BubblingThoughts

Unsettling Thoughts...

2009-01-19T13:01:00.000-08:00

This walk in the nippy, blustery New York weather was making me use every single muscle in my body, when they were virtually numb. Perhaps this majestic city was teaching me the skill to raft against the flow. Apparently, this was no more a 15 minute walk from the subway station; the only thing that kept me moving was the sight of my friend’s apartment from some distance.

Finally I reached the place with the hope to keep myself warm, but it was equally cold inside, Freddy had lost his software job a couple of days back in the recession. After spending some time with him, I left for my home, but with a thought for analyzing possible mitigations to this all-pervading catastrophe for smaller companies like the one Freddy used to work for. How do these companies stand the storm?

This somewhere reminds me of the early web boom and the subsequent bubble burst. Companies mushroomed up from nowhere, to get their share of the pie and some of them really sailed with the tide, but temporarily. Only companies who resorted to disruptive innovation could stand the downturn. Web based businesses like Amazon and Google not only sustained but thrived to become business leaders.

What companies really need to evaluate is that, if their innovation is really disruptive?

Recently, I was having a discussion with one of my fellow colleagues regarding how performing out of your comfort zone is a true test of one’s character, the same concept applies to businesses. This downturn is a test of the character of your business. This tremor though has shaken many Red Oceans but has surely created some new Blue oceans. Now it’s all about spotting and capturing those blue oceans.

InsideView is a good example both for disruptive innovation and identifying new blue oceans. It is a crawler for pulling business contacts from social networks and other web based resources thereby making the existing sales teams in companies more efficient, as the chances of recruiting new people are thin in the dipping economy. Innovative…isn’t it? This start-up could raise a $6.5 Million dollar funding on their innovation.

To my mind this is a new beginning, entrepreneurs surely need to think of new ways of doing business, new ways of strategizing, finding new markets. Now is the time to give up on orthodox business thinking, now is the time to think of value creation, don’t let the opportunity slip through your fingers because of your institutional blindness.

If we look at Gartner’s technology predictions for 2009, it again emanates from the shift in business outlook. With things like social software, virtualization, WOA and cloud computing making it to the Top10 does corroborate the perception of changing face of business.

I was reading through an article from Rita McGrath of Columbia Business School, where she had pointed out the non-value-addition culture in organizations today. Employees are always busy checking emails, taking phone calls, making some presentations, which if you step back and see do not really add any value to your company's disruptive strategizing. Going forward, companies need to reconsider these non-value chunks.

Companies also need to rethink their strategies for this difficult time. Strategy is always relative to the market-frame-of-reference, what was a great strategy yesterday might not even work today. Today, your clients need solutions which help them reduce the costs but at the same time offer the same value as before. This surely is a challenge, but challenges create opportunities, true… isn’t it?

Considering the paradigm shift that is reverberating across the global markets, to me, it’s time for companies to bring new thought leaders and at the same time making use of the conventional leaders by putting them in support roles.

Conclusively, I see this turbulence as a true growth opportunity for companies if they play it right. Think of the recent news article about Google dropping 100 recruiters, which might suggest that recruitment as an industry is going to face slow growth ahead but then we have LinkedIn growing as a career site at a faster rate than SimplyHired, and Monster.

Doesn’t this signal that disruptive innovation works…even in the bad times?

:- Muktesh Kandpal

The New Web for The Enterprise

2008-10-21T03:04:00.000-07:00

When I started on the web, the very idea that it is comprised of billions of documents weaved together by numerous links was quite enthralling. The definition of web has changed considerably since then, it’s becoming more and more a world of connected data then just connected documents.

Today the web which started as a huge information repository is changing the way companies run their businesses and the way people connect. For the enterprise, the new web is not only making optimizations to the existing business processes but also defining newer and better business models altogether. Here I try to analyze and explore the blue oceans for the web from a development solution provider standpoint.

In the “Emerging Trends and Technologies” research by Gartner for 2010-2015, few growth areas have been identified as “Hot Spots”. These include; The Real World Web (objects and places), Leveraging Connections (People and Community) and Redefining Data (applications and processes).

Assume the world where the online ads are context aware, a shopping web store, automatically redefines the product pricing/positioning based on a pre-defined set of business rules. A HR person utilizes a social network to know employee concerns, making policies around attrition, retention and recognition. Applications run independent of the device, so on and so forth.

Over the web, we’re progressing towards a developing a culture where the control shifts from the technology guys to the business user/end user. Web applications like Salesforce.com and the CMS enabled websites are early examples of this.

Forrester research in one of its reports, “The Dynamic Business Applications Imperative [2007]” brings up the concept of continuously evolving applications with changing business needs. They identify “build for change” as the key-phrase for next generation web applications. They say that, today applications designers take data integrity, performance and scalability factors into account but the new applications are going to be “build for change”, driven by business rules.

Also, Gartner in the “Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies - 2005” identified “Business Rule Engines” as one of the future technologies, and I see this playing a vital role in shaping the applications for the future.

The coming years are essentially going to change the way software gets architected. It’s already changing from colossal black boxes to amalgamated applications. The intelligence is moving from applications to data, with technology advancements as RDF, OWL and SWRL.

The new buzzword, Web 2.0, has shifted the spotlight from the enterprise to the consumer. If web 1.0 was all e-commerce, enterprise architecture, then web 2.0 is all consumers, it’s all user experience.

Someone may call attention to the belief that web 2.0 is a non-enterprise stuff; it might appeal to the younger generation but not relevant to the corporate. Moreover, companies have already started seeing opportunities in collaboration, blogs and tagging kind of web 2.0 practices.

This web 2.0 technology upgrade is surely an opportunity area for smaller vendors. CNet’s Antony Brydon says, “Corporate customers have distinct needs from consumers, but software companies, particularly smaller challengers, can employ consumer market tactics to take on large, entrenched rivals.” Ray Lane, former oracle president adds, "All these things that are thought to be consumer services are coming into the enterprise".

Web is becoming much bigger than what anybody envisaged it to be. In times to come, the demarcation between desktop and web application space is likely to get blurred. Google the bellwether of business models over the web is forging all its nerves towards defining this new model where web applications run and behave as desktop applications. Adobe AIR, Mozilla Prism and Microsoft LiveSpaces are again endeavors in this very direction.

Now what it essentially means for solution providers is that the rules of the game are changing.

Forrester envisions Service Oriented Architecture clubbed with B3 (BI + BPM + Business Rules) as the new computing platform and Information Workplace with Social Computing as the new user experience.

To my mind, I see some new roles emerging and firms should be ready to go belt and braces to hone their resource pool on those lines. Firstly, people who are responsible for defining and analyzing business rules are going to be vital. Forrester in it's report says, “In the Dynamic Business Applications era, business analysts — increasingly called business architects in some of the early adopter companies — must deepen their technical skills to participate in development more actively, creating models, business rules definitions, mashups, and other live assets to drive IT development.”

Second but perhaps the most important for web applications would be the UX consultants, the guys responsible for defining the user experience. These are the people who understand the UI aesthetics and user psychology at the same time. Though for business applications, these folks would need to whet their ability on “how it works” and “what options are available, technically”.

The business models for web 2.0 with enterprise systems would be an interesting thing to watch, but something important to take note of is that, web 2.0 in itself follows a services kind of model, and thus closely associates with SOA, SAAS style of applications.

Conclusively, one thing which I can indisputably say about the new web is that it gives new ways of solving old problems. The open question is that, Why won’t the phenomenal one-click usability breakthroughs come to the enterprise?

:-Muktesh Kandpal

Keep your business growing – A perspective!

2008-04-16T02:41:00.000-07:00

Businesses are like babies, they have different nurturing requirements at different stages of their growth. At the initial stages, business need to straighten their assembly lines, thus more operational effort has to be forged in, and then subsequent step may be, devising appropriate business planning and strategy for establishing the EDGE of your product or service offering, it goes on and on…., but the one essential requirement which would keep your business afloat at all times would be, the necessity to reinvent and evaluate your business processes relative to the market needs at regular intervals.

Enough examples can be cited from the past wherein, business dynasties have sunken either due to unawareness of the changes in the business environs, or reluctance to adapt to those changes. Today perhaps you can not think of travel agencies without a web counterpart. Those who got stuck to the conventional ways of doing business vanished altogether.

Another very vital requirement is getting good people on board. No, it’s absolutely not just a HR concern; good people will surely do great deals. All you need are people with thinking heads over their shoulders. We should always strive to hire people, with good learning curves, not people with good understanding of conventional systems (though it is needed at times, but the former should be a more weighed upon criterion).

Also, it’s always necessary to keep your key people (thinktanks) with you unless you cross the threshold of growth. Discuss your plans with them, take their inputs, appreciate/criticize them and be ready to be criticized. Let people work for themselves, be a facilitator for letting people execute their stuff.

Always work towards developing a core competency for your business, which in longer course would distinguish you from others. Normally, once you’ve decided your focus, you’ll start getting many deviating business opportunities to de-focus you. So are we not going to take that up? Technically speaking, if you can execute the requirements of that opportunity independent of your focus area, with your focus un-influenced, get a go ahead, but if at all it is other way round, Beware!!!

One of the most vital things which essentially has to be taken into considertation during your growth curve is "PROCESS ORIENTATION". All the endeavours should be towards building and defning business processes. The better processes are defined in your organization, the less you depend on particular people. This leads to lessening the SPFs (Single Point of Failures).

As the next thing, every company must have an appropriate client risk mitigation policy, which deals with risks involved in depending on a seasoned client. This normally is a missing manual in new businesses, and the reason why few companies getting regular business from one client, end up in dearth, once that client withdraws.

The key is, “Keep your brain fluids flowing”, there is always scope for finding voids in the already aligned businesses and systems. Develop an eye for locating that void, and strategize to capture that void with full force. The benefit to small business innovators these days is that, now it’s essentially “A Flat World”. If you’ve the mettle there are people (VCs/Angles) who will help you prove it.

Whether it is the changing pace of technology or the market paradigm shift, these factors always keep the entrepreneur in you kicking with spirits to outcast the competition and inevitably bring you to the same platform as the established players in your business.

My conclusive bottom-line remarks would be, “Know your onions well” and keep your eyes peeled, nothing is going to stop your business thrive.

:- Muktesh Kandpal

When do success stories help?

2008-04-10T00:29:00.000-07:00

I wanted to have a success story of my own. I was all aloof looking for somebody to come and enlighten the lamps for me. That one day, a beautiful, obliging success-mantra book fell onto my lap, piercing the tranquility shaped by the wars between varying ideations to carve my own success sutra.

It took me about four days to accomplish the commendable write-up, I ended up with high energy levels, planning things on the directions shown by the book, but say in about a time of 2 weeks it all proved to be a vicious circle. I realized that it could be something which sounds great but doesn’t really seem working on the scene of action.

I wanted to backtrack, what exactly success mantras result in. Is it so easy to make an educated fool realize that this the way you achieve it. One of my bosses used to say, “If at first sight you find anything nice, it actually is nice!”, that made me derive that if I was elited going through a write up, it does mean that it had some useful stuff for sure. So, how come such a thing, which my outlook finds helpful, does not really help me?

I just do not want to bang on about my theory of achieving success, but one thing which I deduced for myself is, that success mantras provide you with a framework, which may or may not help you out, but eventually architecture above the framework has to be built by you on your own.

The essence is that these are really helpful, but they have to be customized based on ones own persona, the better you customize it, the more it works for you. Nothing is a piece of cake.

:- Muktesh Kandpal
(my original post at wits.rediffiland.com)