Redundant Processes

Last 12-18 months have been tough for most businesses and we have seen wide scale redundancies in jobs. Most analysts & observers are so much focused on corporates cutting people in order to reduce costs. But I’m surprised to see that most organizations pay no attention to processes and making them redundant based on their level of importantance. In my observations people continue to follow processes & generate reports as if it is business as usual… and that too with lesser people. We should be thinking about Process Redundancies and develop a 3-6-9 months roadmap to get rid of unnecessary processes that cost us time, efforts and hence money.

Loss of my travel buddy

We arrived in Copenhagen a couple of hours back from Honningsvag. It was a long journey with 3 flight changes. Our bags took some time to arrive and to my horror I realised that the handle for my bag was broken. It is almost impossible to carry a bag without its handle unless I lift and carry it. So I walked upto the SAS counter to complain and they acknowledge the fault. They reacted quickly and replaced my bag with a new one.

As we started shifting my stuff from the bag…thoughts started flying… and then the it struck me that I’m going to abandon a travel buddy. You might think I’m crazy but people who spend a lot of time on the road will tell you how important it is to have a bag that serves you well. Quite a few requirements are there – sturdy, compact, style, water-proof, design etc…

This bag was perfect for my travel needs and accompanied me to 20 odd countries and traveled over 300,000 miles. It never failed me. It was always there when I rushed for flights or once in a while missed them and got stuck.

In no time my stuff was transfered to the new bag and with heavy heart I bidded farewell to my travel buddy who went through some crazy travel with me. All I could say was Thank You!

Confusion over UGC, Social Media & Video

This is a conference season and we’ll find same people speaking at different conferences week after week. Next week I’m speaking on a panel at the ad:tech in Shanghai on User Generated Content. Over last 3 years I have seen this topic discussed to death so I’m busy thinking of what exactly has changed in UGC over last 3 years. Add to that we were casually informed that there are other panel topics like Social Media, Search & Video etc and we should not touch those topics or overlap. I was a bit shocked with that casual information and asked myself whether UGC would be of any relevance without Social Networks, Video Platforms, RSS, and Search. And the answer was NO. So I don’t think I can put UGC in a silo and frankly speaking I don’t know how to create that silo. Let me explain why -

People generate two types of content – long form content and short form content – and a small fraction of this content is original and rest consists of mashups. I personally think not much has changed in the long form content except the content generation, distribution & hosting platforms are much better & user friendly. I think short form content is really driving the growth of UGC – people putting out status messages on IM or Social Networks, people commenting on status or other updates, people tagging each other etc. I also think that the content distribution has become very sophisticated and hence people get to new content quickly. Essentially the ecosystem (Social Networks, Video Platforms, RSS, Emails, IMs, Search Engines, Publishing Platforms) around UGC has progressed tremendously and it is helping in making UGC popular.

I’m looking forward to raising some of these issues & discussing them on the panel. Lets see how that goes..

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