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Bowling Alone: The New Reality

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DQI Bureau
New Update

Has anybody heard the name Kjell Nordstrom? No relation to the famous US

retailer, but a Professor at Stockholm University, who I would rank as a

passionate speaker and evangelist par excellence, in the league of Michael

Hammer and Tom Peters. Kjell was a keynote speaker at a recent Financial

Services Customer meet in Monte Carlo, where many of us made presentations on

the challenges facing the financial sector. Describing the new socio-economic

landscape in the US and Western Europe through a speech titled "Bowling

Alone", Kjell painted the picture of the new socio-economic landscape in

the world; where over 50% of Americans and 60% of Europeans (70%-plus in

Scandinavia) now prefer to remain single and go "bowling alone". This

creates new challenges for marketers and all service providers in developing

unique value propositions for a customer size of one, which is what most of our

customers are faced with today.

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“Imagine how much easier it would be to understand the needs of a group of chattering ladies in Ahmedabad than it would be to discern the desires of a taciturn individual in a singles bar in

Mumbai... and you get the message”

Ganesh

Natarajan

Developing his corporate message from this, Kjell pointed out the need to get

closer to the real needs of the customer by understanding and using tacit

knowledge that goes beyond the standard articulated knowledge, which is

predictably less and less in the lonely societies of today. Imagine how much

easier it would be to understand the needs of a group of chattering ladies in

Ahmedabad than it would be to discern the desires of a taciturn individual in a

singles bar in Mumbai and you get the message. For the IT industry, the lesson

is obvious — the new application areas of the future will all be

customer-centric, CRM and SFA applications will rely heavily on extensive data

warehousing and data mining and business and competitive intelligence tools

combined with the yet unexploited potential of KM will prove to be the true

characteristics of corporations dealing with individual customers as well as

providers of these solutions to these corporations in the global marketplace.

Our consulting teams have coined a new acronym called "KEOS", or

Knowledge Enabled Operational Systems for this, and we see every corporation

embracing a KEOS interface to its package implementation and custom built

software to give it the cutting edge in a world full of chaos. This prediction

also comes through in a research project that I have been doing on knowledge

maturity models for the IT industry for IIT, Mumbai, where it is becoming clear

that companies will need to move higher and higher in the knowledge creation,

dissemination and usage cycle to ensure relevance of their value propositions to

an increasingly picky set of customers in the years to come.

Kjell also made two interesting observations that are points to ponder. In

the new world, it is no longer the survival of the fittest but the success of

the sexiest that will be a reality. Note Infosys’ larger than life image

compared to its peers, Wipro and TCS in the top of mind recall of the common

man! But beyond just perception, what this means is that all organizations will

have to develop sexy value propositions that catch the attention and fancy of

the customer and create a "temporary monopoly" if not in the market

place, at least in the mind of the customer. The Indian BPO industry is on the

verge of creating this, if the hype that surrounds this in many world markets is

to be believed.

The second point made by Kjell was that in a market where supply is

outstripping demand by many orders of magnitude (does that sound familiar to

software exporters?), Number One will take all and there is no place for second

best. This is an important message for all of us who are building software

export companies out of India. A set of distinctive value propositions coupled

with all the good and well known capabilities of cost, quality and delivery

capability will have to be developed and honed by every firm and marketed as the

new India advantage as we continue to compete for pole position in the global IT

marketplace!

Ganesh Natarajan



The author is deputy chairman & MD of Zensar Tech and chairman of Nasscom’s
SME Forum for Western India

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