A mail to my friends at Infosys

Following is the mail that I sent to my friends at Infosys after joining IBM. It was critical of the applications that both the companies have on their intranets - Sparsh and w3 respectively.

Dear All,

It has been two weeks now after I left Infosys. I have joined IBM and am still in Pune as you all might be knowing. The company has changed, people have changed and so has the culture and environment. I am trying to adapt to the new system. Things are different, processes are different and moreover I didn't like the intranet. Though it is comprehensive and the knowledge base is marvelous, but at the same time lacks ease of accessibility and is not user friendly - Sparsh and Harmony rock!! Also, there are two blogs portals both running on different versions of Lotus Connections but I think InfyBLOGS running on LiveJournal are fantastic and once we move to Wordpress it would be far ahead. Wiki here has a huge database unlike Infosys, where we are still trying to make people believe in Social Media, but still since it is running on Media Wiki, Infosys wiki is great and familiar as we all are used to Wikipedia that also runs on Media Wiki. Blink, the bookmarking site at Infosys is much better than the one running here again on Lotus Connections.

Also, Helpdesk applications (AHD and ServeCentrale in Infosys) are much better there. In short as far as user-friendliness is concerned, Infosys is far ahead than IBM's w3 (equivalent of Sparsh in Infosys). But still I think knowledge base is better than at Infosys; the work is needed to be done in KSHOP area as KSHOP needs a major revamp - a major cleanup as far as its database is concerned. Also, the process of contribution to KSHOP should be made more stringent and as far as my opinion is concerned, material should go through proper scrutiny in terms of IP, plagiarism and content. Most important I think is content. We have many and most of the articles submitted in KSHOP that are not upto the mark and few are direct copy from online and offline helps available for a product. We need to check this as this is in direct violation of IP laws. Also, if possible most of the contribution should come from senior people like for technical stuff, Technical Architects and above should contribute majorly towards it.

I have lot to say to make KSHOP better. But will stop here as I am diverging from the topic I had started writing the mail for. So, finally I have got my email id changed and you can contact me at palak.mathur@in.ibm.com.

IBM is a strange company with so many managers whom I have to report. I have to report to two managers, rather four. One is my people manager who looks after my allocation, leaves, appraisal etc. The other one is my project manager who looks issues related to project only. Third one is my team lead who is a IT Architect and I have to report to him as an IT Specialist. Fourth one is HR Partner and I am yet to figure out what she is for. Hope that I will understand the organisation here as soon as you all will understand iRace. :)

Hope to meet someday. Till then good-bye and please keep mailing as I will.

Thank you all for my wonderful days at Infosys!! :)

Regards,

Palak Mathur