4 Fundamental Principles For Building Alumni Value Proposition

Taking cue from my previous post, I would like to extend the concept of Alumni Value Proposition (AVP) a little further. There is a framework for building AVP, which is simply based on four fundamental principles:

• Hire the best into the organization
• Let them build the organization
• Proudly Brand what they build
• Alumni constitute our extended organization

Hire the Best. Since people like to associate with likeminded people, if organization has good people then it will attract other good people. Anybody who gets selected to join such an organization considers it a privilege that he/she is getting the opportunity to work with other good people who would make a huge difference in his/her life.
Correspondingly it becomes organization’s responsibility to follow very high hiring standards to avoid dilution in the quality of its people, and secondly ensure that word gets around loudly that this organization is built with good people thus ensuring that good applicants pool continues to grow exponentially.

Built by the Best. Once organization has hired the best employees, it should let these employees take complete ownership of building the organization, and also have them take pride that their contributions is what makes this organization great.

• Let employees define the criteria for selecting right people for this organization and how to bring them onboard.
• Let employees take charge of inducting and mentoring new people into the organization.
  Let employees build a continuously learning organization by defining a culture of complete knowledge capture and sharing across the organization. Requiring everybody to document their learnings from projects and other activities they undertake – developing a strong habit and capabilities in employees to communicate well – extensively using tools like Blogs for external and internal publishing of contents.
• Let employees recognize what they are best at and then take pride in training others in the organization to be good at that.
• Let employees be the navigators who understand the tides of industry and the world around the organization, and then counsel others in the organization to mould their careers to be successful in rapidly changing tides.

Branding. As the organization does these great things it is equally important that it gets the word out. It should be proud of what it built and we must let others know how good it is from inside. Employees and Alumni are the true carriers of brand message. They should be encouraged to use blogs, message boards, trade magazines, conferences etc. to spread organization’s brand message.

Treat Alumni as part of extended organization. Alumni are a great asset for any company as they take companies message in their new companies. If that message is strong then it greatly benefits the company in attracting more good people. Organization must strive to stay connected with its Alumni and simultaneously create strong reasons for alumni to stay connected with it. To facilitate this it must use tools like Alumni website and newsletters.

Building Alumni Value Proposition based on this framework is our joint responsibility and our primary mission for 2008.

Posted by Rajiv Jain, CEO, OutworX Corporation

Web 2.0 Technology Driven 8 Business Trends

An enterprise create real wealth by combining technology with innovative ways of doing busines.This is what came out in The McKinsey Quarterly which identified 8 unique business trends empowered by the Web 2.0 technology in its article " “Eight Business Technology Trends to Watch”..

McKinsey’s Eight Business Technology Trends to Watch

• ‘Distributing co-creation’: "Technology now allows companies to delegate substantial control to outsiders—cocreation—in essence by outsourcing innovation to business partners that work together in networks. By distributing innovation through the value chain, companies may reduce their costs and usher new products to market faster by eliminating the bottlenecks that come with total control."
• ‘Using consumers as innovators’: "Consumers increasingly want to engage online with one another and with organizations of all kinds. Companies can tap this new mood of customer engagement for their economic benefit."
• ‘Tapping into the world of talent’: "As more and more sophisticated work takes place interactively online and new collaboration and communications tools emerge, companies can outsource increasingly specialized aspects of their work and still maintain organizational coherence."
• ‘Extracting more value from interactions’: "...a growing proportion of the labor force in developed economies engages primarily in work that involves negotiations and conversations, knowledge, judgment, and ad hoc collaboration—tacit interactions, "which will be core to the workforce by 2015.
• ‘Expanding the frontiers of automation’: "organizations have put in place systems to automate tasks and processes: forecasting and supply chain technologies; systems for enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and HR; product and customer databases; and Web sites. Now these systems are becoming interconnected through common standards for exchanging data and representing business processes in bits and bytes. What’s more, this information can be combined in new ways to automate an increasing array of broader activities, from inventory management to customer service."
• ‘Unbundling production from delivery’: "Use these technologies to offer other companies—suppliers, customers, and other ecosystem participants—access to parts of their IT architectures through standard protocols”.
• ‘Putting more science into management’: "The quality and quantity of information available to any business will continue to grow explosively as the costs of monitoring and managing processes fall......Information is often power; broadening access and increasing transparency will inevitably influence organizational politics and power structures."
• ‘Making business from information’: "Accumulated pools of data captured in a number of systems within large organizations or pulled together from many points of origin on the Web are the raw material for new information-based business opportunities."

So, "creative leaders can use a broad spectrum of new, technology-enabled options to craft their strategies." Apply these trends in a wide variety of businesses, and be the winner.

Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation

AJAX, Enterprise Mashups, and SOA

According to JSON inventor andYahoo! Architect Douglas Crockford, one of the things that AJAX has enabled is mashups, which he boldly calls "the most interesting innovation in software development in at least 20 years."To him,"mashups are the fulfillment of the promise of competent architecture and highly reusable modules”, offering “a whole new class of interactivity and value”.

Mashups originate with Web 2.0, which epitomizes development on the fly. With the rediscovery of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) technology and the mushrooming popularity of rich Internet applications, we now have the ability to create mashups that quickly solve business problems by using the standard dynamic interfaces that front services. Mashups provide a quick and easy way to solve many of today’s simple business problems — and should scale nicely to solve more complex and far-reaching problems in the future. Now-a-days, more and more enterprises are looking into how they can benefit from mashups to improve their business.

With the increasing use of mushups, “the line is blurring between the enterprise and the Web. However, mashups live on that porous perimeter, offering the reusability of an SOA plus very rapid development using prebuilt services outside the firewall. Soon, we may live in a world where it’s difficult to tell where the enterprise stops and the Web begins. It’s scary — and exciting at the same time,” says Dave Linthicum, a blogger in InfoWorld.

More complex mashups move toward composite applications - made up of many services, which is an advanced SOA concept. And, enterprises should be prepared properly to leverage mushups for their business growth. In this context, it is better advisable that the enterprises need “to design and deploy an SOA with mushups in mind”. He further adds, “mashup preparation can be divided into six familiar stages: requirements, design, governance, security, deployment, and testing. These are core architectural bases you must touch if you are to arrive safely in the promised land of mashups on top of an SOA.” They make the value of an SOA much more visible over a much shorter term.

Now, we are in 2008, and we need to first know a few critical questions to ask next about AJAX, Web 2.0,RIA (Rich Internet Applications),Mushups, and then look for their answers. Eric Miraglia of Yahoo! Douglas Crockford, creator of JSON; Coach Wei, founder and CTO of Nexaweb; Chris Schalk, developer evangelist for Google; John Crupi, CTO of JackBe; Joshua Gertzen, lead developer of the ThinWire AJAX Framework; Kevin Hakman, co-founder of TIBCO General Interface; etc have raised a few pertinent questions:

• How significant is Enterprise Mashups to you (your customers)?


• How can I make AJAX applications that easily go offline? (i.e. can work easily and in a similar manner when not connected to the Internet.)


• Will JavaScript 2.0 be a success, or a dud?


• Is AJAX about more than just web development? Should we be campaigning to replace all desktop apps with an AJAX equivalent?


• How do you apply user interface patterns and user experience design to your AJAX project?


• What are people mostly using AJAX for? Enhancing existing website, building a new website, building an application, replacing an old client/server application, etc?
  

Read complete AJAX questions


Posted by Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation

2008: The Year of RSS

A latest post on newsgator speaks about what will be the trend throughout 2008 in RSS, both from the consumer and enterprise RSS perspective. It highlighted the following trends in the year ahead:

Portal Plumbing. Using RSS / Atom as a way for backend systems to funnel information (both publishing and retrieving) into a single access points that are easy to use and easy to manage. As increasing number of users are using iGoogle and Netvibes as their own aggregator, and are using RSS to accomplish this.

RSS will be the transfer protocol between yourself and your social networks.

Ease of use will be greatly enhanced with discovery and filtering mechanisms to help you find new content and sort/organize the feeds you already subscribe to.

Atom publishing will become more important as well within social networks. A widely adaptable comment publishing protocol will emerge that would allow users to comment on an item.

Within the enterprise, the use of authenticated feeds to access transaction and master data systems will rise.

Posted by Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation

Google Planning Online Storage Service!!!!

Google is developing an integrated service that would allow users to store and organize their information on Google’s servers, according to a report in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal. The Journal said that, internally, the service was known at one point as "My Stuff."

With this service, Google would join an array of vendors, such as IBackup, Xdrive, and eSnips. Itself a veteran of the online storage industry, Google’s Web-based tools, such as Picasa, Gmail, and Docs, already provide free storage and additional levels of paid storage.

Posted by Praveen Panjiar,Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation

Mission 2008: Alumni Value Proposition

Companies that create a strong Alumni Value Proposition for their employees successfully attract and retain best people. Aah!? You might wonder. Employee retention and Alumni in same sentence, isn’t that an oxymoron?

Ok, let me try to explain why I made above statement with couple of examples. McKinsey and Solomon Brothers are two companies that are considered most coveted companies (in their respective domains) by every jobseeker. Although if you talk to any employee at any level in these companies, he would tell you that his jobs is extremely demanding, he works almost 16 to 20+ hours a day 7 days a week, often for lower pay than his counterparts in other companies.
So if it is not the money, and if it is not work-family life balance, then what attracts jobseekers to these companies that they always consider them as dream companies to work for.

After speaking with a few senior people at McKinsey and other organizations I realized that it is the Alumni Value Proposition (AVP). When a company tries to create AVP it is no different from what good universities do to attract best students and give to its students when they become Alumni.

So is there a framework for building AVP?

It starts with building a comprehensive process for selecting the best, because first pillar of building AVP is to have best people in the organization. And if you have good people, they connect with former colleagues, locally and globally, build a positive environment about the organization, attract smart people, and, eventually, inspire them to join and build the organization. Also, these very people help peers in career building by counseling and mentoring them properly and adequately.
But, what if these very good people opt to move on to some other organizations. You would be pleasantly surprised to know that it is Alumni who eventually become a great asset for the country.

How? Let’s find out.

It is alumni that take companies message to their new companies, and if that message is strong then it greatly benefits the company in attracting more good people. In today’s fiercely competitive knowledge-driven market, only those companies can thrive which believe in and create AVP. To stay connected with their Alumni, companies need to leverage tool such as Alumni network website and newsletters that enable them to

• Connect with former colleagues, locally and globally
• Communicate and expand social network via live and online events
• Collaborate on special projects or pilots, find a job, a candidate, a supplier, or generate new business contacts

Further, companies need to work on Knowledge Creation, which has been widely recognized as strategically important for organizational learning and innovation, requiring employees to document their learning from projects and other activities they undertake – developing a strong habit and capabilities in employees to communicate well , using tools like Blogs, social community sites, external and internal publishing of contents, etc.
Teamwork plays an important role in AVP, where people own responsibility collectively. It is teamwork that motivates employees to take pride in mentorship and coaching other employees (old or new).

To add grist to the mill, companies let employees take ownership in building the organization, let have them take pride that their contributions is what makes this organization.
Don’t you think that their contributions to recruiting process play a big role in bringing the best into the company.

Branding is one exercise that companies need to do constantly to deliver the message clearly, confirm the organization’s credibility, connect with your target prospects, motivate the audience, and, most importantly, create a positive environment for the company across the industry. Apart from PR activities including media coverage, seminars, webinars, etc, employees and alumni are the carriers of brand message.

And, now, let me conclude that building Alumni Value Proposition based on this framework is our Mission 2008. On the sheer strength of AVP, I look forward to the future with a goal of attracting the best people, creating a niche for OutworX. Alumni represent the company, peers will look up to you for career counseling, and alumni will help establish the future strength of our company. The journey has begun…

Posted by Rajiv Jain, CEO, OutworX Corporation

6 Essential Things Developers Need to Know About Google’s OpenSocial

Folks,

Awfully sorry for giving latest updates on Google’s OpenSocial model for social networking applications so late, as your Blog Evangelist was a lit bit tied up with some other important activities.

What perceived by some as Google’s smart move to outmaneuver the increasing popularity of Facebook, but this is not going to stop developers from building applications for Facebook.

But that doesn’t mean that OpenSocial doesn’t have advantages. According to Joe Kraus, a Director of Product Management at Google, OpenSocial will make things easier for developers "because it makes it easier for them to focus on making their web apps better; they get lots of distribution with a lot less work. It's good for websites, because they can tap into the creativity of the largest possible developer community (and no longer have to compete with one another for developer attention). And finally, it's good for users, because they get more applications in more places."

Better if you look at the 6 essential things, which you need to know about Google’s OpenSocial:

1. OpenSocial only offers the lowest common denominator, not the full richness of each social networking platform.
2. OpenSocial is largely based on open standards and there's only minor developer lock-in.
3. OpenSocial is a real doorway to social networking data portability as well as potential security holes.
4. OpenSocial is simple and straightforward but also capable of developing full-blown, rich Internet applications.
5. OpenSocial is from Google and excessive philanthropy should not be expected.
6. A new era in competency in social software is being ushered in by models like OpenSocial.

If you want to know more about Google OpenSocial, look at the video....



Posted by Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation