Spend a Lot to Save a
Lot
According
to INPUT, a Reston, Va.-based IT market
research firm, U.S. federal, state and city
governments are poised to spend an aggregate of about $150 billion in 2010 on
IT products and services. Significant investments are expected to go toward key
"de-materialization" technologies such as virtualization, private and
public cloud services, and SOA, as well as geospatial applications and open-source
software.
INPUT's
survey of more than 140 government agencies suggests that key motivators include
the need to save and manage energy usage, minimize carbon footprints, increase
agency and end-user self-service capability, reduce complexity, and enable
scaling without increasing IT headcount. Another likely motivator is that
government agencies want to spend now to achieve order-of-magnitude
improvements in efficiency for the intermediate term. INPUT's Manager of Industry
Analysis Deniece Peterson points out that, while part of the anticipated
efficiency gains come from technology itself, the greater portion derives from
optimization of processes compelled by new technology adoption. To learn more, click here.
Close Enough for Jazz
Sooner or
later, all productive people grasp the wisdom of Voltaire's epigram "Le
mieux est l'ennemi du bien" ("The best is the enemy of the good").
They come to understand that seeking perfection may not be as efficient as
accepting a "good enough" solution. True productivity gurus may
eventually reach an even deeper insight: The very notion of a perfect solution
may inhibit innovation and prevent one from seeing a new and elegant way of
approaching a problem.
Apparently,
such an insight was recently granted to a set of MIT researchers, who used it
to produce an impressive new tool for software optimization at the Computer
Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Their tool looks at inputs to
and outputs from looping functions to estimate the speed gained and accuracy
lost if these loops are "perforated" (i.e., rewritten with a larger
increment, thus completing in fewer cycles). As the researchers discovered,
many applications—particularly those that process datasets of normal
distribution, like video compression algorithms—gain hugely in speed through
this kind of optimization, with no noticeable loss of quality. To learn more, click here.
Agile Tech for Agile Enterprise
The
principles of enterprise agility—decentralization, reduced organizational
complexity, self-directed teams, rapid iteration of new ideas, products,
versions ... in short, the whole "thriving on the edge of chaos" theme—can
be hard for managers to grasp. These principles can be harder still for IT
managers to map with assurance to requirements, key technologies and solutions.
For the agility-challenged,
IBM has done a great
conceptual favor in authoring the white paper "Making Sense of SOA and
Today's IT Innovations." In fact, this document is a sort of a manifesto
that outlines all the current trends in enterprise IT (SOA, virtualization,
cloud, IOD, BI, etc.) and shows their interconnections. The white paper then
goes on to call for a redefinition of the role of IT under the aegis of SOA
considered as a philosophical proposition: the idea that IT is a service
organization, which serves the business by providing reusable, dynamic tools. Such
tools are meant to execute tasks tailored to the business's users, policies and
methods. Definitely worth a read, whether you're in your "tech head"
or your "strategy head." To
learn more, click here.
Check it Out! Nano-RFIDs on the Way to Big Box
Stores
Moving to
implement "walk-through instant checkout" technology at Wal-Mart
stores, a team at Rice University, in collaboration with Sunchon National University in Korea, is busy driving down
the cost of passive RFID to the critical per-unit threshold prescribed by the
giant retailer. Project leader Jim Tour, professor of chemistry at Rice in Houston, came up with a
carbon-nanotube-infused ink that can be used to print RFID circuits on paper or
plastic. Tour’s colleague Gyou-Jin Cho, professor of printed electronics engineering
at Sunchon, offered the missing piece: a simple gravure process for managing
the printing. This process is far cheaper and more robust than ink-jet-based
techniques. To learn more, click here.
Saving Time While Managing Energy
Data center
managers are now mostly familiar with the benefits of measuring and managing
energy consumption—and with its expense, difficulty and complexity as well.
Most solutions require installation of hardware and software monitoring devices
on a granular basis. In addition, they may necessitate relatively
time-consuming integration tweaking and calibration to render a reliable
picture to central management applications.
A new
product introduced this quarter by Sentilla replaces dispersed monitoring
hardware and software with a single, central AI. This AI queries devices for
identity and configuration and accesses a central database to determine
specifications. It then optimizes its notion of individual device performance,
and deduces both per-device and overall energy consumption, usage and waste by
an iterative process of elimination. The Sentilla Energy Manager is said to
achieve effectively the same results (+/- 2% accuracy) as monitor-based
systems. To learn more, click here.
