At the outset, pardon  the misleading title !
Nothing short of an 11th Vishnu Avatar can resolve the problems of our IT capital.

On a daily basis, whenever I cross the myriad potholes, crevices, shortcuts and long cuts which collectively are addressed as "roads" in Bangalore, my problem solving mind keeps thinking of things like 'the helpless of man' against the Karnataka Govt. , Or the futility of resolving the corruption of road contractors etc. etc. etc. .

Apart from these philosophical, anthropological and other 'basic' thoughts, I sometimes also think of what can be done to work around these issues, or at least fore-warn my brethren of the impending jam around the corner !

One such attempt is as follows :
We have a robust SMS technology in place. We also have a robust GPS technology in place. And we definitely have a lot of people to experiment things on !

So, combining these three ingredients, a solution can be built to embed GSM tracking SIMs in a large enough no. of vehicles in the city to record the average travel speed, waiting time and similar parameters from individual vehicles and transmit this to a central server. coupled with the locations coordinates and an adequately large sample spread well across the city, a "traffic map" can be created that can be accessed via a smart phone by any traveler on the street who has dared to travel the roads of Bangalore.
Even a simple color coding ( like RED for high traffic and GREEN for regular speed) would be help enough !

This simple arrangement ( with adequate control to ensure anonymity of the volunteer traveler who has these chips installed) will be adequate to guide and shape the traffic by informing discerning travelers of the problem areas ahead and the easier paths available.

A healthy marriage of Google maps with this technique is all that we Bangaloreans need !

If someone has the technical knowledge, and the statistical wherewithal to define the minimum sample required, volunteers can be picked up to make a good, representative traffic map of the city ( or any other city for that matter !) which can give good coverage to the entire city.

Any takers ??

Transformation projects :

An oft repeated phrase (perhaps abused phrase is a better description !), this animal called transformation is often coupled with another equally abused word called 'project' and used as a deadly combination to impress higher-ups about the immense potential of some obscure, worthless effort that will bring in funds, effort, resources (and ultimately incentives of some sort ! ) to the person propounding the idea..
This thorough abuse, as unwarranted and displeasing as it may be, dulls the true content and import of the phrase.
Transformational projects by definition should be an effort that brings sizeable, measurable and drastic improvements i some important parameter of work or efficiency. More words !!!

Project managers and leaders alike often debate on these lofty words and manage to come to some sort of accomodative arrangement with each other to agree with each other's concept and measure of 'transormativeness' of their idea and start milking the enterprise with their ideas.

So, what's the answer to this ? Does a leader with a small budget stand correct when he refers to a project with $100 saving as a transformative project, or the head of a $5 million project be deemed as a trnsformational leader for his project that saves $5000 a year !

I think the idea of tranformativeness needs more than a quantitative measure ( not to discount the quantitative part of course..). It needs to be a % age figure rather than an absolute no. for sure, and a high enough % at that ! but it also needs to show some innovative thought behind it. There needs to be a specific guideline within a vertical, or a company or even an industry that defines this very specifically and clearly separates it run-of-the-mill projects.
As an example, I remember an old company that employed me which, in all earnest brought up an Employee's suggestion scheme to encourage provoking thoughts from a very intelligent set of people. The guy going through the ideas once gave me a glimpse of the 'transformative ideas' he often came across !
One went like this : The employee suggested that flower pots be placed in the employees's bays to encourage positive thoughts, break the monotony, feel closer to nature and improve the ambience and impact on visitors.
Within a month of it's acceptance ( a fine idea it was ! ), another employee gave a transformative, extremely thought provoking idea to remove it !!
Why ?? - because it was in the interest of employees' safety that such potential 'tripping points' like flower pots be removed. The chances of spillage of water, and the idea of employees skidding through the hall like ice skaters was a morbid thought for the management ! Swish, and they were missing the next day...
Though this may be a humorous example of many such schemes which all of us know of, this is very similar to the more serious transformation projects meted out on employees and shareholders by serious, straight-faced , well-meaning leader of organizations !
Only that the $1 flowerpot is replaced by some very serious dough, and the explanations are far more convincing, backed by some solid number crunching, eye catching graphs and the works ...
Change the leader, an see the new leader create another transformation, which will be 180 degrees reverse of the previous transformation :-) A confused leadership, a cynical set of workers, laughing competitors and company about to go to hell ! Some transformation indeed !!

After all the bashing, one good point to note is that today's corporations at least understand the concept of transformation, the idea that such a massive, positive change can be done ? and many of them actually do accomplish them a lot of times..

To understand the power of this thought, just increase the scale of this thought to the level of a country,
specially like India, and see what one small transformative project can do.
I would call the Maruti 800 one hell of a transformative thought, the focus on IT as another one, liberalization as yet another.. If these few "real", transformative ideas took the country so far, what can a dozen of these do for our people...
I hope Montek+Manmohan Singh realize this :-) I hope there is a serious thought to setting up a 'public' think tank that can really focus of creating the pipeline for positive, forward looking ideas to be collected, vetted and most importantly put into action with no political baggage attached. We being a country of the wise, learned saints, a dozen religions, a hundred cultures, should not have a dearth of ideas for sure ! If only there was a way to channelize this 'force'...

Extra Humans ! :

Being in the automation industry, a question that often crops up is "What will these guys do once the software product is in place ? " This 'redeployment', workforce reduction , layoff or pink slips have become such a common usage vocabulary that it's not longer the scary thing it once was.
It makes you wonder if we have become "de-humanized" or is this really something inevitable ?

To me, it brings another question : Are we really too many of us to be employed ??
No, I am not talking about the overpopulation story, and I'm not talking about the labor ministry or HRD ministry discussions on the lack of "employable" skills in our country/world.

I'm really taking about the fact that the machines can actually do so many things that , sooner than later (if not already !) , we just dont NEED too many of us in this world..

..and the sophistication of machines is increasing, making humans more and more redundant.

Choices :
a. We let it continue and humans keep trying to retrain themselves to remain employable.
b. We take a look at the skills that computers/machines can't have , at least in the near future, and try to create more of those jobs.
c. We let the 'financial' pain hurt people into reproducing less !! and wait for 'time' to solve this problem.

There is another less appealing point .i.e
d. We automate in a controlled manner.
This point, like the others, may be brought into force through the influence of suitable government policies being devised and deployed, but is a far less appealing one because capitalism amounts to profit maximization, and the most costly resource seems to be the human being ( even though it's available in the plenty !).

There's actually another way that is a combination of many of these..
e. Let unemployment be a reasonable state of affair for a fellow human and the government bears the load of  feeding, clothing and educating the unemployed and deploy them as needed.

This is not a new thought, but a thought that is dismissed as just that...a thought !

Enforcing this policy will force the government to start inventory-ing the skill sets available in the country, and setting forward projections of employable skills and create pressure points to encourage industry that deploys the maximum number of people.

If you look at it carefully, it simply means that handling unemployment needs to be set as a major, unavoidable goal statement and pushed through the government's throat to make it devise a plan around it.
This is in contrast to it being just another politician's slogan that remains nothing more than a slogan !

Office Schizophrenia

If you look all around in the office, you can find easily that we're so concerned about persenting the better side of ourselves for the world to see that we all are sort of schizophrenic in a way. I guess the disease is just an aggravation of what we keep practising everyday ! Would the ideal work environment be one where people are receptive enough of each other's 'real selfs' and this constant 'background job' of putting up the facade can be safely killed :-) HR practitioners should probably make it a barometer of measuring the success of engagement exercises but observing the extent to which the reserved, introverted workers deviate from their usual 'selves' ! Haven't come across any HR material that talks about this stuff. I guess I'll have to pick up stuff from the psychiatry department for this.

The presence of the real self would be such a performance enhancing drug for the workplace..

Virtual Reality

In Hindus, the whole world is the imagination of Vishnu, lying on his snake bed in Vaikunth. So the whole universe is a "mayajaal", or illusion. There are famous stories in which he tests the devotion of his devotees by throwing them into terrible situations in this illusory world..
In the real world, scientists have also prophesied that our ' mental image' of the world is but a measly projection of the senses. In essence, the world of the dog, the human, the cow are all different.
Probably that's the reason that seers of old have been emphasizing the importance of changing 'our own' way of looking at the world by altering 'ourselves' rather than trying to change the world around us to suit our mind.

In the new context, the computer engineers have reincarnated the Lord God Vishnu in a computer and his projections have come into the 'goggles' where we humans can see them :-)

Even though this is nothing more than a 'fad' in the world of technology, the impact of this will be very profound because we're about to begin the era where humans will confuse themselves between the 'real real' and the 'created real' ?

I hope the creators of this software have an India saint in their midst to keep things in perspective :-)

Wasted Cycles


In a past life, I worked as a part time DBA and an interface and batch process expert. An intriguing ( and disturbing) fact that I always saw was that the machine CPU always showed more than 80% free ! So pained was I to see this state of affairs, that I spent a lot of time devising processes that use parallel processing features of databases and ran multiple load sharing batch processes on the same data set to finish processes faster ( or to wrench out work from the CPU - if I may confess !). I even created mammoth denormalized structures  during lean period ( read - night time), so that reports could use them during the day. I even implemented the badly supported features like real-time trigger based updates, to keep the machine busy and spread out the processing evenly.
In hindsight, I realize that I was trying to achieve as an application programmer and analyst,  something that should have been the job of the chip designer, or the OS writer, or the package creator (database or ERP company guys) or all of them together. The application programmer is a 'end user' of these products ! He has a limitation to how intelligent and resourceful and clever he can be ? You cant run a grand prix on a bullock cart no matter what you do..

The very fact that the disks on a system are always churning while the CPU is dozing off - means that there's something seriously wrong with the way we're doing things in the world of computers..
To call ourselves intelligent, while we try covering up our limitations through CPU features like pipelining etc. is nothing short of sham. It's time someone got up and called it a day.

I wish I see it while I can still type :-)

Does automation really beget discipline and uniformity

Call it good advice or bad, the earliest influences on my programmer mind told me that requirement, design, implementation and redesign followed a vicious circle ?
Simply put, a requirement raised by a user 'seeds' the design. The design refines the requirements sometimes and finally things get implemented (hopefully !). The implementation sometimes pulls back on the design and requirement too and the give n take continues until someone gets bored and puts it on production !

After a while, age ( or bugs !) catch up and the piece of software undergoes a 'change' or a redesign. The lifecycle of the previous round of requirement/design and implementation haunt the current round like the shadow of a ghost from a stephen king movie :-) ..

The unwanted fallout is that the software gets embedded in the users' psyche so deep, that he never escapes from it's shadow and his mind goes around the old software while he's thinking of the next round of development he needs. It shackles him without him knowing it. It becomes the 'religion', the anchor - around which he's trapped.. the software becomes the 'business process' instead of the original intended evolution..

The 'good' fallout is that this psyche is infectious, and with this user's career path, job changes and network, the idea propagates and catches momentum to become a standard of sorts..!

Even the developer keeps following the 'safe' design everytime he needs to implement something similar anywhere else..

That, friends is what passes on for uniformity and discipline in the world of programmers.. :-)

PS : No offence intended to my comrades !

Nature will bill you

Costing model for natural resources :

When a guy digs the earth to get water that is not replenished by him, he consumes a resource irreversibly .. like any other resource consumption costed by 'authorities' or corporations, there should be a notional body  called 'nature', on behalf of which the individual should be costed for 'services rendered' ...

Funny, isn't it :-) But wait a while and this might be the biggest truth of our lives ! Nature might just setup the account itself ( or already has ??) and start costing in a way that we may consider too harsh.....