Problems with Automation without feedback

It was a gloomy, soggy and chilly day. I went down to our pantry to get some coffee…My office is right next to the famed “Durham Bulls Athletic Park”. I was looking out the window and found the green grass on the outfield particularly green and shiny.

Then I noticed, despite the rain, the sprinklers were ON. I heard on the news that we are short of rainfall for the month, which means, come summer, restricted watering of lawns.

Anyway, the picture triggered off another thought i.e. Advantages & Disadvantages of Automation. The incident I just explained is a perfect example. By automating the watering of the outfield, the park maintenance team has done a good job of not only reducing the effort required but also ensured that it is done on a timely manner. However, what they forgot is to include a “Feedback” mechanism. This can be either automated or manually provided so that the sprinkler system is shutdown during the rains. If they have not built an automated feedback mechanism, then they should think of one. This could be either through a local news channel or national weather service, whatever is the easier way. Alternatively they can have personnel to check on the sprinkler system during the rains.

We can extend this analogy to organizations. This can be in terms of mission critical systems that are automated or even personnel related operations like “Annual Appraisals”. I have seen and experienced many organizations going through a very elaborate process to design and build a smart system or process. However, when it comes to obtaining feedback and improvising the system or process, they utterly fail. This could be either lack of a mechanism to collate and analyze feedback or gross negligence.

Moral of the story is, however smart the systems or processes are, unless until you build a good feedback mechanism to continuously improve, the systems will fail or will become outdated and costly over a period of time.

Hello World!!!

It’s been a while since I had a new post on my blog. Things have been moving pretty fast for me these days. I mean that in a positive way. This post is my “pingback” into the blogosphere again, after a hiatus of about 3 months. I need to get back to my old form, speak my mind, that is. I promise to myself that I will have a couple of posts every week. Let’s see how good would I be on my word to myself

One more thing I want to announce through this post is that I am 10 lbs lighter now. Feels great to lose some weight. Am trying to get rid of another 15 lbs. That will get my BMI under 25 and make me ‘Normal’ and not over weight. It is amazing that I was able to do this in the past couple of months. I always used to say to myself that I do not have time for physical activity, except for a couple of tennis sessions with friends, in a week.

So, all you ‘OverWeight’ or ‘Obese’ folks out there, If I can do it, you can, too. So, just get out and walk,run,play. Do anything but eating or sitting idle. Things look very different and exciting when you get active. Good Luck!!!

EMC builds the mother of all storages – Symmetrix V-Max

EMC has developed a new architecture for Virtual Data Centers dubbed as EMC® Virtual Matrix Architecture™. Apparently they have even built an instance of this huge storage array named EMC Symmetrix V-Max™ . EMC is touting it as the world’s largest high-end storage array and also the fastest. it makes use of the commercially available off-the-shelf gadgets to build a very large storage system capable of providing 2 Petabytes of storage capacity using 2400 drives, 128 processor cores and 1 TB of global memory. It is also built for future where in availability of 200 GB, 400 GB flash drives are factored in. It also makes use of the VMWare technology to offer hundreds of thousands of VMWare or similar virtual machines in a single federated virtual infrastructure.

So, it is not a Myth or Hype anymore. Cloud Computing is for real. Organisations like EMC, Microsoft, IBM, Google, Amazon are making it a reality. I think  we are getting closer to making the “Utility Computing” a reality. However, the questions around Portability, Security etc. still remain and need to be addressed. I hope the Open Cloud community that took off recently will help us get there.

Accelerating your Projects using Commitment Based Project Management Technique – Training

I wrote about a session on “No Surprises Project Management” in a NC PMI Special Interest Group. Mr. Jose Solera is conducting a training session on the technique they call “Commitment Based Project Management (CBPM). For those of you who are interested, here’s a link for the training details: CBPM Flyer. I think it would be a good start for organisations that are setting up or planning to setup a PMO. I found the technique to be interesting and also very close to some of the Agile based project execution methods.

Lotus Live – IBM’s Cloud Offering

Not to be left far behind, IBM has come out with it’s own version of “Cloud” service.

 It is called ‘Lotus Live’ and even has a separate website named “LotusLive“. The services being offered falls into three categories:

1. Networking & Collaboration

• LotusLive Engage: Integrated suite of Web collaboration tools designed around online Web meeting service 
• LotusLive Connections: Integrated suite of Web collaboration services including file sharing, activity management, instant messaging, and networking capabilities – without the Web meeting service.

2. Web Conferencing

• LotusLive Meeting: Full-featured, online meetings with integrated Web, voice and video conferencing based on Lotus SameTime.
• LotusLive Events: Online Event management service that includes LotusLive Meetings plus registration, promotion, post-event follow up tools and more.

3. E-mail

• LotusLive Notes: Lotus Notes e-mail hosted for you by IBM. This service provides online email solutions. 
• LotusLive iNotes: Security-rich, Web-based messaging service for exchanging e-mail and files with a Web browser and Internet connection.

Follow the links for each item for more details.

They are a little late, but at least they have something to offer. This will fulfill the wishes of small to medium sized organisations to make use of the IBM solutions in this space from a cloud rather than having to invest on Hardware, Software Licensing etc.  However, we have to wait and see how successful this offering would be.