Tibet, the Beijing Olymics & hospitality of a country

We read ever so often about the Beijing Olympics, the protests by the Tibetans, human rights , separatists and all related news. Now I am not into politics but am a firm believer in human rights. However this article has nothing to do with any of above. It is about an issue that really bothers me as a citizen of India and that is the hospitality that has been offered by my country to a visitor has been taken for granted.

When you are guest in some one's house you abide and respect the rules and expectations of that house and its owners. Well that is what really bothers me about the Tibetan protests and their attempts to stop the Olympic flame going thru India. Tibetans have been given refuge in India and our they are welcomed guests but their protests in Delhi left a unhappy taste in my mouth.

When the Olympic flame arrived in Delhi , huge security arrangements had to be made to ensure all went well and the Tibetan protesters would not be able stop it. Not only was this a huge overload on our already stretched security forces, millions of rupees were also spent towards this security arrangement and huge inconveniences imposed on the residents of Delhi due to this. The government of India had deemed it fit for the Olympic flame to come to India and so did a majority of its citizens, this should have been respected.

The protesters are guests in our country. They should not break the laws of the land, nor cause financial losses, cause a law and order mess for our security personal or cause inconveniences to our citizens for their causes.

Perhaps they forgot that it is because we might be sympathetic towards their cause that they are allowed to live as free people in our country. We might understand their cause, we might be sympathetic , our government might be using back door diplomacy to further their cause but these incidents in Delhi should not have happened.

and then she touched my feet ....

For those who are not acquainted with Indian traditions & customs, the action of touching someone's feet is considered as a mark of respect for an elder. It also could be a mark of respect as shown by a student to a teacher in appreciation for the impartment of knowledge.

A couple of days ago, I had a software engineer resigning from her post in our company for better prospects. She was a good engineer and I was confident she would do well in her new job. Just before she left , I spoke to her and I gave my new pence of advice of what she was good at and what she needs to work on. It had been a good association but it was time to part ways. She then came upto me and touched my feet and said "thank you for everything".

This simple action came as a jolt out of the blue for me. This is the second time this has happened to me , the first being one of my senior engineers giving me this respect. Both times I have not known how to react and both times I am reminded of the immensity of the responsibility that we as employers/bosses/managers carry on our shoulders. This is the responsibility of not only ensuring that our people work well and get their projects done on time, within budget and of the quality required but also ensuring the growth of these youngsters both as a good engineers and more importantly as a good people. Once they step into our offices it becomes our responsibility also to mentor them, to groom them and work on building their self confidence.

When they step out of CygNET, they step out as better people and better engineers and that if nothing else I do believe this has been something I have always been able to achieve. They have learnt to respect their abilities, their work, their team mates and their clients. My engineers have always stepped out of CygNET as self confident and technically good engineers and more importantly I hope as better human beings.

Lately, our company has not been doing well at all for a variety of reasons and all sorts of thoughts crosses one mind when in a situation of adversity. You tend to question the level success of running a business and whether all the effort has been worth it.

Well thinking of these 2 your engineers , I do believe I have achieved a certain degree of success. During their tenure at CygNET , I have been able to touch their lives , I have been able to make them grow both professionally & technically and in return I have been awarded the respect that they would reserve for one own family only. This doesnt happen to everyone.

I think that is a achievement in itself.

Energy Conservation in a small office is not as difficult as it seems....

According to me it has only been recently that issues such as energy conservation, effects of global warming, saving the earth etc. are really been taken more seriously by the small business office. Better late than never I would say.

We are all to blame for this as we all felt that as small business owners there was not much we could do and very conveniently left this responsibility to our governments hoping their agreements and efforts of decreasing the release of green house gases by the industrialized & developing nations as well as stopping the deforestation in South America would be some of things that would really solve the problem.

But if given a thought seriously all of us could really contribute to saving the earth and conserving energy in our own little way.

How do we conserve energy in a small office ?

1. Switch off Lights, Fans & Air Conditioners when not in use
More often that not, we leave electrical equipment such as lights, fans and ACs on even when there is no - one in the room/cabin. It could be that all have gone for lunch or for a meeting so if there is a room that is empty and and not in use it really makes no sense to leave the lights, fans or ACs of that room on. Not only would you be conserving energy but also reducing your electricity bill.

2. Those 24 X 7 Lights in the toilets and washrooms.
This is one place where I have always noticed that the lights are always on. Why do you need a light on in the toilet and the wash room when not in use ?

3. Printers , Printers & Printers
Switch on the printers only when you need to take print outs. It will give you some exercise too if it is not next to your desk. No need to leave it on the whole day.

4. Switch off computers when not in use.
I have seen so many employees so often leave their computers on when they leave for the day or perhaps when they go for lunch / tea. Switch off the inactive computer or put it into hibernate as this would definitely help in the conservation of energy.

I had noticed this so often in my office that I decided to add Save Energy Alert feature in our data protection software, USB CopyNotify!. As soon as it detects a computer has been on and not being used for over 15 minutes , it sends me a notification of it. I then look into the matter and ensure that the computer has not been left on unnecessarily.

5. Use Energy Saving Bulbs.
I have now replaced most of my bulbs in office with energy saving bulbs and have noticed a notable reduction in my electricity bills. Might be slightly expensive to replace them all together but you could do it over a period of time and you can see for yourself that it does help. Electricity bills being less means less energy consumed means more energy conserved.

6. Lifts and Elevators are such a waste of energy

If your office is located on the 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th floor/storey of a building, use the stairs and avoid using the lift/elevator. Not only is the exercise good for your health but a LOT of evergy is saved bu not using the lift/elevator

These are 6 simple yet effective steps that would help conserver energy.

Perhaps the difficult part is to be disciplined and consistent about it but if you consider the fact that is our Earth at stake it will be well worth the effort. We have only one Earth so lets do everything to save it.

This work is useless and I will not pay for it. !

I have had this statement thrown at me several times during my tenure as Managing Director of CygNET. It still never ceases to amaze me of how shameless people can be when they don’t want to pay for something and the flimsy excuses that they come up with to justify the same.

Not that we have had a flawless run of projects in the history of CygNET, its just that we have been ALWAYS paid finally for genuinely problematic projects while this line "This work is useless and I will not pay for it. !" always seems to come for perfectly implemented projects.

On postmortem of these "useless" projects, it always turns out that the client just does not want to pay and will pick on anything to justify the non payment. No matter what you put in front of the client in terms of justifications such as deadlines were being met, requirements & quality standards were being met, the client seems to just wake one day and decides not to pay. Most often they seem to even get away with it.

How can one do that ? Yes business is fluid and situations might be ever changing but you have to pay for the work done so far and respect its utility even if it does not serve your purpose any more. More importantly you do not run down its creators as a lot of time and honest
effort has been put into it.

We were hit by this recently. We were sent a spec sheet of a project by a supposed reputed company based in the UK and we were asked to estimate for it. On first glance of it, I knew it was a rather large project and hence requested dedicated time to study and estimate it. We estimated the study time, got it approved by the client and began the work.

The progress was regularly reported and prototypes / documentation of the same were also regularly delivered. There was regular communication and the client knew exactly what was happening. Not once thru out 90% of the estimated time was anything wrong even indicated.

Suddenly towards the end of this study period even before the deadline date, the project was cancelled and the line "This work is useless and I will not pay for it. !" cropped its ugly head up.
Here we go again.

The client had seen the work so far and even approved of it but hey there was no convincing him, he just was not going to pay. He even went to the extent of insulting our capabilities and integrity in an effort to justify why he should not pay.

Why did this happen ?

When the project was initiated, they were under the impression that it was a small, quick and inexpensive project. On near completion of the study, they realized that it was a much larger project than anticipated and hence decided to shelve it due to anticipated costs. In the process of shelving they unilaterally decided to further save costs by not paying us for the study as well. As far as they were concerned the study was now useless as the project has been discontinued.

So what do they do..."This work is useless and I will not pay for it. !"

Again I repeat, how can one do this ? When you claim to be a business professional, you should be a professional in all scenarios including the ones that are difficult for you. You will never be able to grow your business with this habit and what is more, you should have the courage to stand up and give the real reason. Not only are you not paying for hard & honest work done for you, you further decide to insult the people that have done the work so as to back up your false claims. This is unacceptable.

Your actions not only cause undue financial strains on people that don’t deserve it but your actions have demoralized them too.... it is just not done.

Common Sense Steps for Data Security in office.

Its been a while since I have added to my blog, its been on my mind for a while so this Sunday morning took some time off, made some coffe and added this entry.

We have recently launched USB CopyNotify, a network security software for the Small Business Segment and this in turn has got me in touch with several business owners and IT administrators who are very concerned about theft of confidential data from their networks.

There has been a lot of exchange of ideas, strategies, recommendations of software to be used but in all this I am suprised that we in general tend to forgot to implement some basic common sense procedures in office which in itself would minimize confidential data from the network being taken out of office.

I am no top notch , certified security consultant but I do know that following these simple steps would help in minising the leak of confidential data from your office

1. Educate, Educate, Educate

Your staff / employees should be educated about confidentiality of data and its importance. They should be told that this data belongs to the office or its clients and should not be used un appropriately. They should be made to understand that data is associated with a value and it is property of the company or its clients. They should be taught the professional ethics behind it too. They should also be reminded of the Non Disclosure Agreements they have signed with the your company in which it clearly indicates that unauthorized copying of data could lead to serious consequences.

You will be suprised that if you drill this into the staff regularly, a correct attitude about corporate data and its usage get automatically inculcated in a majority of the employees and often education could become one of the most effective means of securing your data.

2. Backup and delete data that is not currently required.

This happens in every office, a task/assignment/project is completed, the data is backed up but several times a copy of this data still remains on the computers. After archiving it, delete this data. The less data you have, the less you have to worry about people stealing it.

3. Avoid personal belongings being brought into the work area.

This might sound a little draconian but employees should not be allowed to bring in their hand bags, haversacks, pouches into the work area. They should leave it outside. This will at least minimize the risk of them bringing & using external devices such as CDS, DVDs and USB devices such as External Hard Drives/Flash Drives/iPODS/Digital Cameras to copy data that they are not supposed to.

Of course today, USB Flash Drives unfortunately are so small they can be put in the pocket or as a key chain and no-one would know. Other than strip searching the employee (which is not always possible as a routine policy) you wont be able to detect these devices brought into office.

In fact this was one of the reasons I use USB CopyNotify! myself in office. It alerts me of USB Device usage on the network.

4. Use Login Names and Passwords

Very often , we tend to ignore the importance of the User Name and Password that is asked for during start up of the Operating System. Either it is not set or all computers have the same user name / password or everybody knows everyone else's password (it is public domain).

Take this security feature seriously and educate your employees to use it in the appropriate manner. Only you and the user of that machine should know the login name and password. This will at least reduce the risk of other people sitting on the machine and accessing the data inappropriately.

5. Internet Access

Ok, this is a tricky one as Internet access in several offices in available on all machines in the office for the purpose of email, research, uploads & downloads etc. Perhaps web based email should be restricted and only email access only via the office intranet should be allowed ie there is only a single point of entry/exit for email from/to the outside world. This would at least allow you to monitor what data & the amount of data being uploaded out of office via email.

Another simple way of finding out whether the web is used for Internet Research or for uploading data is by monitoring the amount of data transfer is taking place on the machine. I get this report every morning. When I see an increase of data transfer or an unnecessary amount of data transfer on a computer, it gives me a automatic indication that the Internet access is not only being used for browsing but only for upload/download of large files. This itself gives me an idea that the Internet is being used to transfer data out of the office.

So as you can see all the above steps are simple, cost effective and very easy to implement and would help in the increase of data security of your network.

What goes around, comes around !.

Recently I read an article in the business section of our newspaper and began smiling which is unusual when I read this particular section.

There was an article on how one of the largest software services company in India was now going make *certain additions* to the contract which they make their engineers sign the day they join. These additions in short prohibited the engineers to join any company on whose projects they might work during their employment with this COMPANY and also prohibited them from joining certain companies that this COMPANY defined as competitors. This was one of the efforts made by the company to stem employees jumping jobs. Other larger software firms are believed to be following the same.

Ok so this is a REAL BAD SIGN as even one of the largest software firms in India has not been able to control its attrition rate even though it doles out the some of the most expensive employee retention & benefit schemes in India.

My smile was due to the fact, that it was some these very same large companies that have caused this employee retention problem and employees jumping jobs. In their quest of employing 1000s of engineers to match their expansion plans, they broke all possible ethical rules of engagement. From encouraging engineers to leave their current companies without giving notice periods to remunerating them for the breaking contracts with previous employers.

Of course one would say all is fair and it is the survival of the fittest. Little did they realize, the devastation they left in their wake with their recruitment drives. Smaller companies missed deadlines, lost clients and even had to shut down as they had just lost entire teams to these large companies.

No, I am not trying to say that you cannot target employees from other companies. I just feel all should adhere to certain basic ethical rules of engagement, the simplest being insist that the engineers must fulfill/honor their previous contract & commitments and then move to the new job.

I still recall going to a NASSCOM meeting where this very issue of was being discussed and I remember very distinctively that several small and medium scale companies were trying to get these large scale companies to understand that employee retention FOR ALL is based largely on big companies not poaching or snatching employees from smaller companies without certain rules of engagement and representatives of these large companies didnt even think it was worth a discussion. It was survival of the fittest as far as they were concerned.

Well now they in turn are facing the same problem, their operations now getting affected due to problem they were a cause of years ago.

They seem to have forgotten "What goes around. Comes around!”

Long Live the shareware utility !!

It has been years since we have been servicing shareware authors with our software programming expertise. I believe it is called OPD "Outsourced Product Development", the new buzz word in the IT services market but hey I didnt even know it was called that !

But getting back to the point, all that time during our various associations with shareware authors I always envied a shareware author for having the vision , guts and persistence to come up with an unique idea, ensure it becomes a reality (with a little bit of our help :-)) and then offer it to the world via the medium of the internet. Thier products are small software utilities with simple concepts behind them that are really really helpful to general computer users. So a user can go to one of these shareware download sites, download an evaluation copy, if they like it , they pay for it via the internet and the whole process was complete. Neat, Slick and Simple .....

Who can deny that a shareware product defines ingenituity and brilliance of its author. In the world of outsourced IT programming services, huge software product corporations, billions of dollors of production, R&D , marketing and sales, I have always found the very existence of the small/tiny shareware utility and its author very very REFRESHING.

Here is an individual or a very tiny group of individuals, with a very limited budget equipped with just an idea and a dream to offer it as shareware. No large development teams, no large QA teams, a neglible or non exisitant marketing budget but yet an idea, a utility that if you get your hands on, it becomes a very integral part of your computer operations. Simple and yet extremely effective and it is *exactly* what the user wants.

This to me is what software development is really about and this is to me gives the birth of "KILLER PRODUCT", a product that is accessible to everyone, affordble to everyone and does what it promises.

I am not a anti BIG COMPANY/CORPORATION activist and but who can deny the fact that billions of dollors , a huge team and massive marketing in general will not give that KILLER SOFTWARE PRODUCT !! You need an idea and a passion to deliver it.

Long live the shareware utility and the its author !

PS>

Seeing all the wonderful work some of my clients have authored all these years, I have decided (with a little prodding from my directors to take a risk ) my company should also attempt to make a shareware product ( http://www.cyspl.com/files/products.html ) , if for nothing else but as an exercise to try to expose me & my company to what computing skills & customer relationships should really be about.