IDBI’s unique BS 25999 certified BCM model a first among PSU banks

A relatively new banking player, Industrial Development Bank of India (IDBI) strives to segment itself from other domestic players. IDBI’s BS 25999 certified BCM initiative which encompasses key products and services is the latest on that front. According to IDBI, this effort makes it the first Indian public sector bank to get BS 25999 certification.

Initiated in 2007, IDBI’s branch-level BCM project was seen as a strategy for differentiation from competitors says Anirudh Behera, IDBI Bank’s general manager for operational risk. With over 1000 branches, IDBI’s enterprise-wide BCM program faced many challenges. On September 6, 2012 the bank achieved BS 25999 certification for all Indian branches, as well as a majority of its critical business and support functions.

Long road to certification

According to Behera, IDBI’s initial objective was uninterrupted customer service, since branches regularly faced downtime. Apart from branches, external interfaces like IDBI’s trade-finance and credit departments witnessed business disruption.

IDBI’s first BCM policy was drafted in July 2007. A BCP steering committee was formed in September 2007 comprising of the top management, with members from all operational areas. The team determined IDBI’s BCP requirements and benchmarked those against BS 25999. The BCM model is unique to IDBI, asserts Kuntal Biswas, the deputy general manager for IDBI’s operational risk and BCP cell.

IDBI’s BCP plans were approved in March 2010, following which a full-fledged BCM team was formed within the risk department. The core three-member BCM team operates under IDBI’s risk function. The central BCM team drawn from various business functions conceptualized and completed the BCM process. Biswas explains that engaging a consultant would have proved expensive due to the comprehensive scope.

Roll out time

Evaluation of asset/function criticality, business impact analysis (BIA), risk assessment (RA), implementation and testing was performed by respective business units under the BCP cell’s guidance, says Ritesh Kumar, the assistant general manager for IDBI’s operational risk and BCP cell.  

BS 25999’s multiple documentation requirements became the BCM team’s focus. The team comprehensively documented BCM plan requirements, starting with separation of IDBI’s various business lines. BCP requirements for each function were extensively documented in consultation with the function. This enabled prioritized grading of plans and processes for function-wise BCP, as well as subsequent BS 25999 certification.

Post documentation, implementation was a straightforward task of defining timelines, personnel, responsibilities, owners and priorities. Recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) for critical business applications have been based on BS 25999 standard guidelines. Kumar informs that state-of-the-art DR is in place for data centers. Quarterly DR drills ensure that every critical application (numbering over 100) is covered at least once a year.

The implementation process relied on phase-wise testing. IDBI’s over 1000 branches made this technically impossible to do in one shot, says Biswas. At the time of writing, 200 branches have undergone final BCP testing. Given the unique way in which IDBI’s BCP plan involves branches, each location is tested from another branch. 400 branches have been covered so far, says Kumar.

How it works

Monthly top management meetings discuss and review BCP related issues to evolve BCM in sync with the bank’s needs. Each branch has a well defined BCP hierarchy with a designated BCP invocation authority. 

Invoking the BCP involves bringing the business unit’s ‘call tree’ into play. A ‘call tree’ is a layered hierarchical communication model used during a disaster to communicate, coordinate BCP and percolate messages down to all unit layers (See Figure 1). Personnel fall back on prearranged and rehearsed roles as per the unit’s BCP documentation.

Figure 1- Sample call sheet for IDBI's central credit unit

Going the extra mile

According to IDBI, it was the first public sector bank to have its own DR setup (implemented by IBM) in 1991. In its current avatar, IDBI wanted BCM to go beyond IT. Biswas says that innovation was essential to break away from industry standard procedures. In cases where the branch cannot connect to the IDBI’s core banking system due to network failure, deviations from existing systems and procedures (approved by the top management) ensure uninterrupted services.

Biswas asserts that this provision is procedural and not IT related. BCM invokes an alternate location/branch’s services to provide operations. Only critical processes/transactions are expected to run at such times. Each bank has two BCP terminals used by other branches for BCP. The level of additional IT/resource augmentation depends on function and BCP role, says Kumar. For instance, DR for treasury requires subscriptions to wire services and terminals at its designated BCP site.

In addition, certain provisions allow branch staff to work from alternate locations/branches, or workload can be taken up by the alternate branch. IDBI’s each branch/function has a ‘hot standby’ or ‘DR’ at alternate bank locations/branches. IDBI’s treasury has two DR sites equipped with necessary infrastructure in different areas of Mumbai. These sites are located near IDBI’s housing colonies to compensate for transport unavailability during disasters.

Implementation challenges

According to Behera, employee sensitization was the major challenge. The BCP plan’s nitty-gritty had to percolate down to all 16,000 employees. Considerable hand-holding brought branch managers up to par with BCP. “As the first point of interface with customers, branches stood to gain the most. Enthusiastic support followed awareness,” says Behera.

Determining redundancy was a challenge. DR redundancy requirements for functions like treasury and data centers were based on a cost versus criticality valuation, as well as acceptability to the business. A recent power grid failure in north-east India demonstrated the effectiveness of IDBI’s BCP plan – 99% of affected branches continued operations.

Getting BCM certified has brought a great deal of assurance followed by process maturity, says Biswas. He also adds that migration to ISO 22301 maybe a future option.

The Hunt for Innovation: 10 Strategic Insights

Disruptive technology's potential (Wikipedia)

Ever hear of the dreaded “CEO Disease?”

It was initially diagnosed by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, who discovered that the broad power and authority held by CEOs often leads to risk-averse and even truth-averse culture in which employees offer up nothing but “the good news of their perfection and the company’s success, no matter what the warning signs may be.”

Determined to find a treatment for this deadly affliction—sometimes also known as “the peril of the fixed mindset”—The Economist Intelligence Unit earlier this year interviewed 226 senior executives in hopes of discovering why some companies are so good at innovation while others, in spite of the very best intentions, are hopelessly woeful at it. (Survey respondents work at companies across the globe and in a wide range of industries; more than half of the companies have revenue of more than $500 million.

The survey, sponsored by Oracle, generated a range of insights into how companies wittingly or otherwise stifle innovation via obstacles that can be cultural, organizational, hierarchical, or some combination of those.

The results indicated that tech-based products—as well as tech teams—can play vital roles in overcoming those obstacles. Disruptive technologies, including Big Data and also social—were found to be powerful antidotes to this innovation deficiency malady.

At the same time, however, executive-level risk-aversion about deploying new technologies frequently stifles the quest, the Economist research team concluded:

“Although respondents identified several technology trends as catalysts for innovation initiatives, perceptions about security risks linger over cloud computing and mobility. The concerns are common regardless of company size, industry or geographical location,” the study says.

But wait—it gets worse: “Only a handful of executives in our survey (15%) said they are not hindered in adopting any of these technology trends.”

Seems to me that right there we have—with deep apologies to Clayton Christensen for abusing his term—the innovator’s dilemma: most executives who say they want to pursue innovation won’t permit their teams to use some of the tools most capable of delivering innovation!

That short-sighted limitation aside, the study (you can see the full reporthere) offers a wealth of insights and ideas into how innovation can be nurtured more productively, and how the hunt for innovation can include a far bigger percentage of the company’s employee base.

In that context, I’ve extracted from the survey findings 10 insights for helping companies improve their efforts at identifying, nurturing, and generating innovation.

1.) Remember: Like Decline, the Lack of Innovation Is a Choice.Innovation-stifling siloes—cultural, psychological, financial, or organizational—are more likely to be found in large companies, the report says. But this isn’t a law of physics; it doesn’t have to be that way. Rather, big companies have to relentlessly fight the tendency toward innovation in isolation.

2.) IT to the Rescue! IT departments are “underutilized and could be more engaged in educating business leaders about new technology trends, enabling business units to adapt processes rapidly and identify pockets of innovation in the enterprise,” the report says.

3.) Customers *Must* Be Part of the Co-Creation Process. As companies of all sizes and across all industries realize that the co-creation of value and of experiences with customers can be a profound way to boost customer loyalty, they also must recognize that relevant innovation in a customer-free vacuum is impossible. Mid-size and smaller companies ($500 million or less) connect directly with customers in interviews about product design and testing, while companies with revenue above $1 billion or more likely to use social technology and sentiment analysis to uncover customer-focused innovations.

4.) HR Has to Solve the Analytical-Talent Shortage. While disruptive technologies such as Big Data was selected as the favored tool for developing new pricing models (60%), new products or services (38%), and improving business processes (38%), the “lack of analytical talent topped the list of concerns around Big Data.” No successful executive would sit by and let revenue languish and decline due to a lack of sales talent, so why on Earth are many companies not aggressively hammering away at this debilitating “lack of analytical talent”?

5.) The Title “Chief Innovation Officer” Can Be Dangerous. “I always resist the temptation of allowing myself to be called chief innovation officer, because it would send the wrong signal to the rest of the company,” says BT Group managing director Jean-Marc Frangos in the report. “Innovation is not something a special team does—it is something which must be ingrained in the mindsets and behaviors of everyone, and for which, ideally, there should be no special process.”

6.) It’s the Hierarchy, Stupid! When more and more employees are involved in the hunt for innovation, the likelihood of deeper engagements with customers goes up, the report says. At healthcare provider Kaiser Permanente, several “innovation centers” are responsible for improving the care of patients—and the ideas come from all levels of the organization, not just the leaders. “Nurses and even patients initiated and drove three of the healthcare provider’s more-successful projects,” the report says, including text-based reminders for patients; neon-colored uniforms to reduce errors and confusion; and portable clinics.

7.) If Leaders Aren’t Serious about Social, Then They’re Irresponsible. While it might seem painfully obvious that social media offer a great means of customer engagement, executives reported that “a lack of understanding” of social media’s benefits “remained a barrier to creating an innovation culture.” As in #1 above, the lack of innovation is a choice: if social media can help foster the types of deeper customer engagements that often trigger innovation, then executives must be responsible for dropping the Luddite act and becoming fluent with these game-changing tools. How bad is it? Accenture reports that “60% of their clients still consider themselves to be social-media novices,” the report says.

8.) Can Failure Help Foster Innovation? The absence of formal programs to analyze projects that didn’t work “means respondents’ companies invested time, money and other resources in a failed innovation effort without finding out what went wrong.”

9.) Can Innovation Be a Defined Process? At Lojas Renner, Brazil’s second-largest department-store chain, CIO and chief process officer Leandro Balbinot four years ago began collecting retail data as a means of predicting future demand. But he also believed the project could help spur innovation: Lojas Renner views innovation as “a defined process commonly used to achieve measureable objectives,” Balbinot says in the report. “The value of innovation comes from achieving new levels of results that would not be obtained through continuous improvement.” He offers a number of other valuable insights as well on the mildly counterintuitive notion of process-driven innovation.

10.) Small Can Be Big. “Empowering smaller teams to build their own tools to solve business problems helps to give rise to wider innovations,” the report says, citing a compelling involvement from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. In addition, instead of trying to boil the ocean, companies should encourage small, iterative projects that “set up an environment in which repeated experimentation and learning refine winning ideas.”

The full report can be found here.

RECOMMENDED READING:

Oracle’s Secret Sauce: Why Exadata Is Rocking the Tech Industry

The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues For 2013

Larry Ellison Doesn’t Get the Cloud: The Dumbest Idea of 2013

Career Suicide and the CIO: 4 Deadly New Threats

The Surge of the Strategic CIO

Oracle’s Mark Hurd: What CEOs Want from CIOs

Oracle Execs Tell Wall Street: We Got the Cloud

Mark Hurd on the Customer Revolution: Oracle’s Top 10 Insights

Oracle Disrupts Cloud Industry with End-to-End Approach

Big Data Gets Personal as Healthcare and Life Sciences Converge

Emerging Technologies Can Trigger Business on Steroids, Says Gartner

Create your LAPTOP as WIFI hotspot and SHare LAN / Wired Internet

 What do I need to set a HotSpot? 

1. Active Cable Internet

2. Laptop

3. WiFi on Laptop

4. Wired net connection

Once you have all the above things mentioned, you are all set to follow the steps:

How to setup HotSpot on Windows Vista:

1. Got to Control Panel

2. Click on “Network and Sharing Centre”

3. Under Tasks choose “Setup New Connection”

4. Wireless “Ad-hoc network”

5. Now type in a “Network Name”

6. Choose “WEP” password if you don’t want to share the connection with the entire world

7. Click “Internet connection sharing”

8. Done!

Now a WiFi enabled machine will be able to connect to the network you have just setup with the WEP password

Lets setup a HotSpot on a Windows XP machine:

1. Go into Control panel

2. Open “Network Connections”

3. Right click on "Wireless Connection" and click on "Properties"

4. Click on the "Wireless Networks" tab and select the check-box which says “Use Windows to configure my wireless network settings”

5. Under “Prefered networks” click “Add”

6. Type a name in “Network name” text box

7. Select “Shared” from the options under “Network Authentication”

8. Under Data encryption select “WEP” and type in your password in “Network Key” field and now click "OK"

9. Now the new HotSpot should show in the list of preferred networks.

10. Click on the “Advance” button and select “Computer-to-computer (ad hoc) networks only" and press close

11. Hit “OK”, we are done with the wireless connection properties

One more step, we have to change something in the wired connection setting so that it knows that it has to share connection with the computers accessing our HotSpot.

1. Go to local Area Connections, right click it and select properties

2. Go to the “Advanced” tab and under Internet Connection Sharing check the box which says “Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s internet connection” and make sure the box under that is NOT selected so that no one can disable the network remotely.

3. Hit “OK”

I hope this helps setting up a wireless connection without a WiFi router. Have FuN!

Tomato chicken with brown rice

Tomato chicken with brown rice is a delightful blend of spices and tangy tomatoes. It is essentially chicken pieces coated with many fragrant spices like turmeric, cardamom and cloves, then simmered in a tomato sauce. 

A perfect family meal, and wonderful to serve to guests too, this complete dinner meal will also complete the day's health quotient for any family interested in fitness. 

Original recipe yield: 6 servings 
- Prep time - 15 mins 
- Cooking time - 2 hours 

Ingredients 
- 1 large onion, chopped 
- 4 cloves garlic, chopped 
- 1 slice fresh ginger root 
- 1 tablespoon olive oil 
- 2 teaspoons ground cumin 
- 1 teaspoon ground turmeric 
- 1 teaspoon salt 
- 1 teaspoon ground black pepper 
- 1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom 
- 1 (1 inch) piece cinnamon stick, chopped 
- 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves 
- 2 bay leaves 
- 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg 
- 6 skinless chicken thighs 
- 1 (14.5 ounce) can whole peeled tomatoes, crushed  

Directions 
- Place onion, garlic and ginger in a food processor and process into a paste. Heat oil in a large skillet over medium heat, add onion paste and saute, stirring continuously, for about 10 minutes.  

- Stir in the cumin, turmeric, salt, pepper, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, bay leaves and nutmeg. Saute, stirring, for 1 to 2 minutes. Place chicken pieces in skillet and stir them around with the spice mixture until they are well coated.  

- Saute for another 4 minutes, then pour in the tomatoes with liquid and stir. Reduce heat to low and simmer for 1 to 2 hours, or until the oil has separated from the liquid. Stir occasionally. (Note: If you simmer uncovered, the sauce will thicken; add water, or keep covered while simmering.) 

Serve with brown rice. 

Power is as addictive as cocaine

LONDON: More than a hundred years after noted British historian Baron John Acton coined the phrase 'Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely' , a scientist has said power really does corrupt as it is as addictive as cocaine. 

The Daily Mail reported, the feeling of power has been found to have a similar effect on the brain like cocaine as it increases the levels of testosterone and its byproduct 3-androstanediol in both men and women. This in turn leads to raised levels of dopamine in the brain's nucleus accumbens , which can be very addictive. 

A report by Ian Robertson professor of psychology at Trinity College, Dublin - said cocaine works in a similar way, which can have varied effects from increasing alertness, confidence, energy, feelings of well-being and euphoria , but also anxiety, paranoia and restlessness. He has also written a book, 'The Winner Effect: How Power Affects Your Brain' . 

Power has almost identical effects to cocaine and too much of it can produce too much dopamine, leading to more negative effects like arrogance and impatience. 

"Baboons low down in the dominance hierarchy have lower levels of dopamine in key brain areas, but if they get 'promoted' to a higher position, then dopamine rises accordingly. This makes them more aggressive and sexually active, and in humans similar changes happen when people are given power," Robertson wrote in the Telegraph. 

"Conversely, demotion in a hierarchy decreases dopamine levels, increases stress and reduces cognitive function," he said. Power has also been found to make people smarter because dopamine improves the functioning of brain's frontal lobes. Submissiveness and dominance also give similar effects through the same reward circuits of the brain as power and cocaine.

Chilli Chicken

Ingredients

•	Boneless chicken,cut into fingers	400 grams
•	Green chillies,chopped	6-8
•	Cornflour/ corn starch	2 1/2 tablespoons
•	Salt	to taste
•	Black peppercorns,crushed	1/2 teaspoon
•	Egg	1
•	Dark soy sauce	2 tablespoons
•	Oil plus to deep fry	1 tablespoon
•	Garlic,chopped	8-10 cloves
•	Onion	2 medium
•	Green capsicums,seeded thick strips	2 medium
•	Red chilli sauce	2 tablespoons
•	Chicken stock	1 cup
•	Vinegar	2 tablespoons

Method
Take chicken pieces in a bowl. Add half the cornflour, salt, crushed black peppercorns, egg and mix. Add a little dark soya sauce and mix. Heat sufficient oil in a wok and deep fry the chicken pieces till golden. Take care not to overcook. Drain and set aside. Heat oil in another wok. Add garlic and sauté for half a minute. Add green chillies and continue to sauté. Add onion, green capsicum and sauté. Add the remaining dark soya sauce, red chilli sauce and stir. Add a little chicken stock and bring the mixture to a boil. Blend the remaining cornflour in a little stock. Add fried chicken pieces to the wok and toss. Add blended cornflour and mix. Add salt and cook for a minute. Add vinegar and stir. The starter is ready. If you want gravy add some more stock and let it come to a boil. Serve hot. 

Chicken Hazarvi

Ingredients

•	Boneless chicken breast,2 inch cubes	8
•	Ginger paste	2 tablespoons
•	Garlic paste	2 tablespoons
•	White pepper powder	1 teaspoon
•	Salt	to taste
•	Cheese,grated	1/2 cup
•	Green chillies,finely chopped	4
•	Mace powder	1/4 teaspoon
•	Nutmeg powder	1/4 teaspoon
•	Fresh coriander leaves,chopped	2 tablespoons
•	Egg	1
•	Fresh cream	3/4 cup
•	Butter	for basting

Method
Apply the ginger paste, garlic paste, white pepper powder and salt to the chicken cubes and set aside. Mash the cheese to make it into a smooth paste. Add the green chillies, mace powder, nutmeg powder, coriander leaves and salt. Add the egg and mix well. Add the chicken to the cheese mixture. Add fresh cream and mix gently. Keep in the refrigerator for about two to three hours. Pierce chicken onto skewers and cook in a moderately hot tandoor or a preheated oven (200C) until it is just cooked and lightly coloured. Brush with melted butter and cook for another two minutes till chicken is fully cooked.