Illusions of Reality

Ever since the web has been overloaded with heaps and heaps of information  and as a common man has started to imagine that he can look for more and more of the things on internet, reaching the right information quickly has become one of the most critical aspect. Google’s success with effective search, cry for everything metadata, emergence of Web 2.0 - all point to the same thing as well.

And I beleive this is exactly what the creators of like.com would have thought when they came up with an interesting and innovative idea of visual shopping. How often do we see an item and intend to have one that is similar to what we see. It is easy to judge that the probability of this happening is much more rather than we intending to put in description of the item we want to buy to search it out. Like.com pulls items from agencies such as Amazon.com and then provides a visual "likeness" search for items. So you can pick a t-shirt displayed in their catalog and then say show me other t-shirts similar to this one. What’s more - it allows you to specify what aspect of the t-shirt is more important for you - color, shape or pattern? This helps its search engine determine closely what likingness you want to search out. Additional search criteria include specifying color, prize range and other common search filter criteria that common catalog systems provide. And all this - without a touch of the keyboard!

The site is, however, in alpha release right now and its future growth and success depends on many factors:

- How accurate and fast is the visual search?
- What variety of aspects can the item search on and for what variety of items?
- How far can it go? (Can I just click Brad Pitt’s photo that I see on a news article  and get a look at the watches that are similar to the one he’s wearing in that photo..? )

In any case, certainly impressively innovative.

Before a couple of years from now, I started reading a lot of business leadership inspiration kind of stuff. The Jack Welch, Lee Iacocca, Lou Gerstner kind of stuff. As I read books after books, it started appearing how the effect of factors such as work-culture, knowledge of company values, deep impacts of management and company leaders were one of the most important and contributing factors to success of the great companies.

However, working here at one of my company’s client site (lets call it C) has kind of confused me to a certain extend. At C, most of the IT related work is outsourced (not just to India for cost savings but to other IT services provider companies in US as well). So, every project involves as many as half a dozen teams from different companies meeting together to work. Even the managers for C are contractors who would work here for a period and move on.

The benefit that C extracts out of this is slim company structure with minimal fat layers. So once a project is over or a technology is out of date, its not C’s head ache to take care of these people. And this is not an uncommon structure - infact most companies prefer this model.

But, at the same time it is very apparent that each of the participating vendors try to keep an edge over each other at all times and in process, end up giving top performance. C need not take up all the head ache of keeping close track of all the things - the vendor managers do that out of desire to bring in more and more business.

Now, all this brings into my mind a few questions:

1. If shrewd business desire can bring in so much of push to performance - isnt outsourcing in this way a better deal? And yes, where’s the limit to stop outsourcing things? Even the project and program managers are contractors these days.

2. How are things such as team spirit, common goals, common culture, etc handled or work in such a model?

3. Is the company probably giving up long term goals for short term objective of minimizing fat layer and keeping its structure cost effectively slim?

Opinions and thoughts are more than welcome!

Came across LiveOps today - a customer care/ support company - found an impressively innovative operations model that they work on.

Here’s what they do:

They recruit new call center agents who are asked to work directly from their home. They supposedly pays on call per se basis. They use a proprietory call-routing technology to route calls to the best agent out of the ones available at that time. They constantly keep on rating agents for this. Also, they commonly arrange sessions for exchange of know-how from these best rated agents to others. So, what are the advantages here?

- Cost savings since infrastructure goes nearly to 0 - no offices, etc.
- Best quality service based on call routing technology
- Comfort for agents/ employees since they get maximal flexibility
- Ability to reach good agents in remote areas who have mobility problems
- Innovative pay structure directly based on performance - pushes for performance and also minimizes load on company to pay low performers.
- Maximal location flexibility - you can have one employee in Bangalore while other in Buenos Aires to get the best mix of quality and cost savings on outsourcing.

But, I beleive there’s still more to look into before we can predict how successful a company adopting this module can be:

- How dynamic and correct is the ratings procedure?
- How accurate and advanced is the call routing mechanism?