Year: 2014

I am the CEO. I am the Employee.

Posted on by Idexcel Technologies

No Management. No Subordinates. Is Workspace 2.0 ready to take self-management to its logical conclusion?

How flatter can an organization get in the context of workplace 2.0 which hates hierarchy? From the Buck Stops Here to the Buck Starts Here? The knowledge worker of today doesn’t bat an eyelid cracking Dilbert jokes with his boss at the water cooler. All this is the new normal (?) and that’s why management tomes like ‘First, fire all the managers’ fly off the shelves faster than you can actually do that.

All this is oh-so romantic and utopian. But would Apple run by a million CEO workers have been better than Apple under Steve Jobs? Jobs, according to people who worked closely with him was more of an autocrat than less. Damn! Not fashionable at all. Jack Welch too by all accounts can hardly ever be a pinup idol for zero hierarchy. Of course they were all for empowering the down lines, but finally, the nuclear button vests with them.

From a historical perspective, there’s nothing “new” about self-management. Peter Drucker way back in 1953 in his classic ‘The Practice of Management’ called for empowering workers as managers and more importantly, said, it requires new tools and far-reaching changes in traditional thinking and practices.

Now that we have the new tools and think out of the traditional box, more and more companies are putting the Drucker test to practice. Gary Hamel, “the world’s most influential business thinker” according to the Wall Street Journal and author of the recently released What Matters Now, showed how Morning Star, a leading food processor, had made it to the top without bosses, titles or promotions in his analysis published in Harvard Business Review.
The California-based Morning Star, the world’s largest tomato processor handling nearly 30% of the tomatoes processed each year in the United States and with annual revenues of $700 million is not just a Drucker dream-come-true but a company which has registered phenomenal success. And that’s why it makes you pause and ponder. Is it really possible for an organization to become a global market leader where there’s no CEO, where everyone can spend the company’s money, and where each employee is responsible for acquiring the tools needed to do his or her work?

As Hamel explains in his case-study, Morning Star is built on the edifice of five fundamentals, viz. Make the mission the boss; Let employees forge agreements; Empower everyone – truly; Don’t force people into boxes; and Encourage competition for impact, not for promotions.

So why aren’t we seeing more Morning Stars shine bright? If self-management has evolved from a nice-sounding slogan to a workable sound business strategy that can enable organizations to grow to the pinnacle why is it still unfamiliar to most of us? The view from the cubicle (and even from the CEO’s penthouse) is that self-management is an idea whose time has come as much as it is an idea which is yet to really take off. Contradictory? Yes, but check your premises – and we mean your company premises. People are not ready yet. Paul Green Jr., who helps run the Self-Management Institute launched by Morning Star, is on record having admitted that not even one company to his knowledge has “fired all the managers all the way” a la Morning Star and hit pay dirt.

Self-management like Morning Star is still an outlier. Of course organizations swear by empowering people, and are eager and willing to go the extra mile to bat for a minimalist hierarchy, but as to whether go the whole hog with this, they have to wait for a nod from their Board. It’s still for the Boss to decide whether he/she can be fired…
A true answer would be to perhaps go for the middle ground. Go for self-management, and retain the boss. You can’t win Wimbledon only on the strength of your forehand…

Bloodless Revolution: Data Mass transforming the Masses

Posted on by Idexcel Technologies

A cell phone in your pocket, a tab in your backpack, and an IT system in your back office, and off you are to unleash your own little revolution.

Data Revolution is the way ahead. Read it again. And you will discover a Data-driven revolution is actually a double whammy.

In the world of Version 1.0 and 2.0, data defined the world and knocked on our doorsteps with silos of info. But with the advent of social media and Version 3.0, all that tons of data started to get knocked around, here there and everywhere. That’s how data got smaller and smaller, as it got bigger and bigger, with giant servers serving up all the data to all the people and in all of 140 characters. (You can go ahead and tweet this gyan). That’s the revolution which is happening not once but almost in countless ways, and in ways we cannot even fathom. .

Data revolution? What’s the top-of-the-mind recall it gives? The Arab Spring in of all places, Egypt, was shaped largely by the social media, so much so that it is also described as a Twitter Revolution. The Arab Spring shook up the world’s richest sheiks through three million tweets and thousands of blog posts and YouTube videos.

Take a dipstick poll anywhere, any time among any people about the likeliest place where a bloodless revolution fueled by data could happen, and you will find that the Middle East would hardly find a mention in the poll. Right? Wrong. The Iranian Revolution for democracy is attributed to the Twitterati data warriors. It has even inspired calls to nominate Twitter for the Nobel Peace Prize.

For the pink press the Data Revolution is all about remaking big business, but that is the only visible part of the shakeup. What is invisible – or lesser known – is how it is transforming ordinary lives of ordinary people.

The Britannica Encyclopedia, the Bible of all Data, started eons back in 1768, is now history, felled by the revolutionary power of data. The PC era first pushed it to the precipice, and then the CD-Rom and an endless, me-too data devouring Wikipedias sent it to rest.

Who started The Huffington Post? Not Rupert Murdoch, but citizen journalists. What about Linux and Asterisk? They are powered by well, collaborative communities. How these little unknowns morphed into a kind of Big Boys Redux is what data revolution is all about.

This data revolution thing may be bloodless but is still scary – not so much for us, but for the big boys actually. If an iconic 250-year-old company can be sent packing by an upstart, imagine the mind-boggling extent to which the playing field has been leveled.

You can’t get more disruptive than this. Or maybe, the only way to get more disruptive is to get less disruptive…

Big data is not only disrupting our lives by the hour, but it is also redefining the rules of engagement globally and locally. Businesses don’t have to play by rules writ in stone anymore. Example: Facebook which has one in ten persons the world over logged in to it has no website of its own!

It might seem silly at the first cut, but the original revolutionary, Karl Marx may well have embraced this data-driven revolution as his own playbook. A cell phone in your pocket, a tab in your backpack, and an IT system in your back office, and off you are to unleash your own little revolution.

Looking ahead, we may have to find new ways to grapple with this data overload. Indigestion can afflict the mind too. While the walls between us have collapsed and have been replaced by “Windows” through which data can flit in and out, we have to run with what we have. In theory all this data is only making it that much more difficult to make sense of all this change, but it could still work in practice. As one anonymous wise man has said, “Wikipedia only works in practice. In theory, it can never work.”

Cloud Computing in 2020: More security, directory, identity, privacy, storage, computing

Posted on by Idexcel Technologies

To put it simply, let’s just say More for less.

Caution: Take a deep breath before you proceed. And it’s ok to get scared or excited after a look at these figures.

Year 2020: The digital universe would be run by something like 40 trillion gigabytes of data. That’s what we could be creating, consuming and managing.

Now, figure out the math. Do we have the skills, experience and resources needed to manage all these data all the time through all networks and info-gateways? Nope. The resources we have will get less and lesser, even as they get more and more specialized. This is the scary part of the algorithm facing us.

Let’s cut to the chase and once and for all end the debate on cloud computing. The only way out is to have new, flexible and scalable IT infrastructure that extends beyond the enterprise, viz. cc.

Need any more data points to consider? An estimated 40% of all information in the digital universe will be “touched” by cloud computing in some way or the other, and probably 15% maintained in a cloud.

2020 will see not one cloud, but many clouds, and a migration to converged infrastructures, where servers, storage and networks are integrated together, and installed as a unit of IT infrastructure.

The three tipping points to plug in and play for cloud computing are safety, storage and ease of retrieval.

The corporate is easily convinced, whereas the consumer is a tough nut to crack. But the cloud has gained enough mass and momentum to be the new age choice for both the corporate and the consumer. The new Google Chromebook Pixel, says technology wizard Phaneesh Murthy, is “a truly groundbreaking new device” and “a potential game-changer for cloud-based computing” for both corporate IT as well as in personal computing.

Powered by the cloud, cutting edge and game-changing computing trends are already blowing in the wind. Just like how laptops felled the desktops and smart phones replaced the uni-dimensional traditional mobile phones, light-weight tablets and lean and mean personal computers are leveraging the best of cloud technology to take over the computing world.

Why carry stuff in stuff like pen drives and EHDs when you can access any data from anywhere? That’s the simple idea behind the cloud which is making our life simpler, more fulfilling and engaging.

It may sound funny but it’s hard to resist taking a jab: A little bit of “clouded thinking” can work wonders. It can level the playing field for little David against the Goliath, the giant. A small company, with a little bit of “clouded thinking” can fell Goliath who thinks “traditional”. A big traditional company may take pride in stocking up on computer hardware. But David cuts down on its IT costs, using the cloud by which it pays only for what it wants to use. And before you can understand why what happened, Goliath is history and David is the new big future.

Strip cloud computing off the clutter and the jargon, and what do you have? It’s the new big idea that’s drawing in ooh’s and aah’s from the IT community at the industry box office. Essentially, cloud computing is a pure play on the theme of utility computing, or software as a service (SaaS).

Computing will move to the cloud in newer and bigger ways, and more and more companies, large and small, are betting their new money on the “mainframes in the sky”, if not already.

With the sky opening out to the cloud, the sky is the limit for computing and for consumer experience. Computing is now served up as sauce if you please, over the internet and from vast warehouses of shared machines. Many companies are rapidly moving their applications into the cloud.

Web 2.0 offerings like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon’s raw computing power, Microsoft’s Azure and Google’s App Engine, Salesforce.com, Goople Apps, set the ball rolling for utility computing enabled by the cloud. At Microsoft, millions of customers including top brands like Coca Cola, McDonalds and GlaxoSmithKline, have signed up for using the cloud.

Oracle’s Larry Ellison who once dismissed cloud computing as “water vapour, nonsense, just a computer connected to a network” and “something we have done for more than ten years” must be wondering how he got the Oracle wrong. But big guns don’t always hit the target. Bill Gates was equally dismissive of mobile phones and look what happened.

The rules of engagement have changed. Yesterday software as a service delivered in the form of email, shared photographs, documents, was a beautifully disruptive idea. Today, moving away from “pure software” is the disruptive beast. And we better hurry. For 2020 is just a “few clouds” away…