CIO-Reinvented Blog - By Prashanth Rai

Steve Ballmers Memo, A quick thought

Was just reading the Steve Ballmer Memo one interesting thing that stood out was when he spoke about the enterprise there was no mention of the Business Applications....(CRM, ERP etc) ...Makes me wonder why?

· Business and enterprise: Our enterprise and server business has never been stronger—today we are on the verge of becoming the number one enterprise software company. We need to continue to push on all fronts—mail with Exchange, business intelligence with PerformancePoint, virtualization with Hyper-V, and databases with SQL Server. We have to drive our enterprise search capabilities, our unified communications solutions, and our collaboration technologies. And we must continue to compete against Linux in key workloads such as Web servers and high performance computing.

Tags: enterprise+software - microsoft - future - memo - ERP - CRM

Prashanth Rai

EPM Aligns S2S - Management Excellence By Oracle EPM

Frank Butendijk an ex-Hypeiron Executive now over at Oracle as VP EPM Strategy has a post up on his blog introducing the theme of "Management Excellence" which is going to be at the heart of the Oracle EPM approach in the next year. They have also started a Quarterly publication with the same name, june edition of teh same is available here.

I just read through it, Its an introduction piece trying to put the whole Management excellence theme in perspective.

Some excerpts from the same:

The Hackett Group in their Book of Numbers™ Research Series has documented that the way forward for best-in-class organizations is to solidify their  operational excellence through ERP and CRM, while differentiating with management excellence that is enabled by EPM.

The closest thing people mention to describe their management process is the PDCA-cycle (Plan, Do, Check, Adjust). This cycle is sometimes also called the planning and control cycle, or management cycle. Sometimes it involves more steps, but it is always based on this principle. It is concerning, almost scary, that the management processes are not as clearly defined as business processes, as the competitive advantage that organizations can have is increasingly dependent on the management process, instead of business processes.

Being smart, agile and aligned are not characteristics of operational excellence, but define what we call management excellence. Management makes the difference. And enterprise performance management (EPM) should be the enabler.Unfortunately, EPM traditionally focuses on the management- or PDCA-cycle, an inside-out approach. This was confirmed by a recent Cranfield University study that found organizations are too internally focused and did not use sufficient external information or benchmarking. Contrast this to management excellence, which is the art of reconciling outside-in and inside-out.

S2S

Measures / Call to Action in each of these steps:

EPM promotes managementexcellence based on two simple concepts that parallel ERP and CRM:
- Take a systematic approach to the management activities through modules operating on a common platform and provided by a single enterprise
software vendor. 
- Identify and refine the key management processes necessary to manage the business.
The first concept is once again based on sound technology strategy and best practices in systems engineering, while the second concept is truly a revelation as most businesses can’t readily identify their key management processes, such as “gain-to-sustain”, “investigate-to-invest” or “plan-to-act” to name a few.

Tags: me - management+excellence - journal - oracle - EPM - BI - business+intelligence - management+process

Prashanth Rai

All is not well in the world of Business Intelligence

Dynamic Markets last year conducted a research based on interviews with 218 operational executives and front line management conducted between November 2006 and August 2007, providing a snapshot of current use and satisfaction with Business intelligence systems and their impact on operational performance.

The research revealed that business intelligence systems are failing to improve operational performance or impact decision making within US and UK businesses.

In many cases, IT executives find themselves forced into a position where they have to make decisions before all the information they need is available (76 percent), believe that BI reports end up being simply reference documents to justify decisions that have already been made (63 percent), and do not receive reports that provide predictions about potential problems or provide potential opportunities (more than 70 percent).

The impact of inadequate intelligence on the business is huge. The average cost - discovered by the research – in lost revenue to an organization is $478,686. In fact, one operations manager admitted to a direct $5,000,000 cost to his area of the business. By extrapolating this annual average as representative across the market, then the survey indicates that the Fortune 500 companies are losing approximately $250 million per year in missed business opportunities as a result of inadequate business intelligence

Charles Nicholls, CEO and Founder of SeeWhy Software, commented, “What is clear from this research is that all is not well in the world of BI. BI tools are perceived as hard to use, reports are out of date and largely irrelevant to daily operational decision making and BI is seen as inherently retrospective. Yet it is clear that managers strive for more, seeking information that can make a difference; that is relevant to operations now; that can give early warning of problems; or can present opportunities for the business.”

Almost allmanagers surveyed (90 percent) believed that there would be significant benefits to the business if they could embed greater intelligence into daily operational processes. Benefits mentioned included:

72 percent believed that their company would employ more efficient processes.
71 percent felt that there would be an improvement in customer service.
65 percent thought that there would be an increase in revenues and 65 percent saw an increase in profitability.
59 percent believed there will be lower levels of risk to the business.
57 percent felt it would make them more competitive.
52 percent said that it would enable better compliance with regulations.
Charles Nicholls explained, “We’ve seen order of magnitude increases in performance when business intelligence is built into operational processes. In some cases the improvement exceeds 10x (1000 percent). It’s clear that operations managers in the US in particular are becoming increasingly aware of the potential to transform key operational processes in this way.”

Source:1

Tags: bi - operational+excellence - business+intelligence - future - CIO

Prashanth Rai

The eventual Demise of the OLAP Cube .....Forrester

In the Forrester blog For Information and Knowledge Workers analyst James Kobielus has an interesting post on the change of guard in the BI scenario looking at the eventual demise of OLAP.

I think the points raised by James are very relevant and does get us thinking on how we should look at the whole analytical framework / architecture that is defined in organizations.

Excerpts from the post:

No one expects the OLAP cube to vanish completely from the BI landscape, but its role in many decision-support environments has been declining over the past several years. Increasingly, vendors are emphasizing new approaches that, when examined in a broader context, appear to be loosening OLAP's lockhold on mainstream BI and data warehousing. The emerging paradigm for ad-hoc, flexible, multi-dimensional, user-driven decision support includes the following important approaches:

• Automated discovery and normalization of dispersed, heterogeneous data sets through a pervasive metadata layer
• Semantic virtualization middleware, which supports on-demand, logically integrated viewing and query of data from heterogeneous, distributed data sources without need for a data warehouse or any other centralized persistence node
• On-the-fly report, query, and dashboard creation, which relies on dynamic aggregation of data, organization of that data within relevant hierarchies, and presentation of metrics that have been customized to the user or session context
• Interactive data visualization tools, which enable user-driven exploration of the full native dimensionality of heterogeneous data sets, thereby eliminating the need for manual modeling and transformation of data to a common schema
• Guided analytics tools, which support user-driven, ad-hoc creation of sharable, extensible models containing data, visualization, and navigation models for customizable decision-support scenarios
• Inverted indexing storage engines, which support more flexible, on-the-fly assembly of structured data in response to ad-hoc queries than is possible with traditional row-based or column-based data warehousing persistence layers
• Distributed in-memory processing, which enables continuous delivery of intelligence being extracted in real-time from millions of rows of data that originates in myriad, distributed data sources

Tags: olap - Forrester - future - bi - business+intelligence - information - intelligence

Prashanth Rai

Customer financing for Infor Customers by IBM

Infor recently announced a new financing relationship with IBM Global Financing the largest IT financier in the world. The new agreement will enable Infor’s customers around the world to finance products from Infor’s entire line of enterprise business software, as well as complementary hardware and services, through IBM Global Financing. Under the terms of the agreement, Infor’s channel partners can also offer financing to their customers through IBM Global Financing.

Are we going to see more from where this came from ?

“Most organizations today walk a narrow line between preserving day-to-day cash flow and making fiscally prudent investments to improve their business,” said Robin Pederson, chief operating officer, Infor. “The expansion of our relationship with IBM will help to make this decision easier.”

The new financing relationship provides many benefits to Infor's customers. For example, organizations can move forward with their technology initiatives while spreading up-front payments over time, conserving cash for other investments. Companies can also put technology to work immediately to establish a stronger competitive edge, rather than delaying until the next budget cycle.

Excerpts from the Forrester Blog

This program provides Infor's customers with:

• Access to a line of credit for key tech investments. Similar to other IGF deals, the program includes more than just Infor's entire line of business software. Other eligible items include software, services, hardware, and maintenance.
• Flexible payment options. Customers can spread traditional up-front payments over time. Flexible payment plans for loans or lease extend up to 60 months. Interest rates are country specific.

Key facts about the deal:

• Geographies: All
• Products: All products, No IBM hardware or software required
• Length of program: Up to 5 years, typically 24 to 36 months
• Interest rates: Country specific
• Partner eligibility: Open to all partners
• Program inclusion: software, services, hardware, and maintenance.

The bottom line.
Vendor-led financing options and payment alternatives provide users with opportunities to avoid up front payments and efficiently deploy capital. While financing options do not address the issues of recurring costs for support, upgrade, and hardware infrastructure, the bundling of professional services, hardware, and other related software offerings provide a compelling business case to choose one preferred IT vendor while deferring capital outlays. Financing will continue to prove to be the game changer in this consolidating and competitive software market.

Tags: it - financing - ibm - infor - erp - infrastructure - future

Prashanth Rai

Reading the IBM CEO Study Report

I was just reading the IBM CEO Study Report, It was very interesting, I suggest everybody read it. Below are some thoughts/excerpts from the same:

What will the Enterprise of the Future Look like?

1. Organizations are bombarded by change, and many are struggling to keep up.
2. CEO's view more demanding customers not as a threat, but as an opportunity to differentiate.
3. Nearly all CEO s are adapting their business models — two-thirds are implementing extensive innovations.
4. CEO s are moving aggressively toward global business designs, deeply changing capabilities and partnering more extensively.
5. Financial outperformers are making bolder plays.

Traits of the Enterprise of the Future

Hungary for Change:

CEO s are most concerned about the impact of three external forces: market factors, people skills and technology. Customer expectation shifts, competitive threats and industry consolidation continue to weigh on their minds.

These 3 were rated above many other factors including MacroEconomic Factors and Globalization - which you would think would be top factors given fears of recession, inflation etc globally.

Innovate Beyond Customer Imagination:

As one real estate CEO from India highlights, “In India, 400 million consumers will demand new housing in the next 20 years — that’s more real estate than the United States has built since the Second World War.”

the middle class is growing and becoming progressively more prosperous. Greater disposable income brings new demand for more sophisticated, higher-value
products and services.

in established economies, significant wealth accumulation among aging baby boomers and a corresponding increase in young, affluent inheritors are boosting prosperity in what some might otherwise consider flat-growth markets.

CEO s cautioned that using the same go-to-market strategies, products and services seldom works: tapping into these new geographic and demographic
segments will require a deeper understanding of these customers and a more tailored approach.

Customers now have far more sources of information, and the enterprise is no longer the definitive authority.

With the billion-user Internet, customers can broadcast expectations and share views worldwide — and publicly grade a company’s performance against them. Like-minded customers can network socially and pool their influence. And in increasing numbers of industries, customers are swapping passive roles for much deeper involvement. “Consumers” are becoming “producers,” creating entertainment and advertising content for their peers and even generating their own electricity.

The Enterprise of the Future aims beyond articulated needs and wants, creating first-ofa- kind products, services and experiences that were never asked for — but are precisely what customers desire.

1. Finds ways to make offerings relevant to new markets and increasingly prosperous consumers
2. Understands timing and network effects
3. Connects everyone to the customer
4. Uses technology to anticipate shifts faster than the competition

Globally Integrated

As the world becomes more connected and more accessible, CEO s see tremendous opportunities to expand their global reach, tapping into new sources of expertise and new markets. Traditional views of globalization — labor arbitrage and riding the wave of economic growth in China and India — are being replaced by a new focus: global integration. By this, they mean new business designs that facilitate faster and more extensive collaboration on a worldwide scale and rapid reconfiguration when new opportunities appear.

Across the entire CEO sample, more than half plan to deeply change their organizations’ capabilities, knowledge and assets. New customer expectations are driving some of these shifts. “We need to move away from an operational focus to a client interface focus,” one U.S. CEO said. “This requires new skills and a new skill mix for the corporation.”

We also found that outperformers are 20 percent more likely to partner extensively than underperformers.16 This reinforces what we discovered in our last CEO Study: extensive collaborators outperform their competitive peers.“Partnering has shifted from tactical ‘Enter a new market’ to strategic ‘Access to capabilities’,” explained one CEO from Hong Kong.

Disruptive By Nature

Most CEO s are embarking on extensive business model innovation. And outperformers are pursuing even more disruptive business model innovations than their underperforming peers.

CEO s told us they are changing their business models because it is increasingly difficult to differentiate based on products and services alone. But they also stressed another reason: they simply have more options now.

Forty-four percent of CEO s are focused solely on enterprise model innovation or are implementing it in combination with other forms of business model innovation. This trend toward enterprise model innovation is even more pronounced in emerging economies (53 percent).

Enterprise model Specializing and reconfiguring the business to deliver greater value by rethinking what is done in-house and through collaboration (as Cisco
has done by focusing on brand and design while relying on partners for manufacturing, distribution and more).

Among those pursuing revenue model innovations, nine out of ten are reconfiguring the product, service and value mix. Half are working on new pricing structures.CEO s are incorporating more services into their offering portfolios and changing one-time payment models to ones centered on recurring charges. More are starting to price based on value to the customer, rather than on cost plus. Depending on the particular needs of their respective industries, some companies are bundling to create more valuable solutions, while others are unbundling to offer customers a menu of choices.

CEO s are also using revenue model innovation as part of their geographic expansion strategies. Having the right pricing structure, they told us, is critical when entering markets like China and India where consumers have a wide range of incomes.

CEO s mentioned several reasons for not pursuing industry model innovation. But most can be summed up with: it’s tough to do. For similar reasons, industry model innovators are more focused on redefining their existing industries (73 percent) than on entering or creating entirely new ones (36 percent).

Things to do::

1. Thinks like an outsider
2. draws breakthrough ideas from other industries
3. empowers entrepreneurs
4. Experiments creatively in the market, not just the lab
5. Manages today’s business while experimenting with tomorrow’s model

Genuine Not Generous

CEO s are investing rapidly in corporate social responsibility. CEO s generally agree that customer expectations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) are increasing.While customers have always cared about societal issues, their concerns are now more frequently turning into action and influencing purchasing decisions. According to a recent CSR study, 75 percent of the companies surveyed say that the number of advocacy groups collecting and reporting CSR-related information on them has increased over the past three years.

Source: IBM

Tags: IBM - CEO+Study - CIO - Future

Questions/thoughts:

• How do you get your customers/prospects to work with you to craft out your products/service offerings?
• How are IT departments /CIO's preparing for these things? - As I don?t see any of these being possible without significant assistance from IT.
• How can IT departments/CIO's collaborate better with its customers (business users)?
• How do we leverage Social Networks to get intimate with the customers and their needs?
• Though the IT industry is one of leaders in leveraging global capability - Are they leveraging the "Capability" or only "Bodies"?
• Are IT departments and IT Services Organizations processes recalibirated for Global Integration?
• What innovation in terms of Enterprise /Revenue / Industry model has IT Department or IT Services Organizations seen?

Internal IT Department Brand

I was reading this post at the Life Beyond Code blog on "Personal Branding" specifically for IT / Technology people. This got me thinking shouldn't IT departments also worry about their "Personal Brand", the post also suggest a model to build a long term brand, I think it is relevant from a IT Department perspective also - Your thoughts?  Some Excerpts from the post on this long term model:

The long-term model for personal branding adds a few more pieces to the personal branding puzzle.

1. Relevant and Valuable Accomplishments:  The bedrock of any solid personal brand will be accomplishments that the marketplace determines as relevant and valuable. Nothing else. Why do people skip working on accomplishments? Simply because they are hard to do and the barriers to entry are high.

2. Supporting Structure: The next piece missing is the development of supporting structure to produce even bigger accomplishments - building on the earlier accomplishments. You can’t attract quality people to support you unless you first produce some accomplishments that are noteworthy. Of course, there are always exceptions based on your history but they are rare. You can’t do this alone - at least when you have big goals on your agenda. You need help. Actually, you need VERY GOOD help. That is the part of supporting structure that you need tow work throughout your lifetime to build.

3. Ability to Deal with the New Personal Brand: The last piece of the puzzle is your overall development to deal with the consequences of your new personal brand. People tend to dismiss this but it’s always important to be ready - to savor the success of your personal brand. There will be more things to deal with (like requests for help) almost on a daily basis. Without being prepared, you might just ruin what you have worked hard to build.

Tags: brand - marketing - IT - CIO - IT+Department - LifeBeyondCode

Prashanth Rai

Interesting reads of the day!

Not satisfied  - Only 47% of workers are satisfied with the speed at which their businesses’ tech departments adopt new technology.The number is from a new report by the research firm Gartner and it’s an average across the medium and large companies surveyed.On average, the tech pros said that 32% of workers in their companies thought that the IT department moved too slowly. These are the people who want to use online software, collaboration tools, iPhones and other new technologies that IT often outlaws. Gartner makes the case that some dissatisfaction is good: All but the oldest technologies are still works in progress, and if no one feels disrupted then the tech department probably isn’t pushing the envelope enough. The people Gartner suggests upsetting, however, are the people who think that the tech department is moving too quickly – about 21% of workers now, according to the IT pros surveyed

Source: 1

OBIEE On IPhone - Chris Claterbos from Vlamis has picked up on the story that one of the first official iPhone apps is a front-end for Oracle BI Enterprise Edition. The App Store hasn’t gone live over here yet, but apparently one of the first applications you can download (and for free) is a viewer application for Oracle BI Answers.According to Chris, “The new applications leverage the SOA capabilities and Oracle Business Intelligence Web Services available in Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Pluss (OBIEE). The new apps will be available today for FREE from the Apple appstore. These applications will run on iPhone (original), iPhone 3G (available tomorrow) and iTouch using the new version 2.0 software.”

Source: 2

Consistent Innovation - There is a fascinating article in this month’s Harvard Business Review entitled Investing in the IT That Makes A Competitive Difference that discusses how “internet and enterprise IT are now accelerating competition.” As processes become more digitized within enterprise IT, they can be propagated more quickly across the organization. Companies that select the right operating model to digitize, embody the processes within enterprise IT, deploy the solution consistently throughout the enterprise, and then continuously leverage the platform for further innovation and propagation will lead their industries.

You can support your company’s competitive imperative by becoming a key agent in your company’s innovation engine. You don’t need to be a technologist, but you do need to be an expert on your business processes, data, and technology systems that run your business. To do so, make sure that you:

• Understand your company’s operating model and the processes that need to be consistent across the enterprise to drive competitive success (e.g., market to sell, lead to order, quote to cash, etc.)

• Commit to relying on your enterprise systems to get what you need (rather than demanding customizations or building stand alone systems)

• Know the configuration options inherent in the enterprise systems that can be leveraged for experimentation (e.g., report writers, data extract, process scripts, screen “painters”, table driven logic)

• Champion experimentation with full transparency and discipline regarding success measurements

Alternatively, IT needs to foster the capability of “consistent innovation” by:

• Working with the business to identify the operating model and the implications regarding process, data and technology

• Ensuring that “tight but loose” decision rights are rigorously defined to ensure consistency but prescribe where innovation can occur within the defined boundaries

• Architecting and delivering technology that ensures consistency AND promotes innovation and change. It’s relatively easy to build systems to perform tasks in a prescribed manner by people in static roles. But it’s much more difficult to design and deliver systems that are configurable in terms of inputs, process, and outputs and where the authority to access and make modifications are encoded in logic that ensures compliance to enterprise decision rights (e.g., a system that allows vendors to be hired at the local level and held to common quality standards may need to support a mix of national and local vendors and market based quality measures at some time in the future.)

Source: 3

Fortune 500, Indian Industry - India is seen as an emerging economy having registered impressive growth rates for over a decade. The services sector has been doing very well and manufacturing has not performed poorly. What must come as a sobering thought to a nation of a billion people is that the latest Fortune 500 list has just 7 Indian companies. Of these, five are state owned – four in the petroleum sector that is showing high revenues thanks to oil being on the boil and one bank. Only two companies are in the private sector – Reliance Industries and Tata Steel.

Source: 4

Cloud Computings Impact on BI/DWH - How will the Cloud Computing change BI and Data Warehousing?  In theory, it should be much easier to get a system up an running.  This is the same reason why the data warehouse appliance is so compelling.  Give me a box, let me plug it in and load my data, and off I go to do the work I really need to do.  The idea of Cloud Computing is even easier.  This is the CPU power/storage that I need, where do I load my data, and off I go to do the work I really need to do.

Source: 5

Tags: saas - india - IT - innovation - future

Prashanth Rai

Interesting reads of the day!

Interesting articles or items read today:

A Recent Goldman Sachs report sees growth in IT spending dropping from 7% last year to 5% this year...and near steady rock bottom levels at the end of the year.  That says declining budget GROWTH (vs. declining budgets). Major spending areas?  Cost cutting, vitalization, server consolidation, application integration, and data center consolidation….sounds like a theme going. Once these Y2K like efforts are done…watch out.

Source: 1

Your Next outsourcing destination Ghana - Ambassadors from 41 countries recently toured California. Among the reasons: to learn how the U.S. high-tech sector operates and to make a pitch for their home countries as sources of tech talent.

Source: 2

Tech Hiring still on the rise - In June, the number of information-technology pros employed in the U.S. reached 3,907,800–an all-time high, according to the National Association of Computer Consultant Businesses, an industry group for tech-consulting companies. Each month, the NACCB scours through Bureau of Labor Statistics data to find IT-related jobs. In June, the number of these jobs only increased by 1,700, but that was enough to set a new record. For the year, U.S. businesses have added almost 90,000 IT pros, which is a lot, considering that the U.S. has lost 438,000 jobs over the same period. The gains are a reminder that while growth in IT spending may be slower than in past years many research firms have revised downward their forecasts for corporate tech spending recently the sector is still growing.

Source: 3

Technology Diffusion - How long are technology adoption lags? Can cross-country differences in technology adoption lags account for a significant fraction of cross-country GDP disparities? Diego Comin of Harvard Business School and Bart Hobijn of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York develop a new benchmark to understand the diffusion process of individual technologies and the consequences that this has for aggregate growth. This benchmark provides a rationale for the evolution of diffusion measures that include how many units of technology each adopter has adopted in addition to the traditional extensive margin. The model is estimated to obtain measures of adoption lags for 15 technologies in 166 countries. Key concepts include:

• Adoption lags are large. On average, countries have adopted technologies 47 years after their invention.
• There is substantial variation across technologies and countries. 
• Over the past two centuries, newer technologies have been adopted faster than old ones. 
• The remarkable development records of Japan between 1870 and 1970 and of the so-called East Asian Tigers in the second half of the 20th century all coincided with a catch-up in the range of technologies used with respect to industrialized countries. 
• Adoption lags account for at least 25 percent of cross-country per capita income differences.

Source: 4 

India IT Export to Middle East - India’s IT exports to the Middle East are expected to cross $1.30 billion in 2008, an increase of 30% compared to $1 billion last year, Electronics and Computer Software Export Promotion Council of India (ESC) said. According to ESC, an autonomous body under the Indian Ministry of Communications and IT, Indian IT exports are growing at more than 30% annually and are expected to cross $50 billion this year and touch $100 billion by 2012. “IT exports from India to the Middle East, particularly to the UAE, have increased substantially in recent years. We see huge potential for further growth as ESC is devising new strategies to expand its market-share in the region,” ESC regional director for the Middle East and UAE Kamal Vachani said.

Source: 5

Tags: Outsourcing - offshoring - India - technology - hiring - IT - Ghana

Prashanth

Clash of the Mindsets, I dont think its limited only to R&D

At the Harvard Publication Discussion leader site Navi Radjou (Forrester Analyst) covered the topic of how with a growing number of companies setting up R&D (own / contracted) facilities in India. There is a clash between their India R&D Engineers and engineers from the rest of the world.

Navi makes some interesting observations on the reasons for the clash, but first I think its important to understand that this isn't restricted to the ambit of R&D all areas where the organizational network is at work and there needs to be collaboration between multiple group of people to work together not only as customer/vendor.This is true even when companies have development centers across the world including India, If a development center needs to work with the India center they face similar challenges.

These two opposite approaches clash when they are asked to collaborate on a R&D project. Why? Because Indian and Western engineers completely differ in their:

1) Reasoning. Unlike Western engineers, who reason with a predicate logic (a statement is either true (1) or false (0)), Indian engineers solve problems using a fuzzy logic (the degree of truth of a statement can range anywhere between 0 and 1). Both reasoning styles have their own merit. In the exploratory stage of product development, Indian engineers’ creativity and flexibility help solve ambiguous technical problems with imprecise data. But Western engineers’ quest for predictability brings stability to the development process later as it gets closer to commercialization. One Indian exec who manages a multinational R&D team joked he felt like a diplomat as he must constantly broker peace between uncertainty-loathing Western engineers and ambiguity-loving Indian scientists!

2) Problem-solving. Given their average age (mid-20s), Indian engineers belong to the Generation Y, or the Millennials, who learn through hands-on experiments (think video-games) and peer-to-peer interactions (instant messaging anyone?). When solving a problem, these grown-up “kids” harness the multiplicative power of social networking tools to experiment with multiple solutions simultaneously, and select the optimal one based on peer input. You can call this problem-solving approach “Collaborative Darwinism.” By contrast, Western engineers, many in their 30s/40s/50s, theoretically weigh the pros and cons of every single solution before even trying it, and feel too proud to ask for help when stuck solving a problem. It’s the “ostrich-style” problem-solving.

3) Market expectations. It’s hard for Western engineers living in rich economies with advanced infrastructure to design products for use by customers in developing economies with poor roads and unreliable electrical and water supply. But that’s second nature for Indian engineers in Bangalore, with its ever-congested roads and frequent power cuts. As a US tech multinational’s exec eloquently puts it: “Western engineers’ product ideas are shaped by laws of abundance whereas Eastern engineers’ inventions are motivated by the rules of scarcity. Our Silicon Valley engineers don’t even know what “low-cost” product means. And they would have never conceived, let alone marketed, a telecom router with embedded back-up power-supply, as our India team did, to cope with India’s constant power shortage.” Necessity is indeed the mother of invention.

Tags: India - r&d - offshore - outsource - innovation.

Prashanth Rai