The impact of language in culture and business

Language can not be reduced to a simple tool of communication. In fact, language not only shapes communication and its content but also influences the communicating persons.

The impact of language on culture and behavior is a very interesting subject. Here is an article on TED's blog explaining five examples of how our language can affect the way we think. In one of the examples, an expert in linguistic-cultural connections thinks about the English justice that aims to punish criminals rather than compensate victims. The expert argues that this is deeply tied to English language. Indeed, in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but in some other languages we tend to say that the vase broke itself.

This subject reminds me strongly of the famous dystopian novel "1984" by George Orwell. The story happens in a country deeply controlled by a tyrant totalitarian political system. In order to better control the population, the ruling party has developed a new language called the "newspeak". Newspeak is a minimalist language meant to ideologically align thought and action to the principles of the party. Newspeak:

• Removed words referring to dangerous concepts such as freedom, diversity...
• Minimized dictionary by removing synonyms and words with ambiguous meaning
• Removed subjectivity from words and gave them strict meaning
• Created new words illustrating new concepts of the party such as "doublethink"
• Shortened words length so that people don't get time to think about what they are saying, and speak rather like robots.

Even in programming, the choice of language has a strong impact on the way the programmer designs software. For example, an object-oriented language will drive you eventually to design object based architectures and use advanced concepts such as design patterns paradigms.

Finally, i think that the same dependence exists between the behavior of employees and their company's internal language. In illustration, I will give some examples:

• The absence of a disparate honorific addressing among employees might help them communicate more easily.
• The intensive use of internal specific words makes it more difficult for the employees to imagine new ideas requiring other terms in order to be described. For example, when listening to a client expressing his needs, a sales representative might only capture the needs that can be matched with internal words of his company.
• Another consequence of intensive use of internal words and acronyms is a more significant barrier for quitting the company, thus affecting the loyalty of employees.

The culture and behavior of a company, and thus its success or failure, can be tied to its internal language. Do companies consciously manage this aspect?

IT department organization

During a training, I recently had the chance to meet the CIOs of two big establishments, the first in the French health care industry (10 000 employees) and the second in the field of European air navigation (50 000 employees). They explained to us the governance and the challenges of their IT departments. What I liked the most is the common vision of this department as a dynamic "small company" inside the establishment. This vision is reflected by the organization of the department and the interactions with its environment:

 

The organization is shaped by the demand side, the final users of IT services. Through a team of account managers, the IT department not only understands IT needs of the different internal customers but develops them in order to drive innovation in the business. For example, an account manager will continuously accompany the business unit 1 in its development by providing required services through the service catalog, and by proposing new services (ERP, SAP, BI..) that help the business unit 1 to reach its strategic goals. Account managers play an important role in IT strategic alignment.

The service catalog is somehow the offer portfolio of this "small company".  Each service is subscribed by the internal customer according to a contract, in which service scope, features, SLAs and maybe internal price are agreed upon.

Each service is built with different components. For example, in order to deliver visio-conferencing, visio QoS must be enabled on WAN/LAN, reservation application should be implemented on a server, conferencing equipments must be hosted and help desk must be able to give support on this service. The service manager is responsible of the life cycle of the service, and he is helped by the project managers team in the build phase. He works closely with the account manager to design the required service and then delivers it.

Each component is provided and operated by a component factory. For example the WAN/LAN component is manged by networks team and specific internal software development is delivered by the competence center. A factory can produce the service internally or rely on an external provider. The trend is to rely more and more on external providers in order to focus more on core business and on strategic alignment. 

Finally, some transversal entities may be needed. When the IT department rely strongly on external providers, supplier management is critical to assure quality and minimize outsourcing risks. PMO office can be also interesting to improve project management practices.

In conclusion, IT governance must be well thought because it is a success key for business since business becomes intrinsically dependent on IT!

Music in success

In my professional experience, I have noticed that high profile people were often musicians: at Devoteam our branch director was a violinist, and in Orange she was a pianist.

I believe that playing music is an important advantage for those seeking success in their career.

The first skill acquired by a musician is discipline. As opposed to what a lot of people think, natural gift only doesn't make a good musician, but practice, exercises and eternal hard work. I can't but think of Charly Parker (AKA Bird), the virtuoso saxophonist who developed the Bebop current in Jazz. Bird used to practice up to 15 hours a day for several years in the 30s in order to achieve his ingenuity.

Secondly, playing music in public allows you to develop public speaking skills, self expression and stress management which results in gains in self confidence.

Another consequence of music is unleashing creativity. Some practices in music, like composing and improvisation, just sharpen creative thinking skills. It's the skill of continuously exploring new worlds of sounds and rhythms.

Finally, ensemble playing is a great field for developing relational and teamwork skills. The key of playing with others is listening to them, in order to know when to start, when to stop, when to solo, when to follow, when to be piano and when to be forte. Music teaches you to appreciate silence as much as music itself. You learn how to listen to others while playing, and continuously how to adapt yourself to others in real time for succeeding all together the piece of music.
I noticed that musical activities are more and more used in corporate team building; Once I had the occasion to participate in a team building activity through Brazilian Batucada: we witnessed a enormously strong cohesive energy forming around us!

Optimize your solution by better knowing your service provider

I've been working in presales with a service provider since a couple of years, during which I witnessed different kinds of relations with customers. In this post, I will give my recommendations for improving the relation with your service provider in order to optimize your solution (quality, price..). The following does not apply on one shot providers.

The most important step is to understand well the organization of your provider:

• Understand his commercial organization and the role of each representative (Account Manager, Business Manager..). Is the there any hidden influent positions? who is the decision maker? for example who validates margins and discounts for your account?
  To analyze well the organization of your provider, you should diversify his representatives as much as possible, and try to target the best representative for each specific subject.
• Anticipate any risk due to the organization of your provider and overcome it. For example, if you realize by time that your provider doesn't have an efficient internal communication plan among different actors involved in your complex project, you can play an active role to improve this communication.
• Understand the commission structure of the sales representatives: based on turnover? on margin? on quality? any representative who is not commissioned? This information reveals the development strategy of your provider and its values, and helps you avoid any possible perversion of his management system.
• Understand the sales cycles of your provider: monthly based? or based on trimester? this helps you adapt the phasing of your service procurement to your provider's sales cycle in order to get the best financial offers.

Another aspect, which is rarely considered, is the motivation of your provider's team. It is very important to consider his team as a part of your project team in order to motivate them and succeed your project. Some hints for smartly managing your provider's team:

• Empower your provider's team by giving the complete picture and explaining the stakes of your project in an atmosphere of trust and partnership.
• Try to play the fair game of competition, in order to challenge enough the provider's team, yet maintain it's motivation in the same time.
• Put the right amount of pressure on the provider's team for the same reason as described before. To know what is the right amount of pressure, you must understand well the processes of your provider: how do they function, what is their average delays..

Achraf

Content Delivery Networks

As promised previously, I'll dedicate this post to Content Delivery Networks. The goal of CDN is to improve the performance of networked applications, whether on a private network or over the Internet.

CDN is a distributed set of interconnected surrogate servers offloading traffic from the origin server. When a user makes a request, the intelligent CDN platform redirects the request to the best server capable of answering, in order to deliver the best performance and user experience.

CDN's performance is measured by the hit ratio, the ratio of requests served by surrogates instead of the origin server. Hit ratio depends on the nature of data: It is more suited to static and basic dynamic data and it's not suited to security sensitive data and data modified concurrently by different users.

CDN is a great solution for businesses that depend on networked applications, typically online e-commerce websites. First, the CDN solution will improve and harmonize the customer's experience, leading to a more loyal customer and a better conversion rate thus generating more revenues. Second, a CDN System will help simplifying and improving the efficiency of the webserver infrastructure:

• Reduce infrastructure (Internet access, servers..) by offloading traffic to CDN provider's surrogate servers.
• Avoid sizing the infrastructure to the peak traffic making it more effcient.
• Avoid the complexity of evolving the infrastructure in order to absorb more traffic (load balancing systems, heavy investments ..).
• Increase the availability of infrastructure by leveraging the availability of a redundant and distributed CDN platform.

In the following Prezi slides, I try to explain the different components building a CDN system and the different possible architectures and their stakes. This presentation is inspired from the great book by Dinesh Verma on CDNs.

Personnaly, my first experience on CDN was with Orange Labs, where we tried to leverage a CDN for a Video on Demand service. And now, I am excited about designing and proposing CDN solutions to my customers, since Orange Business Services and Akamai (leader global CDN provider) have signed a strategic partnership in November 2012: Orange will commercialize Akamai's solutions and will extend Akamai's CDN on their networks.

Achraf