Becoming an year old baby...!

Well for most it may not mean much and even I had almost forgotten until an evening where I got enough time to be retrospective and walk through my past for a while. It indeed is an amazing feeling to have completed an year in United States specially for the approach that has radically changed (at least I feel so) towards life.

There are lots of things that happened in my life and I am sure to miss few of those. But again, the amazing part of blogs (or any application for that matter) is the ability to revisit things and modify those the way you want. Anyways, lets get to the business.

So what is it that is worth a mention? Well, the thing that makes me feel honored is the realization that everyone plays a role in maintaining the smooth ecology. I learned the importance of learning and sharing in individual's life. I learned that every individual has one thing or the other to teach me and thus worthy of a respect as a teacher. I learned to see bigger picture of businesses while still tickling down to narrower details to ensure successful operations.
Besides this pool of positive things, I also learned few things which I feel are negative. I learned to stay alone, away from family, and still be happy! While at one instance I loved to be completely independent, at the other, I realized the importance of showing dependence on others even though you aren't. Well, believe me, that is what many people like to believe. I learned that many people (specially Indians) doesn't make good lasting friends as they a little mean. I learned to be optimist and expect from people which at times made me pay heavy duties!

Everything said, it is very important to learn to love, learn to share, learn to respect individuals, learn to receptive to others' ideas and opinion and make an effort to justify those individuals thinking differently from what you think, learn to be a team player, learn to walk towards success with abilities that each individual has. Any organization succeeds only if it realizes the fact that sustainability is achieved through people, processes and technology. By that I of course don't mean of having any herd of people, any broken processes or any out-dated technology. There infact are very few people who understand and attach appropriate adjective to above items to yield better & profitable business.

Before I started writing this, I wanted this blog to be highly emotional, but I think I dived to much of the practicality! But ya, those 15+ hours per day on laptops to manage your student life kind of takes you away from relationships. At least in my case, it stood so. Everything that makes sense would then be just money. Well thats indeed the reason why many of us fly to States, isn't it? But hey, every achievement has some sacrifice behind it. It ultimately then boils down to individuals' decision on how (s)he wants to move ahead. So ya, one definitely learns to make concrete, sound decision based on facts learned through others which effectively is strong decisions with others help. To me, thats life! Life of keep the continual momentum towards enthusiastically learning from others walking along the goal oriented path without keeping room for any digression. But ask people who went on to become, CEOs, MDs and other high rank positions and some ideas of those individuals' will align well with the ideas presented in this blog...

OK...No more writing...Thanks for being good audience...If you happen to land in US (and are Indian), you will miss India after some time...specially relations...or rather strong and trust-worthy relations...

A week into ERP Consulting

I always wondered why the consultant are paid so much (Please don't assume that I am paid too much). There indeed is a reason. Firstly, they usually have a diverse technology experience making them an easy going person while understanding existing enterprise applications and architectural environment. Secondly, they have good persuasive skills and also good command over what they talk and how they talk. That makes them gel well with company people and eases the process of fetching requirements, understanding existing company processes and so on. Thats in general about consulting.

Lets now focus on ERP implementation. While reading articles on ERP, you will always come across an astonishing percentage of the failures during ERP implementation. Well, I learned in my first week of work that most of this comes from unclear business needs and organization's un-readiness (specially people) for adopting the change. Obviously, if you are at the age of 50, you might as well grow up to be reluctant to learn new things. So what do you do with these otherwise innocent people. Infact most of the organization are finding this problem of holding on with a talent because talented individuals keep moving (causing exodus) while some hold on with the existing skillset but expect hikes in the pay check. That might well be the reason for labor unions which cause stoppage of work. I think, I diverted from the main topic, but the perception of PPT still holds true for sustainable success of any organization.

Keep visiting this blog for more...

The SOA Way...

Ever wondered a repository where you query anything and expect a perfect answer. Well you might think of Google but is it really a repository? It will only be wise to leave the answer for Googlers and move ahead. My current dive into SOA has poised me with some stunning facts and few dazzling question. First was the number of SOA patents that IBM has and how over a period of time it has captured more than 60% of the SOA market leaving no place for other players. Honestly speaking, IBM has well matured with SOA and rendering key services to other industries in embracing this potentially robust architecture.
One of the questions we must surely ask is how the seamless integration achieved at the end between heterogeneous systems? After all, IT systems are the most notorious ones when it comes to talking with each other. Talk about APIs, OO Modelling, UML Design and what not...but all show some kind of loopholes when it comes to establishing cross organizational interaction between the business processes. How does then SOA claims to embark that it supports flexibility and reuseability. The sole power comes from XML which eased the process of data representation in a standard form across the internet industry and soon became a widely embraced standard by all leading IT organizations. The never sleeping IT world quickly grew to web services but it definitely took time for standards to emerge to have a giant and widely accepted IT architecture in place.
It is sheer amazement to browse IBM website for SOA and find tonnes and tonnes of documents explaining the evaluation-standardization-adaptability-governance process related to SOA. It definitely isn't a magic to have 2 applications build by two mutually independent organizations to interact seamlessly and produce consistent results. But it happens through SOA! The simple fact of creating services as stateless and then standardizing the interface that can be used to enable global communication is really the charm of SOA.
The supporting protocols have even seen a dramatic growth over a period of time. Each aspect in the supporting protocols is so fine tuned! You read about XML-RPC to get convinced that this protocol will withstand tomorrow's business needs and then you see SOAP emerging as yet another standard offering some advantage over the previously considered 'sufficient' protocol. The signs are clear that IT is never going to sleep.
Think of declaring the availability of a particular service. The WSDL, UDDI and SOAP coordinate with each other so well to have a unified service directory which not only takes care of services' name, but also the description of what is does and how can that be invoked while contacting service provider.
It truly is a pleasing experience reading what is dominating the industry and I would definitely recommend readers of my blog to invest good time browsing IBM's site to learn more about this fascinating architecture.

Everything in world has a dimension to analyze!

Now this might look like a thread triggered after taking Business Intelligence class, but believe me the roots are much much older and deeper.

Dimensions-Something that helps us analyze several business facts in context of certain attributes. Well thats a typical definition that everyone finds in BI, Data Warehouse classes. But how can we extend this approach to human beings? Let me give it a shot...

Lets try building a complete star schema for a human being (I will of course skip the attributes). I am proposing a completely new design for star schema because of the complexity involved with the human beings. Let the 'human behavior' be the factless fact table surrounded by several facts such as nature, failures, achievements, recognitions & of course time. While nature will be a slowly changing dimension and thus cannot be the reason for sudden drastic change in the human behavior. However, the other 3 dimensions are highly volatile and may occur in person's life in any frequency and in any order.

Our purpose for this schema is to analyze the change in the human behavior over a period of time depending upon his/her failures, achievements and recognitions he/she gets in the society. I am sure that you are inching closer in shaping your thoughts to what my analysis and conclusion would be. But I think this a predictive behavior of human as a species. Everyone is affected by these dimensions and this brings change in their behavior. But I am looking towards formulating a schema for a mankind that remains polite and humble despite all odds of achievements and failures. I am probably unable to shape my mind to figure out the dimensions which can lead to drastic change in the mood of humble people!

So, in case you are satisfied with the above analysis, do help me to find out the schema and specially the dimensions I am looking for...

Rhythm divine in the pool water

It is hard to believe that non-swimmer can enjoy the pool water and going deep in. But not when you are at my blog. hehe! Well, I became one of the examples today. Not knowing how to swim, I kept striking my feet against the water to gain the momentum (after all everybody knows that to survive in water, you need to keep your hands and feet moving). Not because I wanted to learn swimming (well, I actually wanted to learn ;) ) but primarily because whenever I poured my head in, I could listen to music which I otherwise couldn't whenever I had my head over the water. Amazing was the feeling with so many firangs in Bi**ni around you and the music...ummm...Manish is back into the mood...!

Pursuit of Happiness

For everything that is complete today is likely to be torn tomorrow. Trusting, believing are the natural instincts that arise when you don't want to go any further in pursuit of that extra quality that you may otherwise get. When do you give up? At the age of 50? When you probably think you are off the age to pursue that extra piece of knowledge which can make you being counted in the elite group of people whose stories every person want to read to thrive in their endeavors? Where does it all end? For me (at least thinking wise), the tale is never ending. Whenever you achieve, it becomes a point of new career endeavors. I don't know, but at this early stage, life at times suddenly makes me take a pause, feel stagnant may be to enjoy the surroundings which I otherwise may not be able to during my quest of growth. How do you justify/characterize such aspects in your life?

How do I believe in recession?

Creating a belief requires set of facts from authentic source! I do read journals from most news site quoting around 63000 jobs being cut in US alone but I also read global players (like Google and Amazon) reaching realms of India (IIMA to be specific) in this economic slowdown for hire! On one side, I find correlation of economy getting drilled down with enough being spent in elections, on the other side, I do notice US still deploying troops in Iraq costing billions of dollars per month.

Share market (my area of interest :) ) shows all signs of derailment plunging valuable money of millions of investors, but I also read economy boom that will soon make BSE touch 29000 from current 16000!

Do you believe in recession even without knowing what kind of job cuts are happening, what functional domain they are happening in, what kind of an industry and what kind of people??? What do you have to say?