The Hindu Business Line : High-tech can be high-touch

The site of First Direct ( www.firstdirect.com), the online banking subsidiary of HSBC in the UK, opens with a teaser: ‘£100 if you like us… £200 if you don’t.’ An inside page explains how: “Switch to ‘first direct’ and we’ll give you £100. If you’re not happy after six months we’ll help you move to another bank and give you another £100.”

Equally interesting should be this snatch from Peter Sheahan’s Fl!p ( www.harpercollins.co.uk) about another customer-friendly service from the company: it sends an SMS to its customers when they are approaching their credit limits to save them embarrassment when they try to make a purchase they can’t afford, and also to spare them unwanted overdraft fees.

“In early 2007, the bank estimated that the SMS program had saved customers around £32 million in overdraft fees. The program has proven so popular that other banks in the UK, such as Nationwide, have begun to follow suit.”

High tech can be high touch if you can mine the potential of new communication technologies, argues Sheahan. “The LG Internet refrigerator is designed so it can order your groceries through an online grocery gateway. It is also a music player and PDA. The DIVA (among other) air-conditioners can be activated via an ‘I’m on my way home’ SMS.”

An Australian example the author mentions is about how United International Pictures partnered with a number of interactive marketing and technology companies to launch Mission Impossible 3. “Nearly 10,000 people registered online to use their mobile phones to participate in a huge, city-wide puzzle game with clues delivered by SMS and ‘hypertag’ technology embedded in bus shelters and signs,” narrates Sheahan. “This was a far better way than 30-second television ads to attract a large number of committed fans who would swell opening weekend ticket sales for MI3 and create an all-important buzz about the movie.”

Relatively simple interactivity can massively increase customer participation and hence the feeling of a reciprocated relationship with your brand, Sheahan advises.

“Don’t make technology your obsession, make connecting with your customers and staff your obsession. If technology helps you do this, and it can, then use it.”

Ideas in every page that you would find hard to flip past.

Refreshingly different

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. If that sounds tough, how about Ajax, the acronym coined by Jesse James Garnett? “A whole new approach to Web development,” explains Rajnikant Rao in Ajax: Conversations with an Ajaxian ( www.tatamcgrawhill.com).

“The tools, as a developer, you use are the same — HTML to display a page, JavaScript to build some intelligence on the browser side, and a server-side scripting using Java, PHP, Visual Basic, etc. for backend processing.”

Refreshingly, however, the difference is in the ‘refreshing’. While a normal Web application refreshes a whole page when any change has to be made on the screen, in an Ajax-enabled application only that part of the browser screen that needs to be refreshed gets updated, elucidates Rao.

“In a normal Web application, every user interaction, i.e. click of a button, or menu item, or link, or sometimes even shortcut keys, results in an HTTP request sent to the server. The server processes the request and generates a fresh HTML page using server-side scripts,” he elaborates. The response stream traverses back to the browser, which then renders the same on the screen; meanwhile, the user is twiddling his thumb!

In contrast, Ajax code, written in JavaScript and using DOM (document object model) objects and CSS (cascading style sheets) concepts, causes a browser to get updated without a full screen refresh. “Popular sites that use Ajax include Google Mail, Google Maps and Flickr.”

For the cutting-edge developers.

Invest in talent management

The early days of the IT (information technology) industry in the US were dominated by large companies such as IBM, HP, Sperry and Univac, with traditional models of talent management, recounts Peter Cappelli in Talent on Demand, a book from Harvard Business Press, to be released this month.

“A new generation of companies located on Route 128 in Boston led the growth of the industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s: Wang, Data General, and especially Digital Equipment Corporation. Their practices for managing talent were also traditional, with elaborate planning models based on internal development.”

The 1990s saw the Silicon Valley firms coming into the game, with a new approach that relied on ‘hiring the skills from the outside when they were needed, luring talent by offering stock options and exciting projects.’ A large proportion of the talent for these companies came first from larger, traditional companies like Fairchild, Hewlett-Packard and IBM, the author traces.

The outside hiring model, which came to rest in the industry, has a flip side, observes Cappelli.

“When employers must rely on colleges and universities for their talent, the problem is that the supply is not within their control. It responds to signals from the market but with a time lag.” Also, when new talent is brought in for meeting the changed organisational requirements, the old talent must go out. “Retraining in IT occupations is virtually non-existent… The number of openings that resulted from employees leaving not only companies but also the programming occupation exceeded the number of net new positions in programming in the 1990s.”

The book cites an insightful statistic from the National Survey of College Graduates, thus: “Although 52 per cent of civil engineering graduates were still in that field twenty years after graduation (typically in their early forties), only 19 per cent of computer science graduates are still that field twenty years later. In computer programming, 36 per cent of all graduates have left that field and are working in other occupations.”

Outside the IT industry, Cappelli finds a contrast. Most employers seem to have concluded by the end of the 1990s that a strategy of relying on outside hiring to address talent needs was not working, and some began to think about the alternative of building an inventory of talent internally, he writes.

The most sophisticated of corporations in their thinking about talent management appear to be Indian companies such as Wipro, Tata, HCL and Infosys, opines Cappelli in the concluding chapter. The way forward, according to him, is to realise that the talent problems of employers, employees, and the broader society are intertwined.

“Employers want the skills they need when they need them, delivered in a manner they can afford. Employees want career advancement prospects, and they also want control over their careers. The economy as a whole and the societies in which it operates need higher levels of skills, particularly deeper competencies in management.”

Cappelli advises employers not to rely entirely on the outside labour market but to get better at their own talent management processes. A chapter on ‘the return on talent management investments’ speaks of how in the Tata group of companies, candidates for development bid for openings in the TAS division, which is known for establishing leadership credentials.

“Candidates must demonstrate how the desired job will help them build their own competencies. Candidates who secure these positions are then slotted into leadership positions in the other Tata companies after they finish these developmental assignments.”

Recommended addition to the recruiters’ shelf.

Tailpiece

“We found that a sizeable percentage of our big attrition was involuntary, especially among the fresh recruits, and that too in the first week of hiring.”

“How so?”

“They kept forgetting the name of our company, which is why we decided to offer free SMS to them every morning!”

dmurali@thehindu.co.in