus giving non-cluttered view of the mind map.

There are quite a few mind-mapping software products available. Notable examples of commercial products include Buzan's iMindMap, MindManager (formerly known as MindMan) and XMind Pro. There are free software alternatives too. FreeMind is the one that I personally use for creating mind maps. It's easy to use and provides quite a good feature set. XMind is another free software product that can be considered.

Armed with a software product, you can effectively use mind maps thus increasing your productivity in learning and brainstorming!

What is Knowledge?

2010-02-10T15:20:00.001+05:30

While searching for the answer to this question, I came across following useful definition of knowledge:

Tom Davenport, who is considered to be the authority on Knowledge Management has defined Knowledge as "fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information, and expert insight that provides a framework for evaluating and incorporating new experiences and information". This definition tells us the following:

Nature of knowledge, which is fluid and sometimes causing some degree of difficulty to exactly identify its scope
Composition of knowledge, which are comprised of experiences, values, information, and insights
Purpose of knowledge, which are creating new knowledge and sharing/transferring existing knowledge

Taking it further, Knowledge Management (KM) can be defined as managing identification of knowledge, creation of knowledge, transfer of knowledge and sharing of knowledge. A Knowledge Management System (KMS) is the one that can facilitate these management activities. Needless to mention, KMS is necessary for effective KM but is no way sufficient for the same!

Creativity & Team-building Workshop for Secondary School Children

2010-02-09T18:05:00.001+05:30

On Sunday December 10, 2009, four of us, Mona, Manish, Vinod and I had an exciting experience in facilitating a Creativity & Team-building Workshop for Secondary School Children residing near IIT Bombay. Four of us volunteer with an NGO called Asha, which works towards providing education to underprivileged children. Asha Mumbai chapter runs a center near IIT Bombay to provide tuition to underprivileged children who study in nearby schools but do not receive enough quality education in schools.

Being working professionals, we always found it difficult to commit to teaching either on weekdays or on weekends for an extended period of time. Hence we decided to conduct a day-long workshop where we could teach something useful, which is not covered in the curriculum.

On the workshop day, we started at around 10 am. We had 26 children from fourth to ninth standards as participants. We started with "Name Game" for which we wrote 20 adjectives on blackboard. We made all children sit in a circle and asked each one to tell his/her name by adding the most relevant adjective to it. Since initial few picked up the easy ones such as good, tall and perfect, we asked others to pick up other adjectives such as courageous, enthusiastic and cooperative. We found that the children had difficult time to pronounce the long words but they were equally enthusiastic to give a try. Interestingly, we ended the session with the same activity to check the effectiveness and we received descent feedback.

The second activity involved formation of 5 teams out of 26 children. Each team was given a packet consisting of 10 stationary objects (e.g. eraser, sharpener, etc). This activity, called as "Name the things", required each team to write names of all 10 objects on one A4 sheet. Two teams won the competition by scoring seven out of ten. We took this opportunity to write down all ten names on backboard and asked each team to learn all these ten names by heart. It was interesting to watch children helping others in their teams learn these words as we tried to emphasis the importance of teamwork to them.

The third activity was quite simple. We gave one jigsaw puzzle to teams and asked them to identify the picture once completed. The children found this activity quite easy though there was intense competition among teams to complete the jigsaw at the earliest! The next activity was equally easy. We had prepared 25 chits containing 4 letter-words (no pun intended!) with last two letters swapped. The teams needed to write the correct words on given A4 sheet. This activity had a simple objective of adding/reinforcing 25 words to the vocabulary of the participating children.

Now came the time for lunch! We had arranged for vegetarian biryani and raita for all children. As we served food to them, they patiently waited and then jumped on the food altogether once we finished the initial serving. After lunch we gave them 15-minutes break so that we could quickly clean the classroom and get ready for next activity.

The post-lunch activity was for boosting the creativity of children. Trophy building, as it was called, required teams to make a trophy out of 10 sheets of A4-sized paper. We first gave them one sheet to draw the trophy that they intend to make as a team. Though initially the children were seen clueless, quickly during team discussion they came up with enough ideas. Out of five teams, only one team couldn't make the trophy that could stand by itself for at least 30 seconds. Nevertheless all the trophies demonstrated high creatively among participating children.

The final activity was a Team Drawing Competition. We gave a drawing sheet to each team with one pencil and one eraser. We mentioned 26th January as the theme. We also told them that each team member had to contribute during the drawing exercise. With only one pencil and eraser, the team found it quite difficult to coordinate their actions and we had to cool off quite a few heated arguments. Nevertheless, each team completed the drawing and then got crayons to paint the same. At the end of this activity, we had five colorful drawings, out of which we picked up one, which was not only good-looking but also was result of excellent teamwork. We took this opportunity to advise children on how team work is important and how it can help bring out excellent outcome such as winner drawing.

It was 4 pm by then and we had to conclude the workshop. Most of the children were quite engaged and wanted next activity to start. Since time was constraint, we repeated the first activity, which also helped us assess its effectiveness and served as good wrap up. The children
bid farewell to us with a question on when we will meet again. Given our constraints, we chose not to promise anything though we promised to repeat this workshop for other children supported by Asha Mumbai.

My notes from "The IT Consultant" book

2010-02-09T17:46:00.000+05:30

“The IT Consultant” book is an excellent resource for any IT professional aiming to become IT consultant. Written by Rick Freedman, this book provides a commonsense framework for managing the client relationship. It provides a wealth of ideas, tips and information that any budding IT consultant would find useful. I have prepared my notes using mind map technique and shared here as an image in this blog.

SAP Software Licensing Model

2010-02-03T15:17:00.001+05:30

On its web site, SAP has made available easy-to-read 16-page document that helps develop basic understanding of SAP Software Licensing Model. You can find the link at http://www.sap.com/solutions/licensingmodel/. This guide is applicable only to SAP Business Suite, SAP BusinessObjects software, and SAP NetWeaver. Let me share my notes here.

SAP offers perpetual software licenses for which up-front payment is needed at the time of purchase. Additionally, SAP offers maintenance and support services for a recurring fee. Typically the annual fee for maintenance is calculated as a percentage of the software contract value (maintenance base). The annual fee is due from the first month after delivery and must be paid in advance.
SAP licenses its software through a combination of package licenses and named user licenses. Package licenses entitle a licensee to deploy and use the specified software functionality provided that the appropriate users accessing the functionality are licensed as well. Named user licenses are generally not tied to a specific package license but are valid across all package licenses.
Package licenses are priced based on key business metrics such as orders processed, contracts, gross written premium, number of patients treated, and so on. In some cases, package licenses are priced by technology metrics, like the number of CPUs in a server environment. In the case of CPUs as a license metric, the first core of a processor is counted as a full CPU while every additional core is counted only half. The licensed software product can only be used up to the licensed amount of the respective business metric.
SAP offers two user types: "SAP application users" and "SAP platform users." The latter are users that access SAP software exclusively through non-SAP applications that have certified integration with SAP applications. For each user type, SAP offers a number of user categories that are suited for different user roles. The default user category is the professional user. All other user categories, such as employee or limited professional, are suitable for specific usage scenarios only.
SAP uses different licensing principles when SAP software is accessed by a technical interface or a non-SAP application. License requirements are based on the utilization of the software functionality independent of the technical interface that is used to access functions and data.
Any package license includes unlimited rights for nonproductive use of the licensed software, such as development, testing, training, or creating backups. However, all users accessing the software for such purposes (for example, developers, system administrators, and trainees) need to be licensed as named users.
SAP software may be delivered with detailed customizing settings and master data that have been preconfigured to meet the requirements of a specific industry sector or country (SAP Best Practices packages). The right to use SAP Best Practices is included in the respective package license. Maintenance does not include delivery of new versions of SAP Best Practices.

Agility Paradox

2010-02-03T15:12:00.001+05:30

We tend to believe that to become innovative and agile, the companies should not have standardized processes. In other words, we tend to believe that standardized processes stifle the innovation. Dr Peter Weill, Chairman of the MIT Sloan School of Management's Center for Information System Research (MIT CISR) disagrees. In an interview to Wall Street Journal, Dr Weill has talked about agility paradox – the companies that have more standardized and digitized business processes are faster to market and to get more revenue from new products. Dr Weill's proposition is backed up by the extensive field research done by MIT CISR so it has to be taken up seriously. And if you think through it for a long time then you will also agree with Dr Weill. I did!

Gartner Perspective on IT Spending in 2010

2010-01-30T13:12:00.001+05:30

Gartner has published its take on IT spending in 2010. It is available as free downloadable booklet. Following are the key figures (in billions of USD), worth taking note of.

	2007	2008	2009	2010
Worldwide End-User Spending on IT	3,181	3,372	3,198	3,304
Worldwide End-User Spending on Computing Hardware	370	380	317	317
Worldwide Enterprise Spending on Software	209	225	221	231
Worldwide End-User Spending on Telecommunications	1,854	1,958	1,879	1,940
Worldwide End-User Spending on IT Services	747	809	781	816

This booklet provides following 10 top business priorities:

Business process improvement
Reducing enterprise costs
Improving enterprise workforce effectiveness
Attracting and retaining new customers
Increasing the use of information/analytics
Creating new products or services (innovation)
Targeting customers and markets more effectively
Managing change initiatives
Expanding current customer relationships
Expanding into new markets and geographies

It also provides top 10 technology priorities:

Business intelligence
Enterprise applications (ERP, CRM and others)
Servers and storage technologies (virtualization)
Legacy application modernization
Collaboration technologies
Networking, voice and data communications
Technical infrastructure
Security technologies
Service-oriented applications and architecture
Document management

Gartner List of Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2010

2010-01-30T13:09:00.001+05:30

In October 2009, during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, Gartner declared its list of top 10 strategic technologies for 2010. Here is the list for quick reference:

Cloud Computing
Advanced Analytics
Client Computing
IT for Green
Reshaping the Data Center
Social Computing
Security – Activity Monitoring
Flash Memory
Virtualization for Availability
Mobile Applications

Describing myself

2010-01-26T21:43:00.001+05:30

Today on 60^th Republic Day of India, I got into thinking to come out with description of myself. How do I describe myself? Typically we use resumes and profiles to describe ourselves in public life. So updating my resume was my first step. But then I wondered whether I can use any different structure or format.

I am currently involved in developing Triple-3 Framework for IT Strategy Consulting. Why triple-3? Because for IT Strategy Consulting, we intend to do following three activities: understand three factors, examine three areas and recommend using three artifacts. Now I must admit that this triple-3 notion is simply used to increase recall value of the framework. BTW, the framework is under development and I hope to write about it soon.

So I decided to use this notion of Triple-3 to describe myself. After a lot of thinking (I am not that smart!), I came up with my description using following Triple-3 format:

Three Aspirations:
1. Contribute at least one knowledge artifact (e.g. management framework) in public domain.
2. Make enough money to become financially secure.
3. Help improve quality of life for quite a few underprivileged individuals
Three Assets:
1. More than a decade-long hands-on experience with diverse software tools and technologies.
2. Management Education from premier institutes (MBA from IIT Bombay and Executive Education at IIM-A & IIM-B).
3. Good amount of professional networking
Three Action Areas:
1. Continue to acquire, share and create knowledge in information technology management.
2. Improve business acumen through work experience.
3. Systematically increase professional networking.

Preparing this description of oneself is not necessarily an easy task. Do you want to try yourself? What are your three aspirations, three assets and three action areas? Just think over!

Board Briefing on IT Governance

2010-01-22T20:31:00.001+05:30

Today I read an excellent document published by "The IT Governance Institute" on the topic of IT Governance. The document is titled as "Board Briefing on IT Governance". Written for Board members as target audience, this 63-page document provides an excellent introductory view of the IT Governance area. Following are my takeaways from reading this publication, in the form of Q&A:

What is IT Governance?
- IT governance is the responsibility of the board of directors and executive management. It is an integral part of enterprise governance and consists of the leadership and organizational structures and processes that ensure that the organization's IT sustains and extends the organization's strategies and objectives.
Why is IT Governance important?
- With IT now so intrinsic and pervasive within enterprises, governance needs to pay special attention to IT, reviewing how strongly the enterprise relies on IT and how critical IT is for the execution of the business strategy, since:
  - IT is critical in supporting and enabling enterprise goals.
  - IT is strategic to the business (growth and innovation).
  - Due diligence is increasingly required relative to the IT implications of mergers and acquisitions.
Whom does it concern?
- IT governance, like most other governance activities, intensively engages both board and executive management in a cooperative manner. However, due to complexity and specialization, the board and executive must set direction and insist on control, while needing to rely on the lower layers in the enterprise to provide the information required in decision-making and evaluation activities.
What can they do about it?
- Both Board and Management should engage in following activities:
  - Become informed of role and impact of IT on the enterprise
  - Assign responsibilities
  - Make transformation happen
  - Manage risk
- Only Board should engage in following activities:
  - Set direction and expected return
  - Define constraints within which to operate
  - Measure performance
  - Obtain assurance
- Only Management should engage in following activities:
  - Determine required capabilities and investments
  - Sustain current operations
  - Acquire and mobilize resources
What does IT Governance cover?
- Strategic Alignment - focusing on aligning with the business and collaborative solutions
- Value Delivery - concentrating on optimizing expenses and proving the value of IT
- Risk Management - addressing the safeguarding of IT assets, disaster recovery and continuity of operations
- Resource Management - optimizing knowledge and IT infrastructure
- Performance Measurement - tracking project delivery and monitoring IT services
How does your organization compare?
- The use of maturity model greatly simplifies this task and provides a pragmatic and structured approach for measuring how well developed an enterprise's processes are against a consistent and easy-to-understand scale. Following maturity scale could be useful:
  - 0 Nonexistent – Management processes are not applied at all
  - 1 Initial – Processes are ad hoc and disorganized
  - 2 Repeatable – Process follow a regular pattern
  - 3 Defined – Processes are documented and communicated
  - 4 Managed – Processes are monitored and measured
  - 5 Optimized – Best practices are followed and automated
What reference material exists?
- COBIT (Control Objectives for Information and related Technology), issued by the IT Governance Institute
What is the ultimate message?
- IT Governance should be integrated within Enterprise Governance.
- IT Governance Roles and Responsibilities need to be defined.
- IT Governance Implementation Plan is required.

Book Review: The Secrets of Consulting

2010-01-22T20:17:00.001+05:30

Written by Gerald Weinberg, this book provides memorable rules, laws and principles for becoming a successful consultant. Since the language is quite witty, it's fun to read this book. There are more than 100 laws, a list of which is provided at the end of the book. But it's important to read these laws in the flow of the book though a list makes a good reference. Out of these laws, I found following laws quite useful. Please note that this is personal selection and to appreciate these laws, one will need to read the book (or the chapter which contains it).

If you can't accept failure, you'll never succeed as a consultant
In spite of what your client will tell you, there is always a problem.
If they didn't hire you, don't solve their problem.
We can do it – and this is how much it will cost.
Things are the way they are because they got that way.
It may look like a crisis, but it's only the end of an illusion.
You'll never accomplish anything if you care who gets the credit.
Pricing is not a zero-sum game.
Set the price so you won't regret it either way.
The best marketing tool is a satisfied client.
The trick of earning trust is to avoid all tricks.
Never be dishonest even if the client requests it.
Spend at least one day a week getting exposure.
Never promise more than 10% improvement. If you happen to achieve more than 10% improvement, make sure it is not noticed.

A Viewpoint on Open Source Software

2010-01-08T23:57:00.001+05:30

I recently attended Interop 2009, in which one CIO provided his views on open source software. Being a strong advocate of open source software, I found these views quite interesting and useful.

Firstly, the speaker classified the open source software into two categories: popular open source software and not-so-popular open source software. The popular open source software included Apache web server, mySQL database, Linux etc. As per the speaker, there are no issues with the popular open source software; rather they should be used as they provide low-cost alternatives to proprietary software plus they provide simpler licensing as compared to that of proprietary software products. On the other hand, he noted two problems with not-so-popular open source software. Firstly there is inadequate number of people that can be hired to customize/configure and secondly, one can't be sure about the security since not many people would have evaluated the not-so-popular software.

I tend to agree with him. I see a laundry list of open source software alternatives for a given product category but always recommend the ones which have got the maximum community involvement. Now how one can measure the community involvement? I typically go by the sourceforge.net ratings and/or reviews in the blogs and press. Though this method is quite imprecise, I guess one can easily build a quick list of recommended (read: popular) open source software for each product category. Let me make an attempt in my next blog!

Book Review: How the Mighty Fall

2009-10-21T15:51:00.001+05:30

I am big fan of Jim Collins; I became one after reading his book, "Good to Great". I have also read his another book, "Built to Last". So when I came to know that his recent book has come to market, I immediately grabbed its copy.

In his preface, Jim Collins has mentioned that he had considered this topic more for an article than for a book. Right now it has come out as a lengthy article published in book form. It is a small book with a little more than 200 pocket-sized pages to read. Nevertheless, the content presented in this book is quite powerful and thought-provoking. In line with Jim Collin's style, the content is backed by 4-years long research that involved comparative study of failed companies in contrast to the companies that attained and/or sustained exceptional results during the same era.

The book describes a model consisting of five stages of decline, through which great companies go before becoming irrelevant. The great companies enter first stage named as "Hubris Born of Success" largely due to their arrogant neglect of their primary business and because rhetoric of success (what) replaces understanding and insights (why). The second stage, called as "Undisciplined Pursuit of More" happens largely due to unsustainable quest for growth, declining proportion of right people in key seats and problematic succession of power. Companies enter third stage of "Denial of Risk and Peril" as they make big bets in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary and as they indulge in externalizing blames and obsessive reorganizations. Stage 4 of "Grasping for Salvation" can be recognized with markers such as series of silver bullets and initial upswing followed by disappointments. The final stage of "Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death" is reached when company either gives up the fight or run out of cash.

The book makes certain statements, which are backed by the research but are not so much intuitive. Let me list those statements as IMHO they are the real learning from the book:

Whether you prevail or fail, endure or die, depends more on what you do yourself than on what the world does to you.
Great companies can stumble, badly, and recover.
Leaders who fail the process of succession set their enterprises on a path to decline.
The signature of mediocrity is not unwillingness to change. The signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency.
Most "overnight success" stories are about twenty years in the making.
Great companies can fall even if engaged in energetic and ambitious activity, thereby undermining the hypothesis that all great companies fall because they come complacent.
Right people for key seats show following six characteristics: they fit with company's core values; they don't need to be tightly managed; they understand that they do not have jobs but have responsibilities; they fulfill their commitments; they are passionate about the company and its work; they display "window and mirror" maturity (credit others for success, hold self responsible for failures).

The book also mentions the Packard's Law, which states that no company can consistently grow revenues faster than its ability to get enough of the right people to implement that growth and still become a great company.

In all, the book is an excellent reading for those who love studying management.

Responsibilities of Enterprise Architect

2009-10-01T05:55:00.000+05:30

It's very difficult to answer what are the responsibilities of Enterprise Architect? It's not because nobody has an answer to it. It's the other extreme. There are too many answers to this question. Let me too join the club of the preachers to describe the responsibilities and the performance measurement criteria for Enterprise Architect. I guess they would be useful for hiring enterprise architects!

IMHO, Enterprise Architect has following responsibilities:

Analyze the interrelationships among business processes, information, application systems, and underlying infrastructure technology and maintain their documentation in EA repository.
Develop technology strategy and standards in consultation with technology SMEs and business leaders.
Monitor adherence to the technology strategy and standards using Architecture Review.
Introduce new technology to enable new business capabilities in consultation with technology SMEs and business leaders.

And the performance measurement criteria could be one or more of the following with case-specific targets:

Cost saving
Reduction in IT project execution time
Reduction in IT risk
Increase in consistency of project delivery
Enabling business innovations

I will keep on updating both these lists as and when I acquire new learning!

Will the hype for cloud computing continue forever?

2009-09-10T22:49:00.000+05:30

There is more than enough hype in the media about cloud computing. It seems like cloud computing is being positioned as the ultimate delivery model for providing IT solutions to the business. While there is some truth in this hype, there are many fallacies too. Let me take a shot at this hype in this blog!

Simply put, cloud computing is the computing paradigm in which computing resources such as software, infrastructure (processing power, storage etc) and the deployment platform (e.g. Microsoft .NET platform) are provided as services over internet. That means the service consumer organizations do not own any of these resources. They consume these resources and pay as per their usage. These two attributes differentiate the cloud computing from the traditional computing. In traditional computing, the organizations own the computing resources and incur expenditure regardless of the usage.

Putting in economic terms, cloud computing helps organizations incur only operational expenditure instead of capital expenditure. That’s the great news for the consumer organizations as in current economic climate it would be difficult to get the capital expenditure sanctioned. Also since the payment is tied to the usage, the consumer organizations can both upscale or downscale their usage without worrying about sunk cost, as there is none.

Having said so, it’s not so great situation for service providers. Firstly, they cannot lock in their customers and can’t expect any annuity business in terms of annual maintenance payments. Secondly, they need to provision for scalable service delivery, which is an expensive proposition in spite of use of technologies such as virtualization. Lastly, the payback period for their capital expenditure is long as they are not paid in lump-sum but in small installments over a period of time.
Having said so, one would wonder why there are so many companies providing cloud computing services. The answer is simple! In today’s economic climate, not many organizations are willing to spend money as capital expenditure and perhaps the only way to survive is to get paid in proportion of the services delivered. In other words, this is buyers market so the sellers will need to bend backwards to make money.

Does it mean the cloud computing phenomenon will disappear once the economy accelerates? Not really! The hype will surely come down but there will be some companies that have betted heavily and will continue to embrace this paradigm. The opportunistic companies, who have now jumped on the bandwagon, will scale down (or close!) their cloud computing services and increase their emphasis on the traditional computing delivery model. In other words, the traditional computing will continue but will have the companion in the form of cloud computing! The consumer organization will use both the paradigms in future and there will be less number of companies calling themselves as cloud computing companies!

Book Review: Leading People

2009-07-01T15:00:00.001+05:30

Leading People is part of Pocket Mentor series from Harvard Business School Press. Written by Lloyd Baird, this book provides essential theory, checklists and annotated list of learning resources in less than 100 pages.

The book classifies effective leaders as charismatic leaders, transformational leaders and pragmatic leaders; each one of these types is useful in certain scenario and not in others. For acquiring leadership skills, it provides suggestions such as "learn from experience" and "find a true mentor". It lists six leadership styles, viz. coercive, authoritative, affiliative, democratic, pacesetting and coaching along with their characteristics, usefulness and weaknesses.

The book provides following tools for leading people:

Self-evaluation checklist on characteristics of effective leadership
Worksheet for crafting and maintaining the vision
Checklist for evaluating ability to establish credibility
Worksheet for tracking motivation level of staff and allies

The list of learning resources is quite long and the comments provided for each item helps setting the expectations. In all, this book can be counted as a high-quality primer on the topic of leadership.

Book Review: the say it with charts complete toolkit

2009-06-22T08:55:00.001+05:30

There are very few books that you find, which teach you so much in short time. This book is one of them. Written by Gene Zelazny, this book offers definitive advice on how to communicate your message using charts. Gene is the Director of Visual Communications at McKinsey & Company. That fact itself establishes the credibility of the book even before you start reading it. But it is only after reading the book; you find it as a real treasure. Many thanks to the author for sharing his wisdom! I not only read the book, I "experienced" it, thanks to the writing style of the author and the inclusion of the practice sections in the book.

The book is divided into four sections. First section describes the process of moving from data to chart form. This process consists of three steps: determine your message, identify the comparison and select the chart form. The message and not the data that determines the chart form, hence determining the message is the first step in the process. Once the message is determined, it leads to one of following five basic types of comparison:

Component: Percentage of a total
Item: Ranking of items
Time Series: Changes over time
Frequency Distribution: Items within ranges
Correlation: Relationship between variables

For third step, the author has suggested that following chart forms should generally be used for each of the types of comparison:

Comparison: Pie
Item: Bar
Time Series: Column and Line
Frequency Distribution: Column and Line
Correlation: Bar and Dot Chart

The author has then discussed each of the comparison types and has illustrated how these chart types can be used. The first section concludes with two work projects that help reinforce the concepts presented in this section.

The second section consists of 80 charts, organized around five comparison types. They are presented in increasing order of complexity ranging from, say, one pie per chart to multiple pies. While charts are focus of first two sections, third section presents concept visuals and visual metaphors. The concept visuals consist of abstract geometrical shapes such as arrows, circles and triangles. The visual metaphors, on other hand, include everyday objects such as puzzles, mazes and ladders. The author calls these visuals as solutions in search of a problem. His advice is to use this section as a portfolio of thought starters. These visuals are available as EMF files on the CD accompanying the book.

The fourth and last section of the book is what you would love the most. Aptly titled as "Play it with charts", it provides the reader a practice ground for practicing whatever is learnt till then. It provides a series of business charts, with author's solution on next page. While it is tempting to flip the page to see the author's solution, the authors suggests the reader to first try himself/herself the solution before looking at author's solution. This exercise helps immensely to reinforce the lessons learnt.

In all, it is a must-read for any business executive or consultant! It's a great investment of time and money, which will provide enriching dividends over a long period of time.

Workshop on Becoming a Consultant

2009-06-22T08:54:00.001+05:30

Recently I attended half-day training workshop on becoming a consultant. In this workshop, among various things, I learnt the Consulting Process consisting of five sequential phases.

Entry & Contracting
Discovery & Data Collection
Feedback and decision to act
Engagement and implementation
Extension, Recycle and Termination

The consultant enters the first phase with information of client, sales and current trends. This phase involves negotiating wants, coping with mixed motivations and surfacing concerns about exposure and loss of control. The consultant needs information seeking, problem solving, critical thinking, questioning and negotiation skills in this phase. The tools that the consultant can call upon include MECE, argument mapping, critical questions and funneling. The ultimate outcome of this phase is a contract.

Second phase begins with the contract and initial hypothesis. The consultant executes this phase with questioning, observation, listening and analysis skills. Conducting interviews, MECE and scenario planning are the tools that consultant uses to come out with data analysis, problem statement, solution and recommendation.

Beginning with the outcome of second phase, third phase involves funneling data and managing feedback meeting with six hat technique, brainstorming and facilitation tools. The consultant uses the skills such as data analysis, creative thinking, decision-making and managing emotions. The deliverables of this phase include final recommendation, signoff on actions and plan.

Fourth phase involves aspects such as 'engagement over mandate & persuasion', 'design more participation than presentation', 'encourage difficult public exchanges', 'put real choice on the table', 'change the conversation to change the culture', 'pay attention to place' etc. The consultant would need skills such as involving others, communication, assertiveness, influencing and conflict management to deliver task completion report. The consultant can use tools such as influencing model and minto pyramid principle.

The final phase results into completion report, cheque (!) and further work plan if needed. It includes aspects such as completion review, further recommendation and separation. The consultant would need skills such as strategic thinking, being objective, presentation and relationships management and can make use of tools such as review and feedback gathering.

Book Review: A Better India A Better World

2009-06-18T14:54:00.001+05:30

"A Better India A Better World" is a book written by Infosys co-founder N R Narayana Murthy. It's a collection of his speeches delivered over recent years, to different kinds of audience across the globe.

The book has 38 speeches classified into 10 parts such as Address to Students, Values, Leadership Challenges, Entrepreneurship and globalization. While quite a few things repeat, these speeches are fairly exclusive in communicating the thoughts and ideas. The Introduction written by author is also an excellent piece of work.

I would suggest reading this book to get motivated for achieving your own lofty dreams with hard work and high moral sense.

Adobe ConnectNow

2009-05-30T12:27:00.001+05:30

Today I signed up for Adobe ConnectNow service. Adobe ConnectNow is a free web conferencing solution, which can be used by up to three participants (including host). It allows a permanent meeting room to each signed-in user. One can invite others, who are not signed up for this service, to join the online meetings.

I have not yet started to use this service but I guess I will find it useful when I will be travelling. I will post the feedback once I start using this service.

Adobe ConnectNow is one of the free hosted services offered at adobe.com. Other services include collaborative online word processor (Adobe Buzzword), document and file sharing and online PDF creation. I plan to explore these services in days to come.

MIT Center for Collective Intelligence

2009-04-26T18:35:00.000+05:30

While surfing, I stumbled upon the web site of MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. Launched on October 13, 2006, it focuses on answering one key research question: How can people and computers be connected so that collectively they act more intelligently than any individual, group, or computer has ever done before?

It’s indeed an interesting question to investigate. Prof Thomas W. Malone, who is director of this center, has mentioned in his remarks at the official launch that the center will conduct three types of research: case studies, new examples, and systematic experiments, in order to answer this question. The center has published many working papers, which I am planning to read carefully in my next visit to the site.

Million Dollar Consulting

2009-04-26T18:25:00.000+05:30

I just finished reading the book titled "Million Dollar Consulting Toolkit" by Alan Weiss. Though I have read quite a few books on consulting, I found this book to be different due to its hands-on approach. It is most useful for those consultants who are working solo but can also be used by consultants working in big consulting practices.

Alan Weiss has built a million dollar consulting practice, as a solo and in this book he has shared everything, right from tips to templates, in this book. When I started reading this book, I was puzzled to see so much nitty-gritty details. But then I found that to be its strength. The book provides field-level guidance in following areas:

Office and Practice Management
Sales & Marketing
Self-Development
Travel (here you will find a wealth of tips for business travel)
Project Delivery ( a good number of checklists are here)
Forms (templates for invoice, expense reimbursement etc, more useful in USA context though can be modified to suit local conditions)
Financials
Legal (again USA-specific details though can be adapted to local conditions)
Advanced marketing (covers publishing, speaking, newsletter, referrals and repeat business)

A must-read for the one who is planning to start as a solo consultant!

Measuring the Impact of Electronic Data Management (EDM) on Information Worker Productivity

2009-04-26T17:49:00.001+05:30

I just now finished reading a research brief from MIT Center for Digital Business on measuring the Impact of Electronic Data Management (EDM) on Information Worker Productivity. Authored by Sumit Bhansali and Prof Erik Brynjolfsson from MIT Sloan, this research brief has reported the findings from their project, in which they studied the effects of digitizing work on information workers' time-use and performance at a large insurance firm.

The authors used four complementary data sources:

Extensive on-site observation (of 4 managers) and interviews (17 pre-EDM interviews and 20 post-EDM interviews)
Detailed time use records at three different time points (one pre-EDM and two post-EDM)
Office-wide surveys (one pre-EDM and one post-EDM)
Accounting data on multiple intermediate and final performance metrics such as current year closure rate, previous year closure rate, retention rate, YTD loss leakage and YTD average amount per claim on physical therapy cost and chiropractor care cost.

Some of the important findings reported are as follows:

EDM changed task composition at the individual level. EDM led to a significant decline in the substitutable routine labor input and an increase in non-routine cognitive labor input at the information worker level.
EDM caused the "IT-enabled slack", which allowed information workers to spend more time on value-adding communication activities as well for more personal time relaxing and resting at work or at home (less overtime).
Post-EDM, both the quantity and quality of routine informational inputs significantly increased, which in turn increased the productivity and performance of workers performing non-routine tasks that demanded those inputs.
Introduction of EDM got associated with the positive effects on the performance metrics.

We all know that introduction of new technologies such as EDM improves employee productivities. Such research projects help establish this proposition with systematic evidence and can help (perhaps!) establish the business case for New Technology Introduction (NTI).

InnoCentive

2009-04-26T17:48:00.001+05:30

Today during internet surfing, I stumbled upon web site of InnoCentive Inc and got to know about this interesting venture.

Founded in 2001, InnoCentive has built up a web-based marketplace, where organizations (called as Seekers) submit challenges for individuals (called as Solvers) to solve for financial awards along with professional recognition. InnoCentive's Seekers include commercial, government and non-profit organizations such as Procter & Gamble, Avery Dennison, Pendulum, Eli Lilly and Company, Janssen, Solvay, GlobalGiving and The Rockefeller Foundation. The company claims to have 172,000 registered solvers from 175 countries. Interestingly, till April 7, 2009, $4.1 million has been awarded for 472 solutions. Some noteworthy solutions are as follows:

In November 2007, the Oil Spill Recovery Institute (OSRI) awarded $20,000 to John Davis for his creative solution for a challenge related to oil spill recovery issues.
An electrical engineer from New Zealand solved the Challenge to create a dual-purpose solar light to serve as both a lamp and a flashlight to be used in African villages and other areas of the world without electricity. The seeker, SunNight Solar in this case, awarded $20,000 to the solver in March 2008.
In late 2007, the TB Alliance, a not-for-profit organization, received solution from two solvers for a Challenge seeking a theoretical solution to simplify the manufacturing process of a current drug compound.

There are four types of challenges that Seeker can post:

An InnoCentive Ideation Challenge is a broad question formulated to obtain access to new ideas. It's like global brainstorm for producing a breakthrough idea. The submissions are typically about two written pages.
An InnoCentive Theoretical Challenge contains detailed solution requirements that Solvers must fulfill in their responses. A solution to a Theoretical Challenge should solidify the Solver's concept with detailed descriptions, specifications and requirements necessary to bringing a good idea closer to becoming an actual product or service.
An InnoCentive RTP (Reduction to Practice) Challenge requires that the Solver submit a validated solution, either in the form of original data or a physical sample.
An InnoCentive eRFP Challenge is a request for a partner or supplier to provide materials or expertise to help solve a business challenge.

The company has provided detailed instructions about IPR requirements for each of these types of challenges. The company earns its revenue from Seekers who pay a fee to post Challenges and, in some cases, also pay a commission on the amount awarded. InnoCentive does not charge Solvers to view Challenges and submit solutions. It also offers to R&D organization its product called InnoCentive@Work, which is a customizable internal web-based community platform.

With its 32 employees and venture funding of $16 million, InnoCentive Inc seems to be a company, which can't be ignored in current innovation-centric global business environment.

Activity Based Performance Measurement (ABPM)

2009-04-26T17:43:00.001+05:30

While surfing, I stumbled upon the slides presented during MIT Data Center Workshop on May 20, 2005 by Robert Laubacher of MIT Sloan. The topic is Activity Based Performance Measurement (ABPM). I found this topic interesting and hence made further search and browsing to make following notes:

ABPM can be used to measure value created by new technology or management intervention. It can assess business performance at the activity level and then aggregate these fine-grained metrics upward to the business unit and firm level. ABPM is based on two insights:

Calculating the costs of an activity is a matter of decomposing it into constituent parts, determining the cost of each part, and aggregating those costs. The benefits of an activity usually arise from how it affects other activities in the value chain. For example, quality programs reduce product defects and so reduce costs associated with factory rework and staffing customer service units. Higher quality can also increase future sales, due to greater customer satisfaction and enhanced firm reputation.
There are common patterns in the types of benefits associated with activities that have similar underlying characteristics. For example, checking the quantity of goods is an activity that takes place at many junctures in the retail supply chain. Quantity checks of this sort occur at the receiving dock of the manufacturer's warehouse, when shipments arrive from the factory; at the manufacturer's loading dock, when shipments are placed on trucks for transportation to the retailer; at the retailer's distribution center, when the truck arrives; and so on, all the way to the point where the consumer makes a store purchase, and the clerk checks the quantity of each item in the shopper's cart.

Using ABPM to assess the impact of a new technology like RFID involves four primary steps:

Develop potential post-implementation scenarios
Identify activities affected by the new technology
Map the activities with vs. without the new technology
Measure benefits and costs by comparing differences in outcomes of pre- vs. post-implementation activities

There are two types of benefits: localized vs. distant benefits. The benefits tied directly to the activities affected by new technology are localized benefits. Other benefits, by contrast, involve connections between activities directly affected and activities that occur within other units of the firm or even within outside firms. The distinction between localized and distant benefits is important because it shapes the extent to which a firm or business unit implementing new technology has direct control over achieving the full benefits of the technology. When most of the benefits are localized, the group implementing the new technology has a high degree of control over whether or not it achieves the benefits. But when many of the benefits are of the distant kind, the implementing group must rely on other business units or supply chain partners to achieve the full potential of new technology.

Though I do not feel I got the full understanding of ABPM, the insights and the other details associated with ABPM are nevertheless useful!

Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007

2009-04-02T18:56:00.001+05:30

Today I attended a brief training of Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server (MOPPS) 2007. MOPPS 2007 is part of Microsoft's Enterprise Project Management suite, which also includes Microsoft Office Project Server. It allows creation of a project portfolio, including workflows, hosted centrally, so that the information is available throughout the enterprise, even from a browser (as per Wikipedia entry).

As I understood, the product provides two major modules: builder and optimizer. The scope of training session included only builder module, which is all about maintaining data about projects and resources. Obviously, this data maintenance can be configured to be very systematic hence can become quite useful for gaining visibility into project portfolio. The software allows grouping the projects as per programs, portfolios and organization units. It supports workflow feature, which allows move the project across the stages such as RC&BRD, Reject/Hold, Imp/Dev. The stages are specific to the project class such as application maintenance and application development. The software allows configuring which data fields (grouped as tabs) become editable or read-only or invisible depending on the current stage of the project. That makes the data collection quite disciplined. The examples of groups of data fields include budget cost, benefit estimation, strategic impact, Risk, schedule, cost tracking and document management. Also there is an audit trail, which captures all the user actions for possible review later.

The trainer also showed a feature called dashboard, which as name implies, can show the selective attributes (mainly iconic attributes) of selective projects. There is a similar feature called scorecard, which can show selective attributes of all projects. This scorecard, which is part of Builder module, can also be used for navigating through the projects.

Overall I found this training session useful for getting an awareness of the software product.

Searching Lotus Notes email

2009-02-06T19:54:00.001+05:30

At work, I use Lotus Notes email client and found its search reasonably good. But what irritates me the most is searching through archives. Since I am supposed to copy the archive database on CDs, I have created many archive files for different time periods. That has now required me to open each archive and search through it for anything I need. That made me search a tool that can provide an unified search interface for searching through all archive files.

Finally, my search ended with IBM OmniFind Personal Email Search tool. This is an outcome of IBM Alphaworks and one can download the tool from its site. I started using this tool since last Friday and have found it extremely useful.

While installing the tool, it asked for all archive files and local folder for indexing the documents. The tool provides a locally hosted web site for searching through all this data. It's not only keyword search. One can search for telephone numbers, email addresses etc. Actually the tool recognizes the concepts such as email address, telephone number, directions, schedule, call, person etc and hence one can search for them. The sample queries could be something like, "from chetan", "chetan phone", "url icws".

This tool has really enhanced my effectiveness at workplace. I would recommend it to you for enhancing your effectiveness at workplace!!

IT for enforcing process discipline

2009-01-14T11:58:00.001+05:30

I was recently reading a blog of Prof Andrew McAfee from Harvard Business School where I spotted a very interesting line: (Enterprise) IT can be used to enforce process discipline. I quickly disagreed because IMHO it is only transactional systems (e.g. ERP, HRM, CRM) that can enforce process discipline and not collaboration systems. I also thought that collaboration systems are actually useful when we don't need process discipline. But after a prolonged thinking, I agreed that even collaboration needs process discipline for making it effective and efficient and collaboration systems such as SharePoint can enforce that process discipline.

I would like to get your comments on this thought process.

What is SOA Governance?

2008-12-18T12:08:00.001+05:30

This is one of the frequently asked questions to me. While my answer depends on the background and motive of the person asking this question, let me state the general-purpose answer to this question in this blog.

SOA Governance is a subset of IT governance. Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross from MIT have given the definition of IT Governance as "Specifying the decision rights and accountability framework to encourage desirable behavior in the use of IT." On similar lines, we can define SOA governance as specifying the decision rights and accountability framework to realize the full value of SOA adoption in an organization.

To better understand SOA governance, let's categorize it as design-time governance and run-time governance. Design-time governance primarily includes business services portfolio planning but sometimes also includes SOA Platform planning. The business services portfolio planning involves establishing answers for following questions:

* Which services to develop?
* Which services to develop first?
* Is this really a new, reusable service?
* Who is going to pay for the development and maintenance of this service?
* Who owns this service?

By establishing answers to these questions, the reuse potential of SOA adoption can be fully exploited thus giving rise to cost reduction and IT flexibility.

The run-time SOA governance involves definition and enforcement of policies for security, SLA monitoring, routing and transformation. While design-time governance focuses on developing right services, run-time governance focuses on ensuring smooth execution of these services as per the expectations.

While governance is more to do with people behavior, some tools can be used to aid the people responsible for governance. One can use service repository as the tool for design-time governance as it stores all metadata related to services at a central location. For run-time governance, one can use a service registry and/or services management tools. Many Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) products also provide the functionality for run-time governance.

Benefits of Enterprise Architecture

2008-12-17T10:45:00.000+05:30

Once in a while, whenever I get time, I browse certain web sites to check whether anything new has come . I know RSS is a great mechanism to keep oneself updated on what's new on almost all web sites. But still I like this random check on my favorite sites.

One of my such favorite sites is the MIT CISR web site. This site hosts the working papers and research briefings, which are freely accessible. Today while I was going through them, I found one research briefing on Benefits of Enterprise Architecture. I found it very useful as it has given a list of both technology-related and business-related benefits of Enterprise Architecture.

The authors Jeanne Ross and Peter Weill, have described three types of technology-related benefits: IT costs, IT responsiveness and risk management. IT costs benefits include reduction in IT operations unit costs (cost of services such as helpdesk, network capacity and email) and application maintenance cost. IT responsiveness benefit includes reduction in develpment time. Finally, risk management benefits includes the following ones: reduced business risk, improved regulatory compliance, increased disaster tolerance and reduced security breaches.

The business-related benefits include the following:

shared business platforms - greater data sharing and integrated process standards
senior management and business unit management satisfaction
strategic business impact - operational excellence, customer intimacy, product leadership and strategic agility

The research briefing also provides details about how maturity level of enterprise architecture help organizations grow these benefits.

Model Value Analysis

2008-11-05T11:58:00.000+05:30

Today I read an excerpt of an upcoming book titled "Business Modeling: A Practical Guide to Realizing Business Value" written by David Bridgeland and Ron Zahavi, available on OMG web site. It discusses a very simple technique to ensure that business modeling does not run into trouble due to Model Value Destruction. Many of us must have heard of failed business modeling exercises in our own or our customer organizations. There are various reasons why business modeling projects fail. These include reasons such as model value destruction, scope failures, straight through modeling, creeping complexity, ugly models, and incompetent modelers. Though the book addresses how each of these dangers can be avoided, the available excerpt provides how model value destruction can be avoided with model value analysis.

Value destruction happens when the company takes an action that has a smaller economic
benefit than the cost of the action. Similarly, building some models incur more cost than the benefits that can be generated out of them, thus resulting into model value destruction. It can be avoided by using Model Value Analysis.

Simply put, model value analysis is a summary of the expected costs and the expected benefits, and a comparison of the two, as described in a spreadsheet. One sheet of the spreadsheet should list all the possible benefits of business modeling against which both estimated one-time and annual time savings should be recorded. There are eight benefits of business modeling as given below.

Communication
Training
Persuasion
Analysis
Compliance Checking
Requirements for software development
Direct Execution
Knowledge Management and reuse

It is not necessary that each modeling exercise should save time (and hence cost) against each one of the benefits listed above though one can discover additional benefits during model value analysis. In the second sheet, one must record all time spent (both one-time and annual) for business modeling against following elements:

Constructing the model
Socializing the model
Maintenance

While hours can be the unit to record both costs and benefits, perhaps dollar value is the better unit to use for comparison by taking into account personnel cost.

While this technique looks so simple, it may consume considerable amount of time and efforts if one employs it for making decision regarding complex business modeling exercise. A good rule of thumb is to spend 1% of the total anticipated modeling time on the model value analysis, to decide whether the other 99% makes economic sense.

BTW, after reading this excerpt, I am now awaiting the release of this book as it seems to have useful content on business modeling. Since it is being published by OMG itself, the quality has to be very good!

IBM's Smart SOA

2008-11-03T14:59:00.000+05:30

IBM is spending millions of advertising dollars on promoting what they call as smart SOA. After ignoring for so many months, I finally decided to look into it. Following are my notes that are trying to capture the essence of smart SOA without any IBM advertising!

Smart SOA is a set of guiding principles based on IBM's thousands of real-life deployments and experiences with SOA. IBM defines four approaches for adoption of SOA: Fundamental, Extend End-to-End, Transform and Adapt Dynamically. Fundamental approach involves departmental, very focused projects to meet an individual business need. IBM has defined five entry points as the means to pursue this approach viz. reuse, connectivity, people, process and information. Projects associated with Reuse entry point typically involve creating reusable service-based business components out of existing IT systems. The connectivity entry point links people, processes and information in the business through the use of an intermediary service gateway or bus. The people entry point improves productivity by aggregating services as views, as well as enabling human interaction in the context of the business process. Common projects associated with process entry point include automating and optimizing manual business processes and human workflows. Finally the information entry point provides access as reusable services to complex, heterogeneous data sources within an enterprise.

The Extend end-to-end approach involves collaboration between business and IT to optimize and bring greater innovation to business processes that span the organization and extend beyond it. BPM enabled with SOA along with maintaining integrity across the processes is a major component of this approach. The Transform approach is a broader approach than the earlier ones as it involves using technology for strategic advantage. It is about innovating the business model itself as opposed to the individual end-to-end business processes through which that business model is implemented. Finally Adapt Dynamically approach involves creating a predictive business that responds to market forces in a semi-automated, intelligent way. It embeds a belief that the emerging ideal of rapid transformation in a semi-automated way will become increasingly possible as a critical mass of service providers in the ecosystem adopt SOA to enable the business to respond with agility to business opportunities.

IMHO, the first approach is the one which will be used by majority of enterprises as of today. Few innovative companies will go for second or third approach. The fourth approach seems to be quite futuristic though it provides a grand vision for SOA adoption.

The Keys to BPM Project Success

2008-10-29T22:44:00.000+05:30

Today I read an article titled "The Keys to BPM Project Success", written by Derek Miers and published in Jan 2006 issue of BPTrends. This article describes a recipe for execution of a successful BPM project. In this blog, I am trying to capture the steps of the proposed BPM Project Delivery Framework. The article provides quite a few examples while describing these steps, which are worth reading once to get convinced for significance of each of the given steps.

Step 1 – Establish the Steering Group consisting of executive head of the affected business area, CIO or lead IT executive, BPM program manager (or head of BPM CoE, if exists) and senior LOB managers from the functions directly affected. Conduct the initial Steering Group Workshop to obtain formal commitment from the business, linkage between BPM program & strategy of the organization and tactical agreement on the choice of project & consensus on scope.

Step 2: Identify the suitable target process which has relatively low level of maturity, high impact and low complexity. A good rule of thumb is to ensure that the selected initial project can complete within 3-6 months.

Step 3: Develop the business case that can be tied back to the Key Business Objectives (KBOs) of the organization. Techniques such as Goal Question Metric (GQM) technique developed by Victor Basili and his colleagues can be used to ensure alignment.

Step 4: Gain executive sponsorship

Step 5: Form the BPM Project Team consisting of BPM Project Manager, Senior User from the affected area, one or more SMEs from the LOB area, Lead Business Analysts and IT Specialists.

Step 6: Understand the process by using techniques such as Role Activity Diagrams (RADs) and Object State Transition Network (OSTN) techniques in addition to flow diagram based approaches.

Step 7: Identify breakthrough opportunities such as potential for faster cycle times, enhanced customer service, channel integration, minimizing the number of times of handling the work items,role rationalization, management and monitoring of personnel performance and better exception management.

Step 8: Develop and prototype on the BPM suite

Step 9: Implement and align organizational change

Besides this recipe for sucess, the article also provides a 16-points list of pitfalls to avoid. In all, the article is a good read of anyone interested and/or involved in initial BPM projects in an organization.

Colligo for SharePoint

2008-10-27T12:31:00.001+05:30

Today while surfing the internet, I came across a Canada-based company called Colligo. Among its various products, one that caught my eyes is Colligo Reader. This product can be used to download the sharepoint site contents on the laptop, which can be read offline. It's a free download for personal (non-commercial) use. I have just installed it and downloaded a couple of internal sharepoint sites on my laptop using this product.

Before installing this product, I had an impression that I can now see the entire sharepoint site without being connected to the site over network. However, I then realized that I can only view the document libraries and lists offline using this software. While that has disappointed me a little, I have also figureed out that this itself has a lot of value for any user of sharepoint sites.

Obviously, the paid products from Colligo provide more powerful features such as two-way synchronization and I hope to at least try them out once I get comfortable with the use of Colligo Reader.

Developing Office Applications using SharePoint

2008-10-27T10:24:00.001+05:30

Currently I am spending a good amount of time in learning and teaching how SharePoint can be used to develop office applications without coding. What are these office applications? One can define office applications as those applications that are owned by and used by the same department. I contrast them against enterprise applications, which are owned by one department but are used by multiple departments. Let me illustrate this classification with examples. Leave and Attendance System is owned by HR department but used by all of us. On other hand, recruitment application is owned by and used only by recruitment group.

Since Office applications are used by the same people who own them, they are typically easier to develop. Why so? A typical enterprise application becomes complex over a period of time, largely due to the growing exceptions that need to be incorporated and also due to the complex rules of authorization that get embedded in the applications. Since Office Applications are used by the same department, one can have minimal rules of authorization. Also the complex and one-time exceptions can be handled outside the system so that the system can be kept simple enough to maintain easily.

I know this line of thinking makes people uncomfortable. How can one have a system, which does not cover all kinds of exceptions that can arise? My argument is that by insisting on including all exceptions in the system, we end up having systems quite complicated and difficult to maintain over a period of time. For enterprise applications, this complexity is very much justified but not for office applications.

So what is the use of SharePoint in the development of office applications? Yes, one can develop office applications using Excel. Rather Excel has been popular among office workers, largely because office applications can be developed using Excel quite easily. What is missing though is the workflow feature in Excel. Also Excel files with large macros and data become difficult
to manage as they get stored on personal drives of office worker who develops them. Use of SharePoint provides same facility as that of Excel plus it provides workflow thereby giving complete solution framework for development of office applications that too without any coding!

Currently I am involved in development of an internal office application, which will be owned by and used by Training Department. I will continue to post learning from development of this
application on this blog site.

ERP products from India

2008-08-02T12:09:00.000+05:30

When we think of ERP product coming from an Indian company, we can think of only Ramco. I just went on their site and found that they have now come up with ERP on Demand, which is nothing but a SaaS offering. What I found interesting on their site is one whitepaper in which they have addressed the security concern, which is associated with any hosted application. They have compared keeping data on capus against in vendor's data center with keeping family valuables in home against in bank's lockers. In India, where bank lockers are perceived to be quite safe to put family valuables, this comparison really connects with Indian psyche. Obviously they have provided quite a few details on the security of their data center and have mentioned their 27001 security certification. It's worth reading this whitepaper fully!

While Tally is a leader in accounting packages in India, its site also mentions an upcoming ERP product, named TallyAscent. It will be interesting to see how much market can be penetrated by TallyAscent.

Finally, I was pleasantly surprised to see an ERP product from Godrej Infotech. eNccompass - ERP claims to have leveraged Godrej group's experience of running various manufacturing companies. It seems it has been implemented in various Godrej companies so it must have got matured by now. It will be worth watching its market penetration in coming time.

Billing Boss

2008-08-02T12:04:00.001+05:30

While surfing net, I came across this interesting online business solution called Billing Boss. It is a free online invoicing tool, targeted for small businesses and freelancers. One can create, email and track the status of invoices. After watching the small video demo hosted on its site, it looked very easy to use this tool.

Since I neither run a small business nor I am a freelancer, I can't use it. But I guess it will be interesting to see how this site gets used in future.

mentor, trainer, consultant and counceller

2008-07-28T19:53:00.001+05:30

Just came across this interesting way to classify mentor, trainer, consultant and counselor. It's as follows:

Mentor or Coach asks solution.
Trainer tells solution.
Consultant tells problem.
Counselor or Therapist asks problems.

One can also make a 2-by-2 matrix to put these roles in each grid!

SAP Enterprise Services Workplace

2008-07-04T20:13:00.001+05:30

When I first heard of SAP Enterprise Services Workplace, I wondered why would SAP share complete interface details of its all enterprise services. Today I got some time to look at the website and was amazed by the availability of details available there. It seems to be quite an information overload though I plan to explore it for few days in coming weeks.

The Right Way Towards SOA

2008-06-30T18:06:00.001+05:30

While browsing the web site of Diamond Management and Technology Consultants, I came across this interesting article on SOA adoption. Here are my notes:

In this article, the authors have identified two kinds of SOA: Technology SOA and Business SOA. An organization can go for Business SOA only after doing Technology SOA. The focus of Technology SOA is on reuse of technology components and IT productivity leading to faster and cheaper IT. On the other hand, the focus of Business SOA is on rapid reconfiguration of business processes and/or providing trading partners and customers with access into corporate systems, leading to better and faster IT.

The authors have then adapted the MIT CISR research, to construct an SOA maturity model as shown below:

Level 0: Ongoing Service Delivery
Level 1a: New Project Delivery
Level 1b: Governance and Alignment
Level 2: Technology SOA
Level 3: CIO/CxO Relationship
Level 4: Business SOA

It's worth reading the whole article to understand more details about each of these six capabilities.

Learning resources for process modeling using BPMN

2008-06-19T17:45:00.001+05:30

Today I found following two very useful learning resources for process modeling using BPMN:

I am still reading them!

Courage as a Skill

2008-06-04T08:54:00.001+05:30

The January 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review has focus on the leadership. One of the articles that I read yesterday was from Kathleen K Reardon from USC Marshall School of Business. In this article, the author has argued that courageous action in business is rarely impulsive, rather it is a special kind of calculated risk taking. She has coined a term, "courage calculation", which has been defined as a method of making success more likely while avoiding rash, unproductive or irrational behavior. Following six discrete processes make up the courage calculation:

Setting primary and secondary goals, which are reasonably within reach, not pie-in-the-sky ambitions.
Determining the importance of achieving them
Tipping the power balance in your favor
Weighing risks against benefits
Selecting the proper time for action, which requires a deep sensitivity to one's surroundings and a great deal of patience.
Developing contingency plans

Let me quote the last para of this article, which very well sums up the entire article.

"In the end, courage in business rests on priorities that serve a personal, an organizational, or a societal philosophy. When this philosophy is buttressed by clear, obtainable primary and secondary goals, an evaluation of their importance, a favorable power base, a careful assessment of risk versus benefits, appropriate timing and well-developed contingency plans, managers are better empowered to make bold moves that serve their organizations, their careers and their own sense of personal worth."

Becoming an architect in a system integrator

2008-05-30T20:02:00.001+05:30

My colleague, Amit Unde, recently wrote an article, titled Becoming an architect in a system integrator, in the latest issue of The Architecture Journal. In this article, Amit has described variations of architect role, explained the architect competencies and has provided useful advice to aspiring architects.

Amit has captured following three variations of architect role by putting them on a two-by-two matrix with Technology Focus one one axis and Strategy Focus on the other axis:
Technical Architect on higher side of Technology Focus (indicating technology depth) and on lower side of Strategy Focus (indicating project scope).
Enterprise Architect on lower side of Technology Focus (indicating technology breadth) and on higher side of Strategy Focus (indicating organization scope).
Solution Architect exactly at the center of matrix
While there could be varying opinions on this way of defining architect roles, I tend to agree with these definitions.

Amit has also explained the architecture competencies. He has constructed a pyramid in which the foundation consists of leadership, relationship management and variety of experience. The middle layer for skills consists of domain knowledge, project management, technical acumen and communication skills. Finally the top layer consists of strategic mindset.

The advice for aspiring architects contains pointers to educational resources, certifications and groups and forums. But what are more interesting are the tips on how to choose employer for availing desired development opportunities!

In all, it's a good read for any practicing or aspiring architect.

Our SOA article got published in IT Professional magazine

2008-05-28T10:57:00.001+05:30

I co-authored an article titled "Where do you want to go in SOA adoption journey?" some months back. It is now published in IT Professional, which is an IEEE magazine. If you have access to IEEE Digital Library then you can read the article at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/6294/4525527/04525540.pdf?tp=&isnumber=&arnumber=4525540

Please share your feedback on the article with me.

Today is 125th jayanti of Swatantryaveer Savarkar

2008-05-28T09:48:00.001+05:30

Today is 125th jayanti of Swatantryaveer Savarkar.

Today is the day to remember him for his patriotism and his sacrifice for the nation.

What the CEO wants you to know

2008-05-26T09:10:00.001+05:30

I recently read this book, "What the CEO wants you to know", which is authored by Prof Ramcharan. The sub-title of this book is "Using Business Acumen to understand how your company really works". IMHO, the sub-title is what correctly describes the content of the book though the title is the one which is more catchy!

In less than 150 pages, the author has provided time-tested advice to each one operating in the business. What I liked the most about this book is a list of eight questions that one should ask about a company to understand its total business. These eight questions are as follows:

What were your company's sales during the last year?
Is the company growing? Or is growth flat or declining? Is this growth picture good enough?
What is your company's profit margin? Is it growing, declining or flat?
How does your margin compare with your competitors? How does it compare wit those of other industries?
Do you know your company's inventory velocity? its asset velocity?
What is your company's return on assets? (ROA = After-tax margin * Asset Velocity)
Is your company's cash generation increasing or decreasing? Why is it going one or the other?
Is your company gaining or losing against the competition?

First Pardhi to clear UPSC (India) exam

2008-05-24T22:28:00.001+05:30

It was heartening to read a news story about Sajjansingh Chavan, who is first in his pardhi community to clear Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) exam in India. The Pardhi community is (wrongly!) considered to be a criminal tribe though the Criminal Tribe Act was repealed in year 1949. Born in Mumbai's Aarey Milk Colony slum, Sajjansingh is son of Ramsingh who worked hard to make his son earn MTech from IIT Delhi.

My heartiest congratulation to Sajjansingh! And salute to his father, Ramsingh!!

open source software guide for SMEs

2008-05-07T18:40:00.001+05:30

Today I came across very good reading on open source software. FLOSSMETRICS/OpenTTT free/libre open source software guide for SMEs has following TOC:

What's Free/Libre/Open Source Software?
Ten myths about free/libre open source software
Basic FLOSS adoption models
Finding and selecting software
Best practices for FLOSS adoption
FLOSS-based business models

Competing with the Best

2008-05-06T09:05:00.000+05:30

I just finished reading this book named, Competing with the Best. It is authored by Dr Rajnish Karki. Since he had taught us strategic transformation course in SJM School of Management of IIT Bombay, I found myself familiar with most of the contents of this book.

This book is quite well-written though it is definitely not a light reading. It provides both theoretical discussion as well as case studies. The students of strategic management in Indian context will find this book quite useful.

The Art of the start

2008-05-04T11:25:00.000+05:30

After reading the sample chapter of this book in January, in the month of April, I got to read this book entirely. I needed to wait so long because a copy was not available in India. We imported it from USA, which took fairly long time. But it was worthwhile to wait!

While Guy Kawasaki has covered the essence of the book in its first chapter, he has provided more details in subsequent chapters. Some of my takeaways are as follows:

Positioning boils down to the answer for a simple question, "what do you do?".
10/20/30 rule for pitch: 10 slides, 20 minutes and 30-point font.
Sales prospect pitch should contain following ten slides: title, problem, solution, sales model, technology, demo, competitive analysis, management team and next steps.
A bootstrappable business model is characterized by low up-front capital requirements, short (<>
Start as a service business.
Hire "infected" people.
A chart showing what you and your competition can and cannot do is useful to show how you are superior to the competition.
Define deliverables and objectives for partnerships. Put an "out" clause in the deal.
Top five lead generation methods include: conducting small-scale seminars, giving speeches, getting published, networking in a proactive way and participating in industry organizations.

Requesting your contribution in my research work

2008-03-18T20:51:00.001+05:30

I am working on a research project with my friend who is a PhD Student at IIT Bombay. This research project aims to evolve a methodology for selection of web services during development of composite applications. As part of this research work, we are conducting a survey to seek opinions from software architect community for identifying the most important parameters in selection of semantic web services. This survey consists of 29 multiple-choice questions grouped into eight categories. Our initial respondents reported that it took them less than 15 minutes to complete this survey.

I have two requests to you:

1. If you work as a software architect then please respond to the survey at http://www.ikenstudio.com/Demoapplications/WebServices/Questionnaire.htm

2. Please pass on this request to your friends, who are also software architects.

By spending at most 15 minutes of your time, you will help us collect the quantitative input required for our research work. We will be more than happy to share the findings of this survey with you, if you wish.

Thanks!!!

The Case of the Bonsai Manager

2008-03-10T13:30:00.001+05:30

This book written by R Gopalakrishnan is a must-read for any middle-level manager. What I liked the most about this book is that it made me think whether I am slowly becoming a stunted manager! The advise given by the book is quite valuable and convincing.

HBS Case on Wikipedia

2008-02-14T13:06:00.001+05:30

Today I came across a Harvard Business School (HBS) case on Wikipedia. The case begins with a story of addition of the "Enterprise 2.0" entry in Wikipedia. It then gives some history of encyclopedias and that of Wikipedia. It explains the transition from Nupedia to Wikipedia before getting into detailed account of Wikipedia in 2006. There are quite a few exhibits that provide background data. Finally it describes some debates and controversies regarding accuracy, expertise, authority, anti-elitism and bureaucracy with a mention of philosophical differences between inclusioninsts and deletionists camps.

This is a well-researched case, worth reading to get a good perspective on Wikipedia.

Trends underlying Enterprise 2.0

2008-02-14T10:37:00.001+05:30

I came across this very impressive blog on trends underlying Enterprise 2.0. Prof Andrew McAfee has explained following three trends in quite convincing manner:

Simple, free platforms for self-expression
Emergent structures, rather than imposed ones
Order from chaos

Worth reading!

Andrew McAfee

The art of the start

2008-01-28T16:19:00.000+05:30

Today I took a "test drive" of Guy Kawasaki's latest book, The art of the Start, by reading its first FREE chapter from his web site. It's interesting! And has prompted me to buy the book! The first chapter titled The Art of Starting, provides five important things that an entrepreneur must accomplish, a mini-chapter on the Art of Internal Entrepreneuring and FAQ.

The list of five important things is as follows:

Make meaning - Complete this sentence: If your organization never existed, the world would be worse off because _________________________.
Make Mantra: Mantra is something short and sweet such as Authentic athletic performance (Nike), Fun family entertainment (Disney), Rewarding everyday moments (Starbucks), Think (IBM), and Winning is everything (Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers).
Get going: Follow these key principles: Think big, Find a few soulmates, Polarize people, Design different, Use prototypes as market research.
Define your business model: Here the advice is be specific, keep it simple and copy somebody!
Weave a MAT (Milestones, Assumptions and Tasks): Seven milestones viz., Prove your concept, Complete design speciﬁcations, Finish a prototype, Raise capital, Ship a testable version to customers, Ship the ﬁnal version to customers and Achieve breakeven. Assumptions about product or service performance metrics, market size, gross margin, sales calls per salesperson, conversion rate of prospects to customers, length of sales cycle, return on investment for the customer, technical support calls per unit shipped, payment cycle for receivables and payables, compensation requirements, prices of parts and supplies and customer return on investment and finally tasks such as renting ofﬁce space, ﬁnding key vendors, setting up accounting and payroll systems, ﬁling legal documents and purchasing insurance policies.

The list of recommendations for internal entrepreneurs is as follows:

Put the company first
Kill the cash cows
Stay under the radar
Find a godfather
Get a separate building
Give hope to the hopeful
Anticipate, and then jump on, tectonic shifts
Build on what exists
Collect and share data
Let the vice presidents come to you
Dismantle when done
Reboot your brain

People and Performance

2008-01-27T22:38:00.001+05:30

Today I started reading a book titled People and Performance. It is a collection of essays written by Peter F Drucker, on the topic of management. Published by Harvard Business School Press, this book consists of 26 essays , divided into six parts. Let me share some of the points that I noted from this book.

1. Alfred Marshall (1842-1924) added management to the factors of production, land, labor and capital.
2. J.B. Say (1767-1832) coined the word, entrepreneur, who he said, directs resources from less productive into more productive investments and who thereby creates wealth.
3. A Scottish industrialist, Robert Owen (1771-1858), actually became the first manager. In his textile mill in Lanark, Owen, in the 1820s, first tackled the problems of productivity and motivation, of the relationship of worker to work, or worker to enterprise and of worker to management.
4. The problems where the job is to restore or maintain the operation at a preset level, traditionally require decision. However, in reality they are not decisions as there is actually only one right answer. Then there are so-called managerial decisions for situations such as allocation of existing resources, especially people. Here there is no right answer but a range of optimal solutions, each with a definable risk or a balance of risks. Finally there are entrepreneurial decisions where there is no one right answer and not even a range of optima.
5. Management has to do following three tasks:

Fulfilling the specific purpose and mission of the institution, whether business enterprise, hospital, or university.
making work productive and the worker achieving.
managing social impacts and social responsibilities.

And all these tasks are to be done in a balance between the demands of today and the demands of tomorrow.

---------------
I hope to complete this book in next week.

Managing the Professional Service Firm

2007-12-31T09:05:00.001+05:30

For last two days, I am reading this book by David Maister. Though I have not yet finished it, I found some of the points covered in this book, quite relevant to my work. Let me share them with you.
------------------------
Almost every professional services firm, has three goals to perform: deliver outstanding client service, provide fulfilling careers and professional satisfaction to its own people and achieve financial success.
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There are three types of client work: Brains, Grey Hair and Procedural. Brains type of work involves new solutions to new problems. Grey Hair type of work requires some prior experience while Procedural type of work requires efficient delivery of solution. The types of practices needed for these types of work could be termed as Expertise-based Practice, Experience-based Practice and Efficiency-based Practice respectively.
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The Dupont formula for profitability of industrial companies is as follows:
Profits/Equity = Profit/Sales * Sales/Assets * Assets/Equity = Margin * Productivity * Leverage
The author has similarly derived the profitability formula for professional firms:
Profits/partner = Profits/Fees * Fees/Staff * Staff/Partners = Margin * Productivity * Leverage
The author has further provided the formula for productivity as given below:
Productivity = Fees/Staff = Fees/Hours * Hours/Staff = Value * Utilization
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We can put all practice development activities in following five categories:

Broadcasting - generating leads and inquiries
Courting - selling and proposing
Superpleasing - ensuring client delight with current matter
Nurturing - marketing to existing clients
Listening - gathering market intelligence

------------------------
Following are the means of listening to clients

User groups
Reverse seminars
Attending client industry meetings
Market research
Senior partner visits
Engagement team debriefings
Systematic client feedback

------------------------
The marketing tactics in descending order of effectiveness are as follows:

The first team

Seminar (small-scale)
Speeches at client industry meetings
Articles in client-oriented (trade) press
Proprietary research

The Second string

Community/civic activities
Networking with potential referral sources
Newsletters

Clutching at straws tactics

Publicity
Brochures
Seminars (ballroom scale)
Direct mail
Cold calls
Sponsorship of cultural/sports events
Advertising
Video brochures

------------------------

Quantifying Busing Agility

2007-12-21T10:25:00.001+05:30

While talking about SOA, we routinely make a claim that agile business needs agile IT and SOA is required for having agile IT. But then sometimes the questions comes, how do you determine whether the business is agile or not? I have got one possible answer for this question from the book titled “Enterprise Architecture as Strategy”.

“While there can be many ways, one indicator of agility is a company’s percentage of revenue generated from new products. MIT research on 147 companies found that, from 1998 to 2002, on average, 24% of a company’s sales were from new products introduced in the prior three years. But this percentage varied greatly from company to company - even between those in the same industry. For example, in manufacturing the average was 24%. However, a third of companies achieved 50% of sales from new products. These more-agile companies also had a high percentage of their core business processes digitized.”

I am now SAP Certified Associate Enterprise Architect!

2007-12-14T09:48:00.001+05:30

Yesterday I appeared for SAP Certification test for Associate Enterprise Architect and could pass it! The test covered topics such as SAP NetWeaver stack, SAP EAF and Enterprise SOA. There were 80 multiple-choice questions for 3 hours. I could complete the test in half the time. Many questions were tricky and needed careful reading. I found some questions where recommendation was asked for a given scenario while rest of them were more details-oriented.

It's a good feeling to know that I am now SAP Certified Associate Enterprise Architect!

Wikipedia on my laptop!

2007-10-16T13:03:00.001+05:30

Want to know some details of something? No problem! I just go to Wikipedia and search for it. Rather in my Firefox browser, I have set up Wikipedia search engine so I can simply search an item on Wikipedia at a single click. During leisure time, I simply search a random term on Wikipedia and get into reading something interesting and useful stuff. However, the problem comes up when I am not connected to internet. But now I have got a solution to this problem too.

I have downloaded Webaroo software on my machine. It allows me to download many web packs, the logical collection of web pages, specially created by Webaroo team. One of these web packs, the largest one is the Wikipedia. Yes, they have seemingly packed whole of Wikipedia in less than 10GB, which can be downloaded on local disk (and mobile!). I have downloaded it on my hard disk and now I can search through it and read required articles, even when I am not connected to internet.

So do I get the same experience of Wikipedia browsing as I get online? Not really! Firstly, the images are not part of this web pack. So I miss on them. Secondly, only Wikipedia articles are downloaded so I can't surf out from Wikipedia to referred external sites. But then does it bother me? Not really! It's alway better to have something to read than not having anything of it! -:)

BTW the Webaroo also allows to download the web sites. One has to provide a link and the depth of web site to be downloaded in terms of number of links. This becomes a little dicey because a typical web site may have many links, in which I am not interested. Nevertheless, this facility also seems to be exciting. I have just downloaded the IASA IT Architect Skills Library. While it downloaded quite a few pages not required by me, I could get all pages needed by me. So now I will not have an excuse of not being connected to internet for not reading Wikipedia and IASA IT Architect Skills Library!

Interesting Videos at MIT World

2007-09-10T08:36:00.001+05:30

Today I spent time in watching videos hosted by MIT World. The first one was an interview of Prof Henry Mintzberg by Ricardo Semler (President, Semco S/A). Prof Henry Mintzberg is Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University and is considered to be one of the Gurus in the area of Strategy. This session was however related to Prof Mintzberg's latest book titled, Managers Not MBAs. In his interview, Prof Mintzberg made very strong point that MBAs don't make managers. Business schools such as Harvard do teach business skills such as marketing and financial analysis but do not make tomorrow's managers or leaders. He asserted that management is more of a craft and hence can be learn only by being on the job. He talked about the program he is running for practicing managers and how the approach is different there. It was quite interesting to listen to Prof Mintzberg's provocative opinions and also the thoughtful and relevant questions asked by Ricardo Semler.

Second video that I watched was a Q&A with Jack Welch in which questions were asked by Alex D’Arbeloff (Professor of Practice, MIT Sloan School of Management) and some time directly by audience. Jack Welch in his characteristic style answered all questions while offering his wisdom as shared in his book titled "Winning". His answers for questions related to firing of employees, work-life balance and telecommuting were quite interesting and provocative. While I have read Winning and knew most of what Jack Welch said in this session, watching him speaking was indeed a treat!

The third and last video that I saw was a speech of Tim Berners-Lee. He started with talking about emerging technologies and how standards are important for emerging technologies. Later he shared his vision about semantic web and talked about RDF. After his (fast-paced!) speech, Bob Metcalfe (Founder, 3Com) asked him very interesting questions. One of the interesting questions was which browser does Tim use!

There are few more interesting videos that I wish to watch now. But now it's time to go to bed!

MIT CISR Research on IT Portfolios, IT Savvy and Firm Performance

2007-09-09T00:37:00.001+05:30

While waiting for my next flight to Houston at Atlanta airport, I read the Research Briefings published by MIT CISR on their research on IT portfolios, IT Savvy and Firm Performance. The points that I found useful for my work, are noted below.

The investment in IT by firms can be viewed using the portfolio concept. MIT CISR has identified four asset classes in which firms make their IT investments. Based on their research, they have also given the breakup of IT investment across these asset classes for an average firm as per data collected in year 2005. The first asset class is Infrastructure, which typically accounts for 46% of total IT investment. Infrastructure systems provide IT capability to support the applications. The second asset class is Transactional, which accounts for 26% of average IT investment. Transactional systems utilize the infrastructure and are used to cut cost or increase throughput for the same cost. The third asset class, Informational accounts for 17% of average IT investment. The Informational systems typically summarizes the transactional systems and provide information for any purpose including to account, control, report, communicate, collaborate or analyze. They make use of both infrastructure and transactional systems. The final asset class, Strategic, accounts for 11% of average IT investment. Like Informational systems, Strategic systems use both infrastructural and transactional systems and are used for gaining competitive advantage or position in market place.

Beyond providing overall average figures, the research briefing also provides the average figures for industries. So if we know these figures for a particular firm, we can compare them with the industry average to gain some useful insights. The research briefing also provides average figures for firms having different business strategies such as cost focused, agility focused and balancing cost and agility.

Another interesting finding from MIT CISR research is that firms with more firm-wide IT savvy have better pay-off associated with all their IT investments. The IT savvy is defined as a set of practices and competencies that add value to each IT dollar invested. The researchers have identified five characteristics of such firms. The first three characteristics are practices related to IT use while the last two are the competencies needed for high IT savvy.

More IT use for internal and external communication and work practices.
More business transactions digitized.
More use of Internet and open standards.
Higher IT skills of both business and IT employees.
More senior management and business unit involvement in IT decisions.

The research briefing provides one-page questionnaire for IT savvy self-assessment.

Obviously, this research briefing has many more interesting points to know and understand. But right now I am going to stop here because I am picking up only those points that are apparently useful for my work. On top of that, the departure time of my flight is coming nearer. -:) Anyway, if you wish to read the entire research briefing, then you can find it from the web site of MIT CISR.

The Art of Standards Wars

2007-09-07T02:16:00.001+05:30

Today I enjoyed reading the article, titled "The Art of Standards Wars". This article was published in Winter 1999 issue of California Management Review. Unlike the famous book titled "The Art of War", this article is quite readable! It contains very pertinent advice to the technology companies, which are involved in the standards wars. It talks about strategies and tactics with quite a few examples from field.

The article begins with a discussion of the historic examples: North vs South in railroad gauges, Edison vs Westinghouse in electric power and RCA vs CBS in color television. Besides telling the stories, this section also draws the learnings from these examples. Then the authors go on describing the types of standards wars. They have identified three types: Rival Evolutions, Rival Revolutions and Revolution vs Evolution. The terms evolution and revolution refers to the backward compatibility (and lack of it, respectively) of new technologies.The authors have then identified seven key assets, ownership of which could indicate strength for waging in the standards war:

Control over an installed base of customers - can be used to block cooperative standard setting and also to block rivals from offering compatible products.
Intellectual Property Rights (IPR)
Ability to innovate
First-mover advantages
Manufacturing capabilities - cost advantage is important!
Strength in complements
Reputation and brand name

In next section, the authors have identified two crucial marketplace tactics: preemption and expectations management. There are multiple ways to preempt. One simple way is to be first to market. Secondly, you should aggressive early on to build an installed base of customers. Penetration pricing can be used to build such installed base of customers. For expectations management, vaporware is a classic way: announcing an upcoming product so as to freeze rival's sales. But perhaps the most direct way to manage expectations is by assembling allies and by making grand claims about product's current and future popularity.

Finally, the authors have given advice to both winners and losers. The advice for winners is as follows:

Stay on guards and let not rigidity due to early move constrain you for brining in improvements.
Offer customers a migration path so that newer versions of products can be brought out without worrying about supporting the older versions.
Commoditize complementary products so as to maintain a competitive market.
Competing against your own installed base
Protecting your position by offering ongoing attractive terms to important complementers and by taking steps to avoid being held up by others who claim that your product infringes their patents or copyrights.
Leveraging your installed base by carefully expanding in adjacent space and/or by expanding geographically.
Staying a leader by means such as developing proprietary extensions to otherwise open standards and by allowing complementers and even rivals to participating in developing standards under your terms (Thinking of Sun's JSRs!)

The advice for losers for recovery is as follows:

Add an adapter or somehow interconnect with a larger network.
Resist from offering survival pricing as it signal weakness.
If all else fails, sue!

Although written for technology companies engaged in standards wars, this article is a good read for anybody interested in knowing how standards get established and in knowing the political side of standards-setting.

To dream the possible dream

2007-09-03T07:06:00.001+05:30

Some days back, Ram, my senior colleague at L&T Infotech, had emailed me the Turing Award Speech of Dr Raj Reddy, as published in May'96 issue of Communications of the ACM. It remained on my reading wish-list for these many days and finally today I got chance to read it. And I wondered why didn't I read it before!

The key message of Dr. Reddy's speech is that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not only a possible dream but rather it has been a reality, which has been demonstrating results for last 40 years.

In this speech, what I liked the most is the answer given to the often-asked question, can AI equal human intelligence? The answer given is, AI can be both more and less than human intelligence. And this answer is illustrated well by two analogies. Firstly, it's just like an electronic book is more and less than a real book. While you can't do all those things such as reading it in a bed, electronic books allow you something that real books can't; e.g., search for words in text, open the right page, change the font size and so on. Similarly, visiting an electronic mall can't give you same experience as that of visiting a real mall, but can give you convenience that real malls can't. The bottom line is AI systems will enhance and not replicate the mental capabilities of human being.

The speech touches upon many points and is a good read for anybody who is generally interested in the area of AI.

Introducing Service Component Architecture (SCA)

2007-09-03T07:04:00.001+05:30

David Chappell has written an excellent introduction to SCA in a whitepaper hosted on his site. Let me share my notes on this whitepaper in this blog.

SCA defines an approach for creating components and for describing how these components can work together to develop an application. There are three primary constructs in SCA: component, composite and domain. The components can be combined into a composite and a aggregation of composites makes a domain.

Components are the atoms from which an SCA application is created. It is an instance of an implementation, which is appropriately configured. The implementation may be in Java or in BPEL or in any other programming language. The configuration is expressed as XML in the language called as Service Component Description Language (SCDL).

Each component comes with a set of services, references, properties and sometimes bindings. It implements some business logic, which gets exposed as one or more services. To provide the necessary functionality, it invokes references, which are nothing but services of other components. Components can also make use of properties, the values it can read from SCDL configuration file when it gets instantiated. A binding needs to be specified for a component when it needs to communicate with a non-SCA application or with a component from another domain. the kinds of bindings include web services binding, JMS binding and EJB Session Bean binding.

Composites can be said to be molecules of SCA applications. The SCA Assembly Model specification defines how components can be wired to make up composites. While developers can use the GUI-based tools to wire together the components, ultimately these wirings get expressed as XML in SCDL configuration file.

SCA Policy Framework specification is used to define two categories of policies. Interaction policies can be defined by developers to modify how a component interacts with another components, in terms of security and reliability requirements. The Implementation policies are to be specified to modify how the component behaves locally.

While specifications provide a starting point, what is required for adoption are developer tools and runtime. While almost all vendors except Microsoft are gearing up for providing both developer tools and runtime, we will also have open source alternatives. While Apache Tuscany and Fabric3 from codehaus represent open-source options for runtime, Eclipse SOA Tools Platform (STP) Project is engaged in developing SCA tools for developers.

It's very unlikely that organizations can start using SCA now. I feel SCA will be considered by user organizations for adoption only after ratification of SCA specification by OASIS. Till then, we will need to watch its evolution as it indeed provides a latest state-of-the-art approach for software application development.

What are the business models of US Firms?

2007-09-02T10:37:00.001+05:30

What are the business models of US Firms?

This is indeed an interesting question. And the answer has come from MIT. The Social and Economic Explorations of Information Technology (SeeIT) Project at MIT Sloan School of Management, has undertaken research to develop frameworks for analyzing and classifying
business models and to use these frameworks to empirically classify the business
models of substantial numbers of companies. Also the project aims to use the empirical data for formulating and testing hypotheses about the distribution,
performance and evolution of different business models.

So let's get back to the question. But before that let's see the definition given by the MIT researchers. At the broadest level, business model may be defined as how business appropriate value for the products or services they create. More specifically, the business model is defined as a description of the activities that a company performs to generate revenue or other benefits, and the relationships, information and product flows a company has with its customers, suppliers and complementers.

Now comes the taxonomy of business models. The classification scheme consists of four-by-four matrix, giving 16 types of business models. The two axes represent asset types and asset rights. The four asset types include financial, physical, intangible and human resources (HR) (actually the time and knowledge of human resources). The four types of asset rights include Creator, Distributor, Landlord and Broker. Now that gives 16 types though only some of them matter.

When the revenue data of publicly traded US firms over eight years (1997-2004) was analyzed, seven models were found to be common. They included Manufacturer (creator of physical assets), Wholesale/Retail (distributor of physical assets), Financial Landlord, Contractor (landlord of human resources), Physical Landlord, IP Landlord and Financial Broker.

Now while these findings answer the question, there are some more interesting findings from this research. Let me cover that at some later date. Now let me sleep. -:)

Business agility explored

2007-09-02T07:53:00.001+05:30

While discussing SOA adoption, we believe that SOA is needed for achieving business agility. However, at the same time, we find our understanding of business agility is limited. We understand that business agility means the ability of business to respond quickly to the ever changing needs of environment in which it operates. It also means how quickly the business can launch new products, enter new markets or respond to new regulations. However, beyond this understanding of business agility, we stop to explore.

An article from the Research Briefing 2006 of MIT Sloan CISR would perhaps help us in understanding more about business agility. In this article, authors Jeanne W Ross and Cynthia M Beatch, have defined agility as the set of possible business initiatives a firm can readily implement leveraging pre-determined competencies with managed cost and risk. Based on their research, the authors have identified seven types of business agility, which they have grouped into three categories. These categories and the types are as given below:

Business Efficiency: Continuous improvement and Scalability
Market Responsiveness: Product innovation, Process re-engineering and New business model
Boundary Spanning: Acquisitions and Partnerships

Business Efficiency agility attempts to identify repetitive processes and extract unnecessary cost and time. The continuous improvement agility is more found with commodity businesses such as consumer product manufacturers. Such organizations are required to implement continuous improvement initiatives for accelerating profitability while reducing business risks. Scalability agility is the ability to rapidly scale up and down in response to changing business volumes. This kind of agility is almost must for companies from the Property and Casualty (P&C) Insurance industry as they would experience extraordinary demand for claim processing after natural disasters. The key organizational characteristics that would help to achieve the Business Efficiency agility include the following:

Standardized IT environment
Standardized operations processes, systems and data
Enterprise-wide process design
Strong metrics and
Shared services

The speed with which organizations are required to respond to new customer demands and competitive challenges have gained increased importance for market responsiveness agility. Unlike Business Efficiency agility, Market Responsiveness agility disrupts, builds and reuses core capabilities. Interestingly, even if processes must change, companies benefit from developing clearly defined, standard operations processes and related data. Standardized IT Environment also helps in providing the foundation for new processes and interactions. Most notably, matrixed management structure helps companies introducing new capabilities without discarding old capabilities.

Organizations with boundary spanning agility have competencies enabling profitable growth through their acquisitions and partnerships. The key organizational capabilities that enable Boundary Spanning agility include aligned incentives, strong metrics and individual heroics. Interestingly, the key organizational capability for other two categories of agility, the Standardized IT Environment is actually found to be negatively correlated with profitable acquisitions. On the other hand, while the heroic actions of individuals enable boundary spanning agility, it gets highly discouraged for achieving other two categories of agility.

While some organizational characteristics would help for more than one categories of agility, there would involve some trade-offs if an organization attempts to achieve agility in multiple categories.

This kind of understanding of business agility would definitely help in planning for SOA adoption. Let's hope to receive even more understanding about business agility from MIT CISR. We will then be more wise while discussing the need of SOA for achieving business agility.

Checklist for developing a strategy for web services

2007-09-02T05:49:00.001+05:30

In his book titled Loosely Coupled, Doug Kaye has offered a checklist for developing a strategy for web services. After going through it, I found it useful as a starting point for making road-map for SOA adoption. This checklist has got more than 80 items grouped into into four categories: Inventory, Project Requirements, Planning and Evangelism. You can find this checklist as a free chapter download (without giving out email address!) from the book web site.