Search results matching tag 'measurement'

Woolsey and Swanson

woodsps56 — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:31:00 GMT

Hi. My name is Steve Woods and I work in HP Enterprise Services Application Modernization. I’ll be posting on topics that involve how we use some fairly innovative approaches to legacy transformation. In particular, I’ll discuss our Visual Intelligence Tools. Let me begin by covering the Woolsey and Swanson rule. In 1969, Woolsey and Swanson published a great book on operations research, Operations Research for Immediate Application: A Quick & Dirty Manual. Chapter Twelve: Final Instructions has the following warning to his students.

I recently showed this slide to the CIO of a large financial services company. He asked for a copy to frame and put on his desk. Seems every time he asks his staff to provide him with transformational opportunities this is the expression he gets. Legacy applications are around today for many reasons, but many organizations are living with the problem, not accepting the solution. I believe the toughest part of the “acceptance” is the acceptance of a transformational approach. Most accept that modern architectures work, but how do we get there? Can you even get there from here? In future posts, I’ll be addressing the Woolsey and Swanson impasse. I look forward to your comments.

I’d like to invite you to our virtual event; I’ll be discussing the Visual Intelligence Tools. Application Transformation: Getting to the bottom line.

For a quick preview check out Dana Gardner’s recent post:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Gardner/?p=3300

Nov 5th, Americas: http://www.bitpipe.com/hpsolutionsconference/america

Nov 4th, Europe, Middle East, Africa: http://www.bitpipe.com/hpsolutionsconference/europe

Nov 3rd, Asia, Pacific and Japan: http://www.bitpipe.com/hpsolutionsconference/asia

Metacognition: Knowing about knowing

woodsps56 — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:57:00 GMT

At the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting, neuroscientists are interested in the tricks magicians use to fool us (http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/48544/title/Magic_for_neuroscientists). It seems that magicians are keenly aware of issues we humans have. How we perceive is a very imperfect process. Magicians and con artists know this. They are metacognitive. Don’t believe your brain can be fooled? Take a few of the tests here: http://www.gocognitive.net/demo/change-blindness. I was startled at how some changes were fairly obvious, but I missed them completed. You have to click on the part of the picture that is changing. Try changing the time cycle.

What’s the point? Your brain is an amazing resource, but it has shortcomings. The point of the Visual Intelligence Tools is to leverage metacognition, to know about knowing. Check out this video.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

I’d like to invite you to our virtual event; I’ll be discussing the Visual Intelligence Tools.

Application Transformation: Getting to the bottom line.

Nov 5^th, Americas: http://www.bitpipe.com/hpsolutionsconference/america

Nov 4^th, Europe, Middle East, Africa: http://www.bitpipe.com/hpsolutionsconference/europe

Nov 3^rd, Asia, Pacific and Japan: http://www.bitpipe.com/hpsolutionsconference/asia

One Fish, Two Fish...

woodsps56 — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:11:00 GMT

In his book, How to Measure Anything, Douglas W. Hubbard laments the reluctance of IT organizations to use inferential statistics for measurement. Hubbard poses the question of how to measure the number of fish in a lake. Many IT decision makers might respond just to drain the lake, kill the fish, then have someone slog through the mud and count the fish. Hubbard suggests another method. Simply go out and catch 1000 fish and tag them. Then release them, come back later and catch another 1000 fish then count the number of tags. Of course, this isn’t as precise, but often the degree of precision is enough to make an informed decision.

So, what’s this got to with legacy transformation? Remember in my last post I spoke of asymmetrical transformation, transforming legacy code to specialized frameworks and tools such as extract/transform/load (ETL) tools and reporting tools. So how do we know how much ETL code there is in a legacy application? Should we drain the lake again? I suggest taking a page from Hubbard’s book and using inferential statistics. In the example below we randomly selected 259 modules and categorized each module. This took about 8 hours. Better than draining the lake, which would have taken about 230 hours? We have a margin of error, of course, but this is good enough to make some decisions, such as how to proceed with an asymmetrical transformation.

Geoffrey Moore, best-selling author and managing director of leading consulting firm TCG Advisors, calls this differentiation core and context. Core makes your business unique, context is all the useful utility functionality that is required, but doesn’t merit hand-written code. Mr. Moore will be keynoting our conference. Details below. Check out his blog: http://geoffmoore.blogs.com/

Application Transformation: Getting to the bottom line.

Nov 5^th, Americas: http://www.bitpipe.com/hpsolutionsconference/america

Nov 4^th, Europe, Middle East, Africa: http://www.bitpipe.com/hpsolutionsconference/europe

Nov 3^rd, Asia, Pacific and Japan: http://www.bitpipe.com/hpsolutionsconference/asia

EODB Assessments and Anniversary

christina.sullivan — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:45:00 GMT

I can't believe that I have been blogging a year! I'm not a super-blogger by any means and certainly don't have the volume of posts that most bloggers do, but I'm pretty proud that I've stuck with it a year. It has been challenging, interesting, and a very positive experience overall. So, here is to 1 year. The goal for the next year is to post more and collaborate more with other bloggers in my subject area.

I've been toying with the idea for quite a while to develop an assessment that companies can use to evaluate how easy they are to do business with at a more detailed level and from a customer's perspective. I have tons of survey data that includes “How easy is it to do business with (X company)”?; however, very few actually break "easy" down into components

I've reviewed the Forester's Customer Service Innovation Framework and Self-Assessment http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/0,7211,47688,00.html and think Natalie L. Petouhoff has done an excellent job of defining 150 best pratice capabilities. Although I like her framework, I'd like one that could be applied to any business process.

A former boss of mine, Jerry Wittig, developed a draft assessment that I think could provide an excellent starting point. It had the following categories which could be rated on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being the lowest score and 5 being the best. The idea is that the customer of company X would rate their company interactions based upon the following categories and sub attributes:

Effortless - less time, fewer steps, fewer decisions

Comfortable - friendly relationships/dialogs, free of embarassment

Informal - fewer worries, less rules/constraints

Unforced - per my timeline, few demands

Rewarding - high benefit for effort, unexpected pleasures

Jerry passed away some years ago and I'd like to think his legacy and work continues. What assessments have you seen/used for assessing ease of doing business? What other characteristics do you think should be included in such an assessment? Send me your ideas/comments.

Doubling Down

s_mathur — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 20:44:00 GMT

In blackjack, if you have a great hand versus the house, you can double your bet or “double down” to show the confidence that you have in winning it all. HP’s commitment to our new Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processor is a clear signal that our technology partnership is strong, and the products are even stronger.

In today’s economic environment, customers can’t afford to make anything other than a safe bet. They are concerned about energy efficiency, performance and manageability – these are the keys to getting the most out of IT investments. With the new HP ProLiant G6 servers, based on Six-Core AMD Opteron processors, HP is increasing the capabilities of their award-winning ProLiant product line. Seven new models feature an uncompromising six-core processor that is designed for outstanding performance while still working within the same power and thermal ranges of existing HP servers based on our quad-core family.

We’ve written over and over again that consistency is critical for our customers. In large data centers, having consistency of platforms provides a huge benefit for customers, helping to turn the complexity of managing thousands of devices into a much easier task. From managing to servicing, if you can reduce the complexity and variance of the platforms, you can reduce the costs. And who wants to spend more in management costs? Especially with the business constraints of today’s market bearing down on you.

While we strive for consistency in our processors, we also offer a no-compromise approach to the products. Some in the industry may artificially limit the capabilities of the processors for marketing reasons, but we believe that keeping a consistent set of features from the top of the line down to the lowest option helps customers better manage their platforms. And, when it comes to planning, you know exactly what you are getting, from I/O to memory to cache – making it far easier to plan for your deployment needs.

HP takes the consistency concept a step further. The G6 servers have a common set of features, regardless of the processor, that allow us to cleanly integrate our technology into their platforms and bring the customer a unified product offering that makes it easier to make HP the clear choice for the data center.

From the “Sea of Sensors” to help manage the systems, to the commonality across power supplies and even the HP ProLiant Onboard Administrator, managing an HP server becomes a simple, and most importantly, repeatable activity. This helps drive more consistency in the data center and allows you to maximize your critical IT resources.

We’re also very excited about the new levels of performance that customers will see with a Six-Core AMD Opteron processor, and a great compliment to that is the new 6GB/second SAS drives that, when combined with the HP Smart Array controllers, allow the I/O subsystem to keep pace with all of those cores. Combining that with our new HT Assist feature is expected to bring an unprecedented level of I/O and memory throughput for AMD-based ProLiant servers.

With all of this new performance, we haven’t pushed the power consumption up, allowing the new six-core processors to work in the same power and thermal ranges as their four-core counterparts. If your goal is to get the most out of your data center while keeping a “green IT” focus, this is the product for you.

There is no greater compliment than being chosen as the cornerstone of a great platform, and with the new G6 servers, there are seven new reasons for customers to choose HP ProLiant G6 servers featuring AMD Opteron processors, each a winning hand for solving today’s IT challenges without breaking the bank.

In Vegas you “double down” when you have a great hand against the house, and it is clear that, with all of these new platforms coming to market, HP saw the great hand that we were dealing with the new six-core processors and doubled down as well.

John Fruehe is the Director of Business Development for Server/Workstation products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Customer’s Clock Rules

christina.sullivan — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 22:20:00 GMT

In a previous blog, http://www.communities.hp.com/online/blogs/ease-of-doing-business/archive/2008/11/20/disneyworld-does-it.aspx, I cite 5 rules for ease of doing business and improving customer experience. The 2^nd rule I cited was that you must “Evaluate your processes and procedures with #1(put the customer first) in mind”. If you are working to transform a critical customer process, you need to know: 1) what you are trying to accomplish? and 2) how do you know when you get there? The latter gets to developing the right measures. Let me give you an example of this. If I was looking at customer turnaround time for a specific process, would I measure time in business hours (the time that the establishment is open) or would I measure it in customer real-time? If you’ve read the title of this blog you should know the answer, but you would be surprised how many companies don’t do this. Customers don’t care if the office was closed between 6pm and 8am. They want a response and they want it now. If they made a request yesterday and don’t get an answer until today, that’s a 24 hour response in their mind. Systems may have limitations that get in the way of measuring your performance in “customer time” but in order to follow the first 2 rules (#1: putting the customer first; and 2: Evaluate your processes and procedures with #1 in mind), you have to ensure your measurements are consistent with the customer view.

Go forth and measure! But, make sure you do it with the customer mindset – not the internal view or just the way the system allows you to.