Executive MBA

Why MBAs from TOP institutes Don’t Necessarily Make Good Managers

2008-09-16T04:24:00.000-07:00

Why MBA “Stars” Don’t Necessarily Make Good Managers

Why top notch MBA candidates are not always the best team members let alone managers.

Unfortunately, the students who get into fancy schools like MIT and Stanford and even our own IIMs and are evaluated both before and after they arrive largely on their individual performance: BUT then life plays a cruel trick on them, forcing them to work in groups, to deal with the messiness and sometimes craziness of human groups — and their individual brilliance is no longer enough and they have all those damn people, with different needs, opinions, priorities, and skills, and different schedules too, to deal with.

That is why you will see most of the MBA grads from top institutes look for the cushy positions and that too in an already well established company. They will leave the tough job of making their hands dirty to the managers from other institutes.In the history you do not find case of even a single company that was turned around by an MBA from a college in Ivy league or other top colleges.Not even a single company that was saved from distress in the market by these people.
If you’ve been selected and groomed based on one set of standards (individual performance) it’s hard to accept that those old standards don’t work any more and your success will be based on a new standard: the ability to work WITH a group to create, innovate and ultimately produce results as a team.

Individual performance is based on a different set of skills, talents, and motivations than group collaboration. So even if you can make the internal switch to accept the new standards, you aren’t necessarily going to have the right kind of motivation, the right skills, or the right talents to succeed at collaborative work.

Management isn’t easy, it’s hard work that requires really understanding people, their individual strengths and weaknesses, and creatively organizing them to accomplish things as a group that none of them could accomplish on their own. Unfortunately that’s just not what they teach in school, so you have to learn it somewhere else.

The 4S Web Marketing Mix

2007-12-02T02:00:00.000-08:00

Competitive Advantage

2007-11-24T00:50:00.000-08:00

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Strategy Grand Tour

2007-11-24T00:39:00.000-08:00

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Business Problem Solving

2007-11-24T00:24:00.000-08:00

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The ROI of Open Source

2007-11-21T09:33:00.000-08:00

The ROI of open-source software is a contentious issue.The ROI of upgrading a Windows installation versus switching to Linux and have concluded that it is less expensive to stick with Windows.Switching from Windows to Linux is the worst-case ROI scenario. After all, the new platform requires training and perhaps hiring new personnel—always expensive propositions—versus merely paying for licenses.

A more important question is, can open source generate real ROI elsewhere? Yes. Oregon State University (OSU), for example, has websites that visitors need to search, so the school bought a Google appliance for about $125,000 per year. Two years later, OSU’s IT department, aided by the Open Source Lab, replaced the appliance with an open-source search product called Nutch (license cost: $0). Nutch is not as easy to use as the Google software, so additional administration costs run to about $10,000 yearly. The overall five-year payback, however, even when you consider additional hardware and engineering time, still produced an internal rate of return of 2,300 percent.

The key to success is determining which projects make sense for open source. To get started, treat each product individually. Savvy organizations consider both commercial and open-source options for projects, and choose the right product for the given situation. Then make sure you evaluate using the proper time horizon. A single heads-up comparison between a commercial product and its open-source counterpart may not offer good open-source ROI, because the costs of training and switching can outweigh the cost of a commercial license. But if you extend the time horizon to the realistic life of the application, it may tip the balance toward open source. Finally, take the entire organization into account. While a specific open-source project may not offer great ROI, the cost benefits of pioneer applications often materialize downstream in later projects that are able to adopt the open-source package. Even if you purchase enterprise licenses for your commercial products so that your marginal cost for a new application is effectively zero, keep in mind that someday, when those licenses are up for renewal, that marginal cost may be much higher.

This column hasn’t touched on any of the other reasons organizations use open source: flexibility, reduced operational costs through not needing to track license compliance, and greater control of the organization’s software stack, since there are no forced upgrades or product end-of-life announcements. Because ROI is so tangible, however, it is critical to address it explicitly. Just keep in mind that there is no single answer; you need to find the right choice for your organization and your application.

Strategy--- an introduction

2007-11-10T05:59:00.000-08:00

What is strategy?

The word “strategy” derives from the ancient Athenian position of strategos.
Generally, the definition of strategy is regarded as a complex combination and there are lots of debates about the definition itself.

“A number of reasons contribute to this complexity. First, the field represents the
convergence of multiple disciplines, including economics, organization theory, general business, marketing, finance, and geography (to name but a few). As a result, strategy is often viewed through different lenses, depending on one’s background and purpose. Second, and perhaps more important, business strategy is a very young field. As a result, not all of the concepts and approaches to analysis are yet well established or agreed on.” (http://www.ache.org/PUBS/Luke1.pdf, 2005-11-22)

Mintzberg has created a “five-P-model” for the definition of strategy,which provides some clues to the rich meaning of the concept.

Strategy as Plan:
Strategy is a plan- some sort of consciously intended course of action, a guideline (or set of guidelines) to deal with a situation. By this definition, strategies have two essential characteristics: they are made in advance of the actions to which they apply, and they are developed consciously and purposefully.
Strategy as Ploy:
A strategy can be a ploy too; really just a specific ‘manoeuvre’ intended to outwit an opponent or competitor.
Strategy as Pattern:
Defining strategy as a plan is not sufficient; we also need a definition that encompasses the resulting behaviour. A third definition is proposed: strategy is a pattern- specifically, a pattern in a stream of action. In other words, by this definition, strategy is consistency in behaviour, whether or not intended.
Strategy as Position:
The fourth definition is that strategy is a position- specifically, a means of locating an organization in what organization theorists like to call an ‘environment.’ By this
definition, strategy becomes the mediating force between organization and environment, that is, between the internal and the external context.
Strategy as Perspective:
The fifth definition looks inside the organization, indeed inside the heads of the
collective strategist. Here, strategy is a perspective, its content consisting not just a chosen position, but of an ingrained way of perceiving the world.

“Strategy content: basically the “what” of strategy. This means defining what strategic decisions are about and what their intention is. The content perspective also address such questions as where are we going and what is the scope of the business. “

“Strategy context: the “where” of strategy. This is the set of factors that comprise the setting for a strategy. This includes the internal context of the organization as well as the characteristics of the external context in the opening environment.”

“Strategy process: the “how” of strategy. This details who is involved in the process and when activities take place. It is the story, the drama and the list of players in the strategy as well as the characteristics of the process itself.

Mintzberg & Waters model - Intended and emergent
Strategies

According to Mintzberg and Waters (1985), there are five kinds of strategies in their model emergent strategy, intended strategy, deliberate strategy, realized
strategy and unrealized strategy. Their definition of these is:
Emergent strategies can be seen as responses to unexpected opportunities and problems and are usually developed from the locations at which business-level strategies are usually implemented, i.e. within business units and not at corporate headquarters. The pure definition of emergence requires the absence of intentions.
Realized strategy is a blend of intentions and emergence which can be interpreted by reference to the strength of pressure from the external environment—a kind of environmental determinism.
Intended strategy is strategy as conceived of by the top management team. Even here, rationality is limited and the intended strategy is the result of a process of negotiation, bargaining, and compromise, involving many individuals and groups within the organization.
Mintzberg and Waters mentioned that realized strategy – the actual strategy that is implemented – is only partly related to that which was intended (Mintzberg suggests only 10–30 percent of intended strategy is realized). The primary determinant of realized strategy is what Mintzberg terms emergent strategy – the decisions that emerge from the complex processes in which individual managers interpret the intended strategy and adapt to changing external circumstances. This model should also been seen as a process and especially if you include the variable of time. As show in the model below the realized strategy effects the intended strategy as times goes by. This is an important part of the model since it shows that current strategies will affect future strategies. There are two extreme types of organizations, the ones that have only deliberate strategies and the ones that have only emergent strategies. These two pure forms are very rare and perhaps there is no organization that has one of these pure types of processes. For a pure deliberate strategy, the organization must have pure intentions with a relative concrete level of detail. This plan has to be carried out exactly as intended. For a strategy to perfectly emergent there has to be consistency in action over time but without any intentions. Except for these two pure types of strategies that are extremely rare according to Mintzberg & Waters (1985 pp 257-258) but they argue that between those two extremes are several different type of strategies that are common in companies today. Mintzberg & Waters (1985) classifies eight different types of strategies:

1. The planned strategy
The planned strategy is clear intentions back by formal control. The leader is the centre of authority with their intentions being very clear and precise and the goal is to transform the intention to collective action with minimum distortion. Programs and systems are built in to the plan to ensure that no one acts in another way then intended.
For this type of strategic process to be effective the environment has to be extremely stable or the organization has to be able to predict it with great accuracy. When organizations put large quantities of resources in a mission or project they might nottolerate unstable environment. When they have plan several years ahead and don’t allow avoiding behaviour and commit themselves firmly. An example of this can be mining companies.

2. Entrepreneurial strategy
The second type of strategy there is has tolerance for a little emergent strategy, but is still very much planned. The owner controls the organization tightly and can impose his vision or direction on the organization. This type of strategy is very common in young organizations and in entrepreneurial organizations. The central actor is the one that places the organization were he/she wants to in the world. Compared to the planned strategy the intentions are harder to identify and are less specific, but as long the actors in the organizations respond to the will of the leader the strategy appear to be rather deliberate. Because the strategy comes from a single person there can be sudden changes in it and reformulation isn’t unusual. The adaptability of the entrepreneurial strategy is what distinguishes it from the planned one. Visions in the brain of a person are more flexible then articulated ones. The adoption and “emergentness” of planned strategies are discouraged by the articulation. Psychologists have shown that articulation of strategy manifests it, impending willingness to change it.

3. Ideological Strategy
Vision can be collective – when the members of an organizations share a vision and the members identify so strongly with it that they pursue it as an ideology. This leads to patterns in their behaviour so that clear realized strategies can be identified. Since an ideological strategy is likely to overt and becoming articulated one can see intentions. That is why one can say that this type of strategy is deliberate. These intentions would be viewed as organizational, differing from the entrepreneurial and planned strategy by being embraced by everyone in the organization and not originate from one centre and then being accepted passively. The collective vision makes it harder to change, because all members of the organization have to accept the changes. Moreover, the ideology is rooted in traditions and precedents. Therefore people resist changing it. Mintzberg &
Waters has not yet studied any organization dominated by an ideology but such
strategies seems to occur in certain organizations describe in the literature.

4. Umbrella strategy
For the umbrella organization Mintzberg & Waters relax the condition of tight control over the actors in the organizations and in some cases control over the environment. Leaders have only partial control over the members of the organization and can design the umbrella type of strategy. An umbrella strategy is when there are general guidelines for behaviour, defined boundaries and the other actors in the organization can manoeuvre within them. This means that strategies can emerge within these boundaries.
The umbrella strategy can not only be labelled as deliberate and emergent but also “deliberate emergent” in the sense that the central leadership creates conditions which allow strategies to emerge. Like the entrepreneurial strategy there is a certain vision emanating from the central leadership, but in the umbrella strategy don’t the ones controlling the vision also control the realization. One example of the umbrella strategy is NASA during the 1960, when they focused their efforts to put a man on the moon.
Within this specific target several different strategies emerged, as various technical problems were solved by thousands of different specialists.

5. Process Strategy
The process Strategy is similar to the umbrella strategy. The leadership functions in a organizations in which actors must have considerable discretion to determine the outcome. This is because the environment is unpredictable and uncontrollable. Instead of controlling strategy on a general level with boundaries and target the leadership influences the strategy indirectly. In other words they control the process of strategy making instead of the content of the strategy. This results in a behaviour that would be deliberate in one respect but emergent in another. The leadership designs the system from which patterns of action evolve from.

6. Unconnected strategy
The unconnected strategy is perhaps the most straightforward of all. One part of the organization, a subunit or sometimes even an individual is able to realize its own pattern in its stream of action. Since these unconnected strategies doesn’t come from the central leader ship or from intentions from the whole organization the can be considered relatively emergent. But for the subunit/individual they clearly can be deliberate or emergent depending on the prior existence of intentions. Thus the unconnected strategy may be deliberate or emergent for the actors involved but always emergent from the perspective of the organization.

7. Consensus strategy:
In this strategy the condition for prior intentions are totally dropped, this type of strategy is clearly emergent. In this strategy different actors converge on the same pattern or theme so that it becomes pervasive in the organizations, without need for central direction or control. The consensus strategy grow out of the mutual adjustment among the different actions as they learn from each other and from their responses the environment and thereby finds a common pattern that works for the organization. This means that the convergence is not driven by intentions by management or by prior intentions shared by the organizations as a whole; rather it evolves around the results of a host of individual actions. Sometimes actors might promote the consensus and try to negotiate others to accept it, but the point it that this strategy comes more from collective actions then from collection intentions. One example of this could be a university that finds itself over the years favouring the sciences over the humanities as its members came to realize that this is where its real strengths lie.

8. Imposed strategy
This time the strategy comes from outside the organization, its imposed on the
organization. This means that the environment can directly force the organization into a pattern in its stream of actions regardless what the central control does. The clearest case is when a external group or individual with a great influence over the organization imposes a strategy on the organization. For example, state-owned Air Canada was forced by the minister to buy a particular type of plane. The strategy was clearly deliberate but not by anyone in the organization. Given the inability to resist, the organization had to pursuit the given strategy and thus it became deliberate for the organization. Sometimes can the environment rather than individual/group that impose strategies on organizations by restricting their options. Once again Air Canada can serve as an example. Did Air Canada really choose to fly jet aeroplanes and later wide body aeroplanes? Could any world class airline decide otherwise? Again the organization has to make the external strategies, imposed on them, internal. In reality the organizations have to compromise between determinism and free choice. Environment seldom pre-empt all choice and just as rare the environment seldom offers unlimited choice. As most real world strategies have some umbrella strategy characteristics, so to does the environment set boundaries for most organization.

These eight types of strategic processes is a big part of Mintzberg & waters (1985) theory. They claim that there aren’t many, if any, companies that can be classified as the two extremes but that they have the characteristics similar to one of the above mentioned types of processes. Thus all companies that are taking part of this study should be describable by one of them.

Steve Jobs on CNBC

2007-09-27T12:29:00.000-07:00

A Famous speech by Steve Jobs "Stay Hungry - Stay Foolish

2007-09-21T11:41:00.001-07:00

Another famous speech, this one by Steve Jobs.

Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.

Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, "We've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.

This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.

If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.

Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something--your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever--because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.

My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, and then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I'd been rejected but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life. During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's first computer-animated feature film, "Toy Story," and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle.

My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "no" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important thing I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept. No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don't want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. it was sort of like Google in paperback form thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath were the words, "Stay hungry, stay foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. "Stay hungry, stay foolish." And I have always wished that for myself, and now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Thank you all, very much.

Setting up your own website...

2007-09-16T12:31:00.000-07:00

This is a compilation of several articles from rediff.com

Hosting options:

So you want to tell the world you have arrived or you have a business and want to expand its reach, whatever your motivation, setting up your own website is a great way to get noticed.

Before you shrug off the idea pleading ignorance of coding, Photoshop, web design and everything else related to the topic, take a look at our easy-to-follow guide to setting up your very own website.

The first decision you need to take is whether you want a free (almost free) web page or if you're willing to shell out a certain amount on a paid domain name and hosting services. (The domain name is the name through which people can access your WebPages. Hosting is the service that provides you space on the internet to save the web pages that you have created.)

Free hosting services
Freewebs.com, tripod.lycos.co.uk, geocities.yahoo.com, freewebsites.com and many others provide you with space on their servers where you can host your website for free. For most of these free hosting services, you do not need to buy a domain name. These services would provide you with a sub domain name on their server.

For instance, I may host my web pages for free on geocities and anyone on the world wide web may access my pages on 'http://geocities.com/ankurjain/index.html'. Some of these free hosting servers may also provide you with easy-to-use utilities to create web page polls, feedback forms, albums and blogs on the web pages you host on their servers.

However, if you are a firm believer in the saying 'Nothing comes for free', you aren't far wrong. The catch here is these sites will take up a prominent space on the pages you host on their servers (a small, but prime spot). The company will use this space to display advertisements relevant to the content of the webpage and relevant to the visitors to your page.

For instance, if you are an expert on financial planning and you plan to host some articles on financial planning, then the service provider may use the space to post an advertisement from a company dealing in mutual funds or tax consultancy firm.

So, while this option is very handy for people with tight budgets, if you are using a free service to host your company's web page, be warned that your clients might just end up seeing your competitor's advertisement on your home page.

That's where paid hosting services come in.

Paid hosting
Once you decide on your hosting options, the next step is to book a domain name. To buy a domain visit any of the following websites: godaddy.com, buydomain.com, net4omains.com.

If I am hosting a website about myself, then I might want to buy the domain ankurjain.com. Since domain names are unique, only one website can exist with the name ankurjain.com. If someone has already booked this domain name, I could opt for ankurjain.in or ankurjain.name among others.

After checking the availability of the domain and the other domain options, the website will show you the annual price listing for each. You will need to renew the registration at the end of the end of every year if you want to continue using the domain.

If you take the time to search, you'll find a number of good offers by Indian hosting providers for web hosting on the net. You can also just choose to host your site with your registrar (the place you buy your domain from). For example, if you buy a domain from and host your website at GoDaddy.com, you can get 500 MB of web space, a 25-GB data transfer limit and 100 e-mail IDs with both POP3 and web mail access for just $3.95 (approx Rs 170) a month!

What hosting provider you eventually choose depends solely on your needs and budget, but you should trawl the web for user reviews that are a good pointer to the most user-friendly and dependable service providers.

Most of the hosting services provide you with complete know how on how to setup your website on their servers. They provide easy to understand step-by-step documents for uploading the pages created/designed by you on to their servers.

The only drawback is that you have to have a credit card!

Designing a homepage :

What affects your online presence most, either as an individual or as a company, is, perhaps, your website. Your home page is the one thing that defines you most, for the millions of strangers online. Today, with so many free options for web-hosting, it's almost a crime not to have a functional and regularly updated site.

We will walk you through the basics of designing a simple site. You need to decide where and how your site will be hosted. All the millions of options you have can be categorised into either free or paid solutions. Once you've decided on the type you want, you can go ahead and start planning the look of your site.

A common misconception is that coders who know HTML and other web design languages can only design sites. In this age of software empowerment, anyone to do anything: Web design has not been spared. Design programs such as Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver make sure that a good design is simple to achieve.

Frontpage

FrontPage has always had the distinction of being really easy to use, but has generally been less respected as a web design tool by hard-core designers. However, for those just starting out with Web design, there is no simpler tool. As with most Microsoft products, you'll take almost no time to get to grips with the interface.

Let's take a look at MS FrontPage:

~ When you run FrontPage, it starts off with a blank page.
~ You can choose to build a site from a template. There are several templates available -- choose one that matches your needs.
~ We chose to build a 'Corporate Presence' site.
~ Change the logos and add suitable text where clearly marked, and save each page.
~ Check the pages you've designed in different browsers by going to File > Preview in Browser.
~ Once all the pages have been edited, upload the entire web folder to your hosting server.
~ Check all the pages again, and your site is done.

Though this sounds a little too simple, the fact is FrontPage is designed that way, so the easiest way to experience its simplicity is to install it and try it yourself.

Web Components:

Web components in FrontPage are very important. FrontPage calls Flash movies, hit counters, buttons, etc 'Web Components'. The simplest way to see what each does is to open a blank page, insert one of each component and then preview the page in your favorite browser.

Pictures:

Inserting a picture in FrontPage is very easy: just go to Insert > Picture and choose the appropriate option.

Themes:

Use a theme to get a predefined colour scheme and save your time trying to think up one.

Import:

If you already have a site, and are looking to modify the existing site rather than building a new one from scratch, you can choose to import your site by going to File > Import.

Dreamweaver

Macromedia Dreamweaver is the preferred professional Web design tool. Though it is not as easy to use as FrontPage, it is considered to be much more powerful. Of course, this does not mean it is impossible to use, and it is actually quite simple to accomplish basic tasks, just like in Microsoft FrontPage.

When you run Dreamweaver, you are presented with a blank page. You can just close that page and go to File > New, and in the 'New Document' dialog that pops up, choose 'Page Designs' from the 'Category' pane on the left. You will see a long list of options in the 'Page Designs' pane in the middle, and clicking on one will show you a preview of what that design looks like in the 'Preview' pane on the right.

Choose one that suits your needs for the page you're designing and click 'Create'. Just like in FrontPage, you are shown a page with blank images and dummy text. All you have to do is edit the text and images by double clicking on them.

Once you are satisfied with your final page, press [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [S] and choose where to save the web page. Create all the pages you want for your site and save all pages in the same folder relative to the index.html page. If you need to make new folders, do so and make sure to keep all images in a separate 'images' folder. This will help you sort your data more efficiently.

Once you are done creating all the desired pages, make sure to right-click to see the many options easily available to you. Preview all of them in a browser -- you can do this by pressing [F12]. The last step is to upload all the pages and images to your web server. Remember to keep all relative paths exactly the same as they are in your root folder (where 'index.html' is saved) on your hard disk.

Inserting Objects:

In Dreamweaver, you can insert a large variety of objects into the current page. Just click on the 'Insert' menu to see the list of available objects. Once done, don't forget to save your page.

Right-click:

Dreamweaver's right-click menu is quite exhaustive. Right-click anywhere on the page to see the long list of options available.

Tables:

Drawing tables is easy in both Dreamweaver and FrontPage. All you need to do is look for the 'Insert Table' option in the 'Insert' dropdown menu.

Task Panes:

In order to use Dreamweaver more efficiently, you'll need to learn to use the various task panes provided on the top, bottom and right-hand side. The best way to learn is to use each task pane and get the hang of the software.

Covering both the tools in detail would require a big fat book. Just start using these tools -- look up Internet tips and tutorials, and basic information about them for help.

Avoid these errors:

More often than not, web designers get carried away by technology and create websites that have a lot of frills and fluff but nothing that actually tells the visitor what the website offers. There are hundreds of websites sporting constantly changing images and floating objects, but falling desperately short of holding the visitor's attention long enough to find out more. What you need to keep in mind if you want your website to be seen and visited regularly, is that (as in life) looks aren't everything.

Here are some of the tools you need to use with care:

Frames

Five years ago, frames were the 'in' thing -- they let one or two parts of your site remain constant, while only one frame changed. This idea caught on like wildfire, and every second designer, at one point, was designing sites with frames. However, when content on the web started to grow, search engines became more popular, and the concept of bookmarking caught on. Frames didn't gel well with bookmarks.

In the context of search, the concept of frames is flawed: it uses one HTML page that gets content from two or more other pages and places the content in pre-defined parts of the page. Though this sounds like a good idea, search robots will visit the index page and catalogue it as the content of your site -- ignoring the entire HTML code that refers to other pages. This led to sites with frames dropping rapidly in search engine rankings. This was perhaps the major reason why frames are no longer popular, after all, search engine optimisation (SEO) is a full-time business now, and is also a major aspect of web design.

Misleading or useless page titles

The page title is the text that is supposed to describe the current page, or at least your site as a whole. This text appears between the '' code tags in an HTML page. Sadly, most amateur designers fail to notice the importance of titles, and leave it as "Welcome to xyz.com".

Again, this is very wrong when you take into account the way search engines display results: almost all search engines make the link to the page title. Even if a search throws up your page as a result, all a potential visitor sees is the text "Welcome to xyz.com", and a few lines from the site.

The page title is what will draw a visitor to your site, and as the latest generation of internet surfers is quite comfortable using search engines, they have learnt to ignore sites with such title tags.

Let's say you're in the business of selling computer hardware, and your site is called 'xyz.com'. Another company also sells IT products, and has a site called 'abc.com'. Let's assume a potential visitor or customer searches for "computer hardware vendor India" in a search engine and gets the following results:

"Welcome to xyz.com

We believe in finding the right solutions for your pocket. Whatever your budget for computer hardware, we have a configuration that will fit your needs. Vendors of --

www.xyz.com/52K-8 Aug 05. Cached - Similar pages"

"Something.com

Your source for in-depth computer hardware info.

www.something.com/524K-10 Aug 05. Cached - Similar pages"

"Abc.com: The best computer systems in India at unbeatable prices

ABC is the leading computer hardware information resource on the 'Net. We have all the information you need about computer hardware, including vendors.

Abc is a renowned computer hardware vendor based in Mumbai. We deliver anywhere in India within 48 hours, and have over 1,000 service centers located at."

www.abc.com/24K-10 Aug 03. Cached - Similar pages"

Even though your site, xyz.com, may show up first, chances are potential visitors will click on the link to Abc.com, only because the title tag matched what was searched for. In an age where internet users estimate relevance based on a quick scan of content on search engines and web sites, the wrong title tag could kill your chances of getting hits.

Size matters

Considering that India is still to achieve the mass adoption of broadband, sites with large file sizes for pages are frowned upon. When you get data transferred to you at around 5 KBps, the average 100 KB page takes 20 seconds to load. This is already too long in terms of visitors' patience, and the only reason most sites get away with is because here in India we're used to waiting for pages to load.

However, if you have a site that has a 500 KB start page, this translates to a minimum of 100 seconds of waiting for the page to load. On an average, try to keep pages as small as possible -- less than 100 KB -- by using fewer images and other unnecessary design elements. This will ensure that users have a better experience at your site.

Flash designs

Although the use of Macromedia Flash has revolutionised the way content can be stored on your site and displayed to visitors, it is another bandwidth hog. Since Flash is generally used to compress videos or animations to display on web pages, the file sizes are always large. Even simple button animations can add a few kilobytes here and there, which can total up to a lot.

You also need to remember that text almost always loads before graphics, and most users will scan through whatever appears on your site first and decide whether the content is what they are looking for. Even though you may have relevant content neatly displayed using a fancy Flash links menu, many users may not stick around long enough to see this.

Gaudy colours

Some websites give you the idea that the people who designed them are colour blind! The net is jam packed with sites that use vivid reds, pinks and purples that distract rather than attract. There isn't much to explain here, with millions of colour combinations available it's purely up to you to decide what combinations are just not right.

Browser support

Most designers don't seem to care about whether their sites work on browsers other than Internet Explorer (IE). In fact, it's not just site design you should worry about, you should also choose a hosting solution that is compatible with most browsers. For example, Microsoft's ASP technology is largely targeted at IE, and browsers such as Opera and Mozilla Firefox often run into trouble with some ASP pages.

The best way to check the functionality of your site is to check it using the most popular browsers. We suggest you start with Lynx, the popular text-based browser in Linux, to see what your site will most probably look like to a search engine bot, and then work your way through IE, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and others.

Balanced content

Sites with only text, or even those with only graphics, can be very irritating to view. Even if your site has only text, try and make the text layout look good.

You should never substitute text with graphics, such as making an animated GIF image with changing text. Doing this only increases the size of a page, and also takes away people's ability to resize the text on the page according to their needs. It also almost always results in a low-resolution image that shows very poor quality text.

A good rule of thumb is the ratio of 80:20 -- 80 per cent text to 20 per cent images. This means that when you look at the pages you design, no more than 20 per cent of the screen area should be images.

You also need to remember that websites have depth, so there's no reason to try and cram everything you offer into your homepage. Divide your content into little piles, study your existing as well as target audiences, and then tag your content in decreasing order of importance or interest to this audience.

The top 50 per cent of your content should be easily accessible from your homepage, and the rest can either be distributed lower down on your homepage or stored in lower levels (different pages) of your site.

Navigation

Very often, you come across sites that lead you to a page best described as a virtual dead-end. Somehow, visitors might get stuck at a place, and have no clue as to how they got there. This usually results in a visitor clicking on the little [X] on the top right corner, banishing your site from their screen forever! The entire reason for taking pains to design sites is to avoid this from ever happening -- yet it does!

So what causes this problem? Simple. Bad design!

All the pages your site contains should at least have links to your homepage and major sections. The easiest way to do this would be to have a constant navigation bar that has a fixed position on every page of your site. A good rule to follow is the 'three-click rule': no page in your site should be more than three clicks away from any other page.

Being over-creative

Sometimes, designers have delusions of grandeur, and think they would make good copywriters or visualisers in advertising agencies. This leads to sites that are cryptic to the common man. Such sites might be acceptable if the business or individual is attempting to show off their creative prowess -- as might be the case with an actual copywriter or advertising agency, or perhaps an artist's homepage. However, most often, such sites are a big no-no for the majority.

Outdated pages

Nothing is worse than having a site that has outdated content. Sites that contain content on the homepage that was last updated over a couple of months ago are often considered 'neglected', and are ignored by visitors. This holds true especially if you add a 'News' section to your site and start updating it regularly and then somewhere along the line, falter and stop updating it.

No resizing

Web pages that cannot be resized are a big no-no. Often, people browse websites without maximising the window. If half your content is not visible because your site does not allow for resizing windows, you have a problem on your hands. This also holds true for text resizing: nothing is more irritating than text on a page that visitors cannot increase or decrease the size of by using their browser's text resize option.

Moving text and images

Scrolling text marquees are ugly! They are not considered good design any more, and you should avoid putting in scrolling text as far as possible. The only form in which scrolling text is acceptable is as a ticker on your site, such as a stock quote ticker, news ticker, or Shout box, where visitors can leave a message for other visitors. Basically, only if you need to dedicate a very limited space to content that changes rapidly, or is input by visitors, should you consider scrolling text.

Animated GIF images, too, are now considered amateurish. Most often, only jokes and ads contain GIF animation. Web users are accustomed to seeing GIF animations as advertisements, and have learnt to ignore them at sight. This means that all the effort you put into animating an image will be wasted on the majority of visitors.

If you have to include moving pictures, make sure the animation is done well and flows smoothly, otherwise it's likely that you'll make your site look unprofessional.

Online Marketing

2007-09-12T13:48:00.000-07:00

A McKinsey survey of marketing executives from around the world shows that in marketing, things are starting to change: companies are moving online across the spectrum of marketing activities, from building awareness to after-sales service, and they see online tools as an important and effective component of their marketing strategies. In 2010 respondents expect a majority of their customers to discover new products or services online and a third to purchase goods there. A majority of the respondents also expect their companies to be getting 10 percent or more of their sales from online channels in 2010—twice as many companies as have hit that mark today.

In addition to established online tools such as e-mail, information-rich Web sites, and display advertising, survey respondents show a lot of interest in the interactive and collaborative technologies collectively known as Web 2.0for advertising, product development, and customer service.

What are emerging vehicles?

Blogs (short for Web logs) are online journals or diaries hosted on a Web site.

Online games include both games played on dedicated game consoles that can be networked and “massively multiplayer” games, which involve thousands of people who interact simultaneously through personal avatars in online worlds that exist independently of any single player’s activity.

Podcasts are audio or video recordings—a multimedia form of a blog or other content. They are often distributed tharough aggregators, such as iTunes.

Social networks allow members of specific sites to learn about other members’ skills, talents, knowledge, or preferences. Commercial examples include Facebook and MySpace. Some companies use such systems internally to help identify experts.

Virtual worlds, such as Second Life, are highly social, three-dimensional online environments shaped by users who interact with and receive instant feedback from other users through the use of avatars.

Web services are software systems that make it easier for different systems to communicate with each other automatically to pass information or conduct transactions. A retailer and supplier, for example, might use Web services to communicate over the public Internet and automatically update each other’s inventory systems.

Widgets are programs that allow access from users’ desktops to Web-based content.

Wikis, such as Wikipedia, are systems for collaborative publishing. They allow many authors to contribute to an online document or discussion.

In four of the five major areas of marketing, a majority of executives—83 percent for service management and, even at the low end, 44 percent for pricing—say that online tools are at least somewhat important for companies in their industries. At least two-thirds of companies are using these tools in all the areas they deem most important.

The importance of these tools naturally varies among industries—for instance, 65 percent of the respondents in high tech say that advertising online is very or extremely important for them, compared with just 39 percent in manufacturing. There are also two other likely reasons for the relatively low use of online tools: a lack of capabilities to manage them ³ and the fact that access to high-speed Internet connections (required for many of these tools) is uneven (just under half of Europeans have it, for example, compared with 59 percent of the US population).

Although marketers expect to rely increasingly on digital-advertising vehicles, they recognize barriers that could slow the adoption of these tools. The lack of sufficient capabilities at companies or their agencies is the most significant concern, for both those that are advertising and those that aren’t (Exhibit 6); among online advertisers, for example, about 60 percent of responses indicate that insufficient capabilities are a barrier. Even among respondents at companies that frequently use online tools for all marketing purposes, a full 50 percent of responses highlight capability barriers to advertising. Other McKinsey research shows that a lack of online capabilities extends far beyond the marketing department: 42 percent of the respondents to another global survey said that investing more in the capabilities of their companies would have made initial investments in Internet technologies more effective.

Security Metrics

2007-08-30T04:35:00.000-07:00

The pressure is on. Various surveys indicate that over the past several years computer
security has risen in priority for many organizations. Spending on IT security has
increased significantly in certain sectors -– four-fold since 2001 within the federal
government alone.1 As with most concerns that achieve high priority status with
executives, computer security is increasingly becoming a focal point not only for
investment, but also for scrutiny of return on that investment. In the face of regular,
high-profile news reports of serious security breaches, security managers are more than
ever before being held accountable for demonstrating effectiveness of their security
programs.
What means should managers be using to meet this challenge? Some experts believe
that key among these should be security metrics.2 This guide provides a definition of
security metrics, explains their value, discusses the difficulties in generating them, and
suggests a methodology for building a security metrics program.

Definition of Security Metrics
It helps to understand what metrics are by drawing a distinction between metrics and
measurements. Measurements provide single-point-in-time views of specific, discrete
factors, while metrics are derived by comparing to a predetermined baseline two or
more measurements taken over time.3 Measurements are generated by counting;
metrics are generated from analysis.4 In other words, measurements are objective raw
data and metrics are either objective or subjective human interpretations of those data.
Good metrics are those that are SMART, i.e. specific, measurable, attainable, repeatable,
and time-dependent, according to George Jelen of the International Systems Security
Engineering Association.5 Truly useful metrics indicate the degree to which security
goals, such as data confidentiality, are being met, and they drive actions taken to
improve an organization’s overall security program.

A Good Metric Must:
1. Be consistently measured. The criteria must be objective and repeatable.
2. Be cheap to gather. Using automated tools (such as scanning software or
password crackers) helps.
3. Contain units of measure. Time, dollars or some numerical scale should be included—not just, say, "green," "yellow" or "red" risks.
4. Be expressed as a number. Give the results as a percentage, ratio or some other kind of actual measurement. Don't give subjective opinions such as "low risk" or "high priority."
Source: Andrew Jaquith
A Good Visualization of Metrics Will:
Not be oversimplified. Executives can handle complex data if it's presented clearly.
At the same time, not be ornate. Gratuitous pictures, 3-D bars, florid design and noise around the data diminish effectiveness.
Use a consistent scale. Switching scales within a single graphic presentation makes it confusing or suggests you're trying to bend the facts.
Include a comparison to a benchmark, where applicable. "You are here" or "The industry is here" is often a simple but informative comparative element to add.

By no means does Jaquith (or CSO for that matter) think these five metrics are the final word on infosecurity. Quite the contrary, they're a starting point, relatively easy to ascertain and hopefully smart enough to get CISOs thinking about finding other metrics like these, out in the vast fields of data, waiting to be reaped.

Metric 1: Baseline Defenses Coverage (Antivirus, Antispyware, Firewall, and so on)

This is a measurement of how well you are protecting your enterprise against the most basic information security threats. Your coverage of devices by these security tools should be in the range of 94 percent to 98 percent. Less than 90 percent coverage may be cause for concern. You can repeat the network scan at regular intervals to see if coverage is slipping or holding steady. If in one quarter you've got 96 percent antivirus coverage, and it's 91 percent two quarters later, you may need more formalized protocols for introducing devices to the network or a better way to introduce defenses to devices. In some cases, a drop may stir you to think about working with IT to centralize and unify the process by which devices and security software are introduced to the network. An added benefit: By looking at security coverage, you're also auditing your network and most likely discovering devices the network doesn't know about. "At any given time, your network management software doesn't know about 30 percent of the IP addresses on your network," says Jaquith, because either they were brought online ad hoc or they're transient.
How to get it: Run network scans and canvass departments to find as many devices and their network IP addresses as you can. Then check those devices' IP addresses against the IP addresses in the log files of your antivirus, antispyware, IDS, firewall and other security products to find out how many IP addresses aren't covered by your basic defenses.
Expressed as: Usually a percentage. (For example, 88 percent coverage of devices by antivirus software, 71 percent coverage of devices by antispyware and so forth.)
Not good for: Shouldn't be used for answering the question "How secure am I?" Maximum coverage, while an important baseline, is too narrow in scope to give any sort of overall idea of your security profile. Also, probably not yet ready to include cell phones, BlackBerrys and other personal devices, because those devices are often transient and not always the property of the company, even if they connect to the company.
Try these advanced versions: You can parse coverage percentages according to several secondary variables. For example, percentage coverage by class of device (for instance, 98 percent antivirus coverage of desktops, 87 percent of servers) or by business unit or geography (for instance, 92 percent antispyware coverage of desktops in operations, 83 percent of desktops in marketing) will help uncover tendencies of certain types of infrastructure, people or offices to miss security coverage. In addition, it's a good idea to add a time variable: Average age of antivirus definitions (or antispyware or firewall rules and so on). That is, 98 percent antivirus coverage of manufacturing servers is useless if the average age of the virus definitions on manufacturing's servers is 335 days. A star company, Jaquith says, will have 95 percent of their desktops covered by antivirus software with virus definitions less than three days old.
One possible visualization: Baseline defenses can be effectively presented with a "you are here" (YAH) graphic. A YAH needs a benchmark—in this case it's the company's overall coverage. After that, a business unit, geography or other variable can be plotted against the benchmark. This creates an easy-to-see graph of who or what is close to "normal" and will suggest where most attention needs to go. YAHs are an essential benchmarking tool. The word "you" should appear many times on one graphic. Remember, executives aren't scared of complexity as long as it's clear. Here's an example: plotting the percentages of five business units' antivirus and antispyware coverage and the time of their last update against a companywide benchmark.

Metric 2: Patch Latency

Patch latency is the time between a patch's release and your successful deployment of that patch. This is an indicator of a company's patching discipline and ability to react to exploits, "especially in widely distributed companies with many business units," according to Jaquith. As with basic coverage metrics, patch latency stats may show machines with lots of missing patches or machines with outdated patches, which might point to the need for centralized patch management or process improvements. At any rate, through accurate patch latency mapping, you can discover the proverbial low-hanging fruit by identifying the machines that might be the most vulnerable to attack.
How to get it: Run a patch management scan on all devices to discover which patches are missing from each machine. Cross-reference those missing patches with a patch clearinghouse service and obtain data on 1. the criticality of each missing patch and 2. when the patches were introduced, to determine how long each missing patch has been available.
Expressed as: Averages. (For example, servers averaged four missing patches per machine. Missing patches on desktops were on average 25 days old.)
Not good for: Companies in the middle of regression testing of patch packages, such as the ones Microsoft releases one Tuesday every month. You should wait to measure patch latency until after regression testing is done and take into account the time testing requires when plotting the information. The metrics might also get skewed by mission-critical systems that have low exposure to the outside world and run so well that you don't patch them for fear of disrupting ops. "There are lots of systems not really open to attack where you say, ‘It runs, don't touch it,'" says Jaquith. "You'll have to make a value judgment [on patch latency] in those cases."
Try these advanced metrics: As with baseline coverage, you can analyze patch latency by business unit, geography or class of device. Another interesting way to look at patch latency statistics is to match your average latency to the average latency of exploits. Say your production servers average 36 days on missing patches' latency, but similar exploits were launched an average of 22 days after a patch was made available. Well, then you have a problem. One other potentially useful way to approach patch latency is to map a patch to its percent coverage over time. Take any important patch and determine its coverage across your network after one day, three days, five days, 10 days and so on.
One possible visualization: For data where you can sum up the results, such as total number of missing patches, a "small multiples" graphic works well. With small multiples you present the overall findings (the whole) as a bar to the left. To the right, you place bars that are pieces making up the whole bar on the left. This presentation will downplay the overall findings in favor of the individual pieces. One key in small multiples graphing is to keep the scale consistent between the whole and the parts. This example plots total number of missing patches for the top and bottom quartiles of devices (the best and worst performers). Then it breaks down by business unit who's contributing to the missing patches.

Metric 3: Password Strength
This metric offers simple risk reduction by sifting out bad passwords and making them harder to break, and finding potential weak spots where key systems use default passwords. Password cracking can also be a powerful demonstration tool with executives who themselves have weak passwords. By demonstrating to them in person how quickly you can break their password, you will improve your lines of communication with them and their understanding of your role.
How to get it: Using commonly available password cracking programs, attempt to break into systems with weak passwords. Go about this methodically, first attacking desktops, then servers or admin systems. Or go by business unit. You should classify your devices and spend more time attempting to break the passwords to the more important systems. "If it's a game of capture the flag," Jaquith says, "the flag is with the domain controller, so you want stronger access control there, obviously."
Expressed as: Length of time or average length of time required to break passwords. (For example, admin systems averaged 12 hours to crack.) Can be combined with a percentage for a workgroup view (for example, 20 percent of accounts in business unit cracked in less than 10 minutes). Is your password subject to a lunchtime attack? That is, can it be cracked in the 45 minutes you are away from your desk to nosh?
Not good for: User admonishment, judgment. The point of this exercise is not to punish offending users, but to improve your security. Skip the public floggings and just quietly make sure employees stop using their mother's maiden name for access.
Try this: Use password cracking as an awareness-program audit tool. Set up two groups (maybe business units). Give one group password training. The other group is a control; it doesn't get training. After several months and password resets, try to crack the passwords in both groups to see if the training led to better passwords.
One possible visualization: Both YAH and small multiples graphics could work with this metric. (See the graphics for Metric 1 and Metric 2.)

Metric 4: Platform Compliance Scores

Widely available tools, such as the Center for Internet Security (CIS) scoring toolset, can run tests against systems to find out if your hardware meets best-practice standards such as those set by CIS. The software tools take minutes to run, and test such things as whether ports are left unnecessarily open, machines are indiscriminately shared, default permissions are left on, and other basic but often overlooked security lapses. The scoring system is usually simple, and given how quickly the assessments run, CISOs can in short order get a good picture of how "hardened" their hardware is by business unit, by location or by any other variable they please.
Expressed as: Usually a score from 0 to 10, with 10 being the best. Best-in-class, hardened workstations score a 9 or a 10, according to Jaquith. He says this metric is far more rigorous than standard questionnaires that ask if you're using antivirus software or not. "I ran the benchmark against the default build of a machine with Windows XP Service Pack 2, a personal firewall and antivirus protection, and it scored a zero!" Jaquith notes.
Not good for: Auditing, comprehensive risk assessment or penetration testing. While a benchmark like this may be used to support those advanced security functions, it shouldn't replace them. But if you conduct a penetration test after you've benchmarked yourself, chances are the pen test will go more smoothly.
Try this: Use benchmarking in hardware procurement or integration services negotiations, demanding configurations that meet some minimum score. Also demand baseline scores from partners or others who connect to your network.
One possible visualization: An overall score here is simple to do: It's a number between 1 and 10. To supplement that, consider a tree map. Tree maps use color and space in a field to show "hot spots" and "cool spots" in your data. They are not meant for precision; rather they're a streamlined way to present complex data. They're "moody." They give you a feel for where your problems are most intense. In the case of platform-compliance scores, for instance, you could map the different elements of your benchmark test and assign each element a color based on how risky it is and a size based on how often it was left exposed. Be warned, tree maps are not easy to do. But when done right, they can have instant visual impact.

Metric 5: Legitimate E-Mail Traffic Analysis

Legitimate e-mail traffic analysis is a family of metrics including incoming and outgoing traffic volume, incoming and outgoing traffic size, and traffic flow between your company and others. There are any number of ways to parse this data; mapping the communication flow between your company and your competitors may alert you to an employee divulging intellectual property, for example. The fascination to this point has been with comparing the amount of good and junk e-mail that companies are receiving (typically it's about 20 percent good and 80 percent junk). Such metrics can be disturbing, but Jaquith argues they're also relatively useless. By monitoring legitimate e-mail flow over time, you can learn where to set alarm points. At least one financial services company has benchmarked its e-mail flow to the point that it knows to flag traffic when e-mail size exceeds several megabytes and when a certain number go out in a certain span of time.
How to get it: First shed all the spam and other junk e-mail from the population of e-mails that you intend to analyze. Then parse the legitimate e-mails every which way you can.
Not good for: Employee monitoring. Content surveillance is a different beast. In certain cases you may flag questionable content or monitor for it, if there's a previous reason to do this, but traffic analysis metrics aren't concerned with content except as it's related to the size of e-mails. A spike in large e-mails leaving the company and flowing to competitors may signal IP theft.
Added benefit: An investigations group can watch e-mail flow during an open investigation, say, when IP theft is suspected.
Try this: Monitor legitimate e-mail flow over time. CISOs can actually begin to predict the size and shape of spikes in traffic flow by correlating them with events such as an earnings conference call. You can also mine data after unexpected events to see how they affect traffic and then alter security plans to best address those changes in e-mail flow.
One possible visualization: Traffic analysis is suited well to a time series graphic. Time series simply means that the X axis delineates some unit of time over which something happens. In this case, you could map the number of e-mails sent and their average size (by varying the thickness of your bar) over, say, three months. As with any time line, explain spikes, dips or other aberrations with events that correlate to them.
Metric 6: Application Risk Index
How to get it: Build a risk indexing tool to measure risks in your top business applications. The tool should ask questions about the risks in the application, with certain answers corresponding to a certain risk value. Those risks are added together to create an overall risk score.
Expressed as: A score, or temperature, or other scale for which the higher the number, the higher the exposure to risk. Could also be a series of scores for different areas of risk (for example, business impact score of 10 out of 16, compliance score of 3 out of 16, and other risks score of 7 out of 16).
Industry benchmark: None exist. Even though the scores will be based on observable facts about your applications (such as, is it customer facing? Does it include identity management? Is it subject to regulatory review?). This is the most subjective metric on the list, because you or someone else puts the initial values on the risks in the survey instrument. For example, it might be a fact that your application is customer-facing, but does that merit two risk points or four?
Good for: Prioritizing your plans for reducing risk in key applications—homegrown or commercial. By scoring all of your top applications with a consistent set of criteria, you’ll be able to see where the most risk lies and make decisions on what risks to mitigate.
Not good for: Actuarial or legal action. The point of this exercise is for internal use only as a way to gauge your risks, but the results are probably not scientific enough to help set insurance rates or defend yourself in court.
Added benefit: A simple index like this is a good way to introduce risk analysis into information security (if it’s not already used) because it follows the principles of risk management without getting too deeply into statistics.
Try this: With your industry consortia, set up an industrywide group to use the same scorecard and create industrywide application risk benchmarks to share (confidentially, of course). One industry can reduce risk for everyone in the sector by comparing risk profiles on similar tools. (Everyone in retail, for example, uses retail point-of-sale systems and faces similar application risks.)
One possible visualization: Two-by-two grids could be used here to map your applications and help suggest a course of action. Two-by-twos break risk and impact into four quadrants: low risk/low impact, low risk/high impact, high risk/low impact, high risk/high impact. A good way to use these familiar boxes is to label each box with a course of action and then plot your data in the boxes. What you’re doing is facilitating decision-making by constraining the number of possible courses of action to four. If you need to get things done, use two-by-two grids to push executives into decision making.

Books for IT Managers

2007-08-25T13:41:00.000-07:00

Here’s a list of some of the books that have resonated particularly well with me. I have learned a lot from each of these books, and I highly recommend them to all sorts of IT Managers, team leaders, and project management professionals.

Books about IT, but not a specific technology:

* Becomming a Technical Leader: An Organic Problem Solving Aproach
* Rapid Development
* Code Complete
* The Practice of System and Network Administration
* Peopleware
* The Pragmatic Programmer

Books about Lean and the Toyota Production System

* Lean Software Development
* Lean Thinking
* Product Development for the Lean Enterprise: Why Toyota’s System Is Four Times More Productive and How You Can Implement It

Books about Human Relationships

* Crucial Conversations
* Getting to Yes
* Influence: Science and Practice

Books about organization/time management

* Getting Things Done
* Organizing from the Inside Out

Powerpoint Tutorial

2007-08-23T06:17:00.000-07:00

Apple Story

2007-08-23T06:11:00.000-07:00

Cobit

2007-08-20T23:20:00.001-07:00

COBIT

Overview

COBIT was first released in 1996. Its mission is “to research, develop, publicize and promote an authoritative, up-to-date, international set of generally accepted information technology control objectives for day-to-day use by business managers and auditors.” Managers, auditors, and users benefit from the development of COBIT because it helps them understand their IT systems and decide the level of security and control that is necessary to protect their companies’ assets through the development of an IT governance model.

COBIT has 34 high level processes that cover 318 control objectives categorized in four domains: Planning and Organization, Acquisition and Implementation, Delivery and Support and Monitoring. COBIT provides benefits to managers, IT users, and auditors. Managers benefit from COBIT because it provides them with a foundation upon which IT related decisions and investments can be based. Decision making is more effective because COBIT aids management in defining a strategic IT plan, defining the information architecture, acquiring the necessary IT hardware and software to execute an IT strategy, ensuring continuous service, and monitoring the performance of the IT system. IT users benefit from COBIT because of the assurance provided to them by COBIT’s defined controls, security, and process governance. COBIT benefits auditors because it helps them identify IT control issues within a company’s IT infrastructure. It also helps them corroborate their audit findings.

COBIT product family

The complete COBIT package is a set consisting of six publications:

Executive Summary
Framework
Control Objectives
Audit Guidelines
Implementation Tool Set
Management Guidelines

A brief overview of each of the above components is provided below.

Executive Summary

Sound business decisions are based on timely, relevant and concise information. Specifically designed for time-pressed senior executives and managers, the COBIT Executive Summary consists of an Executive Overview which provides a thorough awareness and understanding of COBIT's key concepts and principles. Also included is a synopsis of the Framework, which provides a more detailed understanding of these concepts and principles, while identifying COBIT's four domains (Planning and Organization, Acquisition and Implementation, Delivery and Support, Monitoring) and 34 IT processes

Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (COBIT®) provides good practices across a domain and process

framework and presents activities in a manageable and logical structure. COBIT’s good practices represent the consensus of experts.

They are strongly focused more on control, less on execution. These practices will help optimise IT-enabled investments, ensure

service delivery and provide a measure against which to judge when things do go wrong.

For IT to be successful in delivering against business requirements, management should put an internal control system or framework

in place. The COBIT control framework contributes to these needs by:

• Making a link to the business requirements

• Organising IT activities into a generally accepted process model

• Identifying the major IT resources to be leveraged

• Defining the management control objectives to be considered

Thus, COBIT supports IT governance (figure 2) by providing a framework to ensure that:

• IT is aligned with the business

• IT enables the business and maximises benefits

• IT resources are used responsibly

• IT risks are managed appropriately

The COBIT products have been organised

into three levels (figure 3) designed to

support:

• Executive management and boards

• Business and IT management

• Governance, assurance, control and

security professionals

Briefly, the COBIT products include:

• Board Briefing on IT Governance,

2nd Edition—Helps executives understand

why IT governance is important, what its

issues are and what their responsibility is

for managing it

• Management guidelines/maturity models—

Help assign responsibility, measure

performance, and benchmark and address

gaps in capability

• Frameworks—Organise IT governance

objectives and good practices by IT

domains and processes, and links them to

business requirements

• Control objectives— Provide a complete

set of high-level requirements to be

considered by management for effective

control of each IT process

• IT Governance Implementation Guide:

Using COBIT ® and Val IT TM, 2nd Edition—

Provides a generic road map for

implementing IT governance using the

COBIT and Val ITTM resources

• COBIT® Control Practices: Guidance to

Achieve Control Objectives for Successful

IT Governance, 2nd Edition—Provides guidance on why controls are worth

implementing and how to implement them

• IT Assurance Guide: Using COBIT ®—Provides guidance on how COBIT can be used to support a variety of assurance activities

together with suggested testing steps for all the IT processes and control objectives

The COBIT content diagram depicted in figure 3 presents the primary audiences, their questions on IT governance and the generally

applicable products that provide responses. There are also derived products for specific purposes, for domains such as security or for

specific enterprises.

Framework

A successful organization is built on a solid framework of data and information. The Framework explains how IT processes deliver the information that the business needs to achieve its objectives. This delivery is controlled through 34 high-level control objectives, one for each IT process, contained in the four domains. The Framework identifies which of the seven information criteria (effectiveness, efficiency, confidentiality, integrity, availability, compliance and reliability), as well as which IT resources (people, applications, information and infrastructure) are important for the IT processes to fully support the business process.

To govern IT effectively, it is important to appreciate the activities and

risks within IT that need to be managed. They are usually ordered into

the responsibility domains of plan, build, run and monitor. Within the

COBIT framework, these domains, as shown in figure 8, are called:

• Plan and Organise (PO)—Provides direction to solution delivery

(AI) and service delivery (DS)

• Acquire and Implement (AI)—Provides the solutions and passes

them to be turned into services

• Deliver and Support (DS)—Receives the solutions and makes them

usable for end users

• Monitor and Evaluate (ME)—Monitors all processes to ensure that

the direction provided is followed

Control Objectives

The key to maintaining profitability in a technologically changing environment is how well you maintain control.COBIT's Control Objectives provides the critical insight needed to delineate a clear policy and good practice for IT controls. Included are the statements of desired results or purposes to be achieved by implementing the 214 specific, detailed control objectives throughout the 34 IT processes.

Audit Guidelines

To achieve your desired goals and objectives you must constantly and consistently audit your procedures. Audit Guidelines outline and suggest actual activities to be performed corresponding to each of the 34 high-level IT control objectives, while substantiating the risk of control objectives not being met. Audit Guidelines are an invaluable tool for information systems auditors in providing management assurance and/or advice for improvement.

Implementation Tool Set

An Implementation Tool Set, which contains Management Awareness and IT Control Diagnostics, and Implementation Guide, FAQs, case studies from organizations currently using COBIT, and slide presentations that can be used to introduce COBIT into organizations. The new Tool Set is designed to facilitate the implementation of COBIT, relate lessons learned from organizations that quickly and successfully applied COBIT in their work environments, and lead management to ask about each COBIT process: Is this domain important for our business objectives? Is it well performed? Who does it and who is accountable? Are the processes and control formalized?

Management Guidelines

To ensure a successful enterprise, you must effectively manage the union between business processes and information systems. The new Management Guidelines are composed of Maturity Models, to help determine the stages and expectation levels of control and compare them against industry norms; Critical Success Factors, to identify the most important actions for achieving control over the IT processes; Key Goal Indicators, to define target levels of performance; and Key Performance Indicators, to measure whether an IT control process is meeting its objective. These Management Guidelines will help answer the questions of immediate concern to all those who have a stake in enterprise success.

COBIT structure

COBIT covers four domains:

Plan and Organize
Acquire and Implement
Deliver and Support
Monitor and Evaluate

Plan and Organization

The Planning and Organization domain covers the use of information & technology and how best it can be used in a company to help achieve the company’s goals and objectives. It also highlights the organizational and infrastructural form IT is to take in order to achieve the optimal results and to generate the most benefits from the use of IT. The following table lists the high level control objectives for the Planning and Organization domain.

HIGH LEVEL CONTROL OBJECTIVES

Plan and Organize

PO1	Define a Strategic IT Plan and direction
PO2	Define the Information Architecture
PO3	Determine Technological Direction
PO4	Define the IT Processes, Organization and Relationships
PO5	Manage the IT Investment
PO6	Communicate Management Aims and Direction
PO7	Manage IT Human Resources
PO8	Ensure Compliance with External Requirements
PO9	Assess and Manage IT Risks
PO10	Manage Projects
PO11	Manage Quality

Acquire and Implement

The Acquire and Implement domain covers identifying IT requirements, acquiring the technology, and implementing it within the company’s current business processes. This domain also addresses the development of a maintenance plan that a company should adopt in order to prolong the life of an IT system and its components. The following table lists the high level control objectives for the Acquisition and Implementation domain.

HIGH LEVEL CONTROL OBJECTIVES

Acquire and Implement

AI1	Identify Automated Solutions
AI2	Acquire and Maintain Application Software
AI3	Acquire and Maintain Technology Infrastructure
AI4	Enable Operation and Use
AI5	Procure IT Resources
AI6	Manage Changes
AI7	Install and Accredit Solutions and Changes

Delivery and Support

The Delivery and Support domain focuses on the delivery aspects of the information technology. It covers areas such as the execution of the applications within the IT system and its results, as well as, the support processes that enable the effective and efficient execution of these IT systems. These support processes include security issues and training. The following table lists the high level control objectives for the Delivery and Support domain.

HIGH LEVEL CONTROL OBJECTIVES

Deliver and Support

DS1	Define and Manage Service Levels
DS2	Manage Third-party Services
DS3	Manage Performance and Capacity
DS4	Ensure Continuous Service
DS5	Ensure Systems Security
DS6	Identify and Allocate Costs
DS7	Educate and Train Users
DS8	Manage Service Desk and Incidents
DS9	Manage the Configuration
DS10	Manage Problems
DS11	Manage Data
DS12	Manage the Physical Environment
DS13	Manage Operations

Monitor and Evaluate

The Monitoring and Evaluation domain deals with a company’s strategy in assessing the needs of the company and whether or not the current IT system still meets the objectives for which it was designed and the controls necessary to comply with regulatory requirements. Monitoring also covers the issue of an independent assessment of the effectiveness of IT system in its ability to meet business objectives and the company’s control processes by internal and external auditors. The following table lists the high level control objectives for the Monitoring domain.

HIGH LEVEL CONTROL OBJECTIVES

Monitor and Evaluate

ME1	Monitor and Evaluate IT Processes
ME2	Monitor and Evaluate Internal Control
ME3	Ensure Regulatory Compliance
ME4	Provide IT Governance

An Introduction to IT Governance

2007-08-17T14:53:00.000-07:00

From relative obscurity a few years ago, several factors have come together to make the concept of formal IT governance a good idea for virtually every company, both public and private. Key motivators include the need to comply with a growing list of regulations related to financial and technological accountability, and pressure from shareholders and customers. Here’s a quick primer on the basics of IT governance:

What is IT governance?
Simply put, it’s putting structure around how organizations align IT strategy with business strategy, ensuring that companies stay on track to achieve their strategies and goals, and implementing good ways to measure IT’s performance. It makes sure that all stakeholders’ interests are taken into account and that processes provide measurable results. An IT governance framework should answer some key questions, such as how the IT department is functioning overall, what key metrics management needs and what return IT is giving back to the business from the investment it’s making.
Is it something every organization needs?
Every organization—large and small, public and private—needs a way to ensure that the IT function sustains the organization’s strategies and objectives. The level of sophistication you apply to IT governance, however, may vary according to size, industry or applicable regulations. In general, the larger and more regulated the organization, the more detailed the IT governance structure should be.

What are the drivers that motivate organizations to implement IT governance infrastructures?
Organizations today are subject to many regulations governing data retention, confidential information, financial accountability and recovery from disasters. While none of these regulations requires an IT governance framework, many have found it to be an excellent way to ensure regulatory compliance. By implementing IT governance, you’ll have the internal controls you need to meet the core guidelines of many of these regulations, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.

What’s the business case? That is, how can I convince top management that we need to do this?
Make sure the right people are selling the concept; if IT is selling it, you’re in trouble. It’s much more effective if a cross-functional team consisting of IT and line-of-business managers makes the case to the board of directors that effective IT management is an important part of the company’s success. The team must be able to explain that the company needs a road map—something to tell decision-makers where the company is, where it needs to be and how best to get there. And of course, talk about the benefits—greater efficiency and accountability, along with reduced risk. Be careful, however, when talking about ROI: A lot of the cost of implementing an IT governance framework can be chalked up to what management should be doing anyway. Simply put, companies have to accept the cost, but they don’t like to hear that.

What are the major focus areas that make up IT governance?
According to the IT Governance Institute, there are five areas of focus:

Strategic alignment: Linking business and IT so they work well together. Typically, the lightning rod is the planning process, and true alignment can occur only when the corporate side of the business communicates effectively with line-of-business leaders and IT leaders about costs, reporting and impacts.
Value delivery: Making sure that the IT department does what’s necessary to deliver the benefits promised at the beginning of a project or investment. The best way to get a handle on everything is by developing a process to ensure that certain functions are accelerated when the value proposition is growing, and eliminating functions when the value decreases.
Resource management: One way to manage resources more effectively is to organize your staff more efficiently—for example, by skills instead of by line of business. This allows organizations to deploy employees to various lines of business on a demand basis.
Risk management: Instituting a formal risk framework that puts some rigor around how IT measures, accepts and manages risk, as well as reporting on what IT is managing in terms of risk.
Performance measures: Putting structure around measuring business performance. One popular method involves instituting an IT Balanced Scorecard, which examines where IT makes a contribution in terms of achieving business goals, being a responsible user of resources and developing people. It uses both qualitative and quantitative measures to get those answers.

This appears pretty complicated; how do you actually implement everything involved in IT governance?
It doesn’t make sense to reinvent the wheel by starting from scratch, so don’t even try. Start with a framework; there are many to choose from, but using at least one means everything has already been organized and bulletproofed by industry experts worldwide. These frameworks even offer implementation guides. And most companies use a framework: According to a survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers in conjunction with the IT Governance Institute, 95 percent of companies use one of the major IT governance frameworks, while only a few create their own.

Here is a quick rundown on the choices:

CoBIT: This framework, from the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA), is probably the most popular. Basically, it’s a set of guidelines and supporting toolset for IT governance that is accepted worldwide. It’s used by auditors and companies as a way to integrate technology to implement controls and meet specific business objectives. The latest version, released in May 2007, is CoBIT 4.1. CoBIT is well-suited to organizations focused on risk management and mitigation.

ITIL: The Information Technology Infrastructure Library(ITIL) from the government of the United Kingdom runs a close second to CoBIT. It offers eight sets of management procedures in eight books: service delivery, service support, service management, ICT infrastructure management, software asset management, business perspective, security management and application management. ITIL is a good fit for organizations concerned about operations.

COSO: This model for evaluating internal controls is from the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission. It includes guidelines on many functions, including human resource management, inbound and outbound logistics, external resources, information technology, risk, legal affairs, the enterprise, marketing and sales, operations, all financial functions, procurement and reporting. This is a more business-general framework that is less IT-specific than the others.

CMMI: The Capability Maturity Model Integration method, created by a group from government, industry and Carnegie-Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute, is a process improvement approach that contains 22 process areas. It is divided into appraisal, evaluation and structure. CMMI is particularly well-suited to organizations that need help with application development, lifecycle issues and improving the delivery of products throughout the lifecycle.

There are a lot of framework choices. How do I choose?
Most companies go with CoBIT or ITIL, but others can also fit the bill. For operations, try ITIL. For application development and lifecycle issues, try CMMI. For risk, use CoBIT. CoBIT is also a great umbrella framework. But combining frameworks can also make sense, says Ron Saull, an IT Governance Institute trustee. You might want to use CoBIT as an overall framework; then use ITIL for your operations, CMMI for development and ISO 17799 for security. In fact, combining frameworks is fairly common; the PricewaterhouseCoopers study found that in 65 percent of cases, companies use CoBIT and ITIL together or with lesser-known frameworks. But most importantly, use a framework that fits your corporate culture and that your stakeholders are familiar with. If the company is using one of these frameworks and can leverage it to be its IT governance framework, all the better.

Can we do this alone, or should we get some outside help?
Sometimes it makes sense to get help, and implementing an IT governance framework is one of those times. Not only is internal expertise on IT governance hard to come by, but executives just don’t have the time. The best scenario is usually a combination of the two. Internally, someone really needs to own the process, but getting some help is essential.

What can go wrong if it’s not implemented effectively?
If the IT governance framework isn’t implemented properly, it can directly affect how IT is perceived at a high level. The last thing you want is for IT to be perceived as a cost center that doesn’t produce real value, says Marios Damianides, former international president of ISACA and the IT Governance Institute, and currently a partner for Ernst & Young. Lack of effective implementation also can cause continued issues with project overruns and poor value to cost measurements, not to mention stakeholder dissatisfaction.

What are some tips for making sure it goes smoothly and delivers positive results?
You’ve heard it all before, but here we go: Get executive buy-in. Dedicate a cross-functional team to the process, and get outside help if needed. Clearly delineate the roles and responsibilities of each department and stakeholder in clear terms. Take into account the corporate culture and adjust accordingly. Maintain continual communication during the process. Measure and monitor the progress of the implementation. And don’t consider this a “nice-to-have”—it’s a “need-to-have.”

9 Essential Competencies for Successful C-Level Executives

2007-08-17T14:46:00.000-07:00

In 30 years of assessing executive talent, recruitment firm Egon Zehnder International determined that the competencies listed below are core to c- level executive success. The CIO Executive Council has adapted these competencies for assessment and development programs to aid CIOs and their senior staff in achieving their full potential as strategic enterprise leaders.
1. STRATEGIC ORIENTATION
Strategic Orientation is about the ability to think long- term and beyond one’s own area. It involves three key dimensions: business awareness, critical analysis and integration of information, and the ability to develop an action- oriented plan.
2. CUSTOMER IMPACT
Customer Impact is about serving and building value- added relationships with customers or clients, be they internal or external.
3. MARKET KNOWLEDGE
Market Knowledge is about understanding the market in which a business operates. This business context can include the competition, the suppliers, the customer base and the regulatory environment.
4. COMMERCIAL ORIENTATION
Commercial Orientation is about identifying and moving towards business opportunities, seizing chances to increase profit and revenue.
5. RESULTS ORIENTATION
Results Orientation is about being focused on improvement of business results.
6. CHANGE LEADERSHIP
Change Leadership is about transforming and aligning an organization through its people to drive for improvement in new and challenging directions. It is energizing a whole organization to want to change in the same direction.
7. COLLABORATION AND INFLUENCE
Collaboration and Influence are about working effectively with, and influencing those outside of, your functional area for positive impact on business performance.
8. PEOPLE AND ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
People and Organizational Development is about developing the long- term capabilities of others and the organization as a whole, and finding satisfaction in influencing or even transforming someone’s life or career.
9. TEAM LEADERSHIP
Team Leadership is about focusing, aligning and building effective groups both within one’s immediate organization and across functions.

From CIO to CEO

2007-08-17T14:33:00.000-07:00

CIOs vs. CEOs
Examining the competency performance data based on interviews and 360-degree assessments of 25,000 executives in the Egon Zehnder database, we find five points:

1. Outstanding CIOs (those ranked in top 15th percentile) score highest in Results Orientation, Strategic Orientation, Change Leadership and Customer Focus.

2. Outstanding CIOs perform significantly better than average CIOs in all competencies except for People and Organizational Development, where they are equivalent.

3. People and Organizational Development scores are relatively low for all types of executives assessed, particularly CFOs.

4. Outstanding CIO scores slightly surpass good CEO scores on most competencies.

5. Outstanding CEOs —the most well-rounded strategic leaders —perform significantly better than outstanding CIOs only in Market Knowledge and External Customer Focus.

How to Improve Your Executive Quotient (EQ)
CIOs who want to devote more of their time and energy to driving business strategy and innovation should focus on developing and leveraging the three competencies most particular to the business strategist: Market Knowledge, Strategic Orientation and Commercial Orientation. (See the “Future-State CIO Model,” above, for more on how each competency maps to three aspects of the CIO role: Function Head, Transformational Leader and Business Strategist.) However, even to get a chance to be a business strategist, CIOs must be strong in foundational competencies such as Change Leadership, Collaboration and Influence, and Function Expertise. Without these, a CIO is unlikely to get a seat at the strategy table, and may in reality be a CIO only in title.

Some terms used freqently

2007-08-17T06:46:00.000-07:00

Enterprise resource planning

Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERPs) integrate (or attempt to integrate) all data and processes of an organization into a unified system. A typical ERP system will use multiple components of computer software and hardware to achieve the integration. A key ingredient of most ERP systems is the use of a unified database to store data for the various system modules.

Ideally, ERP delivers a single database that contains all data for the software modules, which would include:

Manufacturing

Engineering, Bills of Material, Scheduling, Capacity, Workflow Management, Quality Control, Cost Management, Manufacturing Process, Manufacturing Projects, Manufacturing Flow

Supply Chain Management

Inventory, Order Entry, Purchasing, Product Configurator, Supply Chain Planning, Supplier Scheduling, Inspection of goods, Claim Processing, Commission Calculation

Financials

General Ledger, Cash Management, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Fixed Assets

Projects

Costing, Billing, Time and Expense, Activity Management

Human Resources

Human Resources, Payroll, Training, Time & Attendance, Benefits

Customer Relationship Management

Sales and Marketing, Commissions, Service, Customer Contact and Call Center support

Data Warehouse

and various Self-Service interfaces for Customers, Suppliers, and Employees

ERPs are cross-functional and enterprise wide. All functional departments that are involved in operations or production are integrated in one system. In addition to manufacturing, warehousing, logistics, and Information Technology, this would include accounting, human resources, marketing, and strategic management.

ERP II means open ERP architecture of components. The older, monolithic ERP systems became component oriented.

In the absence of an ERP system, a large manufacturer may find itself with many software applications that do not talk to each other and do not effectively interface.

Other confusing terms:

IBM Information Management System (IMS) is a joint hierarchical database and information management system with extensive transaction processing capability.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a broad term that covers concepts used by companies to manage their relationships with customers, including the capture, storage and analysis of customer information.

There are three aspects of CRM which can each be implemented in isolation from each other:

Operational CRM- automation or support of customer processes that include a company’s sales or service representative
Collaborative CRM- direct communication with customers that does not include a company’s sales or service representative (“self service”)
Analytical CRM- analysis of customer data for a broad range of purposes

Operational CRM

Operational CRM provides support to "front office" business processes, including sales, marketing and service. Each interaction with a customer is generally added to a customer's contact history, and staff can retrieve information on customers from the database as necessary.

One of the main benefits of this contact history is that customers can interact with different people or different contact “channels” in a company over time without having to repeat the history of their interaction each time.

Consequently, many call centers use some kind of CRM software to support their call centre agents.

Collaborative CRM

Collaborative CRM covers the direct interaction with customers, for a variety of different purposes, including feedback and issue-reporting. Interaction can be through a variety of channels, such as internet, email, automated phone (Automated Voice Response AVR), SMS or through mobile email.

Studies have shown that feedback through SMS or mobile email provides greater efficiency relative to alternative channels. Part of this has to do with the ease of use of particular feedback channels. A study of telephone feedback showed that if consumers cannot get through to customer service centres, 31% hang up and go to a competitor. 24% of consumers give up all together. In addition, in a separate study, it was found that a bad experience with a customer call centre led to 56% of callers to stop doing business with the organisation concerned. (Ian Brooks May 2006) Other studies have shown similar findings; a separate study in the trade journal Quality Progress showed that only 4% of unsatisfied customers complain, whereas 96% of consumers go to competitors. Additionally, 90% of defecting customers do not come back (Scriabina, Fomichov 2005).

Feedback through text has many advantages; not only does it allow the consumer to give feedback at the point of experience (in-situ) but additionally it allows companies to capture insight from a wider consumer base.

The objectives of Collaborative CRM can be broad, including cost reduction and service improvements.

Analytical CRM

Analytical CRM analyses customer data for a variety of purposes including

design and execution of targeted marketing campaigns to optimise marketing effectiveness
design and execution of specific customer campaigns, including customer acquisition, cross-selling, up-selling, retention
analysis of customer behaviour to aid product and service decision making (e.g. pricing, new product development etc.)
management decisions, e.g. financial forecasting and customer profitability analysis
prediction of the probability of customer defection (churn).

Analytical CRM generally makes heavy use of predictive analytics.

Technology strategy

A Technology strategy (as in Information technology) is a planning document that explains how information technology should be utilized as part of an organization's overall business strategy. The document is usually created by an organization's Chief Information Officer (CIO) or technology manager and should be designed to support the organization's overall business plan.

Relationship between strategy and enterprise technology architecture

A technology strategy document typically refers to but does not duplicate an overall enterprise architecture. The technology strategy may refer to:

High-level view of Logical architecture of information technology systems
High-level view of Physical architecture of information technology systems

Starters for IT

2007-08-15T01:55:00.000-07:00

So to begin here are some laws i.e. rules of IT game:

Moore's Law is the empirical observation made in 1965 that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit for minimum component cost doubles every 24 months.It is attributed to Gordon E. Moore (born 1929), a co-founder of Intel. Although it is sometimes quoted as every 18 months, Intel's official Moore's Law page, as well as an interview with Gordon Moore himself, states that it is every two years.Under the assumption that chip "complexity" is proportional to the number of transistors, regardless of what they do, the law has largely held the test of time to date.Moore's law is not about just the density of transistors that can be achieved, but about the density of transistors at which the cost per transistor is the lowest.

Wirth's law in computing was made popular by Niklaus Wirth in 1995.The law states

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

Software is decelerating faster than hardware is accelerating.

Hardware is clearly getting faster over time, and some of that development is quantified by Moore's law; Wirth's law points out that this does not imply that work is actually getting done faster. Programs tend to get bigger and more complicated over time, and sometimes programmers even rely on Moore's law to justify writing slow code, thinking that it won't be a problem because the hardware will get faster anyway.

As an example of Wirth's law, one can observe that booting a modern PC with a modern operating system usually takes longer than it did to boot a PC five or ten years ago.Software is being used to create software. By using Integrated Development Environments, Compilers and Code Libraries, programmers are further and further divorced from the machine and closer and closer to the software user's needs. This results in many layers of interpretation which take a complex requirement in human understandable form and convert it into a very large number of the extremely limited set of instructions that can be performed by a computer.

Gates' Law is a humorous and ironic observation that the speed of commercial software generally slows by fifty percent every 18 months.Though the law's name is meant to refer to Bill Gates, Gates himself did not actually formulate it. Rather, the term is attributed to Gates based on the noted tendency of Microsoft products to slow down with each successive feature or patch.

Bell's Law of Computer Classes: "Roughly every decade a new, lower priced computer class forms based on a new programming platform, network, and interface resulting in new usage and the establishment of a new industry."
Established market class computers aka platforms are introduced and continue to evolve at roughly a constant price.In 2005 the computer classes include: mainframes (60's); minicomputers (70's); personal computers and workstations evolving into a network enabled by Local Area Networking or Ethernet (80's); web browser client-server structure that were enabled by the Internet (90's); web services e.g. Microsoft's .Net (2000's) or the Grid; cell phone sized devices c(2000); Wireless Sensor Networks aka motes (>c2005). Bell predicts home and body area networks will form by 2010.

Brooks's law was stated by Fred Brooks in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month as "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." Likewise, Brooks memorably stated "The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned." While Brooks's law is often quoted, the line before it in The Mythical Man-Month is almost never quoted: "Oversimplifying outrageously, we state Brooks's Law."One reason for the seeming contradiction is that software projects are complex engineering endeavors, and new workers on the project must first become educated in the work.Another significant reason is the communication overheads increase as the number of people increase.

Metcalfe's law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system (n²). First formulated by Robert Metcalfe in regard to Ethernet, Metcalfe's law explains many of the network effects of communication technologies and networks such as the Internet and World Wide Web.
The law has often been illustrated using the example of fax machines: A single fax machine is useless, but the value of every fax machine increases with the total number of fax machines in the network, because the total number of people with whom each user may send and receive documents increases.

Since a user cannot connect to itself, the reasoning goes, the actual calculation is the number of diagonals and sides in an n-gon (see also the triangular numbers):

However, that value, which simplifies to $(n 2 - n) / 2$ , is Big O proportional to the square of the number of users, so this remains the same as Metcalfe's original law.

Metcalfe's Law can be applied to more than just telecommunications devices. Metcalfe's Law can be applied to almost any computer systems that exchange data. Examples of applications include:

Reed's law is the assertion of David P. Reed that the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network.

The reason for this is that the number of possible sub-groups of network participants is , where $N$ is the number of participants. This grows much more rapidly than either

the number of participants, $N$ , or
the number of possible pair connections, (which follows Metcalfe's law)

so that even if the utility of groups available to be joined is very small on a per-group basis, eventually the network effect of potential group membership can dominate the overall economics of the system.

Given a set A of N people, it has $2 N$ possible subsets. This is not difficult to see, since we can form each possible subset by simply choosing for each element of A one of two possibilities: whether to include that element, or not.

However, this includes the (one) empty set, and N singletons, which are not properly subgroups. So $2 N - N - 1$ subsets remain, which is exponential, like $2 N$ .

From David P. Reed's, "The Law of the Pack" (Harvard Business Review, February 2001, pp 23-4):

"Even Metcalfe's Law understates the value created by a group-forming network as it grows. Let's say you have a GFN with n members. If you add up all the potential two-person groups, three-person groups, and so on that those members could form, the number of possible groups equals

2 n

. So the value of a GFN increases exponentially, in proportion to

2 n

. I call that Reed's Law. And its implications are profound."

That all for today..........Will be getting deeper as we go on.........