Justice Doomed

The recent verdict dispensed by the Supreme Court of India on Section 377 of IPC has generated huge clamor in public domain. The major point of conflict is the wordings of the verdict that reflect a mediocre, medieval, and regressive mindset of judges who risked their sensibility in addressing a larger democratic and human rights issue, in rather the most imbecile way possible. Articulating this judgment, first, they have contradicted the fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution of India, and second, misread the universal democratic principles.

Decriminalization of homosexuality has nothing to do with culture, religion, law and state; it's a consensual act between two free adults who have every right to do whatever they want to in a liberal society. Keeping an archaic, meaningless, orthodox piece of penal code, which has no relevance in the current social dynamics is another reference of state crime, and, simply, it reflects how vulnerable is India as the largest democracy of the world – the democracy that doesn't uphold the basic principles of human rights. This judgment is perhaps the most regressive one in the recent history and, beyond question, it degrades the democratic index of India in a modern world. In all modern democracies of the world, civil liberty takes the front seat of progression, and in India, it's almost invisible in action.

While political classes are now squarely blaming the verdict and reacting to this judgment in the most opportunistic way, they have hardly done anything significant in all these years. And the most incredible point in the context of this judgment is that even after 67 years of independence, India is still servile to the laws enacted by the Britishers some 150 years ago. As a parliamentary democracy, India has not only failed to imbibe the principles of modern democracy, but also it has aborted the mechanism of delivering fair justice to its citizens. Whether political, judicial, or bureaucratic, each organ of state has proved inefficient, indolent, and digressive to the modern democratic principles. Now is the time to overhaul the system in letter and spirit.  

Building Your Brand in 10 Simple Steps

Your brand is perhaps the most valuable asset of your organization. However, many business owners don’t understand its importance completely. And that could be the reason why many companies still struggle to create a niche market segment for them. Before venturing into brand development strategy, you should understand the concept of brand. Brand is your company's reputation and visibility in the market place.

Many business owners think spending a lot on advertising and publicity can create a better brand. Wrong. Brand is not what you just publicize to your target customers; it's more than that. The history of advertising also reveals that many companies leverage the advertising route to build their brand in public memory, but that has a limited impact. Today, consumers are educated and smart. They can easily differentiate between the real and fake publicity. So what matters here is what you promise must be delivered, else consumers will never follow you.

A highly successful brand needs a synchronized operational and marketing approach. If the marketing department doesn't correctly understand the values of your products or services offerings, the chance is that you will unmistakably land into trouble. Successful brand doesn't happen overnight. It needs consistent efforts from all departments. For example, a service company offering software services should focus on the quality of service vis-a-vis pricing strategy to edge over its competitors. You should know what your competitors are offering, what's their pricing strategy, what's their post-sales strategy, etc. Without that you will fail to deliver a solid brand strategy.

10 Simple Steps for Brand Development

1. Develop your brand story. Your brand speaks about your products/services, your corporate culture, your identity, how you care about your customers, and how you are different from your competitors. Consumers always need a compelling story that matches with their requirements. If your products or services won't deliver that vital value to them, they won't care whatever you do.
2. Consider your business strategy. Your business and brand are inseparable. They are like body and soul. While formulating your branding strategy, don't forget to include some of your business strategies. For example, if your company is planning to reduce the price of a product, then ensure that this specific information be a part of brand communication.
3. Identify your target customers. This is the most important part of brand strategy. First, find out who are your target customers. Everybody can't be your customers, if you are not selling products like salt and sugar. You must carry out extensive research to clearly identify your target customers. For example, if you are selling diamond necklace, your target customers should be women with high income group. When your focus becomes narrower, you can ensure faster growth. Be specific while addressing your target audience.
4. Build your brand positioning. Once you define your target customers, the next step you need to execute is categorizing the customers. You should know which customers groups need your services or products the most. If your competitor is targeting a specific customers group, you can create your own and address them with specific benefits that they would receive. A typical brand positioning statement comprises three to five sentences and captures the essence of what you wish to deliver. Just remember, you must deliver what you would like promise.
5. Develop your messaging strategy. Messaging is the most powerful tool that translates strangers to you customers. Your messaging should address to your various target audiences such as potential clients, potential customers, opinion leaders, employees, and other stakeholders in you business. While defining your core messaging strategy, you should consider the interest of each audience group. For example, the messaging for your employees should be different from that of your customers.
6. Develop your corporate identity. This comprises your company name, logo, and tagline. If you are an established organization, you need not to change your name or logo; but if you are a new entrant into a business or at the stage of merger and acquisition, this is very important. For any major business transition, you need to redefine these identity parameters. Remember, while doing all these tasks, ensure a semblance between what your business does and how these corporate identities satisfy the ethos of your business.
7. Develop your content strategy. Content is king, and always it remains. Content is not just written text, this also includes images, graphics, audio, video, and other multimedia elements. Apart from the type of content, the breadth and depth of content should include the interest of target audience. If the target audience doesn't perceive any worth in your content, your strategy fails. Depending upon the medium, your content structure should change and it must drive your brand visibility.
8. Develop your web and social media strategy. With the rapid surge in internet population, websites and social media sites are becoming indispensable tools for a business. Your website is the gateway to your products and services. Your audiences generally visit your website to explore everything about you – who you are, what you do, how you do, and for whom you do. Other than your website, your social media sites talk a lot about your activities, and the conversation there goes viral from a loyal customer to the external world. With technology innovation, you can even do wonders through your social media sites. But remember one thing: any wrong message will completely destroy your brand in seconds. So, the content strategy should be the central to your web and social media strategy.
9. Build your marketing collateral. When your website is ready, you need to publish various sales-driven information to engage your customers and clients with your brand. This task is achieved by marketing collateral, which includes brochures, case studies, feature lists, data sheets, videos, and multimedia presentations. While developing these, keep your brand positioning clear and intact. Never dilute your brand in any sense.
10. Monitor and modify. This is the last step in the brand development process. While you execute previous nine steps with a great deal of research and deliberation, you never know how the real world would react to all these activities. Now, the step 10 exposes how your brand strategy is performing, how your target audience is reacting, and how your customers are accepting you. At this stage, you need to monitor the performance of brand, and if there is a gap in your strategy and real world needs, you should rectify here and implement the next version of your brand strategy.

Build a Strategic Framework Through Strategic Planning

The success of an organization largely depends upon the vision of the leadership. More importantly the vision should be supported by a strategic framework, which would guide individuals and teams to achieve both tactical and strategic goals set by the management. While building a strategic framework, you must focus on every bit of strategy and execute a dry-run on the outcomes. Moving straight from the strategy document to operation is not an easy job because implementation of strategy needs a real-life environment where ideas will be translated into actions. In that process, some pieces of strategy though initially may sound high, during implementation stage would experience certain snags. So, what exactly you need is a full-proof strategic framework through which you can articulate your vision, mission, and values, strategies, and how would you leverage those ideals eventually. You can also deliberate upon tactical steps to materialize a strategic goal, including the methods, processes, tools, and calibration of success. Everything should be well-documented. In case you deviate from the defined path or a specified process, the rationality of deference should also be articulated. Let's first understand what's a strategic framework and what does it capture.

Strategic Framework

A strategic framework is a master plan that defines the structure, aspirations, limitations, design and delivery of a product or service that an organization desires to deliver. On a broader perspective, a strategic framework is a top-level guideline defined by the management as how to achieve the vision of the organization. Every organization starts with a vision. The vision is achieved through mission, values, and strategies. Although you can define your vision, mission, and values very idealistically; without right strategy, you won't be able to achieve those ideals. So, you need strategic planning in which you can set your priorities, quantify your existing resources, and leverage organizational processes, technology, and skills of employees to achieve those common goals. Here is how strategic planning helps achieve your business objectives.

Strategic Planning

Strategic planning is a process of defining organization strategy through which you can analyze the current position and determine the future course of action and how you would do it and for whom you would do it, with due diligence. Strategic planning is fundamentally a deliberations of decisions and actions those could be implemented down the line. An effective strategic planning not only talks about a specific action plan, but also it defines the parameters as how to achieve it successfully. Thus, strategic planning ensures a strategic framework work in a flawless manner. The core components of strategic planning encompasses an understanding of the vision, mission, values, and strategies of an organization.

Defining Vision Statement

A vision relates to the future of the organization – it covers the long-term aspirations. This articulates the dreams and hopes of the promoters and employees as well. A vision statement provides continuous inspiration to all the stakeholders of an organization. While crafting the vision statement for your organization, you must think futuristic and expand your imagination to articulate where do you want to reach or what do you want to achieve in the lifetime of your organization. Let's examine some vision statements of top global companies:

Walmart: To become the worldwide leader in retailing.

Chevron: To be the global energy company most admired for its people, partnership and performance.

GE: We bring good things to life.

Ford Motor: To become the world's leading consumer company for automotive products and services.

City: To be the most competent, profitable, and innovative financial organization in the world.

Well, what do you observe here? All these statements talk about the long-term aspirations of the organization. These statements don't explain how the organization will achieve that vision. And to enable vision work for your organization, you must define your mission statement.

Defining Mission Statements

A mission statement focuses on the purpose of an organization. It explains why the organization exists and how it would achieve the vision. For instance, the mission statement of Walmart states: “To help people save money so they can live better.” Let's now decipher how this statement is supporting the vision of Walmart, which states, “To become the worldwide leader in retailing.” While the vision of Walmart is an inspiration for the organization, the mission clearly putting the purpose of its existence.

Defining Values

Values are the core belief system of the organization that drive its employees to live by those high ideals to deliver results unfailingly. Values explain the collective behavior of the organization. They describe the organizational culture, business ethics, and relationships amongst different stakeholders of the organisation. Let's look at some value propositions that organizations alike believe in. For example, competency, integrity, respect, diversity, teamwork, quality, efficiency, and collaboration. Sample these values of Coca-Cola, which emphasizes on seven parameters:

Leadership: The courage to shape a better future

Collaboration: Leverage collective genius

Integrity: Be real

Accountability: If it is to be, it's up to me

Passion: Committed in heart and mind

Diversity: As inclusive as our brands

Quality: What we do, we do well

You can also check the Philosophy of Incrego, which focuses on seven values:

Innovation – Explore groundbreaking technology solutions to address client’s problem
Nurturing – Encourage a culture of professional excellence and continuous innovation to always exceed our client’s expectations
Commitment – Ensure our “clients first” ideology tops our priority
Reliable – Emphasize on the robustness of our services and solutions to ensure peace of mind for our clients
Effective – Assure our clients get the desired results of our services every-time
Growth – Dedicate our efforts for sustained growth of our clients’ businesses
Open-minded – Listen to our customers, employees, and partners without any bias

Defining Strategy

Strategies are the methods or approaches through which an organization accomplishes its mission and eventually lives up to the vision of the organization. Each piece of strategy defines a particular goal and the corresponding action plan to achieve that goal. For example, the strategy to achieve a sales target of $100 million in the first quarter can be achieved by strengthening the sales pitch and converting every lead into a sale. Similarly, for HR function, the strategy to bring in transparency in the organization can be achieved by ensuring a continuous top-down communication and developing channels through which employees can post their honest feedback about the organizational decisions. Organizations use various tools and processes for strategic planning. For example, SWOT analysis helps you analyze the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in the current situation of the organization and define corresponding strategy to improvise the conditions. Similarly, Balanced Scorecard is a performance management tool that helps managers to track the staff performance.

How to retain your best employees

Regardless of constricting job market, the top talents of an organization are always on high demand. For them, switching a job even during intense job market slowdown is like performing a gimmick. However, most organizations ignore this fact and think everything is hunky-dory.

Before getting down to brass tacks, let's quantify the contribution of these top talents for an organization. Various polls and surveys on employee performance and contribution reveal that the top 20% of best performers create 80% value for the organization. Thus, it's quite unthinkable for HR and top management of an organization that they can afford to ignore it and let the top talents part away.

As an HR head or a senior executive of a company, your contribution towards talent management doesn't restrict you to go an extra mile and delve deeper into the issues that your best employees often try to speak out in different forums. For instance, a growing conviction has been established across the board that employees never leave an organization, rather they leave their managers. However incredible the fact may sound, the employees are always on a loggerhead with their managers on different issues, be it personal or professional. Here, you shouldn't blame a particular band of managers because a manager is also a subordinate to her of his superior up in the hierarchy. So, if you look microscopically, you may discover the root of the problem lies somewhere else. This is just one dot of the problem line, there are many such examples.

Well, before zeroing in on the solutions as how to retain your top employees, let's first understand the reasons why employees leave an organization. Some pressing reasons of top talents being dissatisfied with the organization include lack of professional growth, lack of recognition and rewards, missing long term strategy of the organization, and poor work-life balance. Now, you can address these issues and ensure your best employees stay with you so long as they outperform. Here are the ways!

Ensure Growth

In general, employees aspire for continuous growth in their career and the best employees need it more often. Top talents achieve their target faster than an average employee. For them, professional growth is the top priority. If they notice growth opportunity is stymied in the current organization, they will search it elsewhere. Thus, it's imperative for you to chalk out a sustainable growth plan for the best employees and promote them to the position they deserve, so that they can add more values to the organization.

Recognize and Reward their Contribution

Who doesn't need a pat on the back after a good job? The best performers have more appetite for rewards and recognitions. The key aspect of a sustained employee satisfaction program lies in recognizing and rewarding the best talents and setting it as an example for others. This not only elates the spirit of your employees, but also builds up an ecosystem of fair competition amongst the real talents of your organization.

Articulate the Long-term Strategy

The best talents mature faster than the organization does, and they need more opportunities and challenges to prove their mettle. Show them the big picture. If the management of the organization lags behind the thought leadership of the best talents and fails to craft a long-term strategy for the organization, the top talents will be impatient and eventually leave the organization. So, before they take a hard decision, just articulate your vision of the organization and walk the talk. If possible, involve these top talents to shape up your strategy.

Maintain Work-life Balance

Here just one exciting thought of William Henry Davies sounds appropriate:

“What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.”

After all, the best talents are human beings, not robots. If an organization fails to provide a proper work-life balance for the employees, they will look for some better organizations where they can experience it. The best solution is develop a flexi-hour culture and map rewards and recognitions with actual contribution, not with the amount of time clocked by an employee in the office premise. With the advancement of technology, the concept of workplace is changing faster. Be a change agent of this trend and provide employees the power of flexibility without neglecting the organizational goals.

Perils of Cloud-based ERP

While majority of ERP systems are implemented on premise, the rising cost of IT infrastructure, upfront investment on software licenses, and the complexity of implementation have compelled CIOs and CTOs to adopt innovative ways to optimize IT operational excellence with minimized cost. As a major tectonic shift in IT operations, the innovations in cloud computing have contributed significantly to the acceptance of cloud-based software systems in general, and cloud-based ERP systems in particular. Although the early adopters, mostly small and medium enterprises, are leveraging the benefits of affordability, accessibility, and manageability of cloud-based ERP systems, the large enterprises are still skeptical about the long-term benefits because, for them, ERP system is not just another piece of fringe software which would meet their short-term objectives, nevertheless it's a key driver of their long-term strategic goals.

This white paper attempts to touch upon various aspects of cloud-based ERP systems and deciphers the myths around realized benefits that are usually advocated by the software vendors and product evangelists. With changing business landscape, emerging customer needs, and evolving best practices in securing customer data and privacy, the large enterprises are focusing majorly on the right kind of deployment of ERP systems that would not only accelerate business productivity, but also it would ensure their business future ready and full-proof during any disaster. This paper unfolds the fact behind increasing concerns over cloud-based ERP systems and why the large enterprises are still not ready to move into cloud computing in a decisive manner.

Overview of ERP

The genesis of enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions emerges from the requirement of management in accessing information regarding the performance of all departments and business processes in any organization. In an enterprise structure, as different business functions, such as finance, human resources, sales and marketing, customer service, manufacturing, quality assurance, and IT, are integrated to translate the organizational goals into top lines and bottom lines of the enterprise, similarly an ERP system supports the data flow of all functions in a seamless manner and provides a holistic view of enterprise-wide information in terms of reports and charts. Since its early adoption in industry in the late eighties and early nineties, the ERP systems have evolved along the ever changing business requirements of organizations.

The latest breed ERP system framework comprises modules like HRM (human resources management), SCM (supply chain management), CRM (customer relationship management), FAM (finance and account management), MRP (manufacturing resource planning), project management, and BPM (business process management), which are loosely coupled with the core ERP system database. A client can opt for an all-inclusive system or even can demand a lean system with fewer modules depending upon the business requirement. Furthermore, the ERP system vendors are smartly designing industry-specific ERP solutions, such as for manufacturing and service industries.

While integrating various functional processes, the ERP systems ensure businesses eventually increase productivity, reduce turnaround time, improve customer satisfaction, increase transparency and accountability, speed up decision making process, and save money and time.

When it comes the deployment, the real fight begins amongst the decision makers of the organization. While cost becomes an alpha factor for deployment type, the management team often deliberates upon various sensitive issues including privacy, control, data security, dependency, performance, and integration. Depending upon client requirements and organizational conviction, the ERP vendors provide flexible options like on premise, hosted, and SaaS-based deployment.

Understanding Cloud-based ERP

Cloud computing has opened new avenues for delivering an array of IT services over the Internet. With the advent of service oriented architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0 technologies, software vendors have started offering various cloud-based services such as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and SaaS (Software as a Service), easing the upfront investment required by any client. Multi-tenancy, hardware virtualization, and flexible software architecture contribute to the drastic cost reduction in cloud-based offerings. And that's the vantage point which prompts many leading technology behemoths like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Apple to provide cloud-based services to enterprises across the geographies.

With changing business dynamics, market competitions and sheer economic reasons are becoming more palpable to the management. This endorses a paradigm shift in the managing of IT and software services in any organization. Most small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are now shifting towards the cloud-based services for the singular reason that initial investment becomes a pain area while acquiring enterprise-grade software; however, with a fraction of that cost they can even realize immense benefits, if they adopt cloud-delivered services. In fact, a typical ERP solution, which is a huge capital-intensive product, for a small company with 100 users, would cost around $500,000 plus the investment on IT infrastructure for on-premise deployment; whereas, the same system on cloud-based delivery would almost cost half of that price, and that too without infrastructure burden.

Apart from initial investment point of view, cloud-based ERP systems have a number of tangible advantages that appeal to SMEs. Some core advantages include:

• Decreased infrastructure cost
• Reduced maintenance staff
• Quick implementation
• Lower implementation cost
• Faster customization
• Easy integration with other systems
• High scalability

However, large enterprises where user base accounts more than 10,000, the implementation of ERP on cloud gets extremely cumbersome. Adding further, data security, control, and customization are other critical areas that turn stumbling blocks for the decision makers to promptly switch over from on-premise mode to on-demand implementation over cloud.

Challenges of Cloud-based ERP

While cloud-based software services are defining new dimensions in IT offerings, large enterprises are still not fully convinced about the future trajectory of these offerings. Although many SMEs are taking the lead in adopting cloud-based ERP solutions, big organizations are treading with a caution. The major point of concern is data security. When the entire business-critical data are stored on cloud, the management is doubly skeptical about the control and portability of data. Irrespective of big assurances of cloud service providers regarding the security and privacy of information, the large enterprises are yet on evaluation mode. Here are some challenges that restrict large enterprises to adopt cloud-based ERP solution.

Data Security & Privacy

The biggest fear about cloud-based services is the breach of data security and privacy. Despite continuous assurances from cloud-based service providers, the large enterprises are still doubtful about the measures taken by data centers. And to exacerbate their doubts, the growing incidents of cyber attacks across the world only add more distrusts. According to a report published in Security Week, last September noticed a number of cyber attacks on top US financial institutes including Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase. The fact that people generally believe that client machines are more vulnerable to attacks; however, in this case the denial of service was originated from the servers in data centers. According to Internet Security Threat Report Volume 17, Symantec, April 2012, 93% of data theft identified in 2011 were from the companies in the computer software, IT, and healthcare sectors.

Since enterprise-grade ERP systems capture the business critical data from all functions of the organization, exposing them to a third party service provider would not only sometimes breach the SLA between the company and its clients, but also it jeopardizes business secret when they become vulnerable to large scale cyber attack. For big enterprises, the security of customer information, business strategy, and business-sensitive data weigh more than the growing trend of cost optimization. Although cloud service providers come out with innovative methods such as data encryption techniques, multiple authentication process like dual password system and sequential log-in, and multilayer fire-walling, today's hackers are smart enough to intrude into data centers quite easily. Certainly, there is no 100% guarantee from the cloud service providers that their data centers would never be vulnerable to such attacks.

Data Control

When cloud service providers take control of enterprise data, it becomes imperative for the enterprises to agree upon various service level agreements (SLAs) to accommodate service requests. However, once the data are moved into data center servers, enterprise control gets diminished. Any request for accessing a specific type of reporting or maintenance of data becomes binding to the SLAs. As large enterprises place thousands of requests from various functions, these requests turn out to be additional cost overrun. Moreover, when an enterprise wants to change the cloud service provider, the real trouble arises because data migration from one data center to another data center is the toughest task they have to handle.

Integration

For large enterprises, cloud-based ERP system is not the only program that they entirely bank upon; there are scores of other critical software programs that run on the premises are also equally important. Synchronization of data lying at the local servers with the data available on cloud sometimes becomes difficult. When integration of data sources becomes essential, the inability to do so or inordinate delay in execution impacts the business.

Portability

All cloud service providers are not in a democratic structure, which would enable transitioning of data from one data center to another smooth and painless. When a large organization invests hugely on cloud-based ERP solutions, it doesn't essentially corroborate to the fact that the business relationship would last for eternity. Sometimes, the services provided by the cloud service provider won't suffice to the relevant needs of the business. In this case, a shift in vendor becomes indispensable. However, simply shifting the vendor won't resolve the issue because the huge corporate data lying with the previous vendor might not be migrated to the new vendor's data center as it is. Then the real crisis begins.

Dependability

In comparison to on premise deployment, cloud-based ERP has a major bottleneck, which essentially represents the dependability on the vendor for all and sundry. Even a small report, which might have some urgency for now, can't be retrieved at the moment because everything needs a proper process and it takes time to execute. Too much dependability on the vendor for everything sometimes hampers the decision making process of the client as well.

Conclusion

The evolution of of cloud computing combined with the power of Internet technologies and the service oriented architecture (SOA) has opened a floodgate of opportunities for cloud service providers and software vendors to expand their services. From multiple deployment opportunities to flexible services to easy customization, the cloud-based software services have already made their marks in the SME segment delivery. However, the large enterprises are not fully convinced about the benefits articulated by cloud service providers. Especially, in case of cloud-based ERP solution, the short-term benefits may seem quite exiting, but for many good reasons such as data security, privacy, super control, integration, and data migration, the big companies have a valid point to differ with the service provider's views. Vulnerability of business-critical data, customer information, and strategic corporate information is not a mere narrative, but the stark realities of today's cyber attacks. While hackers are stealing millions of customer data from the data centers, then it dismantles the real vulnerability of cloud service providers, as how helpless they are. And all these ground realities only substantiate the skepticism of large enterprises on the promises made by cloud service providers. There is a long way to go for the cloud-based ERP solutions for large-scale deployment because the unquestionable risks attached to data security and privacy shouldn't be undermined.