Contemplating Employee Loyalty

CRM Mastery eJournal has an interesting excerpt from Employee Loyalty: What Makes them Stay?:

"Managers need to know how to create effective relationships. Supervisors need tools to help them identify the "value" in the life of employees. They can then use this information to begin to build relationships......

Here is a simple concept to consider. Use the CalibrationCoaching concept of the YMCA. No, not the silly dance song from the 70s, but the simple acronym that outlines how to coach in almost any situation:

• Your Thoughts - open the conversation by listening to the employee's perspective on the issues.
• My Thoughts - share your perspective with the employee. Explain the details and how they can change their behavior.
• Calibration - discuss what needs to change -- choose no more three areas for focus.
• Action - define expectations and set a timeline for change."

IMHO: Attrition levels are big concern for me, as I have written here, here and here. And yes, Managers do need to change the way they behave towards there reportees....treating them as a group, as a team, and reinforcing the precednce of the team's goals over personal goals. Also, at the same time, focussing on each individuals' own aspiration and trying to weave them into those of the team. Ultimately, it boils down to balancing the benefits equation: the higher pay, and the anxiety, time for settling in, from switching jobs, versus the trust, culture, and yes, familiarity of the current situation, but lower pay. Our job is to make sure that the latter part of the equation is always heavier.

Oracle Releases new WebCenter

From ZDNet:

"Oracle announced today WebCenter Suite 10g R3, which it describes as a "next-generation user interaction environment." It will deliver task-oriented, contextual, multi-channel interactions for information workers, bringing Web 2.0 technology to the enterprise," according to the press release. And, it's part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware. Not only that, Oracle WebCenter Suite is licensed as an option on top of Oracle Application Server Enterprise Edition for $50,000 per CPU.

....The demo of WebCenter given {this morning} at OracleWorld was impressive, with blogs, wikis, threaded discussion, widgets, instant messaging, search, VoIP, RSS and mashhups all rolled into one application development environment. However, two key components–WebCenter Composer, for creating and customizing the application user interfaces, business rules, profiles and policies, and WebCenter Spaces, which allows individuals and groups to collaborate and manage projects–are not available in the first release."

An attempt to bring Web 2.0 technologies to the Enterprise through the Fusion platform. For me, there will be limited impact of this addition to the stack, mainly because there are a lot of cheap options available for people trying to collaborate, like JotSpot. Maybe we'll see it bundled somewhere.....

Indian IT industry's (forthcoming) woes

Vinnie has a great post up on India's inflexion point. To summarize, he brings out three trends in Indian IT services environment which might hamper their continued growth:

1. Labor Shortages
2. Failure to develop significant competence in the business/program management domain, as opposed to technical domain
3. Shying away from new investments (Vinnie says Capex, but I believe that except for human resources, more an operational cost anyways, there is no significant investment in any key area)

As an aside, an intersting conversation is going on at Infosys Blog on talent shortages.

IMHO: I have written about this before here, here and here. I would also include:

1. Lack of focus: All Indian IT vendors want to be everything to everybody, consequently lacking the depth to tackle specific challenges

2. Underutilization of resources: Efficiency and productivity are frowned upon as I have written here.

3. Short term thinking: Quarter numbers are the most important items on every agenda, punishment from the market deeply feared. This manifests as a lack of forward, longer term thinking and hence obstructs development of competencies to face future challenges.

4. Walking the Talk: The use of IT inside the industry is abysmal. HR systems, and to some extent Financial systems are used, but in silos. CRM technology, Web 2.0 technologies, and other newer technologies are severely underutilized. These are the same technologies that we sell.

All in all, while there is a lot of buzz about the industry, the shortcomings pointed out above dampen the long term prospects. Playing Safe seems to be the mantra. As Seth would say: Playing Safe is Risky!!!

PS: Just shifted to the new Beta Blogger. So some of the Category Links might not work correctly. Do drop me a note if you come upon any such links.

Gearing Up for 2020

Paul Kedrosky has up some findings of a June study by the RAND corporation, highlighting the key technologies for 2020, and the countries best equipped to deliver:

Category:Trends, EmergingMarkets