Savvy Avi

TNS, a market research firm, conducted an extensive research on the use of mobile, internet applications and social media around the world. What's really cool about it, more than the findings themselves, is the way the findings are presented. Sometimes, visualization is what matters most. http://discoverdigitallife.com/

It seems that agile is the predominant methodology in software development, especially in shrink-wrap software and web. It certainly stands behind some mammoth success stories of late. However, agile is not a fit-all method, in many software domains it just won’t work well. More than that, agile seems more like a philosophy, a way of thinking, than a complete methodology. Software is a new field and it is going through some phases. Agile is one of those. Let’s look at the language used in new wave development methodologies. Programmers are action figures; they are “cowboys” or “ninjas” or simply “heroes”. Programming is a dangerous, masculine, activity like rugby (scrum) or an extreme sport (extreme programming). Planning is a poker game, specifications are paper in an electronic paperless world and all we need is dialog (agile manifesto). Could it be that this juvenile lingo is a product of an engineering field that is in its adolescence? When considering what methodology to use...

AA stands for Attention Allocation not Alcoholic Anonymous. Sorry for the deceiving eye catcher. PTT presentation is work I did in 2005 in the purely abstract edges of Operation Research. I uploaded a PPT presentation. The presentation is lighter and more colorful than the actual article. Warning you have to be a bit of a geek to press the link above. For the super geeks I put a link to the full article. It’s called “Attention Allocation to Partially Observable Heterogeneous Customers – with Imperfect Treatment”, Catchy? Full AA Problem article

Another System Design and Management certificate program started this summer. The event ended with a robot design challenge which I managed along with Hamid and Kandarp. With just three organizers there was lots of work but it was a rewarding experience. This is a part of an article that appeared in the SDM alumni newsletter: “Certificate students spent the last two days of the workshop completing the Design Challenge (DC) Competition. SDM Fellows - Kandarp Bhatt, Avi Latner, and Hamid Salim - designed this challenge using the latest LEGO Mindstorm NXT kit with several stages of events having increasing difficulty. A primary premise of this particular exercise was that the events stressed different (sometimes conflicting) performance requirements, forcing teams to perform critical design tradeoffs. This year's teams exhibited outstanding inter-team collaboration during the long hours of the DC process. First place Design Challenge winners were: Nick Biersdorf, Brad Hitchler, ...

A thesis is one of the advantages System Design and Management has over other professional degrees such as MBA. However, it is not structured like course work and it can take a lot of work to get started on the right thesis. There are three key decisions to a thesis: a topic, an advisor and a company (optional). Since you’ve got to start somewhere I started by choosing a topic and then pitching to professors hoping they would use their connections to find a company. It didn’t work. After several iterations I changed strategy and started with a company. Getting a company to collaborate wasn’t easy, but once that was done the other pieces fell neatly into place. Another option is to work without a company. An advantage to this approach is that you are more independent. Keep in mind that an independent thesis must rely on publicly available data sources. In engineering most of the data isn’t public but the front end of systems (finished product, website, mobile apps, standards, ...

Service companies use branches, phone, kiosks and web as direct channels to customers. In recent years service companies added a new channel - the smart phone application. Smart phones differ from PCs in screen size, ease of typing and input, connection speed and use context. Keeping these changes in mind, mobile apps shouldn’t be a replica of their online counterparts. One difference is that the mobile app has to be leaner. Another difference is that mobile apps should have unique features, such as location based features, taking advantage of mobile capabilities. As a case study, I compared the online website and mobile app of Citibank ’s card services. As shown below the mobile app has fewer pages (17 vs. 84) and has fewer levels (4 deep vs. 6 deep). Companies rushed to create iPhone and android apps often not doing it “right”. Mobile operation system defragmentation and rapid market changes make doing it right all the more challenging. That may be the reason why Citibank’s iPhon...

Dan Ariely a behavioral economist from Duke mentions System Design and Management in his new book “The Upside of Irrationality”. In his book, a sequel to the New York Times bestseller “Predictably Irrational”, Ariely intertwines research with personal stories including stories of his time as a “lowly assistant professor at MIT”. The story begins with “here is a story of a time when I lost my own temper” and describes a dispute between Ariely and a revered professor of finance, a former dean of Sloan, code named Paul, over a scheduling conflict of SDM classes. SDM students are described as curious and, reportedly, Ariely enjoyed teaching them. This story is just an anecdote used as a preface to a chapter on fleeting emotions followed by impulsive acts. Ariely and his fellow behavioral economists construct amusing research to expose how we humans continuously fail to behave rationally. In these experiments subjects fold origami frogs, build Lego robots, put their hand in close to b...