Follow up Post on "Economists/Intellectuals - Are we hurting our children?"

Recently, I posted an blog entry titled : "Economists/Intellectuals - Are we hurting our children?"

The post argued how programs like - "Cash for Clunkers", "Hiring more Govt Services Staff using borrowed (Stimulus) money leads to inter-generational transfers i.e. in simple terms - burdening our children with debt of our consumption. Interestingly today I read the following articles on Yahoo! Finance

1. Cash for Clunkers under budget with 690,000 sales
2. "Artificially Sweetened" Market Could Face "Seismic Readjustment," Harrison Says
3. It's Hard to Worry About a Deficit 10 Years Out

Correlating the articles - In US, We just bought a many "Corolla’s and other Small Cars", most of them are not even Innovative (potentially clunkers themselves). The subsidy of $3 Billion therefore will only benefit the manufacturer and buyer at the cost of the some "current or future" tax payer and can in no terms be qualified as something that will benefit the future generation, on the other hand Article 2 clearly equates that a lot of current debt accumulation will have to be repaid by our Kids - inherently lowering the standard of living for them and finally the last article argues how each one us or a future taxpayer will pay for this in the form of higher taxes.

I always believed and still do; that my parents strived for better living for me - and I want my kids to think the same of me when they grow up. I am not sure they will, given our generations lack of fiscal control and amount of debt we are piling on to them. Hopefully I am proven wrong.

Your feedback or comments on this post are welcome.

Thanks

Nagesh

The views represented in this blog are my personal views and are not a "reflection of" or "opinions of" any of the institutions I am associated with or have worked for.

Cloud Computing - Why should Enterprises Care?

Recently, I wrote a blog entry analyzing the results and what they mean - in most cases I concluded that most executives were more confidant on controlling costs than they were on growth. Links to the post: http://kunamneni.blogspot.com/2009/07/ramblings-on-economy-is-it-all-good-now.html.

This brings attention to why are the executives not confidant on growth. Innovation is key to growth, and every executive is talking about it however their immediate actions are related to cost cutting. There may be many reasons; one reason that is probably obvious is that they are not confidant bringing their investments in Innovation fast enough to the market or another reason could be that they try too few ideas and cannot reliably predict the impact on revenue due to high risk that failure of any single idea may cause deviation that will not be accepted by the markets

This then truly raises the question, is the company’s innovation process scalable and whether the costs of scaling innovation process is truly linear to number of Ideas being pursued. Should every organization not take a closer look at their “Process of Innovation” as their future may very well depend on efficiency of the “Innovation Engine”. In simple terms - if a company typically tries 5 - 10 ideas at any time, then it is probably time to ask the question - how can the company scale this 10 fold - without increasing costs linearly, decreasing quality of product and at the same time improving time to market (bringing ideas to market faster).

So what is the answer from my vantage point:- (My take)

If we assume that today’s enterprises rely heavily on technology and analytics to foster innovation; then cloud computing has the potential to provide solution to scaling of the Enterprises "Innovation processes".

Cloud computing promises to lower Innovation costs by

1. Eliminating Upfront Investment Costs by allowing “Pay for Use” and thereby avoiding the lengthy, costly and cumbersome CAPEX processes.


2. Eliminating the need to plan complex deployment processes, by inducing highly efficient scaling and provisioning processes


3. Standardizing the Management Framework to enable complete visibility to all business processes.

In summary, if the future growth of your enterprise is based on engine of rapid innovation, then it is time to analyze the innovation process and how to scale it to try new ideas in a highly efficient manner.

Thank you your for taking the time to read. Your opinions and comments are welcome.

Thanks

Nagesh
The views represented in this blog are my personal views and are not a "reflection of" or "opinions of" any of the institutions I am associated with or have worked for