Sameer Agarwal

Stumbled upon this preview of fonolo at RWW. It’s a cool service (still in private beta) that promises to take the frustration out of dialing any service provider (bank, travel agent, anyone who has an IVR) and waiting endlessly to talk to a real person. This service promises to do the dialing (and waiting) for you, and call you back once you’ve reached your menu option (or real person as applicable). Cool, huh?

I just hope this service or something similar is launched for India. Any takers?

Reacting to the story of Mehtas who want to abort their 6 month old foetus because the baby will be born with a terminal illness. More details here.

I’m not arguing for the Mehtas’, neither against them. A lot of debate is already happening on how ethical it is, should the abortion laws change, etc etc. Here’s my fear - when the child is born, and if the child lives a reasonably normal life, what ‘mental’ trauma will she go through?

All this while everyone has been talking about the potential physical trauma of the child, and the mental/financial trauma for the parents. But won’t the knowledge and evidence of the fact that the parents actually wanted to kill her, play havoc on her mind? How unwanted will she feel? How lonely? And hence, how vulnerable?

But hey, don’t get me wrong here - I’m sure the Mehta’s are going through a lot of stress and in a way they are being fair to the unborn child. Mercy killing, in theory, is not such a bad thing. Abortion, at least in India, is allowed up to 20 weeks of conception - that is also killing in a way; and that’s always selfish, right? One aborts because she does not want that child. Period. What is so different here?

However coming back to the point, if such an ‘unwanted’ child is born, and later knows that she was unwanted, what does she go through…

Or does it have any? It was a Friday afternoon and I had come out lunch with my colleagues in East Bangalore (RMZ Infinity, Old Madras Road). It must have been around 1:45 PM when a colleague got a phone call from a relative asking if he was safe.

Safe he was, but the call brought anxiety to the table faster than anyone’s imagination. There was a bomb blast in South Bangalore! Even before we could rush to the closest TV screen, in retrospect, 9 bombs exploded in different parts of the city. Of course we didn’t know then - but we did fear that it can’t be an isolated bomb blast and that serial blasts are going to follow. No place was safe. My mother usually goes out in the afternoons for her ’satsanga’ sessions and the first thing I did was to call her and tell her not to step out of the house. My wife is luckily in Delhi, so thankfully the anxiety was half of what it could have been. Then I went to office, picked up my computer and directly drove home. Not sure if that was a good decision or bad (since hypothetically the office premises were safer than the roads).

Thankfully the bombs were low intensity and not much damage was done - of course two lives were lost and some people injured which IS huge damage. Enough to shake everyone a bit though, and as if that wasn’t enough what followed a day after was Ahemadabad - which was much gorier than Bangalore. Even hospitals were not spared with some explosions in front of the civic hospitals.

Who is India Mujahideen and does it have a face? Will we get to see that face? What is their motive? It’s not as if terrorism is something new to India but I hate it when people like you and me become so casual about it. We say that life must go on. We go out shopping the next day because we think the traffic will be less. How insensitive can we be!

We need to bring a stop to this. Why should innocent people lose their lives like this? Who is it helping and how?

Before I boarded the Shatabadi on Thursday I was quite skeptical since I was traveling in a train after a really long time. But I was to be proved wrong!

It was 5:30 AM in the morning when I entered the Bangalore City Railway Station and saw a Bangalore-Chennai train parked on Platform 1. It couldn’t have been better, right? Wrong! That was not my train - the Shatabadi - and I like a jerk kept looking for my coach without realizing that it was some other train. When I did figure that, I had difficulty locating where the Shatabadi was parked, since the display unit showed the wrong platform number! I had to almost run for a couple of hundred meters to be on time. Of course I was cursing, and yeah panting as well!

But as soon as I entered Shatabadi (Executive Class), I knew all the reasons for cursing were over. The seats looked pretty decent - upholstery was quite OK and the leg room - as good/better than business class!  The servers carried a warm  smile on their face accompanied by several rounds of goodies - water, candies, tea/coffee, corn flakes, veg/non-veg breakfast and tea/coffee, and I promise the cutlery was definitely very decent as well!

Cutting a long story short, below are the 3 reasons why Banaglore-Chennai Shatabadi rocks (over a flight):

1. Save Money. An executive class ticket on Shatabadi comes for around Rs 1000. An air ticket will not cost anything less than Rs 4000 one way for economy class. That makes it a cool saving of Rs 6,000 on a round trip without compromising on the total travel time or comfort.
2. Spend more time traveling to Chennai rather than traveling IN Bangalore. Shatabadi takes 5 hours, from station to station. Add an hour max for travel to railway station, locating your platform etc. That mkes it 6 hours (>85% time traveling TO Chennai). Here’s the typical time you’ll take if you fly:
   • Travel to the Bangalore airport: 90 mins
   • Check-in and Boarding:60 mins
   • Flying Time: 40 mins
   • Congestion Time (since it happens almost always): 20 mins
   • Baggage Claim at Chennai: 20 mins
   • Total Time: ~4hrs (>80% of time spent traveling IN Bangalore).
3. Get better service (compared to economy air). Have you even heard of leg room in economy airfare?

You need more reasons, huh?!

Yeah that’s how it feels. Sakshi is away on a one month sabbatical and no matter how exciting bachelorhood may sound to a married man, I’m not sure what I’ll make of it (too early to comment - while I write this she is still flying!).

The trigger for this post is an interesting article from Atul Rai here. Atul articulates that from a ‘tacit knowledge sharing’ perspective (call it Web 2.0 or social networking if you have to) communication is probably not that relevant. He cites the SMS and twitter phenomenon has changed the way we communicate as people. Fair point - SMS hs chnged rules qt a bit & its nrml fr cnvrstns 2b lk ths.

But is communication all about the way we write, or speak. Isn’t their more to it? Bloody well yes, communication is about effectively transmitting a message from a sender to a receiver. While articulation (for traditional, ‘explict’ kind of KM) requires good writing skills, and for Web 2.0 kind of KM it does not, the realm of communication is much beyond articulation alone!

‘Communication skills’ is about an understanding of what mediums work best to be able to most effectively ‘transmit’ information. As Knowledge Management, or Knowledge Sharing professionals isn’t our job to create an environment conducive for effective collaboration? How people collaborate, what appeals to them and what doesn’t - including the medium (say Web 2.0) and language (say twitter/SMS kind) - is something that will fall in the communication realm for sure.

Of course you can argue that it really is about understanding human behavior, but ‘communicating’ with humans effectively to get the desired behavior is key, and ‘that’ definitely is the task of a master communicator.

In a corporate setup you’re trying to reach out to employees for a whole lot of reasons. Employee engagement,  knowledge management, information dissemination and a whole lot of other things. Poor employee! There are too many voices, too much clutter, too much confusion. Why can’t we have one voice, why can’t we align the communicators and the knowledge managers?  Is it because the knowledge managers think more in terms of processes and systems while communicators more in terms of info bytes? But isn’t knowledge management just a name now - is it not about knowledge sharing - sharing of knowledge bytes. Isn’t Web 2.0 breaking the structures and the processes out of KM? If yes, then aren’t communicators and knowledge managers inadvertently converging at “employee engagement”? Both trying to make sure employees know what they need to, and tell what they ought to…

Think about it. And if you agree, then well do you really need knowledge managers anymore? Isn’t it better to have a bunch of people who understand human behavior and the mechanics of bringing people together (broadly in the realm of employee engagement) run the show? Isn’t that very close to what communicators typically are anyway expected to do?

Footnote 1: Of course some technology may be involved in setting the mechanics up - but that can always be outsourced.

Footnote 2: I do a dedicated “KM” job as well, and am at an equal risk of losing my job if people buy in to what I said!

An IIT Bombay student (Sweta Mehta) contacted me recently for a project she was doing on Knowledge Management. I answered some questions for her, which I thought I ought to share here as well:

1. When did KM start in India?
   KM in some form or other existed ever since enterprises started! The whole process of filing documents is knowledge management in itself! The term knowledge management was probably coined sometime in the 1980s and organizations started formal programs on KM in the early 1990s. McKinsey and some other consulting firms were the front-runners in embracing KM. GE, HP, Boeing etc also boast of formal KM programs that started in early 90s. Of course India offices of some of the firms mentioned above also embraced KM around the same time, but amongst the Indian companies probably Infosys is one of the first Indian organizations to have embraced KM in the mid-late 90s. Airtel, Satyam, Wipro and lately Mind Tree have also been some of the Indian companies that have created an impact in the KM space.

2. What is the difference between Indian and international KM standards?
   Unfortunately there is no such thing as “KM standards”! This is bad because most organizations grapple with evolving a “KM strategy” but this is also a blessing in disguise since “one size doesn’t fit all”. Any successful KM program needs to be customized according to the culture, people and nature of work of the organization. So the KM framework of a consulting organization will be very different from the KM framework for a BPO. The ‘lack of standards’ actually encourages organizations to ‘think’ and evolve their strategy. Of course there are benchmarks available in terms of what other organizations are doing, and there are frameworks like the APQC road-map available to help one get started.

   To answer your specific question about the difference between Indian and international KM standards – well honestly, that’s food for thought and requires research. I’m not aware of any such research that has been conducted in the past. However, I do think that there will be a significant difference in global and India-only KM programs because of the difference in cultures. As I mentioned above, a KM strategy is/should always be based on the culture of the organization/the country it operates in (and hence the culture of such countries).

3. What is KM portal?
   The literal meaning of a ‘portal’ is gateway. So by definition, the KM portal is a gateway/starting point for the ‘knowledge’ available in an organization. There is debate around whether you should have a ‘separate’ KM portal, or if one org portal (intranet) should be good enough so as to not confuse people with multiple starting points – ideally (in my opinion) there should be ‘one’ integrated portal and several sites for various KM tools as needed.

4. How is Knowledge Management implemented?
   The first step is to define the KM strategy for an organization. Such strategy should be evolved on the basis of organizational priorities and should have the buy-in of senior management. Unless the top management is convinced that the KM strategy is actually impacting the organization you can be sure that the program will fail. Once you have a high-level strategy, then a multi-generation plan should be evolved in consultation with several influencers in the organization who can champion the program eventually. While creating the strategy it’s important to understand what the ‘people’ want out of the program and what ‘processes’ can be set that will drive/sustain/control the program. Once you know what you want out of your KM program then technologies/tools should be evaluated. Remember technology is an enabler and merely deploying technology does not mean that you have “implemented” KM. KM is a continuous journey – the strategy needs to be revisited and tweaked as required. And never forget that it’s the people who make or break a KM program, so have utmost focus on people, and think of ways of engaging them at all levels in the program – through rewards, recognition and whatever else it takes!

5. Who is the key person responsible for formulating the KM strategy?
   The Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) will typically formulate the KM strategy in collaboration with senior management. (CKO is merely a title – anybody who has the mandate to lead the KM program is responsible). It is important that the CKO understands the business well, is a good communicator, can network well with people at all levels and is senior enough to understand business drivers and people behavior.

6. How can KM implementation affect the organization and its stakeholders?
   The success of a KM program can be felt but not measured accurately. Unfortunately there are no accepted ROI models for KM. Typically KM professionals ask senior management to think about the cost of not doing KM rather than the cost of doing it and/or asking for ROI! Measurement can of course be done hypothetically – based on the assumed time saved by employees in finding knowledge/information and hence illustrating productivity benefits. Such models will however remain debatable and hence it’s best to not create an ROI model in the first place! KM is a continuous journey, and you do ‘it’ because you believe in it.

7. Which companies in India have the best KM implementation process?
   The only recognized KM awards are the MAKE awards. Last year, Mindtree was the winner of the MAKE India awards. Airtel, Eureka Forbes, Infosys, Satyam were among the other finalists. You can find the details of the 2007 MAKE awards here (scroll down to the 2007 Indian MAKE Study Executive Summary).

At GE one of the things they train you well is making those impactful elevator pitches. Supposing you meet your CEO and he asks you how it’s going and you have 20 seconds at best to make an impression, what do you say. What are those right words, et al!

Lately I observed that such pitches reek of bull. Those same standard words, that fake assertive voice. Those fake smiles and laughters, that tapping on the shoulders, that little bow. Get real guys!

Champagne. Bouquets. Several courses of meal without the hassle of deciding what to order (that’s a big incentive to me!). Birthday cake. A linen jacket that I wanted for several months, or maybe years! All this without the slightest hint. Yes, that’s what Sakshi did on my birthday on Jun 9.

She insisted on picking me up from work to go to Taj Residency even though her office is close to that place and it just didn’t make sense with Bangalore traffic. The booking was for 7 PM but we were on our way at 5 so we decided to have a couple of drinks. Sakshi was careful in avoiding that ‘one drink too much’ for me despite my insistence, and without leaving a hint of what was in store.

So we arrived at around 7:20, and the restaurant I discovered that we were going to was called “Graze”. It is a beautiful, Victorian, poolside restaurant, that is quiet and niche. This was only the beginning of discoveries for the evening. Quickly I realized that the table was already chosen, and the servers already knew Sakshi. Whoa! Even before I could digest that, champagne came rolling, and I was already feeling royal!

Cheers, and then the flowers came. Then the first course. Then flowers and then the next course. Man it just couldn’t get better. Wait - there was a cake and a linen jacket for me as well!!

It was all so well planned. Right to the last detail. Completely based on what I like and what I don’t. So much thought to make your husband happy. God - I don’t deserve her at all! As Richa said, “I’m a lucky dog”!

Yeah that’s what I keep on doing I realize. Sometimes run faster to do better on the job, sometimes to keep up with family commitments, sometimes for this and sometimes for that. Lately (just been two days), I’ve been trying to run faster on the treadmill (maybe I’ll find my L-Spot!). And that’s making me mind run faster as well. Maybe I’ll not be late again, this time around with what I’m thinking! I hope I don’t lose the interest, build some focus and just do it!