India’s sports awards – time to change at least the names ?


Of course Cricket is the big dog – and cricketers earn more money and fame than every one else in sports in India. Field hockey probably is next in demand, since India occasionally shows sparks of brilliance. Then there is a variety of other things like athletics, swimming, tennis etc where  India tries hard, but generally with limited success.

But despite the lack of glory in international arena – India has always had government sponsored awards for its sports persons – players and coaches. The top three being Rajeev Gandhi Khel Ratna, Arjuna award for players and Drona award for coaches.  Rajeev Gandhi – though I don’t know if he was accomplished in sports or not, was India’s Prime Minister, and probably an award in his name can be justified for his work as an administrator who supported sporting events.

But I do wonder what is the rationale for naming awards after to characters from Hindu Mythology who never stood up for the right thing.

Let us start with Dronacharya – the guy who taught martial arts to both Pandavas (popularly believed to be the good guys) and Kauravas (the bad guys). This is the man, who asked the tribal boy Ekalavya to donate his thumb as tuition fees (guru dakshina) with the sole intention that this tribal kid doesn’t become a better archer than his favorite pupil Arjuna. Years later, this is the same guy – fully knowing his side was on wrong side of justice and morality, picked up the role as chief of army for Kauravas to fight Pandavas. Now – why would the award for best coach be named after this guy, who is known for NOT doing the right thing and being partial to his favorite student ?

Moving over to Arjuna – the ace archer. This guy is a hero only because his teacher (Drona)  and dad (King of devas – Indra) and best friend (Krishna) stacked cards in his favor throughout his life, at the expense of others who played by the rules.  Now, why would the best sports person award be in honor of such a character?

Politicians decide who gets these awards every year. Some choices are inexplicable when announcements are made. That is a problem that is not easily solvable – at least in a secular country like India, government should be smart enough to at least make the award not honor less than ideal characters from Hindu mythology. Can’t they be named after sporting heros of past? Or neutral names?

Please please pretty please

Are you sure you can make use of REAL TIME data?


Several BI vendors, insist that real time data will magically change the enterprise world. They may be right – I have often heard my customers echo that line too. But here is the question that doesn’t get asked often enough – what will you do with it, if information is delivered to you real time?

When world moved from handwritten letters to emails, there was a definite improvement in speed of business. But how long did it take, before people let emails sit unread in inboxes without acting on it? Same with twitter – how many people make use of real time information that gets bombarded via twitter? They choose to bookmark it somehow for later consumption. You can only deal with a certain amount of information – the rest is not useful, and often counterproductive.

This is much bigger in enterprise scale issues. Lets say you find at real time that there is a surge of demand in west coast, and you can make a killing by moving inventory from your Midwest stores to the west coast ones. Excellent idea – except – do you have enough people to pick,pack and ship in real time? Do you have 200 trucks that can show up in next hour to transfer the goods? Can your store systems handle such a load? Do you have people watching real time data stream in – and empowered to act on it? If not, can you realistically automate responses to real time alerts.

Getting real time information is just one part of the solution – even a small one at that – your ability to react to it is what matters more.  The investment needed to react to real time information is pretty significant for most companies.  Which begs the question – how many companies will make significant investments on getting real time information?

The alternate paradigm is “right time”. Well – sounds like a better  idea to me, except there is no one “right time” for everything.  For some one who does day trading, getting up to the second data is important – but for a rank amatuer investor like me, it does not matter much at all. Stock market decisions can be abstracted to “buy and sell” at my level. And I can automate that by alerts and automatic orders. I lose some flexibility, but feel comfortable at the risk level that I don’t mind. Evidently the definition of right time is different for me and a day trader. In the enterprise scene, it depends on multiple factors at various points in time.  And as business evolves – you could get caught up chasing your tail on what is right time.

Real time information surely has its place – I have no doubts – but we need to seriously think about what part of a company’s information needs have a “real” need for such information. “Actionable BI” is probably a nice way to describe it – but actionable does not always mean you get to act on it. It just means if you had the ability to act on it – you could have acted on it. BI does not dictate if it is actionable or not – your operational abilities decide that. In our extreme excitement about cool technology, and Moore’s law and all that – I guess we can all be forgiven for not thinking about the surrounding issues 🙂

Random musings on customers and vendors


Many times during this week, I had conversations on the dynamics between customers and vendors with my buddies.  These are all not connected thoughts, but let me type it here for some day in future, when some of it may make sense – at least to me 🙂

 

In B2B – Customers and Vendors are always strategizing to take advantage of each other. CRM and SRM are practically aimed at the same thing – find as much about your business partner so that you can gain an upper hand in the short term and long term transactions.  B2C is similar – except, the SRM is mostly social in nature. I, as a consumer, cannot keep track of Vendors who will sell to me  – so I trust social channels to give me a fair chance.

 

A common concern from customers is that vendor companies do not share information internally, so the customer has to redundantly provide data in transactions.  This led to the big mantra of 360 degree view of customer – every company out there wanted this, and very few did get there.  Customers would really like their vendors to do all they can to prevent redundant data entry etc, but they will cry bloody murder and sue the vendors if they think Vendor is storing “personal” information about them. The point is – it is not easy to do this, and technology is not always the limiting factor. Example : No sales person on a commission will enter “all” his account management information on a system where some one else can use it. Even if he did – in some countries, he cannot enter certain information that can identify you as a person.  In some other countries, certain data needs to be stored in a server that resides locally in that country and so on. So, even if the vendor has the best CRM system in the world, there is no way of getting around it without serious overhaul of culture, human behavior, incentive schemes and the legal framework. In short, it ain’t happening any time soon in a meaningful way.

 

Customer will not always upgrade to the latest and greatest version of a product, unless they are forced into it somehow. However, they do expect 100% support of what they once bought and also want the vendor to continuously innovate. A lot of consumer software can do innovations much easier than enterprise software strictly because they are not tied to backward compatibility.  If enterprise software can get to that paradigm, we have a prayer of expecting real innovation from vendors.

 

Bottom line – customer wants to pay the least possible money and expect the vendor to be there for them for ever and ever. Vendors on the other hand would like to be constantly paid for what they do, usually via a maintenance fee .

 

Neither customer nor vendor will let go of their profit motive.  But here is the thing – vendor can quantify the profit better than customer. Vendor knows cost and revenue. Customer knows the cost in most vases – but in most cases , customers have to guess or approximate the value.  Due to this – Customers can fairly guess what margins a vendor has, where as the Vendor cannot guess well in most cases on what is the exact value a customer gets, since the customers themselves cannot figure this out easily.  In those cases where customers and vendors know each other to a good extent, the chance of making a deal is much higher. In my opinion, this is also why some customers and vendors stick by each other although they both term each other as difficult. Known devils are generally better than the unknown ones 🙂

 

And finally – business is always done between people. They represent companies – but they still are people who need to feel comfortable dealing with each other. A lot of attributes of these people get attributed to the companies they represent.  So when you hear things like “that Vendor is hard to work with” or “that customer is cheap” or “that company only does on-premises, never on-demand” – most often, it just refers to one person, or a very small group within that company.  But at an abstract level – especially when used as part of aggregate data – these nuances get lost, and we reach very wrong conclusions.

That is it – end of my rant. It is time to start the weekend.