The Hindu Business Line : Plugging knowledge leaks

Senior executives of an emerging biotechnology company had to travel to parts of the world that were not the most secure. And they “often carried highly sensitive corporate material with them while travelling,” narrates Kevin C Desouza, about a client of his, in Managing Knowledge Security ( www.vivagroupindia.com). His suggestion to the company was simple: “Do not carry sensitive material during travel.”

If you wonder if that is possible, here is the process, as the author describes: “Travelling executives would meet with a local computing vendor in the country of interest, purchase a laptop, and download the requested material from their home office using a secure telecommunications channel. Then they would conduct their business…”

“Before leaving the country, they would upload any material that they needed over a secure connection. Soon afterwards, they would destroy the hard drive of the laptop and return the rest of the laptop to the computer vendor.”

The strategy was not easy or cheap, concedes Desouza. “The organisation had to forge alliances with local computing vendors in three frequently visited but insecure locations. The organisation was required to pay fees for use or the laptops and reimbursements for the hard drives.” Also, the executives had to spend time and effort to upload and download material.

Yet, the strategy was worth the costs in at least two ways, says Desouza. One, it minimised the loss of intellectual assets, and two, it reduced the threats faced by the executives. “After all, in the countries the executives visited, it was not uncommon for business executives to be taken hostage and held to ransom.”

Compulsory reading material for your staff before they embark on their next high-risk trip.

Patents and programs

Do computer programs qualify for a patent? To answer this question, the UK courts have relied on a variety of approaches, writes Feroz Ali Khader in The Law of Patents – With a Special Focus on Pharmaceuticals in India ( www.lexisnexis.co.in).

For instance, the verdict of the Court of Appeal in Aerotel Ltd vs Telco Holdings Ltd spoke of three approaches, viz. contribution, technical effect, and ‘any hardware’. The last is about ‘whether the claim involves the use of, or is to, a piece of physical hardware, however mundane (whether a computer or a pencil and paper)’. This approach was adopted in three cases – Pension Benefits, Hitachi and Microsoft – the author elaborates.

He states that a mathematical or business method or a computer program per se, or an algorithm, is not patentable under the Patents Act, in India, though Article 27 of the TRIPS (Trade-Related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) Agreement does not exclude them from patentability.

Computer programs are protected as a literary work under the Copyright Act, 1957. And “a claim expressed as a computer arranged to produce a particular result and computer programs which have the effect of controlling computers to operate in a particular way may be subject matter of a patent.”

Valuable reference.

Shed ‘educated incapacity’

Do you feel weighed down by the past, even as the rush of the present blinds you? Take a break, to read FutureThink by Edie Weiner and Arnold Brown ( www.pearsoned.co.in). “Future can be grasped only when you combine objective information about change with clear-eyed thinking,” they declare.

First, shed ‘educated incapacity’, they exhort, especially those who have too much information to see clearly. “As you become more experienced, ‘forgetting curves’ become much harder to navigate than ‘learning curves’.”

The authors list four thinking techniques to overcome ‘educated incapacity’ as follows: Looking through alien eyes, trend/countertrend, substituting the spiral for the pendulum, and the extremes inform the middle.

‘Alien eyes’ are what you can find in employees who leave and later rejoin after a stint in a different organisation; they often come with a different perspective. ‘Boomerangs’ are former employees who left to go to Internet startups and then returned to their original jobs, the book informs.

“In the year 2000, at e.Com, those who left were not forgotten, but rather put on an unpaid leave of absence. Another company didn’t hold an exit interview for 45 days, hoping the resignee would change his or her mind and return.” The workplace, which used to frown on ‘betweenity’, is now encouraging or capitalising on it, the authors observe.

“Technology, thy name is poetry,” reads a section in the chapter on trend/countertrend. “Generation X – and, possibly even more, Generation Y (those born since 1978) – in their search for meaning are attracted to terminology that is more image-laden than that of recent years… For emerging generations, the connectedness of technology to the psyche may be an important part of their adaptation to the future.” High-tech, high-touch, as John Nasbitt calls.

“The more technology there is, the more its countertrend, humanisation, becomes important.”

A book to prepare you for the future race.

Project management

For managing a project well you need to “define tasks, set task durations and dependencies, and assign resources to tasks,” and, well, do a lot more. For the ‘more’ part, though, you may take help from How to Do Everything with Microsoft Office Project 2007 by Elaine Marmel ( www.tatamcgrawhill.com).

The book is about how Microsoft’s software can assist you in applying project management concepts to finish projects within time and budget constraints. For example, with inputs given by you, the software ‘calculates the length and cost of your project schedule’, updates the schedule ‘as you make timing and cost changes’, so that ‘you can focus on the effects of changes to a project rather than on the changes themselves’.

Hands-on guide.

Easy e-learning

Can computers replace human contact in learning environments? Opinion on this has been mixed, writes Laurel Alexander in Online Training ( www.jaicobooks.com).

A common culprit contributing to the ‘loss of touch’ for the e-student is the lack of bandwidth. “Limited bandwidth means slower performance for sound, video, and intensive graphics, causing long waits for download that can affect the ease of learning. The problem is greater over the public Internet, where more traffic jams occur.” Fatter pipes, greater compression of data, and hybrid CDs can be effective as antidotes.

‘Live’ e-learning classes offer plenty of interaction, argues Alexander. With people logging in from all over the world, you may meet many ‘you never would have met in a traditional classroom setting.’ Where, however, students find e-learning ‘uneasy’, consider a gradual introduction of the technology, she notes, citing Brandon Hall.

Constructive counsel.

Network value

In the age of the Internet it is no longer good enough to offer a product in line with its value alone, says Yoshitaka Kitao in ‘The SBI Group Vision and Strategy’ ( www.wiley.com). You need to offer ‘network value’, he adds.

“For example, let us say that there is a fellow who wants to buy a house. The first thing he has to do is look up real-estate information, or obtain housing loan information such as what a financial institution offers, the most reasonable interest rate, and so on.”

There’s more. The prospective buyer may also want to know if the property is close to schools, parks, hospitals and so on. He would look for information on relocation, interior designers, etc. when it is time to move into the new house. “If our group were able to offer every piece of information needed while other financial institutions were not able to, then whom would these customer select?” asks Kitao.

Strategic answers from the head of SBI Holdings, Japan ( www.sbigroup.co.jp), which aims at ‘bringing financial innovations to the forefront of the financial industry, capitalising on new opportunities emerging via the Internet and developing financial services that further profit customers.’

Tailpiece

“I was prepared to be an e-employee till they…”

“Proposed a pay-cut?”

“No, they insisted I should have the boss’ photo as the desktop wallpaper!”

dmurali@thehindu.co.in