The importance of Interop Mumbai

When the first edition of the television show Indian Idol was nearing its conclusion in early 2005, I remember one of the judges admitting to initial apprehension and expressing relief that the participating singers hadn’t let India down and had ensured that the show was as good as, or even better than, the forerunning British and American versions that it was modeled on.

When I set out a few months ago as Conference Chair to devise the conference program for Interop Mumbai 2009, I had similar apprehensions. Where would we find so many speakers? Would the speakers be good enough? What about the workshops and demos? Would we be able to put together and deliver a conference and exposition of this scale in Mumbai? (a city notorious for its woeful lack of world-class convention infrastructure).

Sweating the small stuff

When Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto first put forth the observation in 1906 that 20 percent of the people in his country owned 80 percent of the wealth and property, he probably never dreamed that many years later the scope of this theory of uneven distribution would be extended into other areas of human endeavor, including business and management, in what has come to be known as the Pareto Principle or the 80-20 Rule.

Management guru Joseph Juran, based some of his pioneering concepts of quality management on Pareto’s original postulation, speaking of “the vital few and the trivial many.” I’ve heard the 80-20 Rule being cited on many occasions, mostly to highlight how we often miss the forest for the trees, and focus on areas that are not necessarily key. Indeed, anyone who’s managed a project of any considerable size quickly comes to the conclusion that 20 percent of the work invariably takes up 80 percent of the time, effort and resource, so it becomes pretty obvious where one needs to focus one’s attention. But the 80-20 Rule is sometimes misunderstood and taken to absurd levels. Even Juran himself later modified his original credo into “the vital few and the useful many,” ostensibly to indicate that it could be perilous to ignore that other 80 percent of the big picture, however trivial it might seem. 

Such an approach seems to assume even more significance in times of economic grief, and this applies very much to the management and governance of IT in enterprises, wherein most CIOs are seeing IT budgets shrinking, but are still expected to achieve more with less. At a recent Smart Enterprise Exchange event that I moderated, Professor S Sadagopan, director at IIIT in Bangalore, advised CIOs to get back to basics and find a million different ways that each save a dollar, rather than seeking only that elusive single, big-ticket, million-dollar saving.   

While this might seem an oversimplification at first glance, what the professor doubtless intended to convey was that in bad times, one cannot ignore even the smallest of savings to improve overall health and sustainability. This can sometimes be achieved using a common-sense approach, but there are also more structured and robust frameworks and methodologies that IT managers have at their disposal today.

For instance there’s the current Version 3 of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework, which focuses on helping CIOs align IT strategy more in sync with business needs, while simultaneously improving efficiencies and cutting costs. Another approach that’s gaining credence is that of Lean IT. Once processes have been standardized and optimized, Lean IT provides a framework for further increasing efficiencies and eliminating waste in IT operations or software development or customer-focused business processes that have a large component of IT embedded in them. The idea is to adopt…

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[This is an excerpt from Val Souza's Between the Bytes column published in the August 2009 issue of Network Computing magazine in India. To read the entire column, click here]

Maligning Business-IT Alignment

If you proudly proclaimed at last night’s CIO gathering that you’d managed to get your IT operation “closely aligned with the business,” you probably got nods of approval from your peers, and even envious looks of admiration from the wannabes.

But that was yesterday. Today, you’d more likely be met with frowns instead. In two separate panel discussions that I moderated recently, one common thread that emerged was that denoting “alignment of IT with the business” as the prime objective of the CIO and the IT department is being looked down upon as an unmitigated insult these days.

In the first discussion that focused on enhancing IT agility, the CIO panelists smugly averred that business-IT alignment was pretty much a given in their organizations. One panelist patiently explained that his IT team has been routinely sitting down with the business heads since over a dozen years, understanding their needs and strategies, and simultaneously analyzing technology trends and advancements, before deciding on the appropriate IT solutions or strategy to deploy. 

Your reputation’s on(the)line

Are you “Global CIO” material? That’s something pretty difficult to evaluate objectively, but apart from vision and influence that goes beyond geographical boundaries, such a title would probably be conferred on CIOs who have broken away from the pack with their pioneering efforts and innovation, resetting the competitive landscape in their industry segments, and contributing significantly to their organization’s high growth in the marketplace.

If you knew then what you know now

What’s a blog? Now that might seem like a pretty strange question to pose in a column that’s featured in a magazine dedicated to CIOs, IT Managers and computer professionals, don’t you think? Nevertheless, I reckon we’ve all asked that question at some point (hopefully quite a long time ago), figured out the answer one way or another, and probably professionally and personally benefit from blogging today. Even Guy Kawasaki, formerly an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer and now a venture capitalist, entrepreneur, author and popular blogger, had the same question once.

In a nifty post on his How to Change the World blog a couple of months ago, he pasted an e-mail he had sent to his friend Ray Schraff back in September 2002 asking the very same question; Kawasaki says that he started his now-famous blog three years after that initial mail—by his own admission, not exactly the “early adopter” people perceive him to be!

Groundswell!

It was the last day of February in the year 1953. Two young men dashed out of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, and across the road into The Eagle, a pub they frequented. “We’ve found the secret of life,” one of them declared to the barmaid behind the counter. Not exactly the most original pickup line, you might think, but the two young men in question were James Watson and Francis Crick, and they had indeed worked out the structure of DNA that very morning.

Undoubtedly, that qualifies as one of the classic “Eureka moments” in history. But you can be certain that it was the culmination of long years of struggle and toil by Watson, Crick and many other scientists around the world. “We were just, you know, mad keen to solve the problem,” Crick was later quoted as saying. A groundswell of scientific research, if you will, that resulted in the groundbreaking discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA. 

Who’s afraid of the Digital Divide?

Summary

Is the digital divide, that alleged gaping chasm that separates the “technology haves” from the “technology have-nots” a figment of the imagination of over-zealous academics and activists? Statistics that reflect the rapid spread of Internet access and mobile telephony to an ever-increasing number of earthlings certainly seem to indicate as such. Yet the digital divide does exist, and the enabling nature of information and communication technologies causes it to widen, if unchecked.

Cracking the manufacturing conundrum

Express Computer :: “Between the Bytes” :: Val Souza :: February 28, 2005

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Ken Kao had never visited India until last November. Yet his Taiwanese company, which specialises in networking gear and consumer connectivity, has had a 36 percent stake in an Indian joint venture for the last 10 years. The chairman and CEO of D-Link Corporation was gracious enough to state that he has never really needed to travel to India, as operations at D-Link India have always been super-smooth and everything has worked out just fine. But from a different perspective, Kao’s presence at the 10th anniversary celebrations of D-Link India in Goa last quarter was strong proof of the Indian partner’s increasing strategic importance to its global parent, and subtle acknowledgement of the growing market in India not only for networking products but also for mobile access and wireless gear.

Revitalising a languishing society

Express Computer :: “Between the Bytes” :: Val Souza :: January 24, 2005

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At the beginning of last month, I was at an IT conference which, in terms of content, I would rate as one of the best I’ve attended in a long time. Unless you were there too it would be almost impossible to guess that the conference I’m referring to is the 39th national convention of the Computer Society of India, CSI 2004. Surprised? Well, so was I.

For, if you’ve been around the Indian computer industry for a while, you probably belong to that vast majority of IT professionals who have written off the CSI as a fast-fading association that’s an irrelevant anachronism today, ill-equipped to cater to the changing needs of the fraternity. Perish the thought. As the only body in the country representing individual computer users and professionals, the relevance and importance of the CSI can only grow as computer penetration slowly but surely deepens in this country.

What’s your BI quotient

Express Computer :: “Between the Bytes” :: Val Souza :: January 10, 2005

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Is Business Intelligence (BI) relevant to organisations in India? Now that’s a moot question, especially when you consider that so many of them are still struggling to get their basic enterprise IT infrastructure in place. Meanwhile, CIOs of many large corporations tell of shrinking or static IT budgets; those that are more fortunate can at best hope for a 3-5 percent annual budget increase. BI thus seems like a ludicrous luxury for most of corporate India.

Logical as the above argument against BI sounds, it misses the point completely. For, it has been categorically shown that the best way to unlock the business value buried deep within existing IT investments and enterprise systems is through effective implementation of business intelligence solutions. Indeed, with BI, that elusive “aligning IT with the business” Holy Grail is within grasp.