I was speaking to a former colleague of mine the other day. Someone who has significant experience selling IT services to the Indian Public sector market. I asked him about the unique challenges of that market and he proceeded to unwind a long list of maladies: Corruption, unprofessional culture, political dynamics, nepotism and commodity focus.

Stephanie Overby's great summary (price focus, brutal SLAs, tactical approach, internal inertia) of the maladies of public sector outsourcing in the US resonates well with what I learnt from my friend.

"A non-discrimination rule that bans all application-specific discrimination, but allows all application-agnostic discrimination. Discrimination is application-specific if the discrimination is based on the specific application or content (e.g. Skype is treated differently from Vonage), or based on classes of applications or content (e.g. Internet telephony is treated differently from e-mail)."

We started off with customer satisfaction. Not satisfied we decided we needed to delight them.

 It seems Apple has taken it (not by design - pun intended) to a whole new level. UK based gadget insurer, Supercover Insurance says "For short periods around new model or upgrade launches, claims for lost, stolen or damaged iPhones go through the roof. The issue appears to be that most iPhone owners can only go for so long realising that they're a generation behind the latest must-have spec before they resort to extreme measures."

Here are the top ten wildest claims:
1. I dropped it from a hot air balloon
2. I lost it while sky diving
3. It broke when my son used it as a table tennis racket
4. I lost it while building a sand castle for the kids
5. I accidentally buried it in the garden
6. It fell into the kettle
7. I dropped it in a food blender
8.  My dog chewed it to pieces
9. Juice from a defrosting piece of meat leaked into it
10. It flew out of the car window

Nielsen Media has an interesting report on demographics and the chart on income levels of iPhone users is interesting.

80% of all iPhone users make more than 50,000 USD and only 13% are below the 35K mark. So money is not the problem.

Now, fraud is obviously something wrong, but how many companies can claim their customers are desperately crazy about their products ? I don't own a single Apple product but after writing this I am in love with them.

A US senator has called Infosys a "chop shop" (I thought he really mean 'body shop'). Infosys and the rest of the industry including clients have hit back. I think the senator is just playing to the galleries before the polls. Regardless of intent, this is sure to impact the industry. What do you think the impact on the industry will be ?

Wipro's Jt.CEO Girish Paranjpe on Creating competitive advantage.

Cognizant's Q2 2010 earnings call transcript. Good overview of the demand picture.

Nasscom on the H1B visa hike.

Android no jacket ad.

Bugs in the bed. End the week with a laugh. Ha ha ha!

"If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it." ~Albert Einstein

Clients expect many things from vendors. There are hygiene factors like good delivery, reliable resourcing and honesty in dealing with problems. These are the building blocks. Going back 15 years, getting these hygiene factors right was all that mattered. Certifications like CMM and ISO were supposed to reassure. As the industry has matured, "thought leadership" has emerged as a major expectation. Sudhakar Ram over at Sramana Mitra's blog calls companies that can do this as Wave 3 companies. The website of every major outsourcer seems to have a section on this topic. So how does one go about implementing this on the ground? How does one deliver thought leadership to clients?

     
Photo by Dierk Schaefer

JP has an interesting post where he says "don't focus on the business model, but think of ways to create value". I think this is very relevant to delivering thought leadership and innovation in a practical, actionable way. So very often we take an outside in approach to innovation. Start with an industry problem > Create a solution > Link it to the client's problem > Sell the benefits and hope it sticks. The problem with this approach to innovation is three fold:
  Priority: With budgets being what they are, every client is trying to do more with less. The problem maybe real. Solution maybe good but it might rank too low on the roster. Great idea. Thanks but not right now.
  Relationships: Deals and won and sold on relationships. Outside in propositions tend to be politically dicey. Technical buyers feel threatened. Objections on why it won't work are easy to raise and sometimes relationships get strained.
  Context: Most outside in solutions look cool on the flyer. Great ROI, strong credentials, vendor is willing to invest. However, what clients are really interested in is :How does this solution fit into my IT environment ? I have an in-house tool that can be extended to do the same thing! I don't think this platform aligns with my goal state. IT environments are too complex to allow any outside solution to easily integrate. 

So that leaves us with the problem of generating ideas from the inside. Here are five steps to help you get there.

Create the vision: Create a common vision that both clients (not just at VP level) and your own team can relate to. What do "Innovation" and "Thought leadership" mean to the customer ? How does it relate to known strategic initiatives ? What does this mean for someone who is managing a Java project to create a portal for Insurance agents ? Give specific examples of what this can be at a role level. How can a developer or a project manager bring thought leadership into their day to day activities ? People need to be able relate to the vision and see themselves as meaningful contributors.

Share it: Share it with the client and the team, including leaders outside the account. Get the whole organization aligned and create the internal marketing buzz needed to make it a success.

Photo by Ivanpw.

Create and publish a thought leadership register: This is a formal registry of value generated and accepted by the customer that each team should update. Dollarize the value where ever possible. This is the acid test as no idea can go it till the client accepts that this has been of value to her.

Incentivize people: Align performance plans and appraisals. Create quarterly awards for the best idea. Celebrate the winners. The tools are many. Objective is to motivate.
 

• Added 35 new clients, the top 10 clients grew 5.9%.
• Revenue increase sequentially, volumes increased sequentially, pricing stable, utilization improved.
• Net increase in employees this quarter.
• Expect the budgets to be flat next year
• Better traction in BFSI, retail, and energy and utilities.
• Better traction in business process management, infrastructure management and in system integration.
• Consulting and package implementation has come down marginally this quarter.
• US has gone up and Europe has marginally come down.
• Pricing stable. It increased by 0.4%, but in terms of constant currency, it declined by 1.1%.
• For the next two quarters, the upper end of the guidance assumes 1% revenue growth.

More details are here.

Source: Bespoke Investment Group

Andrew McAfee, the Harvard professor who coined the term "Enterprise 2.0" writes about the positive impact of social media technologies on the Intelligence community. Andrew makes a case that while massive computing power continues to be important, rich social connections between people in the intelligence community would enable better leverage of human pattern recognition.

I feel these two aspects are interdependent and self reinforcing. Picture this: Possibly, hundreds of terabytes of raw data flows into the US intelligence system on a daily basis. Thousands of "agents", both human and machine are responsible for the data. The data is then sliced and diced by super computers and the "intelligence" is dished out to analysts.

Why not enrich the data "socially" at the source and at the edges of massive computing? I don't for a minute imply that this would make computers any more human that they are. But the intelligence that comes out of the data would have more social context that would reinforce human pattern recognition. The intelligence could be further massaged at the edge to blend in with Ent 2.0 networks within the intelligence community. The results of human analysts collaborating over social networks could further be fed back in to the computers and create a virtuous cycle.

Another interesting application could be the area of psych ops. The old fashioned way is to drop pictures of a 5000 pound bomb with Bin Laden's face on it and scare people. The Ent 2.0 is to leverage the natural trust and high influence social networks have to influence and shape young people in vulnerable communities and prevent them from becoming prey to the bad guys.

What do you think ?