No takers for philosophy?

Have you ever wondered when dictators arise, the first thing they tend to do is to silence the “Philosophers”! Why? For it is they who seem to bubble with ideas and ensure the thirst for continuous inquiry continues. Yes, the dictators and autocrats fear the philosophers and their influence on the thinking of common men and women.

What do you think studying philosophy means? This is one area where there is no set of defined answers to issues. The act of thinking deeply and critically, inquiring constantly and arriving at one’s ideas i.e. the sheer journey itself is so special. This is one subject you can be sure that those who take it up are at least interested in that subject with no other expectations.

LSE (London School of Economics) has a department – “Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method”. According to LSE, “Studying philosophy is an excellent opportunity to think deeply whilst developing important transferable skills. Choosing Philosophy as your subject will prepare you for the kind of careful thinking, critical analysis and persuasive writing that is critical in many different areas of work.”

Philosophy has multiple dimensions and aspects of inquiry. It covers ethics, politics, economics, law, metaphysics etc. Challenging questions are constantly debated and explored in philosophic inquiries.

A few examples are:

• What is good?
• Is it ok to sacrifice a few for the greater good of the society?
• Is there something called “Free will”?
• Does God exist?
• What is an opinion, a belief? What are the types of knowledge?
• How should the society be grouped?
• What can we know?
• Why should we obey the law?
• Can we every state anything with absolute certainty?

If you are curious and has an open mind, philosophy is the subject to turn into.

Let’s go to the next topic. What can I do with a philosophy undergraduate degree? In other words, “Does it really pay?”. Very pertinent question that cannot be ignored in today’s world of survival.

Many studies have pointed to the fact that the philosophy graduates work in various departments starting from finance, science, NGOs, Government, Law and business and consistently earn well above the median average.

The students tend to do well in tests that require thinking, writing and critical judgement. Take the GRE or GMAT exam. Philosophy majors seem to get to the essence and ace the exams as entry to graduate studies.

One of the most sought-after skills in the 21^st century is critical thinking, working in a team and analytical/logical bent of mind. Studying philosophy prepares one for such a rigour and it can play a role in the general life too.

For this, it would be better to see what can one be able to do after studying philosophy major:

• To understand and articulate issues – public or otherwise clearly drawing upon philosophical learning
• To develop an inquiring and investigative mindset
• To attain research skills, approach any issue logically and reason it out
• To recognize fundamental questions on life, knowledge, rights, living, society etc.
• To hone skills in analysis, interpretation and proof
• To apply formal techniques of logic
• To identify central issues/messages/concerns and get to the core of the debate/text

John Campbell, a renowned philosopher, says “Philosophy is thinking in slow motion. It breaks down, describes, and assesses moves we ordinarily make at great speed.... It then becomes evident that alternatives are possible.

Starting from Socrates, Plato, Aristotle to early modern and latest era of Machiavelli, Sir Thomas More, John Calvin, Michael de Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Descartes, Boyle, Spinoza, Locke, Voltaire, Hume, Kant, Bertrand Russell, Gödel and Camus have contributed to a better understanding of the fundamental questions, thought process and knowledge.

India has its own philosophers who have written treatises on metaphysics, materialism, justice, law, soul and body etc. Yajnavalkya was one of the earliest in the Vedic age. Many others followed including Kapila, Gautama Buddha, Mahavira, Chanakya, Patanjali, Bodhi dharma, Adi Shankara, Ramanuja, Basaveshwara, Madhvacharya, Vallabhacharya. In the modern times, Rabindranath Tagore, Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, Jiddu Kirshnamurti are notable ones propounding and exploring in various aspects of the discipline. In addition, the Upanishads and other treatises serve as philosophical and scientific inquiries.

If you are keen to enjoy such a rigorous subject, go out, fall in love and find joy in the learning process itself.

Bertrand Russell said “"Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good."

15^th November is celebrated as “World Philosophy Day” all over the world. UNESCO introduced it in 2002 with the following objectives:

• to renew the national, sub regional, regional and international commitment to philosophy;
• to foster philosophical analysis, research and studies on major contemporary issues, so as to respond more effectively to the challenges that are confronting humanity today;
• to raise public awareness of the importance of philosophy and its critical use in the choices arising for many societies from the effects of globalization or entry into modernity;
• to appraise the state of philosophy teaching throughout the world, with special emphasis on unequal access;
• to underline the importance of the universalization of philosophy teaching for future generations. In establishing World Philosophy Day UNESCO strives to promote an international culture of philosophical debate that respects human dignity and diversity. The Day encourages academic exchange and highlights the contribution of philosophical knowledge in addressing global issues.

References

http://opcentral.org/blog/why-studying-philosophy-matters/

http://www.lse.ac.uk/philosophy/why-study-philosophy/

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/10/is-philosophy-the-most-practical-major/246763/

https://philosophyisagreatmajor.com/

https://www.apaonline.org/default.aspx

http://www.physicscentral.com/buzz/blog/index.cfm?postid=5112019841346388353

https://qz.com/1016900/tracy-chou-leading-silicon-valley-engineer-explains-why-every-tech-worker-needs-a-humanities-education/

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/05/why-philosophy-majors-rule_n_4891404.html?utm_hp_ref=tw&guccounter=1

CIOs and CTOs: How frequently do you perform a health check up of your portfolio?

An IT landscape, like any other real estate, grows and changes continuously. In the process, it accumulates technical debt, grows equally well in both legacy and modern technologies, redevelops functionality, creates redundant systems and keeps tweaking many products to suit the BAU scenario. On top of it, if the organization acquires another company, the diversity of the portfolio multiplies. In the entire melee, no one bothers about keeping a proper count of inventory or documentation or health of the portfolio.

Very few organizations invest in a portfolio assessment exercise and fewer do so periodically. No doubt, such an exercise is time consuming and expensive. But, the benefits of a proper exercise, if done well, will help the organization to take decisions faster. Not knowing the extent of technical debt or the inability of the agility of the portfolio will creep up more and more work in every IT project and eventually pull back the organization’s ability to develop new differentiating products or services.

Now the industry is moving from on-premises to cloud; legacy to differentiating technologies; from systems that are obsolete or about to go out of support to open sources; separate development and support to DevOps; waterfall methodology to agile; sedate landscape to one that evolves and learns. Consequently, the focus of such assessment exercises should bring out these factors in the form of metrics.

Based on my experience, here is a primer in the form of FAQ on such an exercise:

What is such an exercise called?

It is typically known by various names. Some of them are APA (Application Portfolio Assessment), APR (Portfolio rationalization) or APO (Portfolio Optimization) or APM (Portfolio Modernization).

How frequently this should be carried out?

Once in three years is a minimum. This should be modified depending on the growth of the organization in terms of IT systems, inorganic acquisition of other entities etc. If the pace of change is more, once in 2 years will be better.

What is the duration and involvement of such an exercise?

The duration can range from 1 to 3 months depending on the quality of the IT assets and configuration data base maintained. Involvement from Product owners, Enterprise architects, procurement and senior management will be required. This initiative should be owned and driven from the CTO’s office.

Let’s talk about the outcome of a typical APA exercise.

Once we understand the output, the activities to be done, during the exercise, can be inferred easily. For the purpose of clarity, let’s look at the output as consisting of two parts:

1. Part-1 is about metrics that indicate the health of the landscape across various dimensions
2. Part-2 is about resulting initiatives and recommendations.

What does Part-1 focus on?

This has 2 sets of metrics. First set focuses on hygiene factors; the second set on value added parameters. The hygiene set should address, at the minimum on the completeness, quality and currency of data pertaining to the following 7 dimensions:

1. Inventory (List of applications and related details like description, technology, # users etc.)
2. Mapping (Business capability or function to Platform Platform to IT application and IT application to Infra)
3. Product Usage (Product Name, associated details, Extent of customization of the product, Vendor)
4. License (Vendor, License, ILF – Initial License Fee, RLF – Recurring License Fee, Contract expiry date etc.)
5. Documentation (Required documents for understanding the system, required documents for providing support/development of the system)
6. Technical debt (a quick assessment in the form of KLOC – Kilo Lines of Code or Cost)
7. Cost related (Various cost elements including but not limited to resources, service provider, product vendor, license vendor, compute, network, storage, cloud etc.)

The second  value-added set should focus on the ability of the IT organization to closely align with business and quickly respond to the changing needs without undue lag. What are the areas to focus here?

Cloud readiness – Cloud is great leveler of the landscape and imposes more uniformity and standardization without compromising on the business capability. How much of the landscape can be easily shifted from on-premises to cloud?

Platformication readiness – How are the IT systems and infra being developed? Do they lend themselves to a vertical clean cut enabling business, application, data and infra layer to go towards a platform or a utility model? Typically the top 30 to 40% of the landscape that are key to the business should fall into this bucket.

System of innovation and differentiation – All the systems can be bucketed into system of records (back office, core, legacy that undergo little change), differentiation (the middle layer that gives opportunities to differentiate the services) and innovation (the key ones that are integral and unique to the organization’s capability). As the landscape matures, more and more systems should move from records to differentiation and differentiation to innovation. That way, more and more of the landscape will lend itself to agility and help in a faster turn around.

DevSecOps readiness – How are changes implemented in the portfolio? How is support provided? Is there a wall between them? What type of people are being used across the landscape? What is the release periodicity? Is the entire IT operating on a single cadence even if many methodologies are followed? How is security principles embedded in the life cycle? Today’s world is taking the landscape towards a common set of cadence with no blockers to the ground.

Skill readiness – The organization should adopt a uniform system across its internal as well as external employees / contractors / service providers to denote the skill and competency. Dreyfuss or SFIA can be adopted. This help in talking the same language, drawing up training plan, cross-skilling of people, providing a career path etc.

Tell us about Part-2 of the outcome

Once the above is complete, various metrics can be collected that can provide a useful basis for arriving at a set of recommendations. We can classify the recommendations into 3 categories:

Category-1: Hygiene initiatives

All the hygiene factors, mentioned in part-1, should be ranked on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being high quality, complete and up to date). Wherever the score is below 5, a program plan for bringing it to 8+ should be provided. If the score is > 5, either a separate plan or as a by-product of a major upgrade/project should be specified.

Whatever it is, by a certain time line, all the hygiene factors should be brought to 8+. Even if no modernization is undertaken, this is very important. Otherwise, this will drag the entire development and release.

Category-2: Extrinsic initiatives

These should address factors like the following:

1. Data centre Consolidation (Number and locations)
2. Service Provider Consolidation (for a given IT spend, how many service providers should exist? 
3. Scope for consolidation; Dependency vs Risk vs Savings)
4. License Optimization (Optimization of licenses across the organization, management of RLFs, negotiation with vendors etc.)

Category-3: Intrinsic initiatives

These arise from within the portfolio and enable the organizations to move to a certain state. Every state should be characterized by the set of value-added factors mentioned in part-2.

Some of these could be:

• Categorization of applications into those that can be decommissioned, migrated and modernized and consequent programs to implement the same. All the initiatives (a functional migration, technical reengineering, refactoring etc.) should be ranked according to the RoI, Time taken to implement and risk including cost of change across the organization. Implementing such initiatives will lead to reduced application intensity, reduced technology spread etc.
• Program plan for increasing the cloud usage
• Program plan for bringing the entire organization into uniform DevOps or DevSecOps
• Program plan for eliminating niche, obsolete and other technologies that will soon go out of support
• Program plan for baselining the skill, productivity and measurement across the landscape

Tell us about the stakeholders

These exercises should be driven by the CxO through an appointed PO (Program Owner). A ToR (Terms of Reference) of such an exercise, objective, timeline and involvement and support of different stakeholders should be drawn up and roadshows held one to two months before the exercise. The program should be part of the CxO’s steering committee. A dashboard indicating how the health and agility of the portfolio evolves during the next 3-year is a must.

Potential introduction of a digital currency called e-Krona by Swedish Central Bank

Usage by % of Households in Sweden

As the markets change rapidly, one important aspect is the movement towards a cashless society. Sweden is at the forefront of technological changes in terms of electronic money and payment systems. The Swedish Riksbank has started a project on the feasibility of introducing digital currency e-krona in place of the usual cash krona.

But once the population moves away from cash, will it rob them of flexibility? Will it make them more dependent on private players and payment systems? What roles does the central bank want to play? All these conundrums are being studied by the central bank. Digital money, by itself, is not something new. The Riksbank already deals with digital money with its participant banks but not the public.

Two important factors of Swedish market are as follows:

The cash to GDP ratio is the lowest in the world for Sweden. Most people do not use cash at all so much so that the tourists have started complaining!

The growth of alternative payment solution providers like Swish. Created by the Nordic banks and used by > 50% of Swedes, this is challenging the unicorns in the field.

“Just Swish it to me” will be the familiar phrase in Sweden when sharing bills or sending payments.  The steps are so simple in Swish – Open the landing page, enter the counterparty’s phone number, amount and comment, Mobile BankID app opens to authenticate payment, confirm with an option to send a text to the recipient and actual transmission without any fee. The transfer is instant and free of charge for private users. No wonder, the swedes have fallen in love with it. 6.5 million users! Norway and Denmark too use similar systems called Vipps and MobilePay. Look at its amazing growth...

Given these, no wonder, the Riksbank doesn’t want to introduce e-Krona without doing a feasibility study and its impact. It will be worth the wait to see how the payment systems and related settlement systems will be reconfigured.

References:

https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/payments--cash/e-krona/

https://www.thelocal.se/20181016/sweden-leads-the-world-in-cashless-digital-payments

https://www.thelocal.se/20180527/tourists-complain-as-sweden-becomes-more-cash-free

https://medium.com/@etiennebr/swish-the-secret-swedish-fintech-payment-company-created-by-nordic-banks-and-used-by-50-of-swedes-cfcf06f59d6f

https://www.getswish.se