Ego Is Virtuous

Divergent to the popular belief that ego is the reason of your demolition, in metaphysical world ego is the only incentive to transcend from the lower echelon to the higher ones. Why then the global scriptures or seers, be those from Hinduism, Christianism or Islamism sects, potentially deliberate on the annihilation of ego at personal level to achieve the spiritual growth or even salvation? In religious or political ecosystem, the leaders always want the followers. So, from the day of initiation of followers into the system these leaders indoctrinate the belief that ego is an obstacle to the growth of human being. That’s absolutely false and preposterous. The only reason why they spread these canards is to ensure that their followers are subservient to their causes. In these circumstances, a person with ego can think independently and may not think in consonance with the ulterior motives of these leaders. Thus, from many thousands of generations of human settlement in social milieu, these leaders are propagating false values to their followers on cultivation of ego. 

Let me first scientifically deconstruct the theory of continuity in human evolution process before delving into the cultivation of ego theory. As everybody knows the evolution of mankind has taken billions of years in the chronology of genesis of universe, for a lower species to surpass the original genetic construct and move to the category of higher species is mostly sublime and gentle. Normally, this process takes millions of years. What actually prompt the living consciousness to passage from one terrain to another are self-realization and an intemperance of extrapolation. In a specific realm of life, the growth of life is compounded with the awareness of higher self – a state of conscience that unfailingly triggers the quantification of actualization of life – which we colloquially connote “the more, the merrier.” The ego starts from there. When a person with many virtues and few vices vacillates in moral dilemma during a decisive moment of truth, his or her ego plays a cardinal role to bolster the thought that what in a societal dynamism he or she is representing. A person with real ego for his social position and status will think twice before taking a wrong decision. On the contrary, a person sans ego will move on with his or her instinct.

Why crimes of any kind or wrongdoings are happening in this world? Is this happening only because of ignorance or disrespect for law? No, not really. Even the white-collar crimes are carried out by highly brilliant minds – educated and well-off. The reason is these people don’t have conscience or moral ego to fight against a wrong decision. Real ego differentiates a person from the crowd on various attributes such as knowledge, wealth, beauty, righteousness, integrity, honesty and social position. People who actually cultivate these attributes by convincing their ego will always uphold their position and social value system vis-à-vis to those people who don’t have an iota of ethical ego.

Ego is never a deleterious factor either for your spiritual or mundane growth in life. Ego is the preserver of your value system that stimulates you to be superior to other mortals. Ego is your self-esteem. You are nothing without your ego. Your true self is your ego. Cultivate ego in a more subtle way to transform yourself from a lower moral to a higher mortal. In Hindu philosophy, the Sanskrit verse “Aham Brahmāsmīti” translates to “I am of Brahman” or “I am the Infinite Reality”. This actually guides us to transcend from mortal to immortal, finite to infinite and mundane to celestial. This is the ego of being human with virtues, which propels you further up in spiritual cycles to the highest order. Remember when you leave this mundane world your soul is only accompanied by your ego, nothing else.

Blockchain: Thwarting the Possibility of Frauds

Why do frauds crop up in a system? Sounds hackneyed? Maybe, but the provenance of fraud is pretty premeditated and intrinsic in any society. Innately frauds are a symptomatic manifestation of diluted accountability, inefficient compliance system and condescendingly low-slung trust levels in any institution, be it public or private. The recent unfolding of banking frauds only corroborates the fact that the lack of transparency, trust and traceability in banking operations has led to such deafening denigration of integrity. As media reports suggest, a few low-profile authorities in PNB have managed to manipulate the system by resorting to alternate means for allowing free flow of credits to a client who is also a big-time defaulter in debt repayment. And all these happened without the knowledge of the key stakeholders. Though sounds gross and sordid a closed system has always been the epicentre of genesis of frauds.

Now picture this. If the credit disbursement system would have been distributed or decentralized, trust-worthy, transparent and compliance-ready, these frauds perhaps won’t have happened during the life time of a bank. Beyond an idealistic consideration of non-occurrence of frauds, we must converge to an argument that let fraudsters play their dirty tricks in a system, but the system should be robust and dynamic enough to transpire the truth to all the stakeholders associated with the system. Then these frauds could be nipped in the bud without snowballing into massive swindles. In the light of modus operandi of frauds in any system, blockchain technology based solutions could be the de facto measures.

How can blockchain solutions really avert these frauds? Well, before getting down to brass tacks of fraud management, let’s first understand what blockchain technology is. Technically, a blockchain is a decentralized, distributed, digital public ledger that stores records of transactions across many computers so that no record can be transmuted retroactively without the amendment of all subsequent blocks and the complicity of the network. For a layman, a blockchain is a public distributed ledger. It’s a value-exchange protocol authenticated by mass collaboration over a peer-to-peer network of computers and distributed timestamping servers. The central point of blockchain is that it can’t be conned by few authorities having access to the system. Being a distribute ledger, blockchain thrives on the mechanism of consensus, which requires all stakeholders (here globally distributed computers or nodes) to be in collusion. Furthermore, the anonymity of computers throws the toughest task to hackers or bad actors to mutate the veracity of data.

Juxtaposed to a centralized system, which is managed by a select few, a blockchain is distributed and carries the consensus of anonymity. Each block in a blockchain, which registers valid transactions, includes a cryptographic hash of the previous block linking the two in the blockchain. Thus, the current block is linked to the previous block and this iteration is all the way connected to the genesis of original block. In a sense, blockchain is a tautology which always converges to the truth. Even separate blocks maybe produced concurrently, the inherent algorithm of blockchain ensures the highest-scoring version supersedes the others making the originality of data inviolable. The orphan blocks are automatically weeded out from the mainstream ensuring the sanctity of information is kept intact.

While discussing fraud prevention we must not forget the role of blockchain in immutability of information. A piece of information validated by collective consensus of stakeholders can’t be altered. This feature of blockchain prevents counterfeiting of documents. In financial domain where the complexity of transactions is surreptitiously high with multi-stakeholder approval processes, blockchain can enviably reduce the probability of fraud to almost insignificant level.

(This article was originally published by me on LinkedIn Pulse) 

Amazing Customer Experience

In every management discourse “amazing customer experience” spins off more questions on the customer engagement program. Earlier companies hardly care about what customers think about their products or services because the marketing function was busy transforming the negative experiences of customer through various marketing gimmicks and tactics. But today the emergence of social media has altered the game. The customers are more empowered to express freely their honest opinions and views about a product or service offered by a company on any social media platform. If any customer’s negative opinion is supported by similar views of other customers, this becomes a major concern for the company. Once the discussion transforms into a more participatory forum, it not only impacts the future business of the organization, but also it destroys the brand.

The role of social media has been predominant in empowering both businesses and customers. The marketing team can explore new avenues in the digital ecosystem to boost their marketing strategy. While earlier customers had little choice for selecting a channel to interact with a company, today the upsurge social media has brought in a plethora of options to reach out to the company representative. It’s not only a unidirectional communication that hides behind the carpet; rather a more participatory discussion that attracts many stakeholders to engage with customers.

An amazing customer experience doesn’t come out of blue. The company needs to understand the customers’ needs, engage with them, and deliver exceptional value in whatever form of offering. But the primary task is how to understand their actual needs. According to a survey conducted by IBM, just 35% CXOs really understand their customers well. This indicates that maximum CXOs don’t understand the customer needs.

In a customer-centric business environment, companies need to engage with customers through various communication channels and must endeavor to deliver value in concrete terms. Today, a number of companies send a survey form to customers and expect them to provide exciting feedback. That’s the inherent problem in customer engagement. You can’t dictate customers to be servile and expect good reciprocation. There are many players in the market and it won’t be too harsh to say that customer has always a choice.

The tricky part of customer engagement is how effectively companies can drive the customers to act as per their strategy. It’s not a marketing gimmick at all; rather it’s a cohesive customer engagement program. For example, a company’s sales representative can even gather precious information in an informal way while attending to a customer. It’s not a one-off incident. Companies should build up an engagement strategy in an implicit manner. A better way of doing this would be building the trust among customers and employees. Human relations can deliver amazing business value.

If you want your customers should respond to certain questions, then don’t send a formal survey link or questionnaire to millions of customers. In fact, train your employees to build an environment in which customers could be tempted to respond to many open-ended discussions. During those discussions employees can keep exploring the opportunities or help driving the customers to a point where the discussion points can provide huge insights.

The best customer engagement policy should hinge on the fact that a good listener is the most successful achiever. Try not to intimidate the customer by repeatedly intervening in the discussion. Give the customer free hand to open up and come out with as many points, which in turn will provide a gigantic customer datasets to explore the treasure. But the company representative shouldn’t forget the role of moderator; else the customer will drive his or her own agenda and the information collected will have no use.

Let’s consider the efficacies of social media engagement. Today, all young customers have a social media account and they are quite active in social media discussions. Anything and everything is discussed threadbare on social media. But the crux of the problem is that companies are not equipped with the right technology solution to decipher the discussion points. With millions of customers posting their views on a specific issue, it’s a gigantic task for the company to get the desired insights.

What’s required to analyze these engaging discussions is a technology solution, which would enable companies to derive powerful insights. However, to achieve the optimal outcome the companies should integrate all customer-facing applications – be it customer portal, corporate website, social media sites, CRM, or business analytics tool. The synergy among the tools will manifold the power of analytics.

As mobility is taking the lead in disruptive technologies, the companies can leverage its capability to boost the customer engagement program. With millions of smart apps readily available, companies can move their CRM and other customer applications into cloud and build a mobile strategy for business workflows. This will improve the quality of 24x7 operations. As customers will be exposed to a response mechanism round the clock, it will drive more customer engagement. But here is a caveat! The employees responsible for customer engagement should be distributed across various time zones and they must internalize the local culture to be more customer-friendly.

Remember, cohesive communication can only resolve 40% of the problem, but it requires the support team to accomplish the rest 60% task in a responsive manner. Although the companies have a mandate like SLA to take care of issue resolution process, there is no harm in building a smart system wherein support staff can reduce the resolution turnaround time in a proactive manner. When a customer issue is resolved with due diligence within the SLA, there is no substitute to the customer satisfaction level achieved in that process. A satisfied customer can be a reference point for many customers down the line.

Moreover, a satisfied customer can be open to share his or her views without a second thought. So, it’s a tactic for customer support representatives to collect the feedback of customers when they are really satisfied with the service of company. A unified system can enable the company to collate customer data from various geographies and eventually help derive generate meaningful customer insights. A data-driven company can bring in customer service excellence and deliver amazing customer experience in every customer engagement.

Marketing Optimization for Building Better Customers

Today’s businesses are more concerned about acquiring better customers, a segment that sustains the repeat business of a company. But the ground reality for the companies is that these customers are not acquired shortly. This requires a comprehensive customer engagement process. From attracting customers to the business to nurturing their expectations across the customer life cycle needs huge marketing efforts. As new channels of communication are evolving, the marketing department is getting the heat of channel optimization. For example, if some customers are eager to connect through social media, some prefer a more direct communication through phone or chat. The diversity of customer interest is another hurdle for the marketers to roll out an optimized marketing campaign. Although personalized communication is the best option to transform a stranger to customer, the logistics of execution sometimes restricts a marketer to adopt a particular channel.

In real-world scenario, companies face many constraints while executing an optimized marketing program. Multiple channels, various offers, and diverse customer segmentation increase the complexity of marketing optimization. However, smart marketers prioritize campaigns, channels, and customers singularly or in groups depending upon company’s business objectives. For example, a company desiring to increase the number of customers in a particular segment would certainly like to prioritize the customer segmentation, but at the same time it can’t ignore the campaign and channel. For any marketer, the judicious balance among the three elements – campaign optimization, channel optimization, and customer optimization - is the key to successful marketing optimization.

In each optimization process, a company wants to measure the returns on investment. As marketers define a strategy to acquire a customer base for a new product, the first thing that triggers off the debate is customer segmentation: knowing more about their priorities, buying behavior, and brand affinity. For instance, customers consistently using a product for many years are difficult to be trapped by a mere campaign. Here the marketers need to understand the priorities of the customers, the reason behind brand loyalty, and if they need a better product within the same price range. Well, the customer prioritization depends upon a number of factors: the offerings, the pricing, and most importantly some opinion leaders to claim the value of the product. With competitive market intelligence a company can develop a better product to enter a particular market; design a campaign to address the customers’ expectations; and prioritize the channels to reach out to them. In marketing optimization, the marketers should focus on the following best practices to optimize the results.

Invest on Quality Data

Data plays a major role in marketing optimization process. Trusted data can multiply the power of marketing campaign. Any marketing campaign requires information about the demographic information, risk information, prior customer response to a campaign, and profitability. While these data sets can be availed from different sources, the credibility of data plays a critical role in the success of a marketing campaign. If a company can access to the workable data, programmatic marketing can deliver the desired results. Thus, businesses should invest judiciously to aggregate customer data. If the quality of data gets jeopardized, the investment made in the marketing campaign will be at risk.

Prioritize Optimization within Constraints

Every company has certain constraints; however, the business objectives are always kept sacrosanct. In marketing optimization, a marketer may find some limiting factors while strategizing a program, but these factors should be considered as the parameters of innovative disruption. For instance, when a particular factor doesn’t support the marketing program, a new factor should be considered to play a viable alternative. If a company wants to launch a campaign within a low budget, the marketers shouldn’t lower their business target, but they should apply different methods of low-budgeted campaign methods to target the customer base and derive the expected results.

Select the Right Technology

Today’s marketing is increasingly technology-centric. The evolution of social media platforms, mobility, big data, and CRM has transformed the marketing automation process. But there is a catch. Though all new technologies can magnify the intensity of a marketing program, a specific technology can always deliver better results. A campaign that needs real-time response from the customers can’t be done through print media, but it can be effectively managed through social media. Based on market demand, the CRM vendors are coming out with feature-rich products to ensure exceptional customer service. The marketing heads should focus on the right technology to optimize their marketing efforts.

Increase Customer Contacts

Customer contact information is critical for launching a marketing campaign. Larger the customer base, customer segmentation can be more meaningful. Recently, the social media platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn are the largest source of user information. Using these network exchanges companies can roll out a programmatic marketing campaign and can achieve the desired results. Companies can also leverage big data to access to these contacts and derive a predictable buying analysis.

Leverage Existing CRM

An existing CRM is the primary source for customer touch-points. A company can use the CRM to analyze customer behavior, buying habits, spending modality, etc. The customer data available in the CRM can be used to propel a marketing campaign. Before adapting to a new CRM, the companies should devise a data transition plan so that no historical data is lost.

Pilot and Replicate

Large marketing programs need huge investment. Without verifying the marketing returns, investing on a new program could be risky. To avoid such risks, companies to start a pilot on any marketing program and analyze the returns on investment. If the program is successful, then the companies can replicate the strategy and scale up the execution.

Cloud-based CRM systems dominating market

Cloud-based CRM application vendors are brimming with boundless excitement. The good news for them is cloud-based CRM systems are receiving faster adoption. According to a recent report published by Gartner, 41% of total CRM systems sold in 2013 are SaaS-based. With growing investment in digital initiatives and customer experience management, the media and IT services companies are leading the CRM spend globally, with manufacturing segment is holding the second place, and banking and securities industry retains the third position. Gartner finds that companies across the board are looking for a hassle-free, easy-to-deploy CRM system with capability to scale up or scale down depending upon the business requirement.

Gartner further predicts that the CRM growth will be visibly sustainable in 2014-15 like the last three years’ journey. With CRM revenue touching USD 23.9 billion in 2014, the cloud-based CRM revenue is projected to account for 49%, and this will touch 50% in 2015. Thus, a steady growth in the cloud-based CRM systems adaptability is an indication of bright future in this segment. According to an analyst at Gartner, the largest spenders of CRM will include banking, securities, high-tech, telecommunications, media, pharmaceuticals, consumer goods, and IT manufacturing and services verticals. All these industries require a better customer experience even during slump period.

As customer relationships are shifting faster from transaction- to context-based scenarios, the growth in the CRM market is determined by the integration of social media and many other third-party applications. Today, every company has a social media strategy to enhance the customer relationships. The contextual mode of customer conversations happening widely on social networking channels provides a reason for the companies to integrate the customer data (along with conversations) into CRM strategy. In fact, the customer-driven communications is transforming the deployment model of CRM systems. As cloud CRM vendors are offering advanced application programming interfaces (APIs) for businesses to integrate with a number of innovative technologies such as mobility and social media, the demand for cloud-based CRM systems is gaining ground.

For a cloud-based CRM, the integration process is faster and easier compared to premise-based CRM systems. When a business requires a customization in sales and marketing process, the cloud-based CRM systems allow vendors to integrate lightweight APIs without halting the operations. Various functions such as social feeds, geo-centric customer touch points like usage of Google map, and mobility of users can be integrated with social media exchanges and smart apps. The growth of smartphones is another trigger for the cloud CRM vendors to provide with mobility feature as a default offering to clients. Along with mobility platform, custom smart apps are adding a new dimension to the utility of cloud CRM.

Cloud CRM allows the businesses to access customer data anywhere, anytime. As multi-national companies are operating in multiple geographies, the real-time accessibility of customer data is an important aspect of customer service. Improved collaboration, mobility, and flexibility of usage offer a better edge to the cloud CRM. Since cloud CRM systems are hosted in a data center, the cost of deployment is also drastically reduced. The hassles of managing capital-intensive IT staff are also significantly lowered in cloud CRM implementation.

While businesses are unequivocally moving toward cloud-delivered IT solutions, the CXOs are seriously considering the short- and long-term business benefits. Apart from lower IT investment, cloud CRM delivers a plethora of benefits comprising operational, technical and financial.

Here are some benefits that cloud CRM offers:

Lower cost of ownership: Today, companies opine capex (capital expenditure) a bad operational strategy and hence they convincingly follow the opex (operational expenditure) model that cloud CRM delivers. The immediate business benefit that cloud CRM offers is the lower total cost of ownership. Since the cloud CRM is hosted in a public or private cloud, the infrastructure cost including servers, office space, and IT resources is significantly reduced.

Scalable system: The cloud CRM inherently possesses the software architecture that can be scaled up or down depending upon the business requirement of the client. Being multi-tenant and modular, cloud CRM provides a huge leg room for the business owners to customize their licensing requirement.

Global access: As the CRM system is deployed on data center it can be accessed by users anywhere, simply through an Internet connection. This feature of cloud CRM allows business owners expand their geographic reach without much difficulty.

Smart collaboration: Collaboration is the new normal of a customer-centric application. Since CRM needs a huge interfacing between service staff and customers, the cloud provides the opportunity for the business to integrate with various social media networks and external application. This helps develop a collaborative environment wherein the customer can effortlessly reach out to a service representative during business exigency. Furthermore, the social CRM requires a qualitative interaction between customers and service agents. The marketing, sales, and other functions can collaborate among themselves without requiring any technical handholding.

No maintenance: Cloud CRM requires minimum to no maintenance efforts. This allows higher uptime and lower expenditure on maintenance staff.

Multi-layered security: Today, tier-1 data centers deploy multi-layered security measures to avoid any kind of untoward situation. Since cloud CRM is a multi-tenant system, the vendor provide security measures at various levels such as physical, network, application, server, and database. Data center service providers follow the global security standards to ensure the optimum safety to critical customer information.

Easy upgrade: Software upgrade is common feature in the life cycle of a product. However, in case of on-premises CRM system, the normal software upgrade takes a toll on operation. During upgrade the live application is curtailed from use. On the contrary, cloud CRM doesn’t need such formalities. The software vendor can upgrade the system without disturbing the operational schedule of the clients. Sometimes the CRM vendors also don’t charge for the upgrade, as these features come as a value-add options to increase subscriptions.

Quick customization: In a normal CRM system, any customization requires more time as the complexity of architecture takes the vendor to use more IT resources. However, in cloud CRM the customization is more flexible, and it doesn’t impact the operations of the client. Regarding the cost of customization, the cloud CRM provides option to reduce the customization cost depending upon the usage.

Faster implementation: In a cloud CRM, the implementation is almost done in real-time, if there is no complex client business requirement.

Increased productivity: The cloud CRM offers better reliability in comparison to on-premises CRM. The 24x7 accesses and flexibility of operation allow employees even work while at home or in transit. Customer information can be retrieved from any place using mobility devices. Since the office-centric work expand beyond the premises, all the functions can work independently as well as in a collaborative manner. This gives more opportunities for the employees to reach out to the customers and resolve their issues.

Reliability: Today, the public cloud vendors offer 99.9% uptime for the hosted applications. A higher uptime is highly reliable for the business to ensure sustained operations.

Agility: The promptness of accessing customer information from cloud CRM provides a better competitive edge to the clients. The client employees can easily access the system via Internet. The independence of IT infrastructure adds more flexibility to the employees to leverage the speed of access.

Globally large enterprises are also looking for moving toward cloud CRM. But the strategy is a bit different from what SMEs are adopting. Given the security of critical customer data, the large enterprises trust the private cloud instead of public cloud. The large enterprises also leverage the same benefits such as reduced cost, mobility, high automation, server redundancy, flexible and scalable operations, quality of service, and certainly the security of customer information. Greater control over private cloud provides enterprises more flexibility to deliver quality customer services.

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.   

Real Fight Begins Now

After hobnobbing with anti-corruption movement for over a year and half, Team Anna is poised to float a new political outfit or some kind of alternate political force to translate Jan Lokpal Bill a reality. And that too only after 22 eminent citizens like former army chief VK Singh pleaded them to end their fast and think of a political alternative to give a new dimension to their fight. The fun part is that till evening of August 1, Team Anna was decisively against joining politics, and specifically the mascot of Team Anna, Arvind Kejriwal, rubbished the speculation of their political intention as reported by some news channels. And what's more shocking that on July 27/28 Anna in an exclusive interview to CNN-IBN and NDTV on two different occasions had already revealed the political intention of his movement. On replying to a specific question that whether his team members would like to take electoral route, he improptu said if good people like Arvind and Kiran would like to contest elections, he would support them whole-heartedly; nevertheless, he underlined the fact that he will never fight any election. What's going wrong with Team Anna is a fitting anecdote of rolling stone that gathers no moss.

When the anti-corruption movement was started last year by Anna Hazare, the whole nation supported him because the issue of corruption was quite hot and live in public domain. Reports on huge scams like CWG, 2G, and Adarsh were heading the front page and consuming significant amount of prime time and the entire country was fed up with the connotation of corruption. That was a coincidental moment Team Anna leveraged for a life time. Once newspapers and news channels shifted their focus to other territory, the public memory disappeared instantly. Moreover, internal conflict among Team Anna members and digression from the core issue of Jan Lokpal Bill impregnated a sense of distrust among the same citizens who supported Anna last time. And that rationally generated a low turnover of supporters this time. The government was equally smart to ignore this agitation and preferred not to initiate any dialogue with Team Anna and that became a breaking point for them. With deteriorating health of Arvind and other two members after nine days of fast, Team Anna was completely flummoxed to understand as what's the logical conclusion of this movement when government turned stone wall. When they were thinking of an exit route to save their face, the pleading of few eminent citizens to end “fast culture” and begin an alternative political force to deal will corruption was just a transitory point of victory for them. Maybe Team Anna had always a hidden agenda to eventually launch a new political outfit, but it was looking for the right time to unfold it in public domain.

Now the larger question here is whether Team Anna can ever be successful in electoral fray where money and muscle play a much bigger role in winning elections? Forget about money and muscle power, does Team Anna have even the minimum resources and network to run a national political party? What's the certainty that Team Anna won't fail in politics as they shamefully did in social activism, which was their forte? Moreover, politics is not sloganeering or fasting unto death. It's about managing diverse aspirations of people. A single issue like corruption, however pressing maybe in the present context, can't touch the imagination of 1.2 billion citizens of this nation. There are far more important issues that hurt a common man everyday than corruption does. Championing anti-corruption movement is another thing and running the largest democracy of this world is altogether a different ball game. Can Team Anna first come out with a vision paper as how they want to see this country 20-30 years down the line? Then only the citizens of this country would be able to read their true intention.  

Virtual Classes: Changing Face of Education

When Saumya Tandon (name changed), a software developer, was eagerly waiting for her annual appraisal in July this year, her manager called her into his cubicle and silently passed the appraisal letter and urged her to go through and express her concerns, she anxiously sneaked into the bottom line, and the immediate expressions on her face were laced with sadness. The thoughts that she carried out with her before entering into the cubicle vanished into the thin air and she was crest fallen. The reason: the appraisal was far below her expectations. The manager soon broke the ice and tried to keep her enthused by citing few other appraisals as how they have fared equally badly. When she mustered courage to question why this has happened to her and her peers as well, the manager in his sangfroid mood got down to brass tacks – the company has steered a policy to encourage continuous learning and earn necessary diplomas and certifications which would help improve their performance, and that was the reason why she and others were deprived of a certain percentage of benefits in their annual appraisal. This is not just the story of Saumya and her colleagues who fared badly in their annual appraisals, rather it's a ground reality that has affected many employees who forgot to brace up them with the latest degrees or diplomas required to excel in their professional journey.

Being employed and getting diplomas and degrees are not hard nuts to crack these days. The virtual education system of late has transformed the landscape of learning methods. Virtual education is now an integral part of both corporates and educational institutes those are vying for democratising education, training, and professional skills across the board. The emerging trends in the evolution of Internet have brought about significant changes in the way people think about the concepts of education, campus, curriculum, courses, learning processes, credentials, and diplomas.

With a growing number of people opting out for both continuation of education and simultaneous employment, it has become imperative for institutes and universities to tread the path of innovation and fulfill the needs of virtual students. Online education has certainly changed the way people think about education today. What's more encouraging for students that the flexibility of virtual classes has attracted people from all walks of life. Whether they are housewives, working professionals or students engaged in part-time employment, the 24x7 accessibility to the virtual class rooms allows all to complete their study with a greater flexibility. As technology enables virtual students to access pre-recorded lectures, assignments, online forums, whiteboards, and online tests, the learning process has become hugely interactive and engaging for students.

What's more rational for people to opt for online education largely depends upon the low cost of program along with myriads of opportunities to participate in virtual classes. With powerful pedagogy backed by virtual community learning, virtual classrooms have eventually harnessed technology for nurturing social simulations, helping students to interact with fellow learners and exchange views, and finally engaging them in an environment that they can feel the presence of real classrooms. The technology that once thought to be a prerogative of elitists has finally broken down that myth and the universalisation of education through virtual classrooms is a pointer that signifies the importance of thinking beyond the obvious.

Linux Cloud Hosting: The New Shift

In an extremely competitive environment where enterprises are forced to achieve more from less, the adoption of cloud computing has become the new paradigm shift. To leverage flexibility, speed and cost advantages, the enterprises are not only moving towards cloud computing, but also increasingly they are depending upon the ubiquitous technology called Linux. Undoubtedly, the lethal combination of cloud computing and Linux has become the unusual steroid for business transformation. The advent of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) has brought along a whole new set of considerations. Apart from flexibility, speed, accessibility, higher availability, and lower cost, the most critical consideration is an open-source technology that supports the all other parameters. In true sense, Linux has taken over many proprietary technologies used in cloud hosting because it offers economy with scale in a more calibrated manner. Perhaps, that's the reason why the top-tier cloud computing solutions such as Amazon EC2, ElasticHosts, Mozy, Google Apps, Blue Cloud, and vCloud are powered by Linux.

Why Linux?

Linux has become the de facto technology for cloud computing. It's not just the cost advantage that attracts the global players to run cloud infrastructure on Linux, but there are a number of other important factors that support this trend.

Architecture

While a technology offers flexibility for customization, it adaptability becomes universal. And that's the core strength of Linux kernel. The configurability, compotentization, customization, and high availability are few parameters that drive the whole business of cloud computing. With Linux at core, the architecture of cloud computing becomes robust and flexible for disparate customer requirements.

Compatibility and Standards

In a cloud computing ecosystem, the customers prefer open-source service architecture because they benefit hugely while extending their local data center to cloud. With thousands of open source applications available in the market, the customers bank on Linux for hosting and administration. Thus it becomes imperative for cloud service providers to bang on a common standard for better usage.

Manageability

Adopting to a technology becomes faster when its manageability becomes easier and cost effective. As Linux becomes a core common skill for infrastructure administrators, the cloud computing solutions providers trade cautiously. And here comes the rationale for the cloud players to leverage the demand for Linux.

Cost

Apart from licensing cost of proprietary platform, the running cost guzzles out huge money on power consumption. Where as Linux-based platform can be run on scale-down hardware which require lower power consumption in comparison to other high-end hardware. So, from managing a data center to administering client units, Linux offers a credible cost-saving option for customers.

Conclusion

With growing adoption of cloud computing in next generation businesses, the leading solutions providers are considering critical parameters including but not limited to cost optimization and technology delimitation. The flexibility of usage, scalability, affordability, and faster replication have added more reasons for solutions providers to engage Linux with cloud computing. Perhaps, the technology leaders like Amazon and Google have internalized this truth.

Engaging Audiences for Optimum Learning Output

Great online trainings not only cater to reaching out to maximum audiences across geographies at any given point of time, but also they offer superior learning experiences, which even can be rated higher than the conventional learning model in terms of quality and effectiveness. With increasing competition in this space, the challenges for the training solutions providers have been manifold, partly because the faster innovation in learning technologies infuses unlimited expectations in learners' mind. That in turn pitches a war path for training solutions providers to seriously optimize the crafting of online training in a manner that could even engage the audiences more effectively than that of a physical training environment. Here are are some important pointers for an engaging online training model.

Online Icebreaker

In an online training environment, audiences don't expect a boring, high-sounding introduction speech. What they want is a compelling, warmed-up starter, which would drive their curiosity and engage them for a longer duration. So what do you do then? Start with a great anecdote? Bang with a survey poll? Or surprise them with some amazing facts, not available to public easily? The call is yours. Different audience groups have different tastes, but the single fact that bind them all is pure emotion. Charge them with a hot starter that would transform their enthusiasm into a riveting life-time experience.

Peer Partnership and Team Activities

Online environment offers a wide range of possibilities for collaborative learning. Engaging students in collaborative learning can significantly increase their learning standard. According to a research, students remember only 10% what they read by themselves; however, they can remember 70% what they discuss with others, and even remember 95% what they teach to others. Thus a collaborative learning with with peers and team-based activities can help improve the learning standards of students. With a range of new technologies available, you can adopt some pertinent ones like micro-blogging, discussion forums, instant messaging, interactive white boards, and audio and video conferencing to enrich their learning experience.

Reflective Activity

Online learning environment can be transformed into a pure reflective medium in which students can express their thoughts through various tools such as blog, wiki, and email. As a reflective activity takes some time to cogitate and deliver the task, the solution provider can assign them with complex questions, which would require a fair amount of brainstorm and reading from various sources before expressing their thoughts on a collaborative space. Moreover, you can ask online participants to create a movie by themselves and post it on YouTube and send the link for trainer review. This way students can group them and pitch in for a better creative output.

Authentic Activity

Activities are an essential part of any learning model. In online model, during any coursework or session or post fact, you can engage students with random instant questionnaires from a master question bank. With various types of ratings and ranking systems, you can ensure students are both learning and also getting incentive. This will certainly optimize the learning process of students.

Games and Simulation

Games and simulations are a great incentive for online learning. Learning with fun is the new truth. While designing an online learning coursework, you can embed videos, games, and simulated stories to enrich the learning process. With advanced software on gaming and simulation hitting market every other day, the learning solution provider can offer a comprehensive teaching model by adopting to various tricks, and they work as well.

Learner-led Activity

When learners take the lead in designing and delivering various activities, they feel empowered and responsible for their actions. This model provides online learners an element of authority that in turn helps the learners contribute to the learning community in a great measure. However, there is a significant amount of responsibility from the solution provider. While engaging audiences through learner-led activity, you should ensure that the objectives of the activity are clearly articulated, scope of creativity is highly encouraged, and gradings are explicitly explained.

Conclusion

Learning is a continuous process and certainly it doesn't happen in vacuum. For an engaging online learning environment, innovation always drives the lead. A combination of creativity and technology can even do wonders. In fact, there are many ways making this possible.