Thinking outside Bar Code!

Am sure you are familiar with Taco bells’ caption – Think Outside the Bun!  This post is intended to explore the ways where we can think outside the Bar code!  In this post, Bar code is used as the metaphor for representing Standardization and Automation!

While the last post is all about certainty, this post is all about Standardization and Automation.  This is an extremely beloved topic in Enterprise application space, because standardization and automation leads to certainty and predictability.  Standardization, Automation also leads to mass production, cost efficiency and eventually commoditization.

Absolutely, nothing wrong with this concept. However, as we discussed earlier, the business that focuses only on cost eventually will get devalued. A business that focuses only on cost will not be able to improve its business performance.

The challenge becomes apparent when we stretch the concept of standardization and automation to almost all areas of enterprise applications. They are extremely good at digitizing transactions, but not relationships. They are extremely good at addressing complexity, volume/scale, and computation/analysis.

For example, I visit a rental library in Bangalore – called Just Books. It’s a professional business model that has standardized the business process, service catalogue, digitization/web presence, etc. Pretty neat model. When an existing customer does a transaction in the branch (issue of new book, or return of old book), absolutely no social contact / conversation required with branch staff. The firm follows a self-service model enabled by technology. The books are tagged with RFID. Hence, the books can be issued or returned by interacting with a digital kiosk. Job gets done!  Customers are so happy. Even kids could do it!  So simple!  No learning curve required!  This is a perfect example of automating a simple business process/transaction with a customer leveraging technology!

But remember, it’s a transactional scenario. How do you understand the customer, if you don’t talk to them, converse with them, and understand their customized needs or wants. How do you grow your business?  How do you get new ideas based on customer insights?  That’s the challenge!  The Bar code attitude will help us to reach only certain heights. Moreover, Bar code attitude is replicable and A better technology, better invested business could put the current model at risk any time.

Am not talking about digital businesses or e-Commerce here. That’s a different beast altogether!  Will discuss more on the same in a different post.  But, my concern is that even in brick-and-mortar businesses, in the name of standardization and automation, we are steering away from customers. We miss the opportunity to understand their customers, build relationships, build new business models, new growth engines.

So whatz the alternative?  I would have loved to see JustBooks creating community groups around different book genres, discussions/connect sessions with book authors, friend referrals based on book interests, etc. That would have been fantastic!  Then, JustBooks becomes a platform for sharing knowledge/interests and insights. This increases engagement with the business and would lead to new business opportunities! But, it may not be easily replicable across branches. The TCO may be high!  But, the brand as such may gain unbeatable value!

This whole new set of ideas can be enabled by deploying new set of technologies. That’s what I call systems of engagement, systems of personal fulfillment.  The system of engagement and personal fulfillment will become applicable only when it intersects with individuals/communities interests, desires, needs and wants.  The intersection is possible only when the conversation happens. When conversation is limited or eliminated as the increased cost to business, businesses will lose out all opportunities to sustain and grow!.  And these conversations could happen anywhere be it physical or digital media. It doesn't matter. The question is are they engaged. Are they engaged with your business.

The challenge of future businesses lie in creating context for customers to interact, socialize, work together towards a compelling interest/purpose.  This context needs to be created proactively by businesses.

From enterprise technology perspective, Analytics could help in identifying the context, social could provide the platform for engagement and mobile would become handy in providing personalized fulfillment services. All this could be powered by Cloud Infrastructure by serving elastic/scalable computing needs.

Design with Uncertainty!

Recently I read the quote by - Mario Andretti, one of the world’s most reputed automobile racing driver.

“If everything seems under control, then you are just not going fast enough”

I also like few other quotes on similar lines  

“If you know what you are going to do, its not research”

“If you absolutely know what the solution is, then you are not doing a strategy”.

I would like to slightly revise the first quote by saying

“If everything looks certain and absolutely measurable, then probably you are not innovating enough”

In a tough business climate, we all long for certainty. I see the micro-metering capability of our cloud computing models is exactly the reflection of our business sentiment.  We want to absolutely know measure and have a handle on the cash outflow on our computing needs. Perfectly understandable, if our focus is on cost!

However, if someone wants to build a whole new business model that makes breakthrough revenue, no amount of certainty is going to help.  Here, the focus is on performance and growth.  A business that constantly focuses only on cost will get devalued.  In order to generate growth and new revenue, it’s absolutely required to come up with new products/services.

There is a whole lot of discussion happening on the Net around the topic – Design Thinking.  Not sure how many people believe in it. I have started to believe in it as I study and practice more and more on the topic.

Am not going to explain and defend in detail about Design Thinking in this post. That’s for another time!. But, In essence, Design thinking is just an attitude. It’s a way of problem solving – applying a designer’s techniques/methods in solving real business problems!.  Some of the key distinguishing aspects of Design thinking are – Applying Abductive thinking (Asking what might be possible?),  Applying Divergent thinking before making a conclusion (Coming up with variety of options before concluding a solution).

The issue which I wanted to highlight is businesses hate uncertainty. Finance hates uncertainty (That’s why we hedge). Project Management methods hate uncertainty (as cost increases).  IT service contracts hate uncertainty.  Eventually, business suffers. Creativity suffers.  Innovation is hard to come by.

The more we apply our scientific, statistical, monte carlo methods, continue to baseline our plans (in agile), We constantly move away from ‘Artistic’ side of problem solving.  Scientific, Structured methods are absolutely necessary, critical in solving structured problems, where stakes are high and risks are unacceptable.  The artistic methods are people-centric, inherently learning (doesn’t assume a certain solution upfront) and may waste resources.

In order to solve wicked problems that are chronic, unstructured, Design thinking methods could certainly help.  Applying Design thinking in the project means you may come up with variety of ideas/solutions in the project, discard a few, combine one or two and form the final solution. Now this whole process may take its own course of time, based on the team dynamics.  How do you arrive at an estimate for such a scenario?  Certainty goes out of the window, when team dynamics comes into the picture.  That’s the reason we take people out of the equation and shift the focus on the process. Agile could be the answer? – Agile campus agree that a different approach needs to be taken for design thinking projects and Agile methods like Scrum can complement those projects.

Design thinking process necessarily involves understanding, observing, ideation, prototyping and testing.

The key question is – How do you package the design thinking projects in conventional IT services contracts?  There are various models such as Time & Materials, Fixed Cost, Outcome-based, etc.  Each one has its own flipside as they are suited to solve structured problems with certainty as the key metric.

Remember, compensation structures of sales executives are highly variable, dynamic based on revenue/growth. Unless such variability is introduced into business contracts, there wouldn’t be an incentive for the teams/partners to come up with fantastic ideas applying design thinking solving real business problems.

Industrial Internet - GE's Grand Renewal?

Recently, GE announced its new strategy called 'Industrial Internet'. Its based on well-known trend 'Internet of Things'.

By using Industrial Internet, GE intends to offer smart software services over their existing hardware product lines across various sectors - healthcare, aerospace, energy. They intend to do this by gathering massive amounts of data from those devices and then utilize the data for further analysis and subsequently towards the optimization of GE's own product configurations as well as the processes involved in those products. GE projects that a mere 1% of productivity achieved out of this initiative could lead to billions of savings. That's astonishing!. 

 

For example, a General Electric power could transmit valuable data about electricity usage that can then be optimized in isolation or along with other parameters/interrelated devices!.

Couple of aspects in this initiative are really interesting!.

- A Company articulates a strong conviction for future. In today's volatile times, by all means, this is a brave attempt by GE!.

- GE being a industrial conglomerate, articulates its strategies in terms of cutting-edge technologies - Big Data, Analytics, Data Visualization using Natural User Interfaces. The whole Industrial Internet idea is driven by GE's R&D

- At times when leading social/online startups are struggling to find their business value, GE articulates a compelling business value proposition of its new idea

- GE takes a architectural-approach to the solution. In one of the sections in the recently released report, it says traditional ERP products encourage only local optimization - optimization at product level or transaction level. Taking a industrial internet approach that gathers data from a variety of sensors and devices will have the ability to integrate and encourage a systemic approach to problem solving!. To me, that's profound value that was not possible before!.

- Declining cost of sensors and computing infrastructure, affordability of communication networks, increasing capabilities of statistics and algorithms all have been put to form a cohesive story that delivers a business value.

GE is going to rally around a large ecosystem of technology and service provides to pursue this vision in coming years.  To me, it sounded like GE's vision has lot of similarity with SAP, when it pursued Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture along with its partners as its Grand Vision a few years ago. Not that, GE could potentially reverse this direction or fail, but there are certainly significant challenges to overcome in its journey:

- All GE's products may not have the capability to emit data as required by the new ecosystem. Some products may need to be re-engineered / redesigned altogether to support this vision. Customers need to upgrade to new products if they need to avail smart services!. 

- Once hardware devices support emitting data, the next challenge is Quality of Data. All downstream activities such as analytics, visualization will be of value only when the underlying data is useful.

- GE's taking an architecture approach which is extremely difficult to implement. We know why - it is very similar to the challenges that I articulated in the post Why Enterprise Architecture is fundamentally failing. Though GE's vision is no where related to Enterprise Architecture, both are similar in terms of applying systemic thinking. And systemic thinking is hard, especially when it comes to siloed organization models.

- Is it GE's Grand Renewal?. Is GE attempting this whole thing only because it reached a saturation in its traditional businesses?. Is GE trying to move up in the value chain further?. Is GE moving into Services business?. Of course, its not trying to become a IBM global services or a SAP product vendor?. Of course, Not.  It pursues this vision purely an organic growth strategy, that builds on its own products/services targeted to their existing/new customers. 

In one of the interviews, a GE executive said - When it comes to devices, We are reaching the end of Physics. The next phase is to integrate digital information technologies to those devices to offer smart services to the client.

The future possibilities look very interesting!. And its all hybrid and versatile - mechanical with electronics, electronics with information technologies, information technologies with physical spaces/natural user interfaces.  

 

Continuous Clients - Holy Grail of Mobility and Cloud Computing!

Recently came across an interesting article by Gartner – differentiating apps Vs applications.  Most of the organizations are simply taking the ‘appification’ route by creating the miniature versions of their corporate applications to support Mobility.  Is it the right thing to do? Of course, NOT.

What is the fun in accessing online banking from mobile when you can comfortably access account details online. You wouldn’t want to heavy-lifting usages from your mobile, not just from security point, but also from usability perspective.

Some other companies prefer to deploy bare minimal, marketing apps onto the customers’ mobile devices.   Is that the right thing to do?  May be. But, it’s certainly underutilizing the potential of mobile devices.

Then, what’s the right thing to do?  Per Gartner, it is best to create ‘apps’ that are personalized and provide proactive services to the customer. In short, ‘apps’ should function like ‘virtual assistants’/’agents’ installed on their mobile devices which act as customer advocates to the organization. The traditional ‘applications’ provide ‘reactive and canned’ services to the generic customer base. And that’s the difference. How many ‘apps’ have you seen or used in your mobile devices, which truly understand your needs and wants?

In my view, Banking and Retail were the first few verticals to embrace multi-channel strategies. They were the ones started servicing customers by providing multiple delivery channels. Customers felt empowered and they could choose the channel based on the transaction/service needs or their personality/convenience levels.  People who were not comfortable interacting with technology can walk-into the branch and perform the transaction.

Few years before, when I worked in Banking IT, one of the key dream use case that was prevalent in Multi-channel was to provide the ‘continuity’ feature – continuity across channels.  For example, a person who starts an ‘Account Opening’ transaction in Branch should be able to continue in online banking and complete by Phone Banking. Isn’t that amazing?  Yes, it was a dream.  I have not personally come across any bank that claims to provide that kind of continuity across channels. 

The dream that the industry had in last decade has the potential to be realized NOW. I spoke about the reality of multi-screen customer experience in InformationWeek few weeks ago.  One of the key tenets of multi-screen user experience is to provide continuity across channels/ screens. 

I sometime think our daily lives are nothing but sifting through multiple screens during the course of the day – mobile in morning, PC/Laptop all through the day, TV or Tablet in the evening and mobile late night. Isn’t it true?

Now, all  through this day, you are shifting from one device to another. But, you wouldn’t want to explain your preferences to each device individually. Or you wouldn’t want to stop and restart your work on every single device that you use…including TV.  Nowadays, TVs are coming with processors.

And that’s exactly called as – Continuous Clients.  In my view, Continuous clients is the Holy Grail of Mobility and Cloud Computing. Why Cloud? – Because the continuity can actually be provisioned by managing the user state in the Cloud. And mobility in this case, applies to all kinds of devices that we use throughout the day.

The term Continuous client was coined by Engadget Blogger – Joshua Topolsky – and it’s widely referred in several implementations.  

More than this underlying concept, the scenarios and applications that can benefit from this capability would be more interesting.

How many times you have felt – you are watching a movie in your TV and you want to continue later in your tablet later in the day in different location?.  All this needs to be done without major plumbing!. And that is the wonder delivered by Continuous Clients.  Continuous clients need not span just devices. They can span across locations and platforms and media as well. All that matters is the user's state continuity across these transits.

Continuous Clients are the way to build Boundaryless Experiences!.

Analytics and US Presidential Elections!

Have you observed the statistics or mathematicians views on Big Data or Analytics?  They probably wouldn’t stress those jargons too much in their conversations.   Checkout Political Statistician Nate Silver’s interview and a question on Big Data.

In the world of Enterprise IT, there is no dearth of jargons – Business Intelligence, Analytics, Big Data, Insights, Data Mining, etc. There is good amount of time one needs to spend NOT on applying these techniques, but to get a perspective on what is real and what is not.  In Nate Silver’s words, in analytics world, one needs to have the ability to differentiate noise from the real signal, ability to differentiate real data from insignificant information.  I believe, in the World of Big Data, its lot more critical to understand and differentiate noise from the signal. Else, we could be easily misled in our decisions.

In the upcoming US presidential elections, Nate Silver predicts President Obama has a 73.6% chance of victory. Yes, 'Chance’ of victory, even though the number 73 is far more significant. Nate Silver humbly claims that he is by no means certain and that his analysis is a mere probability of a given result.  As this article points out, If a Weather forecaster tells you there’s an 80.9% chance of rain, she is not guaranteeing rain. But she is saying you should probably take an umbrella when you step out.

That’s exactly the perspective we should take when we approach Analytics in Enterprise IT – As Nate puts it, any model of real world is an approximation.  He also adds Data driven predictions can succeed or fail. Its when we deny “our role” in the process that the chances of failure rise.  To me, “our role” indicates the magnitude of organizational changes and people behaviors required to adopt analytics successfully.  We discussed about it in my previous post – Big Fat Truth behind Business Intelligence.

The need of the hour is to have a more people-centric, personalized view of analytics that doesn’t blindly believe in data, but to blend in people’s confirmation biases (based on social context – We find what we generally search for and We like to stand confirmed with the data that we find) and big picture (The same data could translate to a different interpretation in a different context) in which data is analyzed and interpreted.

Another news that caught my attention this week on analytics was around disaster modeling. A company named - Eqecat - does catastrophe risk modeling that helps to forecast losses from catastrophic events such as Hurricane sandy. This forecast helps government agencies and insurance companies for further planning and action. 

Visual Web - Rising Trend in 2012 and in Future!

What is common in modern platforms and devices - be it Windows 8, Apple iPhone/iPad and Android devices?

Very simple - Visual Appeal & Presentation.

All the latest devices such as Samsung Galaxy S III, Samsung Note are designed and marketed to the visual senses of end customers. All major platforms are researching and adopting design innovation in user interface/interaction.

Is this the next big thing?. Not really. The next big thing in user interface and interaction is claimed as invisible interfaces - meaning technologies will become embedded in real-word objects so that there is no specific or separate interface designed for it. Designing a separate interface to activate actions on the computing platform brings a separation in cognition and leaves an impression of operating on a secondary medium. Its not fully immersive!. So, We will soon be moving away from fantastic graphical user interfaces to invisible, natural user interfaces. But, I believe, even with the advent of immersive/natural user interfaces, graphical user interfaces will not go away completely.

With all your computing requirements can be addressed by cloud platforms, what do service providers do?.
If you have so much of computing power in edge devices - dual cores in mobile devices and tablets - what can you possibly do with such abundant compute power in the hands of end users?
When there is red ocean in the industry, and too many competitors, how do you stand out in the first place?. How do you make yourself deserve user attention, even for couple of minutes?

By designing visually appealing and useful services.

This decade belongs to visual design. Access any medium - be it newspaper, hoardings or main roads, websites - all are designed to appeal to your visual senses. The saying 'a picture worth 1000 words' is taken pretty seriously.

Have you observed the marketing campaigns of McDonalds and KFCs?. It is so flawlessly designed that you would feel the food is so good. That's the point. It may or may not taste good. But that's different. But, it looks stunningly good.

Going by its signature design, Windows 8 advises clients to invest in designing a good 'Tile'.

Going by the reality shows like American Idol, Indian Idol, one critic says 'Music is more seen than heard today'. Yes, everything is seen today - be it Music or Food - that are typically heard or tasted.

Why do you think Facebook acquired Instagram, a photo sharing site, for a billion dollar?

Why Pinterest, a visual intensive bookmarking and sharing site, gaining millions of visitors in couple of years of launch?

When I say 'Visual Design', its not the conventional, linear,navigational, user interface design. It is so web 1.0. The new Visual Design is all about Creative Design.

The new phenomenon is called as Visual Web.

Apu Gupta, CEO of a startup - Curalate - a marketing suite, says - "Images provide a visceral emotional reaction. Emotions drive discovery. Discovery drives clicks. Clicks drive revenue".  

Hence, investing in good images/visuals is actually designing for reaping greater ROI in user's emotional reactions and eventually greater financial returns.

If you are designing any new application for large scale users in 2012 and in near future, this is one aspect that you cannot afford to ignore!.

Calm Computing - Need of the Hour!

We have heard about Cloud Computing. I have written about Klout computing. I said in my LinkedIn status that my next post would be about Cognizant Computing. But, before that I found this ‘Calm Computing’ intriguing and need of the hour.

Before I start discussing about the term, would like to narrate few scenarios that would set the context.

Have you ever wondered why you end up spending more amount of hours in Internet than planned?

Have you ever started searching something specific in Google, clicked on a set of results and then you navigated from Google and you kept your reading / scanning on and on and lost the time and intent on where you started?  In search results, any hyperlink that you click ‘initiates’ or leads to a diversion.   

Have you ever clicked on the links recommended for you on news sites  (e.g. Harvard Blogs) and spent good amount of time without actually noticing the time lost?

Have you noticed the Facebook’ design of displaying your contact’s recent updates?. It will show the picture of yourself followed by a text box, waiting for you to add your comments. Pls note the ‘initiation of update’ is already done for you. All you need to do is to ‘complete’ the same. That’s good enough stimulant for the end user to add his comment.

Am sure most of us would have had these experiences. Internet sites are inherently designed to be ‘sticky’.  Sticky experiences help to generate relationships and transactions for the business. That’s the key. But, the flip side is that the end user ends up spending quite a lot of time involuntarily.

Distractions are everywhere. Email beep, Blackberry buzz, facebook social updates, advertising messages, phone calls – interruptions are pervasive.

While the biggest boon of today’s trend is abundance of technologies and devices, the bane is the attention deficiency. People are constantly distracted and there are tons of books, tools, techniques to help them to get focused on their work.

Have you ever wondered why so many to-do list apps are there in the industry?. Just search for a perfect to-do list app, and you will get tons of them.

I believe people want to get focused. And To-do list app does just that.

I believe today’s web user interface design is meant to facilitate constant information flow and constant feedback loops.  Starting from Google’s all-white web page design with list of clickable search results to Facebook comments update - all commercial internet sites apply the same principles.

This phenomenon may not apply to business applications. But with advent of Consumeration of IT, We may apply these practices to business applications as well unknowingly. 

So, if someone is addicted to Internet, its no surprise. The design leads to constant use and potential addiction.

So, What’s the solution?.

If User Interface design experts are helping to design ‘sticky’, same geeks are giving ideas to design for the opposite – to design for focus, to design for user attention.

Before getting to the solution, let us see what are the alternate user interfaces that we are used to, that helps us to focus our attention?

-          Conference rooms in offices which have small window and rest of the wall in the rooms are either covered with tinted glass or sealed. This helps the participants to focus on the meeting without getting distracted by the outside noise and whenever the participant wants to get the view of the office outside the room, they can always look through the small window.

-          Have you been to meditation halls where the hall is devoid of all unnecessary objects except one or two objects of focus?. (e.g. a glowing candle)

-          You can add lot more here… J

Is there anything that we can take from these physical interface designs and apply in our virtual world? This should help us to design user interfaces that would help users to focus and converge their attention on specific tasks/actions.

I have thought about this problem and potential solution a while ago and believed it was innovative. Not true. As the saying goes – Innovation happens elsewhere – and there are user interface design experts who have formalized this design paradigm and identified certain design principles for implementing encalming experiences.

They  call it ‘Calm Computing’. Its all about designing or engineering user interfaces for calming the human attention, helping to achieve focus. Search for this term and you will get tons of links that will direct you to more information on this topic.

Charlie Bess of EDS has been blogging about it in the topic of ‘Attention Engineering’.

With the abundance of devices and services, the critical need of the hour is to design applications that will apply Calm Computing principles that help the users to achieve their objectives without loosing too much of their precious resource – Time!.

Social Analytics and Relationship Management!

There is a good amount of traction on Social Analytics from Marketing departments. CMO Teams are experimenting their discretionary spending in listening platforms, sentiment analysis, campaign impact measurement, amplification rates and competitive intelligence metrics.

The mainstream investment is yet to kick-in in Enterprise IT space. In my view, Social Analytics is all about Qualitative intelligence whereas traditional analytics is all about Quantitative intelligence.

Where do you typically need Qualitative intelligence?  When I say Qualitative intelligence is all about something that is not measurable, not explicit, lies as tacit knowledge in people's minds, often not expressed in numbers, generally not quantified, subjective. By means of subjective, the intelligence also largely depends on cultural bias as well.

Now, Where do you seek and use such intelligence?. We all know Quantitative intelligence is something that everybody seeks in structured financial investments/reviews or operational improvements. But, Where do we use Qualitative intelligence?

Hitherto, We seek Qualitative intelligence from people. We talk to people our inner circle and our networks to figure out what is subjective opinion on certain individuals/institutions/products and services and then We decide.

But, with arrival of social networks, its much easier to capture such information from Social Analytics tools.

In my view, Qualitative intelligence is lot more applicable in relationships whereas the numerical intelligence is applicable in transactions. What do we mean by relationships and transactions?

I remember reading the following saying few years go...

"You focus on transactions. Relationships will not grow.

 You focus on Relationships. Transactions will grow naturally".

Unfortunately, with intense competition and scarcity for time, everything is a transaction now. The responses are almost instantaneous and the relationships are volatile, as choices are too many.

Then, When do we really have relationships?. I think Relationships are a must-have in long-term associations...or a series of short-term engagements. CMO team approaches relationships from the second perspective – series of short-term engagements.

In that context, I see social analytics are lot more relevant in relationship-centric environments such as

- Measuring customer feedback in services' firms Offshore Delivery centers

  (I recently gave a survey to my car dealer on their recent car service.  They asked me to force fit my rating into only three categories.    For example, the service executive asked "Do you want to us rate as Excellent, Good, Bad?"    I said "Average". I explained the reasons for the same opinion.   Unfortunately, they couldn't complete their survey, because their system expects only one of the three above mentioned ratings!.  That's crazy!. I could still force fit my survey rating. But, it would mean the auto dealer will lose the value of my feedback. That's exactly the Qualitative intelligence I am referring to).

- Measuring Employee Performance for Leadership roles (Largely deals with perceptions)

- Measuring the perception of say, a real estate firm, based on its past deliveries/customer services (again perception driven), before somebody makes a huge investment

In all these scenarios, stakes are high and data/information is scarce while decision making.

In all these examples, I am not saying Quantitative metrics doesn't matter. But, Qualitative information weighs a lot more, which is often overlooked.  In fact, Qualitative intelligence with corresponding quantitative metrics, it could be a winner metric all the way!

In some of the scenarios, Social analytics is also used to compute the impact in short-term transactions such as measuring the impact of time-bound marketing campaigns (internal/external).

Its very valid, but using social analytics in relationship management will create greater impact than transactional scenarios.

Today, Social Analytics is all about Marketing because that's where it gets funded and largely public data focused such as Twitter, Facebook, etc.  This is required. But, let's not get skewed that public social is the only social.  

There is good amount of social activity happens in Intranets (beyond Twitter, Facebook, etc.). There is good amount of social activity happens in non-digital world as well (Phone, In-person meetings, word-of-mouth opinions)

If we depend and derive our opinions based only on pure-play social analytics that monitors public facing sites,  We should also be aware of their boundaries. And there are tons of opportunities to employ social analytics in lots of business and social scenarios.

Insights from Social Analytics should ultimately help us to improve our relationship management actions!.

 

Social Engineering in Action - by LinkedIn!

Am not a big fan of Social Networking sites. Have ranted about my perspectives on famous social networking sites in my earlier posts. But, a recent initiative by LinkedIn really got my attention. Would like to share my observations on this initiative and some of the key take aways in this post.

In all my previous companies, the HR department typically chases employees every six months to update their individual skill sets and certifications. This information is used by Resource Managers to identify the best people required for the upcoming business opportunity, be it consulting or application development or system integration. Obviously the HR initiative falls flat consistenly with meagre employee engagement resulting in incomplete / inaccurate data.

Then IT department changes the look and feel of those competency management tools and releases a simplified new version to appeal to its employees. Assuming employees would embrace the new system, there would be new set of internal marketing / evangelization undertaken within the company. Guess What?. The pursuit falls flat again with discouraging results!.

The reason for failure is simple. Employees don't see value in return for submitting their individual skill sets/expertise/certifications.  There are no organizational incentives that compliments the IT systems to encourage the employees to submit their individual information.

LinkedIn has solved this very issue in capturing the skills data for individuals who have registered their profile with LinkedIn.  This blog post is all about the idea LinkedIn has applied in achieving decent results.

If you have been a observer of LinkedIn in the last few years, you must have seen the company morphing itself from a Professional Networking solutions provider to a Social Job Portal. Nothing wrong with that!. Its the business model that LinkedIn has adopted. Its definitely better than a business model that is completely dependent on pure-play advertising!.

Guided by its business model, LinkedIn was pestering me to provide details on my skills sets for quite sometime.  It sent me email reminders. It tried to influence me that providing details would help me to land great opportunities!.  Of course, I didn't budge!. and LinkedIn also gave up after few weeks.

Now during last week, I received about 10 emails from LinkedIn stating that one of my ex-colleague has endorsed my skills in several areas.  I received one email per skill set that is endorsed by my connection. What an Idea?

LinkedIn has cleverly applied the idea of nudging my connections to endorse my skill sets. And it really worked!.  Have also started receiving periodic emails from LinkedIn stating various conenctions of mine endorsing me in different skill areas.   Whenever a connection of mine visits my profile, LinkedIn asks the question to them if they would like to endorse me in a variety of skills areas.  If they are interested, they could endorse it and the number of endorsements appear in my profile.

 A very complex challenge that enterprises have been struggling to tackle for a long time has been solved by a very simple social idea.

The key observations that I derive out of this idea are:

- Your social connections may know little more than what you think they know about you. Of course, some of these could be mere perceptions or inaccurate information.   But, Please note having some data with less accuracy is always better than having no data at all (like the HR department example)

- By having connections endorsing your skills, LinkedIn has pulled the right levers in the interest of its business model.    It had an insight that connections would have some knowledge about an individual's skill sets.

  It also had an insight that connections would be willing to help the individual by doing the simple act of endorsements.   By helping the individual, the connections also help LinkedIn to gather more data that would be useful in its job / candidate matching.

- The unintended side-effect is that the individual may feel happy about the endorsements and may also like the connections who did the endorsement.    This could nudge the individual to renew their connections and reopen the communications with the people who have endorsed.

- Above all, the intiative helps to generate 'more' data that is decent and useful in a business and social context.   It helps to keep the system 'live' and 'fluid'.

[Would also like to add another example here by LinkedIn itself. In initial years,when somebody registers their profile with the site, it would ask certain set of information under pre-defined categories. And it would also let the user know how much percent the profile is complete with information. (e.g. 80% or 70%).  Letting the user know and indicating the completeness would potentially nudge the user to provide more information and make it complete. Pls note here the user is influenced to provide information in favor of LinkedIn's business. But the individual perceives its towards the benefits of his own interests.  Initially when I created the profile, I made it 100% complete. Now if I look at my profile again, it says 90% complete. I was wondering why?. Because, LinkedIn wants my resume also to be uploaded to make it 100%. Isn't that a great idea?. If I am a novice user, I would certainly upload my resume and make it complete. Unfortunately for LinkedIn, am not!. :-)]

This is a classic case of Social Engineering, where you are subtly nudged to do certain things in favor of an individual or a business, without major effort.

Am sure We are going to see lot more examples not just from LinkedIn but from other leading companies in near future!.

Hollywood: Inspiration for designing Next Generation Workstyle?

 

Recently, IBM bought a company called Kenexa.

 

SAP bought successFactors.
Oracle acquired eTaleo.
and now its IBM's turn to pickup a HR technology company.

The reason this news caught my attention is that Kenexa is not only a technology company that has HR solutions, but also provides HR services such as Hiring/HR consulting, etc. Now, that's interesting. Initially, I was thinking its a innovative idea from IBM perspective. But later, I had to change my mind and hence this blog post. Read on to find out why!

IBM has acquired not just a software company but a services/operations company as well, in HR space. Essentially, its a vertical integration of IT services business, where the IT services organization delivers the complete business operations enabled by technology.

Now, lets take a small detour...Go thru the following list and try to figure out what is common

Apple
Prosumers (Integration of Producers/Consumers)
Sellsumers (Consumers who sell their data/insights to corporations)
Tasksumers (Consumers who make money by doing small tasks for other consumers)
Single point of contact
Single window clearance

All these are examples of vertical integration where couple of responsiblities are fused to single individual or  organizational entity. The fact is single window clearance in Govt context is so attractive not because its accountable and delivers results, but because coordinating with multiple entities within the Govt is time consuming!.

We live in highly-networked, Globalized World. We live in times where we have the unique opportunity to network with
virtually anyone in the World, thanks to advanced communication technologies.  Still, the irony is We believe vertically integrated business models succeed!.

Vertically integrated business models indicates the degree to which a firm owns its supply chain, either upstream or downstream. Irrespective of the outcome - products/services - of those vertically integrated business models, people perceive  those models are highly reliable, accountable and products are superior and world-class.  It could be true!.

 

But, the question is - with the far reaching capability of social/professional networking, are we losing the opportunities to create world-class products/services by leveraging vertically disintegrated business models?. Unlike integrated business models, in a disintegrated model, the scope gets partitioned across several organizations that have their own specializations that gets finally integrated to deliver a product/service.

 

The more we disintegrate the responsibilities, the more we co-ordinate & co-create with diversified stakeholders in a network. The more we disintegrate and unify the capabilities in the network, more innovative the end products/services would become.  But, does it also mean 'more chances of failure, more failure points?'. Possibly Yes.

 

Do we have examples?. Of course - What do you think 'Open Source Movements' are?.
There is no integration, There is no reward/incentive, There is no measurement criteria, There is no single point of contacts, There is no raci chart, Still the movement created a tremendous amount of impact in IT industry. The essence of open source development is all about 'coordination'.

Unfortunately, We couldn't replicate open source models within enterprises. Will we do the same mistake in Enterprise Social Networking?. We need to wait and watch.

In the industry, we constantly oscillate between integration and disintegration or centralization/decentralization. The question is not to ask - Either this or that, but to ask when to apply what?

But, as we have access to abundant data/computing power/professional knowledge across the globe, following a vertically integrated model would be a lost opportunity where we give the entire control to a single entity!.

What is another example of Vertically disintegrated model?. - Very simple - Hollywood industry.
Making a movie involves involving professionals from multiple business entities and they all work together to create a successful movie. The entire team gets dismantled once the movie is complete.  Remember, with a variety of stakeholders from different entities, Intellectual property is still managed and results get delivered. The essence is 'Coordination' across entities, not just individuals.

While the traditional project management works under the premises of 'integrating' resources to deliver reliable services, breakthrough innovation can only happen by 'willingly coordinating' individuals/entities.

Soon, some pockets of our workplace could get transformed to the way the Hollywood works!.
 

Unpredictable Analytics!

This is my 200th post! :-)

Thanks to all my readers who continued to frequent my blog for all these years and encouraged and shared similar perspectives!

When it comes to digital media, We have the problem of abundance. That's the reason we have so called 'Big Data' solutions. 

Abundance everywhere - be it mobile devices, its features, social media, its humungous lifestream data, and other typical web 2.0 channels such as blogs, wikis, etc. With abundance, people end up having too many choices and often challenged to seek clarity when trying to identify the best thing that suits them. 

To top it all, We have new generation professions called 'Data Scientists' and 'Social / Big Data Analytic' solutions which promise to give some of the unique insights that were never available before - be it competitive intelligence, customer sentiment, persona analysis.

Again, Analytics opens up a floodgate of opportunities which again businesses have to figure out which one is the best to take advantage of.  Regarding Analytics, I came across a very interesting perspective shared by HP-EDS fellow Charlie Bess - who says that analytics should enable us to contemplate on questions that were never asked before, rather than answers/insights. In my view, its a profound statement!.

He goes on to explain - Don't analyze the transactional data of your own customers, instead ask why the similar customers in the market are NOT buying your products/services?. What are their preferences which you are not addressing?. 

The moment you identify a question that was never asked before, you have a innovation opportunity. Today's marketplace has tons of answers seeking questions - be it all new technologies/solutions/devices/services.

But, Identifying the question is not so easy! :-). It's a integrative competency that encompasses many aspects including business acumen, customer insights, technology trends and product/service leadership.

Would like to give another example...I am choosy when it comes to shopping. I dont mind visiting multiple shops/malls when it comes to shopping a product/service that meets my quality requirements.

The Retail store can do lot more data mining and analytics when it comes to analyzing the purchasing pattern of its customer base. But, What happens when an existing customer has a preference, visits the store, doesn't make a purchase, but walks out simply. That's a missed opportunity. I have done that couple of times. Am sure, many shoppers do that especially when they have a clear expectation of what they want to buy.

Often, these opportunities go unnoticed because the customer doesn't make a digital interaction with the business/store. Hence, it goes unnoticed and becomes a missed opportunity!.

If you've observed, in small pharmaceutical shops, if the same scenario had to occur, the pharmacist prompty takes a note of the unavailable prescription and even offers to deliver when the stock arrives in a day or two. But, it doesn't happen in all kinds of retail. 

The question to be asked here - Is there any loyal customer who visits our store and doesn't make a purchase?. If yes, why?

I firmly believe the future service innovations deeply depend on mining the innovative questions. And that requires a unique capability!.

In my previous organization, as a Technology/Architecture practice lead, I was also running Innovation charter for one of the lines of business. In those days, when we run out of good ideas from conventional Innovation workshops, my Director used to challenge me saying - 'The recipe for innovation doesn't lie in analyzing tech trends and coming with cool ideas. The recipe lies in identifying unique business problem statements that are yet to be solved'. Very True!.

In summary, as my other favorite blogger Vinnie says - The idea is not to find out just 'Why'. Creativity is all about asking 'Why Not'.

IT Architecture Meltdown - Agile is NOT the answer!

In the last post, We discussed about the diminishing role of IT Architecture in Enterprise IT.

The meltdown was mainly attributed to couple of reasons:

- Implementation/Development of Business systems are complete or consumed as a service

 (The business systems include system of records, system of transactions and even systems of engagement)

- IT costs are constantly scrutinized for business value. In understaffed and underfunded IT projects, Architecture would be the last thing that gets focused.

- Continuous Disruption in Technology space opening up a huge but uncertain canvas for experimentation and business innovation.   Experimentation / situational solutions calls for spontaneous processes.

If traditional IT architecture practices dont match up to the needs of today's requirements, what is the alternative?. Would 'Agile' help?

We have been discussing about the role of 'Agile Architectures' or 'Agile Methodologies' for coming up with solutions quickly. But, they have their own caveates namely.

- Agile methods are suited for building systems where there is uncertainity in underlying technology or uncertainity in business requirements. However, In today's times, the customers are lot more smarter. They are pragmatic, incremental and absolutely clear about their next 2-3 steps.

- Agile Architectures / Agile modeling concepts largely thrive on 'emergent architecture' patterns. The philosophy here is that 'Architecture' evolves as the business requirements evolve. Again, an expensive assumption to make in these times.

- We have also heard a lot more on 'Agile' Systems where the systems would be flexible enough to be responsive to changing business needs. This means the systems could have been over-architected to accomodate multiple unforeseen scenarious in advance. Yet another expensive approach.
- Agile methods also require the product owner to spend quite a lot of time with engineering team to continuously review and refactor the requirements and the software. All this was acceptable in a development life cycle where you have several sprints/several interim releases. Today, fully functional releases are expected in weeks not in months. So, Product Owner would rather like to spend his time with his own customers/end users than with engineering teams.

In my view, the traditional IT architecture as we know it, is dead!

If 'Agile' is not the answer, What is the next best alternative?. In my view, the next best alternative doesn't exist yet in proper shape and form and it needs to be invented/designed.

Would like to highlight some of the critical considerations for the next best alternative:

1. The traditional architecture practice focused on 'business requirements', 'static structures' and 'runtime behaviors'.    If traditional architecture is closer to 'software engineering' and 'management systems', new age architecture is expected to be closer to 'end users'. (not the sponsors)

  

2. The past decade focused on building 'systems/solutions', while today's expectation is build 'meaningful experiences'.    The 'ends' are far more important than 'means'. It doesn't mean that processes can be ignored, but they are taken for granted.   Unfortunately, We focused too much of our efforts on 'processes' in the past decade that we are poorly prepared to build 'experiences' in coming years.

The olden days architect thrived on his own technical strengths and political ability in internal organizational ecosystem. This is no longer adequate.  To be a successful architect today, it requires a lot more understanding on markets, trends, business, technology and more importantly end users and their social context.

An IT architect from past decade can morph into a new form to address these new requirements. But, We may not call him as 'Architect' anymore. Probably, a 'Service Director' or 'Experience Director'. The Director would be responsible for the overall creative outcome of the project.  I wish to see the traditional Project Manager role to morph into the role of something like a 'Production Manager' who manages all non-technical/non-creative aspects but critical for delivery such as logistics, resourcing, finances, stakeholder management etc.

In order to effectively leverage IT architecture in Enterprise IT, it is absolutely necessary to categorize/tier the systems in the order of importance as we discussed in the last post. For example, System of Records and Transactions need a lot more stable IT architecture than systems of engagement and systems that deliver experiences.

In summary, We still need traditional architecture methods and practices, but to 'maintain' our business-critical/supporting systems 'not' to address the new age business requirements.  What we need today are the frameworks, architectural processes and project management methods that would enable us to deliver 'amazing IT services & experiences spontaneously'.

Would like to stress upon some of the significant aspects of the above statement:

- We are not going to build systems and solutions - but services. Services by themselves are co-created by consumer and producer, short-living experiences.

- We live in times of plenty. To differentiate truly valuable services, they have to deliver 'amazing' experiences/results. Mere functionality is not enough.

- We need to deliver services 'spontaneously'. We should be able to deliver expected/instinctive results almost instantly.

    

Are we prepared?

IT Architecture Meltdown - Are we prepared?

If you are an IT Architect, Am sure you must have come across a similar situation in your career..

Few years ago, in my previous company, I used to lead Architecture practice. During those days, One of the senior program managers came to me asked - 'Bala - As you know, We are developing this application for an internal need, do you think we need to go all nine yards in Architecture?. Is it even worth it?. Can we do it in some scripting langauges like cold fusion? Would that suffice?'. My answer was a resounding 'Yes'.

In most of the unstructured scenarios where a new custom application gets developed, it may be worthwile to watch out for following scenarios:

- The so called new app may be for a non-critical internal business need
- The app may be an interim arrangement till a suitable solution becomes available in the company / market.
  For example, most of these custom apps may get replaced by a huge ERP or a cloud service or COTS package in near future
- The underlying business process itself may be temporal / short-living in nature
- The app can be an 'early-bird' experiment in a specific technology - for example, a mobile application for a specific platform.

In all these cases, the app is not expected to be built for durability. I would like to stress the word 'durability'.
Durability calls for high-commitment, high reliability, huge upfront costs/investments, plan for future support (example - versioning). In short, durability means 'built to last'.

In the absence of durability, we are referring to a low-touch, low-commitment application. You may say, it may of of low-quality.  And Customers are perfectly fine with that, purely because of the fact that those apps are not expected to be durable.

Only when you build a highly durable software, you will need the 'Architecture'. Having a robust architecture will address all the non-functional requirements of the software.

In my view, we are at the 'tertiary' phase of Enterprise IT applications, where the core apps that form the foundation & custom apps that form the differentiation were all built in the last few decades. We have now entered in to the decade of discontinuities where architecture multiplicity has become the norm, not the exception. Business is flooded with abundant of choices in disruptive technologies with their own architectural choices - be it mobility, social media, cloud and analytics.

And We live in highly uncertain times where predicting the business climate for next few months itself has become a huge challenge. For the first time in many years, Indian IT services company Infosys has suspended its quarterly revenue guidance, owing to uncertainities across its global customers across many verticals.  In those conditions, businesses are forced to take tactical, incremental and sometimes non-durable/experimental steps to sustain and grow the business. Of course, not to mention with least upfront costs. In another story, most of the IT outsourcing companies are holding around hundreds of thousands of people on Bench - without utilization - due to decline in demand.

In times where just-enough functional outcomes are valued lot more than durable qualities, Architecture would be underutilized. If done in force, unvalued by the business.

And that is exactly happening in the industry right now - be it Enterprise IT or outsourcing / IT services industry.
For Architects who have not come to terms with this reality, finding themselves misplaced and misunderstood. And businesses end up underutilizing Architecture in places where its not appropriate.

The whole reason that triggered me to write this post was an article on the traditional civil architecture called - Architecture Meltdown - that talks about the fate of building architects post recession.  For hundreds of years, art and architecture usedt to be the symbolic representations of a city's prosperity.

Ok, If this is the issue for the Architecture meltdown in Enterprise IT, what is the solution?

Is the role of Architect dead and not required any more?. If not, what are the options in leveraging the best of Architecture and Architects in these uncertain times?

Have some suggestions...Stay tuned for my next post.

Marketing Blue Ocean Strategies!

Am sure most of us must have come across the bestseller business strategy book Blue Ocean Strategy. Blue Ocean Strategy is all about achieving high growth and profits in business by creating uncontested market space and making competition irrelevant.  This is essentially accomplished by coming up with innovative products/services. In contrast, Red Ocean is all about competing head-on in traditional marketspace with conventional or rapidly commoditizing products/services. And in the book, you find several examples of companies that have demonstrated the benefits of Blue Ocean Strategy.

If you observe the examples, you will find the likes of Apple, Nintendo, Air Asia and others. Of course, being big and daring to take risky market adventures is no small feat!  Some of these companies also have the advantage of an established brand by having competed in red ocean products/services. Hence, when they enter into blue ocean (such as introducing something like iPod), they demand attention regardless of the merit in the new product.

The question is - How can small fishes enter and succeed in Blue Ocean?. For one, startups & small companies may not have enough clout/marketing budget. Second, by virtue of being innovative, none would be able to understand & appreciate the new product without enough marketing. So, How could they be successful in marketing their unique products/services?

As Jack Trout says there is no objective reality when it comes to marketing. There are only perceptions. Marketing when undertaken purely on product merits regardless of perceptions is sure to fail.

However, When it comes to startups/smaller companies, there are no market perceptions on the company.  People neither love it nor hate it, because they may not know enough yet. That's not a nice situation to be in!.

When it comes to Online Marketing, We are still in light bulb stage!.  Would like to quote couple of examples here.

1. The social analytics tools such as PeerIndex, Klout and Twitalyzer report the most influential people on the Internet. They are highly reputed, established and successful in the offline world as well. They report people like Deepak Chopra, President Obama as top most influential people. Come on!. They are and would continue to be influential and successful
even without Twitters/Social Networks and other online tools.  We dont need analytics tools to report these findings.

2. Digital Marketing thrives on keywords, search and celebrities. If you dont have a presence in any of these, you are lost.
   For example, if some one comes up with a new vocabulary, new word (example - web 2.0), it wouldn't be successful and top the listings unless its quoted by an online celebrity or gains enough traffic.   Recently, I was introduced to a new word called - Filter Bubble - by Venky, who is a regular reader of my blog.   Though Filter Bubble is a brand new word, Search engines will get you plenty of results because it was coined by a reputed online activitist (who has klout) and there was a TED presentation on the same.   Keyword based marketing takes a mechanistic approach and limits the possibilities of innovating / discovering and amplifying new concepts!.

3. All Internet marketing efforts are based on quantitative analysis of content such as page ranks, klout computation, number of hits, retweets, etc.  Keywords and traffic hits rank humans?. Excuse me! :-) They are not based on qualitiative assessment or the merit of the content.   Unless this happens, We wouldn't be able to unleash the potential of the Internet and its Innovation diversity.   Using Online tools, you would only be able to find what you would like to know. How will you discover something radical which you dont know, but that exist online?

   May be, the next generation online tools could leverage semantic technologies assisted by Human intelligence to qualify the content and reach the required audience.

I was trying to understand how Facebook and Twitter became popular despite being new & small in the market. Facebook became popular because it was launched and grown in universities till it gained a significant mass. Twitter grew significantly by having celebrities signing up for the service.

But, Marketing innovative concepts/products/services pose a unique challenge given the top limitations. This applies to marketing products/services born out of Blue Ocean Strategies as well, especially from Startups/smaller companies.
So, What is the next best alternative?. The best way to amplify an innovative product/service is to first create a 'local density' - a small group of people who would turn as advocates, salesmen, tribes who communicate and support each other in the community around the new offering. And they would need to connect with 'Connectors' who can bridge them to larger communities. (like Facebook did) as mentioned by the 'Tipping Point'.

Apart from online efforts, TED conferences were widely recognized as platforms for spreading ideas. Some of the TED ideas are worth listening to and has the potential to influence the audience. However, there is another dispute here that talks about what influences the TED conference sessions themselves (including celebrity sessions) and their usefulness in recent times!.