Article: Cross cultural issues and how to live and work in a new culture

There was an interesting article in the weekend Wall Street Journal "Learning to Speak Iowan: Corn, Pigs, Cyclones and Hawkeyes." The article talks about the cross-cultural challenges faced by foreign doctors immigrating to work with patients in Anytown rural America.

The challenge is not unique to doctors. Even techies face a version of this issue and how the “Software Culture” helps mitigate the typical cross cultural issue that I described in my book a while ago.

Most of us have spent some time in the west can only smile and reflect on learnings when we see younger generation of doctors and software engineers learning to speak Iowan.

Like the training for doctors in the article, larger software sourcing firms have institutionalized orientation of cultural training, especially focused on Indian culture vs American/European culture.

The issues they miss out on cultural training are reinforced periodically by onsite managers and leaders… occasionally with emails that get into nuances of Do’s and Don’ts, some of it are sure to make the more seasoned veterans smile.

Ps: Sample of Email continually sent to onsite team members by sourcing firms

Come to work on time
· Most client folks come to work by 7-7:30 AM
· Try to match your customer's schedule - If they work early, you also work early; If they start work late, you start late
· Be there when your customer wants you
· Let the manager to whom you report to know when you are not going to be available in your seat during regular hours

Follow Client's dress code
· Business casuals / formals from Monday to Thursday - Jeans and sneakers not allowed
· Jeans and sneakers, if allowed, only on Friday

Use perfumes and deodorants regularly
· Change your clothes daily
· Wash and press your clothes before wearing them to work
· If you suffer from bad breath, chew gum, eat peppermint, brush regularly

Be polite
· Do not get into fights with offshore team over the phone in open air – it tends to get noticed and escalated
· Speak slowly (Indians are very fast in speaking compared to Americans)
· Say thank you and please to everyone
· Open the door for others walking behind you
· Never slam the door on the person walking behind you
· Move away from the doorway when some one else is walking by
· Greet everyone whom you see on the passages
· Learn how to do the "How do you do, Good, How do you do" sequence while passing someone on the passageway
· Always speak in English when you are in office (not in Marathi/Bengali/Tamil/Kannada/Malayalam/Hindi etc). In case you need to speak in any other language, please go into a closed conference room and do so.
· When you answer the telephone, identify yourself and greet the person on the other side
· Don't just pick up the phone and say aah, mmmh or be silent

Security
· Show your identification badge to the security officer (whether he asks for it or not)
· Get proper parking tags and park in proper parking lots
· Do not park in Visitor parking lots

Access
· Do not make personal telephone calls from the work phone
· They monitor very closely the calls that are made from each phone
· Do not try to access internet sites that are blocked
· Do not access chat sites from work
· Do not visit Pornographic sites from work
· Do not engage in online trading of stocks from your work PC
· Do not download any software from the internet (be in free ware or share ware)
· Do not receive or forward junk/chain/joke emails
· Requests for additional access/ Prod access etc should go through your manager
· Never request for additional access/prod access directly.

Communication with Client
· Do not ask any Technical questions to client folks (All technical questions are to be resolved within Infosys -using Technical bulletin board, referring to manuals, sending e-mails to team members-Onsite/Offshore)
· Ask as many Business questions as you can to Client folks
· Put down the business you learnt on a BOK
· Use short simple sentences
· If you feel that the other party did not understand you completely, do not hesitate, start explaining all over again
· If you did not understand what the other party said, stop them with an excuse me or pardon me and request them to repeat
· When attending a meeting, be prepared for the same and make sure that you have a notepad/book and take a note of all the important points discussed especially if it is a meeting regarding requirements with users
· Have SIGN-OFF/REVERSE sign-off on any issue-resolution/requirements/design before starting off the work. This is part of the process and will serve as an agreement between both parties involved and will help everyone when there is any doubt or lack of clarity.
· DO not refer to Infosys Project code while discussing with Customer, as they may not know/understand the code. Instead try to refer to your application/system(s).
· While addressing people directly, please use the ‘first name’. In E-mail directories, you will find the name listed as ‘Last Name, First name. (For example, Tom Smith is listed as ‘Smith, Tom’.)
· When talking about somebody in a conversation, please use the ‘first name and last name’ or just ‘last name’ (For example, Tom Smith can be addressed as either Tom Smith or just Smith)
· Understand the short names used in the first names. Usually people are addressed with their short names. Consider the following examples:
· If a person’s name is Robert XYZ...he/she is addressed as Bob XYZ……
· If a person’s name is Thomas, XYZ…he/she is addressed as Tom XYZ…
· If a person’s name is William ,XYZ…he/she is addressed as Bill XYZ
· If a person’s name is James XYZ…he/she is addressed as Jim XYZ

Generic
· Never comment on political/racial/sexual sensitive issues
· Always give a meaningful subject to the emails that you sent out
· Do not sleep while at work
· Honor other people's personal space - don’t stand or sit too close to some one
· Make sure that no one gets an opportunity to complain about you on sexual harassment
· Be very careful with your looks , gestures and words you use to colleagues of opposite/same sex
· Eve Teasing in the office is unacceptable
· Prepare Bok documents on what you learned onsite
· If any valid point is missing here, please add the same
· Please make sure that Out-of-office mail is set up in e-mail and voicemail whenever you are not in office (travel, vacation, sick leave etc.)

Musing on accidental Enterprise Architects and Enterprise Solutions Architect

Enterprise Architects (EA's) periodically like to muse on the evolution of their roles and how they need to be aligned more with the "Business." Some get on discussion forums to debate how they/their roles need to move up the value chain, which makes for an interesting blog post but practical challenges continue to keep many EA's grounded.

Last week I was visiting clients in Washington DC area and met with their EA's whose business card reads "Enterprise Solution Architect". It was in the context of their adoption of TOGAF and ideation on how they could leverage the toolkit and frameworks better. This was a group of technologists and business analysts who had grown into the EA roles in their organization, a mid-size enterprise.

During our discussion, some were voicing concerns on the strategic-vs-tactical challenge of their roles. I got a feeling that these were accidental Enterprise Architects. For some the goal was to be the Über techie, a.k.a lead technical architect, focus on technical problems with projects and programs than on other core EA challenges within the enterprise.

Of late, I see a lot more accidental EA’s wanting to move towards their Business or Solution Architect roots (circled in image above). And in many cases, organizations are also providing the nudge. Organizations that employ experienced technologists in "Enterprise Architect" roles want them to double up by wearing technical or business analyst hats in projects and programs. In TOGAF speak; the focus of Solution Architects is on B. C. and D. dimensions. (refer image).
I guess there is some rationale here: in a tough economy, employers and managers are looking for a better ROI on their employee’s skills. Remember, Enterprise Architects are highly paid "resources" and productivity of resources is a key performance indicator.

Maybe it is just me, but in an uncertain economic climate, I see a lot more Enterprise Architects hunkering down to leverage their core competencies – technical or business skills – than stepping up to prepare their firms for growth.

TOGAF: The Open Group Architecture Framework

Musings on Jobs and Economy

The direction of economy hinges on Jobs, and jobs in the Information Technology sector has been fluid at best. Those who habitually read the newspapers, blogs and other media sources are bound to be bewildered by the swings in topics. A sampling of headlines from USA today in the span of few months

• March 2011: Tech sector hiring is hot again as Google, Twitter, etc., grow


• April 2011: Tech jobs boom like it's 1999


• May 2011: Tech talents from India , other countries leaving Silicon Valley

And this is just a few examples from a single newspaper. Most media outlets have similar contradicting stories coming out every day, which is enough to leave many bewildered. This said there is element of job-hopping and opportunity, especially for skilled professionals.

Here is a straw poll: Among the couple of hundred professional associates spread across the globe that are connected with me on LinkedIn, over 30-40 had a job/role change in the past six months. In percentage terms it translates to about 15-20 percent, which in the tech sector is a reasonable attrition. Another set of data points: I travel extensively on business either for client engagements or for meetings and pre-sales presentations. At airports across the country and in hotels and at Car rental outlets, I continue to see a large number of fellow consultants. Perhaps the reason WSJ continues to feature articles and blogs on Health Woes of Business Travel. Sure there has been a cutback in such travel and expnse accounts but as economic activities continue at a slower pace, so do consulting and the travel that comes with it.

In my current role of the Lead Architect for a key client, I have been interviewing candidates to fill in eCommerce and Data Warehousing roles, a situation where the demand is exceeding supply of the pool. Of course, in case of my employer, the supply is also constrained by the number of ‘visa ready’ folks who can travel onsite to client locations in the US. To be fair, it is a challenge most other offshore outsourcing firms are facing too. Local hiring is certainly an option I and colleagues continue to pursue, provided candidates are willing to be mobile.
On the flip side, my LinkedIn profile has also been attracting a number of queries from headhunters looking to "urgently fill" key technology roles, which is perhaps a silver lining in the gloomy economic cloud.

Bottomline: for journalists, jobs and economy is yet another hot-button topic but for those of us who are a part of the real economy, pursuing jobs and opportunities is something we will continue to do.

Viewpoint on Enterprise Architecture Consulting: Architecture Assessments and Roadmaps

My team is wrapping up an eCommerce assessment and Foundational Stability engagement for a client and I have been reviewing some of the older program documents. A few of these documents date back about five years ago – authored at the time of program inception – provide an excellent rear-view mirror. One in particular titled "eCommerce Strategy current assessment"is especially thought provoking. It was a report authored by EA consultants from a competing firm, highlighting the application portfolio with inputs from Technologists and Business stakeholders. The deck had a whole set of documents one would expect including

• eCommerce Capability Models, Capability Mappings
• Analysis of Business Units including Heat Maps
• Application Assessment catalogs
• Survey administration approach, toolkit and findings including highlights from technical and functional standpoint
• Benchmark surveys from other client engagements
• Health-Check and findings
• Future State Roadmap

The client is about five years into the enterprise eCommerce consolidation journey, with several projects and programs executed (read, millions of dollars spent) and my team was engaged to assess the Architecture developed and rolled out based on the original roadmap, a checkpoint if you will.

The report by itself was comprehensive, what you would expect from a tier-one consulting firm and would have probably cost a small pile of money to compile. Needless to say a tremendous amount of time and effort from the organization’s resources also went into that excercise.

The fact of the matter is that the benefits of portfolio consolidation promised by the strategic exercise are far from realized. After reviewing the report and documenting my observations on the small steps the organization had taken towards actually developing a unified enterprise "eCommerce Platform," I began to reflect on the challenges of laying a roadmap versus the effort involved in actually realizing it. The portfolio of eCommerce platforms remains fragmented with redundant applications meting their individual functional requirements in a silo. In some cases the portfolio is more fragmented than it was five years ago. For instance, the report talks about 25 Order Creation Applications, 11 applications supporting product search and over 8 reporting applications. Fast forward five years and the numbers have not changed! The TCO gains from consolidation have not been achieved. The only saving grace: the organization has been Offshoring a lot more of application development and support, thereby reducing overall IT cost.

As a consulting EA, I get to visit a fair share of clients, some of them a while after my teams have helped assess landscapes, define roadmaps or strategies for future. The sense Déjà vu during such reviews – similar to the experience in the current engagement - should not surprise the seasoned consultant in me, but it still does.

Other intersting views on EA this week. An interesting Video on Enterprise Architecture (Tipoff Mike Walker's Blog) - What is Enterprise Architecture According to Industry Thought Leaders

Enterprise Architects and Social Media

Most of us who started our digital lives with Web 1.0 or before are well past the novelty of yet another social media tool. You perhaps remember the buzz in the mid-nineties over the novelty of signing up for new and newer free-email services before yahoo, hotmail and gmail became the gold standard, with unlimited .. or near unlimited mail achieves? We seem to be going through a web 2.0 version of the same with trying to rearrange our circle of friends on GooglePlus (re: WSJ article on “How to Circle Your Friends Without Alienating People”).

While this buzz is enough to get the stock and IPO valuations of dot.com’s going through the roof, the Enterprise Architect in me has been trying to reflect on what this means to those of us in the corporate world. Among the few dimensions that requires deliberation and analysis

• Guiding your organization on proliferation of social media tools. This includes guiding business leaders, corporate marketing folks and other stakeholders with a viewpoint emerging tools platform and whether they are aligned with corporate business and IT strategy


• Guiding corporate policies and governance around tools. We see extremes on social media policies in the corporate world. A few organizations block any employee access to social media tools and websites while others allow complete unfiltered access. Many, however take a middle ground (eg. Allowing access to linkedin but not facebook or adverts from streaming in). In most cases, organizations also reserve the right to monitor and log activities of employees.


• Participating and enhancing knowledge network. Many EA’s from Service organizations and end client organizations actively participate in online discussion forums, blogs and try and leverage the tools. Few organizations also encourage internal communities of practice to go outside (e.g corporate blog on Microsoft or Oracle technologies by Infosys’ bloggers)


• Organizational branding: while organizational branding has been a traditional area of focus when it comes to digital marketing strategies, online reputation management is an emerging area of interest to business leaders. Views on products and services can be made and weighed in on by digirati in a matter of hours if not days or weeks, and it requires an equally fast and deliberate response to defend one’s reputation.

Enterprise Architects who operate at the intersection of business and technology have a unique opportunity to bridge the gap when it comes to evaluating emerging technologies and their applicability in their business contexts. Working with their business stakeholders to visualize newer application of technologies is just one of the tasks at hand.

A few interesting blogs and viewpoints on the topic:

• Enterprise architecture can manage the use of social media - Government computer news


• Leveraging Social Media for Collaborative Enterprise Architecture - Cutter IT


• Rewiring your enterprise architecture with social media - CIO Talk Radio


• Adding Social Context To Enterprise Architecture - Collaborative Thinking


• Do you have a Social Media Business Architect in your enterprise?


• Enterprise Architecture 3.0 - Andy Blumenthal

Weekend musings of a Global Digirati: PINs That Needle Families

I was reading a fascinating article in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal titled “PINs That Needle Families.” The article touches a nerve and also makes one reflect on our digital life and afterlife:
What happens if, god forbade, one were suddenly incapacitated or worse, drop dead?

After the logistics of sorting through the last rights etc, my better half would have to begin picking up the pieces. This includes sorting through my complex web of finances, bank and brokerage accounts, some of which I have left open in the countries I have lived and worked in during the past decade and half. Couples generally manage finances independently and Suja and I are no exception. Though my wife has a general idea of my finances, she doesn’t know all the intricacies of the various accounts that I manage.

As a global digirati, my financial management is as complex, eclectic and globally distributed as the Enterprise Architecture engagements I undertake. Some were opened because of account-opening incentives I received and keep open ‘just in case.’ Given my frequent relocations in the past years, I prefer being green: receiving online only statements. I admit there is a need to ‘rationalize’ my portfolio of accounts but that digresses from the problem at hand: how will my better half get access to my accounts?

I had a conversation with my mother on this very topic when I was in India last year; tough we decided that giving her the details of my financial accounts wasn’t the most practical solution. We discussed the possibility of my exchanging the details with my brother who lives in London, half-way around the world.

As the article alludes, the process of managing accounts and corresponding passwords does not have a cookie-cutter solution (yet). Writing it down in a sheet of paper or diary wouldn’t be ‘secure.’ And storing them in a digital file? Also, any solution would need constant maintenance to ensure synch-up with the changes to account password I have to make periodically. I am yet to evaluate a password management service: I guess am not ready to add yet another digital service/tool to my life.

Enterprise Architects Enabling Strategic Global Sourcing

As the lead Architect for my firm at the client we are engaged with, I anchor a weekly pow-wow between our teams and client’s Enterprise Architects. The agenda for the sessions is open, addressing key architectural, technical and process related issues, ideation on best practices and discussions from our respective eco-systems.

During a recent session, Dave, one of the clients EA’s brought up the topic of sourcing and a viewpoint he was building for his CIO. I pointed out to Dave how the sourcing challenge EA’s at this firm are coming to grips with are not unique. I pointed him to my Cutter Journal paper on the topic (Enterprise Architects Enabling Strategic Global Sourcing) and we began brainstorming some of the ideas as it was applicable in the current context.

After the brainstorm I began musing how I hadn’t revisited my views after I had written the paper, over a year and half ago. A few of the background issues continue to plague Enterprise Architecture groups: sluggish economy and lack of hiring means Enterprise Architecture groups are not getting fresh talent. Lack of hiring at the bottom is also impacting nurturing of homegrown talent in client organizations while continued visa restrictions also means Offshoring firms are discerning when it comes to bringing talent more than needed onsite.

I had addressed some of the key issues I had seen at client organizations in the paper:

• Loss of technical expertise due to sourcing


• The need to coordinate multivendor scenarios


• Vendors lacking knowledge of organizational dynamics


• Vendors lacking specific business context


• Vendors not up to date on organizational processes, acronyms, and jargon

Since I wrote the paper, I have continued to be engaged with other clients and Enterprise Architects, who continually voice views on similar challenges I had highlighted in the paper. As I continue to brainstorm on the topic, I might revisit the views in the paper. Do send in your comments too.