Nothing Original About It...

Multi-Sourcing - Some Common-sense Do's

2008-04-16T23:12:00.001+05:30

Industry Analysts have of late (for the last 1-2 years) been harping of the growing trend of Organizations outsourcing to multiple vendors. Whether this is genuinely a deliberately thought out strategy leading to such trends remains a moot point. Perhaps organizations are forced to multi-source because their existing vendors are unable to provide specific skills / services or worse unable to

Tax Impact on India Heritage IT / ITES Provider Revenues

2008-04-08T22:47:00.001+05:30

Over the last couple of years, there has been a considerable brouhaha about the Indian Government doing away with the tax SOPs for the IT & ITES industry. But. the actual impact on of the STPI scheme going away is about 7% of revenue though the worst case scenario calculation tends to put it around 13-15%. Here's how.Give or take a few % points, for every $1 earned by India Heritage players they

India Television Channel Subscription Model

2008-03-25T00:26:00.001+05:30

I subscribe to Tata Sky for television channels at home. My bouquet of channels unfortunately does not include the channel(s) which would show the India-SA cricket matches and Tata Sky sent me an alert today reminding me that I need to pay up to watch the matches getting me all hassled.Now, some amount or other would apply whichever DTH or Cable provider I used. And, the amount involved is really

Human Resource Outsourcing - Road to Success

2008-03-19T21:16:00.003+05:30

HRO has seen its fare share of ups and downs. Here are my thoughts on why HRO may need some time before it becomes mainstreamMost global organizations tend to have 'utilities' rather than applications to service their HR processing needs outside of major countries (US, UK et al). Not only there is no existing global system, but also the systems that exist are not up-to-date, given that HR tends

Building a Partnership with the ITES Provider

2008-03-17T21:32:00.001+05:30

Building a partnership with a service provider requires extensive investments of time and management / planning effort on the customers part.It is no doubt possible for a buyer to continue demonstrating success in a model where the buyer is responsible for strategic & tactical management while provider is responsible for operations. While not the most healthy relationship - it is sustainable, or

Organization Transformation - Does IT & Process Transformation need to be coupled?

2008-03-16T23:05:00.002+05:30

In there attempts to be competitive, organizations continue to re-invent themselves. This transformation involves organizational changes as well as IT changes to support the organization change. The million dollar question is as to whether these two need to happen together or if they can be (and should be) decoupled.While coupling the IT initiative with an initiative to change the Organization

The Innovative Mindset

2008-02-24T10:53:00.000+05:30

The inter-webs seem to be more & more buzzing about the need to innovate. Fail to remember who, but some eminent personality said that organizations can sustain both profitability and growth only if they innovate. This was also the constant refrain in the recently concluded NASSCOM India Leadership Forum. Business leaders tend to have taken this to heart and there continues to be talk about

Technology Enablers for BPO Providers - II

2007-10-13T18:10:00.001+05:30

A quick recap of what I said in the previous post - Barring some industry leaders – most BPO providers have not adapted to BPM / BAM / DMS / KM withSOA based implementation allowing for integration with customer / third-party systems easilyThird-Party, Industry proven scalable systems rather than home-grown systemsMulti-tenant / Shared Service implementation.One would expect that most providers

Technology Enablers for BPO Providers - I

2007-10-06T23:34:00.002+05:30

Mature customers today expect way more than cost arbitrage in a Business Process Outsourcing. While (commitments to) increased productivity, innovation and transformation seem to be attracting more and more attention as a part of service provider evaluation – its equally important to ensure that the providers can assure and effective & efficient transition & subsequent delivery.Considerable

Swimming along for an efficient career

2007-09-13T09:30:00.001+05:30

Think back to your first real job. Not the summer job you took up as a precocious kid emotionally blackmailing friends & relatives to buy Lemonade. Nor the errands you ran as a college kid enabling you to take a girl out for a dinner in places better than Burger King or Denny's.The first real job - your start in corporate rat race. When you started that race, did you have a destination in mind?

Working Late Hours? Here's Why...

2007-05-27T19:14:00.001+05:30

IT projects - especially those executed out of Indian companies seem to always have people working long hours to deliver on time. One would think, and would be right in thinking that after so many years of delivering solutions - these companies would learn to estimate accurately.So if estimates are right, why the long hours. Here's my explanation of how IT projects tend to follow the typical

Percieved Reality as a Barrier to Listening

2007-05-01T16:54:00.000+05:30

Typical articles on Effective Listening list out the following issues as the barriers to effective listening.In-effective SpeakerListener being pre-occupied in either a rebuttal or irrelevant thoughtsListeners inability to comprehend the subject What most articles fail to address is the fact that every human being operates in their own cocoon / version of reality and that they are loath to get

Six Sigma - Sustained Benefits or Just Another FAD

2007-03-27T00:36:00.000+05:30

Six Sigma got some negative publicity after a CNN republication of a Fortune magazine article by Betsy John concluded Look Out & not in and quoted Charles Holland the CEO of Knoxville, Tenn. based consultancy firm Qualpro to debunk Six Sigma. Around the same time Karen Johnson from Wall Street Journal (paid content) wrote an article attributed The Home Depot’s stock price decline (and subequent

Firefox Extension for Blogging

2006-04-23T01:05:00.000+05:30

Performancing has come up with a nice extension to allow blogging from within Firefox

Cost of Not Paying Attention

2006-01-15T19:25:00.000+05:30

Gloria Mark and Victor Gonzalez, of the University of California, studied a random sample of 36 office workers and found that the employees devoted an average of just 11 minutes to a project before the ping of an e-mail, the ring of the phone, or a verbal interruption from a manager or colleague pulled them in another direction.Read More in the news story publsihed on The Herald

Critical Chain Project Management

2005-11-15T21:39:00.000+05:30

Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) is the application of Dr. Goldratt's Theory of Constraints to Project Management. It essentially believes in factoring resource availability constraints in addition to the elapsed time requirements (only) factored in by Critical Path I have put together here a compilation of slides detailing out CCPM - mostly plagiarizedPresentation moved to Slideshare in

The Path to GM

2005-09-24T19:56:00.000+05:30

Steven Sinofsky on his blog has an excellent write-up on career growth path to becoming a general managerRead More at Steven Sinofsky's Microsoft TechTalk

FUD about Bill Gates spreading FUD

2005-02-08T01:28:00.000+05:30

Slashdot today has somebody writing about the FUD that Bill Gates is apparently spreading about OS being non-interoperable (whatever that means). And then it links to Bill Gate's Executive e-mail on "Building software that is interoperable by design". Well, well - the subject line of Bill's mail doesn't seem to have to anything to do with OSS...so I decide to go look for myself.As far as I can

MS Outlook Attachment Stripper

2005-02-06T01:32:00.000+05:30

My mail-box recently exceeded 1 GB, primarily because I had some 2000 items lying in the Deleted Items folders. Well, its not the first time my mailbox has exceeded 1 GB - but I usually acrhive of mails at the end of the project and manage to periodically get my Main PST file considerably down. Offlate, I am hitting the 1 GB faster and cannot afford to archive either. Hence the hunt for an

OOP Criticism

2005-01-27T23:26:00.000+05:30

I started off Professional Programming using the Procedural Paradigm (Algol) gradually moving to Component Oriented Paradigm using the highly efficient Unisys Linc - basically my path never crossing the much touted OOP paradigm before I gave up programming to become a manager. And boy, ain't I happy about that.As to why happy, somebody else has put that beautifully on this site OOP

Software Sizing, Estimation and Function Points - Part I

2004-11-21T11:53:00.000+05:30

J. P. Lewis in an article in the Jul 01 issue of ACM Software Engineering Notes, concludes that there is no rigorous method for calculating the development time of a software project before actually doing the project. Lewis's argument is based on the notion of algorithmic complexity, which is a measure of the shortest program that will produce a given string. Next, Lewis states a standard result

Microsoft offshores patent war

2004-11-20T22:38:00.000+05:30

Microsoft's decision to offshore its war against the free software movement to the World Trade Organization may save it some domestic embarrassment, but it may ultimately cause more problems for the WTO than it will for software libre says Andrew Orlowski

Israel, Palestine and Yasser Arafat - Part II

2004-11-19T18:45:00.000+05:30

Yasser Arafat was born Muhammad Abd al-Rahman ar-Rauf al-Qudwah al-Husayni, was born in Cairo on August 24, 1929 In 1957 he, with a group of refugees from Gaza helped found Fatah which later morphed into Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964. The Palestine Liberation Army was created as the regular military arm of the PLO in the late 60's. Surprisingly the first war that it fought

Will Canada Indict Bush?

2004-11-19T02:24:00.000+05:30

Thomas Walkom writing in the Toronto Star seems to think that Bush's shenanigans in Iraq qualify him as a war criminal..

Attracting Visitors to your Web log - DIY

2004-11-18T01:29:00.000+05:30

Let me start with a cliche – Blogs are individual, each one being an outlet in some fashion for the owner. A week or so ago – I decided I needed my own outlet on venting my rants and started this blog. A week down the line, I have started feeling the need for an audience. I dream of getting slashdotted but then if wishes were horses… Thats where I started my quest to get some eye balls. Did a bit