Indian IT Consulting Firms

[via Sadagopan] Forbes writes in a story entitled "Consultants from Chennai": "The top five Indian players in consulting (Tata, Infosys, Wipro, Satyam and HCL Technologies) have averaged 30% revenue growth this year, while the largest U.S. players have averaged just 4%, according to Datamonitor senior analyst Patrick O'Brien. The Indian firms see consulting work as a way to maintain their competitive edge in the face of wage inflation in India and the rise of Chinese data processing firms. The labor arbitrage is not what it used to be. Wages for project managers in India have increased 23% per year from 2000 to 2004, while salaries for programmers have increased at a 13% pace, according to the McKinsey Global Institute."

Catalytic Innovation

VentureWoods has an abstract from HBR's December article:

Based on Clayton Christensen’s disruptive-innovation model, catalytic innovations challenge organizational incumbents by offering simpler, good-enough solutions aimed at underserved groups.

Unlike disruptive innovations, though, catalytic innovations are focused on creating social change. Catalytic innovators are defined by five distinct qualities.

First, they create social change through scaling and replication.

Second, they meet a need that is either overserved (that is, the existing solution is more complex than necessary for many people) or not served at all.

Third, the products and services they offer are simpler and cheaper than alternatives, but recipients view them as good enough.

Fourth, they bring in resources in ways that initially seem unattractive to incumbents.

And fifth, they are often ignored, put down, or even discouraged by existing organizations, which don’t see the catalytic innovators’ solutions as viable.

Enterprise 2.0 in 2006

Dion Hinchcliffe writes:

Enterprise 2.0 describes the use of the latest freeform, emergent, social software tools that hold the promise to significantly improve the ways that we work together and collaborate. As an example, the liberal use of internal blogs and wikis with discoverable content frequently forms the foundation of an Enterprise 2.0 software strategy.
...
All in all, it's been a wind-up year for Enterprise 2.0 and 2007 will likely prove the year that IT departments really get their hands on the tools, find out what works and what doesn't (yes, letting the right mix of features and technologies emerge naturally), and for the first well-run case studies to report their results. But you can count on some continued controversy, particularly if there are any high-profile failures of Enterprise 2.0 rollouts, which instead of outright technology failure are at high risk for governance issues of various kinds.

Beyond Pageviews

Peter Daboll of Yahoo writes:

Page view counting has been a key measure for a decade but just because it was once the obvious solution, doesn’t mean it’s the best one now. A couple of reasons why:

* PVs aren’t a good reflection of web activity in 2006 and beyond. It’s a broadband world and page views are irrelevant to some of the most frequently used Internet services like instant messenger, VoIP, or video, in addition to technologies such as Flash and Ajax. More page views might actually reward sites for poor site design in light of these new technologies.
* PVs have never been consistently measured by third parties or by sites themselves. Everyone has a different definition of when and how a page is counted.
* PVs don’t represent ad inventory. In the early days of the Internet, page views were used to represent available ad impressions, but the reality is that page views and ad impressions are actually counted in different ways and don’t correlate. PVs also have little to do with available inventory with the different types of ad units available today using text, audio, video, etc.

Digg Algorithm

SEOmoz Blog analyses the algo.

TECH TALK: Best of Tech Talk 2006: Changing India

Living in India, the rising stature of the country globally is something I am obviously very happy about. But at the same time, there are many challenges that I do not think we are doing enough about. Every so often, I discuss some of my thinking in the Tech Talks. In January, I wrote about India Rising. Here are excerpts from the introduction...

Almost every investor and senior executive has started to think about India. For some, it is about leveraging India’s cheaper skilled labor. For some others, it is about capitalising on India’s growing domestic consumption. And for investors, it is about India’s attractive returns on investments.

Whether it be the steady stream of investment announcements in India as companies grow their operations or the flow of visitors seeking to ‘discover the new India’, there is now little doubt that India is starting to get factored into the plans that companies are making.

The outsourcing and services story is well-known. But as incomes start to rise (and salaries are indeed rising rapidly in the white-collar sector), domestic consumption is starting to take off. (These two factors are the principal drivers behind the real estate boom in Indian cities.)

...and the conclusion:

India is the flavour of the day. But we need to make it more than that. India needs a few decades of sustained development to make up for all the lost time. We have the world’s youngest population. If we are not to disappoint and lose this generation, we need to work on building the India of tomorrow. We may not be easily able to change our politicians and policies, but I firmly believe that we can use our innovation and entrepreneurial abilities to bring about change. We have to do this not between two generation, but between two elections. The India Rising story needs to not become a chapter but a book.

I wrote about the Revolution on the Roads in April, because “Indian roads are changing, and with them, they are starting to change the way we travel.” I wrote:

Taken together, the combination of good cars and highways, along with improved stopover points and ubiquitous connectivity, is going to start bringing a change in travel attitudes in India. I think people will be more open to taking weekend outings – armed with the Outlook Travel Guides exploring new places in the vicinity. Already, Lonavala and Pune are but short drives from Mumbai. Mahabaleshwar is becoming ever closer with the improving road. A journey which used to take the better part of a day (Mumbai to Mahabaleshwar) can now be done in less than half the time. With increasing air connectivity to a greater number of places, the number of destinations which can be reached in 4-5 hours is increasingly rapidly.

This ‘mobile’ lifestyle will also enable a discovery of India. There was a time when it used to be so much cheaper and better to travel to destinations outside India. Part of the allure was shopping. Now, with the mall mania reaching epic proportions in India, even that is less of a reason to venture beyond Indian shores. Our own country, which once had become alien to us, is now becoming much more accessible and inviting.

Two other themes I covered were on Education and Reservation and Gandhigiri (inspired in part by the movie, Lage Raho Munnabhai). This is what I wrote on the education: “For India and Indians to realise its true potential, one of two things needs to happen – either we need a government that understands the true aspirations of the youth and focuses on solving India’s problems at the root, or people take matters in their own hands to counter the short-sighted policies of those in power. The issue about reservation in education shows clearly that the first is unlikely to happen in the near future. The second option is the only solution.” An idea to making this happen came from an unlikely source in the Munnabhai movie: “Education, energy, urbanization, healthcare, poverty, AIDS, infrastructure, corruption – there is a lot of catching up to do. India’s young need jobs and opportunities – and we have increasingly little time to provide it. We are going to need disruptive solutions to many of India’s problems. Gandhi realised that a violence-driven approach would probably not have gotten India independent – and even if it did, it would not be the same India. His ‘disruptive innovation’ of using non-co-operation as a weapon against the British needs to find its echo in today’s India to solve the problems that we face. Gandhigiri is just a start.”

Tomorrow: The Blog, and Abhishek

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TECH TALK: Best of Tech Talk 2006: Video and Social Networks [December 20, 2006]
TECH TALK: Best of Tech Talk 2006: Blue Oceans and Black Swans [December 19, 2006]
TECH TALK: Best of Tech Talk 2006: Entrepreneurship and Vision [December 18, 2006]
TECH TALK: Best of Tech Talk 2006: Network Computing [December 15, 2006]
TECH TALK: Best of Tech Talk 2006: The N3 Web [December 14, 2006]