The Work Bubble Concept

After what happened in 2008, we all know what an Asset bubble is. I am sure we knew it before that also but the glamor quotient came only after 2008.

Well, today I will expose you to what is a "Work Bubble". As you would have guessed, its not a complex phenomena which needs experimental evidence to be proved. Its just an abstraction of what we see around ourselves sometimes, typically in large organizations.

The genesis interestingly lies in the following simple traits of human behavior

1. Everyone wants to save their ass - No one wants to own up anything. Everyone always wants an excuse in case things go wrong.

2. Everyone wants to find work where there's none - Well does it need any explanation? People have to justify their salaries.

Its like disguised employment. Bringing in an analogy, work bubble means creating an illusion of work when there's none and charging the customer for that.

Now a visual representation of what I want to explain:

This is more like the ant story we have all heard/read here and there. But what does this entail?

This entails polynomially less "actual" work than portrayed out to be. Polynomially more costs , polynomially less efficient solutions. But do we care?

What this leads to is a false belief that things are on track because you are measuring the wrong things to track progress. Instead of measuring the actual work done, we measure the number of documents made till now, lines of code written till now, and taking a little more liberty sometimes we also tend to mention that meetings which we have held till now to showcase progress. Nothing could be further from the ideal scenario. In this respect, Eric Ries (a champion of this cause) is coming up with some amazing tips and a book.

At the end of the day, its about communicating clearly and getting the things done. No doubt communication is most critical and cannot be undermined. For sure, without consensus things cannot progress. But how much effort you need, to make communications simple and scalable. No doubt there will be some necessary non value adding activities.But in its guise of communication so much non value added activities are authorized by design that its close to appalling. 

Its like a Ponzi scheme. When everything is hunky dory this doesn't matter. However when going gets tough, pressure is exerted on the bubble. And for those of you who have studied surface tension, would appreciate the distress of a bubble under such pressure. Unfortunately this bubble is more thick skin and takes more time to bow out but bow out it shall.

Why it matters in IT?

Work bubble will not be a nuisance in industries where we don't have headcount linked revenue model.However,  IT services is in one of those phases where currently the prices are moving from transient to  stabilized levels based on the nature of work. Hence commoditized work would have downward pricing pressure and upward cost trends. On top of that, for the foreseeable future the incumbent model is here to stay. In such places, cumulative work bubble impact will become huge and almost wrecking for any organization.

Here's hoping that this bubble will also burst sometime and unlike the Financial industry which is back to its perilous money making ways, the tech service industry will actually come out stronger with better frameworks. Though they are being adopted to solve other problems , approaches like MVP, Agile, SCRUM are the way forward in cleansing the mess. Hoping these will not get corrupted.

Amazon's experiment with business model

An article in McKinsey Quarterly mentions De-bundling of Production from Delivery. It has been proclaimed as one of the main technology trends going forward. Here is the link. The logic is simple - it helps companies to utilize their fixed assets better by segregating and distributing its capacity better. Amazon has had a great reputation as far as innovation is concerned. Jeff Bezos (amidst all the cynicism from industry pundits and investors) showed a great example of De-bundling by opening up its computing power and storage capacity to be used by other small businesses who cannot afford astronomical cost of monolithic assets. This is not the first time that Amazon faces flak about doing some thing different. Earlier when Amazon opened its 20 distribution centers and logistics services to other companies, investors were worried that the focus is shifting from the core business and then it was Kindle - the ebook reader from Amazon. In this post Seth Godin captures the cynicism about Kindle beautifully.

Like most computer networks, Amazon's uses as little as 10% of its capacity at any one time just to leave room for occasional spikes. Rest of the time this capacity is idle. It only makes sense that some thing should be done with these capacities. Look at it in a way that these excess capacities built in are just like waste until unless utilized. They are like the excess capacities built in the car. If some data is gathered about capacity utilization of personal cars, it would show almost the same numbers i.e around 10%. The rest of the time that capacity is going waste.

And why there will be customers for such service? Simply because the marginal cost of using such resources is less for them using this model. The customers will be able to get their websites online at much lesser cost and much more quickly. This service will in fact will fructify many more start-ups which can do which was not possible economically earlier. There are many examples, one of them being SmugMug Inc which plans to save $500,000 annually by using Amazon servers for storage.

Though to start with the revenues from this operation are small, this service is surely going to pay in the long run. Ya, I get this whole logic that computing and storage will become cheaper, but the trend might not continue as we move to quantum levels of miniaturization.

I like the statement by Jeff Bezos - "We are willing to go down a bunch of dark passageways and occasionally we will find some thing that really works". And as the recent results amidst all the recessions fear show, it does work out for Amazon. It has come out with impressive results crushing street expectations. Here is the link. Well these results might not be related to this particular practice by Amazon, surely it does reflect previous innovations which are paying off right now..

I hope Amazon keeps innovating and surprising all of us and changing paradigms time and again.It has done it with online retail, with Kindle and now with De-bundling. Amazon has faced lots of controversies and have proved all cynics wrong in the past and recently so with Kindle. Which brings us to another important point :-

Some times the market may not see the value of the change you want to bring in the system. I had a dialogue with Seth Godin himself (over email of course) and this is what he said:

"yes, that's exactly it
great marketers persist or work with their story and their market and get through to them eventually.
Take a look at "Crossing the Chasm" a great book on the topic..."

Happy Republic Day

Happy Republic Day!

Merriam Websters dictionary describes Republic as :- A government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law.

The officers and representatives are responsible and accountable to us. Often its the accountability which is lacking because they think these representatives are invincible and answerable to none.

A step is the right direction is increasing the efficiency of the Grievance Redress system. By bringing it online Government of India has made it easier for all citizens to file our grievances (Portal for Public Grievance - http://pgportal.gov.in/). It does not become easier than this.
Also you can track the action status on your grievance and escalate in case the action taken is not satisfactory.

I am sure though, that the utilization of such portals will be very dismal. Well I guess apart from spreading the news about portal government has done its job. Now, we need to reciprocate.
So, lets help make this endeavor work. Please use the portal whenever you have any grievance against any government authority rather than shying away from hassles because now they are none. It believe we owe this much to our country.

I have updated the link in my bookmarks. Have you?