Praveen Puri

Saturday, September 3, 2022

We Don't Talk About Inequality...

"When I was poor and complained about inequality they said I was bitter; now that I'm rich and I complain about inequality they say I'm a hypocrite. I'm beginning to think they just don't want to talk about inequality.”-Russell Brand

But They Were Rude to the Waiter...

"I don’t trust anyone who’s nice to me but rude to the waiter. Because they would treat me the same way if I were in that position." - Muhammad Ali

Sunday, August 21, 2022

Aesop, Thieves, and Politics

"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office."

- Aesop

Friday, August 19, 2022

Cloud and Big Data: Unexpected Expenses

As more systems move into the cloud, and companies rely on ever increasing amounts of data, operating costs can increase in unexpected ways.

Especially when companies use more than one vendor, with different pricing structures, it becomes a full time job just to track costs and optimize systems and infrastructure to keep costs down.

Knowledge Silos Hinder Software Developers

According to Stack Overflow's 2022 Developer Survey, 2/3 of developers run up against "knowledge silos" that slow them down. When needed data is stored in other, inaccessible systems, it compromises the effectiveness of your organization.

Thursday, August 18, 2022

The Great Resignation Also Affects Institutional Knowledge

Especially at tech companies, when workers quit, you not only have a loss of expertise, but you also suffer a loss of institutional knowledge.

What's the difference? If you lose a python developer, for example, you've lost the expertise of python development (which you can recover by hiring a new developer). But, if that developer knew the quirks of the accounting software that your company sells, and can quickly resolve bugs, then that is institutional knowledge that will take time and experience for someone to learn.

To guard against this, you need to encourage employees to document their knowledge of your applications and work processes. The worst way to do this is through requiring them to create complex, formal documents. Your workers are already busy, and this will get put off.

The best way is to encourage them to informally record what they learned as they solve issues. Blogs and wikis are ideal formats.

Tuesday, August 16, 2022

Tech Investments Wasted by poor/slow end-user adoption

According to an article in CIODive (https://www.ciodive.com/news/investments-attrition-tech-end-user/629538/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Issue:%202022-08-12%20CIO%20Dive%20%5Bissue:43785%5D&utm_term=CIO%20Dive),

60% of IT leaders feel that Digital project ROIs are threatened because end-users aren't adopting new tech quickly enough.

This is why my Strategic Simplicity® framework, with its 4 components (change simplicity, market simplicity, decision simplicity, user simplicity), is so important.

Change can't be "dumped" onto end-users. Their needs have to be incoporated in new products. Tech needs to serve the business. Users should not have to adopt sub-optimal processes to adjust to technology.