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Value Centric Organizations – I

As organizations get to be more global, more diverse, more flexible and more agile in this digital world, it is imperative that they stay transparent to their employees and stakeholders although this is going to be a challenge for most. The management and the employees must operate through a ‘common fabric’ that ‘stitches’ them together cohesively in a collaborative manner in such dispersed and virtual organizations. This common fabric are a set of VALUES based on ones beliefs, convictions, ethics and principles which would be the ‘guiding principles’ of the organization. The beliefs of an individual would be based on their cultural, educational, family and ethnic background. The behavior is based on the values and the culture is based on the employee’s behavior.

Global organizations in the future would be more flat, less-hierarchical and power neutral, with lots more of first level management handling employees based on geography and markets, and lots more matrix managers handling the projects. Both these types of management would have to work together in an ‘electronically-social’ environment and work towards a common aligned purpose, made effective by top leadership through a set of values that would be the framework of the entire organization. One has to ensure they stay true to these values during all times, good or bad.

When you start an entrepreneurial venture, the sets of beliefs and principles of the founders becomes the undocumented set of values for the organization. Yes, their personal values become the one that the organization practices. And as the company grows, the managers and employees imbibe the same set of values and this becomes their path of choice to productivity and profitability. As the company becomes a mid-sized one, it is best to document the set of values and limit them to 5 or 6 and the organizational culture would be a reflection of these values.

If there are mergers or acquisitions happening, it is best for the top leadership to sit down quickly as part of the integration process and chalk out the combined top 5 or 6 values for the combined organization. It is also a good practice for having a survey done internally with all the employees to understand what they feel the organization stands for and then summarize the top 5 or 6 values – the benefit here is the values came from grounds up and since all employees participated in the process, the motivation level of adopting it is quite high. Some companies go this exercise every 5 years or so, and may change one of the values in the process based on the feedback received, but the core values do not change with time. It is a good practice to have the values written at the back of the identification badges of the employees so that they get reinforced daily. The most common values you would see across all organizations would be integrity, quality, something to do with community and customer satisfaction to name a few.

Having got the values worked out, it is important that all the policies, strategies and performance measures reflect them. The tactical part and the approach of doing things may change, but not the strategy that is based on the values. There are two parts to any performance appraisal system – “What” objective was achieved and “How” it was achieved. The values address the “How” part and the performance should be evaluated based on the values exhibited while achieving the desired objective. Values essentially connect the organizational goals to the employee’s achievements, thus becoming a motivational tool.

Going back to my previous statement that the future organizations would be less hierarchical and more flat, the values help the employees manage themselves without much of a need of active supervision and they begin to trust each other as they work across boundaries to achieve common organization goals. They feel more empowered because they believe that they impact the organizational positively at all times, they believe the system they operate in encourages excellence and they have better work-life balance because their beliefs are the basis of the values of the company. No one can ask for a better win-win situation than this.

The author, Rajagopalan V, is a business and technology consultant based out of Bengaluru, India and is a foot-soldier for value based leadership and conducts management workshops in Asia in helping organizations come out with their own set of values.

Why are Flash storage companies the acquisition flavor of this season?

Recently Dell has agreed to acquire EMC for $67 billion and then Western Digital intends to acquire Sandisk for $19 billion. Both EMC and Sandisk made their name due to their storage expertise, although at opposite ends of the spectrum – EMC at the enterprise side of data storage and Sandisk in the client and mobile side. So, why are storage companies the flavor of the season to get acquired?

Other than Sandisk, the three companies mentioned above are going through a slow demand and facing intense competition for their products – be it PCs which is nearing end of life as we know it, legacy storage or mechanical hard drives. Dell with its server expertise combines well with the storage expertise of EMC to make an entity that can take the data center market (read Cloud) flag position – I am going to assume there is going to be some overlap in their storage products which may lead to some consolidation. Also with the advent of Flash as enterprise storage, EMC may not be effective in competing at the price points with their fiber channel arrays. Everyone knows Sandisk from their consumer space but they have made acquisitions in the enterprise space a few years ago which made them have effective solutions across all the computing market segments.

If you look at Flash as a storage (it is actually a solid state device – SSD, storing data using electricity and is non-volatile), they have been more used in the consumer space (embedded applications) in the laptop, cameras, tablet and mobile markets. They are also more rugged as a physical drop of the device that has Flash storage does not lead to a data loss as it may in the case of magnetic drives. Presently their price points are about 5 to 10 times more expensive than the well-known desktop storage – the ‘mechanical’ hard disk. But with volume usually the prices drop, and higher volume is a result of more use cases of the technology – as data centers and cloud are the latest buzz words now, it is clear that enterprise storage class will have to go with Flash and its related array technology as they have no moving parts which results in less acoustic noise, less power consumed and less heat generated, and comes with a thinner profile and are about 100x faster, all a big win for huge data centers being planned as less cooling and less real estate would be required, thus making them ‘more greener’. The biggest drawback today for Flash is they have lesser longevity and old age reliability than the regular hard drives. So, be it public or private cloud, looks like the future holds well with Flash technology.

If you look at the competition for Flash as a storage medium, there are only a handful of them for Sandisk – a combination of Intel and Micron (individually they are leaders in Flash technology and together they have formed a partnership company as well), Samsung and Toshiba. These companies have both the IP related to Flash which they license out and also have end products that they sell directly. Intel, having seen the light at the end of the tunnel for a few years now on their personal computing segment and having gone nowhere in the mobile and tablet business despite their acquisition of Infineon, is a leader in the data center and server farm business, indirectly though (meaning others use Intel’s technology and products to operate their own data centers) and raking in the dollars from this enterprise segment – in fact, this has been their most profitable business now and have customers like Amazon and Microsoft. They do have all the expertise and the IP behind the manufacturing techniques in the sub-micron space which helps them have a generation lead in the Flash technology. Samsung, the world leader in the memory space, is a major Flash supplier to other storage companies and they would like to stay that way given their business model. Then comes Toshiba which is a credible innovator and a technology provider in the Flash space. Actually Toshiba invented both the NOR and NAND based Flash memory technologies, thanks to Dr. Masuoka, NOR considered a more expensive/GB, less durable and slower than NAND in general.

Western Digital and Sandisk combined would offer a lot in the overall storage space across all market segments, and probably may be the biggest supplier to many an enterprise storage companies. Flash can be packaged in different formats for different applications and it is capturing the eyes of chip makers, enterprise storage and server companies, thus potentially leading to more partnerships and mergers in this space in days to come. Enterprise storage is the biggest wave that is happening with the cloud, and big data and analytics segment, and it looks like Flash is getting to be the biggest beneficiary. Expect some strong moves by HP Enterprise, IBM, Hitachi, Netapp, Seagate and Kingston, and even the networking giants in the near future along the M&A space as technology predictors already are pointing to the fact that Flash storage market would exceed the Hard Disk storage market even as early as next year.

This article was written originally in 2014

T20 is entertainment

Twenty-20, or T20 as it is called in cricket lingo, started off mesmerizing the whole world after the IPL season and definitely is meeting its objective of more inclusion from all rungs of the society. It is equivalent of baseball played in USA from a time format perspective and started getting more followers in women (wives, daughters, mothers) and many 9 to 5 professionals who started unwinding over a T20 game in the evening, either at home or in the stadium. I have been following this game for the past 10 years or so, and am a self-professed addict and I would like share what I experience – great cricket players may concur with some but not with all, but thought I would express what I have observed till date:

T20 is all about entertainment. It is more batters friendly and bowlers unfriendly. People have come to see lots of sixes and fours, and this is what they enjoy and this is what they usually get. Spectators come to see certain players and to support their team and have fun.
T20 game is mostly a factor of the pitch on that day, the weather conditions (rain or heat), Dew factor, size of the ground, and above all, how the player feels about himself on that particular outing.
T20 is about being a Glenn McGrath type of bowler. Bowling a tight line and length and not wavering is critical. If you are able to do this consistently, the batters get annoyed and start committing unforced errors. A pacer with more yorkers, especially during the death overs, is the one that wins the battle (Ex. Malinga).
T20 has made fielding gain importance in all three formats now. The amount of runs saved by good fielding can be anywhere between 5 and 20 and this can make a difference between a win and a loss. Amazing catches and run outs do happen in T20, and they are worth to watch and do make a big difference in momentum of the game. An agile fielding unit is an asset to any team.
SPIN saw a resurgence in all formats with T20. There were several Doubting Thomases’ that thought spin would be useless in T20 format but everyone has got this wrong. In fact, more times you see pacers getting hit than spinners in T20 and it is not unusual nowadays to see spin opening the attack in both the limited overs format
Again, AGE is not a factor in T20 surprisingly. You can see lots of late thirties players playing some great cricket and enjoying their T20 game, even after their retirement from the other two formats.
A low scoring game that is usually run-a-ball or lesser can turn out to be pretty exciting as I have observed the chase to be tough as well. It was a low-scoring game for a reason and most likely the conditions are good for bowling. The pitch is offering some bounce or swing or is madly spinning.
At the same time, a huge scoring game of 200+ runs can also be tricky. Again, the chasing team usually comes close and many a times even win. The turning point in chasing a huge total was that epic 430 run chase by South Africa against Australia in a 50 over match that turned the tables in both the limited over formats. The logic is simple – if the team batting first hits 200+, so can the team batting second. The pitch is all batting friendly and nothing at all for the bowlers. Most of these high scoring matches happen at smaller grounds.
During the Powerplay overs – the first six, if the team managed to hit fifty for the loss of no or one wicket (at 8 runs an over), they are placed well to hit a decent score to defend or chase– usually in the 170-190 range. During these 6 overs, the conditions are totally batters friendly and rarely bowling friendly unless the pitch is doing something for them. A 170 plus score is usually a respectable score to defend under any condition.
During the middle overs of 7 to 14, if the team averages 6+ runs, and they have not lost more than couple of wickets, again, they are placed for a respectful score of 170 to 180 runs. The bowlers need to do their best in these overs to contain the batters and not allow them to settle.
If the team has managed to score 100 for the loss of 2 or 3 wickets in 13 overs, they are usually placed to hit 160 to 180 runs overall. What the team hits in the first 12 overs for the loss of 2 or 3 wickets, it is safe to say they can hit the same score in the last 8 overs provided they don’t lose too many wickets.
It is not the death overs of 19^th or 20^th over that gets smashed around, but rather the overs 16 to 18. So, one need to use their best bowlers for these three overs. These three overs usually is the difference between win and loss. If you need to hit 27 runs or so in the last three overs or 18 runs in the last two overs or 10 runs in the last over, it is usually the chaser’s advantage as they can achieve it if they are even down 5 or 6 wickets. The tail (position 9 to 11) can wag and give support if needed.
A team with batting strength till position 9 can have a great outing almost always.
The so called finishers do have the ability to hit 10 to 12 runs an over on an average during the last five overs. More the merrier. These are usually the batters who come between positions 5 and 7.
If the game becomes one sided at any given point, the spectators both at home and in the stadium do not show that much interest. It is important though in T20 to come close to any score while chasing and never give up the fight – winning and losing is secondary. This is still obviously seen if any test team plays a minnow or an associated team, although I see lots of improvement in many of these teams in the past 3-4 years.
As in all formats, as long as you hold on to wickets, you can hit a respectable score. Wickets are key, and if they keep falling at regular intervals, then only a sub-par score is in the offing.
Finally , it is not about prior statistics or records – one any given day, provided both teams have a good strength and no injuries to main players, any of the top 8 test playing teams can win over the other team in a T20. It is more predictable in Tests and limited overs but not in T20 which makes it more exciting. If it is a rain affected match with shorter overs to play than 20, definitely it is anybody’s game.

Six things that E-commerce companies have to get right

Having been part of the e-retail journey as a customer for the past few years and as a consultant for the past two in India, I have seen pretty much the entire spectrum of sites from really pathetic to very good, although only couple of them stand out at the top consistently.

As many single retail shops want to get an e-presence now and putting up websites, they have to be conscious of six things (five if you take the first one out) that would lure customers to their site:

(I) Price: For specialty and high end luxury items, you can discard it as people with big wallets just come in to buy from here for a ‘status symbol’. But since it is easy to compare across different e-tailers on the web, it is imperative that the PRICE is absolutely competitive with other sites and much less expensive than a brick-and-mortar price with FREE Delivery. Price to be compared is the actual selling price plus any delivery charges….

(II) Security of transaction: Absolutely critical to ensure the customers are at ease when they transact. The default and safest approach is to do Cash on Delivery (CoD) at no additional charge – I know lots of friends who do not buy if CoD is not available, that too at any extra charge. This makes the seller more accountable as he does not receive the money before the product even gets shipped – he would be longing to close out on his ‘receivable’. The ONUS is not with the customer – his attitude can be, if it comes great, if not, not to bother. So the site has to be approved by all the Transaction gateways available that are secure and must be cleared by all reliable known virus software there is.

(III) Ease of Return and Refund: I cannot understand still why Amazon India cannot do replacement – they do only returns and refunds. They should not ask the customers to print return slips and keep the invoice and put it back in original packing etc. Especially if the frame of mind is to return or replace, these are additional pain points that no customer must go through. And their pickup of the goods must be efficient and guaranteed within a time window of couple of hours – not an entire day waiting for it to be picked up. And the pickup must happen on the very next date after the refund or replace was logged in to the system and the couriers have to be punctual. I do not see all these happening in most of the cases. Usually we are at the mercy of the couriers who do not turn up on the date or the time specified, and some e-tailers want us to keep the invoice, original package and the return slip printed out – not everyone has a printer here. And anyone in the family who received it would have opened up the package and not retained the invoice! E-tailing is all about understanding the customer’s behavior well.

(IV) Own inventory and courier helps a lot: A 100% market place sort of E-tailer is at the mercy of the vendors. The E-tailer in this case just provides a platform for all businesses to sell. They have absolutely no control on the way the vendor packs the goods, ships it on time or not, and no grip on the quality of delivery. If the vendor packs something and it comes in broken to you, you are asked to send photographs of the same back. If the vendor does not ship on time and it does not meet the guaranteed date, then this is a big issue – this happens when we need something for Diwali or some event and the goods do not arrive in. Having their own inventory shop and go downs in major cities for easy shipments eases a lot of issues and since they buy in volumes, their own shop gives the best price in the catalog. As for having the courier of their own, this ensures that the entire chain is managed by them, thus increasing accountability of the delivery. Being at the mercy of the inefficient external third part couriers is going to degrade their business. Unless someone ensures that they are in the check point process with all the vendors to ensure the packing, shipping and delivery is correct, and take complete ownership and not blame the vendors for any incidents, your entire commerce system is susceptible to criticalities in its chain. Customer can and will hold E-tailer responsible. Of course, there are local laws and regulations that may prevent the e-tailer to also be the seller, especially if it is a foreign company, but there must be ways to circumvent the problem legally.

Having said that, it is in the best business interest of third party couriers to align with several good e-commerce sites and take them as customers and adhere to their vendor policies and regulation and make the best out of the situation. They should not act as if they are the ‘outsider’ in this transaction but a value-adding partner in the whole commerce.

(V) Customer Experience: Along with the above owned inventory and courier, this is the other most important part that E-Tailer has to provide without any excuses. By experience, I mean ease of the website to transact, the website having detailed and right description of the product and all reviews associated with it, ease of different options for secure payments, getting the products on time EVERY time within the guaranteed date in normal delivery, having the products delivered in good quality so that it meets what they are looking out for, thus avoiding any replacement or refunds(‘one gets what they asked for’), keeping the customer informed if the product is getting delayed due to various factors, etc. so that the customer is at ease at every step of the transaction and delivery. Better still is to have some good escalation path clearly documents names with phone numbers and email – this shows they have the utmost interest to improve and delight customers. If you take the Ahmedabad based e-tailer Infibeam, who are pretty decent, somehow they lack the refund and replacement button in the order chain which makes one feel uncomfortable about the experience in the site. Lots of metrics must be tracked on a regular basis by the management, rogue vendors must be taken off for repeated mistakes so that they do not spoil the name of the e-tailer, refund processed within a day, etc. all these would add to loyalty of the customer to come back. I somehow feel Flipkart (and Myntra which is part of FlipKart now) and Snapdeal are to be appreciated here although I believe they still have a long way to go and they must be improving on making the CUSTOMER HAPPY All the TIME.

(VI) Respect for Local TAX and Accounting: If an international chain wants to set up shop here, it is better that they understand the LAW of the LAND – they must look before they leap. They cannot complain after having started their enterprise in a local country that the laws are not conducive for their business. If one has not done their homework, and has not understood how to run a business here, it is no fault of the local government but purely theirs. Failure to understand the market to do business in is totally unacceptable and I would certainly blame the management for the same. Being LEGAL in the land they do business in is critical. There would be lots of foreign direct investment (FDI) regulations that one has to adhere to, as the local government would like to protect the local interests first and not to give undue advantage to anyone from outside to do business in one country, all things applying equally. If they want to have certain things change, there is always a legal lobbying route that they can take to address their problems and work out things with the local government. This is certainly not the area that I can talk with confidence but there are experts who can guide any multinationals to do business in one country and there are many successful ones who are running their show for a long time now.

As I write these, I am sure we would be a few successful ones standing after a few years in the e-commerce arena and a handful of logistics companies doing a great job as well, but most likely that many of the today’s e-commerce players and logistics companies would not exist in couple of years. Not everyone can be a reliable e-tailer. It takes some good leadership, strong accountability and conducive commerce laws that would differentiate the best from the rest.

The author is a business consultant based out of Bangalore and has been in the IT industry for two decades across various domains.

A Beginner’s guide to Big Data, Analytics and Cloud.

I have been hearing a lot about these buzz words in the title for about couple of years now, and luckily had couple of opportunities to work on them over the past 6 months or so, thanks to my own consultancy, which made me read a few books and articles on these subjects that got me ticking to know more. With certainly no claim to being an expert in these areas, I have managed to gain some fair understanding that I thought would share here purely for education purposes, so that everyone who hears these buzzwords knows what it is all about and can manage to have a good conversation around it. I must definitely thank the references below as most of the writing here is just a highly edited summation of the details found in them, to keep your reading more at the layman level. Consider this as a crisp primer for the uninitiated from both the technology and the consumption angle.

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) that made India its right-sourcing capital during the first decade of this century has slowly moved on to the shores of Philippines and Vietnam. Now it seems that everyone is talking about the Analytics and Cloud wave to have hit India, either through the typical right sourcing to analytics companies here or as a captive analytics center for some big multinational company. Certainly I see the value being created in this wave to be higher than the BPO wave, and looks like India can establish its credential using its early mover advantage. Lots of big names like HCL and IBM have got major contracts to maintain the entire IT departments of the Fortune 500 companies on a cloud model and this is a growing area.

Digital economy(sales) is ready to surpass physical economy. Nowadays, all organizations are asking what their customers want and what do they generally do? With your private information on any social media not exactly private as you think, they want to know who your friends are and what do they like? Who influences you and whom do you influence? They have large quantities of the data in the world to analyze these information from and design a product or a feature to a product that you are bound to be happy with. Companies are thinking on their feet, in real time, very quick to react to the feedback you have given them… at least good companies strive to do this and are placing their bets in this direction. It is no more about a group of customers or a cross section of people that they want to study, but they want to know YOU as a customer individually. Oh how lovely you feel!

Analytics is being used in both B2C and B2B but the former is more challenging than the latter because predicting end consumer’s behavior to buy, which is usually emotional and irregular, is touch. Businesses buy or consume in a more regular and rational fashion using usually a well-known process. What makes the B2C modelling much harder is the fact the data here is more complex due to its volume and variants as more than half the data is ‘unstructured’.

Definitions

This Big DATA is just ‘data that is quite large that cannot be processed by conventional methods’. McKinsey defines Big Data as large data sets that cannot be captured or analyzed by typical database software tools. So, Today’s Big Data may not be tomorrow’s Big Data as the tools would have caught up to analyze today’s Big Data tomorrow but Big Data of tomorrow would be orders of magnitude higher than today’s data so that the same problem remains. Hence if it safe to say that we are just at the beginning of an explosion of a DATA world. Big Data is all about the Internet of Things, social and mobile put together.

The industry has defined Big Data across three V characteristics: Volume, Variety, Velocity and sometimes a fourth gets added – Veracity. The volume is measured by the sheer size of the data, the variety talks about the assortment of data (structured vs unstructured) and the velocity about the speed at this data get created or processed. Veracity is the one that talks about the accuracy of these huge data, trust behind these data sources and how to take off the noise to arrive at decent useful information that makes good business sense. The source of data can be either machine generated like sensor data, web log data, transaction data etc. which are structured and satellite images, scientific data, multimedia which are unstructured data, or human generated like survey input data, click-stream data, etc. which are structured data and emails, social media data, SMS etc. which are unstructured data. Each one of these unstructured data can be an analytics domain independently, like text analytics, and lots of research is going into them. Usually structured data are stored in some sort of a table in a RDBMS and can be queried through an SQL.

Traditionally we know of only the ‘structured’ data – the ones that can put into a database. For the past few years, thanks to the explosion of social media and smart phones, we have ‘unstructured’ data in the form of text(emails)/SMS, multimedia (audio, video), (A)GPS and other location based data, data from sensors , etc. that seems to be imploding daily. These ‘unstructured’ data are the ones that are becoming to be less private because you like to share them across the social platforms and the corporations want to have a strong direct relationship with you based on these data. They want to do everything they can to acquire new customers and retain and cross-sell to existing customers. If you sneeze, the corporations catch a cold – this is how close they get to you.

Analytics is the way in which corporates handle these complexities and speed in data to arrive at a business value that gives them the competitive advantage. Analytics is just an interface between these large data and the business model. It uses mathematics to derive meaning from data. Most of the analytics has its roots to Google, Yahoo and Amazon who are considered pioneers in these and the technology being used. In the earlier days, they just used to work on ‘samples’ or a smaller subset of the data, discarding all the outliers, and do some predictions. Nowadays, with the availability of affordable storage, networking and computing power and even pay-as-you-use models, all the generated data gets analyzed to arrive at deeper and broader insights. Since all the decisions are getting to be more data-centric, it is imperative there is proper transformation and cultural change across the corporation in terms of all the people, the process and strong leadership

Big Data analytics have moved from being descriptive (based on past information using statistics – Business Intelligence to understand what happened) to inquisitive analytics (why it happened) to being predictive (used past information to predict future outcomes- Data mining and forecasting for what is likely to happen) to being prescriptive (used past information to direct future results – optimization to arrive what should happen). The world has moved from models created by small ‘samples’ to using ALL the data to create more complex models and simulate evolving scenarios. All these outcomes of information management in the form of reports, dashboards or animated visualization gets up-levelled to the senior leadership team to arrive at some qualified decisions which becomes the baseline for the way ahead for corporations. The talent that is required to do all these modelling are essentially a combination of data scientists with good maths, statistics and technology background and business managers with good economics, behavioral science and social skills.

Cloud is just a means to provide shared computing resources that are pay-as-you-go and in the IT jargon, it is often referred to as XaaS where X can stand for I or H, P, S, etc. IT services are seen as utilities and one pays only for the time the resources are being used, hence cloud is also referred to as Utility computing. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS, Hardware as a Service – HaaS) is the most common of all cloud services that delivers all computing resources on a rental basis, Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a means by which tools and middleware gets integrated with IaaS to provide a comprehensive consistent platform, and Software as a Service (Saas) is an application that gets created and hosted by the developer in a multi-client mode and will sit on top of a PaaS or a IaaS. Cloud, be it private which means owned and operated by the organization itself or public which means owned and operated by a vendor or hybrid which is a combination of both Private and Public, is essential for Big Data. Examples of Iaas would be Amazon EC2-cloud Compute service and Rightscale, of PaaS would be Microsoft Azure and of SaaS would be a CRM like Salesforce.com. Google has also introduced Data as a Service (DaaS) where one can use the cloud to store and retrieve data. Cloud computing still has some nagging issues of security, privacy and standardization (or lack thereof) which are slowly falling in place, and the old IT organization and the CIO roles are getting transformed taking this new paradigm into effect.

Technology

There are many Big Data technologies being used but the most common today is the Apache Hadoop framework which is an open-source platform for both storage and processing of all data variants. The two critical components of Hadoop are the Distributed file Systems (HDFS) used for storage and the Map Reduce which does the analysis on the data, both in the distributed sense.

MapReduce was designed originally by Google that distributes the problem and later aggregates the result in batch mode. Google developed Big Table as their distributed storage system from where Hadoop derived the HDFS.

Hardware, networking and storage have become more affordable now and are constantly getting cheaper to enable distributed computing in a big way. Cloud gives you all these through subscription based service, with no upfront capital or maintenance costs.

Open source software is key and was made prevalent by Google through its Android mobile OS and is the key forward for any new technologies to be embraced quickly – the eco-system builds up around this open source efficiently and quickly, thus able to deliver all sorts of solutions for a very low cost. The smaller companies seem to be more agile in delivering a solution for a customer need than the big software vendors and this is creating competition where size does not matter. The software has moved from a classic licensing model to a royalty based model to an annual fee based model thereby benefiting the end user who always has the latest updated version to work with.

Distributed computing is a fundamental technology that allows independent computing resources to be networked seamlessly together across a huge geographical area to make it look like one single coherent environment. Computing resources that are being shared can include computing entities to memory to networks to storage, but they all have to work together to execute a program. Over the years, distributed computing has evolved from mainframe computing where there was a large computer using multiple processors with massive IO operations used for batch and transactional processing, to Cluster computing where several cheap commodity machines were connected by a high bandwidth network and controlled by specific software tool for parallel computing, to Grid computing which is an evolution of clusters where the grids are actually an aggregation of geographically dispersed clusters connected by Internet and users can ‘consume’ resources just like any other utility.

Distributed computing can be regarded as a super set of parallel computing, the latter implying a tightly coupled system of mostly homogenous components sharing the same physical memory or shared memory. Distributed computing encompasses all architectures that use heterogeneous computing elements not necessarily co-located. The differences between these two types are getting blurred as these two terms indeed gets used loosely to mean the same thing – both are used to perform multiple activities in parallel. Since in Big Data, the data complexity is high due to its volume, variants and distribution, and the computational complexity may also be high, distributed heterogeneous computing fits well for statistical models, and simulations. Cloud technologies support Big Data well by providing large computing resources on demand, providing large storage for keeping these large data and providing frameworks for optimized processing of large amount of data.

The foundation of cloud computing is Virtualization that separates the resources and services from the underlying physical system- here again, this logical split can happen at the server end through a thin software layer inserted into the hardware that contains a virtual machine monitor (VMM) or Hypervisor, at the application level to make it OS independent, at the memory level where the memory gets decoupled from the server, at the networking level through a SW that just makes a pool of connectivity available or at the storage level – this level of abstraction that virtualization gives just provides the relevant information needed and hides the exact details which may not be relevant, and makes applications portable across different hardware and software environment. Although not meaning the same, this software abstraction is more or less similar to the green-font HW machines called ‘XTerm’ used by DEC and SUN during the 1980s that front-ended for their servers there were at the back for computing. The most common technologies used here are Xen, VmWare and Microsoft Hyper-V.

Applications

Analytics has become prevalent in some key areas now and is slowly changing the way we do business:

Financial-Banking and Insurance – perhaps the prevalent users of analytics and early adopters as well

Credit Card Fraud: The transaction record of the customer is validated against the customer records and his/her past transactions, their travel schedules (getting access to travel sites from where they did the booking) and place of transaction to identify if there is any abnormal activity, as they are transacting in real-time. There are certain rules set for each customer based on his/her history that the transaction gets checked against. If some transaction is believed to be ‘suspicious’, then more ‘verification’ process is added to the transaction to make it more secure.

Credit Risk analysis: Banks wants to play safe to ensure they can retrieve the loan from their customers – they look at past credit history against your name to see if you are a ‘safe bet’. Thanks to the credit rating agency like Crisil which does this as their main line of business, the information of all credit transaction of all kind is available to the banks and loan-giver to verify the details and distribute a loan or give you a credit card or line of credit.

Insurance Risk analysis: Right now, your vehicle insurance premium is based on the city you live, the risk of the neighborhood you are in, and your driving points against you and prior claims made. In the USA, few insurance companies are generating the premium based on INDIVIDUAL customers and customized to them as a pay-as-you-drive insurance policy. The onboard telematics sends feeds to your insurer on your braking and acceleration habits, distance you travel, and the roads you frequently travel on (using GPS) – thanks to these various sensorial data, higher premium is charged for more irresponsible driving. This in turn serves both purposes – makes insurance companies more profitable and also betters one’s driving habits. A shining example of not only where the ‘rubber meets the road’ but also where the ‘engine meets the wallet’!

Healthcare

The biggest bang for the buck for analytics, in my opinion, would be in two areas – healthcare which impacts everyone’s life, and in retail to understand customers better. Healthcare comes today at a cost and is heavily dependent on the facilities of the hospitals or clinics you are getting the treatment in, and the knowledge of the doctor attending to you. Healthcare is one critical industry like power where the government needs to ensure it is affordable to all its citizens, and at the same time must be the best available there is to all.

For all this to happen, a good start would be a health record of the patient available electronically across the nation and the globe. This would carry a history of ailments, conditions, surgery and medications of the patient and the regular health check-up results – this is the Electronic Health Record (EHR) available in the US and other countries. The second would be the availability of all clinical trials that are in process or already FDA-approved, side-effects data of all medications, common diseases data prevalent in certain parts of the world and definitely the insurance data of the individual. With these two together, any doctor from anywhere in the world can give guidance to the best and optimum cure and care for the patient, best medicine from any pharma company for a particular condition, and the best insurance plan for an individual and his family based on the risks they carry. Data drives most of these integrated decisions now, along with the doctor’s experience to suggest a remedy – compare it to the yesteryears where the former data would not be available. This also further progress into tele-medicine where a solder injured in the battle is in an operation tent with medical gadgets streaming data to experienced doctors sitting elsewhere to guide the surgery procedure and to have him get out of danger quickly.

Retail

All your purchase patterns and transactions are being collected and analyzed carefully to send you targeted advertisements with e-coupons, to aid companies do location based marketing, to help companies get data on leaving customers and where they are going to and why, in managing the effectiveness of an ad campaign, and in knowing details of acquired customers to improve cross-selling. The better they know the customers, the better would be their sales in an industry with thin margins.

The other areas in retails where big data analytics is already in use are in inventory management, logistics optimization, merchandize assortment and pricing optimization, fraud and loss prevention and vendor rationalization.

Classing examples of analytics are Amazon “you may also want” prompts and Netflix “what your friends thought” of movie suggestion, both of which shows good results for the retailer.

Travel

Many of the travel sites collects the log files from all the searches made by the users, and based on your desired preferences will strive to increase their bookings ratio. They would also have data from the text analytics report from your TripAdvisor reviews and based on what you like and do not like, and based on your past history on their site and other sites, will be able to give out optimized flight and hotel options taking together the inputs you had given based on budgets and time.

Transport

Volvo along with Sweden’s Transportation department is using cloud service for car-to-car communication to warn the drivers ahead of icy and slippery roads, thus making safety a priority. They collect the data from the sensors (ESPs) fitted inside their cars – ESP stabilizes the car as well as sends signals of hazardous road conditions through the mobile network to the cloud. This real-time information is shared with the cars behind that are to use the same road so that they are pre-warned about the actual condition of the road and this information compliments any blanket weather warning that the drivers automatically get updated on.

Media

Major part of advertising is the reach and conversion that one gets through any forms of media, be it mobile, TV, Web or the classic print. Advertising is what brings money to the media houses. Despite the numerous ads that come on any websites, only a few gets clicked and only a small percentage of these clicks actually turns into a purchase. The marketing world is always challenged with how an ad can be more effective so that the hit ratio increases. Now with the digital cable and dish TVs clearly revealing your viewing patterns, your online purchases and shop transactions revealing your buying pattern, with the website having a history of your visits in some format, and with the operator knowing what Value-added services you have enrolled in, and with the world knowing what paper you read, all these combined through analytics would clearly describe a ‘path-to-purchase’ pattern to enable the media houses to focus their ads appropriately. It would not too long before ads stream into your TV or mobile that is customized based on your likes.

We already have News websites that customize your viewing page automatically based on your interest as this data is already collected and analyzed based on your previous trips to the website.

Pharmaceuticals

The business problems that get tackled here through analytics are classified into three buckets:

Sales and Marketing to understand their sales force effectiveness and resource optimization, market assessment and competitive analysis
Research and Development for clinical trials and reporting to FDA, safety analysis for the product, and licensing
Pricing and contracting for inventory and logistics management, and for setting up contracts and buybacks and rebates etc.

The other applications that are prevalent, some of which are being used by you daily without being aware they are Cloud based , are Google Docs, Gmail and Yahoo Mail, wearable health devices that has sensors that routinely monitor vital patient data and feeds back to the hospital or doctor who can take action based on any anomalies immediately, gene profiling and protein structure modelling that was done using community cloud from research institutions, use of satellite image processing used by several countries now for natural disaster management, opinion polls during elections, online document storage like Dropbox of iCloud by Apple, all the social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, online gaming and casino gambling predictions.

Transformation in the future

How do you feel if some complex tool used by a company predicts your next behavior with reasonable accuracy? How can companies use the data you provide and analyze them to make you BUY? How can healthcare be more focused to your particular problem and provide the best care at the cost you want? How you get the best travel package suited for you and your family based on your likes and dislikes that would enhance the memories of the travel? How can your insurance be tailor made for you based on your own defensive driving habits and your history of no claims? How can the banks give you the best bang for your buck by automatically understanding your financial goals and delivering a better return for you as a privileged customer? How can airlines make you fly with them frequently by enhancing your particular travel experience every time?

Big Data and its associated analytics are used to take on each customer as a time and enhance their experience. We can still use the old route and use the 80/20 rule that says that one can easily draw effective 80% of the conclusions and decisions based on the top 20% of the overall customer data. The choice is clear.

REFERENCES:

Big Data, Big Analytics – Michael Minelli et al , Wiley, 2013
Big Data for dummies – Judith Hurwitz et al, Wiley, 2013
Mastering Cloud Computing – Rajkumar Buyya et al, McGraw Hill, 2013

Many thanks to the reviewers of this blog and their valuable feedback – Vishoo, Venki and John, all of them from either analytics or e-commercebackground.

Retail E-commerce today in India – to boom or go kaboom?

Last week started off by Flipkart announcing a big sale on Oct 6^th which seemed to show lots of products at unbelievable low prices and netted $100M in revenue on one day but left a lot of customers dejected – it is not that they lost money, but rather seemed to have lost an opportunity to get a deal. Looks like they could not handle the high traffic and many of the product’s prices did not match what was advertised. So, a mixed results in my opinion. But I love the fact that they accepted the failure on their part and sent a personalized email out to all their customers – a very courageous move indeed, much like what Intel did when the first Pentium flaw came out and they offered to replace them all – this indeed gets a lot of loyalty to the brand in the long run. But definitely Flipkart has to have a much better system to take care of the traffic and the day spikes, have enough inventory of items to be sold at a good price or mention how many items in that price to be sold, and have better relationships with the OEMs who cry out loud that Flipkart is lowballing the brick-and-mortar stores which compromise 90% of their sales today. I am sure everyone would have teething problems to begin with and it is better to be addressed properly and I guess I would see this as a courageous move by Flipkart to really take the bull by the horn at this early stage to learn and adapt.

In the meantime Snapdeal also had a great sale going on clocking 100 crore per hour, and this being the season of Diwali it looks like everyone wants to be on Top gear to maximize their sales this month. I do not understand why the store retailers have a hard time when it comes to better pricing on the net – the margins are thinner and the warehouse cost is much lower than the real estate of the stores in prime locations. Also, it is a great way to compare and shop for the best item you want instead of believing the not-that-knowing-salesman-in-the-shop who just wants you to buy one particular brand because their commissions are better. I will not even think twice to go with an e-tailer for books, movies and music, camera and phones and their accessories- as long as the warranties are proper.

Having the government look into the e-commerce segment and being forced by the store retailers to curtail them is something that is not right for the customers. Instead of that, it is better to see what is best for the customers and make laws accordingly. Otherwise, it would be like countries like France where an e-tailer is not allowed to sell any book at more than a few percentage discounts from the MRP which makes the French folks go outside and buy them at better prices whenever they travel.

So, where are we now with E-commerce (web and mobile included in this) in Retail in India? My focus here would be India as this is the story that is developing for the past 5 odd years, but many of the facts scribed here can be relevant to any geography depending on the maturity of e-commerce in retail in that country. I am more confident to write about the Indian story as I have been following this for the past few years, both as a regular customer and also as a consultant and the story unfolding come with a bag of mixed emotions.

Benjamin Disraeli said “How much easier it is to be critical than to be critical”. Yet, I chose to be critical here and hopefully correct. Let me segment some of the areas of retail where e-commerce is a player, over and above the brick-and-mortar shops, and highlight some of the inherent issues being faced. The issues are not confined to any particular e-tailer but rather a common occurrence in this segment. I am not going to touch financial transaction as an e-commerce example here as we all know that this is the one what has the maximum penetration in India, thanks to the banks and insurance companies doing everything online now.

Furniture: Yes, one can get an entire Kitchen done or bedrooms finished, or just purchase a coffee table or an end table or just a ward robe, both antique and regular, all online. Half the time, the bookings get cancelled as the vendor is not able to make the product or ship it in time. But they need to take an advance of 10% only instead of the entire amount for furniture, especially if it has to be made after the order, and ask for the remaining money only when they are ready to ship. Just before they ship, they must be able to send a short video of the actual product to the customer for the final approval which would ensure they meet quality requirements.

Once they ship, installation, if any, by local carpenters that they align with has to be done smoothly to the customers. I have personally have had my orders cancelled more than three times after about 6-8 weeks, the e-tailer had taken my full money during booking and it is a good way to get interest collected without sending a products – bad way to do business. Such things have made me NOT buy furniture on-line anymore. Once the delivery of an end table happened 3 months later, after I reminded them a month after I booked, and the drawers were not fixed properly and a local carpenter really drove some nails in and made it a little ugly. So, my suggestion for furniture is, go to an actual store, select some options and haggle on the price and have them delivered to your address, and pay them by cheque on delivery.

Tickets to any shows or events: Again, a great way to get cinema tickets but the service fee can add up to a significant amount (Rs 30 to RS 50 a ticket for an Rs 200 ticket is 25%). Why cannot the actual PVRs and other multiplexes have a direct online booking without any additional service charge? I realized when I went to a cricket match in Chinnaswamy stadium and the Davis Cup Match in Bangalore recently, only 60% of the tickets are allocated to be sold by the third party e-tailer and we could still get some privileged tickets in better stands that we do not see while booking online through them. The worst error of all would be to have the same seats sold to a different set of customers – this is a big flaw in their system and this happens definitely. And the worst part is, when two customers with the same tickets happen to confront the e-tailer, they start investigating the customer instead of serving an apology unconditionally and trying to fix their end. This is ugly arrogance of the e-tailer at their peak.

Taxis: Honestly hilarious to charge a service fee if we call them up over the phone – their excuse is someone has to pay for the call center person – why should this be a customer’s headache? I am going to assume this may be illegal as well. Also, a new company now milks the customer for the amount of time spent in the cab over and above the actual per km charges, instead of taking it up with the city planners about it… knowing India and the metro traffic, this is a huge drain on your wallet. And the worst of all is they do not have any control over the drivers – if the driver does not show up or seems arrogant or charges extra by adding stuff, then the customer is left unhappy. They have a long way to go in terms of actual fares, driver control, transparency and making the customer eventually happy. And believe me, when you need them the most, none of the cabs are available. Try getting a cab during a rainy day in Bangalore!

Auto Accessories: A good product to get online. But when I once got a helmet from a leading e-tailer, they gave me another design and their support staff does not even get back to you when you report it. Again, an example of the problem inherent of a bazaar-type e-tailer who does not have any control on what the actual vendor ships and does not own the quality requirements before shipping.

Lighting Fixtures and bulbs: Although you may get better deals online, it is better to go to a physical shop, try the bulb or the lighting fixture actually and then buy it after some bargaining. Despite some heavy packing, the chances of the light fixtures or the bulb breaking are very high – their transit is tough on Indian roads. And once it is broken, they would ask you to take some photos of the broken item and send them by email before they can act on either refund or replacement.

Sporting goods: if you are buying some balls for tennis or football, or a racquet for badminton, or some wrist band, online purchase is definitely a great thing to do as long you know the grip size and understand the material being used on the frames so that its weight is not a strain on your elbow or wrist. It is better to go to a sporting goods store, check out their prices, and get a feel of what exactly to buy and then try online for the best price and see if you can get one. If not, go back to the store the next day and make the buy.

Footwear and Apparels: If you know the brand and their particular size that fits you, I guess buying it on the web saves a lot of money. Remember, as in apparel, every brand has their own size that fits you – a Eur 42 may not be the same between a Puma and a Nike sandal. An L size is not the same between an Arrow and a John Player, and you need to watch out for slim vs regular. Again, it is better to get into a name brand store, get the size done and see if the same is available online to buy, if not, come back to the store and buy the same.

Home Décor: This is one item where it is always about look and feel, and people need to see or touch them to buy them. Although plenty of choices are available on the net, I guess these are impulsive buys and more festival aligned and hence, in my opinion, would be something customer would still prefer to buy from the actual stores. And the chances of getting an inferior thing as compared to what you saw on the web is very high – say for ex, one gets a bed sheet at a good price but finds out that they run colors or it is so thin or it tears after the first usage that it cannot be used later – a total disappointment. Buying a statue or a vase that it does not feel like what you expected would be another disappointment.

Perfumes and cosmetics: Again, this is one area where you see lots of ‘pirated’ ones available on the net and even in a store, we do not know if they are actually the original or not. Complicated purchase pattern and the deals on the net are not usually great and would stay in the realm of the actual store. And you can regret the fact that that the fragrance can really be strong and against your senses that you are not able to use it on you. This is a very personal item and you really have to experience the odor before making a decision on the purchase – what others like may not fit your senses.

Wine and beer: This being something that government has a big say in and can get into some law issues, may not be something everyone would buy on the web, let alone it being delivered to your home or office which may make us uncomfortable as well. And definitely no price advantage for folks to get on the web and buy them. In India, again, most if it can be impulsive – the mood, money in your wallet and quick occasions are the ones that you drink for and hence would not have the time luxury to go online to buy them.

Electronics and Kitchen appliances: Big ticket items on the web has got into some tricky OEM antagonism due to some ‘predatory pricing’ on the web but if you know what you are looking for, it would be great to have it bought online. This is where I see a huge market for all the manufacturers – they just need to open up front ending stores that carries almost all their models for the customers to come and check, and then give them an option to go online and buy them up to get it delivered.. They can actually give some gift certificate with a short validity to force a purchase of their product. This way, the stores do not need to have inventory of all the items and the same can be applied to multi-brand stores like Girias and Croma as well. Someone is going to have an online price that is much cheaper than the store price and there is no need to go through the store in that case as long as the warranties are the same. Many OEMs are not fully supporting e-commerce pricing yet as they do not want to antagonize the store retailers but this is a bad strategy in the long run – they are setting themselves back in ages. Customers need to reap the benefit of technology and not to fall back on older ways of doing things just because they have been better in the past.

So, what can you reliably buy on the web? E-commerce started off with Books (Amazon worldwide and Flipkart in India) and they are still the best buys – it is unfortunate that nostalgia rules over common-sense amongst customers like us who would like to have a purchase done in a Higginbothams or Sapna but get disappointed by lack of discounts at the physical store. Also the variety in selection that an individual customer has access to on the web is something unimaginable. Office stationaries may be something that can be purchased on the web as well. Crossword and Landmark have no excuses not to offer the same price like an Amazon or a Flipkart if they have a strong online presence as this just would complement their store offerings.

I guess the penetration of e-books is going to happen, thanks to the pressure from the lobby against cutting down trees, and this would see an upswing – this is going slow because we are not comfortable yet with a reader device and the lack of standardization of the e-books publications. The only way I see old classics coming alive would be on e-books only. So, whether the shop owners like it or not, and fighting the wrong battle in going against the Flipkarts for selling books at rock-bottom price, it is the advent and explosion of e-books that would be their dooms day.

And the next good buy on the net would be music and movies DVDs and game DVDs – you need to ensure they fit the region you need to play them in and your DVD player at home can play that region and this is a LEGAL copy. Beats buying from the store any day and this has made getting those ‘illegal’ copies on the street a thing of the past as the price points are too good for originals on the web. Also, Moser Bauer offering low cost DVDs of classic movies has helped the case to get the best legal editions of good movies. I do not know why Flipkart walked out of their mp3 store as this was the best thing in India to follow in the same lines of ITunes store of Apple – customer could get affordable music of their choice at the right price with all the IP protection.

Definitely Groceries – how convenient is this for all of us! Surely it makes us lazy too that we avoid even that neighborhood walk nowadays. Given that this sector is most unorganized and run by neighborhood Kirana stores, e-grocery is definitely something that is going to change the way we shop for groceries. Since you can pay upon receipt, you can also reject things you see are not fresh then and there. One can definitely avoid searching across aisles, waiting in queue at the cash counter, searching for a parking spot close to the grocer and lack of efficient customer service by sticking to online purchases. Nonperishable is definitely a good buy online and everyone delivers on the same day now. As the technology grows and somehow the fridge and the pantry gather intelligence to inform what is there and what is not there, if this gets automatically dialed up to the grocery store, the whole thing can happen automatically based on some analytics in the back as well.

The most commonly utilized e-commerce deals are in travel – be it rail, air or bus booking or hotel reservations or vacation packages. Travel constitutes most of the internet commerce both in India and worldwide today. I guess the days of going through an agent are long gone. Even visas nowadays are being applied online. If I have to name the top two for ecommerce, it has to be travel and books/e-books.

All watches just show time, but still it is considered a prestigious fancy item and people can have much more than one with them at any price range suiting occasions. Now with the affordability of many to splurge, watches priced at lakhs are available in the hands (no pun intended) of any customer… it is going to be better with phone like features on them, whether we like it or not.

Stay away from an e-tailer who does not give a phone and an email on their website and try their support line before you even start any dealings with them. It is a good practice to always go with the cash-on-delivery option as much as possible as many of the sites, even the reputed ones, fail the Internet Security software’s checks. Or always have one card or one bank for net banking with low balance for all online purchases… ensure you have an OTP check before you make a purchase.

If the e-tailer has shipped a wrong size of the product you asked for, then again, their quality check somewhere has gone bust and there is a strong likelihood they would do it again and again. They would always say that they do assume their vendors take care of it. And you see the product delivered in a particular size not at all the same as what was provided on the website (ex. Size 10 is 41 cm when the one delivered is only 27 cm but still says Size 10 for a sandal). But if this wrong size happens, there are still companies like Amazon who do not do replacement but just do only returns – honestly, it ticks the customer off. And there is no excuse for an e-tailer not to give all the relevant details about the size, materials, color etc. which is still missing in a wide range of offerings.

It is important as a customer, to write an honest and relevant review of every product one has got from a seller, so that it helps the buying decision of others. When it comes to apparels, your size is not consistent across all brands – each brand has their own size that fits you.

What can the customers do?

Be careful about the security (or lack thereof) behind the umpteen e-commerce sites and believe in the ones that is more famous. Check for safe pay channels that they use. As much as possible, try to do Cash on Delivery. Ask your friends where they shop online.
Check for a good customer support system – check their phone and emails before you make any purchases. See if they offer replacement and not just refund.
Books, travel related purchases, Groceries, show and movie tickets, music and movies, and sporting goods are all items that are better online, both in terms of convenience and price.
Avoid buying furniture, shoes and apparels (if you are not sure about the size fitment), perfumes and cosmetics, and home décor items online as most of these are very subject to personal tastes.

Since the E-market seems to be more dispersed now, in the next 3-5 years, we would see only 3-5 brands remaining, thanks to some solid consolidation, in the general e-tailer market whereas the niche players and the brick-and-mortar shops that have their own internet shopping presence would still see a good business online.

What are some of the key expectation of customers from the E-tailers?

Better real time customer support – by means of WhatsApp, Email and Phone, with a resolution of any issue within 24 hours
For big ticket items, getting the full money upfront is unacceptable, especially if the delivery happens after a month or so, esp. in furniture. A token amount of 10% to be used as booking amount, and rest of the payment during delivery is key.
Warranty of all items sold should be solid and should be backed by the manufacturers
If some deep discount sales happen, it is imperative that they advertise the number of units to be sold at that low price and set a counter as to how many are remaining so that customers do not feel dejected about a potential opportunity lost. It is always first-cum-first-serve basis, even on the Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, in the USA.
Definitely there should not be any excuses of not able to manage surge in traffic or peak loads – the site must be available and fast for all customers
For cab booking related sites, it is illegal to charge the customer for calling to make a reservation and pay for their call center person. How does the customer care about one’s operation cost?
Most important for those ‘marketplace’ e-tailer who operate on bazaar type model, is to have total control on the vendors who are listed in their site, have a good quality process both in terms of quality of the product being shipped and the time within which it gets shipped and take FULL Responsibility and ownership of any issues that may come, instead of having customers waiting for response from the vendors who never seem to do anything. This is mission critical for customer’s loyalty and their business success. The more hassles the customers face and more frequently they face them, they slowly would start looking elsewhere.
The other key aspect is the logistics part of delivery. Every e-tailer must have a logistics partner or have total control on delivery so that the delivery happens at the time customer requests them. Expecting someone to stay home during the weekday is not a reasonable thing to do. They need to invent better ways to deliver – may be in the evenings or weekends, and ensure to a time window of couple of hours max within which they would make delivery. It makes no sense to try a delivery when the customers are not there. Or have a pick up place in a location close to the customer’s home and offer them the facility to pick it up at their time of convenience. The delivery guy must know exactly where it has to be delivered and when, instead of repeatedly calling for directions to come – in most of the cases, I get these calls when I am in meetings in office and this really gets annoying. If they do not know the address, they should not be running a courier service, period!
If there are issues, treat customers as if they are not guilty and investigate the process first and see where the problem is, before jumping to conclusions.
Any legal issues or sales and GST tax issues should not be affecting the customers.

Summarizing, I guess I feel a little patriotic to see Flipkart giving everybody a run for their money and of course, a cause of envy to the guys who do not know how to compete. Flipkart (with Myntra) will be to e-tailing as Infosys was for the professional services industry and I want to see them that way as a pride of India. E-tailing is going to be a disruptive technology use case that is going to do magic, esp. in congested cities where folks have no time to spare to shop effectively. So far their customer service and engagement has been absolutely great and added to their purchase of Myntra, which has the same traits, I see a winner in our hands which has to be nourished and not be to be reprimanded.

Disclaimer: I do not have any association with Flipkart or Myntra, two of my best loved e-commerce sites, based on some great experience – just a loyal customer so far. After having shopped literally in almost all leading sites, I would give these two very high marks for satisfying customers and having a great transparent process.

This article was written in 2014

Results Orientation : an Essential value to any org

Continuing on with my Values Centric Organization article published recently, I wanted to introduce you all to something that the leading semiconductor company Intel cherishes the most – RESULTS ORIENTATION. The timing of this article is coincidentally a tribute to Andy Grove who died today- the first employees of Intel after its two founders and later years its CEO, Holocaust survivor from Hungary and a practical management guru. I salute you SIR.

As Intel describes it, it is set challenging and competitive goals and focus on the output by assuming responsibility and executing flawlessly. Any issues or problems that come in between have to be solved and confronted constructively and quickly to achieve the goal. Focusing your resources on the important results is key for success and managing through people to create a positive impact for the organizations is every manager’s priority. I do not see many organizations recognizing results orientation as a critical value.

For all types of organization, be it a small privately held one or a bigger public company or a government establishment and even a not-for-profit one, delivering on your goals successfully is essential. The leader in you should be able to push self and others to desired results and should celebrate successes. The value of results orientation is the basis behind setting up a matrix organization where every talent within the organization works for a product, solution or oriented towards a service, from various functionalities. The entire team has to agree to a set of objectives (remember SMART) and work together to achieve those with high quality. At the end of the day, the products or services that the company sells or gives is the one that brands the company to the customers. Even if you are in a research organization, it is critical that the development happening inside is mapped to a product that they can sell eventually or a service that they can offer later.

Every employee should review the work they are doing regularly with their immediate management and prioritize what is urgent and more important. Each employee needs to plan their work accordingly to ensure that important goals get done within the required time. Be realistic at your workload when you take on more work. As a manager, one must be aware of the stress levels within the team and try to re-prioritize and re-distribute the workload within your team. It is a good practice to keep your ears to the ground and actively listen to your team and to put some sense around what they say. Finally celebrate small successes and the eventual ones.

In these Agile days of working, it is easier to have discrete sets of results achieved within a shorter time span and corrective actions put in place for any deviations that happen. Three behaviours come to the fore-front to achieve results: Effective time management, managing stress at work (there is always going to be stress, you need to find your own ways to manage it properly) and good influencing skills to get things done. From the HR perspective, a few tweaks must be in place so that they start measuring the engagement and commitment levels of the employees to the programs they are in and to the organizations, and monitor if key decisions are being made quickly by the managers and whether they are putting undue stress on his or her employees to an extent that it affects results. Most metrics should be taken at a project or program level and not at a horizontal functional level.

For those of you who have not got the privilege of the working for Andy Grove and living during the times when he built Intel, I would highly recommend two books, “High Output Management” and “Only Paranoids Survive”.

The Author is a business and technology consultant based in India and if also a former employee of Intel. He also conducts leadership programs that are based on key values of organizations.

Recruiting the right talent

Once someone sees a job advertisement in the local newspaper or on social media, and if one feels that they do fit into the role, one immediately applies. Then of course, you are in dark days where nothing happens, and one goes from applying from one to another trying out their luck.

But recruitment as such is both an art and a science: art because many a times we are very ambiguous in what we are asked to look out for, and science because there does lie a process behind it, although it is hardly being practiced religiously. Usually they companies are looking for that ‘missing piece’ in a jigsaw puzzle that has to ‘fit exactly’ – this is what they want ideally.

Nowadays, I find in every company there are three divisions: Human resources (either general or business oriented), Recruitment and Staffing, and then Learning and Development. Eventually all fall under the Human Resources department. I have a philosophical problem with the word “ resources” – this means people are treated like machines. On one hand, the corporate big wigs talk about their people being their Intellectual property (IP), their Knowledge Solutions, their Talents that they nurture and on the other hand, they have a department that maps them as a resource. Finding a talent, training them regularly and retaining them is a continuous process and this has to be individually based, rather than a policy document or an objective in some performance assessment. People have to be recruited slightly differently based on whether it is a product development organization or a professional solutions organization. Then as a large team, they talk about ‘Pyramid fit’.

What should a recruiter ideally do in order to get the best talent available into his or her organization?

Capture/Document: The expectation of the hiring manager must be very clear to the person who is looking out for profile. The required technology skills and the soft skills have to be enumerated in order of priority. It is better to have three Must haves and three nice to haves. If one cannot capture the exact requirement in 6 lines, then one cannot recruit properly. It is always desired for a hiring manager to put in everything that he thinks it is important, but it is like a matrimonial match – you cannot ever get an exact wife! One needs to understand that the recruiter has to select the best fish that fits the size somehow from the ocean full of fishes. So, capturing the requirements and expectation must be the very first step. This is the reference for the recruiter to start his work

Research/Study: It is not a given that the recruiter may be versed in the area that he is recruiting. It is better for him to research and study the area or the technology that the recruitment is happening for, so that he is aware of the key jargons and outlier areas that may be interested as well. It is imperative that he understands what is that he is looking out for, given that he has a published reference point before him.

Search: Now he scouts for the best fitting profiles and also uses his judgement to see if any outlying areas does fit the requirement as an extrapolative guess. He must be able to see the profiles, make a quick call to understand the candidate and have a folder with 6-8 profiles that he deems are the best fit available. It is always better to do a video call of the candidate at the very first instant so that there is a personal connect with the person. A quick 15 minutes call would be more than sufficient. This is just a pre-selection and once you are convinced, you must have the candidate send his updated profile across with an embedded photo. If he is able to send his profile within a day, we have some sort of assurance that the candidate is also showing interest.

Shortlist: Based on the screening calls, a recruiter must confidentally be able to shortly 4 candidates now to further interview processes within the organization. It would also be better if someone from the technical side is able to wet the candidates at this point with a quick call to ensure this fitment is there. It is always better to avoid calling in more candidates for a Face to Face than needed.

Select: This selection MUST NOT be done by recruiter nor anyone from the human resources , nor do they have a right to reject. Selection is always done by the hiring manager as the candidate would be reporting to him and he has to be fully accountable for the same. And al the final interviews must be done within a day and must be done face to face (F2F) and not spread across many days and over phone – this gives a professional look for the candidate as he comes in and leaves with a feeling that he is indeed joining a professionally run organization or a group. From here on, the engagement with the candidate should be through the hiring manager and no more the recruiter. This gives a professional touch to the entire organization and makes the candidate very proud that he is wanted and gets a feeling that he is already engaged with the group he is to join. One of the inputs to the selection process should be given mandatorily by the human resources person, both a generic HR and a business HR as they view the candidate from two different lights – this would include all the behavioural skill they had observed during the interview and the financial numbers (budget ted vs present and expected numbers of the candidates) – they must be able to sell the entire organization at a high level during this interaction. A good 30 minutes must be spent with all interviewees and all inputs collected and decisions must be arrived at – select one, have one backup and reject two. The hiring manager calls up all the four candidates and gives them the message within a day of interview and not later. For the backup, one can just say we can looking at him for a different role to give a positive spin and this may take a little while for you to get back. This process is the best remembered by the candidate and they carry memories of the organization and the group here. The files are sent back to human resources department for further processes of hiring.

Secure: I added this step as this is usually missed by any recruiter. Once we have the selected candidate, it is important for the recruiter who called him in the first place to keep the channels with the candidate open and keep him engaged with the group and organization. Having a 5 minute call every week or so would be most ideal. Any questions the candidates may ask can be referred to the right authority and information fed back to the candidate appropriately. By ‘securing’ him, one knows for sure the candidate joins. If not kept engaged, you may have a no show during the joining day and the process has to repeat. Atleast during this engagement one gets a feel of what is going to happen. Depending on the market conditions, if it is especially for the skills you are hiring to, one can do two things: Add a hiring bonus as a carrot (based on the person joining within a month) and making an offer for both the primary and backup candidate – this way you have a higher probability that one of them would join. If both join, it is merrier as there can always be a place for a candidate that the team selected and more work can be added to the groups plate.

How do you measure the recruiter’s work? We used to have a metric that measures success by number of resumes screened and shortlisted that has been sent to the number of candidates selected. It has to be 33% and above (some product development companies have 25% and above), meaning one out of the three shortlisted is selected. If over 5 jobs that this is lesser than 25%, then it very well says the recruiter is not doing his job well. We usually have this metric of 33% for consultants that we may hire for some ‘extra-ordinary’ hiring (in terms of numbers to be filled or in terms of niche skills that may be sparsely available) – for normal recruiting, it is always beneficial to have an in house recruiter on contract to hire you the best talent. Once a consultant accepts the requirement to hire, it is their responsibility to get you the best. Never have a external consultant contact a hiring manager and have the interface only through your internal recruiter on roll. For the first time, if external recruiters are called for, it is better for them all to come in one room face to face, get the expectations and their measurement criteria from the hiring manager , and then after that their only point of contact should be the recruiter only.

Now comes the debate of whether you need a recruiter on your roll permanently or hire a contractor. If you have a good human resource personnel on roll, then my take would be to hire a suitable contractor who has recruited in like fields for 6 months to a year and pay them a base and a bonus for successful hiring. On days that no recruitment happens, this recruitment is actually a liability on your financials. The same rule applies for a guy on bench on any professional services organization- if he is not able to market his skills or convince his client and he does not pay back to the organization, his days are numbered within.

Queueing theory and Utilization factor in Services Company

I recently read an interesting article on Queueing theory and the analysis of server utilization. This theory has been there for a long time and properly researched mostly from the hardware angle. An idea struck my mind – why not I extend this theory to the utilization and billability concept that every professional services company talks about and see if it makes real sense for them to achieve greater than 90% utilization of people resources.

Let me introduce you to the common referred graph for server utilization. Every company has a Human Resources department which means that all employees are treated like resources. This very concept is so appalling to me as I prefer to use “Talent Office” because every employee is a talent for the organization – we live in the days of Knowledge management. But let me not digress and let me introduce you to the concept on which I would make some inferences later. This graph denotes that the wait time just goes up badly as the server utilization goes beyond 80%.

The X Axis is server utilization and Y axis is the average wait time. At a utilization of 1, the average time is actually infinity. Wait time here means that the jobs that arrive at the server have to wait that much longer to be processed. You can even apply it to any retail store format regarding people wait time where when the numbers of customers arrive faster in the line than the cashier can actually serve and be done with each customer, the line becomes longer. The same logic applies to fine dine-in restaurants – you see a line outside because all the tables and the waiters inside are complete engaged with present customers who take a significant amount of time to get served and eat. I will not get into the semantics of how to classify these types of time.

Now let us split the total amount of time to two segments – the actual wait time to get served, and the actual service time where your job gets executed. Both of them together are the response time – actually this would include a variability effect as well. To highlight the impact of the wait time, let us assume the service time remains the same for all jobs or customers which may be incorrect but let us do so for this article. And we are talking averages here throughout. The response time degrades the busier the resource is. There would always be a safety capacity plan to support in excess of expected demand to cover for the variability effect.

Some observations here:

If you are the first job or the first customer, your response time is equal to the service time.
If your resources are utilized at 50%, you can see the response time doubles!
At 75% utilization, the response time quadruples and at 87%, it becomes eight times.
At 94% utilization, the response time is 16 times and at 97% utilization, the response time is 32 times.
When you go from 75% to 90% utilization, your response time increases by 225%!

So it is obvious that if the machine or the resources are busy, there would be lot of jobs waiting in the queue. Now let us correlate it to what every professional services company uses as a key objective – its billability and utilization. Without going too much into details, billability rate is usually less than the utilization rate – meaning not all what a resource does for a project can be billed. Utilization is just how long a resource gets occupied with a chartered project and billability is how much of that can the service company bill the actual customer. Ideally they would try to make them equal which is a fallacy and hence usually it is anywhere between 80% and 90% of utilized time becomes billable to the customer.

What are the usual metrics that the services company would go after?

Billability ratio of 90% and utilization of 100% ideally.
Lots of customers and new clients added per quarter which necessitates adding capacity (more resources) but to keep the cost down, they would maximize hiring freshers and manage every project with a hierarchy of varied-experienced employees.

Now let us prove how these metrics may not be the right ones to use. Let us analyze from the bottom and try to see how much of time does an average employee have for a project. Since this is a high level view, with each company having their own way of operation, let us just use this as an example for our story here:

There are 52 weeks in a year.
The vacation days (holidays and vacation put together) can be anywhere between 4 to 6 weeks depending on which geography you are in. So, effectively one would work for only 46 to 48 weeks in a year.
Let us assume a barest minimum of 1 week set aside for training each employee with new skills. Usually this is more. Now we are left with 45 to 47 weeks of possible project work time. In all honesty, most of the employees do not even get trained for a new skill ever!
There are months where there are more orders and there are some with the normal orders. Hence these employees would be dragged to more critical projects for a week or two, on a high priority need basis. So, we have about 43 to 45 weeks left. Again, these are minimal numbers estimated. So, this 5% (~ 2 weeks) is to adjust for the variability effect.
Let us assume we work on projects 4 days a week of five official days. Meaning, your billability is only 80% of utilization. You may be attending some process meetings, some team meetings to make the project work, some lectures and talks, some business meetings etc. which cannot be directly billed to the customer. Assume now that we have taken off 9 weeks for non-billable work, out of 43 to 45 weeks. One is left with only 34 to 36 weeks of project work.
34 weeks out of 52 weeks total is about 65% (36 weeks would make it 69%). Let us assume it about 2/3^rd for calculation purposes. The employer still has to pay you for the 1/3^rd that has to be accounted for in terms of salary. The other way of saying this is that a services company takes a loss of a third of the total salary paid which they have to recover.
For our calculation again, let us assume 35% instead of 33.3% for this loss. If one take’s more than a week for training, and if one gets dragged into other projects more than the two weeks allotted, then this number actually increases to 40% and more. So, to recover that 35% of your salary, the company bills the customer 35% more than the salary (let us say this is the average salary for the company). This amortized over the 260 working days possible would give the company the contract rate to the customers. Of course, this would differ from small to big based on the experience of the employee but again, we are talking averages.
No services company runs for charity – they would try everything to make money. Not only it does not want to take a loss, they have to make profit. This is a commercial venture. So, let us assume 20% as a profit margin a company would expect. So, the services company would charge 1.55x average salary and derive the per day or hour contract rate! Again, if you are an accountant trying to read this, sorry, I may have simplified it a lot to give brevity.
Now the company has lots of overhead that they cannot bill. These could be support functions, enabling functions and even managerial cadres. Let us assume for every 10 employees there is a manager who cannot be billed. Now his salary has to be amortized over 10 employees. His or her average salary would be 2 x employee salary. Now this salary has to be added to the contract rate which makes it 1.75 x average salary! Yes, there are differences you would see in these calculations (albeit minor) if you are mathematician and can definitely pick holes in my derivation but this is close enough. Close enough is good enough for an engineer! So, if the company is paying $10 for any BILLABLE employee on an average, they would charge a minimum of $17.5 to the customer!

I pointed out these calculations to make the audience understand at a high level how the accounting works (but there is more to this than what I have written) but may not directly relate to what I am driving at.

I am assuming 34 weeks of 100% utilization for every employee based on the above analysis. Now the expectation for all the employees to be 100% efficient in these 34 weeks with no slack whatsoever. Borrowing from the machine utilization analogy, the following things can be inferred:

The slowest resource is going to derail the project – this is the critical path ideology that every project manager would practice because of Theory of Constraints. Given this is the scenario, the slowest resource efficiency cannot be equated to the normal or faster resource efficiency. Yes, the slowest resources are working 100% of his 34 weeks but his output is lower than the others! So, as a project manager, add resource to compensate for this thus adding cost, or push schedule and eat your TIME buffers to meet the customer milestones. If the slowest resource is the long pole in the tent, it does not matter if others finish faster – they all need to wait for this resource to complete! Plan for lower utilization to address this factor.
- If something goes wrong in between, there is no slack to compensate now. Since employees are on the edge with 100% utilization, this automatically means nothing wrong is allowed to happen nor all risks are naturally mitigated so that there are no surprises. Living on the edge can never be right. It causes stress and stress leads to lower quality of work. So, even in those 34 weeks, it is quite natural for the project managers to add a safety cushion for a said demand (remember, this is NOT a variability effect cushion which is based on demand)
- Not all customers are alike nor all projects the same. Some customers are more demanding than others, and some projects are more complex than others. So, the response time of execution of any project is going to increase based on higher demands of a customer or due to more customers, if the capacity of resources remains the same! Service level agreements are likely to suffer.

With all the above factors, it is extremely difficult to get to a consistent long-term utilization of 90% and above, which would automatically means the best billability would be in the range of 75% to 80%. For the services company to stay competitive on rates, they need to reduce their operational costs and develop a decent hierarchy of experience that can still deliver high quality solutions. It is always about quality assurance during design rather than quality control after design! Continuously improve the process but understand there is an upper limit in utilization for your highest efficiency and this is not even close to 100%. Even if you are pushing the envelop, the incremental benefits in revenue you may get from pushing the utilization (and hence billability) from 90% to 95% or more would be definitely negated by the impact it would have on quality and customer relationships. Remember, there would be penalty clauses at high as 20% from every customer if the deliverables are not achieved within the specified time.

Remember, we have been just talking about averages here and not even maximum which would be worst case. Also I have not even accounted for attrition which is usually between 8-20% for any services company which would translate to delays in response directly. Going from 85% to 90% and beyond does have a bigger impact on response time. For a services company to deliver with good quality at all times, the target thus has to be preferably defined between 80 to 90% only. Nothing more. If someone is saying they have a 100% utilization, it is high time we do a due diligence audit on the calculation!

Operations of Inland Waterways in India Needs a Solid Holistic Plan ahead

Enough is being written and talked about developing the National waterways in recent times. Although the latest budget allocated for Inland Waterways is more than a hundredth of magnitude less than what has been allocated to the rail and road infrastructure, and the investments in waterways has always been low for the past three decades or more, today the government is viewing the Inland Waterways as a priority sector. It has been a proven conclusion from other countries that the waterways are the most cost effective mode of transportation, the river systems have always enhanced commerce for them and this mode has accounted for more than a third of national cargo and people movement.

Having given sufficient background, this is a new area for me but my interests in this topic reaches new heights every time I read some article from some expert. I have been following this topic long enough that I am here unable to resist writing about it. My focus is not the talk about how the linking the rivers will happen, which unfortunately in India are state owned, but more about how this would become operational once everything is said and dusted.

Living through the apathy of bad infrastructure of many Indian cities where excellent airports have come up without any rail or public bus transport connections to the city, having seen city metro rail being constructed and delayed continuously in major cities based not on what the traffic would be twenty years from now but rather what it had been 20 years past, having seen cities explode without any adequate public water and sanitary facilities in the ‘boom’, having seen polluting vehicles in abundance surviving with no strict enforcement of emission standards (more like a certificate you can get for Rs 50), having seen the explosion of number of cars and other vehicles and hence the vehicle density choking every city added by selfish drivers and bad driving conditions, having seen road vehicle parking increase tremendously as no residential or commercial building make adequate space to accommodate parking and still get registered somehow, it is high time we clean up our act when it comes to Waterways and have a fresh start taking into account all the variables that would make it one of the best, cost efficient, safe, environmentally friendly mode of transportation that we can proudly give to our future generation. Combine it with some of the Smart Cities, we as INDIANS should be proud of what we can build and execute.

Hence operations of the waterways remains the critical element if indeed we all remain optimistic and the waterways gets linked for both cargo and people movement in the next few years in phases. But we need to think AHEAD and for the future rather than plan for the pain level we have now or in the past years. Here are some of the variables, given my limited knowledge that needs to be encompassed before we implement a fully functional internal waterway system – everything should be planned for Day 1 operations:

First, clean up all the rivers those are deemed navigable and provide for consistent depth for navigation through the year, come rains or not. All the industries polluting the rivers should be fined and their disposal of waste managed through alternate means. I guess this would be a good idea now for the river systems to be centralized rather than the states fighting over water for their own use – it has to be distributed according to the needs of where it flows rather than someone making claim of ownership based on the origin of the river. And this would ensure there are no tollways in the waterways as one crosses from one state to another.
- Fix our Indian rivers first and extend them to the countries in the east and west with other countries to enhance our maritime trade and commerce with our neighbors
- Once the navigable rivers gets fixed, it is important to look at canals and backwaters that connects with rivers and can transport traffic (hence forth by traffic, I include both cargo and people) to the interiors of the cities. Again, they have to be cleaned and silted first. Having grown up in Chennai, I would rather have a clean Buckingham Canal that one day has boats transporting folks from one place to another.
- Keep the lakes as is – do not get them involved in this program. Lakes are needed for the healthy living and it is important a good green cover is made around every lake that the local population can use for walking or running.
Avoid overcrowding the water space. Safety first. Who operates what should be stringently regulated and competitive licenses should be given only to the deserving in a transparent manner. No politicians or bureaucrats or their immediate relatives can either directly or indirectly own or operate any transportation or infrastructure in these waterways. Keep it clean. Never abuse a particular waterway because it is rewarding – keep the checks and controls in place properly and audit this regularly annually. Understand a river can only take so much.
Highly effective alternative non-polluting fuels a must for all the vehicles that use these waterways. Given that all the lakes in all hill stations are totally polluted with bad diesel powered boats, we do not want to see the same issue here. Keep the rivers and waterways clean and ensure no outlet of pollutants from these vehicles go into the river. The flora and fauna around the waterways needs to be maintained well. Strict enforcement with immediate stoppage of services of any polluting vehicles should be done with no loop holes to operate. At no point, should the aquatic ecology be disturbed and constant effort to preservation should be made. Also care must be taken so that no hazardous items are being transported without adequate safety measures.
Use solar and wind energy mills on both sides of the waterways to generate and distribute electricity for the manufacturing plants and the parks that will come up within the proximity.
No monopoly should be allowed to be established in this internal waterway system. There must be open competition based on demand with a ceiling regulated by the government. No one can have more than 10% share of this waterways market, be it transportation based or infrastructure based.
Given the experiences of railways (fully government owned) and the airways (mostly privatized with the government run Air India not in the best of health for ages), it is better to evolve a model that is midway – yes, it may not be the most optimal solution from a capitalist perspective, but the best alternative model for evolving this internal waterways to peak utilization soon.
Have smaller ports throughout the waterway to connect the water traffic with the road and rail traffic at regular intervals. This would reduce the logistics costs of transportation and make a competitive environment. With GST rolling out in the anvil, this would be a great win for all industrial hubs and their productivity and exports.
Most important is to limit load to capacity. Never overload. Looking at all these trucks that take more than twice their scheduled load between cities, we are all living a nightmare in terms of safety. Truck owners do not seem to care about the suspension and brakes that may not work, thus risking every other life on the road. Licensing the drivers that enable such traffic and regularly updating their licenses (say every three years) is critical to keep them in check.
Given how the recent scams have surfaced, while building and enhancing these waterways, it is best to keep all the contract documents and tender notices available in a transparent manner. All project execution reports should be available on a regular basis for monitoring purposes and annual report should be maintained by the institution managing the waterway.
Skill Development – since this may involve lots of maritime skills and also different building norms, it is best for the universities and vocational schools to start preparing adequate talents to build, manage and operate these waterways. High employment generation is foreseen in these sectors. Skills India for Internal Waterways is the need for the hour.
Regular maintenance and security patrol is also essential. Due to monsoon effects and flash flooding concerns, there is a definite possibility that silts accumulate in the rivers that may inhibit navigation. Proper silting on a regular basis has to be put as a process. Also, to ensure no pilferage or attacks or hijacking of the goods and people take place in remote areas where the rivers wind through, increasing patrol both on and around the waterways is to be done by the central police force.
Proper bypass mechanisms to be put in place in case of excessive flooding that India is prone to so that the transportation does not get affected too much during the worst days.

Doing everything in phases and doing a complete job in these phases should be the mantra. Link River 1 to River 2 with two way traffic and show it as complete, addressing all the above variables and above before the next phase gets operational (work can start with all these variables in mind). First phase should be stitching two major rivers in the North and the second one must be one in the South. As the phases evolve, they must be more uniform (may have different emphasis) in operations throughout the country.

If the Mughals and the British have done this effectively in centuries past, I am sure we can do this better but we need to execute them well with nothing left to after thoughts. “OOpps, I did not consider it” should not be an option while we make the best transportable internal waterways of the world. Civilizations have always flourished in and around a waterway for ages and it would continue to do so as well. Also since land acquisitions for these waterway projects would be minimal compared to any road transport project, the only worries would be to fix any disruption of the connectivity in rivers along the way and to ensure that the clearances of the existing bridges across the rivers are maintained, to enable a smooth ride. Any project of these dimensions would not be simple to build and operate, but I wanted the stakeholders and decision makers to encompass lots of variables together while planning and executing to make the Indian Internal Waterways system so good that other countries become envious of us.