Siddhesh's Musings

My Email Travails

2012-01-08T12:29:00.002+05:30

siddhesh@iitb.ernet.in... that was my first email address. I read emails through a cute little email application called something I cannot recollect. I felt proud every time I got an email.

That was 1996.

Today, like everyone else in this "connected" world, I have a love hate relationship with email. I use it to get most of my work done, and I also waste most of my time awake on it.

But it's not all been downhill. I have tried various approaches to email management, with some measure of success. This longish blog post is an attempt to share some of those learnings and experiences with you in the hope that it helps you too!

Shift to Outlook. My first real email client on the job was Netscape. It allowed me seamless access to our newsgroups (which Outlook didn't do), and since all the email folders were treated just like file folders on disk, taking backups, moving folders around and so on was fast, easy and intuitive.

But after fighting the move to Outlook for a couple of years, I succumbed and migrated to Outlook as my email client. Reason: a better integration with tasks, contacts and calendar.

For you, dear reader, this is irrelevant - and I am assuming you are already on Outlook and Exchange. If not, well, time to get there :) If you still insist on continuing with whatever else you use, well, feel free to drop off at this point.

Set up your folders. Creating a good folder structure can be deceptively tricky! Many of us lesser mortals succumb to the lure of the email filter, setting up dozens of them - for every friend, for every project, for every team mate. What could be simpler and easier than mails that obediently sort themselves out and sit in fodlers waiting for you to discover them?

Unless you have the IQ of a potted plant, you would have already figured this out yourself. Instead of processing an inbox, you now end up with dozens of them. Mails intended to go into a project folder go into your team mate friend's personal folder. You miss the important stuff from your boss because it gets auto-filtered into one of those dozen folders you are trying to track. And you process mails completely out of order in which they arrived, answering to older mails in a conversation long after newer ones have arrived! Not exactly the best way, right?

Keep the processing disciplined. I follow a very simple, but extremely effective mail processing workflow. All mails stay, unfiltered, in my inbox. Sorted on time of arrival. Only rarely, very rarely, a filter is employed to segregate mails, like for example, those that need no or very, very specific processing... mails from MIS, for example. All mails stay "unread" until I have processed them - giving me an easy way to figure out how much mail is sitting unread.

When I get down to processing mails, a quick first level processing takes place... based on the subject, or the content, if I realise a mail is of no consequence or need for the future, it gets deleted - never to be seen again. This "glance" typically takes 1-2 seconds per mail. No keeping around mails simply because I have disk space. If the mail needs a quick reply, or is urgent and can be processed immediately, I do it. Mostly a dozen words or less per mail. In the rare case that a mail is a call for action and needs more work, it stays right there - in the inbox, until I get down to processing it. Again, no missing a mail because I read it and lost it in one of the "folders". After a mail has thus been deleted, processed or delayed processed, it then goes into one of the "Saved" folders, or gets deleted never to be seen again.

Now you are free to set up the "Saved" hierarchy any way you want,s but I recommend that office stuff be classified into projects (NOT people), and only personal stuff be sorted by people. If you are in the habit of forwarding jokes and other stuff, keep separate folders for them and don't let them get mixed with other "personal" mails by people. The last thing you really need is to have a dinner invite, an adult joke and a project status report all sitting in the same folder!

A quick word the PSTs. Having different folders is one thing, having multiple PSTs quite another. A PST can support hundreds of folders, but again, I recommend you maintain multiple PSTs. When a large project ends, for example, move the mails into a separate PST, close it and banish it to your archives. A bloated PST slows down Outlook. The tighter you can keep it, the better.

Keep it minimal. It is easy to get carried away and end up with Gigs of mail very quickly. Use some simple rules to control the size of your inbox. Save only the last mail in a long conversation. You have the whole thread and the redundant mails can be safely deleted. As far as possible, avoid saving mails with large attachments, stuff like screenshots and documents sent to you for review.

Make the best use of your Exchange Server quota. Unless you work for Google, you probably have a limited disk quota on the mail server. It becomes critical, therefore, that you "pop" mails on your desktop/laptop and not leave copies on the server, using the "local email folder" setup in Outlook. But with today's smartphones making email processing much easier and faster on the move, how do you ensure you fulfil the conflicting requirements of popping mails with leaving them on the server for your mobile to get access to? I struggled with this for quite some time. On the move, I had access to email on the phone from the server. But, as soon I went online with my laptop, all mails popped into my laptop's local inbox, removing them from the server. The problem arose when I had a large stack of emails to be processed, and ended up going online inadvertently, thus making it impossible for me to access them on the road.

Worse, managing calendars became a major headache. Once you pop invites, appointments get onto your local calendar. If you accept invites on the server, the appointments get into the server calendar. I ended up having two separate calenders, and managing them became a nightmare. Accepting a meeting reschedule on the server, when the original meeting had found its way into my local calendar, for example, ended up creating a new meeting on the server, leaving the older meeting on the local calendar! There's no easy way to sync up both calendars automatically.

Then one day, it hit me. And it was so simple, it was no surprise I had completely missed it!

Inbox on server, archive locally. Now, my default email folder is the server folder, not a local folder on my laptop. My inbox stays on the server. When I send or delete mails, they stay on the server, and hence, are accessible on the phone at all times. Only my "Saved" folders are local. Yes, the Gigs of mail I save are NOT available on the phone, but that's perfectly fine. All my latest, unprocessed email is there, and that's all I need 99.99% of the time. The 0.01% can be done when I am on my laptop anyway. The only inconvenience is having to clean the server trash can and the sent box more often than I would need to when these mails accumulated in the local folders.

Even better, calendar management is now a breeze. Since all the invites get processed only on the server, there is now a single calendar, always available and synced up with my cell. So are all my contacts and tasks.

Did I mention that Windows Mango does a phenomenal job of syncing your email, contacts, appointments and everything else between your Exchange Server and your phone? If you are a serious business user, you got to try it! That device will simplify life to a large extent!

If you have read until here, there's a good chance you have suffered heavily from email deluge, and I hope my tips help you take back control. Do write in with your experiences!

Unplanning

2011-11-22T15:24:00.000+05:30

3-4 years ago, as part of the business climate evaluation and 5 year planning exercise for the company, we came up with scenarios on how to tackle the situation where the rupee would hit 34 against the USD.

Today, the rupee is at 52.

How can the world's best economists and planners and financial wizards have got it so wrong?

And indeed, if things are so difficult to forecast after all algorithms, ideas and efforts put into it, why and how can we afford to do so much planning and execution based on it?

In the software development world, more and more companies and customers are realising the benefits of keeping it simple, agile and responsive. We do not buidl software for the future any more, we keep it live, we design it to be agile and easy to adapt to changing requirements, and focus on what today's user wants today!

Shouldn't we do the same in business planning? Isn't it better to focus more on the situation, see how it impacts business, and be prepared for frequent course corrections, instead of spending efforts on looking into a future that is guaranteed to keep changing?

Unplan. Get agile. Get ready to move. Fast. Survive and prosper.

Gamification

2011-11-19T00:14:00.000+05:30

Gamification is the process of using game-based mechanics to make ordinary business process and data visualizations more interesting, fun, and effective at the same time. Most "gamifications" today involve giving badges and points for tasks completed, and some basic social networking. I believe this is an early trend that will quickly outlive its usefulness and attraction. However, the process of gamification itself is here to stay, and more and more Enterprises and application developers will begin to see the huge value in learning from Angry Birds and Farmville, and applying it to everyday problems.

User Experiences

2011-11-19T00:11:00.000+05:30

User experiences on tablets, especially from a point of view of input gestures, are every different compared to the desktop/laptop experience. It is a big mistake to believe that users will be happy as long as the application runs in a browser, or can be easily ported to the OS/platform supported by the tablet. On tablets, users use completely different gestures like swipe and multi-touch, not double click and right click! It is necessary to keep this in mind when you port your application to a tablet, and engineer/design your application to support these new gestures.

NASSCOM LaunchPAD

2011-11-07T17:19:00.001+05:30

Off to Bangalore tonight for the NASSCOM LaunchPAD event tomorrow at the Taj Gateway, where we will be launching eMee - one of the 10 products selected for this prestigious event out of 60+ aspirants! Watch out for updates....

Criminal Minds

2011-11-02T22:56:00.000+05:30

You can learn a lot about what makes great teams from watching my favourite crime series, Criminal Minds...

Standing up for your team members, and standing by your leader
Allowing each team member to focus on what they do best, building on individual strengths...
And yet, being able to move on when one team member goes away
Allowing team members to maintain their individuality
Unquestioned loyalty and respect to the team lead - but that doesn't mean you cannot question
And as a leader, heeding the advice and suggestions from your team members...
... but taking complete ownership for the results when things go wrong
Being there for each other in their moments of weakness, but giving them their space when they need it
Revelling in each other's success, sharing losses
One Minute Management - clear goal setting, clear recognition of good work, one min reprimands
No tolerance for indiscipline, yet complete tolerance for individuality

Needless to say, it's one of the best crime series too!

Lighthouse Insights

2011-10-13T22:25:00.003+05:30

My interview on Enterprise Social Networking and eMee in Lighthouse Insights.

Reproduced here...

Apart from being a blogger, I work in a software firm like most Indians do. The company provides me with a decent salary, a nice place to work and also a bunch of good colleagues. However, I have always dwelt on why employees are not allowed to access personal sites such as mails or social network sites. One reason being security but then visit any employee in a day and you will find that they browse Facebook on a regular basis. There is one more reason that has been never thought of or never cared about is the boring Intranet. Software companies now use it to just post information without giving a thought to employees views. This can’t carry on for long as the Facebook generation joining the race will need it. So businesses in India are slowly preparing themselves to find ways to keep the security thing intact and also provide a way to engage with employees. Persistent Systems on eyeing this opportunity, has developed eMee that promises to redefine employee engagement.

eMee, a product that has been developed for SMEs and large scale enterprises is an employee centric approach and it pitches with an idea of higher level of engagement results with less attrition. The product has interesting modules such as visualization of performance notes as virtual gifts, continuous performance monitoring, feedback and mentoring, professional and personal social networks, corporate portal, animated reports and so on. These features definitely are worth trying as they not only try to build a community but they also showcase the employee achievement and appreciate them.

We are working on doing a review of the product, but until then, we thought of getting in touch with Siddhesh Bhobe, Chief Architect and Product Manager of eMee. The email interview that we did with Siddhesh is shared below:

1. eMee, redefining employee engagement is a product that really excites us. Siddhesh, we would love to know a bit about you and how have you been associated with eMee?

I was keen on using my experiences during 13 year old long association with Persistent in tackling some of the key HR issues facing the software industry today – need for better employee engagement, attrition control, knowledge management and transparency in performance appraisals and compensation. As Chief Architect and Product Manager for eMee, I am exploring the use of enterprise social networking and gamification in converting mundane but critical management functions into highly effective and enjoyable activities for line managers. I believe this innovative approach can fundamentally change the way companies engage with their employees.

2. What has been the objective and can you list some of the key features that should motivate SMEs and large enterprises to buy it?

We are a “Like Me” generation. Social networks have imbibed in us the need to be constantly appreciated and applauded. We have dozens of choices in our personal life, but things change drastically when it comes to our work environments. Most businesses do not allow social networking for their employees while at work, and of course, they have valid reasons –exposing the corporate Intranet to hacking, bandwidth clogging, and undesired disclosures of information through “Innocent” posts. However, this results in employees feeling disconnected, craving for recognition by managers and more importantly, peers. Today, it is unimaginable that a growing organization with global aspirations will not have a website and an Intranet. A couple of years from now, it will be the same with an Enterprise Social Network.

eMee brings social networking and gaming into your corporate Intranet environment in a safe and secure manner, enabling employees to connect and bond, bring transparency into performance and appraisals, allowing enterprises to discover assets and be more productive, and motivating employees into a high performance work force. All this, while leveraging existing investments in IT and MIS. And eMee’s pay per use pricing model ensures HR gets all the benefits at a fraction of their total employee-centric budgets.

3. The product has features such as Performances reviews, Progress Graphs, etc. Looks good but are they visible to my network. If so then don’t you think it will create unnecessary employee problems?

eMee is completely configurable for role-based access control, allowing organizations to align access to data and workflows within eMee to their HR policies and guidelines. For example, performance notes can be configured in such a way that the gifts are visible to all, but details visible only to direct managers in the hierarchy. Negative performance notes can be visible only to managers. The entire appraisal module and associated reports can similarly be configured to be accessible only to managers. Personal choices can be exposed only to “friends”.

4. Security has always been a debatable issue whenever we have spoken about social networking sites. How have you handled it in eMee?

eMee differs from other social networks in that it is a closed network, ensuring all information is local and restricted to the company’s Intranet. Access control and security is a fundamental cornerstone of the eMee infrastructure, ensuring data is accessible and visible only to authorized entities. All the data belongs solely to the organization, and is not shared or used by eMee in any way for deriving other benefits.

5. Finally, B2B social media engagement is thought to be bit difficult but this will also need companies to create a social media policy too. Do you think every company should have a social media policy and why?

As more and more users get connected to the Internet, they are basing their decisions on products and services offered by searching and comparing online. For employees too, the network will be the primary medium to connect to their company. As I mentioned earlier, it will soon be inconceivable to be a globally aspiring organization without an Enterprise Social Network. The smartphone revolution is hastening the pace to a whole new level. Without a social media policy, companies will flounder and do mistakes which can cost heavily in terms of reputation, customer satisfaction and employee retention. It is imperative for organizations to realize this and get social media savvy as soon as possible!

Thanks Siddhesh for talking to us and sharing your thoughts on eMee. It is no more a need but slowly becoming imperative that businesses accept the fact that being social will allow them to grow. eMee with some of its attractive features does stand a chance to engage employees in real time.

What do you think about such industry specific products that promise to give higher level of engagement by creating communities? Do you think this could be one of the ways of holding employees in future?

P.S. We will be doing a product review of eMee as soon as we are able to get hold of the trial version.

CII Conclave

2011-09-21T23:22:00.000+05:30

Pitching the Social Web as a tool for employee engagement at the CII HR & IR Conclave in Pune...

.. and of course, offering eMee as the solution :)

Presentation on eMee at CII HR & IR Conclave

2011-09-20T19:10:00.002+05:30

Redefining Employee Engagement

View more presentations from Siddhesh Bhobe.

CII HR & IT Conclave

2011-09-20T00:13:00.001+05:30

I am presenting at the CII HR & IT Conclave in Pune tomorrow on "Redefining Employee Engagement - role of IT in HR". Will put up the presentation on eMee's Facebook page and share the lin tomorrow!

Introduction to eMee: Redefining Employee Engagement

2011-08-26T23:57:00.002+05:30

eMee at NASSCOM BPO Summit in New Delhi!

2011-08-24T23:02:00.000+05:30

eMee at http://www.emee.co.in/

2011-07-08T17:54:00.001+05:30

Our product website is up at http://www.emee.co.in/

Do visit us, and send me your comments!

Proudly Launching eMee

2011-06-23T22:13:00.000+05:30

It gives me tremendous pride and pleasure to announce that we have formally launched eMee, our very innovative social networking and gaming based offering for employees, giving them a unique platform to showcase their skills and achievements and get the recognition they deserve! While I do not want to disclose too much here at this time, look out for our website coming up soon.

With more than 6000 users at Persistent already thrilled by eMee, and at least half a dozen customers lined up eager to get it deployed, this is definitely something you should sign up for :)

So what is eMee trying to achieve? Well, for most of us, Facebook has made it necessary to get recognized and appreciated for everything, whether it is for a haircut, or our latest Beemer. We want to be "liked" and commented on. But what happens in our professional life? We do a good job, maybe our customer or boss sends a congratulatory mail - maybe we get some kinda medallion. But how do I show it off? That's the problem eMee tries to address.

For more, drop me a note! :)

Team Work

2011-04-14T13:20:00.000+05:30

Reproducing here from a forward, thought this was so relevant and important for all of us...

Well it all started on Feb 18th 2011 and hasn't ended on 2nd April.... Each one of us has connected with this WC in a unique manner. Here are my Top Lessons from this WC....

1. Visualize Your Success in Advance. You always win twice, first in the mind's eye and then for real. This team started visualizing playing in the WC finals one year back at Dambulla (well Aug 27th , 2010 to be precise) & Pady Upton was the man who created that vision for the first time.

2. Speak Less Do More. Calmness is a virtue which isn't valued much nowadays. Calmness, Dignity & Poise make character shine, and thanks to Sehwag for bringing them back in fashion. Can we ever forget him getting down from the team bus whistling ? and then an hour later brutally spanking Umar Gul to all parts of the park.

3. Do it for team and not for your-self. Difficult one to believe, but more often when a team starts to do it for other members the glory that comes ones way is unbelievable. We will all remember the quote of the final "He has carried the nation's hope on his shoulders for 21st years, time we carried him on ours" Kohli you beauty.

4. Acknowledge Self's Mistakes and Team's Success. Every member of team throughout the campaign kept on talking about where he could improve individually and how others were doing great collectively.

5. Each Member's Contribution is Critical for Team's Success. It could boil down to Nehra or Raina or Chawla or even Sreesanth. Once given to you that is your team, one can't always have a say in that. However one can show undying and unwavering faith in your team members and that's how a Nehra v/s SA can turn into the best bowler v/s Pakistan.

6. When a Team Member is Down, Don't Forget Him. In today's dog eat dog world, who carries the can for any-one's failure. But remember when your team member is down, that's when he needs you and the team most. And don't worry he will remember it and will pay you back - Yuvi's Story will be part of sporting folklore for many decades.

7. Even the Best can't do it Without the Right Team. One word - Sachin !

8. Scraping is Just as Beautiful. Beautiful and sublime has no meaning if it isn't effective and purposeful, wonder how many will remember Mahela's sublime innings. It is Ghambhir's scraping, fighting, chancy and dirty innings which was more valued. Some time it is just too easy to throw it away , but team values every scrap that's done for a larger cause.

9. Importance of Back-room Boys. Greg v/s Gary , need I say more. It was so emotional to see the masseur of the team holding and posing with the cup in the dressing room. The image of support staff in red shirts forming a chain behind team blue's victory lap signifies the foundation role of these man with few words and lots of hard work.

10. Remember The Contributions of the Past Members - The team pulled Kumble in the dressing room celebrations, Yuvi remembered Saurav's contribution to his life at the most important press conference. In today's world when most people are busy garnering all for themselves, it was nice to see this team remember past contributors with humbleness.

11. Lead from the Front. Of course it is risky, so was coming at no.5. Of course you will be criticized ,so was not picking Ashwin, Of course you will be tense, so was facing the best bowler of all times, Of course you will have self doubts, Of course it's for all or nothing ... but that's the only way to be crowned the best Caption in Modern Cricket - Mahi you are the Man.

12. Once Done, Let Go of the Emotions. - That's the time to bare it all to the world. Yuvraj,Sachin, Bhajji, Gary in tears will remain etched in our collective memories for ever. Also important to let those emotions flow so as to close the successful chapter and look forward. After all life's a journey is it not :-)

What Really Motivates Us

2011-02-26T10:24:00.002+05:30

Beautiful video on what motivates us... see till the end, not only for the content but also for the wonderful way in which it is presented!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

Intrapreneurship

2011-02-20T22:27:00.000+05:30

Gifford Pinchot, in his book on Intrapreneurship, gives ten interesting commandments, out of which I particularly liked two:

Circumvent any order that stops you from realizing your dream

and

It is easier to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission

Very true!

Coming Up At The Web All Around You!

2011-01-13T18:00:00.000+05:30

After Facebook and Twitter, what next? What is the next Internet craze that will suck time, money and bandwidth the world over, and inspire dozens of wannabes and clones, vying for attention from the ever-multiplying millions of web-enabled and mobile-enabled users?

Here are some of the cool sites I have come across recently...

Foursquare (http://foursquare.com/): Explore places on the go, give reviews, suggest restaurants and shops to your friends, check in at those places, earn badges, and finally, be the "mayor". Interesting locale-based services, and could be great for Internet based marketing and attracting footfalls through social buzz. Facebook recently tried to buy them, before giving up and starting their own Places. Other similar sites are Whrrl (http://whrrl.com/) and Foodspotting (http://www.foodspotting.com/) which as you can imaging is focussed on bringing foodie lovers together.

Another very interesting application is Glympse (http://www.glympse.com/) where you can publish your whereabouts, for a given time interval, to a given set of people, who can then trace you during that time interval live in action :)

Qwiki (http://www.qwiki.com/), showcased at TechCrunch in SFO in Sept, promises to bring you "information experiences" not "search results" - type in a word, and you will be presented with a pretty cool multi-media presentation on the topic! Would be an excellent source of learning, besides being a mcuh more fun way of finding out things.

An esoteric but equally exciting application I came across was Wolfram (http://www.wolframalpha.com/), which is all about number crunching and statistics, a wonderland for those obsessed with figures, comparisons and graphs. If you need numbers to impress your MBA colleagues, this is for you!

Have an idea and need funding and backers? Register on Kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/) and you will be well on your way to be a multi-millionaire enterpreneur!

And finally, Waze (http://world.waze.com/) which promises to get you the latest information on traffic jams and street conditions, straight from the horses mouth - the commuters.

Social Networking in Search!

2010-10-18T23:27:00.005+05:30

What next in Search? Social Networking. Can I get you better results by looking at your social network and giving better context to your search queries? Amazing thought... and that's what Bing is trying to do by looking at using your Facebook network to return you hopefully more relevant results! For example, you are searching for a restaurant in your city, and maybe one of your friends "like" it... lo and behold, Bing will notify you of it along with your search result.

Another interesting aspect here - Facebook is huge, and this partnership will definitely give Bing an edge over Google in winning over some fans.

Will Win Mobile 7 Win?

2010-10-18T23:25:00.000+05:30

MS has taken on iPhone and Android with the Win Mobile 7, and I think it has a good chance of winning this war. Why? Android is at a clear disadvantage with respect to hardware and overall build quality. iPhone loses out on its OS being non multi-tasking, which means that you might have great graphics, but only one application at a time! And as far as applications are concerned, other than the typical social networking stuff, I sincerely believe you only need a good browser.

Add the tight controls MS puts on hardware interfaces and integrations, its OS, its marketing dollars, and its excellent understanding of what makes customers tick, I think Win Mobile 7 has a great chance of winning the mobile war.

Gaming For Management

2010-10-18T18:01:00.000+05:30

With social networking games like Farmville attracting millions of users, gaming is quickly becoming mainstream. Gaming has always been used for entertainment, and recently, games have become a critical tool for training too.

Check the awesome video at the link below (from a Ted Talk) on how games can be used constructively to drive this young generation to solve complex world problems by exploiting the social psychology of gamers.

http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html

What I am working on at Persistent is aimed at bringing the same constructive emotions and attitudes of gamers, as well as the thrill and excitement of games, into a manager's day to day life in his organization, moving beyond spreadsheets and providing an exciting user experience. From the all-important yet extremely tedious and unhappy task of appraisals, to poring over endless rows and columns in spreadsheets, from code reviews to assessment tests, games can provide you just what you needed to fall in love with your job, all over again.

Watch this space for more, as we publish our first two games by the end of the year.

Project Natal

2009-12-05T15:38:00.003+05:30

With Project Natal, to be released by end of 2010, Microsoft promises to bring in the next generation of gaming experiences. With a baton-like long, flat "depth, face/object recognition and motion sensor" coupled to your standard Xbox 360, you will now be able to play games using every inch of your body, moving in real time and real space, "interacting" with the game through body movements, speech and gestures.

Imagine sitting on a couch in your living room, playing a quiz game, over the Internet with your cousins. When the quiz master asks a question, you can raise your hand or press the buzzer (your knee), and then answer the question. Or, when you are racing a bike, you can sit on your sofa, lean into the wind and take tight turns by shifting your weight. And of course, you can play a very exhausting game of tennis by running and jumping all over the living room. Never once needing a mouse, keyboard, joystick or any other contraption.

Not just in gaming, but you can apply the same technology to dozens of other applications, opening a whole gamut of "unwired, non-touch" user interactions with your applications.

The possibilities are endless...

Windows 7 Rocks

2009-11-27T20:23:00.002+05:30

I finally got over my aversion to trying a new OS (reinforced by experiences with Vista), and got Windows 7 installed on my laptop - and boy, I feel like a bull in a china shop. OK, maybe more like a boy in a toy shop :)

It's fast. It's pretty neat. The search option from Start menu just makes life so easy. And as far as compatibility with applications etc is concerned, it's been a darling so far.

In short, I love it. So far.

Google Chrome OS

2009-11-24T22:15:00.002+05:30

The next big thing from Google is Chrome OS, built "on top of" the Chrome browser. So how is it supposed to work?

Imagine having a very basic device with just a rudimentary browser on it - anything and everything you do goes through the browser. No other OS, no other applications. The browser is your window to the world through the Internet, and of course, also to everything else you want to run!

So, you open a Chrome OS "web page" which acts like your desktop - except that, this one is more like a set of webparts on your browser. You want to write a document, open a new document editor "tab", running the editor in your Chrome browser, with the document hosted on the cloud in Google Docs. Get the picture?

Why is this great? Well, for someone who needs to just browse the Internet and do basic documentation, spreadsheet and email, you don't need to pay for all the OS, the "Office" and so on. You don't need to worry about hard disk and RAM. You need a very cheap device, and you are done.

But will this really work for serious users? We are still far away from super fast all pervasive broadband networks. What kind of SLAs will Chrome OS provide? What about the hundreds of different devices I plug into my laptop today? Will there be drivers made available for all that? Without a USB or card reader, am I going to be OK? What about serious gaming, one of the key drivers for home PCs? What about reading and executing stuff from DVDs? Movies?

My verdict... Chrome OS has scope for low cost computing, or rather, network access devices, things that can be deployed in villages, self-help kiosks etc, but it's got an uphill battle for capturing the PC market.

ps: Chrome browser has been doing pretty bad with a miniscule market share

Quote for the Day

2009-11-19T22:39:00.002+05:30

Poster at the quality assurance lab of a soft drink major:

"Encourage your customers to complain. A complaint is a very precious gift!"

Social Networking - Real or Hype?

2009-09-03T23:19:00.002+05:30

Real:
Connecting with lost friends and digging out contacts - great value! I love Linked In!
Wasting time on useless updates and counter-updates - take control!
Collaboration and very targeted communities - huge value add here, but I wouldn't really call it social networking! A must for every organization!
Huge volume of digital information - but can we make sense of it?

Hype:
Business value - very few will really make money from it! Too many players commoditizing the offerings, and ad values go down with increased availability
Social intelligence - most of the information may end up being incorrect if it is unregulated, even Wikipedia is now enforcing curbs
Value of information - Fake identities, how do you know it's not a fake Twitter?

Innovation Workshop - See you in Mumbai!

2009-08-19T14:29:00.003+05:30

(Abridged from a NASSCOM invite)

NASSCOM is organizing a series of workshops/seminars with globally renowned consultants, PRTM Consulting, on the topic of Innovation. The seminars will be led by an expert from PRTM on the topic of Innovation, Rob Shelton. Rob, a former Incubator specialist, is a well known speaker on the topic of innovation, and has authored a book on Innovation – “Making Innovation Work”.

As part of the workshops, NASSCOM is looking to feature the Innovation Award winners as successful cases of Innovation in our industry. The winners will require to make a brief presentation on their innovation and this will be followed by a discussion with Rob Shelton, where key aspects of the Innovation, challenges faced etc will be brought out. This will serve as an opportunity for the winners to receive further recognition from their peers in the Industry as well as motivate the others in the industry on the path of innovation.

As a NASSCOM innovation award winner, Persistent Systems has been invited to participate in the session to be held in Mumbai on Thursday, 17th September ‘09.

I will be participating, and I look forward to it! :)

Creating Solutions vs Products

2009-08-19T14:16:00.003+05:30

Something I came up with when working on how to transform the company from one that builds products to one that sells solutions. Based on an interesting book "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Christensen.

View more presentations from Siddhesh Bhobe.

Products typically bundle a set of functionalities, are expected to work seamlessly in multiple installations with minimal customizations, and can typically be installed and configured by the customer himself. Products are packaged in a way that they can be marketed and sold by a sales team, and typically come with support and future roadmap by the company that built them.

Solutions have all the characteristics of a product. In addition, solutions are dynamic and very customer focused, and are managed through a continuous improvement cycle. A solutions manager needs to define and productize the offering and then deliver it through an ever changing combination of hardware, software and services.

Why Solutions?
1.Solutions provide much higher ROI through non-linear and recurring revenues compared to traditional T&M and FP models
2.Solutions help in building value-added partnerships with your customers, preventing commoditization
3.Solutions also create long term relationships with customer, allowing repeat business
4.Solutions, being so customer-focused and dynamic, differentiate you from competition and prevent a direct price comparison with you

There can be two kinds of solutions, based on whether we are focusing on the product aspects or the service aspects.

Service-centric
1.Here, the solution is based on our expertise in delivering projects in a specific technology area like analytics, data or application migration or security, and supported by multiple, integrated products and components through which this service is delivered efficiently
2.Typically need heavy involvement of professional services and onsite resources, which is a factor to bear in mind when pricing and delivering the offering
3.Solves a business-level problem, and is often customized for specific verticals. Hence, this service is typically sold to business stakeholders and not to IT
4.Could be product/platform specific or product/platform-agnostic
5.Tagline: “Here’s what we can DO for you”

Product-centric
1.The solution is based on a reusable component, framework, or product that can be customized/integrated through services
2.By virtue of being a product, it will typically be platform-specific, but the solution can be offered in multiple platforms
3.Sometimes, the solution might be specific for a partner, but involve multiple license sales to different customers of the partner
4.Like a product, the solution is expected to work in multiple installations, can be sold by sales team, will be supported by the company, and can typically be installed and configured by customer
5.Will involve some, but not much, deployment of professional services or onsite resources
6.Tagline: “Here’s what we can BUILD for you”

For more, wait for my whitepaper on the topic :)

Some Cool Things I Never Warmed Up To...

2009-06-21T23:03:00.002+05:30

Apple Mac
Apple iPhone
Open Source
Linux
Twitter
Coke

CIOL Interview

2009-04-19T15:15:00.003+05:30

Below is the coverage of my interview with Pratima Harigunani of CIOL (Cybermedia).

April 9 2009: How Bridgestone changed tyres with mobility - CIOL

It was not an easy terrain. Picture this. About 25 million tyres per year, large fleets of trucks moving on difficult load and travel conditions, non tech-literate users and thousands of dealers scattered all over the geography, and with tyre coming to the pitstop - a mammoth task of data collection for each operation recorded per tyre.

Before the idea and execution of a PDA application came on the dashboard, the pre-solution scenario was all about primeval methods of repairing tyres by dealers and users who couldn't boast much about being tech savvy.

Add to that, a toolkit that was all about pen, paper, working and measuring tyres with thick gloves, a memory burden of remembering long digits of tyre depth from the point the end-dealer measured it to the point they go back and enter the data on a system sitting lengths away.

While they climb up and down, remove gloves and then again down the cabin, the simple task of repairing and reading data from a tyre turns more than gargantuan.

For the tyre major Bridgestone selling tire-as-a-service wherein it charges their customers as per the usage and per KM billing along with wear and tear of a tyre, the problem was not just about technology but about tweaking and shaping it right for the end user in thick gloves.

It was a challenge now for Persistent that has been Bridgestone Europe's software engineering partner for the last five years. What followed was a keen insightful peek into the end-user scenario and then developing and driving their mobile strategy.

This strategy entailed the use of Internet-based hand-held devices and server-side integration. What Persistent and Bridgestone did with this helped develop and implement innovative pay-per-use pricing strategies rather than up-front fees. The application gathers real-time information concerning tyre health and distance traveled in a centralized manner, effectively and efficiently.

Now the dealers had a bluetooth/RF enabled device with a large numeric pad and sound indications that was capable of working in online/offline modes and with connectivity to ERP/CRM also measuring on-the-air compression

The post-solution scenario looks a lot different. Lot of time savings (8X time saving in service resources), less data entry errors, better service relationship, customer stickiness, VAS and mapping services around the model apart from more than 800 per cent improvement in productivity for Bridgestone's service engineers and dealers.

For Bridgestone Europe, it meant an identity much more than a manufacturer of tyres that spelled now a provider of services.

"Persistent has been instrumental in driving our mobile strategy for Europe," says Marcel Gottlieb, manager CBS and IT, Bridgestone Europe.

"While the results of their work has produced tangible benefits around increased revenues and higher customer service, more importantly, Persistent has directly contributed to innovation in our business model."

The challenge was the leap from a view-from-office to a view-from-dealer as Siddhesh Bhobe, associate vice president and project lead at Persistent Systems shares. For him, the project was personally a great experience.

"I wrote codes before but never knew the effect they have eventually on the user. Owning an end-to-end solution is so impactful," he adds.

"This case really shows the difference when the focus is completely on user and technology works as an enabler. The project helped in gaining the satisfaction in making practical difference to dealers who were living unwieldy work scenarios before."

Bhobe says this technology is a great concept and can be applied in enterprises with field force who are scattered and need quick, critical data update systems.

Next on the board could soon be RFID and Tyre Identification technology with more automated and more real-time deliveries for Bridgestone.

Persistent Systems, a outsourced product development (OPD) services company, won the NASSCOM Innovation award for 2008, in the 'Market Facing - Business Process and Business Model' category for this innovative mobile strategy, developed for Bridgestone, Europe - world's largest tyre manufacturer.

The innovation has helped Bridgestone in transforming from selling products to selling services, from transnational equations with customers to relationships, and from B2B to B2C.

Another Article on the NASSCOM Emerge Blog

2009-03-26T00:39:00.002+05:30

Check our latest Bridgestone article on the NASSCOM Emerge Blog at http://blog.nasscom.in/emerge/2009/03/24/getting-rolling-with-the-big-idea/

I am taking the liberty of reproducing the article here, for quick reference :)

Pune-based Persistent Systems has won a NASSCOM award for innovation, stemming from a project they delivered for their client – tyre major Bridgestone. The Emerge newsletter team visits with Persistent to find out why this engagement is now being held up as a shinning example of innovation the world over.

It was a moment of truth for 34 year old Siddhesh Bhobe, an Associate Vice President at Pune-based Persistent Systems, as he watched the burly Belgian Bridgestone dealer casually use the metal tool in his hand to enter data into the PDA device running the software program that Persistent was piloting. Siddhesh was then in Brussels, testing out the new PDA-based software application that his company had built for client Bridgestone to support the latter’s innovative “tyre as a service” business model that the tyre giant was trying to roll out across Europe.

“We realized that these dealers were never going to use a stylus on the PDA and would just instead reach for what ever was at hand – most likely a tool. We knew then that the device had to be pretty rugged.” It’s a lesson that Siddhesh and his team applied right through the project and which guided everything from software user interfaces to the bright colours on the device. “It’s the sort of thing that would never fit on a corporate desk. But out there in the snow, rain, sleet and dark days, something like this has to stand out.”

Standing out there, speaking to his customer’s customer taught Siddhesh and team a lot more than just dry functional requirements would have. These site visits also reflect the kind of partnership that Persistent brought to the table to help its customer roll out a business model that is being held up as a shinning example of innovation by legendary management gurus such as CK Prahalad and MS Krishnan. “It all started when Bridgestone came to us and said, “Look, we have this business model, where we want to start charging our customers not the acquisition cost of a tyre, but a usage fee based on distance travelled and stress on tyre. How do we make it happen?” Persistent knew that they would have to create a mobile application that automated the model, but how? So, they put together a team that went out and mapped exactly where and how the application would be used.

With its tyre-as-a-service business model, where customers are charged by usage as well as tyre wear and tear, Bridgestone required its dealers and service engineers to undertake inspections of tyres on vehicles at various outdoor locations, often in difficult working conditions. Data needed to be obtained regularly from thousands of vehicles across numerous fleets. With millions of data points to be captured, often in terrible working conditions, paper capture just wasn’t working out. Teams on the field had to make sure that they were only capturing data from vehicles covered by the service contract, which was often not the case. Missing and incorrect data was already costing the company in high operational cost and revenue outages.

Persistent quickly realized that, in order for the service model to succeed, Bridgestone needed an effective data capture mechanism that would reduce data errors during inspections. Such a system would also have to feed the data collected in real time into a centralized application that would make program management much more simpler for its client.

The team then went back to the drawing board to create, in a matter of 4 weeks, a pilot application running on a handheld device that service engineers could use right from the inspection site. “It’s critical to go to the end-users quickly and use the first release as a beta for feedback,” says Siddhesh. Indeed, based on such end user feedback, innovations such as a virtual numeric keypad were incorporated, as were sound cues optimized to the end user profile.

The handheld device application was also engineered in such a way that network connectivity was not required during actual data capture – this freed the engineer from the need to have continuous, uninterrupted network connectivity. End-user optimization was also done by localizing the application for all major European Languages. Today the application has being deployed at approximately 2,000 dealers across more than 15 European countries – all integrated seamlessly with Bridgestone’s centralized ERP and CRM applications in Brussels. The deployment has improved productivity by 800% at Bridgestone as manual data capture errors have dropped. Service engineers are now also able to access customer data on the field, enabling them to respond quickly and efficiently on the spot, thereby improving decision making and time-to-revenue.

So, what was Persistent’s value-add? “I think it was in our 360° solution approach and the fact that we took end-to-end solution responsibility,” says Siddhesh. Persistent has also been seeing more of such projects. “Ten years ago, we were only working with (client) IT development teams to write software. In the last one decade this has changed, and we are interacting more with frontline people in customer teams as well as their customers. Now we actually get a chance to see real people using our applications in real-life situations. It also makes the project that more interesting and fulfilling,” he says.

Fundamentally Persistent’s work has changed the vendor-client relationship to one where the software development vendor is an extension of Bridgestone’s engineering’s team. “It has proved that innovation is possible through a partner sitting tens of thousands of miles away. And this project has also changed our concepts of sales and selling - from selling tyres as products to selling them as a service” says Siddhesh.

Any spin-offs from the Bridgestone project? Apart from all the high profile branding and book mentions, it has encouraged the company to pitch more aggressively for such end-to-end, full service, customer facing projects. At a lesser level, it has also deepened the company’s expertise in mobile and field force automation solutions.

What was the catalyst that enabled Persistent innovate so effectively for its customer? Siddhesh says that the culture at Persistent has been one that encourages ideation. “People are encouraged to think and not just to write code. They are given time during the work schedule to pursue an idea and take it forward. That’s the spirit we applied to the Bridgestone project – in fact a big part of the way the application finally turned, stemmed from ideas that we gave them, and not from the requirements that originally came.”

In Persistent’s case their innovation stemmed from not altering or modifying their business model but by empowering their customer to change his. Taking ownership of that change was clearly the big catalyst here that put Persistent – and its customer –on a roll - quite literally!

Contributed by Anita Mani, Prayag Consulting, for the NASSCOM EMERGE newsletter.

Effective ALM

2009-03-04T23:39:00.001+05:30

Gave a presentation on ALM at a Executive Roundtable at the Taj Blue Diamond today...

Here's the slidedeck

View more presentations from Siddhesh Bhobe. (tags: vsts alm)

The CIO - Hero or Zero?

2009-02-26T00:12:00.002+05:30

We had a pretty interesting discussion today on the road ahead for the software industry, given the state of the economy, and the resultant pressure on cutting costs. What will it mean for the CIO and IT departments in the world's enterprises?

There's one school of thought that predicts that the CIP will get his budgets squeezed and asked to cut costs. This will result in him being unable to ask for those endless customizations and fancy menu items for his IT and software needs with multi million dollar budgets, and instead go to cloud operators and a monthly budget and take what they have to offer out of the box. The days of extensive customization will be over, and business will realign itself to standard processes, using standard functionalities. SaaS will rule.

I think it may ultimately also turn out to be the opposite. Here's why.

CIOs will get budgets squeezed. They'll need to cut costs. They'll reduce expenses on infrastructure using virtualization. They'll cut frivolous and esoteric R&D. They'll consolidate and maximize what they already have. Companies will need new business strategies and smarter ways of running their operations. In such a scenario, the focus will be on higher customizations to align their softwares with their business processes. After all that's where the differentiation for these companies will come from. The CIO can be the hero. If he can use his budgets wisely to improve competitiveness. Asking the business to standardize is probably not an option.

With Obama's dictat today to cut down outsourcing and not give out American jobs, the focus might shift from outsourcing people to "buying solutions". BPOs might be hurt hard. However, I believe there's a huge playing field for companies like Persistent to take their innovative solutions out to the world and really create an impact. The next Indian wave may be just around the corner!

Quote for the Day

2009-02-22T00:09:00.001+05:30

Communicate. Collaborate. Contribute. Create.

I kinda like this quartet - especially since I coined it :)

Say More With Less

2009-02-21T23:57:00.004+05:30

When I participated in the NASSCOM contest, I was given 15 mins to present my solution. 5 years of work compressed in 15 mins? Are you kidding me? Well, I had no choice, and I think I managed to do a good job. And then, for the NLF summit in Mumbai a few weeks later, I was given 5 min for the same job! The presentations I used are available... see for yourself!

What's the point I am making? Well, if you get down to it, you can say a lot with a very few words! You don't need flowery words, you don't need dozens of slides with tonnes of bullet points!

I was reading Presentation Zen (www.presentationzen.com) by Garr Reynolds, a highly recommended book for anyone wanting to be better speakers and presenters, and came across this wonderfully illustrative story I am reproducing below...

When Vijay opened his store, he put up a sign outside that said "We sell fresh fish here". When his dad saw it, he said, "we" puts the focus on us rather than the customer. So Vijay dropped the "We", and the sign now read "Fresh Fish Sold Here". His sister saw it and said, hey, the "Here" is really superfluous. So the board changed to "Fresh Fish Sold". Hey, said someone else, obviously you are selling fish, so why have the "Sold"? The board now became "Fresh Fish". When his uncle came, he said, you know what, everyone should know this is always fresh fish. We've never going to sell stale fish are we? So finally, the board just read "Fish". Next day, as Vijay walked towards his shop, he realised his customers would smell the fish from far, long before they could actually see the word "Fish". There was no need for the board.

Keep it simple, keep it concise. Your audience has come to hear you - they don't want to read a presentation. If you want them to read something, why not just send across a document? Presentations are meant to supplement your talk, it's not your replacement!

Head First

2009-02-15T19:22:00.002+05:30

A quick recommendation - if you ever see a Head First series book, buy it! It's one of the best ways to learn the topic - written in a very beautiful, easy to understand and learn visual style that keeps you interested and excited, and not bored with endless streams of text and boring dumps of code.

I learnt Ajax through a HF book, and just yesterday I bought one on SQL and another on C#.

CK Prahalad's Favourite Example

2009-02-15T13:47:00.001+05:30

From the NASSCOM blog:

Dr. C K Prahlad gave the closing keynote to draw the curtains on the Nasscom India Leadership Forum 2009. He has recently released his latest book titled “The New Age of Innovation” (after The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid”) and he sought to drive home the point that the economic crisis is an opportunity for organisations to re-engineer their businesses and create new models of delivering products & services to their customers. To illustrate this, he cited the example of Persistent Systems which has created an innovative technology solution for BridgeStone Tyres (for tracking tyre wear status using customised PDAs) that allows BridgeStone to potentially change their core model from selling tyres to renting them out (think “tyre as a service”).

3 Min Introduction to 5 Years of Work!

2009-02-15T00:45:00.003+05:30

View more presentations from Siddhesh Bhobe.

The Coveted Trophy!

2009-02-13T02:42:00.001+05:30

Anti Patterns - The Knowledge of What NOT To Do!

2009-02-08T23:00:00.003+05:30

Just like Patterns tell you best practices and tried and tested techniques of doing the most common tasks, Anti Patterns are an equally powerful tool of knowing what NOT to do. As I've learnt in my decade long career, sometimes the knowledge of what to avoid is far more important that knowing what to do!

px" width="425" height="355">

View more presentations from siddhesh_bhobe.

Ruby On Rails - An Introduction

2009-02-08T22:58:00.000+05:30

View more presentations from siddhesh_bhobe. (tags: ror)

Effective Meetings - The Six Thinking Hats Technique

2009-02-08T22:54:00.002+05:30

View more presentations from siddhesh_bhobe. (tags: meetings)

My NASSCOM Presentation on Slideshare

2009-02-08T22:28:00.002+05:30

Here's the presentation I used for the NASSCOM Roadshow in Bangalore, shared and embedded here through Slideshare.

Powering Business Through Innovation @ Persistent

View more presentations from siddhesh_bhobe. (tags: bridgestone persistent)

Nasscom Innovation Award 2009!

2009-02-03T23:01:00.006+05:30

We won the Nasscom Award for Innovation 2009, in the market facing innovation in business model and business process category :)

For more on Nasscom and the awards, please visit:
http://www.nasscom.in/Nasscom/templates/NormalPage.aspx?id=55730

Some of the press releases that talk about the award:
http://specials.rediff.com/money/2009/feb/03sld7-innovation-8-win-nasscom-awards.htm
http://www.efytimes.com/efytimes/fullnews.asp?edid=32053

After being recognized in C.K Prahalad’s book, “The New Age of Innovation”, this particular award means a lot coming from India’s apex software industry body.

For more on the contest itself, check my earlier posts.

What's Your Finish Quotient?

2009-01-28T11:19:00.000+05:30

OK, so what’s a Finish Quotient? It’s a ratio I just made up – the ratio of the number of tasks you “finish” to the number of tasks you take up. Obviously, the ideal ratio is 1. Or, is it really? We’ll discuss that a wee bit later. It can include tasks at any granularity, professional or personal. The deal though is, be honest to yourself!

Why is this quotient important? Because in some sense, it’s a measure of how efficient and reliable you are! It’s a measure of whether you are spending your time doing useful stuff, or whether you are one of those people who do have a lot of enthusiasm at the beginning, but quickly switch on to something else, without completing your earlier task, wasting a lot of time, effort and money in the bargain. Like someone who pursues guitar one day, then table, then kite flying! A jack of all trades, but a master of none. Kick starting a dozen things every week, but completing few. But more dangerously, you might be someone who people cannot rely on to do what you are asked! Because while you start off on a great note, a few hours later, you have left it hanging around and moved on to something else…

Why do we behave this way? Sometimes, we are just careless or insensitive, sometimes it’s because we have never really understood the criticality of the task we have been assigned, or simply do not believe in it. Sometimes it’s because the task was just a means to get to something else, and as soon as the other objectives are met, we lose interest.

Is it always important to complete what we start? No, of course not! Many times, it’s more prudent to stop and stop quickly! Visionaries, leaders, innovators can never really always complete what they start – simply because their growth is in mistakes, and it’s important to quickly stop a mistake when you recognize it. The challenge, here, is to make sure you stop as soon as you can. Far too many people I know continue having a bath because “paani toh waise bhi garam kiya hai”. You wasted the electricity, and now you are also wasting the water!

So here’s another quotient you can start thinking about – Saved Wasted Efforts. It’s the ratio of the “wasted” efforts you saved by taking quick action to stop a task to the total “wasted” efforts planned for the task. Remember, you cannot use this ratio to justify not completing work – it’s only applicable to “wasted” efforts :)

Take a few mins to look into your near past, and I am sure you’ll know what your quotients are. And I am sure you can get much better at both!

At NASSCOM Innovation Summit

2009-01-11T16:23:00.004+05:30

I attended the NASSCOM Innovation Summit in Bangalore last month, where I presented our Bridgestone work. It went off well, and though results are awaited, I am pretty confident we will pull it off :)

Here's something from the NASSCOM reporter covering the event on it's EMERGE blog:

Next in line we have an interesting speaker who opened the talk with “Tyre as a Service“. It was a welcome change given we had heard SaaS, IaaS, PaaS all through. The tone was rightly set to highlight the innovation they did in business process and in business model but for their client. They on their own still operate like a technology services company.

Siddhesh Bhobe of Persistent Systems presented the change they brought in BridgeStone, a global leader in tyre industry. The problem they solved was to get rid of the lethargic and ineffective tyre servicing of trucks. BridgeStone guaranteed their customers to provide this service and used to pair up with service centers to provide the same facility for which they had to pay upfront. Persistent Systems came up with a mobile based solution levaraging RF tracking to completely remodel the way the servicing was done at the service centers. The synchronised tracking and update has also enabled BridgeStone to move to a pay-per-service model.

In a very compact and user friendly application they have enabled viewing and updating history about the tyres - age, miles driven, damages and repair etc. Additionally all tyres are trackable by just walking at a close distance. Apparently in cold weather this improves productivity a lot as the mechanics don’t have to make multiple trips back and forth to measure and note down their findings. Given a extensive history of the tyre is collected this helps BridgeStone in optimizing their internal processes. In all BridgeStone focus has moved from ’selling tyres to servicing tyres’, enabled a direct B2C relation than the earlier B2B.

Though their high involvement into a client’s problem and delivery are exceptional, what was little unexpected was that they did not deliver on a business-value delivery model but rather for the technology development. Again, though this was highly impressive, the innovation was still about enabling innovation for a client than innovating for themselves. At this point it dawns on me that the “Market Facing” in the Innovation Award series is stressed more than I thought. On a personal opinion I think we in India should gradually also focus on innovation at core than enablement (a services model which has always existed).

The jury seemed to quite impressed by the presentation and the Q&A sessions did not have anything much to add.

The slide deck used for the event can be accessed here.

Express India Article

2009-01-11T16:22:00.003+05:30

Story on Express Computer on the adoption of VSTS and Sharepoint in my team: http://www.expresscomputeronline.com/20090112/management03.shtml

Has a nice photo of yours truly too :)

A mail circulated to stakeholders at Microsoft by the media company says (till the end of the post):

Quoted in the story Siddhesh Bhobe, Associate Vice President-Microsoft Technology Practice and IVV, Persistent Systems said, "It was getting difficult for the team manager to remember what needs to be done and take tasks to completion. Tasks would fall off the plate and would become very difficult to track. This development helped in quicker deployment cycles of the tool ensuring that people get to start using it sooner and also feedback could be incorporated in a timely fashion, Continuously changing requirements and updates to the business processes and workflows are a big challenge to any such system. The system needs to be nimble and very easy to customize and adapt to changing needs. Sharepoint made it very easy to keep it simple and very customizable with minimum disruption to the team”

Other comments provided by the writer are as below with point 1 and point 2 as the sub headline in the story:
1. Persistent Systems has deployed Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2005 CVSTS) to expedite the process of generating reports automatically and to enhance the existing development environment

2. Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2005 provides Persistent with a programming model and infrastructure that lets developers create scalable and secure connected applications

3. Through the tool, now, all that the team lead needs to do is add the resource to the project using the given InfoPath form and all the tasks that need to be done are generated as tasks and can very easily be tracked.

4. The solution integrated well with other Microsoft applications, optimized its system architecture and advanced the quality and speed of its development process. VSTS offers all the features that are required to automate the processes during different phases of the software development cycle.

The story ends with a positive note explaining that Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2005 provides Persistent with a programming model and infrastructure that lets developers create scalable and secure connected applications. This helps in increasing productivity, better manage and understand the application life cycle, and increase software quality.

The story is extremely impactful and strong to bring out the messaging of Microsoft tools in the SDLC space and how it has benefited existing customers.

Marketing Liberties?

2008-11-14T13:12:00.001+05:30

Microsoft claims in a new ad on TV that original MS software can save businesses up to one and half lakh per month per PC! Wonder how they can justify something like that...?

Persistent and Sharepoint

2008-11-10T21:24:00.002+05:30

Here's a second case study from Microsoft on the work we have done, this time in Sharepoint, using it effectively to automate human workflows and processes :)

http://www.microsoft.com/india/CustomerEvidence/details.aspx?casestudyid=527&type=C

Google's Computer Navies

2008-09-16T23:55:00.003+05:30

From an article in the Times Of India:

Google is all set to extend its domination over cyberspace to the high seas, with the launch of its own “computer navy” -- a set of supercomputers necessary to operate its Internet search engines on barges anchored up to 11km offshore. The “water-based data centres” would use wave energy to power and cool the computers. Their offshore status would also mean the company would no longer have to pay property taxes on its data centres sited across the world.

The supercomputers housed in data centres, which can be the size of football pitches, use massive amounts of electricity to ensure they do not overheat. As a result, the Internet is not very Green. In fact, data centres consumed 1 per cent of the world’s electricity in 2005.

To address the problem, Microsoft has investigated building a data centre in the cold climes of Siberia; while in Japan, Sun Microsystems plans to send its computers down an abandoned coal mine, using water from the ground as a coolant.

My prediction #5 (see this post) is coming true! :)

World's 9th Most Innovative Company

2008-08-02T22:12:00.005+05:30

Persistent recently got listed as the 9th most innovative company in the world and readers favorites by Fast Company magazine readers. Fast Company was looking for companies using ‘business as a force of positive change’ and helping its customers. Based on the work we had done for Bridgestone, as mentioned in CK Prahalad’s recent book on Innovation (The Age of Innovation), our submission made the cut :)

Excerpts of the award details are mentioned on this link:
http://www.fastcompany.com/fast-50-2008-application/fast-50-2008-application-88

Fast 50 Reader Favorites Innovative Companies ranking:
http://www.fastcompany.com/articles/2008/07/fast-50-reader-favorites.html

About Fast Company magazine: Fast Company magazine illuminates the evolution of business through a unique focus on the most creative individuals in the marketplace. By uncovering best and "next" practices, the magazine helps a new breed of leader work smarter and more effectively. With a total paid circulation of 750,000, the award-winning business magazine is read by some of the most innovative and successful executives in industries across the globe.

University Research?

2008-07-28T01:04:00.004+05:30

I had a conversation with a friend recently, on why under grad students do not do much research, and how we in the industry can tap into them.

I think there is one critical reason why the academia is so far from industry in many ways, and why they will never really come together. The academia thrives on the fundamental activity of publishing papers and participating in conferences, and the industry, of course, thrives on secrecy, IP and getting out to the market first. Can these two ever really co-exist together? I do not think so...

My Predictions - Revisited :)

2008-07-28T00:48:00.003+05:30

Some time early last year, I made these eleven predictions for 2007 - let's go back and see where we have come with them in these last 12-18 months :)

1) Vista will be highly acclaimed by engineers, but will be shunned by buyers, until Miscrocoft goes for a drastic price reduction.
Half-true. Shunned by buyers, and well, ignored by engineers too! Needs too much to get it to run, and is too expensive an option - not much when it comes to value-for-money, Vista will probably never really deserve the popularity of XP, but I am sure Microsoft will soon make sure, some way or the other, that you have no choice! A point of inflexion might come when 64-bit takes off (more an issue of availability of 64-bit and the discontinuation of 32-bit!), and the world is left with no choice but to upgrade. Mind you, this will also be a good opportunity for migration!

2) SQL Server 2005 will be the database of choice for most SMEs and SaaS providers, with IE 7 and .NET 3.0 being the platform of choice.
2005 has definitely taken off, and we see more and more SMEs jumping on the 2005, and now, 2008 bandwagon! The all-in-one package definitely makes SQL Server a very attractive option! .NET 3.0 is yet to really take off, but WPF and Silverlight have a lot of promise. Silverlight has had a bad start though - the move from 1.2 to 2.0 is VERY PAINFUL, and definitely won't endear it to developers and end-users alike.

3) Google will get into the television and media advertising market, changing focus into a media company.
We are still some way off from this one, but Google is definitely branching out into mobile services, Internet and applications. Still interesting to see how this pans out...

4) Google Enterprise platform will be a big failure, and get converted into an open/free source community showcase with no other application in the commercial world.
Google Enterprise hasn't really taken off, though there is still some noise. I guess the key issues are the same - people are fundamentally not happy keeping their data on the cloud! And uninterrupted Internet connectivity is still a dream...

5) Google will move it's data centers to Canada or maybe even the Arctic! Yahoo and Microsoft will follow suit.
I need to check this out :) I am sure it's happening... Well, the prediction was based on the premise that cost of air conditioning is the critical factor in running data centers, and makes up for most of the cost!

6) Microsoft Live.com will fail to take off. So will Virtual Earth and Map Point, till Microsoft makes it free to use.
True, again! We are yet to see Live.com taking off, and Map Point and Virtual Earth nowhere close to Google Earth. It's all about money, honey! Paying per transaction is still too heavy on the pockets.

7) Ruby on Rails will be a serious contender in University projects - but not in the commercial space
Ruby on Rails is definitely catching up, and yes, it's mostly still in the academia than in serious commercial projects.. though IBM is showing some interest in it.

8) Microsoft will tie up with Sun - sounds outrageous?
Not happened yet, though it did attempt a tie up with Yahoo for it's Internet search business!

9) Intel will get a major boost because of Vista 64 bit
Interestingly, now it seems it might be the other way round!

10) SaaS will come to mean "renting out software deployed in your captive data center"
I am not sure about rest of the world, but I am definitely looking at this as the best way to do SaaS - and a number of our customers do agree. Coupled with virtualization, this is a killer.

11) Virtualization will be big, and a critical component of any web based software delivery model.
Very true! So very true...

VSTS

2008-07-16T00:01:00.002+05:30

We have been avid users of VSTS - and Microsoft rewarded us with a case study on their site recently :)

Here's a link to it...

http://www.microsoft.com/india/CustomerEvidence/details.aspx?casestudyid=488&type=C

Quote for the Day

2008-05-23T00:31:00.001+05:30

Seniority is not an excuse for incompetence.

Book Review: Silos, Politics and Turf Wars

2008-04-09T21:33:00.002+05:30

Read this beautiful book by Patrick Lencioni on silos and turf wars in a corporate environment - devoured all 200 odd pages in one sitting and totally loved it! One of those books that has one simple, but powerful influence that can change the way you look at life!

A must read for everyone who has experienced silos - and I dare say there won't be any who haven't!

Learning and Positive Reinforcement

2008-03-23T16:56:00.002+05:30

Any observable change in behaviour is evidence that learning has taken place. Positive reinforcement, where the manager rewards the employee for his/her performance, is a much more effective tool than negative reinforcement or punishment. While punishment is much more effective at eliminating unwanted behaviour, there are negative effects including a drop in morale, and the effects tend to be temporarily supressive, rather than long term.

Positive reinforcement can be done in a continuous way - each time the desirable behaviour is executed, or in an intermittent way - only once in n occurences or after a defined interval.

Interestingly, continuous positive reinforcement quickly loses its effectiveness, and the employee tends to satiate early, and withdraw if the reinforcement is ever withheld. Intermittent reinforcement is more effective, and also keeps the employee more alert because of the element of surprise involved.

What Managers Do

2008-03-23T13:40:00.002+05:30

Every organization exists to achieve some goals, and the role of the manager is to define those goals, and the means of achieving them. Management, therefore, has four basic functions:
1) Planning: defining the goals, the strategy to achieve them, and a comprehensive set of plans to integrate and coordinate activities
2) Organizing: designing an organization's structure including determining what tasks are to be done, by whom, who reports to whom and where decisions are to be made
3) Leading: directing and coordinating people, motivating employees, communicating effectively,
and resolving conflicts
4) Controlling: monitoring performance against previously set goals, and getting organization back on track if there are deviations

Managers play three different categories of roles in the discharge of their duties...
1) Interpersonal - these are roles that are sometimes almost ceremonial and formal in nature. These include being figureheads (symbolic, handing out awards), leaders (hiring, training, motivating, disciplining) and liaisons (maintaining networks for favours or information)
2) Informational - collecting and transmitting information.This includes monitoring (collecting), disseminating (transmiting) and being a spokesperson (transmitting to outsiders on the organization's vision and plan)
3) Decisional - making choices, including being enterprenueral (initiating projects to bring about change), disturbance handler (corrective actions against unexpected disturbances), resource allocator (makes or approves organization decisions around resources) and negotiator (represents organization at major negotiations)

Now, the interesting part. An average manager typically spends an equal amount of time in the four key classes of managerial activities - traditional management (including decision making, planning and controlling), communication, human resource management and networking. Effective managers spent a lot more time on communication at the cost of networking, getting better and faster results. However the successful managers spent a lot more time networking, giving least importance to human resource management! Having better relationships with your bosses and peers is obviously much more effective than spending time becoming liked by your team!

Managing The Monkeys!

2008-03-16T12:39:00.003+05:30

How often do we, as managers, as friends, as colleagues, feel over-burdened with work and responsibilities, unable to scale up, unable to manage all the expectations? Sometimes, it's plain simple over work, but sometimes, it's just about not being able to manage the monkeys!

There was this beautiful article in the HBR Nov-Dec 1974, by William Oncken, Jr. and Donald Wass, that has probably had the biggest positive influence in my life!

This blog tries to capture the learnings from that article, and I hope it will benefit you just the way it did me!

Management Time

As a manager, we can classify our time as one of the following three:
1) Boss-imposed time - to do what our bosses require us to, and which we cannot refuse to do without penalty!
2) System-imposed time - the time we need to do what the system requires us to do, especially requests from peers. We can choose to ignore some of these demands, but this carries a penalty too!
3) Self-imposed time - the time needed to do what the manager originates or wants to do himself. A part of this time is "subordinate time" - time spent with juniors and team members, and the rest is "discretionary time" - the time he can use to do whatever he chooses!

A manager cannot easily get rid of the boss and system imposed time, and hence the successful manager will try and reduce the subordinate time, increase the discretionary time, and use this time to get better control of the boss and system imposed time.

Where is the monkey?

Every time your subordinate comes to you with a problem, ask yourself if it fits these two characteristics:
1) you know enough about it to get involved and
2) you do not know enough to make a spot decision

If this is true, you have probably just taken on a new monkey. Why? Because the end result of the conversation with your subordinate will probably be a situation where the next action item needs to come from you, not your subordinate. You will need to read his report, you will need to do some thinking, find some solutions, and then get back to the subordinate. You will need to take care of his monkey, and while you are burdened with the task, your subordinate is free waiting for you to get back to him!

Not only have you become your subordinate's subordinate, you have probably even promised him a progress report. And worse, your subordinate will probably remind you a couple of times that it is still pending, only adding to your headaches!

Taking control

So how does one take control? Some simple rules... whenever your subordinate comes to you with a monkey, keep it on the desk between you two, and then figure out how the next step will be the subordinate's, not yours! If you cannot figure out the next step, just let the monkey go back overnight with the subordinate and continue the discussion the next day. But DO NOT offer to take care of the monkey on your shoulder while you sleep that night!

There are five kinds of initiatives a manager can exercise, each giving him different levels of control over time and content

1) wait until told (lowest initiative)
2) ask what to do
3) recommend, then take action
4) act, but advice at once
5) act on own, then report (highest initiative)

While a manager himself should never indulge in 1 or 2 with respect to his boss and the system (doing that makes him lose control over his time!), he needs to also outlaw the use of these initiatives by his subordinates, and heavily encourage the use of the other more active initiatives.

Taking care of the monkey - the 5 rules

There are 5 simple rules that help in keeping the initiative with the subordinate, and the care the feeding of the monkeys:

1) Monkeys should be fed or shot - else they starve to death and manager wastes a lot of time on postmortems and attempted resurrections
2) The mponkey population should be kept below the max number the manager has time to feed. It should not take more than 15 min to feed a properly prepared money!
3) Monkeys should be fed by appointment only. Managers should not try and hunt down starving monkeys and try feeding them!
4) Monkeys should be fed face to face or by telephone - using mail transfers the initiative back to the manager!
5) Each monkey should have a clear assigned next feeding time and degree of initiative, and this should not be left vague!

Delegation

2008-02-14T23:15:00.002+05:30

From a beautiful article from the HBR:

"At no time while I am helping you with this or any other problem will your problem become my problem. The instant your problem becomes mine, you will no longer have a problem. I cannot help someone who hasn't got a problem."

As long as a manager can make his subordinates understand this, he will be on the path to salvation!

Managing by Exception

2008-01-05T21:47:00.000+05:30

I am a huge believer in this approach of managing by exception, where systems should be allowed to run under the assumption that you do not need to track/manage anything unless there are exceptions. For example, as long as a budget is approved at the beginning of the year, do we really need approvals to kick in at every point? As long as the overall billing rate is above average, do we really want to manage/track how resources are being used on projects/investments?

Set up your systems in a way that any exceptions are flagged and corrective actions can be taken immediately, focusing all management bandwidth on solving tough problems and planning for the future, instead of getting mired in the quicksand of collecting and analyzing metrics and approvals at every point, strangulating innovation and ownership from individuals. We spend so much time ensuring everything is alright – why do we need to do that? Can we not let our systems track that? That’s such a manual task – you do not need senior management to figure it out. Let senior management focus on finding solutions once the system has identified a potential problem.

Adobe AIR

2007-12-27T23:39:00.001+05:30

Adobe AIR aims at enabling the development of rich desktop applications using Internet technologies - or in other words, Rich Internet Applications on the desktop. Combining the advantages of the two worlds, AIR will allow you to seamlessly combine Flash, HTML, AJAX and PDF into applications that will be installed using a Click Once install using a single install file across platforms, and then effortlessly run on different platforms using the AIR runtime engine - similar to the .NET runtime that gets downloaded for Silverlight applications. It will provide support for HTML/AJAX using an embedded browser, Flash using a Flash player, but will need to bridge to a local Acrobat PDF reader. It will provide APIs for accessing local system resources, and ideally, these APIs will be provided in such a way that your applications can work across platforms without the need to be ported for any specific one. Once installed, these applications will behave like locally installed desktop applications - including showing up in the Add/Remove Programs, and Start folders!

Pretty interesting - but I am wondering if this hotch potch of technologies will be a great idea, really! I would still bank on Silverlight...

Being an Architect: Ray Ozzie

2007-12-25T23:31:00.001+05:30

Here's an excerpt from an interview Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's Chief Software Architect, gave to the Architecture Journal. Definitely an eye opener and a must-follow-guide to all budding Architects like me!

AJ: Given your responsbilities, what does a day in the life of Microsoft’s chief software architect look like?

RO: From my vantage point, being an architect is really about pattern matching. It’s about being exposed to enough tools and techniques of the trade that over time you start to develop a toolkit of different patterns that work in different situations. This is true of software architecture and probably other types of architecture as well. Whether you build bridges or design buildings, you’re trying to apply design patterns to a given situation.

My role within Microsoft is an interesting one because there are very strong architects within the different product groups, within the different divisions of the company, and they’re doing a terrific job on their products. My role is essentially a cross-cutting one. By that I mean understanding how customers are using multiple products together, and then asking myself what patterns I see. What’s the smallest possible thing I could suggest to a product team that they could do to re-architect their product in order to minimize seams with other products? Or from a business perspective, what’s the smallest possible thing I could overlay on these products to add value for our customers, and advantage our solutions in the market.

At the very highest level, my advice to aspiring architects is, don’t jump in too
quickly. You need to do your time as a programmer to understand the different patterns that are out there, and recognize the attributes of well-architected systems, in order to raise yourself to the next level of abstraction in the solutions you’re building.

AJ: It sounds like the ability to do pattern matching really comes down to experience?

RO: Absolutely. It especially pertains to the things that nobody at the architecture level likes to think about. For example, performance characteristics, IO characteristics, reliability characteristics… You might have had experience with a system that works well given a certain level of complexity, but if used in a more dynamic environment it could be too fragile. You only learn that through experience.

AJ: I imagine that to do that you must have a wide array of knowledge across multiple technologies. Given that, and the product teams you interact with each day, how do you keep up to date?

RO: It’s really an interesting combination. The easiest and most natural thing is to just talk to people in your sphere of influence, and gain exposure to different technologies as a part of your job. But in order to be successful long term, you need to stay in touch with the trends and what’s going on externally, especially staying in touch with what customers or individual users are saying and doing.
I spend a fair amount of time reading blogs, tracking specific influencers that have very interesting voices both related to our products and completely unrelated to our products.

I go to a combination what I call ‘head’ and ‘tail’ conferences. I’ll attend a few where the known industry influencers congregate. These allow me to track major competitive issues, or at least the outward presentation of what competitors might be saying and doing. But I also enjoy the tail conferences, where you can get a closer-to-the-ground perspective on what’s really happening. I like to meet people who are just out of school, who have startups and understand the kinds of technology choices they’re making and why.

At the highest level, my advice to an aspiring architect is find the right balance of focus on internal and external trends that will give you the perspective you need.

AJ: That’s definitely great advice. Related to this, what would you say are defining characteristics of an effective software architect?

RO: The most effective architects I’ve dealt with are the ones who’ve paid their dues. These are the architects who’ve spent time in the trenches building and debugging fairly complex systems. You can learn a lot about how things work by fixing other people’s bugs. When something fails and the person has left the company, you can learn a lot by either reverse engineering or looking at the documentation. The more systems that you can learn from the inside out, the more you can develop an understanding for bad practice and good practice design patterns. As I mentioned earlier, it’s this library of patterns in your mind that will define you as an architect.

Innovation!

2007-12-06T21:46:00.000+05:30

Progress isn't made by early risers or hard workers, but by lazy people, who find easier ways to do difficult things! Henry Ford.

What Great Managers Know...

2007-10-29T00:35:00.000+05:30

People don't change that much.

Don't waste time trying to put in what was left out.

Try to draw out what was left in.

That is hard enough.

From Marcus Buckingham's "First, Break All The Rules"

Breaking the Rules...

2007-10-28T21:23:00.001+05:30

From Marcus Buckingham's, "First, Break All the Rules":

The greatest managers, despite their differences, share one common trait: they do not hesitate to break virtually every rule held sacred by conventional wisdom. They do not believe, that with enough training, a person can achieve anything he sets his mind to. They do not try to help people overcome their weaknesses. And yes, they even play favourites.

Do you have these traits in you? Do I have these in me? That is a question I would like to explore in the coming weeks...

Team - Lesson from My Kid

2007-10-28T21:15:00.000+05:30

My kid asked me this riddle today, "What is the full form of team?"

Answer: Together, Everyone Achieves More!

People Management: The 12 Questions You Need to Care About

2007-10-28T20:44:00.001+05:30

It is often said that people leave their managers, not their companies. In the IT industry, hiring and retention are probably the most critical issues facing growing companies today. So what can managers to do keep their team motivated and happy? What is the difference between a good manager and a bad one?

I have been reading Marcus Buckingham's "First, Break All the Rules" in which he addresses these very questions. Accordingly to his book, which is a result of years of research conducted by the Gallup Organization, the following twelve statements measure the core elements needed to attract, focus and keep the most talented employees:

1) I know what is expected of me at work
2) I have the materials and equipment I need to do my job right
3) At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day
4) In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for good work
5) My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care for me as a person
6) There is someone at work who encourages my development
7) At work, my opinions seem to count
8) The mission/purpose of my company makes me feel like my work is important
9) My co-workers are committed to doing quality work
10) I have a best friend at work
11) In the last six months, I have talked with somebody about my progress
12) At work, I have opportunities to learn and grow

The best managers get scores of 5 (strongly agree) on most of these questions.

Here are some key points, though, in the way these questions are framed. Many of them contain extremes (best), which makes the ratings of 5 difficult to achieve. That is exactly the intention - to make it hard to make very strongly assertive statements. If an answer gets 5 from everyone, it loses its power to discriminate and loses its relevance. Also, interestingly, these questions are such that the most engaged and productive employees would answer positively, and everyone else, answered neutrally or negatively. This is not necessarily a reflection on the kind of employees you have - it is more likely a reflection of the kind of manager you are!

These questions can be categorized into 4 distinct "phases", as you climb your mountain. The "base camp" questions (1 & 2) address "What do I get?" When you start a new role, your questions are very basic - you need to know what is expected of you. Camp 1 questions (3 to 6) address the next question you will have, "What do I give?" This is where your attention shifts to your personal contribution and how it is perceived by others in the company. Camp 2 (questions 7 - 10) addresses the phase where you ask yourself, "Do I belong here"? This is where you ask yourself, do I fit in here? Finally, Camp 3 (questions 11 & 12) is about "How can we all grow?" You want to make things better, to grow, to innovate. And you can innovate only if you are focussed on the right expectations (Base Camp), have the confidence in your own expertise (Camp 1), and aware of how you new ideas will be accepted or rejected by the people around you (Camp 2).

Ask yourself these questions, and you will know where you are on your own mountain. And just like on the mountain, if you do not spend enough time on base camp, if you aim high without focussing on the basics first, you will get mountain sickness and one day, die with your team.

As a manager, of course, these are the questions you know your team members will be asking - what can you do to get all 5s? Here lies the challenge. Many of these questions are inherently contradictory. For example, you can have hefty manuals that make it clear how your employees should work, and get your a 5 on the question, do I know what I am expected to do. However, it will stifle their creativity and feedback, and get you a 1 on the question, do my opinions count?

One of my biggest problems has been being able to follow the 80-20 rule with my team, focussing my time and attention on those who have grabbed the opportunities in the past and shown promise for the future, without appearing to be partial to some. It's not easy being best friend on the job - when your team member performs, you can be accused of being partial for being a best friend - remember, even if another of your best friend doesn't have the same success, no one will remember that!

To be really successful, you need to be able to set expectations from everyone consistently, yet be able to treat each person differently. You need to be able to make each person feel as though he is in a role that best utilizes his talents, yet challenge him to grow! You have to care about each person, praise each person, and if necessary, terminate a person you cared about and praised.

Watch out for Facebook...

2007-10-25T16:36:00.000+05:30

One thing you will need to watch out for in the coming months will be Facebook, the social networking site developed by Mark Zuckerberg in early 2004. While most of us are aware of Orkut today, Facebook has gone ahead to be the most popular site for photos in the US, with around 50 million registered users today.

If you needed any more convincing, you might want to know that Microsoft has just beaten Google for a 1.6 percent stake in the company for 240M USD, including exclusive rights to see ads on Facebook outside the US.

Earlier this year, Facebook launched an API called Facebook Platform, that allows developers to connect to and use Facebook's core services. Today, there are reportedly more than 6500 applications connecting to Facebook!

Just like Orkut, Facebook has also had it's share of critics and concerns over privacy and security, copyright violations, and even allegations that Mark stole and reused source code to develop Facebook - but one thing is clear, you better know what Facebook is all about!

Astoria - Data Services

2007-10-18T22:56:00.000+05:30

The goal of the Astoria project is to enable applications to expose data as a data service that can be consumed by web clients within a corporate network and across the internet. The data service is reachable over HTTP, and URIs are used to identify the various pieces of information available through the service. Interactions with the data service happens in terms of HTTP verbs such as GET, POST, PUT and DELETE, and the data exchanged in those interactions is represented in simple formats such as XML and JSON.

For more, check out http://astoria.mslivelabs.com/

Why is this cool? Because it takes the concept of web services to an entirely different level - from sharing business logic exposed by partners to sharing data for consumers in an easy and application-independent manner. How is this different from consuming data as a web service? Well, a web service exposes a method or set of methods that get you the data. The data itself is not addressable or identifiable. With Astoria, Microsoft aims to provide you a simple way of addressing the data elements exposed through the data service using URIs.

For example,
The URI that will represent all of the Customer entities in an example Astoria data service would be:

http://myserver/data.svc/Customers

In this context, the "/Customers" part of the URI points to the Customers entity-set, which is the container for Customer instances. It is also possible to point to a single particular entity using an URI, for example:

http://myserver/data.svc/Customers[ALFKI]

This URI results in a single Customer entity whose key, as defined in the EDM schema, has a value of "ALFKI". If each of the customers in the data service has a set of Sales Orders associated with it, the following URI would represent the set of Sales Orders associated with the Customer whose key has a value of “ALFKI”.

http://myserver/data.svc/Customers[ALFKI]/Orders

For URIs that represent a specific entity instance or a specific association, not only it is possible to use HTTP GET to retrieve the entity, but the system also handles HTTP PUT to replace an entity (effectively updating the values in the data service), HTTP POST to create new entities and HTTP DELETE to eliminate entities from the data service and its underlying store.

Astoria Online Data Store

There is new class of applications emerging on the web where an obvious “data storage server” is not available. Mashups are an example of a new type of web application that, today, is basically stateless. While mashups have access to data across the entire internet, they can only consume that data. They cannot store their own data on the web (without a custom back-end service to do so). The Astoria online service offers just such a data source that can be combined with other external sources. A second example is internet-enabled desktop applications. These applications are not delivered through or executed inside a web browser, but still connect to the internet to retrieve and store data.

The Astoria online service is an experimental service that aims at exploring programming models for data on the web, offered in the form of a service.
Using the Astoria online service, web developers can create custom structured data stores on the web and access them from anywhere that they have internet access. These data services can then be the storage or data source for mashups, or the backing store for internet enabled applications, or be applied to any other scenario where a rich data service on the web is required, independently of where it is hosted.

AJAX or Ajax?

2007-10-18T22:20:00.000+05:30

Something interesting... :)

The term Ajax was initially coined by Jesse James Garrett to describe the style of web applications and set of technologies involved in making highly interactive web applications. Historically, the term Ajax spread around the web as the acronym AJAX, meaning Asynchronous JavaScript And XML. With time, however, people realized that the "X" in AJAX was not very representative of the underlying data format used to communicate with the web server in the background since most implementations were switching to JSON as a simpler and more efficient alternative. So rather than coming up with a replacement acronym like AJAJ that's a bit of tongue-twister, the acronym is generally being retired in favor of Ajax the term rather than AJAX the acronym.

At the time of this writing, expect to see a mixed and wide use of "AJAX" and "Ajax" to mean one and the same thing. In this article, we've stuck with "Ajax the term." Commercial products that provide frameworks enabling Ajax-style applications, however, tend to use the acronym form to distinguish from a similarly named cleaning agent product and to avoid any potential trademark or legal disputes.

JSON - a Better Alternative to XML?

2007-10-18T22:09:00.000+05:30

JSON is picking up favour among programmers as the format for data interchange. Here are some of my notes, taken as I read about it in this MSDN article:

JSON syntax is very terse and yields formatted text where most of the space is consumed by the represented data. No additional application code required to parse text; can use JavaScript's eval function.

When using JSON as the data exchange format, two common tasks are turning a native and in-memory representation into its JSON text representation and vice versa. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, JavaScript does not provide built-in functions to create JSON text from a given object or array. Until these JSON formatting functions are formally added to JavaScript and widely available across popular implementations, use the reference implementation script available for download at http://www.json.org/json.js.
In its latest iteration at the time of this writing, the json.js script at www.json.org adds toJSONString() functions to array, string, Boolean, object, and other JavaScript types. The net result of the toJSONString() functions is that any type can be converted into its JSON format with a single function call.

Parsing JSON text is even simpler. Since JSON is merely a subset of JavaScript literals, it can be parsed into an in-memory representation using the eval(expr) function, treating the source JSON text as JavaScript source code. The eval function accepts as input a string of valid JavaScript code and evaluates the expression.

The eval function blindly evaluates whatever expression it is passed. An untrustworthy source could therefore include potentially dangerous JavaScript along with or mixed into the literal notation that makes up the JSON data. In scenarios where the source cannot be trusted, it is highly recommended that you parse the JSON text using the parseJSON() function (found in json.js).

When working with JSON for .NET, you can use the ASP.NET AJAX library, or you can use Jayrock, an open-source implementation for JSON for the .NET framework.
Working with JSON in .NET using Jayrock is similar to working with XML through the XmlWriter,XmlReader and XmlSerializer classes in the .NET Framework. The classes JsonWriter, JsonReader, JsonTextWriter, and JsonTextReader found in Jayrock mimic the semantics of the .NET Framework classes XmlWriter, XmlReader, XmlTextWriter, and XmlTextReader. These classes are useful for interfacing with JSON at a low- and stream-oriented level. Using these classes, JSON text can be created or parsed piecemeal through a series of method calls. For example, using the JsonWriter class method WriteNumber(number) writes out the appropriate string representation of number according to the JSON standard. The JsonConvert class offers Export and Import methods for converting between .NET types and JSON. These methods provide a similar functionality as found in the XmlSerializer class methods Serialize and Deserialize, respectively.

Note: One of the sore points of JSON is the lack of a date/time literal. Most applications using JSON as a data format, therefore, generally tend to use either a string or a number to express date and time values.

What is Persistent all About?

2007-10-07T21:23:00.000+05:30

I had to make a presentation to a bunch of students yesterday, and my motive was to give them a feel of what Persistent is all about - and I decided to try something new. I showed them a short 30 second video I took of one of my team mates in Goa last week on a water scooter, coming in from the sea to the shore.

I played the video and asked, so what do you think life at Persistent is all about? And I got some beautiful descriptions...

Fun, excitement, team work, exploring something new every day, taking challenges, not being afraid, some apprehensions, and a lot of adventure!

It was the perfect way to start my presentation!

Introducing the Microsoft .Net Micro Framework

2007-06-30T17:02:00.000+05:30

The Microsoft .NET Micro Framework is a bootable runtime module for embedded devices which are highly resource-constrained and unable to run even embedded OSes. The coolest thing about it - it does not require an underlying operating system!

With a footprint of just 300 KB, .NET Micro provides a fully managed execution environment with memory management, a substantial subset of the .NET Base Class Library, GUI classes based on WPF, persistent storage, and support for serial communication and networking, as well as tight Visual Studio integration and emulation support.

.NET Micro provides OS-level services including environment initialization, interrupt handling, threading and process management, heap management, and other support functions necessary to run applications. This allows .NET Micro to run directly on hardware without an underlying operating system, although an operating system may still be used if desired.

Code that is specific to a particular hardware platform is factored into a hardware abstraction layer (HAL) so that .NET Micro and applications built on top of it can be ported to new platforms with ease. The HAL is typically 20-30 KB. The layer above the HAL is the Platform Abstraction Layer (PAL), which exposes abstractions such as timers, memory blocks, asynchronous communication, and lists and other data structures to the .NET Micro Framework CLR, serving to further abstract the functionality exposed by the HAL.

The CLR is a small, highly optimized managed-code runtime that provides the main benefits of managed code: safety, security, resource protection, validation, recovery, and isolation. It supports C# programming language and includes a class library tailored to the needs of embedded applications. The library incorporates a substantial subset of the .NET BCL, as well as WPF based UI, communication and networking classes, and more.

And the main selling point? Productivity boost for embedded application developers through it's tight integration with Visual Studio and extensive emulation support!

Knowing where to Tap...

2007-06-23T00:34:00.001+05:30

A giant ship engine failed. The ship's owners tried one expert after another, but none of them could figure but how to fix the engine. Then they brought in an old man who had been fixing ships since he was a young. He carried a large bag of tools with him, and when he arrived, he immediately went to work. He inspected the engine very carefully, top to bottom. Two of the ship's owners were there, watching this man, hoping he would know what to do. After looking things over, the old man reached into his bag and pulled out a small hammer. He gently tapped something. Instantly, the engine lurched into life. He carefully put his hammer away. The engine was fixed.

A week later, the owners received a bill from the old man for ten thousand dollars =

"What?!" the owners exclaimed. "He hardly did anything!" So they wrote the old man a note saying, "Please send us an itemized bill."

The man sent a bill that read:
Tapping with a hammer....................... $ 2.00
Knowing where to tap........................ $ 9,998.00

Effort is important, but knowing where to make an effort makes all the difference!

Customer Service Lessons

2007-06-23T00:29:00.000+05:30

This is an often referred story that is used to illustrate one simple point - never take your customers lightly, no matter how stupid they may seem when they are complaining! It's a good lesson in life too, and is something that should remind us that at times, truth is stranger than fiction, and everything is possible!

A complaint was received by the Pontiac Division of General Motors:

'This is the second time I have written to you, and I don't blame you for not answering me, because I sounded crazy, but it is a fact that we have a tradition in our family of Ice-Cream for dessert after dinner each night, but the kind of ice cream varies so, every night, after we've eaten, the whole family votes on which kind of ice cream we should have and I drive down to the store to get it. It's also a fact that I recently purchased a new Pontiac and since then my trips to the store have created a problem.....

You see, every time I buy a vanilla ice-cream, when I start back from the store my car won't start. If I get any other kind of ice cream, the car starts just fine. I want you to know I'm serious about this question, no matter how silly it sounds "What is there about a Pontiac that makes it not start when I get vanilla ice cream, and easy to start whenever I get any other kind?" The Pontiac President was understandably skeptical about the letter, but sent an Engineer to check it out anyway.

The latter was surprised to be greeted by a successful, obviously well educated man in a fine neighborhood. He had arranged to meet the man just after dinner time, so the two hopped into the car and drove to the ice cream store. It was vanilla ice cream that night and, sure enough, after they came back to the car, it wouldn't start.

The Engineer returned for three more nights. The first night, they got chocolate. The car started. The second night, he got strawberry. The car started. The third night he ordered vanilla. The car failed to start.

Now the engineer, being a logical man, refused to believe that this man's car was allergic to vanilla ice cream. He arranged, therefore, to continue his visits for as long as it took to solve the problem. And toward this end he began to take notes: He jotted down all sorts of data: time of day, type of gas uses, time to drive back and forth etc.

In a short time, he had a clue: the man took less time to buy vanilla than any other flavor. Why? The answer was in the layout of the store. Vanilla, being the most popular flavor, was in a separate case at the front of the store for quick pickup. All the other flavors were kept in the back of the store at a different counter where it took considerably longer to check out the flavor.

Now, the question for the Engineer was why the car wouldn't start when it took less time. Eureka - Time was now the problem - not the vanilla ice cream!!!! The engineer quickly came up with the answer: "vapor lock".

It was happening every night; but the extra time taken to get the other flavors allowed the engine to cool down sufficiently to start. When the man got vanilla, the engine was still too hot for the vapor lock to dissipate.

Even crazy looking problems are sometimes real and all problems seem to be simple only when we find the solution, with cool thinking.

Microsoft OneNote

2007-06-17T12:28:00.000+05:30

Another very promising productivity tool from Microsoft - OneNote, just caught my eye. Have been playing around with it a bit, and I love the flexibility and integration it promises to provide - including easy to create audio recordings in the middle of your meetings, ability to mail your notes out, so on and so forth.

Definitely worth a try!

Leadership Styles and Techniques

2007-06-12T09:41:00.000+05:30

We had our first session as part of the Arjuna program today, where we discussed 5 cases, as given below.

Think about the cases, and tell me, what would you do in each of them?

Answers and analysis in the second half of the post.

Case 1

You are foreman of a construction team laying a pipeline in the Sahara desert. There is an opportunity to extend the pipeline by a few miles, which would bring in $100 K of extra revenue every year. The cost of laying the pipeline is negligible. However, there is a risk, however small, that, because of the extension to be added, the pipeline may burst, causing extensive damage. You are tempted to take the risk, though you are not sure what the probability of disaster is. Several members of your team are opposed to the plan, saying it is not worth the effort and risk. Some members are willing to go along with you, and as usual, most members of your team are either indifferent or unable to articulate what they really think.

Case 2

You have just taken over as project manager of a large project team. Your company has never dealt with this particular customer before, though it believes this is potentially lucrative business for the company. The technologies to be employed are very new, and hardly anyone in your team has any experience with them. You don’t have any, either.. Team members are already grumbling about the prospect of endless days and nights of hard work, nightmarish bugs and a never-ending spiral of problems. As a new project manager, you already suspect some members of your team might be happy to see you fail. Maybe one of them should have been named project manager instead of you, at least according to them.

Case 3

You are leading a team of 12 systems engineers. Your manager informs you that one of your people needs to be sent on a 6 month assignment to the U.S. All your people are roughly equal in ability and skill-set, making them more or less interchangeable. How would you decide which of them should go? (the U.S. is considered a desirable assignment!)

Case 4

You are in charge of the construction of a bridge. Your team includes several members who have been with the company for several years. You have never been involved in constructing a bridge before. The schedule requires you to complete the project in 1 month. Safety considerations are paramount, cost second and schedule third. There are two or three alternative construction methods you could choose, all of which have been used in the past in various projects in your company.

Case 5

You have just taken over as manager of a project, which is already under severe schedule pressure. The six members of your team have all been on this project for 6 months each. On your very first day, one of them came to you with a long litany of complaints about the allocation of work. According to this member, your predecessor had allotted all the most painful tasks to her, apparently out of pure spite. You are just about to do something to ease her load when two more members of your team walk in with similar issues. The project is still 4 months from completion, the customer is already unhappy, and enormous penalty clauses loom if you miss the target date. Based on whatever you know thus far, it would be possible for the project to get back on schedule if certain major decisions are taken, and everyone in the team puts in some extra hours of work.

My Initial Reactions

Case 1

I am the foreman, responsible for executing projects. I may not be authorized to make decisions on the pipeline itself.

However, assuming I can do it, I would need to figure out the cost of damage of a burst pipeline (loss of revenue, downtime, reputation) and then make a cost-benefit analysis. Unless the cost is exorbitant or damaging to the company’s operations, I would go ahead and make the extension.

This is not a decision that can be taken on the spot, though. I would call for a meeting of my key people, form a core group, and do the analysis. Also, it might make sense to work out a possibility of strengthening the pipeline to minimize the risk.

Case 2

Get the best technical guys together to do a POC. Arrange for training. Minimize risk of engineering failure.

Talk to the team on the criticality of this customer, and how their careers will benefit if we are all successful. Show them the growth path.

Put good project management and change management in place, to ensure adequate buffers and contingency plans and avoid stretching work hours.

Case 3

What does the work involve and who is best suited? Who has good communication skills, and business development skills? If it’s urgent, which of the guys has a ready visa? Any family issues which prevent them from travelling?
Once we narrow down the options, award the best performer with the trip.

Case 4

Form a core team consisting of experienced team members. Make a plan. Rope in security experts to evaluate safety. Add buffer time if needed, and use high quality equipment, and if needed, delay the schedule.

Case 5

Talk to the team heart to heart. Hear out their complains, but also emphasize that we cannot afford to fail. If possible, add a couple of resources to the team to ease the pressure, but in most situations, this will not help.

Reprioritize, and make incremental/intermediate drops if possible to reassure the customer and win some breathing space for your team. Reduce short term pressure.

Promise (and stick to it) the team that you will give them a time off, and will set better project planning in place once this project is over, but win their support in making this a success.

Summary of Discussions in the Class

Case 1

1) Here, you are an insider, and aleady have the trust of the team
2) You do not really need the team to be with you once the decision is made - success or failure depends on external factors
3) This is a go - no go decision, and making the decision is the primary role of the manager/leader
4) You need to make a cost-benefit analysis, and manage the risk of the known

Case 2

1) In this case, you are the outsider, and you need to win the trust of the team
2) Buy-in and support of the team are all-important, if you need to succeed
3) Managing the unknown is the core issue here

Case 3

1) This is an example where you do not really need to make any decision - you can toss a coin, or you can let the team nominate one person
2) The key point here is showing fairness and transparency in the process
3) As a manager, you will always be in the public eye, and every decision you take and every statement you make will be analysed and debated upon
4) As a manager, you cannot always take decisions based on your wisdom - the process and transparency is key

Case 4

1) Here, your knowledge is less than that of the team
2) You need to use your team's combined wisdom to make the decision on which approach to take
3) Once the decision is taken, the success or failure does not really depend on whether the team is with you

Case 5

1) There is no decision to be taken here - you have no choice
2) You have to be an inspirational leader here - lead by example. The team will suffer long hours and tension, and you need to suffer the same

Summary

The five key expectations from a leader:
1) Take decisions
2) Build and win trust
3) Be fair and transparent, based on values
4) Build on your team's knowledge
5) Lead by example

Finding Time To Do More

2007-06-11T23:40:00.000+05:30

I once asked Anand (my boss) whether he was free, so that I could come to see him for a meeting. His response was, "I can never be free - that would mean I am not doing my job! But that doesn't mean I do not have the time to meet you!".

For everyone who wonders how to do more, how to learn new stuff, how to manage multiple responsibilities while "working on live customer projects", this is an awesome message to learn from. You will never be free, but that doesn't mean you will not have the time to do anything else!

Link to CNBC Interview

2007-06-10T12:59:00.000+05:30

You can watch my CNBC interview on Google Video at this link

Quote of the Day

2007-06-06T16:24:00.000+05:30

You add more value being a "Yes, And.." person than you do being a "No, But.." person..

Microsoft Surface - A Whole New Experience

2007-05-31T13:20:00.000+05:30

Tired of the mouse and keyboard? Wish you just had a virtual table where you could lay out your pics and shuffle them with your hands? What if you could choose your menu by "pointing" out to the interesting items on the table, and maybe take a good look at the ingredients and the calorie values before you do so? What if you could open a map on that table, and then click interesting areas, and get vidoes and pictures, and driving directions?

What if you would have a unique "touchy and feely" bridge between your real world, and the digital world?

Futuristic? Well, check out Microsoft Surface at http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

Mind blowing stuff!!!

Multi-Level Cubes?

2007-05-28T23:04:00.000+05:30

We came across an interesting problem today, which I can best describe as multi-level cubes. So what are multi-level cubes? Let me try and explain with an example...

In any cube, we have data points (sales figures, inventory stock numbers etc) representing some measurable quantity for a given combination of dimension values - location, time, product category etc. Now, what if we have data points representing these same measurable quantities, but some of these are at a lower level in a multi-level dimension than others? For example, consider that I have sales figures for individual stores in Pune, but a consolidated sales number for ALL stores in Mumbai? Can I create a cube with these kinds of multi-level dimensions, with data at varying levels of granularity?

What are the implications? Drill down and roll ups now work for some combinations of dimensions, but cannot be done for some other combinations. Queries need to present some leaf nodes, and in other combinations, need to present aggregated values!

Possible? I am not sure - but definitely sounds like an interesting problem to look into!

CNBC Shoot

2007-05-24T14:50:00.000+05:30

We had a shoot for CNBC today. The episode will be telecast on the 9/10 June in the evening. For more details, see this entry on my K3G blog.

What follows is the basic pitch I used…

Intro – 17 years, 1000 releases

At Persistent, we have been providing complete product development lifecycle services for our customers for seventeen years… over 1000 product releases for some of the top software product companies, as well as start ups and enterprise customers…

Go To Live - VSTS

Persistent’s value offering today is this combined expertise and experience in building products – an offering we call “Go To Live”, based on Microsoft VSTS, where we provide services for the complete product development life cycle – from concept to deployment, performance engineering, usability engineering, deployment support and monitoring – end to end… Based on best practices in development and management, our “Go To Live” offering enables us to effectively manage the two key issues facing product companies: time to market, and zero risk of engineering failure.

VSTS end to end, 20% productivity

Microsoft’s VSTS has been critical to Persistent’s Go To Live model – it provides us with a single unified platform for design and development, testing and tracking, with end to end traceability, as well as high extensibility and integration with other third party products and components. We have easily seen up to 20% productivity gains for our development and management teams using VSTS.. the common database provides ability to generate traceability data and productivity metrics that was never possible before…

VSTS extensibility - integration

The most exciting part of VSTS is that its almost limitlessly extensible… at Persistent, we have built connectors to some of the third party source control systems, for example.. as well as to our internal MIS systems.. a project manager therefore can easily correlate the efforts spent on the project with the total resource allocation in the HR system, and the invoices and billing data generated by the finance applications… with VSTS, this kind of integration and extensibility is easily possible…

VSTS process elements

We have been able to customize VSTS for processes that we have refined and optimized over the years – from heavy duty CMM based processes to agile, SCRUM based projects, we can have our teams process ready in 2 hours

Using VSTS event and notifications, we can monitor and trace interesting events, including bugs filed, resource additions/deletions, and trigger appropriate actions – you can take an indisciplined team, and enforce guidelines and best practices through the system.. customer is happy, development teams are happy, and of course, managers have a lot less to do!

Business Opportunity

I think there is a huge business opportunity here for partners to develop these connectors and bridges to other systems… in a real world, you will always need to integrate with other sources of data and business systems..

Conclusion

At the end of the day, any software that gives you 80% of the functionality at 20% of the cost is a winner… VSTS goes much beyond that 80%..

Hooked on SCRUM

2007-05-21T17:18:00.000+05:30

We have started using SCRUM recently in some of our projects, and while it's still early days, there are a few things I love about SCRUM.

For one, it's all about being agile and incremental. This is great for certain kinds of projects, including internal competency building, bug fixing, web site development etc. By forcing the team to do short sprints, and discuss often, SCRUM ensures that the throughput is much higher than in traditional models like Waterfall.

Does SCRUM work on all kinds of projects? Maybe, maybe not. Too early for me to say - but I do feel that when building large systems, Waterfall might be a better idea - spend some serious time thinking of the bigger picture, and come up with the design etc, before you get agile and start thinking incremental.

Isn't SCRUM going to waste too much time in meetings? Could be. You got to control the meetings. For example, the SCRUM meeting in the mornings should be restricted to 15 mins, and just focus on a quick task status update, and not a design discussion. Remember, even at 15 mins per meeting, a ten person team will easily "waste" 2.5 person hours per day - for a 2 week sprint, that's a loss of almost 4-5 person days. But in terms of the ability to identify bottlenecks and keep the team running at full speed, the advantage of this investment is probably worth it.

How do we factor design and testing when we do incremental implementations using SCRUM? You can! Remember, SCRUM only mandates agile development of "stories"; it does NOT keep you from defining HOW those stories will be implemented. In fact, investigations, design activities, and testing, are integral to any development process, and it holds in SCRUM too. You take a story, and then define tasks that represent how you will implement that story. The tasks will include design and testing!

SCRUM is informal. It expects the team to be made of "equal" members, and everyone takes collective responsibility. Practical? Not always - but I am sure with time, team members will get there. Till then, I would expect the SCRUM master to double up as mentor and manager! Diluting SCRUM? Maybe - but at the end of the day, it's making the process work for you, not working for the process itself!

The Arjuna Program

2007-05-17T12:18:00.000+05:30

Persistent is launching an awesome program for managers and future business leaders, called the Arjuna Program.

According to Dr Ashok Korwar, an ex IIMA faculty, and senior acamedician and consultant, good Managers should be Arjuna personified - they should be doers, backed by knowledge and vision, and driven by principles.

Are you an Arjuna?

SSRS Filtering

2007-05-13T17:28:00.000+05:30

When defining a report using SSRS, you can use the Filters tab to define a filter - this is similar to the SQL WHERE clause, with a major distinction: unlike in the WHERE case, the filtering happens on the client side after the data has been fetched from the data source.

Hence, use the filters judiciously and replace it with WHERE as much as possible!

However, there are times when you need these filters. For example, you might be connecting to a data source that does not support the WHERE clause - like binding to a ADO.NET Dataset.

Filtering can also be used to enforce identity-based authentication and restrict access to data. For example, you may have a sales report that allows users to specify the region for which he wants to view the data. This parameter can be populated from a lookup dataset. We can now set up a filter based on an expression that restricts the choices for a given user based on his Windows identity.

SSRS Authentication Best Practices

2007-05-13T17:02:00.000+05:30

SSRS provides connection pooling, for improving performance. However, pooling works only when the connection strings are exactly the same. If you use Windows Integrated Security, or Credentials Supplied by User options with SSRS, connection pooling across users will not work since every user will be having different login credentials.

To enable this pooling,

1) Use Shared Data Sources.
2) Use the "Credentials Stored Securely in the Reporting Server.." option with Standard or Windows-based Authentication.
3) Do not use an account with admin privileges. Instead, create a separate user and assign it to a role with read only permissions - in SQL Server 2005, you can use the db_datareader role.

While on the topic, also remember that if you want to hard-code the credentials in the connection string for some reason (especially during testing), VS.NET will not allow you to do it directly for security reasons. You can however achieve this by manually editing the RDL file.

Competency Building Plans

2007-05-13T12:55:00.000+05:30

This is extracted from a mail I sent to management yesterday, about my plans for competency building through my group, the Microsoft Technology Practice:

Focus Areas

Based on feedback from current customers and the market, leads/opportunities, and technical innovations in the field, we have targeted the following areas as focus areas for the MTP this year:
1. SQL Server based database tuning, integration, analysis, and reporting
2. Sharepoint and Office based applications
3. .NET 3.0 and Vista applications, and issues in porting to Vista
4. Programming best pratices and component development
5. Mobile and mapping applications
6. VSTS

Competency Building Plan – Teams, Key Contributors and Contributors

1. Internal project teams have been created for each focus area. Each team:
a. is led by an identified team lead
b. has its own VSTS repository and Sharepoint project site
c. follows the SCRUM process diligently for incremental and short term project sprints
d. creates knowledge content and demoable POC applications
e. behaves just like any other project, and is a first class entity in Whizible with assigned resources
2. Every team member doing competency building is assigned to one or more of these internal project teams
3. The competency center resources have been classified into Key Contributors, Contributors and Others
a. Key Contributors are the “gurus”
b. Contributors are the resources expected to focus on certain areas (but will be usually junior resources)
c. Others can participate in competency building activities, but do not have specific hard KRAs.
d. Key Contributors and Contributors have hard KRAs against competency building activities
4. Membership in these teams will be long term for some of the key resources – most of the junior members will be rotated between competency development teams and customer teams
5. Senior members will play dual role – contributing to competency building and leading/driving customer projects at the same time
6. Specific groups of individuals will be identified as “review committees” – they will be responsible for reviewing and auditing MTP projects on various areas like database design, programming best practices, performance etc.

Competency Building Plan – Discussion Forums and Developer Sites

1. A Sharepoint site has been created for MTP developer community, for all competency building and knowledge sharing. This site hosts specific forums in all the key areas, and everyone is expected to post on these forums, and answer queries that may be posted there.
2. This activity is monitored closely, with the site also generating automated weekly reports on the activity and contributors to the forums.
3. The site will also host our knowledge repository including training material, videos, webcasts, Investigation reports and best practices
4. The site will also host reusable components created by the MTP as part of competency building or offshoots of specific customer projects
5. Shortly, this site will be opened up to the rest of the .NET community in Persistent

Competency Building Plan – Projects

1. Each project team use the competency matrix for a given focus area as starting point to come up with a product backlog (SCRUM terminology for a product feature wish list)
2. Each team works in SCRUM model, selecting target areas for competency building, and corresponding features to be implemented in the demo application
3. At the end of the sprint, the team publishes knowledge content, and has a demoable application showcasing the competencies gained in the sprint
4. The competency chart is then updated, and a new sprint planned
5. The following projects have been created at this point:
a. HealthMatrix: Based on the eMerge project requirements, this demo EMR system is a showcase of the latest and best in .NET 3.0 including workflows, WPF UI, and WCF communication protocols
b. BizTRACK: This is the showcase application of the SQL Server focus group, and showcases reporting, dashboards, database best practices and reporting capabilities. Based on Persistent’s MIS, this is also a POC for a planning and tracking, and business intelligence platform proposed for Persistent.
c. ProTRACK: This is the showcase application for the Sharepoint and Office group, and will be a real application used by MTP Managers for project tracking and monitoring, automating many of the repetitive tasks, setting reminders, and allowing most of the planning and tracking to be done using Office applications, through Open XML and Infopath based integration with Sharepoint.
6. We have a focus group that is actively looking at .NET programming best practices and component development – given the nature of this work, this team does not have its own separate project and includes senior members from customer and competency building teams
7. In addition, we have smaller demo applications being built to showcase our mobile and mapping capabilities

Competency Building Plan – Training and Certification

1. The MTP is working closely with the training department to plan and conduct training in various identified focus areas, for MTP members, as well as rest of the company
2. The MTP is also driving the PRP training and mini-projects for .NET. The 3rd such batch is currently in progress, after successful training of an ELTP batch, and 2 PRP batches in the last 6-8 months, totally around 60-70 persons.
3. We are also working aggressively on pushing e-learning and certification for all MTP team members, and this has been included as a KRA for all junior members We plan to have at least 15-20 Microsoft-certified resources in the team at the end of the year.
4. We are also aggressively identifying Microsoft-sponsored training programs and workshops, and sending senior team members for the same

Operational Processes – SCRUM

1. As mentioned earlier, the MTP is aggressively adopting SCRUM as the default process for all its projects, especially in competency building teams.
2. VSTS templates are being customized and adopted for effective and efficient SCRUM based projects
3. At this point, 50% of the MTP is on SCRUM

“Reaching Out”

1. The various focus groups have provided significant help/support/consulting to other projects/teams at Persistent in the recent past
2. We have organized training, and opened half the seats for rest of Persistent. BU Ops Leaders have been requested to send nominations
3. The MTP Developer Forums will be shortly opened up to the rest of the company and is proposed to be a one-stop shop for all developer issues and discussions, and a strong knowledge base

Interestingly, way back in February 2003, I had sent this mail:

Background

1. Technology is moving too fast, and we need a lot of dedicated effort simply to catch up and stay in touch. We have barely managed to stay abreast of developments in .NET, Web Services, Microsoft Office and Tools and other areas. Security is another major area; so is bioinformatics. We are lagging behind in many of the core technology areas.

2. In many projects, people just do not get time to do investigations and prototyping unless the client expressly sanctions or requires it. This leads to potentially a lot of missed leads and possibilities.

3. There is very little knowledge sharing, and practically no mechanism wherein projects can benefit from the learnings and experience in other teams. Mechanisms like Thursday lectures, Monthly status reports are very limited in usefulness.

4. As we grow larger, the need to recruit and train people will be felt more and more strongly. Learning on the job, on billed projects, is not always possible. What we require is a good bench management and training strategy.

Setting up a Technology Incubation and R&D Group

I am proposing the setting up of a Technology Incubation and R&D Group, with the following charter:

1. To keep abreast of technology trends and groom experts in these areas.
2. To provide projects support in technology investigations, prototyping and other related activities.
3. To seed project groups with trained people.
4. To provide back office support to Bizdev.

How is this different from the earlier TID?

1. This group will not concentrate on products, but will concentrate more on technology leadership. IP generated will be a side-effect, although a very important and useful one. The PSPL board can decide/approve the high level technology directions to focus on.

2. This group will have a very minimal permanent staff, consisting of an Exec (part time), and one or two TMs/ATMs. The rest of the staff will consist strictly of the benched resources, or resources billed to customers for specific tasks.

3. Resources from the group will be freely moved to project teams and vice versa. No binding on resources allocated to the group to "stay till TID project is completed"

Interesting to see how ideas evolve, and yet, remain so much the same!

Don't Deal in Round Numbers

2007-05-13T12:52:00.000+05:30

From Mark McCormack’s "What they don't teach you at Harvard Business School"
Category: Negotiation
Title: Don't Deal in Round Numbers
Page: 146

Round numbers beg to be negotiated, usually by counter-offer round numbers. Odd numbers sound harder, firmer, less negotiable.

I hate to hear "a hundred thousand dollars" as a number thrown out in negotiations. That's the world's most negotiable number. Make it $95,500 or $104,500. Either way you're probably going to end up with more.

Step Back and Relax

2007-05-13T12:51:00.000+05:30

From Mark McCormack’s "What they don't teach you at Harvard Business School"
Category: Negotiation
Title: Step Back and Relax
Page: 153

Counter emotional outburts by going emotionally limp. Say anything except what you probably want to say. "Let me think about that", or "I'll call you back". Perceive it as a game with winners and losers, because that's what it is: a game of wits-and who's going to be the first to lose theirs.

Pick Your Shots

2007-05-13T12:50:00.000+05:30

From Mark McCormack’s "What they don't teach you at Harvard Business School"
Category: Getting Ahead
Title: Pick Your Shots
Page: 77

The quickest way to lose credibility is to rage about minor offences because of a build-up over major ones. This is the corporate version of getting a divorce because your spouse squeezes toothpaste form the middle of the tube. We're all susceptible to it, but it also shows immaturity and reveals lack of good judgement. Moreover, most companies do not have the time to psychoanalyse you to find out where the real problems lie.

When you join a new company at any level, the job comes with a certain amount of chips. Your judgement as to when - and over what - to use these chips will either add to your winnings or send you looking for another game.

Act in Anger but Never React in Anger

2007-05-13T12:49:00.000+05:30

From Mark McCormack’s "What they don't teach you at Harvard Business School"
Category: Negotiating
Title: Act in Anger but Never React in Anger
Page: 154

Anger, and other strong emotions can be effective negotiating tools, but only as a calculated act, never as a reaction. I read somewhere that a photo of Nikita Khrushchev’s historic shoe-pounding incident at the UN revealed that he was still wearing both his shoes. A third “for-pounding-only” shoe? That’s calculation.

How to Determine Value

2007-05-13T12:45:00.000+05:30

From Mark McCormack’s "What they don't teach you at Harvard Business School"
Category: Marketability
Title: How to Determine Value
Page: 127

A lot of times you cannot. But the usual business answers - "what someone is willing to pay" or "what it costs us to make" - are often worse than no answer at all.

In determining the value of what you are selling, it's helpful to ask yourself these questions:

How unique is it? Can they buy it for less from our competitor? If so, are there some real qualitative advantages to our product?

Can I sell it for more to their competition?

How badly or quickly do they need it?

What would it cost to replace it?

Are there any precedents that help me?

Is there a "passion factor"?

Is this a one-time deal, or is this the future?

When you have a pretty good idea of value, don't be afraid to name your price. There is an advantage in going first in the negotiation. When it is guesswork, try to protect yourself in other ways in the event of success: We arranged a business meeting between Norfolk and Western Railway and the president of Fuji Iron and Steel for $10,000 (in the mid-60s) at a golf course. Later we found out this had generated $17 million in business for Norfolk. Later, I have often asked myself why we did not add "and 1 percent of any business this generates". I am sure they would have said "Fine"!

Divide and Conquer

2007-05-13T12:42:00.000+05:30

From Mark McCormack’s "What they don't teach you at Harvard Business School"
Category: Strategems
Title: Divide and Conquer
Page: 135

This is probably more appropriately phrased "Unite and Conquer". Suggest the same idea to two or more different key executives in the same company, and get them to agree independently that the idea is sound. Then, when they come together to discuss the issue, they will probably agree with you! You can use your discussions with one to influence the other, and act as the middleman. (Bill, Bob really likes this. Bob, Bill really likes this)

Each will feel reassured and less at risk, and will also be able to take credit for the decision. You can force a decision without appearing to do so!

Commentary:
It isn't about lying. A lot of decisions at the executive level are grey areas; not black and white. The idea of this tip is, you can discuss with key people who matter and influence decisions that way, using each other's thoughts very effectively to come up with a best solution acceptable by all. If you wait till the day the decision is made, the executives (or people waiting to make the decision) can get into a lot of personal and ego issues, which can make them do things you do not want them to do.

Let me give you an example. If I have to decide how to split responsibilities between three senior people, its best when I talk to them separately and use each other's thoughts during my individual meetings, before all three come together to discuss how best to proceed :)

TechnoSparsh 2007

2007-05-12T23:47:00.000+05:30

We had a day long event a month back in my group, the Microsoft Technology Practice. Initially planned as a set of presentations, the idea soon blossomed into TechnoSparsh 2007. With lots of technical presentations, treasure hunt, booth decorations, and various fun and game events like dunb charades and mad ads, the event was a roaring success. Everyone participated in full strength and with extremely high levels of commitment, and it was great to see the kind of rapport and team spirit that was on evident display on that day, as well as in the run up to the event.

We plan to make this an annual event, and something that will be eagerly awaited by everyone!

Here's a tribute to the hard work and dedication of my team - our first TechnoSparsh poster!

SQL Server Reporting Services - Caching

2007-05-12T22:49:00.000+05:30

Reporting Services allows caching of reports. But, how do you enable the first user to benefit from the cache? The solution is to pre-populate the cache. SSRS provides a NULL option for delivering and rendering data-driven subscriptions. When such a data driven subscription is executed, the query is executed and results available in the cache, without rendering or delivering the report to anyone. And when your first user demands the report – you already have it in the cache!

Another interesting problem is invalidating the cache. SQL Server 2005 provides query notifications through the Service Broker infrastructure. Using QN, your application can request the database to notify you when relevant data is changed – the database does this by posting the notification in the Service Broker, which is then picked up by your application’s event handler. This handler can then invalidate any application cache.

Can we use this approach on the Reporting Services cache? Yes, we can – using the exposed SOAP APIs! Using the FlushCache(String Report) method of the ReportingService2005 class will flush the cache for the named report (you have to specify the full path name). The ReportingService2005 proxy class allows you to call various web service methods exposed by SSRS.

ADO.NET Data Access Options

2007-05-12T21:26:00.000+05:30

Every application works on data. And nowadays, almost every application works on XML. When connecting to a database using ADO.NET, you have a myriad of options: how do you decide which one is best?

Here's a quick guide:

DataSets and DataReaders are excellent if you are very comfortable with the relational model, and need high performance and complete control over your data. This is also great if you have data-bound UI controls in your application. Of course, if you need to hold data in memory (for example, WinForms applications with data binding), require client side sorting and searching, or require manipulating data from different sources, use DataSets. DataReaders are great for fast, read-only access to data.

On the other hand, if you want to expose your data to other B2B/B2C applications, or if you are handling unstructured, sparse data, use SQLXML. SQLXML is also great for loading bulk data into relational tables.

Architects...

2007-05-12T21:14:00.001+05:30

Becoming an Architect is a journey towards becoming one who dreams of a solution, rather than the one who builds it.

Quote of the Day

2007-05-12T00:19:00.000+05:30

It's not enough to get better. You need to get better faster than the others are getting better!