The Hindu Business Line : An eye for technology vision

Born the last of 10 children, Swaminathan was able to observe people across various stages in life. “Some of my elder siblings had kids, even as I was growing up. All the time, someone was getting married, someone else was going through teenage crises…” That got him hooked to humanities, especially Cognitive Psychology.

Add to it the usual aspirations for the average Indian — to get into engineering or medical college.

Swaminathan got into IIT and studied Aerospace Engineering. But, he discovered that he “wasn’t the engineering type.” So, he further studied Artificial Intelligence, for “AI blends my background in technology and my interest in how people think and behave.” His Ph.D was in Language Understanding.

As he prepared for a position to teach at the University of Maryland in 1990, he got a call from Accenture, to become just their second employee in the R&D arm.

His interests have led him to projects related to document processing, Knowledge Management and Collaboration.

Two years ago, he took over as Chief Scientist at Accenture. Explaining his job, he says, “Since we are a services company, we do a thorough analysis of what is happening in technology, all the way from what academic R&D is doing, what suppliers’ R&D organisations are doing, what analysts are predicting, where venture capital flow is going…”

These inputs help the company create a technology vision. This vision is the anchor around which its makes its R&D, training and investments into new lines of business. This vision drives Accenture’s technology strategy and Swaminathan is in charge of this vision, as well as Accenture’s technology research.

Improving delivery

Last year, he set out on a goal to revolutionise software engineering. It resulted in the Industrialisation program for Accenture. It aims to improve not only software engineering but also delivery to the client. He explains, “Delivery involves the software, documentation, a whole lot of training, collaterals… the whole thing is called delivery.”

Under this, Accenture has a target to improve delivery performance by a ‘certain’ percentage within five years, he says, unwilling to give away more details.

This involves three components: Improve processes, use metrics and then automate stable processes.

Once you have processes for how people write software — such as how Quality Assurance or testing is done and formalised, then you can have much better metrics to compare between projects. When processes are all over the place, then metrics are of little use.

When processes are standardised, metrics come into the picture. Swaminathan’s team is doing work on how metrics can help in providing insight.

Calling it software telemetry, he says, “If a large number of people are developing a piece of software, the whole environment is instrumented and you collect data.”

So, measuring it tells you that someone wrote a piece of code on such a date and that someone else touched it up three days later. Then, this data is analysed. Swaminathan asks, “If 10 people touched a piece of code in a week, would it have more bugs or less bugs?”

As you gape helplessly at the question, he adds helpfully, “I can argue both ways. No one knows the answer to questions like this. So, we take this through the software telemetry program to bring in metrics.”

Currently, metrics that the IT industry uses are those that workers bring to management: on productivity, errors that occurred in testing and the like.

Swaminathan’s job here is to help Accenture move from reported metrics to what he calls ‘diagnostic’ metrics.

He says, “The mistakes you make in software development show up only during the testing phase, so you can’t attribute a bug to a particular part of the software engineering process.”

So, if this data is analysed across multiple projects, it could help find patterns.

For example, if a project manager changes three times or project structure is such that two architects are in different continents what are the early warning signs, is a question the analysis could answer.

Currently, this kind of analysis is still in the R&D stage for Accenture.

Swaminathan says that once the processes are standardised and metrics are available, then you can segregate processes that are stable and those that involve subjective human intervention.

At this point, it would be safe to automate stable processes. That is the third component to improve delivery.

Would not project managers, or even leaders involved in each project, have intuitively aided automation of such processes?

Sure thing, he says, but, “the reality of the consulting world is that people move from one project to another.

“So long as they are in one project, they come up with a scheme for that project, but they tend to re-invent the whole wheel for the next — so the learning does not spread.”

Another innovation Swaminathan and his team brought into Accenture is the ‘forever beta’ mindset.

He says, “Don’t assume you are making a finished product. Assume it is always evolving. So, come out with faster iterations with the user, but monitor the use it is being put to and slowly change it.”

The product would not have releases or versions with significant changes, and hence the user doesn’t have a learning curve.

Technology vision

Every year, the company comes out with a technology vision for the subsequent five years. Swaminathan explains, “We do this annually so that we may calibrate it for what happened in the previous 12 months.”

There are exit and entry criteria for these forecasts. When something is obvious, you don’t have to tell that to the world, he says.

As soon as his team publishes the vision, several things go into motion in Accenture. For instance, the strategy team begins to figure out what the vision means to the company: would it have to get into a new business or exit a business... Swaminathan says, “Sometimes, it leads to acquisitions. We also go on a road-show to talk to client CIOs from various industries and geographies.”

But, why five years? Swaminathan says that if you get into any large project, it could take up to six months to assemble the team and by the time the work is done it is anywhere between two and three years.

“In that time, the world has changed. All your calculations for the future are based on today’s world.”

And, these may become less, or more, relevant as the world changes. In his view, it is easier to backtrack on your IT strategy if you have an idea of how things would be five years from now.

The vision helps the company on three fronts: Launch a completely new business; accelerate entry into a new business to command better margins; and, bring innovation into the market.

Explaining each, he says, in 1992-93, Accenture first experimented with multimedia and used it in corporate training. By 1995, it had a completely new business in that arena.

Second, there are businesses that a company would anyway get into because the world would force it. But getting there early helps margins later, he explains.

“We saw e-commerce coming early on. As academics, we in the team used the Internet far more than corporate executives did and this helped us explain our vision better.

The R&D and the vision organisation would take credit for Accenture getting into that business six months earlier than we would have.

Third, his team bet on cloud computing last year and the company now has an emerging practice in Cloud Computing and Software as a Service (SaaS).

His research team is now working on workforce analytics — i.e. analyse data on employees and predict who would do well in which area so that each might be appropriately placed.

Another example of Accenture’s innovation is its biometrics initiative. Says Swaminathan, “We are currently doing a pilot at the London Heathrow airport, If you are registered, you need to show your palm to the scanner and don’t need a passport.”

The 2009 edition

For this year’s vision of things to come, Accenture is betting on the elasticity of the environment.

What if your business capabilities can stretch and expand at will?

What if your workforce is no longer a fixed group of people and skills, but can include a wide range of talent — the occasional expert from far away to solve a difficult problem or a team of hundred new employees to meet a sudden business spurt?

Responding to these thoughts, Accenture’s vision this year states the following…

1. The Internet is rapidly becoming the focus of IT-based business capabilities.

2. Two very distinct types of collaboration technologies — one supporting effective, targeted, point-to-point collaboration and the other supporting diffuse, open and community-based collaboration — are converging and redefining how we work.

3. Mobile devices are beginning to dwarf PCs as the electronic channel for businesses and consumers.

4. Technologies for extracting intelligence from data are maturing, and this adds a new urgency to all aspects of data management.

Swaminathan is bullish about cloud computing. He says it’s the beginning of something much larger, with the Internet going from a communication platform to a computing platform. He cites the example of Google Maps, which architecture is not the typical client-server one, but uses a lot of the local cache, assumes intermittent Net connectivity and the like.

As to intelligence technologies maturing, he says business intelligence software is getting integrated into major technology applications, such as SAP and Oracle, since these organisations have been acquiring analytics companies. “So, the focus shifts to ‘what products you have and how well you use analytics to analyse data and make decisions on that.’

He says it’s a fairly significant change from last year’s vision where he looked at analytics. “Now, it’s a commodity and we have to look beyond it.”

Mobile devices, already a rage, can only get more pervasive. He cites the example of the iPhone in the US, where more than half its buyers had a family income of less than $50,000, which puts them in the lower-middle class category. Swaminathan says, “They weren’t buying an expensive phone, but only a cheap computer.”

In 1988, 75 per cent of mobile phones were in the west. Today, it’s vice-versa. Mobility is a revolution in the developing world, which, he says, is pretty innovative with the technology. He cites the example of a Vodafone offering in Kenya that allows users to exchange mobile minutes. He says, “If I need to pay you for services, I can give you equivalent mobile minutes. It’s essentially currency.”

However, there are three caveats for Accenture’s predictions; or factors that could hasten or slow the adoption of these technologies. The first is IT Security, or IT assurance, that companies need for business continuity. For, if there is a major security breach on the Net, then Cloud Computing could face some obstacles. Two, economic, social and regulatory pressures related to climate change and sustainable development. And three, the effect exerted by the ‘millennial’ generation — both as consumers and employees — on the direction of information technology.

Millennials

The millennial generation that Swaminathan refers to are those born around or after 1982, which has grown up with technology, mobile phones and lately, Google. Swaminathan says, “They have very different sensibilities and of working.”

Most of them prefer technology-mediated communication to face-to-face interchange. If they are using the phone or are on chat, they have the option to time-share and talk to multiple people. Two, they also have a lowered sense of privacy, compared to the current generation. The baby-boomer generation is now moving towards retirement and the younger folks are coming into the market as consumers.

He describes them in a nutshell: “If the millennials become managers, then there would be no projects, no clients, no deadlines, no status reports, no deliverables, no one works for anything, nothing is ever finished, but somehow stuff happens!”

It sounds far-fetched, but Swaminathan cites examples of open-source software development and Internet phenomena such as the Wiki: there is nothing structured in the way these things evolve, people who have never seen each other are able to work together, but things do get done.

His impact on Accenture

Ask Swaminathan for examples of how his work has impacted Accenture and he says, “My responsibility is to formulate our overall R&D policy. My stance is that a successful R&D organisation should be on the strategic critical path of the company and not on the tactical critical path. In terms of big business change, you should be leading it but not solving everyday problems.”

In 2000, Swaminathan and a colleague helped Accenture quickly get over the negative business impact of the 9/11 attack on the WTC towers in New York. Accenture was then starting to build its offshore capability. Workers from offshore destinations, such as India, would travel to the US, learn from their counterparts and return home to spread that learning. “We had signed a whole bunch of deals and this learning transition stopped midway because of the attacks.” People could not get visas.

Accenture, he says, couldn’t even get started on projects it had signed up. “A colleague and I came up with a technology solution called Rapid Transition Suite, to facilitate this transition process.” It was built on standard collaboration themes but with support for the transition process. In a typical outsourcing environment, about 100 people would be involved. So, the software would track who is learning what, from whom, how far along they are and all this gives the management a snapshot of how the transition is going. The suite is still being used in the company, he says.

Personal interests

Recently, Swaminthan took a year off from Accenture to build up an online museum for children’s art pieces. Called Artsonia, it provides a platform for self-expression. “Schools teach you science, maths, humanities and general values. I ask myself what is so valuable culturally, socially and artistically, to a society and a family — it’s a young person’s expression through art.”

In the US alone, he says, ten billion pictures are drawn by children between ages 5 and 15. Most of it is forgotten or thrown away.

The Net provides this platform. He says, “You can’t have a physical museum for this but you can have virtual museum. And each art piece brings, on average, five adults to our site — mom, dad, grandma, grandpa and one other relative.

And when distribution costs are high, your product has to service several millions at one go. But, when distribution costs are low, you can cater to one or five or 10.

And, the business does make money. “We are a small company. Our money is from the coffee mugs and t-shirts we sell to parents, with their kids’ art work on them.

He recounts one poignant story about one of the children who participated in Artsonia, a fourth grader from Canada. “The child died in an accident, and his friends came together and created a sort of memorial for him around his art work. That told me that when a young person dies, what he leaves behind, of value and worth, is his picture and the art work he did.”

bharatk@thehindu.co.in

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An eye for technology vision