The Hindu Business Line : Communication between services

Business agility, shorter development cycles, reduced time-to-market, lower total cost of ownership, strategic architecture, alignment of IT and business, and interoperability are among the benefits of SOA (service-oriented architecture) that Shankar Kambhampaty lists in Service-Oriented Architecture for Enterprise Applications ( www.wileyindia.com).

The author explains SOA as an architecture style that supports communication between services. “A service is a unit of functionality that exists autonomously and whose access is through a defined interface. Services are coarse-grained elements that are stateless, loosely coupled and communicate via messages.”

Since the basic concept of SOA is to encapsulate coarse-grained functionality and expose it as a service, it may be leveraged ‘to define a business model in which the service consumer only pays for the services consumed,’ he suggests.

“This pay-as-you-go model is attractive for small and medium businesses which cannot afford large IT investments in development of functionality that is standard, and even commodity-like (e.g. payroll or tax) that is non-core to their business.”

Such a model is similar to ‘renting’ software rather than ‘buying or building,’ and it is referred to as SaaS (software as a service), observes Kambhampaty.

“Since this is essentially a services model and SOA is an approach for services model, it follows that SOA is fundamental to SaaS.”

From a technical perspective, he looks at the possibility of SaaS as ‘a judicious mix of SOA technologies, Web 2.0 technologies and implementation of SaaS patterns.”

For the tech-avid.

Versatile temps

The Human resource outsourcing (HRO) market is pegged at $140 billion globally, informs an essay in Temping: an introduction, edited by B.V.S. Prasad and K. Sangeetha ( www.icfaipress.org).

While internationally the HRO concept has been quantified as giving a 30-40 per cent savings to HR departments, closer home, the benefits from HRO seem to have made good business sense for IT bigwigs such as Oracle, TI, MindTree Consulting, and Reliance Infocomm that have utilised temping staff.

A ‘temp,’ for starters, is a temporary employee in an organisation who is on a third-party payroll, i.e. temporary staffing company.

“Temping is a contractual employment arrangement based on a three-party liaison involving the temping agency, the client and the employee.”

The book cites a Deloitte survey for findings about the use of temporary workforce, for a variety of purposes: such as, to decrease wage cost, to meet seasonal demand, to substitute work of permanent workers holidays/sick leave, to execute unusual tasks, and to cover up permanent employees’ maternity leave.

At times, temps are hired for their special skills, or taken on a test basis to analyse their suitability to become permanent employees.

Of more than temporary interest!

KM needs trust

Knowledge management (KM) is as much, if not more, concerned with people and how they acquire, exchange and disseminate knowledge as it is about information technology, says Michael Armstrong in Strategic Human Resource Management third edition ( www.vivagroupindia.com).

KM is both about stocks and flows of knowledge, he elaborates. “Stocks include expertise and encoded knowledge in computer systems. Flows represent the ways in which knowledge is transferred from people to people or from people to a knowledge database.”

The purpose of KM, according to Armstrong, is to transfer knowledge from those who have it to those who need it in order to improve organisational effectiveness. Social networks can be particularly important to ensure that knowledge is shared, he adds. “What is also required is another aspect of social capital, i.e. trust. People will not be willing to share knowledge with those whom they do not trust.”

The author cautions that the culture of the company may inhibit knowledge sharing. “The norm may be for people to keep knowledge to themselves as much as they can because ‘knowledge is power.’ An open culture will encourage people to share their ideas and knowledge.”

Critical insights.

Technology in TV

One key limit on access to television is economic capital, says Joseph D. Straubhaar in World Television: From Global to Local ( www.sagepublications.com). “Even though people buy televisions before stoves, refrigerators, or indoor plumbing, hundreds of millions in the world still cannot afford a television,” he notes.

Understandably, therefore, the radio is still more widespread as the medium of the world’s poorest; “radio receivers are still much cheaper to buy and radio signals much cheaper to transmit over greater distances.” Yet, in places like Mozambique, as many as a third of the population cannot afford even simple receivers for AM radio or the batteries to keep them running, the author bemoans. In a chapter on ‘the technology for creating television spaces,’ he informs that cable systems are the dominant means by which satellite-delivered channels are carried to the viewer in most countries. “Cable systems are cheaper in many countries, costing only a few dollars a month in some places, for example, India, where systems are informal or illegal.”

Value read.

Writing on the wall

Move over, Skype, because here comes PingCo, advises Rebecca A. Fannin in Silicon Dragon: How China is winning the tech race ( www.tatamcgrawhill.com). “PingCo, which is shorthand for Personal Information Next Generation, or ‘ping,’ as in ‘ping me’ (‘send me a message’), promises to be a killer application for wireless communications,” she predicts. “It could be the next new thing that feeds consumers’ appetite for more. It also breeds addictive behaviour.”

This, PingCo does by going beyond text messages to mobile chat, games, and matchmaking. “Many of the basic services are free now, but PingCo is beginning to charge for premium add-ons such as a next-generation dating service that lets potential mates talk online before committing to a night out.”

Then there is the e-book on the mobile phone, at a monthly charge of $1.30 or 2 cents per 1,000 words; and ‘virtual weapons’ for less than a penny! “If China Mobile doesn’t do PingCo in – and that’s a big if – PingCo could be another Hotmail, the Web-based e-mail service that debuted in 1996 and in little more than a year had nearly 8.5 million users including grandmas who discovered the joys of sending e-mails to friends,” foresees Fannin.

Exciting stories.

Tailpiece

“I get goose bumps whenever I hear a cell-phone ring!”

“So, you put the phone in the silent mode?”

“No, I keep it in the other room.”

dmurali@thehindu.co.in