CTO Blog
In a recent article by Reena Jana, Business Week spotlighted the concept of ‘Jugaad’, a Hindi slang word for doing things ‘fast and cheap’ by using innovation to get around conventional barriers and focusing on exactly what the real need is rather than the more aspirational requirement that may be the starting point. As an approach to building and delivering IT requirements in the current tough economic period this is of course immediately recognisable as an interesting concept.
The article quotes a number of well-known companies that claim to be making use of Jugaad and points to training by Indian management gurus. Actually the term goes deeper than this. It means making do with scarce resources, or ‘getting it done’ anyway you can. Stretching the definition, this may even include illegal or dangerous means. To me this is an exact summary of the risks that enterprises are running by allowing ‘shadow IT’ within their business, a term that refers to employees outside the IT department building and deploying their own DIY technology solutions under the radar.
Every CIO I speak to recognises that there is a lot of this going on across their business. Readily available virtual machines or platforms, paid for on a per-use basis, have provided increasingly technology-literate end users with the ability to do it. So is this classic Jugaad? I reckon so. It accomplishes the immediate objective, but ignores the bigger impact that such improvisation can bring.
Am I guilty of being a typical IT person who can’t, or worse still won’t, listen and compromise? If you mean do I worry about the consequences of this then the answer is an unrepentant yes because IT is about enterprise-wide stability and coherence. However neither do I reject the need to achieve some of the principles that Jugaad implies.
So thank you India for the philosophy and cultural concept. Now, what about linking it to ‘lean’, a western concept for reducing unnecessary waste? Lean Manufacturing was the starting point for the development of a methodical approach for reducing unnecessary activities and the removal of people who might complicate rather than optimise the process. Today Lean Manufacturing is well understood, and respected, complete with structured training, designated practitioners and alike. It is also frequently aligned with Six Sigma, the equally methodical approach to designing out factors that can introduce substandard quality.
Lean Software Development, named after the book, marries the principles of Lean Manufacturing with those of Agile Development. Its key additions to Agile lie in helping the refinement of the requirement by teaching how to recognise ‘waste’ introduced in any stage of progress, in order to positively manage this out. The result is less time, cost, and more reliable results out of any build. The book is a rewrite of the major textbooks on Lean Manufacturing specifically to adapt it to Agile Software Development and includes 22 ‘tools’ to use. As such it is considered by many Agile Practitioners to offer real value.
However, perhaps the most important of the seven principles of Lean is the one that focuses on ‘empowering people’, because that’s the one that comes back to the key principle of Jugaad – putting the power to solve problems in the hands of those most closely involved. Put simply, in large enterprises methods have all too often taken flexibility to optimise away from people and replaced it with conformity. Jugaad is right to recognise this, but in a large enterprise some ‘awareness’ of the bigger picture is needed too. Adding Lean as the bridge from Jugaad to Agile may be the answer.
About the author
Capgemini Global Chief Technology Officer, Andy is a member of the Capgemini Group management board and advises on all aspects of technology-driven market changes, together with being a member of the Policy Board for the British Computer Society. Andy is the author of many white papers, and the co-author three books that have charted the current changes in technology and its use by business starting in 2006 with ‘Mashup Corporations’ detailing how enterprises could make use of Web 2.0 to develop new go to market propositions. This was followed in May 2008 by Mesh Collaboration focussing on the impact of Web 2.0 on the enterprise front office and its working techniques, then in 2010 “Enterprise Cloud Computing: A Strategy Guide for Business and Technology leaders” co-authored with well-known academic Peter Fingar and one of the leading authorities on business process, John Pyke. The book describes the wider business implications of Cloud Computing with the promise of on-demand business innovation. It looks at how businesses trade differently on the web using mash-ups but also the challenges in managing more frequent change through social tools, and what happens when cloud comes into play in fully fledged operations. Andy was voted one of the top 25 most influential CTOs in the world in 2009 by InfoWorld and is grateful to readers of Computing Weekly who voted the Capgemini CTOblog the best Blog for Business Managers and CIOs each year for the last three years.
In India,a common refrain is “Kuch jugaad lagao” (Do some Jugaad). Though it has many connotations based on context of its use, it basically means to go out of system (or process) to solve a problem. Obviously, based on nature of system , jugaad can have varying results. For example Jugaad can result in innovative products (low cost transport) where needs were not met by the system (transport, supply chain), Or jugaad could create damage where systematic change is desired over short term quick fixes.
It is quite interesting to see Jugaad becoming a sort of buzzword. Here are links to couple of articles on Jugaad:
http://bit.ly/7RwUby
http://bit.ly/89vdnF
Oh, well, there is also a site Jugaadu.com which lists many Jugaads.
Thanks Gaurav – thats a jolly interesting build, much appreciated for the clarity. The idea of going outside the system or process in the broadest sense of the word does seem to describe what we are all increasingly driven to do as events and circumstances seem to be changing quicker than our formal systems can be updated to cope.
It has been fascinating to watch the growth of the Jugaad idea in the west sinceI first read about it in the Business Week article by Reena Jana.
Like Gaurav, I took it to mean thinking outside the box as apposed to just fast and cheap and simple (like the Flip Cam for example… and the book you mention)
There are many other very interesting articles about this. My favorite is from Collaboration King- where I too listed more articles in the comments section at the bottom- like articles from Fast Company, NY Times etc:
http://bit.ly/7cKb94
Thanks again to Brandon for helping us to understand what Jugaad really means. the more i read the more i think i was guilty of a popular cultural sin – taking things out of context – so pleased to have these builds. does anyone have anything to illustrate Jugaad in an IT environment – a real personal act and not a ‘case study’.
Nice post Andy. IMHO that Jugaad in the context of IT arises from the frustrations that business user community feels from being insulated and disempowered from IT. When IT is not able meet the business requirement in a timely fashion, business community resorts to whatever they might have at their disposal — Jugaad. Therefore the rise of what you call Shadow IT.
Maybe the role of IT in Jugaad ought to be to empower business users with an approved set of powerful, secute, and yet easy-to-use tools for Jugaad.
I have hundereds of stories of business users at SAP shops empowered with tools of Jugaad (like our Winshuttle software) doing things that IT could never deliver to them around SAP reporting, data loading, and business process improvements.
This whole topic gets more and more interesting and wider and wider with each post! i thought it was just an interesting byline and excuse for a blog at first but now it seems a really big topic!
Andy
It would be interesting if we could have a reference catalog of numerous fast/cheap end user tools delivered to clients as well as use within Capgemini – call it by any name as Google may claim “Freedom and productivity” as their mantra – basically taking the baton from the Seattle company. Interesting for any leader in management especially looking for innovative ways of Making IT work! So Jugaad seems to be another buzzword emanating from offshore – we may have more languages contest this arena as China, Phillipines, Russia, Poland, Romania and several other countries vie for the IT / Business Outsourcing destinations.. The word “Software Coolie” did hit the stands like jugaad..
Interesting times ahead for Globalization and some localization reaching Dictionary updates! as English language embraced so many WORDS from so many languages like catamaran, milagu tawny? etc
wow just goes on getting more and more interesting. may be this is also assoiated with the shift to customisation and differentiation? the shift from centralisation and one way of doing things in volume to the way individuals want things and therefore need flexibility?
Excellent article !! One thing that stood out, was your clear and precise understanding of the word ‘Jugaad’. Its actually a punjabi word/lingo and the context in which its used/practiced, has been so clearly stated by you. Jugaadu is the term for a person who ‘works out the things’ anywhich way or has the means and solution to ‘get things done’. Please keep posting.
mmm – this raises an interesting and may be some will say sensitive point about innovation. This has long been claimed as a ‘western’ strenght but is that or will that necessarily be true if we move to more distributed and differentiated activities aroind the edge of the enterprise? will an ‘eastern’ Jugaad mind set actually be more valuable?
I loved the links from @Gaurav. The case studies seem to point toward an idea of “managed chaos”. It’s a bit like that of adage: management is not the art of making the perfect decision, but making a timely decisions and then making it work.
This seems to be something we’ve forgotten in the West, and particularly in IT. Perfection is an unattainable idea, while agility requires a little chaos.
Consider a fighter planes. The other day I was watching a documentary on the history of aircraft which show how the evolution of fighters is a progression from stability to instability.
The first fighters (and we’re talking WWI here–all fabric and glue) were designed float above the battlefield where the pilots could shoot at soldiers, or even lob bombs at them. They were designed to be very stable, so stable that the pilot could ignore the controls and the plane would fly itself. Or you could shoot out most of the control surfaces and still land safely. (Sounds a bit like a modern, bullet proof, IT application, eh?)
The problem with these planes is that they are very stable. It’s hard to make them turn and dance about, and this makes them easy to shoot down. They needed to be more agile, harder to shoot down, and the solution was to make them less stable. Yes, this made them harder to fly, but it also made then harder to hit.
Wizz forward to the modern day, and we find that all modern fighters are unstable be design. They’re so unstable that they’re unflyable without modern fly-by-wire systems. The governance of the fly-by-wire systems lets the pilot control the uncontrollable.
The problem with modern IT is that it is too stable. We’ve designed all the agility out of it. Jugaad points out that we need to allow in a bit of chaos if we want to bring the agility back in. And we need to update our governance processes, evolving them beyond being simply a tool to stop the bad happening, and into a tool for harvesting the jugaad where it occurs. After all, the role of enterprise IT is to capture good ideas and automate them, allowing them to be leveraged across the entire enterprise.
Governance as a competitive advantage. Who would’a thought that?
r.
PEG
I just love the fighter plane comparison!! you are right we have made enterprise IT that stable reliable platform that can resist de stablisation by users or even circumstances. But is that completely wrong or is this area of IT more related to the heavy fright carrying end of the airforce? Have we lost, or may be not even built, the single seater fighters we need today for a new conflict in the market?
Andy,
are we not repackaging the existing innovation concepts in a new terminology here? Isn’t “Jugaad” vs. “Lean” akin to “Disruptive” vs. “Sustaining” Innovation concept of the late 90s?
A point to be noted in this debate is that there is danger in blindly copying the “Jugaad” or “Disruptive” solutions that work in one market to another. Instead the need is to have intelligent adaptation of such solutions to suit the needs of end-users or customers in different markets….
In other words, the benefits of utility-based solutions shouldn’t be generalized or overemphasized….
True – and yes what goes round does come round as the saying goes. my version is that the problem statements dont change too much but what does change is the capabilities to adjust. so yes the parallels must and do exist, and i am not saying that IT and stability isnt important but i think we all recognise that we have an ‘additional’ use for technology in the enterprise
@Andy
If we’re to push the analogy along, then our IT assets (CRM, ERP …) are the major components of the plane (wing, engine …), and we can use these components to create planes for different roles (fighter, bomber), or business in with different strategies (fast follower, innovator …)
The moral of the story is that while most of the parts of the plane need to be stable and rock solid (we don’t want our ejector seat to fail), we should construct the plane in a way that provides the performance characteristics required.
Our focus on delivering stable on-premises applications has created the lumbering bombers of WW1. A more modern approach would to be leverage BPO, SaaS, AM, and partnerships in tandem with traditional on premises applications and bespoke solutions to shape the performance envelope of our IT estate.
This might be the root of many problems we’re seeing between business and IT at the moment. IT’s tendency to measure value in terms of cost and/or stability leads us to create IT estates which are at odds with the dynamics of the modern business environment. We should be focusing on the overall business performance of the IT estate, its energy-maneuverability profile.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy-Maneuverability_theory
All this makes me feel a John Boyd[2] moment coming on
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boyd_(military_strategist)
@Renjish
Is this the old argument of “borrow” vs. “steal”? Mere copycats borrow, while innovators steal. Or, put another way, you should never borrow a solution/idea, simply using it in your own context; you need to steal, making the solution/idea your own. Bruce Lee captured this nicely with the concept of “absorbing what is useful”[3], which is something I seem to be referring to a lot at the moment.
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeet_Kune_Do#Absorbing_what_is_useful
r.
PEG
i sense we might be getting to the end of the analogies ! so how about me asking for a real Jugaad solution?
here in my part of the UK we have 30 to 40 cm of snow and almost impassable roads, so how do i make a set of snow chains for my car from house hold materials? may be chain collars for dogs joined together by key rings?
Peter, yes that’s what I meant…
Andy, my question to you in return is whether you want to add reliability and quality requirements as part of your problem statement? How long do you need the solution to survive etc? It is this difference in aspirations that I meant, shouldn’t be ignored while adopting a jugaad solution….
Besides, I think it is also a cultural thing…. can you imagine constraints to trigger innovation, when you have plenty? In your example, I mean, will you bother to build a snow chain which may be unreliable, when you can buy it from the next door shop?
Another example is Tata’s Nano. It sure is a great innovation for the masses… But the question to you Andy, is whether you would like to drive it around? No-frills or low-frills are fine to some extent, but when we add the bells and whistles, it eventually converges to the mainstream solution?
By the way, in a telco context, isn’t the burden of hundreds of legacy billing & crm systems a result of quick-fix or jugaad? Doesn’t it also lead to redundancies and costs, if not managed, as we see now with all the system rationalization efforts?
interesting question is good enough enough? and the answer clearly changes with longevity of use of the solution and frequency or robustness of user / or numbers of users. also consequences of failure. as solutions become more personalised and less enterprise industrial these deciding factors change in my view
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