Speaking at NASSCOM on the Cloud monetization strategy

Posted in Conference
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NASSCOM is doing its first Annual Technology Conference on 12-13 December at Noida. In past I have been part of their panel discussions and have attended the product conclave that is now an annual feature. I have always been impressed with the organization skills of the NASSCOM team and the ability to bring expert speakers from diverse background.

nasscom-atc

The focus this year is on topics of Mobile, BigData and Cloud – something that has impacted and is beginning to impact all industries. These organizations are looking to prepare the best strategy that will take their business forward.

atc

I will be presenting on “How to build and monetize the Cloud” and will cover various strategies related to cloud.

If you are planning to be in this part of the world, you do not want to miss this conference. Use this link to register.

FDA wants to ban genetic tests by Google-backed 23andme

Posted in Analytics, General
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23andme is one of the companies I am always fascinated about from a BigData perspective as they have access to huge amount of data that can dramatically change the healthcare systems in the world and and I have discussed this in many conversations with my friends and colleagues.

About 23andme

23andme is a DNA analysis company and is backed by Google. How does it work? Well you order a kit and provide saliva sample and send your kit back to 23andme. The company runs a DNA analysis and then provides details about your health risk, carrier status and drug response based on a detailed genetic analysis. Why do you need it? Knowing your health risks will allow you to manage your health better and can make some lifestyle changes and take some preventive action. Additionally, you can find out fun stuff, like if you have ancestors in another country. For example, DNA tests reveal that Prince William has ancestor in India.

23andMeBan1

Why is FDA worried?

It all sounds great but then why is Food Drug & Administration (FDA) worried? FDA is worried about potential pitfalls of false positive and false negative about health risk assessment and drug response. For instance, a false positive on risk assessment on breast or ovarian cancer could lead a patient to undergo prophylactic surgery or chemotherapy. While a false negative could lead someone to overlook an actual risk that may exist. FDA is also worried if drug response test will lead patients to self-manage their treatments by dose changes or stopping certain drugs.

The real issue is not that the tests are bad – these tests bypasses a physician’s presence and his assessment of patients health and response and expose consumers to the risk of trying to self-manage their own treatment of serious diseases or if incorrect test results are reported.

What 23andme should do is to prove to FDA that the tests work and are accurate. Easy problem you data scientist, huh? It should also educate the consumers about the risk that are inherent in such tests and provide guidance to consumers on how to use the results.

Which has more lines of code – Windows or Mac OSX?

Posted in Data visualization, Technology
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If you ever wondered how many lines of code are there in your favorite app, checkout the infographics by Information is beautiful.

And yes, Mac OSX has more lines of code than any Windows OS! Do not miss the last application shown in the infograph.

1276_lines_of_code5

One popular notion in software industry is that “the more code you write, the more bugs you end up with”. What does this data say about the quality of these apps?

Some of you may wonder if these apps can be written with much denser code. There are many reasons why that may not be practically possible – primarily to make applications extensible and maintainable. The other reasons for bloated code can simply be poor programming.

However, we will never know that. I don’t think a tool or benchmark exists that can tell a project manager if an application can be written with fewer lines of code. Even if it does, do you really care?

From BYOD to BYOS – A new service model for enterprise

Posted in Hot, Ideas, People & Culture, Technology
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These days it is not uncommon for you to access your official mails on your personal Blackberry or Android or iPhone. This is exactly what a BYOD or bring-your-own-device model is. It is quite a challenge for enterprise IT teams to ensure security of network and corporate data every time an employee accesses sales report or downloads sensitive information on his own device.

BYOS

The adoption of BYOD is on rise and a recent poll by market researcher IDC shows that more than half the polled companies support employees using their own device. It is also shown that there exists a positive link between usage of employee own device and employee satisfaction. This is a great news as it can help reduce cost as well as boost employee performance.

From BYOD to BYOS

As more employees start to use BYOD model, the boundary is getting pushed beyond devices to include software and services that employees want to use directly. Today 77% of online adults in US use at least one personal cloud service such as Dropbox (a file sharing service). This consumerization of IT is leading to a shift towards more personal choice and ability to personally select the tools that employees want to use. Many products are moving away from perpetual to subscription based model and offering SAAS (software-as-a-service). So, employees are increasingly selecting what is available. Well, if you represent enterprise IT, there are many challenges that you have to deal with.

Security
This is probably the biggest issue to deal with in a BYOS model. Similar to BYOD, organizations need to worry about if these BYOS services meet their security requirements. Moreover concern around providing access to sensitive data has to be solved before the integration can work.

Integration
Though this is somewhat related to security but organizations need to consider any additional cost of hardware and software that these services might need and how requirements across multiple groups can be managed together.

Support
Just like any service model is built with standard SLA, BYOS is no different. It is important to understand them and know the quality of support should things go wrong.

Future proof
Are the services customization and extensible? It is important that BYOS remains compatible with other IT systems and integration points where they are used.

Just like the forces of BYOD models are prevailing, BYOS is here to stay. We better get in front of it!

Whopping 87% of employees worldwide are dis-engaged in their jobs!

Posted in People & Culture
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A recent Gallup survey reports that only 13% employees worldwide are engaged in their jobs. The number for India is –

Engaged – 9%
Disengaged – 60%
Actively disengaged – 31%

The problem is not just a large percentage of disengaged employees but employees who are actively disengaged. Gallup defines actively disengaged employees as

“Actively disengaged employees aren’t just unhappy at work; they’re busy acting out their unhappiness. Every day, these workers undermine what their engaged coworkers accomplish.”

disengaged employees

If you talk to many front line managers, they will be able to describe several reasons about why this is happening. In my opinion, it is not that the organizations are not aware of key issues that is causing this disenchantment. But what is hurting organization is the lack of ability and willingness to act on it and provide ways that employees feel connected to their company.

I do not want to focus on what key issues are and what can potentially be done – much literature exists on that. I am more interested in hearing your observations on what you have seen organizations trying out to increase employee engagement – what has worked and what has not.

Harvard Business Review has created an interactive map for all countries.

My ColdFusion book and the learnings!

Posted in Book, Technology
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Late last year, Ben Forta asked me about an opportunity to  tech review ColdFusion 10 book. This was not a difficult task as I had some experience being a tech reviewer of 3rd edition of Enterprise JavaBeans by O’Reilly, one of the most popular book at its time. However, I soon got completely involved with the project as a co-author. I want to share my experience that can help other folks in a similar pursuit with their first book.

ColdFusion Book

What I found most effective is to write down high level sections of the chapters in a top-down approach. This allowed me to ensure that I will be covering the right amount of technical information and a logical flow is already established. The remaining work, then is mostly about filling those sections and fine tuning the sub sections.

With this high level – breakdown approach I was able to achieve a good momentum in finishing the chapters. And this is the second thing that I found effective – riding on a momentum and not getting stuck up with something like an example or a particular section. Since I was always working with a top-down approach, I was able to park sections that were slowing me down. Finishing parking lot items at a later time or on a new day when you are fresh, was much easier and faster.

So, if you are a ColdFusion programmer and have not already bought this book, I strongly recommend the book. It is great addition to ColdFusion 9 WACK series and a relatively thin book focusing on finding what’s new and changed in ColdFusion 10 at a single place. Access additional details on book are here.

Go grab the book from here.

 

Law of Hiring

Posted in Hiring, People & Culture
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The law of hiring states:

“Hiring an individual whose potential to perform is below the current team’s average brings down the team’s average performance”.

Conversely, “Hiring an individual who can perform better than the current team’s average increases the team’s average performance”

Why the law is important? Because the law of hiring determines your team performance. A sample calculation based on this law illustrates this point.

hiring-infograph

This means that the hiring exercise should focus on assessing a candidates potential to perform. Higher the delta, higher the influence on the team’s average. There will be times when your assessment will go wrong but at least being aware of this law allow you to take corrective measures during your next hiring gig. This awareness also help you to provide any training and mentoring facilities to the new hire.

What constitutes performance and how to assess it is not an easy task. However, it is something that you must prepare yourself, in advance, if you are the hiring manager.

The team’s overall performance depends on you. Are you listening? How have you applied this law?

Let’s Do Nothing!

Posted in Hot, Ideas
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Now the title may sound like a pessimistic advice but there is a case for doing less and not more.

The below is cover page of one of the favorite books that I enjoy reading to my kids. They love it. The idea of two kids – Frankie and Sal, trying not to do anything and ending up spending time thinking and pretending is hilarious to kids and something for all to think about.

do_nothing

In our work life, we are slowly and surely getting slaved by the following 4 M’s

1. Mindless web surfing – This is increasingly taking away lot more time than most people realize. Aimlesslely surfing internet or social web sites and reading articles of no value and not aligned to what you are trying to do in short or long term wastes time.

2. Meetings – A lot has been written about it. Jeff Weiner, CEO of Linkedin wrote a great article on how to eliminate useless meetings.

3. Mail – Checking e- Mails at the dinner table is no longer cool. Many folks can’t go to bed without checking their inbox. Work is routinely carried back home. The problem and solution is widely known – lack of discipline and commitment to generate lesser mail traffic is required.

4. Managing operations – This is the most important one that hurts organizations. Many top minds and executives time is better spend thinking about strategy. Operations help execution of plans but does not prepare company for future. Strategic thinking requires some uncluttered time. When Jack Welch was at GE, he used to spend an hour a day “doing nothing”!

How can we be like Frankie and Sal and do nothing, even for few minutes?

eBook and Big Six publishers

Posted in Book, Data visualization, Education
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I recently completed analysis of Big six publishers to understand eBook market that they represent. I decided to summarize my analysis using my first ever infographics using piktochart. I will summarize my experience in detail later but it suffice to say that infographics tool have way to go before they are ready for wider adoption.

Big six publishers

Some interesting observations – while the revenue seems to be increasing, there is a decline in profit because of larger share of eBook. I have used data from 2012 when Penguin and Random House were still separate entity. The data is collected for various public reports available on internet.

What does the future hold for the bigwig publishers of eBook industry – now Big Five?

How business models like subscription impact innovation culture

Posted in General, People & Culture
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I was recently reading an article by Steve Blank on how startup is not a smaller version of a large company. One of the important points that he mentioned was around value system and the differences in a way a large company evaluate business opportunity than a startup.

Now think about a business model like subscription. A subscription based business model increases predictability in revenue on an ongoing basis. This is because subscribers pay for the duration of subscription and if they like the services, subscribers are highly likely to renew their subscription. This typically happens in advance as subscribers provide payment information in advance. Wikipedia says –

“Businesses benefit because they are assured a predictable and constant revenue stream from subscribed individuals for the duration of the subscriber’s agreement. Not only does this greatly reduce uncertainty and the riskiness of the enterprise, but it often provides payment in advance (as with magazines, concert tickets), while allowing customers to become greatly attached to using the service and, therefore, more likely to extend by signing an agreement for the next period close to when the current agreement expires”

too risky

This is unlike perpetual/one-time transaction model, still uncertain. Now business managers can predict quarterly revenue with increasing accuracy with subscription. This means that the value system being built is one to reduce uncertainty and riskiness which is what a new product idea does not have. A new product idea by definition is in a phase of discovery and building sustainable business model. And hence unpredictable and risky.

This conflict can have serious negative impact on innovation culture of an organization – more so for large organizations as they want to reduce risk and have smaller variations in their quarterly and annual results. Subscription is a new business model and many large organizations are experimenting with it. It will be a while before this value system gets deep rooted and impacts innovation culture. Organizations need to watch out!

In my next article, I will describe what companies can do to leverage this change and still be innovative.