It is a lesson for us all to know how ahead of time google keeps itself , It has started developing google wave 2 years back and now is the time when it is ready with this amazing communication and collaboration tool named google wave, needless to say it is designed to accommodate todays youths changing communication method where they are now communicating in a group involving more than 2 people , hence the walls, scrapbooks or tweet posts are growing stronger day by day.
The other point to be noted was growing usage of instant messengers which are almost replacing emails, now even if the receiver is offline than also one can IM him which he can open after coming to online so the very first work GW did was to take a hybrid look of IM and email where now there is hardly any difference left . In GW when sender is editing /writing /musing in his email text editor , that is instantly visible WORD BY WORD , now imagine that , this is what is called real time messaging , messages at the speed of your thought ( though I would never like this much realtime ness so google has also given a check box to disable this ). Even more exciting is that attachments also appear realtime on the recipients wave window. The time sender drags and drops attachment , thumbnails will appear at receivers window much before he has downloaded entire lot.
Another cool function is to playback forwarded mails in the sequence in which they were originated and evolved,its so common to forward a mail chain to a new recipient and he has to go through entire chain from bottom to top but now he can just click on playback option and this chain will start appearing from scratch , pretty impressive I would say.This way it is much easier to add a person to the wave and again for people who would like to choose to send a private reply , they can do so privately in wave too. Google calls it a tree structured mailing/messaging where any branch of tree can be taken and expanded only to a limited group ( or to entire public).
This wave will without any doubt collaborate and consolidate all your communication channels. Very soon you will be using waves in your orkut accounts, blogging portals and anywhere else and yet be able to control and monitor all of them from your google wave (email ) editor. So what happens about editing, currently if you share something across so many comunication channels you edit it every where but in wave you just have to edit it once and it will be reflected everywhere . This collaboration is even possible for documents editing and production where same document can be edited (simultaneously!!)by multiple members ( it will include power point , spreadsheets and text based docs).
oh yes it also works on mobiles !
Undoubtedly it is the first and foremost collaborative tool of its kind and competitors of google (like yahoo, MSN and now their marriage..) will find themselves in a shocked state to counter it ,may be copying this formula from google would be easy and at time people do it well ( like facebook copied stuff from orkut and twitter and today is leading the social networking area) but we all know google has the ability to take a quantum leap every time..
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Friday, September 25, 2009
ITIL in real life
Those who have ever taken ITIL training know the toughest part is to explain people difference between incident and problem, it is very easy to explain every other difficult concept of ITIL to people but incident Vs problem is always a tricky one. Looking at a practicle example suppose every day when you come from office to home , you wife opens the door, takes your laptop from you , offers you a gilass of chilled water , this is standard operating procedure which is followed on your returning but what if one day to your surprise it did not happen , you came home and there was no one to open door, take your bag and make you comfortable , is this a problem ?
In ITIL terminology , this is a disruption from daily standard operating procedure hence it is not a problem , realisticaly if you think your wife may be caught up in some other work or she may be out to buy vegetables in grocery store near by , this was just one off incident , specially if you see that from the next day onward you are back on the same routine । But if next day also same incident is repeated and even after that you do not get the expected reception on your home coming than there are multiple occurances of the same incidents pointing to one common root cause and thats a problem for you so ITIL would take it into problem management process.
Now once you have realised that this is a problem , you would have to resolve it and for resolution you would need to do a root cause analysis , after putting some stress on your head and talking to your wife you realised that the root cause of this cold reception may be because she has been doing it from so long but you never care to talk to her about her day instead
you switch on TV and engross yourself on useless breaking news of 24X7 news channels. Now this problem ( having identified root cause) becomes a known error for you and it seems for solving it you would need request for change to change the standard operating procedure , now instead of turning to TV on your arrival you would rather have a small chat with your wife
and find out how was her day .
Even if this approach does not solve the problem than you have two alternative one is to do a functional escalation that is to escalate some one who is higher in authority and can handle the problem in this case it may be your father in law or mother in law who. Otherwise you can do a hierarchical escalation to a person who is expert in this type of problem , it may be your sister or brother in law.
See ITIL is even relevant to daily life !
In ITIL terminology , this is a disruption from daily standard operating procedure hence it is not a problem , realisticaly if you think your wife may be caught up in some other work or she may be out to buy vegetables in grocery store near by , this was just one off incident , specially if you see that from the next day onward you are back on the same routine । But if next day also same incident is repeated and even after that you do not get the expected reception on your home coming than there are multiple occurances of the same incidents pointing to one common root cause and thats a problem for you so ITIL would take it into problem management process.
Now once you have realised that this is a problem , you would have to resolve it and for resolution you would need to do a root cause analysis , after putting some stress on your head and talking to your wife you realised that the root cause of this cold reception may be because she has been doing it from so long but you never care to talk to her about her day instead
you switch on TV and engross yourself on useless breaking news of 24X7 news channels. Now this problem ( having identified root cause) becomes a known error for you and it seems for solving it you would need request for change to change the standard operating procedure , now instead of turning to TV on your arrival you would rather have a small chat with your wife
and find out how was her day .
Even if this approach does not solve the problem than you have two alternative one is to do a functional escalation that is to escalate some one who is higher in authority and can handle the problem in this case it may be your father in law or mother in law who. Otherwise you can do a hierarchical escalation to a person who is expert in this type of problem , it may be your sister or brother in law.
See ITIL is even relevant to daily life !
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Can't Fire
It will be a dejavu for Mr Naresh Goyal , head of jet airways. Last year during tougher times he tried to remove around 1900 employees from the jet payroll , which sounded a right decision for the company as many of these people were on probation and they had completed their probation period post which it was Jet's call whether it want them to continue or not, given the special macroeconomic conditions there was no other option . Of course no one can deny the human side of the story but this risk has always been associated with private jobs and people today come prepared to face it any time .
Doing a job today does not make you feel as safe as it was 4 years back or much safer before 2000 bubble burst or safest before GE Neutron Jack era when lifetime jobs were guaranteed and companies like IBM was famous for committing to life time employment of its employees . Currently once more jet fired 2 pilots facing an unprecedented situation with almost entire pilot staff going on a synchronized leave. Organizations which are service intensive and have to face volume of customers on many touch point every day turn themselves into a tricky situation by such issues , some thing similar happened in 2006 when some staff of gourmet ( a food supplier to airlines) was fired resulting a strike which meant no food in flights irrespective of the fact that many of these flights were as long as 14 hours journey.
In such conditions company would not have any choice but give it up to the demands of the union. Even though there is no such instance observed in IT industry where in last two year thousands and thousands of people have left the job but there is definitely damages, when companies remove employees who are redundant or so called non performers , people who have been retained also feel the fear and start looking for the opportunities to leave the current company . It may result to a fast attrition rate once normal times return back which leaves companies into a situation where they have work but no resources and now they are bound to hire resources from market at higher costs.
Given this vicious cycle , it seems organizations just can't fire but still they do ....
Doing a job today does not make you feel as safe as it was 4 years back or much safer before 2000 bubble burst or safest before GE Neutron Jack era when lifetime jobs were guaranteed and companies like IBM was famous for committing to life time employment of its employees . Currently once more jet fired 2 pilots facing an unprecedented situation with almost entire pilot staff going on a synchronized leave. Organizations which are service intensive and have to face volume of customers on many touch point every day turn themselves into a tricky situation by such issues , some thing similar happened in 2006 when some staff of gourmet ( a food supplier to airlines) was fired resulting a strike which meant no food in flights irrespective of the fact that many of these flights were as long as 14 hours journey.
In such conditions company would not have any choice but give it up to the demands of the union. Even though there is no such instance observed in IT industry where in last two year thousands and thousands of people have left the job but there is definitely damages, when companies remove employees who are redundant or so called non performers , people who have been retained also feel the fear and start looking for the opportunities to leave the current company . It may result to a fast attrition rate once normal times return back which leaves companies into a situation where they have work but no resources and now they are bound to hire resources from market at higher costs.
Given this vicious cycle , it seems organizations just can't fire but still they do ....
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Challenges of third kind!
Recently I was reading the 2008 annual report of varian Inc which is one of the leading medical equipment manufacturer , in the opening statement of the report Varian Inc CEO mentioned that he put forward a challenge in front of his employees to save 100,000 lives every year , that is the number which can fill a football stadium.
This challenge aptly suites to Varian which has already developed many cutting edge instruments based on radiotherapy and other cancer related treatment technologies to save cancer patients , enhance the accuracy of the results and reduce the overall treatment time to almost half. One latest example is their rapidArc beam which targets tumor in a single continuous
rotation around the patient leading to the highest possible precision and control of the treatment ( Hence lesser chances of killing healthy tissues) . Whats motivating in this case is rather than putting forward a target of increasing bottom line , increased rate of product development, rapid go to market timing ( and what not) CEO hit on a point which can be related by almost every one in the company and also by supplier and customers of the company , a higher cause which is worth putting every bit of effort . Should it has been a normal sales and number oriented motivation , only top and middle management would have been running behind those numbers but now every one would be willing to contribute looking at the noble cause.
This should be a learning for many other in different industries as how to thing of a bigger picture and inspire people to do something which can give them extreme satisfaction and drive their enthusiasm to the peak point of making a difference. The beauty of such inspiration is that it has not ignored top and bottom lines in fact it has encompassed everything in much better way then any other vision could have been , meeting such challenges means producing most innovative products, driving highest quality level and near zero defects , taking direct feedback from customers and their customers and implementing them , carving a niche for yourself and when all of this is done numbers will follow.
Look back in the history of business whenever such a vision statement was created , it had become an instant success . I see Mr D B Ambani's objective of making a call cheaper than a postcard considering our rural population can afford only this much for communication created one of the largest telecom player of India, there are many more !!.. Tata family also put forward many such challenges to its employees like creating a world class Indian hotel when Indians were not allowed in british hotels, Developing leading science institute like IISc to groom young india !!
This challenge aptly suites to Varian which has already developed many cutting edge instruments based on radiotherapy and other cancer related treatment technologies to save cancer patients , enhance the accuracy of the results and reduce the overall treatment time to almost half. One latest example is their rapidArc beam which targets tumor in a single continuous
rotation around the patient leading to the highest possible precision and control of the treatment ( Hence lesser chances of killing healthy tissues) . Whats motivating in this case is rather than putting forward a target of increasing bottom line , increased rate of product development, rapid go to market timing ( and what not) CEO hit on a point which can be related by almost every one in the company and also by supplier and customers of the company , a higher cause which is worth putting every bit of effort . Should it has been a normal sales and number oriented motivation , only top and middle management would have been running behind those numbers but now every one would be willing to contribute looking at the noble cause.
This should be a learning for many other in different industries as how to thing of a bigger picture and inspire people to do something which can give them extreme satisfaction and drive their enthusiasm to the peak point of making a difference. The beauty of such inspiration is that it has not ignored top and bottom lines in fact it has encompassed everything in much better way then any other vision could have been , meeting such challenges means producing most innovative products, driving highest quality level and near zero defects , taking direct feedback from customers and their customers and implementing them , carving a niche for yourself and when all of this is done numbers will follow.
Look back in the history of business whenever such a vision statement was created , it had become an instant success . I see Mr D B Ambani's objective of making a call cheaper than a postcard considering our rural population can afford only this much for communication created one of the largest telecom player of India, there are many more !!.. Tata family also put forward many such challenges to its employees like creating a world class Indian hotel when Indians were not allowed in british hotels, Developing leading science institute like IISc to groom young india !!
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Questions which can not be answered
Since the downturn has started there are some of the questions which have gained popularity with all the business news papers and news channels , interesting fact is no one seems to know answer to these questions yet these reporters keep asking same thing to almost any one and every one they meet
What kind of recovery we would see? : Now we all know there are various kind of recovery , W, V ,U shape etc but how can one predict recovery from a recession which is not yet near to completion , anyways how does it matter to business and common man as what sort of recovery it will be . It sounds important only to great economist and academicians who are good only in postmortems and never in predictions.
How should industry leaders respond to this down turn ? : after reading couple of answers on this I am myself now expert to give an answer , tow things 1) Innovation 2) Cost optimization . These two are the buzz words and now even in normal times innovation is very difficult for an industry where thousands of players selling same thing so the easiest resort to the industry is cost optimization which means cutting on head count . I have till now not seen a different answer to this question and hence stopped reading at the point where this arrives , whether its been asked to some business guru or minister , I have yet to see some innovation in their answers.
What is your focus market ? : Dare any one answer this beyond India and China , people will think he is illiterate and have not even attended pre school education, even kids know that these countries are focus market from super cars to match boxes , whats the point in reading a whole paragraph just to get the same conclusion
Do you see these green shots as a sign of recovery ? : This is a binary question and half of junta replies in 1 and other half replies in 0 so you are left confused whether there are any green shots , whether there are any recovery ? no matter how logical answer to this question is , it will not satisfy your quest of knowing whether recovery is happening or not because you yourself keep looking at so many contradictory examples around.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
My pick on top tech trends
I believe next technology business would see lots of potential in following areas
Mobile application : Internet did spread like a wild fire and every one had gut feeling about its potential but today mobile has much wider penetration then internet and also the time people spent on mobile is almost their entire waking up time. Currently where internet penetration in India is for 250 Mn people on the other hand mobile penetration is almost double with
around 500 Mn people . Organizations which missed on net applications can directly jump to mobile . Recently SBI's Mobile banking is a classic example , SBI could never make it big in ebanking but counting on the fact that now mobile technology is mature and secure , plus their are regulatory frameworks around , it can instantly reach to such a large user base.
With cheaper high end sets ( including iphone and BBs) applications dealing with media contents are also becoming popular and a large segment is using these apps exhaustively. Mobile is already transferring good amount of data from one place to other.
Security : Here I am looking at all kind of security , with global connectivity Internet security has definitely become high priority and companies and professionals in this business are making a fortune a logical extension to it is mobile security which seems to be more vulnerable thanks to wireless , blue tooth , data card etc.
On the other side now physical security is also taken very seriously not only at corporate level but also for personal and private usages, look around the new real estate development and you would find each flats have security systems.
Television applications : Television penetrates even much larger segment then Internet and mobile and now holds lots of potential . The first immediate preference would be to make it interactive and start selling products via live televisions. however the hidden treasure is in on demand content , today's lifestyle make it very difficult for people to follow some
program on a regular schedule , they must have flexibility to watch any program at any time of their choice , In India some operators are now already equipped with these facilities where any one can view any program ( at his own preferred time )telecasted in last one week .
Going forward a huge entertainment library which would empower users to pick and play her favourite programs ( no matter whether they are telecasted on current week or closed down last year) and watch them. Latest plasma LCD panels and home theatre system will compliment it very well
Mobile application : Internet did spread like a wild fire and every one had gut feeling about its potential but today mobile has much wider penetration then internet and also the time people spent on mobile is almost their entire waking up time. Currently where internet penetration in India is for 250 Mn people on the other hand mobile penetration is almost double with
around 500 Mn people . Organizations which missed on net applications can directly jump to mobile . Recently SBI's Mobile banking is a classic example , SBI could never make it big in ebanking but counting on the fact that now mobile technology is mature and secure , plus their are regulatory frameworks around , it can instantly reach to such a large user base.
With cheaper high end sets ( including iphone and BBs) applications dealing with media contents are also becoming popular and a large segment is using these apps exhaustively. Mobile is already transferring good amount of data from one place to other.
Security : Here I am looking at all kind of security , with global connectivity Internet security has definitely become high priority and companies and professionals in this business are making a fortune a logical extension to it is mobile security which seems to be more vulnerable thanks to wireless , blue tooth , data card etc.
On the other side now physical security is also taken very seriously not only at corporate level but also for personal and private usages, look around the new real estate development and you would find each flats have security systems.
Television applications : Television penetrates even much larger segment then Internet and mobile and now holds lots of potential . The first immediate preference would be to make it interactive and start selling products via live televisions. however the hidden treasure is in on demand content , today's lifestyle make it very difficult for people to follow some
program on a regular schedule , they must have flexibility to watch any program at any time of their choice , In India some operators are now already equipped with these facilities where any one can view any program ( at his own preferred time )telecasted in last one week .
Going forward a huge entertainment library which would empower users to pick and play her favourite programs ( no matter whether they are telecasted on current week or closed down last year) and watch them. Latest plasma LCD panels and home theatre system will compliment it very well
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Reasons why Facebook can replace twitter
After doing some analysis of facebook and twitter I am feeling that the "share whats in your mind " feature of facebook could be a good replacement to twitter. At one place twitter started to facilitate only small updates about self but then it restricted itself to it , even after there is so much buzz about twitter in the web world and increasing users , it has not added any significant applications to attract more hits. Sharing a pic with follower would have been a very basic facility
Your message is shown to everyone connected with you : what ever you share in facebook is available for everyone to read instantly whereas in twitter one has to follow you to be aware of what you are up to
A pic is better than thousand words : Facebook like orkut enables sharing of pic and video plus friends can comment on those pics/videos . I see people using this feature much more than simply putting text on their status of facebook
Other applications : There are so many application which facebook is enabling its users to use ranging from surveys, quizzes , games, sending gifts and so on . This keep users involved and also generates more comments and related discussion comments
Celebrity trust : Twitter generated initial buzz because of some of the celebrities choosing it to keep their followers updated but look facebook today and you would find so many of them are already present there.
Structure : The way twitter shows messages of people you follow looks messy and unstructured some times whereas facebook has put across a good structure of showing messages and clubbing related comments in the same discussion
Even though the ease of accessing twitter from mobiles can not be debated but with so many high end hand sets around I feel accessing facebook from mobile is also becoming a trend. If twitter does not come up with some thing better , I feel it may loose its grip over the user base within couple of years
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