Roman's miles

Committed or tentative?

How to know much? How to have time for many things? How to be a pro at various activities at the same time? Why some people have no time for anything they've been dreaming about and achieve very modest results with no progress from year to year? Why at the same time  others find time for all new things they really want and are very efficient at their accomplishments? I think the answer is about Goal settings.

Goals are not amorphous wishes. There is a tiny trait distinguishing a goal from a wish - your commitment. When you pick up a wish from the dreams pool and decide you want to turn it to reality - you commit to it. Until you committed to a goal it lives in the dream pool and has no chance to get realized. Until you make a commitment your dream lives its own life and you do yours. Your commitment is a give birth of your dream in this world, in reality. People that don't make any commitment live in a tentative, passive mode. They may have numerous dreams but they don't associate their life with the dreams. They don't give a chance to a dream to become reality. Even if they spontaneously decide to accomplish some of the wishes without a commitment such attempts lead only to still-born dream realization.

Committed living has  accomplishments, purpose, and excitement. Tentative living is destroying, it begets critical and negative perception, and undermines self-confidence. Zig Ziglar cites on his lectures Alfred Smith: "commitment is essential for victory in an individual's life". I think each one has to set up goals to win, to make small victories that then will lead to bigger victories. The atmosphere of goal-achievements is charming. The feeling of accomplishments bewitches. Put yourself to a challenge. Pick up a dream from a wish flock and make it part of reality.

Don't start with something grandiose if you don't have a habit of discipline and self-control. Start with small but it has still be a challenge. Find something making you passionate about it. It can be anything from running every day some miles or devoting permanent time for learning something new or spending consistently some time for spiritual development or a million of other things. The key thing here is consistency. Pick up an interval for your challenge. Don't start with "from today forever" swear. Start with a limited commitment. It's a bit tricky to set up a goal that is challenging and feasible at the same time but on the way you'll cultivate a habit to make right estimation for you.

Don't be frustrated if you slip on the way. It may (and will) happen. Carefully analyze the reason but don't let it transform to a regular practice. Don't give up your goals while they're in the living period. You commit to yourself or, at first to yourself, and the biggest challenge in the committed living  is to grow a respectful "commitment history". Track all your commitments as credit bureaus track your credit history. Every negative act is logged and affects your score. The same is with your commitments. Every accomplished commitment your score - your self-reliance - that let you take bigger "loans":  set up and commit to more challenging and more long-term goals.

It's called BPO. Part-I.

I ran across the BPO (business process outsourcing) term in a recently found  blog of Vinnie Mirchandani (very interesting and fertile in ideas blog). I thought it's called out-tasking or out-servicing but actually it doesn't matter. Vinnie has written a few articles about BPO and covers this field broadly and I'd like to add my two cents here too.

Roughly applying the principle "Shoemaker, stick to your last" to the businesses where IT plays a noticeable role one might assume that their ITs shouldn't be large in numbers (either of people or direct expenses). But in reality it's not true, of course. I incline to agree with Vinnie in his foreseeing the future of successful enterprises as those that out-task their not core business processes. I'm sure the current situation where every enterprise invites the wheel exists due to the 'historical reasons'. I think also that in every enterprise a very limited number of processes represents ones that actually core for the company. The rest is severely universal and repeats itself from one company to another. The idea of BPO is to take such non-core services out of direct control and instead of managing them just to consume from an outside service provider.

Now a tough moment here is to distinguish between outsourcing and BPO. Typically by outsourcing we mean out-contracting. So you define what results you want to get and a contractor is obliged to implement it (in our case to develop software with some level of maintenance and suppurate). The problem with outsourcing is to define what you want. Many unsuccessful outsourced projects failed because the customer didn't (or couldn't) define and transfer in a formal form its requirements. Then the contractor formally carried out what the agreement was about but in fact it didn't make the customer happy and satisfied.  There were also some unsuccessful experiments when entire organization liquidated their internal IT group and entrusted with the work an external (outsourcing) contractor to define, design, and deploy necessary solutions. Here the reason of failure is similar to the previous case.  The implementator created something that didn't fit the customer's needs.

So what the BPO is different from pure software development outsourcing? A customer in this case doesn't order an implementation but buys services. Moreover, the quality, in its widest meaning: the feature set, the price, agility to changes, performance, support and so forth, is higher than if it were developed and deployed by the customer inside the enterprise.  For a BPO provider this service is his core business and hence he is an expert and knows more about it than the customer. Such differentiation should allow him to offer services more appealing to the customers comparing to theirs developed in-house. At the end of the day both win: the customer from lowering TCO and the provider from selling services.

I'm not saying that ALL enterprise processes can and should be outsourced via BPO but I guess that a major portion can and should. I think we don't witness a trend toward BPO merely due to inertia and the fact that  BPO is still new. Only early adopters gingerly try to outsource via BPO some not key processes to see the results. A small number of BPO providers of heavy enterprise services (like HR, SCM, CRM, ERP or finance) also doesn't promote this idea. But the global "service-sation" in various incarnations (SOA, ESA, on-demand services) of internally deployed systems firmly prepares enterprise architectures to be ready to outsource any of their parts. Actually ANY service can be out-serviced and the good thing is ANY PART of a service can be independently outsourced too.

In the next blog I'll bring some concrete examples that came to my mind that my look more attractive for enterprises to consume than to develop.

Techorati tags: BPO SOA outsourcing service-oriented

 

Conscious living

I open a new category in my blogs. In the Conscious Living I'll write about setting goals, achieving targets, life balancing, self-motivation, building own development path, and various techniques that help me discover my track and walk on it.

I was contemplating how to shape many things I have to write about in concise topics and how to organize these topics in a clear taxonomy. Many of them are linked to others and you come across the same ideas from different angles again and again. I decided not to beget many subcategories but to write about all the topics here, in this category.

This category is about my own experience, the philosophy (or rather the life approach) I'm following, methods I've tried, mistakes I've made, and conclusions I've come to. It's very personal adventure and "your miles may vary". It is all about what I'm thinking over when I'm not sleeping:-) Somebody said that all our actions are driven by answers we gave to our "Why?", "What?",  and "How?". I'll write here about the last two because I'm sure each of us has his own answers to Whys. But the secret here is whether you've asked yourself your Whys. If yes it means you live your life consciously and hence you're already on the right way. It means you don't drift with the current - you have started your biggest adventure in your life - finding answers to your own Whys along with asking new Whys on the way. If not - it's still never late and I hope my blogs will drive you to start thinking about it and will inspire you to find your great Whys.

Though enough with romanticism. I didn't know what to start from and how to shape what sits in my mind waiting to be set out in writing. So I made in MindManager a tree of coming topics and collapsed them on the second level to let the picture fit in the page. You can see coming topics I'll cover in this category. I hope you'll enjoy it and I very welcome your feedback as usual but especially on this category.

Bad VoIP vs. Good VoIP

Mark in his Top 8 Reasons for NOT using Lingo VOIP loudly regrets he started using it and promises not to use it anymore:-) Being a big supporter of VoIP as a technology and a very satisfied customer of MSMNetPhone I want to share my very positive experience and convince you not to bury that great technology (apparently unless it's in incarnation of LingoVOIP).

My plan includes a local number (you pick up a region), free long distance calls in the States and Canada, free land-line calls in Israel, and free land-line calls in England. All together it costs $29.99 including all taxes. Calls out of your plan are priced here and you can see that the prices are the same as in Skype. Additional number costs just $4.99.

My cable Comcast Internet connection (the last bastion of Comcast in my house after I replaced their TV service with I-Dish) fuels my computer, which is almost always in the VPN, a computer of my kids, which is almost always in eMule with about 35Kbs/sec. download and 10Kbs/sec. upload, and the VoIP phone. Never, never ever I experienced any clutter or noise on the line even downloading something from FTP servers. It's very undemanding and modest in its requirements. All people talking to me from the Americas, Israel, Russia, Georgia, England or Australia confessed they heard me very well and didn't notice any difference in quality comparing to the wired lines.

People called me never had strange system behavior like Mark describes. Also the voice mail system is great - you can get notifications about new voice messages via email and listen to them from the Internet.

Customer service is fantastic. You have an option to call a technical support (I just checked how fast they answer while was in a trial period of the first month). You also can send a message and get a response very fast (anyway less than 24 hours).

Installation was a piece of cake and the receiver is free. Last but not the least is the cancellation policy. No fee is required and you may do it any time. I don't remember by heart now but I hope I recall correctly that if you cancel the service during the first trial month you pay not only nothing for the cancellation but the shipment fee ($10) is returned to you.

I've been using this service since May of this year (when I throw from my home network another "no-service" provider - BellSouth) and never ever called the technical support. I strongly recommend you to try it this VoIP system if your current phone calling plan costs more.

P.S. If you do decide to try don't fotget to refer to me:-)

Why to become a founder?

David Beisel in his post "Seven Reasons To Become a Founding Entrepreneur" lists seven great reasons why to become a founder.  A neat list, nothing to add but as an man falling in love with  analogies I want to add my short remark.

My math (and life) teacher told me one phrase I've been permanently recalling. It happened when I confessed I wanted to be a programmer (it was in 1986 in Russia) and I saw myself as a geek coding complex algorithms in a big computer facility getting assignment from scientists. He said "math is a servant of science. Programming is a servant of math. Why to deal with a servant's servant?" Then we had a long talk discussing where more "creativity, variety, and control" is presented. Don't forget, it was 1986, the computers were big mainframes and our vision on "hi-tech" was not limited but blind. Though he was not very accurate and his hypothesis about math and programming are arguable I very respect his instructive analogy about servants and masters.

I'm not saying that any 'servant' profession is worse any 'master' one. But the more 'mastery' a position is the more opportunities it potentially contains to incarnate something new and non-existent. I'd define a master position as one that decides "what" rather than "how" - a destiny of 'servants'. Of course it's not black and white but a scale of what/how decisions locales, to a certain extent, the master/servant nature of a position. I think a founder is a place in a company ultimately moving one towards the master end of this scale and all the seven David's reasons  just accentuate why the founder is firstly the what-man and only then the how-man.

Business intelligence, SOA, and your grocery shop

In a very competitive market, such as the retail grocery industry, the battle for every customer  became reality many years ago. All top management teams have  been racking their brains to attract new and retain existing customers creating different programs, building new partnerships, enriching their networks by new services, and constantly re-decorating the stores. Apparently all this costs a lot. Some of the industry's players reached tremendous success, like Kroger, and others barely are in coma waiting to be acquired (Jim Collins in his "Good To Great" tells very exciting and instructive stories about it).

In the Atlanta area the battle for the customers on the grocery field occurs between Kroger and Publix. I found 3 the former and 4 the latter stores in a radius of 3 miles from my house. So how do they attract us and how do we choose between them? I think it's just a matter of taste. The prices, the assortments, the locations are very very similar. If I were an ideas generator in those companies my creativity would have run out new ideas very fast. But before it does I still have one idea on how to make one "Purple cow" out of this white herd.

I have a customer card in Publix and Kroger and every time I pay for my cart I give such a card to a cashier. Conclusion? - I'm identified as a customer. They know everything about all my purchases. I'm sure it helps them to make complex analysis and tune their supplies and planning towards the customer needs (of course not my personal but an average customer out of our aggregated statistics). What I don't know is why this information is concealed from me? And this time not the aggregated but my personal information. Wouldn't it be a great idea to provide me detail statistics on what I've bought, how much I've spent on certain categories, what was my price deviation during a certain period, how I could plan my food budget, and so on, and so forth. If one of the networks provides such a service then I'm, as a customer, bought by them.

For me this service would be a meaningful differentiator. Our family account's transactions coming from grocery shops sum up to $1K-$1,3K per month. Then it's a black box. I can only guess how this money is split between different goods and hence I'm blindly clueless on an idea what we spend or where we can save.

Now technically speaking providing such a service is not an expensive and a complex task. They already possess all the info and for the beginning stage the service may be 'read-only' - very like the Internet access to a bank account. But if to develop this idea further and make the service really interactive with the customer it can bring new opportunities as for the stores as well as for the customer. We can plan my spending together more effectively, the store can offer me more attractive deals (on a personal basis) since they possess the knowledge about millions of customers and can extract concrete patterns. They can build new partnerships and offer new services for me providing access to my statistics. Here a SOA-driven architecture can  prove its value. One wild example would be to allow me to order goods via the Internet and provide this info to a delivery service. I'm sure dozens of new services can be founded on the basis of a closer store-customer interactions and both  parts - the stores and the customers - will win.

Let's meet in Boston

I'll be in Boston Sap TechEd and even probably give a lecture about ESA and MDM at SDN ClubHouse (you're invited to register)

will be happy to meet my readers there:-)

 

It's all about honesty

It wasn't a coincidence. The "great quote" of the day resonated so good with today's blog of Brad Feld: "To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity" (Douglas Adams).

While I was reading the 5+ answers of Brad an idea about their common denominator recurred and recurred again. All the five answers (and the three "reminders") have the same root, the same reason - the CEO is lying. Not necessarily by saying not the truth but by not providing her service "sincerely and  integrally".

Even though a CEO is usually a founder she's still a wager-worker as a CEO (at least towards the board and other founders). I'd say if the company, driven by the CEO, doesn't behave with "sincerity and integrity" towards its customers, partners, and employees this is already a good sign for replacing the CEO. But if such behavior is seen regarding the board the situation is really critical.

Seeding thoughts

My readers ask me what logic stays behind my categories since their names are not evident. I tried to group the posts on a few categories:  on one hand not to mix too different topics together, on the other hand, not to create too many categories. So here what we have now.

1. Travel - all related to traveling, mileage earning, tips, and so on.

2. Seeding Thoughts - all related to my former and future start-ups - passion, marketing, team building, raising money, project management, business development, customer interactions... Everything that has connection to the area of how to join, build, and work in a start-up. Since opening of my own start-up is still behind the horizon these seeds  have good chances to grow.

3. Common Sense - actually the rest of my thoughts unless a stand alone category emerges.

Falling corporate startups

I recently ran across a series of blogs of Richard A D Jones reasoning why corporate-founded startups fail. Interesting points. I'd like to share my thoughts on the topic.

I think an internal startup to be successful as a real one has to pretend to be a real one. The only difference should be is that the internal startup is being funded by a corporation and not by a VC found. So the corporation's intentions are not revenue-driven mostly (hopefully for the startup's founders) but originated by a desire to win on the technology or attacj on new market niches. Other than that the internal startup should be in general the same as the VC-founded one. Probably some variations are possible in the conditions of the founders but for regular employees there should be no significant difference.

I’m sure the corporate and the startup worlds are very different (if not just the opposite) and hence the odds to find passionate gurus from the corporation resources are small. People willing to drive a startup (and in a startup all employees should drive) usually don't work for corporations. Exceptions may represent former startups' employees recently being acquired by the corporation. These people usually have some vesting period and can't leave the corporation immediately after the acquisition. At the same time they taste the new (for them) corporate atmosphere. On the one hand they're comparing tradeoffs between coolness of working for a big brand and future career perspectives and on the other hand rigid restrictions of the corporate policies, deep hierarchies, and ubiquitous internal politics. Some of them will like the new reality but others will be missing the startup air and will eventually go. Now the question is how to find such employees. I don't believe a corporate VC can broadcast a message to its employees asking interested to apply for positions in a coming venture. It definitely can be part of the hiring process but shouldn’t be the only part.

Even a more crucial question occurs with “the founders” or the management team of the new venture. I’m afraid the option when a senior corporate VP invites her employee and declares that the employee is entrusted with a very responsible role of the new startup’s CEO simply will not work. The initiative should come from a founder (whether he works for the corporation or not). Passion of the team and first of all, the management team, underlines success of the new venture. I don’t believe that passion can be given to somebody by title. In the case of the management I see an exception in a way that a trusted corporate employee is looking for an option to leave the corporation to join a startup. Then a corporate startup can work for him.

I’m sure a corporation establishing a startup should clearly understand the difference between the two worlds and detach the new venture from itself. The new venture should have its own budgeting, decision making team, policies, and culture. The less connections exist between them the better chances of success are.