regulatory reporting and technology jobs

As economy slips into depression, there is a destruction in the number of jobs. However, a new set of jobs always emerges. This time, the new set of technology jobs are in the fields of "regulatory reporting"

Citigroup (NYSE:C) and Bank of America(NYSE:BAC) have been nationalized. New York is no longer the US financial capital anymore. For now, it is Washington, D.C. They call the shots w.r.t. dividends paid, executive staffing, etc.  Jobs will be created at two locations:

a. Points of operations - for collecting raw data

b. Points of customer-contact - in Washington DC. "You gotta please your sponsors !" was what a leading Director at Citigroup told me once while I worked for him on an assessment project. 

These opportunities are similar to Sarbanes Oxley Act related requirements. They are short-term in nature. I had expressed this point of view in April last year in the form of a post: paulson creates business opportunities for consulting firms. Diamond Management and Technology Consultants agree with this and came out with a point of view (Jan 2009) much after mine (March 2008). 

How can one prepare for these regulatory requirements related positions? Think about it - it's very obvious from the words: regulatory reporting. 

is itsm relevant in the current economy?

David Cannon's name alone drew a good crowd for the monthly meet of ITSMF USA's - New York LIG. The weather was aweful.

The topic for tonight's discussion was "Is ITSM relevant in the current economy?" An effective presentation indicating why is ITSM not only relevant but also effective. Some practical tips and suggestions helped the presentation worth while. He did bring up Majid's slide on Service Strategy. He also brought up a slide on a topic that I was a Teaching Assistant on - "Enterprise Architecture as a Business Strategy" by Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, David Robertson.

IMHO, ITSM is relevant for parties interested in realizing the complete potential of IT. I have seen environment where businesses abdicate from their responsibility of making IT as a service successful. Such environments are relatively hopeless. This is where the pitch for a Service Manager comes in. Think about it.

It felt good to be back to these LIG meetings. I used to attend those until Nov 07 and thereafter started my travel projects. Now, I will be attending these on a regular basis as I am working locally and can control my timelines.

After the presentation meeting, the organizers, myself, and David decided to go out for socializing. We had a few drinks at Connolly's in midtown Manhattan after the presentation was done. This took me back to the CMU days. The last I met David Cannon was at Walnut Grill in Shadyside, (Pittsburgh, PA) in early '07 while he was guiding us for the CMU SMO Student Interest group.

I regularly keep updated via various sources. One of the most under-rated and relatively unknown source in the developed world is the Infosys blog on ITSM - ITSM Service Matters!

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. 

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. 

 

consultants...

Dilbert presents Dogbert the consultant !

check here ...

It is hilarious !

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. 

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..

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.

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!

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!

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 !

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?

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.

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 !

...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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.