RECESSION synonymous with IT

I have been hearing a lot about recession in India, job cuts everywhere, panic all around etc. What recession mean to the people of India?? Even I have been a victim of recession in the early 2008, the reason, quite same to that of everyone, my ex-company which used to work for US Clients suddenly didn't have any projects. The sceanario is quite same everywhere. The problem is more external rather "UNITED" more than Internal. Even if there is a rise in the GDP growth, govt. focussing on more investments in the Railways sector, a confident political scenario beaming but this doesn't help.

I somehow feel that the word "Recession" is synonymous to IT. It's all about how Lehman and GM getting bankrupt, turmoil is the financial industry esp sub prime crisis taking a toll on India's IT health, market dynamics in US directly affecting the IT market dynamics in India. There's a saying which goes, if US sneezes, India catches Cold which is very true.The Indian IT companies are so very dependent on the US market ranging from Banking, Retail, Healthcare etc, that if there is even a slight variation in the performance of those sectors in US, the Indian IT companies performance too varies. Suddenly, they are left out with no projects, big companies loosing out on major chunks, people losing their jobs and ITS RECESSION everywhere in India!!!

US is not the only reason for the recession in IT companies in India. The other thing which affects is "CAUTION". Fear grips the world market because of certain incident affecting the world economy for e.g Sub prime crisis and then other financial companies in the world get alarmed and take more precautions to stop such incidents in the future. This "Caution" leads to shrinking of budget,putting hold to some on-going projects and plans and take a strategic shift from transformation to settlement. In this scenario when the whole world sits and takes a close watch rather than focussing on their future plans, it too affects our IT economy.

The problem is not how and where Recession started, but how and what to do so that it doesn't affect us in the future!!!

Journey of KM in Tata Steel

Last week, I attended the KM Community Meet in Infosys organized by Cognizant Technology Solutions in Chennai. No doubt, it was an informative session and the AVP-KM of Infosys spoke about the KM initiatives that Infosys have adopted down the years and how successfully the initiatives have repead benefits in the organization. I came across another organization Tata Steel who decided to embark on formal KM initiative in the year 1999 and yes the results are there to see. Please click the link below to know more on




Knowledge Management in Tata Steel

RECESSION Bug on INVESTMENT

Recession everywhere, no jobs, less pay package, cost cutting, phew!!! It’s time for basics, putting a cap on your expenditure and think about some serious investments. Where to invest, well, here goes the answer:

•Bond Funds
Now is an especially good time to consider bonds, some planners say — perhaps for as much as 20% of assets. The percentage of corporations defaulting on their debt obligations is on the rise as the economy slows, the risk to investors is particularly low for investment-grade bonds. Moody's says the default rate on these products is less than 1%, compared with the 7% default rate on much riskier high-yield or junk bonds. The risk associated with investment-grade bonds is further minimized in a broad-based corporate bond fund. "If you hold an investment-grade bond fund, your exposure to defaults is pretty low," says John Puchalla, a Moody's economist. "But if you start buying individual bonds, you start raising that risk."
Investors with a greater risk tolerance — and much deeper pockets — may even want to consider buying into a junk-bond fund. Recent history has shown that junk-bond investors have earned their best returns the year after the junk-bond market bottoms out.

•Exchange-Traded Funds
For those investors itching to play the stock market again, planners say now isn't the time to try to pick hot stocks. Instead, they suggest buying shares in several exchange-traded funds, or ETFs. That way, they can participate in any early rally in stocks without being overly exposed to any single company's poor earnings performance. In the past few years, ETFs have grown in popularity with individual investors because they're cheaper and easier to invest in than traditional stock index funds.

•Money-Market Accounts and CDs

Finally, financial planners say that in a recessionary environment, investors shouldn't be ashamed to keep some extra money in an interest-bearing money-market account — especially if they're investing money they'll need fairly soon. He also suggests investors stash some money in six-month or one-year bank certificates of deposit, which on average pay a 2% higher annual yield than a money-market account. The bottom line is diversification. And that's a valuable lesson investors should keep in mind even when stocks are again heading due north.

For more, read SMART MONEY

Power of Ideas: SELLING your IDEAS

Now that your idea is ready, what’s next??? Well, it’s time for selling your ideas, the big task ahead i.e. approaching angel investors with your idea. As long as the idea is in your mind, it’s a piece of thought, the moment it comes on paper it becomes a blueprint of our business. And, when it’s business, it’s serious. So, how to make your plan eye catching for the investors?? What are the points to be covered which gives a strong foundation to your business?? Well, here are some points that needs to be covered on the paper:

1.Value Proposition of your Idea: Every unqiue idea sells and every generic idea fades. So, the first and foremost thing to cover in your plan is the business model and it’s USP.You should be clear enough of the market you would be catering to, geography segments and any validation that supports your business idea. If you have charted out a framework for your business, mission and vision statement, then it would be a value addition to your plan and good enough for the angel investors to believe your thoughts.

2.Sales/Marketing Strategy: The idea is viable, it’s unique and have potential to grow. But, the next question arises, how to sell your products/services and acquire customers? Mind you, without a good sales/marketing strategy in hand, business die. You might be very good in ideating but if you don’t know how to sell your ideas, then you are not a good businessman. Prepare a clear sales/marketing strategy for your proposition along with the expenses (advertising,branding and others) and growth model for your business.

3.Competitor Analysis: Your idea is unique and saleable but what about the existing players in the market? A good competitor analysis always supoorts your plan and help the angel investors to know the differentiation points of your business. Support your plan with the exisiting players in the market, SWOT analysis, unique features/ parameters of your products/services. DO mention the entry and exit barriers too.

4.Key Financials: Every start up/ business has a key question to ask i.e. when do we breakeven??? And that’s also the interest of the angel investors too. Present a proper plan of the funds required for your business, allocation of funds, capital required projected P and L Account, Balance Sheet etc. Good numbers support good business.

5.Risk Management: Risk Management is the key to everything right from a business survival to its downfall. It’s an important point that needs to be covered in the business summary. Risk Management includes risks that you either foresee or are already facing in your business and explain the same and do make a point to add risk reduction strategies too.

Interesting?? Well, keep reading STRATEGYAAN for more…

Power of IDEAS in Business Recession!!

Is the recession hampering your business and affecting your work as an individual? Are you one among those who is on bench because of no project allocation? Well, why not just sit peacefully and churn your brain to ignite the thought process which I am sure the recession will not be able to affect. Yes, I am talking about one thing which can really bring a revolution in your organization especially for start ups and also as an individual. The magic word is “IDEATION”. When you have nothing to do, brainstorm with your friends or colleagues. Think about the business ideas which are unique and you think can bring a change to the face of economy or society. The idea need not have to be great, but yes, it should be practical and something which can be implemented. Truly said by someone, that only when you think 100 ideas, then only there would be 10 which would be viable and perhaps 1 or 2 which would hit the bull’s eye. Sometimes, the worst of ideas have made millions not because they were rejected outright by few angel investors or didn’t have the potential to made it but because of the confidence and commitment by the individuals to make it happen.

In times, when the recession is hitting every individual and business, Economic Times came up with POWER OF IDEAS and to everyone’s surprise some 11,000 entries were received out of which 1000 got selected for second round of selection. And, those who were rejected, well my advice would be to work on your idea more, think about the loopholes of your ideas and work on it to make it more viable. And, if not anything, start ideating more. Every individual can bring a change. Whether it’s an economy or society, change starts with an effort of a single individual. And, Ideation is one way to bring that change. Ideas good or bad help you in exploring and understanding a lot about the nuances of business because a lot of research is involved. A thorough research on the market, competitors, and services/products gives you an insight whether your thought process is in right direction. Sometimes, there is a common question which arises is, what triggers an idea?? Well, the answer is “Difference”, difference to the society, economy or you as an individual. Anything that can give you a creative satisfaction is the cause for an idea to evolve. Whether an idea to be a success or a failure depends on the efforts, analysis, and viability of implementation of an organization or an individual. There’s nothing which can beat the recession the way an IDEA do. Idea can be about a fresh start, diversification, acquisition or merger or sometimes a mere discussion. An IDEA CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE, rather, it changes the very moment of you as an individual or organization because of the hunger to do something new. So, what are you waiting for?? FORGET THE SENSEX and START IDEATING….

Product Management: An Insight (Contd.)

1. Confusing innovation with value: Innovation without a clear purpose is simply technology looking for a problem to solve. There are countless products on the market today simply because they were now possible, not necessarily because they solve a real problem, or solve the problem better than other solutions. What motivates the engineers on the product team may not be the same thing that motivates others. Engineers care a great deal about the technical challenge itself, and the particular technologies that they get the opportunity to learn and use. However, if the engineering team is provided with a clear vision and product strategy, and if the engineers are provided the opportunity to see the customer problems directly, then they can often come up with innovative solutions to very real problems, and breakthrough products can result. The key is that innovation needs to happen in the context of a vision and strategy. The innovation needs to be in support of providing true customer value.

2. Confusing yourself with your customer: We must constantly put our products in front of customers directly from the target market, and consider carefully their response and constantly strive to keep their perspective in mind and not our own understandably skewed viewpoint. So many products today are unusable to all but the product’s creators. Typically this is the result of poor product design and no usability testing. When usability testing is performed, it is often too little, and too late in the product lifecycle to matter. If you haven’t had your product tested for usability recently, it is likely the insights you will gain from testing will benefit you greatly. The goal should be to redesign your product as necessary to get to the point where you can run usability testing with people from your target market and have these potential customers emerge enthusiastic and eager to buy the product. The use of prototypes during usability testing can significantly help in building confidence that the product you eventually build will, in fact, be usable and desirable.

3. Confusing the customer with the user: The person who buys the product to address a business requirement may have very different concerns from the people that sit down and use the product every day. Sales people understand this distinction, and often break the types of users down further into the various people in a company that influence a purchase. But too often the product team is just exposed to the customers – the buyers or economic decision makers – who may do their best to try and represent the needs of the users too, but it is critical to have a clear understanding of the different types of people that will actually have to use the system. The technique of personas or user profiling can help to raise this issue early and ensure the product.

Interesting, more in the next post….

PRACTISING the Best PRACTICES

There is always a room for improvement and every organization has some measurement and benchmark placed to improve their policies and processes. The Best Practices is certainly not absolute and it depends on the kind of organization and its services/ offerings. But few things for an organization to look for while defining the best practices for them are:

1. Internal Practices: Before you start looking outside, concentrate internally. If you are a start up, then check the measure, matrices and balances and see whether they are properly in place. Before you actually start on improving policies and processes, see to it that the basic requirements are met for any processes or policies. For e.g. a successful project management should fill the criteria of gathering exact client requirements, defect management, risk management etc. And, if you are already an established organization, how the existing practices have affected and impacted the organization as a whole in terms of performance and running of organization.

2. Market Benchmarking: An organization cannot run in isolation. A lot of external factors impact the organization. It’s always advisable to research on specific practices and policies used by other organizations in the market who sell the same kind of services/ offerings. Not only that, you can also focus on the practices and policies which are generic to all the organizations. For e.g. Risk Management is very specific area while Resource Management is quite a generic one.

3. Involve your customers: Customers are the king. Always involve them while setting up the best practices in your organizations, take their suggestions and regularly inform them regarding the changes in process and policies in your organization. Publish Newsletters and let them know the practice areas of other organizations and how it differs in your organization. And, sometimes, involving your clients and customers can help you get the benefits of extracting information regarding the dynamics of other organizations as they are the one who works with different service providers.

4. Involve Industry Experts: Industry Experts are the one who have the experience of working in various organizations across the globe, working with acclaimed industry leaders and renowned organization. So, they have the knowledge of setting up the best practices for each and every kind of organization. Involving them would certainly help the organization in knowing the loopholes in the existing practices and the areas of improvement.

5. Documentation and Version Control: It might seem trivial but this is one of the important aspects of best practices in any organization. Proper documentation and version control helps in knowing the history and the changes that actually occurred in any practices and its overall impact.

Product Management: An Insight

Products are everywhere, some succeed and some fail. To create a successful product, it needs to follow a structured approach which is the product development process. Product development is the process of designing, building, operating, and maintaining a good product or service. Software and Internet companies use a product development process to ensure that they are not just manufacturing a technology, but creating a product that people will want to buy and continue to use. Product development adds things like pricing, marketing, and customer support to the technology to create a complete product. Without a product management philosophy and discipline, an IT organization becomes focused on the technology instead of the customers and is often organized along technology lines rather than in ways that benefit the customer.

This article is dedicated to few common product pitfalls which lead to a product disaster which are listed below:

Confusing product requirements with customer requirements.
Confusing innovation with value.
Confusing yourself with your customer.
Confusing the customer with the user.
Confusing features with benefits.
Confusing building right product with building product right.
Confusing good product with good business model.
Confusing Inspiring features with “Nice-to-Have” features.
Confusing adding features with improving product.
Confusing impressive specifications with an impressive product.

To briefly explain the first point, it’s not always wise to look forward to your marketing team, sales or customer for knowing about the kind of product you are working on. Sometimes, the customers don’t understand or know the kind of similar products available in the market and sometimes they don’t have the expertise on the technology and don’t understand the possibility of developing the product. Hence, Product management is responsible for defining the right product. It is the job of the product manager to deeply understand the target market and their needs, and then to work to combine what is possible with what is desirable, to create products that solve real problems. This is why top product managers often come from the engineering ranks; they understand what is possible, and when they see an unmet need they can often envision new and innovative solutions. Product marketing is also very important, just very different. Product marketing is all about communicating what the product does to the target market, and supporting the sales channel with the tools they need to effectively sell. Good product marketing is difficult and critical, but it is not at all the same thing as inventing the actual product.

Interesting, more in the next post….

The buzzword is CMR more than CRM...

Customer Relationship Management has been the mantra for many organizations now. Though critical, most of the CRM implementations are failure stories. Why?? Probably because, most of the times, the organization wants the CRM deployed quickly and the returns are expected soon, the vision remains unclear, the management of customers appears to be a Herculean task. They fail to understand what the customers really want and how CRM can be a driving force to better manage the relationship. There is a paradigm shift now from CRM to CMR i.e. Customer management of relationships, it’s just not about customer relationship but customer empowerment too. CMR gives the customer the power to tell what he’s is interested in and not interested in.

Every organization is different, so are its requirements. It’s always essential to align the right kind of CRM vendor application with the kind of clients you cater to and the services/ products you offer. More than what you perceive as important in CRM application, it’s important what your client wants in an application. The organization should not try to implement CRM as a technology but as a Sales and Marketing practice. The organization should be ready for a process and philosophy change if required from client’s perspective. It has been observed that CRM is being used to curb the information flow for security reasons because of which the importance of information flow among certain stakeholders is ignored. CMR addresses that companies should encourage information flow not only with customers but also within the organization. A classic example being one organization bidding with two different solutions/offerings and the two teams are unaware of each other, the result being business clash among practices. CMR just not stresses on capturing right kind of customer information but also how that information would be helpful to the organization in return. It’s a two way process of maintaining the relationship. The most important question to ask next is whether your sales force is trained enough to understand the terminologies of the application and enter the correct data. In many situations, the sales force just ignores the meaning of certain terminologies and enter data what they assume and in the process the reporting shows inaccurate results hampering business forecasts. Training and updating the CRM users on the latest functionalities and features should be a continuous process and automation of knowledge transfer should be a key initiative by the organization through CRM. As they say, the first step for the success of CMR is CRM. Interesting, more in the next post…
to be continued)

Ernst and Young’s tips for Business in 2009

One
Focus on Cash, manage it well as it is the most precious asset that businesses hold. Ensure that even if your revenues are dropping, you have sufficient cash to meet your immediate obligations.
Plenty Cash reserve can avoid situations like automobile companies in US.

Two
Pay attention to risk management as unidentified risk can lead to catastrophic results - shown by 2008. Try to ensure that effective risk management is tied directly to business priorities.
Lehman fiasco along with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac lacked good risk management policies in place.

Three
Be mindful of compensation as pay programmes affect stakeholders in the form of accounting, reported earnings, disclosure and tax implications.

Four
Keep your eyes open for mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Companies looking to expand through M&A should stick to their core services and competencies and ensure they're making smart purchases, including snapping up an underperforming competitor as prices become more affordable.

Fifth
Retain high performers in tough times. For companies searching for quick ways to reduce costs, labour may seem like an obvious expense. But retaining top talent during crisis time can help companies stay afloat and reduce costs in the longer term.

Sixth
Always look beyond here and now. While navigating current challenges, businesses should not forget about the future.

Seventh
Make your non-financial metrics count. In the current state of the global economy, many will argue that economic reality will kill the budding green industry. But investing in clean technology can give you competitive advantage in the form of cost cuts, efficiency, compliance with new regulations and the creation of new products and services.

Eighth
Get ready for International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). Soon public companies will be expected to provide securities administrators with a detailed implementation plan and quantify the conversion's impact on their business, more precisely.

Ninth
Be smart with tax strategies to save you money. Talk to your advisor and do it early. Implement tax strategies to improve cash flow or minimize taxes.

Tenth
See the lemonade, not the lemons. Use the heightened scrutiny caused by the current financial and economic challenges to identify ways to improve and grow your business.

According to Ernst & Young, a climate of fear and risk aversion creates real opportunities for investment and innovation if firms are able to step back and see beyond the current turmoil.