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The term Business Process Management (BPM) has been buzzing around for quite a while.
What exactly is BPM?
Is it solely about technology?
Or is it more than that?
Yes, BPM is in vogue because the technology to model processes, simulate them, improve them, and maybe even improvise is available in a huge way.
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Mumbai University have set a record of sorts by declaring the October TY B Com exam results within ten days. This minor miracle was made possible by a change in ‘methodology’; six centralised assessment of papers were set up at South Mumbai. Navi Mumbai and Thane. This had the effect of reducing the travel time of the evaluators who would previously travel to Kalina campus.
Just goes to show that more than technology itself, it is change effected in processes that has more of an impact.
The statutory requirement is that results are to be declared within 45 days of the exams.
This year’s March-April examinations were declared after 89 days ;the university was severely criticised for a lackadaisical attitude towards the students.
The number of CAP centres will be raised to 15 – 20 for next year’s March exam.
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Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity. |
Image by doegox via Flickr
| Sometimes you’ve gotta bat for the other side to know what it feels like! |
You’re watching Castle on Star World, and you are thoroughly engrossed but just when the tension is unbearable and you’re wondering what’s going to happen next, the ubiquitous commercial break kicks in. What a pain in the butt!
What do you do during the commercial break?
Read a newspaper?
Surf channels? – only to discover that the television networks are hand-in-glove with each other; they have conspired to inflict paid advertisements on you – the unsuspecting viewer – synchronized to be played out at the same time.
If you happen to be one of those unscrupulous (to the advertisers) techno-geeks (No, I’m not knocking technology or geeks!) and can afford these gizmos, you would either have TIVO so that you can watch your favorite programs undeterred by the threat of commercial disruptions, or you may have switched to IPTV , where you watch your pre-recorded and time shifted programs when you please , at your leisure and convenience. Of course, you can always have your programs pre-recorded the old-fashioned way on your VCR or DVR. Or if you are the patient type,you can just catch them on YouTube or Lulu, just a bit later.
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I , unfortunately, suffer from none of the above luxuries. And although I have a broadband connection, it is not truly mega-speed. And so, my usual reaction is to find something else to do during those three minutes of inanity simultaneously muting the set;my ears do not wish to endure the cacophony of pretty (petty?) housewives and even prettier (pettier?) models and actors intent on selling me soap,shoes, jewelry and other FMCGs – they strive to invite, lure and seduce me into becoming part of their anesthetized, antiseptic,sanitized, made-for-TV world.
But then I get to thinking that surely there exist some viewers who prefer these very commercials that I dislike,deride and avoid with such antipathy. And if so, why should they be burdened by the interruption of content meant for mass viewers? Why can there not be a dedicated channel for commercials? A niche channel! I am, of course, not alluding to those annoying,pesky TV shopping networks that have half-hour long infomercials on which every product is touted as the panacea to your undreamed, unfulfilled desires – products that tout convenience and are anything but that. They just happen to be convenient means of relieving your pocket. And not with much finesse, if I dare say! (They prey on your insecurities and work best when you’re down in the dumps!)
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How about a channel on the lines of an MTV , a VH1 or even a Channel V, dedicated to commercials and just commercials. Great commercials! Seductive commercials! Top 20 Commercials! Most Wanted Commercials!
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Maybe a program dedicated to those monstrous Hollywood commercials plugging Japanese and Korean products aired solely on East Asian networks. (The commercials aren’t monstrous; the premiums charged by the stars to endorse those products are! Ask Arnold Schwarzenegger! Just some loose change for pocket-money!)
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Or those nauseous commercials made for the Middle East market that actors from Bollywood, Mollywood and Tollywood parade in selling, well, almost everything. Just goes to show that you could be idiotic on-screen and earn a lot of moolah – just elsewhere!
How about some golden oldies added to the mix to indulge nostalgia? Create your own digital commercial contests?
Just picture it – a channel that does not have to bother with programming. Content will be served by the advertisers with no commercial breaks! The commercial is the program. What will advertisers not do for free air time?
In India, music channels – in the local languages – run themselves. Film music is the most popular form of audio/video entertainment. Reality shows are mostly song or dance based or both. Thus content is easily available and advertisers flock to these channels because of the sureness of eyeball capture. Mass media was never more mass!
Can something similar be done with TV commercials?
Is there an idea here somewhere? Or am I just rambling? Ranting? Or just being plain loony? Of course, this might not be such a great idea; all programming is now a long paid commercial – the deft/brazen product placements prove that!
Your thoughts?
Have a great day!
Disclaimer: I have not verified if any such channel exists! Pardon my ignorance!
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0 Non-existent—Complete lack of any recognizable processes. The enterprise has not even recognized that there is an issue to be addressed.
1 Initial/Ad Hoc—There is evidence that the enterprise has recognized that the issues exist and need to be addressed. There are, however, no
standardized processes; instead, there are ad hoc approaches that tend to be applied on an individual or case-by-case basis. The overall approach to
management is disorganized.
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Corporate, or enterprise governance, establishes the rules and the manner in
which an enterprise conducts business, based upon its strategy, marketplace,
and principles of doing business. It defines for employees and for business
associates the processes that are used to conduct operations and the manner in
which people interact.
Beginning with the board of directors and extending throughout the organization,
there are many aspects and levels of corporate governance. All aspects of the
business are touched in some manner. Governance is applied to major
functional areas of an organization. Organizations govern their financial assets,
human resources, customer relations, intellectual property portfolio, and their
Information Technology.
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Attributes of people who consider themselves to be highly proficient at managing their own personal information , both at work and at home.
1> They avoided gadgets.
Most find a few key tools and stuck to them. Most are universally conservative in adopting new tools.
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2> They limited the no. of separate devices.
Most used just one or two devices.Usually a laptop and a smart phone to manage their information.
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Availability is a measure of the accessibility of a system or application, not including scheduled down-time. It can be measured as a ratio of expected system up-time relative to the total system time, which includes uptime
and recovery time when the system is down.
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Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there. |
Source: http://quotes4all.net/quote_1235.html
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No series on cloud computing would be complete without alluding to Google’s audacious attempt at building an OS around the cloud computing paradigm.
Yes, I’m referring to the Google Chrome OS, a spin-off to the Google Chrome browser. The open source versions for the Chrome OS are the Chromium OS and the Chromium Browser respectively.
The Google Chrome OS is targeted specifically to netbooks, not the primary device of use, but a secondary, portable, lightweight device. The OS is small enough to be loaded on a USB drive and booted from the very same device. Applications on local storage are few and far between and most useful, user applications are based in the cloud. The user interface is minimalist much like the Chrome Browser. Boot time is very quick with Google software engineer Martin Bligh demonstrating a bootup time of four seconds.
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A discussion on web services, SOA, BPM and Cloud Computing would be incomplete without a post on grid computing.
Wikipedia starts their article on grid computing by saying that “Grid computing is the combination of computer resources from multiple administrative domains for a common goal.”
So what does this mean?
In the first place, computing is about achieving a piece of work, what the work consists of is irrelevant for the definition.
Grid computing is about achieving or completing a humongous piece of work which if given to a single computer would take an inordinately large amount of time and would also in all probability lock up the CPU cycles of the machine, leading to that notorious reaction ‘My computer froze”.
For people who are maybe not technically minded but are aware of SETI@home (The Search For Extra Terrestrial Intelligence – this is a volunteer computing project that utilizes the unused CPU cycles of volunteer home and work PCs to analyze radio signals emanating from space for signs of some sort of intelligent life out there. This seeks to answer that philosophical question “Are we the only ones out here on Planet Earth? It cannot be – there must be someone out there in the vast reaches of the universe”.
What this implies that each volunteer machine downloads a set of radio signal data, analyses it and sends the results back to the SETI project server. The SETI@home application is a screen-saver to be loaded onto the client machine.
This is what in technical terms is known as CPU scavenging and volunteer computing.
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[tweetmeme alias=”http://tinyurl.com/y9tehkd”%5D
In my second post about blogging, per se, I would like to touch upon something that every blogger wishes that his reader would do – Share! And by this I mean share the post he/she found interesting with his/her social circle.
But for that to happen, the blogger should make it easy for the reader to do so! And when I mean easy, it should not take more than 2-3 clicks of the mouse to do that!
One of the features you would like is the ability to share your post on social bookmarking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
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Now, for sites such as Blogger and self-hosted WordPress.org sites, this is quite simple. For WordPress.org sites, which is meant for technically minded individuals and recommended for commercial blogs, the availability of installable plug-ins is the only way to go!
But in the case of sites such as this, which are shared across the WordPress.com platform, the only way to go is to use a good blog composer such as Live Writer with its plethora of plug-ins that can make your job easy.
For Windows Live Writer, the 2 ways I would recommend to embed social bookmarking tags in your post are either using the free Get Social client application and pasting the generated tags into your post’s source or using the Windows Live Writer plug-in provided by Rahul Soni at DonNetScraps.com. The Rahul Soni provided plug-in is a work in progress and I personally prefer using the GetSocial application generated tags (with some tweaks of my own) simply for its completeness.
How about making your web-site accessible to readers in different languages?
Creating a link to one of the online translators such as BabelFish, Google Translate or Microsoft Translator is an easy way out.
Finally, we come to Twitter again.
Since the Twitter mania seems to feed on itself, we cannot avoid it and neither can WordPress.com, it seems. WordPress.com users have access to the shortcode tweetmeme that embeds a widget that allows your reader to retweet your post to Twitter.
That’s about it for now w.r.t blogging!
Have a great day!
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Quote of the day:
The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth. – Edith Sitwell______________________________
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