So President Obama won a second term. Congratulations to POTUS and all my friends who supported him. And I do feel bad for several friends who genuinely feel bad that Romney did not win . I didn’t think either candidate had it in them to help this country prosper. The ideal candidate in my mind needed more Obama like stances on social issues, and a mix of Obama and Romney stances on economic issues. But that is not going to happen any time soon I guess.
What fascinated me most in this election was the use of quantitative methods in Obama campaign. At a high level, there are 3 things campaigns need to know
1. Who to target to secure enough votes ?
2. Who to target to get funding ?
3. What to tell these 2 groups, and using which media ?
And one way or other, the Obama campaign seem to have succeeded on all three, and hence Obama gets to be President for 4 more years. So far so good – but that is not the part that fascinates me.
Now, with the elections behind them – will the administration still invest in big data analytics to govern better? That is the possibility that fascinates me. I sure hope the answer is YES (Not YES WE CAN, but YES WE WILL 🙂 )
Now, the administration does not create laws – Congress does. And given the control of house and senate are not changing according to latest poll results- the chance of a different type of law making is pretty low if nothing changes. But things could change – and if all arms of government can use a little more of decisions based on data, and a little less of “political gut” based decisions – maybe this country can start prospering again. The type of analytics needed for policy making is not exactly the same as the narrow objectives of campaigning – but I would argue that similar principles apply. And just like in enterprise software projects, I suspect that the hard work is less of tech work, its probably change management.
Second presidential terms are all about leaving a legacy, I am told – I would love to remember Obama as the president who used data effectively to win 2 elections, and then used data to effectively govern this great country. Probably wishful thinking on my part – but hey, I make a living doing BI work for my clients, AND I am jet lagged as I am typing this at 2 AM 🙂
I am also rather curious now on whether Indian politicians will use big data analytics in their campaigns. If they do, India might see some interesting times.
Last time I went to India was in May of this year. And I came back totally convinced that Mobility and Cloud have tremendous potential there. As I am flying back home to Phoenix now, after a whirlwind trip to India, I have a better perspective of opportunities and challenges.
I know BoneyM might not be popular with some of the readers – so check this video out. When I think of mobility in India , the lyrics of the song that goes “…6 beautiful roses, and no body to pluck them..” come to mind.
First, some observations from last week when I was in India.
Internet speed in India has increased by leaps and bounds, but hotels surely have ways to go in terms of bandwidth they provide their guests. I spoke to the staff at both Windsor and Leela Palace in Bangalore, both amazing hotels – and was told I will be pleasantly surprised if I visit a year from now. I will take them for their word since I know first hand over the years that they take customer service more seriously than almost any other hotel I have stayed in.
Mobile phone bandwidth on the other hand is a different story. I had poor up-time even with international roaming for data and voice. Voice surely was better than data by a long margin.
Device diversity is probably bigger in India than in US – and I found everything from iPhones, iPads, Androids of all form factors, Nokia phones and several blackberry PDAs. Email and Facebook are probably the most used apps from what I could see.
But almost every person I met is an expert in SMS messages. India runs on SMS (and missed calls – no voicemails, people just leave a “missed” call as an indication that they expect a call back).
Mobile banking continues to be a big hit with even the “tech averse” older generation taking an active interest now. I was pleasantly surprised to see many elderly folks take internet connections to just read news on internet, and do internet banking and save trips to the bank.
Mobile users in India seem to have lower expectations of functionality and performance than those in US and Western Europe. However, they do expect extreme simplicity. Given a choice, they would like to live in a world of SMS alone.
With these observations, I have to believe there is tremendous opportunity for someone to take that market by storm. Volume is not a problem in India – there are a billion people, and vast majority seem to have a mobile device of some sort. However – I think a mobile solution for India should have some common aspects to succeed.
1. It should be inexpensive
India needs a volume pricing – and buyers are price concious. And this would mean whatever solution is put in place needs a solid platform to go with it that gives economies of scale.
2. It should work in any device
There is no one favorite device. It is a gadget friendly nation
3. Wherever possible, use SMS
The country practically runs on SMS. It will take time to change to something else. But if SMS can solve an issue today, there will be lot of people who will buy. This is also good from a multilanguage support point of view. It will be an expensive undertaking to build apps for each Indian language.
4. Offline capabilities is a must
Given high availablity of bandwidth is a pipe dream in several parts of India, some offline capability is a must for any mobile app
5. Government, banks, construction and transportation are easy pickings
Forget your political leanings – India is all about big government, and people look at government for all kinds of things. Vendors should embrace this and not fight it. On bright side, there is plenty of interest from government to IT enable everything. Banks are already on forefront of mobility initiatives, but the opportunity is huge. Construction is probably where the biggest bang for the buck is – there is a high rise coming up anywhere you look. And I am yet to see engineers use a mobile device to do their work in those. Public and private transportation companies are used by everyone, yet hardly make use of mobility. These are the no-brainer type opportunities. I can think of another two dozen or so avenues for mobility initiatives
6. India needs local talent to develop and sell mobile solutions
This is applicable not for just mobile – but ANY solution really. It is a unique place, that many from outside India will find hard to figure out at a level needed to succeed in business. It is not a big deal for vendors since India has amazing talent locally, and a large expat community that can bridge any gaps. It will be a very strategic investment to utilize this talent pool and invest in it now.
7. Extensibility, multi language support can wait a bit
On first impression – it looks like several users in India can live for some time with out of the box functionality. From a good design perspective, of course it is better to build things with extensibility and multi-language support in mind. But it can wait for a bit – I think a profitable business model can be built for short to mid-term without needing a lot of enhancements and multi-language support. Of course I will gladly stand corrected if people who live in India point me in another direction. I am basing this on my short visits, and I am fully aware that I might not have picked up on the nuances.
The question in my mind is – who will seize the first mover advantage in India? Will it be SAP? IBM? Startups? By first mover – I mean the first to try to solve the problem in large scale. I am well aware that this is happening already in a low scale fragmented mode. I must admit I am quite tempted to give it a go myself.
Every enterprise software vendor I know of touts innovation in every message they share with their ecosystem. It has many flavors – open innovation, inclusive innovation and so on. Yet, there are very few products that come out that customers cheer as innovative.
That shows a couple things clearly, in my opinion
1. There is more thought leadership and marketing about innovation, and less actual innovation
2. Innovation does not scale
More Talk, Less Action
This is not a surprise, since generally talk precedes action in software circles ( as proven by hype cycles of SOA, social business, big data etc in last 5 years alone). SOA by now is well accepted, and real projects use it. When it first was talked about and evangelized, very few projects used it. Social business and Big data will most probably follow that same trend.
But unlike with SOA, I see a disturbing trend with newer topics. People who talked up SOA had a good proportion of folks who knew what they were talking about. They could articulate the value proposition, and answer criticism logically and explain the pitfalls. Even then, it took several years for actual projects to use SOA at scale.
That is not true for currently hyped stuff like cloud, big data, social business etc. There is an absolute minority of people who can sound credible when they talk about these topics. That scares me. A lot of evangelists of cloud, for example, have never seen a data center, worked closely with an IT organization , been involved with a CAPEX/OPEX decision in their life at big scale, or negotiated a software contract to know how lock in happens in on-demand and on-premises world. Yet, they have no problems advising CIOs (at least allegedly advising) on what they should do about cloud. And they are the loudest – so I always worry some CIO will inadvertently fall for it and make a bad decision. A lot of reasonable voices on cloud just drown unnoticed because of the loud evangelizing of the people who are unreasonable.
There is a simple reason I worry about this topic. I get paid for actual execution of projects. When unrealistic expectations are set for my clients, my job gets harder because a lot of my time will be spent in convincing people to let go of fantasies and get realistic. That is time that I should have spent in executing the project. I also get criticized by many friends that I have no incentive as a consultant to promote cloud, since it reduces consulting effort. Actually nothing is farther from truth. Cloud needs a lot of change management, integration and migration work . I ( and others like me) will earn a living doing that work instead of on-premises work. So – no , I do not worry for a second about my work disappearing.
Does Innovation Scale ?
I used to think till very recently that innovation scales. I was wrong – it does not scale. I need to live with it. Innovation – and the associated disruption – is not every ones cup of tea. In fact most people cannot live with innovation in their work life. The same people usually love innovation as a consumer of someone else’s work.
To begin with – it is very difficult for two people to agree on definition of innovation. For example, SAP promotes design thinking a lot. It is a simple philosophy, but if you ask 3 people in SAP to explain it to you – you will rarely get any consistency in their responses. That is not a bad thing really. If two smart teams are given a problem to solve – and they both follow design thinking approach – there is practically no possibility that the two teams will come out with same solution. We all have our biases – formed by our life experiences. That decides what questions we ask, and you only get responses for questions you ask. And the solution you design depends on those answers. Ergo – design thinking is not a magic bullet that helps industrialize innovation. It does help provide a structure – and that is pretty much it.
We all know what happens when design happens by committee. And if Jobs and Ive tried to ask customers on how to get requirements for Apple products, how would that have worked for them ? So, essentially true innovation needs special people, who by definition are small in number in any population. And even those people can only come out with so many new ideas. Look at Apple – they have shifted to an incremental improvement model now. May be something truly innovative will come again from them in future, but it is a good point for rest of us to know how mass innovation does not happen.
I am still on the fence on effect of inclusion on innovation. That is what I am planning to think through in the next 36 hours or so that it will take for me to reach India.
And Vijay Says... 