Paradigm of Conditioning

Paradigm of Conditioning

Most of our response/reaction/actions are conditioned. We are told to do a certain thing in a certain way and we continue doing it that way without questioning why ? A certain way works and we use it for all situations.

I feel this is a big problem,

don't know why I thought of this when I was on my way to office today.

If one approach is successful,we then just continue to do the same thing over and over again ...we are conditioned...then the situation changes and we become like fish out of water.

Each situation/case is different and it is important to deal with each accordingly - in cricket parlance, play each ball on its merits and the other factor is your capacity/capability..there is no one shot fits all.

Google XUL App

Interesing and simple APP - http://www.google.com/mozilla/google.xul

Beautiful Systems

One other thought that I have been engulfed with is the idea of "beautiful Systems"

This is a concept I picked up from the Tom Peters book "ReImagine".

Here the key point that stuck me was the fact that ...A system/process is first built for a given set of rules and conditions, then these rules change....we tweak the system or process to include these changes...then these rules change further...we tweak the system a little more...now we have a system which bears very little resemblance to the system that was originally developed but has all the weights of the original system that are still weighing it down. - ReImagine.

Good Blog - Bnoopy

I came across a new blog, I dont know who i have to thank for it, but the blog is excellect. It is by one of the founders of excite, i think its a very good blog..a must read for all people who would like to break out and create a venture of thier own.

Three very good ones were

Persistance - 1
Persistance - 2
Take a Cookie

I AM BACK.

Books i am Reading

Books I am reading

1. Direct from Dell
2. Beyond the last blue mountain
3. Leading Revolutions

Beyond the last Blue Mountain - Biography JRD

JRD Tata was a great man, but the one take away from the book, that i thought was key...is the objective or goal that drove the Tata's once you have such a clear goal than all desicions become simple is it in line with the objective if it is then go ahead else no go. Simple!!
Also the goal itself - Well this is the interesting thing...What is your goal?...More importantly for me what is my goal?

Direct from Dell, A well written book, but it reminds me of a text book...i think the content is "BRILLIANT" but the writing style could have been better, more incidents could have been highlighted...this is just my criticism, but they might have had thier reasons.

Leading revolutions, just seeking to become a reolutionary.

Enterprise Apps - Where do we go?

The first topic i am going to deal with is ERP, Yes enterprise resource planning. Now of all the things to do why that well, i think there is some big transition

that is going to happen in that market..still not to sure what it is

Why do i think there is going to be a transition, here are the top reasons...

1. ERP has become a Utility
2. ERP - II is / has happened
3. Open Source ERP packages are becoming available.
4. Market / Module Segmentation - Vendors used to segment the market till now by verticals etc, but moving into the future that will be
5. Reduced IT budgets need to use as much as possible for Tech Competitives building, rather than maintenance
6. Maintenance Costs are quite High, for ERP
7. Consolidation of the ERP Servers. - Central Costing
8. Bandwidth/Network Costs down
9. Hardware Cost down...maintenance costs still high
10.Real Time Management - Need!!!!!

In retrospect, the above mentioned points are

applicable to any of the Enterprise Applications.

Disappearing Act - Readers Complaint

There are a lot of things i have been meaning to blog but i have been pretty busy with stuff.

One of my readers KK (collegue) was complainting, He was away on a holiday...and logged on to read blogs only to find nothing interesting up there...Apologies KK.

Well now lets see if i am able to make up for lost time.

Kudos Bloglines

thanks bloglines, for allowing us to subscribe to yahoo groups/google groups and so on in the bloglines account. I think that is a mighty usefull functionality.

Bloglines is one of the best sites, i have used in the recent past. They are function rich and fuss little!!! - Great job guys!!!

Update: Bloglines just got a little better, Now they offer webservices to access data, built on OPEN STANDARDS(Need to find out what). It also syncronises with some Aggregators.

Quick Hack - Local News - Keyword Search

A blog finally!!!!!, I have had just too much on my plate the last couple of days-week and this trend seems to be continuing for some time, What can I say its crazy but true.

But today, I finally got to spend sometime doing not so mundane stuff.

Background the whole things started with a meeting with my boss, he wanted some functionality which would enable him to search a set of sites for specific terms/key words in them on a daily basis. At present a marketing analyst spends time going to each site and searches for this information and picks up the relevant links and displays it/documents it.

First thoughts, If all these sites has RSS wouldn't it be so cool. All this person would need to do it get these feeds into an aggregator and search for those particular terms or set up search feeds like those allowed by bloglines for those terms. But alas since there is no RSS feeds on these site...though I really wonder why?

So when required to come up with an alternative, I moved to Google Web API, the suggested approach is where I will maintain a simple text file list of the terms that need to be searched and another text file list of the sites that need to be searched in. And then using the google API get the search results for each of the words in all the sites using site and date restricted searches. Then compile all the results into a easily viewable format and present it to the team. - In the process of hacking it together. Going to try and develop it in both Python and Java..lets see how it goes.

Interesting Links

Interesting docs at accenture
Why IT Still Matters
Automated decision Making

Others
Ask questions and indicate how much you are willing to pay for the answer.
http://answers.google.com/answers/

Transfer Large Sized Files

Tranfer large size files from point A to Point B

Well yesterday a collegue of mine wanted to send a 12mb file to another person located in some part of the world,

Our servers dont allow us to host it up there for people to download...(needs to be configured)...so i wanted a quick and dirty way of doing that and the options i came up with are

xdrive.com - they have a 15 day trial edition - but u need to give u r card details. It is a pretty well know and secure place.

Gmail - checked
Option 1: Give the other person an invite and send the file to him at his new account.
Option 2: Send a email to yourself from the gmail account and give the other person the password.

Final alternative, though a little complicated, this might be good to set up for a long term - This systems uses the GMAIL, as a file system pretty cool stuff. But requires a a lot of set up, particularly since now GMAIL offers upto 1tb, details available at -
http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-filesystem/gmail-filesystem.html

Approach - Weddings ...Organisations

That is some title,

Well hopefully after reading the post you will make sense of it,

Last nite and this morning and later today ..I am attending a marriage of a friend of many years....he is getting married in the Marvadi(community) style.

And during the course of the wedding I kind of started analyzing why their weddings are more fun than ours and the first reason that I hit upon was their weddings are people focused ours are process focused.

When I say people focused, I don't mean to say they don't have process(rules/regulations) they do and quite a few...but still the important thing at the end of the day are the people and that people should have a good time.

Immdly I thought that is how organisations should be "process driven but people focused".

People should be at the heart of the process, and the objective of the processes should be help reach the people & organisational objectives/goals.

Okay time for me to leave and attend the final event of the wedding....

ps: Wishing KS and Meenal an very Happy Married Life.- All the best!

Architecture - I

Last night after a long time i got back to do some technical reading , this time it was the MSDN Library article on Enterprise Architecture and Design and the Integrated architecture framework by Andrew Macaulay.

I am just going to pick part from the piece that i liked and am going to put it up here,

'architectural view' of systems (both business and IT systems)
'the fundamental organization of a system, embodied in its components, their relationships to each other and the environment, and the principles governing its design and evolution'

Classify business and IT architecture into a number of different levels:

Enterprise Architecture. Defining the overall form and function of systems (business and IT) across an enterprise (including partners and organizations forming the extended enterprise), and providing a framework, standards and guidelines for project-level architectures. The vision provided by the Enterprise Architecture allows the development of consistent and appropriate systems across the enterprise with the ability to work together, collaborate, or integrate where and when required.

Project-Level Architecture. Defines the form and function of the systems (business and IT) in a project or programme, within the context of the enterprise as a whole and not just the individual systems in isolation. This project-level architecture will refine, conform to and work within the defined Enterprise Architecture.

Application Architecture. Defines the form and function of the applications that will be developed to deliver the required functionality of the system. Some of this architecture may be defined in the Enterprise and Project-level Architecture (as standards and guidelines) to ensure best-practice and conformance to the overall architecture.

Architectural Framework:
Break down the overall problem into a number of the related aspect areas covering Business (people and process), Information (including knowledge), Information Systems, and Technology Infrastructure, with two specialist areas addressing the Governance and Security aspects across all of these. Analysis of each of these areas is structured into four levels of abstraction: Contextual, Conceptual, Logical and Physical.


Architecture Framework

Contextual
Why do we need the architecture?
What is the overall context?

Conceptual
What are the requirements?
What is the vision of the Solution

Logical
How are these Requirements to be Met?

Physical
With What is the SOlution Built

Comparing Architecture & Design

	Delivers	Doesn't Deliver
Architecture	Non-functional requirements Functional scope and responsibilities (who does what) Key design and product choices High level design Design constraints	Prototypes Comprehensive functional requirements Detailed data analysis Built and implemented systems
Design	Functional requirements and how they will be met Detailed data analysis and data model as necessary System design documentation Built and implemented systems	Solution Vision Comprehensive and traceable non-functional requirements Security and governance architectures

Still to read integration with the RUP/Development Process.