Saturday, December 13, 2008

imminent boom in healthcare IT...

This post might sound opportunistic. However, I have to discuss this thought as I see new markets opening up. Specifically, here I discuss for the benefit of most of the IT management professionals who visit this blog of mine. 

Here's the money trail for the healthcare IT boom to come in the next few years. Immediate gainers would be folks experienced in EMR and allied fields. 




Certified professionals will be in heavy demand and will have good earning potential.  One must keep the pulse of this market. Networking can be achieved via HIMSS.

Research opportunities now emerge for healthcare topics as the funds will be diverted towards the same. Those interested in PhDs must check out this as a potential problem to solve and a solution that helps reduce costs for the companies, the taxpayers, as well as the govt. 


Thursday, October 23, 2008

ultimate ad spot

Yes - if you partner with Google then you can get the ultimate ad spot ever - the Google page. 

Check out this ad for the G1 phone. 

With the Learn more - Google indicates the discrete nature it always exercises in its approach. A gentle giant. If they wanted, they could say "Buy It" alike some other websites. However, they are elegant and they say "Learn More"

I feel like extending my contract with Tmobile just for having this phone.  However, on second thoughts, I feel that I must wait for a second version of the phone and some other carrier as Tmobile's service in NYC is inferior relative to Verizon. 

 


Sunday, October 05, 2008

Wednesday, September 03, 2008

best practices....(and Dilbert)

Dilbert series presents another amazing strip about best practices. 
Check here

This makes me think if all those companies who want to copy best practices from other companies have competitive advantage? I say this because some so-called ITIL pundits indicate that the ITIL publications creates level-playing grounds for companies not knowing best practices. 

However, I question this statement. Best practices will keep evolving and are tailored to a specific environment. ITIL is  a best practices compendium as of May 2007. More best practices have evolved since then. Hence, the companies can gain competitive advantage in their IT Management only if they have people with right skillsets.  Human capital is as important as practices in place. 

Saturday, July 19, 2008

advertisements in india are creative

As a part 1 of this series, I would like to make an assertion that Indian advertisements are fairly creative even if they have social constraints to not go beyond certain boundaries.

A highly focused ad mechanism by a company in the buses in Mumbai. This takes advantage of c k prahlad's hypothesis about jewels at the bottom of the pyramid as well as creative marketing. Some creative entrepreneurial thought must have gone into this.

In my trip to India after 40 months, I wanted to experience every means of transport in Mumbai - the trains, the buses, the taxis, the autorickshaws, everything. I boarded a bus and lo behold, I found an entire system with a speaker system, a small screen and what not.

++:
Local ads can be directed into this device based on the payments by the local ad-spot bidders. This piqued my interest and I further delved into knowing about the company.

They are capturing a significant time spent by folks traveling. They can extend this concept to the first class compartments in the railways as well.

--:
They haven't yet made a facility to update ads real-time. The ads are still uploaded using some hardware mechanism. This will lead to lack of scalability after some time. The marginal cost will increase as the volumes increase and hence, they have to figure out a mechanism to uplink the unit in the bus using telecommunication device so that the content can be uploaded real time and assets can be tracked from a central location.

One could expect this in developed nations. However, in India, the entrepreneurs were scared about the investment due to potential losses due to multitude of reasons such as lack of public property safety, ability of generate adequate revenues, and technology limitations. However, apparently, noone had time or interest to do any harm to that screen. Yes, Mumbai has become so expensive that there is an implicit self-select mechanism built in. Even the slum dwellers are fairly civic conscious now!

India - lage raho....lage raho..

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

a graduate program in service management!

Check here for the new program at CMU for experienced candidates in the field of Service Management. It is being offered by Institute of Software Research in the School of Computer Science.

Already, ITIL v3's Service Strategy was successfully bid for authorship by one of the CMU folks (Majid Iqbal) earlier this decade. Now, ITSQC in conjunction with ISR and SCS has introduced this new program. The pitch sounds convincing. I wouldn't be surprised if PRC govt sends its folks to learn in this program in order to support their budgeted 5-year plan to increase services in China.

Saturday, May 31, 2008

msft: accelerating market share?

I wanted to blog about this musing earlier. However, other competing priorities delayed this.

MSFT has just 5% of the search engine marketshare and wants to expand it to a formidable # 2 slot. Currently, Yahoo has #2 slot and has expressed its dissent in joining hands with Microsoft.

MSFT has resolved to alternative means to capture market share - cash back ! An interesting thought in a dwindling economy and the most bang for the buck as it targets the highly lucrative click-thru-to-revenue.

How can they expand the volumes for the same?
1. Targeting gems at the bottom of the pyramids: I mean the emerging economies !

For instance, if the MSN folks can make their finance site for India better, they will be able to eat up that entire market. Google has no product for that market and the Yahoo product is appalling.

Another example is if MSN can introduce bill-pay for Indian service providers. The population will happily get onto MSN site for paying bills at nominal premiums of INR 10 or a quarter.

2. Focusing their information security dept's innovation to online payment safety.


What is still lacking in their product?

accuracy:

As against the rival Google, the accuracy of the Live search product is inferior. For instance, I gave a search string of "Sony Cyber-shot W120 Black 7.2 MP". Despite of the fact that the product was available on the website, it wasn't the first one that came up. It came up way at the bottom of the page and that too, I had to scroll down. At Google, the only product in response to this search string was the one I was looking for.

This reminds me that "attention" is a pricey commodity for which every advertiser is craving for. If the search result is not at the top then it loses the relevance.

cheapest prices:
Also, the price was not comparing itself to other deals that may be available. However, that's a flaw that even Google has. Google checkout had higher prices for this search than Microsoft search.

I think that MSFT can innovate on the cheapest prices point to get an edge!

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

moody's bug in the model and the art of IT management

Moody's recently discovered a software bug. Details of the story are here.

This incident exemplifies the reason why financial services firms need to follow a more rigorous service management approach. Service Validation of the IT Service Management paradigm from ITIL v3 would've helped. However, I am reasonably assured that Moody's IT staff didn't follow it.

The IT departments of US financial services' institutions are more matured when compared to IT departments of other industries in technology and speed-to-market aspect. Yet, they are neither frugal nor disciplined. Some of the reasons are:
  • The attrition rate: In an inflationary economy at locations such as NYC, the attrition rate is cause of their miseries but also the reason why they must have a strong process rigor
  • Demand for agility: This leads to lack of strict discipline in IT operations. I do not propose that one cannot achieve discipline without agility - one can; it just needs practice and perseverance.
  • Demand for higher speed-to-market: This leads to lack of thought given to service-strategy as well as service design. As the industry is matured, if someone comes up with a service idea, s/he wants to take it to market ASAP to capture the market share.
I am pretty sure there are many other cases such as Moody's that result in losses and may have been absorbed either by the consumer and/or the banks. Time for the banks to think about their money now!

Saturday, May 17, 2008

talent war...

The global war for talent is intense! Nature of work, composition of workforce, and new world order are the key drivers for such a war.

First, the organizations are operating in an environment with ever-increasing proportions of tacit knowledge. This stems from the fact that the proportion of services in the global GDP is increasing and the fact that many services are getting highly specialized.

There was a Congressional hearing on why CEOs of loss-making investment banks were compensated millions of $s. The board members from the compensation committee for these companies were drilled by the Senators. However, the board members had a simple stance: there is a war for talent and if we have to run our businesses, we will have to award these bonuses. Such politically satisfying rituals help the elected representatives to go back to their people and say - "ah, I tried ...did you see that on the television?" :P. Also, there are surveys by IPS-DC on executive excesses (2006 report, 2007 report). The ludicrous hearing by the Senators (I watched it on C-Span) and/or the surveys had no effect on the pay-practices in the financial services sector. This is evident from the recent WSJ article on "Say-on-Pay doesn't play on Wall St."

Second, the increasing global nature of workforce is posing other set of challenges. McKinsey & Co had an article on why multinationals struggle to manage talent. Mobility among countries and cohesiveness in achieving cultural diversity are prime challenges for multi-nationals. The global workforce today demands wage equality across the globe and is ready to move around to other companies that offer so. For instance, one of my former colleagues at a US-based system integrator/consulting firm didn't get US visa (lottery issues) and the firm could not make arrangements for him in some other country than India. She didn't want to be in India due to wage-difference. This led to her resigning and joining some other global consulting firm that could deploy her in Europe.

Third, the huge transfer of wealth from the US to West Asia (via oil) is leading to demands for talent at higher wages in a global demand uptick. The new world order is causing countries with immigration policies non-conducive to immigrants to lose out on competitive workforce for the nation. For instance, most of the financial services firms which cannot get visas for their workforce in the US are retaining the talent by deploying them in the UK or Canada. Similarly, west coast companies (such as Microsoft) is deploying its workforce (that lacks visa) in Canada.

Another evidence of the war for talent is apparent with the current talent-sourcing practices of leading organizations. Cyber sleuthing, an art practiced and perfected by Shally Steckerl and the likes, along with the boom for niche jobsearch sites for 100k+ jobs (The Ladders.com or 6figurejobs.com) are evidences for the same.

As Friedman mentioned in his book "The World is Flat", the companies that are not ready to change will cease to be competitive and later, the countries that are not ready to change will lose out. I think that the companies that are ill-equipped with HR policies to tap the global talent will lose out in the medium to long run and the countries that are having mis-aligned immigration policies will miss out in the medium to long-run. So, catch up with the times - change or else there will be nothing left to change !

Sunday, May 11, 2008

fear and loathing at the airport

US air traffic is simply atrocious. The aircrafts are getting older - so are the flight attendants! The snacks and food offered on flights went from complimentary to paid and to disappearance (they don't want to have the inventory management headache!) - LOL.

Safety is in question. First, lack of inspection by the authorities is increasing the risk. Recently, we saw a spate of a large number of flights being canceled due to pending inspection. In a bid to keep the carrier running, safety was prioritized. The rich no longer want to fly with commercial airlines and they fly via NetJets! There were 339 incidents in 2007 when two aircrafts came dangerously close to each other or to objects on the ground. I experience more bumps in landing these days, hmmm.....are those due to reduced paychecks to the flight pilots?

Consolidation emerged much to the disadvantage of the chagrined consumers. Prices were hiked as soon as the Delta-Northwest merger started coming into transition phase. I see further consolidation in form of combining the points, miles, etc. The airlines must be cursing themselves for introducing the points system to begin with.

The options provided to the consumers are causing the issues to a certain degree. To woo the customers, airlines provide tons of options. However, the infrastructure required to support it is simply absent. For instance, take the condition of La Guardia airport. It is no where close to the state-of-the-art airport-designs I have seen at other domestic or international locations. Yet, it is a nerve center for the entire US traffic. Any backlog there causes cascading effect in the system. Such airports need to be corrected in terms of design.

Most of the US airline carriers are trying to improve. Air aviation is a highly leveraged business with huge capex and/or leases (depending on how you laid it out) unless you have a niche target market to focus on luxury flying. The fuel prices are leading airlines to become very insensitive to the consumer needs. Airlines started taxing consumers with charges for checked in luggage in order to make up for prices. Southwest has good hedge against oil. What about others? I saw someone shouting on cnbc when the oil went up by $11 /bbl (chuckles).

I blog this as I am waiting at the airport due to a flight cancellation - they said that there was some weather issue. However, another airlines is letting its flights go at the same time to the same destination. Is this an outright lie? who knows? Can FAA do something about it? Do they care? Blakey unabashed the airlines publicly last year. Does he have enough powers to do something?

Sunday, April 13, 2008

time management

good tips on time management by Prof Randy Pausch. He has less time in life left and hence, wanted to share all these interesting tips . Its about 76 mins but would be well spent as against a movie or something.


Friday, April 11, 2008

google and the art of recruiting

"I said Google, not Sizzler, " says Micky Rosa, the kingpin for the card-counting affair and the MIT professor in the movie 21.

As innovative as they get, I love Google's recruitment strategies ! Last time I made a remark like this was when I interviewed with them. This time around I make this comment after watching 21.

The product placement of "Google as a prestigious job" in the movie 21 was brilliant. This truly exemplified the "context-sensitive" nature of Google !

In the past, I have seen cyber-sleuthing as a technique being deployed by them at a massive scale in an amazing way to fetch talent from the open market - now, this. Well, the firms thirsty for talent have a thing or two to learn from Google !

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

...truly world class? forex prudence is missing...

For Indian service providers to become truly world class, they will need to spend on in-house forex talent. Check out this case where the story suggests "Nishar said that company does not have have any in house expertise to enter into forex deals." from the cnbc article.

This indicates low risk-management maturity of the vendor. If the earnings are in USD and costs are in INR then one cannot ignore forex. In the past, I had blogged about how Infy couldn't manage its forex here.

I extend this hypothesis of managing forex better to any Indian exporter. If you want to have a sustainable business in a global economy, you must have economists and forex specialists at your disposal.

Business case for forex specialists?
Now, in case of Hexaware, Nishar can argue that he cannot afford to have a full-time position for just forex as Hexaware is relatively small. This observation leads to business-case for forex consultants. I am not talking about forex-agents, who sometimes claim to be forex consultants. I am talking about hardcore economists or forex specialists.

Govt intervention?
For India to be truly world class with the nature of companies it is coming out with, GoI policies need to incentivize forex education initially. Traditionally, everyone has been focussed on engineering and medical to such an extent that there is huge dearth of these other functions' personnel.

Monday, March 31, 2008

paulson generates business for consulting firms

Henry Paulson, the US Treasury Secretary, will create huge business opportunity for consulting firms with his proposed regulation. It's the broadest reform of oversight in the financial markets since the aftermath of the Great Depression.

Businesses are amenable to the same as it will streamline the regulation to avoid such fiascos such as Bear Sterns. It will result in reduced profits but will reduce risk of persecution later.

This regulation translates into a huge opportunity for the consulting firms because both the Fed as well as the commercial sector will have a run for becoming ready for the new era! Consulting firms will flash their accelerators to get the business. As time will be of importance, the billing rates will be at a premium.

Sunday, March 30, 2008

robbed by the FCC...

Yes, the American consumers consumers were robbed by the FCC from cheaper Internet-access and communication charges. Instead, the FCC ended up making the two telecom giants get a tighter grip on the consumers than ever before with the spectrum auction's results.

Mobile-phone companies have long opposed open access. Verizon even sued the FCC last year in a bid to block a move toward open access. It failed, then did an about-face, promising to open its network to third-party devices and applications in the future.

Verizon wireless was awarded the largest chunk of the spectrum auction and also, allowed to make a decision about accessibility to its spectrum by others. This is not in line with what Google tried to petition against.

The Economist notes:
"ONE of the dirtiest tricks played on American consumers is the way their country’s mobile-phone companies force them to use phones sold through the companies’ stores, then lock them into two-year contracts with punitive cancellation fees. Asians and Europeans—who can take their mobiles from one provider to another, and use them on different networks around the world—shake their heads in amazement at Americans’ meek acceptance of such anti-competitive practices."

As it is the interest-rate cuts have been making me skeptical about allowance for market forces to thrive by themselves. The spectrum auction fiasco further disturbs me as bureaucratic intervention and incestuous relationships have created this broad daylight robbery from the consumers!

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

PE firms must deploy ITIL v3 in their portfolio companies

Recently, an article of mine was published on thinkingstreet.com here.


ITIL v3’s business service management approach makes it the best fit for adoption by private equity (PE) firm for deploying in their portfolio companies in order to enhance the value of their portfolio.

The prime objective of a PE firm is to obtain controlling interest in a target company and restructure the target company over a period of 3-7 years such that its value enhances and sell it once the market value is more. It can be reasonably concluded that the value of the PE firms is a function of value of their portfolio companies.

This objective is achieved by deploying best management practices and cutting on flab in the operations of the target company. Usually, in a PE firm, a partnership’s investment activities can be divided into four stages: selecting investments, structuring investments, monitoring investments, and exiting investments .

ITIL v3 fits well at the stages of structuring investments and monitoring investments. The PE firms can leverage the best practices in the only written IT Operations’ guide. The beginning of a v3 project is resource intensive. However, it starts yielding benefits within 6-12 quarters depending on how it was deployed.

The prime reason that v3 is a good fit for PE is due to its business service management approach for the IT services. Besides, v3 introduces the much needed dimension of Financial Management and portfolio approach, a dimension that was missing from the earlier versions but was of high significance. The address to value creation, value capture, and value networks makes it well-aligned with the objectives of the PE firm.

The concept of market spaces discussed in V3 helps the IT department think beyond the immediate internal customer. If the IT arm of a particular portfolio company can start providing services to external customers, the value of the portfolio company will be enhanced.

Also, V3 adopts a lifecycle approach, which is pragmatic as compared to the earlier modular approach, which discounted the fact that the business place is constantly evolving and that IT needs to adapt. When a portfolio company is being restructured by a PE firm, there are significant changes, which can be addressed on the IT side only by a lifecycle approach.

On one hand, most of the IT shops find V3 abstruse and hence, either delay the adoption and/or are too busy putting out fires in order to adopt it. V3 will act as a shaman between those who worlds. The resistance is easier to overcome in case of a PE portfolio company than in case of a regular company. The structuring of the organization is in such a way that the partners can exert significant pressure to get initiatives off the ground quickly. Besides, the managers of the portfolio companies must not oppose the adoption of v3 in these environments as they gain an experience, which sells for a higher rate in the market, if they can prove a successful deployment.

If I were a stakeholder in the third version (popularly known as v3), I would pitch it to the PE firms, in order to have increased adoption for my Operations’ guide.

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

US recession is a boon for service providers well-entrenched in India

Recession in US puts Indian firm on a good footing for leveraging the relatively inexpensive image of their services ! The economies of scale established by leading firms entrenched in India is remarkable.

The usual principal-agent issues impede these firms from making off-shoring decisions. Indian service providers have demonstrated good capabilities around the same in the past. After initial doubt, outsourcing had gained ground in last 5 years. Further, the contracts are up for renewals. We will see large bout of negotiations for the renewal of contracts and further large proportions of sourcing.

eSCM
- Sourcing Capability Model encompasses all the sourcing issues and the Indian service providers are rapidly climbing the ladders of the eSCM capability levels. You must check out on the eSCM website for the list of the Indian firms.

Currently, the leading Indian service providers are making offers that are hard to refuse. No wonder - when the doom-gloom about the R-word started, progressive companies such as Infosys started booking the 30-seconds-slots on CNBC in the US.

From the vantage point that I am looking at, this recession is a boon for the Indian Services, in general, and software services, in particular.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

contingency firms v/s retainer firms

While going through the emails I received last week, I could see some recruiter emails - some from contingency firms and some from retainer firms. This got me curious on digging on the net for finding the differences in how they operate. Click here to read a good differentiation.

Sunday, February 17, 2008

par excellence

Google doesn't stop to impress me with their products. The newest one which impressed me was the ability to give a certain name to a tab in iGoogle and get related widgets automatically.

Here's how it works. If you are signed in the iGoogle webpage, click on Add a Tab. Give it a title, say notes. You will see a tab with multiple notes gadgets. I thought may be this was too obvious. So, I went ahead and added a tab called India. Huge number of widgets came up on that tab ! Same with stocks, technology management, etc !



This is amazing new step to keep Google users stuck to its page !!!

Friday, February 01, 2008

microhoooooo

Microsoft bid for Yahoo at $31 a share in a bid to gain some market share in the rapidly evolving online ad industry.

An earlier post on this blog here, expressed the possibility of consolidation with Microsoft buying Yahoo. Microsoft senior leadership was astute and kept this possibility on bay for a while. They made their move with an unsolicited bid when the Yahoo stock was beaten down due to lacklustre performance by Yang and the Gang. Larry Ellison moves in similar ways.

The media expressed that there may be anti-trust problems. Now, you gotta be kidding me! Together Microsoft and Yahoo will cover only a quarter of the total space that Google commands. I learnt at least this much in my Business Law class from Prof Hersch. I am not sure why the popular media made these comments. This just indicates how the media runs hurriedly to create sensational headlines rather than providing any thought to it. None other than CNBC said this and other channels followed suit ! This sad display of journalism reminds me of Prof Chris Telmer, who used to rip apart the pink press (financial press) for spreading false notions in the minds of the naive readers. Astute and educated investors read most of the pink media with a grain of salt due to such incidents.

Of course, Yahoo and Microsoft have huge share of email accounts. However, I am not yet sure if they have good enough products to target ads in that fashion. If they build it together, they will save money on building that. May be both already have products in the pipeline...who knows.

Going ahead, we will witness some interesting times in the search space.
1. MSN Money must leverage Yahoo Finance for their content but not the UI. The international market and eye balls (remember - Jewels at the bottom of the pyramid!) that MSN Money will get with the inclusion of Yahoo Finance content on MSN Money will surpass that of Google Finance easily.

Google Finance does not have any grip in the foreign markets - for instance, the Indian market. Whereas Yahoo Finance has a good set of data (though there is room for improvement for the international markets. Besides they roll no the RIC codes and hence, have a standardized convention for naming the stocks.

2. We will have a very colorful time watching the titans clash for the online ads market. MSFT has been ramping up its Live Search staff with good talent from around the globe. They have some way to go in order to make themselves equivalent to that of GOOG. However, they are on the right path.

3. Will MSFT be able to retain the top talent from YHOO? or will they be bought away by GOOG or facebook? Time will tell. Most of the sources I talk in Yahoo with tell me that they will not like to work for MSFT given that when they chose their careers - they had a choice and they actively chose YHOO over MSFT.

Another take on it is that this was a la The Art of War move by MSFT in which MSFT doesn't engage YHOO into a battle but just surrounds it. YHOO has nowhere to go. Mr. Yang and Gang could not maintain a high valuation for the ailing online giant. GOOG cannot make a bid as they dont want another regulator hassle from the DOJ for another anti-trust trial (this time it will be fatal).

In conclusion, 31 bucks a share is not a bad price to pay considering the additional steady revenues it will bring in. Microsoft senior leadership was astute and kept this possibility on bay for a while. Let us see how YHOO responds to this bid.

Thursday, January 31, 2008

infy and the art of PR!

At 5.30 am, while working out at the gym, I saw few frequent Infosys ads on CNBC and I thought that it does merit a blog here.

Infy has relentlessly worked towards branding efforts - more than any other Indian service provider. The vision that the top management has is way ahead of its peers. No wonder their media hits are way higher than its peers in the Indian service provider business.

What drove them towards this obsession with branding?

Vision:

NRN's vision as conveyed to me by their Healthcare and Lifesciences chief during a campus presentation at CMU indicated that Infy wants to leverage its deep expertise that it develops at the grassroot levels in order to deliver business solutions. Also, I could practically experience this at one of our client engagements, where the management consultants who were brought in could not provide the most optimal solution due to lack of grassroot level knowledge. Most of them suffered lack of depth.

If one has good contextual knowledge for a client then one can provide a better solution -- there's no doubt about that. This is more relevant to complex transformations than simple best practices implementations for simple transformations.

Pressure to upsell:
In the GDM or Global Delivery Model, the revenues were primarily in USD and the costs were primarily in INR. With weakness in USD against INR, there is a huge pressure on their margins. This is forcing them to upsell.

Timing is right:
The timing of ads is right - with slowdown, US businesses will require more and more of outsourcing. The businesses cannot hold on to costly US-based resources if they want to stay competitive.

Lessons learnt:

Competing on price is not the silver bullet
-
This reminds me of our lecture in International business by ex-chief economist of Gulf Oil (bought by Chevron in 1984). Sustainable business requires that one must compete on the quality and not on price. This came up during the Matsushita US market-entry strategy for a specific product.

Perception issues -
No matter what high-end services are delivered by Infy, they suffered from perception issue of being "cheap" or "inexpensive". Upselling the services is difficult once this happens. I remember doing a high end work that is delivered by some of the snobbish consulting firms and charged at 5-6 times.

Manage the forex actively-
Sound International finance principles need to be deployed if you want to be a true "global player." Infy lacked in this aspect. I remember the conversations I used to have with one of our Group Manager - Infy doesn't know how to handle forex and he used to have a popular perception that - ah, they are such a large firm, they must be having experts in place. Hell no! They didn't have experts until 07 in place. This was especially true with USD tanking more than 20% against INR in less than a year. Global players such as Merck have much more complex strategies in place for forex management. If Infy wants to become a true global player, they will have to increase the sophistication to mitigate this risk!

Monday, January 28, 2008

business planning

The art of the start - check out this small demo by Palo Alto software guys -
http://www.paloalto.com/ps/bp/demo/sba/index.html#

I would blog about this topic in much more details later.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

consultants and recommendations

Dilbert had a neatly outlined strip on recommendations. A software is recommended against and still gets installed causing it to be a DoA! You can check the strip here.

After checking out the strip, a few questions that linger reader's mind are :
  1. How to make persuasive recommendations?
  2. How to prevent political agendas from derailing your recommendations?
  3. Do recommendations become negotiations? If yes, how do we negotiate?
Recommendations can become negotiations depending on the situation (the ones who get recommended, the ones who recommend, the political agendas of different stakeholders, etc). Consultants in advisory capacity always face such situations where the recommendations can become negotiations.

Consulting is an art and not a science. As Dr. Young taught us the psychology of audience decision making in his course on Consulting and Conflict Resolution, I recall a few of the prime points are as follows:
  • Insist on using objective criteria. For instance, in case of software architecture negotiations, a good method to use is ATAM or Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method
  • Focus on interests and not positions. Use data to back your interest - it could be industry reports from authoritative sources such as Gartner, Forrester, etc
  • Like it or not, negotiation is a fact of life
  • In negotiations, neither be too hard nor be too soft - use principled negotiation to get what you entitle and be good to people as well
  • Separate people from the problem
  • Invent options for mutual gains
  • Use BATNA for folks who are more powerful
  • Use negotiation jujitsu for difficult folks with dirty tricks
All of the above points are important and they work if practiced the right way. I have experienced it and recommend it to every reader of this blog.

Happy Consulting !

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Monday, January 21, 2008

booz allen to break up !

Check out this news here.
BAH to break up and have its consultancy services separate ! BAH generates about USD 4bn a year revenue. Given this, the firm's conservative valuations will be easily in the ball park of USD 50 bn+. The partners will have a ball in case this deal goes through.

I am trying to gauge what will Carlyle gain if they get control of these assets (which in absolute terms are - NONE! - most of the assets are intangibles). The people may or may not stick out with BAH - given the turmoil that BAH consulting will undergo with new paymasters in form of Carlyle. Also, as partnership targets of sr managers and managers will get hazed out - there may be a certain degree of attrition to face.

Having said that, Carlyle can deploy the staff and the managers in private equity related work. Their existing assets can be used for it. However, what impact they can bring is a suspect as 70% of BAH's consulting division works for the government and the dynamics in that sphere are much different than commercial sector (critical success factors are more political than merit-based).

I am not sure if this will affect BAH Consulting's ability to attract good talent from b-schools !? Time will tell...