 Mr. Barn is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and a visionary. He's the founder of The Barn Company, an enterprise providing ERP software. And then he went on to find Cardis, one of the first companies to take ERP to the web. So this is the company that we were part of 10 years back, I believe. So Mr. Barn was a great proponent of design and is someone who believed in usability and UI. Like we used to know UX in those days, right? As one of the key differentiators, he was a great support for UX process and he was a great inspiration and source of guidance and mentorship. His companies have produced many entrepreneurs, business leaders, and founders of such organizations like UX India. So this was the thought, the very thought of founding this platform came from Cardis when we were all working together there, right? So without much ado, I would like to call Mr. Kaladar Babu to the stage and Mr. Barn on to the stage as well and take us through this exciting session. So 18 years back, if somebody is talking about design, thinking, user experience, it used to be called usability. Think about 18 years back, someone is talking about usability and UX or a product value. So what do you call that person? Visionary is Mr. Barn Barn. He's a Dutch entrepreneur. I'm honored to work with you, sir, in your mentorship. So I always had a question that what was the reason you invested in Hyderabad? First of all, I like the city, but first we came to Mumbai. We called it Bombay those days in Seeps and all the regulations we had. The problem was a little that people have to travel two hours to the office and go two hours back. And then we decided a little, okay, louder, going there and see all the stuff in Mumbai, crowded, Bombay those days. And we were one of the first, say, developing our software in Seeps and had a nice team. And then we're looking back and say, this is becoming too crowded. When people have to travel four hours a day, it's real stupid. And we're looking back and say, people say, you have to go to Bangalore. I said, why Bangalore? Everyone is going there. Why should I go to Bangalore? Why should I follow others? And we came to the conclusion, should it be Pune or should it be Hyderabad? There was nothing in Hyderabad, but I was in Hyderabad the weekend. And I like the city, the Hyderabad Briani, maybe the nice people. If you look at the climate, it's a real nice excitement in the city. I found that a little and then we did a look around here and we came to Cybertower. That was the only building just under construction. And the rest was rocks, beautiful rocks, by the way. And then we decided a little, that was a nice person when we discussed with the team of Chanderbaba Naidu and the team. And they were very real helpful and eager to help us. And we decided, okay, if we do it, we need then a big space and we do it in a different way. And I put my own money, I bet on Hyderabad. That is even what I promised Naidu, I bet on the city. I did it with my private money because I was high on the stock exchange with a company who went from 1 billion market cap to 12 billion market cap in a few years, even number two after SAP. But there, you know, it is tremendous risky, especially this American style and the American way of business have nothing to do with usability. It's more milking the customer and real try to be high, but it is more what we say shareholders driven. And the biggest confrontation for usability is too much shareholders driven is what is there in the next quarter. I did it with my private money. Invest in Hyderabad, even the buildings. We built quite big buildings. We had the Wanneberg IT Park. And even that place was even done by a usability style for use green and all these elements. And that was more or less a story we moved to Hyderabad always here being at home. So that was like a startup kind of situation. And what was your vision actually invested a lot on IT Park and also software? What was the vision that making the people? It's not the product first product is the beginning. On the end is the customer. But crucially, you have all the stakeholders and my vision is you can have all those stakeholders. But one of the stakeholders are what we say, but all those stakeholders are like the in-laws and you have your own ones is your own employees. And on the end, the most important one is your employees. Take care for your employees. Although we all have to work for the customer. We have to work hard. But they are more important than the in-laws and give the employees the satisfaction in their career building. And I've seen that many of my teams are becoming the leaders in many companies. So there was no word called usability and nobody even heard about it. Like I think in the morning I was talking about I was in IIT and a bond company came for a campus recruit. So how did you trust me that I would actually be a team for a bond company or usability team? It was easy looking in your eyes. Looking in your eyes. And I spent many times with these guys and I was very critical to those guys. We debate on colors. We debate on different elements. First of all, he brought a new element in. A man of art. He could draw very nice. I liked the drawing. It was one element and he seemed smart. And we brought that in and it was a crucial part because what was our biggest enemy? Killing complexity. If you run EARP, we had 35,000 users of Boeing. The biggest in the world on one instance. But to learn EARP it took months. Why can't it be done in weeks? The biggest problem in IIT is complexity. And that brought me, and I started already from 78 in EARP, in MRP in 82, we were one of the first in UNIX. We are always used to going to new roads. So that time we had the India's largest team. I think we had around 20 people in usability. I'm talking about in 1998 and 2000 that time. But not only enough. I could not do it in the beginning with only these guys. And we asked someone with real, what is real? The real foundation of usability is even not so much in Europe. It's maybe part, Italy. But those are not bringing the best quality. And what you do is you combine it. We took some from Italy. There you see the real designs, the Italians. And they did it already in the 17, early in the 16th century. Look to this. And we came to the conclusion, we take Italy as design. We take Germany, we say it's gruntlichkeit. The real, the elements of must be stable. And we put two people for more than a year and we'll help them with 20 of your people together. And that was the foundation in 98. I say 97, 98. Yeah. So the surprising thing is like, you know, even if right now, offshoring design to India, they say no, no. I think most of you, you know, had that experience. Generally like, you know, software development, they can offshor it, but design, they don't. But there's one problem more. I could only do it, but there's one way of thinking before. You normally know even what I've seen the sir mentioned here also that India is involved in backend solutions. And 75% of the work just mentioned by Gardner last week is done by keeping the light on. And 90% of your work, what you do here is working on keeping the light on. That means you have master slaves. Often the master is in the European world, the American world. Slaves are here doing programming work. We were one of the first who delegates IT to India. And the owning element of IT was Sir Ramanathan who was working for more than 25 years with me. He was the owner. We trust the people. I've given my wallet to him. We built IT sentiment therein. First of all, we built years the IP, but then it's the beginning of everything. If you have IP, then you could do everything. Then you can do center of excellence. Then you saw the complexity is too much. And then we learn the crucial, crucial part around IT is usability. And suppose that we have no IT intellect property, no IP in India, it was nonsense to do usability. Realize that. That means if you're working with TCS and do all this, say, anyway, body-shopping work, what means usability? Yeah. So in 2001, if you remember, in 2001, I think, we had Asia's best usability lab. It was a huge investment. It was a state-of-the-art lab. So what was the vision actually? We just said, yes, go ahead. So even now it's very tough to sanction that kind of grant to start a lab. And many companies, I don't think all of our companies have labs still now. The crucial part with lab is it was unique. It was a mirror. And you're sitting before the mirror, seeing yourself and working for a while, not seeing that five people are watching you outside what you cannot see. But they use everything from you. And even train myself means ask people to give trust. And the beauty element is the engineer is controlled before Scrum. Realize that. We did Scrum 98. And usability should be before Scrum. Now you see your input five years later, 10 years later, if you see these old-fashioned products who cannot go over to new products. That means even now for cloud-related products, because usability is done for products who have a lifecycle of 20 years sometimes with this legacy stuff, with 60,000 tables and going therein. But what means it now, we come back on it maybe still, what means it's for usability for the future? That means the input was usability in a lab direct back. That means the engineer is decoupled from complexity. And we learned always decoupling. Decouple the engineer from complexity, force them again to see what he's doing. And normally we see more engineers, more complexity, more complexity. So if you remember like we used to do a testing at the client site in Netherlands. So I'm talking about like we're 18, I think 15 years back, you know, testing at the users place. We used to do a lot of iteration. We used to keep designing it. So what kind of challenges you face to institutionalizing the design? I'm talking about, you know, mid-management to understand design and also work with us. Crucially it's culture. And again, we force your people, I have always a saying and it's not so, maybe fits in the beginning, not so your culture. If you say, yes, yes, it took me a while to understand that you mean no. And I know how hard is it for you to say no. And we have different elements in culture. We are blunt. If you call, if I call something's called you at home and you're not at home, maybe you are a little too much involved with the British years ago and learn too much there. And if you ask maybe a lady, Madam, is your husband at home? Sorry, sir. I'm afraid to explain you that he is not at home. Okay, friendly. If you ask my wife, is your husband at home? No. You win a lot. And the crucial element with usability is trust. And we became two Dutch-English cultures. Tried to be open from both sides. Crucially it's the respective people with different elements. Not convinced, but at the other hand, understand this stuff and delegate it totally. And again, and it can only start from top. I myself, I feel myself as a good entrepreneur but a terrible manager. A good entrepreneur never can be a good manager. And I have time enough because I had to do management. I traveled here many times with my private plane those days and I was there, I've been maybe a hundred times here. I knew the guys a little. I debate with him. You can say debate as a CEO with him. Yes, because have to come from the top. And many times I force people, engineers to do this. And I was authorized because I was the owner in the beginning and the biggest shareholder to force them and came in. I thought that is an important element. Sir, this is a very important question for all of us. Like if you remember IBM used to say if you invest in one dollar in UX and you get the result as a hundred dollars. So what was actually like our way because you invested a lot in design? First of all, the usability was not done for profitability. First was for customer intimacy. If you do it for only profitability, the end. And in an IP, if you look real in a NASDAQ company, if you look to all this stuff to a NASDAQ company, the shareholders are only focused on shareholders' value. As only and as the poorest you can do. Shareholders' value goes only in the beginning to next quarter and later on is only this quarter. And a company and a customer here for 10 years and longer. And that's the element. It should not be driven in the beginning by a short-term purpose but really long-term sustainability. So you had that vision 15 years back itself. If you were to start again, how do you like to envision the design? No, I would start again. I start again again. I start three times again. I now have even nice stuff in what we see in Comma Tour. What is the crucial part in usability? There are a few elements for the future. Start again means we are now changing. Next week my Tesla is coming. If you all drive a Tesla here, also in Hyderabad, it will help you a little for the traffic. It will be hard here, but what is tomorrow? Tomorrow is the Internet of Things. It's big data. Tomorrow we go to smart industry. And we have this very old, old, old software. We are not professional software that cannot fit together. My old band product cannot fit in this new world. 20,000 tables. Even as a piece product, 60,000 database tables. 120,000 if you look to even elements to parameters. And a user has only 15,000 parameters. You have to go to new elements. If you look again, what is tomorrow? At least everyone will be replaced by platform as a service. Like if you look like a sales force. For me, the best product, if you look now available, is all these elements together. What does that mean? Have that in mind. That means the first element that is coming is digitalization. We are in the heart of Fokker elements where digitalization is crucial. And by the way, digitalization has nothing to do with PDF. Nothing. You expect digitalization as PDF nonsense. Like it can be dead. That means digitalization means every element is there. Second is what we built. We saw PDF was the end of everything. You need a dynamic dossier. A dossier form was going like an agent who is dynamic. And then you go with this real, what we say, digitalized environment. You have your backend, it's coming. And for me, the backend is entering now in the internet of business processes. Everything is accepted from the internet. There's only one internet. The second internet is the internet of things. And there you deal with billions of things. We have six, five billion smart mobile phones. We have 50 billion things around us already. And chambers from Cisco expecting 500 billion things that are all talkative to us. Don't worry with this. We see now that things have a middleware layer where you can, in one second, you can have every some of the things. And the life cycle of a sensor, 60% of the data of a sensor have a life cycle of less than one millisecond. How can you connect them with the internet of business processes? And then we go to the internet of the human. Three internets. Who win? We talk it is. Is the robot winning or me? Is it the sensor winning? Or my common sense? Is it common sense or common sensor? Usability can help us to win in a common sense. Everything is going from data to information. But from information is going to knowledge. And usability helps me to transfer knowledge to wisdom. And what we are doing there and realize that even usability helps us in the big stories. The last two years Google stored more data than every all the time you can remember the Earth is staying here till two years ago. How can we take then also these big data elements and to improve my elements now? What is in the cruise ship? I think you are talking about big data and internet of things. Do you think that designers can play a big role in this crucial future technology in the current years to come? It is the only way. If you see a little card that talks over the three layers, the layer of transaction is terrible. When I sold it, I said it is my transaction in one silo. Second we bring the business process is the inbound part of the enterprise. Maybe in a sales force environment only one object or inherited objects on the internet, on the mobile, beautiful. That is only the inbound, the second layer. The third layer we go, what Peter Drucker is saying, we are going now entering from enterprise to the human, to the citizen. And in that world, it is a simple world because the processes are completed, the gateway from the second layer to the third layer is only a task. And the task should be driven by the usability to improve the task and connecting these three internet layers together and see this dynamic document as a cornerstone and then you need elements like case management. And then the usability allows me now to improve my task, take alerts from big data and what do I have to do for the next two hours? It can help me to open the complexity of everything in me, my mobile, my things together. This is the persona. And it is like if you look therein, the persona is coming crucial but not only usability for an enterprise, that is what we did in the decade before. But it's now going for usability for different personas. You are an older man, what do you need? You are a younger man, I'm older than you. Okay, but I feel still a little energized to do some things. I'm only 70 years old, but still I'm quite intrigued in all this stuff. But the different personas, but not only both elements, not only different personas, but different personas in different tasks. And there is where the biggest, say, disruptive element comes in. I can win from you because 10 minutes before the tender, I bring totally new stuff in. And in the different element of personas, we're going to no longer Kodak. We had two big customers in the past who came over to big system, was Boeing and Kodak. Now Kodak went to SAP, you can see it, and we took Boeing. Now, it's going from Kodak to Uber. How can you bring the way of thinking in the Uber in this world? So before I leave one question to the audience, I want to ask you my last question. What is your advice for designers and engineers who want to be an entrepreneur? Crucial for you is being an entrepreneur means being a startup don't overvalue from 100 startups, only one is making it to the top. Means don't think that startups is the only one. Even you can have what we see and kind of a startup in an enterprise. Both elements are there, but important is what you should do. Try to learn the business environment elements and enough. We go to the consumerization of technology. Don't bother for in-depth stuff only if you can do it. But combine this. We called it, four years ago in Ban, we called it already the boundary spenders. Be a boundary spender where you should be the bridge between the creative part on the one hand and still the adoptive business element therein. And for the rest, relax, be not a workaholic. It's more quality than quantity for sure. If you are at the end of the life and you say, I like work so much and I was on this planet only to work, it seems very poor. So any questions from audience? Hello sir, this is a wonderful session and I would like to call you the godfather of UXO. Thank you for this great session. I'm honored, thank you. My question to you is you talked about IoT, you talked about cloud computing and things that is happening in this industry, it's growing fast. Our question is what is the paradigm shift we are going to do so that the organizations, higher UX designers, I mean we do actually have engineers. Even now today, engineering teams are a part of the UX. How do you bring this designers, the art people in the organization and what transformation we need to do so that we have these as part of the organization? First you're lucky. In the future you have not to go longer than my old Ban system in the SAP in the Oracle system. They are far too complex and you have not so much chance to improve them. First you can start with cloud related stuff who can be renewed every day. But take care that you are the beginning, you should be there before Scrum. That's the crucial part. Before Scrum means you should be there respectful enough to talk with these little, sorry for that, but these nerds who are very good. The best ones have a little that at least have to be very indirect, where even go very deep in this element. Try to socialize and what the beauty is, you bring a little the sun in, you bring the colors in, you bring beautiful things in that world. It's respect for each other, small teams and here we see the big chains last quarter if you look all this outsourcing stuff is going down, will be replaced by bots, the robots will replace the coding over years. Let's go down. There's a big problem here, if you look to all these elements, what will happen in the next couple of years? We see the beginning already, not only by Brexit, not only by banking. You bring the future and be alert on the future that's only focused not on the enterprise, the future we focus on tasks, we decouple this stuff. And again, the creative part is a crucial part, it's doing again and again and again. Don't be perfect, it's an ongoing improvement. So John, you hired Bapu to set up a usability lab because he had good drawing skills. So is that an important skill to have for every UX professional, good drawing skills? At least this drawing skills for me was an element that he could explain his creativity. It can be in different areas. But drawing skills were more important for me than programming skills. And that's an element, doesn't matter. It's social, we go to usability of everything. The sketching part, like if you were talking about design thinking, you know, it really do sketching. So quickly show that. Of course I'm a trained industrial designer, so that's all. Now we call it low-fidelity prototyping. Yes, low-fidelity prototyping. So where there was a situation when you had a researching team on site and the designing team here, so how did you manage the traction in between that? First of all, we developed already, we had a research team here and in the Netherlands. And later on in many countries. And that was also managed. And then you have to understand the fundamental elements of outsourcing. There was an article 2005, what you did with Cambridge Studies. Very interesting. The crucial part becomes why the people. Talking the same anywhere, Esperanto, a kind of a language where you can understand and respect. And then we decided the core of the core of development was in India. And the more customer-related stuff to implement was more from the Netherlands and US where we moved this stuff. But the core maybe design was still in the Netherlands. But we're giving it over to the people here because they're closer to the customer. And then we saw that the only bridge to do this and to do more because the Indians were so far from understanding the customer. And the only way to do this we found was usability. Because immediately then you have the confrontation from the engineer and see it back and going there. And that was for me a big help, but maybe you can add some things, you knew it even more. So as I was talking about, we used to have the lab testing as well as user research. Directly go to the customer's place and we got an opportunity to do that. We go to Netherlands and work on it. Other thing to add is cross-cultural design. So now it's actually unified and everything is clear. That was the time. Even to use an icon, some symbols are very offensive in different countries. We used to have thorough research on bringing on each icon even to put a small book, for example. Now he's talking about hand gestures. Some hand gestures are very bad. Yes, yes. Sometimes you're related. So some books you cannot keep this. So then it's like, no, we don't want to. Because it maybe can say Quran or Gita. So people misinterpret in different ways. So we had a lot of research done and then arrived finally the guidelines. But actually it worked for internationally. And one thing to add to be there, it's my example here. You can make good careers. Mr. Ramanathan, look to the people around Ban who are in many countries. I'm joyful. I was yesterday also seeing my heart. It's so much joyful to see these people. I've given them more than money. And that's what we could convince people. We help you in your career. And that's tomorrow's world. The crucial part for usability is continuous learning. We like to connect usability on the end, not only with IP, but with learning. And the crucial part is catering for life you're learning. Your CV for life. We go into a revolution in a way of thinking. From enterprise driven silos to end to end processes, but no one even still have it. They still have the silos. Some do a little business process management. It will turn totally to the task. And we go from MRP, material requirements planning to TRP, task resource planning. What is predicted that you do next week? Can you do it? Big data is giving me information. Your constraints. Are you diploma good enough? Are you tired to do this? Totally new thinking is coming. So I would also like to ask you that. He's a visionary and he's got many firsts to do, but apart from all, he's got many grandchildren here in India. Would you like to share that one? Okay, that's good. They call me Tata, yeah? And I'd joy if I see this very small one from this age. I'm now here. And I train them with the best training. All the usability. Coming from the poorest of the poorest background and I decided to make leaders out of them. Maybe a little opposite your culture, but if they're staying a little before me, I'm saying no, you change one thing. Only you dumps. Every person is a trustful person. And for you, care around you. You do great. 1.3 billion. Where are you? Why is it that I have to help your poor? I did it. Because these guys have given me so much in my value on Wall Street. Why should I not contribute back? And take care around this. And that's joyful. Real nice. That's the best. And that was, therefore, I was 100 times here, many times here and coming and see also my grandchildren. We say, Tata, what are you doing? And they are fluent in English. So thank you so much, sir. We're all very honored to have you here.