06 Jun

Are you a CEO without a Corporate Content Strategy?

By TWB_ In Content /  6 3 Comments

Photo credit: https://pixabay.com/en/rubik-cube-game-sand-strategy-1703600/

 

Not having a corporate content strategy adversely impacts revenue by 10%[1] and increases spends to create content across Marketing & Sales, Engineering, Delivery & Support organizations by a whopping 200%[2]. Here’s why every CEO should have one, and how.

Does a company really need a content strategy and does the CEO need to get involved?

Any number of CEOs will tell you that they don’t need to bother about content because their management does. It’s true in a way. The CMO’s office takes care of marketing content. The CTO and Engineering CxOs handle the product and technical content. The HR CxO takes care of internal training content for company processes, sometimes even internal communication. Many in their teams are not trained in creating content, or the technologies or the processes or understand company objectives. But that is only part of the problem. Forget corporate alignment and reuse, organizations will develop content simply because they are expected to. Content is a line item for most organizations within the company. For the company itself it’s a footnote. Which begs the question, do you need a corporate content strategy, and why?

A content strategy is the high-level vision that guides different organizations’ future content development to deliver against specific corporate objectives. It puts into words a company’s content goals, audience, creation, quality and collaboration workflow.

Content strategy is required because without it a CEO’s company creates content with no core theme or purpose. A lack of strategy leads to generic content. Generic content is made by generic companies. Generic content is unlikely to rank organically on searches. Generic content doesn’t get shared. Generic content doesn’t engage people. Generic content does not talk about a CEO’s specific product or brand.

The companies that have the capacity and understanding to link content and communication into corporate strategy tend to be stronger and better performing than their competition. A CEO needs to get one together. Not soon. Not next week. Now.

Corporate Content Strategy, a CEO responsibility

Every organization of the enterprise – from finance to delivery – has a content element. It makes sense for it to be nurtured at a strategic level. A CEO’s goals could be retention or growth of market-share, or something else, but in all cases, focused communication through the right channels is a core element.

Any long-term activity that has a long-term effect for the company belongs to the CEO’s desk. Any decisions that are not within one organization but thread through many belong to the CEO’s desk. Content projects of all kinds are time-intensive up-front, with little visible output in the short run, if they are going to be effective. A CEO’s understanding and effective representation can make the difference between success and failure. It’s a strategic decision.

Content strategy touches each area of a CEO’s business. All the software programming in the world is pointless if it doesn’t support the goals of a CEO’s users and clients — that’s what makes a CEO involved in the engineering function. The same should hold for content.

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06 Jun

Escaping the automation led redundancy shaping the Indian IT Industry

By TWB_ In Communication, Content /  5 No Comments

Photo Credit: A man moves his finger toward a robotic hand at the IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots in Madrid on November 19, 2014. AFP

 

Recent data is for half a million employees being made redundant over the next 5 yrs. due to automation. Is it true? And what is that the industry, companies and employees can do about it.

The first half of the next decade will bring a lot of pain to the Indian IT business as automation sets in and we go through the transition from people to technology + people. But the real opportunity is still available to people, as the enterprise still craves more human-centric skills at scale that cannot be fed into an AI platforms. These are challenging times, but the change brings the opportunity.

The Manpower Shrinkage

Technology has and will continue to fundamentally reshape the world. But the largest move is not from more people creating more technology but of machines creating technology and delivering services. As that happens, the job market shrinks. World Bank President Jim Kim said in March 2017 that technology could fundamentally disrupt the pattern of traditional economic path in many societies and threatens 69 per cent of the jobs in India and 77 per cent in China. However it the relative wage that will determine the relative pace of automation and it is here that the Indian IT industry is most vulnerable since the cost structure is closely linked to the ability of the customer in developed economies to absorb this cost.

The Trend

In the technology-led businesses AI and Automation are already present — whether as the evolution of autonomous cars or as software that writes itself. Consider this,

  • Google’s Deepmind can now read lips better than humans and play and beat different 30 video games at the same time. It is writing its own algorithms to better itself. And to translate languages where no translation has previously existed.
  • IBM Watson can now not only read a physician’s notes but also go through a massive library of related information and figure out, say, a particular type of rare cancer.
  • Chatbots are already being used by Amazon and Facebook to automate responses.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. However, a large part of the Indian IT outsourcing industry is directly being impacted by different levels of automation creeping into its customers. To expand their operations a US-based customer today is not looking at additional headcount, but at automation. More insurance claims processing requires a platform to scale for the extra work. Greater IT infrastructure management requires more cloud-based orchestration tools then. Not more people. So the scale and/or productivity gain is coming from autonomics management, and not headcount.

Worldwide the total IT Service and BPO industry employed 15 million people in 2015, with ~3.5 million in India, ~1 million in Philippines, ~5 million in North America and ~4 million in Europe. The impact of automation on this global industry of 15 million IT services and BPO employees is expected to be a net decrease of 9% or ~1.4 million jobs. Of this, India’s services industry workforce is expected to shrink 500,000 by 2021 – a decline of 14-15% (explained below)[1]

The workforce is in three categories: low-skilled, medium-skilled, and high- skilled. Low-skilled employees conduct simple entry-level, process-driven tasks that require little abstract thinking or autonomy. Medium and high-level employees undertake more complicated tasks that require experience, complex problem-solving, the ability to learn on-the-job, and to work autonomously. In terms of impact, it is the low-skilled Indian services workforces that will be most impacted.

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15 Dec

What makes Entrepreneur Couples tick I Womens Web India

By TWB_ In Press & Media /  3 No Comments

The husband-wife team of Rakesh and Helen Shukla started up TWB, a technical communication company offering outsourced solutions as well as training, in 2005. Having worked together closely for 5 years now, Rakesh Shukla, Founder & CEO, TWB, believes that not carrying work home was the single biggest challenge they faced. Over time, they have consciously tried to avoid it. Rakesh says, “It’s not that work never gets discussed, but we try to minimize it. You don’t want to spoil your marriage and your relationship at home.”

Read more on Women’s Web India

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TWB I The Writers Block I World Leader on Technology Content
26 May

The story of self-funding an enterprise I FranchiseIndia

By TWB_ In Press & Media /  5 No Comments

What Does Self Funding A Venture Really Entail? Entrepreneurs are known for their risk bearing ability; even then not many have the ability to put all their savings in their venture. Most of them turn to friends, family or investors to get started.

But Rakesh Shukla believes, “It’s right only when you start the game with your own skin.”

When Rakesh and his wife, Helen started TWB they decided to fund it all by themselves and not turn to any of their family or friends for help. Not just that, both of them also quit their jobs and so had no other source of income but TWB. How hard was it? Read on FranchiseIndia

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19 Jun

How TWB is a leading employer for stay-at-home moms I LiveMint

By TWB_ In Press & Media /  7 No Comments
When Rakesh Shukla started his technical writing outsourcing firm called The Writers Block (TWB), he decided to go after a somewhat unexpected source of labour to staff his company: the unemployed. To be more specific, he looked for women who had taken some time off to raise a child, but were looking to get back into the workforce.

“A lot of times they have had some kind of experience and been relatively successful,” Rakesh Shukla says. “They have quality, but have taken a break and want to do something different.”

TWB I World leader in Technology Content

Prema Radhakrishnan, at TWB, says flexi-timings were what attracted her to her job

As the demand for good people far outstrips their supply, and companies of all sizes struggle to find enough skilled employees, companies are turning to alternative tracks to meet the need.

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