Once we were clear we are starting Sahaj an IT services company, the bigger question we had was what are we trying to solve. When we talk about creating a company on the principle of Simplicity what do we actually mean. While we all know in our heads what simplicity means in IT industry, putting it in words to explain to our clients and even to our own people seemed difficult.Here’s my perspective, on what we are trying to do. What I have personally experienced so far and also based on my discussion with friends (specially in sales) in other companies, one of the most prominent way to succeed in IT services business is to ride the complexity wave. What I mean by it is, the business environment is becoming complex, competitive and challenging and we have no control over it, but what we have control over is the solution that we design to thrive in this complexity.Typical, services mindset is to design a complex solution for a complex problem and the result is exponential increase in complexity. The reason for this increase is, one the problem is complex and now on top of it the solution is so complex that the person / company / vendor who has spent time in understanding the problem and designing the complex solution, is key to resolving problems and / or maintaining the solution and this adds the dependency complexity. This dependency is so huge that it creates at times monopolistic service lines for companies. So basically it means that if I have designed a complex solution to a problem, then only I (or someone like me) can maintain it and this enables the company to get repeat business year after year. Now, I am not challenging the whole client loyalty theory here and there are valid reasons why client wants to work with the same vendor again and again but there are not so valid reasons like the cost of transitioning from an existing vendor (even though the client may not be happy with the services provided) is prohibitively high or the knowledge that the vendor team has is irreplaceable and there is a huge risk to business in transitioning to a new vendor or even a new solution. These to me are smell of a complex solution giving sustained business.I am referring to the notion where the solution to a complex problem has to be complex. Our endeavour in Sahaj to challenge this notion. We believe that there could be a simple solution to a complex problem. We believe if we design a solution holistically and spend time in understanding the problem deeply enough, the eventual solution could be simple and elegant. Now this doesn’t mean that this whole stuff is easy, on the contrary we think this needs really different and deep thought process, skills and experience and that’s what is Sahaj is trying to do. A simple solution can also be maintained easily and by anyone who can spend sometime trying to understand it.We think that we have the people, determination and skills to work on these lines. The path forward is challenging but looks exciting and intriguing.
