What you saw..

Identities have a funny way of alienating entities.

Drawn in physical resemblance, expressed though localized pervasion of customs, reinforced in rigidness of opinions, identities are an attempt to define my existence much before I became conscious of the infinite abstractness surrounding the very idea of it.

Color of my skin, build of my skull, twirl of my hair, and style of my beard –all cues should converge to stack me in nomenclature of religion, race and regionality.

Choice of my favorite movies, culinary predilection, my pick of books, love for piano rock , should that tell you something about me?

Or subconsciously I am blaring for your attention and too self-effacing to admit it and subsequently surrendering to subtleties of aesthetics.

No, I don’t have a problem with that tattoo on your butt-crack or the belly piercing. It makes me notice you in a way I wouldn’t have in the absence thereof and heck I don’t know what to make of this visual mimesis.

Don’t get me wrong… I am arguably blasé to your desire to resist blending in banalities of average Joe’s fucked up, uninspiring nay unexciting existence. I totally get that…exactly the way I get people’s absurd conformance to logic-defying principles of saying no to animal’s meat on some days of week or deferring big purchases, etc , etc.

Such instances abound, and my humble upbringing in the aegis of God-fearing parents ensured I was in decent know-how of religious do’s and don’ts. So chances are I might know what I am talking about--- now, here is the thing --- When societal tenets set the coordinates for us to baseline the predictability in our outwardly appearance and religious outlook , adherence to an Identity is sought but as a continuum of the content. Now, When I refuse conformance and the tell-tale signs of my raucous dissonance tear down the sanctity of ‘Identity’, hither-to understood in its last archetypal version, paradoxically I am still desperately trying to carve an ‘Identity’, albeit presumably a different one.

Content may have got contaminated but tenacity of concept… never… it just gets louder in assertion much to the dismay of the harbingers of generation gone-by and it's contemporary proponents who remained steadfast believer in the purity of everything that was bequeathed.

So the compass of Identity has moved from an expression of collective noun to desire for intense distinctiveness.

Identity1.0 had the loyalties of larger group with underlying assumption of uniformity of opinions across its subscribers. In contrast, new notion of Identity has practitioners shifting away from the periphery of Identity’s paraphernalia to embody the very idea itself. It’s no statement on the profundity of the new state or genuineness of the new members yet it promises to devitalize the spell of proverbial ‘opium’ under which we have been held for long.

Call it the celebration of individuality, manifestation of our inflated persona, call it your fuck-whatever, even though the world we know has shrunk to the size of your smartphone, it has also placed us in a crucible of yawning contradictions.. its numbing to make sense of several lives we live, trying hard not to let the Identities we grew up with come in way of Identities we long for and Identities we let go of. New order is not just about the movement of enterprise’s production base and extension of their supply chain… it has also heralded the era of cultural trade where aspirations and opportunities are not in parity (understandably so)…where tradeoffs run the business of life and ensconced in the instruments of hedonism we talk about this rut.
Funny!! may be Sad..


PS: ‘Identity’ -2003 was my 3th brush with MPD( after ‘Psycho’ and ‘Primal Fear’) ...climax was a beauty.

Getting your Ps and Ts right

For a B school graduate freshly out of haven of academia, it takes a while to digest that folks in new companies are not rubbing their hands in anticipation of your recommendation and suggestions in the last slide. Fed on a staple of case studies, we dreamt of easing our way through the complex 'strategic' problems plaguing organization . We would do some radical earth-shattering number crunching of their performance indicators, market trends and industry benchmark. We will call to question their unacceptable positioning at right-bottom quadrant of fix-it-all-need-analysis-cost-benefit-bell graph and anoint them to that elusive market leadership position. How ???
Just wait for that last slide of recommendation and next steps. It was like the richer cousin of some regional party election manifesto in terms of articulation. Sexy, promising, eloquent and forward -looking. So what went wrong in the real life ?

Actually, nobody asked for one.

So that begs a question whether they were too timid to acknowledge our intellectual radiance or we just stuffed our brains with jargons that were rendered meaningless in the face of organizational dynamics.
Or we just thought too much too soon.

My short stint in an IT company has taught me a thing or two about organizations. Though not a fair extrapolation, yet I would like to believe my observations will be traceable to majority of corporate workplaces.
I hope to be remain objective in my narration and therefore, may be 1 point at a time is what I may do justice to:

1. People, process , technology (PPT): My presales experience has given me tremendous exposure to molestation of this otherwise profound abbreviation. If you are entrusted with outlining a transformational framework for your client’s existing set-up or in-house divisional restructuring or executing a new project regardless of scale , remember this- You have three candidate dimensions to effect changes and drive efficiencies.

Technology might be the easiest to turnaround but the efficacy of any change across any of these 3 dimensions are so closely related to the readiness and acceptance of the other 2 that absence of alignment spells doom for all transformational undertakings. Before any radical shift, get your people in line for they are the end-users and it’s in the trenches of junior management that change agents lose their way.

Then pan out the components of workflow and identify the points where the implementation of new technology will cause changes. Once the complexities arising out of new technology adoptions have been identified and remediated, conduct a pilot phase of implementation. This will help in picking up the bottlenecks that were glossed over in planning and assessment phase.

Once the big –bang or phased deployment of change element is complete, next step would be to closely monitor the performance metrics of new environment to stability and have a help-desk for handholding of end-users in their understanding of new set-up. Now just as I wrote the last line, I felt my professional bias has taken over the neutral mindset i intended to stick with.

To cut the chase, even though you may have the wisest of intentions or best in breed technologies in backyard, unless there is an aggressive strategy to engage people, little can be achieved. Now I won’t pontify what great feats have been achieved by people willing to do something inspite of absence of all standard enablers yet my takeaway is that even in context of profit driven organization, sustainable benefits can be realized if only managers invest in nurturing employees and upholding organization’s values system. Long back in Mr Handa’s witty one-liners I read- you can fool the people you work with, you can fool the people you work under but and that's a big BUT..you can never fool the people who work under you.

Hypocrisy on the part of top management can let indolence run amok. Likewise, a battery of top managers totally dedicated to customer’ cause and employee’s legitimate interests will draw a multiplier effect on the morale and motivation of the people they represent. We have been told all this in context of leader's virtues but corporate set-up has a wonderful way of inverting the fallacies of democracy. In your company you don't get the manager you demand but we most certainly strive to deliver as he wishes.

Transition phase of IT

Traditionally, IT has long burdened itself with the tag of ‘business enabler’ and even that was a kind euphemism for an organizational function that works in the background. Clichés of IT-business alignment have really suffered a reality check with the recessionary headwinds of 2008 and subsequent years have forced CIOs to ask hard-hitting questions which had got sidetracked for its elementary genre. That question has started haunting them back. In one of the Gartner reports, GM’s CIO puts it across without any bells and whistles – ‘how do we help in selling more cars’!!Boom. There you are. With all the fancy paraphernalia of disruptive technologies and cutting edge voodoos, just one explanation is begged of IT head honchos – how do you help me sell more, how do you increase my top-line, how do you make me grow organically.

We have seen process innovations that have helped in reducing the cost incurred in procurement of IT assets. Not to mean operational optimization has become any less significant but at the same time it is sort of IT putting its own house in order that reaching out for impacting business development. If an organization’s IT spend were to be bucketed into before the sale, during the sale and after the sale categories, only minuscule dollars and inputs find way to during the sale and before the sale dimensions.


Cursory analysis of key IT contributions across industry verticals for past decades will be along supply chain automation, business processes optimization ,accounting, inventory control, purchase order and several related sub-activities. Though critical, these capabilities relegated IT to an uncelebrated contributor to overall business. Another study proclaims more than 80% of an enterprise’s IT budget goes to running the ‘Business as usual’ (support & maintenance)and only 20% find way to innovative projects that can actually optimize the way IT conducts itself and may align more visibly to selling process. With the advent of cloud computing, IT has a real chance of bringing its investments in line with business demands but more than the cost element it would be the value propositions of agility and responsiveness that IT department must push for. Saving 2 penny in IT expenditure will slowly become a hygiene factor and if IT helps me in selling 5 pennies more, that’s when business will take notice.


With my limited understanding, I feel a CIO can thump up the table in a boardroom if he can just get the mojo of mobility and social networking right. Cloud for sure is a big differentiator and will change the operating model fundamentally. Yet, on the sales front, when IT starts powering the sales application, products are displayed on tablet, giving the feel of interface and usability, inventory is checked real-time, delivery schedules vetted , POs are generated on the fly, that will herald the true enablement of man on the field and bring back rave reviews for IT. The ergonomics of tablets and smartphones will need power of mobile business productivity applications to unleash their true potential in enterprise context. Companies have started owning up the concepts of Bring your own device where employees are promoted to use their authorized gadgets to access corporate applications. Not just it eliminates the capital expenses on assets but also allows employees not remain tethered to their desks. As more and more taskforces derive resources from diverse teams and functional units, collaboration regardless of geographical distance and disparate applications would determine how productive they are in their joint endeavors. Mobility is one idea in enterprise sphere whose implementation will allow real time communication and increase responsiveness and visibility across the value chain.


Closely related to the idea of collaboration is emergence of social media which has radically changed the way consumers connect for their personal communications however smart enterprises should appreciate the great pace at which tools of Facebook and twitter have invaded the consumer psyche and a grudge against service provider or product vendor finds disproportionate reverberations. None of the media had so far been successful in establishing a duplex communication in a way new 21st century portals have. The other day one of my Facebook pal had his under-service airtel number reassigned to some random guy. In all issues ranging from my-dog-is –so- happy to what-was –mayawati-thinking he shot his outage on Facebook and within a day he had detractors of Airtel liking the past and narrating similar woes in comments section. If Airtel PR thinks they can sit over such tid-bits events for long they should stop smoking whatever they are now. During my brief stint in Technical Support Services presales I had come across workflow of support department actively mining millions of tweets for outage specific keywords and establishing direct contact with the aggrieved party post verification of entitlement. Here’s the thing, in the age of fickle customers with power of snapping back with tweets and posts you really can’t afford them terrorizing your existing customers and prospects. And make no mistake, way way back in 70-80’s when Zukerberg’s father was a jobless youth, Intel was forced to recall million digital calculators which had a floating point approximation error that too recurring after several million calculations. The impact of the apparent flaw was insanely disproportionate to the outrage building against Intel in the media and academician. Just to reiterate, the elements of brand promise and brand performance are shaken by apparently trivial events. The multiplier effects of social media if leveraged thoughtfully can spring big positive surprises. For a CIO, opportunity lies in marshaling his analytics resources to gauge the indicators trending the market and give actionable insights to business units.

In my next article on the same topic I would try breaking these macro-trends into sub-components with a ground-level commentary of how some leading enterprises have institutionalized the paradigm of new age data center.