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Cloud Computing en Costa Rica

Web Image Consulting y sus servicios a través de Internet

Comentarios, General cloud computing, saas, software as a service, cloud hosting

Never leave a techy guy in charge of a Business Process they would be thinking all that it takes to solve any problem is either create or install an Information System, I had an argument on CRM with a "just install it" kind of guy and base on that conversation I decided to add this quick post. Business process en general should be aligned with strategy, and these process feed strategy back along the path; strategy is the basis for all actions within the organization and in particular a CRM Process Implementation is one of these actions. Any modern organization should know what its strategy is in terms of the relation with their customers, that strategic view will be the starting point for the implementation of a CRM (business) system, CRM as IT systems should be a tool aligned with the Business objective not an objective on its own.

It is true that successful CRM will heavily depend on technology; however, these technologies do not come cheap; there is a significant amount of money and time to invest and the process to implement such systems should be clearly and carefully planned and executed; otherwise, the promise of solving the relation problems with customers will become a back fire because lost of credibility with the current customer base. Before starting with any actual implementation of the system as a whole, company goals has to be revised and updated accordingly and the CRM process has to be designed and analyzed with all their consecuences for the business and the customer relationships with all the key players.

Comentarios, Comentarios crm, crm, system implementations, system implementations

Las 9 C's del liderazgo, por Lee Iacocca

Durante un seminario sobre Administración de Proyectos conocimos la historia de una persona que como todas tiene algo bueno que enseñarnos, y por supuesto, como el tipo de persona que logra trascender tiene aún más algo bueno que enseñarnos.

Lee Iacocca. Su historia resulta muy interesante, entró en Ford como simple vendedor hasta ser presidente, y revolucionó la compañía, tanto con sus ideas de marketing como ideando nuevos modelos, su gran éxito el Ford Mustang. Tras marcharse humillado de Ford, Iacocca fue contratado como presidente y director ejecutivo de Chrysler Corporation, empresa que atravesaba una mala situación. Consiguió ayuda gubernamental y levantó la compañía. (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Iacocca)

Las 9 C's del liderazgo

La mayor de las C es CRISIS: los líderes se hacen, no nacen. El liderazgo se forja en tiempos de crisis.

Comentarios liderazgo

There always has been been promises to solve tech problems since ever; although, sometimes a solution creates another problem, first we had monolithic applications where all code has to be written by the same team; from I/O access to Presentation; then we had libraries to concentrate common pieces of code for a particular task, but these libraries created to be reuse had interdependencies with other libraries of code, then to solve these interdependencies we create versioned libraries and ship them in a single file, but as we had versioning we start to have problems with libraries having dependencies for a particular version and any new version might break the code; thus our code is still tightly coupled; even though, we have tried all tricks in the book (and some that aren’t in the book) to decouple our modules.

One common approach is to use patterns such factories to decouple the modules and leave the factory to decide (based on configuration) which “module” to deliver, and yet still once the object has been delivered it cannot be retaken or change into some new version; despite all these efforts, one fundamental problem remains: “how to decouple our modules and make them resilient to change in other modules”. Since 1999 there has been efforts from a group to define a standard for a framework capable of this decoupling, it first started as a solution for device communication where its applicability is obvious (i.e. in a Smart House where appliances come a goes any time) where the modules should be self aware of each other and auto-configurable.
Nowadays this framework is making its way into the enterprise application world to allow a SOA environment to exists in a single JVM or distributed JVMs, making modules reusable, secure, distributed, resilient, environment aware, self configurable, versioned and more; it varies from WS SOA in not requiring a transport layer removing this overhead and making services resilient. This framework its defined by OSGi Alliance and they provide the detailed specs for the framework but several implementations can be found both in commercial and open source versions, some examples are:

http://www.knopflerfish.org/
http://www.eclipse.org/equinox/
http://felix.apache.org/

A promise of a SOA environment without the overhead of the transport layer and a build in ability to react to failures and code changes is a great improvement it definitely adds a great number of advantages for (at last) modular development. We definitely should keep an eye in the releases of implementations of RFCs from this group.

Tips & Examples, Comentarios java, architectura, soa

Comentarios creativity

Sometimes we just sit down and write anything without having a any deal of thinking about the target audience of what we are writing. Moreover, we do not have any kind of tools; but, peer reviews and comments from readers to understand and qualify our writing skills. I was thinking that it would be nice to have a mechanism to test my articles; browsing around I found an article in wikipedia about a test named Flesch-Kincaid Readability you can read the whole article in here. Despite the fact that the test might help into measuring readiness of the text in terms of sentences length and word length using Flesch Reading Ease test, or changing the equation to get Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level test. Investing time to think about the target audience; to take language, audience education, even the medium used to present the article; may change the perception about the article greatly by the readers.

People is getting used to read from digital mediums, such as PC or cellphones; however, the traditional medium is printed; such books or newspapers. Digital books are more common nowadays; although, when it comes to read a book the favorite media is the old fashioned paper. Readers looking form information in the internet have different reading patterns, they tend to do skimming reading; which means, reading pieces of the whole page, the starting sentences of the paragraphs in a effort to read only the strictly necessary to figure out if the article worths being read completely; therefore, when writing for a digital medium we have to pay special attention to starting sentences on paragraphs.

This behavior on reading has lead to a number of mechanism two I would like to mention here; one to encourage fast reading and other one to assist skimming reading; since the 70's a technique know as Rapid Serial Visual Presentation has been used in a experiment at the Standford University Persuasive Technology Laboratory; the technique is used in a web site called buddybuzz.org there several content providers can present their text in the tiny cellphone screens, RSVP consist of flashing one word at the time allowing to draw attention on that particular word before moving to the next one in the text; allowing speeds up to 1000 words per minute, this mechanism have prove useful for those interested in reading their favorite news or blogs in their cellphones.

Skimming experience can be enhanced and eased by means of tools; a group of researches at Palo Alto Research Center in California develop a tool called ScentHighligth, the tool is specially useful with digital text, they use correlation, spread activation and word co-occurrence to get search keywords related and highlight sentences based on a base of correlated words you can read the entire paper here.

Sadly both techniques are only experimental and our articles will have to be carefully written and correctly targeted to the audience to avoid loosing the effect that we want to achieve and all our effort will be wasted. I all the browsing I did about reading I found a site where the readability test can be done to a page, so I posted this words in the internet and ran the test here this are the results:

Total sentences 26
Total words 501
Average words per Sentence 19.27
Words with 1 Syllable 302
Words with 2 Syllables 114
Words with 3 Syllables 62
Words with 4 or more Syllables 23
Percentage of word with three or more syllables 16.97%
Average Syllables per Word 1.61
Gunning Fog Index 14.49
Flesch Reading Ease 50.84
Flesch-Kincaid Grade 10.96

Comentarios writing, redability