Record and Play Back

Weeks and months fly by quickly in this quantum/nano/mobile/green technology age! One of the reasons is countless number of meetings that are scheduled every day and week. These day s you can participate in 8 meetings from your own laptop or desktop, without getting up. Welcome to the world of Webex, GoToMeeting, LiveMeeting, etc.

Information overload is felt by all knowledge workers these days, especially when more work is squeezed out smaller teams. You feel like quitting meetings but you really can't because you are no longer in the know and more importantly your boss may notice your absence. You can only do so many Webex sessions a day before you start slipping on your other deliverables.

Another thing that happens frequently is, the presenter gives our all the information via PowerPoint or demonstration etc., however the people who attended the meeting go away with different takeaways. It is amazing when the same information is presented to a group of people, especially, cross functional teams, they process and understand the presented information differently.

And then there is that occasional event, when a key person, whether a technical architect or a senior director or V.P. just cannot attend a meeting or does a no-show. The whole project is delayed by a week because the meeting needs to occur for that one key missing person.

Here is a solution, insist on whoever scheduled the meeting to do the following,

1. Record the video, especially useful for software demonstrations

2. Record the audio of all participants through out the meeting

3. Make the recordings available to the team, especially to those who missed the meeting

Take away all excuses from the cross functional team, so they cannot say oh! I missed he meeting.

Simplicity versus Complexity

Humans are complex beings! There are hundreds of specialty doctors to treat one human body. Amazing amount of complexity is involved in the heart pumping blood, huge amounts of complexity is involved in the mind processing thousands of thoughts everyday, on and on. Yet when you see a human being the form and functionality are simple yet capable of tremendous ability. A person can play tennis, ride horses, fly airplanes, jump on a trampoline, swim and so much more.

Yet, day after day humans deal with software at office that is quite complex, rigid and incompatible. Although, in the last 10 years software has gotten much simpler and flexible. We are only at the tip of the iceberg. We yearn for simple, well designed, applications that are reliable, scalable, and flexible. A software can have all the bells and whistles but if no body in the office uses them, then it is of no use. Senior management must make it their goal to continually drive out complexity from software.

Here are some simple suggestions on embracing simplicity and eschewing complexity,

1. Business teams and IT should meet at least once a month for at least 1 hour to discuss the complexity in the software
2. Identify the top 2 or 3 complexities involved and brainstorm ways to try and eliminate them. Then execute those strategies
3. Brainstorm and come up with strategies to cut down the system proliferation. Then execute those strategies
4. If possible, appoint one or more point persons who will make sure the action items in this context are accomplished
5. Talk to other companies in the market place and see how they reduce complexity

E-Commerce Fraud Management companies should take cues from PC anti-virus firms

The anti-virus companies such as Symantec, McAfee, TrendMicro etc. have come a long way. With the ubiquitous network connectivity (wireless and wired) available PCs can be up to date with the latest anti-worm, anti-virus, and other security software and patches. Many times the updates are transparent to the PC owner. As the owner is working away on the PC or goes away for a break the PC stays updated with the latest security updates.

McAfee for instance has relatively new products such as McAfee SiteAdvisor that not only rates websites according to their risk profile but also protects PCs from Instant Messaging threats and Phishing treats. They claim to work with 19 search engines including the big ones such as Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. Obviously a database is maintained by them to constant update the risk profiles of the billions of websites out there. Value added services such as these reflect a highly innovative "product management" at McAfee. Hope they and other security software companies continue to be customer centric and develop great products.

What does this have to do with e-commerce fraud detection, prevention, and management. In the former scenario, individual consumers are protected from the vast Internet juggernaut. The idea being not all emails, instant messages, websites, are to be trusted by the individual consumer! In the fraud management scenario not all site visitors can be trusted by the e-commerce site! The e-commerce company cannot blindly allow any individual consumer to transact on the website. The biggest contributor to the problem is, unless a lot of software and resources are put in place, distinguishing between malicious individual person and a bot or automatic script/program.

In the last few years many e-commerce fraud companies have poped up. Some of them are Accertify, Kount, Iovation, 41st Parameter, Actimize, Retail Decisions USA, CyberSource, and ClearCommerce etc. There are many more companies in the space.

Here are some pointers that I believe, the e-commerce fraud management companies can learn from the PC security software companies,

1. Continuously learn about the individual consumers and web bots. Aggregate the data among all their customers and keep the list of potential fraudulent customers up to date.

2. Develop software that is able to adapt and self learn as new threats arise. May mean the use of artificial intelligence software.

3. Make the creation and implementation of new fraud business rules in the fraud processing engine very easy.

4. Try to stay constantly ahead of the fraud schemers, although it is next to impossible to be ahead of Internet shysters all the time.

The e-commerce fraud management industry is poised for growth in the future and the true innovators will prosper. It will definitely be interesting to see which companies will will.

Is Customer Service An Afterthought?

For retailers with e-commerce operations, there is almost a direct correlation between promotional campaigns (web ads, email, mobile, radio etc.) and the call volume to the customer service department. In this day and age where retails present compelling "deals of the day" to customers and bombard them with emails, the customer does come to the website to save a buck or two!

And the customers pour in via all channels and try to grab merchandise things can go wrong, such as, orders not received on time or errors on website. The natural upshot of this is an overwhelmed customer service department because the customers will call in.

Here are some ways the pain points for the customer service department can be alleviated,

1. If customer is truly comes first for the company, then do things that highlight that lofty goal. When undertaking any project, whether it be adding new payment types such as, Bill Me Later, or changing returns policies, provide lot of self help tools and guidance to the customer. Any process automation or IT project should include a phase for providing self help tools to customers.

2. The marketing department has to work closely with the customer service department. This is much easier said than done. It sounds so simple but difficult to do it religiously. The problem is departments in a typical company are silo ed. Every one is busy and so people are comfortable in their own islands. Cross functional interaction is the key and must be done

3. Top management must be aligned with the "customer comes first" principle. Without the top management buy in nothing will happen. Every one can feel warm and fuzzy but nothing get done without buy in.

These three points should get any company started in scaling greater heights and truly pleasing the customer.

Case for a product manager at eCommerce companies

Depending on the size of a company, every day/week/month/quarter/six months/year, discussions arise about "buy or build". Business and IT staffers, in meetings, go off on tangents and start talking about software utopia. The reality is both approaches have their pros and cons. However, with the advent of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 software companies are creating much better than the in-house development team. In general more features, more customization options are becoming the norm of third party software products, whether it be licensed or SaaS.

One of the reasons for third party software products being better than in-house products, is that they employ "Product Managers". Typically product managers have their ear to the customer needs. They interact with all constituents that use the product in a proactive way. It is almost like a shepherd watching over his flock. Care is exercised in developing new features, fixing bugs, along with financial responsibility.

In eCommerce companies and departments you may have all folks such as business directors, IT directors, project managers, developers, enterprise architects, User Interface architects. However, a product manager is lacking. To ask the business director, or the Vice President, or the project manager to play the role of product manager for a few hours a week does not do justice to the website.

Somebody, ideally in the product manager, should be dedicated to watching over the evolution/development of web site and over navigating the difficult "conversion/increased revenue" waters.

Recently read a neat article in Inc magazine about how Reid Hoffman the CEO of Linked In hired Dipchand Nishar from Google to free him up, so he could focus on being a CEO. Reid left the core product development to Dipchand. If Reid can do it every eCommerce shop should hire a product manager!

More cool and useful features on a website equal more ka-ching, and a good product manager is invaluable in the mix.

Urgent need for enterprise twitter

All companies large or small, public or private, run projects. Complex projects with muliple parties involved start off well but some time degrade into a chaotic mess. The immediate managers get involved. The conference calls keep getting bigger with more and more invitees added to calls.

Emails start flying by and the emails threads start becoming one endless book. Then something else goes wrong and the person at the very top of the chain gets involved.

Then come the infamous words, "we want daily and some times hourly updates" on the status of the project or issue.

It is great to have a tool like Twitter within the enterprise. Sending compact 140 character messages is a great idea to manage projects gone wild.

In worst case, if greater detail is needed, atleast enterprise Wiki URLs can be sent out as updates and details can be written on the enterprise Wiki.

Email should be limited to notification

With the economy being so bad companies across industries are struggling to generate revenues. Sales are down across broad swaths of industries and business Vice Presidents are scrambling and subjecting IT to do new tricks that have never been done before. It is quite a thing to see projects being prioritized and re-prioritized endlessly to appease one business Vice President only to change order next week to appease another business Vice President.

The business analysts and project managers are caught in the crossfire and don't know what to do!

Although the Enterprise 2.0 revolution has been underway for the last 2 years in a more robust way, not all companies are caught up. Email is heavily abused to send attachments of sizes over 10 MB if possible. Various business requirements are lost, meeting notes miss certain points, lot of repeat meetings occur to rehash what was said in some other meeting!

The expedient solution is to immediately implement a Enterprise Wiki. Open source solution such as MediaWiki (http://www.mediawiki.org) can get a company started immediately, as long as there is a spare server with decent CPU, RAM and RAID 1+0 hard disks.

Atlassian's Confluence (http://www.atlassian.com) is another excellent solutions that can be obtained for $8000 for enterprise license.

In short Enterprise Wiki is a must have, otherwise the he said she said, will continue and business and IT will continue to get frustrated and no permanent record of everything the stakeholders said and did will be lost in the email abyss!

IT Security Team - Role and Responsibility

This an introspective period in time for IT security departments. Yes, identity theft, malware, and all kinds of online fraud is on the rise, and needs to be stopped. Most of the terms like denial of service, SQL injection, cross-site scripting etc. cause some amount of trepidation among the business teams and also among general IT teams. IT security teams are quick to capitalize on the fear factor and tend to become bureaucracies.

Across the spectrum numerous IT projects have been delayed time and again and one of common causes is the IT security team won't allow certain things. Having strong IT policies is good but if it becomes a hindrance to other IT teams or business teams, that are trying to look at new ways of generating revenues or some cost saving measure, then it is a problem.

You can't have something become, "I SAID SO", wont' cut it any more. The IT security team needs to take a collaborative approach of saying, well this is our policy but let me understand what you want to achieve and more importantly, let me see how I can help you achieve that by adhering as closely as possible to the corporate security policy. The old maxim, "where there is a will there is a way" applies here.

Most of the time the IT security teams won't take collaborative approach is because it could be extra work for them or sometimes they just don't know how to help in new ways. Sometimes they need training or more investigation on how to get something done but yes keep it safe as per the policy.

In this economic climate, collaboration is the key and hopefully the IT security teams start collaborating more and not just be a road block!

Outsourcing and Agile Methodologies

In the CIO magazine (Feb. 1, 2009 issue) article, "Agile at the wheel", Jackie Barretta, the CIO of Con-way talks about going agile. Similarly in the PM Network magazine (Jan. 2009 issue) article, "A closer look: Nationwide mutual insurance co." talks about the company adopting Agile methodologies.

Two major trends in the IT arena definitely encourage the acceptance of Agile methodologies, outsourcing and the current economic malaise. In fact I would argue that the most of the agile methodologies when applied correctly and patiently would yield the most ROI in an outsourced relationship, especially when the developer, support and maintenance, and QA teams are geographically disbursed. One of the primary reason is the business teams such as marketing, finance, customer service, distribution center, supply chain etc. need quick solutions to IT problems they face every day. They cannot afford wait another three months or worse six months for a solution to come around. The current economic conditions are creating additional
stress on the business teams. The environment is filled with uncertainty about sales forecasts, cash flow projections, budget decisions etc. If IT does not raise up to the occasion and really help business teams in a dynamic way, in a matter of few months it could be too late.

The quick "feedback loop" between business teams, business analysts, IT teams needs to happen in a twenty four hour cycle and in a constant manner. If mistakes are not caught up front and quickly great losses can be incurred. The prototyping and iterative methods give business teams to understand what they want and to change course quickly.

The outsourcing vendors should be quick to offer these value added services to the customers. Most often we find that corporations have to bring in external Agile consultants to train their staff and even outsources sometimes on Agile methodologies. I think if the outsourcing vendors offered these services in an integrated fashion, it could be a win-win for both the company purchasing outsourced services and the vendor.

We are witnessing the acceleration of change in the last couple of quarters and only the IT departments that adapt quickly using at least some Agile methodologies stand a chance in the long run. The only thing constant is CHANGE!

Thin line between development and system administration in Web world

In the world of web programming whether it be simple web applications or complex web applications the divide between code development and system administration seems so thin and indistinguishable. The lines seem to get crossed frequently and there is friction and tension between the developer group and systems administrators. The tension is heightened when the developers report to a different manager than the system administrators. Typically there is a lot of he said she said between both the groups.

The adage, "you cannot control what you do not measure". Most of the time IT leaders in the name of creativity and various other reasons do not apply sound management principles to their departments. Part of the problem in trying to measure performance is the complexity and time consuming nature of the process. There are lot of frameworks such as ITIL, SEI, COBIT etc but the IT systems that support these can be complex and take time and effort.

In the long run IT departments that have good controls do exceed and add greater value to business. Here are some simple solutions that can help IT departments become more valuable,

1. Appoint only one IT manager/director in to whom both the developers report and the system administrators report. This layer should be kept at just two levels, with a mezzanine level of may be a "development team lead" and a "system administrator team lead". This way great agility can be built into the process when decisions need to be made.

2. Emphasize and encourage short term focus on getting work done instead of long term theoretical discussions. Use agile methodologies or prototyping etc.

3. Good bug or defect tracking systems such as Jira can be used for both developers and system administrators to keep track of all their work effort

4. Using collaboration tools for projects such as Confluence, Sharepoint, BaseCampHQ, or so many other Web 2.0 solutions can greatly help in keeping tracking of all communications.

5. Stop relying on emails and using collaboration tools

6. IT Manager/Director should identify the strengths and weaknesses of the developers and system administrators and help them develop

7. Finally IT Manager/Director should manage more than do the work themselves