What does companies like Infosys do?

Thats a good question. A friend asked me. What is the difference between a product company and services company (in other words, a services department in a product company and services company). How could companies like Infosys deliver so much so fast for so less. I gave the following answer. They have processes so much established that a newbie becomes productive in less than three months, where as it takes upto 6 months to be productive in a product company. Definitely he did not buy the idea of process. Of course, then I started thinking and started writing this blog.

Priorities

Define who are the customers. In a product company the customers could mostly be either internal or sales force. Sales force would (perhaps) promise heaven and earth to customer and sometimes customer is willing to wait (till end of the year or till the current contract comes to expiry). Revenues would be realized as per the contract and may not be so much dependent on 'all' promised deliverables. But in a pure offshore services company majority of the projects are handled in Time & Material way. Which means one could bill only to the amount of 'actual work'. This means a clear visibie signs of functionality to customer. Customer would not pay unless things are moving. Situations like this forces offshore companies to really deliver something with time. But product companies which get the pressure only towards the deadline do not see any motivation to deliver.

 More on the way...

Technorati tags: Business, Technology, Outsourcing

K@W: Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Just came across this article and found quite interesting.

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1623&CFID=2567255&CFTOKEN=90452463

Following are the takeaways for me.

• Entrepreneurs not only take risk, but also manage it well.
• There are no special qualities they posses. Its the drive and passion to take on makes them one.
• Check out how much you got to lose if you start something on your own. Its better to have as low liabilities as possible.
• Follow the KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid principle. No fancy GUI without value addition.

How to be a good manager.

Or atleast I try to write how to be a manager or on the second thought i think it is just enough to write how to be a human being. Let me write some of my observations that would tell budding managers on how not to behave.

1. Privileged Person: Being a manager does not mean that you belong to a privileged lot of human beings. Only from 8 to 5 at work somebody is a Manager. After that he/she is just 'somebody'. You cant take extra luggage on plane without paying extra, you cant upgrade to business class without being a frequent flyer, you cant just do things which you are not allowed to or can not do!!

2. I am GOD: PLEASE for GOD's sake, leave the notion that a manager is God. A manager is after all a human being (atleast should try to live like a human being, if the manager is appointed from the Homosapien species). A manager does not necessarily have to have the knowledge of everything in the world. Other people in the society know about it. One does have to say that Operas come from France and Italians make Champagne. One does not have to say, I do not work for money. One does not have to break all speed limits (one does not get lucky always). One does not start to speak a foreign language without learning it.

3. Manager Attitude: First of all by virtue of your name and location where you sit, everybody around you at workplace knows that you are a manager. This is enough to kill opponent's energy by 50%. You still do not have to kill the rest by wearing 'Manager Attitude' hat and moving around. Stop doing that. Stop telling people that your laptop was used by somebody next to Board member and now it is possessed with super powers. Stop compelling people that they need to invent super duper figures and presentations in two shakes of a lamb tail because somebody next to board member asked. Stop telling people that you are flying on a work day and you can send emails while flying. Stop telling people in meetings that you are attending the meeting not to understand the contents but to tell at the end that you are a manager and you just want to grace the meeting with your presence.

4. Accept Ground Realities: Everybody who is employed at work place are productive in their own way. Infact a manager is the one who is not as productive as the employee. There are ways how a manager could be productive. you could contact me to find that out. But a manager should never become a hindrance to productivity. One must not carry the tag that says I am the manager, I work the most, I produce the most!! This is a wrong notion. As I said earlier a manager by himself does not produce anything. Its like Government. A government organization can not survive if there are no people paying taxes or no people at all. Without a team a team manager is nothing. One has to realize that. A manager has to respect the team members and also people outside his team. Who knows, may be one day the manager has to work for the team member.

5. Move with Makeup: This is one thing I always suggest wannabe managers to be aware of. If you think you are moving with a make up, remove that make up. Everybody around you knows how a damn fool you are with the make up. Everybody around you knows everything. you are the one who is ignorant.

6. Managers make mistakes: Its alright. Nobody is perfect. If you are a manager, if you commit a mistake there is no problem in admitting it. nobody takes you off your position. You dont get dis-respected suddenly. So, dare to commit mistakes and dare to admit them.

Standard Disclaimer: All characters & information posted are purely my personal opinions and any resemblance to dead or alive is purely coincidental.

MTR Ready to Eat

When MTR Foods introduced their ready to eat stuff, there was an interview with the CEO of the Company. He shared one vision "MTR wants to be McDonalds of South India". In my opinion they are heading towards the right direction.

I happened to buy 6 of their ready to eat packs on Sunday, tasking one by one. So far I finished Tamarind Rice, Sambar Rice and Vegetable Pulao. Ofcourse, in the past I also tasted their Pongal, Tomato Rice, Masala Rice. Of all these, the best so far is Veg Pulao. I liked it for two reasons - 1. Less oil than other products in the same category, 2. Less spicy. Next best is Samar Rice, again for two reasons one being less oily and second being the taste (though a bit spicy). Then comes Pongal that does not make you miss the authentic taste. My next choice is Tomato Rice. Though a bit oily, the taste is quite good. Masala Rice takes next position with similar taste as Veg Pulao but more spicy. Tamarind Rice comes last because of heavy oil. If you are a staunch MTR customer, chances are that you would like this because MTR managed to preserve the taste.

By the way, for bachelors in Bangalore I feel this makes a quite nice meal after a hard days work and no time left. All you need to do is keep the pack in boiling water for 5 minutes and your favourite hot dish is ready. Except Veg Pulao, all of them are in the range of 18 to 22 Rs. And if you are really hungry two packs are recommended.

Successful Innovation

I am currently reading this book and picked up few lines that I thought I must remember & recollect often.

Capturing the thoughts... (How to capture creative ideas)

• Org wide competetions - People put their minds to work not because of the prize money, but because of the opportunity to gain public recognition for their thinking.
• Association of language and creativity - The choice of words provde an intellectual and emotional context for the way in which subordinates and colleagues relate to and make sense of their work.
  
• Avoide bullets during presentation - instead use story telling. Story telling has always been an important part of the culture of 3M. For example, story about a scientist who, while singing in the choir, wished he had bookmarks that wouldn't fall out of the hymnal - and later createed Post-It Notes. Bullets are typically generic and cant give critical relationships in a logical way.
  
• Reduce work based stress, one of the great inhibitors of creativity.
  

What are the attributes of a software company?

One of my friends told me, "Check out my startup's website"! I was quite amazed, then started thinking. How easy it is these days to start a website and it does not cost so much if its a no frills site (I mean no large data, no database connection etc). I asked him, what does your startup do? He said, they offer unique customer experience, they are into training, they are into product development etc. He mentioned that at the moment he is the only one and looking for freshers because they are less expensive. This made me think on the above subject. How much the traditional business has been changing.... one could ask what are the attributes of a company - the answer is readily available. What are the attributes of a manufacturing company? One could answer without hesitation. But, what are the attributes of a software company? To make it worse, how much thin line of difference exists between ITES and IT Services Company. I tried searching for this answer over the web and found one article that is quite interesting. I will not copy paste entire thing.. but here is what the author feels are important attributes of a software company.

• Requirements Management
• Change and Configuration Management
• Effective communication among development teams
• Appropriate defined processes
• Reviews

If you observe most of them align with SEI CMM assessment requirements. This would then showcase the capability of a software organization. A software company begins with a commitment to learn and employ the fundamental principles that govern the development and management process of software.

For further details, Roger Pressman's book on Software Engineering is highly recommended.

Making sense out of non-sense

The other day Rajeev asked me 'What is this blog thing all about?'. In his blog he wrote a blog on blog. If you read his post, one of the main concerns is that, does blogging have a purpose? In my opinion so far there is not a single tool or site that actually makes use of blogging platforms. So far blogging is really seen as a platform for individual's opinions. (To make it a point, read my previous sentence - it says my opinion). So far what is the commercial value of blogging? Why did google buy Blogspot? Why does Microsoft provide a tool to publish blogs? Why is every F500 company is trying to have a blog for their own? Why many technology companies have their 'Official' blogs? Is the information published over a blog just an opinion? (One of my friends says Opinions are like ass holes - everybody is entitled to have one.)

Anyway... to a common avid blogger or a net savvy user its not un-usual that the above questions pop up in the mind. I think (again in my opinion), there is a business opportunity here. Or...let me not even go to the extent of talking about business opportunity. Let me put it as taking some value out of blogging. First thing I noticed is all blogging sites and platforms provide a way to tag the posts with labels. Which is quite good. This makes blog search quite easy. It becomes easier to categorize given blogs into these topics. So, the next step is to apply little bit of analytics to these categories to figure out trends. For example, Coca Cola has launched 'Chai Coke' a new flavor of coke that smells like Ice Tea in 4 metros of India. Now coke wants an instant feedback on the product to proceed further on this product. My idea is that Coke should promote blogging on this product to individuals and apply our little analytics tool on the blog sites to search for labels such as Colas, Cool Drinks, Spirits, Cocktails etc and search for the word Chai Coke and see the number of positive or negative words in these posts. This could give an idea on success factor of the new product.

Netscape and Google - Web 1.0 and Web 2.0

Google requires a competency that Netscape never needed: database management. Google isn't just a collection of software tools, it's a specialized database. Without the data, the tools are useless; without the software, the data is unmanageable. Software licensing and control over APIs--the lever of power in the previous era--is irrelevant because the software never need be distributed but only performed, and also because without the ability to collect and manage the data, the software is of little use. In fact, the value of the software is proportional to the scale and dynamism of the data it helps to manage.

Another example demonstrating Web 2.0 principles - BitTorrent: a key Web 2.0 principle the service automatically gets better the more people use it.

The central principle behind the success of the giants born in the Web 1.0 era who have survived to lead the Web 2.0 era appears to be this, that they have embraced the power of the web to harness collective intelligence:
The lesson: Network effects from user contributions are the key to market dominance in the Web 2.0 era.

As noted above, one of the defining characteristics of internet era software is that it is delivered as a service, not as a product. This fact leads to a number of fundamental changes in the business model of such a company:
1. Operations must become a core competency
2. Users must be treated as co-developers - It's no accident that services such as Gmail, Google Maps, Flickr, del.icio.us, and the like may be expected to bear a "Beta" logo for years at a time.

Real time monitoring of user behavior to see just which new features are used, and how they are used, thus becomes another required core competency. A web developer at a major online service remarked: "We put up two or three new features on some part of the site every day, and if users don't adopt them, we take them down. If they like them, we roll them out to the entire site."

Mittal wins

As I rightly predicted, Mittal has won. From his words, 'If this deal does not go through, Globalization has no meaning'. I think so too.

Mittal vs Arcelor

Its an interesting game is not it? But its not new to Mittal. Infact its been his most favourite game. The game he played since he has been an entrepreneur. The game he mastered for years. For me personally, I felt Arcelor made a hasty decision when it could not shape up the deal right with Severstal (the russian steel maker). Infact I read one of the reportes wrote a sentence that sounded like this entire take over bid of Mittal is a conspiracy planned with the help of Indian government. It might sound absurd... but then how else could one convince the investor community in European countries?

Now Mittal has got the nice business plan presented to the investors and I have a strong feeling that he is going to win this match too.

Social Networking

These days I see lot of people using Orkut. Then I started wondering how successful this webcommunity is. Coincidentally, I found an article on Social Networking from K@W Newsletter. (Connecting the corporate dots). Its an interesting article, afterall some big heads from Wharton have written it. Well... the amazing thing is, the concepts have been there for quite sometime - except that the new age computing has made them as a bigger commodity. Easy to use, whenver, wherever, more accessible, more interesting.... all in all it has become a fun activity that users would love to do.

I would now like to take another view point on these web communities. Just login to Orkut or MySpace or Friendster. Did you find any ads? Or adsense atleast? (ubiquitous google)
How do they make money? Atleast they are not in charity. This certainly is a food for thought.

Atleast one blog a week

I set a goal for myself to write atleast one sensible blog in a week. I myself did not like the making of telugu movie blog. I shall delete it.

A small story....

Once upon a time in a village a man appeared who announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for Rs. 10. The villagers seeing that there were many monkeys went out in the forest and started catching them. The man bought thousands at 10 and as supply started to diminish and villagers started to stop their effort he announced that now he would buy at 20 rupees. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching moneys again. Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer rate increased to 25 and the supply of monkeys became so that it was an effort to even see a monkey let alone catch it. The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at 50! However, since he had to go to the city on some business his assistant would now buy on behalf of the man. In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers. Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has collected. I will sell them to you at 35 and when the man comes back you can sell it to him for 50. The villagers queued up with all their saving to buy the monkeys. Then they never saw the man nor his assistant, only monkeys everywhere!

What is the similarity between Indian Cricket & Indian Stock Market

These days its like Indian cricket team. I seriously doubt the current windies series. What would you do incase the popularity for cricket is going down especially when windies is hosting the next year's cricket world cup!! One must revive the interest and which is the best way to do it? Get a strong cricket team and make it lose. Thats it. I feel this series would have been mutually agreed at high levels.

Big deal. What the heck this has to do with Indian stock market? Pretty simple huh... how do you attract lot of money? Make it popular... from 6000 to 12000 in just one year, hype it, talk about it, let media take care of advertising for it, create an impression as if its going to cross 20000 points... let the retail investor's hard earned money be pumped in. Now pull your (FII) money back...

Drawing similarities between these two.... look at mass behaviour of people. Its pure flocking nature. And others make money out of it.

**Disclaimer: All my posts are purely of personal opinions. You are most welcome to comment on my posts.

Stock market blues... cont...

Found some interesting statistics...
Today's market correction is the biggest single day fall in absolute terms (Sensex).

Single Day market falls
18-May-2006 = 862 Points ?? Global fall + Commodities fall + Fed Hike + Taxation of FIIs
28-Apr-1992 = 570 Points ?? Harshad Mehta Scam
17-May-2004 = 564 Points ?? NDA losses + Left joins Govt
15-May-2006 = 462 Points ?? Global Fall starts...

In percentage terms...
Oct 8,1990 = 15
Apr 28, 1992 = 12.7
May 17,2004 = 11.1
May 12, 1992 = 9.7
May 18, 2006 = 7
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Munich

Watched the movie Munich last weekend. Liked it. The way Speilberg makes movies !! Truely amazing. He shot the movie as it it was taken during early seventies.

The way Golda Meir potrayed is brilliant. Very inspiring character.

Indian stock market

Tell any stock market savvy person that lefts have joined the government or serial blasts in Bombay or war situation in middle east or new RBI credit policy, immediately he would ask how many points Sensex moved?

Situations like changing governments that do not suppoert liberalization, could be a big thing. Stock market crashed more than 200 points. Trading was stopped for a while.

Well, times have changed my friend. Two years is a considerable time. I agree, looking at the percentages, you might say it is just 7% down. But, when its big, a small percentage of change also effects.

Look at small investors who entered the markets at 12000 levels, hoping for 13000 or worse (rather best) 16000 levels. And if the market goes down 850 points in a single day who is protecting them?

MindTree was born

I could not resist myself from writing this after reading 'The making of MindTree by Subroto Bagchi'. The transcript is available in MindTree Consulting's site. Do you know that the logo of MindTree was painted by K.S.Chetan a 17 year boy who has a form of Celebral palsy that denies him co-ordinated limb movement and affects his speech!

I strongly suggest the budding entrepreneures to read both the documents available on MindTree about Making of The MindTree.

Web Services

I just want to share few new terms I have been hearing oflate related to WebServices.

1. BPEL - Business Process Execution Language Wiki link

2. CDL - Choreography Description Language
The Web Services Choreography Description Language (WS-CDL) is an XML-based language that describes peer-to-peer collaborations of parties by defining, from a global viewpoint, their common and complementary observable behavior; where ordered message exchanges result in accomplishing a common business goal.

The Web Services Choreography specification is targeted for composing interoperable, peer-to-peer collaborations between any type of party regardless of the supporting platform or programming model used by the implementation of the hosting environment.

The main difference between 1 and 2 is that CDL ensures ORDERED MESSAGE XCHANGE. And BPEL requires central co-ordination whereas CDL does not (atleast thats the idea).

Well the main advantages with the above BPM techniques are, an Enterprise can service enable its systems and wire them together in a network of SOA systems. Once service enabled, any third party or new internal service integration is a cake walk. No need of middleware integration programmers. You can ask them to develop business logic.

Entrepreneurship again.

Many places you hear about individuals talking about 'Entrepreneurship'. You hear this word from those who are successful, those who are not and also those who are in the process of falling into one of the first two categories.

After reading the stories from Subrato Bagchi on 'Making of Mindtree', it inspired in me and my dear friends on the specifics of 'Entrepreneurship', from 'What' to 'How'. Let me share some information from the discussion.

Every entrepreneur has to first answer these two questions.
1. Why do I want to open an Enterprise?
2. Why would my Enterprise be a success? What are the strengths I have to make it a success?

Now, how to answer these questions?

Are you doing business because you have 10 crores of money to spend? Or is it a unique business idea you have which you would like to see taking shape? If you are not passionate about your business, not committed, can not give your 100% effort and time, lets not talk about this any more. If you are into a startup you have to give up two things. All of your time and all of your money. Only then I feel its possible to shape an individual's imaginations.

More in my next post...