Let's Be More Professional!

At the time of the 'Big-Bang' launch of India's largest Broadband
Internet services, I had written in these columns about the ways in which one
can leverage the availability of broadband Internet services. More than six
months after the beginning of a long awaited revolution, I am still on VSNL
dial-up, waiting for the word-of-mouth publicity to reach me about how great the
new broadband services really are!

All over the world people are using broadband modems and routers with their
broadband connections with ease. But here, I have seen a broadband service
provider struggling for one week to set up a broadband connection at a customer's
premises using a wellknown brand. After using the new broadband connection for a
month, the customer's experience is 'slightly better than dial-up!'

While
Indian companies are becoming IT superpowers abroad and getting acclaim for good
customer support, why are they treating their own countrymen as C-class
customers? A customer for a leading ERP vendor has been working hard with a
solution provider for the past two years to implement ERP at his end. But there
were many glitches in the initial deployment itself. He is now thinking of
giving up and going with another vendor to fix the problems in the ERP
deployment.

Valuing Indian customers

Recently, a prospective client called me to discuss an ERP solution. I was
looking forward to an assignment involving evaluation of a suitable ERP package
for the client. What the requirement turned out to be, however, was very much
unexpected.

The company had already implemented an ERP solution at a very high cost
covering almost 20 locations across the country. The solution is a well-known
global brand and the implementation partner is also a well-known company that
has executed successful projects abroad.

The customer was facing a lot of post-implementation problems and they wanted
me to study the situation at a few important locations and come out with a
report on what was going wrong.

So, what is the problem here? Is the customer so dumb to let almost over Rs 2
crore go down the drain or is it the solution provider who is not taking the
customer seriously because he is an Indian customer? As I didn't get involved
in the investigative project and haven't had a chance to study the situation
first hand, I have no answer to this question.

But I think it's a very relevant question and we need to look into such
cases with an unbiased mind. It's not that we treat only our customers
indifferently; we even tend to treat ourselves in the same way.

How otherwise can you explain a developer of software solutions having their
mail server out of service in the midst of a PR campaign for three consecutive
days? The logic seems to be — if the snail-mail can wait for three days, why
can't e-mail wait for three days?

I wonder how many replies to their mail campaign must have bounced during
those three days of blackout. More surprisingly, the link in their e-mail, which
pointed to their website was also down for three days.

Assuming that this happened only once in a year, it roughly works out to less
than 1% downtime. What an unfortunate timing for that 1% downtime to take place.

There are web-hosting companies that offer a much better uptime guarantee,
but they cost a lot and we are always ready to take such risks to save a few
hundred dollars at the cost of our reputation.

Risking it with IMs

Talking of reputation, I will not be surprised if some day I hear about a
security solutions provider's website being hacked or an anti-virus solutions
developer's LAN getting infected by viruses. While there is some awareness
building up about protecting the corporate networks, there are still many
companies with vulnerable networks and virus infected mails keep going out from
their mail servers. People are using public services like Yahoo! messenger and
MSN messenger for their inter-branch communications and file sharing without
looking at the vulnerabilities in both these services.

If we carry out a quick web search on the vulnerabilities of these messenger
services, we can see a good deal of information about patches being released and
holes being plugged. Some companies who have installed firewalls on their
corporate LANs cannot block Yahoo! and MSN because these have become a part of
their corporate communications tools. The end-users then remain free to use
their personal e-mail IDs from the office network and the anti-virus scanning on
the corporate mail server becomes ineffective.

Because of the almost immediate two-way nature of communication, many users
feel that the use of instant messaging (IM) in the workplace leads to more
effective and efficient workplace communications and, therefore, to higher
productivity. As a result, IM is increasing in popularity in both professional
and personal applications.

However, the increasing use of instant messaging means an associated increase
in the number of security risks. Instant  messengers can also provide an
access point for worms and backdoor trojan horses. Hackers can use instant
messaging to gain backdoor access to computers, bypassing desk-top and perimeter
firewall implementations.

Why IMs are so popular

It's not that there are no other means of secure messaging available to
the corporate users. But for reasons better known only to them, many companies
don't bother much about such issues. I remember having seen detailed
instructions about how to install Yahoo! and MSN messengers on the FAQ page in
the support and training section of a website belonging to a banking solutions
provider. I do not know if end-users of the banking solutions use these public
messenger services for inter-branch communications and file sharing.

Enterprise class professional IM solutions provide a secure, rapidly
deployable communications platform that integrates instant messaging and file
sharing applications. They can provide logging, archiving, advanced security,
sophisticated administrative features, hierarchical structures and
interoperability with other instant IM networks if required. Using such
solutions, managers can maintain the user base, search log files, create new
user domains and change the services available to each user, preventing
unauthorized exchange of information via instant messaging. I think it is time
to get more professional on such issues

and build up better security and confidence for the customers. 

The author is an independent consultant, and can be reached at dongre@usa.net