The occasional light expression

Manu Sharma has a great blog post on how Apple’s employee badges were designed to be as distinct as the products the company designs. The post is a good reminder that all great design outcomes are a result of multiple forces at play: Executive management sensitivity, a respect for individuality, an aesthetic grounding across the company, and a VERY user centered design process (not a reactive usability engineering process).

Here are some of my observations from the field in India’s technology sector. While an employee badge is the least of ‘motivators’, in the true Chinese tradition of starting every journey with a small step, it is a great starting point. A new employee is uncertain about many many things when they join a company. A well designed ob-boarding process, and certainly a well designed badge essentially says to the employee ‘There’s some thought behind things here’.

And here’s where most Indian companies get it wrong.

Several companies in the Indian IT industry follow the lowest common denominator to employee badges. Most badges are printed on cheap plastic, with even cheaper plastic covers, use employee-submitted dull ‘passport’ photographs, and include as Manu points out, all sorts of extraneous information. The result is depressing looking employee badges that give no sense of pride, no sense of inspiration, and certainly no sense of differentiation in an extremely commoditized marketplace. And then companies complain about employee loyalty! I suspect the reason for this is not only costs, but also that it gets outsourced to a Security setup which has no stake in employee satisfaction, only in workplace safety. It gets worse. Since almost everybody in Bangalore wears some kind of collar tag, all the way from BPO executives, office boys, Citibank sales drones standing outside ATMs and airports, to just about anybody and everybody, an employee of a company with a black, or red, or blue collar tag has a thousand other people in the city wearing the same tag.
Here is my wishlist for a GOOD employee badge:

1. Some customization on shape
2. Change your own pictures
3. Bright and cheerful

4. Some metal, not all plastic

Human Factors (HFI)’s redesign of the Times of India website is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it is one of the more advertised re-designs of Indian web portals. Indiatimes has gone all out to advertise its improved ‘usability’ - even written an article about it!. And with some pretty flowery language too….”In the 60th year of India’s Independence, we’ve freed your TimesofIndia.com from the shackles of yesterday. And in defining the new tomorrow in a Web 2.0 world, we had the best adviser. You. It was from your constant feedback, brickbats and bouquets, that we drew the essence of the brand new TimesofIndia.com”. Right………………

Notwithstanding the unabashed plug on ‘improved navigation’ and ‘user generated feedback and ‘advanced usability engineering methods’ I think this is a good reference point on how Indian companies are very quickly waking up to the need for a user centered design process for product differentiation in a largely unusable space of Indian websites - The Indian Railways museum of horror - www.irctc.in comes to mind. (Much like CEOs discovered ‘Design’ and started running around to find designers the way a poor sod bitten by a snake runs around randomly for an antidote!). Products ranging from the famous desktop finance app Tally to ICICI Bank to new entrants such as Minglebox have hired usability professionals or consultants to make their sites more usable. There are rumors that even the very-successful Shaadi.com and Naukri.com are looking for usability managers and professionals to drive the next generation of their sites.

All in all, good news for professionals engaged in the business of design, usability, user research, ethnography, and related areas in the Indian market.

Last Monday I visited the Infosys campus on Hosur Road, Bangalore (Image courtesy Diomidis Spinellis from http://www.spinellis.gr - Thanks Diomidis!).

In the two hours I spent on campus after my meeting, I met an old industry friend, Shan who heads the User Experience part of Infosys’s Communications & Design Group (housed in the much talked about pyramid), walked around observing the architecture, and doing a snapshot ethnography of campus.

In walking around, I was trying to notice the subtleties of the company that have made it a valued employer of choice in India, a super brand internationally, and the bellwether of India’s IT services industry. Here are some of my random observations on what makes Infosys tick:

1. Infosys has modeled its campus strongly along the lines of any top tier American university campus (Stanford comes to mind), and some of the American tech pioneers (Microsoft comes to mind). While most of the structures are indistinguishable, some, like the CDG Pyramid, the Terminal Food Court, Building 9, the lake and fountain areas, and overall, the wonderfully landscaping stand out as examples of good work. I was stuck that ironically, the Infosys campus seemed to have more ‘soul’ than most multinational campuses in India - while considering the scorching growth of the technology sector in India, most companies have reconciled to having drab, grayish white buildings with cheap glass facades. Infosys certainly gets the importance of having an inspiring physical campus.

2. Looking around at the Infosys staff walking around on campus, especially in looking at the old-timers, I got a sense of confidence, well being, and a sense of purpose and even more so - of people having been around for a while. Because of Infosys’ presence in industry for over 25 years, there is an interesting demographic distribution – I saw many people in their 30s and 40s on campus, lots of women employees, and lots of Euro-American or Asian expats. Incidentally the Infosys internship program has been one of the most sought after program for international students in overseas universities looking at good experience and the ‘India flavor’ on their resumes. Infosys seems to get the urgent, burning need for cultural and conceptual diversity to drive innovation and that one has to create a global workplace IN India to foster that global diversity.
3. The Infosys focus on ‘care & nurturing’ areas, including the standardization of processes, the consistency of processes, the fairness of the compensation and career pathing, and above all, the diversity and imaginativeness of the food courts is noticeable. Among others, I noticed a world class bakery run by a Frenchman (try the cinnamon rolls and croissants there), and a plethora of breakfast and lunch options, all dished out at very subsidized rates and with the quickness that the Indian IT industry is famous for. Certainly no one goes to office to have great cafeteria food, but the extra soft touches were visible.
My ‘external-observer’ observation of all the designers, usability professionals and other ‘creatives’ I met at the pyramid was that most of them are the kind of people you’d like to have a great conversation with over coffee, and in general work with. There is a great deal of diversity within the group – from a chap who designs world class Annual Reports to a chap who redesigned Infosys’ award winning corporate Intranet, to a dedicated HR lady whose job is to keep the design staff inspired and motivated. The glasswork in the pyramid is also quite intriguing (though I hear complaints about the greenhouse effect!), and the rooms – named after luminaries such as Steve Jobs and Spielberg house posters, books and more books – always a peek into the minds of the founders of the design group.

Great thoughts and some vision that went into all this! I think more technology companies should take a leaf out of Infosys’ book in terms of some of the elements of its campus, its architecture, and of course its spanking cleanliness :-)

Barcamp Bangalore 3 wrapped up this Sunday, April 1 at the IIM Bangalore campus. I was only able to make it for the afternoon sessions but had some good hallway conversations with Param, Abhinav, Rajan (a sharp entrepreneur and co-founder of Motvik), Ashwin (speed demon who loves cruising the ideascape – and live blogging), Arun - a Barcamp and tech veteran, Harish (who has some great ideas on applications for unstructured and structured data – and is looking for smart tech folks for his startup -OneBigWeb, Rajiv (who started Mobile Monday in Bangalore and runs his WLAN startup Sedna), Hazra (independent visual artist and old comrade from my consulting days), MJ (A landmark graduate who told me much about utility computing at his company), and Soumya and Ashish (both from IIM B and currently Product Managers – at Aditi and Yahoo respectively – with great ideas on Web 2.0, Indian startups, and the blogging)…

My only gripe about Barcamp - it could be a bit wierder, with more edge conversations, and with a broader mix of design, music, art and technology - not just technology itself. This Barcamp’s theme - social tech - while treading new ground for Bangalore Barcamp is an old theme in general - and the absense of true artists, visionaries, or voices from the grounds of culture and the social sciences was felt. Barcamp does not need to be Burning Man, but it could get a bit edgier, more informal, a bit more chaotic as far as the themes, speakers, and presentations go - so that some magic may emerge.

Nonetheless, Barcamp still remains one of my favorite places to meet folks slightly outside of the mainstream in this part of the world..

Business Week has a timely article in its April 2007 issue on areas of work where different industries in different geographies are facing a severe human resource shortage. The article notes that the supply for several key professionals including engineers, plumbers, electricians, lab technicians, accountants(!), skilled manufacturing workers, equipment operators, and other such hands on professions is very squeezed. The list is topped by - guess what - the Sales Representative :-)

I was reminded of a thought experiment i once did that if there were a Third World War, and we went back to the stone age, what kinds of ‘professional’ skills would I need to be able to survive? I suspect story telling, teaching, cooking, and playing some kind of music that crowds can tolerate might be somewhere on top of that list…
Regarding the labor shortage in India, the article notes that ” The labor squeeze in India gets lots of attention. Oddly, though, Manpower’s survey found that employers in India reported the least problems filling jobs: Just 9% said they had difficulty, vs. 41% in the U.S. and 82% in Mexico. The explanation? Manpower’s staff thinks turnover is so rapid in India that employers figure if they really need to fill a job, they’ll lure someone away from another company. But stealing scarce talent from rivals isn’t a strategy for the long run. That’s why employers are on an all-out campaign to increase training and raise education levels. While India produces 400,000 engineering graduates a year, few have the skills and language abilities to work in an advanced multinational corporation. Some 1.3 million people applied to tech-services giant Infosys Technologies Ltd. (INFY ) last year, for instance, but the company says only 2% of those were employable. For business, it seems, there’s no shortage of work involved in easing worker shortages.”

Bangalore Barcamp is back. THe next one is slated for Mar 31/April 1 at the IIM Bangalore campus.

This Barcamp is around social technology - or as the website states “At this event, we intend to share stories of technology implementations that affected society around us, and social norms that affected the course of technology. At Barcamp Bangalore 3 we have stories of e-governance, electronic record keeping, and what it means for those without access; Indian copyright law and innovation in music; and celluloid, movies and the resultant shaping of society and culture. We’d love to hear more, perhaps on the application of technology to understand the human condition, or perhaps on the growing spread of personal communication technologies and the unexpected but undeniable shift in the landscape of mass media and governance…”

The Barcamp 3 theme reminds me of Doors 8 Delhi, which was a Doors of Perception conference on platforms and infrastructures for social innovation.

I will probably present this time on Innovation - Innovation as a fad, innovation as a buzzword, and what innovative thinking really means in an organizational context. I might also present a spin on the future of the technology User Experience field.

I cover two points - A recent article highlighting Indian salary hikes and the issue of whether India’s cost advantage in technology is eroding.

Regarding the first, ECA international recently published the results of a survey from 2006 where they found that India, Indonesia, and Russia had the highest salary hikes in the world. Specifically, India had the highest pay hikes of around 12%.

The article notes- “As highlighted recently by ECA’s discussion forums in Hong Kong and Singapore, companies in Asia are becoming increasingly focused on recruiting and retaining welleducated, highly skilled employees in order to maintain the rapid economic growth the region is currently experiencing…”

My observation of the IT industry in Bangalore since 2003 is that this is only partially true. The Indian IT ecosystem covers the entire gamut - from companies that charge about a thousand dollars to GIVE you a job that pays $100 per month, to companies that splendidly compromise and give employees un-ergonomic chairs, terrible lunches, cheap pens and paper pads, to companies that allow you to work from home and cover your transport. There are clearly two kinds of high tech companies in India. One kind has the motto “Throw money at us and we will code just about anything for you with our backs bent and our noses on the ground”. The second kind has the motto “We honor our work and integrity, so please honor yours”.

Moving on to the second past: Is the Indian market overheating because of rising wages?

One recent piece by a global HR firm (reference quoted in a recent Economic Times Brand Equity article) suggests that the Indian cost advantage in global outsourcing of software development will remaiin for about 45 years. The argument is that while at senior and executive levels, wage differences have gone down to 1:3 or even 1:2, the wage differentials at the entry levels remain at about 1:6 and cause the overall Indian IT industry to remain competitive in matters of salary and compensation, even with a 15% salary hike every year. This while a top notch salaried Indian CEO may make about 1 million USD a year, an entry level programmer/designer/analyst still makes only about $10000-$15000. This compares favorably even with salaries in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea and other Asian economies.

My two cents: Global product and services outsourcing will continue on its trajectory for atleast the next several years. Outsourcing has taken on a life on its own, and wage inflation notwithstanding, companies outsourcing software to Bangalore, manufacturing to Beijing, and architecture to Bucharest have no option but to continue building armies of staffers outside of the developed world markets. They also have no option but to continue selling to what a famous politician once called the “great unwashed masses”…

In early December, I gave a small plug on User Experience 101 at Bangalore Barcamp 2006. Thanks Muthu for helping with the presentation :-]

The crowd at Barcamp is quite different than the usual Bangalore conference crowd. It is certainly more agile, sharper, savvier, and keenly aware of global technology, business, and design trends. Some of the presentations I enjoyed (below are links to their sites or related podcast links) were:

- Web 2.0 business models by Sowmya Karmalli

- A Reality Check on WiMax by Sujai Karampuri of Sloka Telecom

- An overview of MingleBox, an Indian social networking site (a direct competitor to Orkut) by Kavita Iyer

- An overview of the Venture Capital scene at Sequoia Capital by Sandeep Singhal
- An awesome overview of the Indian independent music service - RadioVerve by Shreyas Srinivasan

I hope there’s a Bangalore Barcamp 2007 round the corner…..if anyone hears anything let me know!