THe New AVATAR

Daily morning walk at 5.30 and dip in temple pond and having a ‘dharshan’ of lord and then prayers . By 8 am nice hot idlies and Sambar , then a Mathrubhumi daily , a ride to a paddy fileds . A nap during brunch. A sumptuous lunch in plantain leaf . Drowsing after noon in midst of fluttering wind . Paruppu vada and tea ( kannan devan tea) at 4 clock. A bath in the evening and long walk to the temple again. Spending quality time in sanctum sanctorum, walking back with the chatter boxes discussing about LDF and UDF..
Checking mails of loved ones between 7 and 8 in the evening.
Hot Tiffin and glass of milk . Giving ears and heart to Kishor kumar , Udit , Pankaj, latha and slipping down to a unknown world .

Waiting for this avatar! May be after 15 years ……

SENSEX for NEWBIES!

The Sensex is an "index". What is an index? An index is basically an indicator. It gives you a general idea about whether most of the stocks have gone up or most of the stocks have gone down. The Sensex is an indicator of all the major companies of the BSE ( Bombay Stock Exchange). The Nifty is an indicator of all the major companies of the NSE( National Stock Exchange) for example Satyam, Infosys & Wipro are listed both in NSE and BSE. If the Sensex goes up, it means that the prices of the stocks of most of the major companies on the BSE have gone up. If the Sensex goes down, this tells you that the stock price of most of the major stocks on the BSE have gone down. Just like the Sensex represents the top stocks of the BSE, the Nifty represents the top stocks of the NSE. The Sensex is calculated taking into consideration stock prices of 30 different BSE listed companies. It is calculated using the “free-float market capitalization” method. This is a world wide accepted method as one of the best methods for calculating a stock market index. The method used for calculating the Sensex and the 30 companies that are taken into consideration are changed from time to time. This is done to make the Sensex an accurate index and so that it represents the BSE stocks properly. Market cap or market capitalization is simply the worth of a company in terms of its shares! To put it in a simple way, if you were to buy all the shares of a particular company, what is the amount you would have to pay? That amount is called the “market capitalization”! For eg: Satyam has a market capitalization of approximately 8 Billion US Dollars.

About me

Hi , this is Prasad , born in the year 1978 for Kallikkal Prabhakarn ( Govt. Servant , Served Kerala Poilice at the capacity of Inspector ) & Pathayil Padmini ( house wife) in a small village Coyalmannam near Palakkad in Kerala .
Did schooling at Chinmaya Vidhyalaya & Gurukulam High school both in Palakkad District , matriculated with high distinction . College education at Govt. Victoria College , Palakkad and did Masters at Mahatma Gandhi university Kottayam , Kerala . I have an younger sister Preetha an Electronic Engineer , a talented one with diversified skills , married to Prasanth both are working for Satyam Computer services. I got married in the year 2006 to Smitha a Gold medalisit in Masters , currently working for Cognizant technologies.
I have around eight years of experience in IT of which 24 months in managing a full life cycle business of Talent Preparation services.
Worked extensively in Quality Assurance & Quality Control and well versed with Project management, team building and SDLC Concepts. Strong in developing process in talent preparation services & e-learning frame works. Is conversant with project management and desigining quality procedures in service offerings. Have good knowledge of Human Resource Management.

My Certifications
Six Sigma Green Belt certified
Project Lead QMS certified
Learning services QMS certified
Certified Internal Quality Auditor


My professional Experience
Currently workinng with Satyam Computer Services Ltd., Hyderabad , India in the role of Manager .
Worked in John Informatic Pvt. Ltd (Now UB Group ), Bangalore in the role of a Consultant for the period 06/2002 – 08/2005
Worked in R.V. Group of Institutions as Program Coordinator for the period 07/2000- 06/2002

ACHIEVING QUALITY FOR THE CUSTOMER

According to me there are three key elements of quality: customer, process and employee. Everything we do to remain a world-class quality company focuses on these three essential elements.

1 ... the Customer
Delighting Customers

Customers are the center of the quality : they define quality. They expect performance, reliability, competitive prices, on-time delivery, service, clear and correct transaction processing and more. In every attribute that influences customer perception, we know that just being good is not enough. Delighting our customers is a necessity. Because if we don't do it, someone else will!
2 ... the Process
Outside-In Thinking

Quality requires us to look at our business from the customer's perspective, not ours. In other words, we must look at our processes from the outside-in. By understanding the transaction lifecycle from the customer's needs and processes, we can discover what they are seeing and feeling. With this knowledge, we can identify areas where we can add significant value or improvement from their perspective.

3 ... the Employee
Leadership Commitment

People create results. Involving all Associates are essential to the quality approach. Most of the corporates are committed to providing opportunities and incentives for employees to focus their talents and energies on satisfying customers.

In Filim City

Interview with Paul Clement

Excerpt of the interview of Dr.Paul C Clements, PhD happy reading!

Paul C. Clements, Ph.D.
Senior Member of the Technical Staff- SEI
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Good afternoon Clement Are you enjoying the Archcon 2006 workshops?
Clement: It is always great to be in Satyam, the kind of enthusiasm you people show makes us connected with you! Its great job inviting all expertise in Architecture especially partners and vendors and having knowledge sharing and learning, I am also learning!!

What is your current role in SEI?
Clement: I am into Software Architecting initiative of SEI, setting out duties, skill and knowledge for Architectural need of corporate house and architects like you. Currently I am enjoying my time in IIT Mumbai.

Where do you see the maturity of Software Architecture?
Clement: Indeed, it has matured a lot; it was very difficult to create a niche of architect then, architect was monolithic, no flexibility. In olden days the Assembly language programmer will have implicit architecture in their minds it is not presented in any format, as programming language evolved in a spiral, Software Architecture too. The architecture is influenced by the III Generation and IV Generation languages, now Architecture has more flexibility, reusability and it is no more monolithic. Lot of happening in this area, Enterprise orientation, business orientation, service orientation etc...

Lot of discussion on SOA?
Clement : You are right , lot of discussions are made on SOA , but we have to accept SOA is not any new rocket science, it is old wine in new bottle , your CORBA’s DCOMs are all in the line of SOA , for me SOA is just style!! Look for it, it is a real candidate!!!

Is the cost of Architecture is increasing?
Clement: Cost will definitely increase if Architecting is not done!! Cost is increasing in all the areas!!

How we can get a best architecture for a given context?
Clement: Sit with all stake holders, get their inputs have a meeting, cut a balance between technology and business, end of the day your architecture should optimize business results!! It is not fare in going behind technology and models unless you can bet on ROI!!

Prasad: For fresh engineering graduate what kind of Architecting skills are required?
Clement: It is a good thought? SEI is working on set of desired Duties, Skills and knowledge that Architect aspirant should have, once it takes a shape surly we can share with you people. In brief they should be good learners, innovators, should have passion and of course good problem solvers.

Any tips for existing software architects
Clement: - learn – learn, sharpen your knowledge weapons, please learn how to use sharp weapons, because some weapons wrong usages will DISTRUCT!!

It was nice talking to Clement, it was a quality time discussing with you, sorry to steal few minutes from a coffee break of ArchCon2006!!

Bill Gates Success Mantra

ARTICLE: HOW to MAKE YOUR WILDEST DREAMS a REALITY - by Craig Lock

According to Bill Gates there are 3 keys to success in any new venture:

1) Being in the right place at the right time. (You could well be already there!)
2) Have a vision of where the industry/business you're working in is going!
3) Taking Massive and Immediate Action! (It is time to act!)

"The future belongs to those who believe in the quality of their dreams." Was it Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, the famous German poet and philosopher who said those wise words?

Here are my 15 steps to fulfilling my wildest dreams...

1. KNOW YOURSELF.
Know and accept your weaknesses and faults (we all have them), but even more so your strengths, abilities and gifts. Build on your strengths and try to minimize or improve on your weaknesses. An honest, objective analysis of yourself is the first step in preparing you for success and realizing your dreams. Celebrate you for just being you, a unique creation.

Aim for mental clarity about what you most want out of life. Think about it and write it down. If it's happiness, what do you mean by happiness: a sense of belonging, recognition, independence, love, money or security? If you don't know where you are and where you want to go with your life, how will you ever get there? Aim at nothing and you're sure to hit it.

2. GET PASSIONATE
Don't apologize for getting passionate. What excites you the most? If you are not enthusiastic and excited about what you're doing, your path in life, you'll never get others to share your dream. Once you find your passion, you will have found your POWER, MEANING and PURPOSE in life.

3. SURROUND YOURSELF WITH POSITIVE PASSION
Always be aware. Negative people will poison your dream faster than anything else. Motto: "If you can't be positive, shut up!" Try and stay positive...even in the face of negativity.

4. ACCEPT FROM THE START THAT YOU WON'T PLEASE EVERYONE
You're going to be misunderstood, misquoted, hurt some feelings, perhaps even lose some friends (for the time being). Motto: "What other people think of me is none of my business!" Repeat this statement to yourself, especially when you doubt or feel discouraged.

5. ALWAYS BE YOURSELF
To thine own self be true. (Shakespeare's "Hamlet", act I.3.) This is supremely important, no matter what the world may think of you. The masses are conditioned to mediocrity and other people's success can make them not feel inferior for their own insignificant little lives.

Accept yourself. Learn from others--but don't be intimidated by them, or pretend to be someone you're not; because... "We are most effective when we're being ourselves."

6. DON'T BE SCARED OF MAKING MISTAKES
The only real mistake is one from which you learn nothing. Motto: "Far better to try something and fail, than try nothing and succeed!"

7. ACCEPT THAT IT WILL NEVER BE EASY
Realizing your dream may be the hardest, most uphill thing you'll ever do. A truth ... "You can't coast uphill."

The key ingredient in success is never giving up. Keep on keeping on with your quest. It has been said that "success is 99% made up of failures".

8. STAY HUMBLE (no matter how successful you may be.)
Don't ever think you've made it and arrived--there's always a lot ahead, more to do, higher mountains to climb. Motto: "The greatest way to do our thing has yet to be discovered!"

9. DON'T UNDERESTIMATE YOURSELF
There is incredible power in yourself (in the form of the unique human mind), but far more so in the forces of the Universe. Make them work for you by living your life in harmony with these natural forces. Like positive energy attracts like.

Enough "spiritual" thoughts! Back to the "real world" and you. Avoid developing an inferiority complex (Who am I, a 'nothing'?"). Don't be filled with feelings of self pity ("nobody likes me"), or think "I can't do it". These thoughts will steal your dream.

10. HAVE FUN
Nothing is ever as bad as it seems--don't get too solemn, or serious or too downcast when things go wrong (as they surely will from time to time). Take a leaf from Thomas Edison's book: "I never did a day's work in my entire life: it was all FUN!"

Laugh at life's funny moments... and there are plenty of them. "The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes, but in liking what one does." -J.M. Barrie

11. DEVELOP 'THE WILL TO LIVE' There will be plenty of times when you'll face the death of your dream. When failures, disappointments, and criticisms come you need the will and faith to keep going. Remember: We learn far more from our failures than our successes, because failures show us what doesn't work. So, failure is just one step closer to ultimate success. Often the difference between failure and success is trying just one more time, picking yourself up off the canvas after being knocked down time and again.

12. DEVELOP 'THE WILL TO HELP AND SERVE OTHERS'.
Success on its own (i.e., for its own sake) will pollute and corrupt you--it's a dead end street unless you have meaning in your life. The years of struggle breed fortitude and character. The gold may be an inch away from the seam, where your fellow miners have given up. You need to succeed for a reason, a purpose, a cause that's bigger than you! and IF (a very big if) you've fulfilled all the above requirements...

13. ALWAYS BE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR OPPORTUNITIES.
They are all around you. There are no permanent problems-only solutions, possibilities and opportunities. The Chinese word for 'crisis' means 'danger' + 'opportunity'.

14. If you truly believe in what you are doing, DEVELOP THE 'WILL TO SUCCEED' with absolute commitment. It is not enough to just survive, aim at being the best you can possibly be! Keep your dream big, bold and even outrageous--don't water it down or settle for mediocrity... even if others think you are crazy! Trust in your judgment, your intuition and your creative mind to overcome any obstacles. "Be bold and mighty, unseen forces come to your aid."

15. NEVER GIVE UP ON YOUR DREAM!
Be patient. Don't be in too much of a hurry to achieve your goals and dreams. Be persistent and never quit. As the saying goes, 'Winners never quit and quitters never win.'

Always remember, when you think you've exhausted all your possibilities, you really haven't--there's always another way, a better way...and even more importantly, there's always another day!

Life is not a dress rehearsal, it's the main event. GO FOR THAT DREAM. It is within you and within your reach.

SOA

ArchConf 2006 – Learning

There was immense learning and sharing in the ArchConf2006. We could meet and interact with Architects from Satyam, customers and external speakers. Through this article I would like to share few takeaways.
Theme of the conference was “Architecting solutions for the agile Business”.
All the speakers addressed on Architecture that connects multiple platforms and technology like BPM (Business process modeling) and SOA (Service oriented architecture).
Most of our architects, partners and costumers discussed on SOA in length and breadth, according to them this will be most preferred candidate in future for solving complex agile business requirements especially if reusability and integration is the key for the business.
One of the clients’ (BP) presentations has given us lot of food for thoughts beyond Enterprise solutions.

My learning on SOA- Service Oriented Architecture:

SOA is not a technology it is a style of enterprise architecture that enables the creation of applications that are built by combining loosely coupled and interoperable services.

(SOA) expresses a business-driven approach to software architecture that supports integrating the business as a set of linked, repeatable business tasks, or "services". Services are self-contained, reusable software modules with well-defined interfaces and are independent of applications and the computing platforms on which they run.
Eg:- Service consumer request for the service and the Service provider responses, here consumer is not bothered about the interfaces and channels through which it is getting serviced. Analogy: Dabba walas taking Tiffin from houses to Offices in Mumbai.

SOA helps businesses innovate by ensuring that IT systems can adapt quickly, easily and economically to support rapidly changing business needs. - meeting agility

SOA is not a product, rather an architectural style. Several vendors offer products which can form the basis of or enable SOA, particularly Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) products. ESBs provide infrastructure that can be purchased, implemented and leveraged for SOA-based systems.

Service-oriented architectures are not a new thing. The first service-oriented architecture for many people in the past was with the use DCOM or Object Request Brokers (ORBs) based on the CORBA specification.

Halt during a drive in outskirts of Bangalore

New Paradigm of Learning: Services – SSME (Service Science, Management and Engineering)

New Paradigm of Learning: Services – SSME (Service Science, Management and Engineering)
By Prasad Parabhakaran
[ Prasad Prabhakaran is currently working for Satyam Learning Center, Satyam Computers Service Ltd. Hyderbad , as Dy Manager .
He carries out learning interventions at different levels. His area of interest is creating values in Human Resource for the System Integration Business through service sciences. He can be reached at prasad_prabhakaran@satyam.com ].
The service sector or the service industry is one of the three main industrial categories of an economy, the others being the manufacturing, and primary industry (extraction such as mining, agriculture and fishing). Services are defined in conventional economic literature as "intangible goods". ( wikipedia)
In keeping with the general trend the world over in economic development, the contribution of the Services sector to India’s GDP has been growing. Currently services account more than 50% of the nation’s GDP, far more than the contributions of the agricultural or the manufacturing industry sectors (RBI Annual Report).
India being strong in value based human resources; this part of world is going to dominate the service sector / industry.
Most of our learning at schools and universities predominantly focuses on bringing values to Manufacturing and Primary industry sector. There is a big opportunity to inculcate the values of services to our academy and universities. This is the need of the hour. This article focuses on the new emerging SSME.
Service Science, Management, and Engineering (SSME) is a term introduced by IBM to describe Services Sciences, an interdisciplinary approach to the study, design, and implementation of services systems – complex systems in which specific arrangements of people and technologies take actions that provide value for others. More precisely, SSME has been defined as the application of science, management, and engineering disciplines to tasks that one organization beneficially performs for and with another. (IBM Research SSME site)

Today, SSME is an urgent call to action for academia, industry, and governments to focus on becoming more systematic about innovation in the service sector, which is the largest sector of the economy in most industrialized nations, and is fast becoming the largest sector in developing nations as well. SSME is also a proposed academic discipline and research area that would complement – rather than replace – the many disciplines that contribute to knowledge about service








Why SSME
The world is becoming networked, dependent on information and information technology
Science will provide tools and methods to study services and develop solutions to problems that span multiple disciplines
Graduates may be solution designers, consultants, engineers, scientists, and managers who will grow into becoming entrepreneurs, executives, researchers, and practitioners

What SSME should do
Aims to improve the performance of services by applying scientific, engineering and management disciplines to the configurations of people, technology and business.
Improves the predictability, productivity and quality of services
Provides graduates new skills and tools to work effectively in a services world.


Service design, development, marketing and delivery all require methodologies and techniques to make service businesses more efficient and scalable. Both depth and breadth is needed in technology, business, and organizational studies, even at the undergraduate level.
The goal of the SSME discipline is to make productivity, quality, and sustainability, learning rates and innovation rates more predictable across the service sector.
Service system is a term that frequently appears in the service management, service operations, services marketing, service design, and service engineering literatures.
Service involves both a provider and a client working together to create value. A doctor interviews a patient, does some tests, and prescribes some medicine – the patient answers the questions, cooperates with the tests, and takes the medicine faithfully. Perhaps technologies and other people are involved in the tests or in the assignment and filling of prescriptions. Together, doctor, patient, others, and technologies co-create value – in this case, patient health. These relationships and dependencies can be viewed as a system of interacting parts. In many cases, a service system is a kind of complex system – a system in which the parts interact in a non-linear way. As such, a service system is not just the sum of its parts, but through complex interactions, the parts create a system whose behavior is difficult to predict and model. In many cases, a main source of complexity in a service system is its people, whether those at the client, those at the provider, or those at other organizations.








Key Questions in developing Curricula

What skills and knowledge to students need to learn to be a part of the services world?
How can we take what we already teach and apply it to Services? (context change)
How can we help students to gain practical experience as well as “book knowledge”?
How should we structure the curriculum to address such a broad area of the economy and such diverse areas of work?
How can we position the research program and curriculum to have the greatest impact?

Goals of the SSME Program should
Serve as a unified point of contact for the coordination for Services Science, Management, and Engineering (SSME)
Create mutually beneficial opportunities for faculty, student and industry collaboration in Services research
Help students to develop the skills to thrive in and contribute to the services economy through extracurricular and curricular activities
Benefit society by educating a new wave of labor with the skill set to innovate services Roles: executives, solution designers, entrepreneurs, scientists, consultants, engineers, policy-makers, venture capitalists, etc.
It is time for our think tanks to look in to the opportunities and ensure our large and vital Human resources will be equipped with new paradigms of Service science management. The only way this is can be taken forward is complementing current curriculum of schools and colleges with inputs of SSME.
The future is bright, we do not have to wait for long time to see our “boys and gals” taking the global leadership of service sector.
Some resourceful SSME websites
IBM Research SSME site
http://www.research.ibm.com/ssme/
IBM Almedan Research Center
h ttp://www.almaden.ibm.com/asr/SSME
IBM Academic Initiative SSME site
http://www-304.ibm.com/jct09002c/university/scholars/skills/ssme/teach.html
Journal of Service Research
http://jsr.sagepub.com/
SSME India initiatives
http://ssme.in


NB:- The views expressed here is of author ,not of any organization or body