I note that CIO magazine’s November 2005 edition has an article on business activity monitoring (BAM) which allows the business to respond to the changing environment, and be more responsive to problems in production. Although it can be simply about monitoring stock levels and sending a simple alert, it can be a whole lot more than that, and a lot more closely aligned with data mining and data warehouse techniques.
To find out more, read the article.
Open source software continues to have an impact that its founders may never have envisaged, although I’m certain they would approve. The United Nations has supported an initiative of a $US100 laptop – being pursued by the One Laptop Per Child non-profit organisation.
It’s a hand-cranked (!) laptop capable of addressing most student’s requirements. It includes a web browser, a word processor, email, and so on, and it’s all based on Linux.
It was launched with a prototype on November 16th at the WSIS Summit in Tunis. I note that Andy Carvin has an 8-minute video covering the launch on his vlog at http://www.andycarvin.com/archives/2005/11/the_100_laptop.html.
Hmm. As always, everything I ever learn I learn from Wikipedia and Rocketboom.
It sounds like something that could indeed make the world a better place. Just imagine if developing companies really could have reliable ICT access and a generation that grows up using information systems and getting somewhere? Although $US100 is still a lot of money in some developing nations, it has to be better than the $US1,000 or so you’d need to pay out for the more standard system.
Given that it’s Linux, they’ve got a lot of learning that they’ll end up doing…
ZDNet have an article by Steve Ranger called ‘CIOs must bridge gap between business and tech’. The essential point of the article is that the role of CIO is not technical, it is about business strategy and implementing that in the technical sphere.
The CIO is responsible for the stewardship of technological resources within a defined architectural framework – and then implementing strategic direction (not technical implementation!) to achieve technological goals.
This echoes the discussion CPA Australia was having recently regarding information technology governance. Keep it simple for the board, and break up the tasks in terms a layman can understand: Keeping It Running, Plan It, Manage It, and Build it. At the end of the day, that’s all that’s involved in IT (it’s a lot more complex than that, technically, but business-wise – that’s all that matters.
You say tomato, I say tomato (say, that doesn’t work so well in print). A rose by any other name is just as thorny, that much is certain at least, and there are often objections to the term ‘best practice’. Although it is meant to capture practices that are generally accepted by everyone else, and that the ‘man on the Bondi tram’ might adopt if he thought about it, there are some who consider that ‘best practice’ is code for ‘doing what our competitors did five years ago’. And certainly there are some aspects of this – that ‘best practice’ is not necessarily ‘best’, it is just what everyone else is doing.
Still, it’s a good place to start, surely, and if it isn’t a place where competitive advantage can be gained (even unsustainable competitive advantage) for your business, why bother reinventing the wheel?
I note this recent article at NetworkWorld that discusses ITIL and COBIT, and discusses the two of them as being complementary, and in fact that they can result in more returns when coupled together. Certainly the news that 75% of IT Managers in the United States have plans to implement ITIL, or at least are thinking very strongly about it. When you check the fine print, of course, you realise that it isn’t that scientific a study (all those attending a conference on IT Service Management) but it probably provides some interesting flavour of what’s going on in the real world.
As a postscript to my earlier post regarding a Telstra Bigpond user who was stuck on the wrong plan, a follow up invoice for about $580 (yes, that’s right!) was received for June (the May one was about $350).
According to the contract, this is how the world should look, of course, but to pay nearly $1000 for a total of about eight gigabytes of download would seem a little bit of sheer bastardry when, for the same period, a different contract (for another $0.90 to the monthly fee) could be had under which it would cost less than $120 for 10 gigabytes.
Fortunately my colleague is a seasoned negotiator, rang, was honest with the call centre person and just used the silence tactic at his end of the phone and just plain didn’t hang up. Eventually he got $320 of the bill waived – probably because it was going to blow out the daily KPI for the poor person at the end of the phone.