Thoughts

The Wikipedia definition of benchmarking says,  Benchmarking  is the process of comparing one's business processes and  performance metrics  to industry bests or  best practices  from other industries. Almost all organisations do it today for existence in this competitive world. It is necessary to know what is achieved by others, how it is achieved, compare it with yourself and keep continuously improving. Though performance metrics benchmarking can be directly compared, it is important to note that through this method of comparative what is it we are trying to change as part of improvement in the name of benchmarking, especially if it is related to process or policy benchmarking. We should remember what works well for one organisation may not work well with another if we simply try to copy. In some cases it is observed in the name of benchmarking it touches some policies or core values...

Machine Intelligence

The Ant Internet   - Interesting article

Cloud computing has become a hype today in the IT world. No doubt there are lot of attractive features talked about for which people will be interested. There are two  types of cloud infrastructure which are available today, i.e. private cloud and public cloud. Private cloud is one in which the CPUs are dedicated for the user and optimization is being done through virtualisation within the limited capacity of CPUs which form a pool for virtualisation. In this case anyways the user is paying for all the CPUs so private cloud helps primarily to optimize your existing resources through virtualisation. There is apparently no difference to a situation when you host your servers in data center of a service provider, implement virtualisation and have option of deferred payment in opex model. But some organisations are there who might capitalise those investments and in those cases avoidance of capex really  does not work. However, it does not provide any substantial reduction in CPU ...

It is sometimes found CIOs are confused regarding the role of Enterprise Architect (EA) as well as reporting structure of EA. Some are of the opinion that EA should report to CIO while others are of the opinion EA should report to business head. In my opinion both reporting structures are acceptable but it is dependent on the IT organisation structure in the organisation. For organisations which has inhouse IT department probably an EA will be able to add more value if he is part of the business unit. EA will not be driven by the preferences of the internal IT organistion but will be able to bring in impartial views which are likely to add more value to business. In organisations where IT is completely outsourced and outsourced vendor is managed by a team of people (more commonly known as Corporate IT), EA can report to CIO. In this case EA alongwith CIO is more focussed in bringing in business benefits to the organsition with IT as their thinking will be more business oriented ra...