Efficient Internet Search

According to a recent Microsoft study, people on an average spend 11 minutes on a typical Internet search. It could be due to a variety of reasons -

· Not knowing exactly what it is that they are searching for,
· Trawling through giga-bytes of irrelevant data that is generated as the result of a key-word search,

being just two of many reasons.

It makes sense to create a search strategy for optimizing Internet search results and to decrease the amount of time spent in looking for what you want. Optimization can be done in two ways -
· Using several search engines to synergistically arrive at your results
· Utilizing one search engine efficiently

I have outlined three websites, that could help you to meet your search needs in an efficient manner. Most of this information is freely available on the Internet, and detailed understanding is just a click away.

http://www.blogger.com/www.vivisimo.com - This is an Internet clustering search engine, wherein your searches are aggregated based on content groups. This tool works best, when a person is unsure of what sort of information or key-word search would lead him or her to the desired results. Ideally vivisimo.com would throw up results that can then be fine-tuned using focussed key-word search via http://www.blogger.com/www.google.com or http://www.blogger.com/www.yahoo.com

http://www.blogger.com/www.Answers.com - This is an interesting website that trawls through around 100 reference databases to arrive at a set of results that will usually give a relevant set of search results to any questions or keywords that you may choose to enter. In addition, the predictive technology feature can help you choose from a variety of options as you type out your query.

http://www.blogger.com/www.google.com - This is used across industry due to several path-breaking innovations in search. I have attached a set of Google tips that may come in handy during a search. Use http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en as the URL for utilizing the interesting Google Suggest feature, an excellent predictive text search facilitator within Google within the Google.com website.

For more Google secrets, visit http://www.google.com/help/operators.html.

Media Tech!

The Indian electronic and print media are gradually making the transition to tech-have-nots to the tech-haves. From Hindustan Times which gets its design re-done by leading designers from abroad, using the latest technologies to companies such as Adlabs which are implementing an ERP solution for accounting and other activities, we find that the 'Tech' buzz word has been enmeshed into the thought-fabric.

Financial Accounting, Sales Force Management, Campaign Management etc. were previously thought to be human capital intensive jobs. Exit the old rational school, enter the seemingly irrational new school - where each and every activity can be traced via a project management Work Breakdown Structure chart and collated to an item in the company's Chart of Accounts.

Companies such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft etc. have come up with solutions that address issues in CRM, HR, Knowledge Management etc. that can be tweaked for the Media industry. Especially industry specific solutions from the SAP and Oracle stables take away a great deal of the pain that normal CFOs,CTOs and CEOs in the media space undergo on a daily basis while transacting their business.

Of course, this comfort comes at a price. While ERP as a buzz-word has become popular due to plain vanilla implementations, the true value is often found only at the end of the rainbow when the client either implements a lot of the value-added features, which he must of course pay a premium for, or indulge in a great deal of customization. The latter is because of the peculiar nature of our indusry, which is still ad-hoc and not process driven. Best practices from abroad cannot be implemented in a home-grown company as easily as it can be in an MNC subsidiary in India. As a result, ERP implementations normally take recourse to customization to mimic to-be processes that have some delta from the existing process.

Explore the open blue ocean

Presenting one aspect of Competitive Strategy - avoid the clutter, cut through the noise, perception of the core value etc., calls for a lot of effort in wading through a pool already crowded with numerous strategies and peripheral analysis. A company tends to expend resources and intellectual bandwidth in trying to squeeze every last drop of merit in an already depleted reource or industry - akin to flogging a dying horse.

Blue Ocean strategy is remarkably refreshing in that it just asks the consultant or the XIO to think outside the box - and cultivate an understanding of the opportunities that lie un-harnessed in as yet un-discovered areas falling within the organization's core competence spectrum. An example would be that of an automobile ancillary manufacturing company ELECON diversifying into heavy engineering gear-box manufacturing, because its initial business of manufacturing gear-boxes for the automobile industry was being threated by decreasing profit margins due to imports and increasing cost of playing the economics-of-scale game. Heavy engineering gear box manufacturing would have been the niche playing field of foreign players, that is now being targeted by the smaller, nimble-footed and hungry Indian firm.

This strategy of exploring the unexplored, can work equally well in the Service industry. Creating a retail opportunity out of Vada Pav - the ubiquitous Marathi snack-on-the-go has led to enviable operating margins for the Jumbo King chain. Ten years ago, it would have been considered infra-dig to commercialze the common man's food. But exploring possibilities and converting them into realizable value propositions never hurt anyone. All it takes is a bit of courage, the wherewithal to stick it though thick-and-thin and valuable strategic far-sightedness.