Organizational Processes that matter July 12, 2007
Posted by savitakini in General.add a comment
In my past life, when I was an engineer (I still consider myself one, despite the MBA!)..I used to be quite hung up about processes, code quality, documentation etc to the extent that often my persistence used to tick-off my colleagues who loved coding and didn’t want to be bothered about processes.
Since my MBA however, the passion for processes has not gone away from my life. Now I look for processes in an overall organizational context taking into account business processes, strategic thinking processes, marketing processes, sales processes. I get very unnerved when I see a team investing in building something because they think they should build it. Often the big gap is in – are they the right people, do they have the money to invest, where is the market, which is the best market to go after etc. This due diligence is often missing.
In a business environment, the sheer fluidity of the industry & the technology, requires that the processes themselves be ‘agile’ to incorporate the chanding scenario. Someplaces, I see all kinds of processes in place to address the customer, but miss out on the processes for employee concerns.
Finally, we have the problem where the origanization has put in all the processes in place for employee concerns, customer concerns etc, but then doesn’t have the mindset, nor the will power to actually execute or follow through on those processes. To make it even more messier, they try to cover up the issues, and the disappointment it causes among all the stakeholders is worse. The organization might as well not gone the the distance in trying to create and put in place half baked processes.
So the question really is
- What processes do really matter for a startup, for a large company, etc.
Mobile Transformations July 8, 2007
Posted by savitakini in Technology.add a comment
When I returned to India in June 06, one of the most striking things I noticed was the usage of mobiles among the common population. There was a whole range of cell phones at reasonable prices, technologies that were available for people to vote for a TV show to buying plane tickets using mobiles. On a trip to Mumbai visiting my parents, my sister laughed at me struggling to type an SMS. She kidded me that for all my fancy gadgets that I used to bring with me from the US, I couldn’t do a simple SMS.
Since the last 1 yr however, I continuously have tried to apprise myself of the transformation in this part of the world caused by the explosion and availability of a mobile techologies at a cost affordable to most users. I have met from startups to MNCs looking at India & China as their next big growth market for telecommunication technologies. Voice is just one part of the big pie, there’s economics around – value added serves from text to multimedia messaging, gaming, mobile conferences etc. Combine that with other vertical industries – Finance/Banking services, medical, education, entertainment – the Innovation & Adoption continues at a fervent pace.
My exposure to this transformation started with the first MobileMonday meeting that was started in Bangalore in July 2006. I had met some smart folks who are driving some of this innovation at Netcore Solutions (Rajesh Jain, Veer Bothra, Girish Nair, Srinivas M) and that perhaps was the begining for me. Since then, after some 8 such meetings, I have become more aware of other interestingplayers in the ecosystems – ActiveMobs (SMS based groups), Zook.in, Motvik, Jatayu Soft, ZivaSoft, mCheck, etc to name a few.
India has the lowest per minute rate in the world for mobile voice calls. To give a comparison, in the US – we paid $70/- for 500 mins, approx 14cents/minute including all charges. Here, I pay about Re 1 per min (current exchange rate is Rs40=$1) and SMS is is almost free. In the US over & above the $70, I also had to shell out almost a $1 per message if I was not on a plan. In India, you don’t need to be on a specific plan to be able to send an SMS. Ofcourse, the carriers are not able to make much on per user basis, but they recover that through the sheer volumes. One has to really admire the operators in India for taking such bold, aggressive and even perhaps innovative business strategy.
What seems to be missing is, a detailed and continuous coverage of this transformation as it unfolds ?
The missing piece is also not just the coverage in terms of the technology evolution itself but also the adoption methodologies, business transformations that are happening in parallel.
