Process Management

And the question why "Process Management" will haunt a few people and would be just another word to impress the vocab of business communication/language. I was doing this session on Process Measurement with Prof Saxena; KBC as he is popularly known as. And when I am in the class trying to relate it to something from my past corporate experience I start realizing how such big companies like the one I was working for sometime back can talk about management philosophies and water tight execution. They never define it around the process but around the team and in true sense it's quite ironical.

We are so ignorant to get into the system and forget to apply the things we have learned in our academics. True that management is to be practiced but do they really practice it. Why do I not see a manager or the head of a department, coming to the company and giving his/her process an improvement that's strategic in nature.

Let me critic a process very common in most of the organization. We talk about process improvement. Let's take HR hiring process. How many companies after a desired period of hiring a person evaluate whether their hiring of the above candidate was in fact justified. All these traditional hiring process suffer from the myopia of evaluating their team and process internally as to how many were the potential hire and how many got hired? What were the targets and what were the actuals? I am still curious to find that one organization which has an HR function that measures the outcome of whom they have hired. Let's say six months, does the HR evaluate whether the candidate which was hired for six months now is on expectations. Do they identify the strategic factors which might re-evolve their hiring process?

I am listening if there's someone who does these basic "Performance Measures" to complete the cycle of "Business Process Management".

The day as it goes by..

Trying to find something constructive that was part of the day. I had the opportunity to attend the mock pre-thesis defense of one of the guys from our FPM programme and I am starting to realize that more than the content/outcome of your pre-thesis work is your ability to justify the methodology of your research. May be I am too new to understand and conclude that it's quite ironical.

What I am starting to realize already is that you must be very strong in your research fundamentals and this gives a real upper edge in justifying your work and marketing you work. If you are looking to do a Ph.D from MDI come prepared with the state of mind that you'll be doing hardcore studies in Research methodologies and importantly the philosophy of the way the knowledge is to be created. After all an FPM program is knowledge creation exercise.

Lethargic

If anyone is wondering why I am not posting, the reason is, laziness. Moreover, got a little caught up with reading. Finally have a direction I think I can take for the quest of knowledge. I am getting closer (at least I fee that way as of now) to find my area of research. Seems like a pretty bold step as I am counting on future more than what is hot property today. Will try chipping in with a post or two today.

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BPM-An Introduction

Business Process Management (BPM) is rapidly growing and becoming the technology for modeling, optimizing and automating business processes. Analyst firms predict the BPM market growth rate at 15 percent to 20 percent, which far outpaces the 3 percent to 4 percent growth rate predicted for ERP and CRM markets. BPM will continue to accelerate this momentum by expanding its ability to model, manage and optimize the business process flow.

Technology and drivers of business should provide an environment where better business applications can be developed with minimal effort. Business applications should closely align to business processes that can be readily adapted to the changing nature of business processes.

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Reality Assumption

Analytical philosophy's assumption of quality of reality is that, the whole is the sum of it's parts. This means that once the researcher gets to know the different parts of the whole, the parts can be added together to get the total picture.

Knowledge created using Analytical approach is characterized as being independent of the observer.

The assumption behind the systems approach, different from the assumption underlying the the analytical approach, is that reality is arranged in such a way that the whole differs from sum of it's parts.

If we say that the whole is understood by characteristics of it's parts, we bring into picture the third approach known as the actors approach.

The Above three are the basic methodological approaches in Research.

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Get Im-ified.

Although this is an old story and quite an old product launch, the technology is worth keeping an eye on. I am talking about a new IM based reminder service named imified. Did I just say reminder service ! Apologize me for giving a narrow scope for the product that might just be the next revolutionizing technology.

Let me talk a little more about it. But before that let me ask you a question that might sound stupid and give an impression of my high levels of ignorance which might be a bliss in my case. How many of you use Instant Messengers? If you think that's stupid enough, let me ask you another question. How many of you use AIM, MSN and Gtalk/Jabber? No points for guessing and this time I'll feel offended if you'll question me, "what the hell is wrong with you moron; why are you not naming the king of all IMs Yahoo?" I have a reason to not mention yahoo messenger here. So if you guys use IMs other than Yahoo as mention above please continue reading. For the people who cannot think beyond Yahoo Messenger, I am afraid you'll have to stop reading as this post will not bring any sort of enlightenment to you. As Yahoo is not supported by Imified.

Imified is a new concept and who else will be better able to define it than the site itself which says, "IMified is an instant messenger buddy that works across all major IM
networks and offers access to a growing number of web applications, as
well as productivity tools like notes, reminders, and todo's. Imified
helps you get things done faster."

I'd suggest all you nerdies to check out the developers section because Imified has come out with it's own API and you can develop your own widgets for Imified.

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Web Crash 2007

The Web Crash 2007 is a catastrophic event that has hit the world really badly . All th governments in the world are taking every measure to avoid mass paranoia. Let there be peace. I tried doing a CTRL+ALT+DEL on myself because I am so depressed about the Internet crashing, but I get a message "You are without an operating system, you moron !"

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Entrepreneur for creating Serial Entrepreneurs

I was talking my ex-colleague and a very good friend Amaltas. And in some context he used the term Serial Entrepreneur. I was pretty curious to know if the terminology exists and to my surprise it does. However, very little has been talked about it. Moreover, the best I could find was from a German wiki and not too my surprise because Europe is known to come out with these real high quality philosophical thinking of ideas which gives new dimension to the philosophies of creating knowledge. Not going into too many details of Europe and it's role in knowledge creation but I must say the concept of post-modernization is a concept that was born out of Europe. To be precise from France.

Getting back to Serial Entrepreneur, I'd not like to discuss the context the term was used by Amaltas because strategically confidential reasons and I am sure in his context this word is worth a trademark. However, what the wiki mentions is an entrepreneur, who creates new enterprises again and again in relatively short time and sells them. I am ignorant of any example of such person from the world of business. However, as I say this I'll leave the readers with a clue and the clue is that Amaltas is an Entrepreneur for creating Serial Entrepreneurs.

Internet is for Porn! Part 2

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Blogged with Flock

Internet is for Porn !

A good video on censorship of pornography on Internet. However,  we are not getting into any debate.

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Blogged with Flock

There's light at the end of the tunnel..

And who told Firefox is the only open source browser. I might be contradicting myself by saying this because I am big time Firefox fan. However, I must say that Flock has arrived the arena. Yes, if you've not seen the new flock then I must say you have missed something new and something sweet.

The new tanned bluish look is just one of the changes. It comes with in-built features to instantaneous blogging. A new way to manage online media and a really eye-candy looks for the feed reader. However, there's a cost to it. The setup file is 10.4 MB compared to 5 MB of Firefox installation file. But in this era of cheap memories do you really care how much will the browser occupy the secondary memory storage. I have still not used it extensively to check if it fits the non-memory leaking benchmarks but I am sure even that won't be too much of constraint.

As far as support for extensions goes, I am sure with little bit of smartness you can bring every extension available to Firefox to work for flock. A big thumbs-up for flock and to the open source community.

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The World of Business Process Management

An introduction to a not so unknown world of "Business Process Management" what is also an acronym for BPM. A brief wiki article can be had at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_management. Let me dissect the term Business Process Management for you. First let me take management out of it and thankfully I don't have to go into the details of discussing what Management is. Let's now briefly talk about the term "Process". The word process has it's origin from Manufacturing as far as the field of business management goes.

"Process is a naturally occurring or designed sequence of changes of properties or attributes of an object or system."

Source: Wiki

Of late there has been an urgency or should I say evolved need to see Business Process as a resource just like human resource and other resources applicable in an organization. And because of this evolution to see Business Process as a resource there is a continuous need to manage it just like any other resource.

With changing influence of technology into business there were concepts like ERP which started gaining popularity. However, initially these efforts did not enjoy the success because they focused on department or functional areas of business. The myopia they struggled with was that they failed to understand that such efforts will provide multitude of success if the pattern to implement them was process oriented. However, on a larger perspective it also gave an insight that business should be looked from the criticality of process driven rather than function driven. The problem with a function driven approach is that it looks at the business from an in-house perspective. But as we all know that the success of any business today is driven by customers and hence the approach that the business should take today should be process driven. The process that focuses on customer satisfaction.

As a result of this advancement in the way the Business is starting to take advantages of process driven approach we see many companies (esp service-oriented) to boast about being 100% process oriented. Airtel, makes such a claim. I carefully used es service oriented. This is not to take anything away from manufacturing intensive firms' claim of being process intensive. However, there can be an eternal debate about how many of manufacturing firms have functions which are product oriented rather than service oriented.

We are now starting to see that companies are becoming more and more process oriented, but not many of them have reached a stage where they can brag about being process centric.

Let me briefly give theoretical elements involved in Business Process.

I think this should be it before I completely talk about my learnings of 4 hours today.

This is too Innovative.

I cannot hold myself from blogging this. This might not be one of the best post AFA relevancy of my blog goes but I'd love to share this.

The above are the error codes for HTTP header response.

411 Length Required: The server refuses to accept the request without a defined Content- Length. The client MAY repeat the request if it adds a valid Content-Length header field containing the length of the message-body in the request message.

413 Request Entity Too Large: The server is refusing to process a request because the request entity is larger than the server is willing or able to process. The server MAY close the connection to prevent the client from continuing the request.

If the condition is temporary, the server SHOULD include a Retry- After header field to indicate that it is temporary and after what time the client MAY try again.

403 Forbidden: The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it. Authorization will not help and the request SHOULD NOT be repeated. If the request method was not HEAD and the server wishes to make public why the request has not been fulfilled, it SHOULD describe the reason for the refusal in the entity. If the server does not wish to make this information available to the client, the status code 404 (Not Found) can be used instead.

200 OK: The request has succeeded. The information returned with the response is dependent on the method used in the request, for example:

GET an entity corresponding to the requested resource is sent in the response;

HEAD the entity-header fields corresponding to the requested resource are sent in the response without any message-body;

POST an entity describing or containing the result of the action;

TRACE an entity containing the request message as received by the end server.

Originally found at http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/ladies/6792/

The Scientific Way

Apologies for not posting yesterday. The reason is simple. In everyone's life there are some days known as wasted and yesterday was one of those days for me. Let's not get into wasting time on something that's already categorized as wasted.

As I mentioned in my posts "An encounter with the World of Philosophy", I am into the world of philosophies which leads to knowledge creation. We start with questioning what is science? I'd like to take some excerpts and try bringing myself closer to what is scientific way? Scientific way is specific aspects.

First, every attempt that claims to be scientific is based on explicit relationship between ideas and empirical observation and an attempt to be relevant to reality. Second, using a scientific approach necessarily means a conscious application of reasonably clear formulated rules. Third, using a scientific approach means that the scientist acknowledges that every member of society has a a legitimate right to protections form the public scrutiny of his or her private life.

Being a scientist and creating knowledge

It is not necessary for you to be a scientist in order to create knowledge or being a part of process of knowledge creation. A key difference between knowledge created by the scientific method compared with any other method (say as a consultant or any other kind of investigator) is that some kinds of studies do not present their methods and result for the public and critical scrutiny by other creators of knowledge. Both these ways of creating knowledge can be treated as Methodology for Creating Business Knowledge.

"Practiced" and "Reconstructed" Logic

Practiced logic is the path that researchers/consultants/investigators follow de facto.Reconstructed logic is presentation of this path.

Rendezvous with truth !

Today was the day I learnt that it's not an easy life to be into academics and specially more importantly into an FPM programme. I was part of a presentation of what we call here as Pre-thesis defense. This is the time when a scholar presents post proposal work and has to defend his/her upcoming Ph.D.

From what I saw and felt the scenario is really tense and there's a grill down session on the proposed thesis. If you are the one defending the prethesis you better go with some psychiatrist advice on how to face pressure; immense pressure.

The professors show no mercy on questioning every aspect of your work. I'd not want to discuss here the person nor the prethesis that he was defending for the reasons of confidentiality. I am starting to believe that there's more than what meets the eyes when it comes to going about Ph.D.

I hope all of you'll pray for my survival :)

10 reasons why you should do research from MDI

I am going to put down 10 reasons why one should choose MDI for research in Management. I am not making a case of me being a genius to cite these reasons when I am not even a week old to MDI. However, I am going to put the reasons from the perspective of a juvenile. However, I'd wish to revisit these 10 reasons every semester and see if I can modify them.

So here we go:

1. The Brand Name: When it comes to research in the field of management MDI is one of the most renowned institutes in India.
   
2. The Professors: I have had the opportunity to see 2 professors in action and they have been exceptional in what they have offered.
3. The course structure: The course structure for the research/FPM programmed here is one of the best in India.
4. Senior FPM Scholars: Senior FPM scholars in the colloquial language (it's corporate language as well) I'd say are really cool and chilled out. They are very helpful in every aspect.
5. Selection Process: The good thing about the selection process is it's not too sophisticated and with basic maths and decent English it's not too tough to make it into the interviews. I must however caution that if you are a fresher and are anything less than exceptional you better get some experience behind you.
6. Database of Journals
   
7. Library: The one phrase that comes to my mind is "State of Art".
8. Gym: Very close to perfect.
9. Accommodation
10. Me. No I am kidding! Still hunting for the 10th one :)
    

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The Debate Continues 2...

Before I dive into discussing the eternal question whether Marketing is Science or Art. I'd like to share something that I've not felt through out my life. I'd like to introduce you to professor Ashok Pratap Arora. Professor Arora is one of the best professors I've met in my academic life. The genius of the man is questioning the most simplest terms which we take for granted. Questions like "What is science?; What is the role of logic in science?" He gets his student think about the challenges of marketing from the very basic of the subject itself. His style of teaching is intriguing and hence creating the curiosity that you want to get rid of right after the class. The persona of professor creates magic in the thought generation process of his students.

It's so easy to say that marketing is applied science. However, how do you distinguish pure science from applied science. And then the debate that "Are all pure sciences absolutely pure in nature?" I came out of his class at around 10:40 AM in the morning but I still feel I am in that room trying to understand the world from the very basic. And I suppose this is what is the purpose of a professor. The purpose inducing self learning in his students by giving them the curiosity to ponder the unknown. And trust me in Prof Arora's class everything (unless he chooses to explain something) is unknown. I am having my fingers crossed to prepare well for the next class but I know I'll go into the class with immense amount of unknown to be explored.

I'd have loved to answer the various questions I posed in the post The Debate Continues... but I guess I need to do a lot of reading to justify the answers and importantly gather enough courage to defend my point of view on the eternal debate.

I promise that there will be multiple post coming up in the series The Debate Continues...Let me conclude by sharing something.

Every Discipline takes something from other disciplines and so has Marketing. However, Marketing has grown so tall in stature that it's time for Marketing to contribute to other disciplines. Most important thing to remember is that Emphasis of Marketing is on "Exchange".

The Debate Continues...

I am back with the ongoing question of whether "Marketing is Science or Art?" This is a question that's under scrutiny since the inceptions of Marketing as a discipline.

Keep watching this space for more.

Coming Soon......

I'd have tried giving my point of view on the above debatable topic. However, it deserves a dedicated separate post and hence I am going to publish it as part of my next post.

The First Sophisticated Seminar..

Prof Abhishek Srivastava from the West Virginia University presented a seminar on "Encouraging Knowledge Sharing in organization". I won't discuss a lot about it because frankly I could not get most of it. However, what I could establish from my past work experience at Google and Juno, I am starting to believe that with very unique and special profiles it's not a win-win situation when it comes to Knowledge Sharing.

Let me tell you how. With what I've experienced as a Search Quality Analyst, Google, the best way to become an analyst is not to get tampered by the knowledge that might be passed in totality to you from some senior analyst. This would result in an unidirectional way of looking things and hence missing out on innovative part of the profile. I understand that this is a very juvenile hypothesis but I am starting to assume that there is need to get closer into this by doing a study. A very niche study but it should be fun.

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An Encounter with the World of Philosophy..

I carefully chose the word encounter. I could have used the word rendezvous but for someone like me a rendezvous with the world of Philosophy is no less than an encounter. I mean a guy who's never been away from the objectives of science and technology is suddenly asked to get into the subjective ocean of philosophy.

It's not that I've never come close to reading philosophy and it's subset psychology. For that matter I've read a bit of Freud. But something like Penis envy is a new phrase. Let me just scrape something from wikipedia on penis envy.

"Penis envy in Freudian psychoanalysis refers to the supposed reaction of a girl during her psychosexual development to the realization that she does not have a penis. Freud considered this realization a defining moment in the development of gender and sexual identity for women. According to Freud, the parallel reaction in boys to the realization that girls do not have a penis is Castration anxiety.

In contemporary culture, the term is sometimes used inexactly or metaphorically to refer to the idea that adult women wish they had a penis, or to refer to anxieties between men about the size of their genitals."

I might be sounding crazy as to why I am having this unimportant discussion on penis envy. The reason is because I am still trying to understand what psychology is. Contextually it's been said that Psychology is the Mother of All Sciences. However, physicist believe that psychologists have physics envy. Physics Envy; now this is what brought me into discussing penis envy. Anyways before I confuse myself and/or my readers with all the hoopla about the philosophical essence of psychology, I'll move into putting down the flavor of my first day of class at MDI.

The class was about the "Philosophy & Methodologies of Creating Knowledge" popularly known as PMCK. I must say my first stint with Professor Rajen Gupta has created a very strong impression about the class of the man and his eternal quest for being an assimilator (knowledge assimilation). And after having the privilege of hearing him the quote “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known” has a sense of completeness.

Getting back to classes.

The day has come when I am all set to convert the fear of getting back to school into the thrill of exploring unbound territories. Really, I mean the the field of knowledge; research specially is unbound by any boundaries. I might be wrong at this early stage and would be into juvenile thinking process but this all seems to me like dejavu.

I would hold my punches until I have the feel of the ring. But once I do I am all set for coup de grâce.

Oops.... was almost about to have a perfect start until I realized I'll be late if I don't get out of my indulgence of weblogging.

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The Journey has just begun..

And I thought Google was the place I had the opportunity to meet and work with the best minds. How quickly the perspective can change. My first day at MDI as a FPM Scholar was an experience I'll never forget. Apart from settling down I had the chance to rendezvous with the seniors and the conversation was no less than rocket science sometimes. Their eyes glitter with passion for the institute, for the course, for their area of interest and for their professors.

I am looking forward to begin a new journey with excitement and a little bit of fear; fear from the unknown. Fear of returning to school after 3 years of casual corporate life....