Managing Budgets and Costs: Life on the other side

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.