What thing is this twitter !

During a recent backpacking trip in Indian hinterland, one of the evenings as I watched TV placed in corner of tea shop in a small town, news of an acrimonious war of words between a famous Indian movie star and a political party was playing on. News channel was reporting what the star had to say on controversy, not through interview given to news agency or channel but through tweets on his twitter account. As the saga was unfolding on twitter the new channel was merely picking it up and broadcasting. Someone seated nearby exclaimed "Ye twitter kya cheej hai (what thing is this twitter)" . And this could have summarized what many people in India have wondered for past few months. Twitter has been in constant news. If it is not a political leader who is fast building a reputation of getting into trouble in parliament because of his tweets ,then it is news about what some Hindi movie star has posted on his/her twitter account. In a way it is ironical that mainstream media that had labeled twitter as flippant when it was gaining traction with geeky crowd and early adopters, is now doing more for twitter's promotion.

Like elsewhere in world, twitter is rapidly growing in India in terms of number of users. Inflection point occurred after tragic Mumbai terror attack when traditional news media discovered how powerful and fast Twitter was in spreading information. For much of last year twitter's growth has been on upswing thanks to quick adoption by news channels and traditional media. There is hardly any news channel now which has not integrated twitter as a feedback and live user commenting tool. But with recent events involving popular movie stars which have brought twitter itself to news headlines and front pages of newspapers, Twitter's growth in India will perhaps go on a different trajectory. Hindi Cinema also sometime referred to as Bollywood is one of two major obsessions in India, other being wildly popular game of Cricket. And with movie stars, coming to Twitter in drove, a different segment of users is taking up to twitter. It is not then perhaps surprising that a news channel recently gave away Indian twitterer of year award to a movie producer and director who it claimed has got large chunk of movie folks and film fraternity onto twitter. Last year, Twitter itself hosted Mallika Sherawat, a Hindi film actress in its office and stated that she was instrumental in membership in India to skyrocket. It is easy to understand why stars and celebrities are adopting twitter as it helps them promote their movies, directly connect to fans and do PR without risk of being misquoted. And of course this is threatening existence of celebrity gossip magazines and paparazzi and is bringing hordes of fans to twitter if just out of curiosity.

It is worth to note that last year in October, Twitter had struck a deal with one of major Indian telecom companies , allowing its users to tweet through SMS on normal rates. It is significant because India has huge penetration of mobile phone users with almost 600 million mobile users as compared to just 50 million internet users. With mobile users projected to grow to 1200 million by 2015, India stands as a lucrative and expanding market for mobile twitter. Twitter CEO ,Evan Williams himself says that even though lots of twitter growth has come through web, their visions has been "to spread Twitter to the weakest connection in the world", which in this part of world happens to be a no frill mobile phone. In a recent TV interview, transcripts of which can be found here, Evans also hints at possible ways of making money through twitter ads as lots of information shared is commercial in nature. He also notes how companies are using twitter to connect to their customers and possibility of making money out of analytics data which companies will be interested in buying. So, as twitter chalks out plans of making money out of its platform, many new users will keep flocking to twitter if only to check ….what thing is this twitter. And as we know, that warrants a long answer.

Some information dynamics for Enterprise IT

While spending some time in an automobile factory recently, where I had chance of meeting many people from production and manufacturing background, I had to frequently explain what I do and since I was amidst many engineers, I found myself calling an information engineer. Not that software engineer is not well understood but It was easier to explain to logistics expert that my job was similar to his. He manages flow of goods and my job deals with flow of information. I know information engineering is just one of approaches we take in software engineering but using this perspective provides a different and interesting view of enterprise IT.

For effective information flow throughout the enterprise, info pipes need be laid down and taps and faucets installed at points where this information needs to be consumed, This can be understood as design of IT system landscape for enterprise and building applications (taps!). Together they can be called Info-structure. The master plan of information flow, the taps that need to be installed and how information will be consumed is what a typical enterprise information architecture would be. It is also required that on regular intervals it is checked that pipes are not clogged and that information is flowing smoothly. Clogged information flow is bad as it blocks and wastes precious human energy. To discover this ,the pertinent questions to ask is if employees have access to information which they need to know to do their jobs better and efficiently. The moment you find employees struggling with and groping for information, you would know that there are problems within organization’s info-structure. And the common symptoms of this are when you hear employees say : "I don’t have this information, I will call Tom", or, " Oh, I know that data is in excel sheet but it is not very recent", or "Let me call Mr. Gupta and check if he has the latest data on this".

In today's fast moving economy where business decision are to be made quickly, the information flow has to become more fluid. For example, in an automotive assembly line, use of SAP for running MRP and production planning is not enough. On demand information is needed, and not just by management but also at lower levels. The buyers department need to know historically which suppliers have problem delivering on time , the store manager need to know how parts age in inventory and if he needs to focus on logistics of certain parts more than the others. Business intelligence or BI is becoming important for this very reason and BI is akin to installing filters over the structured information flow. For information to become more liquid, the data trapped inside applications has to be unlocked and put on gradient. Enterprise also has to become porous as it has to absorb information from outside its boundaries and ,also , if I can put it that way , deliberately leak its own information outside its perimeter including to its customers. Reverse osmosis of information at enterprise boundaries!

Social media is also becoming an important element in enabling info-structure, as these tools are cheap and much effective ways of drawing employees into the information flow or let them plug into info-structure. They become social filters of information and can provide the ad-hoc plumbing over which unstructured information can flow overcoming departmental barriers. Their efficacy in knowledge based enterprises, where production of data or information is primary business is well understood but they are equally important in traditional businesses where information is result of business activities. To provide a simple example, a help manual on chassis number generation or a vehicle parts specification document is ok as a static document exchanged over emails. But, when kept on a Wiki, this information transforms from static to fluid and can flow more easily. And liquidity of information is only one advantage, distillation and refinement is another. Enterprise micro blogging platforms, wikis; they can enable social distillation of information. Increasingly, enterprise IT is going to be lot more about making information liquid and enabling its flow within enterprise and outside it as well. This diffusion of information will create a more "knowing" enterprise and that will be a key advantage in knowledge age.

(First posted on Capping IT Off)

Goodbye to Digital Decade

A day more and first decade of this century will be over. And what a decade it has been, marked with blistering pace of digital revolution which has left everything in sight singed. Such has been impact that decade is being called a digital decade. In span of 10 years we have seen massive changes thanks to advances in digital technology, explosion of internet and unleashing of waves of innovations. Come to think about it, how fast some of application and devices we use today and take for granted have sprung up e.g ; wikipedia: 2001, Myspace: 2003, Facebook: 2004,Youtube: 2005,Twitter: 2006,iPhone 2007,Kindle: 2007 and many more.

In span of 10 years, Google turned from a company to a verb, Facebook became a place to hang out, Youtube redefined blockbusters and Amazon survived dark ages of e-commerce to ride high on clouds. What started as a bug squashing exercise, turned into a dot com boom before crashing with a thud and reviving with everything 2.0 phenomenon. If we risked becoming verbose and blasé with blogger, twitter showed that 140 characters were more than enough to express anything. And this was much after a generation of kids had developed lingos not taught in any language academies, thanks to ubiquitous toy of decade called mobile phone. Oh well, the mobile itself, the question was not whether you had it but how smart it was. Wisdom of crowds, long tail, wikinomics, user generated content threatened some conventional business models and new paradigms emerged. Impact of social networking was not only felt in personal life but inside corporate walls as well, where some old ramparts could be seen crumbling. Low cost of communication and distribution ensured that the word which was with God was finally and truly appropriated by men.


In an old Indian philosophical thought, evolution, is seen as a progressive manifestation of nature ( to experience itself). Evolution doesn’t always result in what can be called a happy path scenario and in those circumstances self-correction is done. In similar vein, we can see human intelligence virtually exploding in many forms in this digital decade and moving towards some kind of distant Omega Point. The pace of this technology innovation has been so rapid that its impact on society's fabric and different aspects like political, legal and social is yet to be known fully. May be we are going to discover that not all innovations and technology made our life easier or fruitful after all. Now we have less time to do more things. Growth has become a monster which has to be constantly fed. "What Next!" drives us and there is almost sense of paranoia if we can’t see that Next. To some , digital technology and specially the Internet has ushered in a cult of the amateur that is "taking us back into the Dark Ages". Change always creates flux and that unsettles many. Regardless of different views, one thing is certain, that the mark has been made. Future generations will look back at this decade and perhaps wonder how it would have been to live through those years when epochal changes were taking place. Or possibly they are going to look back and wonder about a decade of digital stone age. Time will tell, as someone has said, future is not googlable.

(First appeared on Capping IT Off )

Does Agile mean no Processes and no Governance?

There are two generally held perceptions about agile. One, that agile is a kind of anarchist model with no processes, and second, that agile means no governance. Let’s look at the first perception that agile means no processes. We can understand how agile looks at need of processes by applying a well known principle called Occam's razor which states that ” one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything”. The principle helps us to remove those concepts, variables or constructs that are not needed to explain a phenomenon. By doing this, it becomes easier to create a model which resembles reality much better and redundancy and inconsistency is removed. In essence, Occam's razor stipulates that when multiple theories are available to explain a problem, the simplest one is preferred. Nature likes simplicity. Ocaam's razor when applied to project management methods would imply that a Project should have only those processes which are required and not more. This is exactly what agile paradigm means with its use of low ceremony, just enough processes. Agile teams chose processes which are most relevant for them to meet their goals in their context. It means you do not pick set of pre-defined, rigid processes in a bunch and deploy them on a project. A process is good as long as it adds value to project; or it should be discarded or amended. So, why is to so hard to agree with this!

It is possibly due to the fact that traditional management methods have relied heavily on process standardization and execution efficiency. But it has not helped achieve predictability of results which is clear from number of IT project failures. Today's business scenario is vastly different with constant change and dynamic markets. Project teams like Organizations need to adapt quickly. Traditional methods, which are based on "execution as efficiency”, find this hard to achieve because they inherently oppose changes in system. In a Harvard business review paper published in 2008, Professor Amy Edmondson identifies a different approach to execution, called "execution as learning" which looks uncannily similar to agile thinking of software development. She calls execution as learning “a radically different organizational mind-set, one that focuses not so much on making sure a process is carried out as on helping it evolve". Agile practitioners would easily relate to her thoughts and “execution as learning” looks very similar to agile manifesto.

Second perception about agile is that there is no or very little Governance in agile methods. But the fact is that agile makes governance more effective as it puts onus on participation of all stakeholders in project. Traditional command and control governance models usually end up creating bureaucratic hurdles and illusion of control. Agile governance model on the other hand is about enabling the team and facilitating an environment where team can meet its objective without avoidable hindrances. Whole team principle is about shared vision and goals and that there are no finger pointing and putting the blame when and if things go wrong. Should project sponsor remain a distant illusive figure or rather become part of the team! Perception of agile being low on governance perhaps comes from principle of "self-organizing teams". Scott Ambler explains this principle when he says that "self organizing doesn’t mean that you are out of control and doing your own thing. It means that team members are themselves deciding how to meet the goals. But the goals they have to meet, the resources used and timeframe, are governed by organization". Agile governance he says is about keeping the baby and throwing the bathwater. And that might well summarize processes and governance perspective in agile.

(First appeared on Capgemini technology blog )