Meeting versus Movies

“Five dysfunctions of a team” book does an interesting comparison around movies and meetings. Basically, why are meetings boring to attend while movies are interesting. Why would people like to go watch movie and not excited to attend meeting?

To make story short – thought process here is the presence of “conflict” in movies that makes it interesting for people to watch and get involved with the plot. Point is during meetings it helps by being involved, having opinion, taking side on issues, having some conflict makes interaction exciting among people. Essentially, all conflicts are not bad in a team.

A team that has build trust among each other and understand that conflict, dis-agreements among parties, etc. are on positions that makes them pick the right choice towards acheiveing organization goals – is a mark of a stronger team.

If anything, meetings can be better than movies (I am sure someone is saying dream on!) since in a meeting one can participate and see the plot unfolding based on participation. At least, movies aren’t that interactive yet and the end is always pre-determined.

It is all about Business Processess…

There are several upcoming technologies that will have much impact to the enterprise applications like SOA, Web 2.0, etc. Various pundits have already touted the technical advantage of all these technologies. To prove the point, every major software vendor today, has a SOA strategy. So how does all this cool technology will help businesses whose only job is to manufacture, sell and service some simple widgets and not necessarily care about what technology they uses. Infect, they probably don’t care whether it is Web 2.0, SOA or some RPG/Cobol on a green screen terminal.

Business deploying enterprise software (ERP, Supply Chain, CRM, HRMS, etc.) uses technology as a business enabler to help them manufacture the widget cheaper/better/faster or service its customer better, etc. Successful companies proud themselves on their business processes making them unique and differentiating them in their respective market. Technology wow factor is usually not the front runner. Much of enterprise businesses remains slow on the technology adoption curve. At best, it may either be classified as “Early majority” or “Late majority” if not outright “laggard” trying to avoid “Innovator” or “Early adopter” technology adoption curve.

So how would all the upcoming technologies help existing business processes of a company? To do that let’s look at the key components of what makes a business process and understand how these upcoming technologies can be applied to make aspects of business process better. One can certainly add or refine the list here.

• Information – Information is critical to any individual executing a business process successfully. As technology continue it improves it is providing new benefits that were not available before like –
  1. Reliable information that provide deeper visibility into what goes on in a business
  2. Real time information when you want it, where you want it
  3. Information from relationships – multiple degrees apart and from extended sources like partners, suppliers, outsourcers, employees, market places, etc.
  4. Information from unstructured sources – capturing knowledge, increase integration with email, files systems, document management systems, etc.
  5. Vastly improved searches for mining the sea of information and analytical tools to come to deliver what you want and understand Patterns, Metrics, goals, etc.

• Tasks – This has been the frontier as industry has been busy automating much of the human tasks aggressively since more than a decade or so. Also, as existing tasks gets automated – new set of human coordination tasks or extended responsibility appears in the horizon. Some benefits from new technologies here are:-
  1. Extending/changing existing tasks without writing code – STANDARDS is the way to go
  2. Easy creation of new tasks as new processes comes to life
  3. Enabling work-flows easier between automated tasks and human tasks
  4. Quick alignment/training of the team to ever changing processes regardless of location of employees
  5. Enables getting tasks done cost effectively without sacrificing quality or customer satisfaction goals
  6. Enables ramping up new people easily and help extend enterprise frontier to newer geographies

• Interaction – A business is net sum of its people accomplishing their individual tasks and interacting with each other. This is their everyday interaction as they formulate, strategize, decide, work, act with each other to take company ahead one day at a time. Much is based on the foundation of real time visibility, availability and ability to engage everyone needed in a dialogue. Huge benefits from new technologies in this space:-
  1. Collapsing invisible walls that were between the parties/individuals as relationship maps become visible
  2. Continue to make world a small place to live, connect and make interaction real within it larger ecosystem
  3. Assess and establish new relationships quickly – expand ecosystem and extend reach
  4. Increased participation of many in decision making as several new communication channels reaching out to all becomes available – enabling the system to operate on power of many
  5. Capture, track and publish knowledge at determined time to feed into everyday work
  6. Speed up information sharing, decision making and rollout to the ecosystem
  7. Speed up feedback from market on decisions and place effective measure to correct

To sum it up upcoming technologies holds the promise of providing new kind of business processes not possible today or refining existing business processes that can help a company to remain differentiated and successful.

Just as an example – think today we enter more trades every day (couple of billions everyday on NYSE these days) than what we used to do in a week couple of decades (couple of million everyday on NYSE in early 70’s) back. All of this due to technology improvement that leverages the same process of placing, reconciling the trade, clearing the trade, settling the trade, invoicing, paying for the trade, etc. But now these tasks are automated, collapsed various walls that were needed in the past to place a trade, and provide real time information to a trader. New processes have evolved around technologies like real time information, increase self service, automatic trade placement, portfolio analysis, etc… that is changing the scale of business.

There are many examples how leveraging the right technology can help things scale quickly that is otherwise not possible. It is this promise with upcoming technologies like SOA, Web 2.0, etc. for businesses allowing them to unleash new level of accomplishment across its social communities – makes enterprise applications an interesting space for years to come.

Blogging metrics

For someone interested in knowing various blog metrics and its relevance – this is a nice summary by Techcrunch folks on its own blog. 

As someone said you can’t improve what you can’t measure – hopefully this will provide insight to how to improve a blog.

A view on Indians immigrants

A BusinessWeek.com columnist and businessman, Vivek Wadhwa shares his views on why Indians are such a successful immigrant group. Ignore the catchy title but the stats thus far remain good to prove his point. Also, US immigration rules helps as typically it attracts somewhat better part of the crowd (educated, skilled, speaking english, etc.) from India to start with.

I am sure many first generation Indians who immigrated to America can relate to several points identified in the article. Vivek has highlighted the following points :-

1. Emphasis on education
2. Upbringing – expectations
3. Hard-work
4. Determination to overcome obstacles
5. Entrepreneurial spirit
6. Recognizing Diversity
7. Humility
8. Family Support
9. Financial management – Spending within means
10. Networking
11. Giving back
12. Integrations and acceptance

Ignore the Indian title and most of these traits now become the proven recepie of anyone from any background who have been successful in life.

Yahoo mail gets better

Yahoo just launched beta program of its Yahoo! mail. User experience is just slick and getting pretty close to windows based clients. It allows drag and drop, selecting, highlighting multiple emails, various sorting of mails, preview pane, popular keyboard shortcuts, etc. Client layout is quite similar to what people are probably used to seeing on their windows based mail client reader. I find new user experience more productive than the earlier version.

Here is a screen shot of Yahoo Mail before and after…

Before

 

After

 

I also like having RSS feeds available right next to all the mail folders. Although, functionality of Yahoo! RSS reader is still not at par to Newsgator or other popular web based RSS reader but Yahoo! may catch up here. I would like to keep my blogroll updated right from my RSS Reader. This will eliminate my need of having two sign-ons and two different windows one for Yahoo mail! and other for Newsgtor RSS reader go away.

Check it out for yourself.

Slingbox

For folks who live on the leading edge of gadgets – read a review of Slingbox and how you can watch your TV feed while on road.

Now I am curious – how many people are really-really hooked on to their TV shows that they can’t live without while on-road. I know people who can’t live without their Tobasco sauce and carry it wherever they go. This just takes it to the next step for road-warriors and extend their personal boundary.

Does LAMP need its CASE – Open Source in Enterprise

Much opinions have been floating on each side of the discussion why Open Source is or isn’t a good idea for an enterprise. Usual suspect like long sales cycle, implementation challenges, support concerns, etc. are cited as the barrier to entry. While free/cheap, no lock-in concern, open source benefits, etc. gets cited as the reason to support Open Source in an enterprise.

So as in life there is no perfect answer. This one is no exception to that. It comes down to making choices that suits the organization net positively and help accomplish business goals.

In my opinion, Open Source enterprise offering can have some legs. Companies like Compiere or other upcoming venture stand a good chance to replicate say what Redhat has done to further the cause of Linux. At current level of Open Source Company’s valuation this remains a viable business towards a targeted market. Although, some shrewd venture folks may suggest it is a matter of time before Open Source companies starts to get valued as a Service company given the margins are closer to that than a product company.

I would think certain market say where audience has embraced LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP) should be supportive of Open Source enterprise product, if it can be successfully packaged, delivered, deployed, implemented and supported at no worse than the leading vendors. Thought process here, in some regard, is extending the open source stack to its preferred constituents and make it available at an acceptable total cost of ownership.

Figuratively speaking, does LAMP need to be in its CASE (CRM, Analytics, SCM, ERP) for a deeper adoption of Open Source within enterprise?

One example of Open Source friendly market is India. Lately, much news has come out suggesting how various state governments are favoring Open Source as the platform of choice.

Some may ask – Does the economic impact of software cost is more to companies in country like India? It all depends on how many companies can really afford $100s of thousands (after discounting) of software when earnings are not in hard currency? Also, different Enterprise structures adds to the discussion – like how many companies have revenue of $250M or more in India; need of larger number of seats (read more scalable software and support needs) as companies have more employees for a typical say $100M company in US; software cost impact to top line revenue depending on whether it hits operational or capital spending; etc. Some of these factors make Open Source more appealing to the market. One can add low implementation cost to this within domestic Indian market to make the overall implementation of Open Source enterprise software rather cheaper to accomplish.

A gating factor for Open Source success stories will be how it extends and matures the eco system beyond development community – to cover every aspect of value delivery. It is vital for the Open Source model to scale and instill confidence in enterprise customers about their investment in Open Source. Like having enough partners who can effectively implement, sell, support Open Source products in various geographies. Time will tell how successful open source will be in an enterprise market.

So what do you think – do you believe LAMP need to be in its CASE to make Open Source successful in enterprise market?

More thoughts on Social communities within an Enterprise

Facebook on Tuesday added a new feature that RSS feeds changes on a member page to its friends like photos updates, profile changes say address, status, etc. This new feature got strong negative feedback from the user community. By Friday, CEO of Facebook has to come out and say how they messed up here and need to review and modify the feature. Read his blog here.

Anyway, the point here is what I suggested earlier on Social communities and interaction blog around how within an Enterprise a similar relationship can be formed between its social communities.

Like in this case among the end user community and the developer/implementation folks. Currently, within enterprise, this is accomplished in various ways to engage customers/users, capture the need of the end users while building an enterprise software and get user feedback on the feature. Several local or global user groups, customer consortium, product launches, conferences, regular meetings, customer surveys, etc. all try to gauge the need, establish requirement and later feedback on what’s working or not. This works for few customers that participate but misses out on the larger customer base. Also, the process is long and lot gets lost in translation as information changes hand from end user before it reaches developer/implementer.

In some regard, today, it is a discussion of haves and have nots. Today, it is a discussion of which customers have found ways to influence the eco system versus who don’t.

Can Enterprise 2.0 provide similar equalizer to all – small or large, local or global, vocal or supportive, successful or struggling, etc. - with an opportunity to choose and participate in defining enterprise implementation to morph to their need in a quick and efficient way? If done right – I think yes…What do you think?

Colorado Gubernatorial debate update

Today I attended the Colorado Gubernatorial event at Brown Palace hotel during lunch. Forum was good and we had over 200 people – mostly CEOs and executives from local technology companies, in the room. My friend, Vic Ahmed, President of TiE-Rockies opened up the debate. Both VCs Jack Tankersley and Brad Feld did a good job moderating the event.

Much of the discussion between the two candidates was cordial – Bob Beauprez made his statements and Bill Ritter made his own. However, on few points there was some disagreement that showed the partisan split. Particularly around Referendum C.

Some of the questions asked were around:-

1. Education

2. Renewable Energy and growth

3. How to attract big technology companies head quarters in Colorado. Seems like a trend where big Colorado technology companies gets picked up by large corporations from outside Colorado. Recently, McData, StorageTek, etc. were acquired. Resulting into not too many big technology companies in Colorado now.

I was hoping there would be a question around outsourcing and understand candidates stance. Also, what would they do to help ease the pain that gets affected by the outsourcing. Anyway, no such question was asked.

Since I am politically inactive and have no previous knowledge of either candidate – personally, I left the place without picking any favorite. I am not sure any candidate will do better than other to cultivate technology/entrepreneur environment. My vote on either of the candidate will be on some other factor than just today’s discussion. Just could not pick my favorite – not that I went there thinking I will pick a favorite.

Just a logistics note - serving lunch at the same time when candidates were debating was not a good idea. Too much distraction and noise from servers while taking away dishes or serving the food. There was much activity on the floor throughout that could have been avoided by starting 30 min earlier.

On a disappointing note to myself – I carried camera with dead batteries. I was hoping to post at least one photo here of the debate. Oh! well – some other time.

India visit

During this summer, my family and I went to India. Here are some photos from the visit.

Google’s time machine

While growing up as a kid in independent India, I used to wonder how was India’s independence portrayed in the then European and American media. Thanks to Google who made news archive available now – making it convenient for people to peek back in the history and review the news articles from the past. I like reading Time magazine articles reporting India’s independence from 1930s. 

Did you know Mahatama Gandhi only weighed 76 lbs? wow! I missed that detail – knew he was a lean person. I had not imagined though if he was this frail with such strong determination in his belly.

Anyway, check yourself out Google news archive here. It gives time search as well – so you can track the progress of important historical events.

Ignorance has never been an acceptable argument – and now people can learn from the history more than ever without pleading ignorance of the past <grin>

Social communities and interaction within enterprises

Enterprise 2.0 is a catchy term. If our history teaches us something about hype cycle it is the over usage of trendy terms. However, well known terms also are the best way to capture much of the broader context to convey the essence and help with the mass adoption. So to better describe what Enterprise 2.0 to look like – I am sharing some examples here.

In my opinion – Enterprise 2.0 includes effort beyond just capturing collective knowledge for deeper insight into businesses. It should also provide application building paradigm mimicking interaction model needed within different social communities of an enterprise. Something unleashing new values and making current challenges in an enterprise disappear.

Let’s briefly discuss “Social communities” within an enterprise and their “Interaction model”. At a high level an enterprise consists of various social communities of internal and external stakeholders. Some examples of these communities are say Sales community – which includes direct sales organization, marketing organization and partners, etc. or say a Product community which includes development organization, contractors, implementation partners, outsource vendors, end user customers, etc. So a web of individuals that are stakeholders of some set of common interests like what is needed in a product, success of the company, working on similar project, need to solve similar kind of issues, etc.

First version of Enterprise, if someone calls it as such – was about automating much of the paper process. Applications were built to automate the work traditionally done by filling paper(s) – hence much of the current generation of enterprise applications are build around user experience that mimic the paper process – be it invoicing, pick slips, order, entry in financial books, etc. These applications did good job of automation of routine work and brought in a level of consistency within an enterprise. It established best practices for doing everyday task.  Quite a win in this regard as overtime companies shifted IT budget towards packaged enterprise software.

However, current solution limits the collective knowledge captured to the extent of the structures defined within an application – its schema model. Also, the focus is much more on routine tasks rather than enabling various social communities within an extended enterprise to have an effective interaction.

This is a promise that people are hoping Web 2.0 based technologies and emerging/successful web based models can be deployed in the enterprise arena. Today, much of the interaction within and across social communities is either done poorly by software (like having notes kind of field in all application to key in any unstructured information) or done in all sort of fashion – say pick the phone and call the other person, capture information in a spreadsheet and share, emails, browsing/researching multiple sites, etc.

Enterprise 2.0 – as the promise starts to get shaped – has the potential to overcome it and provide much more than that. Some of the macro reasons that are adding to the trends this time compared to in the past are: -

1. Confidence of the enterprises around adoption of Web based technologies to run the business (quite a jump from green screen to client server to web based computing)
2. Maturity of the work force and their comfort using web and computers
3. Shrinking geographical boundaries creating more distributed and virtual organizations whether it is for manufacturing or outsourcing
4. Thus driving the need to capture knowledge and effective knowledge transfer within a social community 
   • Also read – capturing of graying or displaced workforce vital knowledge for the new comers to be successful
5. Create more knowledge workers than routine workers

Some examples of successful interaction model within Social communities of a company that Enterprise 2.0 could address are: (My apologies in advance as my examples are biased towards product communities within an enterprise as that is my focus. But there are similar examples on every community that exist within an enterprise)

• End customers rating usefulness of a feature (and providing feedback to its implementer/developer) directly for future improvements – ala digg it; embedded within a product
• End users forming community and sharing best practices of how-tos and influencing industry wide business process definition and consistent adoption – ala wikipedia; available within the self service dashboard
• End users subscribing to the interests in product features/updates that are in development and getting auto updated when the feature/patch is available – ala RSS feed; embedded within the product administrative suite
• Distributed, virtual product development organizations effectively capturing knowledge, aggregating information to ramp new knowledge workers quickly
• Above can be extended to include Implementation Partners for know how to extend/customize right from the guts of the system
• Sales organization acheieving higher success rate of business leads converting to opportunities due to better visibility of contacts and degree of relationship with prospects within the community
• Quick growth and scaling of an eco-system across multiple geographies for a company by its Partners/Distributors
• Remain aware of the changes to business processes by learning from similar companies/industries and get knowledge workers transitioned
• Quick market wins due to an organization ability to pull together right skills/people from an extended enterprise
• Finding the network effect helping business open up opportunities not available/hard to do at present – say building economies of scale with like minded community to acheive desired results
• etc…

Anyway, there are tons of other example that people can think around Enterprise 2.0, which has the foundation around how to enable successful interaction model for various communities of an extended enterprise.

Think for a while couple of years back our daily work was around paper/pencil/fax/todo lists, etc. Now people find it difficult what it was living without email, internet, etc. This is just another natural progression as technology matures and the younger generation (read more adaptive) gets in the workplace. 

Also, while I am at this topic – seems like Wikipedia has brought back Enterprise 2.0 discussion now under “Enterprise social software”. Thanks to SJ for pointing this out to me.

Enterprise-ready: things to consider

I have been talking about Enterprise-ready for over a year now on what is needed for a development organization to deliver enteprise ready product. So capturing some thoughts on what an Enterprise ready product should contain that need to be kept in mind during product development.

1. Basic product out of the box should simply work for what it is designed to do – Not just for happy path but also for not so happy paths and code detours that users might take.
2. Test more than what you code (Saying it again. I mean it. Test more than you code)
3. K.I.S.S. Use your brain. It is amazing how making things simple require some critical thinking.
4. Promote design patterns and architectural thinking before jumping on to code
5. Learn how to work well in a team; share; review; collaborate; learn, etc. Create team effect larger than the sum of all individuals.
6. Consider interfaces that people will rely on and pay lot of attention. Correcting any defect later will be hard to fix without introducing upheavel in the eco-system.
7. Document what you code
8. Consider global market impact – Language, Currency, TimeZone, Literal handling, etc.
9. Consider configurablity of the product to meet major use cases of the customer deployment. Say configuring a call center; dispatching calls; order of workflow; etc. Software configuration should be easy and simple to do that can be carried forward with each upgrade.
10. Consider how the product can be extended – it is better if extensibility is declarative. Best practices, APIs, guides, etc. should be made available addressing how to extend; test extension without affecting the base functionality; how to preserve extension as software gets upgraded, etc.
11. Consider how the product can be customized. Again, providing the necessary abstraction so that customization do not become invasive surgery on the base components and provide a path for future upgrades.
12. Consider product performance in Web environment. This should consider both for latency and bandwidth issues given companies are increasingly global and desire to achieve single global instance. Also, data centers are becoming huge and consolidation is the trend. Keep in mind several developing world may not have the best infrastructure available as well. Watch out for round trips and bad programming practices. Institure anti-patterns.
13. Consider product deployment choice – Hosted, Licenced, Multi-instance, Integrated environment, Global consolidated, etc.
14. Consider product scalability needs. It help if the product can be staless allowing better load balancing and clustering
15. Invest in user experience that can help end user get productive quickly. Make everyday tasks really easy to do and make it hard what you don’t want user to do, if can’t outrightly blocked it. As Krug and other usability experts would say – Don’t make me think. Idea should be represented intuitive and simple for user to get the task completed.
16. Consider making choices that most of end users will make. Sometime allowing every flexibility to be addressed by the end user makes a product hard to use and difficult to configure. Leaving less choices on the table is not a bad thing. Think iPod.
17. Centralize simple setup of similar product features – if acheiveing it is not possible for the entire product.
18. Invest in tools that can provide developer good information on vital statistics of code – complexity, path, memory checker, code scanners, etc.
19. Consider security and how application/technology fits in the larger enterprise eco system
20. Consider data quality issues and best practices needed to be deployed to keep data fresh. Keep in mind garbage in – garbage out. Think about purge and periodic reports on data.
21. Consider pre-seed data and setup data needed to get up and going quickly
22. Consider product development and implementation life cycle. How the change affects patch, update or upgrade.

Last but not the least… know developers are ultimately responsible for the quality of the products. Others in the value chain including QAs who touch the product either verifies or consumes what a developer develops. Hence…

• Learn quickly when a customer calls with a problem. It is not that customer don’t understand or use the product incorrectly. It is what the product allowed. You make more point with customer and marketplace by making the product work and share the learnings to avoid future pitfalls.