Just Express

Wake Up America

2011-02-17T06:14:00.001-05:00

I read an interesting blog about the state of the Congress. I read it in the Washington Post this morning. It echoed the same sentiment that our mode of instant gratification continues to prevent us from doing the right thing. It is funny that the Congress is more worried about their political legacy, redistricting and less about long term health of their constituents and the long term health of the country. I am no authority to challenge or even remotely comprehend the issue of national debt. It is something that is fed to us in ongoing media and news streams. As we know there is lot of public unrest going on in the Middle East at this time, I would wonder if the more aware of US citizens are ready to initiate their protest of this lackadaisical approach to managing the future of our country and actually do something about it. I am sure it does not need to be in the same form as that happening on the other side of the world but in our own Unique way, we should be putting a cyber protest. If the ordinary citizens have been dealing with personal budget challenges and making some tough cuts that have their children not so happy, I think the federal government needs to do the same.

Working through the day with iPAD : Refreshingly positive experience

2010-11-24T20:53:00.005-05:00

I have been one of the early adopters of iPAD and as some label me another Apple fanboy. I am sure smitten by the Apple sleek design and polish. Anyhow after the initial excitement had faded, my iPAD was becoming yet another gadget gathering dust other than the occasional desire to read my books on the iBook application. But two days ago, I said let me run with not taking my laptop of my backpack and work through the day with an iPAD. I had this twelve south company compass mobile stand which I neatly placed on my desk and start plugging in. I made sure, I had my read my emails and responded to the ones that needed a follow up or an immediate action. It was a breeze with every minute of my usage improving my typing efficiency. I had to read some RFP documents (typically 100+ page document PDF's) and I was able to open that quickly in the Good Reader application, annotate it and take my notes using the just released multi tasking feature. Out went my follow up email from my notes application. It was a simply a cool feeling. I then plugged on the Pandora online radio and had the music running as I read through an awesome iPAD version of Washington Post. Battery was there throughout the day and I felt my investment in iPAD was not a sunk cost after all. . I have to admit, I did not do a lot of document writing even though I had the Pages and the KeyNote application on my iPAD. Please feel share with your experience of using iPAD in a true productive setting.

Freedom Fight of the Next Decade and the 21st Century

2009-12-28T12:24:00.001-05:00

As journalists and historians sit back and write down about the highs and lows of this decade, I sat back and reflected over this long Christmas weekend to come to single most critical aspect of this decade which is suffocating us, making us paranoid and fearful and above all putting us into a death spiral of human societal DNA. It is changing all of us at a subconscious level. We may not sense it and may be totally unaware of it but it is changing the direction of our human society. We need freedom from its shackles and stranglehold. We need freedom from Terrorism. It is in my view the fight of the century rest alone the coming decade. It is more significant than peak oil issue and equally pervasive if not more than the issue of global warming. We are slowly becoming slaves to its dictates. Our lives are being changed to accommodate the perils and the consequences of this phenomenon and we need to fight for our freedom. The whole world is experiencing this in some form or another. Unfortunately our approach to fight and attack this issue in my humble opinion is misplaced. We target nations or organizations but fail to acknowledge that it is a mind game. If the youth of today in different societies is being brain washed, how do you intend to fight that with the latest drone aircrafts. In fact if the education system is being polluted with all the events of today, rest assured the coming generations are going to be less accommodating and less patient. It applies to both the worlds (if there is a bipolar world of west and non-west, since China is going to be facing this challenge in this century). As Thomas Friedman put it in his article that the real challenge is to combat the vastness of internet media reaching out in every home with the same message of hatred, eye for an eye, use of violence for every wrong etc etc. I think the answer does not lie in more troops or for that matter remote controlled deployment of forces to avoid physical causalities since the damage is done mentally and at a subconscious level. Now the next time, we board the plane, everyone who takes a blanket during the flight is going to be stared at, we are going to be subconsciously make our judgments and place people who look different in to typical stereotypes. Responding acts of terrorism with force and violence (where ordinary citizens suffer and the issue is dusted under the term of collateral damage) actually creates a more long term mental damage in the minds of the people which in return comes back in form of terrorism. If we continue down this path( in fact the current events are a result of similar approach for decades) we are sure bound to further erode our basic fabric of human race. We will become another animal type who could do no better but killed each other to survive. Is there an answer? I don't know but all I can say is that success stories like Mahatma Gandhi gives us a hope. In his case acts of aggression were met with a smile and peaceful rebuttal. This could be an antidote to all of this. He gave Indians a way to undo the British where one seemed unlikely. Yes there had been numerous freedom fighters who had individual acts of heroism but he fundamentally altered the rules of the game.

We need to ensure that we have a strategy to address the health of minds of our next generation on both sides of the world. Today, it is being overly influenced my the internet media, the current acts portrayed as righteous and hence create an impression that world is filled with hatred or violence which is very damaging to the long term future of our society. But we as a society are not doing enough for the future since we are too occupied in winning the next battle and as a result we are loosing the war.

PS: I am an Indian, sikh by religion who is settled in USA for the last 10 years. I have had my share of experience when the Sikh community was attacked in 1984 by heinous acts of hate crime by its own fellow citizens

Means vs Individuals: Health Care Debate

2009-08-17T10:03:00.000-04:00

This is how I like to think about the crux of this current debate on health care. It may appear strange to associate this kind of parallel to the health debate but it is true. We are having this town hall meetings and discussions with two parties coming from a totally different vantage points. The law makers/decision people are attempting to base their approach, direction on the basis of statistics, data points whereas each of the town hall community set up is challenging them with their individual experiences and stories. Yes critics will challenge the data points being used by the government to promote their legislation since statistics has always been subject to that scrutiny. Similarly the individual stories and folklore ( these are apparently individual stories from other countries (Britain, Canada) which are used to amplify the problems with the health care reform) are also sometimes biased since there is a lot of human emotions involved. But to cut to the chase given the two different vantage points for the two parties the debate becomes loud, unruly and unproductive. Thanks to the media you are streamed that 24*7 to make matters worse.
I am a proponent of the health care reform but cannot provide my preference to the current government proposal since I am not done enough homework (people tend to assume the legislation based on here-say and it is a Chinese whisper at this point of time). However I am pretty sure the current status quo needs to be changed and our healthcare system needs to be fixed. As someone said the devil is in the detail which is true but individual ownership of health is a must to solve the long term health care industry. In the interim, the healthcare system needs to avoid bankrupting the rest of the economy and anything to fix it is better than nothing. Yes the medians and the means will not line up with every individual case but that is what societies have always done. Work for the masses and masses are sure not 100%.

Neil Moore: You will remain in our minds and hearts

2009-06-30T11:50:00.001-04:00

Ever since I heard the news of shocking, untimely death of Neil Moore (our Project Manager in South Dakota), on Saturday evening, I have been in a state of disbelief. It was a tragic and an unfortunate day. It has been immensely challenging to come to grip with the fact that Neil is no more with us. Neil was a remarkable individual and a great personality with a lot of composure and self-belief. I developed a deep sense of appreciation for his demeanor and approach to work as I worked directly with him in the last 6 months. His candor and his openness to employees was a refreshing change and his uncanny ability to think through a problem or an issue was indeed commendable. As I reflect on this loss to the CNSI family, I want to extend my sincerest sympathies to Neil’s family and I wish them heart and courage to bear and overcome this huge loss.

I am sure the actual SD project team members will have tons of stories and events that they experienced working closely with Neil on ground in South Dakota. I strongly encourage each of them to share their stories as a remembrance to Neil and his unwavering commitment and dedication to State of South Dakota and SD MMIS project.

2009-04-25T21:01:00.001-04:00

Testing Blogger Widget for MAC
This will increase the number of posts that i make.

S2 New Year Resolutions: Personal Accountability and no procrastination

2009-01-20T16:09:00.001-05:00

This year I have challenged myself! Challenged not to procrastinate ☺
I do procrastinate. More than I wish and I hope. Of course others who deal and engage with me will say I am even worse. Regardless, the goal this year is to hold myself accountable. And not lapse into a victims thinking mindset. I have reached a conclusion that procrastination is a friend of failure.
Each day as I walk through the unexplored world full of events, I have choices to make and I own full responsibility for those choices. That is personal accountability for me. Personal accountability is not about the other person or holding one other accountable. I believe that I need to focus on my thoughts and actions and use that as a measure since that is more fulfilling and enriching. I think every one (and more so a leader) needs to hold the wagon of personal accountability. As Mahatma Gandhi said “ You must be the change you want to see in the world”. I am planning to start with a small step in that direction by holding myself personally accountable in professional and personal lives and do that both in spirit and letter. I just need to remind myself of this goal every time I lapse into the world of procrastination.

S2 Muses on the technology potpourri i.e. SOA, Cloud Computing, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, Mash-Ups

2008-11-23T00:46:00.001-05:00

Today world is filled with the next big wave of technology solutions, frameworks and panacea. But as we are seeing with the financial sector creating fancy instruments, complex deals don't take away the inherent risk and complexity of the situation. The same applies to the technology market. From client server to now SOA the technology market has been churning these solutions like crazy and yet the situation has not fundamentally changed. For everything that Larry Ellison from Oracle says, this quote is a gem (was said in reference to cloud computing)

"The software industry is more fashion driven than ladies apparel!!!"

Recently on a Gartner blog, the State of the SOA was summarized in a letter which highlighed the following

"To the CIO, CEO, CFO, CTO and shareholders,

As a result of the following I can now only deduce that SOA is a failure and any attempts at SOA will result in failure. Under my direction:

* I have failed to associate our SOA initiatives with our business needs, therefore I cannot show any value for the hundreds of services we have created ,
* I have failed to properly create and support an SOA Center of Excellence, Steering Committee or Competency Center,
* I have failed to enlist the executive staff as true supporters and evangelistscfor our SOA efforts.
* I chose to buy an ESB prior to truly understanding our SOA infrastructure needs (In reality this wasn’t my fault, the vendor said it was super duper necessary)
* I have failed to provide my developers incentives to reuse artifacts,
* It was not my responsibility to follow what was going on next door where there was a separate team dealing with BPM, I mean they are two different initiatives,
* I firmly believe that SOA is nothing more than fancy CORBA or COM.

Despite all of the things I have NOT done, SOA has failed. My additional failure to recognize and implement best practices that have been proven successful in many other companies worldwide also play into the failure of SOA.

Oh well, we should move on and try something new. On the bright side 70% of our initiatives fail anyway. The failure of SOA is SOA’s fault not mine.

Thanks for understanding and I’d like to declare in advance that Cloud Computing, Virtualization and SaaS will be failures under my direction as well.

All I can say is the need to go back to fundamentals like the financial services sector and solve the underlying business problem (process or otherwise). So next time you hear about SOA, Cloud Computing just remember it is not about IT but business.

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S2: Review of White Tiger

2008-11-22T12:34:00.001-05:00

I am not much of fiction reader but took some courage when I bought the book 'White Tiger' by Aravind Adiga. Well for starters it is written by an Indian. Well let me correct myself. Aravind is a journalist and author, who holds dual Indian and Australian citizenship. The White Tiger, won the 2008 Man Booker Prize. Quite an achievement for your first novel. Back to the novel. I am not a fiction reader so the very fact that I was hooked on to the book is a reflection of some good writing by the author. Let me clarify, I could relate better with the story since I come from India. I not only associated myself with the overall concept but literally visualized the characters in my real life from India. Yes it shows the inequality, political corruption, greed, disillusionment within the story but there is a lot of truth and substance to that. The rawness in description of certain settings and encounters between the protagonist and the cast of characters add more realness to the story. Its a must read for anyone who comes from Northern part of India and a good read for everyone else.

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Zero Sum Game : Debate Continues

2008-11-20T23:57:00.001-05:00

My last blog on stock market was commented to remind me of the fundamentals of capitalism and that I was drifting to the dark side. Further I was reminded of the following

Stocks on the other hand represent ownership in a company. Value is created as the company's value increases. Yes there are speculative runs on stocks that are not based on the underlying company value, but they are always corrected. In the end the value of the company is reflected in the value of the stock. By investing in the company you are providing much needed capital to increase productivity and create more value.

Well stocks represent ownership. Correct! Organizations create value. Correct! Stock market prices these organizations values. Correct! However the very fact that pricing the true value or judging the potential value becomes an issue. yes the market pundits say that the collective group wisdom establishes the right market price. Without getting into a debate on that the stock market in this process creates two parties. The first party who anticipates that the stock is over priced and the other who thinks otherwise. Subsequent to the initial IPO (for the most part), the subsequent trades and transactions are based on continuous betting on the potential movement of the stock market value. And there starts the zero sum game. Stock markets are definitely a mechanism to create a market of willing investors for the initial offering (may that's where it creates a value for the organization). However at that time and subsequent to the initial IPO event the average investor is not aware of the information to adequately price a stock and subsequently follows biased set of information to make ill conceived decisions. I am sure that the market correction in the recent months (Dow now sitting below 7500) makes every one reassess that the theory of acceptable multiples of P/E. Regardless the average player in this market is definitely playing with odds stack against him or her and more than likely is working against a similarly handicapped investor on the other side.

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S2 Muses the Stock Debacle : A Zero Sum Game has no winners...

2008-11-11T22:59:00.001-05:00

A lot has been made about the recent Dow Jones crash in the last 30-45 days. I as like millions of others has observed and come with their own theories of this debacle (wasteful spending on wars, poor credit market, sub prime mortgage mess. But instead of thinking and justifying the events in retrospective, I thought and tried to analyze the crystal ball from a different perspective. It stuck me! Stock market is a zero sum game. By making that statement, I am challenging the premise that does stock market really create value? Because behind every transaction (profit or loss) there are two parties that offset each other ( one who sells more than the intrinsic value of the stock wins and the one who buys it is a looser). So technically there is no real value being created but a steady amount of movement of cash in different hands and hence giving a perception of wealth creation. The reason this is difficult to recognize this basic phenomenon, is the macro representation of the economy that there is potential growth involved and hence the potential upside movement of the stock. I am sure the converse is true in the bear market. I think the sooner we realize that stock market was created as a a mechanism for ensuring easy and cheap credit and not a value/money creation manufacturing plant the better of we all will be. Yes there are economist pundits that will belly this whole theory and tell me that this is a typical myth of the common man but I thought i wanted to challenge the so called day trader champions (you will make millions of dollar by following the technical analysis) who imply there is someone out there who is on the receiving end of this strategy. Also in the midst of all these transactions, the financial service companies eat their brokerage fees. Wow, on top of not creating value, we have just reduced the pie every time. In my mind the only thing that counters this zero sum equation is that future holds more potential than the current or let me say future is not the same as present and hence the potential of change. What is the time horizon? Where is the present ending and future beginning is a debate in itself but for now the next time you think you cracked the stock market movement and hence made a buck or two (thousands and millions for the big league) remember there is someone sitting on the other side of the world or coast loosing the same amount.

Long Time Coming: World has Changed

2008-10-24T14:25:00.001-04:00

It has been only 3 months since I wrote my last blog entry and the world seems to have been turned upside down. I would have assumed that to be the case after presidential elections in November but the financial markets had a plan of their own.The financial market mess has shaken everybody from their ill conceived idea that we are going to always grow, and there is enough room of growth in the global economy. Not to say that the financial market mess is a contradiction to that assertion but definitely has gotten the world to a grinding halt and make it reassess its modus operandi. These last 3 months are going to be historical since they are going to be referenced in numerous writings, books and case studies for ages to come. The unflappable Alan Greenspan the most widely recognized messiah of free markets finally succumbed and finally admitted that he was wrong in his understanding of the self regulatory power of free markets. Let me correct myself. He said he was partially wrong. Either way, the Adam Smith school of thought has had a foreclosure and the Keynesian school of thought is the hottest commodity in the market. Sure there are plenty of prescriptive articles being published, smart authors catching on with writing books (from pen to print in 30 days) claiming the deep understanding and dissection of the whole mess (in fact more account of unfolding of events) and tons of new lines of business(America is creative with it service economy) addressing the financial mess( consultants to manage your debt, avoid foreclosure and of course numerous law suits on the Wall Street companies and executives). Also it is funny and ironical that the 'Socialism' word has been picked up in the media like crazy whether it is the unfortunate branding of Obama policies as socialism by Sarah Palin and /or the bail outs being termed as big socialism efforts. I guess it is going to be debated ad nauseam for the next couple of years. But what does it mean for me as an individual? Yes my tax money is going out to saving these banks and investment houses as some one will say, yes my future is more unknown than before and yes, I will be struggling to assess the impact of all of this on my mind set towards spending, investing and self growth. But I have to say one thing I will definitely cherish(cherish may not be an appropriate word) that I have experienced this in person. I was not living around the Great Depression and was too young to understand and decode the Black Monday in 1987 but this time around I have had the capacity to see and observe the the apocalypse. Tough times ahead for each one of us and during tough times, we need to work as a team. I am sure someone will say this is leaning towards socialism but even the capitalists cannot deny that after all 'Man is a social animal' and that is is what makes us different from the rest of the animals.

A Sad Day: Randy Pausch is no more

2008-07-27T21:56:00.001-04:00

Randy Pausch, the professor whose “last lecture” made him a an inspirational speaker died Friday (July 25th) at his home in Chesapeake, Va after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer . He survived 6 more months than what the doctors told him so. And he did it in style, living every bit of it and sharing his ideas and thoughts in more than one way. Truly inspirational talks!! It made me realize that never give up one's passion and life is brief so enjoy it and relish every second . For those who are not aware of him, do listen and watch his last lecture; you will sit back and ponder and rethink yourself. I guarantee...

Managing Budgets and Costs: Life on the other side

2008-06-11T19:32:00.001-04:00

In the last few days I had to send emails out as the head of my business unit to manage and control costs. Least to say it was a very interesting feeling as I send the email out. Previously when I used to receive this email from my boss, I used to get sometimes flustered, sometimes found it unacceptable and totally inappropriate. I am sure similar reactions must have been discussed by my team as well. It is a natural reaction. The few weeks have been an eye opener in terms of costs and managing budgets. These things are very trivial when looked in isolation but quickly add up to the bottom line. It is funny, as I read in light of the oil prices surge and impact on airlines, that the airlines are trying to reduce costs in creative ways. For instance, they are reducing the amount of water they carry in the aircrafts. Their cost reduction economics say that if they reduce the overall weight they carry by 25 pounds they save 440,000 per year. Now for a given flight it might be an insignificant amount but it is a reasonable cost savings in tough times for the airline. I am sure there are other ways of wasteful expenditure that can be controlled but sometimes is not seen in the same priority order as others would assume. Anyway, I am quickly learning the dark side of accounting and finance which has given me a new perspective on things. I cannot fully say it is the right guidance framework though the Wall St. and financial world will tell me it is a numbers game. All I am doing is playing a balancing act as of now before I either become a part of the dark side or quit the responsibility.

Status Reporting: To be or not to be

2008-05-21T01:10:00.001-04:00

The recent weeks there have been conversations and discussion around Status Reporting. Both up and down the organization food there seems to be an inherent distaste for the status report. Sometimes it is around the content of the status report, sometimes frequency and sometimes the very existence of one is questioned. It made me think and ponder. So I did some reading and came across this perfect write up that summarizes in my mind how some of us feel around status reports and growing organizations. Thanks to Rands in Repose blog for the following paragraph

"

There are two organizational inflection points which drastically change communication within the organization. The first change occurs around fifty or so people — this is the moment when, if you’re an early employee, that you first see someone in he hallway that you do not recognize.

This is troubling to you because, until that point, not only knew everyone on a first name basis, but you also knew what they were about… what they were responsible for… what floated their boat. Now, there’s an unknown quantity in the building.

This awkward, but necessary evolution of the organization, passes. You accept the fact the company is growing and you decide to focus your attention just on your group… who cares what those schmoes over in the support group are doing, anyhow? You’ve got an engineering organization to build.

The second organization inflection point happens somewhere around two hundred… two hundred and fifty. The problems identified during the first inflection point are serious problems now. Fiefdoms have been created in your organization and they’re not talking to each other. What made your organization great early on, great communication, is still going on.. it’s just going on inside of each of your organizations and not across them.

Executives in these larger organizations may be the first to recognize this when they’re meeting with these different organizations and get the impression these individuals teams don’t work for the same company.

"

The context of this is at the end of the day communication is required to know what is happening in the organization. There is no better solution than a status report. Period.

So now comes the question around frequency and content of the status report. Two things are important in my mind. Producing a status report should not be a long drawn out process. The reason it ends up being is because as the information flows through the different levels it takes a change in format and style. Also after some time people don't take them seriously and it becomes a copy paste process.

Is there a solution or a fit all for this problem pool. I don't have a great answer but if people continue to be serious about thinking status report as a reflection of their quality of work, I think we can make this whole issue on status report more effective.

Like Churchill said, it's a horrible system but the alternatives are even worse. Why? Cause we don't have a good way to deal with decision making in complex systems.

Gosh , I need to complete and update my status report :)

Doing Increasingly More with Increasingly Less

2008-05-21T00:43:00.001-04:00

As the US economies goes through a tough time and borders on the edge of recession, every organization is required to do a lot of soul searching of their business plans and their operational model. As experienced economists fantasize and visualize the world through their ideal world models the and seasoned politicians shmooze their their way with grandiose plans, what does an individual employee do as his part to support the organization. That's where the individual team member,developer, tester, middle manager and everyone can act like an entrepreneur.

What I've always believed in is that under ALL circumstances, we need to do increasingly more with increasingly less. Period.

This is not a call for beating one self up with more workload, more stress and less available time. It's just the opposite. On the contrary it is a mechanism to get through tough and trying times where one needs to trust the gut and follow the smarts and that is one can do more with less. That's what our American spirit is all about. It creates winners that produce better stuff using fewer resources.

This is a call for evaluating every small decision you make through the lens of operational and financial efficiency. Will developing a small utility help me operate more efficiently than the way I do today? Does it save time or rework for me? 100's of decisions by individual team members actually contribute to the success of any undertaking. By wearing this lens of operational and financial efficiency they can not only contribute to their immediate teams but also establish the spirit that yes we can do increasingly more with increasingly less.

S2 Appreciates Quiet Strength

2008-03-11T13:36:00.001-04:00

I have been intrigued, motivated and impressed reading the book from Tony Dungy. This was a very powerful inspirational book from one of the well respected and revered coaches in the NFL. The most apt statement that has been resonating with me which I find most suited and apt to day to day work place environment is the following

Whatever it takes....

No excuses ,No explanations

Today's high stress, pressure projects (no different, no less than the NFL game time pressure) warrants to embrace this mind set. The theory is simple that there are no excuses and no explanations (justifications) and every team member needs to do whatever it takes. Yes there are the independency champions but nothing is more involved and interdependent than winning an NFL game. 53 people playing in different sets(offence, defense, special teams) contribute to winning the game. The offence can turn over the ball and put defense in a bad situation or the special teams can make the starting position for offence miserable. But there are no excuses, no explanations every individual has to do whatever it takes to win the game. The results may not be immediately available but this is such a fundamental mind shift that the long term benefits of this are immense.

I just hope, I can spark that in my team and as someone said charity starts at home so I need to embrace this first in letter and spirit. So I will do whatever it takes to succeed ...no excuses and no explanations. The results may not be immediate but they are going to improve over time period.....

S2 Muses: Leading Indicators of Project Success

2008-03-10T00:07:00.001-04:00

I think one of the industry wide pain point is the continued lack of success of large complex IT projects. Post mortem reports galore, lessons learned plenty, infinite measurement points but the guaranteed success remains elusive. This makes me ponder what could be a leading indicator of a project success. A lot of the metrics are after the fact analysis like schedule slip, cost overruns, defect rate etc. For me a leading indicator will be pointers that identify critical aspects of the project even before a project is started. Well for example the need for a leader or a project champion. Increasingly in organizations the project champion is stripped of all powers to make some tough decisions or the project champion is constrained by a consensus decision making process. The need for a consensus decision making points to a lack of well defined vision, goal of the project. Also if a project has a long life cycle it has little chance of complete success. More than likely at the end of the project battle will emerge a wounded tired bloody survivor and not a victorious soldier. Anyway I would like to listen for these leading indicators. For one of them I believe is to establish before the start of the project that there will never be a increase in the budget and /or a change in the timeline once started. The only thing that would happen is a trade-off requirements.

S2 : Life is lonely on top

2008-03-03T21:30:00.001-05:00

The last month has been least to say eventful. There have been a few changes in my workplace and I have been a part of the roller coaster ride. I guess we are still going through the bumpy ride though I hope we are no longer in for any flips or deep drops. Well you never know since as you go up the food chain, the air is thin, its lonely and things happen. There are more procrastinators than well wishers. There is little to gain but a lot to loose. Yet, I chose to go for the ride up the top since I wanted to experience the phenomenon. I hope in my attempt to perform, I do the right things. It may not be the desired final outcome and applauded by the world but it will be an honest and sincere attempt to do the right things. The first thing is to have a participative process of decision making. People construe participative decision making sometimes as consensus based approach but that is not the case. Participative decision making requires active participation from the right stakeholders in a decision (from top to bottom) but final decision making lies with the person in charge. It implies that the rational and the approach behind the final decision is understood by all the participants I recognize my limitations and limitations of my position in the overall context of the organization but I see that as typical of any situation of life. My self grade will involve assessing myself how well I did within those constraints. The second aspect is to have the right team around me. The key aspect of any team is trust and the ability for the players to line up behind the captain and support each other in the most productive way. People may think they are supporting and very participative in the organization activities but that is not the case. One should read the five dysfunctions of the team for an eye opener. Star performers of the past assume that they are not to perform day in day out. On the contrary, the star performers are expected to perform at the same high level day in day out. Like any professional team,a star performer gets the necessary limelight when the team does well and gets severely dinged when the performance takes a nose dive. Well all it warrants is a lot of soul searching? Do I have that team? Maybe or maybe not but I believe that I need to trust the team first before they can trust me. I have to give them my vote of confidence before expecting them to trust me. I am ready to do that. However if things don't change for the good in the immediate future there will be changes in the team or if need to at the captain level? The expectations are high, challenges galore and odds stacked up against me. However I have trust in my God, my skills and my team.

S2 Muses: Star Players and Dysfunctions of a Team

2008-01-08T22:32:00.001-05:00

I believe this is often discussed, spoken and written subject on the subtleties of team dynamics. You don't appreciate the phenom till it impacts your bottom line. An analogy from the world of sports. The indian cricket team has all time star players who will be remembered in the cricketing history books. Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid are recognized, established stars and they continue and continue to deliver stellar individual performances but the Indian team fails to reach any greatness. They are medicore at best sprinkled with real bad and glory days. That points to the inherent difficulty in assessing the complexity of the solution. (Note : the indian team has come together as a team to back one of their players who has been recently banned showing some unified spirit). Who is responsible for the team to act/play like a team? The obvious answer lies in the team leadership which is the coach and captain. However, I believe on the contrary that it is the resposibility for each and every individual player. Better said than done. The team's cohesiveness and coherene is orchestrated by the mastero and he needs to be constantly engaged in ensuring that players are alinged since a single player who is not mentally and goal wise aligned can ruin the show. Yes, we do tend to sack captains and coaches whenever a team fails without addressing the root cause. This is not necessarily bad since it is better than not making any change or making changes that just do lip service and hope for a miracle to rescue the ship for yet another time.

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What would you have Mobile Phone or Electricity?

2007-12-24T20:34:00.000-05:00

With the political stage heating in the US for the next presidential elections, I thought this might be one of the crazy ideas to the potential candidates.
Politicians in India text (read SMS on mobile phones) to plead for votes on the election day. While some remote locales of the nation still don't have electricity -- but that doesn't mean the politicians cannot reach them on their newly distributed cell phone freebes come election day and request their vote using the power of SMS. Reportedly, about 30 to 40 individuals living in a Dalit village some 50 miles from Sagar in Madhya Pradesh are trudging around 12 miles per day just to get their mobile phones juiced back up for the next 24 hours .

I am not sure if they are getting their value worth since I don't assume they expect informational messages other than the latest cricket scores ( India got thrashed by Australia in the first test match) and latest bollywood movie releases. Everyone wants their attention. And I am sure Nokia is happy since they get to add yet another set of client to their customer base.(Nokia has 90+% market share). Well I guess we are not going to see any sign of electricity being piped out to this remote region in the foreseeable future. But as politicans will like to tell you what counts is for the public to first get them those necessary votes and then only they can bring in the changes. After all what can be more important than to gather support and mass for a leader running short of votes
This may appear rather amusing but it is an interesting aspect to the amazing growth of cellphones in India. The facts of this are courtesy of site (Engadget).

High Road to happiness in life

2007-12-02T01:54:00.001-05:00

This is the best way to go about leading your way through daily ups and downs. This is truly the high road approach to life. Thank you Mother Teresa.

People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered ... forgive them anyway
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives... be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies... succeed anyway.
If you are honest and sincere people may cheat you... be honest and sincere anyway.
What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight... build anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous... be happy anyway.
The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow... do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have, and it will never be enough... give the world the best you've got anyway.
You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God...
It was never between you and them anyway.

S2 Personal Challenge : Wish My Dad Recovery

2007-11-21T02:55:00.000-05:00

It is a testing time for me as I come to grips with a personal crisis. My Dad had a massive heart attack this Sunday (India Monday morning), was rushed to the hospital and went under a heart operation. He is on life support as I write this blog waiting to board my flight from Frankfurt to Delhi. I pray and hope that God is merciful and gives my family the courage to come through this testing time. I am confident about it and I am sure he will recover for he has been an inspiration to me in terms of his sheer will power and defiance of any form of defeat. He is a fighter and he is going to fight this out too. But the events in the last couple of days were a humbling experience from two perspectives. One is on the personal front where sitting 8000 miles away, I could not provide any comfort and care to my mom and dad in the difficult time. Your success as an individual in terms of professional achievements and personal assets is naught when it could not help your very parents who are fundamentally responsible for your success Second is a more philosophical in context. The very fact that we as humans have created this illusion that we are in control of our environment and surroundings. Scientists and doctors make us feel that we know more about our human body workings than ever before. It is true in one respect since we can control many life threatening events from the past but we are far from conquering the body and its working. I have a suspicion that we will never conquer the uncertainty of life and we just need to learn to accept it, adapt to it. As I close this blog write-up, I just hope that my Dad is recovering fast and furious since I expect no less from him since he inspires me every second with his energy in life at his age and his zealousness to his work (he teaches kids physics these days).

Halo Effect: Delusions and Critical Thinking

2007-11-20T04:06:00.000-05:00

After a very long time I completed a book end to end. The book title was ‘The Halo Effect’. Many of you may already observed that on my IM personal message few days ago. I was intrigued by the book only because it started with assertion which closely lined with my personal thinking. The very thought all books whether self help books (rich dad, poor dad), business mantras (Good to Great) make success sound a simple prescription of certain core principles. It is a good story to tell but as we have all experienced, life is not that simple and success not that easy. You can follow and apply to heart the 7 habits of effective people and still may not be effective. As an organization you can follow all the tenets of Great companies and still be struggling to sustain your business. The reason lies in our attempt to simplify things in a framework model. We as human beings cannot handle continued chaos around us and need to develop a plausible hypothesis for every event. However we forgot our unique context (environment, people social interactions and culture since every organization is unique in its setup) and apply these so called seduced theories (like applying ‘Best Practices) as instant cures to the problems. I always believed that books should only be read to simulate one’s thinking. One should use them to invigorate new ideas, invoke new thoughts, assess and evaluate situations critically. I guess the very fact that we need to respect that life is uncertain, business is influenced by variables and forces beyond an organization and /or an indivuals control, recognition that decision making is all about trade-offs and nothing in life and business is absolute is highly unnerving. Today outcomes drive the assessment of the execution and our decisions. Decision making and execution is excellent and the management team phenomenal if you meet the desired metrics (Wall Street quarterly earnings at one end to meeting your deliverable on a simple software project at the other end). On the contrary the decision is flawed and management team are a bunch of losers if the output is not in line with the expectations. This mindset is the root cause of those fleeting Wall Street darling companies and is at the heart of the flip flop stories covered by the various business journals and magazines. Outcomes driving the assessment of the situation is by its very nature flawed (surprising to many). This applies to personal frame of reference as well. We like to create a semblance of order within the chaos that surrounds us. We create simple decision models that help us evaluate and assess a given situation or a problem. However our individual decision making framework models is influenced negatively by flawed facts collection (skewed by our predispositions and/or existing haloed data)and simple but inaccurate cause and effect theories. As the author of the book outlined, we need to respect the uncertainty and account for inherent risk of failure in every decision whether it is personal or otherwise. The failure does not necessary imply that we need to change our decision making model but makes us recognize that luck,chance and probability of bad events exists and is fundamental to our sane and continued existence in the world.

Customer Anthropology: Next Steps: S2 is Intrigued

2007-10-01T10:23:00.000-04:00

Welcome to the world of social sensors. I had briefly mentioned the concept of customer anthropology in one of my previous blogs. Just a quick reminder: Customer Anthropology is the act of observing customers in their natural habitat is definitely a powerful framework. But the challenge lies in that observations by the most diligent social analyst is filled with objectivity and relies on human recall with all its inherent weaknesses. It is not quantitative. Now the research being done at the MIT Media Lab Human Dynamics group is working with series of smart sensors (yet another smart kit) that will help track the unconscious and instinctual side of human behavior. The intend to provide more data on subtle personal cues and social interactions never available before. Yes there are all privacy lawyers waiting in the wings to kill this thing down but it definitely looks like a way to gather more empirical data which may finally give managers, marketers critical input intothe hidden web of social interactions that determine the effectiveness of organizations, product launches.

Releasing Big Software Systems: Just do It

2007-09-30T07:01:00.000-04:00

This blog entry is a result of a WSJ article dated 09/25/2007. The article was covering the release of Oracle Payroll ERP in the Arizona State University where the information technology department decided it will be more effective to stick to rigid deadlines, releasing the software on schedule even if all the kinks hadn't been worked out- and try to fix the problems on fly. The software was released in an unconventional way but painful approach. The approach was Admit from the start that there will be mistakes and hten work through with glitches in production with the actual users.

Every large system implementation is mired with schedule, cost and scope issues. It has become a question of whether it will happen or not but when it will happen. The software industry and the project management thought gurus continue to be baffled by the continuous lack of maturity of the software system implementations. Project management outline of processes, tasks, measures are all modes of reducing the risk but do not eliminate the inevitable. Every time a project encounters a miscue, process mania creates more controls and communication models that suffocate the individual output and productivity. But there is no one on the project team (customer, vendor, and other stakeholders) to challenge the process overkill. The progress and the output are measured on project charts and schedules. There is often a quote ‘We will finish this project on Microsoft Project’. The ability to see the big picture is increasingly lost and every issue is deemed detrimental and becomes a stalemate. Subsequently the project team morale goes south since things are not going as planned and finger pointing and CYA mindset sets in. It is tragic and highly debilitating to all the parties involved that no one can see beyond the petty issues. I guess the root cause of this malaise is the expectation setting at the start of any project. The projects are sold as the next best thing after the slice of bread. It is not that the system and solution are not going to improve the overall business process efficiency but the bar is too high. The yardstick is contradictory to the ground reality. The systems take time to mature and they are not right in the first go round. (The fact is that most of the software system/solutions take 3-4 versions before they deliver the actual desired benefits and their design goals. The earlier versions of windows were dismal and it took almost the 4 version to get it to an acceptable and desired threshold of acceptance among the user community. Today it is the age of perpetual beta software’s (Google Gmail continues to be a beta product after 4 years in existence). But somehow that reality check is missing in the business community and the message from the software community gets distorted by the time it reaches the business community. The funny part of the story is that key drivers of the project understand this challenge but they choose to ignore reality. It is either under the aegis of ‘not my problem’ or ‘we are bound contractual boundaries’ that people shy away from facing the brutal reality. As we ignore reality we are actually caught in a downward spiral. The occasional messiahs are shot down by reference to historical facts. The players become so risk averse to the point of negative returns.

Is there a way out of this rut? I guess it takes some individual champions who have the political and leadership clout to ignore the noise. Yes it will ruffle people since you ignoring the cynics, it takes political and mental fortitude to call the shots and make progress. For software implementation you can choose the University of Arizona route of implementation (albeit some will see that as political suicide) or never come out of the vicious cycle of over planning, feature creep, scope change, schedule slippages and risk multiplication effect. I am in the doer category of things whose motto is ‘ Just do it’. I will like to leave you with two quotes from two respected entities in the business world

“We have a ‘strategic plan.’ It’s called doing things.”—Herb Kelleher

“We made mistakes, of course. Most of them were omissions we didn’t think of when we initially wrote the software. We fixed them by doing it over and over, again and again. We do the same today. While our competitors are still sucking their thumbs trying to make the design perfect, we’re already on prototype version #5. By the time our rivals are ready with wires and screws, we are on version #10. It gets back to planning versus acting: We act from day one; others plan how to plan—for months.”—Bloomberg by Bloomberg

S2 and India Trip: Part 1

2007-09-25T15:17:00.000-04:00

The trip to Chennai started with me making some assumptions about my flight time from DC. Not to anybody’s surprise, I assumed my flight was scheduled at 5:50 pm EST when in fact was 4:45 pm EST. What followed was the typical S2 2 hours mayhem.. dumpster style packing, race to the airport and plead the way through security etc. As someone said your past experience not only makes you war-ready (clock ready in this case) but creates that semblance of confidence which is actually false since it rests on a very fine line. Anyway, I reached ahead of time with plenty to spare. In fact my travel partner was surprised. Hmm.. let me introduce him here, referred to as SP going forward. He was going to experience his ex motherland (I did not know motherland could change, he is now a proud US citizen) after 35 years. I wonder how old is he??

Anyway the flight experience was marked by this clumsy user interface tool for the seats and the audio/video equipment. In fact it clearly demonstrates what is lacking with today system designers of user interface. They make it so unwieldy and complicated and think they have worked out a cool device. I wish they dispel the assumption that people know computers and browsing for them is like a child’s play. Maybe 25 years from now but the money people (remember the baby boomers) like it simple and easy. For it was not easy, it gave you the opportunity to strike a conversation with the air hostess. Well she may think you are a looser but it is entirely on the individual creativity to use this opportunity and make the best of the situation J

The stay at the Frankfurt was not that much fun even though we used our United Card to be in a Lufthansa lounge. I sucked up good when I choose to spend euros on t-mobile hotspot. Yet another bad decision. The flight to India become interesting since all I could see was Chennai Software engineers in different shapes and forms (mind you I am one of the ugly specimens though not from South India) and the scene at the Frankfurt gate was pretty much reminiscent of a typical India international airport. So SP was anticipating his time in India and was getting mentally prepared for some cultural shock. Wonder why he chose the land of Rajnikanth (people who don’t know him its Ok, he is the Tom cruise of the South Indian cinema though some proclaim him to be more popular than Princess Diana), idlis and dosas ( fanatic Tamilians may claim dosas are legacy from adjacent rival state Karnataka). All I could say to SP was…What a choice!!!.

The immigration line at Chennai airport was long and stay there was protracted as I say my US citizen partner breeze past me (when would India respect their own citizens more…Hold on don’t do it now for I hope to become US citizen in the near future.

SP experienced his first rude awakening of the Indianism (new term coined by me) when no one stopped for him as he crossed a road to the parking lot. He was treated with couple of horns and Tamil stares. SP, the brave soul chose to sit up front and experience the chaotic driving in India on our rental chauffeur driven car ( Mind you ‘In chaos lies Creativity’). His first reaction was ‘ Looks like Egypt’. Poor guy had only experienced Egypt as a non developed country in his lifetime. Think about it, we as Indians project such an image of disorder that we are compared to Egypt even though we are miles ahead in all economic progress metrics. I wonder why J

The Hotel reception was interesting least to say. We were staying at ‘The Park’. The hotel was a decent attempt to copy Modern architecture based hotels. We as Indians do a decent job on copying. So the room had the right modern architectural elements in term of the bed, the study, the plasma but at the same time had pillows that were stained. We had modern bathroom elements but an interesting implementation of multi-headed shower (see the picture). Actually the hotel used to be an ex movie studio (Gemini). Wow a theme hotel in India. But all in all a decent hotel.

We experienced the Chennai traffic next morning when we headed to our office. We observed the creativity of Indians in action in how they leverage the width of a road. On a given three lane road, there were 6-7 vehicles. We support a heterogeneous mode of travel( cars, trucks, buses, motor bikes, rickshaw, scooter) apart from occasional animal rides (bullock cart). It appeared as a gridlock to any layman but everything was moving with unspoken rules and processes. Do we have a solution for the US gridlocks? I did forget to mention that horns (an unused tool in US automobile circle) were effectively deployed with great success. The Indian roads reflect one of the nature’s basic principles of food chain hierarchy. The bigger vehicle gets it right to way and the more agile (bikes, scooters) maneuvers their way. Law of Natural Survival in practice on Indian roads. The margin of error is very low and occasionally when a bike scratches the car on the side, the stares and occasional bad mouthing is met with a plastic ‘Sorry’.

Our CNSI office was nice and looked all crowded. In fact there was a specialist for every job. You had a specialist for ‘making and serving tea’, a specialist for ‘photo copying’, a specialist for closing and opening doors. Interesting when we tried to photo copy ourselves it was met with astonishment, concern and fear of job. No matter which way you look, the ancillary support organization was impressive. I think it leaves the engineers to just focus on the work in hand. I hope all this ancillary man force means better productivity and higher throughput from the India office. If it was not enough, we experienced a special check processing service where we did not leave our seat and our antiquated check (check with no MICR code and double the size of our current day check) was deposited and processed within 1 hour. Talk about customer experience. Well customer delight in this case.

As days progressed we chose to come to the office all by ourselves. We tried to reach the office at 9:00 AM in the morning. Well no jokes on IST time Ok but the fun was that we were dropped by our car in front of the elevator called lift in India (this is called chauffeur service). Well to our surprise, the lift did not operate before 9:30 AM. The reason was that the lift operator (specialist job) did not show up before 9:30 AM. (Remember JS experience in SD where going up and down the lift was no rocket science, Well in India it is some science for it needed a specialist whose job was to take the lift up and down almost 1000 times in a day). Well yet another curious observation that SP made was the tendency of Indians to form groups of people (2-5) and stand and observe. He was intrigued by it. It is definitely not a gay thing but Indians are very social and this chit chat keeps us sane in the midst of all the chaos and humdrum. One last incident was the little shopping experience. Yes we haggled for prices and even though we felt good about reducing the price by 20% it left us with a hollow feeling of how much more we have been cheated. And of course our beloved head of India operations picked up something for the most important person on the US office. Guess who!!

Anyway enough said about our interesting encounters there but on a final note before I close the blog entry, the Indian team in Chennai was very hospitable, pleasant, courteous and hungry for work. I wish them success!!!

Road to Customer Anthropology: S2 sounds weird

2007-09-07T22:47:00.000-04:00

Whenever I reach a moment of aha!, I always try to reconstruct and see how it came about. My today's aha moment was getting across the concept of Customer Anthropology. Customer Anthropology: the act of observing customers in their natural habitat is definitely a powerful framework. I came across this unintentionally and credit to Dave Pollard's intriguing outline of the concept. The concept can be simplified as yet another approach to perform business process analysis but the emphasis is more closely observing the habitat, recognizing the human experience pain points and identify undiscovered interactions. More of the same but the devil in the detail and approaching with the mindset of an anthropologist. Yes it appears to being recognized now more and more in the industry thought it appeared in Fast Company article almost a decade ago. Anyway it is funny since I fumble on this concept without looking out for it on the internet. On the contrary , I am listening to the author of this new book 'The World Without You'. So I go to Amazon to know more about the book. This book was outlining how the man made infrastructure is going to self destruct and lead to interesting consequences. An excerpt from New Yorker review of the book
"Teasing out the consequences of a simple thought experiment—what would happen if the human species were suddenly extinguished—Weisman has written a sort of pop-science ghost story, in which the whole earth is the haunted house. Among the highlights: with pumps not working, the New York City subways would fill with water within days, while weeds and then trees would retake the buckled streets and wild predators would ravage the domesticated dogs. Texas’s unattended petrochemical complexes might ignite, scattering hydrogen cyanide to the winds—a "mini chemical nuclear winter."
So I read the customer reviews and encounter a series of books compilation on 'Save the World' and encounter this phenomenonally talented personality Dave Pollard. One of his previous works is on Customer Anthropology. Hmm..an interesting way of discovering new ideas. I am not sure search engines and computers will emulate this process of discovery in human brains. What do you think?

9/11 and (WWI) Web War One

2007-09-02T19:49:00.000-04:00

On the eve of 9/11, its always a time to do some retrospect. I guess there are many out there which will take position on either side of the table and make claims for the overall safety of US , global peace and world order. Well I wish not to suck in that debate but want to get your attention to the potential 21st century warfare and our first true experience of Web War. Many are calling it the WWI (Web War One) since it is for the first time a focussed attack was able to bring the entire government to a stand still. Yes, we have read this nightmare in science fiction thrillers but we have now experienced in real.The attack was against the most wired country in Europe-Estonia. According to defense minister Jaak Aaviksoo "All major commercial banks, telcos, media outlets, and name servers — the phone books of the Internet — felt the impact, and this affected the majority of the Estonian population. This was the first time that a botnet threatened the national security of an entire nation" Read this link for more details .
I guess one message for us to undertake is that in the race to connect and wire entire cities (San Francisco project) we are creating significant risks for our country and its citizen. Yes the security consultants will have a field day and reiterate the need for security and sell more products and services. But fundamentally every technology advance that human kind has experienced has resulted in in unknown loose ends. Yes there are sick minds who will exploit this and the worst is everyone's imagination. But as a part of the society, I am willing to take the risk for I want to enjoy the better half of technology collaboration, global connected society since benefits far outweigh the potential risks. What do you think?

S2 Encounters at SD

2007-08-25T21:52:00.000-04:00

Phew I finally reached Pierre SD around midnight. I also had the honor of stopping by the rising star of SD 'Watertown'. I had no time to rehearse the demo so I quickly went to bed. And if it was not enough, I was told that only if I had replied to an email, I would have had my tickets and not suffer through the ordeal. I was just left wondering only if someone knew that a hotel reservation in Pierre without an airline reservation does not get you too far. Yes only if I had checked in a day earlier, yes only if I had done my own reservations and yes only if I had planned not to go to SD all of this will not have happened!!!
Anyway, the demo morning came in quite early and I managed my way to the demo hall. I was not only low on energy but anxious and nervous. Dr VG and AG had worked through the previous evening to address last minute kinks in the demo. At the same time the demo team had been bit by the flu bug with JG totally looking done and couple of other team followed soon. Anyway, the demo on Day 1 went fine and we planned to go out for bite before we went back to the hotel to get some rest. As is the case most time with CNSI contingent in these endeavors we had our first reportable encounter. One brave soul on our team forgot that there is a swimming pool at the hotel and decided to swim across the Missouri river. And yes he managed to battle the undercurrents and stay alive and show up on the dinner table. In order to celebrate his survival he drank a liquid cocaine shot (details of this cannot be published on the blog). To conclude day 1 I will have to share that that the whole town was dead by 8:00 since couple of the team members were roaming on SD streets trying to figure out a dinner place at 8:30 PM and the only thing that was open was a 'Blind Casino'.

The second day demo started with Allan waking up to high fever and wisely deciding to take a couple of hour’s additional rest before his presentation in the afternoon. The second day demos also went well and we were wrapping our session with Q&A with the state team. The fact that our team was very honest, forthcoming and open to the state with the questions was a pleasant and a big positive of the demo. Though few one liners like ‘I stood up Maine’, ‘in the past you must have been running a dating service’ stood out. But the real fun was in store for us in the evening. We had our entire team on the streets which had a big title board ‘The Cow Town’. Yes we were definitely new meat on the streets. As we made our way to a drinks place, we were stared at by everyone. It appeared that everyone at the bar knew everyone and finding this new bunch of people was definitely strange for them. After having some drinks we went to the Italian restaurant for food where JG ordered a white wine which was red in color. Are white wines not supposed to be white JG!!! Well you don’t question the sales man. After a lovely dinner we moved over to yet another bar (YAB) where quickly one of our team members became the talk of the entire woman crowd in the bar. They were all for him or as it is said they were all over him. We then moved over to YAB which had a dance floor and there as usual I was chanting ‘Punjabi’ in a town which had experienced their first brown skin 48 hours ago. But not for this dance floor we would not have discovered the hidden talents of our former deputy chief architect, ex-implementation manager. The person definitely made it a point to be on the dance floor trying to swing his way with every girl on the floor. It did not matter whether the girl had a man with him; our friend was swinging his way. Before I close this blog entry, I just got an update that I missed the highlight of the nite at the bar. State of SD runs a public shuttle service to drop all the drunk people from the bars to their houses. The service runs after midnight till three in the morning. But the highlight was that our ex marine colleague acted as a Good Samaritan when he helped broke up a cat fight. Two girls went at each other locks and barrel before our friend tried to intervene. Blood flowed, bones cracked all for our deputy chief architect ....PM. Anyway, it was three eventful days and hopefully we are given the opportunity by the state to not only act as a good Samaritan but also as a good IT partner.

S2 AirTravel Saga: Yet another lost Cause

2007-08-22T17:10:00.000-04:00

Here I am sitting at Barnes and Noble in the Mall of America typing this blog. Well I am neither on a vacation trip nor on a fact finding mission in Minneapolis. I am sitting here because my travel plans were totally bungled. In fact there was no plan since when I landed this morning at Dulles airport, I was welcomed by the NW assistant saying that I don't have a reservation. I forked out$1000.00 for a $ 400.00 trip. I guess I can relate with the advertisement where I am sitting to the person next to me who is traveling at half the fare I paid. Anyway I am destined to go to Pierre South Dakota. I guess the reservations can only take me to Minneapolis since I cannot get the connecting flight. The connecting flight has a weight limit and can only accommodate 26 people instead of the 32 seats. I guess either the engineers did not design the plane right ( not surprised by it) or they failed to measure the exponential growth in the waistline of the American population ( I guess M Moore has something to say on this). Either way an empty seat went to Pierre and not me. I am supposed to spend 8 hours in Minneapolis. There were my good collegaues who were volunteering to give away their seats but the damn computers came in between. They did not have menu option called 'Volunteer Swap'. I guess the next generation airline reservation softwares will have this option. I guess by then we would have virtual travel and don't need to spend time praying for the flights and the bags. On the note of that i just discovered that my bags reached ahead of me. They are already there in SD. I guess the airlines can claim ahead of time arrival even though it is for the bags and not the actual passenger. There is always something positive in an episode. My takeaway was 'Choose which one you want to reach on time : Bag and Yourself'. I chose the former on this trip... More on the trip later...

S2 Encounters at the MMIS Conference : Lighter Side of Things

2007-08-18T20:10:00.000-04:00

This years conference at San Diego was much anticipated since after a long time it was happening in a city period. :)
The conference started with United bungling my bags. For one of the rare occasions, I was ahead of time for the flight but for no good reason the bag felt the need of travel via Denver and not directly to San Diego. Yes with my unique situation as a Sikh, I was stranded to my hotel room for the first afternoon before I could reveal my presence to the rest of the world. I know I know , dressing up for a Sikh man requires more resources and more time than a woman sometimes.
Anyway, the night was spend at CNSI hospitality suite. Our jokes increased in laughter (not proportional to the the quality of the joke) with every drink. Of course we experienced the Marriott rule which was a 2 strike rule ( I guess Mexico baseball rules are different). And is with such settings, we were forced to leave the room not by the Marriott staff but by the room owner in a polite way.

The much anticipated Arabian Nights evening host by CNSI started on a slow note with the dancers doing some slow body flexing moves. The attendees were busy munching food and enjoying the eCAMS cocktail with mixed reviews. The surprise started with the snakes on the floor..Ooops around the bellies of the dancers. It was a jaw dropping moment for some. A run away moment for others. As the evening progressed, the Punjabi dance made its way and the CNSI team made its own stage for a workout on the dance floor.
The evening was not over since the team trickled over to the roof top bar( Altitude at Marriott). I guess it is said that being cute sometimes misfires. One of our colleagues JS discovered when he asked a group of girls how to take the lift to the Roof Top. Well the short answer was 'Its not Rocket Science; press the button and it takes you there'. The evening had more in store for us. We were introduced to a stranger girl from Italy by JS and once she settled in with us, JS did not mutter a word. I guess we spoiled the fun. Well after exhausting our options at the Roof Top we were forced to choose our rickshaw back by BR. Well it was fun till we reached our destination where we paid $20 per person which was 20 times more than we paid going the other way. At if that was not enough they were asking for tip. Go Figure. The saving grace was that we had in our accompany the financial power of BoJK. We all were in as much shock but we said it is good as long as our friend BR enjoyed the ride. You will believe that this would be end of Day 1 but not to be. We went to the hospitality suite where we were subject to a therapy session and brotherly love was exchanged in a most intriguing way.

The highlight of the next day was the official announcement of CNSI Booth Babe. The award went to 'Gino'. Yeah the girls were disappointed since they did not anticipate this competition. He not only graced our booth with his effective presence but was shoulder to shoulder with his look alike brother in the neighboring booth of 4TG. I think it runs in the blood. Then there was tennis. JM came with the brilliant idea and I borrowed running shoes from Gino to stretch my muscles. Yes it was weary and its impact was felt in days to come but the highlight was the JG move on the racket course. Came up with the right warm up, stretches himself... has all the moves of a star on the field and swing his serve in style but alas...the ball never made it to the net. The evening was concluded with a dinner at one of the expensive restaurants. We were split into two groups and ate some expensive cold soup and equally dry fillet mignon. I guess it is rightly said that in an expensive restaurant a large group is not a good idea.

The Day 3 was when our proposal team emerged from the confines of the South Tower room. We had forgotten that they were at Conference. This was definitely a proposal lockdown 2500 miles away. The team finally decided it was time to return back and chose to carry their bags on Old town streets. As they left we were in the hands of JG. The ex SD native JG took us to the beach front. It was not surprising that it took 1 hour and 10 minutes to reach the beach which was just 10 minutes away. And to make the ride musical we had the background music by JM snoring every now and then at the back of the car. I never knew that nostalgia leads to memory loss. Yes we are still searching for the illusive McDonalds on the beach front. May be next time JG. ... But the final honors went to JG when in his nostalgic mood, he took us to .... spot. Since this blog is rated PG I will let this remain as ....

S2 Escapades at San Diego

2007-08-12T15:58:00.000-04:00

You can read my latest blogs over the last few days and the next coming days at the following site http://mmisconference.blogspot.com . I am using the MMIS Conference blog site as a more focussed blogging site on MMIS Conference and related industry. Don't miss some exciting blog write ups and some live coverage from the MMIS conference at San Diego. Next blog update on this site after August 20th.

S2 Travels: Coming to you Live from 2007 MMIS Conference at San Diego

2007-08-06T22:32:00.000-04:00

I will attempt to enthuse the blogging phenomenon in the MMIS space this year. I will be attending the 2007 MMIS Conference from August 13-August 17th at San Diego and I intend to use the blogging tool to share information updates from the MMIS conference. Will it be useful for the reader community. Well I don't know about that. I will try my best to make it a good read, invoke some thought in the minds of the reader, intrigue the reader with my perspectives. It has been now a regular annual event for me and my company CNSI to attend. We are all excited at CNSI since we continue to make a difference in the industry with our solution offerings and this year we are planning to give a preview of our new user interface.

Personally, I continue to make my 2 cents of contribution by doing sessions that challenge the status quo. It is always nice to see that the ideas raised last year by us are being accepted across the vendor community. Last year, CNSI led the way with our pragmatic roadmap to RHIO integration. The 'Inside-Out approach' trend is now being expanded in two separate vendor tracks. It goes to show that we can make a difference.

This year, I am co-presenting with Pitney Bowes on Monday August 13 at 3:30 PM. Even though we are running our session in parallel with MITA and a RHIO track, I hope we have audience that can listen to our message. We hope to make people pause and reevaluate their approach to Communications. As we usher and embrace the new social interaction models, we need to shed our archaic model of communication in the Medicaid industry.
Also, I will like to welcome other contributors to this blog, since this poor soul cannot be there all the time at all the events. As we are in era of information overflow, the MMIS organizers are doing their contribution by conducting 30 odd sessions with diverse topics in three days. Good Lord! I just wished I was back in the good old days :)

Escapades of S2: Daddy Day Care Saga Continues...

2007-08-01T23:55:00.000-04:00

I thought the worst was behind me. We all like to think that way but alas I was wrong. I was like a fatigued runner hoping this is the end of the race . But not to be I am here for yet another day. I think one of the most burning issues that we need for the upcoming elections is to create a free, interoperable, open society for Nannies. Yes she ditched us for 4 days in the week. And yes as in round robin fashion, I am back to take care of my darling angel. Yes if I have to go by my experience of Tuesday, I have more than my hands full. I know it will sound so cliche, but it takes energy, perseverance and patience to deal with an infant. Diaper changing was an adventure with turnaround time of 8 minutes ( compared to 1 minute) l that made my daughter staring at me and saying 'Daddy, whats the matter with you? I can't believe your boss has not fired you for such inefficiency. My daughter in the interest of hunger and starvation swallowed food which I failed to warm it after pulling it out from the refrigerator( Dah..well it was not on my wife's cheat sheet). And yes the fact that I gave her apple juice without mixing it with water was less of my problem since she was out of he Daddy Day care by the time her some stomach disturbances were apparent. Come on, I thought kids should get pure adulterated food. Here, i am supposed to mix it water. Hello!. Anyway, as the time flew, I got more comfortable with the fact that I am out of my league here. Yeah as someone said tomorrow is yet another day at Daddy Day Care :)

Escapades of S2: Daddy Day Care

2007-07-30T21:49:00.000-04:00

S2 is anxious, concerned and petrified. 9 months and 10 days after my little angel came in our lives, Daddy has to take care of her for one entire day. Let me correct for 8 hours and yet it seems a lifetime. Yeah, I have to change diapers (bound to use twice the number of wipes), feed the little powerhouse and of-course keep her distracted from feeling the difference. The little one will quickly discover her clumsy father who can't handle little chores. She is going to stare at me like 'Dah Dad, you can't even handle this'. Well I can only try but I feel like a rookie being asked to play his first game in front of national TV. Yeah I am going to get all kinds of cheat sheets from my wife in forms of strict calendar (dare I miss on this, at least one project where schedule extensions are not permitted) , ready to use feedings. But tell me when has anything gone according to plan. All I pray is that my daughter wakes on the good side and lady luck is on my side.

Escapades of S2:: Receiving FedEx package from your next cube colleague

2007-07-25T23:40:00.000-04:00

This is a new series of blog entries where I experience an encounter in real life. The encounter has been artistically altered. I play the protagonist named S2. I am Sassy Singh, the lively and playful technical geek. Any resemblance to any person living or dead is coincidental and not intentional.
In this encounter, I deal with a task in hand which is to distribute company shirts to employees at different office facilities.

Process Champion Executive: We need to ensure that we have timely delivery and have a signed receipt by the employee receiving it. We have decided that we will ship using Fedex.
S2:Does it not matter if the person who is going to receive the shirt is actually sitting in our offices which is across the street?
Process Champion Executive But see you don't get the point.We need to follow the process. You always try to take short cuts. When will you grow and mature? We need to be a process organization and according to the process we got to ship Fedex.
S2:: I guess! But there is one of the employees from a remote office who is here today and he wants to know if he can just pick up the shirt?
Process Champion Executive: See you did not get the point, when the process is set, it is set. These shall be FEDEX'ed and the shirts will be there on that person's desk the first thing next morning. Guaranteed... How can he not like this? Guaranteed next morning. We put so much into getting a deal with FEDEX to get a discount and you don't want to leverage it and want to short circuit the process
S2: I guess I am not a process person. Where can I get to know all of this and get trained on this process thinking and indoctrination
Process Champion Executive: We are working on coming up with a University program to get this cultural change. You shall be notified by priority FedEx mail

S2: Hmmm... Waiting for the anxious arrival of the FedEx on my desk...

Unofficial Organization Network

2007-07-16T22:35:00.000-04:00

In this week's fortune magazine there is an interesting article that piqued my interest beyond reading it. I could relate to it since it appeared so relevant to my everyday life. It talks about informal networks in organizations. It talks about how to get things done by avoiding and finiding ways around the official organizational tree. So I started musing what about my organization. I guess every employee has a perception of the informal food chain. Some of them have it bang on target and find their way around the structure and get things done. So in order to make it more interesting, I will like the readers to share their perception of the informal social network prevalent at CNSI that makes things work. As long as social networks do not weaken the morale of the employees and are only enablers of efficiency, they are good. Anyway do spend a minute to write your social/informal organization network to make this more interesting.

iPhone Round Up

2007-07-16T22:26:00.000-04:00

I now own the iPhone for more than a pay period. So am I one of those 85% of satisified iPhone buyers as reportd by USA today.I am definitely happy with some of the user experiences implemented by iPhone. Yes it has some quirks and like everyone in the early adopter community there is this hope that these will be fixed in the future versions. But alas, I am a fickle minded gadget adopter and may not be that patient with Apple :). Yes I will be challenged to throw the device aways since it is after all an iPOD if nothing more. It can not be justified as value for money. Well no apple product has been so far in my mind. All apple products are cool and hip and iPhone is no exception. iPhone tries to do some common things in a more cool way and you pay money for that. Well it is not for masses after all!! Steve Jobs thought there are only 3 million people who are worthy of buying his device. It appears 1 million + have found it and you could be one of the remaining. Is it in you?

iPhone Experience : First couple of Days

2007-07-02T09:21:00.000-04:00

I am on the iPhone hype wave. Got mine on Saturday. There was not much of a line and the Apple Store experience was good. The apple store person processed my request using his handled and emailed me the receipt. Paperless smooth customer experience, sweet. Apple iPhone activation was a pleasure ride. Everything done in iTunes over the Internet. Within 5 minutes I was using the phone and within 30 minutes i had my phone # transferred and I was receiving calls. The phone User experience is different and like nothing before. It may not be to the liking of a few but a good version 1 of convergence. The convergence of mobile browsing, music, podcast and phone is sweet. Yes I have one gripe. The email thing is not working for me:(. I was hoping to get the Exchange email but no success yet. I am hoping to get a software patch but since it is not even a week old in the industry I will have to have wait longer. But Apple has done a decent job of making people rethink the UI experience on mobile phone. People can argue about the price point but purely on UI convergence experience a definite A++

To Buy or Not to Buy: iPhone countdown is on

2007-06-26T21:53:00.001-04:00

The amount of hype and media coverage for iPhone is mind boggling. Today one of its first production unit review features as headlines on the New York Times web site. Not to count the numerous print articles ranging from Wall Street Journal to Fortune and Forbes. At this point, even if iPhone does not revolutionize the cellphone industry, it has definitely done in product launches. I am not sure whether any of the Apple think tank had imagined this amount of publicity and hype. I guess their secretive approach till the product launch has only added fuel to the fire. It used to be a strategy to set lower customer expectations and subsequently ensure customer delight by delivering more than promised. I guess Apple has thrown that model away and revolutionized the industry since HTC followed quickly taunting their multi-touch interface shell as the new breakthrough idea.

I can predict here that iPhone is not going to be iPOD. Industry reviewers like David Progue does his balancing act of identifying the shortcomings of iPhone. Also Apple shares over the last 3-6 months will be a gambling ground for hedge mangers to evaluate their mettle.

I was all set to be one of the first buyers of iPhone but I am now in the 'not so sure' camp. I am more leaning towards Nokia E90.

End of American Idol: Sanjay is out

2007-04-23T07:59:00.000-04:00

Finally the speculation is over! Sanjay has been voted out of the American Idol competition. So whats next
a) No need to watch the American Idol any more since the element of gossip, conspiracy and rumor are over
b) Simon can breath a sigh of relief since his job is safe. I am sure there were not many other employers for the caustic Simon.
c)Britney Spears attempts to team up with Sanjay to woo the American teens who continue to be overtaken by weird style over substance. I guess that is teenage phenom all about!!!
d) Howard Stern will need to figure out another way to bring down the American Idol. For now, he needs to focus to woo audience for his talk show
e) George Bush puts his confused smile when having dinner with Sanjay for he could not figure out the wide smile on every comment that he made
For me, I don't watch American Idol but I enjoyed blogging on it.

Political Correctness and freedom of speech

2007-04-14T21:05:00.001-04:00

The only reason I write a blog entry on this story is my continuous surprise at the increasing clout of political correctness over freedom of speech. I assume there are multitudes of opinions over this debate but I am just amazed if one cannot express one's opinion freely on a talk show then it marks the death of freedom of speech. Yes, I am referring to the latest Dan Immus incident! After that incident the last frontier of free expression is blogging.

But I am predicting the censorship, code of conduct, enforcement rules for the blogsphere space in the near future. It is a matter of time when due to the blogsphere influence, reach and access, there will be so these called controlling forces establishing a modus operandi. The world of blogging will change forever. It will be strangled, initially by moral code of conduct and later by a representative elected body. Then there will be this significant mass of blogging community and organizations that will align with these protocols and regulations and choke themselves to the death of their purpose. Yes, there will be still a handful that will continue to be unconstrained. These exceptions will be ridiculed as outcasts in certain quarters of the society. But there will be a handful of loyal followers and believers in these exception blogger/blog sites . Yet these sites will die a natural death. Well Don Immus paid a penalty and his case of termination and demise from CBS reflects poorly on our social maturity. Till someone strikes on my blog site, I vouch to express my mind and not worry about political correctness.

The Great Move

2007-04-09T00:08:00.000-04:00

We are almost done with a move to a new office space. Yes it was a painful but fruitful outcome of a long wait for the new office space. Yes, I speak for the 100 odd people who were in the abandoned world of 15810 office spaces. They were abandoned since even the conference room was called Annex I and II as if the office space was adjunct to the main office space. The move was delayed like any software projects by almost 3 months. Like software projects the reasons for the delay were beyond the control of the project manager. All past, current and future project managers say Amen.

Every office move brings his gossip and reaction. For the carefree geek it is nice to have a new surrounding for a day. Since all they do is gaze at the laptop screen. For the aspiring, there is always that desire to get an office or the corner cube. I guess having an office is quintessential status of position, power. I am sure it epitomizes a lot to the person aspiring it but believe it or not, it is a loss proposition in its entirety. First, your peers are envious of your preferential treatment by the boss. Secondly, boss is not happy about you continuously pestering him for the room based on your new role. Finally and most importantly, you loose the sense of belongingness to the nucleus of action, your own very source of strength.

But having blabbered about the office space demands, the time for assignments is there. A special committee is constituted to strategize about assignments. The layouts are laid out. The pencils are down. The big architectural diagrams are spread on the tables. The wise men are thinking. Every committee member is with his agenda, favorites. Long hours are spent on how to seat individuals. All kinds of complex algorithms are evaluated since every factor counted (proximity to team members, seniority, position, personality, prior space etc).Finally the plan is unveiled. Office space is ready and the D-Day arrives. The move begins. Oops, one of the most important rooms (UPS equipment) is getting heated. No air conditioning vent in that aisle. Poor engineering design, but the workaround of blowing a fan and keeping the door open to give background music is as creative as it gets.

Oops, we forgot this individual from the list but why? This person is not a direct report to the committee members. No worries. We can accommodate no problems. Yikes, now what? We just discovered we are short by 10 spaces. How can that be? I guess we are growing faster than we plan which is good sign.

To be contd….

Employee Recognition Nite: Last Chapter

2007-04-06T11:34:00.000-04:00

Its time to close the blog series of the Employee Recognition Nite. I think Nagu's persistence and committment to go from desk to desk to secure popularity votes was reflective in the results. The results were decisively in his favor 82% to 18%. Apart from the Chennai clan clout, the messsage is loud and clear: persistence, perseverance and pushing can accomplish everything. But overall it was fun and it was good to see more people read my musings. I hope everyone continues to bookmark my blog and read them every now and then and share their comments and provide feedback. I do update the blog every 7 days if not sooner. I am trying hard to get more frequent and will work towards it. Final Note: Most Recognized Employee Of the Year is Elumalai, Nagarajan :)

CNSI Employee Recognition Nite Contd..

2007-04-03T14:52:00.000-04:00

I have had most written and verbal feedback on this blog. hence the second write-up. The question of the day is that did my blog have more hits because of this blog entry or because of the energy radiant character of Nagu who is one of the central themes of the blog. Nagu for people who may not know is now not only running for the next mascot of CNSI ( if not CNSI atleast CNSI Chennai) but also trying his best to be the photo face of the year. I am waiting to see the pictures from the Employee Recognition Nite. The insider news is that Nagu is featuring in every 3rd picture. Ofcourse the CNSI censor board (guess who) is blocking some pictures ( Oh Lord what happened to free information exchange).Yep they were taken after the official hours of the event was over and people were in their natural no hold bars mode. But I guess they are in the best interest of the team as a whole even though it expressed the team spirit and cohesiveness among the players. Anyway I am starting the first poll! Please do express on the popularity question of the week!

CNSI Employee Recognition Night

2007-03-28T14:32:00.000-04:00

Today my company honored and celebrated the Employee Recognition Night after a hiatus of 1 year. Its no longer called the Winter Gala and more appropriately called Employee Recognition Night but I could not comprehend the difference between them. Nonethless, a great endeavor on part of the CNSI owners and shows their committment to the employees. So here are the Key Highlights

a) Cal Ripken Jr. was the Chief Guest. For people who did not know that, all they needed to do was stroll to the hotel bar where they served decent scotch and you could meet the Hall of Famer.

b) Vik Mehta was hilarious and his ususal self and made some funny and yes sometimes offensive remarks. Always a great show but I am disappointed as he reads his jokes and one liners! And Vik some of your jokes are repetitive for people like me who have attended this event for some years now

c) Nagu, (for people who don't know him he is Oracle DBA for the Washington project) was in every frame clicked by the photographer that night. We could use him as background on our CNSI logo

d) Our President, was precise and thankful but tad bit slow but it was much concise than the previous ones

e) Vivek Gore was standing up and cheering on on every employee that was recognized. Either he did not have a seat on his table or was just naturally excited about the recognition. I could not since I was getting ready to dance!

f) Yes we danced to all tunes Indian, Punjabi, English, Arabic and Finally TAMIL :)

g) Aggh..the nice thing there were four lucky winners who get the BMW. Yes they are mortgaged for 3 years ..you know what i mean...:)

But overall a good event ,people had a nice time and it was a good break and a workout for me personally... Your comments..

Gmail Server is down!!!

2007-03-27T18:19:00.000-04:00

This is not the first time that Google mail has been down. Earlier it used to be the case that is a beta version of the mail but now after being almost 2 years into full operations these errors are a pointer to that Google is not immune to software glitches. We blame Microsoft but we cherish Apple and then apple becomes a self serving entity.The fact is that as the companies grow they are unable to maintain the same verve, enthusiasm and drive that made them reach their glory days. Look at the error message..."Oops the system is unable to perform your operation" If we are to implement such messages in our customer applications it is only considered lame but since it is Google people would recognize the coolness and the openeness of the developer to express their ideas. Apart from the growing clout of Google two things are crystal clear a) they cannot maintain the same velocity of change and innovation and b) they are still not a software services company since such downtime issues warrant more maturity in delivery and handling. What do you think ?

Persistence is Wow!! We can all use some of it!

2007-03-24T09:42:00.000-04:00

John Calvin Coolidge, Jr the 30th President of US had to say this on Persistence

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “press on” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”

I think this is so remarkably true in my personal and professional life experiences. Just keep on plugging in and we shall work through all the issues surrounding us. After all it is all about Karma!!

American Idol: Sanjay Malakar!!!!

2007-03-21T22:22:00.000-04:00

I have never watched American Idol till yesterday. The reason for me to watch was because of Sanjay Malakar, an American born Indian from Federal Way, Washington. Yes, I watched it more out of curiosity of seeing him. Yes, I have to admit, I am just a music listener and by no stretch a discerning music buff. I have yet to vote for him and maybe I never participate in this process since there is already a perception that he is getting votes because of his nationality. Well if open nationwide voting are the rules of the game then everyone should accept it. I guess he might be getting a lot of support from the Indian community but I guess that is pretty much the case for every participant. No doubt, it is different case with the Indian population ( well it helps you in some cases). Again, I am not music guy to say whether he is deserving or not but he stands out of the crowd. As I saw the results today, I could see the clear isolation of Sanjay. Every participant who made it to the next round atleast shared a hug with the fellow participants but poor Sanjay was left to enjoy and savor his relief and joy into the next round with a lonely smile all by himself. Yes, by no stretch of imagination he is going to be theAmerican Idol but he is definitely a star. Why do I say so? The nation watched a young american girl (Ashley) cried crazy. Cried out of joy and disbelief after meeting with her star in Sanjay Malakar. Good Luck Sanjay!!!!

Bob Woolmer: Cricketing Pressure Leads to Death

2007-03-19T01:00:00.000-04:00

I am deeply saddened by the untimely death of Pakistan Cricket Coach Bob Woolmer. Today's sport have such high expectations and pressure that it is beyond words. Pakistan unexpected departure from the World Cup after getting defeated at the hands of rookies Ireland caused a lot of eyebrows and shouts for firing of the captain, coach and lot of other players on the team. But that pressure resulting in death just leaves me dumbfounded. My sincere condolences to the family of the coach!! I just wish people relaxed a bit and stop these money spinners ( bookies, advertisement companies, sponsors) creating bigger than life sized personalities and teams that the pressure is so onerous that we see such an unforntunate incident. The World Cup spirits are marred! Sportsmanship, the ethos of sports is getting lost in the ultra competitvness of the nations and players. My disappointment with the India team being outplayed by Bangladesh is just blown away! The Gentleman's game is on its lowest ebb!!!

Cricket World Cup Begins: India vs. Bangladesh

2007-03-17T12:28:00.000-04:00

Well the world Cup Cricket has begun few days back and had a share of interesting results like the tie between Ireland and Zimbave but for the 1 billion Indians, the world cup starts today as India takes on Bangladesh. yes, some would say, for us the Pakistan loss to WestIndies was a good omen but the saga starts today.....
We are in trouble,...lost Sehwag in 2nd over and his heir apparent Robin Uthappa was back after not scoring much. Tendulkar, he is still playing was back after a painful stint of 7 runs. all of a sudden Bangladesh looked like Australia. Mr. Dependable Rahul Dravid is no longer dependable apart from a dependable friend (his persistence with Sehwag shows his dependability as a friend). Well lets see how far Ganguly and Yuvraj takes us...
Aagh..before all the Pakistani and the Indian community go wild about the lack of performance by the Indian team ....lets see how the match rolls on

Catch Me If You Can

2007-03-16T09:15:00.000-04:00

Do you remember Frank Abagnale Jr. , the subject of the 2002 Steven Spielberg movie "Catch Me If You Can" - one of the most notorious con men of the 20th century recently addressed as a featured speaker at a cutting-edge, computer-ruled event like the Wharton Technology Conference 2007. Well that is a significant role reversal from one who stole close to $3 million (mostly by writing bad checks), impersonated not only a pilot but also a pediatrician, and passed the Louisiana bar exam to today where he runs a highly successful security consulting firm out of Tulsa, Okla. -- works hard to keep up with today's computerized and Internet-based fraud. Well lets see if his 20th century con mind can catch the 21st century wiz kids since most of the fraud is going to happen over the Internet. Well there is no doubt that in USA, people tend to forget the past rather quickly. Take another instance of Michael Milken known for selling junkbonds, triggered the collapse of 1989, sentenced for 10 years! Today, he is termed as philanthropist, a financial innovator. Go figure....!!!

SOA Testing and MITA

2007-03-11T00:01:00.000-05:00

I am finally giving in! After all my blog title is Just Express. I am currently trying to facilitate some MITA testing and performance discussions under the private sector technology group. Its tough to engage industry stalwarts in meaningful and detailed converstations since they are from organizations which compete on a day to day basis. But examples of IBM and Oracle working together are out there in the software world. I sincerely think that by sharing common points of pain and frustration, these converations, dialogs and collaboration will lead to more matured and evolved thinking and benefit the MMIS industry as a whole. Anwyay, I recently penned my thoughts on test aspect on their WIKI site. Here is the URL for it . http://www.mitahealth.org/wiki/index.php?title=Testing_Approach_to_SOA
You might have to register to post any comments on that write-up.

Trick or Treat: Political Buffonery of Day light Savings Time Shift

2007-03-04T21:50:00.000-05:00

As we approach the new day light savings time deadline, a look back shows yet another political decision costing the United States not only dollars but plenty of chaos and anxiety. As political Representative Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican, predicted that children would rejoice at the prospect of an extra hour of daylight trick-or-treating on Halloween. Well the country has been tricked into spending millions of dollars on a Y2K like problem and unforeseen dollars in lost productivity. Well that is definitely a costly treat for the kids at Halloween. Yes there would be savings for the less fossil fuel that would be burned but I would be pleasantly surprised if this would outweigh the costs and the anxious moments that are being spent on the IT fixes. Yes it means good quarterly revenue numbers for IT services firms and consulting organizations but I just wish politicians had a better set of advisors in the future otherwise we would be tricked into yet another political sucide.

The Million Dollar Baby: Are you parenting one?

2007-03-04T21:46:00.000-05:00

In this Wall Street Journal (WSJ) there was a report on how much money is being spend on raising kids from age 0-17. Well though the Government numbers were respectable at $16,000 per year, WSJ identified the numbers in the range of 800K to 1.6 million dollars for the period of 17 years. And to top it all, these numbers do not include college education. Initially I was just 'WOW' but then things started to settle in. The example of $800 stroller ( my wife and I discussed buying one, good we just discussed), a $1000 birthday party with a mermaid theme ( attended one that very weekend where the birthday for a 4 year old had a princess theme with a dressed up princess, customized 30 goodie bags and a clown too), $ 3000 annual family vacation trips, $4000 braces treatment and the numbers start to make sense. These kids are surely pampered and I am indeed jealous. The reason this article grabbed my attention was that I have been blessed with an angel girl recently and just reading these articles and numbers blew me away. But on the positive side I said, if I can not be a millionaire, at least I will have the satisfaction of raising one :).

Race for 2008 Presidency: Spanish Language, does anyone Care?

2007-02-19T19:13:00.000-05:00

This is the start of my series of posts on the US Presidential Run for 2008 . For starters I stumbled on the web site on each of the current front runners ( yes, I did my own triage on that aspect). Hillary Clinton , Obama, John McCain and Rudolph W. Giuliani . Yes every one of these web sites must be backed and implemented by some savvy web designers and information architects but the one thing that seemed missing at the first glance was the lack of support for Spanish language. By ignoring the second most common language are these candidates doing the right thing? According to the 2000 United States Census, Spanish is spoken most frequently at home by about 28.1 million people aged 5 or over. Of these, 14.3 million reported that they also spoke English "very well". United States is home to more than 40 million Hispanics; the fifth largest Spanish-speaking community in the world, after Mexico, Colombia, Spain and Argentina. Yes, the experts would say that the Internet users of this Spanish community would not be challenged by English version of these sites but as the presidential candidate they need to make a more personal connection with their base and having a Spanish based language sites would be a good start in my humble opinion. What do you think?

PS. I am not a Spanish so it is not a personal agenda of mine.

Dump the Golden Rule: " Treat people the way you want to be treated"

2007-02-18T23:20:00.000-05:00

Well these famous words may actually do more harm than good and hence the statement dump it!!! But why! The genesis of this statement is that two humans are alike and the human community is one homogeneous whole. But this is far from truth. Every individual is unique and has different thinking style, preferences and values. If that is the case, how can I assume what is right for me , correct in my style of thinking, precious in my value system is good for my peers and recognizable by my bosses and considerate for my subordinates ( don't have any :)). I just believe we need to recognize the cognitive differences and appreciate the heterogeneity of the people around us and treat them the way they would recognize, appreciate and acknowledge!!! What do you think ?

Winter Storm and Remote Working

2007-02-14T17:16:00.000-05:00

Today we experienced the first winter storm in Maryland as a result of 8-10 hours of continuous nature blessing of sleet, ice and snow. I managed my way to the office but as expected, the attendance there was thin. I wondered if organizations capable of running operations remotely would have faced the same situation and have an adverse impact on productivity. But organizations that did not embrace openly the remote /working from home policy would have encountered significant productivity losses. An organization having 250+ employees would have lost almost one man year in one business day. Yes, lot of organizations allow remote working but are far from a position where they can avoid loosing significant productivity on such a day. The organizations do not have the processes and the code of conduct for working from home. Not allowing to work remotely/home means loss of employee hours which is a direct measurable cost. However these lost hours can result in significantly more loss in terms of schedule slippages on projects and revenue dollars in lost opportunities.

My organization is slowly getting into the mode of remote operations but it is more in the early stages than otherwise.It is a fundamental cultural shift of being able to collaborate and work as a team without face to face interaction. There is the no organization empathy and alignment and blah and blah. But at the same time we know many organizations are doing this effectively. It is a cultural shift and warrants code of conduct, orientations to enable the mind shift. So before we face the next winter storm ( I hope it is next year, don't want to spend time on road trying to go over snow hurdles, slush piles and the little but extremely dangerous black ice) , I hope my organization is able to embrace the remote model of operations. What do you think? Does your company have the desired code of conduct or it is more adhoc in nature?

Synopsis of a MMIS RFP

2007-02-10T23:10:00.000-05:00

I have to admit that the brains behind this is Mike Morgan but I have attempted to tailor his article such that this reads as if a State (referred to as me) is enlisting requirements of an MMIS project in a RFP. The content of the MMIS RFP reads something like this ..

Please design and build me a MMIS system. I am not quite sure what I need, so let’s get started. My system should be aligned with all the MITA business processes even though I am not sure of what they are?. Just make sure the designs are such that the MITA processes can be easily adopted as they mature in their details. When you bring the blueprints to me, I’ll make the final decision about what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdowns for each configuration so I can arbitrarily pick one at a later time.

The requirements go on..

As you design, also keep in mind that I want to keep yearly maintenance costs as low as possible. This should mean the incorporation of automated workflow like single click magic buttons and autonomic computing using industry intelligence standards (If you choose not to use industry artificial intelligence standards and products, be prepared to explain you decision). Please take care that modern design practices and the latest techniques are used in development of the system, as I want it to be a showplace for the most up-to-date ideas and methods. To assure that you are building the correct system for our entire state, you will need to contact each of our sister agencies and their managers and team leads. My sister agency X has very strong feelings about how the system should be designed, since the agency uses the system once every year for some strange reasons. Make sure you weigh all these options carefully and make recommendations. However, I retain the right to overrule any recommendation you make. Please don’t bother me with small details right now. Your job is to develop the overall plans for the system and get the big picture.
Also, do not worry at this time about time and the resources to build the system itself. Your first priority is to develop detailed plans and specifications. Once I approve these plans, however, I would expect the system to be up and running within 18 months.

And to top it all...
You must be thrilled to be working on such an interesting project! To be able to use the latest techniques and technologies and to be given such freedom in your designs is something that can’t happen very often and its great for your company's future market.

Does that sound familiar to your State MMIS RFP and requirements or a similar state IT project....

Note: Any references are purely coincidental and any resemblance purely unintentional.

Corporate Stress and the Certified Asshole Test!!!

2007-02-10T22:34:00.000-05:00

I recently stumbled on an article(click here for the reference) which was on stressful living. Filled with sarcasm, the article divulges on the inclinations of a typical corporate manager (I read the article with my workplace and self context),which all lead to more stress, less productivity and less happiness (as if it counts). One of the most poignant of the five points was our tendency to "attempt to control everything". The reason I could align with this more than any of the other four was that I experience and live that everyday in my workplace. The key is that we really have little control over anything but there is that illusion of control. With the illusion of control comes the weight of acquired responsibility. All being a recipe of daily overdose of stress, pressure and anxiety. Yes, in the world of healthcare business all of these are special conditions of disorder and there are experts trying to solve them. Anyway, back to the stressful living article. We "Try to control other people; both what they do, and also what they think" Does that sound familar? The control phobia is so dominant and embedded in our minds and it is more since we perceive other people to be difficult, incompetent, and unreliable. The author writes that "the stress factor here lies in the fact that trying to control other people is much like herding cats; requires enormous effort, and you know deep down that it’s futile and ridiculous to even attempt. But if you manage to hold onto the illusion that you can actually gain and preserve absolute control over other people, this can be easily integrated into your everyday life as a reliable source of stress." The other four are also interesting and worth a read as well.
Close on the heels to further force the issue on the control phobia and its associated corporate management perils I need to mention the recent book title 'The No Asshole Rule' by Bob-Sutton. I took a small test (ARSE) and came out close to a certified 'asshole'. For example if you answer this question 'True' then you are pretty much certified : Do You feel surrounded by incompetent idiots – and you can’t help letting them know the truth every now and then? ....
Anyway, I hope we become more sane and respectful of our human surroundings. It's a slow transition for me and I do take two steps forward and one back but I guess I am getting there!!! Where do you Stand?

Experience vs Youth

2007-01-26T19:24:00.000-05:00

It so happened that in matter of few hours in two different conversations, the same fundamental question got raised. Which is more important? Youth or experience. The first setting was an industry conference call for MITA where I (with five years of domain knowledge) was trying to exchange ideas with a stalwart of the industry (25 years of domain expertise). Note my use of knowledge vs. expertise. The second setting was on DC 980 Sports Talk with Coach John Thompson where the new trend in NFL for hiring young coaches was being challenged. Well it is a classic and a never ending debate. I believe that experience is needed and it would be not sane to ignore or disrespect the experience of an individual. At the same time experience can be debilitating if it makes one resistant to change and not open to new ideas and approaches. The youth brings freshness, energy, vibrancy and frevor of a child willing to try the untested; explore the unknown and experiment the new. Yes it is a very risk and fraught filled approach. But as many would point the greatest innovations, discoveries are due to this mindset and philosophy. Does age and experience reduce these dispositions and makes you less risk taking and resistant to change? Yes and I think its biologically supported too. But if the experienced people would allow for an open critical thinking of the as-is and the youth respect and imbibe the experience of the seniors as a control board, we can make significant progress. As for Coach John Thompson, I think the marriage of two: have a youthful head coach and very senior assistant head coach is the solution and it is no shame or disrespect to work for a younger person if he honors and recognizes the value of your experience and maturity.

Super Bowl: Colts Vs. Chicago Bears.. Finally Happened....

2007-01-21T22:25:00.000-05:00

Its finally happened. Colts overcame the Patriots lock on coming from behind. It was more sweet than just a victory since many pundits would have said at the half time that New England game plan is working and Brady is money down the wire. It was not to be today....It was Colts Day...Yes calls and luck were against them to begin with ( fumble and recovery on the offensive touchdown for New England) but things turned around one step at a time. And to top to all to win by coming back down from 21-3 is really sweet. Infact, it is the largest comeback in the play-off history.
Not that I am a fan of Mannings but I definitely align with Tony Dungy personality. His calm demenaor and maturity is admirable and the victory well deserved. The Super Bowl is more interesting with two black coaches going head to head for the first time. Both of them are also close friends. Anyway, it would be something to watch two weeks from now. Also more because there would not be any Patriots!!!

Is your company the best Company to Work For?

2007-01-14T10:12:00.000-05:00

I was reading the latest cover story on Fortune where Google employees were shown in all frenzy and the company was named the best company to work for in terms of employee benefits and perks. Every year this reading makes you reflect on your company benefits. The HR department always vouches we offer equal or even better benefits as compared to other companies of our size. Alas, there are no onsite doctors ( well health is a personal responsibility : why do we need one), no onsite car washes ( why buy cars and pollute the environment ride the Metro), no all paid annual ski trip ( we don't like cold, we are warm blooded animals), free gourmet meals( we don't want to create gluttons) and on and on it goes. On a serious front, these are some significant benefits but recognize with all these benefits basically work is home and home is work! Yes they are truly in direction of being employee friendly but we need to recognize that there needs to be a boundary between home and office and between family and work. As of my company, they are embracing remote working (with closed arms though :)), have a pool/ping pong table( can only play after office hours), free soda and discount kababs (term for meat skewers). But plethora of benefits cannot offset the nature of work, team players around you and as of now I am where I should be. Do I know about tomorrow? Not yet!!! What about you and your company?

The Fanatic Pace of Web Exchange

2006-11-25T19:06:00.000-05:00

When I wrote my first blog almost 2 years ago, I was seeing myself as one of the early adopters of upcoming web tools and stuff. I was definitely not religious in continuouly writing about topics though many crossed my minds but today, when I look back at the nature of web information publishing, the scale of blogging, multi media publishing like mytube, myspace.com etc, it is mind boggling. Also, all of this is being accepted with open arms by the new generation. Aagh., I am no longer the latest generation. Yes, I am 33 years old and trying to run at a break neck speed to catch these phenoms but definitely loosing inch every week if not every day. Its true there shall be tools and technologies that would eventually fade out of masses and remain prevalent in their loyal followers but it must be said, that the world of web continues to expand exponentially. There would be lot of people that this is not true collaboration but it is definitely the mixing bowl of ideas and at the intersection of all these varied ideas/schools of thought/streams of knowledge lies the next innovation. Do surf and explore these blogs, myspaces.com etc and not only look for that great idea but see if you can create something out of the fusion of these. So happy surfing,blogging and web collaboration

Winning the FCW Rising Star Award

2006-10-14T22:25:00.000-04:00

I was recently recognized by the Federal Computer Week with the rising star award. The award was a recognition to my contribution to the design of the next generation Medicaid Management Information System. http://www.fcw.com/risingstar/. Even though I feel proud of the fact that this endeavor resulted in a fundamental shift in architecture of solutions offered by the industry, there is yet that need to execute these hugely critical systems more efficiently and effectively. The implementations continue to be held captive to misaligned incentives between the State Goverment and the Vendor. I think we ( my organization CNSI) continue to make small but yet inherently strategic shifts in making implementation less rough and turbulent. At the same time we need to learn not only from other software implementations in different line of business (which are more fluid and dynamic in nature such as ERP implemenations in supply chain) but look for true cross pollination of ideas by exploring totally different industry lines such as ship building and /or home building. The exploration continues....

Simplicity and Demystifying Technology

2006-08-20T21:58:00.000-04:00

I was not only amazed at discovering the simple but uniquely powerful concept of Barefoot College. It is a college and a social research center in one of the poorest villages Tilonia, Rajasthan India. The endeavor started almost 30 years ago; creates self sufficiency among the rural folks; where villagers with primary education are working with computers, maintaining solar panels etc This is truly achieving simplicity; demystifying technology. Even though, I was proud of this fact but at the same time it created a deep sense of hollowness in me and my work. Is my work really valuable? Am I paying my dues to the society? Even though, my work may not value up to the mark of social contribution I would ensure I do a tad bit to contribute back to this society.
What do you think?

Maine's Medicaid Mistakes : A Balanced Perspective

2006-04-17T22:20:00.000-04:00

This is in reference to an article in CIO titled "Maine's Medicaid Mistakes". The article continues to dig in the past without providing a guidance and assumming the reader to take their own prespective of the events. However it surprised me the overzealousness of the author to identify shortcomings of the State government to execute a project with a detailed chronological trail of events without acknowledging the good work being done to adapt to the precarious situation. The author identifies implementing unproven technology as one of the lessons learned, however mentions the use of J2EE systems later in the article as "the Ferrari of software code, which some of the largest corporations are now using to run their global operations".
We need to all recognize that the Medicaid market is dominated by a set of vendors who have exploited the states by repackaging 20 years old solution for 35-75 million dollars and yet have failed in some of those implementations. State of Maine acted as pioneers and did suffer as pioneers and early adopters typically do but at the same time need to be credited for giving the industry a new technology paradigm. Even the existing giants recognize this paradigm shift and in-fact one of these vendors is engaged with a State to implement a similar technology platform solution.

Agile / Traditional approach- Why not hybrid?

2006-03-26T21:59:00.000-05:00

Let’s discuss what are your options if there are some constraints which are preventing you from using agile methodology or simply if your customer does not want to use Agile methodology.
Well, why not use hybrid of Agile and Water fall approach.
Tie your deliverables as required by your customers to water fall steps. Let’s look at the following steps
Requirements Gathering
Designing
Coding
Testing

Go ahead and create requirements and design document and submit it to your customer for sign off.
Take your coding and testing steps and see if you can use some of part of Agile methodology in these steps. Try doing following in 2-4 week iterations:
Create stories from your requirements document
Assign points to your stories
Prioritize your stories
Develop and unit test your stories
Perform automated acceptance tests and deploy

Deploying every 2 week gives your Business Analysts a chance to validate and verify your software. Any resulting issues can be fixed early and will be less expensive to fix. Deploying every 2-week gives your team a short goal which your team can try to achieve and once the team’s goal is achieved, the team will get a sense of achievement and hence this will boost team’s moral. The team will get confident each time an iteration is successful. Not only that, by deploying every 2 week you can measure the development velocity of your team and hence will have more insight in to when the whole software can be delivered. You can take necessary steps if you feel that by this development velocity delivery of the software will be delayed.
Another thing which I want to highlight here is that Agile is less document oriented. No big requirements document, no big design documents, just enough documentation which you feel is necessary. For example, some times we create very detailed design documents explaining how the screens will look, which database tables will be used, what will be the pseudo code , what will be the sql query etc.
Instead of going in so much detail why not a screen design and few words about its functionality. In fact I would prefer to draw the screens with my hand and update the screen when the developer has developed it. Believe me you would save a lot of time and probably be able to code your screen in the time you will be writing your detailed design document. Another reason not to write design documents in so much detail is that no one can be 100% sure about the sql, the database tables and code logic and no one can guarantee that these won’t change. We must welcome change and if we don’t we will fall in our own trap where in the end we will realize that we are running out of time and then these very detailed design documents are left untouched and now suddenly your code and the supportive documents are not in sync. Otherwise also if we know the things will change then why write it. Let coding take its own course, let the development happen with bare minimum documents and in the end produce your documents from your code / software and not the other way around.
All of you who have looked in to RUP and if ever tried to produce those documents will probably realize the pain of doing so much documentation. Sometimes we forget our main goal. Our main goal is to produce working software and not lot of unnecessary documentation just to comply with a methodology. If just by writing few words can convey a software function then please do not write hundreds of lines just to convey the same function in detail. I have seen low level design documents with various sections inside those (For example, Screen Design, Description, Constraints , Database tables, Sql queries, interacting units.) Lets make it simple a screen design ( hand crafted) and just enough detail about its functionality.
Another thing if your customer is not requiring you to submit these low level documents then why make these so much great.

My suggestion lets make our life simple by making things simple, by reducing variables, by not over engineering anything , by being open minded and by welcoming the change. Let’s not make a methodology our religion (be it RUP or Agile or any other) and then keep believe in it for the rest of our life.

Agile or Some other Methodology. Are we still thinking?

2006-03-26T21:53:00.000-05:00

We are still debating in most projects whether to use Agile or use traditional approach.
I find at least two reasons as to why its difficult in moving from traditional water fall / other approaches to Agile (1) our customers are unaware of how agile can help them build something they actually want.
(2) Some of us have made traditional software development approach as our software development religion. We feel threatened by the fact that what ever we have learned in our schools and during our past experiences of developing software applications using traditional approach is suddenly not the right approach.
In traditional approach the design won’t start till the requirements is finished. Coding won’t start till design is finished and the testing won’t start till you are done coding. The reason which was given was that you must gather all and correct requirements before you design because if a requirement is wrong then everything from design to test is essentially a waste. I guess in doing that we missed one major thing and that is human factor. First of all we should stop the over use of the word “Requirement”, and try to find out what are the preferences of our customers. Preferences change more frequently than requirements. (An ideal software solution would be one where there are no requirements but only preferences.)
Let me ask you this, if you plan to build a custom home for your self, can you write each and every detail of your house in a piece of paper, give it to builder and then come back when the house is completely build. Do you think that whatever you were imagining while writing your so called requirements is exactly what you got? You might be getting something close to what you were thinking but not exactly what you want and sometimes it could be totally different then what you have thought. That’s where the difference lies; there is a difference between what you think you want and what you actually want.
Now instead of building the whole house and then showing it to you, if the builder shows you every week or so what he has build so far and what he will be building in next week and each time asks you if you are satisfied? Now let’s say you are not satisfied with what ever was built last week or so and you want the builder to redo or change something. If the change is simple builder would probably do it for free. But lets say doing that change would cost some extra $ . Now you will have three choices (1) Not to do the change (2) Pay extra $ (3) Trade in some other feature of your house. (E.g. may be not to build the deck and instead do the change which is more important to you). The outcome would be totally different if the builder used this approach. At least there won’t be any surprises when the builder finally delivers you the house. Similarly if there are no surprises when the software is put to production then you have a satisfied customer and hence a successful project.
Water fall or other approaches works fine if there is no change in the requirements. No change means you were able to document exactly whatever your customer was thinking (not saying) when you were documenting the requirement. Another issue is that sometimes we don’t know exactly what we want until we see it. Take the example of buying a car. How do you decide that you need a particular car? Well, simply put, you will actually look at a car and if you like it, you will go ahead verify other specifications and buy it. You requirement is that you need a car but which particular car buy is your preference.

We all have seen that most of the time when software is delivered it does not meet our customer’s needs and preferences and then we start blaming our poor requirements gathering, wrong software design and may be bad technology selection. But I guess the blame goes to the fact that we were not ready to accept that fact that requirements could be poorly documented. Human beings to some extent are afraid of change, simply because changes are unpredictable and so we do not welcome changes easily. I guess time has come to solve this software problem and instead of resisting change why not welcome it.
Traditional approach resists change but Agile welcomes change. Agile software development methodology eliminates element of surprise by releasing software in short iteration (2-4 weeks). In each iteration you plan, design, code, test and then release your software. Every 2 week your customers get a chance to look at your software. With each iteration, they will have more insight in to what they will be getting in the end. They are welcome to change their preferences and even after 2-week, if what ever you have developed, is a waste then let it be. It’s far better and more productive than keep working on developing software for a year and then realize that more than 50% of the software is waste. At least we all know that changes done in early stages of software development are less costly compared to changes done in later stages of software development.
In the end I would say that I am not sure whether Agile will work for real-time and satellite/rocket software’s where whole system must be designed and tested before it can be put to use but I assure this approach works for rest of the application software.

World Economic Forum 2006

2006-01-24T00:12:00.000-05:00

The Annual Davos Meet continues to act as the greatest trendsetter in terms of laying new directions and establishing new paradigms in the world economic trends. Every year the visit is limited in invitation to the Who's Who's of the world. The Top CEO's like Charles Prince of Citigroup, Edward J. Zander of Motorola, Stephen A. Schwarzman of Blackstone Group, Henry A. McKinnell of Pfizer, Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP, Arun Sarin of Vodafone, David J. Stern of the NBA, Kai-Uwe Ricke of Deutche Telekom are there to name a few. But the strange aspect of this meet, which creates the unique yet powerful air to this summit is that, all participants are by invitations only. So, don’t feel cheated if your company CEO, COO is not on the list. I guess, they are not deemed special by the WEF selection board. But what made me write this BLOG is a comment on the WEF Blog titled "The elephants in the room" by Dan Bilefsky. The elephants being mentioned are India and China. The thing that peeved me off was the comment that the WEF forum shall discuss reforms/ideas to address the messy democracy of India. It fails to impress me that how could you point the democracy of India in that derogatory nature. I think it is high team people realize democracy is "by the people" and you got to appreciate and respect the settings of any democracy. Every country cannot be run in the US mode, which claims healthy public opinion, issue based elections, healthy infrastructure for entrepreneurship and capitalism as the only form of valid democracy. India chooses to establish its own path to success not only producing healthy entrepreneurs in the process (India has one of the most successful small business sector in the world) but also excelling with 7-8% GDP growth in the post liberalization world. Just because the developed countries feel that they are being beaten at their own game by the locals entrepreneurs does not warrant system changes. Play the game by the Rules of the Game. Home team has a distinct advantage. It is not that Indian system cannot improve and it may take some of the ideas from America, but I hate to see immature comments and use of terms such as messy democracy by people who have little to no knowledge about the rules of the game in India. India and Indians would continue to succeed with their hardworking attitude and strong moral and ethical backbone. I wish all the participants good luck at this year WEF Forum

Yet Another Reason to be in Augusta, Maine

2005-12-25T09:11:00.000-05:00

Well for all the gentleman and excuse me ladies here is some interesting news from the central city in Maine. In our ongoing quest to find incentives for people to travel to Augusta, Maine, we may have discovered yet another gold mine. Well it is store Spellbound in downtown Augusta. And it may be one of the first stores in the nation to use live models clad in bustiers, garters and itty-bitty pieces of metallic fabric and have them in the store windows. Ladies may also be in for a surprise with live men in tuxedos but that may be Version 2. So be careful when you go out to Augusta, since wide eyed men have been reported to slip on ice as they walk by this special store. Volunteers to Augusta, Maine......

CNSI Annual OffSite Meeting Year 2005: Team Building ... Jeopardy

2005-12-12T20:15:00.000-05:00

As I write this quick blog entry of CNSI Annual Off Site Meeting, sitting in the flight back to Maryland from Miami, I am hoping everyone would write back to me with equal verve and enthusiasm with their adventures and experiences over this trip.

Jeopardy remained the highlight of this year’s managers meeting. Hold there! It is not the CNSI Jeopardy buzzer contest game that I am talking about, but I am referring to the jeopardy of drinking too much and then falling from dance floor and spending the rest of the trip on two shots per day dosage. I also wish I could refer to the jeopardy of what eCAMS acronym stands for but I would prefer to acquaint you with the perils of gambling and the persistent effort to loose money as if it was being funded by Bank of Jaytee like some of our famous projects are! I wish I could refer to the jeopardy of who is older, Jaytee Kanwal (last clocked at 44++) or Reet Singh (leading with 44+++) but I am talking about the risk of carrying 60 pounds of luggage on a three day cruise and having to move your two-pieces in other people's luggage . Also it is no less of an insurance risk of having 50+ year old people running up and down in 80 F and scorching sun.

Well there was more than the jeopardy game that was played as a team building exercise. We had the beach Olympics which however appeared more of a beer guzzling challenge, scream your way to victory and 'blow it' competition than.. . Anyway, I cannot get away from referencing the fine gentleman who appeared to had spend more time in the gym than .... and could walk away with a job of a life guard or a modeler for special extra short, extra... swim trunks and add to his list of diverse work experiences (Taco bell fryer etc).

At the end, I cannot close this entry of the blog without referring to the "Finds of 2005" for CNSI. First, Bhanu (pronounced Banu), who represents West Virginia equally well as she does Chennai, not only surprised everyone with her drinking capacity but by her ability of being spontaneous, and a playful teaser . I think we can all see a healthy competition developing for a coveted title and position in CNSI upper echelons. Second was CK Kumar ( Head of CNSI India Operations) who amazed not only by his ability to perform a table top dance with a calendar girl but by his ability to constantly stream out with comments and one liners, though they made sense only to him most of the time.

This was the summary highlight of the meeting but more vivid and detailed blogs shall follow and I hope to get some good contribution from my fellow team CNSI members. After all this off site meeting was dedicated to Team Building Right!

Dialog Box, a bad user interface design element-Part 2( Alternative to a dialog)

2005-10-24T08:30:00.000-04:00

In part-I, I wrote about how dialog boxes can make your application look infested with bugs. In order to solve this, as a designer your aim should be to minimize dialog boxes as much as you can and if a dialog box is really a need then think about making it a modeless dialog box.
Let us assume you have a web application where you want to create a web page to display a list of items. Consider its design; you need a list page and an button to add items to this list. Now, as a designer, in order to provide the add functionality, you will either create another webpage or you will create a dialog box depending on the information you need to display and capture. If the input form has less number of fields (3-4 fields), then most probably you will choose a dialog box. Reason being, by using a dialog, you are letting the user to add the item and also letting the user to view the list of already added items at the same time. Now think what happens if there is a pop-up blocker and pop-ups are not allowed on your site? User clicks on the ADD button and your web page will probably blink and that’s it. Your well thought dialog will be eaten by the blocker. Now you can rely on the user to figure it out or expect to get a maintenance call. In the first scenario, you are relying on user’s consciousness and yeah, he should know what you were thinking while designing your application.
My suggestion is let’s try to be innovative and let’s design for the user and not for the application.
Now regarding the above dialog issue, we can add input fields, which we were displaying in the dialog, at the top of the list page and provide button and a button next to it (See fig. below).

----------------------------------------------------------------
Headers--> First Name Last Name Email Address
----------------------------------------------------------------
Inputs--> Field1 Field2 Field3
----------------------------------------------------------------
List-->
First Name1 Last Name1 Email Address1
First Name2 Last Name2 Email Address2
First Name3 Last Name3 Email Address3
First Name4 Last Name4 Email Address4
First Name5 Last Name5 Email Address5

For editing you can either provider edit image/button in each row or a EDIT HTML link.

In the list above we achieved the same functionality as of a dialog box and much more. Much more? Well using this approach you can easily provide copy row functionality also. Consider the list below; a user can enter values in Field1, Field2 and Field3 for First Name, Last Name and Email Address and press to add a new row. User can also click on edit button/link next to each row, which will copy the row data on Field1, Field2 and Field3. Now user can edit the data and press to save changes or change something and press to create new row (copy functionality).
Hope this helps. I will be back soon with more user interface design issues.

Lavar: Undisciplined Talent?

2005-10-14T13:58:00.000-04:00

Lavar Arrington, wearing the now famous 56 jersey ( sales of his jersey were the greater than every other jersey sold), and the Redskins continues to be in the mix of controversy as he has been relegated from being the center of defense to a non starter. Theories abundant, comments galore but the fact remains Lavar is on the bench.Lavar can blame his injury for his current miseries but it is more of his relationship with the coaches that is at the root cause of this issue. Lavar, football is quintessential a team sport and if the coach and the rest of the players ( it is amazing discipline on the part of the rest of the defense not to comment either way) do not have trust in you to play team football,I think it is the end of the road for you at Redskins. Ah!! it is going to impact and challenge the marketing returns on the dollars that have been put behind Lavar and the only thing that may reinstate some of it is an injury to couple of key players in the current defensive line. Until then all the loyal Lavar fans and Redksins fan do not bet to see him on the field making plays. Yeah you can plan to see him sacking Brunnel since he may be shopping out for another team who can use his great football talent at the expense of his sometimes undisciplined approach on the field. As for Redskins, we may loose yet another top of the league talent since our coaches could not use the strengths of a man who in his hearts is a true Redskin!!!

Make Ganguly : Coach of India Cricket Team

2005-09-26T18:27:00.000-04:00

It is a huge disservice to the cricketing nation of India for both Chappel and Ganguly to go at loggerheads. There is no questioning the track record of Ganguly as a captain and as an aggressive,fearsome leader on the field. But at the same time Chappel was bought for a purpose to address some of the apparent weakness in the team and prepare the team for the WorldCup 2007. My only suggestion to Chappel is that even if he had the right intentions for the team, his approach has left much to be desired. He wants to approach his job as if he is coaching the Australian team. You do in Rome as Romans do. Moreover, his unability to motivate Ganguly to adhere to his coaching regimen may be seen as personality clash.However, I think Chappel needs to adapt to the situation. Either way nothing is going to get accomplished in a fragmented team mode which is unfortunately the current situation. I hope better sense prevails and everyone can focus on the game called cricket rather than scheme yet another soap opera episode. Food for thought How about Ganguly being the Coach and Dravid leads the team? Sorry Greg: It is India After All

Child in EveryOne

2005-09-21T14:20:00.000-04:00

I got reminded of that little child who is full of energy, verve and curiosity when I got my Apple laptop yesterday. Beaming with excitement and intrigued by the new toy, I spend few hours trying to admire the beauty of the laptop and acknowledge the attention to finer details. Ahh!..this blog is not about being an Apple convert (I know Steve is little disappointed), but it is about the discovery of the very fact that there is a child in every person.
In the book 'I AM OK, YOU ARE OK', the author highlights the very fact that every individual makeup is made up of three coexisting layers (adult, parent, child). Believe it or not everyone has that child in him that leads him to enjoy the trivial, live the moment. The very fact that in every conversation that we engage in, there is either the adult or the parent or the child interfacing is intriguing. The appreciation of these subliminal interactions can ensure improved handling of the situation. Anyway, I love the child in me, it gives me the creative spark, fills me with the energy to do things unconditionally and gives the excitement in mundane things. As someone said
"Just Be Yourself, because those who matter, don't mind
And those Who Mind, Don't Matter"
Do you agree? Should I care? :)

Dialog Box, a bad user interface design element-Part I

2005-09-18T21:51:00.000-04:00

Okay, “blog” readers, lets discuss something about user interface design issues.
There are so many of these but lets take one at a time and my random pick is dialog box.
There are so many things the way we design our user interfaces, which we can improve on and we should improve on. I have seen some applications, which we use on a daily basis improving on it but some still do it the old way. Most annoying feature of some of these applications is the modal dialog box. So let’s find out what is bad about these dialog boxes.

As we all know dialog boxes are classified as (1) Modal and (2) Modeless. Modal dialog box is that, which require a user to respond to it before doing any other action on the application which produced it. On the other hand a modeless dialog allows a user to perform other actions also, on the same application, while it is active.

Dialog boxes are useful when we need to get some input from a user or if we need to give a response back to a user. Dialog boxes become more helpful when a user is viewing a list of items and he/she wants to add another item. Using dialog box in this case lets user add another item, while viewing the list.

Now the real question, if a dialog box is so useful then what is wrong with it?
Well, out of the two types, modal dialog box is really the most annoying.
Consider “Font” dialog in MS Word. It is modal in nature and when it is active, it won’t allow you to do any other action on the word document you are working on. Consider its use now. This dialog box is used to change the “Font" properties of the selected text. So let’s say you select some text, open this dialog box to change font and then realize that you need to select some more text. The only option you have is to close this dialog and then select more text and then open it again. Now think if this dialog is modeless (just like “Find and Replace” dialog in MS Word), in that case you don’t need to close it to select more text. A small annoying issue is solved. (To our rescue, MS word has a font tool bar also to perform similar action, which most of us use.).

Now can we live without these dialog boxes? I would say minimize dialog boxes in your applications, especially, if it’s a web application. All those pop-up blockers on user’s machine can make your web application look infested with bugs.
There are some other alternative designs to dialog boxes also, and I will try to write something about that in my next blog, till then bye.

Gaither Reshuffle: Random is the New Order

2005-08-30T00:18:00.000-04:00

There is reshuffle at the Gaither Road facilities of our CNSI office. We expanded our office space by acquiring our next door neighbor’s space. We all assumed it is going to be as convenient and as manageable as $ 99 Apple shuffle. But alas I woke from my day dream. The office planners had planned this for months, but then they re-planed with few weeks left ( they did not order the carpet ahead of time), and then they went into a crisis planning mode( they bought down a wall which now needs to be build up again) too. Alas they finally stopped planning when the work got underway. Anyway, all the planning for the future growth did not last very long since by the completion of this reshuffle project we run out of space (anticipated) Ironical! Well you decide that!
However, to the credit of the office planners, the project appears to be getting over on time unlike some of our IT projects which every time we look into it, we figure out that we have 6 more months to finish. Am I looking North East? Arghh! Back to the shuffle, oops, I mean the reshuffle.
Space is premium ladies and gentleman and individual offices are what people would fight for as if there was no tomorrow. Cubes are considered a step down. Sending emails, escalating to everyone (can you escalate to everyone, I need to figure that one out yet), making presentations to justify the need for the office are the flavor of the week. Hey come on we have to work in the environment for long extended periods, weekends too. (This project was an exception. No work was done during the weekends even though it meant outages in the regular work days.) So Brethern, all I can say is that the fight is justified! Damn! I have an office too and gosh it feels on top of the world. Close the doors and you are at home. The office planners worked to satisfy all kinds of forces for the office space, brainstormed ideas ( as if there were many) , discussed for long hours in meetings ( actually same thing repeated n times ). But time was spend like crazy ( for there was no other work to be done) and out came the guiding principles. Can those be shared? No, because for they are guiding principles, we are not supposed to follow them, just guide along them to walk into the exception world. Further they are baked fresh every day.

Finally the D day came and phase I of the project got completed on time! Infact ahead of time. Pandemonium!! We were supposed to move on Friday. OK! No! Wait we are supposed to move on Wednesday, since we cut down the networks, telephones from the old to the new already. Yikes!
Anwway, we all welcomed the randomeness since 'In Chaos lies Creativity", and we all eagerly wait for the next phase with great anticipation. So till next time welcome the random order and enjoy the reshuffle across the border !!!

Purpose of Testing

2005-08-02T18:44:00.000-04:00

The purpose of testing can be to show that the software works or it can be to show that the software does not work or there can be another level where the purpose is not to prove anything but to produce higher quality software. When we say quality, a lot more gets added to the whole process. The testing simply does not become a procedure to find bugs but something where one set of tests try to fail it and another set tries to improve it( increase in usability/"easy to use" is one such improvement).
Black box testing, white box testing, bottom up approach, top down approach etc. has always been there. To my understanding the goal is still the same , making sure (1) what we built is what was expected by the user and (2)Another level, where the software exceeded user's expectations and software is really solving his problem and not creating a new problems of its own kind.
Today morning while driving I heard this analysis on radio about automakers. Their big challenge is that they design their cars based on user requirements or who would be driving the car etc. But the issue is , as they were saying, most of the time a user doesn’t know what he/she wants till they actually see it. This is what happens to us also when our system goes to production. We can always argue use agile/RUP/CMM etc. to avoid this but still we always find this issue.
There is another issue and that is our test cases. Most of the test cases are written either to satisfy the requirement or to satisfy the design. This is not a bad thing (although I have read some articles which say the word “requirement” is bad. Another topic of discussion!).

I would divide testing in to two levels (1) Business Process Testing. (2) Code level testing.

Arvider has already posted his views on "Business Process Testing". But there is another level " Code level testing" where you go down to the code level, making sure you test each method in the code(Method coverage), Making sure each statement gets executed at least once (statement coverage), Branch coverage etc…. This is where GACC, RACC comes in to picture.
Now you can always say that , that would be a lot. Well you do not need to achieve 100% of Test Coverage and also in order to do this you do not need to change what ever you are doing but you need to look at your Test Cases and produce smart test cases. How you produce smart Test Cases? I will try to write something about it soon.

Software Testing New Mantra : BPET

2005-07-10T01:08:00.000-04:00

Business Process Execution Testing (BPET) is the new matra for software testing. Actually it has been slowly rattling in my mind for some time. Now I am finally acknowledging it in light of the challenges with one of my recent implementations. However, I was struggling to put those thoughts together and consolidate them in a framework. Finally this new acronym came to my mind and I said lets just express it. I just hope no one has used this acronym before!
But anyway, I think one of the fundamental reasons for high customer dissatisfaction with software systems is the lack of coherence with the operational processes. The reason being that the traditional software testing approach is bottom up starting with unit testing and graduating to integration testing and system testing. As a result the software is tested and verified for the way it was built and/or designed to built.Howevever when put to use, there are signficant operational gaps which make the system of little use and reduces its acceptance by the end user community. This has to change!! The wave is of business processes driven application and system design and testing needs to take on this paradigm shift heads on. This paradigm shift can be absorbed and addressed by imbibing and adopting the BPET philosophy!
First of all this philisophy is geared towards testing the software the way it is going to be used. How? You guessed it by mimicing business processes. So this approach starts with understanding the key business processes that support the organization and map them to the system identifying the ownership and roles of the system and its various components that support it. The rest of the plan is to define and develop test cases that verify these processes execution and the success and failure of the system to support the actions.
But two fundemental changes do exist with the traditional approach to testing. One is that the actors in this case (testers) are not traditional software testers but subject matter experts, operational staff who understand the business and have significant domain knowledge. The second but higly controversial, I assume since it causes radical mindset change is the defect priortization in this philosophy. A bug that crashes the application shall get a medium rating if it has minor operational risk.The situation that resulted in a bug is an exception and it is unlikely to occur or there is a reasonable workaround or avoidance strategy. At the same time a result that is not even technically an error – say, a degradation in performance during regular hours may be a showstopper since it means lack of customer response by customer help desk which means the 1000 calls being addressed every hour are not getting addressed. I think this is paradigm shift for both the business stakeholders and the software developers but it is the right way to execute the test strategy. After all it doesn’t matter whether the software is perfect or not as long as it meets the business process needs. BPET is the new mantra Amen!!!
I shall be further elaborating this area in my future blog updates!!!

Genius Babies

2005-07-04T23:35:00.000-04:00

On 4th of July, when I had nothing else do but wait for the fireworks to start, I wandered into the Borders Store and hit this interesting book by David Plotz
"
The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank
"
Well, Twenty fours ago, millionaire Robert K. Graham began a most remarkable project: the Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank for Nobel Prize winners. I guess more driven by the need to help preserve the genetic geniuses in the next generation than altruism or social engineering. This was to help reverse the genetic decay Graham saw all around him by preserving and multiplying the best genes of his generation. By the time Graham's repository closed in 1999, his genius sperm had been responsible for more than 200 children.
Want to know who these 200 children are? What are they doing? Interesting!!! Think about it ...
Here we are on the verge of what are called designer babies with modified genes this story puts insight into what happened when using Genetic Engineering 101 :"Using the most advanced technology of the time a sperm bank with top minds"
Go Figure!!!!

To Bid or Not to Bid

2005-07-01T23:40:00.000-04:00

No different than the movie 'To Be or Not to Be' in terms of the comical twists and turns is the decision to bid or not to bid for a project. I guess every organization goes through the rigorous process of evaluating pros and cons of the bid or no bid decision. Rigorous in terms of time lost, energy spent... Definitely! A signficant time is spend in exchanging emails ( infact sometimes the email trail looks like a chapter of Adam Smith 'Wealth of Nations'. The book has just 1200 pages) expressing benefits or pitfalls of going after an opportunity. There are participants who are flip flops and justify every new decision based on a new insight into the context of the decision. There are participants who think it is important to be on the other side of the table to make the process more challenging, more prolonged, more fun. And I guess that is where the rigor of the process is!!!. There are players in this process who sit on the periphery and wait for a decision! Ahh smart people !!! And Alas a decision is made which appears final But Wait.. there is new information, new perspective..Hold On ..Here we go again. In Indian mythology a cat has 9 lives but the bid-no-bid.. beats it hands down. Till the next To Bid-or No Bid saga, I just smile

Enterprise Management Bus ( EMB)

2005-06-25T22:41:00.000-04:00

Enterprise Management Bus Phew!! Still struggling to come into terms with enterprise Service Bus now we have been given this new term. But alas it is more simpler to understand and appreciate. But implementation is a separate story. So for now lets try to see if we understand this..Its all about the ability to have a unified view to systems, applications and network information. Well is it about business dashboards ( the roots are there) but it is about context aware dashboards that takes away human intervention looking at consoles. It is about autonomic computing. Bottom line with all the focus on enterprise integration, SOA the potential for all encompassing system management tool is out there which provides a multidimensional view cutting across applications, technologies. Wana design EMB, design ideas are requested!!! Collaboration is Welcome :)

Yet Another Attempt

2005-06-25T22:07:00.000-04:00

This is yet another attempt to satisfy my urge to write via the internet and communicate with the world around me. I have had previous attempts but those fizzled out before it started. I know it needs discipline from me to put in some time to reflect on the events and activities and express it with candor. I hope this time it would work and this title makes it exciting... Since it means just express. I intend to freely express my ideas and opinions and bounce with everyone who are ready to give a honest feedback and improve the original idea. I welcome other people interested in expressing their ideas and opinions. I guess it is open canvas for people to share their opinions and form a collective opinion. Phenomenonal things have been achieved by open collaboration and I wish this blog can live a meaningful life and deliver what it is supposed to " Ideas and Opinions".