Hindi cinema has often deliberately pushed the economic policy of the day.
I discovered that strong economic messages were conveyed through some Hindi film songs... Like the bas itna sa khwab hai (just this dream) of Yes Boss (1997) reflecting the dreams and ambitions of post-liberalisation middle class youth, or Govinda's what is (your) mobile number do from Haseena Maan Jayegi (1999) as a take on new telecom policy.
Cinema is a very powerful medium of our popular culture, it subliminally reflects the economic arguments of the time. The hero and villain in films often symbolise prevailing economic conditions.
For example, each time we have a meaningless legislative control, the villain is the one who violates it. In 1950s' films, he was a ration shop owner or a money lender, as those days villainy was associated with hoarding and shortages, then we see him as smuggler in the 1960s and '70s films.
This is not as much reflected in the behaviour of the hero, except perhaps in Amitabh Bachchan's angry young man, which meant "I am sick and tired of the system".
The transition of Indian economy is evident from the days of drought and landlessness of Mother India (1956), Do Bigha Zameen or Lagaan (2001) to the affluence and ambitions of Yes Boss. Every time such major changes occur, cinema seems to capture it, not only in visuals but also in dialogue.
For example, Gupt (1994) has a scene with a strong debate on whether India should have foreign direct investment. The rest of the film has nothing to do with that clip, but the scene presents strong arguments from both sides
We should see if this powerful medium can be used to shape attitudes on what we want to do in the future: like dispelling the notion that reforms are about the rich, or more topical issues where government machinery has failed to convey the message, like the power theft or health concerns such as HIV/AIDS
Bollywood does keep a tab on its times, but blink, and you will miss it. It is the journey for that elusive clip in a long movie, the rest of which will have nothing to do with the prevailing economic situation.
Until 2009, every event depicted the Indian economy as a tiger, one of the Asian economies poised to shine. This year, against a backdrop of global recession, conference titles started to shift: India: A Tiger or an Elephant? But while the country has experienced a growth slowdown, it is nevertheless positioned to weather the harsh economic conditions and to thrive.
There are four distinct characteristics of the Indian economy that soften the impact of today's conditions: demographics, regulation, exports, and the informal economy.
First, India's demographics are favorable to growth. It's a young country with low dependency ratios. Millions of Indians under the age of 30 are slowly receiving better access to healthcare and education, which enables younger Indians to drive the economy by virtue of middle class growth. They will become consumers, spend discretionary income, and enjoy the associated status. This growing middle class will continue to create large levels of domestic customer demand for goods and services.
Second, the fall of Satyam may turn out to be a blessing in disguise for India. The scandal has intensified calls in the country for greater financial transparency, corporate governance, and shareholder activism. Furthermore, the swift and strong response by the country's regulatory agencies has provided global investors with a positive signal that the Indian government, while not perfect, is dead serious about smart financial regulations and accountability.
Third, the Indian parliament is on the verge of passing a bill that would create hundreds of special economic zones (SEZs) around the coastal perimeter of the country. These zones provide the Indian government a vehicle with which to attract significant foreign direct investment (FDI) from overseas and indigenous multinational corporations (MNCs). The SEZs, while not without controversy, are attractive to global investors for their favorable land policies and generous tax incentives. In the global race for FDI, India's SEZs could afford it an unmatched competitive advantage among other emerging economies.
Finally, and most critically, the country's vibrant informal economy, in which goods and services have been traded in the absence of official markets for hundreds of years, affords India's overall economy an invaluable -- and unique -- layer of protection. While traditional development and financial statistics estimate Indian market segments for the global business community, these analyses rarely capture the true weight of this economic activity, which by nature is difficult to approximate.
As the global recession affects its foreign direct investment inflows and exports, India's informal economy acts as a piece of elastic, connective tissue that picks up slack in the system and provides markets for goods and services that may not have been otherwise traded given the circumstances. The existence of this informal economy combined with an emerging middle class, a growing financial regulatory environment, and the creation of more SEZs makes India uniquely situated to survive the current economic storm, no matter if it is a roaring tiger or a slowly moving elephant.
Over the span of a few decades, India has lost almost half its beaches along its once beautiful coastline. And in a few years from now, India won't have a single beach left. We are losing our beaches every second because of simple man made errors. It's not too late - many miles of beaches can still be saved but the government is doing nothing. In fact most state governments are making things worse.
It's known around the world as the murder of India's beaches. Even though it's not clear to the naked eye, beaches are constantly moving, the sand moves up the coast line pushed by the winds and the waves especially during the monsoon.
Now when a port is built, it breaks this natural movement of sand. As a result sand piles up south of the port. But north of the beach the sand gets eroded as it moves further north. If it goes on there will only be rocks, not beaches left.
That is why Marina beach in Chennai has so much sand - but if one goes north of the port, the beaches are gone, lost. They are destroyed.
In other parts of the world, it is mandatory for all ports to dredge the sand from one side and place it on the other side, but not in India.
Instead in India the government gives lucrative contracts to businessmen to fill the eroded beaches with rocks and build walls of rocks. India is building so many miles of rock walls where beaches used to be, that may be 20 or more years from now our entire coastline will be one long rock wall - longer than the great wall of China.
What's killing the beaches even faster is the number of ports India is building. Instead of 5 or 6 big modern profitable ports, India is commissioning a small new port every few months; most are loss making and cannot afford to dredge the sand.
There is another devastating effect of the death of our beaches. The sand on beaches acts as a filter and stops the salt in sea water from going inland. The problem with rocks is that they can't act as a filter. So wherever the eroded beaches are replaced by rocks and rock walls, more and more villages on our coastline have discovered that the underground water in their area has become saline, which in turn means that their crops and livelihood are dying.
India used to be famous for its 'necklace' of beaches unless something is done fast. There will be no beaches but India will be famous for another kind of necklace, a necklace of rocks.
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Executive Summery: Implementing a Self Service Business Intelligence platform in the Enterprise is not a simple task. It requires aligning People, Technology and Process to a Business vision that needs to be strong enough to bridge the gaps among different departments and have them collaborate single mindedly. However the benefits of undertaking such as effort can be substantial and can positively influence the performance of everyone in the organization.
Throughout the years, I have been witness to many Data Warehousing projects that started as an effort to help the business users make business decisions using information and along the way transformed into data centralization exercises. Somewhere during the project execution, the team lost focus on what the organization needed to be more efficient and productive, and became tangled in the complexity of the data. The Data Warehouse became an information bank, storing all valuable data elements into an electronic vault.
The expectations from the project teams were very similar,the teams believed that if they could put enough valuable information in a single location, the business users would come knocking on the door, begging to be given access to the information. Reality prove them wrong, as the expectations from the business users grew up disproportionately given the amount time it was taking IT to complete the project. The business users expected a silver bullet, kind of "click here and your information problems will be solved button", but instead they got a mountain of disorganized data.
If anything, the early Data Warehousing efforts did make the business users realize the value that information could bring to the operation of the business. The business community also concluded that waiting for IT was a long and tedious process and at the end they were not getting what they needed.The solution was simple, many business teams started hiring their own "shadow" IT organizations, bringing people who had the skills and knowledge of the systems into functional areas bypassing IT controls and governance. The irony came as the Data Warehousing effort was supposed to bring the data into a single location, but these spawned initiatives looked to solve specific business problems by creating small functional data marts across the enterprise.Furthermore, as people were using different methods and sources to retrieve and calculate the data, it was a rare occurrence for the numbers to match.
After some time, someone invariable would question how much money and resources were dedicated to these internal/external reporting and analysis teams. The findings were always shocking; in many organizations, these informal IT groups were bigger than the official IT Business Intelligence team. People would slowly start to realize that they could merge all these teams into a single Business Intelligence (BI) team with a significant impact on the bottom line. However there was still some hesitance to form a core team as they did not want to repeat the errors from the past. A new, fresh approach was needed, and so the concept was born: what if IT could provide "The Platform" that enabled the Business for Self Service across the Enterprise. The idea was intriguing, what was lacking was the know-how to make it from concept to practice. This article will focus on defining the concept of enabling a Business Intelligence Self Service Platform in the Enterprise and then laying the foundation to make such an idea a true possibility in any organization today.
Defining a Business Intelligence Self Service Platform from a business perspective
We can easily define "Business Intelligence Self Service" as a service provided by an open Business Intelligence platform that enables business users to access the information they need by themselves, using an easy to understand User Interface (UI) that is defined in business terms and not IT jargon. Perhaps the most critical feature of such a service is to eliminate the "IT touch" for the users to create new reports; the platform should support the capability to combine existing data elements into a custom report. It goes beyond providing ad-hoc capabilities to truly enable a creativity engine that makes it possible for the business users to follow the Information Analysis Cycle (Figure 1) quickly, by themselves, and without calling for IT support.
Figure 1 Information Analysis Cycle
In order to better explain the concept of a self Service BI platform, let's follow the Information Analysis Cycle with a typical Retail Merchandising scenario: A cake mix vendor, MiaCake, is in a grocery retailer buyer's office arguing his company needs to raise prices 15% because of high fuel prices. The buyer is skeptical as he does not know the effect this price increase will have on the consumer behavior. He starts conceptualizing how to measure the potential effect. He remembers that three months ago the competing brand was on sale and the different in price was about 15%. He writes a report comparing MiaCake's sales and the competing brand sales during the week the competing brand was in promotion using the company's BI platform, that by the way enables him to create his own reports and analysis on demand. One minute later with the seller still at the buyer's office, the report comes backs and shows sales were down more than 30% for MiaCake, as consumers quickly shifted to the other brand. The vendor is shocked by the results, but can not argue against the data being show in front of him. He then calls his manager and decides to raise prices only by 5% in order to maximize revenue. As depicted in the example above, timing is everything. If a Self Service Platform had not been present, the report might not have been possible to build without IT intervention. The vendor and the buyer would have had to resort to non-factual arguments probably leading to a less profitable scenario.
Why enable a Business Intelligence Self Service Platform in the Enterprise?
Enabling a Business Intelligence Self Service Platform across the enterprise can have a positive financial impact in the organization. Once business users get more familiar with the platform, and realize how easy it is to create and execute reports on their own, they will start changing their habits to use facts to make decisions instead of gut feelings; thus enabling the next level of enterprise maturity by laying the foundation for creating repeatable/reusable strategies that can be leveraged and shared across the organization in a systematic fashion. A common framework can be created that allows interdepartmental communication and collaboration to socialize the findings and strategies that resulted from the new capabilities; providing management with the tools they need to establish common goals, and define the base methodology to achieve and measure those goals.
In many companies, this Business Intelligence platform has become the engine for positive change reaching into areas that were not traditional information customers, transforming their day to day operations, and making them more efficient and objective.
IT will also perceive a significant change. As it becomes a capability provider, it is teaching the business users how to fish, instead of IT fishing for them. This paradigm change will free the resources that were previously consumed by servicing individual information requests and redirect them on growing the number of services offered by the platform, thus enabling IT to become a strategic partner with the business.
How to Enable a Business Intelligence Self Service Platform in the Enterprise?
Enabling a true Self Service BI platform has to be done across three different components: People, Process and Technology (Figure 2).
Figure 2 Components to enable a true self service BI platform
Each component highlights a different focus that complements the others:
People
In order for the platform to be functional, it has to be implemented with a complete Business focus in mind; if preferable someone from the business should lead the initiative and clearly define how the new platform is going to impact the operations of the business. Furthermore, change management strategies should be clearly outlined and the project plan should allocate sufficient time for them. The business lead should establish a vision for the future that energizes and set the expectations as to what to come from the platform. A training plan should be designed that takes into consideration the different skill levels of the users to make sure all the users will be able to get the most of the new capabilities and they won't resort back to old habits.
Technology
Once the direction of the initiative has been set, it will be critical to align the technology components to support it. Establishing a common infrastructure, both on the database platform and the BI toolset suite will be vital to the success of the initiative. The database platform will have to provide a stable, scalable environment that can grow with the users, adding capacity as the business matures and as the data volumes grow. A robust data model will be required that can capture the nuances of the business, and most important how do they relate and fit into the Enterprise.
In order to overcome the technical complexities of the data and facilitate the use to the business community, there will be a need to establish a common metadata business layer. This metadata layer will isolate the user community from technicalities and enable them to use the data based on its business meaning.
Canned reports will have to be set-up as examples on the capabilities of the platform; these will be used as the base for subsequent analyses, thus providing the first level of analytics out of box.
Last, but not least, the BI platform will have to be robust enough to provide a graphical report builder that facilitates the business users to create their own reports. Furthermore the BI platform will need to accommodate advanced capabilities, such as:
Advanced drilling: the capability to navigate across the data either up/down or across hierarchies
Real time/ near real time data: the concept streaming information as it happens to minimize the time the users need to wait for the data being available.
Process
In order to bind the technology and the people together a process has to be established. To successfully kick-off a Self Service BI platform, a common, well defined process will be required to provide the initial support to the end users. As IT won't have the business knowledge to help the business users translate their information needs into reports, a hybrid group, the power users, will need to be created. This group will be composed of business users who are early adopters and understand the technology, as well as, the business needs. They will be the liaisons between the business community and IT. IT will be responsible for maintaining the platform and adding additional data elements from different functional areas.
A straightforward process should be published that outlines the different levels of support, and so the business community knows who to contact and what to expect from this interaction.
How to measure success implementing a Business Intelligence Self Service Platform in the Enterprise?
Defining clear goals is perhaps the single most important action item while implementing a BI Self Service platform. Key Performance Indicators (KPI) will have to be baselined against organizational goals (e.g. Out of my user universe how many use BI daily, weekly, monthly at all?) These measurements will highlight strategies to promote the use of the platform, and benefits across the enterprise.
One the favorite strategies to promote the use of the platform is to focus on specific initiatives, measuring before and after, and if possible have the champion of the initiative give a lunch & learn to the user community; reporting first hand the positive impact the platform has had in her/his business. (e.g. a deli Vice-President decided to measure the sales of rotisserie chickens, she found that the stores were not making them as they did not know how many to produce at a particular time, after running a couple of reports on sales by hour she was able to put together some guidelines as to how many chickens and when to cook them. The results were amazing, sales went up by 5,000% in one week, the store associates were impressed by the knowledge the VP had shown about the business, and their specific store) The rotisserie chickens story became an urban legend within the company, inspiring, and energizing people to match the deli success in their department.
There is no more powerful way to measure results than in old, plain dollars, if possible try to quantify the benefits in hard dollars. This way everybody across the Enterprise understands the scale, and there will be no doubt about the Return On Investment of the initiative.
Created by many of the same team members that developed the highly successful Google Maps, the preview of the service itself on Thursday was quite compelling, resulting in a rare standing ovation at a tech conference.
Its egalitarian and federation-friendly design is intended to create an entire open ecosystem for communication and collaboration that Google is not-so-modestly touting as the reinvention of digital interaction circa 2009.
Wave’s relevance to the enterprise might seem premature with so many of the early and current Web 2.0 applications (blogs, wikis, social networks, Twitter-style social messaging, mashups, etc.) still — often arduously — making their way into the workplace years after their inception. Though we seem to finally be hitting a tipping point with 2.0 tools at work, Wave itself seems credible enough to get on our watchlists, at least to understand the implications.
The real question is whether there are really such significant gaps in the current state of Web-based communication that we need something new like Wave.
Wave: A communication and collaboration mashup
Google Wave itself consists of a dynamic mix of conversation models and highly interactive document creation via the browser. Using simple, open Web technologies (Google makes much of the fact that most of Google Wave is a open set of formats and architectures that is jointly developed with the Web community) Wave combines many of the key features of e-mail, instant messaging, media sharing, and social networking into a seamless experience and data set that are eponymously known as waves. All of this is opened up to developers via the Google Wave API.
While waves are relatively self-contained and use their own types of servers and data formats, they are easy to embed elsewhere or to build extensions for, enabling virtually infinite options for distribution over the Web or within the firewall, as well as rapid integration with existing applications and data. In fact, a wave is almost a form of social glue between people and the information they care about. And as we’ll see, this has implications for the enterprise world, not only with SOA but also with social communication in general as well as Enterprise 2.0 specifically.
Wave in action
What Google has done with the Wave protocol is essentially create a new kind of social media format that is distinctively different from blogs, wikis, activity streams, RSS, or most familiar online communication models except possibly IM. Both blogs and wikis were created in the era of page-oriented Web applications and haven’t changed much since. In contrast, Google Wave is designed for real-time participation and editing of shared conversations and documents and is more akin to the simultaneous multiuser experience of Google Docs than with traditional blogs and wiki editing. Though Google is sometimes criticized for missing the social aspect of the Web, that is patently not the case with waves, which are fundamentally social in nature. Participants can be added in real-time, new conversations forked off (via private replies), social media sharing is assumed to be the norm, and connection with a user’s contextual server-side data is also a core feature including location, search, and more. The result is stored in a persistent document known as a wave, access to which can be embedded anywhere that HTML can be embedded, whether that’s a Web page or an enterprise portal. Users can then discover and interact with the wave, joining the conversation, adding more information, etc. Google has also leveraged its investments in Google Gadgets and OpenSocial, two key technologies for spreading online services beyond the original boundaries of the sites they came from. All in all, Google Wave is a smart and well-constructed bundle of collaborative capabilities with many of the modern sensibilities we’ve come to expect in the Web 2.0 era including an acutely social nature, rapid interaction, and community-based technology.
Google Wave: An enterprise perspective
The hodge podge of 1990s era (and often older, in the case of e-mail) Internet communication methods were created in another time. Blogs, wikis, IM, and so on are all useful modes of communication but there are better ways and new requirements in today’s high social, interactive, and highly integrated times. That’s not to say that many companies haven’t tried to do this already, but virtually none of them have the ability to drive the modern development community or use their existing online market share to foster adoption in the end-user marketplace like Google does. In the end, barring a major misstep from Google, chances are good that organizations will have to deal with business data in the Wave Protocol format in the future.
Let’s take a closer look at what enterprises need to know about Google Wave:
Google Wave largely complements and doesn’t replace existing communication and collaborative applications. Google Wave creates a healthy synthesis of existing application types by providing integration across existing channels. The early demos in fact showed how Twitter and existing social networks can play very well with Google Wave, enhancing the experience and allow broader participation. Google Wave won’t replace existing apps like e-mail, IM, blogs, or wikis, and will actually make the latter two stronger through embedding. Groupware and other simultaneously collaborative apps, however, are more at risk of displacement.
Enterprise 2.0 is well supported by Google Wave. The general capabilities of FLATNESSES, my mnemonic for all the things that a capable Enterprise 2.0 platform should do, is well embodied in Google Wave. While blogs and wikis are the fundamental Enterprise 2.0 platforms, the basic capabilities of social interaction, emergence, and freeformedness are all there, though a wave presupposes a bit more structure and situated use than the more tabula rasa blog or wiki.
New protocols, servers, data formats, and client applications are required to use wave. Unfortunately, Google Wave brings a lot of baggage with it, though it’s mostly straightforward. You will require new software, though not on the client since that all runs in a zero-footprint browser client. This means more integration code, management, and monitoring. The best news is that everything is well-documented, open, and any organization can participate in directing the wave community, so lock-in, while always possible, seems largely avoidable and Google takes great pains to draw us to that conclusion. Google is also pushing hard for alternative implementations of the client and server components, including on-premise implementations, with the former on display at their announcement.
Waves are a natural integration point for many enterprise services including ECM, SOA, mashups, and more. By defining a strong protocol for continuous server-side processing of live conversations, Google has enabled an entire world where our IT systems are connected to the work we do every day. Literally while participants are busy typing and collaborating, a wave can be receiving support from back-end systems such as HRM, CRM, ERP, and so on to provide data, context, and other just-in-time support. Many businesses could benefit enormously from seamless business data integration such as customers, orders, and so on, never mind the deeper possibilities of contextual business processes leveraged directly in the collaborative activities of workers. I’ve written many times about the convergence of our IT systems and Web 2.0, and this seams one of the more natural environments for it that I’ve seen in a while.
Embedding and extensions will enable widespread distribution and consumption of waves. Google brings ease-of-development for creating server-side extension as well as simple models for user-distribution of waves. While the first will enable easy integration with local data sources and will create a large aftermarket for useful extensions such as the aforementioned language translation capabilities, the second will virtually ensure that enterprises will have interaction with waves one way or another. Since the premise of the product is also one of the dominant activities in the business world (enabling teamwork) and combined with the increasing consumerization of the workplace, it’s highly likely that organizations will encounter waves in their work with external entities, especially with partners and clients. At the very least, organizations will need to understand how waves will make their organizations even more porous on the Internet, and have policies about participating in them, just like SaaS services, social networks, and other external applications. Security will also be an issue with waves though things like integration of Web 2.0 tools and ECM will actually be easier than ever before since a corporate archive robot could ensure every wave conversation is backed up in the formal ECM system.
Google has launched many communication services since its inception including Gmail, Gtalk, Blogger to name just three, yet none of these have had such obvious business utility or attempted to reinvent the collaborative process from the ground-up. While it’s always possible that Google Wave will never broadly take off (see Mary Jo Foley’s analysis of Wave here), I’m betting that it’s likely to be one of the most interesting offerings to businesses that the company has created yet. With the open positioning, early outreach to the world, and the clarity of purpose and design, Google Wave has a good shot at helping take Enterprise 2.0 to the next level in many organizations.
It's much too soon to really decide anything about Google Wave yet, but are you putting it on your watch list? Please put your comments in the comment box below. Thank you.
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