Getting to an effective Daily Stand Ups

I just stumbled across a great read on Daily stand ups -> http://bit.ly/a6UXXJ

Invention Vs Innovation

I was in a very interesting discussion on Invention vs Innovation and this is what the difference looks like



So essentially Invention turns the money invested into Ideas, whereas Innovation turns these ideas into more money (amplified ), which is the returns

Learning Ruby

I am attending a training on Ruby and from what I have learnt so far, my take about the language

• Awesome


• Creates highly productive development team


• Simple enough to learn


• Eases the life of software developer to great extent

Knowledge Worker

I was attending a workshop over the weekend on 4 roles of leadership and one of things we were discussing was the difference between an industrial age worker and knowledge age worker. Very interesting specially because i was relating it to another video I saw the other day on why bonuses don't work. The 3 basic difference between Industrial and Knowledge age worker area.

• Job Description Vs Unique Contributions
• Employees/Subordinates Vs Volunteers, Associate, Partners
• Control Mind Set Vs Unleash Potential/Release mind set

On comparing this with the other video i talked about, it is the fact that a job which needs to do a set of mechanical job corresponds to a industrial age mind set and the other is more on creative aspect/aspect of unleashing potential.

Rationalization - Looking at your IT Cost

With the advent of IT, every organization has been investing into the adding/upgrading and probably phasing out technology. However as organization are growing, the needs of their IT systems have been growing. The systems have gone through manifold changes with the changing business needs. Every application have gone through the hands of multiple people. Not only the application but also the IT infrastructure side of things also goes thru a drastic changes. With new set of hardware purchases to license purchases. At the end of the day, there is high degree of possibility that on a given day it is very difficult to estimate what our true cost towards technology should be.

In the current economic scenario, every organization is under pressure reduce the costs at each and every cost centre. IT and systems areas are the ones who would always face the highest pressure as they are mostly not the mainstream business for the organization. With that in mind I think it is necessary for every person working in this area to look at the following aspects

a. Work on getting the legacy pieces weeded out from the application(Basically Refactor) and reduce the cost to maintain/support application

b. Consolidate apps to make sure that the no two application is trying to provide the same feature. Also work on reducing redundant features

c. Phase out apps that are no longer being used or are being rarely used. For apps that are being used only some of the times or by a very limited set of people, there is a need to evaluate if it is required to continue having a separate app or can the features be consolidated some where else
d. Look at the complete license costs in the organization - Review in terms of re-use of surplus licenses, remove all together or strategically extend/buy new licenses

e. Analysis the utilization and distribution of infrastructure - Look at options to Consolidate/Phase out/or move to platforms that could reduce TCO.

The basic idea is to rationalize the cost towards building and maintaining the Applications, Infrastructure and Licenses used in the organization