The joke goes back to when we were engineering students. A highly respected professor, who inspired awe in Mechanical Engineering students had just finished teaching concepts of IC Engine and left for home in his car. The car unfortunately broke down near the hostel, and the professor had to arrange a mechanic. It was a strange sight of two types of experts - one who probably know all about the mechanics of a car engine but could not figure out what was wrong with his own car, and the second(mechanic) - who knew how to get the car started, but probably knew little about the calculations of valve timing or the firing sequence of cylinders. Paradox, isn't it? Digital Marketing today has exactly these two types of 'experts'. Unfortunately, the industry needs practitioners one can interweave conceptual understanding backed by hands on expertise on tools and techniques - knowing one of the two is not enough. It is with this intent that we subjected students of Martech career tr...
For way too long, observers in business transformation space have kept their telescope intently focused on large, billion-dollar enterprises. The unintended consequence of this telescope vision is that small enterprises, that are all around us, have been missed. We can contend that maybe something akin of a ‘periscopic view’ that allows for a 360 scan of the neighbourhood is required to observe something remarkable that is taking place next to us. However, to understand this in proper context, we must step back and look at the waves of technology adoption and its impact on the businesses. In the initial years of IT adoption, or computerization as it was called then, was primarily a functional level adoption in large organisations in the West, be it Banks (transactional data of customers), Hospitals (patient records management), Manufacturing (production planning or inventory) or Insurance companies (claims processing). It was all about efficiency. In the next wave, organisations took...