Talk of Many Things

In the first part of this post titled Does Google Find Something Different About You?, we’d covered the ‘Something different’ section of Google search results that contains links showing some queries that may be in the same category as your original search. Based on the criteria used by Google to build this section, we’d seen how

1. Companies with poor web presence don’t have this section, and
2. Long-dead companies that once had a strong web presence got a rebirth in someone else’s SDG.

In this part, we shall explore reciprocal relationships between a company and its SDG members.

Based on what we know so far about SDG, we’d intuitively expect to find a reciprocal relationship between a company and its SDG members. In other words, if X belongs to the SDG of Y, we’d expect Y to belong to the SDG of X.

If we take Wipro / Infosys as an example, we find that this is indeed the case.

However, when we explore further, we find that reciprocal relationship is not guaranteed. For example, Amazon’s SDG includes Walmart but Walmart’s SDG does not include Amazon.

Likewise, Wipro’s SDG includes Accenture but Accenture’s SDG does not include Wipro.

Seasoned marketers would immediately understand the implications of this apparent anamoly.  A potential buyer who searches for Wipro might notice that Accenture is in the related business and might contact Accenture with the same requirement. On the other hand, Wipro won’t receive such a collateral lead from a prospect searching for Accenture since it is absent in Accenture’s SDG. Therefore, lack of reciprocal relationship between SDGs impacts Accenture positively and Wipro negatively.

This underscores two major imperatives for marketers, especially those who use social media, search and other forms of inbound marketing within their marketing mix:

1. Make sure that your company has an SDG, otherwise your prospects might think that you’re too small for them.
2. At the same time, make sure that your SDG doesn’t include your competitor’s names since you don’t want your marketing efforts to result in leads for them.
3. Get your company named in the SDG of your major competitors.

Achieving these goals might spawn a brand new cottage industry, which we shall call Something Different Optimization, or SDO, for now. For all we know, SDO could become the next Holy Grail of digital marketing consultants and agencies out there who have been trying to game Google search results all these years with Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

With Google finally cracking down on content farms, paid links and other common SEO techniques, the era of SEO appears to be on the wane and SDO seems to be emerging not a moment too soon!

The jury’s out – well, not even selected – on this latest one but, at 1:1, the verdicts on the two previous lawsuits around EFT and ACH frauds in the USA are matched evenly between corporates and banks.

It seems fair to find in favor of corporates where banks haven’t complied with FFIEC and other well-established security guidelines. Issued over five years ago, and updated last month, FFIEC’s guidance around two factor authentication for Internet Banking have been around for a long enough time and there’s really no excuse for the failure of banks to implement them. The growing popularity of Mint, OfferMatic, BillGuard and other websites that access the customer’s bank account on the basis of a simple username and password suggests that there are still plenty of banks in the US that fall under this category, at least when it comes to retail banking, and I won’t be terribly surprised if a similar situation prevails in business banking as well. UPDATE: The complaint filed by Village View Escrow alleges that Professional Business Bank hadn’t implemented two factor authentication on its website even though its contract claimed that it had.

However, things get very murky when banks get judged by a broader canvas of expectations around what they should, or shouldn’t, be doing with payment instructions received from their customers.

Take the lawsuit of Experi-Metal Inc. v. Comerica Bank, for instance. According to the BankInfoSecurity article quoted in the Finextra story, the court found in favor of EMI on the grounds that “EMI’s prior wire-transfer activity, which had been limited to a select group of domestic entities, should have been noted by Comerica before it approved transfers to overseas accounts”.

This prompts the following questions:

1. Should a bank ignore the “there’s a first time for everything?” maxim?
2. If yes, by the same token, should a bank stop payments to all new beneficiaries just because the corporate had never made payments to any of them in the past?
3. If no, why blame a bank for approving the first cross-border payment, which could signal the corporate’s entry into an increasingly globalized world rather than fraud?
4. Assuming that the bank finds a cross-border payment suspicious, what is its contractual obligation to the corporate?
5. Assuming that the bank decides to go beyond its contractual obligation and takes the initiative to check with the corporate. As experienced bankers know, this could take a couple of hours at times, longer in case the authorized contact at the corporate is traveling or otherwise unavailable. Because of this time lapse, suppose the corporate misses the deadline for submission of security / earnest money deposit for an overseas government tender and sues the bank for loss of the business opportunity?
6. On the other hand, what if a bank sits on a payment on the pretense of carrying out fraud checks only to enjoy the float? Neither is this a rare scenario, as experienced treasures would agree!

As these issues illustrate, holding banks responsible for things other than contractual commitments and well-established security guidelines might result in unfavorable outcome in the long run – not just for banks but also for corporates. Let’s hope that these cases are decided with this consideration in mind.

At this point, it’s not clear if these are one-off cases or portend a tsunami of ePayment fraud lawsuits waiting to strike banks in the coming months and years. Either way, ‘ePayment Fraud Chasers’ will likely emerge as a new and lucrative category of practice in the American legal profession very soon!

Usability is generally associated with benefits like reduced friction, superior UX and greater cross-selling for e-commerce providers. Click here to read a couple of my articles and blog posts about usability in this context.

During a recent transaction, I realized how better usability could also cut costs for an online business.

I normally buy domain names from the leading registrar GoDaddy. From time to time, I receive coupons from GoDaddy for 15-30% discounts. Since I normally order one or two domain names for one year duration at a time, my orders seldom surpass the $40-80 floor values required to qualify for these discounts. As a result, I’ve generally been ignoring these coupons.

Recently, when I wanted to buy a domain name for five years, I noticed that it cost $60.85. I was delighted to get the chance (finally!) to use a GoDaddy coupon. Taking advantage of the huge – now unlimited – storage provided by Yahoo! email, I never delete these GoDaddy coupons even if I’ve been unable to use them. Sure enough, when I searched my archive folder, I was able to locate a recent coupon from GoDaddy that offered 30% off on a minimum order value of $60. I plucked out the discount code from GoDaddy’s email and entered it on the checkout form of the GoDaddy website. However, after applying the coupon, I got a cryptic message saying “The promo code you entered is invalid, expired, or ineligible for the items you are purchasing.”

Well, since my order value exceeded $60, I couldn’t figure out why GoDaddy was rejecting my code. Clicking the View Offer Limitations link didn’t help much.

I was about to abandon my shopping cart at this stage. Not that 30% savings on $60 was substantial in absolute terms. My decision was driven more by getting ticked off at not being able to avail myself of GoDaddy’s discount the first time I qualified for it in all these years. On a higher level, I probably felt betrayed by GoDaddy after years of being loyal to it. Whatever.

Given my state of mind at the time, I’d have quit the website – and, who knows, GoDaddy itself forever – except that I happened to notice a 24/7 Sales & Support telephone # displayed prominently on the top of its checkout page. Since I anyway had an unlimited Skype calling plan for the USA, I decided to don my headphone and make the call.

The Customer Service Representative who came on the line immediately “got” me. There was none of the usual duh-like response that one gets from many call centers these days. Apparently, my order value of $60.85 included a $1-odd fees payable to ICANN. Since my net order value fell below the $60 qualifying limit, the website had rejected my discount code.

Now, domainers are aware that ICANN, or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is the private sector, non-profit corporation created to assume responsibility for coordinating domain names across the hundreds of for-profit domain registrars like GoDaddy. Therefore, fees payable by GoDaddy and other registrars to ICANN are tantamount to taxes, duties and levies. Like anyone reasonable, I’d no problem in accepting GoDaddy’s policy of netting out ICANN fees from its order value.

Where do usability and cost reduction figure in all this?

Simple.

If only its website had explained its policy clearly, GoDaddy could’ve saved money on providing higher cost telephone support. If displaying multiple charges makes things confusing for an average GoDaddy customer, fair enough. The website could show this breakup at least when the order value is close to the eligible floor limit for the entered discount code, like mine was.

For those wondering if there’s any business case in making the necessary enhancements to the website to deliver superior usability in this narrow context, let me do some back-of-the-envelope calculations below and see what conclusions we can draw from them:

1. The telephone call took around 15 minutes
2. The CSR was definitely not located in some low cost call center
3. 15 minutes of a high-quality CSR’s time can cost more than the $$ figure deal size.

Since not every GoDaddy customer is likely to have an unlimited Skype calling plan, they wouldn’t have made the call unlike me, and GoDaddy would’ve lost the deal, if not a loyal customer forever (Note to complacent vendors: I moved a large portfolio of domain names from another registrar to GoDaddy a couple of years ago, so I won’t hesitate to move it once again if it comes to it.)

To come to the conclusion of the story, GoDaddy’s CSR immediately came up with the suggestion of upping my order to six years. For this longer duration, the order value crossed $60 net of ICANN fees and therefore qualified for the 30% discount. Faced with one quote for 5 years @ $60.85 and another for 6 years @ $55, no  prizes for guessing what I did, so the story had a happy ending.

I’m sure that even with the best of design and programming inputs, it’d be impossible for a website to match a human CSR’s ability to come up with a winning alternative proposal interactively and in realtime. So, I’m excluding the concluding part of the telephone interaction from the purview of website usability. (Although it’s probably within the realm of capabilities of virtual agents, but that’s a topic for another day). Having said that, the earlier part of the process flow on the website could’ve always been designed in such a way that the website doesn’t have to face such an impossible situation in the first place.

GoDaddy immediately followed up this telephone conversation with a customer satisfaction survey email where it asked two simple, but highly relevant, questions. Once I gave the above feedback on this survey, I decided to take up GoDaddy’s suggestion to tweet my views – just to see where it went. @GoDaddy tweeted me back almost immediately asking for more information. Credit where it’s due, I haven’t come across such quick response when I’ve tweeted my feedback to a lot of other companies. According to its HEATMAP360, GoDaddy has a 50:50 sentiment on Twitter, so it has the opportunity to improve its service so that its positive sentiment improves even further.

'Something Different Group' of Skype

Although we believe it’s been around for a while, it was only recently that we stumbled upon the ‘Something different’ section on the left-hand panel of Google search results. According to Google, the set of links in this section shows some queries that may be in the same category as your original search. These alternative queries can help you discover webpages that are indirectly related to your search.

For example, if you search for Skype, you could see Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk and MSN Messenger, which are Skype-equivalent services. Likewise, the ‘Something Different Group’ (SDG) for Amazon’s search results shows leading retailers like Barnes & Noble, NewEgg, Walmart, Circuit City and Best Buy.

Different pages on Google’s website explain how Google determines what links to show in a keyword’s SDG and how SDG is different from the “Related searches” section listed at the bottom of the search results page. For the purpose of this post, it’s relevant to note that “Something different” relies on web documents and users’ search queries to identify concepts that that may be related or are in the same category whereas ”Related searches” generally help you drill-down further into the given keyword. For example, if you search for [giraffe], “Something different” may list other animals like zebras and elephants, while “Related searches” might delve deeper into your original search with things like giraffe pictures, giraffe facts and safari animals.

From the aforementioned criteria used by Google for building the ‘Something different’ section, we might be led to conclude that companies with poor web presence will be missing this section altogether. The following screenshot proves that this is indeed the case for a couple of such companies.

Poor Web Presence Means No SDG Section!

Andersen Consulting is still around - at least in Accenture's SDG!

On the other hand, long-dead companies that once had strong web presence achieve rebirth in the SDG of someone or the other. Witness, for example, Andersen Consulting – a company that downed its shutters in 2001 on the back of Enron’s bankruptcy – in Accenture’s SDG.

In the next part of this post, we shall explore reciprocal relationships between a company and its SDG members and how they impact the business development efforts of different companies in a given industry.

Spoiler Alert: In the absence of any guarantee of reciprocity, we might see the birth of a new industry, which we’re calling Something Different Optimization. SDO could very well turn out to be the next Holy Grail of gaming Google Search.

Once upon a time, like most members of the intelligentsia, I too used to have a largely negative opinion about politicians.

Thanks to the regional manager of a leading engineering company (Hint: I took the job!) who interviewed me during campus placement at IIT Bombay, all that changed around 25 years ago. Himself a part of the intelligentsia – having graduated from IIT Madras ten years before me – he enlightened me about what politicians have that most of us don’t.

“Every time I went to my native place in Nasik during my vacations”, he recounted his own ephiphany moment about politicians, “I’d come across some politician or the other giving a speech in the vacant ground next to my house. Even if they were only minor politicians, the ground would be full of people who assembled to listen to them. Now, how many of us from IITs and other colleges can gather even ten people to listen to us? That’s when I realized that politicians have the rare and uncanny ability to rally people around them, something which most of us don’t”.

Converted in my views about politicians from that moment, I’ve ever since been objective in my views about politicians, government, and other public institutions. All media reports on corruption have met a stony gaze from me since they tend to blame politicians unilaterally for corruption.  For one, according to me, corruption is like tango: it takes two to play the game. For another, I’ve always found that many factors considered as leading to corruption in India are practiced perfectly legally in many other countries viz. election campaign funding by business houses, sale of tickets for concerts and games at prices that are determined solely by the supply and demand dynamics even if they are 10-100X of the face value (something that’s termed “black market” in India).

This recent article in the The Economic Times was an exception. Professor T T Ram Mohan of IIM Ahmedabad, the author of this article, puts things in the right perspective and raises many thought-provoking observations:

1. The majority of people see the politician as the most venal element in Indian society. They are wrong. The fountainhead of corruption is more likely the businessman.
2. Corruption in the corporate world would not be possible without the participation of the middle-class.
3. The politician is seen as not only corrupt but incompetent. One is struck by the general lack of appreciation of the abilities of politicians and the contributions they make. Few people are aware that debates in Parliament are often of high quality. So are the reports of various parliamentary committees . Question hour can be very illuminating. Those who habitually denounce politicians would be well-advised to visit Parliament’s website and browse through the material posted there.

His concluding remark is bang on: “To demonise the politician is not only to betray ignorance of the Indian political system (but to devalue) one of (its) most precious assets, our democratic process itself.”

This is true for democracies all over the world and more so for one like India. With its vast diversity in religion, language and financial status, it’s no mean task to hold such a nation together. Warts and all, India has a robust and functioning democracy and, for that, we have to admire the unique ability of politicians to rally people from all walks of life around a common cause.

India has done very well for itself as an IT services destination. In less than two decades, it has reached the #1 spot in the global IT services outsourcing league tables, with over US# 70B in 2010 revenues.

Recently, there has been a mushrooming of IT product companies in India. This trend could be driven by several factors including a passion to create intellectual property and grow up the value chain, frustration with being called “the IT coolies of the universe” and an apprehension with the dimming growth prospects of IT services.

Product companies need to recognize that the product business calls for a different mindset.

Unlike a services mindset, which can be crudely paraphrased by “you tell us what you want, we’ll do it for you – faster, better and cheaper”, a product mindset has entirely different traits.

From having closely observed a couple of the few successful Indian IT product companies, we believe that a product mindset has the following attributes:

1. The belief that one size does fit all. Like Warrillow in this FORTUNE story, it’s important for a product company to believe internally that it is possible to create a product that is rich enough to fulfill the needs of multiple companies, albeit within a set of finite target markets defined by verticals, geography or company size. Such a belief comes from the ability to divine features from nebulous market requirements and abstract the generic from the specific – in short, product management.
2. The determination to rally multiple customers around a single product roadmap and implementation methodology. Where some degree of industry-, country- or customer-specific modifications is inevitable, it’s important to create a versatile set of tools that help in their development without disrupting the core product. Ideally, such tools should be usable by third-party systems integrators and customers, and not be restricted to the product owner alone. While the toolset can begin with a simple report writer, it should eventually expand to include formula builders that allow reconfiguration of existing business rules and building new ones as well as screen painters for the addition of brand new functionality.
3. Marketing, marketing, marketing. Part of a successful product mindset is to recognize that it’s because of marketing that a product company is able to scale up and sell multiple copies of the same software to different customers. When done right, marketing investments payback many times over by way of revenues from multiple customers without proportionately high product development costs. According to anecdotal evidence, a typical American product company invests 1.5-2X dollars in marketing for every X dollars of development. For a product company, it  might be tempting to spend all the capital on engineering under the assumption that the resulting enhanced product would automatically sell more. A successful product mindset recognizes the folly of this notion – after all, the old adage “if you build, they will come” doesn’t work any longer – and resists the temptation.

It has been said that the product mindset is very much at odds with the typical services mindset that has dominated the fabric of the Indian IT industry since inception. Some have even gone to the extent of saying that the difference is so stark and irreconcilable that India shouldn’t bother with products. We don’t agree – it’s a matter of time and reorientation before product companies in India are able to develop the required mindset to succeed in the product business. Ramco Systems and Oracle Financial Services Solutions (formerly i-flex solutions) are two lighthouses that are already available for others to emulate. Maybe Infosys’ recent decision to develop products under a separate company is the way to go.

A couple of days ago, the European Banking Association outlined plans to launch a pan-European electronic payments product called myBank for online shopping, enabling buyers and sellers all over Europe to complete transactions through their Internet Banking portals. Click here for more details.

I predict that myBank will be a hit.

No, not because it’s innovative – it isn’t. This non-card alternative payment method has been around for several years. There’s at least one provider of such payments in the USA (Moneta), UK (eWise), Netherlands (iDEAL) and India (BillDesk). Called ‘Secure Vault Payment’ or ‘SVP’ in the USA, these payment methods connect online shoppers with Internet Banking portals of their domestic banks from where they can make payments to merchants by using their regular Internet Banking credentials. They offer several advantages over card-based payments to shoppers and merchants alike and have been gaining a lot of traction in recent times. Click here to see how SVP works.

Ironically, for all the hype around its entry into payments, Google uses an SVP – and not Google Checkout – for receiving payments for its AdWords advertising program! But, I digress.

Where myBank trumps all incumbent providers is in its awesome geographical reach and inherent ability to gain consumers’ trust.

While domestic transactions are a given, myBank can also facilitate cross-border transactions within the EURO-zone. As far as I know, myBank is the only multi-country SVP payment in Europe or elsewhere.

Coming from a trusted banking alliance like EBA, myBank is very well positioned to address a major hurdle standing in the way of mass adoption of SVP, namely lack of consumer trust. I know many consumers who avoid SVP because they’re wary of being ferried around their respective banking portals by third-party providers. They see potential risk of exposure of their Internet Banking credentials in the hands of these providers who’re often venture-funded companies in near-startup mode. This could well be a perception problem since I’ve been assured by many providers that they can’t view usernames and passwords entered by consumers into banking portals. However, I haven’t seen such a reassuring message in the normal payment workflow of secure vault payments. Besides, in the process of providing concierge service during the checkout process, SVP providers do seem to be ‘looking over the shoulders’ of consumers as they enter their Internet Banking credentials, so it’s open to question how many consumers would take their assurances at face value. Consumers shouldn’t have any such apprehensions with a product like myBank that belongs to a consortium of banks.

By using SEPA / PE-ACH rails, myBank shouldn’t cost merchants any more than credit / debit card fees. Therefore, merchant acceptance of myBank should be a cinch.

Overall, myBank seems to have a bright outlook. If its vision is executed well (Probability = 0.9) and on time (Probability = 0.5), incumbent SVP providers in the Eurozone will have a lot to fear from myBank. They’ll need to find ways to differentiate their offerings to survive the almost certain onslaught of EBA Clearing.

Click to see the ad

In the three months since we’d written about QR codes, their usage by advertisers has seen strong traction. J P Morgan Chase’s ad in the FORTUNE magazine and Bosch’s billboard are just two random examples of QR codes found in the print and outdoor media. Overhyped as it sounds, there’s some truth behind the claims made in report by Mobio Identity Systems that QR code “scans are skyrocketing”.

However, after a quick-and-dirty study of the user community during the same period, we learned that:

1. Many users are unfamiliar with QR codes and end up doing nothing when they see them.
2. The few that have heard about QR codes hesitate to scan them because they’re not sure what would happen next (typical user concerns include “malware”, “identity theft”, and so on).
3. The skeptics amongst them question why advertisers simply can’t display the URL of the website to which the QR code anyway leads them
4. Very few users feel motivated to download and install a QR code reader application, without which they wouldn’t be able to scan the codes.

As with any new technology, the first two issues are quite natural and can be overcome with a little guidance in the ad. Like we’d done in one of our print ads that used QR codes, it would help to provide a short explanation of what to do when the reader sees a QR code (e.g., Point your phone camera at the QR-codes on each corner of this ad to check out GTM360 on your mobile phone) and what to expect when they scan them (e.g., Follow GTM360 on LinkedIn).

As for the third point, it has a straight-forward response: To maximize conversion of visitors to buyers, ads increasingly direct readers to separate landing pages instead of the homepage. Most landing pages have long URLs (e.g, http://www.gtm360.com/EMAIL360/index_email360.php) that are painful to type out using smartphone keypads, so QR codes provide a frictionless alternative.

However, the last issue is not the least issue.

Contrary to reports claiming that many latest models of smartphones come pre-installed with a QR code reader application, we couldn’t find evidence of this in iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, Samsung Android or Nokia E7.

Agreed that it might only take a user a few minutes to find, download and install a free QR code reader application on her smartphone, but the question is, why should she bother? As my 13-year old daughter asked me cheekily, “Why the heck should the reader of your ad bother to download and install an app just so that they can follow your company on LinkedIn or retweet your ad? What do they get out of it?”

This question is difficult to answer other than to say that the advertiser has to provide a strong incentive – by way of exclusive content or promotional offer or whatever – to make the download and installation happen.

Which leads us to the following question: Which advertiser should provide this incentive?

Will JPMC incent the download with the knowledge that the user can use the same app to scan QR codes in ads by Citi, Goldman Sachs and other competitors?

There are no easy answers to these questions. At the same time, we do foresee the following ways to resolve this issue:

1. QR code reader apps offer branding opportunities for individual advertisers, thus providing them with the motivation to incent users to download apps carrying their branding
2. The incentive is provided by a consortium of advertisers
3. The onus of downloading and installing the app shifts to users if they see discount stores and brand-neutral merchants making heavy use of QR codes in their ads.

ADD THIS CONTACT? Scan your smartphone here to add this contact to your phonebook

Meanwhile, as the big issues get sorted out, we explored the possibility of using QR codes to solve the narrowly-defined, yet equally important, problem faced by sales and marketing professionals with getting their collection of business cards organized. Most of them collect a couple of cards every day. We all know how cumbersome it is to manually enter contact information from a business card to a PC or mobile phone. General experience with business card scanners hasn’t been too great since text recognition supported by most scanners meant for retail use sucks. We thought of solving this problem by converting the contact info into a QR code that is printed on the back of a business card so that, by scanning a smartphone over the QR code, the contact gets added to the phonebook in two taps. We piloted this using the QR code of my business card as shown on the right. It worked fine on an iPhone. On a BlackBerry and a Samsung Android smartphone, we were able to download the contact info successfully into the handset but, from there, we couldn’t figure  out how to add it to the phonebook. If any of you readers have cracked this part, we’d appreciate if you could share the procedure you followed by way of comments below.

In the past, I’ve blogged about the friction involved in many Electronic Bill Presentment & Payment (EBPP) systems operated by banks in India and the UK. My recent experiences with those of a leading Indian TELCO and British Financial Services company are no better.

On the other hand, I’ve also raved about some excellent implementations of consumer IT by the public sector.

Let me add Maharashtra State Electricity Board’s EBPP system to the list of the latter – it’s one of the best online bill payment systems I’ve come across.

MSEB is the state-owned power utility for the state of Maharashtra in India. Over the past six months, I’ve been using its online bill payment solution. It tops the consumer experience of any EBPP system that I’ve used so far. And, since MSEB hasn’t pulled the plug out on me – literally – I’m sure its backend is no weakling either.

MSEB Electronic Bill Presentment & Payment Website

Accessible from the website of its distribution subsidiary called MahaVitaran – Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company Limited (MSEDCL), MSEB’s system is extremely quick and easy-to-use. You don’t have to register and wait for weeks for the first bill to be posted online, as has happened to me with a few other bank-based online bill payment websites. While registration is permitted, it’s not mandatory. If you register, you can access your monthly bill by logging on with your user name and password. But, even if you don’t, all you need to enter are two pieces of information – Consumer # and Billing Unit - that can be found easily on the bill. What’s more, the system supports a wide range of payment methods including credit card, debit card, and bank transfer via Internet Banking. After you make the payment, the website issues a receipt in a choice of rich PDF and plain TXT formats that you can view online, save and print.

In the absence of password protection for viewing bills, it might appear that one person will be able to view another person’s bills. However, consumers, security specialists and privacy advocates alike can rest assured that doing so isn’t that easy: The voyeur will need to know not just the other person’s Consumer # but also his or her Billing Unit. Given that there are tens of millions of consumers and over 1,000 billing units, the chances of anyone correctly guessing a combination of Consumer # and Billing Unit are indeed very low. I was initially wondering why MSEB insists that the user should enter both Consumer # and Billing Unit when a given Consumer # is likely mapped to a unique Billing Unit. I could understand the logic behind this design only when I realized that MSEB has possibly used this simple and ingenious mechanism to plug what would otherwise have been a serious security and privacy hole. This is another example (click here and here to see a few others) that shows that it is possible to build in adequate security and still provide a frictionless online interaction experience to consumers.

Very high downtime!

If MSEB’s bill payment website has one blemish, it’s a very high downtime. During a recent visit to pay a bill, I was shocked to find that the service was unavailable for three days. Hope MSEB realizes that such a long downtime is unusual for a consumer web application and makes amends going forward.

The icing on the cake is that MSEB doesn’t charge anything extra for its online bill payment service. Given that it provides a highly convenient alternative to visiting its offices and standing in long queues to pay bills by cash or cheque, I’d be willing to fork out around INR 50 per bill.

Please take the poll below to specify how much charges would you be willing to fork out for the facility of paying your monthly electricity bills so easily over the Internet.

There’s no shortage of blogs, articles and books written by pundits offering advice to executives on how to nurture innovation within their companies. Take, for example, this recent post on Finextra.

However, the question “why innovate?” seems to have acquired the status of a “holy cow”, judging from the relative lack of buzz around this subject.

Even at the risk of badly mixing my metaphors, we need to take the “bull by the horns” or innovators will forever go round in circles trying to make innovation happen in their companies.

Why?

Let’s take Amazon, for example. Ever since the online book retailer was founded, we’ve been hearing about how its disruptive model would annihilate Barnes & Noble, BORDERS and all other leaders in the book retailing industry in no time. However, note that it has taken some 15-odd years for a Borders moment to occur. Likewise, in the case of NetFlix v. Blockbuster. On the other hand, we’ve seen WebVan, Pets.com, WebMD and several other innovators hit the deadpool well before this period. While guidebooks can help companies to fast track their internal innovation process, they can’t bring about large scale changes in consumer behavior, without which innovation can’t deliver business results.

In short, innovation takes time, often costs a lot of money and rarely achieves commercial success.

Therefore, we can’t blame companies if they ask the “why innovate?” question, especially in industries that are highly-regulated (e.g., utilities) and where not too many players seem to be doing it anyway (e.g. banking). As long as corporations are under the pressure to meet quarterly numbers or else face the wrath of Wall Street, innovators in their midst will continue to be weighed down by naysayers posing the “why innovate?” question, even if they do so only within the confines of their offices (for no one would like to be caught on the 6 o’clock news challenging the holy cow).

The way out?

As this article says, it’s the little ideas that turn into billion dollar businesses. Innovation needs to be packaged into bite-size products or services that can deliver ‘early wins’. The greatest priority for the innovator is to prove that they can make a positive impact on the company’s P&L in the short-to-medium term.

Only then will they get the chance to change the world and leave their name on their company’s grand vision (assuming they want to do so!).