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| Friday, 3 January 2003 |
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New strategies crucial for business sector progress - M. S. Jayaraman by Sudarshana Perera
Jayaraman, the Principal Consultant (Deeper learning and Systems Thinking) Selectica, Chennai and Consultant (Telemedicine and TQM) was here to deliver a lecture on IT Strategies for the New Economy organised by CIMA IT section at Hotel Taj Samudra recently. I observed that the business community in Sri Lanka is endowed with infrastructure such as telecommunication, electricity and other facilities and I am very optimistic that the business sector can reap the benefits of ICT and render a satisfied customer service, Jayaraman said. Sri Lankan professionals involved in critical areas of business I feel are talented and possess the know-how to implement new economic initiatives, he said. The IT structure at most of the business and other establishments in Sri Lanka is on par with Bangalore and they must always think innovatively to come up with new IT strategies. There are three perspectives for a software quality such as stability, evolvability and flexibility, the Lankan enterprises must also work out IT strategies incorporating these three perspectives of quality. The new IT online systems must meet the capability to replace the old systems continually by the new IT strategies in meeting the emerging requirements. It also must make possible the new online systems to function in harmony with other systems and applications. The challenge that lies before IT professionals is to find information strategies that is contextually relevant and purposeful, he said. Those engaged in the ICT sector must be aware that Information Technology is no more about computing. It is all about living a life centred around truths and values, he said. Drawing some examples from India's IT education structure Jayaraman said that the Lankan government in partnership with private sector has to take the ICT education to the grassroots level. The sponsorship and assistance of the private sector in this regard is very important and fruitful. The cyber cafes established in remote areas of India have done a significant role in imparting IT education. It is the duty of the government to grant concessions and other facilities for the private sector to start cyber cafes and other IT institutes in remote areas. Commenting on Customer Relationship Management, he said that we have a plethora of CRM packages yet we have failed in providing hundred percent convenient and an efficient customer service. The real problem with CRM is not technology or processes. It is with people. Because we have fifth-generation technology propelled by fourth generation processes and controlled by third generation mindsets. Constant updating of knowledge on ICT and building a caring mindset are a sine quo none to overcome the challenges facing under Customer Relationship Management, he said. He also commended the Sri Lankan government for launching e-Sri Lanka initiative and emphasised the importance of wider private sector participation for the success of e-Sri Lanka. Right team with proper management vital for IT project success The Success of IT projects depend largely on putting together the right team and managing it properly - with the needs of both the project and the individual team members in mind. Creating teams that can deliver valuable software projects is a key challenge facing users and service suppliers alike. What constitutes a high performance team is under debate: more than 100 theoretical models of group development exist.All project teams go through a series of development stages before performing in a fully mature and effective way, and a team emerges from individuals through a series of stages in accordance with the shared experiences of its members. If the project is clearly defined and seen by all members as highly important, these stages may be dealt with in the first few hours. However, for most groups it takes longer, and managers of teams involving people from different parts of the organisation need to plan and allow time for group development. Forming teams made up of international staff also poses problems, especially if participants lack communication and language skills and mobility. People with roots in a particular country tend to find team integration difficult and rarely make it through the forming phase. We recall a lead developer who went back to Egypt one week after arriving in the UK. A mistake people make is thinking that we all share the same cultural goals and objectives: in truth many of us do not, and barriers have to be overcome and respect has to be won. Experience suggests that developing a people resource strategy and skills profile is an important starting point in putting together a high performance team, because it allows you to formulate your thoughts, needs, and goals in a structured and objective way. It also allows you to consider some of the longer-term practical aspects of managing a project. Key questions for a people resource strategy include:* Do I know the technical skills required?* Do I know the soft skills required?* Do I need a training programme?* Do I need an incentive programme? * Will the staff see it through and support me? The last of these questions is interesting, in that it leads to an area of possible differences: individual goals versus organisational goals. This more than any other point raised so far determines the basis of success and productiveness of the project team. Edgar Schein, professor of management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has coined the term 'career anchor' to describe an individual's set of attitudes, values, needs and talents that develops over time and which, when developed, shapes and guides career choices and directions. He says all people develop some kind of picture of their work life and their own role in it. He identifies five career anchors: * Competence represents the need to be competent in factors associated with work, such as problem analysis, emotional stability, communication and dealing with people* Technical competence is associated with motivation for the challenge of a technical field, a functional area, or the content of a piece of work* The security and stability anchor symbolises the desire for an organisation that provides long-term stability, good benefits and basic job security* Entrepreneurial creativity embodies the need to create something, notably by trying new projects* Autonomy encompasses people's need to be free of constraint to pursue professional or technical competence. Research suggests that experience gained in early years is particularly influential in forming individual career anchors.Satisfying individual team members' needs must be a prerequisite to building a stable and productive team. However, fulfilling individual needs must be done within the broader project and organisational framework. Satisfying personal needs alone can result in social ambiguity and can reduce accountability and lead to tension in the team, especially if one person is seen to be favoured over others. Grid computing to integrate IT resourcess Grid computing integrates IT resources owned by distributed institutions.Resources are seen as services: a workstation cluster is seen as a compute service, a scientific database as a data service, a scientific instrument as a data capture service, and so on. Each service may be remotely configured and interrogated by a user to identify its interface. Service users might become providers and vice versa, depending on the applications they manage. A service can be: An application with a well defined Application Program Interface. An application used to access services on other resources, with a remote site administrator managing issues such as access policyA collection of coupled applications: here applications interact with each other but appear to a user as a single service.A software library, with a number of sub-services, all related in some functional sense: one project, Monet (monet.nag.co.uk/), aims to develop common interfaces to numerical librariesAn interface for managing access to a resource: for example scheduling priorities or checking licences. The core technologies used to build grids fall into the following categories:Distributed object technologies, from programming languages such as Java, C# and C++ to middleware such as Corba and .Net, and development libraries such as JXTA and Jini; composing applications from distributed software elements is an important theme .Workflow engines and user portals.Data management systems: the management and archiving of data are supported through metadata catalogues to specialised relational or object databases; a major concern is the need to integrate different data models and types, data storage systems, access rates and pollicies. Task scheduling systems: existing grid systems work with local schedulers and task management systems. Task management is often delegated to these and is not directly managed by the application. Current work focuses on exploring the activities that must be managed by a 'super-scheduler', aimed at providing a common Application Program Interface that could be mapped to specific functionality offered by a local scheduling system Security, a key concern for many grid users, is currently based on digital certificates.Accounting: monitoring service use to support service charging is especially important when a service involves licensed software or access to a powerful computer or a proprietary data set.Cycle stealing: combining the power of a number of machines across a grid; an emerging idea is that of using spare capacity by downloading programs which become active when a computer is not being used (like screensavers do). In this way a large number of machines may be integrated and used to solve a large problem. One concern is to discover business models to exploit grid computing ideas more effectively. The following are often identified as being useful: Establishment of virtual organisations, with resources from a number of organisations being combined to handle a single business process: the grid provides the management infrastructure that allows such an organisation to be formed and then disbanded on completion of the business process Cycle stealing is an important area, (Omer Rana) |
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Produced by Lake House |
The application of new Information Technology Strategies is vital to
face the challenges brought about by the new economic order. Business
establishments will have to rethink and reengineer their products,
services and delivery processes utilising efficient and the most suitable
customer relationship management softwares, said M S Jayaraman in an
interview with Daily News.
