Friday, November 21, 2008

SAP - on demand

Idea is to have a portal which brings the customers and providers of SAP technical work together. What differentiates it from anything else

- Customers pay for work, not for resources. If it is a 4 hour work, customer pays only for 4 hours.
- A bidding process ensures cheapest price for the work - a win-win. For example customer may be willing to get the work done over weekend and provide remote access, which may cost 20 dollars an hour for the same consultant who otherwise would have costed 150 dollars an hour over weekday (and may not have been available for short adhoc work).

- A backup guarntee that there will be at least one bid. The entity providing the portal will have its delivery arm competing with others, and will ensure that any work posted on the portal gets at least one bid.

- Delivery group will also provide value adds in terms of contract and SLA templates, payment channel, VPN services, technical documentation (eg SOW) templates etc.

- Providers (only individuals) can register for free and bid for any work posted. Portal will charge 5% of contract cost from the provider for any successful bid through the portal. Customers will need to pay a minimal annual registration fee (say 1000 usd per year) for membership.

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Express yourself!

The idea is a portal where one can express one's opinion in the form of rating scores. The scores are aggregated and displayed in various reports.

This is a real time updated portal. Users can personalize the portal. Ratings (primarily 'disapproval rating') can be displayed at any level of granularity.

eg a user can go and see
..top 10 'hated' employees at
Org = IBM / Country = USA / Location = Redmond

..top 10 'hated' people in
Country = 'Norway'

..top 10 'hated' organizations in
Global , Category = 'Non-profit'

and so on.

The report can be extended to see a bigger list (50 , 100, ...).
Animation to appropriately express the dislike can be added to make it visually appealing.

Users need to sign on to provide rating. They can look at the rating reports without signing on. The rating can be input through multiple channels (email, web, text msg, ...). The portal is similarly accessible through multiple channels (eg on a blackberry).

The way users can provide scores is
every user gets a fixed no of 'disapproval' points to give (say 100 'disapproval' points) in each category (categories at highest level are combinations of country and one of [people, organization, things, ideas]). These are date specific - a user can for example give 50 points to George W Bush in category 'USA / People' for the period 1st Dec 2008 to 20th Jan 2009. The time period can be set to default (eg 30 days starting from current date) so user doesn't have to enter it every time. User can reassign these points any time (the date windows are adjusted automatically every time user reassigns).

User has to specify own settings in profile (organization, country, province and so on). Users get a fixed set of points in his/her own category, and same no of points in all other categories. For example, if user X lives in UK and works for ABB, he/she gets 100 points to assign ABB employees, and 100 points for geography UK, and gets another 100 points for all other organizations, and 100 points for all other geographies. (This part will need further detailing).

Idea of giving points is to differentiate the level or intensity of dislike. (Eg I may dislike 5 people, but not with the same intensity, and accordingly I can assign higher score to a person I most dislike).


Users nominate categories and entries (people, orgs, ideas, things etc) which need to approved before they appear as entries to be rated.