“Most committed online organisations do not just tweak their sites but opt for a complete overhaul and site redesign,” says the book, talking about culture. “Online vision goes beyond providing a corporate Web site but actively seeks partnerships and strategic alliances to increase traffic, brand awareness and sales.”

Convenience is important because the new-age customer values his time immensely; “From a B2B (business to business) perspective, the Internet and related technologies provide convenience with the streamlining of ordering, invoicing, fulfilment and payments processes that produce significant cost reductions.” On creative content, the authors’ advice to SMEs (small and medium enterprises) is to think of modernising the site on a daily basis if resources allow.

Resourceful guidance.

Fast, urban, tribal, universal, radical and ethical. Or, in short, FUTURE, the ‘six faces of global change’, which Patrick Dixon discusses in Futurewise, fourth edition ( www.vivagroupindia.com).

Being futurewise means planning to change tomorrow, future-thinking at every level, taking a broad view to out-plot the opposition, explains Dixon. “Being futurewise is about shaping the future, making history, having contingencies, staying one step ahead.”

The ‘fast’ chapter talks about the telephone revolution. Developing countries have leapfrogged over old copper networks with mobile technology, installing instant citywide 4G networks ‘with just a few masts on buildings’. The author forecasts an explosive growth of community-based wireless networks, “where home users of wireless broadband allow free access to millions of other people, on a reciprocal basis, while also being paid a small fee if non-users sign on.”

The ideal phone, according to Dixon, “weighs almost nothing, has batteries that never need charging (methanol fuel cells), accepts voice commands and works anywhere – even in a 20-mile tunnel.”

Exciting.

Information technology companies are among the top in terms of staff diversity. But diversity may need conscious pursuit, because “most professionals vastly underestimate the impact of cultural differences in their work,” rue Lionel Laroche and Don Rutherford in Recruiting, Retaining, and Promoting Culturally Different Employees ( www.books.elsevier.com).

“Whether it be accountants, engineers, or doctors, the common belief is that the technical skills can be universally recognised and that these skills are what will make or break the professional equally in any country.”

No, cultures are increasingly becoming relevant at work places, fusing, clashing and coevolving, argue the authors. They define culture as “the shared beliefs and values of a group of people, our learned way of living. It encompasses what we are taught to think, feel, and do in any given situation by the society in which we were raised.”

The iceberg analogy suits culture, explains the book, because what we perceive through five senses is but a small portion of culture, in the form of dress and appearance, body language and greetings, architecture and organisational structure. The bigger, invisible part is implicit and consists of ‘the values and thought patterns’, such as structuring time.

“One way to make this difference visible is to ask people when they would organise a half-day workshop for their teams,” suggest the authors. “In North America, the answer tends to be on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, or Thursdays (North Americans avoid Mondays and Fridays, since they are too close to weekends – people may forget on Mondays and may not be altogether there on Fridays); mornings tend to be preferred to afternoons. By contrast, Mexicans will often schedule half-day workshops on Fridays, preferably in the afternoon, while Indians will schedule half-day workshops on Saturday mornings.”

Insightful.

Can digital marketplaces and efficient supply chains co-exist? Yes, if we can move towards digital supply chains, a converging paradigm, says one of the essays in New Directions in Supply-Chain Management edited by Tonya Boone and Ram Ganeshan ( www.jaicobooks.com).

“We envisage a modular supply chain for the future – trading partners will possess the processes and the technologies that will enable rapid and seamless business integration,” predict the authors.

“It will be the B2B version of ‘plug and play’ where supply chain entities plug-in to their chosen trading partners via ‘digital hubs’ to design products, manage money, information, and people flows, and also fulfil orders.”

They suggest that the hub infrastructure can be owned by one or two major players in the supply chain who would set the required transactional standards or “outsource the task to ‘aggregators’ who will standardise the exchange of information between trading partners… Any trading partner who joins the hub will be rapidly integrated if the requisite standards are followed.”

A happening area.

Push aside the server, and welcome the blade server. For starters, “a blade server is a server chassis housing multiple thin, modular electronic circuit boards, known as server blades,” as http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com explains. “Each blade is a server in its own right, often dedicated to a single application. The blades are literally servers on a card, containing processors, memory, integrated network controllers, an optional fibre channel host bus adaptor (HBA) and other input/output (IO) ports.”

Blade servers are self-contained computer servers designed for high density, say Kiran Mani and Bradley Jee in On the Edge: A Comprehensive Guide to Blade Server Technology ( www.wiley.com). “Blade servers allow more processing power in less rack space, simplifying cabling and reducing power consumption.”

What can blade servers do for you? The authors list the following advantages: Infrastructure simplification (saving resources and improving control); investment protection (scale out by adding a blade as your needs change); flexibility (you can choose among vendors); manageability (single point for access and control); availability (owing to redundancy, advanced predictive failure analysis to achieve near-zero downtime); and budget savings (that should get the accountant interested!)

For the cutting edge.

What is surfing? “Unstructured browsing, whereby links are followed from page to page and educated guesses are made along the way to arrive at the desired piece of information,” say John Adams, Hafiz T.A. Khan, Robert Raeside and David White in Research Methods for Graduate Business and Social Science Students ( www.sagepublications.com).

“Surfing is fun when there is time; however, it is an ineffective method,” they counsel. Instead, find relevant information by browsing through subject directories or using keyword searching, they advise.

There is the ‘invisible Web’, with millions of databases containing high-quality information, one learns. Invisible because “when an indexing spider comes across a database, it can record the database address, but nothing about the documents it contains.” To search them, therefore, “you typically must visit the Web site that provides an interface to the database…”

Educative.

Tailpiece

“One-third of our staff do work, and one-third belongs to the ‘Z’ category.”

“Generally dozing off?”

“That’s right. And the balance one-third is the control-Z category; they undo all that’s done!”

dmurali@thehindu.co.in

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