“Public debate over outsourcing has been marred by two sets of serious muddles,” frets the essay. “The first set of muddles relates to what is meant by outsourcing.” According to some, the word goes “beyond purchases of offshore arm’s length services to include, without analytical clarity, phenomena such as offshore purchases of manufactured components, and even direct foreign investment by firms.”

The second set of muddles is subtler, says Srinivasan. Even some economists who use the appropriate definition of outsourcing sometimes worry about whether arm’s length trade in services should be treated with the same analytical tools as trade in goods, or whether it presents different issues, he notes.

Outsourcing is fundamentally just a trade phenomenon, argues the essay. “A productive public debate about outsourcing might usefully begin by restricting the ‘outsourcing’ phraseology to services traded internationally at arm’s length and principally online: what the WTO calls Mode 1 services.”

For an in-depth study.

The logic for a KMMM (knowledge management maturity model) in the Indian IT industry is strong, say Ganesh Natarajan and Uma Ganesh in Unleashing the Knowledge Force (www.tatamcgrawhill.com). “In the current scenario where attrition of skilled manpower remains one of the critical concerns of all industry CEOs, the need to have a predictable and step-by-step movement towards knowledge management maturity cannot be over-emphasised,” they reason.

There are four stages in the progress towards knowledge maturity, one learns. The first is the pre-knowledge initiation stage, in which the organisation’s success in getting business is ‘largely due to being first in the market with a great product or idea, with no attempt to establish any processes for knowledge capture or dissemination even among current practitioners’.

In the second stage is ‘knowledge initiation’, with explicit information capture on a regular basis for all customer-related transactions. In this stage, “there is some amount of predictability in knowledge sharing at the service delivery level, but there is little or no sharing of knowledge within the sales community and also between sales and service delivery.” As a result, the company has ‘generally satisfied customers’ but ‘poor replicability of success because of lack of knowledge inputs to the sales force’.

Insightful analysis.

Battle lasers, warheads using plastics, ceramic armour, smart bombs, bee-inspired robots, sniffing sensor, bio-fuel for missiles, e-textiles for battlefield sound detection… Welcome to The Geeks of War: The Secretive Labs and Brilliant Minds Behind Tomorrow’s Warfare Technologies by John Edwards ( www.pentagon-press.com).

The book discusses ‘information systems’ in a chapter titled ‘the fingertips war’. Info at fingertips that the military increasingly demands includes ‘data on factors such as troop movements, local terrain, weather, and available resources’.

As you may know, early computers such as Colossus and the Harvard Mark I ‘helped Allied leaders break enemy codes, project artillery shell trajectories, plot ship courses, and handle a variety of other time-critical computations’. Computers are as vital to today’s military as bullets and bombs, writes Edwards. “Modern computers, which can be as small as a single chip, control everything from jet fighters to trucks,” and bring bandwidth to the battlefield!

For instance, project RADAR (Reflective Agents with Distributed Adaptive Reasoning) incorporates techniques from “a variety of fields, including machine learning, human-computer interaction, natural language processing, flexible planning, and behavioural studies of human managers.”

Then, there is ‘battle blog’, being tested out by NUWC (the Naval Undersea Warfare Centre) to bring together teams of people. “If it succeeds, it could have important military applications, and the future of blogging could be very different from what it is today.”

Racy stuff.

Millisecond, microsecond, nanosecond and so on, we know. But what is honkosecond? ‘The smallest measure of time known to science,’ according to a UCLA professor, cited in A Geography of Time by Robert Levine ( www.vivagroupindia.com). The honkosecond is ‘the time between when the traffic light changes and the person behind you in L.A. honks his horn’!

Being able to shift into the consciousness of another pace of life, no matter which the direction, has its rewards, says Levine. “Taking control of time – learning to live ‘inside the time’ – is an empowering experience.”

For a relaxed read, far away from the clock.

A semi-secret society named Oulipo was formed in November 1960, in France. Its members composed “thousands of poems and sonnets, many of them based on mathematical concepts of combinations and permutations of nouns, verbs, and letters,” informs Amir D. Aczel in ‘The Artist and the Mathematician’ ( www.landmarkonthenet.com). “Computers were just beginning to be available at the time the group began its work in the early 1960s, and computer languages, especially ALGOL, were receiving much attention from the public.”

There was general wonder and amazement at the way computers were made to act using ‘commands’ that resembled human languages, writes Aczel. “People were fascinated by these ideas and wanted to understand the relationship between human language and computer languages. Oulipo was especially attracted to ALGOL and its structure and used this computer language – and often the attendant Boolean logic of computers – to create new poetry.”

Here is sample work: “Start: To make etiquette/ Go To commentary/ While Variable Not False/ Otherwise True. End.”

Of endless interest.

“His father has the BNB71 gene for the heart disease.” “He does? That makes no sense. The guy was a health nut.” “He had the gene… The insurance company picked it up and cancelled the son as ‘pre-ill’.” “How did they get the information?” “It’s online,” she said. “It’s online?” “This is a legal inquiry,” she said. “Under state law it’s all discoverable. We’re required to post all lab findings to an FTP address. In theory it’s password-protected, but anyone can get to it.” “You put genetic data online?” “Not everyone’s data. Just the lawsuits…”

A gripping snatch from ‘Next’ by Michael Crichton ( www.crosswordbookstores.com). Catch up.

Tailpiece

“Came to tell you that I sent you an email…”

“Oh, let me check. What’s it about?”

“Just to say that I left a missed call on your mobile.”

dmurali@thehindu.co.in

More Stories on : Books | Outsourcing | Books 2 Byte

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page