Clients to decide salary hikes at Cognizant, Wipro, HCL Tech, Mindtree

For roughly 30,000 client-facing executives at India’s No.3 software services exporter Wipro, this year’s performance appraisal will be different.

The Bangalore-based company, whose customers include Citigroup and Cisco Systems, has embarked on a new experiment, in which its sales executives are ranked and graded based on customer feedback, with 70% of the performance rating coming from them. “If your customer says this guy is lousy and your boss says terrific, it’s not going to matter. Customer feedback is going to be a priority,” said TK Kurien, chief executive of Wipro told ET in an interview last month.

“That cultural change is what we are going through. And my sense is that when it finishes we will be in a far better position.” Kurien, who has been beefing up Wipro’s sales team, said the initiative is part of a ‘360-degree survey’ where everyone, including project managers, will be covered. Wipro is not the only one adopting this.

Cognizant, Mind tree rely on feedback

The need to better evaluate sales staff and improve their relationship with top customers is forcing other big players in the Indian technology services industry to place greater emphasis on client feedback while assessing staff performance.

Senior IT industry executives say linking customer feedback with key result areas drives positive behavior among executives to ensure enhanced customer satisfaction. “If an executive falls short of meeting or exceeding desired client satisfaction levels, it has a directly proportional impact on the annualized variable payout of the individual,” said Prithvi Shergill, chief HR officer at Noida-based HCL Technologies.

At New Jersey-based Cognizant Technology Solutions, which has most of its employees based in Chennai, quantitative and qualitative feedback from clients are part of each leader’s individual bonus plan.

The company organized a planning session for its clients and board of directors, where the board had a chance to hear feedback from customers, said James Lennox, its HR head. Vidya Santhanam, director, people function, at midsized firm Mindtree, said in future the company’s delivery platform will “enable clients to directly give feedback to each project member”.

Employees appraised using customer feedback are almost always sales and other client-facing executives who are responsible for raising client satisfaction levels. Since most of their interaction is with clients, companies say it is only fair if these executives are appraised by clients.

Besides evaluating employees better, it also helps companies do away with the age old annual performance appraisal process, where managers and their subordinates discuss goals and performance. But not everyone is excited.

Some industry experts say placing a higher weightage on customer feedback may fail to motivate employees. “The practice of using client feedback to appraise employees isn’t accurate because of the nature of products and services being delivered to these clients by IT companies,” said Ajit Isaac, MD and CEO at Ikya Human Capital Solutions.

“Essentially, services rendered by IT firms are an aggregation of firms, and no one employee, or group of employees can be appraised based merely on feedback.”

Elango R, HR head at Mphasis said the company has been using consumer feedback to appraise employees for the past couple of years, but it faced problems as “over-enthusiastic customers gave really extreme feedback”. “Relying entirely on this method gave a very one dimensional view of the employee. In cases of extreme feedback, we would now discuss it with the customer and employee individually to figure out why,” he said.

Education are built on Google App: Google Play For Education

Tablets with Google Play for Education give teachers access to approved tools and content that help them meet the individual needs of today’s students. With simple set up and instant app-deployment, a world of resources is at your fingertips.

Google Play for Education has officially launched. It’s an extension of Google Play that’s designed for schools, simplifying discovery of educational apps and enabling developers and content providers to reach K-12 educators in the U.S. It offers bulk purchasing with purchase orders and instant distribution of educational apps, videos and other educational content to students’ Android Tablets via the cloud. Google Play for Education helps your apps gain visibility with the right audiences, without having to knock on school doors.

Google first announced plans for Google Play for Education at its I/O developer conference in May, and has been testing the new educational offering in beta for the past several months with thousands of students and more than 50 schools.

Discover, purchase, and share educational apps, books, and videos easily with Google Play for Education – a new online destination just for schools.

• Browse content by grade, subject, or standard including Common Core
• Purchase via PO with no credit card required
• Distribute apps instantly via the cloud

Google Play for Education is an extension of Google Play designed for schools. Here educators can discover apps approved by teachers for teachers, as well as educational videos and a collection of classic books for their classroom. Teachers can search for approved apps by grade, subject and standard, including Common Core, pay using a purchase order, and deploy the content to students instantly.

Schools can choose from three classroom ready tablet options: Nexus 7 (a 7” tablet) available today, and the ASUS Transformer Pad (a 10” tablet) or the HP Slate 8 Pro (an 8” tablet), both available early next year. Schools can set up a classroom of tablets in minutes with a few simple taps. Just hold the administrator tablet together with the student tablet to set up each device quickly. Tablets with Google Play for Education are built on Google Apps for Education so students use their Google accounts to log in seamlessly. Tablet pricing starts at $229 and management is $30 per tablet.

“With more than 30 million people using Google Apps for Education already, tablets with Google Play for Education easily plug into many schools’ existing technology. This is an affordable, 1:1 solution that puts greater power in the hands of teachers to find the best tools and content for their classrooms. We’re continuing to evolve the Google in Education offering and are happy to bring even more choice in devices and content” Said by, Rick Borovoy, Product Manager for Google Play for Education

Is NFC technology safe as they say it is? Yes, but some don’t think so

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has also an identifier that the credit card numbers can be extremely very easily read using a smartphone and also has located itself into a media difficulty due to its disappointment to the have an understanding of that how NFC technology will work.

The very last time something is very similar happened was Channel 3 News in Tennessee, but the real facts and information remain the exact same– an NFC-equipped card will hand over its various numbers, owner’s name and also an expiry date, to an unauthenticated reader. But it *won’t hand over* the three-digit CVC or the cryptographic keys generally used to verify the payments, anything that the both of news channels have basically failed to be an understand.

So that the debate on NFC technology is still raging, not due to the technology itself but to some of the misunderstandings. There are, Three years ago, News Channel 3 in Memphis had to generally use a laptop and also come up really very close to the card-holders’ wallets, but just now the exact same technology is built into the dozens of smartphones, even if the information & facts stolen is of little or no any other value to many most attackers.

Buy and sell online will still require the three-digit Card Verification Code (CVC), which is generally printed out on the back of the card and also *not* disclosed over the radio link.

PBT (Pay-by-Tap) transactions making use of an NFC technology use a cryptographic response/challenge system which is generally differs each and every time, so make an understanding of the card number still won’t support criminals in any other way.

The so-called ‘expert’ basically called upon by CBC News is adamant that just a card number as well as expiry date can be used to buy “anything from a $1.50 soft drink from a vending machine with a $4,500 laptop.”

That’s generally not to say that the credit card number can’t be generally used at all. It still can in some any other specific cases. Some card suppliers don’t check out the CVC or a card holder’s home address, a practice that goes against much most major credit card’s terms of the use.

Basically one can also consider that a ‘smart thief’ pulling the card number from someone they can know, or someone whose PIN they’ve identified by shoulder surfing at a cash point.

With the card number and also the PIN of the thief could generally make a duplicate card, then take it to a nation where Chip ‘n’PIN security isn’t worldwide and also withdraw a cash, but it’s a very complex process at the very best.

Horrific stories such as these are rampant, just as they were the last three years ago and also no doubt will be again next year & the one after.

Sure– NFC isn’t perfect, nothing ever is, but there’s actually no require to try out to make a different thing worse by scaring person much more than they currently are.