The occasional light expression

Via Bloomberg, some news that should cheer up job seekers: http://www.bloomberg.com/avp/avp.asxx?clip=mms://media2.bloomberg.com/cache/vqBhv_DWum98.asf&vCat=/ceo&RND=024451517

I just hope we use the economic opportunities this downturn provides and emerge stronger by 2010, especially on the infrastructure side.

Via SiliconIndia, “BPOs turn to regional accent proficiency to tap domestic market”. So the BPO wheel turns full circle and in these BPO’s as the article puts it “People with a heavy mother tongue influence are preferred”
This should give  solace to all those folks who wanted a break in the BPO/call center industries in India but weren’t proficient enough with the English language. Perhaps the Indian BPOs should start training people in Chinese next…

A few weeks back, I had an  interesting discussion with Akhila Seetharaman, journalist with TimeOut Bangalore about the field of design and user experience and its relevance for our everyday life (including in Bangalore). We spoke about the Usability Professionals Association (UPA) Bangalore(which I head), the growth of the User Experience community in Bangalore in the past 5 years, good bad and ugly products and services and experiences in Bangalore, and the role design can play in improving all of these.

My friend Sarit Arora from Human Factors (also head of the ACM SIG on Human Computer Interaction and CHI Bangalore) also joined me for a morning chat with Akhila at the Indira Nagar Coffee Day. TimeOut recently published Akhila’s article - you can read the article on TimeOut’s website.

The article covers topics most of us are familar with: Globalization, the rise of the creative economy, the importance of design and story telling and how the design and User Experience field has evolved in India. It also lists products and experiences we’ve all struggled with or appreciated in India: kick-starting scooters, filling in paper forms, the Indian railways website, cleartrip.com and such.

I actually quite enjoy reading TimeOut - their last issue was a retrospective on 30 years of the music scene in Bangalore - a very interesting read!

Via SiliconIndia, a good piece of news for a country and corporate sector reeling under power cuts, too many sloppy and sinister politicians, a decrepit intelligence and counter terrorism system, a general sense of lawlessness on the streets and physical infrastructure which is still best described as ‘crumbling’. Apparently for CEOs India continues to be the second best investment bet after China.
However, I continue to believe that there is a mistaken notion is that as long as Manufacturing and Services and such continue to grow India does not have to worry and that it is poised to keep the halo and global branding it has acquired and retained especially in the 21st century. However, I do believe that unless India invests in its human capital and in the quality of life which affects people at an everyday level, India will lose its competitive edge to countries which are able to attract and retain the best talent that India has to offer.

Justauthority is an interesting Indian site which allows users to search through judgments of the Indian Supreme Court. So if you’re one of those curious cats who is interested in the details of the Rajiv Gandhi assassination, or government cases against Reliance and other companies, or landmark cases, this free online resource might be useful for you.

IDYeah is a niche Pune based design and IT company which created this site.

I am busy with planning out Dcamp 2.0, the second edition of the Dcamp unconference series. After last year’s rather fun experience of organizing Dcamp 1.0 at the Yahoo campus in Bangalore, I’m looking forward to seeing newer topics and perspectives this year. This year, the folks at Aditi Technologies have been nice enough to provide ample event space in their Bangalore campus.

I am hoping to invite creatives from other fields to Dcamp as well – including from art, photography and film. If you know of any good folks I can send a Dcamp presentation invite to, please email me at pande dot amit at gmail dot com

Via Doubtsourcing, an irreverent and in-your-face take on global and distributed product development, outsourcing, offshoring and the like - by Sandeep Sood with artwork by Aron Botham.

Sandeep also runs Badmash.tv, an animation company out of Berkeley and Bombay. One of their pieces has Amitabh Bachhan as an anti-Obama candidate for the 2008 US presidential election. Fun!

The Economic times reported the results of an interesting CEO survey.
CEOs believe that Mumbai and Bangalore are India’s cities of the future while Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore (in that order) are India’s most investor friendly cities at the moment.

Patna and Guwahati were perceived to be the most investor - unfriendly cities.

The rankings relatively make sense to me - Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore are arguably the  Indian cities most geared and oriented towards global business and global competition. They still retain a strong vernacular flavor but their human resource base has become fairly international and the quality of corporate goods and services continues to improve (despite the absolutely shoddy infrastructure, especially in Bangalore).

However, I also believe that atleast for Bangalore the rising costs, increasing crime, political instability, slipshod infrastructure and absurd and nonsensical rules (like the curfew at 11:30 pm and the ban on dance floors) have made it quite unattractive for the creative class that Richard Florida keeps talking about. If all the interesting people that made Bangalore what it is leave it or become uninteresting, dull and mediocre then I would imagine that Bangalore will quickly lose the branding it has projected to the international business community.

Plus, it would be a darned boring place to live, notwithstanding the mostly congenial weather!
Or maybe its just that I’m recovering from my Mumbai weekend hangover - but more on that in another post.

Via Outlook Business - a somewhat critical view of whether the Barcamp unconference phenomenon in India needs to revisit its entrepreneurial roots to avoid imploding upon itself.

A related article notes notes that events such as proto.in and headstart.in seem to be making more headway because they are more self-selective in nature:

My experience in organizing Dcamp Bangalore last year was that it is indeed difficult to get the balance between top down structuring (which you need a bit of to get the event off the ground) and bottom up collaboration (which is sort of the whole point).

That being said, I remain a firm believer that unconferences (even if somewhat directed) have the potential to start radical conversations, are a very democratic form of dialogue and are evolutionary and emergent in nature - which makes them much more interesting than top down events. Unless of course its something as interesting as the World Debating Championships : - )

Business Today recently released a BT-Monitor group study on India’s most ‘innovative’ companies. This is a timely study and it brings out some of the key areas in which Indian companies are innovating – unique distribution channels, customizations for first time consumers, lower cost product development, and in some cases, technology interventions.

However, I believe this study is incomplete and skewed because it fails to take into account two dimensions that are highly critical to innovation: Consumer Experience and Product/service differentiation through Design.

Consider similar lists released recently by Fortune and Business Week documenting the world’s most innovative companies.

Here is Fortune’s top 10 list: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/mostadmired/best_worst/best1.html)

Now look at Business Week’s top 50 list: (http://bwnt.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/most_innovative/index.asp)

Scanning across the names of the world’s top innovators what are the common threads you find? Is it simply low cost product development? (No- they all contract manufacture in China). Is it lower prices (No – companies like Whole Foods and Apple have significant markup)

No – what is truly common (or uncommon) to Apple, Whole Foods, Amazon, Starbucks and even once-stodgy technology giants like Cisco is their relentless pursuit to creating a compelling, integrated and delightful user experience for their end consumers. Not only how to streamline costs and operations but how to make their offerings resonate with customers’ deepest needs and desires.

Here’s how BW put it “Not so long ago, no conversation about innovation would be complete without the story of 3M inventor Art Fry’s eureka moment that led to the Post-it Note. Today, that tale, which verges on cliche, has been almost universally replaced by the story of the iPod, Apple’s omnipresent icon of design. It should come as little surprise, then, that Apple tops the BusinessWeek-Boston Consulting Group’s list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies for the third year in a row. That sort of staying power speaks volumes about the sort of innovation that matters today. Unlike the Post-it Note, which proves the value of lone inventors, the iPod epitomizes today’s innovation sensibilities. These include the ascendance of design, the focus on the user’s experience, and the power of ecosystems….”

My conclusion – some if not many of the Indian firms that are being touted as ‘innovative’ as currently innovative simply because of a temporary cost benefit, a monopolistic market position, or deep pockets. These firms will struggle in years to come as Indian consumers and indeed global consumers become more and more demanding in the ‘experiences’ from these companies and their products and services.

Here is my pick of two sectors that may lose their ‘innovation’ edge unless they get their customer experience defined right, and soon.

1.      Airlines – In this sector, consumer experience can range from frustrating to terrifying. Read some of the first hand accounts below on the rudeness, unprofessionalism and callousness of the service staff of some Indian airlines.

http://expertdabbler.com/2006/07/25/air-deccan-simply-cry/print/

http://jerinj.blogspot.com/2006/07/low-cost-airline-take-train.html

http://www.m-travel.com/news/2007/03/air_deccan_taki.html

http://youthcurry.blogspot.com/2007/07/strange-bedfellows.html

2.      Banking  – Untrained and unprofessional customer service reps, non-working ATMs over holiday weekends, long queues at bank centers, lousy ‘relationship managers’, spam calls – there is a litany of complaints against most Indian banks and the way they treat their customers.

http://www.complaints.com/2006/november/22/Horror_Exp._with_HDFC_BANK_10047.htm

http://www.mouthshut.com/review/HDFC_Bank-29278-1.html

http://rediff.co.in/getahead/2007/sep/28cards.htm

To end things on a more positive note, I would say that the Telecom, FMCG and Automotive sectors have comparatively been showing much more initiative and maturity in defining good consumer experiences by optimizing the various touchpoints of the experience (pre-sales, sales, service, repeat sales). They also seem to have taken notice of the need for differentiating themselves based on design innovations (Think Swift and Scorpio, Airtel HelloTunes and mCheck payments, think Kurkure and Bingo)