Putting ‘digital’ in perspective

This article was originally published on Forbes India Blogs and has been lightly edited   This year, the number of smartphones, tablets and connected devices is expected to cross 7 billion – that will mean more connected devices than there are human beings on earth. With more and more people owning smart gadgets, these devices are going to have an increasingly bigger influence on our communication patterns, online habits and of course, our buying habits, and globally, organisations are trying…

Read More

A Strategy between the Gap and the Result

In a recent short commentary on Strategy in the McKinsey Quarterly aptly titled “Synthesis, capabilities, and overlooked insights: Next frontiers for strategists”, Fred Gluck (who was also the founder of McKinsey’s Strategy Practice way back in 1988, as I learned) says strategies always come from one of three sources – strategic planning, strategic thinking, and opportunistic decision making. In this article, Gluck delves a bit into how these three work, touching upon some interesting insights. I recommend you read it…

Read More

Flinching faces, heart-burns and BPM initiatives

When the gunshot is fired at the start of the Olympic final of a 100m dash,    8 world-class sprinters on the block will leap towards their dream of Olympic glory. All 8 equally skilled, each one equally trained, equally driven, all of them with the same hunger to win. Each one committed to chasing (pardon the poor pun) their life’s single purpose and calling, and each one, to be sure, aspiring to be chased from the moment that gunshot goes…

Read More

PegaWorld 2014 – Getting really serious about business technology

When you are an enterprise spending top dollar on software products, you like to be assured that you are betting on products that satisfy a fairly logical and predictable check-list that assess the vendors products on maturity, stability, cost effectiveness, ability to deliver to the need and so on. For decades these have really been at the core of buyer expectations that software vendors have tried to talk to. And in a sense, most vendors have traditionally also built and…

Read More

…and it’s only the Second Year into the Teens…

You might find this funny, and maybe even somewhat disjointed in logic, but the IT industry after all these years, is now going through its teen years and it appears to have all the makings of ‘teenage’ as we know it. Even if 2014 is only its second year, the anxiety, the tension is all very visible.  Cloud, Mobile, Social, internet-of-things,  – look at it anyway you like, there is a writing on the wall that the extent of change…

Read More

Challenging the Status Quo….

Updated and republished. Craig Reid posted a great write-up about customer on-boarding this week that I think is a good read covering some of the usual issues plaguing the old customer on-boarding process. I am repeatedly surprised when I learn about how badly organizations – fairly large ones at that – handle customer on-boarding. If on-boarding is as important as it might seem, judging from the vehemence with which they agree it is, how come it turned out such a mess?…

Read More

Challenging the Status Quo.

  Craig Reid posted a great write-up about customer on-boarding this week that I think is a good read covering some of the usual issues plaguing the old customer on-boarding process. I am repeatedly surprised when I learn about how badly organizations – fairly large ones at that – handle customer on-boarding. If on-boarding is as important as it might seem, judging from the vehemence with which they agree it is, how come it turned out such a mess? Craig lists…

Read More

Leverage BPM to Kill the Silos. In Your Mind.

  Even as the enterprise IT landscape evolved over the past decades, markets, economy, and technology forces have affected key considerations that dominate and influence annual IT budgets. The nature and the unique mix of these forces, in any given year, have correspondingly triggered a rather unique set of influencers shaping IT budgets. We saw the wave of ‘seamless’ enterprise thinking; then the idea of an extended enterprise arose. Next was data-intelligence, followed by compliance, and then there was E2.0….

Read More

BPM Case Studies – The good, the bad and the good in the bad…

When, during a vendor presentation, the PowerPoint section separator mentions ‘Key Case Studies’ or something like that, you do one of the following – Lean forward in your chair and listen intently to see parallels to your own situation Yawn involuntarily. Or voluntarily, depending on who is running the slides. Interrupt at the 23rd second after the title of the next slide has been read, to ask – “did you use agile or waterfall?” and then drift into a rewarding…

Read More

The Case For A Jack Of All Trades, Master Of One. (Or More)

  When a good friend and I exchanged a few tweets back and forth the other day, it began like the usual exchange of views over news items that the #bpm timeline throws up once in a frequent while. But the ‘twonversation’ with my twitter counterpart – a venerable thinker in technology, particularly BPM – got me thinking and reinforced what I have always thought about the skills that really make a real good BPM Consultant. My friend had created…

Read More

I am a weirdo. I don’t belong here.

…that’s right. I don’t belong here. In fact, what the hell am I doing here? Before you jump to the wrong conclusions, those aren’t my words. You’ll know whose words they are in just a minute. But before that, I want to spend a moment to talk about something that seems to be (but probably is not) a new problem. A problem that is giving more and more program managers and project managers sudden attacks of sleeplessness and acute cases…

Read More

How Can you Design Intelligent Processes?

  Earlier today, I read something that made me snort on my afternoon coffee. Not just because it was funny, but because, to me it had some additional insight that I thought was worth sharing with you, especially when you think about Intelligent Processes and how they can be crafted for a BPM initiative. Here it is: Two men walk into a bar. The first man says I’ll have some H2O. The second man says I’ll have H2O too. The…

Read More