Running IT as a Business

A great slide on Benchmarking  IT spend averages across the industry

Source : Gartner.com

 Source : Forrester.com

What is Value Management

Australian Mining Boom Impacts And Prospects

Is Your Business Ready for Big Data

IT Services Model - Cloud Enablement

Australian IT Industry Growth and Competitive Snapshot 2013-2014

Aussie banks to start rolling out real-time payments by next year

With the Australian Payments Clearing Association (APCA), the banks - including ANZ, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, Citi, CBA, Cuscal, NAB, and Westpac - submitted this attached to make this happen in February. KPMG has won a competitive tender to become programme manager, the plan now is to put out a request for tender next year, and selection of the key elements of the operating system.

What happens when Coles keeps prices down

A fantastic speech By - Ian McLeod, Coles Managing Director, "What happens when Coles keeps prices down?”. Transcript below, its a good read.

Digital Transformation - Update

Digital Transformation - Sweet Spot

 Different organisation require different approach for leveraging benefits from digital transformation in their evolution.

• Pure Digitisation leads to expansion of core business to digital platforms.
• Pure Transformation leads to change in traditional business model to a new type of business model.
• Combination of executing Digitisation (services and platforms) and Business Transformation (transforming culture and business model) in parallel is less agile and is a challenging task to achieve. However this is the best option, executing either option individually or sequentially will not give the desired outcome.

Post NBN Industries in Australia

Why Telcos are Endangered Species - 2012

 

Interview with Brad Howarth - Australian Innovation and Startups Landscape

As part of our ongoing interviews with CEO's, Media Personalities, Philanthropists, and VC’s, to gauge the innovation and startups landscape in Australia, today we showcase our interview with Freelance Journalist, Public Speaker Mr Brad Howarth, who writes on Australia’s startup industry, digital marketing, dangers of climate change and other relevant topics in this domain.

This is what Brad has to say in a detailed interview with me. Read it here

Digital Transformation - Redefining Industries

In the ongoing pursuit of exploring how our world is becoming Digitally Transformed and how this is going to impact every industry, I have outlined the following agenda for a view point and a book that is still in the exploration stage.

The following agenda outlines the scope for me to explore, write and share my rumblings. I'm keen to get some thoughts and feedback. So please don't hesitate to reach out to me.

Update: Updated work on this topic is here

Mobile Megatrends 2012

 

10 Myths about the Mobile Economy

10+1 myths about the mobile economy

Troubled Telco's

When 7 out of top 12 Telco's are in zone of trouble, then its easy to make out that industry has some challenges to tackle.

GFC - 2 In Making..

This is what forthcoming GFC - II is about in a single snapshot.

Internet Trends 2011 by Mary Meeker, Partner at KPCB

KPCB Internet Trends 2011

View more presentations from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

How to Qualify Sales Lead and forecast Sales Target

Sharing my thoughts on how to qualify leads and forecast target.

Over the years, I have successfully used the BANT framework across the Waterfall Model of Funnel.



Let's look at the stages of

• Stage 0 (Demand Generation)
• Inquiry  - via a demand generation campaign like email/social media/webinar etc. or a sales rep. driven
• I'm not sure how you have got these 22 leads.
• From here, 22 prospects needs to be qualified along with 3 existing qualified leads to be sure.

• Stage 1 (Lead Management)
• Awareness - customer says do I have a problem, root problem /or a symptom of a problem
• Exit criteria - Marketing Captured Lead (MCL) which is data requests like  decisions makers, address, email, employees and other details of an organisation
  
• Stage 2 (Lead Management)
• Consideration - mean buyers say I have a problem and a need
• Exit criteria - Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) -  BANT 1 can be used to exit to the next stage 
• Stage 3  (Lead Management)
  
• Engagement  - mapping buyers journey to engage and see if my solution can solve your problem and shall I try it
• Exit criteria  - Sales Accepted Lead (SAL) - Tactical exit criteria are BANT 2
• Stage 4 (Opportunity Management)
• Intent - Customer is ready to learn more about it
• Exit criteria - Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) - BANT 3 or 4
• Stage 5
• Sales Opportunity is qualified and identified
• It's at this stage, sales rep starts his/her efforts

This process can take some time depending upon how much info (like personas and 360 deg  profile of customer) we have, but if we have most of it then, it's a 1-2 day exercise only.

By Stage 5, it will be interesting to see how leads/prospects qualify as an Opportunity. Also, funnel mix needs to be considered esp; how many opportunities are cross/up-sells and how many are new opportunities. 

This will also give a good indication at this stage whether forecasted numbers can be achieved or not.  This process will help to invalidate. Both bottom-up and top-down approach must be used for validation of forecast.

Since I don't know

• how many leads qualify for Stage 5
  
• what is  a typical size ($TCV) of a deal
• an average time of conversion from Stage 5 onwards  to close
• Conversion ratio (say 25%)

But if we know these 4 parameters, then the sales number can be forecasted with certainty.

Strategic Analysis - Facebook

Facebook Strategy Analysis - (2004 - 2011)

Thoughts For Nike Strategy - 2010

Cloud Computing For Enterprise IT

Cloud Computing  

Sydney in race to develop first bionic eye

Bionic eye is very close to my heart. I would definitely love to see something in this space. In future I also intend to set up a wiki/website where I will try to put as much information about where people can learn about the developments in this space. More on the developments here [Via Slattery Watch]

A Centre for Implantable Bionics is to be established at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and one its first aims is to commercialise a functioning bionic eye. UNSW's Advanced Vision Prosthesis Group has been working on a bionic eye since 1997, and has produced over 70 peer-reviewed scientific publications and filed multiple patents. Other research efforts of the Centre will include trefined bionic hearing devices and artificial heart technologies, and development of electronic stimulation technology. A new leading research chair, the Paul M Trainor Chair in Biomedical Engineering, will be affiliated with the centre and an international search is currently underway for the inaugural holder of the position.

Report - Sensis and the Australian Search and Directories Market

I have undertaken this report to explore, learn and analyse the local online search and directories market to understand the developments that are taking place in this area. More than 18 players, from small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to large corporations trying to get some share of this market.

The main focus of this report is on Sensis and its competitors and how it can reinvent itself in a rapidly changing local market.

I would like to thank Mark Rimmer from Rave About It and Meg Tsiamis from dLook for providing a lot of invaluable information, insights and help while preparing this report. Read it here or download it from here.

Top 4 Probable Digg Buyers

Rumours are hot again about Google/Microsoft planning to buy Digg. When I wrote about Top5 probable Digg buyers in 2006 it was a rumor, but this time reports coming out suggest that this time Kevin Rose might sell it, esp when the stock market is going down and the US is technically in recession. The only difference between now and then is, that one of the suggested 5 players, Yahoo itself is in trouble. So only 4 players remain in the race and these are :
1. News Corp
2. Time Warner
3. Microsoft
4. Google

I'm quoting from my previous post here with some modifications on why these 4 players are after Digg:

News Corporation - Newscorp would love to have this esp; after their acquisition myspace has lost traffic/users and momentum to Facebook. And as a media company it makes sense to have the most popular portal for news/technology/current affairs to be in their armour.

Microsoft - Microsoft will be the obvious choice because Microsoft is lagging in this Web 2.0 phenomenon. There hasn't been any decent/buzzing service offering by Microsoft in this space. If this comes on board, it will provide them a kick-start, which they are hoping for a while. Microsoft has got all the ingredients the to make this happen. Only problem i see is they are offering less money than what Google is offering and they are tied with Yahoo acquisition.

Time Warner - Time warner group which own Netscape will be other contender. Netscape has launched their portal on digg style but is not popular as digg is. Netscape previously asked top digg contributors to join and get paid for their contribution. Netscape would definitely like to acquire this.

Google - If nobody can buy digg than Google will definitely try. It will be more of a strategic move, to not to allow, Microsoft or News corp to buy this. Google can pull this off. Also Kevin Rose would love to be part of Google rather than Microsoft.

I can think of only these 4 contenders, what do you think? is there any other company (media) that might be interested in?

Agile Consulting to Product Offerings - ThoughtWorks has come a long way

ThoughtWorks has come a long way from being an Agile practising and consulting company to a product offerings company. Founded by Neville Roy Singham, as a Management Consulting Firm under the name of Singham Business Services in 1992, it relaunched itself as ThoughtWorks after three years of its inception to focus on building software.

ThoughtWorks is now a leading global company when it comes to Agile Development and Practices. It is helping businesses across the globe with their consulting practices which include, Agile coaching and mentoring, S/W Development and Delivery and now products suite under the initiative of Thougtworks Studio

People who are in consulting business can learn few things from them:
1. Be Agile to market forces, prefer people to process.
2. Strategic Resourcing and Innovation - it follows a different model for hiring its workforce, people who already have a good profile in an open-source project are most likely to be hired and will be allowed to continue their participation in ongoing projects. This not only leads to expertise and new opportunities but also allows employees to be engaged with what they are passionate about; its intentions are similar to the famous 4:1 Google Model.
3. Hire bright guys only!
4. Tech due-diligence - is the best way of getting the foot into the door. I don’t think ThoughtWorks has many business partners or third party vendor relationships or product based relationships, pure technical consulting has to drive more business. This is in contrast to other models/practices for growth.
5. Better Movement of People - Probably one of few companies, which has achieved better results with offshore development and delivery. Its offices are located in the UK, US, India, Australia. It is probably the only company, which runs its induction session for new employees from various countries across the globe for 2 weeks in Bangalore (helps in breaking the cultural differences, if you have an offshore delivery model).

Going forward to capture more market share and to expand the relationship/engagement with current and new customers, it has started rolling out its product offering around its consulting practices, for example, Mingle - Agile project management and team collaboration tool.
Surprisingly the product suite is not on RedHat Model. It’s closely developed by ThoughtWorks and is licensed based, with no community participation in development. This model is similar to Atlassian, where an open-source community or non-profit organisation can get a free license.

Whats’ Next - to me it is a well-placed niche market in which ThoughtWorks is operating and will be safe to say are the leaders or trendsetters in their domain. I think sooner or later it will be a target of acquisition from a big consulting company like Accenture, Deloitte or maybe 3 Indian Giants Wipro/Satyam/Infosys. As Steve Jobs said with its launch of Mac Book Air. “It is in the Air”, BEA bought by Oracle, EDS by HP, Microsoft Trying... Yahoo. I will not be surprised if cash-rich Indian consulting firms, which have fewer consulting offerings in this domain, might go for it.

It will be interesting to see how ThoughtWorks go forward. What do you think? Any thoughts?

Catchup at Cebit

I will be heading to Sydney on May 22 to attend CeBIT's Transaction 2.0 conference. For those who are interested in catching up with me, please feel free to come and chat with me. Our Australian Startups Carnival 2008 winner Scouta has got a pod for exhibition in TechRamp Pavilion, so will be there for some time as well.

It's going to be exciting and a little bit hectic, but it's worth it. I'm looking forward to catching up with new friends.

My Thoughts on HP + EDS Acquisition

I have penned down my thoughts on the recent acquisition of EDS by HP, which is about 3 C’s - Consulting, Cloud and computing. Read it here.