The Hindu Business Line : For the stressed techie

Are you busy delivering an IT project in-budget though it was grossly under-quoted by the marketing team to clinch the deal? Or, are you feverishly learning a new technology on-the-job while already being billed as an expert in that area? Or, are you getting pushed to cover for non-existent team members to justify the over-billing?

To all such beleaguered software professionals Rakesh Misra dedicates his book The eMedha Paradigm: A project manager’s billion dollar odyssey (Srishti Publishers). “You belong to a global IT fraternity that is now getting impatient with old ways of body-shopping dynasties and wants to find the righteous ways of successfully managing increasingly global software projects in a more humane and heuristic manner,” Misra declares.

The ‘realistic roadmap for software project management practitioners’ that he lays down comes in the form of the acronym eMedha: Empowering ambience, manageable targets, entrepreneurial attitude, decisive mindset, heuristic approach, and attainable quality.

The author concedes that an empowering ambience, the first step, may meet with stiff resistance from control freaks who believe in vertically aligned hierarchies. He reasons, however, that such attitudes could survive in the past because of the centralised nature of corporate entities, but are of no relevance today as the omnipresent Internet has democratised corporate ecosystems.

Essential lessons in a story format.

Shared knowledge has to be managed

The key to the Internet and how it is changing business, even after the dotcom bust, is found in how it has put knowledge sharing into hyperdrive, observe Helen N. Rothberg and G. Scott Erickson in From Knowledge to Intelligence: Creating competitive advantage in the next economy (Elsevier).

Wal-Mart, for example, has long had close connections with suppliers, the authors mention. “Its well-known information technology infrastructure allowed individual stores to transmit sales information directly to companies such as Procter & Gamble, obtaining near-immediate replenishment.”

The system ran on an electronic data interface (satellite dishes atop individual stores and supplier facilities), explain Rothberg and Erickson. “The Internet, however, allowed Wal-Mart to employ a communication medium that was less expensive and provided easier integration among all the information technology systems across the firm.”

New programming languages such as XML have allowed easy compatibility, and different systems can now communicate with one another, the authors remind. Also, if the knowledge is not used, the technology doesn’t help much.

“The shared knowledge has to be managed. But the potential exists to move information and knowledge sharing to another level.”

The authors are positive that by broadening our definition of what valuable knowledge assets are and by taking an intelligence approach to their use, we can take this potential even further.

Imperative read.

Don’t overload dashboards

You can think of a dashboard as a container for reports, says Michael D. Lairson in Oracle CRM On Demand Reporting ( www.tatamcgrawhill.com).

The dashboard enables you to combine multiple reports onto a single set of pages that shares a common filter, and these reports may be from multiple subject areas, he explains.

“A dashboard can also serve as a launch page for multiple management summary reports, to make accessing multiple reports very convenient for your users.”

The author cautions against overloading dashboards with too many reports and objects. Also, “avoid horizontal scrolling by limiting your dashboard to two columns and formatting the reports on the dashboard to around 380 points wide,” he advises.

“The best reports for dashboards are those that summarise data into a small table with limited rows or single charts… Consider adding a link from the dashboard to a more detailed report rather than trying to get a large detailed report to appear in a dashboard.”

For the avid hands-on professional.

Training lexicon

Cost savings and convenience are the strongest drivers for the corporate uptake of e-learning, writes Samuel A. Malone in A to Z of Training and Development: Tools and Techniques ( www.jaicobooks.com).

However, some of the perceived obstacles, according to published research cited in the book, are lack of interactivity, cultural resistance, bandwidth limitations, difficulty in measuring return on investment, browser problems, firewalls and problems with standards.

On the downside, says Malone, e-learning is but one of a succession of supposed panaceas for learning that include programmed instruction, audio, video, television, computer-based instruction and the Internet. “All of these have failed to live up to the hype. They partly facilitate learning but are not complete solutions in themselves.”

According to the author, therefore, it is not possible to replace trainer contact and the social interaction of collaborative learning satisfactorily with technology.

Compact reference material for quick use.

E-recruiting

Corporate Web sites are increasingly becoming important in attracting candidates because they enable potential applicants to find out more than simply about the vacancies, writes Anna Kyprianou in ‘HRM and technological innovation,’ an essay included in Human Resource Management: A case study approach, edited by Muller-Camen and Croucher Leigh ( www.jaicobooks.com).

These sites, for instance, provide applicants with ‘visuals on what offices, break areas and amenities look like.’ Add this to employee blogs and applicants can now get a better sense of what it is like to work for an organisation, the author suggests.

She adds that interactive tools for processing applications (received online and over the email), and using online screening techniques such as online interviews or personality assessment can enhance e-recruitment.

“Some recruiters use mobile technology to notify candidates of potential job opportunities; a number of mobile access Web sites have been developed enabling applicants to search, view and apply for positions directly from a mobile phone.”

Comprehensive coverage.

Neural networks

Not many are aware that there are ‘successful applications’ of neural networks in the financial domain.

Examples are bankruptcy predictions, currency market trading, picking stocks and commodity trading, detecting fraud in credit card and monetary transactions, and CRM (customer relationship management), as mentioned in Data Mining for Business Intelligence: Concepts, techniques, and applications in Microsoft Office Excel with XLMiner by Galit Shmueli, Nitin R. Patel and Peter C. Bruce ( www.wileyindia.com).

The authors speak of one of the best known applications, ALVINN, an autonomous vehicle driving application for normal speeds on highways. “Using as input a 30 x 32 grid of pixel intensities from a fixed camera on the vehicle, the classifier provides the direction of steering.

The response variable is a categorical one with 30 classes, such as sharp left, straight ahead…”

The main strength of neural networks is their high predictive performance, say the authors. “Their structure supports capturing very complex relationships between predictors and a response, which is often not possible with other classifiers.”

Informative discussion of an important field.

Tailpiece

“To prevent any shock due to possible management initiatives…”

“Huh?”

“The HR guys installed on the server a new game called ‘downsizing’!”

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