The last decade has seen great changes in India, and no city reflects this new India more than Gurgaon does. In this Millennium City you find both the energy and promise that characterize the new India, as well as its chaos and disappointments.

The litany of shortcomings is familiar – broken roads, little public transport, power and water shortages, deficient sewage, and a high incidence of violent crime. Against this, you have considerable efforts being made by organizations such as iamgurgaon and the Cybercity Welfare Society, and by a Municipal Council that is trying hard to take control of the situation.

Gurgaon has the potential to be a role model for the modernizing country. Below, I humbly suggest five ideas for getting there.
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At Nagarro, we are confident that our customers will get better software project outcomes with us than with our competitors. We sell our projects based on this rather bold claim, and potential customers typically make reference checks and convince themselves that this claim is true.

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We have all heard the usability spiel: that technology is more or less a commodity, that ease of use – and in fact “delight of use” – should be paramount. We have also heard the horror stories of expensive enterprise and consumer applications that failed miserably because they were just too “kludgy” to use. Yet even today, for every wonderfully user-centric design (think iPhone) there are dozens of desktop or web applications that are boring at best, and simply unusable at worst.

Why is this so? Perhaps the problem is that when you are early in the SDLC, there are so many other challenges and moving parts that you have little time to worry about usability. You worry that bringing the “naïve” users in for design discussions will just derail the project or send it off on a tangent. On the other hand, if you wait till you are through with version 1, you have been compromised as well – it requires great courage to admit at this point that usability is poor and that major elements of the application have to be re-designed.

These are formidable challenges. Yet we at Nagarro recently had a very positive series of usability-related discussions with a major client, which may be useful to recount in this context.
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Bill holds a Masters in Computer Science from Stanford University. He has more than 20 years of experience with object technology and languages including C++, Smalltalk and Java (he’s a certified Java programmer and architect). He has served as a member of Sun JCP expert groups on RMI Custom Remote References (JSR78) and EJB Performance Benchmarking (JSR131). His career spans IBM, Schlumberger (on oilfield applications), WorldStreet Corporation (on financial applications, as Chief Architect) and SupplyChainge (again as Chief Architect) At SupplyChainge, Bill interacted with Nagarro and visited Delhi as well. After SupplyChainge, Bill joined the very successful application performance management company Wily Technology, which was acquired by Computer Associates in early 2006 for a large sum. He currently works on the Wily Introscope™ product. He is also the co-founder of StepZero, LLC, a performance management consulting firm. He collaborates informally with many open source gurus including Ward Cunningham, the father of the Wiki.

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Category: Guest Blog: Kayser | No Comments »