US developers to put in over $1 bn in India

Gayatri Ramanathan in Mumbai | March 21, 2006 04:06 IST

A fresh investment of $1 billion is heading the India way — this time from US developers. The investment expected to come in three tranches of $350 million, $750 million and $50 million — all this year. The first tranche is likely to be closed by April.

Mark J Reidy, a Washington-based attorney of the US law firm Andrews & Kurth, who is putting the funds together, said large American corporations, construction companies and real estate developers are investing in the fund.

Sources close to the development indicated that a major San Francisco-based developer is coming into the country through the fund with plans for developing tech parks on its own.

The parks will be constructed as per US specifications, they said.

The sources added that the fund managers have begun talking to construction majors such as L&T, and the initial round of negotiations with L&T is over.

So far foreign funds have invested in existing projects in the country that are being developed by local developers. It is for the first time that a foreign fund is considering buying land and developing its own parks.

Reidy said given the volume of outsourcing to India, American companies are keen on developing their own properties.

The tech parks are proposed to be set up in the southern cities of Chennai, Hyderabad and Bangalore. As for the northern destinations, the fund managers are looking at Rajasthan and Punjab, besides Gurgaon and Noida in Delhi.

These will include biotech parks, IT parks and research and development (R&D) centres for top US pharma companies.

He, however, declined to name the companies that are looking to set up R&D facilities in India. The fund is also considering commercial properties in Mumbai, Reidy said.

Source: Rediff news.

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Mining for Gold

by Evan Goldberg

Data mining lets you use historical information to make better business decisions.

Whether you know it or not you're managing a lot of databases in your business. Tons of mission-critical information resides in a huge variety of applications on your company's computers. From the customer list in the accounting system to the email in people's inboxes, these bits of information are nuggets of gold if they can make it to the right person at the right time. Through a process called "data mining," you can actually look at historical information and use it to make better business decisions. But data locked in silos can be difficult or impossible to mine. Let me give you an example.

Customer Joe emails his salesperson, irate that the shipment he ordered has not arrived. The salesperson has no access to the shipping system and must offer to call back when he digs up the information. He calls the shipping department, they figure out where the shipment is, and he emails Joe back, reassuring him that the delivery will arrive tomorrow.

There are two things wrong with this scenario. The first is a practical problem: Sales couldn't help Joe right away because the information about the shipment was locked up in an inaccessible system. The second is what blocks any chance of data mining: The fact that Joe complained at all is information that is now locked up in the salesperson's email account, doubtless headed for the delete folder.

Wouldn't it be better if Joe had been able to access the shipping information himself, reassure the customer in the first call, and then log the fact that Joe had a complaint about shipping so that anyone dealing with this customer in the future can be aware of the history? And here's the kicker: Later, the customer-service department can track how many complaints were about shipping and identify if there is a more global problem to be solved. They can even correlate shipping complaints with likelihood of repurchase to put a dollar amount on the problem and help give an ROI on fixing it.

New tools are emerging to make it much easier for smaller companies to mine the data in their systems, like larger organizations have been doing for years. Doing so can provide a long term competitive advantage over organizations that make their decisions based on little or no historical data.

The most important infrastructure to get in place to allow data mining is, of course, databases. A customer relationship management application for your sales people and service people will capture information that otherwise ends up getting lost in sticky notes or emails. Many questions can be answered just by running reports in these applications, and with today's Web-based versions of CRM the applications can be easy to get up and running without being hard on the budget.

The next step will be answering more global questions about the business like the ones I have alluded to above. How does activity in one department affect the bottom line? To answer these questions will typically involve information from multiple business applications, such as the CRM system and the accounting system. There are a few approaches to solving this dilemma.

The first is to synchronize the data between the systems. This can be challenging and the technical expertise required generally beyond what small organizations have access to. But if the application vendors themselves have developed tools to synchronize the information in their databases, such as allowing purchase history to be stored in the sales system, this may be an option.

The second approach is to develop what is called a "data warehouse". This is an external database that combines information from multiple "operational" databases such as the CRM system and the accounting system. Technically savvy users in your organization may be able to do home-grown versions of this approach that work fine for you -- even if it means the data is just summary data in a big spreadsheet. More advanced data warehouses can require third-party tools and consulting and can get expensive.

Finally you can choose business applications that actually offer cross-departmental functionality and are "pre-integrated"; you can therefore do your data mining straight from the operational system. Some sales force automation tools also offer customer support functionality. Totally integrated systems cover everything from accounting to your web site activity to sales and service.

Whatever approach you choose, there's gold in them thar hills. A better understanding of who your customers are, how and when they purchase, and how your interactions with them affect future activity is another contribution IT systems can make to the bottom line.

Ref:http://www.fastcompany.com/resources/technology/articles/122605.html

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Learn, Unlearn, and Relearn

Learn, Unlearn, and Relearn

by Marcia Conner

The secret to learning new things is to be willing to unlearn--even if your behaviors previously brought success.

One summer in college I canvassed for a local non-profit. We went door to door telling people about the organization and asking them to sign various petitions. I recited my spiel a hundred times. "Hi, my name is Marcia and I'd like five minutes to tell you a little about..."

Halfway through the season my boss asked me to insert a slice of bologna in one shoe. I followed his request, but only after considering telling him where to stick the lunch meat.

At the first house we visited, I physically couldn't say my opening the same way. The bologna distracted me enough so that I needed to reflect on e-v-e-r-y word. The next day, without the bologna, my approach was still fresh, engaging, and more successful than it had been two days before. I had unlearned, and I had relearned.

Unlearning can be a one-shot (one-shoe?) deal or a daily practice. It can help you become open to new skills, experiences, behaviors, and knowledge. Although you can't physiologically unlearn anything--literally erase existing neural pathways--you can create the equivalent of a mental attic and put a sign on the door that reads, "Things I know no longer so." Then you can shift your focus to the edge of what you knew and transition from managing your knowledge to participating in the flow. Here's how.

Begin at the beginning. In order to pick up a new skill, even if it's similar to something you already can do, learn what makes it different. All of us repeat things that worked in the past, even when they don't apply to the now. Repeating isn't always a bad strategy, but when there is a significant difference, the old approach holds you back.

I'll never forget a husband-and-wife team who came to me to learn how to kayak. The guy was a canoeist and he just wouldn't set aside what he knew about canoeing in order to learn about kayaking. He spent his early lessons trying to compare the two types of boats and tried repeating canoe strokes he was certain would work. As a result, he continually found himself facing the bottom of the swimming pool where our class took place. What he knew already wasn't as useful as what he needed to learn fresh. Meanwhile, his wife, a complete novice, made significant progress from the first day.

Stay open. Unlearning doesn't require you to toss out all your accumulated experiences or presume previous know-how will keep you from success. Rather, it asks that you stay open to different ways of getting things done.

What happens when you begin a new job? You learn about the new organization and the department where you'll work while you unpeel the mindset and procedures of the groups you just left. Your refusal to unlearn old rules (for instance, comparing everything to the way it worked at the old company) leaves you out of the corporate culture and keeps you from getting a clear sense of the job. By thinking, "This is how we did it where I used to work," you miss learning opportunities and you avoid moving in. If you go in looking at how the new organization works, thereby replacing your old activities with new ones, you systematically begin to forget what's no longer useful and you begin to prepare for what's next.

Look for mirrors. Make it easy for your boss, coworkers, employees, family, and friends to give you guidance by asking for it. The more people you have in your life who help you reflect on your behaviors, the greater your chance to gain an accurate sense of how other people perceive you and which actions to unlearn.

During Friday lunch meetings with his team members, John Seely Brown (when he was still working at Xerox PARC) focused on what they did well, what they did wrong, and what they learned from it all. A primary objective was to help the team learn and unlearn. One day, team members remarked that whenever they saw John make a certain face in response to someone's idea, it was obvious that the idea didn't stand a chance. John had the next meeting videotaped. Sure enough, he saw for himself that he did sometimes wear a disapproving expression. From then on, whenever that feeling washed over him, he worked to change his facial expression and to listen more attentively to the other person's views.

Examine your beliefs. Your beliefs determine your behavior and it's difficult to act inconsistently with your beliefs for very long. When you believe you already know the right way to do things, everything else can seem wrong. Why then would you want to unlearn what you're currently doing, let alone replace it with something else?

A company I work with needed a way to ready the industry for their offerings and increase the firm's name recognition. Their research and publications team seemed suited for the task. Although widening the market and strengthening brand was far more lucrative than the sales the team brought in by selling papers, the group refused to give anything away. They believed what they were doing was right; that people wouldn't value the research as much if it was freely available, and that clients preferred paper copies to online versions. No matter how many times the CEO told them to blanket the marketplace with information, they continued to do what they'd always done. Then we sent them all to an industry event where they spent time asking questions and challenging their beliefs. Something almost magical happened. The people they met expressed their appreciation for the company's reports, asking if they could have the rights to reproduce and then distribute the research to their customers, too. Within a few days the team developed a new set of beliefs around their value to the industry. They began behaving like a team of market researchers and industry evangelists rather than a product group generating sales for one company.

So what are you going to unlearn first? Create a list of several approaches. Write it your journal or on a sticky note to post on the computer, the television, the dashboard, or your desk--then buy yourself a few slices of bologna.

Ref: http://www.fastcompany.com/resources/learning/conner/022706.html

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