Showing posts with label Customization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Customization. Show all posts

January 29, 2014

A Razor to Apple's Throat


I love Razer's Project Christine - a completely modular PC. 

There is a stand and you simply attach the components you want: Central Processing Units (CPU), Graphic Processing Unit (GPU), Power Supply Unit (PSU), Solid-State Drive (SSD) storage, and so on. 

By making the architecture open and plug and play--just jack in a new module-- and change out whatever you want, whenever you want. Obsolescence be gone. 

This is a challenge to pure standardization, and a way to make customization cost-effective.

The cooling is done with mineral oil that is pumped throughout from the bottom reservoir. 

At the top, you see a module for a command center for adding operating systems, adjusting configurations and settings, or monitoring performance. 

A subscription model is planned where for a annual fee, you can get the latest and greatest upgrades.


Project Christine PC is the epitome of simple, useful, scalable and beautiful.

Watch out Apple, you have a Razor at your throat--it's time to seriously up the innovation game. ;-)
Share/Save/Bookmark

January 31, 2013

Alienware Rocks

So this is the nicest looking laptop I have ever seen by far--and it's made by Alienware, a subsidiary of Dell (acquired in 2006).

Apple, I never thought I'd be saying it. 

But Alienware rocks!

The sci-fi style with beautifully lit keyboard and advanced features for gaming make this one awesomely powerful piece of hardware. 

I can't believe that kids are actually carrying these into school now a days. 

See video review of premier M18X Alienware gaming laptop here.

If you want unbelievable graphics display, memory, sound, processing power, storage, and style--this is it in laptop computers. 

Plus it comes with the cute alien figure etched on the cover. 

I want one! ;-)

Share/Save/Bookmark

October 21, 2008

Lessons from High School Dropouts for The Total CIO

The Wall Street Journal, 21 October 2008, reports some shocking statistics on high school dropouts.
  • “In the nation’s 50 largest cities, the graduation rate [in four years] was 52%.”
  • The graduation rate was as low as 25% in Detroit.
  • “Only about seven in 10 students are actually finishing high school.”
  • “Dropouts are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system, including about 75% of state prison inmates.”
  • “The difference in lifetime salary for a dropout and a high school graduate is about $300,000.”
  • Cutting the number of dropouts in half would generate $45 billion annually in new tax revenue.”

So obviously there is a very compelling case for reducing the high school dropout rate and having students graduate!

What is being done to address this issue?

One new program was started in the city of Houston called “Reach Out to Dropouts.” In Reach Out, “volunteers, including Mayor White and school superintendent Abelardo Saavedra, visit the homes of students who haven’t returned to school.”

How did this start?

The mayor “was troubled by the fact that while the private industry could track inventory world-wide, school systems could not track students.” But then he took this further, by reaching out to students in person, and finding out why they quit, and how the city could help them return (for example, money, childcare, tutoring and so on).

What are the results?

“Reach Out has recaptured more than 5,500 dropouts in the city since it started in 2004.”

One student summarized it this way: “They were saying I was so smart and they didn’t know why I wasn’t in school, that I was too smart to just drop out. It got to me, kind of.”

This is powerful stuff!

To me there are some profound lessons here for the Total CIO:

First is the personal touch. The CIO’s job is providing information technology solutions for the business and this is great. However, IT is not a replacement for having a personal touch with people. Technology solutions need to complement people solutions.

In the case of the Reach Out program, it’s not enough for our schools to track students like inventory or assets using attendance systems, but we need then take the tracking information and apply it with people and process to get in there and actually help the students come back and graduate. The technology along can’t do this; only people can!

In general, IT solutions must follow people’s requirements and process improvements. You cannot build IT solutions for yesterday’s process (sending letters home or calling the truancy officer); you must build it for today and tomorrow’s way of doing business (personally finding out what the problem is and then remediating it). The bottom line is that the CIO has to be forward-thinking rather than reactive: Implementing technology solutions and then modifying or customizing it to mimic existing processes is not the answer. Rather, the CIO needs to work with the business to modernizing the process and then apply the appropriate technology as an enabler for enhanced results.

With the Reach Out program to help students graduate, the City of Houston didn’t just track the dropouts, but they looked at what was being done to solve the problem and bring kids back into the education system. If sending letters home to parents wasn’t working, for example, then perhaps getting out from behind the desk and going to the student’s homes would. Through this new way of “doing business,” the educators and politicians are showing genuine care and concern, and tailoring solutions to the needs of individual students—and it is working!

The personal touch with people, and reengineering process to match what they need, is crucial for solving problems and implementing technology solutions.


Share/Save/Bookmark

June 27, 2008

Architecting a Balance

As a child, we learn from our parents, teachers, and mentors, that too much of even a good thing is bad for you: be it sweets or hard work—in fact, just about anything taken to an extreme is deadly.

The lesson of finding a balance in life has been captured in religious and philosophical teaching about practicing a middle of the road or golden path approach in life. In architecture as well, developing a strong viable architecture is also premised on balancing conflicting demands and finding that delicate balance.

In simple terms, architecting a balance shows up in having to manage scarce IT resources. So that while on one hand, we may like to have the latest and greatest technologies to give us every edge, we have to balance to promise of those technologies with the cost involved. We do not have endlessly deep pockets.

Similarly, while on one hand, we it would be wonderfully customer-centric to provide each and every one of our customers the customized business processes and technology solution that they want, prefer, or are simply most familiar or comfortable using; on the other hand, we must balance the innovativeness and agility that our customers demand with the need to standard around enterprise and common solutions, which provide a more structured, deliberate, and lower cost base on which to service the enterprise.

As we know from childhood, it is not easy to find the “right” balance. That next bite of cotton candy tastes great going down and we won’t feel the stomachache till later that evening.

National Defense Magazine, November 2007, has an article about architecting a balance in the Coast Guard mission of maritime security, titled “License to Boat?”

The threats from small boating vessels are threefold:

  1. Smuggling—“the use of a boat to smuggle people or weapons of mass destruction into the United States.”
  2. Waterborne improvised explosive device (IED)—“that a boat will be used as a weapon itself by a suicide bomber” (such as the attack in 2000 on the USS Cole). “Imagine…the consequences of waterborne IEDs against passenger ships, against tankers, against port facilities themselves.”
  3. Weapons’ platform—“boat used as a platform to launch a weapon, such as a short-range ballistic missle,” says Dana Goward, Director of MDA, at the U.S. Coast Guard

Despite these serious security threats, the article discusses the challenges of architecting a balance between increased security/maritime domain awareness (such as through requiring of boating licenses and/or automated identification systems for the more than 17 million small vessels that operate in U.S. waterways) and the desire to “ensure that future regulations don’t compromise boaters’ way of life or disrupt the flow of commerce.”

Of course, there is more than one way to skin a cat, so if security options don’t include boating licenses, Goward states, “the answer could be something as simple as a combination of rules, extra patrols, and increased monitoring on the waterways.”

When it comes to balancing competing interests, nothing is really simple. National Defense Magazine reports that in terms of maritime security, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) report on “Maritime Security: Potential Terrorist Attacks and Protection Priorities,” states that “terrorists are more likely to use small boats for waterborne attacks because they ‘satisfy the overwhelming terrorist requirements for simplicity,” Now, we need to continue architecting solutions that meet these security threats head-on, but at the same time preserve freedoms, our way of life, and support international commerce.

Creating balance between alternate views/needs is one of the biggest challenges, but also has the potential for some of the greatest benefits, because by striking a balance, we have the potential to satisfy the greatest number of stakeholders and optimize our ability to meet conflicting requirements. It’s easy to (as the Nike slogan says) “just do it,” but it’s hard to do it and not mess up something else in the process. For example, it’s relatively easy to do security, if you aren’t concerned with the affect on quality of life, commerce, and so on. However, this is not realistic.

Like all things in life, finding the right balance is an art and a science, and requires ongoing course corrections.


Share/Save/Bookmark

June 8, 2008

Cognitive Styles and Enterprise Architecture

We are all familiar with personalizing websites like Yahoo.com to make them more appealing, functional, and easy to navigate.

Now, according to MIT Technology Review, 9 June 2008, websites are being personalized not by the person, but rather by systems “that detect a user’s cognitive style” and changes the website accordingly

What is cognitive style?

Cognitive style is how a person thinks. Some people are more simplistic, others more detail-oriented, some like charts and graphs, and some like to be able to see and get to peer advice.

Why is cognitive style important?

Well, if we can figure out a person’s way of thinking and what appeals to them, then we can tailor websites to them and make them more useful, useable, and more effective at selling to them.

“Initial studies show that morphing a website to suit different types of visitors could increase the site’s sales by about 20 percent.”

So what’s new about this, haven’t sites like Amazon been tailoring their offering to users for quite some time?

Amazon and other sites “offer personalized features…drawing from user profiles, stored cookies, or long questionnaires.” The new method is based instead on system adaptation “within the first few clicks on the website by analyzing each user’s patterns of clicks.”

With cognitive style adaptation, “suddenly, you’re finding the website is easy to navigate, more comfortable, and it gives you the information you need.” Yet, the user may not even realize the website has been personalized to him.

“In addition to guessing each user’s cognitive style by analyzing that person’s pattern of clicks, the system would track data over time to see which versions of the website work most effectively for which cognitive style.” So there is learning going on by the system and the system gets better at matching sites to user types over time!

If we overlay the psychological dimension such as personality types and cognitive styles to web design and web adaptation, then we can individuate and improve websites for the end-user and for the site owner who is trying to get information or services out there.

Using cognitive styles to enhance website effectiveness is right in line with User-centric Enterprise Architecture that seeks to provide useful and usable EA products and services. Moreover, EA must learn to appreciate and recognize different cognitive styles of its users, and adapt its information presentation accordingly. This is done, for example, in providing three levels of EA detail for different types of end-users, such as profiles for executives, models for mid-level managers, and inventories for analysts. This concept could be further developed to actually modify EA products for the specific end-user cognitive styles. While this could be considerable work and must be balanced against the expected return, it really comes down to tailoring your product to your audience and that is nothing new.


Share/Save/Bookmark

May 1, 2008

“Glocalization” and Enterprise Architecture

Glocal is a combination of the words global and local. It is a best practice in business where organizations conducts business operations globally, but tailor their offerings to meet local tastes and needs.

Essentially doing business glocally means that you are architecting your business to perform operations both effectively and efficiently—i.e. your business is doing the right thing by growing without geopolitical constraints and you’re doing it the right way, by being sensitive to the customers’ specific needs wherever they are located.

The Wall Street Journal, 1 May 2008, reports that “Kraft became the No. 1 biscuit maker in China by tailoring the Oreo to local tastes.”

“The Oreo has long been the top-selling cookie in the U.S. Market. But Kraft Foods, Inc. had to reinvent the Oreo to make it sell well in the world’s most populous nation.”

“Unlike its iconic American counterpart, the Oreo sold in China is frequently long, thin, four-layered and coated in chocolate. But both kinds of cookies have one thing in common: They are now best sellers.”

40% of Kraft’s revenue is internationally-based, so their strategy to go glocal is critical to improving their market share and profitability.

To increase growth at Kraft, the CEO “has been putting more power in the hands of Kraft’s various business units around the globe, telling employees that decisions about Kraft products shouldn’t all be made by the people at the Northfield, Ill. headquarters.”

Similarly, to market the Chinese Oreo’s, one of innovative things Kraft did was to have Chinese university students ride around on bicycles outfitted with wheel covers resembling Oreos and handing out cookies.

The CEO stated this was “a stroke of genius that only could have come from local managers. The more opportunity our local managers have to deal with local conditions will be a source of competitive advantage for us.”

Glocalization, the customization to local markets, is far removed from the original Ford Model T (the most influential car of the twentieth century according to Wikipedia) set in 1908 that was based on standardization and assembly-line production, rather than individually hand-crafted.

From an enterprise architecture perspective, going glocal and customizing (or tailoring) business products and services to local tastes is also quite the opposite of what most enterprise architects try to do, which is to standardize their products and services to increase interoperability, simplify the infrastructure and operations, and achieve cost-efficiencies.

So what is more important, standardization or customization?

I suppose it depends on your perspective. If you’re in operations, then standardization is the dominant factor in order to streamline business processes and achieve cost-efficiencies. However, if you’re in sales and marketing, then customization is key to market penetration and customer satisfaction.

This leads me to the role of the enterprise architect, which is to balance the conflicting needs of the organization and simultaneously drive standardization in business processes and technologies, but customization to local requirements for sales and marketing. So EA serves Oreos to everyone!


Share/Save/Bookmark

January 3, 2008

Customization and Enterprise Architecture

While User-centric EA seeks to provide useful and useable products and services to the end-user, the heavy customization of major application systems to meet user needs is a huge mistake. Major customization of IT systems is a killer: it is a killer of the application and a killer of the underlying business processes.

What do I mean? When you heavily customize an application system (and I am not talking about changing settings), you do the following:
  • You greatly increase the implementation cost of the system, since you have now added all sorts of modifications to the system.
  • You greatly increase you maintenance burden, because new versions of the software often will need to be recoded.
  • You hamper the ability of the system to interoperate with other systems that it was designed to work with (even when it is built with open standards), since you have tinkered and tweaked away at it.
  • You missed one of the biggest opportunities to improve and reengineer your business processes; instead of aligning your business processes with those identified (by usually hundreds, if not thousands of other organizations) as best practices and written into the software, you have made your enterprise the odd man out and overwrote the best practices in the application system with your specific way of doing things. That’s a big no-no.

Let’s face it, most (and there are exceptions to every rule) organizations at their fundamental “business” (not mission) practices are often close to identical. Areas like finance, human capital, and even IT and considered utilities to the organization. These areas are often run in ways to exploit enterprise solutions for large organizations (for example, one timekeeping system, one payroll system, or one general ledger system ) and these functions are the first to be looked at for integration and downsizing on the corporate side during mergers and acquisitions.

Instead of insisting that your processes are so different, see why others are doing it another way and whether there is merit in it, before you go and customize and chip-away at the system—you may be doing yourself more harm than good. Generally (and there are exceptions to every rule), you’re better off changing business processes to meet widely used and verified software.


Share/Save/Bookmark