Showing posts with label Optimization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Optimization. Show all posts

March 3, 2018

QC + AI = S


Quantum Computing (QC) + Artificial Intelligence (AI) = Singularity (S)

Quantum Computing - Computers using subatomic particles to superprocess atincredible speeds and with less energy--it's similar to massive parallel processing, but in the case of Qubits, they can store more than just 1s and 0s (bits--a binary state), but rather can be both o and 1 at the same time (a "superposition").  So for very large problems ("exponential scaling"), instead of processing (computing one step at a time), you can process all options simultaneously to find the very best ("optimized") solution by eliminating all options that don't fit the algorithm.

Artificial Intelligence - Computers simulate intelligence, using language, perceiving their environment, reasoning to draw conclusions, solving problems usually done by humans, being creative, and where they can actually learn and self-improve!

Singularity - A state of runaway hypergrowth from the attainment of computing superintelligence, where computers are able to autonomously build ever smarter and more powerful machines that surpass human understanding and control leading to unfathomable changes to human civilization. 

The Information Age is giving way to the Intelligence Age, and it is all ready to explode. 

We are getting to the point of no return...

(Source Photo: Screenshot from YouTube with attribution to the move, Lucy")
Share/Save/Bookmark

January 25, 2018

Messed Up By Norton Clean

So I got this message on my computer that it's time to run Norton Clean.

Oy, what a mistake. 

This tool is not ready for prime time. 

It's supposed to optimize memory and clean up duplicate and residual files.

But in my experience, it swept up more good files than junk files. 

And I ended up having to pull my files back from the trash and manually restore them to their file structure. 

What a pain in the you know what!

Artificial intelligence--not way the I see this utility/tool. 

If you don't pay attention, you can lose a lot of important information. 

Yes, it gives you a chance to review the files, but then what do you really need this cleaning tool to begin with. 

Maybe you have a different experience, I can only speak for myself. 

But a little human intelligence goes a long way to sift through the wheat from the chaff--that's what your files really need anyway. ;-)

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
Share/Save/Bookmark

February 20, 2017

Settle Down or Trade Up

So I always hear this question from people...


Should I be happy with what I have or should I seek out something better?


It's the age old question of whether to settle down or trade up.

When it comes to any decision in life...choosing a school, degree, career, place to live, an investment decision, or even your spouse and life partner--how do you know when you are making the right decision?

Maybe you like or love what's in front of your eyes, but you still don't know 100% if there's something better out there for you.

Every choice means you are settling in some way, because let's face it, nothing is perfect in life!

When is good, good enough for you?

There are trade-offs with every decision.

And it's a matter of what YOU can live with!

A guy may say, "I like this girl, but I'm not sure whether she's the one for me or that I really want to settle down with long-term."

Someone else says, "I'm studying to be an accountant, but you know I really always liked psychology."

And yet a third person says, "I like working at company ABC, but maybe I can learn something new or do better financially for myself and family if I go somewhere else."

So when do you settle down and when do you try to trade-up?

The dilemma is fateful because you don't want to lose what you have, but you also don't want to potentially miss out on something even better for you.

Listen, we're not prophets!

No one knows whether your investment in something is going to pay off in spades or land you flat on your butt. 

All you can do is try to weight the pros and cons of every decision. 

If you treat life like a roulette game in Las  Vegas, the one thing that is pretty sure is that at some point, you will lose it all to the house. 

So choose wisely and make sure you are passionate about your choice and that can live with it over time. 

Know that you made the best decision you could by looking at it from all angles. 

And most important of all, be grateful for everything you have--these are blessings from the Almighty Above and you need to have faith that He/She is guiding and helping you all along the way. ;-)

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
Share/Save/Bookmark

January 2, 2017

Can You Do No Right?

Do you ever feel like you can do no right?

That whatever you do or choose, you are opening yourself up to criticism by others or more importantly from yourself.

That's because in life every moment is a choice and each selection of what you do with your time and efforts means by definition that you are not doing something else important then.

- Take the mother or father who chooses to spend time raising their children, but then are not focused as much on their career.

- Take the student who is working really hard on getting those good grades and SAT scores, but then are not doing as much or well with extracurricular activities like sports or socializing. 

- Take the spiritual or religious person or clergy who chooses to focuses their life studying and performing holy speech and deeds but not so much other earthly and material matters. 

- Take the athlete who works out and eats right focusing on toning and honing their body and physical skills but doesn't spend as much time and effort on intellectual interests or more standard career pursuits. 

- Take the extrovert who focuses on building and maintaining relationships and networks--family, friends, community, colleagues, others--but are not putting the same time and attention to enhancing their other knowledge, skills, and abilities. 

So you say, but why can't we just do everything we're supposed to do, and simply balance?

Well, that is what we all try to do in our own way, but still each time and every moment you are doing one thing, you are not at that moment doing something else or being somewhere else. 

So that causes tension, perhaps a tug-of-war within ourselves, stress, and even guilt. 

The impact is that we often run from one thing to another or we get distracted in what we are doing--"Honey can you answer the phone?"

Some classic examples are when we race home from the office to pick the kids up from school or while playing with sweet little Johny or Suzie, the phone rings and and we have to pick up that call from the boss at work. 

As they say, you can't be--physically or mentally--in two places at the same time!

Hence, now the movement for mindfulness, being in the moment and focused.

But as the demands in life forever ask more of us--even amidst ever greater technology and automation to assist us--somehow we can never do enough because of course, the bar gets raised for ourselves and the competition gets tougher from those who make choices to focus on specific areas that we are not as much. 

So say that you are splitting your time between work and family, but someone else is single or doesn't have kids and they are full in with work, staying late, going in weekends, getting those extra credentials, and just putting in every extra effort there...well, how do you think you will stack up?

Yes, some of us recognize the importance of work-life balance and even focusing incrementally across the many important areas of our life: physically, spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, and socially.

Never-the-less every moment, in a time- and space-bound world, we are forced to choose this or that. 

There is no one right answer for everyone!

And every choice in every moment is the opportunity for you to criticize yourself or for others to criticize you that you weren't paying attention, focused, doing your best, etc.

But who cares--it's our life to live and we can live it as we want?

True, however as inevitably important things or relationships break down or fail, have mistakes or errors, or aren't going as we would ultimately want or dream they should--we ask ourselves, could we have done things differently or somehow managed our time, efforts, and focus better.

(Source Photo: Online Advertisement provided by Dannielle Blumenthal)
Share/Save/Bookmark

September 27, 2009

Rational Decision Making and Enterprise Architecture

In the book Images of Organization by Gareth Morgan, the Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon is cited as exploring the parallels between human and organization decision making, as follows:

Organizations can never be completely rational, because their members have limited information processing abilities…people

  • usually have to act on the basis of incomplete information about possible courses of action and their consequences

  • are able to explore only a limited number of alternatives relating to any given decision, and

  • are unable to attach accurate values to outcome


...In contrast to the assumptions made in economics about the optimizing behavior of individuals, he concluded that individuals and organizations settle for a ‘bounded rationality’ of a good enough decision based on simple rules of thumb and limited search and information.”


While EA provides a way ahead for the organization, based on Herbert Simon explanation, we learn that there is really no 100% right answers. Organizations, like individuals, have limited ability to plan for the future, since they cannot adequately analyze potential outcomes of decisions in an uncertain environment with limited information.


Architects and the organizations they serve must recognize that the best laid plans are based on bounded rationality, and there is no "right" or "wrong" answers, just rational planning and due diligence.


Share/Save/Bookmark

June 21, 2009

Making More Out of Less

One thing we all really like to hear about is how we can do more with less. This is especially the case when we have valuable assets that are underutilized or potentially even idle. This is “low hanging fruit” for executives to repurpose and achieve efficiencies for the organization.

In this regard, there was a nifty little article in Federal Computer Week, 15 Jun 2009, called “Double-duty COOP” about how we can take continuity of operations (COOP) failover facilities and use them for much more than just backup and business recovery purposes in the case of emergencies. 

“The time-tested approach is to support an active production facility with a back-up failover site dedicated to COOP and activated only during an emergency. Now organizations can vary that theme”—here are some examples:

Load balancing—“distribute everyday workloads between the two sites.”

Reduced downtime—“avoid scheduled outages” for maintenance, upgrades, patches and so forth.

Cost effective systems development—“one facility runs the main production environment while the other acts as the primary development and testing resource.”

Reduced risk data migration—when moving facilities, rather than physically transporting data and risk some sort of data loss, you can instead mirror the data to the COOP facility and upload the data from there once “the new site is 100 percent operational.”

It’s not that any of these ideas are so innovatively earth shattering, but rather it is their sheer simplicity and intuitiveness that I really like.

COOP is almost the perfect example of resources that can be dual purposed, since they are there “just in case.” While the COOP site must ready for the looming contingency, it can also be used prudently for assisting day-to-day operational needs.

As IT leaders, we must always look for improvements in the effectiveness and efficiency of what we do. There is no resting on our laurels. Whether we can do more with less, or more with more, either way we are going to advance the organization and keep driving it to the next level of optimization. 


Share/Save/Bookmark

September 13, 2008

Gap Analysis and Enterprise Architecture

There was a terrific keynote at the 1105 Government Information Group enterprise architecture conference this week in Washington, DC by Mr. Armando Ortiz, who presented “An Executive Architect’s View of IT Asset Investment and EA Governance Strategies.”

The highlight for me was Mr. Ortiz, view of EA gap analysis, which goes something like this (i.e. in my words):

Enterprise architects, supported by business and technical subject matter experts across the organization, develop the current and target architectures. The difference between these is what I would call, the architecture gap, from which is developed the transition plan (so far not much new here).

But here comes the rest…

The gap between the current IT assets and the target IT assets results in one of two things, either:

  • New IT assets (i.e. an investment strategy) or
  • Retooling of existing IT assets (i.e. a basic containment strategy);

New IT investments are a strategic, long-term strategy and retooling the existing IT assets is an operational, short-term strategy.

In terms of the corporate actors, you can have either:

  • Business IT (decentralized IT) or
  • Enterprise IT (centralized IT; the CIO) manage the IT asset strategy.

For new IT investments:

  • If they are managed by business IT, then the focus is business innovation (i.e. it is non-standard IT and driven by the need for competitive advantage), and
  • If it is managed by enterprise IT, then it is a growth strategy (i.e. it is rolling out standardized IT—utility computing--for implementing enterprise solutions for systems or infrastructure).

For existing IT assets:

  • If they are managed by business IT, then the focus is improvement (i.e. improving IT for short-term profitability), and
  • If it is managed by enterprise IT, then it is a renewal strategy (i.e. for recapitalizing enterprise IT assets).

What the difference who is managing the IT assets?

  • When IT Assets are managed by business IT units, then the organization is motivated by the core mission or niche IT solutions and the need to remain nimble in the marketplace, and
  • When IT assets are managed by the enterprise IT, then the organizations is motivated by establishing centralized controls, standards, and cost-effectiveness.
Both approaches are important in establishing a solid, holistic, federated IT governance.

Mr. Ortiz went on to describe the EA plans developing three CIO WIFMS (what’s in it for me):

  • Operational excellence (“run IT efficiently)
  • Optimization (“make IT better”)
  • Transformation (“new IT value proposition”)

The link between IT assets, investment/containment strategies, business and enterprise IT actors, and the benefits to the CIO and the enterprise was a well articulated and perceptive examination of enterprise architecture and gap analysis.


Share/Save/Bookmark

May 18, 2008

Competitive Sourcing and Enterprise Architecture

Our economy is heavily based on ensuring a competitive environment to drive innovation, cost-competition, and consumer value.
One of the reasons why mergers and acquisitions are reviewed so carefully is to ensure that they are not anti-competitive, which would result in antitrust action.
Competition law, known in the United States as "antitrust law," has three main elements:
  • Prohibiting agreements or practices that restrict free trading and competition between business entities. This includes in particular the repression of cartels.
  • Banning abusive behavior by a firm dominating a market, or anti-competitive practices that tend to lead to such a dominant position.…
  • Supervising the mergers and acquisitions of large corporations, including some joint ventures. Transactions that are considered to threaten the competitive process can be prohibited altogether, or approved subject to "remedies" such as an obligation to divest part of the merged business or to offer licenses or access to facilities to enable other businesses to continue competing. (Wikipedia)
Competition law has been extended to the federal workforce as follows:
The Office of Management and Budget Circular A-76 mandates that “To ensure that the American people receive maximum value for their tax dollars, commercial activities should be subject to the forces of competition.” This includes the following activities:
“a. Identify all activities performed by government personnel as either commercial or inherently governmental.
b. Perform inherently governmental activities with government personnel.
c. Use a streamlined or standard competition to determine if government personnel should perform a commercial activity.”
The concept of A-76 is that without federal workers having to compete for their positions against for example, the private sector, then there is no way to ensure value for the American taxpayer. Where is the incentive for the federal workforce to perform if when they aren’t performing competitively, and they are not threatened with replacement by a better, more effective and efficient provider?
Federal Times, 12 May 2008 reports that “all indications are that as the Bush administration winds down, so too has its most controversial government reform: competitive sourcing.”
“Many in Congress have aggressively challenged the practice as being unfair and demoralizing to federal employees and last year they passed myriad reforms and restrictions that are already being felt.”
While I agree that competitions drive efficiency in the marketplace, I think A-76 has missed the mark in terms of reforming federal human capital.
Why?
Competing federal workforce against private sector contractors on a cost basis does not necessarily ensure best value. From an enterprise architecture perspective, we are missing something crucial in A-76 and that is the human capital perspective.
The human capital perspective on EA is one that was initially proposed by John Zachman, the founder of EA, and I am a strong proponent of it. Essentially, it says that just like the other business and technology perspectives of the EA, human capital is a filter through which you must make organizational decisions.
The human capital perspective of the architecture provides us an opportunity to optimize federal workforce performance in the first place, before getting to an outsourcing decision point. Additionally, if you can’t effectively manage your own workforce, what makes you think you can better manage a contracted-out function? (In the same issue of Federal Times, there was an article about how the federal procurement officials are resigning in droves!)
What can we do to first improve performance results from the federal workforce (and I’m not saying that there is any problem to begin with)? The same as with any organization—provide strong leadership to them. Provide them with a bold vision. Hire the best and the brightest. Accelerate the hiring and clearance processes. Make clear their roles. Inspire them as President Kennedy did when he stated “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Challenge the workforce and empower them. Provide training, career growth, and financial and other incentives. With these, the federal workforce can truly be competitive and best value—if not all the time, then certainly much of the time.
The enterprise architecture way to do this is to first, baseline your current workforce. Then, look at best practices, benchmark, and set the targets for your people. And finally, develop a transition plan to move your workforce from the baseline to the target.
There is much more work to be done in this area, and obviously this is just a cursory overview or sketch of what the human capital perspective of EA would do. On a personal note, this is an area of great interest to me and I look forward to exploring it further.
Share/Save/Bookmark

February 22, 2008

Business Process Management and Enterprise Architecture

Modeling business processes, information flows, and the systems that serve up that information is core to developing enterprise architecture

DM Review Magazine, February 2008 reports that Business Process Management (BPM) changes the game for business performance through process innovation, creating a process-managed enterprise that is able to respond to changing market, customer, and regulatory demands faster than its competitors.”

How does BPM enable enterprise efficiency?

“It acts as the glue that ties together and optimizes existing attempts at employee collaboration, workflow, and integration. It drives efforts in quality improvement, cost reductions, efficiencies, and bottom-line revenue growth.”

BPM drives “the ability to design, manage, and optimize critical business processes.”

Essentially the decomposition of functions into processes, tasks, and activities along with linkages to the information required to perform those and the systems that provide the information enable the enterprise architect to identify gaps, redundancies, inefficiencies, and opportunities for business process improvement, reengineering, and the introduction of new technologies.

Business, data, and systems models are an important tool for architects to integrate and streamline operations.

How effective is BPM?

The Aberdeen Group reports “more than 50% of companies surveyed were expected to turn to BPM in 2007 to get the process right at the line-of-business level without having to throw out their expensive enterprise resource planning (ERP) or custom back-end applications investments.”

Similarly, Gartner reports that “organizations deploying BPM initiatives have seen more than 90 percent success rates on those projects.”

What are some critical success factors in BPM?

  1. Usability—“intuitive and flexible user interfaces.”
  2. Process analysis—“knowledge management, analytics, reporting, and integration functionality.”
  3. Collaborative—“portals, attached discussion threads, document management capabilities, and configurable task views.”
  4. Self-optimization—“ability to ‘self-optimize’ the process.”
  5. Focus on high-value areas first—“initial BPM project should include areas of medium-to-high business value combined with low process complexity…choose processes or business areas that have high visibility.”

From a User-centric EA perspective, modeling business, data, and systems is a key element at the segment and solutions architectures. These models enable the development of business requirements, information flows, and technology needs that help determine the ultimate solution design and line of business projects. These in turn feed the enterprise architecture target architecture and transition plan. So the food chain often starts with core modeling initiatives.


Share/Save/Bookmark

January 6, 2008

GovNet and Enterprise Architecture

In Government Computer News, 10 December 2007, Edward Meagher, the deputy chief information officer at the Department of the Interior (DOI) asks why the federal government doesn’t have one IT infrastructure. He states:

Despite the huge costs and inefficiencies, we still cling to the notion that each department and agency is so unique and special that we each have to create and maintain our own infrastructure to support our mission area.


I am convinced that a day will come when the billions of dollars we spend each year on each department’s stovepiped IT infrastructure will not only be viewed as incredibly wasteful but also incredibly stupid. It will be seen as the equivalent of having allowed each department to drill its own water wells, generate its own electricity and treat its own sewage.

The notion of a true “GovNet” has been around for many years, but I believe the time is fast approaching when we will agree on the terms and conditions and get about the business of designing, building, converting to, operating and managing a secure, unclassified IP network that will deliver all IP services to federal civilian agencies.”

What has the federal government done so far to advance the idea of one IT infrastructure?

An IT Infrastructure Line of Business (ITILOB) has been established as a Presidential Initiative as part of the President’s Management Agenda for e-Government (eGov).

The vision of ITILOB is:

  • “An effective and efficient IT infrastructure enabling government-wide customer-centric services.”

The goals of ITILOB are:

  • “Infrastructure enables interoperability of functions across agencies and programs.
  • Optimize the infrastructure to enable collaboration within and across agencies, sectors, and government levels.
  • Efficiencies realized from infrastructure investments will be recapitalized in support of agency mission.
  • Infrastructure investment governed to achieve agency mission and government-wide goals.” (http://www.whitehouse.gov/OMB/egov/c-6-9-ioi.html)

Are we on the road to success with ITILOB?

The ITILOB links to a related site http://www.itinfrastructure.gov/. It is not clear what the relationship between IT Infrastructure LOB and IT Optimization Line of Business (IOI) are. However, the IT Optimization LOB states that “The Infrastructure Optimization Initiative (IOI) puts in place a government-wide approach for measuring and optimizing agency infrastructures to enhance cost efficiency/service level and better enable core agency missions and customer-centric services. While the IOI provides the standardized framework for comparing performance across the federal government, departments/agencies remain responsible for choosing appropriate strategies for optimizing their commodity infrastructure cost efficiency/service level metrics. The IOI does not mandate how agencies optimize their infrastructure – it will provide tools for agencies to leverage.”

So, while it seems that the vision of one IT infrastructure or GovNet is a noble one and probably one worth pursuing, if done right; the mandate of the existing IT Optimization LOB does not go far enough to actually mandate usage by federal agencies. This makes this initiative rather weak and unlikely to succeed, in its current form.

Are there similar initiatives in the federal government?

DHS has an Infrastructure Transformation Program (ITP) that has been working for a number of years now at “consolidating and centralizing control of its data centers, e-mail systems and help-desk services, and sensitive but unclassified video communication networks under three directorates.” (Government Computer News, 22 August 2005)

Is this DHS infrastructure consolidation perhaps, a first step, where each major federal department (like DHS), starts by consolidating its agencies, and then moves on toward an overall federal consolidation. Possibly, this two phased approach would give the overall federal consolidation a greater chance for success.

Meagher at DOI states:Congress, the administration, the federal bureaucracies and the vendor community must come together to tackle the impediments and move rapidly to create a well-managed, 21st-century equivalent of the Eisenhower-era National Highway System.” Will a federal IT infrastructure be as successful?


Share/Save/Bookmark