E M E R G I C . o r g: August 4, 2003 Archives

Monday, August 4, 2003

Software Marketing

From the foreword to Rick Chapman's new book, In Search of Stupidity, written by Joel Spolsky:

If you want to be successful in the software business, you have to have a management team that thoroughly understands and loves programming, but they have to understand and love business, too. Finding a leader with strong aptitude in both dimensions is difficult, but it’s the only way to avoid making one of those fatal mistakes that Rick catalogs lovingly in this book.

Management | PermaLink | Comments (0)

Business Activity Monitoring

Line56 (an article by TIBCO's Scott Fingerhut) writes:

BAM may in fact be one of the most important initiatives for the next 5 years. Why? Because not since the hype around "Executive Information Systems" (EIS) has their been an enterprise push toward bridging a dialogue between potential BAM users (business) and IT management and fundamentally improving managerial cycle times. The closest we've seen for the last 10 years has been through the business analyst that typically retains no decision-making authority and who oftentimes is an "IT specialist" that can leverage a data warehouse to run analytic queries. Frustration on both sides of the organization is at an all time high. Business reports are never quite what the business wants or delivered in a timely manner. It is analogous to asking a friend to buy a couch for you, not fully understanding your needs, your taste or your vision of the living room. Every time your friend returns with a new couch, you ask for slight changes and both of you begin to get frustrated. In the case of the couch, your living room suffers, for organizations, customers, partners and sales suffer.

Imagine the significant business improvements when two very important things happen: 1) Analysts are transformed back from middle-man reporters to true researchers questing to understand business performance and hidden indicators; and 2) Executive, line and operational business managers become entrenched in partnering and guiding new information systems around their key business performance indicators to take active roles to fundamentally improve business on a day-to-day basis. Business managers will access and interact with BAM systems that enable them to ask their questions and get answers back in "right-time."

BAM will take on many shapes in the ultimate effort to improve the speed, agility and effectiveness of business operations. The most successful efforts will depend on three-way partnerships between the company's business and IT units and vendors.

Enterprise Software | PermaLink | Comments (0)

Buzz without Bucks

Fast Company writes about how "smart companies are discovering that you don't need big budgets to deliver a big message. By cleverly cultivating buzz, small businesses with tiny budgets can level the playing field with established giants. Their motto: When it comes to building a brand, word of mouth is priceless."

More important are people whom Marian Salzman calls "bees." These folks aren't satisfied just knowing the next cool thing. They live to spread the news -- and others listen to them. "Bees are the critical link between the genesis of a trend and its ultimate incarnation in the world of the mainstream consumer," Salzman explains. Harness their power, she says, and watch the news spread, from cell phone to email to Weblog to cash register.

t's all about influencing the influencers. "Finding the superconnectors is the key to a targeted, successful buzz strategy. Go to the trend spreaders and plant yourself intelligently on their radar", says Salzman.

Management | PermaLink | Comments (1)

Solid idea.

Posted by Abhimanyu Chirimar

Macromedia Central

An interview with Tim O'Reilly is always an interesting read. In this excerpt, he talks about Macromedia, having just joined their board.

I find Central fascinating, because I do think that we're deconstructing the browser these days. Central is one of several attempts to take the web apart and put it together in new ways. On Mac OS X, Watson and Sherlock are analogous examples. And of course RSS and related syndication technologies are also deconstructing the web in new ways.

We're entering a new world in which data may be more important than software. The frameworks that enable the manipulation and distribution of that data are yet to be defined. Flash does enable great cross-platform interfaces using a small client footprint (orders of magnitude smaller than Java), so if we can just open up the right kind of innovation and sharing on top of that platform, a lot of great stuff can happen.

It's essential that we keep those new frameworks open and cooperative. I used David Weinberger's wonderful phrase above: "small pieces loosely joined." This is the current architecture of the internet. Tools like Flash and Central are really useful, but they don't currently support that architecture. However, I believe there is an opportunity for them to play better on the Internet, and by doing so, to become even more successful than they already are.

Would be interesting to look at Macromedia Central for the rich web clients.

Software | PermaLink | Comments (0)

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India 2: Education

Education plays a paramount role in the process of economic development. Besides being instrumental in development, it is also an end in itself because it helps people lead better lives. For broad-based sustainable economic development, primary education is critical. Neglect of primary education is endemic in developing nations.

Public support of education is often regressive. For instance, public spending on education for a set of selected developing countries by income quintile shows that the poorest income quintile receives around 14 percent of total spending, while the highest receives around 28 percent (Source: World Development Report 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty" Oxford University Press). Systematic discrimination against the poor regarding public spending in education is also found in India. As shown in the table below, public expenditure for elementary education is only 0.17% of GDP for India.



For 2003-04             (in US$ billion)  Percentage of GDP

GDP                          $ 581              100.00

Aggregate Govt Budget        $  93               16.08

All social services and 

poverty alleviation          $  14                2.49

All education                $   6                1.05

Elementary education         $   1                0.17

The public support of higher education primarily benefits the urban rich and middle class. The policy choice of supporting higher education at the cost of the neglect of basic education is short-sighted. Policy makers must recognize the redressing of the imbalance as one of the most critical challenges facing them. This task is made more tractable by the wide availability of ICT tools. The leverage provided by these tools releases the severe resource constraints that bound the task of bringing primary education to the population.

Education can be categorized into primary, secondary, adult, and vocational. We will focus on primary education since the arguments can be easily extended to the other categories.

Primary Education

Primary education is a public good. Therefore, the level of primary education provided by the market can be expected to be lower than the socially optimal level. Therefore it is up to the government to step in and either provide primary education itself or subsidize its provision by the private sector.

The higher income groups living in urban areas have the willingness and the ability to pay for primary education. The low income groups in urban areas and most income groups in rural areas do not have the ability to pay for education

One way of solving the problem would be for the government to provide credit to the poor so that they could pay for primary education. However, given the small size of the budget allocated for primary education and the immense size of the relevant population, it is a challenge that cannot be addressed without resort to technology induced increase in productivity in the education sector.

To briefly review the broad scope of the problem of primary education , we note that literacy is only 80% in urban areas and 60% in rural India. (For urban areas, the male literacy level is 86% and for females it is 73%; the corresponding numbers for rural areas are 71% and 47%. Data from Census of India 2001 and from the Azim Premji Foundation.) About 36% of all 7-14 year old children are illiterate. That is, the total population in rural and urban areas that needs primary education is 340 million. The annual budget for primary education is only US$1 billion (See Table 1). Therefore per capita approximately $3 per year is available for primary education. This sum is clearly inadequate even if utilized most efficiently under the current method of delivering primary education. Thus if we consider that the budget constraint is hard, then the only way out is to innovate in the process of imparting primary education .

Just to provide primary education, India requires seven million teachers if one were to have a 1:50 teacher to student ratio. Not only is that number formidable, the problem is compounded by the fact that these teachers are mainly required in the rural areas where the current number of qualified teachers is extremely low.

Tomorrow: Distance Education

Related Entries: [All]

Tech Talk | PermaLink | Comments (9)

Hi Rajesh,

I'm still checking in from time to time! I'm glad you bring up education with regard to transforming India. However, I think it will be more effective (and financially feasible) to focus on adult training in vocational skills. Once parents are gainfully employed they will bring alive their children's schools, and also be supportive of their children's education. Right now people are finding farming unproductive and low paying and even if they move to cities they need to learn some new skills. I cannot imagine being a rich country and still having so many people farming -- the solution therefore MUST involve changing the skill set of the workforce. We must stop imagining ourselves as just farmers.

My efforts at bringing Wall Street capital toward funding adult training loans through a securitization market is progressing. Hopefully we will have something running by 2004.

Regards,

Karun
--
Karun Philip
http://www.k-capital.com

Posted by Karun Philip

Hi Rajesh, Karun,

Some random comments:

I wouldn't agree that farming is unproductive and low-paying. For example in the US - a rich country, farming is still a decent profession for many. So its not clear to me if the solution has to be that of changing the skill set of the workforce.

One view is of empowering the rural population by making them technologically-aware which involves basic education and access to technology. This leads them to improve their productivity, know how to better market their produce, eliminate middlemen, etc.

I would think vocational training as more useful for people already in the urban areas and who have the need to acquire skills.

Both serve different needs. Also, it looks to me that primary education along with technology access has the potential for providing more gains if one considers the rural populace.

However with too many people in the rural areas, one could indeed argue the need for changing the skill set of some fraction and there in might lie the need for vocational training.

An alternate view is to see education/technology access as bridging the gap between cities and villages so as to diminish the information gap in cities vs. villages. The best outcome would be to see primary education/technology access aiding people in rural areas to seek out new/alternate opportunities in their location itself.

I'm not sure if the notion of moving to cities for better opportunities/learning new skills is to be encouraged. Shouldn't the focus be on improving rural india so that the move to the city is not required or atleast minimized by improving opportunities at the rural level?

Regards,
Vivek

Posted by Vivek Sharma

Rajesh, Karun and Vivek:

Firstly we all agree that providing education is an important aspect in making India a developed country.

I agree with the ideas of Karun in many ways and after reading his K-Capital concept I believe that this could be a way forward to solve the problem of education.

I want to comment on the views provided by Vivek.

On farming being unproductive,

Farming or in that matter manufacturing itself is not productive or un productive. The techniques, tools and process including the "the market" makes this productive or not.

I think the point made my Karun was that we do not need so many people in farming. In the US as Vivek has pointed out farming is so very productive that only 5% of the population is involved in this.

On your view that we need to stop the rural to urban migration is definately correct and this is not a sustainable model in the long term. The concept of RISC (Atanu Dey's Idea) is one way to solve this.

On the concept of vocational training:

If you look at the concept of development in the developed world, they have mainly moved from agrarian to industrial to services economy. India is yet to go through the manufacturing economy fully and reap its benefit. This is one reason where we will need to retrain our farming workforce at a large scale to support the manufacturing activities. Of course this will require a increase in agricutural productivity to free up the people.

And extending this concept we will need to train these and other people in meeting the challenges of the services economy and the coming knowledge economy.

Looking at this what we want is Adult literacy (as provided by the Tata Literacy program) and added vocational training.

Primary education should be a area concentrated on children and illiterate teenagers rather than adults.

Posted by Suhit Anantula

Structural change is central to economic development. India has to move from being an agricultural society to a non-agricultural one for it to emerge out of poverty. Currently, agriculture -- which is what the majority of Indians are involved in -- is low productivity and consequently low paying. How could it be otherwise -- if it were high productivity, we would be producing too much for the world to absorb given that hundreds of millions Indians participate in it.

Raising agricultural productivity means that we use less labor to produce the same or more output. If we indeed raise productivity, we are left with two choices. One is to have hundreds of millions of unemployed former farmers who would face starvation having lost their livelihood. The other is that former farmers move to other occupations. That is what usually happens in the course of development.

Take US for instance. Agriculture is tremendously productive in the US. Only 2% of the population is directly involved in it but manage to produce enough for the rest and more. They are rich not just because of their own productivity but because of the productivity of the non-agricultural sector as well. That is, they get subsidies from the government. The labor released from agriculture is what was available to manufacturing to begin with, and currently because manufacturing has migrated to low labor cost countries, the labor is in services ranging from financial to fast food to medical to pornography to musicals.

In India, most people are in subsistence agriculture. It is not an eviable position to be in. Life is hard and the returns are meagre. The way out is education. Education would improve agricultural productivity because it enables farmers to increase output without increasing inputs. Education also expands the range of activities that people can engage in and earn a living.

Distinguishing between vocational and primary education is imporant here. As Rajesh and I have pointed out, primary education is basic to development but has a long payback time. Vocational education, however, has a short payback time and can lead to productivity increase in the short term.

Our goal is to address both aspects of education simultaneously -- vocational and primary. While the private sector can be relied upon to provide vocational education (NIIT is a case in point), only the public sector can provide primary education at this point along India's development tragectory.

The models that Rajesh and I are working on -- TIC and RISC -- place a great deal of emphasis on education. While education is the 'infrastructure' part of the overall scheme, the 'services' part of the scheme is equally important for sustainability. If we can enlarge the market for the present production of rural Indians, we effectively increase their incomes. Part of that income can be invested by the population in educating their children. Both aspects -- education and market access -- are important. Market access makes education possible.

I have an article on structural change in which I try to explain why India has to increase agricultural productivity.

Atanu
http://are.berkeley.edu/~atanu/blog

Posted by Atanu Dey

Dear Everyone

Rural India has wide variety of needs and may be a portfolio of initiatives in every direction is needed to really make an impact.

Finance or lakh of it has been one of the major intervention area - Micro Finance has made major gains in identifying this opportunity and we have at AAvishkaar tried to set up a micro venture capital fund to create opportunities for rural businesses.

Stratigically Rural India needs innovative technical and financial inputs and though vocational training would help, the problem is reaching out to the market and converting your skills into gainful employment.

I think education, infrastructure, technology and innovative finance are the areas we need to concentrate if we really want to make a difference to Rural India

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