Disqus - Latest Comments for scorpfromhell

Re: India’s Schools Need the Light of Inner Discipline, Not the Militarisation of Consciousness

A. Prem Kumar — Mon, 24 Jul 2017 10:43:43 -0000

The three levels of obedience as described by Dr. Maria Montessori in her seminal book The Absorbent Mind is also worth referring here.

Re: Chatbot Architecture

A. Prem Kumar — Sun, 25 Dec 2016 06:57:20 -0000

What to do if we need to integrate the rules based AI with a knowledge base? Can ChatScript become a QA system by doing that? Could we interface this with a highly scalable SignalR based chat system and provide a customer support service?

Re: Summer Reading List on the Future of Work

A. Prem Kumar — Tue, 23 Jun 2015 03:32:51 -0000

So many books to be read in a month and not a single one that would guide parents of children who will graduate in this Future of Work? Or for the ecologically minded? Or for the world not yet connected/wired and being asked to cut down on emissions by not asking for electricity?

Re: Inside the School Silicon Valley Thinks Will Save Education

A. Prem Kumar — Mon, 11 May 2015 15:35:25 -0000

Yes, the mixed age groups does give the advantage, yet we do not advise more than 30 children per adult in a Montessori environment. But that's like really stretching it. In practice, that's more like 18-20 maybe per adult in the environment. And considering that there are possibly other adults too who pitch in for arts, music, sports, etc. the ratios are smaller.

Sorry, but the reality is that in India we have been unable to scale this up really, even though we just graduated the 75th year adults of the Indian Montessori Training Courses setup by Dr. Montessori herself in 1939.

Re: Inside the School Silicon Valley Thinks Will Save Education

A. Prem Kumar — Mon, 11 May 2015 15:10:47 -0000

My.Altschool digitizes what the Montessori adults have been doing for nearly a century in the elementary levels - prepare personalised content for the children based on their individual aspirations.

And if it were to be truly Montessori 2.0, it needs to be open sourced and a community of Montessori adults from across the world need to be encouraged to share their content they have created over the decades. That would be real philanthropy by Zuckerberg.

Re: Inside the School Silicon Valley Thinks Will Save Education

A. Prem Kumar — Mon, 11 May 2015 15:09:18 -0000

Sorry to say this, but the City Montessori School in Lucknow, India does not offer anything advised by Dr. Maria Montessori. The school merely has her last name.

Montessori methods cannot scale without scaling the number of adults.

Re: A response to Airtel’s justification of its net neutrality violation

A. Prem Kumar — Sat, 27 Dec 2014 21:30:15 -0000

Pretty good fisking @nixxin. After a very long time. :-)

Airtel seems to be gouging its customers by justifying its old technology. It is also holding us back to old inefficient ways. They do not want to lose out on the old streams of revenues.

Another business tactic is to actually provide the most popular choice at even more attractive prices to get a large share of the market.

Aircel OTOH makes Facebook and WhatsApp free when you subscribe to data since they are the two most popular apps.

And yes, a short writeup on why net neutrality is important other than the fisking done here, or at least a link to a good article on that somewhere in the body of the article would be a ready reckoner for all the people who will be coming here Nikhil.

Re: A response to Airtel’s justification of its net neutrality violation

A. Prem Kumar — Sat, 27 Dec 2014 21:22:26 -0000

Can you back your words "genuinely" and "losses" with data please, for us to understand where you are coming from?

Re: The Customer Revolution: 10 bumps in the road of a digital transformation

A. Prem Kumar — Sun, 30 Mar 2014 15:17:22 -0000

Excellent post Laurence. Couldn't agree more to the points you raise. And your points like tax, skills shortage were informative. I wasn't aware of the developments in EU.

I agree regarding technical debt (thanks for introducing the term, I did not know there was a theory behind it), and mere agile/DevOps doesn't address it either. While code refactoring is important, the bigger challenge my team faces is how do we get to even validate our hypotheses based on which the software is being built in the first place?

Regarding exec alignment, I would hazard a suggestion with a disclaimer that this is our current strategy in which I had no role to play. ;-)

Cognizant has restructured it's business around what it calls the three horizons:
- core business, where BAU is important
- growth business, where incremental growth is to be supported
- disruptive business, where forward looking service offerings, new business models, etc. are tested

These three horizons map one to one to the results of your survey.

Regards,
Prem

Re: Push vs. Pull Design

A. Prem Kumar — Sun, 21 Jul 2013 07:09:28 -0000

Very intriguing post, it set my brain whirring. :)

Ever since I read the papers from John Hagel, et al. on Push vs Pull, including their book called "The Power of Pull" some 4-5 years back, I have been an even stronger believer in the real value of social technology. How it is taking the best of the older, humanistic manner of business and the more modern, industrial manner of business. How it is allowing us to interact and transact like humans, at scale. How it is important to design to allow serendipity to happen, by letting people and ideas collide, and yet I was faced with the constant challenge of removing the heightened noise from such systems.

Thus far though I have been hearing about Push vs Pull only in management circles. And now I come across this post wrt design, and I was intrigued.

I understand and revere simplicity, but to me, simplicity is not a crutch (due to lack of intelligence in the users) but it is an elegance (which allows people to accomplish their main job for which they hired my tool in as quick and easy manner as possible).

People are not morons, or ADD afflicted*, rather they are creatures of purpose, goals. Any tool that does not let them do their job in the least number of steps is inelegant, unpolished. Anything that does not help them achieve their goals is a bore, a burden.

And it is
for this Pull design that I think ODI/JTBD** and Social Modeling (Goal & Agent Orientation)*** frameworks are very well suited since they help us understand what customers really need and what are the factors that impact them, their work and their decisions.
Similarly, Service Dominant Logic is better than Goods Dominant Logic
from a value creation perspective.

---------------------
* Well, it is true that the trends cited wrt people's attention spans are alarming, but it has always been so with the rise of every new media.
** Strategyn's Anthony Ulwick and Lance Bettencourt took Clayton Christensen's idea of Jobs To Be Done and put it into an Outcome Driven Innovation framework that focuses on the Jobs that people are trying to get done, the Outcomes which they use as a measure of the satisfaction from any solution that they hire to get the said job done, and the Challenges that impede the adoption of the said solution.
*** Social Modeling for Requirements Engineering, especially the i* (i star) framework relies on the Strategic Dependency and Strategic Rationale models. While the SD model tells us who relies on who to get a job done, SR model tells us why a particular person is motivated to do a job. It takes into account of the fact that the Actor, a human, is autonomous (capable of taking decisions on his/her own) and yet predictable because the Actor is also social (depends on other Actors to accomplish goals).

Re: InformationWeek – Software > Social media apps expected to give CRM market new momentum

A. Prem Kumar — Tue, 09 Jul 2013 06:38:18 -0000

Sorry Vandana, I had forgotten about this comment I had made and so hadn't checked for any responses.

Glad to see that there is one, and with an email ID at that. I will drop you a line for sure. :)

However, if you reread my initial comment you would realise that I am asking the question from the perspective of the corporate strategy.

I have no doubt of the fact that we have a huge online population. Nor of the fact that the trend of complaining online is still growing, and it is already large in any case.

But I do not see much change in the strategy of the corporates in India where they want to actually, really serve the customers. Be it online or otherwise.

Yes, it would really be interesting to connect with the social experts at Oracle and see what they think of that. :)

Re: Why I Am Not Buying a House (Apartment) Part 3

A. Prem Kumar — Fri, 17 May 2013 17:57:07 -0000

I must be in a peculiar situation since I work from home. I did not when I bought my 'villa' (actually just a row house that looks like all the other houses in the layout but I get my own 30x50 piece of land for the 1300 something built up area) in the burbs of Bangalore, Hosur (actually another state altogether).

Probably this 'work from home' option changes things a lot. More companies should allow that. It will reduce their costs, reduce the burden on the planet and reduce the burden on us salaried employees.

Re: Evolution of social media influencers and the influenced

A. Prem Kumar — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 02:50:00 -0000

#PaidEarnedMedia ? :-s

Re: Evolution of social media influencers and the influenced

A. Prem Kumar — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 23:25:43 -0000

Karthik, thank you for a very easy to understand primer. :-)

While I agree with you, there are a few things I am uncomfortable with. For example, you claim Facebook's tactic as tactfully clever, not devious. While it is true, it is not a comforting thing to see my age old likes being leveraged to make them look like endorsements of what the brand has to say. While it is a fact that I did like the brand, it does not mean I like everything that they do/say, nor is it a license (not the legal meaning of the term, that would get into terms & conditions related discussions) to let facebook or the brand leverage it.

Lots of 'whiles' in the above paragraph. :-(

And therein lies the dichotomy I guess. It is up to everybody to interpret what we say or do in whatever manner they deem fit, and that it is a matter of ethics and choice between short term vs long term effects for the brand to choose their manners. As for for the audiences, it is their choice to be influenced or not. The influencer are capable only so long as the audience chooses to be influenced by them.

So the old maxim still persists, caveat emptor. :-)

Re: InformationWeek – Software > Social media apps expected to give CRM market new momentum

A. Prem Kumar — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 23:59:01 -0000

I find this too good to believe. Has India really gone beyond Transaction ID to Customer ID? Does Corporate India really believe in catering to its existing customers? Have they gone beyond customer acquisition to customer retention? Even social media, where Indian consumers are increasingly voicing their opinions, is considered only as a broadcast channel. Engagement on social media sites at best is about quizzes, contests, etc. that has nothing to do with business.

I would really love to understand why does Oracle thinks that India is prime for Social CRM.

Re: Office 2013 subscription pricing: Who is getting a deal, who is getting screwed?

A. Prem Kumar — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 21:49:37 -0000

Isn't it about now that we looked at options like Open Office? No cost and no worries of being unable to work with older formats.

Re: NE students exodus growing, two special trains provided from Bangalore - Hindustan Times

A. Prem Kumar — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 14:57:58 -0000

Wonder what would it take to mobilise people to protect our brethren who are feeling threatened and prevent the exodus? Where your spirit of togetherness Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune?

Re: NE students exodus growing, two special trains provided from Bangalore - Hindustan Times

A. Prem Kumar — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 14:25:10 -0000

Really disturbing to see this development on our Independence Day. Is this what the Nation stands for? What's with all the communal and ethnic cleansing? Are we so weak a country that we can't stand together against these few anti-social and anti-constitutional elements?

Re: The Three Types of Companies: Biggest, Better, and Different

A. Prem Kumar — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 07:36:52 -0000

You should check out Value Disciplines model of Treacy & Wiersema. But then, its been superceded by the unbundling of business work by John Hagel, et al.

Re: From zero to hero: Is Mahindra Satyam the next Cognizant?

A. Prem Kumar — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 04:26:12 -0000

The irony of it! Satyam was one of the Parents of Cognizant, erstwhile Dun and Bradstreet Satyam Software. It is like expecting Harivansh Rai Bachchan to become Amitabh Bachchan.

Unfortunately, the truth is what it is. Hope Satyam reemerges from the doldrums.

Re: Gartner Says \$1B Market for Social CRM by 2013

A. Prem Kumar — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 12:19:43 -0000

It is 2012 not 2013 as per the MQ for Social CRM of 2011. Last year Gartner said the market would be $1 Billion by 2011. And the report is available online from Lithium: http://www.lithium.com/pdfs...

Re: Why Exception Handling Should be the Rule

A. Prem Kumar — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 02:33:34 -0000

Superb piece Sameer (as if you needed validation of that). I have read & talked on this topic for ages now ... but from a BPM perspective (one vendor segment you missed). Though a BPMS is supposed to cater to business processes other than those covered by a ERP/SCM/CRM, I have often seen them being used for the aforementioned processes too.

And in a BPMS you model & automate the process/work flows after doing rounds of discussions & interviews with the various stakeholders involved in the execution & management of them processes ... with no scope for handling emergent / exception scenarios. Oft have I given a sheepish response to the end users that the problem they are facing is due to an exception scenario, and it is not built into the system ... and that if they need to do it more often, why, they can give the requirements for the 3rd release cycle from now since the next one is almost due for production & the development has begun on the one after the next ... or something to that effect.

I started hating the term 'exception' at one time ... thankfully I am at peace with the term now. Zen ...

But, social has come to torment me from the other end now ... there is so much confusion in this unstructured world that it seems to beat the purpose of it all. Chris Lynch excellently captures the problem with unstructured data/content in his post on rethinking the social architecture in the enterprise [http://thelynchblog.com/201...], but I doubt if the approach he chose is going to help much. I would like to take tibbr for a spin before I comment on it though.

As with content categorization, so with process definitions ... and ACM seems a probable solution there ... need to take a dip in it too.

We need systems that help us navigate from the structured end to the unstructured end of the spectrum (both content & process/work flows) and many other stations in between.

Re: Social Collaboration eg.

A. Prem Kumar — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 22:33:58 -0000

Glad to be of help Manu. :)

Friend of a friend, weak ties, feathers of a bird, diadic & triadic ties, etc. all are important aspects of social networks, and I don't mean facebook/anywhere online. In fact social networks have been studied even before online networks & communities started forming.

You might like to read this 2 year old interview with Prof. Robin Dunbar, whose work has been quite often misquoted as stating the human limit at relationships as 150 at max.

Re: Social Collaboration eg.

A. Prem Kumar — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 07:18:22 -0000

Thanks for continuing the social collaboration discussion Manu & bringing it to an even wider audience. :) Am so glad to seeing deepening interests and growing discussions around these topics in India too! :)

In such confusing moments around Collaboration (in which I have more than a passing interest), I tend to keep referring its definition as mentioned in this paper on stigmergic collaboration: http://journal.media-cultur.... Especially these two points:

1. Collaboration is dependent upon communication, and communication is a network phenomenon.
2. Collaboration is inherently composed of two primary components, without either of which collaboration cannot take place: social negotiation and creative output.

And when it comes to collaboration in enterprises, I focus on the next two points:

3. Collaboration in small groups (roughly 2-25) relies upon social negotiation to evolve and guide its process and creative output.
4. Collaboration in large groups (roughly 25-n) is enabled by stigmergy.

BTW, Emergence is a network phenomenon too like Communication & Collaboration. And one cannot have social anything unless theres a network of relationships. And hence my thought that social & collaboration are redundant terms.

Re: http://www.gautamblogs.com/2011/04/what-is-social-collaboration-in.html

A. Prem Kumar — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 12:56:10 -0000

Thanks for linking & responding to my blog post Gautam. :)

As for the types of power, pls listen to this podcast at manager tools: http://www.manager-tools.co...

And, wrt emergent stuff, do they not happen in an organization without 'social' tools? Emergence is a network characteristic, no? The tools allow more of it to happen, because more random connections are happening in the organization. And thats a good thing. But is it possible only if the tools are available?