Cultural Dynamics

Ever wondered about the changing dynamics of the world (and please I am not talking about the financial dynamics) … what about the culture and demographics change in the world?

Let me look for London where I have spent more than 4 years. When you are walking on the road, every third person you meet will be a non Britisher. As per official Census figures of 2005, 40% of the London population are non-British. This includes Europeans, Asians (including Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Chinese, etc), Carribbeans, Africans, Latin Americans etc. And this % is increasing every year. The same is true for any major city in the world.

Within India itself, we have started seeing an increase in foreigners coming from all quarters of the world like Japan, China, Korea, UK, Germany, US , and needless to say, Bangladesh, Nepal, Afghanistan, Iran and the list goes on. And these are not tourists. These are people who have taken up jobs in India for long – term and who knows they might eventually settle down here.
This changing dynamics is not just meeting people of different cultures but a bit more. The different cultures eventually marry each other and the lines start blurring.

A recent and very much in news example of Barack Obama makes it very interesting. He was born to black Kenyan father and a white American mother. His mother was of mainly English, Irish and smaller amounts of German descent. After their divorce, his mother married an Indonesian and lived in Indonesia and Hawaii before moving back to US. A global diversity in just one family…So what do we call Obama – An American, Kenyan, Indonesian?
Inserting some Glamour Quotient into this blog: Voted as the most stylish and sexiest actress by multiple magazines – Jessica Alba. Jessica’s mother is of Danish and French Canadian descent and her father is of Mexican American descent. Back home, the beautiful actress Katrina Kaif was born to an Indian Kashmiri father and a white British mother. There are enough instances like these.
Sometimes I think in another 100 years there might not be people with single nationality, culture, origin, color etc… People would have moved around, married in different cultures and the new offsprings will be a mix of so many cultures that they cant be categorized under one single banner.
So we might have an Indian-American-Iranian-Kenyan person marrying a Nigerian-British-Japanese woman. Don’t you think?

In fact it brings me to another topic that I hope to cover some other time in my blog – How do we define a person’s cultural nationality – By birth, by citizenship, by allegiance, by residence or something else?

Necessity is the mother of all inventions

I have been in sales for past 5 years and have got the privilege of working with a variety of clients across many countries. Interestingly there is one question I face from most of my prospects -
Why has India succeeded in software sector and others haven’t? How is India producing some of the most bright and talented software engineers?
Is it because of we have many educational institutes? Is the quality of education really good? Are Indians naturally bright? Are we good in analytics and mathematics (the two most perceived requisites to be in software industry)?
Now we as Indians know that the reasons listed above might not be necessarily true. I don’t think we have the best of institutes. I don’t think we have the best of quality and coverage in education. And I definitely feel we are not the best mathematicians and analysts in the world. So what’s the real reason?
My most common response to all the above queries is fairly simple: Necessity is the mother of all inventions. India doesn’t provide any sort of social security benefits. It also doesn’t provide any assurance on employment. We have to fight for it. From school admissions to post graduation courses to final placements, everything is competition based. Even for a kid to get into a nursery school, there is a selection process (ask the parents who have to get their kids admitted to a nursery school). So from the time we are kids, the parents instil a sense of insecurity in us: Unless we study hard, we may not get into a better school or college. Unless we study hard, we may not get through the cream of institutes. Unless we do well at our respective courses, we may not get a placement.
All who try for engineering (atleast most of us) try for IITs, RECs and the other engineering institutes. Job security is prevalent only for the best of the institutes. The process goes on to higher educations as well like MBAs, MCAs and others.
Only the top 2 percent of the IIT applicants are admitted and to get into a decent department. Almost 2.7 lakh candidates appeared for CAT (Apart from IIMs, 118 B-schools also accept CAT Scores) this year (2008). IIM A alone has seen about 51,000 applicants this year. In CAT, success is awarded to only one percent of the total applicants.
With such kind of statistics and success ratio, Indians have to really try hard to get in. This competitive spirit goes a long way in Indians taking up some of the best jobs worldwide. And the success is not just restricted to software industry but extends to financial services, telecom, and other verticals as well. So that sums up my response in that single proverb I wrote earlier… necessity ….
Before I end, I will also like to highlight an increasing recent trend in India which may hamper our future prospects. Due to the booming demand in last few years (and please discount the current economic crisis), the competition has started decreasing. These days jobs are available for simple graduates (even BAs) in software companies. XII pass candidates with some add-on silly courses have started getting jobs in BPO industries. This is slowly going to decrease the competitiveness within us thus decreasing the quality of output from India. Unless we act now, we might very soon stop facing the queries with which I started this blog.

CMM Assessment - Worth it?

Almost a decade back, a craze started within IT companies to get themselves certified at CMM levels (the Capability Maturity Model) created by Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. This craze was more predominant with Indian IT companies to the extent that more than half of the world's CMM Level 5 companies are based in India. Though I don’t need to define CMM as it has got internalized within every software professional but it makes sense to see how the CMM tutorials defines it. CMM describes an evolutionary improvement path from an adhoc, immature process to a mature, disciplined process. The CMM covers practices for planning, engineering, and managing software development and maintenance. At the Optimizing Level or the CMM level5, the focus is on continuous process improvement.
Let me now summarize some of the survey results on success / failure ratio of IT projects. These have been taken from various surveys originated by the likes of KPMG, Robbins, Gioia, Center for Project Management, and many others.

• 51% of ERP implementations have been classified as unsuccessful
• 40% of the projects failed to achieve their business case within 1 year of going live
• Nearly half of the UK's largest companies suffered a failed IT project over the past three years
• Nearly half of respondents reported at least one project failure in the past year
• 77% of projects blow their budgets, with an average cost overrun of 169%

Basically there is no dearth on statistics on the net for failed projects along with their names and even vendors involved
After so many years of this certification process being heavily adopted by almost all major IT companies, we are still seeing a similar statistics on IT failures which was prevalent earlier. Most of these cos are certified at the highest level possible and have even gone ahead on trying out 6 sigma, CMMI, ISO, and many others. Shouldn’t there be a positive correlation with no of companies getting certified and success ratios of IT projects? Why haven’t we started seeing quality of code improving? At least have the internal processes improved? I am sure I don’t need to answer these based on my above statistics.
So are these certifications worth their hype or are they pure marketing gimmick? It might have started as a differentiator for these companies, but has now become just a qualifier. The SEI model was founded by the US ministry of Defense and was funded very (let me put this in BOLD) heavily and hence has received sufficient publicity. I don’t want to get into a criticism of this model as it has its own advantages. But I believe this has become just a requirement mandated by major outsourcers in selecting a vendor. This is more of a compliance factor in which to sustain in the ever competitive world, the vendors are trying hard to get themselves recognized and keep trying new models and certifications. But the spirit and the inherent purpose of creating such certifications are getting lost. And unless we look at the basic fundamentals on which these were created, they will lose its worth. In fact some of the niche and agile companies borne in today's scenario might start opting out of them.