Category: Analytics

A ppt I helped make and present at Shared Value Summit India

An article I wrote for it prior to this

 

 

Ten Reasons the new Bond Movie will be as flat as a low alcohol american beer.

1. Bond Girls hmm- An overage Monica Belluci ( no Botox) and overcold Lea Seydoux (looking more Scandanavian than French)
2. No good song-What a letdown after Skyfall Adele song
3. Bad Torture Scene- I mean really computer aided torture is not so cool as waterboarding in Die Another Day. Maybe they should get Quentin to direct the torture scenes
4. Q – Gadgets were on a budget
5. Two Bond Villians- One has won two Oscars and was too charming in the chilling scenes. The other has played Moriarty and did not come across so cerebral here
6. M- The new Male M actually kills with hands not brain. No no  again -a great actor frowning his eyebrows away with no depth or conviction
7. Trying to mix politics (post Snowden) with entertainment
8. Bad Timing – Just not relevant or tasteful post Paris (terror attacks to stage manage cooperation between allies)
9. fourth innings for Craig- I wish he just shut up and shot. When did Bond turn from one liners to dramatic conversations
10. weak metaphors- from the childhood connection to the Oddjob reference(?) , too many weak connections keep story tepid

Do us a favor. Fire Craig and Hire Cumberbatch for the next round.

As per http://www.aco.nato.int/page12730109 and http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/nato_countries.htm

France remains a founder-member of NATO. It hosts several NATO agencies such as the NATO Helicopter Management Agency, the NATO Hawk Management Office, the Research and Technology Agency, and the Central Europe Pipelines Management Agency which is responsible for the movement, storage and delivery of fuel in Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. In 2009 France ended its 40 year break in participating within the NATO command structure, but France has been a faithful ally by committing its troops to NATO operations.

As per this France is invoking the rest of EU and Russia but not NATO

Article 42.7 of the Lisbon treaty, has never before been invoked. It is modeled on the Nato Article Five commitment, and says that if a country is “the victim of armed aggression on its territory, the other Member States shall have towards it an obligation of aid and assistance by all the means in their power.”

With 129 dead, now is the not to time for France to drag feet. With 230 dead in airplane bomb, Russia is already hitting targets in Daesh held territory. NATO and Russia together hitting targets invokes memories of the Allies in World War 2.

The UN Security Council remains relevant, and indeed the Iraq war proved how much better multilateral action is to unilateralism.

If NATO was relevant for Afghanistan , it is much more relevant to Daesh. By using the name Daesh, they intend to play down the imagery of Islamic State (ISIS) to reduce the propaganda recruitment that it is the West against Islam (clash of civilizations).

http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_110496.htm?

Highlights

• Collective defence means that an attack against one Ally is considered as an attack against all Allies.
• The principle of collective defence is enshrined in Article 5 of the Washington Treaty.
• NATO invoked Article 5 for the first time in its history after the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States.
• NATO has taken collective defence measures on several occasions, for instance in response to the situation in Syria and in the wake of the Ukraine crisis.
• NATO has standing forces on active duty that contribute to the Alliance’s collective defence efforts on a permanent basis.

 

It is NATO that should commit ground troops in sectors away from Russia. It is Russia that should be okay to fight alongside NATO ( or be exposed)

The enemy of a friend is an enemy. The enemy of an enemy is a friend.

France needs to do the French thing and help bring back the Allies together ( which it did in both World Wars) .

Else we will have much more attacks on Western Soil.

 

 

Sketching is a great to release nascent creativity. My efforts though convince me I have some more miles to go

1. Don’t write when you are angry
2. If you wrote something when angry, don’t hit send
3. Keep angry email in drafts folder and see it every two hours. Edit a few lines
4. Delete each and every word that you can delete and retain coherency in email. Delete each and every recipient in cc- till you come to bare minimum of people that should be informed
5. A smiley usually lessons tensions
6. Never give surprises in email. Call before.
7. Don’t use copy all . Don’t use BCC. Dont use slang.
8. Keep it professional. Everyone is doing their job. Everyone has issues that they are fighting.
9. Revise and Edit. Revise and Edit
10. People who write good emails have better career progress than people who write so so emails.

Communication makes the world go round more than job performance does.  Life in unfair but thats the way it is.

Some people like to take and take. They will demand more vacation time, more pay, more stock options. They usually end up whining in a negative manner having failed to achieve success in lets take and take attitude.

Some people pretend they like to give and give, though they really are sub consciously taking more than they are giving. Hypocrisy with attitude can work in sales and marketing but not in real life.

To build a unicorn statup you need ninja hackers. One of the best lines in the famous hacker attitude is – attitude is no substitute for competence

Sometimes we need to turn our past habits of smug success to hungry learning and probing. There are seasons to turn in every startup and you better change your attitude before your attitude hurts your baby unicorn.

 

Business Analytics as it used to be called before it became branded as data science has two decade long history in India. It’s roots were in outsourcing, as associate divisions of large Information Technology firms

The setting up of business analytics in the 1990s was done by two centres- McKinsey Knowledge Centre (1998) ( by the global McKinsey consulting company) and GE Analytics ( by GE corporation).

GE Analytics (1998) was a separate company headed by an XIMB Professor Shrikant Dash https://www.linkedin.com/in/sdash1 which was then merged with GECIS to be a division called ACOE analytics centre of excellence.  In 2005 GECIS was spun off by GE to become GENPACT. ( The author worked briefly for Dash, GE , GECIS  )

Among the people helping set up McKinsey Knowledge center were Neeraj Bhargava and his team. Neeraj later became CEO at WNS Global (2002) and helped take WNS to it’s IPO. Assorted McKinsey alumni helped to boot up WNS especially in it’s analytics division called Knowledge Services. ( The author worked briefly for WNS Knowledge Services)

Business research was primarily pioneered by Evalueserve founded in 2000  by IBM as well as McKinsey alumni. They also may have been responsible for popularizing the term KPO ( Knowledge Process Outsourcing) as a differential brand from BPO ( Business Process Outsourcing). Evaluserve expanded from Business research to financial research, market research but was not so succesful in efforts to establish itself as a leading analytics player.

From Captive Centres to Third Party Offshoring was the next big shift in outsourcing that affected analytics. In the meantime American Express had the largest captive centre (for analytics primarily at parent company).

GENPACT and WNS were and remained leaders in BPO but were joined by EXL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EXL )  in adding Analytics as an added service to its offshoring portfolio.

In June 2006: EXL acquired Inductis, a Analytics firm that had been a pioneer till then in being a pure play analytics company. There were other smaller companies that got similarly acquired ( Adventity by Sutherland Global , Marketics by WNS, marketRX by Cognizant, Symphony by GENPACT)

The leading IT and software services companies in INDIA like Infosys, TCS and in particular WIPRO did start their own analytics divisions but they were primarily aimed at cross selling analytics to existing clients.

GENPACT was listed in 2007 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genpact) and its revenue from analytics is not known though it is generally considered to be one of the premium priced analytics company. As of 2012 it’s analytics revenue were said to be $250 million.

The confused strategy, premium pricing, cross-selling outsourcing with analytics  of all these players led to a gap that was exploited by Mu SIgma. Founded by Dhiraj Rajaram in 2004, Mu Sigma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_Sigma_Inc. ) expanded rapidly to be the first pure play analytics company above 5000 employees. Dhiraj was brilliantly assisted by his wife Ambika, who played a role similar to what Sudha Murthy did at Infosys.Ambiga continues to works for Mu Sigma and has played multiple roles. This probably makes her the most influential  woman in data science as a service in India ( and given’s Mu Sigma size, probably the world )

( The author briefly met them when Mu-Sigma was 200 member and then 600 member strong)

In February 2013, Mu Sigma received an investment of $45 million from MasterCard, which placed the company over the $1 billion unicorn milestone. It also marked a vindication in the model of treating analytics separately and distinct from offshoring services

Fractal Analytics was founded in 2000 and managed to survive both the acquisition binge by the big players as well as the cyclical turns in the offshoring business. It is another pure play analytics company with both a long history, a comparatively early focus on pure play analytics as distinct from outsourcing and comparatively recent focus on venture fund-raising efforts. Fractal continues to grow rapidly, and has attracted multiple rounds of investment.

(The author has briefly met and interacted with the CEO of Fractal, where he also once trained in R)

In 2014, the people calling in analytics industry in India started calling themselves data scientists and they all lived happily ever after 😉 .*

( This is a brief article- it is a continuous work in progress that is trying to chronicle how an industry grew and flourished)

*the Big Data as well as Data Science movements have led to tremendous growth opportunities as well as risks for Indian analytics companies who now have to compete with Silicon Valley startups for analytics  as a product than as a commoditized service.