De Strategie van ITRaj Sheelvant blog bij het uitrusten van Informatietechnologie om concurrerend voordeel voor de ondernemingen tot stand te brengen en te ondersteunen

Het groene Rapport van IT Expo

Volgende blog is door Gast Blogger Patrick Dacre, De Belangrijkste Ambtenaar van de Aanmoediging voor de Groep van Media HarmonyNet en Ontwikkelaar van In Zaken 4 Goede Campagnes. Bekijk zijn LinkedIn bio hier. Contacteer hem bij +16469613748.

Tijdens mijn recent bezoek aan Londen, was ik opgewonden om aan lokaal worden uitgenodigd Groene IT Expo, wat door mijn vereniging met het Initiatief van de Besparingen van de Computers van het Klimaat kwam. Tijdens de tijd daar, was de verscheidenheid van de Groene seminaries van IT ROI intens, aan het punt dat de tegenstrijdige verkoperseisen om begonnen elkaar tegen te komen. De hier dichtbije kwestie, is hoe gemeten deze zijn.

Goed, toonde een adem van verse lucht, onder het mom van een Sheffield Gebaseerde zorg, VeryPC, glimmer van hoop in de het strijdig zijn eisenarena voor Milieuvriendelijke PC' s. Hier is wat ik, van Peter Hopton, leidende directeur van deze vooruitziende groep leerde.

VeryPC toonde een aantal Desktops van de hoge prestaties dubbele kern, die van enkel 17W van elektriciteit beginnen (om dit in perspectief te zetten, is dit over 1/6th van een normale PC, over het zelfde als een dunne cliënt).

Specs:
Fulwood (17W!) £800+
2.53GHz dubbele Kern (C2D)
4GB RAM
250GB HDD
De MiniGrootte van MAC!

Treeton (27W) £399
2.5GHz dubbele Kern (AMD)
2GB RAM
80GB HDD (ultra kleine vormfactor)

VeryPC toonde ook hun technologie van de energie efficiënte server aan, die `Janus II een' 1u 16 kerneenheid aanbiedt die op een machtsmeter aangetoond werd die slechts 147W neemt. De eenheid is eigenlijk twee 8 servers van kernIntel, spleet onderaan midden en aangeboden INVAL 5 op elk (gebruikend de kleine in vaste toestand schijven van de vormfactor of). Zelfs bij volledige lading trok de gehele eenheid slechts 285W, en bood waarde 146GFlops van verwerking (om dit in perspectief te zetten zou een gelijkwaardige hoeveelheid verwerking van een normale grote merkeenheid over tweemaal dit energieverbruik zijn) aan.

Specs:
Twee Servers, 1u doos, elke server:
2x Quad het Geheime voorgeheugen van Intel Xeon 2.5GHz van de Kern 12MB
4GB RAM (maximum 48GB)
2×160GB (maximum 4HDDs)
2x 1Gb Ethernet

De gehele nutteloze doos (beide servers die lopen) 147W, 285W 100% lading.

De meer dwingende kwestie, was de demonstratiemeter, die toonde hoe het netto machtsgebruik, en de Correctie van de Factor van de Macht, een direct resultaat van de innovatieve techniek waren van het de machtsbeheer van het spaanderniveau die deze Eigenlijke Pc's zo efficiënt maakt.

Enerzijds, na bijna 30 jaar grijze dozen, kijkt de gladde pianozwarte, trok het oog aan, en trok vele bezoekers in de cabine. Als dit soort techniek mogelijk is, en bijna 1.3 Miljard Pc's een met ordelijke migratie in deze richting moesten beginnen, dan zouden wij de duurzamere industrie hebben.

For more on Very Pc. www.very-pc.co.uk

Popularity: 15% [?]

Disruptive Trends in IT Revolution

eWeek article titled Seven Disruptive Trends Driving the Digital Revolution has re-published a synopsis of top trends to watch.  This list is originally published by CSE and you can read the 96 page report here.

Here is the list from the article
New Media: The Internet has become the new media. What some call Web 2.0 is all around us in RSS feeds, blog posts and wikis from MindTouch and Socialtext, among others.   All of these tools are inspiring new methods of corporate collaboration.

Social Software: Social networks such as Facebook and MySpace.com has shown us the way we can build a ‘virtual’ society.  Enterprises are capitalizing on the success of social media and utilizing secure social software suites such as IBM Lotus Connections and business-centered microblogs such as Yammer and SocialCast.

Augmented Reality: Virtual reality like “Second Life” will blend with physical reality giving rise to augmented reality. For example, TC2 makes the Intellifit body scanner, a walk-in booth that does a 360-degree body scan to help fit clothes to people.

Information Transparency: There will be sensors everywhere. People will be able to “see” all their assets through tailored services such as personalized medicine. Google Health, Microsoft’s HealthVault and Revolution Health all aim to give users greater control over their health records online.

New Wave of Waves: Wireless technology with location-aware Web services and commerce will make dynamic digital spectrum replete with open access.

Platform Makeover: Virtualization, with software scaling exponentially on one machine to let operating systems multiply, has been steadily evolving. Cloud computing, in which users pay for computing infrastructure and applications from vendors hosting customer data on their servers and storage arrays, is also changing computing models.

Smart(er) World: Semantic technologies will enable computing devices to interpret patterns as humans do, via text, speech or situational means. Computers will learn and make reasoned recommendations and predictions, such as telling the user to wear a raincoat after a forecast of inclement weather.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Procter and Gamble’s Internet Strategy

Procter & Gamble (P&G) is testing its ability to use the internet to sell its toothpaste, household cleaners and nappies directly to US households, in a potential long-term strategic challenge to its retail partners according to Financial Times article titled P&G web move is challenge to retailers dated October 19th 2008.  The article notes that P&G is supporting a website, theEssentials.com, that is exclusively selling its brands, with items such as single tubes of Crest toothpaste and bottles of Mr Clean cleaning fluid, to boxes of its Pampers and Luvs brand nappies and Gillette razors.

As internet become ubiquitous and more and more consumers become comfortable ordering online, direct to consumer sales using Internet will become mainstream sales channel.   In beauty products, P&G’s rivals L’Oréal and Estée Lauder have been selling on the web for some time. Other leading consumer brands, including Kellogg’s, have formed close partnerships with Amazon to drive bulk sales. This move brings P&G into direct brand competition with its retailers, underlining the extent to which e-commerce is contributing to changes in the way the two sides have traditionally worked with each other.   This is an interesting development.  How will P&G communicate to its retailers that this direct to consumer retailing is non- threatening to their relationship?  The article also notes that P&G’s largest retail customer, Wal-Mart, is hiring a strategy executive whose tasks include assessing the potential effect of direct-to-consumer sales by its own suppliers.  Retailers will also be pressured to evaluate their strategy of selling private label brands.   For consumer packaged goods companies, industry analysts argue that direct online sales are also a way to respond to lower prices from retailers’ private label brands.

With the onset of global recession due to financial meltdown, the global consumers will be forced to evaluate the price premium they pay for the brand.    Value for price becomes an important criterion for the consumers forcing them to migrate to private labels (in the US and Europe) and local labels (in the Emerging Market).  Global Consumer Staples companies like P&G, Johnson and Johnson, Colgate etc. will be pressured to reduce price.   Direct selling to consumers using Internet (especially in the US and Europe that have good Internet infrastructure) is a smart strategy to lower cost to the consumers and thus reducing competitive threat by the private label companies in this tough economy.

It will be interesting to follow if and how the retailers will retaliate.

Popularity: 20% [?]

IT Strategy Amid Economic Uncertainty

Of more than 600 business technology execs who responded to the survey in July 2008, 40% said they had decreased their IT spending that quarter relative to their 2008 budgets according to the article How CIOs Are Setting IT Strategy Amid Economic Uncertainty.

While the market grabbed attention past couple of months, the underlying concern is that a global economic slowdown, fueled by a credit crunch, could cut companies’ revenue.  And, given the potential for the economy to slow quickly, IT leaders must engage fellow execs and business-unit leaders directly. Otherwise, people assume a big-dollar project just has to get done.

What else should business technology leaders do amid economic uncertainty? Here are bits of advice from the above mentioned article:
• Have a playbook.
Develop a prioritized project by a variety of factors–cost, resources, technology, time frame, risk–so managers can see their choices as business conditions change.

• Not the same old drill.
Three to five years ago, options such as cloud computing and software as a service didn’t exist hence start evaluating new and disruptive technologies now, in case a tougher economic climate forces spending cuts and new approaches.

• Rogues are reality.
Because smaller IT team can’t respond fast, business units may start rogue projects outside IT.  Be cognizant and let the business go forward, at the same time don’t let them run rampant.

• Fine-tune.
Reprioritize by pushing new-project selection over the next few quarters, assigning high priority to lower-risk projects so the company can respond quickly to economic changes.

• Honestly assess the company’s attitude toward IT.
Is IT a competitive advantage, where spending can help with business problems related to tightening credit and cash flow? Since many companies see IT mostly as a cost to be contained in a slowdown, IT management needs to roll up their sleeves and highlight the ROI for software projects.

According to the article bottom line is UNCERTAINTY = DEMAND.  The uncertain economy only increases the demand on IT. Closer collaboration has been the megatrend of business technology this decade–embedding IT into the fabric of business processes, and forever erasing the line between “IT and the business.” Leaders can’t let this economic slowdown, whether it proves mild or fierce, set back that progress.

Popularity: 21% [?]

GE’s Diversification Strategy

The Bluest of the blue chip companies, General Electrics’ stock has been falling precipitously due to global credit crunch.  General Electric (GE) had used the Lateral Diversification Strategy or Conglomerate Diversification Strategy as its growth strategy.  By consistently increasing in performance objectives beyond past levels of performance, GE has been able to raise its dividends consistently for the past 32 years and has displayed its focus on growth.

GE has taken advantage of Globalization trends and has penetrated into the emerging market aggressive.  It has successfully continued to improve the bottom line.  It has been the only original member of Dow component, but lately GE has been struggling with managing a number of its business unit’s profitability.  Has GE’s growth engine run out of steam now? Let’s look at its diversification strategy.  Management thinkers have developed a framework to address complexity due to lateral diversification.  According to Wikipedia “Lateral or Conglomerate Strategy is when the company markets new products or services that have no technological or commercial synergies with current products, but which may appeal to new groups of customers. The conglomerate diversification has very little relationship with the firm’s current business.”   So the underlying factor is that in lateral diversification the company enters new market even if they don’t have any ‘synergy’ with the existing business.  Companies like GE try to leverage economy of scope, their branding strength and sometimes their size (market capitalization) to penetrate new markets globally, manufacture and service new products.

Success in Lateral Diversification Strategy depends on capital allocation.  The process that allocates capital so as to maximize the return on that capital is an indicator that the company is successfully implementing the Lateral Diversification Strategy.
The GE- McKinseys’ nine-box matrix offers a systematic approach for the decentralized corporation to determine where best to invest its cash. Rather than rely on each business unit’s projections of its future prospects, the company can judge a unit by two factors that will determine whether it’s going to do well in the future: the attractiveness of the relevant industry and the unit’s competitive strength within that industry.  The matrix is shown below

According to McKinsey article on Enduring Ideas, placement of business units within the matrix provides an analytic map for managing them. With units above the diagonal, a company may pursue strategies of investment and growth; those along the diagonal may be candidates for selective investment; those below the diagonal might be best sold, liquidated, or run purely for cash. Sorting units into these three categories is an essential starting point for the analysis, but judgment is required to weigh the trade-offs involved. For example, a strong unit in a weak industry is in a very different situation than a weak unit in a highly attractive industry.

Using this matrix, GE has been successful in allocating its resource in an attractive industry where it can leverage its business unit’s competitive strength.  It has divested and continues to divest from industries that are less attractive and where it does not have any competitive advantages (Example:  GE has divested from manufacturing TVs and currently looking to get out of consumer lending business).

Although this matrix enables the company to correctly allocate capital it does not prevent GE or any other company is from failing to understand the ‘real’ attractiveness of the industry.  Past few years, GE has been wrong (along with all banking and finance companies) in categorizing finance as an attractive industry and GE capital has been responsible for more than 50% of revenue and income growth.  The nine-box matrix does not prevent a company from differentiating a bubble from a real growth story.  That has been the problem with GE share price decline lately.  Although GE is in the middle of this new global turmoil, I think they will emerge out successfully in the long run.  They can continue to successfully use nine-box matrix to allocate resource, but personally I believe that they will also need to invest in a new process (or processes) to identify the real ‘attractiveness’ of a sector and not get carried away by hype like in the past.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Managing IT during Global Economic Meltdown

As the global economy collapses, companies are bound to trim spending to improve the bottom line. Since information technology is bucketed as cost, senior executives inevitably will turn their attention to IT budgets for substantial contributions.  Earnings miss by SAP (read article here) indicates that both Multinationals and SME (small and medium enterprises) are nervous of the credit crunch and its impact on the global slowdown of economy.  They are delaying their Enterprise Application Deployment.

Yet in some instances, IT investments deliver more value to a company’s top and bottom lines—by creating new efficiencies and increasing revenues—than any savings gained from traditional IT cost cutting.  This according to McKinsey Article titled Managing IT in a downturn: Beyond cost cutting

McKinsey Survey has identified number ways technology investments that can have a substantial impact
•    Manage sales and pricing. Develop insights into customer segments and improve pricing discipline to increase revenues without increasing prices.
•    Optimize sourcing and production. Rethink supply chains and logistics to improve the scheduling of deliveries and inventory management.
•    Enhance support processes. Improve the management and use of field forces (such as installers and field technicians) and of customer support centers.
•    Optimize overhead and performance management. Sharpen awareness of risk exposure and improve decision-making and performance-management processes.

The article further says, to extract value from these opportunities, companies must make managerial improvements in two areas.
Developing new insights : Few companies have successfully capitalized on the explosion of data in recent years. Often this information, residing in separate IT systems or spread across different business units, has never been mined for insights that could add value. When such teams use the data to compare best practices across regions or to identify under- and overserved customers, for example, they can identify hotspots of revenue leakage.
Optimizing processes : As IT becomes tightly integrated with processes, breaks in workflows often get built into systems and diminish productivity. Shining a light on these areas with an integrated view of operations and technology may well surface problems, which often involve outdated processes, manual steps, redundancies, and bottlenecks. An 80/20 approach can highlight a modest number of activities that, when corrected, deliver a disproportionate amount of value. Companies can usually apply these fixes in short order. Adjustments to workflow processes may also promote greater adherence to corporate sales-discounting and bidding policies.

These findings by McKinsey, highlights the need for companies to have an IT strategy.  Without well thought out IT strategy, any macroeconomic changes (as seen in the past few days) has a tendency to derail IT investment (be it in infrastructure like virtualization or software implementation like SAP).  Companies that refuse to lose focus due to these short term distractions, and continue to invest in their IT, will in my opinion emerge much stronger at the end of this proverbial dark tunnel.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Re-Branding CIO

The first step in managing IT Manager, CIO brand is understanding one’s environment. IT managers persist in believing their work is about deploying hardware and software when, in fact, their primary job is about deploying change. CIOs are selling change to people who often don’t want it. This is according to SearchCIO article CIOs must learn to brand themselves despite stereotypes.

According to the article good IT leaders need to hone in on how the technology affects their customers, rather than focusing on the technology.  Customers’ decisions are colored by their past emotional experiences, triggered by circumstances and driven by subconscious beliefs. Therefore, CIOs must know their audience and communicate and address those hidden emotional issues.  Article also notes that CIOs also need to understand that the art of persuasion, unlike logical ability and awareness, is “downright irrational.” IT people often have no idea that what they are saying provokes anxiety in the people they’re trying to persuade. IT managers should be striving for a brand that evokes positive feelings.  So, CIO needs to rebrand themselves as ‘transformational leader’.

As it turns out IT managers and CIOs might be under the impression that they are dealing with the IT hardware and software and communicate the technology status to the stake holders (non technical managers and customers). In reality, those stake holders are interested in understanding the impact of that technology on the business.  Not only that IT has continues to be disruptive by challenging the existing business process.  But it becomes the job of CIO and IT Managers to ‘sell’ those technology solutions to the larger audience.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Wells Fargo’s Strategy to Filter Out Innovative Ideas

Glen Grosslight senior VP of the Technology Information for Wells Fargo writes about an unique way to enable the employees to innovate.  They have used a stock exchange concept in which team members trade shares on innovative ideas. Hence a ‘free market’ for ideas and innovation was born.  (Read more at Wells Fargo Uses Market To Filter Out Innovative Ideas).  First a small selection team evaluated ideas submitted by team members against specific criteria, and then placed ideas on the market for trading. Based on hundreds of team member ‘innovation investors’, the innovation ideas’ stock values went up and down just like the ‘regular’ stock market.  Later a second market based on targeted challenges was set forth by the Wells Fargo’s six technology councils. Team members submitted innovative solutions to the challenges from these councils, and these were traded on. Top five ideas were sent to into a single elimination “playoff round” where traders (internal Wells Fargo employees) invested in these top ideas to choose the ultimate winning idea.

Free market approach towards generating ideas is an interesting way to involve the employees to prioritize and identify ways to innovate.  It gets the employees excited and gets them involved in solving problem.  This is a creative way to implement collaboration strategy.  This is also an excellent way to manage knowlege.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Change Management Maturity

IT must implement an effective, mature method of change management or experience significant downtime and negative impact on productivity and profits according to Dennis Powell in his Enterprise Systems article titled Five Keys to Successful Change Management Maturity.

Application and infrastructure change requests of all sizes — from large-scale and important projects to small and low-priority requests — continually inundate IT operations teams. To meet these requests and to be responsive to the business, IT operations teams must fully understand how these changes will impact the day-to-day operations of systems and processes. This brings about a “perfect storm” for IT operations teams: IT and infrastructure changes are necessary in every organization and grow along with business and system expansion, but in organizations with increasingly complex environments, changes can lead to significant service outages and downtime.

Following are the five factors of Change management maturity offering benefits to business operations

1. 1. Change Scheduling: Unscheduled changes are often a major cause of service downtime, especially if the changes are done quickly and without proper testing or screening. Regularly scheduling changes can significantly reduce the number of production problems, the number of IT staff members dedicated to change management, and even the number of emergency changes made.
   2. Automation: The more an organization can automate and schedule changes on a regular basis, the less likely it will be that increases in the number of changes will negatively impact the process.
   3. Process Adoption: Adopting best practices, such as ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), can go far in helping organizations achieve change management maturity.
   4. Change Testing Environment: Companies that test changes in a formal testing environment are more likely to catch problems that changes might cause. A test environment can be expensive to develop and maintain, but because it provides an available representation of the production environment, the environment provides a more flexible “sandbox” that IT can use to minimize emergency changes and their impact.
   5. Completeness of Change Testing: Testing changes on the entire software infrastructure stack, as opposed to a single component or partial systems, can significantly improve the IT operations team’s confidence in changes and reduce the number of problems caused by the changes.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Software Quality

IT management tends to define QA as being simply “testing”. As such, they often view QA as just bringing in some warm bodies to run some test scripts once the coding is all finished. There is actually far more to QA than just testing, and there is far more to testing than just running test scripts.  This according to Baseline article Second Class Software Quality in Major IT Projects.  Also read Bruce Webster’s blog on QA here.  The articles also notes that if the organizational challenges to QA were simply lack of time and money, then they could be readily solved by simply allocating more time and money. However, there is a second, more intractable issue. Put simply, an IT engineer who works in QA has less professional status than one who works in actual coding. The old IT joke is that you conjugate the verb “to program” thusly: “I architect, you code, he or she tests.”

I think this is a huge problem with the waterfall methodology of software development.  Hence newer and better software development like Agile software developement makes more sense.  Testing is not an afterthought.  It’s part of the development process itself.  Its not ‘he or she’ that tests the application, but it’s more like ‘we architect, we code and we test’. Its a bad idea to create professional ‘status’ when QA is delegated to someone with lower status.  Wouldn’t the ‘senior’ or smart developer be passionate and responsible enough to ‘bake’ quality into the product he or she develops?  How can you call someone a good developer if they can’t make their code and architecture bullet proof to outliers and extreme cases?

QA is the collectively responsibility of everyone involved in the project including Project Manager.  The Project Manager also needs to smartly allocate time in the project time line to do some systematic testing.  This should happen not at the end of the development but regularly after the functionaly is built and integrated.

Popularity: 23% [?]