All posts by Neil Harwani

Interested in movies, music, history, computer science, software, engineering and technology
Culture, Excellence, Innovation

Formula for Successful Innovation Driven Companies in IT industry

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There are many formulas to build a successful company:
1. Passion
2. Great investors and board with good mentors
3. Great product
4. Niche skills and services
5. Great legacy
6. Recruit the best, train them, mentor them, give them good career growth, etc.
And so on

But one that I have observed and learnt is another one. We won’t go into the discussion about the earlier ones given above but let’s look at another way to build excellence.

Excellence and innovation is driven by freedom, creativity, knowledge, skill and right intervention by management with positive re-enforcement, promotion of good attitude and removing the bad apples at the right time.

One of the primary enablers for this is less internal friction and a culture to deliver excellence, promotion of passion to perform and learn without unnecessary hindrance.

One of the best ways to do this is to find people in your core teams to go into the non core functions over time willingly and on their own. These people can build a culture that appreciates the problems of the majority core function employees.

An example, if you over time promote in any Information Technology company your core development/product team members via training, education, etc. into Finance, HR, Project Management, Support, PMO, Legal, Sales and other departments you will build a company that appreciates the problems that the core function faces and they will help/enable them which in turn results in innovation and culture of synergy with excellence.

This is not the only formula out their to build a great company but one of the many ways. Only when we perform as one unit do we succeed most of the times, don’t we?

Architecture

Architecture design

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One mistake many make while building architecture for any application / system is to build the architecture using best/latest technology in isolation.

Architecture design has to be mapped to the use case and requirements.

Areas listed below and more should be considered while making design for the architecture:
1. NFR (Non functional requirements)
2. Security
3. Groups/roles/etc.
4. Integration
5. Use case
6. Information processing, etc.

All of the above and more should be considered upfront and consideration should not just be given for the best/latest technologies. Unless for example we consider how many users will use the system, which type of information exists, what are it’s updation rates, etc. who will access the system with what rights, what scalability is needed, how fast will the system change, what are the uptime requirements, etc. we can’t build the right system.

All of the above should be covered right from design and appropriately data should be partitioned, security design should be built, scalability should be thought of and issues like groups/roles/users, identity and access management should be mapped to the use case or the requirement.

Social Media, Software

Social Media Solutions

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Social media is an evolving beast. From few sites and systems few years back to plethora of different sites and systems across the internet accessed from laptop/desktop/mobile – this domain is exploding currently.

LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, Google+, Yelp and so on. List is endless.

Everybody is talking of social media sentiment analysis and analytics over customer information, yes that’s an evolving and interesting field.

But something that is going to create a problem and will require innovation would be areas like:
1. How do you sync your information across various social media sites:
1-a. LIKES
1-b. COMMENTS
1-c. NEWSFEEDS
1-d. Etc.
2. What is your unique public and private unified profile across social media?
3. What is your network of connects across the various sites?
4. How are you perceived across these sites – a unified view?
5. How do you sync your contacts and network across various social media systems?
6. How do you enable similar privacy settings, access control, etc. across all social media sites?
7. Evolving threat management across social media for individuals

Many such questions will come up as social media matures. Lot of innovation, building of standards/protocols, tools and products would be needed in this new exploding social media sites/systems.

There was a phase where database access/import/export/features across various RDBMSes were standardized, operating systems related standards came out, ECM, integration, etc. came out with standards.

A similar phenomenon should and most likely will occur once social media expansion stabilizes and matures. It will be one level above technology and will be at functional/domain/social media feature level backed by unique new ways of implementing technologies. To give an example: if you export your contact from one phone, if you export CSV/EXCEL from one system you are able to import and sync it at other place, such solutions for problems listed above and many more upcoming areas would be needed.