Life of a Business Principal in Consulting

Big programs of work tend to be comprised of several small IT projects stitched together. Business architecture makes sense that way - build and release in small doses and keep building. Momentum - in both IT roadmap and business outcomes - is great and demonstrable in this way. Theoretically, Everything goes smooth and the program is complete and every one is happy. However, in reality, things never go as per plan. No plan survives the impact when the rubber meets the road.

Large enterprises have started their IT journey in earnest. However, they are miles behind what is happening.  Some of them have been trying to learn faster by creating research programs or separate business unites to try out and learn a few exotic ideas that have not yet gained acceptance in the industry or enterprise. Enterprises have moved record collection and data to IT long back and were pioneers in that. However, since the advent of personal computers, they have been left behind. Internet and mobile have left them far behind. For example, Network security, big data, mobile apps. social applications are solved problems that the enterprise choose to ignore. 

In the last post , I discussed about how policy making is not efficient and how to make it better. I also talked about how it could be compared to a typical enterprise transformation program that consultants do. Let me take it one step further. Let me start mapping the steps to the solution for a more efficient policy making process to the software development process. Sound’s crazy right. lets follow through and try to see if it makes sense.

I have long been interested in public policy but have not gone into the details of what makes it work. While I have been socially aware of all the ills of what public policy has become, I have never dug deep to understand how it works and what really ails the system. When I started learning more about public policy making in India, What I learnt made me compare it with what I have learnt working in software development and in consulting. While we are not supposed to compare apples and Oranges, I did exactly that - comparing policy making and software development using abductive reasoning.

When you , as a business, are acquiring digital contacts from multiple channels, there is no way you could serve content that could be relevant to every one. The best way forward is to personalize the content based on the user profile information. More information we have regarding a digital contact, more personalized the content can be.

Coming in a week, we are going to present a series of posts on Omni-Channel Digital strategy and how companies can be more prepared to understand and handle digital strategy in today's world. Companies, both digital as well as brick and mortar, are acquiring digital contacts through various channels.  These channels include social, enterprise, support, mobile, partners among others. The main challenge is how to make sure that they stay engaged. In a series of posts, we will discuss what will help them with this challenge. In a Nutshell, the companies will have to do the following : Personalise Content Strong Forums Connect with online contacts offline Unified messaging across all channels Drive digital strategy through business strategy We will discuss in detail about each of these in the coming weeks.

Lean PMO in everyday agile from Prashanth Madhavan Narasimhan

Consumer Vs Enterprise Every time there is a consumer use product, we see that the enterprise comes up with a very customized version so that the enterprise does not have to adapt. This is with good reason. Enterprise is an entity that is too complex and having it to change would mean a disruption to the business  - something that the stakeholders are not very happy about. For example, take the iPhone and Blackberry. iPhone is a consumer centric product while Blackberry is a very enterprise centric product. However, iPhone introduced major disruptions to the way the enterprise security functions and forced enterprises to be more flexible with the way they allow employees to view email. This increased productivity since employees could view their emails at home or anywhere on the move and respond more quickly. Another example is Microsoft word Vs Google docs. The days when a simple document would have to go through multiple revisions with the whole track changes turn...

I am a socialist by education and a capitalist by profession. I am hence very confused by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s plan for Clean India Campaign . The Campaign has all the similarities of a typical silicon valley startup dream campaign. Market gap Healthy ecosystem Consumer need Very large market segment with similar need All these should be driving plenty of companies to have taken advantage of this campaign and started making money. Delving deeper , I see some issues that could be learnings and also a few opportunities. #1 - Public-Private cooperation This is a very abused word right now in the Indian governance. It rarely helps the normal citizen. I am not sure how it helps the private players. It does help the bureaucrats shift the blame though. Public-Private cooperation will not work for India with such a small concentration of urban space and will lead to skewed demand and supply that will make the issue worse. What we should instead look at is h...

How does a retailer scale and turn itself to profitability?? There have been several cases of online retailers that have struggled to balance scaling at the cost of profitability. The founders / promoters are at the cross roads on the need for more capital - that cedes control - to expand aggressively. They struggle with the need to attain profitability quickly. Their mentors are also not effective at advising them since there is no proper precedent for one approach over other. Looking at Myntra ’s case - a leading online retailer - It proves that it is never too late to get on the path of profitability irrespective of whether you want to grow aggressively ( Reference here ). All promoters would appreciate that. This case is strengthened by Zappos - an US online shoes retailers - as well that has been profitable right from day one. Myntra’s steps to attain profitability is well renowned and the slew of online retailers can gain a lot of insights from Myntra’s case. Pri...

India has a nascent and a very active market place. With good interest, the right climate for growth and right product mix, the indian retail marketplace seems to be going places. However, there are some alarming signals that seem to be ignored for growth that have a good chance of being dangerous to all the stakeholders involved. The issue I am talking about is the sale of counterfeit goods in all the indian market places. India has not had a history of strong Intellectual property rights. This time it is getting messier. The Indian marketplace model is very interesting and suits well to a country as diverse as India. The market place model floated by all the major e-railers suits the fact that the seller and the buyer can be connected for serving the needs for every day goods that are not necessarily covered by IP laws. India needs more effective IP laws since it is struggling with some products like traditional indian products that cannot be covered by IP versus modern produc...

Working in cross functional teams is the occupational hazard for product managers. A typical product manager needs to work with 3 kinds of teams: Engineering team - comprising of developers, testers and IT operations Sales / Marketing team Management team The product manager needs to have different set of information - or rather information represented and expressed in different ways for the three different teams. Engineering Team Focus: Focus on what needs to be done. Define clear milestones  Clearly communicate focus of the product and end user gain Help take decisions to architect the product Detail the product road-map from the engineering side Sales/Marketing Team Focus: Focus on what the product positioning needs to be Map the competitive landscape and find out how we are different from our competitors Clearly communicate the overall marketing / sales goals - with respect to details like channels, goal for the period Detail out the communication pla...