Anup Surendran's blog

I have worked for so many vendors servicing some of the who's who in the financial industry and now servicing the retail industry. One of the application usage patterns I have seen most of the institutions use is that when there is a 'new product' they start using, they usually keep their legacy product around for 'safety' and 'emotional' reasons.

There usually is not enough of a push from the top down to get rid of legacy applications in a project based manner. What usually happens is that after years of evolution of the business and technology within the enterprise, lots of these 'ghost' applications remain in the enterprise. One enterprise initiative which can help in 'decommissioning' these ghost applications is archiving.

The following are the benefits of archiving :

Top Business Benefits
- Manage archive data life cycle based on pre-defined policies
- Provide comprehensive access to the archived data through a common viewer and/or application viewer
- Supports your company's compliance efforts and preserve company’s knowledge
- Increase efficiencies in Records Management processes

Top IT Benefits
- Reduce performance degradation. Periodically remove "excess" data from an application
- Keep the old applications data around and throw away the infrequently used application. This will reduce licensing costs
- Store data by leveraging appropriate and cost effective storage technologies

Do you have archiving as part of your enterprise IT strategy ?

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Innovation and jobs of the past

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 04:30:51 -0700

Think of business as a series of curves where each curve replaces the previous one: telegraphy—telephone—mobile or scribe—printing press—desktop publishing. NPR compiled a photo essay that really drives this point home with pictures of positions such as elevator operator, iceman, copy boy, and pinsetter. It’s change or die…

More on innovation. Hat tip to Rowan Manahan and Guy Kawasaki for pointing out this story.

Read more about innovation at http://INNOVATION.paper.io

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Parenting 2.0

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 12:56:25 -0700

via Posterous Post v0.11

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6 ways to create lasting change in your organization

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 09:22:59 -0800

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My favorite caricature of Albert Einstein

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:34:00 -0800

And here are 10 Amazing Lessons you an learn from him.

See more life hacks from http://lifehack.paper.io/ .

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Scalability in technology and business

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:06:00 -0800

This is a follow up post to my previous one about Performance.

Scaling in technology lingo is - " The ability for your service to continue to serve at the same level of service quality to multiple clients or requests as demands increase". That might be a simplistic explanation. Wikipedia explains it like this - The ability for a business or technology to accept increased volume without impacting the contribution margin (= revenue - variable costs). For example, a given piece of equipment may have capacity from 1-1000 users, and beyond 1000 users, additional equipment is needed or performance will decline (variable costs will increase and reduce contribution margin).

It is interesting to note some technology lessons learned from Google's technical architecture . Here are the highlights :

- Infrastructure can be a competitive advantage.

- Spanning multiple data centers is still an unsolved problem.

- Take a look at Hadoop

- Synergy isn't always crap. By making all parts of a system work together an improvement in one helps them all. Improve the file system and everyone benefits immediately and transparently. If every project uses a different file system then there's no continual incremental improvement across the entire stack.

- Build self-managing systems that work without having to take the system down. This allows you to more easily rebalance resources across servers, add more capacity dynamically, bring machines off line, and gracefully handle upgrades.

- Create a Darwinian infrastructure. Perform time consuming operation in parallel and take the winner.

- Don't ignore the Academy. Academia has a lot of good ideas that don't get translated into production environments. Most of what Google has done has prior art, just not prior large scale deployment.

-Consider compression. Compression is a good option when you have a lot of CPU to throw around and limited IO.

All these will show up in some form or fashion when you consider scaling your technology services.

Now, let us talk about 10 things to keep in mind when scaling your business. These are the three things you have to keep in mind

Scale your most profitable business processes
If your business processes deal with customers, then find fanatics who can add that one bit extra to help your customers.
Assign the best people to your most profitable processes
When new people come on board make sure they learn from the best
Make sure the best communicators are kept in place for intra business process communications
Scaling processes requires documentation and measurement. KPI's should be reviewed and measured periodically
Find the optimal productivity of your key personnel. You want them to run a marathon, not a 100 metre dash every day
Ask people in operations for feedback to make their job better. Ask customers for feedback. See if the feedback can help you scale better.
Create a Darwinian approach to scaling business processes. Let the best business process win
Consider packaging work items differently for efficient human processing
Make sure your first and last interaction with the client has the fanatics involved

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This is me ?

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 09:29:24 -0800

This is what I got when I took the color test.

http://www.careerpath.com/career-tests/colorcareercounselor.aspx

Best Occupational Category

You're a CREATOR

Keywords

Nonconforming, Impulsive, Expressive, Romantic, Intuitive, Sensitive, and Emotional

These original types place a high value on aesthetic qualities and have a great need for self-expression. They enjoy working independently, being creative, using their imagination, and constantly learning something new. Fields of interest are art, drama, music, and writing or places where they can express, assemble, or implement creative ideas.

CREATOR OCCUPATIONS
Suggested careers are Advertising Executive, Architect, Web Designer, Creative Director, Public Relations, Fine or Commercial Artist, Interior Decorator, Lawyer, Librarian, Musician, Reporter, Art Teacher, Broadcaster, Technical Writer, English Teacher, Architect, Photographer, Medical Illustrator, Corporate Trainer, Author, Editor, Landscape Architect, Exhibit Builder, and Package Designer.

CREATOR WORKPLACES
Consider workplaces where you can create and improve beauty and aesthetic qualities. Unstructured, flexible organizations that allow self-expression work best with your free-spirited nature.

Suggested Creator workplaces are advertising, public relations, and interior decorating firms; artistic studios, theaters and concert halls; institutions that teach crafts, universities, music, and dance schools. Other workplaces to consider are art institutes, museums, libraries, and galleries.

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Morning tug of war

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 09:09:41 -0800

My daughter does not get enough of her morning walks!

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Performance, Scalability and Reliability - How they apply to your business

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 04:16:00 -0800

Performance, Scalability and Reliability are three non functional attributes every Architect deals with when they work on enterprise systems or large audience applications. I had been through a recent contract search and I found that different aspects of these were asked at different times within different interviews.

Let's look at what these mean :

Throughput - When you don't deal with clients directly, it is the amount of work your department gets done in an hours time. Basically this is your productivity measure.

For example, in the Supply Chain Management, the resources are consumed by the operations at a 'node'. However, resources have a limited capacity. For example, if it takes one hour to assemble a car on an assembly line, then you can produce only eight cars in an eight-hour workshift. This can constrain the flow of goods and services through that node in the network. This is called throughput. Constraint based planning is a big thing in this industry.

Performance

Performance goals will differ based on the use cases which the system needs to support. If there is an underlying application technology some of the objectives can be measured by the following factors :

Concurrency, Throughput, Server Response time and Render Response time. To read more about these go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_performance_testing .

What Performance measures apply to Business ?

The 4 equivalent measures which applies to Business are Concurrency, Throughput, Business Unit Response Time and Customer Servicing Time.

Concurrency - It is the ability of a business to serve multiple clients at the same time for a certain product / service.

Business Unit Response Time - The business equivalent of Server Response Time. Each Business function's which is performed by the Business Unit should be measured as a black box.

Customer Servicing Time - This is the business equivalent of Render Response Time. A Customer request is serviced by different business units. It is important to measure the combined servicing time for one Customer Service Request.

More on Scalability and Reliability in the next post.

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Slow and Steady

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 10:35:53 -0800

via reflectionof.me

Entrepreneurs know when to go slow and steady

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Have fun when the going gets tough

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 05:34:50 -0800

via flickr.com

Having fun when the going gets tough

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5 tips to choose the right vision statement for your business

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 04:50:44 -0800

“Give us clear vision that we may know where to stand and what to stand for- because unless we stand for something we shall fall for anything” - Peter Marshall

This is so true for business. But the most important thing which entrepreneurs don't realise is that having a vision statement by itself doesnot suffice.

The vision has to be something you commit to on a daily basis. The strategies you come up with should support the businesses vision.

So why do you need a vision statement ?

A vision statement is a tool that can guide your organization as market conditions, technologies, and buyer behaviors change and evolve. It summarizes what an organization wants to become within a specified time frame and should resonate with management and staff. Not only does a vision give shape and direction to the organization’s future, it helps set priorities and criteria for product development plans and strategies. A well-crafted vision will help employees feel proud, excited, and part of something much bigger than themselves.

Here are 5 tips to choose the right "vision statement" ?

When you pitch your vision to prospective investors, prospective partners and possible employees, you need to gauge their reaction. You will need to find out if there was anything in your pitch which interested or excited them. If there was no interest, you will need to make it interesting.

You will need to understand how "far fetched" it is. If your vision is too "far fetched", the people around you will just tune out. They will feel that this is an impossible task and it not worth taking an effort. You will need to move away from complete hallucination to a little more reality.

If you have not included the "human factor", then your vision statement is not ready yet. Any organization you build will need to interact with people (consumers, employees etc) and including human values in your vision statement connects with people who read your vision statement

If your vision statement has not stretched the organization's capabilities and image, it is not the right vision statement. It has to give shape and "direction" to the organization's future. If the "direction" is not present, then redo your vision statement.

If your vision statement is more than a page long, It is blurry. Make it more clearer by making it short and fit in less than a page.

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Creative Financing for Small Businesses

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 13:56:00 -0800

In today’s economic climate, finding suitable lending options for small businesses can be a challenge. While some consider debt to be a negative, successful small businesses understand that it can provide much needed leverage for organizational growth. But, what types of lending are available to small businesses?

First, let’s take a look at a real life business example. A manufacturing company based in Dallas, Texas is looking for funding in order to expand their overall production level. The company is currently profitable and able to produce a regular volume of products for their current customer base. But, the leadership team is thinking big- they are in search of the big retail accounts; Walmart, Walgreens, and other major retailers. In order to produce the level of volume these major organizations need, the manufacturing company must seek capital.

The capital is needed for a variety of reasons, including inventory purchases to produce the products as well as bridge capital to cover the accounts payable delay that many of these bigger companies enforce. When working with smaller vendors, the manufacturing company could expect to be paid for their products within 30 days, but with bigger companies like Walmart, their invoice period may be 90 days. This delay can present a significant problem for a small company with little cash reserves on hand.

So, the manufacturing company began to look at options including bank lines of credit, credit cards, SBA loans, equipment financing and factoring. One of the most appealing options, even though there is a fee to utilize it, was factoring. Invoice factoring would allow the manufacturing company to receive a portion of the initial invoice order from a company of Walmart upfront. These funds could be used to purchase the much needed product to produce the final orders. Without these funds, the small business would have been at a standstill.

So, when working to secure funding, be sure to consider both traditional and non-traditional channels.

Note: One of the companies who do this in Canada is BPF Solutions.

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