The Hindu Business Line : Growing a bank through the punched card era

When a large organisation has an expansion programme, there is an opportunity to introduce rationalisation without tears. That was the view of John Matthai, the first chairman of the State Bank of India (SBI), when he proposed in 1956 that a scientific study be carried out of the bank's methods of solving the problems of growth. IBCON, a firm of business consultants, that had done similar work for the Indian Railways and the Tatas, suggested the formation of an O&M (organisation and methods) section at the bank's central office to carry out investigation and implementation.

Two years later, it was this section that would examine the scope for introducing mechanised accounting, and suggest that punched card accounting machines be installed at the central accounts office for facilitating reconciliation of inter-branch transactions. Machines were imported and the mechanised section began functioning from June 21, 1961, recounts Abhik Ray, in The Evolution of the State Bank of India: Volume 4, The era from 1955 to 1980 (www.penguinbooksindia.com). "Listing machines were also installed at the Bombay and Calcutta LHOs (local head offices) for preparing statements of accounts and other periodic advices for constituents."

By 1965, however, the increase in the volume of work was stretching the mechanised muscle of the bank, and there were active thoughts on installing `data processing machines which would ensure the speed required and at the same time adequately meet the needs for some years to come.'

The then chairman B. Venkatappiah discussed with staff representatives the establishment of an EDP centre, and gave them `unqualified assurance' that the move would not lead to any retrenchment or adversely affect any employee.

An EDP division of the planning department was thus set up in April 1964 for the establishment and control of the central EDP system, provision of other mechanical aids to LHOs and branches, etc., and by early 1967 computers like IBM mainframe and their peripheral equipment were acquired for the new centre at Bombay, Ray narrates.

"The entire work of branch clearing, namely, reconciliation of inter-branch transactions of all offices, was taken up by the centre from April 1, 1967. Teething problems were rapidly overcome and the system soon began operating satisfactorily."

Chronicle of value.

High availability

Do you get to hear the phrase `high availability' too frequently during discussions with application and hardware vendors? If `yes,' it may help to know that the catchphrase has different definitions, as Joel Stidley observes in MCTS: Windows Server 2008 Applications Infrastructure Configuration Study Guide (www.wileyindia.com).

"High availability is simply providing services with maximum uptime by avoiding unplanned downtime," he explains. "Often disaster recovery (DR) is also closely lumped into discussions of high availability, but DR encompasses the business and technical processes that are used to recover once a disaster has happened."

Defining a high availability plan usually starts with a service level agreement (SLA), notes Stidley. "At its base, an SLA defines the services and metrics that must be met for availability and performance of an application or service. Often an SLA is created for an IT department or service provider."

An example he mentions is that of the SLA agreement for an exchange server which might have uptime metrics on how much time during the month the mailboxes need to be available to end users, or it might define performance metrics for the amount of time that it takes for email messages to be delivered.

Two factors that highly-available solutions must consider are RPO (recovery point objective) and RTO (recovery time objective). The former is the amount of data that must be restored for a failure, and the latter is the length of time an application can be unavailable before service must be restored to meet the SLA.

Examples in the book are of how "a single component failure would have an RTO of less than 5 minutes, and a full-site failure might have an RTO of 3 hours. In a single server or component failure, the RPO would be 0, but in a site failure, the RPO might allow for up to 20 minutes of lost data."

Recommended read for the hands-on techies.

Painless physics

You come to your dorm room and find a notice put up by the inspection team. "We've detected a single specimen of a bug that doubles in number every twenty minutes. If the bugs grow to occupy more than 6 multiplied by 10 to the power minus 5 times m cubed, they'll take over your room, and you will need to find a new place to live while we fumigate your living area."

And you wonder how long it will be before things go really bad. "Do we have to clean up tonight, or can we just wait until tomorrow?" Use the power button on your calculator, to multiply by the same number lots of times without having to type it all out, advises Heather Lang in Head First Physics: A learner's companion to mechanics and practical physics (www.shroffpublishers.com).

"If your calculator doesn't have a power button, then you'll need to get a scientific calculator. It'll help you out in the long run as you move onto solving more sophisticated and complicated physics problems."

The `brain-friendly guide' introduces concepts through engaging problems. Such as, the Break Neck Pizza website, in the chapter on equations and graphs; the site has revolutionised pizza delivery through its patented `just in time' cooking process and its large fleet of delivery bicycles.

"But now it's even better! The award-winning Break Neck website has just been upgraded to give each customer a delivery time for their order." And you need to work out how to give the customer their delivery time, urges Lang. "It usually helps to be someone (or something) so you see what the physics looks like from inside the problem."

A book that parents would cherish studying along with their children.

Problem-solving skills are portable

Try lots of things when you're young, so you can find out what you like to do, reads a nugget of wisdom that Ravi Vakil captures in a portrait of Richard Rusczyk, founder of Art of Problem Solving (www.artofproblemsolving.com).

"When you find something you like to do, then do it. Learn how to do it very well. This sounds relatively simple, but kids get lost in the ticket-punching of college applications," rues Rusczyk.

"There's this myth of well-roundedness that is foisted on people. It's far better to be outstanding at two or three things you enjoy than it is to be a notch above adequate at everything. Those who are merely good at everything generally get beaten by those who are great at what they love to do. Of course, the true challenge is finding something you love."

If you were to ask him about the motivations for the site, he'd say he is trying to do the things that weren't done for him when he was a student. "I think this has been our main guiding light for building resources at AoPS. We're all trying to build educational opportunities that we wish we'd had when we were kids."

These resources focus on mathematical problem solving because problem solving skills are broadly transferable to other disciplines, Vakil observes in `A Mathematical Mosaic: Patterns & problem solving' (Westland).

A book you would long to be lost in the woods with.

Tailpiece

"Texting is so high in our company."

"That the chatter level within the campus has been replaced by keypad sounds?"

"Also, we had to add a new doctor to our medical room, a specialist in thumb problems!"

D. Murali