Scribbles-Notes

Business 2 Employee Digital Services

2015-04-14T16:46:00.000+05:30

Interesting saturday early morning bike ride with COOs and Strategy heads of five budding organisations. They are on the verge of breaking into the big league fighting competition that they chose to avoid so far. Having spent nearly a decade to grow from a startup / revival of an age old defunct organisation - to mid market size - to now, having to confront the big boys, as their size and customer segment now, no longer allows them the luxury of separating themselves as either new kids on the block or as niche players.

The moment, the gorgeous valley at the edge of the cliff, in the early morning light at Khandala stopped being a distraction, the discussions hovered around the issues that have been giving these 5 guys sleepless nights. The intent to chart a new path in this digital age, one that is different from their competition. The desire not to compete with the usual big guys on their terms or home turf but rather traverse a different path ahead, a path which none has conceptualised or had taken before.

This set me thinking. For an enterprise to create the unconceptualised, to chart the uncharted what does it take w.r.t skills, culture and management practises. My view is an organisation that takes business to employee service delivery seriously are the organisations that are best placed to brace the challenges and meet them at a level that is beyond the ordinary. I believe starting at home, is the best model for an organisation to go digital... provide digital business to employee services. Only one of my four friends saw merit in this line of thought. The reason being, the other four started viewing B2E digital services more in terms of capital expenditure towards ipads and iphones and the associated eco-system to sustain it effectively within the enterprise network. Automating payroll MIS and HR services for presence on smartphones! The discussion went in the predictable direction, with Microsoft Surface and wearable computing devices that are now part of healthcare accessory market getting added to the list! This is a very narrow view of B2E digital services.

An effective digital enterprise, in my view, is an enterprise that delivers digital experiences as a part of Business2Employee services. Only when employees experience life at work, where the eco-system and workplace experiences get digital, only then they would be able to conceptualise new age digital services for their customers. Some level of experiential learning and a digital experience workplace eco-system, will set the tuning of the thought process at a very different frequency. Employees, during non work hours, weekends and holidays ; as regular consumers undergo some very sophisticated digital experiences just by carrying cell phones and tablets along with them. Location based services predominantly dominate this space. However, location is just one attribute. Digital experience tend to add a significant amount of nuisance value to one's life when they become irrelevant to the task at hand or the time of the day or the event one is experiencing does not resonate with experience being delivered. Context and experience need to be in perfect synch for meaningful digital experience manifestation to add value to one's life. This too, once achieved soon tends to assume a nuisance / irrelevant factor when not laced with personalisation of digital experiences powered by learnings from behaviour analytics of users. To achieve this enterprises need to start stepping into the realm of internet of things, making IoT part of corporate IT & digital strategy.

A full profound and effective digital enterprise strategy for business to employee services, should actually not involve capital expenditure on gadgets, gizmos and wearable devices, but rather focus on creating an eco-system that at a very basic level, entertains BYOT not with an view to restrict, but rather fully leverage without impacting either enterprise security or freedom to personal digital lifestyles on personal gadgets. Once this is achieved, a digital enterprise should start delivering context aware services that goes beyond the singular attribute of location.

Creating an eco-system that delivers business to employee digital services is a very significant and defining aspect that forms the foundation of a digital enterprise. To envision, conceptualise and architect these services as context aware, event driven and event triggered digital experiences; will not just dramatically improve productivity, cut costs over and above the existing automation layers, but also pushes the employees to think around similar context aware digital experiences for their customers. Without this layer being built, the entire management push towards being a digital enterprise might just end up being a hollow affair.

Customer Insights Paradox of the Digital Enterprise

2015-04-09T21:05:00.001+05:30

Enterprise India is going through the most exciting and disruptive phase it have ever seen so far. Having said that, I concede having such strong similar sentiments in the year 2000 , 2003, 2007, 2010 and in 2012 ! I get excited when a radical new piece of technology erupts on the scene, and then get disappointed when adoption takes its own sweet time, and then get all excited and crazy when adoption accelerates to life changing gear!

Walking down the memory lane, digitization meant conversion of physical records to electronic data format and automation of workflows that were simple rule based tasks. That is what we did as CIOs and IT Heads between 1990 -2002. While most of IT India was making money on Y2K projects and dollar arbitrage (which it still does - dollar arbitrage) , a few corporates in India were discovering the excitement of going online with customer service and sales. One of the banks I worked for back in year 2000, my Chairman insisted in withdrawing money for the ATM and seeing that transaction the very next moment on his internet banking transaction query screen, and on pull based sms mobile banking transaction screen. We took 8 days to make it happen for credit cards, and I was told by my boss then, that my employment with the bank now feels justified!

Compare that with about 6 years ago, when you started getting real time alerts, OTP on your smartphone and about 16 months ago that mobile banking apps have been made available with bill payments and internet shopping facilitated with instant merchant payments. Digitization in the yester-years was all about driving efficiency through automated workflows, and in the process enterprises ended up being sole suppliers of technology to customers. Consumerization of IT has put technology directly in the hands of the customers as a lifestyle element, by start-up companies and device manufacturers; with enterprises now playing a catch-up game. Before enterprises could figure out how to participate meaningfully ( some still are) on social networking platforms and in the mobile paradigm, consumer technology has leapfrogged into connected world of internet of things converging rich data and context; leaving behind amazing hidden insights to be discovered through the various digital footprints left by an average consumer, on the grid. Big Data and unearthing hidden intelligent insights has now assumed significant importance for a digital enterprise.

Digital world today consists of

user's digital footprints across

- connected devices

- social networking and general digital utility platforms that users use either directly or indirectly

technologies that enable one to decipher these footprints for insights

enterprise IT plumbing that integrates into this world to loop back the learning's and data into their mainstream customer facing technology

and a whole host of independent apps that serve the customers better than enterprise IT solutions.

When I look at digitization projects with a few enterprises today, mostly financial services world, these are mostly around facilitating easy payments through mobile wallets and mobile devices to leverage the e-commerce boom that is on the surge. Having said that, some of the conversations that I heard during the 1999-2003 era seem to repeat these days - the ones that express anguish about digital space having created a divide between the enterprise and the customer. During the brick and mortar business era, customer relations and hence customer understanding vested with relationship managers, branch tellers, shopping mall attendants and branch managers. Technology was seen as an enabler that would turn this perceived personal asset of front line staff into an enterprise asset. All the CRM systems and online apps have failed to capture this intelligence due to the form filling approach that crept in as a part of this endeavor. Customers were happy to talk about stuff rather than tick check boxes. With consumerization of IT, customers seem less inclined to talk about stuff too. The gap between customer and the enterprise further increases with privacy concerns and the associated laws, as enterprises decide to decipher digital footprints for these insights. In hindsight, the customer touch that existed during brick and mortar era, has now completely vanished and enterprises today seem more far removed from customer insights than before.

Lessons from Sports

2015-03-15T21:36:00.002+05:30

This is a sponsored blog post written for Firstpost.com. To view this same post on FirstPost.com please click on this url http://www.firstpost.com/business/enterprise-learn-cricket-world-cup-2015-2135809.html

There is something that is dramatically different about the Wimbledon championships of the present day and the currently ongoing Cricket World Cup 2015. Technology is now an inseparable fabric of these events and it has catapulted digitization with the introduction of event driven systems, analytics and visualization technologies. The fact that these events are global in scale and attract massive eyeballs, does put pressure on their content, presentation and production quality. This has resulted in some amazing analytics and some extremely amazing visualization products for display of analytical results, that get presented pre and post the matches; on television, mobile and portal. I have been a career CIO and my natural instinct is to look for lessons that enterprise IT could learn.

Event Driven Systems :

Some of the facts leading to the introduction of technology into the game, are remarkably different from enterprise. Unlike the enterprise, were considerable resources of money, time and talent has been spent in designing systems to increase operational efficiency, reporting to calibrate performance against goals and some really sophisticated analytics leading to insights of historical trends; in sports, technology has been introduced to induce better accuracy into existing manual decision systems.

In most sports, the grey areas that cloud a decision add to the excitement, nervousness and hence the interest in the sport. The madness of excitement and the depths of sorrow that one is subjected to when decisions are taken in unclear situations, is what the sport really thrives on. Such decision keep the sport alive in talk and in memory for multiple years after the event has finished. The game feeds on such decisions. In sharp contrast, enterprise space is less forgiving. Decisions that don’t work out sometimes result in burial of IT systems, vendors and careers. Despite this culture of getting it first time right, technology is yet to penetrate areas that increase decision accuracy or take decisions based on circumstantial evidence.

To enable technology to take such decisions, event driven architectures that collate data from events, need to be deployed. The DRS implemented both at Wimbledon and in cricket do exactly this. These technologies marry the real with digital. The need for DRS has been created by the hype around controversies that surround the decisions. With DRS in place that map ball trajectory, bounce, speed, direction and with the flashing bails and wickets being used in the currently on world cup, what follows is very rich data that could be analysed in various situations leading to trends, forecasts and predictions. Context associated with the event and all event attributes like ball swing, speed, batter position, stroke played etc are captured and utilised in correlations. This intelligence is used to predict possible future outcomes with various scenarios.

Enterprises capture lots of data but fail to strike correlations and run other statistical models that generate insights around multiple scenarios with context attached. Hence lack of digital resources to belt our relevant predictions has always plagued most enterprises. This result, is that most revenue and business forecasts made by sales heads meets with little challenge in the board room in the absence of scientific predictions and their analysis for probability of success.

Stakeholder Participation :

One thing that the world of sports and the news media is doing now, is ensuring exceptionally effective stakeholder participation and create a well rounded data view on all view points. Comparisons between analyst views, public view, public sentiment and constant calibration of the event progress with these different view points and opinions, bring a completely different excitement level to the game. Viewers get instantly connected with the buzz that now is no longer limited to their living room or the confines of the sports bar. Technology has plucked each individual out from the confines of their solitude and promptly plugged them into the ever buzzing chatter of the global social fabric – the internet. People tweet as a form of expression letting know the whole world what they thing or are experiencing.

For sports and news media, these people are their stakeholders and customers. Everything they say and do means a lot to these industry domain players. While the India South Africa WC 2015 match was on, different people started to tweet different statistics, views all around.

Enterprises that sell to customers either directly or indirectly have started tracking tweets specially around product and service feedback. Many companies today are plugged into the information super highway with their ears to the grid and are keenly listening to everything that is being said. However the same as process or format is never pursued when organisations role out changes that impacts their employees. Business to employee services are the most unprofessionally managed services with absolutely no meaningful and effective feedback looped in. One most important lesson that an enterprise can take away from the world of sport is about creating a platform that can engage each and every stakeholder on every initiative.

Data Visualization :

As the event driven systems that digitize physical world activity into data points meets the world of software that effectively co-relates this data and once the platform that engages all the stakeholders is in place, you will need a vehicle that serves this data and collects the reactions and presents them effectively to deliver a complete perspective. Today effective presentation is a tool that goes beyond just representing findings in a manner that is digestible, but rather the larger goals of presentation is to vow and awe the eyeballs to ensure stickiness. Style, slickness and a bit of wackiness in presentation styles, somehow ensure stickiness of eyeballs.

Consumerization of IT has resulted in electronic gadgets and gizmos being bought as lifestyle elements, that connect the consumer to the grid. The small screen real estate and the target device being a lifestyle element, poses a presentation challenge. No one likes to look at simple drab and dull visuals on lifestyle mediums. Even Mahatma Gandhi’s picture gets jazzed up as bit without compromising personality values; when the picture gets featured in Vogue or GQ ! Visualisation that vows at first impression gets eyeball to take interest in a space where content is fiercely competing for consumer attention.

While enterprises presentation goals are about driving the point home, there are multiple initiatives, themes and programs that are stakeholder facing where just making the point might not ensure enrolment and participation. Visualization to make the data & results look appealing to the theme and the initiative at hand; can go an extra mile to ensure enrolment. Why do some people go to Starsports app instead of yahoo sports app or vice-versa to view results of the same match. Data Visualization apart from various types of analytical output that gets belted out, forms an important attribute to consider if eyeball stickiness is the goal.

Summary :

Lessons from the world of sports for enterprise IT are as follows:

Venture out in spaces of customer engagement that bridges the physical world or brick & mortar with digital. Internet of Things is in place today that can get one started on this track at reasonably humble budgets. Content is king!
Collect all data. Correlate, detect patterns, run statistical models, but always attach context with each insight. Enterprise BI initiatives capture insights but forget to tag them with context that prevailed when those results were experienced. Big Data technologies are in place an in SaaS model that prevents this exercise from becoming an expensive affair. Insights are invaluable!
Create a platform to get all round stake holder view and present without prejudice alternate view points that decision/policy makers can either choose to look at or ignore. If you choose to ignore this, one would question the business value of your judgement of not collecting feedback that is being voluntarily given 24X7 about your brand / initiative / product / service / culture / HR policy/…… Perception is reality!
Data visualization in all output is a must. The board members who harp about being presented simple data, all appreciate a good visualization output. The same guys talk about how fantastic the soccer match results and analytics presentation was and have their preference of apps and portals and news channels to go to, based on visualization. This is the age of content competing for consumer attention, so make it look awesome.

Better test your systems rather than test your customer's patience!

2014-10-08T10:46:00.002+05:30

The Flipkart episode finally got me back into blogging mode. I am sure they must have tested their IT Systems before going into the big sale day. I wonder what tests were done to assess uptime and availability capabilities they carried for this Mother Of All Events.

I remember way back in 2005 I went to my CEO stating the need to do a stress, endurance and resilience tests before we launched the online trading website. These tests are expensive. I remember the popular vendor in those days in India who had the capability on load runner, pricing services with license cost on the go plus a monopoly premium ! The sales head and the operations head mocked me in the MANCOM saying that IT builds systems that they have little confidence in, and need additional money to validate their creation! Partly, I agree with them; as in those days; we used to underestimate and under budget the testing processes. Testing was limited to functionality testing and was done by internal users. Availability, uptime and scalability was just a infrastructure sizing problem!

For a couple of years in the later half of the first decade of 21st century, oversizing infrastructure covered up coding in-efficiencies and database design inefficiencies. With the passage of time, IT teams have started testing application code for scalability issues apart from just security loopholes. I was quiet amazed that in this day and age, Flipkart comes up as a total goofball on this account!

1) Firstly I doubt if any serious testing was ever done on availability, resilience and endurance. It takes about seven weeks of three iterations and analysis to get anything right , even with the most advanced tools and analysis of results. Every bit of application code needs to be tested for behaviour under loads when you intend to take on a mammoth activity like FlipKart did.

2) Second point. Everyone knows that no one can provide for infinite resources at any given point of time. Sound economic activity like retailing business will not allow massive oversizing for a single day's event. But with IaaS providers, one could have made arrangements for infrastructure to be provisioned on demand...but again don't know if flipkart online shopping application is cloud ready. I guess every e-channel better start getting cloud ready.

3) Third point. Everyone knows that no one can provide infinite resources at any given point in time. If one were to place faith in their business model, and the fact that it will pay off, one could have always drawn a line and declared a finite number of users assured entry on a first come first serve basis and the rest could queue up for entry. One could have played a bit with the pricing model as well.

Point is availability of service in the online world is not an IT problem alone. Business will need to come up with sales strategies and pricing models and footfall management to work within the cost structures to maximise profits on these massive sales festivals.

I am however amazed at the lack of adequate preparedness by Flipkart before they put their brand on the chopping block!

Social Networks & Big Data - Testing business hypothesis On the Cloud

2013-05-26T16:47:00.001+05:30

Business innovation reflects in the form of new products and services, re-engineered / revamped business processes, new delivery mechanisms and sometimes a very different engagement model. One common factor that defines the mood of teams who role out these innovations, is the fear of unknown. Most innovations ( as opposed to changes) typically dabble in the paradigm of rolling out the untested and the unproved with absolutely no clue around how the end consumers might react. Enterprises typically follow a prototype and pilot model before a Big Bang roll-out to counter most these issues. Some forward looking organizations have adventured tools such as market predictions to gauge the reaction of people to new concepts ( could be a new product or a new HR policy) with the employees (employees are end consumers too).

To gauge reactions to a concept post ideation, one needs participants who are willing to put their mind to it and react. We need a platform that can capture these reactions and tools to analyse these reactions. Social networking sites provide this platform and the needed digital footfall , big data technology helps analyse the reactions. Business hypothesis can be tested on social networking sites to take a call on how well the assumptions measure up.

At the CIO round table on the evening of the first day of TechEd 2013 in Bangalore, one of the CIOs brought this point up and we were wondering, where do the Microsoft's products stand on Big Data. To begin with Apache Hadoop is made available as a service called HDInsight on Azure Cloud. What this means is that VMs on Azure cloud support full functionality of HDFS and MPP execution of MapReduce. HDInsight service also has ODBC connectors to enable analysts and BI professional leverage the simplicity of usage of Excel and the power of analytics + reporting now available in MS Sql. As far as I know, this is possible for structured data. To use unstructured data, PigLatin scripts will need to be run on the VMs. One can get visualisation of results going in excel ( from what I gather - I have not tried this or seen this as a demo yet). If this works out fine, one could potentially use Excel, to analyse the end results with the power of dissecting information that excel so very well provides. I am definitively sure excel empowering users to fire HIVE queries from it's interface.

There were slides shown pointing to Pig, Hive, Flume, Pegasus, Sqoop and Mahout implementations provided for on the HDInsight services on Windows Azure. This however needs to be tested for ease of usage and the actual power this implementation puts in the hands of the analyst and the business users. Microsoft has enriched HDInsights service with the ability to control accesses and privileges using Active Directory. For enterprises that use active directory, this wheel needs no reinvention for Big Data setup, if done on Azure. HDInsight does not dilute any of Apache Hadoop capabilities ( hence running as a Azure service you get the same high availability and reliability) with the HDInsight clusters managed thru System Center 2012.

HDInsights service on Azure cloud, with the simplicity of integrating enterprise data warehouses and data marts with unstructured data in HDFS and with the simplicity of using excel and other in-house BI tools to query and visualise results; enables enterprises to empower their business users to start testing their hypothesis and make better informed choices and increase the probability of success on their innovations.

Mobile Architectures

2013-05-20T08:48:00.000+05:30

Enterprise applications follow certain architecture guidelines to deliver the business needs on functionality, TCO and ROI. To achieve this, trade offs made often tend to sacrifice asynchrony and flexibility in favour of assembly-lining of processes to deliver maximum bang for the buck spent and IT security. Large enterprise applications work on the philosophy of FTR ( getting things first time right). Efficiency, effectiveness and cost-control are derived from FTR theme. Any incremental and/or dramatic changes to the systems are mellowed down against the need to keep things familiar, avoid employees going thru a learning curve. Hence most changes are never dramatic, on a floor shop where most processes are simplified and assembly-lined. The pressure to avoid drastic changes is high in order to keep re-learning cycles low (to realize efficiencies from changes faster and at lower cost). In such environments, you would find IT systems architected in a fabric of synchrony when it comes to processes and events. In such environments you will find human resources avoiding the complexity of multi-tasking on mutually exclusive process threads.

Architectures for mobile apps need to deliver on different goals. These goals being asynchrony, multi-tasking and usability. Events arranged in a tight sequence will not work in the real world as the real world is a very different place when compared to the controlled environment of back-office and enterprise shop floors. This is true for sales processes as well. If you really look at the retail sales processes and the events as they unfold on the ground, they are seldom in tandem with the way the processes in the systems have sequenced events, implemented controls and designed the processes. This is one of the many reasons for change requests budgets and exceptions being sought for on mandated process. This is one of the reasons why systems have the facility to request for exceptions and an approval authority workflow for their approval.

When I look at some of the mobile apps from the enterprise that are either customer facing or sales force facing, I have found these apps tightly stitched from an enterprise operations viewpoint, backend to the front. While in reality the mobile app needs to be de-linked from the enterprise backend to avoid the trap of synchrony and the trap of irrelevance between sequence of event play-out in the real world (there are no fixed sequences here) and the fixed sequence of processes manifested thru screens and logic on enterprise applications. How often have people got into BPR exercise initiated as and when these gaps are experienced at a medium to high frequency.

Cloud plays a big role in delivering asynchrony and de-linking from backend to keep the app behaviour relevant to the way events play out in the real world. Windows Azure Mobile services provides some fantastic platforms on the cloud to make this happen.

As an approach the mobile developers should focus on usability and architect the app to handle each fundamental unit event in entirety without stitching the code to create dependency on another event's initiation and/ or closure. Enterprise IT need to provide for multiple entry points for data from mobile apps into processes on the backend systems, without imposing the synchrony that is inherently built into the backend systems. For those who believe that this is an expensive change to make on the backend, it could be and again it may not, if one leverages the cloud queues and service bus to hold the data till all the pieces fall in place for a backend process to consume the data. This will require constant polling from enterprise network to the cloud / a mechanism for the cloud to let the enterprise network know that data is ready to be consumed.

The mobile app, writes to the cloud. Depending on the need, this could be a table (no-sql table) , cache, queue or a service bus. Build the processing logic on the cloud and not on the mobile app itself. On the cloud you would have two roles. A web role, typically the web app executes in a web role and a worker role which typically are cloud resources such as cache, queues and tables which the web app uses. The mobile app is stitched for usability to cater to various events as they play out in the real world. The processing happens on the cloud. The backend systems consume the data to process and give an output back to the cloud. The mobile app takes this output from the cloud to display on the mobile screen and wait for consumers next request, rather than initiating the next sequence for the consumer.

In the traditional development approach, a developer would sit down to create table structures and database schemas , normalise the database design, design screens, write processing logic to read and write data, logic for integration points with the enterprise database and so on. In the new normal, the developer will just focus on UI design, use Azure no-sql tables to store data. The Azure tables, create the structure depending on incoming data. The processing logic is held on the cloud as a web app in a web role. Session data persistence is managed by azure cache. If one needs to capture images or videos ( surveyor capturing data for car insurance claim processing), this can be held on the cloud CDN. Interaction with enterprise systems (for synchronous processing) can happen thru the service bus on a publish/subscribe model.

For example while shopping in a real world brick and mortar store, as I see what I like, I could take my mobile out, invoke the store's mobile app, read the bar code off the merchandise on display, attach credit card from my m-wallet and leave a delivery address and walk out. While different stores will have their own respective mobile apps, the bank could just publish a web app on the cloud, cloud storage (no-sql table) to which different apps could write credit card data, create three different themes on the service bus :

- Shopping Item theme

- Payment Approval Theme

- Item delivery theme

..and publish/subscribe to these themes depending on the context of the transaction. The store app would publish item details and price to the first theme, the bank could subscribe to it for it's records. The bank would publish credit card authorization decision to the service bus , to which apps could subscribe to. As the item is delivered to the customer, the enterprise apps of the stores could publish these details for the bank's systems to subscribe (in case there is a dispute later). The enterprise systems could have web services for interaction with the service bus on the cloud and the web app on the cloud.

Its clear from my above explanation that the app developer can create magic while being completely ignorant of the underlying enterprise systems that come into play. The developer need not worry about database design and structure and can focus only on UI and logic. The enterprise IT teams re-use the existing processing and business logic on the system by directing the data from the cloud into the right systems thru a SOA layer, they build and manage. Welcome to the new normal.

written for:

A Social Network for Enterprise Applications

2013-05-06T08:25:00.000+05:30

Put together a few day-dreamers, high skilled innocent techies who can be taken on a fantasy ride, some chilled beer and the beautiful spring evening of Pune city; what you end up with is a crazy concept and a design document written on tissue papers and thick-paper coasters, for the wackiest and unimplementable idea one could ever come up with. If only one could get some venture capitalist or seed funders on the same table; the next one year could be a well funded sabbatical for most of us around that table. Two fantastic experiences I still savour in from last evening. The build-up of the wacky concept and the associated technical design document (if you can call it that) and the green tea with fresh ginger to end the night!

The big idea - a social network for enterprise applications. A space where different applications on heterogeneous platforms, from different enterprises could reach out to each other on a need basis or otherwise, to befriend one another, share and exchange both data and intelligence for mutual benefit and in a secure manner without violating privacy laws. The applications decide their privacy settings and create trust groups with trust levels of various degrees. I guess by now you guys would have gauged the height and depth of lunacy that prevailed around that table. I state again, there was just beer on the table, nothing else!

Straight thru collaboration between enterprises has always been looked at as a fictional idea. Enterprise IT Policies, data governance mandates and zero tolerance towards alien incoming traffic into enterprise network have prevented straight through collaboration. Management will power always gave way to the logistic nightmare of establishing trust relationships between enterprise networks, working thru the mindsets of enterprise IT teams, enterprise risk teams and IT auditors. Cloud and particularly Azure services seem to have unknowingly offer a solution in this space.

Some of the elements needed for straight thru collaboration between enterprises for consumer's benefit :

Authenticating consumers , employees and partners for the scope of the collaboration in focus.
Persisting session data across multiple systems belonging to different enterprises and enabling these systems to access this data.
Persisting Master Data of the consumer to be accessed by collaborating enterprises, their respective processing partners and the consumer himself, subjected to data access rules of these organizations.
Data transformation outside of enterprise networks as needed by enterprise apps, partner apps and consumer's personal apps enabling these systems to understand the data against the backdrop of diversity in codification of master data and other data items.
A very effective 2 phase commit of transactions across collaborative systems, one that is non-intrusive.

There are a lot more demands that STC ( straight through collaboration) will place, so the list if not truly a complete representation of all the challenges that would need to be met.

Azure services such as :

Identity (AD on the cloud)
Caching (App Caching and content caching on the cloud)
Business Analytics ( BI and Hadoop Services)
Messaging services ( Queues and Service bus on the cloud)
Data Services ( Sql Db, Tables and Blobs on the cloud)

can be meaningfully stitched together into a solution around the scope of collaborative services enterprises want to offer to their consumer. As enterprises start authenticating with the Aadhaar framework, ability to collaborating on a non-intrusive mode will get a further boost. I hope enterprises see merit in authenticating not just consumers but all actors needed to get collaboration going, being authenticated by credible third party services.

Ability to transform data, run transactions to their logical end with asynchrony as a key element of the collaboration fabric, with 2 phase commit as the final goal across collaborating systems, would have been impossible without Azure messaging services ( queues and service bus on the cloud).

Azure business analytics services that unlocks enterprise intelligence to empower it further with big data outputs, will add the winning elements of context, timing and relevance to the collaboration services being delivered to the cloud. Getting these three elements right for a single large enterprise is itself a complex activity, getting it right across multiple collaborating partners is a near impossible task without the ability to transform and interpret data on the cloud. This is the reason why we need multiple services as bullet-ed above to be stitched together into a solution.

The other issue that crops up is that enterprises would not like to remain wedded to it's partners to get STC going for delivering value to the end consumer. The collaboration arrangements could run out of relevance with passage of time , sometimes under 3 hours ( example: credit card companies wanting to collaborate for discounts with in-mall merchants for 2 hours). We need a framework where enterprises could negotiate online the terms and conditions of collaboration, do an online hand shake and get the collaboration going. This is very similar to the scenario where we allow apps to connect to our facebook profile, accept friends invitations on facebook and keep tuning our privacy settings and keep categorizing our friends to get a meaningful discussion / collaboration going. A similar framework will need to be evolved for enterprises to hook-on and hook-off with each other for various transactions that need collaboration between their systems, their partners systems and consumer's personal apps and devices. A social network for enterprise applications!

What started as a fun fantasy discussion, quickly spiraled into some serious paper napkin drawings of architecture design and some specifications bullet-ed down behind a few thick paper coasters We were not completely insane, so there were some assumptions that were made. We assumed systems would be intelligent enough to decide whom to befriend and decide on the degree of trust they would like to establish with the system seeking to connect. We decided to tackle the implement-ability of such a scenario on a later date, and focus for now on other issues to get this concept moving forward!

I need to mention here why I picked Azure. The way Microsoft is approaching the cloud computing paradigm, empowering it with platform services that enterprises need, putting in frameworks for extending these to mobile clients and keeping an open mind on heterogeneity of personal devices and strong preferences of the enterprises to have the flexibility of the cloud with the comfort of implementing their corporate policies. Most of Azure services could literally be an extension of on-premise digital assets as enterprises evolve their view around the right model of governance , security and management for leveraging the power of the cloud.

written for :

Build - Measure - Learn

2013-04-21T10:13:00.000+05:30

Written for :

I was dreading the idea of sitting thru a 2 hour keynote session. To my surprise, I quiet enjoyed the content and the delivery of speakers. I actually enjoyed listening to Amit Chatterjee, Managing Director - Microsoft R&D Pvt Ltd, talk around a flavour of scrum methodology inspired by Eric Ries's The Lean Startup. He talked about how Microsoft R&D has successfully adopted scrum and has become more agile in the last few months. I simply loved the Nordstorm Stores example he presented.

The Nordstorm example set me thinking. Does the next generation impatience and need for instant gratification and results , need a completely different model of execution? When business and operations within an enterprise ideate, they are bound to be assumptions, risks and and unwillingness to entertain any failure on a large scale. Failure is still a stigma in most enterprises despite claims of nurturing innovation and asking people to challenge their boundaries without the fear. New ideas are new, by virtue of being un-thought of before, and hence untested and not yet proven. They are either hypothesis or a bundle of initiatives designed to achieve an objective laced around a foundation of hypothesis and assumptions. These hypothesis need to be put to test without building definitively, a system or a solution around that idea. Nordstorm sent a couple of developers to he floor shop. These guys took the business hypothesis and talked to Nordstorm's customers. Got inputs from them. Coded on the spot and got customers to use and experience it. They built-in the learning by making changes to the code, in front of the customers and got them too try using the application again. By the end of the exercise there were multiple iterations involving collaborating with shoppers on ideation - coding a solution - getting shoppers to interact with the applications - build in the learning. By the end of the exercise, they had the true picture of what the success criteria for the application should be and the metrics they should use to measure the success criteria. Sometimes, enterprises guess these on behalf of the customers and hence possibly get it wrong sometimes.

Amit talks about making the business hypothesis a testable experiment. It makes sense to get all stake holders whose lives will be impacted by the hypothesis (employees, partners and customers) around a table for the experiment and digest their take on the hypothesis. What you then get is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Measurement to calibrate the results need to be included in MVP. Once MVP is coded and ready, validation against the embedded measures is done as users use the MVP. Learning is gained, which then find their way back into the MVP. Measures are re-adjusted and or re-calibrated. The cycle repeats again. The important part being, that all stake-holders traverse this cycle together.

Somewhere during this cyclic iteration, there will be enough learning based on which you could choose to persevere with the hypothesis or pivot to a new hypothesis. Before you guys jump to conclusion, let me tell you what this process is not. This is not a process to decide what a end product should be. This is a process to test the business hypothesis by studying customer behaviour.

User departments and end customers of the enterprise are very good at articulating their need at a very high level. As devil is always in the details, The Build-Measure-Learn approach avoids the creation of a wall between IT and the rest of the organisation and between the organisation and the end customer. Just as IT is accused of not understanding it's internal customers, organisations are accused of not understanding the needs of their end customers.

Coding as a part of structured ideation process, to test hypothesis, helps in avoiding scenarios where IT teams accuse user departments of not giving detailed requirements in entirety and IT teams do not have to deal with the frustration of changing requirements. This approach avoids the Big Bang model around conceptualisation, requirement gathering and delivery.

I have seen and experienced scrum models where requirements are broken down into small chunks, after which a traditional approach is followed where business analysts (BAs) write down requirements, effort estimation is done and development happens in isolation. This model again results in user depts accusing BAs of missing out requirements, which in reality was a result of lack of bandwidth with the business users and most of the times, the lack of will to spell out everything to the last T. Why do IT teams ask business requirements as if they are part of a different organisations? Why do we need to carry IT on the payroll if they cant figure out business requirements as an integral part of the business? These frustrating questions and scenarios can be avoided by following scrum they way it should be. Developers get the taste of the real world and the rest of the organisation starts appreciating the value IT brings on the table. Developers help the business users see the issues with their business hypothesis. This results in all-round appreciation for each other's efforts.

What I personally like about this approach is that it gives an opportunity to take what we have and make it a little better every day. This method greatly helps drive change management where impact is needed on the behaviour of stake-holders for the innovation to deliver and be effective. Stakeholders go thru the process of experiential learning during the build phase, rather than being forced to change behaviour post build-out; during the end user training phase of the project. This approach helps in facilitating a more cordial environment during end user testing and acceptance stages of the project. The biggest outcome of this method will be reduction in rejection of ideas. Management that is unable to visualize the benefits or finds change management around the idea over whelming typically label such ideas as either bad, ambitious and unpractical. The Build-Measure-Learn model executed with scrum methodology, helps evaluate ideas based on experiential learning rather than on perceptions power point presentations create.

It's always a good approach to talk about a new idea and invite stakeholders to test the hypothesis as a collaborative exercise in the build up of the idea and subsequently on solution creation phase, instead of constructing the idea in isolation and then hard-sell it to the management. The challenge is in change management around adoption and not in ideation or executing the system build up. This approach gets people to collaborate to make change management relatively easier by virtue of collaborating in build up of the idea.

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Genchi Genbutsu

2013-04-20T11:18:00.000+05:30

Innovation is a much used term these days in enterprise meeting rooms. I have maintained for some time now, in a few past blog posts, that most of time incremental improvements get termed as innovation, which is quiet sad. As with innovations, incremental changes too cause disruption and present a change management issue that is not trivial. Innovations, unlike incremental changes, significantly alter lifestyles, make certain parts of the eco-system redundant and almost always puts someone or something definetly out of business or commission.

In the banking and financial services space I have seen very little innovation happen in the last 5 years. The last innovation was the brought in by the dot com boom, where people could bank, pay, purchase and help themselves thru self service using internet banking and on-line portals from financial services providers. This has put stress on the incumbent dis-intermediation business models to the extent that some have folded up. I wait for the day to see this happen in insurance industry, where the dot com's today are an additional step adding to the incumbent new business sourcing process for most of the insurance products, barring a miserly few. The reasons for this, is material for maybe another blog post at a different point in time. I am sure, some of my friends from insurance companies will be a bit upset for me having said this.

There are those within the enterprise who are waiting for that dream, that next big idea, something that has not been done before, something unique. Ideaologies that bridge the enterprise vision with what the customers would accept, are more likely to come up with innovations that might work. While one might fight to death on diversity of views w.r.t definition of innovation, one tends to quickly agree to the view that its not about what customer's thought they wanted and most definetly its not about telling the customers what they ought to want. While the latter happens quiet frequently when strategy consultants and IT companies engage with enterprise CIOs!

Some companies in the non-hi tech space, have innovation centres and innovation themes to motivate people to take time away from day-to-day hustle-bustle and come up with new ideas. I wonder how innovation centres, specially in the non-hitech space, measure their performance. I wonder what sort of a yardstick is used to measure their performance and how do they get rewarded at the end of the year. If the innovation centre was belting out one successfull idea a year, we would have seen some awesome stuff coming out from enterprises in the last few years, which is not the case.

In my view the one thing that an innovation department or an innovation center enriches itself with, provided they have a structured approach to the fabric of their life, is validated learning. Without a structured or a framework approach, you would have learning, not validated learning. Companies that adopt lean approach to innovation as a framework and test hypothesis as a structured methodology, gain validated learning. I feel that the innovation centres should not worry about how much stuff they are actually building, but rather measure the amount of validated learning they are accumulating. Learning gained by virtue of exploring ideas directly with the customers are invaluable.

This gives fantastic insights into customer behaviour that could be key to the current idea's success or could break the interia around junking the current idea and exploring a new one. The famous example of this approach was the manager entrusted with the design and development of the Toyota Sienna minivan. He undertook a staggering 53,000 miles roadtrip across US, Canada and Mexico, observing and talking to minivan customers and sometimes driving it himself. The outcome was validated learning! Genchi Genbutsu, as the Japenese say, is the Toyota way to do things!

Another important observation is that not all such endeavors succeed. Successful people have always credited lady luck for putting them in the right place at the right time. For every successful one in the right place at the right time, there were others too, in the right place at the right time, and did not succeed. The difference then has to be that successful people had the foresight, ability and tools to discover what works and what is misguided. Validated learning arms you with this precious treasure, so that you could decide to persevere or pivot; as Eric Ries puts it in his book, The Lean Startup.

Architectures for the new age

2013-04-12T14:07:00.001+05:30

The next generation workforce that enters the organisations, come from a world of funky and cool mobile apps and gaming interface users. As this workforce starts interacting with the enterprise apps, comparisons will start being drawn. Two aspects will stand-out as sticky sore points:

The user interface and information arrangement on the screen
The lack of asynchronous approach to processes

Most of us know how screens of enterprise systems look like. Even though access to corporate digital assets are aligned to the needs of the role and the type of responsibilities employees carry, the screens typically display the master-detail relationship of data with very little effort spent on the GUI design to highlight focus on the few data items that would be responsible for initiating the next set of actions or have a significant role in the decisions that need to be made.

Most enterprise systems are hardwired on context definition and this comes across when we view the screens against the backdrop of changing context on the same shop-floor. The issue repeats itself with enterprise processes. The approach to architecture design around the context - process - screen design relationship, reflects organisational preference of operating in the manageable environment of the synchronous, and the sequential, delivering on the first time right paradigm. Having said this, there is a huge management thrust towards getting people to multi-task, be asynchronous, take risks and be flexible on sequencing events and actions in a process to stay relevant in a world of changing contexts. This is the only way organisations maximise efficiency and quality on a fixed cost base.

This is a great paradox enterprises live in. Once this paradox manifests itself on a large scale and starts affecting relevance of delivery to the end consumer, IT systems get labelled as inflexible, rigid and legacy. In the real world, the word legacy has such a positive connotation to it. We all want to leave a legacy behind that we would be remembered for long after we have gone. Legacy however is an uncharitable word when used around IT system! That however is a topic for a different blog post.

Enterprises will find personal devices increasing their sphere of influence in the domain where enterprises will see individuals in employee role, traversing down a path where enterprise data access only on enterprise devices policy will be a hinderance in delivering results. Class of devices will expand beyond smartphones and tablets as we know it today. Multiple devices that are personal, public and enterprise assets will come into play as internet of things expands to consume every thing that has a potential to store, compute, persist, connect and digitally perish. The GUI of this world will dictate the tastes and preferences of the users and will drive behaviour. GUIs of enterprise IT systems will need to align to avoid high training costs and larger learning TATs to get Gen-Next employees effective and productive.

When I take a look at the Metro framework, at a very high level, I see a lot of thought that has been put in to :

• create a digital UI fashion trend - and an infectious one

• chart a path forward for enterprise IT systems as they undertake a journey to manifest themselves on the list mile on personal consumer devices.

Metro stands out on the following aspects:

1) Its a scalable framework ( tempted to say standard, qualifies in my book to evolve as a standard) that could become a standard as it gets device agnostic and OS agnostic. At this moment the framework for mobile smartphones is different from that of tablets. Metro defines, usable and unusable screen areas assuming the world needs only 16:9 surfaces and hence the different framework for smartphones.

2) Framework has provision to represent master-detail relationships and has guidelines that drive programming behaviour around handling data that is multi row - column tables and scroll. Best practises and the right model to manage activity needed NOW to move forward a process on the timeline in a contextualized environment.

3) Nudges developers to make asynchrony as the underlying to define behaviour that is responsive to now and always ready for the next. The nature of next being that no one can foresee the future and hence a tight synchronous process is not the way to build on personal devices. Asynchrony is central to engage, based on decisions and choices consumer make to progress ahead on the timeline.

4) Guidelines around content being front and central to enable readability puts the consumer instead of enterprise (process ,data and events) in the the centre.

5) Framework to Win As One that keeps you firmly rooted in the present for you to decide on the next moment, enabling developers to stitch the data of events, relationships, communication threads, facts and status all in a grid format on one screen. Imagine your grid shows the meeting that comes up in the next 5 mins where the agenda is discussion around performance management. One square shows calendar data (just the meeting name and time). Next square shows discussion threats from email around appraisals, one that matter for this meeting. A third square shows the bell curve of your team. a couple of grids displays pictures of your top 5% of your team with rating. This picture is not complete without that one red grid that shows payroll budget over-run telling you that you cannot have a top 5% but a top 3% of your team as high performers! Its your choice if you want developers to write code, that makes this choice!!

The dilemma I have in my head is that Enterprise IT systems are stitched for rigidity and robustness. Hence the processes are sequential. Any data entering thru points of integration, will necessarily have to go thru a synchronous, end-to-end experience. Last mile architected around asynchrony integrating into a central system architected around sequential end-to-end process thread, are like chalk and cheese. Some thought will need to be given to Enterprise IT Architecture to make this work.

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BYOD : Issue of classification & personal lifestyle

2013-04-01T12:46:00.001+05:30

As people bring in their own devices, the cost of accommodating these devices into the enterprise could far outweigh the cost savings envisaged around not equipping the workforce with such devices. To be able to get the workforce to effectively deploy their personal devices to empower themselves in meeting their goals and objectives; enabling them to take on both the enterprise landscape and personal challenges, one will need investments in infrastructure, security and other digital assets and services apart from the investments needed in planning, governance, monitoring and management of this way of life.

Enterprises are keen on BYOD for completely different reasons. Most forward looking organisations today hire talent for their attitude, character and potential of promise amongst other personal attributes that HR folks look out for, as they recruit. Gen-Next India from both the employable and ready to graduate in the next 3 year category, though not digital natives, are immigrants who in the last 3 year have been responsible for the momentum that consumerization of IT has gained. Their attitude and way of life reflects in the kind of devices they carry, the kind of apps they download and the way they use them in their daily lives. It will require some serious imagination on our part to gauge and calibrate the attitude, culture and expectations the digital natives will carry to an enterprise as and when they join the employable resource-pool in the next 10-15 years. Today, every young Indian has a digital lifestyle as a result of the device proliferation and consumerization of IT. This talent pool leaves digital footprints all over the cyberspace that is indicative of their attitude, culture and lifestyle in general. These people look up such data in the cyberspace to analyze, interpret and take decisions based on the digital footprints of others to decide the nature of relationship they would want to pursue.

As these young people enter the enterprise, they will be bringing their way of life into the enterprise. Organisations that do not change to accommodate the culture of this talent pool and make them feel at home, will be able to leverage little to nothing from this educated, smart next generation. Don't be surprised if people are searching for their bosses on facebook, twitter and four-square to form their first impressions about them. If they don't find them there, don't be surprised if their interpretations manifest as behavior that might seem bizarre to those not tuned in to this culture. Don't be surprise if in a brain-storming meeting a young one suggests a-kin to download this, put it in sky drive , open the app, modify, scrap from there, click this, put together , check with you on Skype to see what you feel and then its a go. Having been in banking and financial service and having started my career with new age banks and financial service, I can visualize some very senior people (some of them IT leaders) reacting to such a scenario with bewilderment and irritation if this were to occur in their meeting rooms. This will occur. And when it does, and if the enterprises react with irritation and bewilderment at such approach to work-life, the talent pool will look up with little respect both towards the brand and the individuals who represent them. Gen-next will find and very little in terms of alignment between their strong-suite characteristics that makes them productive and keeps them creative, and how they see the enterprise empowering them to excel. BYOD today is seen by enterprises as a way of getting in the new age talent pool and retaining them for the strength they bring in.

There are multiple challenges in going the BYOD way. Among numerous other issues around BYOD, the issue of segmentation of data and the subsequent life-cycle management of the same is complex, one that does not have a solution. As data gets accessed using personal devices, content will be accessed not just to be consumed, but to actually action on the data that was rendered. These actions could result in the need to modify the rendered content or request for more enterprise data to add/modify/delete or create new data - all of this on the go and using personal devices. Editing and creating content will need a store-edit-review-collaborate-despatch cycle to be enabled locally on the device. This is an issue with most enterprises who hate to see their data leave the enterprise network and enterprise storage structures.

There is a need to segment data as enterprise and personal so that it can be governed by the enterprise policies to protect enterprise digital data assets and to cater to personal digital lifestyle and cultural needs of the workforce. This segmentation is a complex issue and has no clear cut solution. As long as the data comes from corporate database, this problem ceases to exist. The problem crops up as one uses word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, design creation, ideation (creation and documentation) and collaboration tools to create, edit and collaborate on content. Ability to segment such content at the time of creation, is a complex problem to solve. A heady cocktail of features in content authoring tools, digital rights management integrated with some aspects of DLP and other document life-cycle management attributes, employee life-cycle management attributes (around roles and access rights) and IT security software attributes will need to be prepared to solve this issue. As a player in both enterprise and consumer space I hope Microsoft finds within itself the right recipe for this Long Island Ice Tea!

The next problem in accommodating BYOD scheme is to provide for a platform for workforce to go thru the iterative cycle of content creation - review - co-creation - collaboration and then submission to corporate networks in a manner that can be governed and managed effectively and efficiently. My view is that an integrated approach between MDM, cloud storage such as Skydrive / Dropbox / Google Drive and mobile apps can make this possible today. Microsoft as an organization that is a serious player in both enterprise and consumer space, is the right organization to take on this challenge and provide solutions. So, I will stick with skydrive, for articulating the enterprise need in the remainder of this post.

Some changes in skydrive will be needed. Enterprises will need to subscribe for cloud storage in a manner that aligns with enterprise IT Security policies. Microsoft's Cloud On Your Terms approach makes skydrive a good candidate for this solution, if they can pull the solution off. Each employee will need an account on skydrive with two logical partitions ( similar to C and D drive on your desktops and laptops); one where all enterprise data is stored and the other where all personal data is stored. One cloud storage account partitioned to create an enterprise cloud and a personal cloud for an employee. If the employee leaves, the data does not go away, as the organization has administrative control on the storage cloud. When an employee leaves an organization, similar to the way employee car policies and mobile policies work where the employee pays the WDV and carries the car/mobile device with them, Microsoft will need to provide for merging the enterprise logical partition into an enterprise pool post which the enterprise could give the personal cloud back to the exiting employee in a format where the exiting employee continues to use the skydrive account, in line with Microsoft's consumer offering. To prevent the corporate data from getting downloaded to local mobile device storage, an integrated approach of accessing all data thru an enterprise app integrated with MDM implementation will need to be done. When this employee joins another organization that happens to be a microsoft cloud customer (skydrive in particular), the technology will need to accommodate for creating the employee account with the new enterprise with similar partition logic and pull the new recruits personal cloud as a partition into the corporate skydrive account. This keeps employees personal data persistent as employees transition organizations or even change roles (employee/customer/partner).

The bigger problem though is of segmentation. Pure-play consumer organizations like Google might not be willing to solve this problem. Microsoft which plays both in enterprise and consumer space should take this problem up and resolve it. Doing so, Microsoft will end empowering its customers to attract talent pool that can usher in creativity and agility into an enterprise.

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The Mobile Apps Paradigm

2013-03-28T14:27:00.002+05:30

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Got an opportunity to peek into the mobile app paradigm, interact , brainstorm and inhale the energy, restlessness and ambitions of various entities that form the ecosystem defining this landscape. I decided to take some time off and interact with minds that imagine and create. I found myself walking the corridors of Microsoft TechEd 2013. The energy was intoxicating, and infectious.

All the big names from TCSs , Infosys's and Wipro's of the world to small unheard of startups, were all there. A couple of 22-24 year olds proudly flashing their business cards carrying the names of their startups and their CEO designation starkly contrasting mature 35 year old project managers carrying equal amount of energy and enthusiasm. Almost everyone I met believed that as developers, they have the power to shape culture, influence behaviour and redefine lifestyle ! They all said it in so many words.

I took some time out, sat in a corner to ponder on that statement. When I look at the Apple iphone and ipad, the Android smartphones and tablets and now the windows 8 smartphones and tablets; the singular thing that strikes me is that, there was no real crying need for any of these devices from the any of the consumer community and nobody really asked for it as a solution to a problem. As a corporate citizen, I have always been moulded in the mindset that innovation occurs when one is forced into a crisis or issues of significant criticality. Sometimes, in such situations, dramatically incremental changes pass off as innovations within an enterprise. Problem solving has always been the main corporate theme. Corporates work on opportunity creation when the existing set of revenue generating techniques run their course to stagnation and/or finally become irrelevant. This happens because corporates invest in platforms and then refuse to make changes till they sweat the platform to maximize their return on investment. Having said this, there are a few forward looking ones who experiment to find new opportunities. These generally tend to be organizations in the hi-tech space ( where R&D is part of their platform) or family run businesses in the non hi-tech space.

The developers who were walking the corridors with me were of different mindset. These guys were dreaming of a space where things could be done differently, the difference being the cool factor. One of the guys showed me an app where the you rest a mobile phone on a table and once you invoke the app, the camera comes on, the phone vibrates and the vibration was programatically controlled to make the phone rotate 360 degrees in a 120 second window to capture a panoramic view of your surrounding. I was stumped, not because of the programmatic brilliance needed to achieve this( none needed actually), but was a little amazed on the need for the mind to come up with something like this. Who needs such a solution. What was the seed of this idea? I asked her. She just shrugged and said, that every time her phone vibrated on silent mode, she always felt it would simply be cool to channelize the energy generated by the vibration to get the phone to move in a circular motion and capture the image. Then she developed a software that can help you look at this amazing complex picture render different parts of it in context and scale that gives you some amazing views. One her friends, smiled and said, sometimes when you are living your life, you miss all the wonderful things that are happening around you which are not in line of your sight !

Bottom-line, these guys are not in the problem solving mode. They are in the mode of creating things that people have not asked for, never imagined they might need it and might not even pay to use it. They want to infect people with their output and attempt redesign our lifestyle, influence our behavior and our culture. More power to the programming brains. Software developers have truely shaped our lifestyle and culture. I am devotee of shirdi Sai Baba and see my god and the aarti whenever my heart desires, thanks to the portal that webcasts live. I have got into the behaviour of seeking blessings live from shirdi before I get into something important, the first thing after I wake up in the morning and before I hit the sack! I go about travelling to places without planning at all, thanks to the gps based apps that map, find hotels and eating joints. I have various metrics at hand as I jog, from the num of kms to my heart rate and the music I need to keep me going. From what I have seen and heard at TecEd, I foresee us swamped with apps that we would never ask for and that we can do without, but very soon our lives will start revolving around these. Apps of similar nature will find their way into education, healthcare, banking and also into our family life and our personal space.

Cloud v/s CIO Battle - Where is the battle?

2013-02-25T10:35:00.000+05:30

NASSCOM 2013 was buzzing with the topics of CIOs relevance in the current context of cloud and consumerization of IT. I was on a panel discussing what keeps a new age CIO awake and alive. The discussion turned to questioning the relevance of CIO within 10 minutes of panel discussion kick off and stayed that way for the balance 50 minutes!

Consumerization of IT fueled by mobile device proliferation, app stores and apps now has received a further shot in its arm with cloud coming in. Cloud is fueling a whole new business that will lead to consumerization of enterprise IT Infrastructure, if you may please, with large players and eager startups jumping into the bandwagon. Almost all IT services being targeted by entrepreneurs will cover the entire gamut of services provided by the CIO / CTO to his organization and more. Even before the advent of the cloud and consumerization of IT caught traction, there were parts of the enterprises that started sourcing their own IT. Enterprise IT teams were caught either in implementation of core systems (ERP, CRM, etc) that were long gestation projects and completely energy sapping, that most of the frontline departments started sourcing their own IT.

Having said that, there is something about the cloud that has sparked off debates about CIOs relevance. The cloud creates the ability to provision, de-provision and price services at a level of granularity that was not possible before. IaaS, PaaS and SaaS service providers will ride the cloud to drive cost down even for moderate to small scale of operations. CIOs have always been seen as people who were stuck with fixed costs in the face of declining business when the economy was under stress, and still is in certain parts of the world. Service providers ride on this aspect as they vend their cloud based wares.

Service providers will always end up selling solutions that solve a part of the puzzle.In complex environments (read SMB and Large Enterprises) there is a need for a person who can source the right kind of services and stitch them together in a manner that makes sense for the enterprise, and in a manner that enables enterprises to derive and deliver value. Industry sectors that are regulated, cloud will take time and will need regulatory head winds to blow across those enterprise skyline to rain the promised benefits. I do not see the CIOs role diminishing, but the role needing skills that are way different from what CIOs are used to.

Unless CIOs fully understand the business of their enterprise, the context in which the business operates and impact of macro economic and eco-system changes on the business, their value to the enterprise will always be questioned. Unless this evolution happens, the CIOs will continue to compete with technology service providers and consultants, instead of strategizing with their peers in the organization against their organization's competitors. Cloud or no cloud, I feel the issue is what I just mentioned. The noise on CIOs life expectancy either because of cloud or consumerization of eneterprise IT are just symptoms and not the real cause.

2013 : The year of Zero Tolerance

2012-12-30T12:32:00.000+05:30

Its very apparent. It stares you in the face, you cannot miss it. If there was one thing that made an impact in 2012, that was technology - both the device and the software. The mobile devices with social networking apps on them were the kings and queens of 2012. I went into a research mode to see if there was an equivalent ubiquitous thing in the past that made a huge impact. Not surprisingly, what came up was a weapon. The AK-47 assault rifle.This was one rifle that is so light and efficient that sadly it can be used by children with minimal learning. This is the most abundantly mass produced rifle and has changed the way wars are fought!

The same can be said of mobile device+social networking apps in 2012. This weapon has given huge strength to the common man across cultures and geographies to raise voice over what they feel is undesirable, unethical and wrong. Mature democracies to dictatorship regimes have belted down under the force of these voices fueled by the mobile device+social networking app weapon. Occupy wall street to Arab Spring and now in our own backyard in India. Governments are seeing the absolute non-tolerant citizen who might not be voting but is definetly out there to tear down structures that don't find relevance in today's times. Not very sure if the mobile devices are feeding on the need to be socially connected on the move or the apps are feeding on the device proliferation. Computerization of technology is happening at an amazing unprecedented phase, that most CIOs could only wish for their projects in the the enterprise.

One needs to take cognizance of the fact that the attitudes are changing. Absolute intolerance to mediocricity, blatant abuse of power and flouting of authority to crub voice of dissent will only grow in strength. I foresee 2013 to be a year where people in public service will come under scrutiny and will suffer lack of credibility and respect. The government and hence the police will find themselves completely lacking in credibility. Socilally connected mobile individuals armed with the power of convergence of video audio and data over the internet will be putting extreme pressure on every social structure - government, police, tradition, religion and family to align to their way of life and find relevance in a positive manner as they live their lives. You will see people in position and power react rather clumsily at first as you have seen in the last two weeks and hopefully, they will adapt and align to serve rather than dictate.

Sooner or later the citizen is going to bring the same attitude to work on monday morning and the affect of this will be felt on the office floors all thru till friday. Enterprises who dont engage on a connected platform with their employees, will find employees engaging outside of the cortporate structure on corporate issues, thru their 3G connected cellphones armed with facebook, twitter and google+. Many corporates today are still heirarchical structures of power when it comes to most things that significantly impact organizational fabric. This is where employees might draw parallels with what ius happening in our society outside the corporate world. Mediocricity and inefficiencies might come under fire within corporates.

Connected employees are much more potent than unions. Most organizations who engage employees effectively, will find a greater appreciation coming their way. The better life inside the security of the corporate building as compared to the life on the street, will only go improve and increase employee engagement scores and drive higher employee loyalty. meaningful engagement within the connected corporate that not just contributes to the employee but acknowledges employees contribution by keeping them in the decision making process, will go a long way. This is not only the right thing to do, this also keeps the spill over of the anger and frustration from entering the office environment. One such organization I know that dos this effectively is Indigo.

CIOs have a huge role to play here. They can be the people who can drive the ground rules of connected enterprise, not as an order taker but as a direction setter. Can a CIO stand up and hold their own when some of the ground rules come under pressure from HR, Finance, Legal and Brand ? many a CIOs will be told that its not their business to set the ground rules of engagement on the platform. How the CIOs react in those situations and conduct themselves, will differentiate the direction setters from the order takers. Direction setting is about painting a strategy and executing on the same with the intent of building long lasting structures on solid foundations. Each CIO knows what the best foundation for their organization is. Jan 2nd 2013 , Wednesday - most people will come into office with a mixed feeling of having mourned the brave-heart, wondering what beholds as future for our girls and women back home, and definetly some excitement around the fact that the old year has gone by and maybe the new year will bring in some hope and cheer. Are the enterprises ready to take on the challenges that will start walking their way starting this Wednesday?

A CIOs Christmas Gift Wish List To Santa

2012-12-19T09:35:00.000+05:30

Its the time of the year where I act like a 10 year old with glee and hope in my eyes, as I draw up a gift list hoping Santa will deliver them. As a CIO I absolutely would love any kind of divine intervention to help me out as I deal with various issues.

My wish list goes as follows:

Dear Santa,

My list is as follows:

I want Google to make up their mind, whether they want to remain a consumer services organization or they want to be an enterprise solution company as well. If they decide to get into the enterprise space as well, I want them to price their services in a manner they can sustain enterprise offerings, build a team that can understand and manage enterprises and commit resources to mould a part of Google that is compatible with the way enterprises want to run their IT.
No man is an island, and technology is here to serve mankind. No technology can stay relevant if it operates in isolation. Its funny that everyone talks of collaboration, team work and productivity while Apple, Google and Microsoft have built walls around their proprietary platforms. Dear Santa, I want you to give a contract to Leonardo DiCaprio to go back in time and invade the minds of Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt and Steve Ballmer and plant the thought of creating a standard for interoperability between iOS, Windows 8 and android mobile platforms, helping enterprises to carry more effectively and efficiently a safe , secure and sustainable mobility strategy with heterogeneity as an integral feature.
I wish for divine intervention to clear up the mobility space and drive clarity. If some need to die, please make it quick and painless (for everyone). Please bestow sustenance for the existing virtues of creativity, sense of purpose, social relevance and enterprise adaptability with all the players in the mobility space.
Dear Santa, please give Leanardo DiCaprio a second contract to invade the dreams of all cloud service providers, planting the thought of creating a standard for interoperability and data exchange between clouds and for creating a standard framework and template for shifting data and workloads across clouds.
I wish for the gift of the ability to quickly unlearn and sit in a discussion without carrying the burden of having to accept or reject everything being; for my team and me and for the world at large. I wish this for all politicians specifically.
I want CISOs to get more business friendly and find ways to support adoption of new invasive initiatives rather than fight it!
I wish for Microsoft to realize that mail, messaging and collaboration is availably free of cost thru social networking sites and get off their high horse and find a way to have more meaningful dialogue with the enterprise. I hope Microsoft's global leadership realizes this and re-structure their organization to operate more meaningfully in the current context and become pace setters in time to come.
Dear Santa, please help me understand why I feel so hollow for Windows 8 as the next enterprise desktop computing platform. I am not able to analyse this hollowness in me effectively!
I wish apple store infrastructure becomes available to the enterprises as a service enabling deliver enterprise app stores to our customers, partners and employees riding on apples creation.
The last wish is a more personal one. Santa, I wish for the next new apple offering to be a personal device that can transport people across time and space. I , for once, want to say beam me up Scotty and experience it happen before I die. I also wish for the world to be free of guns (specially US and UP) , children to be safe, polar ice caps to stop melting and last but not the least , both Cameroon Diaz and me get 5 years younger each year for the next two years and then stop ageing!

Santa, some logistics. If you are flying around India, collecting the wish lists, your 3G might not work effectively everywhere and hence you might not be able to access this blog. To make it easier, I will hang a sock on the christmas tree with the wish list in it. Not too complicated a list, I am sure. For a hi-flier like you, this is easily do-able. Santa, you now operate in a world that is performance oriented, goal driven and results oriented. I will soon email you the balance scorecard based on which you will be appraised. You will get a 5/5 if you just manage to deliver to my last wish. You will get a special performance incentive bonus, if you manage to make any three of my first 9 wishes happen. No pressure buddy. Just do it!

Merry Christmas and a happy holiday season to one and all. Hope your families and you have a blast bringing in the new year later this month. Wishing your families and you a fantastic 2013 filled with peace, prosperity, good health and happiness.
Cheers.

Personal Branding

2012-12-14T10:22:00.001+05:30

Haven't you yet been killed with too much of personal branding advice ? Well, if you are reading this, I guess you are still alive, and the pleasure of putting you to death is now all mine !

Why do we need to brand ourselves? That is a dumb question, considering the fact that we have been doing it since childhood. Those of you who have siblings, you started your personal branding endeavor the moment your sibling arrived. The lucky ones that get undivided attention, you started branding yourselves as soon as you realized that your crush and/or first love needed to be competed for attention and affirmation. For those lucky ones with no siblings, and those who got lucky with crush/first love or both without a need to put up a fight; if you got married, you worked on personal branding to deal with at least two love triangles if not more:
1) spouse : mother : mother-in-law triangle
2) spouse : father : father-in-law triangle
...not to mention that you dont get married to just your spouse but to your spouse's family and their extended family. For those who have not had any of these issues, well you never had a life to begin with!

Personal branding is pretty much the same game, be it at home or work. We show 15% of ourselves (the best parts of our personality) and most of our personal branding revolves around flouting these attributes with an intent to connect with the audience. The strength to our personal brand actually comes from the hidden / behind-the-scenes 85% of our personality. This is where people face challenges when they brand themselves and the branding is not backed up by most of the constituents of their personality. I guess we need to focus on three things:
1) What we brand
2) The brand itself (in this case ourselves and what we stand for)
3) The branding message

I share one anecdotes from one of my past stints, around the branding exercise by IT folks. Similar to people who are uncomfortable with their bodies and hence are embarrassed to take off their shirt while at a beach, some time ago a couple of us decided to brand our initiatives instead of branding ourselves. The branding exercise was successful, and our initiatives were much talked about. Slowly we got distanced from the initiatives as people with much better branding skills worked their way to identify themselves with initiatives under the spotlight. Felt much like Steve Jobs thrown out of the company he created! Under the umbrella of this branded initiative, a lot of business departments went about procuring their own IT needs. Now we had business departments buying IT products and services under the brand created by IT without involving IT ! A lot of us were chuckling even though the joke was on us! We then decided to brand ourselves to get the business departments come to us for their IT needs instead of buying all by themselves. A realization then dawned that when we were not comfortable with ourselves as we projected. Introspection, then resulted in some of us chiseling away parts of our personalities that were irrelevant and bridging the gap with the needed. After a great deal of effort, we saw a close resemblance between ourselves and our aspirational brand image. This effort would have worked against us, had we failed to sustain the perceptions we ventured out to create. This is possible only if the 85% of real you actually grew, evolved and transformed to back up the 15% show-cased.

We have always been taught to play to our strengths. Our core strength areas could be our ability to learn fast, a strong sense of right and wrong, flexible belief systems, tolerance, effective story telling, strong memory, logical reasoning, empathy etc. It makes sense to brand ourselves around our core strengths rather than otherwise. Our conduct and our branding needs to be in perfect harmony. Our personalities will reflect the real us at some point or the other. It would be detrimental to brand ourselves otherwise. A strong story-teller core value could be a great asset in sales or influencer or mentor role. One can brand themselves at fantastic presenter and a sales guru. A person with flexible value systems would make a great go-getter and innovator when playing within the corporate rule framework. It is important to recognize our core strengths and bring them to work, apply them in our individual fields of expertise and gain success. The most fundamental step to branding would be to discover ourselves first. There is no use of branding ourselves as leaders if we have created structures, perceptions and methodologies of management around us. We will be ridiculed if we brand ourselves as direction setters, while our teams do nothing but order taking. It is important to align both the hidden 85% and the 15% window dressing. CIOs are just as good or as bad as their teams. Any personal branding a CIO does, will need to be backed up by their teams in action, letter and spirit. A CIO will end up being ridiculed as a manager and a leader if he creates a ME and THEM as a part of his personal branding exercise. The CIOs personal brand will most definetly rub off on their team and will have consequences. Hence, in performance driven cultures, personal branding can become a very powerful tool.

Sometimes, we can kill ourselves due to lack of finesse in communicating our personal brand. I was delighted with a DBA, who said her core strengths was her ability to think straight in times of duress. The way she came across the interview table, every part of her body had "nerves of steel" branded all across. Three of us interviewing, felt exactly the same way! People mostly come up and say they are a strong DBA! I heard a CIO describe himself as one who can do anything. Having known him for almost a little over a decade, I know he meant that he is comfortable with the unlearning and learning and has enthusiasm and inquisitiveness as a part of his personality. Due to these attributes, he constantly dabbles with different new technologies all the time. He is a risk taker and due to this he is one of the few guys who would pilot almost every new technology in his enterprise! All of this came out as "I can do anything"! I love the way fevicol has been branded as a bond that never breaks. Been racking my brains on how to get creative around my personal branding.

Once we manage to brand ourselves in a certain manner, we need to be cognizant of the fact that organizations face the challenges of playing in a game, where changes in eco-system and business dynamics is a constant feature. This needs the organization to innovate, change and transform; and all of this demands different competencies from its workforce to meet such challenges.A CIO who is seen to bring stability thru standardization and process discipline\ to the organization might become a liability when organizations needs change agents to compete effectively. One needs to keep an eye on one's own branding and how is it seen relative to organization's medium and long term needs. One needs to decide when and how a shift needs to occur in personal branding, with the passage of time, as organizations need to deal with different challenges. I particularly like this book "SHIFT" by Peter Arnell and recommend reading it.

I personally think the best way to brand oneself, is to play to our core strengths and put our true selves on display thru blogs, tweets and the enterprise social fabric for people to see us to be for who we are. One needs to be constantly looking for feedback to mould and shape our messages to ensure that the messages are being consumed exactly as they were meant to be. Personal branding exercise is all about the perception we want everyone else to carry about us. We need to play to our strength, play full on and visibly so.

The Need For Self Preservation

2012-12-03T15:45:00.000+05:30

First responsibility of top managers and leaders is self preservation. I was taught this lesson from a veteran, a very senior board member and a leadership practitioner of a very large and famous IT multinational of yesteryears. His basic contention was, if you don't preserve and protect yourself from each and every threat and not actively lookout for potential threats coming your way, how then will you ever be able to carry out your agenda of value creation for all your stakeholders and the community in general. His message to a couple of us more than a decade ago was to shamelessly protect ourselves if we wanted to really make a difference, and not just take one on the chin all the time.

Managers and leaders will face threats all layers. Let me focus on leadership, as the game is quiet different there and stakes are very high. In leadership roles the following threats are very real but not limited to the list mentioned below, the list below comes from my experience of having fought these demons as they trapped me at various points in time in the past.

Delusion
Insecurity
Amoralism

Delusion:

I have had this amazing opportunity to be in this space called delusion I have experienced many facets of delusion and have learned very invaluable lessons, and fortunately very early in life. Few lessons I learned, are as follows:

What I inspect is what I get. This is true despite the fact that I know the people I work with, I have massive trust and faith in people I work with and some of them have fantastic past track records. I learnt quickly to get out of the delusion that "not placing my trust in someone is bad" is very different from my need for inspection. I trust someone, and hence I bestowed that responsibility to that person. After that, what you inspect is what you get.
I am as good as my current conduct. Walking this path has has helped me to stay out of the delusion that despite status-quo, faith in my abilities and character can never be displaced or disputed.
I am not an island. I need partnerships and eco-system to carry out my agenda. So, I own nothing and control nothing. I facilitate for people around me. I am never in delusion of my abilities by virtue of the role and responsibility I shoulder. First thing I do is insulate myself with complementary skills and attitudes and then find ways to empower them fully.
Leadership is not a step in an hierarchical structure nor is it a virtue that you need to shoulder all the time. Leadership is a tool that one can pick up at discretion depending on the need of the hour.
Leadership and Management and are two different things. Successful people oscillate between the two based on the best one can achieve by deploying either one of these two tools or a hybrid one. On many ocassions I have chosen one of my mates/colleagues to play a leadership role on a key initiative if that's what is needed to meet objectives or deliver results. My role then is that of a management person supporting, mandating and aligning resources to my colleague's leadership to ensure success and meeting of objectives.

Insecurity:

I will be honest. I have never been insecure when I was in a corporate job, not even on my worst day. Hence I had to learn this lesson too late in life when the stakes were really high ! As a corporate citizen, I have never been prey to the 6 Cs that characterize insecurity - Comparison, Compensation, Competition, Compulsion, Condemnation and Control. I stepped off a corporate job in August 2011 and started off on my own as an independent IT Consultant. I was blessed with the opportunity to experience insecurity and discover how I could go from bad to worse. Fantastic lessons learned. Insecurity was neither financial, nor was it fear of failure. Insecurity came from the delusion that to be a good business person, I need to understand every aspect of business. I obviously don't. So, I decided to do everything myself ! How stupid is that. Insecurity makes you wear a mask of a superhero. You try to be who you are not and your actions speak. I decided to register for service tax, manage my own financial aspects (tax, income, balance sheet) etc. Instead of focusing on my core strengths and work with people who have complementary skill sets (something I did all my life by choice in corporate jobs), I became superman. I wore a mask and I started comparing my consulting fees with what other consultants charge. I started, leveraging my gift of gab, putting down fellow consultants with some potential clients. There was a deep compulsion to push clients to innovate and do new things instead of helping them see benefits that they could realize and enjoy, talking to them in their language (again something I have practised all my life as a corporate citizen). It took a meeting with L N Sunderrajan to help me realize that I was insecure. I will never forget the favor he did me, by calling me over for a drink at the MIG Cricket Club, Bandra - to discuss a completely different agenda. Sunder has used experts and partners for his financial accounting needs, coding and design. He focuses on the core strengths of his team members and himself and delivers along with his partners. Luckily, I met him while I was in the 4th month of my stint as an individual IT consultant and learnt the most valuable lesson of my life.I am not sure if Sunder ever noticed me to be insecure. I did talk to him on my need to be financially selfish and not share income. How short-sighted and naive is that for someone who has always talked about delivering success in the long-term thru partnerships while in a corporate job!

You will be the only person who would not know if you are insecure. People around you notice it. Keeping an open mind to that fact that somewhere insecurity could lurks within you, helps you test dispassionately this hypothesis. If you keep a keen eye and ear open to how people around you behave with you and what they talk to you. People tend to run projects without involving the potential end-users right from conceptualization till the time its ready for UAT, if some of the Cs are in the play. The Cs are responsible for blaming end users for lack of imagination and appreciation. People who operate in partnership models neither face these C issues, nor are in the business of requirement gathering.

Amoralism:

The best way to preserve oneself is to be completely at peace with the eco-system while carrying the burden of one's beliefs, value systems and personal notions of ethics. If you noticed some skepticism laced in dark humor in the last sentence, you've got what I mean. As Sarkar says, there is nothing that's either right or wrong. One who has the power, his wrong becomes right (bad english translation)!

Organizations are either social or commercial enterprises out there to achieve certain goals, meet certain objectives and deliver value to its stakeholders. They go about it in a certain manner. Its important to work in places where there is a cultural alignment of notions of personal ethics and value system biases with that of the enterprise's. Its quiet naive to blame an organization to be immoral or ethically wrong if personal biases are tangential to that of the organization. Choosing the right organization to work for, actually means choosing the most congenial place to work, where you have alignment on value systems, ethics and morals. I am borrowing a few lines verbatim from a doctoral thesis :

The phenomenon of amoralism: An investigation of the cognitive and emotive roots.

Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation, 2008, 250 Pages

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

1. The Statement of the Problem

It is a common empirical observation that most people take considerations of morality as important factors in making a morally relevant choice. Moreover, such considerations ordinarily override other reasons for actions. To say that a certain act is useful, agreeable, profitable but yet immoral usually means to condemn the act in the strongest possible terms. In the ordinary discourse the labeling of some action-guiding principle or a particular action as immoral gives the ultimate reason for rejecting it. Likewise, one may think of an action as difficult, unpleasant, risky and costly but yet required from the moral point of view.

You cannot preserve yourself if you are at war with the ethics and value systems of the organization, even if you have what is hilariously known as good ethics and best value systems. Step into organizations where there is harmony and homogeneity between your personal belief systems and that of the organization. This is one aspect where diversity does not take anyone anywhere. People who often blame the workplace to be devoid of ethics (when actually, all the while the employee and the organization have their own ethic systems, but have nothing in common), usually forget that they have the power to choose not be part of the game on that particular playground!

Protect and preserve yourself vehemently against habits, virtues, weakness and people with negative influences. One might ask, what is negative? Anything that deflates , demoralizes and puts you down is negative. Sometimes, it is incompatibility with the co-system, sometimes its your sense of perception and values and sometimes its people who dont like either your agenda or you. Some of us might wash our hands off people issues saying we are not political or my organization is not political. The moment there is more than one person in the room, there is politics! People who take up leadership roles need to deal with this with equal enthusiasm as they do with other challenges. If you dont survive, you will cease to exist in a state of power that is needed to carry out your agenda and meet your goals of delivering value to your stakeholders and the community in general.

New demands on CISO.

2012-11-26T16:55:00.004+05:30

Consumer Technology is inside the perimeter. Its been an invasion of devices, apps and cloud services. Enterprise data has found an easy bridge to cross the perimeter and free itself. None of this is unknown to us, though have to admit its been a sensational development at a sensational pace and technology adoption and work style adaptation has happened with passion that has never been witnessed or experienced by an enterprise app or project. As a CIO one only hopes and wishes that these virtues be associated with enterprise IT initiatives we lead. All of this has caught us off guard as most of this is unplanned induction and some definitely see it as an intrusion.

The CISO's role is all the more critical against this backdrop. The CISO, to be really effective, will have to don a new avataar or rather add a few more facets to their personalities. While setting the ground rules and policing to ensure adherence to policies have been the only traits CISOs have shown, and while some have undertaken branding and advertising to ensure awareness, nobody has seriously stepped into the shoes of a educator and a protector. Every organization has policies around ownership, distribution and life-cycle management of all its enterprise assets; specially data. Data is all over the place - documents, data in the enterprise database, spreadsheets, scribbles and notes on note pads. Employees create data on the go.

Consumer Technology has placed in the hands of employee, tools and devices that come to their aid in doing their jobs effectively. In this process, enterprise data is not just passing thru these personal devices and cloud storage, it is actually being created on them and then , hopefully, getting into enterprise systems. There is ample scope for data theft and data leakage. While enterprise governance is all about checks and balances to safeguard corporate assets and contain risks, employees are all about productivity, speed, quality of service and delivering the wow factor with attitude in their deliveries. Governance need to ensure employees can bring all of that onto the table in a secure environment as employees find lot more exciting tools outside the secure environment. One way to get around this is to step up the act on awareness and education.

The CISO is in a fantastic position to map the spirit and the letter of the corporate policies to these consumer technology choices that are all around us and highlight, clearly, in simple language, with examples, the possible damage that could happen to the enterprise if some of these apps were used. I reached out to 12 senior CISOs in the industry before I penned this blog post and everyone thought that it was a good idea and some called it innovation. I was actually a bit miffed. I reminded them, that this had always been an expectation from their chair, but all that one got was policies and policing. CISOs need to be aware that they are here to support the employees conduct their business in a safe and secure environment. Along with education and awareness, the CISO needs to push the CIO's team to fund small labs that can discover the best way to leverage these consumer technology ideas within their enterprise to achieve business goals.

It would be nice to see CISOs bring out videos and literature that shows how enterprise data and hence the personal credibility of employees could be at risk by unabated and un-mentored use of apps like Dropbox and Evernote. At the same time the CISO should work with the CIO to figure out ways of accommodating such features and functionality within the enterprise. CISOs needs to bring their expertise on the table in a lot more ways than just policing. This happens when CISOs wed their agenda with business objectives beyond just securing the enterprise and extend their expertise to areas around employee productivity and morale enhancement by support agility in the employee personal productivity space. Everyone loves carrying and showing off not just cool devices, but how they use it to deliver value. Most of the the time, the wow factor created is targeted around their individual selves, no harm in supporting it, if it does result in value to the organization.

Part 2 : My First 90 days : Maneuvering The Landscape

2012-11-21T17:21:00.001+05:30

This is in continuation with my earlier post that marked the first 30 days of my first 90 day journey in a new group, in a role that has been created for the first time. My second set of 30 days in Interglobe Group as the Group CIO, gives me the confidence to bat on the front foot for the time being. Having gone through the induction and the learning process on the key businesses of the groups, it was time to get to know the people better. A lot comes out as you do one-on-one with your peers, their one-downs and your direct reports.

3 things have been achieved at the end of 60 days:

Re-validation and the associated satisfaction of having joined the right workplace.
Firm understanding of business strategies, priorities and goals
A fair amount of understanding of the formal and informal structures that is responsible for the enterprise's success

The moment the satisfaction of having joined the right workplace sets in, what hit me immediately is that the organization must be seeking similar satisfaction for themselves on my appointment! This is a fine line one needs to walk on. I am in a new domain and need time to get my head around the business operations, goals and the strategy. At the same time the organization is extremely keen to quickly test the strength of their investment. I listed down three initiatives I need to run, while as a parallel process I formulate and co-create the digital strategy for the enterprise along with my team. Engaging on small initiatives, is a great way to showcase your mettle and also understand your environment and eco-system. Dealing with various individuals helps you discover both the fruitful and the wrong engagement techniques. Each person is different and needs to be approached and engaged with in a different manner, till you firmly establish your leadership and by virtue of that respect, people start aligning to your needs on engagement. Architecting this turnaround is very key both for political reasons and for your influence sphere to be effective. This should not be mistaken for arrogance. There is a huge distinction between the two.

It would be foolish to take everything at face value and dis-respectful if your behavior displays this intent! This is a fine line that needs to be walked again. There are many aspects of the new organization that you want to learn by putting it to test. Small simple tests can reveal the underlying fabric of agility, pride levels and engagement strengths of the organization. These three attributes are very important to me and hence I tend to look out for these and so I mention them here. One might argue, is integrity not a key value and should one not test that ? It is, but that is one aspect a person should research before joining the organization. Once in, it would be foolish to either question or test integrity of the organization. At leadership levels, once in, one should take integrity and ethics as a given workplace strengths and move on to re-enforce these, and not test these. Attempts to test these in the initial phase of your new job at the leadership levels, gives way to various interpretations that will most adversely affect your personal brand. Always remember that you are the new guy. Any perceptions on your personality or brand that get created for in the first 90 days, will last for a very long time. In good organizations, respect for leaders who cannot manage their perception in the early days, is very scant. A few places might entertain benefit of doubt, but most performance driven organizations don't. The leadership is always hoping on riding on the new leader's brand to get a few things done in the first few days. Usually the announcement of your appointment , specially the part where they articulate your strengths,will carry traces of hints on their agenda. If you hurt your personal brand, you tend to be of little use to them in the first 90 days.

It helps to quickly see if there is someone out there who will hold your hand as you maneuver the new landscape, align with the culture and the way things are done, identify the formal and informal structures in the organization that the responsible for the organization's success and discover the most effective modes and means of communication. I found a fantastic guide for myself in this journey. This person had already made up his mind before I stepped in, to play this part. That is an attribute of a very mature workplace. The first thing to do is to cement this relationship with trust, friendship and integrity. My efforts in this direction will reveal their results in the next 30 days to come. But, best not to let the expectations go high on this, or rather on any support system in the organization in the first 90 days.

Armed with whatever I could learn and internalize, I was nervously excited about my first leadership committee meeting at Interglobe, where I was to present my three initiatives. I wanted my first official pitch to set the tone for the next couple of months and lay the foundation of my brand equity as a strategist and direction setter. I was sure, I would be treated with kid gloves and loads of forced warm smiles, patronage and plenty of flowery language laced with nicety; none of which should affect me. Thankfully, the talk was cordial but straight and I walked away with the feeling that very soon, the language will reflect acceptance of my abilities at the table. None of "this is how things are done around here-you are new-you will learn." talk, rather they were looking forward to me setting a direction as the Group CIO. One of the key aspects I have to still work on is the interpretation and hopefully my guide will pitch in here as well.

Quality time one-on-one with business leaders was a must and I did get that to clearly drive my point home, that I am here to give a new direction and set agenda for driving business change, solicit their partnership in driving this change and striking the chord on the fact that its as much their change agenda as mine.

I am completely new to the domain and the following are very clear to me:

They know their business much better than anyone else (including their competition as they are market leaders) and hence I will learn the ropes from them.
I am an outsider and hence can quickly see where frog in the well syndrome is playing up and hurting the organization. This is my key strength at the moment and I bring this to the table.
I am neither boxed down by the organizational thought processes nor have been conditioned to the organizational constraint perceptions. This boosts my strengths further and is my trump card.
I am the new guy on the block and new ones at any level get some leeway. The new guys at leadership levels get loads of leeway for exceptionally short period of time.

So that's 3-1 in my favor as of now and for a very short time, as I add to my strengths, build relationship bridges and lead. That pretty much sums up the second 30 day block of my first 90 days in the new job!

Business Analysts - Key to success

2012-11-15T06:38:00.001+05:30

The CIO round table on "war for talent" at the gartner symposium, brought forward someThe CIO round table on "war for talent" at the gartner symposium, brought forward some very key aspects around success having been delivered more often than not, when there is deep involvement of good business analysts.

We debated on the need for BAs to be part of the IT team and not as part of the business teams. The interesting question posses by fellow CIO of Cannon, was wether it would then be fair to say that business teams can then bring on board technical analysts! Aren't most business folks technical analysts any way!

Grooming BAs to the point where they really start delivering value is a long process. In environments that are friendly and embracing g, BAs could be productive in their second year. In large complex environments, sometimes it takes 3 or 4 years to really deliver value.

The grooming program is the key to success. These BAs need to spend at least 6 to 8 weeks in each of the key depts and SBUs working as apprentice to the line function 2 to 4 weeks each in the other depts of the organization. Once the business operations are clear, these guys should shadow the SBU leaders for 3 weeks and dedicate a day to be spent with SBU head exclusively one-on-one. These guys then been to serve as apprentice to the C layer for a week each.

Couple of aspects to be kept under active observation for grooming interventions in the first 6 months of their active deployment.

1) Do these guys come up with their own ideas for the Organization or do they come back with a list of things to be I proved upon as told by the business teams during the induction and the grooming program

2) Their attitude and their next steps after some of their plans are either rubbished or politely turned down due to prioritisation.

3) their approach to building their individual credibility and branding in the first 4 months of their productive deployment.

4) Their ability to assess risks and their approach to project planning where risk of failure is high

5) Their ability to effectively interact with the C layer and their ability to hold their own under the spotlight.

I have been in the past, been able to very quickly slot the guys into 4 buckets:

1. Self starters - self explanotary.
2. Efficient executors - they need to be told what needs to be done, and then you don't have to follow up
3. Solomon's spiders - keep trying repeatedly when faced with failure. They never give up
4. Batman - two faces, both strong suites
5. The Spielberg - builds larger than life plans and projects. Loves to take Complex projects. When handed over a simple project, paints a larger than life picture about it. Inspires participation from one and all.

Each of these strong suits are detrimental at one level. I don't generally work with BAs who have one strong suit and a equal or relevant mix of other aspects. I like to bring together people with these exclusive strong attitudes on one table and work with them as a team. The learning are immense. However, this results most of the time into an emotional drain on oneself. So if you don't enjoy roller coaster rides at work, maybe a different approach needs to be evolved.

The opposite of work is play. Human beings, I believe are wired to play. We need to choose our game and invite the players to team up. I love picking BAs from college. Good BAs work inside the business teams and get pro-activity going for IT. Instead of being told by the business on what needs to be done, IT can start defining for business the best path forward. For this to happen, the grooming process is key.

Couple of advantages with this approach:

1) CIOs will be integrated on the business plans at the SBU level by integrating the BAs into SBU structure. This move will be welcomed, if the BAs KPIs are similar to that of the SBU heads KPIs

2) The CIO can plan SBU's directions and can have more meningdul discussions at Mancom/ExCo - travesring the journey from order taker - agenda setter - strategy co-creator - pace setter.

3) Evolve the BAs to digital strategy officers

Boxed In By Efficiency ?

2012-10-08T12:34:00.000+05:30

Interesting discussion over the weekend with a few friends with C level responsibilities. People were cursing their past efficiency drives, that have boxed them in so much, that transformation costs look prohibitive as they attempt to do things different. Two things are constant : Change and Efficiency. How does one drive change in an environment that is running efficiently, and meeting customer expectations? At the outset the question sounds quiet ridiculous. If your place is running efficiently, and your customers are not complaining, why change ? We narrowed down the reasons for change in an efficient environment:

1) Aligning with eco-system changes

2) Meet the ever changing customer need that most of times goes unstated or not captured

3) Differentiate yourself from competition

Most of the guys at the bar counter cited reason 3 as the biggest driver to initiate change. Once a pioneer innovates and institutionalizes the processes to the extreme to drive inefficiencies, you have a tightly boxed in system that works like an well oiled assembly line with no need for any maintenance. It does not take much time and effort for your competition to observe and replicate. Giving the innovator the benefit of doubt, lets assume that competition does run the process less efficiently, at the end of the day, the innovator is no different from the competition anymore. They all offer the same service. Perils of service industry. One Tequila shot later, much to my delight, most of the people came around to a consensus that reason 2 is the trigger for change and not 3 - work on the customer , not your competition! More like the 3 idiots philosophy of run after excellence, success will follow. Apologies for digression, but this is how the discussion actually went into a tangent and a couple of us brought the prime issue back on the table. Does the efficiency drive kill your ability to change at reasonable costs?

Sometimes, the BI folks, who are generally at arms length from the nuances of business operations dynamics, come up with head turning stuff that becomes compelling to contemplate the change. Really good ideas that are disruptive and transformational, need the core processes to be uprooted and an invasive surgery done on the business operations to put an idea into action. To mitigate the risk of failure one decides to prototype and pilot. The costs associated with such an implementation approach are quite taxing on organizational bandwidth, time and coffers.

I though the cloud is a good way to offset some of these costs (non HR related costs). Lets say, the BI folks come up with a unique and different way to restructure mortgages that may/may-not deliver additional delight to your customers, but defiantly adds to your bottom-line without taxing the customer any more that status-quo . Your existing systems and processes are run at the best possible efficiency levels and hence are tightly coupled with the eco-system to deliver the results. How will you implement the prototype to test the concept without executing all the changes to the existing systems and processes? Will you ask your eco-system partners to participate in this change, and at what cost?

I would implement the challenger process on the cloud as a service. The only changes I would make to my IT setup would be to add integration points on my ESB to connect the service on the cloud to my data. This way I could get both the challenger and the campion process to work on the same data set ; and I now have an environment where :

1) Both the challenger and champion processes can run at the same time enabling more accurate comparison

2) They both run simultaneously on the same data set and hence I can compare results

3) I do not change my existing eco-system and hence offset the risks

4) In the event the challenger proved itself to be far more exciting and since I did not invest in changing my IT
eco-system to create the prototype, maybe I now have a more amicable scenario where one could discuss
the merits of running the process in-house or outsource it!

Some elements of investment cannot be shied away from. To implement the prototype, there will be investment needed on re-training, re-structuring and job role re-definition. Since this is a prototype, the scale is much smaller and change management easier. Walking thru this prototype experience also sheds light on the merits/de-merits of outsourcing a successful challenger prototype.

This approach requires building the challenger process from scratch and this could be done in a loosely coupled manner. If indeed outsourcing a successful challenger seems a good choice, since the prototype was built from scratch without tinkering with the incumbent mix of legacy/non-legacy / soon-to-be-legacy systems, you have a complete BRS that could just make the RFP really informative. One could look at using the prototype build as a bargain-able asset during negotiations with the RFP contenders.

I have not had the opportunity to walk this path as yet, but it seems a good concept and a framework to keep at the back of my head.

To Track OR Not To Track !

2012-10-03T11:16:00.001+05:30

In the absence of physical connect with the end consumer, the only way to understand your customer behavior is to analyse the way customers react to you solutions, their appreciation of your products and services and their affinity to your brand; all based on data from digital interactions. While most of this feedback is postmortem and /or near real time, almost all remedial actions are after a postmortem analysis. With systems getting integrated for meaningful service delivery, the IT infrastructure is more or less in a position to deliver real time analytics results that could be acted upon. We see this behavior in a lot of web properties.

Many organizations are gearing up to structure their digital assets to be need-aware and sense customer requirements. This happens thru having business tie-ups with digital properties with high footprint and then gauge customer's content consumption and subsequently drawing conclusions from the same. This way when a customer comes onto your portal, you are aware of the customer's browsing pattern and are in a position to personalize the portal experience. Selling becomes easy if you put your customer through a collage of content and track their behavior and the time spent with the content; before you prepare your selling pitch through personalization.

Most of the digital advertising world banks on customer's click stream information as the core constituent of their pricing model. Some models are based on clicks and some on views depending on where you are advertising. Many portals subscribe with third party digital advertisers rather than run their own setup, with customer click stream data being the basis of the billing models. With Microsoft pioneering the Do Not Click feature in IE10, the enterprises, specially the marketing guys, will have to really work hard to make the digital advertising world and the CRM strategies effective. While I am not touching upon the ethics part of tracking a customers behavior online in this blog, I am merely analyzing the challenges this will pose to the enterprise and the effect on technology strategies related to CRM.

Most organizations would love to anticipate customer needs without having physical contact with their customers, and most of this exercise on the ground today is all about what the organization thinks the customer needs rather than what the organization knows whats going on in the customer's mind. Most of the need anticipation data is an out come of analytics results based on the data an enterprise has on their customers wallet, life stage information and life style information. What's going on in the customer's mind is a result of what the customer is seeing and reading in the virtual world on the sites with whom the enterprise might have no business relationship. The only way to read the customers mind is to track customer browsing pattern and time the attention span given by customers to the content that is served up. I land on XYZbank.com after having ogled at the three new SUV models launched, the bank better know that and serve up interesting car loan offers on SUV. I land on XYZbank.com after having browsed thru news portals where the highlight of the day/week is the terrorist strikes and accidents that have taken place; the bank better know that and serve up insurance protection plans. I browse thru some interesting pictures on scuba diving, mountaineering and land on XYZbank.com; the bank better know that and serve me up some content that offers personal loands for holidays. To strike the iron when its really hot, information on my digital consumption is so very essential.

With Do Not Track, these challenges get a little more complex. While my view is that DNT is a flag that you can ignore if you choose to, but that mounts to getting pesky calls and SMSs on your cell phone after having registered for DND. If enterprises start asking customers permissions for tracking their behavior in order to serve them effectively, I am not sure how many customers will consent. Time will tell. For most advertisers life has become now more interesting and they will need to re-look at their basic business models to protect revenue. A consumer today cannot exercise similar choices on billboard ads, print, television and radio ads. They just ignore them or devote time based on their mood and need of the hour. Maybe the same makes sense in the portal world too. DND is essential on telecom side as SMSs and calls are an invasion of privacy on personal devices, where your phone buzzes insensitive to what you be engaged in at that time. Email spam is an invasion of privacy and the you could painfully unsubscribe to each unsolicited content that turns up in your inbox or clean SPAM folders from time to time. But, I guess digital advertising on portals could be treated the same way as billboard, TV and print ads, where consumers will ignore or pay attention based on their interest levels.

Part 1 : My First 90 days : Back to the School

2012-09-18T13:14:00.000+05:30

My last 3 weeks have been amazing. After my decision to return to a corporate job and in a completely unfamiliar domain, I have been having a ball. On my first day of work, I gathered every bit of 19 years of my work experience in the banking and financial services domain, locked it firmly in a box and walked into my new organization with butterflies in my stomach. I joined the Interglobe Group as their Group CIO. Interglobe is in the travel, aviation , hospitality and retail business with plans to enter the education domain. This is completely unrelated to the domain experience I have carried so far, or rather enriched myself with ( as per my resume - what crap!).

On the 1st day of work, my walk, to meet my peers and subsequently my boss reflected my excitement that comes with a new job, hopes and aspirations I carry of making it big in a new place and nervousness with a bit of fear of walking into a completely unfamiliar industry domain(s). I did a final check for the nth time to ensure that I was not carrying any baggage of my past from my umpteen years of BFSI experience! These things just creep in onto you if you are careful !

The lack of knowledge about the domain , and complete lack of knowledge on the non-BFSI office culture (it's so easy to anticipate attitudes and the culture bankers bring onto the table), makes one rather extremely humble, and pleasantly so. This humbleness and humility of not knowing the domain has been such a great asset in my management arsenal. I wish I had walked into every new job after my first one with the same empty head, absolutely no baggage of the past and with a great deal of humility and humbleness.

I was lucky that I made a few right choices on the approach to my new role. I decided to enroll as a trainee and understand the business operations of all the six businesses of the group. Its been three weeks now and I am barely thru 60% of one business and about 20% of the second and there is a great deal of learning yet to happen. The joy of learning truely rediscovered after almost 23 years!

My first job was at HDFC Ltd. I had joined as a Officer - IT (read programmer) having been picked up as a part of campus recruitment process. As part of my induction I spent 4 hours manning the reception desk at the Churchgate branch, managing customer inflow. I spent a full day as apprentice to credit appraisers whose job was to interview potential mortgage borrowers and assess their loan eligibility. I spent time as an apprentice to loan disbursement officer, who hands over the disbursement checks to delighted customers. I went on some very exciting loan recovery visits with the recovery officers assigned to 60dpd and 90dpd buckets! Spent time in the accounts dept helping them with their day-to-day accounting jobs. HDFC was a place where I went thru the branch and backoffice operations as a trainee for a month. I was recruited to program and hadn't touched a terminal to code for the first 30 days! That initial first month stood me in great stead right through the rest of my career. Thanks to this experience I was never an easy prey to ivory tower syndrome. Have always been rooted to the ground realities all through my career.

Now after 23 years, I am doing the same; learning a new domain. Spent some amazing time in the flight ops centre, the planning centre, with the engineering team and the commercial operations. Looking forward to hit the tarmac in blue overalls to check out the preventive maintenance, flight landing and take off ops. Looking forward to meeting the sales franchise, get my hands dirty with retail business ops and walkthru the hotel buss ops. So much to learn and so little time. I wondered again, why do I feel that I have very little time. I realize that its my conditioning of having to deliver a fantastic success in the first 90 days of my job. I decided to put myself off this misery. I walked upto my boss and told him that I need a 90 day window to learn every aspect of the business operation of the group and come back to him on the potential the group carries to leverage each others strengths and synergies - group IT themes that would contribute to both topline and bottomline.

This will be a very exciting journey. The group had decided to experiment by creating for the first time a Group CIO role. This is a new position and it is fascinating to hear the expectations various stakeholders have from a position such as this. It will take a great deal of influence to align perceptions to ensure realistic delivery, given my lack of familiarity of the domain and the current state of readiness of the group companies to work in a matrix structure, that they are so unused to. Its going to be a very harsh test of my influencing capabilities and I am excited to give it a go. In another two days, it will be 30 days gone and 60 more to go! For me it's really back to the school after 23 years of work experience! Wish me luck.

BYOD : Head in the Cloud...but feet on the ground

2012-02-23T00:18:00.001+05:30

BYOD (Bring your Own Device) coupled with cloud based services can turn out to be a killer combination. Just make sure neither you nor your enterprise get killed in the process!

I have been a mute spectator (intentionally so sometimes also known as "listen-only mode") to a lot of corridor talk, post seminar/symposium chatter and some dinner conversations around how my CIO friends are ushering in BYOD and trying to get cloud based applications and other cloud based resources married as part of enterprise IT landscape. I am a big supporter and advocate of such a philosophy. I am, however, very concerned about the manner in which this welcome approach and philosophy is being ushered into the corporate enterprise landscape and the manner in which implementations are being executed. There are some very grave risks associated with the immense benefits such and approach brings to your table.

One of the free and sticky bumper offer that usually accompanies BYOD is the complexity of device diversity. If one implements BYOD in its true spirit, then one has to cater to integrated enterprise apps to work seamlessly across all device types. Diversity presents itself both at the device OS layer and at the device form factor layer. Applications will need address both these challenges coupled with the challenges of version control and management. God help us all, if BYOD device support were to eventually become part of IT facilities management and enterprise helpdesk support offerings!

As with any software, vulnerability of mobile operating systems will get exposed as its proliferation increasing in the enterprises. This will usher in a whole new business opportunities for security software vendors on the mobile landscape, very unlike the opportunities that exist today. This will brings in the challenge of getting BYOD devices constantly updated for firmware and OS upgrades and updates. This will need to be ensured against the backdrop of the challenge that these are not corporate assets and employees have a choice of not to comply. Hence, I have deliberately avoided using the word mandate and stress on the word ensure.

The problem of device diversity and the device (device+firmware+OS) management can be effectively addressed by investing in an mobile application delivery and mobile device management platform. These platforms deliver on manageability, maintenance and governance aspects for mobile application and the mobile infrastructure landscape. These platforms are anything but inexpensive. Some CIOs might find, for their scale of rollout, the commercial benefits to bottom line from BYOD either not significant or completely off-set by the investments required for implementing the platform. These platforms are not yet available as a service, and there is a possibility of such a business model evolving. One needs to evaluate BYOD benefits and associate eco-system costs, in light of business benefits that will get delivered by virtue of business value creation. This model needs to be adopted not for saving cost but more to create and deliver business value benefits.

While the platform ensures management , maintenance and governance challenges are effectively dealt with, the framework falls flat in the absence of employee participation. While the enterprise invests top dollars in such platforms, the enterprises need to ensure that there is enough interest generated to keep the employee invested. If the employee chooses not to participate in the process of upgrades and updates on firmware and OS, enterprise security could take a beating. The secret sauce here is finding the right levers that will keep the employee continuously invested in the process and the framework.

Enterprise governance and security frameworks will be put to severe test as employees leave the organization along with enterprise data on their mobile devices. Seamless and timely de-provisioning of user network and application accounts tightly integrated with employee exit process, is still an issue many Indian corporates haven't yet addressed effectively. BYOD will only add to this already complex problem. An enterprise appstore as a part of the IT Infrastructure will only address part of this problem, that of application access de-provisioning. Having an appstore as a part of enterprise mobility brings other advantages on value creation front. Please refer to my earlier post titled Mobile : the double edge sword for more on this. An appstore just adds more to the investment dollars needed if one were to follow this approach.

I believe BYOD with cloud based architecture for application and storage infrastructure can be big value driver, if one has insights enterprise goals and needs and aligns mobility solutions to deliver the same. there will be significant investments needed to create a scale-able, secure and manageable mobility infrastructure which could potentially wipe-out the bottom line savings BYOD might offer (depending on scale and complexity involved), BYOD will almost definetly succeed as any other initiative, if it delivers on the goals of business value creation.

5 things that left a deep impression on me in 2011

2011-12-28T18:16:00.000+05:30

As the year comes to an end this Saturday, I reflected upon those 5 things that I saw that really touched me and left a deep impression. So here it goes a new post on my blog...

I am an average Indian with a strong desire to possess good things in life. In 2011 I totally fell in love with this marvellous, good looking sexy set of speakers. I would be willing to sacrifice my best friend's arms and legs in a bargain to own this thing! I find even the best of the good looking speakers resemble starwars R2-D2 wrapped in a waste paper basket with a black mesh cloth on top. None of the speakers have any artistry or elegence and absolutely lack charm. When I found these beauties in a magazine, I said, whooaa a design renaissance has swept the land of audio machines! This 5 feet tall assemblage of injection moulded horns and german engineered audio gizmo geekery get a AAAAA+++ ratings in my book. This is a made to order unit. It blends in the old school horn design - AKA- effeciency, range and nuance ; with hifi opulence - AKA- 27 ohm voice colls, 12 pound magnets and Keviar midrange cones coated in trillions of microscopic fibres to absorb high frequency distortion. One of the magazines described this beautiful creation as "A live concert in Henry Moore sculpture". If you really love this and want to own it, but cannot afford it then hiring an orchestra is the available cheaper option! Check out the price tag : USD 65,000/- per pair!

The only thing that kept me in the theatre during an otherwise not so impressive Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol was to catch a glimpse of this beauty - the BMW i8 concept car. What an amazing kickass piece of absolute genius creation. If this is a car, then the rest of stuff people manufacture in the name of cars is absolute shit. BMW calls this an emotional sports car. The fact that this can be fuel efficient comparable to a small car was laughed upon. But German engineering genius, being what it is, i guess boorrowed from its Check poor cousin! No offence meant to skoda here. Acceleration of 0 to 62 mph combined with a fuel consumption in the European cycle of under 3 litres per 100Kms are figues currently beyond the capability of any vehicle powered by a

combustion engine of comparable performance. I have started hating my C Class 220 after having seen the movie. e-Drive technology enables the car to charge its lithium powered battery from domestic power supply. The BMW i8 has been crafted by combining the modified electric drive system of BMW i3 fitted over its front axle, with a high performance three cylinder combustion engine producing 164 KW/ 220 hp and 300Nm (221 lb-ft) at the rear. The motor at the front axle module is connected to the combustion engine in the rear by an energy-tunnel which houses the high voltage battery. This gives the car a low center of gravity and the dynamic benefits that come with it. Well, I had explicity written down the specs of this car along with pictures and put it in the sock , making it easy for Santa to find one for me. I guess he goofed up this Christmas. Next time I see a Santa Claus , I am sure to kick his butt!

2011 has been a year full of protests against the establishment across the globe. Dictators have lost their lives, dictatorial governments are having tough time controlling the emotional outburst of people who were kept under disciplined oppression. There have been gory pictures of police brutality against women, monks self immolation, dictators brutual deaths, police action, rioting. Then there were some absolutely fantastic people who passed away and their images and pictures. Steve jobs, Dev Anand, Shammi kapoor, the gorgeous Elizabeth Taylor, Amy Winehouse , Sidney Lumet, Joe Frazier the boxing champ and many more people from the world of art, music and politics. There were pictures of non-violent mass protest movements of Occupy Wall Street and our own Anna Hazare movement of India Against Corruption. There were images of the Royal Weddings of Great Britain, Monaco and Bhutan. Among all these and scores of other pictures, the one that stuck out the most - for me is the one I have presented here. Against the background of June 15, 2011 riots in Vancouver Street over a lost game , there was this incredible 1942-A love Story moment. Only here, unlike Anil Kapoors movie, things were more explicit ! I am in awe of this photograph. Amazing. I thought such stuff was stage managed for movies. Happy to note these happen in real life as well.