Fabio's thoughts

Love and admiration for Germany

2011-05-28T13:54:00.000-07:00

Fair and nice. This is how I would describe life in a country that I learned to admire and love: Germany. At first, landing in Germany may seem to the regular folk identical to getting to other european countries, like Spain, France or Italy. But make no mistake about it: despite the free circulation of people and goods, Germany is still many years ahead of the other countries in Europe, both socially and economically - and spending a few months here clearly shows why. It is absolutely NO coincidence that Germany is carrying with itself the entire EU during these times of economic crisis. It is simply the result of always doing the right things and planning for the future.

To begin with, take the German education system. Here, after 4th grade, there are 3 "branches": one for the intelectual elite, one for most and regular folks, and one for those who need special attention. All of them have, among regular school subjects, at least one additional language (English) as part of the mandatory program, beginning as early as 1st or 2nd grade in elementary school. It is not rare that many students also take a third language, such as Spanish, French or even Italian. To the universities, only come those from the elite branch, who got the best possible education in junior high and high school, and were not held back by the average or slower folks - thus given the chance to fully develop themselves academically from fourth grade until the last year of high school. Universities are subsidized by the government, and they can be as affordable as EUR 600 per six months. Since not everyone makes it to the higher education (only the statistically small elite group), the costs are bearable and low. This whole system prepares folks for all possible positions in the workforce: carpenters, hair stylists, waiters, store clerks, bank tellers, restaurant managers, engineers, scientists, teachers and even executives. All of them get the proper education that will automatically get 95% of them a flavor of a middle class life (lower / higher), a small percentage becoming well off and millionaires. All of them speak at least two languages, being one of them English. The waitress that served me two days ago spoke nothing less than 5. Therefore, it clearly seems that the German education system prepares people to do what they are best fit to do, and because of that companies get to hire extremely qualified workers recruited by the State, making themselves extremely productive and competitive. One of the reasons why it works so well (besides the perfect conception, planning and execution of the education framework): primary education teachers start earning the equivalent of an engineer with 4 years of experience - in many places, an engineer is hired with a EUR 4000 paycheck. To me, this whole system makes a lot of sense - and works to perfection. I am sure it was not easy to achieve this level of excellence, but the Germans were able to nail it in about 60 years, beginning with the Marshall Plan that followed WW-II.

In another dimension, take social welfare. Here in Germany, any person who gets unemployed may rely on government support for a period of up to 24 months, during which government agencies also help you find a job. Although it seems like an open door for scams and leeching the system, after 3 job offer declines on the part of the insured, unemployment benefits are cut. On the other hand, if no real job opportunity is found after the 24 months, the person can enter an extended benefit program which can go for as long as he shall live! With this type of social support, who in sane conscience would ever think of stealing from or robbing another fellow citizen? If proper education was not enough to get you employed and providing for you and your family, there are social mechanisms to avoid you even thinking of desperate measures. And they WORK - for over 30 years!

Take now the city and country infrastructure: all small, medium and big cities have excellent transportation systems based on trains, buses and (MANY) bikes (see picture that follows this post, taken today in Heidelberg). All streets and avenue are prepared for cyclists, and "parking" for bikes is freely available throughout the city and close to points of interests, such as train stations and parks. Rail roads permeate the whole country, and allow for fast transportation of people and goods. People can go from one city to another in a matter of hours without the hassle of the airport security checks, and goods can be quickly taken from their places of manufacturing/production to ports and airports, therefore reducing transportation costs and making them competitive in the world scenario.

Another needless to speak of item is safety, which is usually taken for granted by most Germans, who claim they seldom hear of rapes and murders on the news and papers. All of my co workers don't even know of someone who has ever been stolen or much less robbed. Kidnapping is a definition they usually get from American movies, just like violent crimes.

To help maintain order and fairness, there is a huge amount of rules and social conventions. Sometimes they can be bugging, but I learned throughout the course of these 6 months here that they are often for the overall good. In the Autobahns, for example, people *actually* stay on the right lane and only use the left one for passing - or cruising as fast as they want. Keeping yourself to the right when riding an escalator is something everyone does by nature - but I have seen this in the UK too, so nothing so special about this. The other day, I saw a lady reprehending a young girl who had her feet on the velvet seats aboard the city trams. Aboard their fast ICE trains, there are special cars where people are not allowed to talk (much less allow a cell phone ring), ensuring a quiet trip for those who wish to have one.

At last, despite the widely available range of education opportunities, social parachutes, infrastructure, safety and social rules/conventions, there is always the rule of law to ensure fundamental human rights, social justice and the right of property. Talk about right of property: here in my hotel, when I got here in February/2011 we were out of internet service. The government had shut it down because some guests repeatedly distributed copy-righted material over the internet (P2P), and since the hotel could not get a hold of the American and Chinese guests who actually did it, they had to fork out a huge fine for it and also had the service interrupted for a month. The Justice Department also said that if that happened a third time, the hotel manager could go to jail. Guess what: no more internet service offered by the hotel - period. It is a BIG inconvenience for us guests, but the right of property is for sure guaranteed - and actually enforced by law. A friend of one of my co workers was fined in EUR 5000 for downloading a few MP3s from the web. Not enough? Here it goes another example: famous goal keeper Oliver Kahn was recently convicted and fined in EUR 125,000 because of an incident at the German Customs when returning from an international trip. His violation: trying to go through the "nothing to declare" aisle with an estimated EUR 7000 in luxury clothes that he "forgot" to declare to the Customs. I wonder if he will ever attempt something stupid like this in the future. In the criminal branch of Justice, take the recent conviction of John Demjanjuk (who is 91 years old!) to 5 years in federal prison for working in a concentration camp and having somehow helped in the mass killings that took place during WW-II.

For all the aforementioned things I have learned and lived about Germany, it naturally made me admire and love their way of life. It seems to me that everything here is just and fair, and if one follows the rules, his/her life will be nothing less than pleasant, safe and nice. One will probably never have to worry about basic human rights, education, safety, infrastructure or health care. And odds are he/she will be well employed for life, thus making them able to provide to themselves and their family without struggle. All these things working in harmony without a doubt contribute to making Germany the European superpower that it is, and it is easy to see how it is no coincidence at all. It is one European nation who was able to get the best of capitalism, without compromising social welfare. What amazes me the most is that all this was built in 60 years, and the only reasonable explanation that crosses my mind for justifying how it all works is that it's nothing else than the product of rightful values, very hard work and abidance to the rules and laws.

Picture taken today in Heidelberg, showing how the public transportation system successfully mixes trains, buses and bikes, lots of them.

IT Business analyst is a profession going under! Or not?

2010-07-02T22:44:00.000-07:00

It is quite disturbing to me the perception that the title of this post suggests. I have been in the technology industry almost 6 years now, and I am yet to meet the first *REAL* IT business analyst in my area. A master, a guru, "the god" in a company's processes and business that can give me a real, in-equivocate and even humiliating lecture in those processes. He would be actually doing me a favor.
I am no CIO of a big corporation, so perhaps I don't have the facts to justify the almost extinction of this profession. It only relegates me the (perhaps biased) choice of speculating.
It may all come down to cost limitations. Though it may be due to bad reputation the title has acquired over the years. We all know at least a bunch of supposed "IT Business Analysts" who don't know their companies' business that much. It may very possibly be that this profession title has worn out over the decades and it is out of fashion to employ IT business analysts nowadays. After all, the industry, the market and the society follow trends, not pure rationality. And it may most probably be that the reason behind it is just for pure unconscious blindness that this highly important profession is the very soul of any good IT solution.
Please shall we not fall into the inviting temptation of suggesting that SAP, Oracle or Microsoft Dynamics will establish all the necessary processes for a company in a standard, lightly customizable way. If this, by any chance, crossed your mind for a single second, you probably never experienced the huge demand of the industry for IT solutions that REALLY adapt to their processes, rather than having their processes fit their ERP.
And it is exactly this huge demand for custom solutions that, for me, makes it an exacerbated absurd that almost no business analysts (the gurus, I mean) are on the industry. Perhaps this happens in the Brazilian industry - and there is a chance it may be a cultural, developing country characteristic.
However, in my Brazilian reality, incredibly enough, the only people who actually and unmistakenly know a company's processes are the plant operators and supervisors. But they are no IT people, and as such they cannot translate the manufacturing processes into an IT solution that fits them.
If the entity of the IT business analyst has been going under for the past decades and plant operators and supervisors cannot speak IT, how are the demands of the industry currently being supplied?? I am yet to find out.
But, for me, the truth of the matter is that there is an absolutely huge suppressed demand for real IT business analysts on the market. Which leads us to the conclusion: perhaps it is not that the business analysts are going under, but instead that the cycle is turning back up in the forthcoming years, when the industry goes back to analyzing (and realizing) the indispensable importance of IT people who actually know their business.

The concept of excellence

2010-02-18T07:16:00.001-08:00

Being here in the United States gives me the opportunity to put a lot of things in perspective when comparing to their counterparts in Brazil.

Though many differences do exist between the two countries, in my opinion the biggest one is what I would call the concept of excellence. I just saw this amazing TV commercial from Audi, where they begin showing several situations where there is always the first and the second, the winner and the loser, the first runner and the late runner. Then they state "nobody knows this concept better than BMW. Audi been number one for several years in a row now.".

This, for me, illustrates one of the basic differences that makes the Unites States be what they historically are and which makes Brazil stand where we (still) do. It is the pursue for being the number 1. The first. The BEST. President Barack Obama said himself in his State of the Union Speech 2 weeks ago that he would not sit and watch as other countries become #1 in technology, science and education. And he is absolutely right in defending the cornerstone of excellence.

Being excellent means pursuing the best.

However in Brazil there is a big cultural barrier. We are a poor country, and, according to the Maslow Pyramid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs), people first need to fulfill their basic needs prior to worrying with second matters in their lives. And people in Brazil, coming from several frustrated economic and social programs, are blindly used to buying things based on the lowest price tag - only. And this does not work well with the concept of excellence.

Achieving excellence takes time. Takes research. Takes doing something wrong several times until the state of the art version of it is obtained. And all this comes at a cost. A cost which many Brazilians are not used to paying for. Or simply WILL NOT pay for, because they might be taken for a fool by their friends and families, for having paid more for an extra service or an extra bit of quality when "the guy just around the corner had a better deal on a similar item".

However, this is not a general rule, and the fore mentioned situation is gradually changing. For instance, it is a whole different scenario with the latest car models, the latest cell phones, notebooks and other more recent pieces of technology that came with the globalization process. I remember many years ago (1999), when I strongly stated that Nokia was the best cell phone manufacturer amongst all others. And my opinion was solely based on the fact that Nokia had the best and most usable operating system back then. Nobody would listen to me, and they would all rush to the stores and buy the old, hard-to-operate, buggy and battery-hungry Motorola Star-Tac. It took brazilians almost 6 years until it became almost a general consensus that Nokia was indeed the best cell phone maker. And that Motorola was nothing but a well marketed company.

For these historical and cultural reasons, I think the concept of excellence will still take several decades (and generations) to penetrate the Brazilian market. Until people actually start seeing the extra value in a product or service and become willing to pay more for that, companies in Brazil will always pursue the lowest price tag as opposed to the best product or service on the market. As mentioned earlier, this situation is slowly changing. The quality of cell phone coverage, for instance, has dramatically evolved in the past 3 years. Just like Home Banking services and several Online Home Brokers. But, it is a slow process. And until people demands quality on every product and service in their lives, price will usually be the most important aspect considered in a purchasing decision, thus making the pursued products and services mediocre rather than excellent.