It's better than just complaining

🌸🍍 oh, much better 🍍🌺

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FarmBots!

We’re one step closer to self-farming farms https://t.co/1Z2YTRwrqK

— Recode (@Recode) January 8, 2022

“...the Facebook of farming.”

John Deere’s self-driving tractor lets farmers leave the cab — and the field https://t.co/PmRuOl3IxG pic.twitter.com/iM5KioJ62u

— The Verge (@verge) January 9, 2022

I want to touch one, grasp one, hold one, feel one, but wait...it's remotely-controlled.  😵

😄  In other news, 😄

twitter is officially back on in the land...so happy.  

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A post shared by The Guardian (@guardiannigeria)

One Hour Later: oh wow, you can touch and feel this 

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Something good is happening...in Lagos #SmarterLagos #AoTLagos

Join AoT 2.0 FREE NOW 

and immediately ENJOY the Full Conference Video experience 

Agenda 

(December 3 - 4, 2020)

This is what our breakout session looks like. See our audience members receiving imperative knowledge that will help them understand the narrative of how fundamental data is to developing a smart Lagos.#ArtofTechnologyLagos #AotLagos #SmarterLagos pic.twitter.com/Kf3iqgEmtB

— Eko Innovation Centre (@EkoInnovation) December 3, 2020

How to watch LIVE.
1. Register at https://t.co/93CpgwOwSk
2. Visit https://t.co/TEn16l2yLH
3. Choose your session
4. Watch, comment, and ask questions in real-time.#ArtofTechnologyLagos #AotLagos #SmarterLagos pic.twitter.com/EAHI0JK4M4

— Art of Technology Lagos (@aotlagos) December 3, 2020

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Meanwhile,

#EndSARS is back on the trend table 🔥

— valking ♔ (@_VALKlNG) December 3, 2020

Featured Music: 

Something Good Is Happening, by BRYMO

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The Debate around Facebook's proposed digital currency

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another food-y blog post

Become an expert in African food

You can do it!  

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At Western University, the Student Council is making sure all students have access to healthy food. Kathy Yu helps run the Digital Food Bank, a student volunteer-run service that uses Google Forms to respond to growing food insecurity on campus. Students who struggle to afford nutritious food can anonymously submit their requests for groceries—then Kathy and her team prepare the orders for private pickup. See how the @WesternUSC Digital Food Bank works in our story. #SearchOn

A post shared by Google (@google) on Sep 24, 2019 at 11:38am PDT

A Michelin-star street food 🥘 pic.twitter.com/AwgPrXfdjJ

— Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar) September 29, 2019

This year's theme is Rethinking Nutrition Innovations and application is still ongoing till the 6th of October, 2019.

To see more details on requirements, eligibility, benefits and application procedure, visit https://t.co/DlW9Mu20fi pic.twitter.com/H4Gkp9Cmqb

— FATE Foundation (@FATEFoundation) September 27, 2019

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Job connect for only the best

Hey, @PulseNigeria247 is hiring in the ff'ng positions:

- Snr. Reporter - Business & Tech
- Reporter - Sex Lifestyle & Erotica
- Reporter - Money & Personal Finance
- Snr. Reporter - Music

Mail me [osagie@pulse.ng] with a cover letter, detailing why you'd love to work with us.

— Osagie Alonge (@OsaGz) February 20, 2018

If you LOVE UpNaira, you'll love this job.

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Technology Today

Ubiquitous, mobile supercomputing  . Artificially-intelligent robots  . Self-driving cars  . Neuro-technological brain enhancements  . Genetic editing  .  .  . 21st-century stuff . . .

in the light of which the constant drama of Nigerian (African?) society, the stuff of our daily news for instance, must appear supremely daft and irrelevant.  Yaba would save us, but that dream too may be dying. 

If you have a ray of hope to share, put it in the comments.

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The big potential of Recommender Systems

Can you think of more applications for software recommender algorithms?

When you read a blog post or digital news item, it sometimes gives you a selection of related news items, designed to keep you enjoying the service on that site.  Amazon famously designed the "you may also like" marketing feature that in part contributed to making their site so useful and 'sticky'.  It's not like recommending is anything new: the other day I ordered snacks or food and the check-out staff asked if I would like a drink to go with it - human recommender :) 

Reading today about related work in progress, this time to assist doctors in caring for patients:

“I thought about how the Amazon product-recommender algorithm works and thought, `Can we do this for medical decision-making?’” said the 34-year-old Chen, a VA Medical Informatics Fellow at Stanford Health Policy.

So instead of, other people who bought this book also liked this book, how about: Other doctors who ordered this CT scan also ordered this medication.

“What if there was that kind of algorithm available to me at the point of care?” he asked. “It doesn’t tell me the right or wrong answer, but I bet this would be really informative and help me make better decisions for my patients.”

 Again, can you think of more opportunities?  In education, in training?  In hiring, in business?  In events, in design, in government?  Anything? 

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Jack Ma, storyteller

 Let him motivate you.  

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The ecommerce pioneer was back at Davos this month with more common sense comments on trade and leadership.   

Optimism // Beautiful world

How Bill and Melinda Gates have tried to make Warren Buffett's vision of optimism a reality - and how you can too https://t.co/EvLnEX1i07 pic.twitter.com/zbSbV642Ci

— CNN International (@cnni) February 14, 2017

Only 1% know poverty has halved since 1990. Optimism in pessimistic times. Read Gates Annual Letter – https://t.co/dKc994XAzq via @billgates

— Carlos A. Reck (@yuyay) February 14, 2017

Announcing the 2017 World's 50 Most Innovative Companies—from @Snap to @Glossier #FCMostInnovative https://t.co/FCIXTrYzaI pic.twitter.com/HVQS89WwGs

— Fast Company (@FastCompany) February 13, 2017

Announcing the 2017 World's 50 Most Innovative Companies—from @Amazon to @Chobani #FCMostInnovative https://t.co/Betg3uxDck pic.twitter.com/dvvHhBkFrU

— Fast Company (@FastCompany) February 13, 2017

She's the first woman to travel to every country in the world https://t.co/OfwVnh3Hf3 pic.twitter.com/79uj49TunQ

— CNN (@CNN) February 10, 2017

All these countries have had a woman leader before the U.S.: https://t.co/7bfYfLjDcW pic.twitter.com/KaY1YPmFIN

— CNN International (@cnni) June 10, 2016

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"Do these things right, and you have a chance to reach business nirvana ...INNOVATION" - Google Chair

This is how google works: 

How Google Works - by Schmidt and Rosenberg (click for more SLIDES)

Good ideas aren’t restricted to the people with the most experience or seniority. In fact, some of the best ones come from unexpected places. The smartest thing a leader can do when it comes to idea generation is adopt as open a posture as possible. This means encouraging people across the company to speak up with suggestions and build demos of projects they think should be supported. It also means making it easy for people who use your product to send feedback and taking it seriously when you receive it. - (SOURCE) Jonathan Rosenberg, co-author with Eric Schmidt of How Google Works

My comments: COMPANY CULTURE MATTERS
BUSINESS-SCHOOL WISDOM IS OFTEN NONSENSE
CAPITALISM LIKES OPTIMISM AND AUDACIOUSNESS

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ICT IN CHINA: Aspiration and Innovation in Chinese telecoms companies

By IGBERAESE J. Abumere, DOSUNMU Ayomide, CHINAGOROM Y. Chinonyerem, and OLULOLA Oluwasefunmi Tolulope

INTRODUCTION

The Chinese telecom companies are recognized as the most innovative industry in China.  Besides Huawei, there was also the emergence of other telecom companies such as Datang, Great Dragon, ZTE among others.

We have many questions about the emergence of these Chinese telecom industries.  The most important question is: why did Huawei and ZTE emerge as the leading telecom companies in

China rather than other companies with strong backgrounds and higher starting point like Datang and Great Dragon.  One reason is what the author calls Aspiration Level. 

ASPIRATION LEVEL

Company	Aspiration Level	Description	Result
Huawei	Wolf	Military style, high survival pressure, accurate eyesight, high efficiency	Purpose to be the first class enterprise
ZTE	Bull	State owned background, but learnt to be pragmatic in the south business environment.	Purpose to overtake Huawei
Datang	Half academic, half business	Financed by the government to do R&D for a long while	Purpose to do standardisation
Dragon	Firework	Originally with high aspiration level, but cannot follow further constrained by system problem.	Almost disappeared
Eastcom	Businessman	From the beginning, it aimed to earn money	Tried to upgrade but eventually still ends up with OEM.

Aspiration level is a soft index which is difficult to measure unlike sales revenue and even investment level which can be expressed clearly by numbers. Aspiration level is an index which is difficult to measure but heavily influences the company’s employees, like an invisible power.

A company’s aspiration level can be reflected in a company’s ultimate goal---through analysis of a company’s ultimate goal, we can preliminarily identify the tone of the company’s culture. Obviously, Huawei has been recognized as the “wolf company” in the industry for a long while, it means a company with high aspiration level to be innovative and creative. 

Further, the aspiration level reflects in how entrepreneurial the company remains. Huawei has kept investing research and development - up to 10% of its total revenue - for many years.  In 2009, Huawei became the No.1 patent applicant (it was No.2 in 2010.)

Huawei’s high aspiration level may be related to the founder’s thoughts of Huawei and the background of the company.  Huawei is typical grass-roots company without any government or state background, it all developed by its own efforts. The founder Ren Zhenfei was an army man for many years, possessing soldier’s qualities – a strict, high pressure, persistent personality. As the spiritual leader of Huawei, Ren’s personality has largely influenced the culture of the company.  

LEARNING AND INNOVATIVE CAPABILITY

Innovation is both a process and a product. It is

• the organizational and social processes that produce innovation, such as individual creativity, organizational structure, environmental context, and social and economic factors

• an outcome that manifests itself in new products, product features, and production methods

Huawei employed the open innovation method (the use of purposive flows and outflows of

knowledge to accelerate internal innovation and expand markets for external use of innovation

respectively)

Innovative capacity and marketing capacity complement to each other. In fact, marketing capacity divorced from learning and innovative capability could only bring temporary resplendence.  A company without capable marketing capability cannot raise sufficient resource to support learning and innovation.

Huawei and ZTE are persistent in R&D investment, but they are also very careful in investing

in R&D: every decision has to be verified by market demand, confirmed by market potential.

Huawei’s catch-up in technology learning totally relies on their own development. The most common method is that they import foreign technology or product, then deploy large amount of engineers to imitate and modify. This is called technology-borrower. When Mr. Ren was invited to give a talk after visiting couple of hi-tech companies, he said something meaningful: “Founder has technology but no management; Lenovo has management but no technology; Huawei has neither technology nor management.”   

Many audiences thought that it was a humble comment from Mr. Ren. However, from Ren’s point of view, the real “core technology” should “create opportunity and lead consumption”, which is quite different from Huawei’s “seek and grasp opportunity” technology.  

Generally speaking, usually the Chinese enterprise can only notice an opportunity after it emerges from potential stage, if they can make correct decision and grasp the opportunity then they can get success.   Huawei is a successful example of this.   However those leading MNC are conducting another method by “creating opportunity and leading consumption” relying on their R&D to create opportunity.  Thus Huawei is defined as a “late comer” in the market: for late comer, it is to seek and grasp opportunity; for forerunner it is to create opportunity and lead consumption. Ren’s point is that Huawei’s technology which can only ”seek and grasp opportunity” is not the true technology, only the “creating opportunity and leading consumption” can be defined as true technology .

Technology innovation is fundamentally based on innovation talent, while talent used is heavily

relevant to capital and culture. Where can Huawei acquire these talents? Most of their employees are directly hired from university. For example, Huawei hired directly from campus less than 2000 graduates from 2002 to 2008. In the year of 2009 it reached 6000. This is called “circling talents” strategy. For example, Huawei claimed that they would hire all the engineering master graduates of the top 10 in the class from top universities.

Major source: A COMPARISON STUDY OF THE CHINESE TELECOM INDUSTRY,  published 2011.  By Hui Yan, Aalborg University, Denmark. 

The four authors are undergraduate students in the College of Engineering at Bells University of Technology, Ogun State, Nigeria.  They prepared this paper under my supervision for the course CEN 302: Introduction to ICT. 

Business Process Outsourcing in India and related HR Challenges

Notes written by Ozodi ARIAHU and Aramide BELLO

(Based on Thite, M. & Russell, R. (2007). India and Business Process Outsourcing.)

India is a country of complete contrasts – five star hotels surrounded by slums, white-collar workers rushing past unskilled labourers using primitive technologies, new globally branded cars navigating congested roads along with antiquated models, freeways and flyovers that suddenly lead to unpaved, snarled roads and so on. 

India Country data:

·         Three times the size of Nigeria, with triple the population density

·         Economy ranked 12^th largest in the world

·         From the 2011 census, 58.2% of the labour force is in agricultural production (cultivators and labourers), 4 % in household industry

·         The remaining 37.6% would include both manufacturing industry and service provision

The Indian IT/ITeS/BPO Sector

The spread of the internet, with cheap and abundant telecommunications bandwidth, has enabled businesses to parcel out white-collar work to specialist outside suppliers, with countries such as India emerging as important hubs for producing services for consumption at the other end of the fibre-optic cable (Edwards, 2004).  This type of work is classified under service provision and termed the Information Technology, Information Technology-Enabled Services, and Business Process Outsourcing (IT/ITeS/BPO) sector.  

IT services include

·         Systems integration and information systems consulting.

·         Application development and support as well as IT training services.

IT-enabled Services (ITeS) include

·         Back-office data entry and processing.

·         Customer contact services (such as complaints, tele-marketing, collections support).

·         Corporate support functions (such as HR, finance, procurement, IT services).

·         Knowledge services and decision-support (such as customer analytics, claims and risk

·         management and consultancy).

·         Research and development services.

Outsourcing is the practice in which companies move or contract out some or all of their manufacturing or service operations to other companies that specialize in those operations or to companies in other countries. 

An example would be an American jeans manufacturer that closes a factory in the United States and hires a contractor in India to produce its jeans, which are then imported and sold with the American company’s logo.  According to Forrester Research, nearly half a million computer hardware and software jobs are expected to be outsourced from the United States to other countries by the year 2015.

Corporate executives say outsourcing helps their companies lower costs, increase profits, stay competitive, and that they ultimately transfer cost savings to the consumer as lower prices.

Currently, the BPO sector appears poised on an unstable knife edge. It involves a young, highly educated workforce conducting often routine work for which, in many cases, it is patently over qualified. As a result, the explosive growth of BPO in India has also given rise to startling attrition rates and working conditions that, although perhaps (temporarily) acceptable in urban India may well prove to be far short of employee aspirations. 

A brief history of Business Process Outsourcing in India

To most Indian software companies, BPO came in handy in the face of the downturn in the IT industry. Another stroke of luck for the industry was the cheap availability of abundant and under-utilised fibre optic cables laid under the sea by western companies during the e-commerce hype generated in the 1990s and their increasing bandwidth capacity (Friedman, 2005).

While the Indian software industry took more than 10 years to mature and climb up the value chain, the Indian ITeS/BPO industry has taken just 5 years (between 2000 and 2005) to do just that. Many of the top Indian software companies, namely; Infosys, Wipro and Satyam, have now set up subsidiary companies such as Progeon, Wipro BPO, and Nipuana, which are their

ITES arms.

Today, there are around 3000 IT companies in India currently exporting to over 150 countries with an employee base of around 700,000 and the top 5 Indian IT software & service exporters are Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, Wipro, Satyam and HCL (Nasscom-c, 2005).

In line with this growth, the ITeS/BPO/KPO industry now employs not only generic graduates, but also MBAs, doctors, engineers and chartered accountants as process executives. Even for Customer Service Representative jobs, which are relatively low-skilled, the vast majority of employees are university graduates.

Apart from its sheer size, India currently constitutes an intriguing part of the globalization story

for its pioneering of what can be termed an Export Led Services Provision (ELSP) model. Today, anybody who visits India will see that changes are everywhere and the country is well and truly on the move.

Despite the spectacular growth and visibility of the IT/ITES sector, it is still largely irrelevant to the vast majority of Indians.  Altogether, the combined IT/ITeS/BPO sector employs under 1 million workers out of a total workforce (waged, salaried and other) that is approaching half a billion workers.   Thus it is that despite the tremendous success of IT and outsourcing in India, poverty persists with 35% of all Indians living on less than one US dollar per day. 

Labour and Human Resource considerations

Although Indian IT/ITeS/BPO workers are very inexpensive by Western standards, their salaries are high by Indian standards.  Currently, the sector is devoid of trade unions, while existing unions appear to be unprepared to enter the new economy.  With respect to changes in existing labour codes, a majority of the states have either promulgated a government order or notification permitting all establishments in the respective jurisdictions engaged in IT-enabled services (including call centres) to: work on national holidays; allow women to work through night shifts; and permit offices to function 24 hours a day, all through the year (Nasscom-g, 2005), although such practices have traditionally been banned through urban Shops and Establishment Acts. 

The industry faces skill shortages, but the question here is of quality, not quantity. While it is estimated that approximately 17 million people will be available to the IT industry by 2008 (Nasscom-j, 2005), the problem relates to their employability and trainability.  Jobs in IT minimally require a tertiary degree in engineering, computer science or mathematics, while call centre and data processing operations insist upon a Bachelors’ level degree and high levels of proficiency in spoken and written English.  Most Indians are not employable in the sector, since  literacy rates hover around 65 per cent for the population as a whole and at 45% for females. 

Attrition is the biggest challenge currently facing the ITES/BPO sector. The ‘race for talent’ as one HR manager described it between BPO suppliers is fierce; the poaching of workers has created much distrust among industry participants. Top five reasons for turnover in the industry: dissatisfaction with salaries (47%), lack of career opportunities (45%), leaving to pursue higher education (29%), illness (28%) and physical strain (22%) (DQ-IDC, 2004).

Marriage and pursuing higher education were frequently quoted as the main reasons for attrition. The night shift work that most of the employees are engaged in causes them, particularly, women, to leave this employment when they get married; hence, marriage is given as the reason for attrition.  To retain those workers who would leave for higher education, some companies are beginning to explore the possibility of providing scholarships, tuition reimbursement and special arrangements with education institutions that would allow them to offer courses in the workplace.

BPO companies may feel squeezed for profits.  Clients on multi-year contracts with BPO providers expect costs to fall over the course of the tender as the provider becomes more experienced and familiar with the client’s products and markets.  They also face shortages in leadership and supervisory skills, particularly at the team/project level.

Authors are undergraduate students in Electrical Engineering at Bells University of Technology, Ogun State.  They prepared these notes under my supervision for the course CEN 302: Introduction to ICT.