Please help me get this book started – I need a get well soon card!

If you are a regular at the Nasscom India Leadership Forum, held every February in Mumbai, then you must surely know Alex Blues. Alex is one of the most knowledgeable people in the world in the field of outsourcing, with a track record  that includes being a partner at PA Consulting, a Director at KPMG, a director at Orbys, and he was once the European head of Syntel.

Search Google for “Alex Blues Nasscom” and you will find thousands of references to his Nasscom comments in blogs and magazines and just look at the hundreds of videos he has made from the Nasscom event.

Alex is a true friend of Nasscom, and he is a friend of mine too. But this year Alex is not in Mumbai and neither am I. For me the reason is simple. A company was going to send me over there to blog about the event, then they changed their mind just a couple of weeks ago, leaving me no time to make alternative plans.

For Alex, it’s not so simple. He is in hospital in the UK recovering from a car crash that took place many months ago in Kenya. He was on holiday with his wife and, to cut a long story short, she was beaten up by the collision and suffered many broken bones, but is now well on the road to recovery.

Alex needed an air ambulance to get back to the UK and is still very poorly. He is partially paralysed and cannot speak, so although his mind is still fine he is trapped in a world where he can’t speak and can’t move in a coordinated enough way to type or write.

But the doctors are working on the best hand he still has, and his speech, and once one or the other is working again, me and Alex are going to write a book together about how the role of influencers has entirely changed within the outsourcing and global services market. It’s an exciting topic that will take in the analysts, the consultants and advisors, and even the hi-tech bloggers and social media experts.

How people make buying decisions has changed enormously since the old days of buying an analyst report for thousands of dollars and trusting those opinions with a budget of millions.

So I need your help if me and Alex are going to get this project together. He still has all this untapped knowledge about the market and I know that you would find it useful as well, so can you do me a favour please?

Email him on alex@carteblanchebs.co.uk and tell him how much you would like to hear that he is well enough to start working on the book.

Or, what would be even better is if you could take a moment to mail a real get-well card. He won’t be leaving hospital anytime soon so if you can make the effort to buy a real card and send it – like we used to before email – then I know he would appreciate that too.

His wife, Caroline, has promised to read him all your messages. Get them focused on how much he needs to start communicating again so he can get to work on this book and I’m sure his recovery can start sooner.

Alex Blues, A5 Addenbrooke’s Hospital

Hills Road

Cambridge CB2 0QQ

United Kingdom

Will you help me – and Alex –  please? Thanks… and I hope to see the Nasscom crowd again in 2013, I miss the food in Mumbai and the random debates about music in Glasgow. You just don’t know how bad Indian food is in Brazil

One final note. Back in the days before social media had really taken off in the corporate world – like way back in 2008 – I uploaded this video of Alex at the Nasscom conference in Mumbai. I ended up in trouble for it because every time a potential client of PA Consulting was told they might be working with Alex, they would Google his name. One of the first results was always Alex enjoying a glass of wine in Mumbai with the team from Steria. Not quite the image a professional firm wants to see, but it certainly helped PA to understand the power of the Internet…

Restaurants that don’t know chutney from cheese

When you go to a restaurant that says it is Indian, or Chinese, or Thai, you expect the staff and management to have some knowledge of the cuisine they are selling, but I end up being disappointed by restaurants – in Brazil and in Europe – so often  that I thought I would post a rant.

I was actually kicked out of an Italian restaurant in Spain (Santander) last August. I had complained that the food was terrible and sent back my starter, only to then find that my wife had an inedible starter *and* main course – at least my main course was OK. When we talked to the manager about it, he took great offence when we asked if he – or any of his staff – were Italian. When we asked further about which type of Italian food they were even attempting to cook, the manager got angry and said he was cooking Italian food Spanish-style for the locals.

He then booted us out. We had not eaten much, but had managed to consume a free bottle of wine so it was not a bad deal.

Today I went to an Indian restaurant in São Paulo and it felt the same. I ordered the combo meal in the vegetarian section of the menu, expecting some kind of veggie curry, only to get lettuce leaves with chunks of Minas cheese.

This was more of a fast food Indian restaurant, than a high class place, but I have tried several higher budget places in São Paulo and none of them serve anything that is at all authentic. One place I went to claims how they pride themselves on their Maharashtran cuisine, when everything remotely Indian on the menu looks more like north Indian food – and they even had things like pasta on the menu too.

I know that British restaurants are not perfect either. The bog-standard small-town Indian full of Friday night drinkers is usually run by Bangladeshis with dishes that originated in Birmingham rather than Bombay. But visit London and it is possible to easily find very good and authentic Indian food – especially around Southall (Punjabi, Gujurati) or Harrow (Tamil).

I know restaurants often modify food to suit local palates, but why don’t they offer a blend of the authentic and the modified, rather than trying to pass off nonsense dishes as “authentically Indian.”

I actually feel cheated. I go to a “good” restaurant hoping to learn something from the chef and management, not to find that I know an immeasurable amount more about the food than them.

I sent an email to the restaurant I was just at, asking exactly which part of India serves cheese from Minas Gerais on top of lettuce… if they answer, I’ll post it as a comment here…

Shame on Hyatt

Each year, NASSCOM brings nearly 2,000 to their annual leadership conference in Mumbai. Since 2005 it has always been held at the Grand Hyatt hotel – a place that is certainly grand, but this year appears to have become too grand for the mere conference delegates.

They have started charging delegates to use tables and chairs in the coffee shop in a bid to prevent pesky conference-goers sitting and working or having meetings in the hotel public areas. Conference-goers have been asked for R$7,000 a table (£95) for a 2-hour slot.

The boss of the Hyatt should consider where his future revenue lies. Should he keep a few coffee-shops guests happy with a half-empty space, or help out the thousands of conference-goers who are also spending money in the bar, restaurants, and booking rooms?

It’s your call Hyatt.

भारत में आपका स्वागत है

I finally arrived in India. It feels comfortable and familiar each time I arrive here. I have now been here so often that the routine at the airport and on arrival at the hotel all feel quite welcoming.

I was interested to see that the road immediately outside the international airport here is getting an upper level – there is a huge flyover being constructed that will presumably create a bypass for those cars just going past the airport. There is a very nice Hyatt hotel just outside the international airport and now this flyover is being constructed right in front of their windows – a shame for the guests there as someone up on the sixth floor will just have a view of cars now.

I’m staying in Bandra this time and there is a lot of new construction going on here too – more than I have seen in this part of Mumbai for a couple of years.

I’m surprised really that I feel quite OK today. It’s now Monday and I left São Paulo on Saturday afternoon, so my journey was around 30 hours long. I had a lot of trouble initially because BA was delayed. I was supposed to connect in London and they told me I could not make the connection to India, so they eventually rebooked me onto a Lufthansa flight.

Incredibly Lufthansa managed to find me some good seats (I always try reserving emergency exits or at least an aisle seat when on economy seats – this trip doesn’t have the budget available for business class) and vegetarian food. The crew at the airport and on the plane were really helpful – with one of the cabin crew really taking some time on board to talk about India with me and help to confirm my onward connection at Munich.

Unfortunately a bottle of cachaça that I had stowed in my luggage got broken, so a lot of my clothes ended up smelling of distilled sugar cane. It’s a good thing that laundry doesn’t cost too much in India…

Back to NASSCOM

Every year in February the Indian hi-tech trade association, NASSCOM, runs their big annual conference in Mumbai. It’s the big annual get-together of the great and good in IT, especially in India, but these days there are around 30 countries represented at the event.

Now that I live in Brazil, it’s a 23-hour journey to get from São Paulo to Mumbai, and that is just changing plane once in London. So I’m going to be dosing up on new films on the way, provided BA has something worth watching.

I’m going to be writing about political risk for Reuters, filing a daily ‘from the conference’ report for silicon.com, blogging about any interesting social media content for Computer Weekly, and anything related to Brazil and South America on IT Decisions, plus I am gathering research for a report I am writing for PA Consulting.

It’s going to be very busy as always, with meetings from breakfast until dinner and this year I am not staying in the conference hotel. It always helps if your room is just above where the conference is taking place, but never mind, I’m sure I’ll cope…

If you are going to be there then do get in touch. I am arriving in Mumbai on Monday and will be leaving very late on Thursday night… once the conference is over I will get dinner then go to the airport to catch the 02.45 flight to London.

NASSCOM. My week in Mumbai…

I spent most of last week in Mumbai, India, at the NASSCOM annual conference. I was there as part of a Steria press trip that also included Mark Samuels from CIO Connect and Jo Best from silicon.com. Here is a list of some of the blogs I produced and interviews I recorded… ready for use in some future blog posts. I will have more NASSCOM material coming soon, once I catch up with everything I noted there in India… I’m also producing a white paper on the Indian tech industry with PA Consulting, so that should be available soon too…

Photographs

http://www.flickr.com/photos/markhillary/sets/72157623314412077/
Interviews (recorded and will soon be appearing on various blogs)
Francois Enaud, Steria
Mukesh Aghi, Steria
John Torrie, Steria
Gayathri Mohan, Steria
Isaac George, Steria
Manish Khandelwal, PA Consulting
Alex Blues, PA Consulting
Chocko Valliappa, Vee Technologies
KK Natarajan, Mindtree
Norman Pitman, CSC
Michael Bieler, CSC
Sachin Tikekar, KPIT Cummins
Suresh Sundaram, HCL
Santanu Nandi, FirstSource
Sanjeev Sinha, FirstSource
Sudip Banerjee, L&T Infotech
John Suffolk, UK government
Kishor Patil, KPIT Cummins
Ganesh Natarajan, Zensar
Arvind Thakur, NIIT Technologies
Baru Rao, Capgemini
Padmini Sharathkumar, Polaris
Arijit Sengupta, WNS
Deborah Kops, WNS
Suketu Patel, Infosys
Abhijit Mazumder, TCS
Avinash Sethi , Infobeans

Video produced during NASSCOM
Arriving at the HYATT hotel

Gayathri Mohan on CSR

Mark Samuels and Jo Best

Walking through the NASSCOM crowd

John Torrie

NASSCOM Tweetup

NASSCOM We Will Rock You dancing

Hyatt gardens

Alex Blues of PA Consulting

Mukesh Aghi

The company stands at NASSCOM

Francois Enaud

Audio Podcasts published during NASSCOM
Isaac George, Steria
Manish Khandelwal, PA Consulting
John Suffolk, UK Government CIO

http://talkingoutsourcing.jellycast.com

Steria Exchange blog
Francois Enaud on sustainability

http://www.steria.com/exchange/?p=549

Summary of NASSCOM by Isaac George

http://www.steria.com/exchange/?p=546

Mukesh Aghi on new markets

http://www.steria.com/exchange/?p=543

Hilary on stage at the party

http://www.steria.com/exchange/?p=541

Sustainability research from K2

http://www.steria.com/exchange/?p=539

Optimism in India

http://www.steria.com/exchange/?p=537

Gayathri Mohan interview

http://www.steria.com/exchange/?p=533

Computing blog
Future of Customer Service

http://markkobayashihillary.computing.co.uk/2010/02/the-future-of-customer-service-harks-back-to-the-past.html

Optimism at NASSCOM

http://markkobayashihillary.computing.co.uk/2010/02/it-services-market-looks-optimistic.html

Steria CSR at NASSCOM

http://markkobayashihillary.computing.co.uk/2010/02/corporate-social-responsibility-recognised-at-nasscom.html

Time for NASSCOM

http://markkobayashihillary.computing.co.uk/2010/02/its-that-time-of-the-year-again-the-nasscom-conference-in-mumbai-india-is-the-largest-annual-gathering-of-tech-people-i.html

NASSCOM blog
Welcome to the event

http://indialeadershipforum.nasscom.in/blog/2010/02/welcome-to-the-nilf

Who is your female tech heroine?

http://indialeadershipforum.nasscom.in/blog/2010/02/who-is-your-female-tech-heroine/

Steria CSR head on video

http://indialeadershipforum.nasscom.in/blog/2010/02/steria-csr-head-gayathri-mohan-on-video/

Back to the BRICs

http://indialeadershipforum.nasscom.in/blog/2010/02/back-to-the-brics-or-bics/

Power to the bloggers

http://indialeadershipforum.nasscom.in/blog/2010/02/power-to-the-bloggers/

Should Shashi Tharoor use twitter?

http://indialeadershipforum.nasscom.in/blog/2010/02/should-shashi-tharoor-use-twitter/

Summary of the event

http://indialeadershipforum.nasscom.in/blog/2010/02/pa-consulting-summary-of-nasscom-2010/

It’s crazy at NASSCOM

I’m interviewing a different Chief Executive Officer almost every half an hour…constantly, and I am also trying to upload video, edit podcasts, and keep comment fresh on five blogs. It’s crazy and it’s constant, going from breakfast this morning with the UK Government CIO John Suffolk, through to a tweetup with Indian bloggers later this evening.

But I love it! And the blogging community here is really growing strong – this is the best year yet at NASSCOM for business bloggers…

Checking in – just in time

I had an interesting experience getting to India. Quite stressful.

I booked a flight with Virgin Atlantic. I did not realise it was going to be a code-share until I got the ticket… it was going to be operated by Jet Airways. Which is OK, because I like Jet too… but a day before the flight I logged into the Virgin website to check-in. Nothing worked. I thought maybe I need to go to the Jet website and check-in over there. The reference number didn’t work.

So I couldn’t check-in online with Virgin because it was a code-share flight, and the Virgin reference number did not work on the Jet Airways website. So I called up Virgin and asked them what to do. They said, don’t worry, just come to the airport and check-in at the Virgin desk.

I was thinking it’s strange to come to Virgin if I know I am on a Jet Airways plane, but the Virgin customer service guy had heard the exact problem and he sounded like he knew what he was talking about.

So off I went to Virgin at Terminal 3 in Heathrow.

Virgin automated check-in at the airport did not work. They don’t fly to Mumbai. I asked the staff what was wrong. They told me that I needed to go to see Jet Airways… I was a bit exasperated at the conflicting advice, but I didn’t argue. I just asked where to go for Jet, they said around the corner, further along T3.

So I went looking, only to find that Jet Airways is in T4.

I went to the train transfer. 15 minutes to the next train. So I went to the Underground and went back to Hatton Cross, then back into the airport again so I would be at T4.

I got to the check-in counter and they were about to close. I had 2 minutes left before check-in for my flight was closing. When I asked to be in an aisle seat the girl laughed… she said the only available seat was wedged in against the window with two people blocking me. I explained my sob story of how difficult this whole procedure had been and by that time the check-in had closed and she could see an aisle seat with a no-show… the guy had not arrived at the airport so the seat was free.

Thankfully I got that seat… but how do I check-in on the way home now?

I’m at NASSCOM in Mumbai

I just arrived this morning in Mumbai, India. I’m staying at the Grand Hyatt hotel and attending the NASSCOM India Leadership Forum this week – the conference kicks off tomorrow morning. As I’ve walked around the hotel this morning, it’s clear that NASSCOM is everywhere and lots of people are getting the place ready for the conference.

I’m doing some preparation work today and trying to ensure I’m recovered from the journey and ready for the intense three days of interviews and lectures. First thing is to sign some of my own books so I am ready…!

Mumbai

I’m going to be in Mumbai all of next week. It’s the NASSCOM conference from Tuesday to Thursday, so I’ll be tied up there blogging non-stop.

I’m arriving very early on Monday morning though, so I will have pretty much the whole of Monday free. I’m been to Mumbai many times, but if you have any suggestion of something interesting to see during the day on Monday then please give me some suggestions!

I’m staying at the Grand Hyatt in Santa Cruz East, which is the location of the conference. It’s on the north side of town and Mumbai is pretty big, so if you can suggest something that’s not right on the other side of the city, it might also be good…!

Looking forward to hearing some ideas…