SMARTER STRATEGIES

Five Resources for Business Agility

John Jainschigg | Date: 05-25-10 | Comments

Check out these hot resources to spark ideas in keeping your business agile, growing and profitable.

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.