easy & opensource products

This morning, I relived an old pleasure with open source technologies. I am used to using all kinds of commercially available software programs to manage projects. I am used to having our CRM system setup to manage marketing campaign work flow. There used to be a neat little project management tool to setup new projects, calculate them ROI's and track completion of activities. In my new world, I am starting up a business on my own and I really dont have the cash to burn on software. Thats when I turned to open source again after many years. The last I depended on open source for actual work was when I was in college. Between then and now, I have used plenty of open source tools to build my own products, but have almost never used a product that is totally open source. That in itself is a little bit of an oxymoron. There are thousands of companies using open source technology to create their proprietary products. For example, there is a whole suite of technical tools available to download at www.apache.org. Companies use these tools all the time to create commerical products. However, they balk at using customer facing open source products due to only one reason: "They are open source and hence there is no performance guarantee". Its true, many IT managers find it risky to use open soruce products because there is no guarantee of performance.

The fact is, that there is no guarantee of performance for any software product period. I mean a technological product can fail and will fail on some aspect or the other. What really is missing is the accountability. I think what managers really want is the comfort feeling that when something goes wrong, they can call a third party who is said to be an expert at a specific technology. They like the fact that there are legally binding contracts which make vendors liable for performance failures. This is a very valid point. I will find it very hard to communicate to my clients that there are no bigger business risks with open source technologies than there are with proprietary technologies. However, once there comes a critical mass of vendors who can support products with legally binding contracts, the playing field will become very level and open source could compete with proprietary technology pretty fairly.

Going back to my experience this morning. I wanted to replace my old features management product with something open source and low cost (ideally free). On the features management function, what we do is we write "stories". Stories are nothing but an imagined day in the life of our customer (or our staff) that is written out in a easy to read format. This story then becomes a starting point for our staff to create software. This mechanism is part of the agile software development paradigm. I looked at a few vendors including our older vendor for this system. All fo them have great offerings. Many of them have free offerings that have the basic features or are bound to work only until a certain "trial period" ends. Then one of my friends suggested I take a look at bugzilla. www.bugzilla.org. I took a look at it and at first glance, it looked an awful lot like a software test support, bugs management tool. However, it was VERY easy to get it running. So I got it and installed it anyway. After a few customizations and some configuration, I had it running and I had almost identical features to what I had before. Now, I can write up my user stories, provide priorities on those and assign people to work on them. Admitted, it still looks a lot like a bug management product. It even says so everywhere it can say so. However, it works great, is easy to maintain and is zero cost solution. Works great for me in my little startup business.

Intelligent web

What does the customer really want from your internet business? Answer that question for once and you can claim a permanent undisputed position in business management text books. As unlikely as answering the question may seem, it might actually be at least slightly more easier than you think. Admitted, all online businesses, great and bad, have tried hard to find an answer. Admitted, there are tomes and tomes written and debated. However, its only recently, in 2009, that all that is really starting to come together in a cohesive and widely available manner. Its a big secret of good online business thats written on the wall. This big secret postulation is that an intelligent website can probably learn more about your customer than most of your offline marketing projects while breaking all speed records. So what's new about that? What is new is that its only now that business managers are starting to actually need the things that engineers have been talking about since google was born. Its only a recent phenomenon that number of Internet connections has started surpassing the typical market share of a leading product of an offline business in a competitive market. It all sounds as though a mini-evolution of sorts is taking place in small pockets of the business world where people have started to answer the question successfully. They are finding out, in hard ways and easy ways, what their customers really want!

This hit home for me when I was contemplating my little web world. I am down with the techno talk and walk at the place I work. I do believe that our setup is fairly modern and capable. However, I had not seen any attempt to really find out what was going on with the website. We had the analytics and the KPIs; every now and then, I would log on to my analytics provider's application and see the green dots and arrows to see that all was well. It was satisfying to see that people were hitting us up. At times, I would see red marks and I would immediately swing into action to fix the problem. Wow! That would really be the time to exchange high fives and pat each other on the back. I really felt that we had it going. However, simultaneously, I had this deep down feeling that the tranquility was just a sign of ignorance. Our bounce rates were acceptable and comparable to competetion, but really high. Our length of visit was acceptable, page views per session were also good. However, we really had no idea what was ticking. It was as though many customers came to our little website, saw things, some left the site, some lingered and some bought stuff. All we could do was watch it unfold. It felt like other than doing what we already did, there was not a whole lot to it. I realized that we had not many concrete ideas on how to pro-actively influence customers or to get them to take favorable action on our site. We had the cool content, we had the humdinger campaigns, but we were simply a production shop with web being another distribution channel. Technology had to better than that! A little research led to ideas about what some people call the intelligent web. If you get the drift, that is what Amazon.com has mastered and is democratically applying it to all marketers who sell products on their website.

The "intelligent web" idea is very simple to build up. Starting at the very beginning, we could state it very simply: as a business, we should adapt to our customers needs. Lets add in a possible outcome namely "satisfaction" to this statement. For this article, lets define satisfaction as an observed positive change in a customer's behavior between successive visits. Thats heavily loaded! Note that we are adding two notions here: 1) the discrete nature of experience as far as visits to the website are concerned. 2) some kind of an outcome of the customer's visit that can be measured for positive or negative changes. For the first point: unlike a product that people consume privately over a long time after the initial purchase, in the majority of the online world, every visit is an experience that occurs in your shop and can potentially be managed with a white gloved hand. For the second point: the online world allows you to measure each and every behavioral minutae that makes sense. In the physcial world, as most of you know, you can only take samples and statistically prove theories. That is a huge opportunity right there! Further, lets talk a little about adaptation now. In a physical world, marketing cycles, store design cycles, product design cycles work really well to provide a satisfying consumer experience that also gets better over time. The beauty of software that powers websites is that it literally provides you the means of adapting to every single click on your website. So, in addition to your tool belt of marketing programs, you can code your website such a way that your store design and almost any other parameter can be changed with every visit to the site. In that light, we could re-state our initial idea to say that "our website should pro-actively adapt to every visit from a customer to provide constantly increasing satisfaction". Its a little complex, but it will do for now.

Sam's poetry

Samya and I were at it again. Self-sympathizing and wallowing in the situation that we are not doing what we want to do. In other words not following our dreams. (This is at an age of 33 years old for each of us). And Sam actually wrote a few lines of poetry. Here it goes:

mirror mirror on the wall,
what's my dream, wherefore I shall,
make my mark and garner my riches,
put to rest the demon that itches,
and scratches and bites and brawls and breys
and makes moments add up to a terrible day

Very Cool I say!

1998 to 2008

I got my under grad degree in 1997 and an year later, my alma mater published a directory of all alumni. Just as any good directory, they had included all known public contact information of alumni. I laid my hands on it recently and realized that the directory did not have any email addresses on there! Cut to 10 years hence. I do not know of any business or person who does not provide email as a contact mechanism. In fact for many transactional relations, people qualify their contact info by adding a line - "best way to contact me would be email" or "just email me and I will be sure to respond quick". Thats how much has that changed. Cut to another area of life. Think B2B IT sales. I remember distinctly that in 1997, when I was stepping into the industry, everything in IT was considered competitive advantage or a means of securing markets sooner etc. IT was core to a good business strategy. Circa 2008, IT is very core to business strategy, however, I will be naive to think that its positioning has not changed. For one, skills have become ubiquitous. In other words, if an IT strategy has been formulated, it is very easy to get it executed. Remember this talk is all in relation to how it was in 1997. For the very act of strategy formulation, there are plenty of companies who are able to do great IT strategy formulation. Some are large and purport to be one stop shops for entire IT function. Others slice and dice the market and specialize in very specific corners of the market. But, there is major proliferation. How will this play out in the future? In other words, just as email addresses and other personal usage of Internet becomes so ubiquitous, what else in the B2B world will the Internet commoditize?

A letter I sent to my House Rep

This is a letter I wrote to Congresswoman Judy Biggert (Rep, Illinois 13th District) as a part of a campaign being run by my friends at IV.

27th Feb 2008

The Honorable House Representative
13^th District of Illinois State
Ms. Judy Biggert
6262, South Route 83, Suite 305

Willowbrook, IL, 60527

Re: Administrative fixes to alleviate issues faced by highly-skilled immigrants in Illinois.

Respected Congresswoman Ms. Biggert,

I am a constituent of the 13^th District of Illinois State and an employment-based highly-skilled immigrant to the United States. I develop highly complex software for major nationwide business corporations in the United States. To be able to do this job, I am educated with a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering and also a Masters in Business Administration. Further, I have almost 8 years of progressive experience in my area of expertise. I'm also a member of Immigration Voice, a not-for-profit grassroots organization working to fix the issues faced by highly-skilled legal immigrants like myself. Currently a million immigrants and their families are stuck in the immigration process due to insufficient visa numbers and processing delays at the agency US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Going by the publicly available statistics, these legal, highly capable and skilled immigrants may have to wait anywhere between 6 to 12 years to receive their green cards. During these 6 to 12 years, large corporate US-based employers for whom these immigrants work face declining productivity and lack of flexibility to employ these skilled immigrants. This is a huge deterrent to new immigrants and an encouragement for skilled labor to flee the United States. This is also a personally and professionally harming situation to be in for the highly skilled immigrants like me. This situation can be alleviated if your office decides to take positive action directed towards the economic betterment of these immigrants, your district, the state of Illinois and the United States. Your person and your office have the power to change the law and in effect change the lives of many people – including these immigrants.

Though Immigration Voice is interested in seeing positive legislative change enacted by the US Congress, we want to participate in the legal process and allow it to happen through the constitutional process of introducing bills that get debated, voted upon and ultimately signed into law. In the meantime, Immigration Voice has proposed the following points to President Bush's administration to fix some of the issues administratively. I urge you to support this cause by writing a letter to the President of United States to implement these administrative fixes as soon as possible. I have provided the content of the letter that you could possibly send to the 43^rd President of the United States Mr. George Bush.

“

Respected President Bush,

I urge you to implement the following administrative fixes immediately to help the highly-skilled immigrants waiting their turn in a severely backlogged system.

1) Recapture 218,000 unused visas wasted over the past few years administratively, in line with Congressional intent of providing 140,000 visas annually to our community.

2) Flexibility in the USCIS interpretation of "same and similar" jobs, to allow promotions and job mobility. Current USCIS rule is restrictive and pushes the applicant to the end of the line, if they accept promotions.

3) Allow filing of 'Adjustment of Status Applications', even when visa numbers are not available. This will not create an increase in visas, but will allow a number of immigrants to avail the benefits of changing jobs while waiting for their visa numbers.

4) Increase the period of Employment Authorization Document (work authorization) and Advance Parole (travel permit) to 3 years instead of the current practice of providing it for 1 year. This will reduce the burden on USCIS and on immigrants. It will also make travel to an immigrant's home country easier during emergencies.

5) Allow visa revalidation in the US as before. Currently, immigrants have to travel to their home country to renew their visas. If it was performed here in the US, it would be helpful in making it easier to travel back and forth during emergencies.

6) Restart premium processing for I-140 applications. Now that USCIS has cleared the receipting backlog, premium processing should be made available. Without it, many immigrants are unable to extend their stay beyond 6 years, if their labor certification was applied for after the completion of their 5th year of stay in the US.

"

As a really relevant opinion, I want to bring to your notice paragraph 2 of page 407 in the book titled “The Age of Turbulence” written by Former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank Mr. Alan Greenspan. This paragraph is part of the book’s 21^st Chapter that focuses on issues related to “Education and Income Equality” in the future of United States. He clearly states a business case for easy and flexible immigration policy as far as skilled labor immigration is concerned. I hope you and your office will use this to formulate your political case on the same cause: “Education and Income Inequality”. Please read the enclosed copy of this opinion.

Respectfully,

Mr. Sachin Sudhakar Dole

3615 Arlington Ct
Aurora, IL 60504
(630) 270 3102
sachin.dole@gmail.com
Web-site : http://www.immigrationvoice.org

AG on Immigration

These are two images I scanned from Alan Greenspan's book "Age of Turbulence" for my friends at the IV.

table photos

this has the photos of the breakfast table i am making at home.