The authors concede that it is difficult to assess and measure the risk related to employee morale; however, they group the impact under two broad heads, viz. reduced employee loyalty and diminished work quality.

“Individuals tend to explore job opportunities elsewhere as soon as it is apparent that services might be offshored.

Skilled and valuable employees will find jobs more quickly, and their departure will affect the quality of work and services. This poses great challenges for the project manager.”

Second in the list of ‘risks’ is the loss of innovation and know-how. The authors observe how, in organisations where competitive advantage is due to the creative use of information technologies, it takes a long time and costs heavily to develop savvy business employees who are technically competent.

“It is very expensive for a firm to build up its human expertise if it decides later to revert to in-house services; it is difficult to rehire skilled employees who have taken up positions with other firms, possibly with the competition. It is difficult to buy back lost loyalty.”

Important read.

Manpower planning has a long history, traces Paul Turner in HR Forecasting and Planning ( www.jaicobooks.com). The ability to mobilise human resource in a planned way was even a feature of the success of the Roman Empire more than 2,000 years ago, he writes.

“So much so that when Hannibal arrived at the gates of Rome, he found three armies in order of battle prepared to receive him. This was in spite of other military campaigns elsewhere.”

How was this possible? The Romans had trained every citizen in the discipline of the soldier, and every senator in the art of generalship, explains Turner.

“In Roman terms, the planning and creation of a succession of leaders and a flexible workforce, albeit a military one, was an attribute of their sense of anticipation of and planning for untoward circumstances. Until the decline and fall, that is.” Manpower planning is a dynamic activity, not a static one, the author argues. He bemoans the fact that many corporates see this activity as a tactical and strategic one, as no more than a numerical analysis.

The book cites research findings about how “traditional approaches to manpower planning have tended to delimit and define it as a central personnel activity, which attempts to reconcile an organisation’s need for labour with the available supply in local and national labour markets.”

Full of insights that can be apt in current times.

Search for ‘Agassi,’ and the first find among the 3-million-plus results on Google is about the ‘Andre’ icon in tennis. Second comes Shai Agassi, Founder and CEO of Better Place, which is planning to launch an AUD$1 billion electric car infrastructure project in Australia, working along with AGL Energy and Macquarie Capital Group.

“Better Place supplies lithium ion batteries and is building a ubiquitous electric car infrastructure throughout Israel, including 500,000 parking-meter-like charging points on Israeli streets and service stations where spent battery packs will be replaced with freshly charged packs within minutes,” informs a news report dated October 23 by Stan Beer ( www.itwire.com).

Do you know that Shai Agassi — whose San Jose start-up, TopTier Software, was acquired by SAP in 2001 — led a campaign inside SAP to open up its closed software and make it easier for customers to tweak applications to suit their needs?

With Henning Kagermann’s strong backing, Agassi began delivering bits of more flexible software in 2003, narrates an essay in Innovation Power Plays: How the world’s hottest change agents reach the top of their game ( www.tatamcgrawhill.com).

“Now the scale of Agassi’s makeover is becoming clear.

Over the next few years, SAP will launch completely revamped products that will be far more malleable than anything the company has offered before…”

Recommended addition to the managers’ shelf.

We use IP (Internet Protocol) networks almost all the time, so it may come as a surprise to many that these networks were not originally designed for carrying real-time traffic. Instead, they were designed for resiliency and fault tolerance, writes Chris Olsen in Authorized Self-Study Guide: Implementing Cisco Unified Communications Manager Part 2 (CIPT2) ( www.ciscopress.com).

Each packet is processed separately in an IP network, sometimes causing different packets in a communications stream to take different paths to the destination, Olsen adds.

“The different paths in the network may have a different amount of packet loss, delay, and delay variation (jitter) because of bandwidth, distance, and congestion differences.”

To explain how during peak periods packets need to be buffered in queues, the author uses an analogy from air travel, thus: “When you arrive at the airport, you must get in a line (queue), because the number of ticket agents (bandwidth) available to check you in is less than the flow of traffic arriving at the ticket counters (incoming IP traffic). If congestion occurs for too long, the queue (packet buffers) gets filled up, and passengers are annoyed (packets are dropped)…”

Valuable reference.

Kelly L. Murdock is aware that buyers of 3D animation software are driven by a variety of motivations. Such as, ‘to make money, claim a tax write-off, earn a way to Hollywood, or impress your girlfriend or boyfriend…’

Keeping all those considerations aside, Murdock locks into one goal, of creating something cool, and so he launches off with a bang, almost quite literally: his book 3ds Max 2009 Bible ( www.wileyindia.com) opens , with ‘Firing a cannonball’ to help you get ‘a soaring view’ of the software!

First, you’ll need the cannon, the author instructs. “Most of your cannon can be built from primitive objects, but you don’t want to get involved in too many details so you’ll keep it fairly simple.

Although you have a good idea of what a cannon looks like, it is helpful to download some reference images of the Web that you can look at while modelling…”

Prescribed for hands-on study.

In parts of Latin America, in areas of Africa not torn by civil conflict, and in India, Robert Shapiro foresees a ‘burst of growth and development’ over the next decade, driven by ‘the convergence of mobile telephone, mobile Internet, and inexpensive laptops,’ and the welcoming of foreign companies to build the networks and provide the hardware/software, and to invest in education.

“But the prospect of widespread Internet access will present a problem for China’s leadership, who consistently work to restrict their people’s unfettered Web access,” Shapiro writes in Futurecast 2020: A global vision of tomorrow ( www.vivagroupindia.com).

“In advanced countries, more computing power and falling software prices also should provide another boost to productivity, especially in the US and other less-regulated economies where companies are better able to adjust their operations to take advantage of new technology…”

Ideal for weekend browsing.

dmurali@thehindu.co.in

Tailpiece

“As the HR manager in the IT company, I have been assured…”

“Of an attractive pay package?”

“Plus the more important guarantee that in case of downsizing I’ll be the last to go!”

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