Desicritics Section: BizTech

Banning of CFC Inhalers - Another Stupid Ban

paul7anderson — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:00:56 EDT

Earlier I commented on banning tin in solder (Problems implementing the Restrictions of Hazardous Substances). The August 2008 issue of Scientific American carries an article about the problems about to happen with the banning of chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) driven inhalers. Here, just as in removing tin from solder, banning a known hazardous material from a trivial use can cause very significant consequences. Emily Harrison in her article "Changes In the Air" gives the history. She goes on to explain why one member of the FDA advisory committee, Nicholas J. Gross of the Stritch-Layola School of Medicine has publicly regretted the decision, recanting his support and requesting the ban be pushed back until 2010 when the first patents on replacement propellants hydrofluoroalkane (HFA) expire. Gross noted that the decision had nothing to do with the environment, Albuterol inhalers contributed less than 0.1% of the CFC released when the treaty was signed. "It's a symbolic issue", Gross remarks.

To quote Harrison's article

"Some skeptics instead point to the billions of dollars to be gained by the three companies holding patents on the available HFA albuterol inhalers, namely Glaxo-SmithKline, Schering-Plough and Teva. Although the FDA advisory committee recognized that the expenses would go up, Hendeles says it also believed that the companies would help defray the added costs for individuals. Fims, for instance, had committed to donating a million HFA inhalers around the country, According to Hendeles, Glaxo-SmithKline did not follow through, although Schering-Plough and Teva did. Glaxo-SmithKline did not resond to requests for comment." (emphasis added)

It might be noted that Leslie Hendeles of the University of Florida has pointed out there are differences in the mechanics and maintance. The HFC inhalers must be primed more carefully and rinsed to accomodate the stickier HFC. The HFC inhalers run out suddenly without warning that it is getting low. This, of course, now puts the patients themselves at increased risk. Who is responsible if a person dies due to an acute asthma attack because they did not know their inhaler was going to run out suddenly? Hendeles points out that pharmicists may not warn patients and doctors do not know.

The HFC inhalers cost three times more than generic CFC inhalers.

Just as removing tin from solder, replacing CFC with hydrofluoroalkane (HFA) gives an inferior product at greater cost.

Clearly, someone profits from doing something that is not in the best interests of the user or the medical community. Profiting from doing harm to society is ordinarily some kind of crime.

To quote Harrison

"The main public health issue in this decision may be the side effects of the economics, not the drug chemistry. Multiple studies have shown that raising costs leads to poorer adherence to treatment. One study discovered that patients took 30% less anti-asthma medication when their co-pay doubled. In the case of of a chronic disease such as asthma, it is particularly difficult to get people to follow regular treatment plans, "generally speaking, for any reson you you don't take a medicine, cost makes it more likely" that you do not , comments Michael Chernew, a health policy expert at Harvard Medical School."" (emphasis added)

Harrison continues,

"Such choices to forgo medication could affect more than just the patients themselves. "For example," Hendeles points out, "in a pregnant mother with untreated asthma, less oxygen is delivered to the fetus, which can lead to congenital problems and premature birth." And considering that the disease disproportionately strikes the poor, what seems to be a good, responsible environmental decision might in the end exact an unexpected human toll."

This differs from the case of tin in solder, but perhaps not by much; removing lead from solder and replacing the less-expensive-lead with all-tin in solder was much more expensive than using the tin/lead solder that was doing a better job ar a lower cost. Here we are again being forced by government regulators that evidently need to suppliment their meager public-service salaries with hidden compensation from industries who benefit from their regulations to spend more money for an inferior product.

Who benefits? Certainly not the end user.

Broadband on Batteries

Shantanu Dutta — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 01:35:47 EDT

While booking an air ticket online the other day, there was a power cut just at the point when the gateway was processing the payment from the credit card and the modem shut down. The resulting confusion led to stress as I tried to contact the travel portal, the bank and the airline to get a clear picture regarding ticketing, charging of payment and so on. Online travel portals are not your typical travel agent of old whom you knew by name and had done business with for years. The anonymity of the voice on the other side of the line, the peculiarity of the problem and their obvious inability to understand, let alone help only added to the confusion. This practically undid any advantages that doing transactions online might have provided.

In India, there is a lot of political backing from both the major political formations to increase internet penetration which is among the lowest in the Asia–Pacific region.

“India has the lowest Internet penetration rate at 3 percent in the region, according to a survey by U.S.-based digital research firm comScore Inc. According to the survey

- South Korea boasts of the greatest rate of Internet usage, with 65 percent of its population using the Internet in May.

- China clearly has the largest online population with 91.5 million people. The number of monthly unique Internet users in India is just a quarter of that figure at 22.8 million.”

- South Korea has the most active online population, using the Internet an average of 17.4 days per person in May, and dedicating 31.2 hours to viewing 4,546 pages during the month. Indians on the other hand got onto Cyberspace an average of only 11.4 days per person in May and viewed 1,400 pages over 14.7 hours.

Clearly though, the government is not pushing for internet penetration so that citizens can watch videos on Youtube. Rather the intent is to promote e-commerce and e-governance through the internet platform and thereby increase productivity and efficiency. While all that is a good thing, the commensurate development of an infrastructure backbone is missing.

For instance, look at energy and power generation. After all, my story started with the recounting of a power failure in the middle of a commercial transaction. Even as I write this, electricity in India’s national capital goes on and off several times a day.

Anybody who has ever experienced a power cut in India would know empirically that India simply does not produce enough electricity for its needs and will not do so in the foreseeable future although the national electricity policy envisages power for all by 2012 and per capita availability of power to be increased to more than 1,000 units by 2011-12. With the deadline barely four years away it is impossible that this goal would be ever met.

While industrialization is progressing at a rapid pace, the fact that power generation has not kept up has meant that even relatively less industrialized states like West Bengal which once were power surplus, have power cuts now. In fact, the more industrialized you are, the more is the demand. Maharashtra, for example, faces a deficit of more than 30 per cent In fact, the colloquial term for power cuts “load shedding” has now become part of the country’s rural folk lore.

As I complete typing this piece on a laptop and upload it from a speedy GPRS modem, I remind myself that having a increasingly high tale density of phones and laying strategies to wire up the country to the customer’s doorstep and using Wi Max to connect up the whole country won’t work if we don’t have a proper infra structural backbone. You can’t run a broadband service operating on batteries ! It just does not work !

The CFO-CIO Cross-over, Part I

Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 12:33:47 EDT

The CFO and CIO roles are interesting roles when compared from various dimensions. As it so happens, I just moved from supporting a CIO to supporting a CFO in a bank, so I thought of shedding light on some aspects of these two roles. The two roles are simple, one looks after the financial matters and the other looks after the information technology of a firm. One would expect the twain would not meet other than the CIO is supporting the CFO's technology and the CFO seeing the CIO as a supplier and a cost line, but life is much more complicated. In a small way, a good CFO-CIO relationship especially in financial institutions, can lead to massive competitive advantage.

Where does one start? One way would be to talk about the past and present of the technology/financial relationship and then my thoughts about the future. As there is a lot of information and facts about these two roles, this will be a series rather than an essay. But before delving into the prosaic matters of organizational structures and strategic alignment, there is the small matter of philosophy to be handled. And that is the philosophy of technology to the CFO herself. And this is where I see the crucial issue.

Accounting and finance, by their nature, are backward-looking and are oriented towards making sense of disorder according to strict rules. There is nothing wrong with that, because that is how you come up with a normative view of the world, something that you can compare and contrast with a fair degree of accuracy and consistency across the world. The field and thus the people working in it are also fairly predictive and reactive in nature. Their remuneration patterns are high and consistent in nature, job descriptions are standardised. This world handles change rather slowly, systematically and gradually, with due consideration and with controls - Salt of the (business) earth so to say. But that sits uneasily with the broader technology world.

The technology area, whether on the web 2.0, the applications, the networks, the technology people, their remuneration, the IC chips, the massively online multiplayer worlds, virtual worlds, ERM systems, virtual reality, Offshoring and outsourcing, SOA, you name it, are almost like the anti-thesis of what I described above. Change is something that is constant; it is creative destruction all the time. The basic foundations of what you believe in change so rapidly, skills become obsolete quickly, and so on and so forth.

You might want to ask, how does that matter to me as a CFO? Here is precisely where it hits the CFO, because technology is redefining our customers, our employees, our ways of doing business, our ways of valuing assets, the question of governance, the communication channels, the people interaction, the coverage of events, and so on and so forth. In other words, just when the CFO is desperately trying to make things simple, explain everything and keep things under control, technology is making things agile, mobile and hostile. You do not believe me? Well, here’s something that you can see for yourself. In a finance department, more and more people are non-financial or accounting people. More and more, the regulators are finding it difficult to just rely on accounting data and demand further information to control the business. And internally, the business also demands much more than just accounting data, it demands commentary which allows the business to be agile, mobile and hostile. Customers walk in and demand information which we cannot provide. Can you imagine trying to provide bank account level information as rich as what you can get from a web page counter software application?

How does the idea of a going concern relate to a website originated business which can be fully automated, dealing in virtual assets such as songs or coding applets with payment in Linden dollars and the possibility of doing a gift exchange within the World of Warcraft? How do you handle a customer who has no conception of paying for assets because he has spent his lifetime getting his songs, films, phone calls, entertainment, software, assets etc. for free or through swapping them online?

What is the role of an intermediary - like a financial institution - when the concept of assets themselves is changing and everybody is running like mad after Intellectual Property and Virtual Assets? How do you account for depreciation of assets which have no discernible way of judging decay or usage? I can put aside 33% every year for a machine because I guess it has a three-year life, but how much should I put aside for an online constantly regenerating random number generator which theoretically has an infinite life? Actually, most software online technology assets have infinite lives. And if the value addition is happening by a group of enthusiasts based on a free open source model, then what do you say to the tax man?

Lest you assume I am just talking about software, how about virtualization of servers? If the asset based was dependent upon a number of servers, then it has just been virtualized, and if you want to go for the virtualized servers, then they have just gone into the Google or Amazon cloud. It is not like everything is moving 100% into the technology world, but every bit of interest to the CFO is being impacted by technology and is making structural changes. Take the example of resource planning. Previously, if your business grew, you would simply increase the number of analysts and accountants you had and kept on supporting the business, but now you cannot do that. You have to have technology to preserve history, run the rules, generate the reports, do the regulatory stuff.

Basel II taught a deep lesson to the world of finance, namely that if a CFO ignores what’s happening in the business, then satisfying requirements such as Basel II will not be possible. This is so, because the front office business and their systems are simply unable to provide the information in the right fashion which the CFO wants, and mostly, it is because the CFO did not specify or demand the front office business and systems to be transparent and fungible as far as accounting and financial information are concerned. This very same point also applies to the CRO by the way. While there is a surprisingly large number of CFOs who are forward-looking and technology literate, CFOs should recognise that there is a philosophical tension between their profession and technology.

While you might differ, my gut feel is that a CFO has to have a very firm control over the technology that she/he has, what’s coming down the pipeline and what’s generally happening around the technical world. In other words, she/he has to be clued-up and work closely with the CIO to manage the business going forward. Now what does this “manage the business” mean? And what does “work very closely” mean? All these questions are strictly with reference to banking because the relationship between IT and Finance is industry and to a lesser extent size, specific. This is what we will find out in the next part.

Problems Implementing The Restriction of Hazardous Substances

paul7anderson — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 12:08:25 EDT

If we are to believe the Wikipedia article "Restriction of Hazardous Substances", it has been a big success. However, Wikipedia articles need not have any reliability as they reflect the views of the last one to edit them, and that can be anyone. It might be useful to look at the facts regarding a very controversial aspect of this directive. The directive required that solder contain less than 0.1% lead. This simple directive was issued without consideration of all of the consequences. The proof of that statement is that there is NO evidence that all the consequences were considered. Even before the 2006 EU ban, most manufacturers made the switch in advance due to shelf-life of products and need to work out problems with the new material. There have been problems. Serious problems.

Often, the removal of lead from solder has been by replacing it with SAC305 which is 96.5 % tin, 3.0 % silver and 0.5% copper. The increased in tin content will increase the use of tin by about 11,000 tons a year. The world production of tin is roughly 300,000 tons. This 3 or 4% increase is small but in context of estimates of the exhaustion of the world's tin deposits in 20 -40 years, it is worth considering. ("How Long Willl it Last" {May 26, 2007} New Scientist 194 :38-39)

Another part of the problem with removing lead from solder is the loss in reliability of electronic devices. Lead solder made tough, flexible (not brittle) joints that were resistant to mechanical shocks. None of the replacements have anywhere as good mechanical properties. Dropping a cell phone accidentally is common, but now it is much more likely to die.

Removing lead from solder has brought a new problem into play. Tin without lead grows whiskers, crystalline filaments. These filaments can and do produce random short-circuits. They have destroyed billions of dollars worth of satellites. They have created incidents at nuclear power plants including a false shut-down command at the Millstone nuclear reactor at Millstone, Connecticut. NASA and other agencies have documented many cases where tin whiskers have been responsible for failure of electronic equipment. However, most electronic equipment failure is just accepted as a matter of fact and no effort is made to pin point the actual cause of failure. In truth, many failures are the result of mechanical shock or tin whiskers. NASA scientists have verified this but manufacturers prohibit a public release of the information. The manufacturers don't want you to know.

The NASA website http://nepp.nasa.gov/whiskers gives scientific facts about what we know and what we don't know about them or what causes them. The bottom line is that no one fully understands what causes them. We do know that a few percent lead will prevent them. At the present time, in the absence of tin, we can not estimate when tin whiskers will form. They might form in a few months and in other cases can take ten or more years. They adversely affect the reliability of electronic devices. Their random behavior has made research very difficult.

It is well established that lead is harmful when ingested. It might be argued that any lead in the environment is bad. Eleven thousand tons is a lot of lead. However, 11,000 tons compared to 3 or 4 million tons of lead used is rather small, About 88% of lead is used in storage batteries, 3% is used for ammunition, glass and ceramics use 3%, casting metals about 2% and sheet lead about 1%. Solder used to consume about 0.5 %. That's all: one-half of one percent. The havoc caused by using one-half-of-one-percent less cannot be justified by any stretch of the imagination.

Most of the lead ingested by humans originated from leaded gasoline. Leaded paint is still a major source of lead for humans, particularly that coming from China. Several Ayurvedic medicines have large quantities of lead. Some forms of cosmetics have a lot of lead. There was a time when tinned cans were soldered. This resulted in contamination of the food. Even today, there is some lead in the tin used to plate tin cans and this leaches into the food. Canned pineapple, fruit cocktail and canned tomatoes have lead levels in excess of the legal maximum of fifty parts per billion, and the food manufacturers know this. Why is nothing being done about lead in our food, and yet this witch-hunt for lead in electronics? Who eats their computer?

There is a published account of children getting lead from lead fishing sinkers stored on the floor on which they played. Workers working with lead are known to accumulate lead in their bodies. The proper design of the work place should greatly reduce this. The cost of properly designed work spaces is trivial compared to the $38 billion and climbing cost of removing lead from solder. (Technology Forecaster Inc.)

Lead poisoning is difficult to diagnose. Most commonly, diagnosis is done by measuring the lead content of the blood. It might be of slight interest that in most of the cases of lead poisoning due to herbal remedies described in PubMed, the doctors are outside India describing patients who have taken Indian medicines.

To summarize, adding lead back into solder will greatly increase the reliability of electronic devices. The effect on humans is small compared to the other sources of lead. The effect on humans can be mitigated by properly designed work spaces.

What should be done? The first thing that must be done is the recognition that the removal of lead from solder was unwise. It was a mistake taken without considering the total costs and consequences. In the United States, it might be possible to require an Environmental Impact Report before any lead-free devices could enter the country. I do not know that any was ever done before electronics without lead were imported. That was clearly a mistake. It should be remedied now.

The Website Ad Placement Heat Map

Ashish — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 07:27:38 EDT

One of the most important points to consider when trying to make money from ads on web pages is the proper placement of ads. If you have done some studies in this area, you could have come across many people trying to sell their secrets of Ad placement or how to make more money from properly placing Ads. However, the basis of many secrets of ad placement is how the human eye perceives ads, how they fit into the page, and whether people notice the ads or ignore them. And the basis for much of this is something called the 'Heat Map'. The Heat Map specifies positions on the page that are much more likely to catch user attention, and other places where users are likely to ignore the ads.

The Google page for the Heat Map specifies more details: Certain locations tend to be more successful than others. This "heat map" illustrates the ideal placing on a sample page layout. The colors fade from dark orange (strongest performance) to light yellow (weakest performance). All other things being equal, ads located above the fold tend to perform better than those below the fold. Ads placed near rich content and navigational aids usually do well because users are focused on those areas of a page.

Keep in mind that while the Heat Map is a good starting point, you need to spend more time on trying to figure out how your users read your page, and the amount of ads and their placement such that they earn the maximum money for you. This will not be a one-time activity, but something that is likely to take several iterations before you reach a higher level of earnings.

Book Review: Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture

Sunil — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:01:41 EDT

Warning: This book might be dangerous. It has the capacity to make the reader think.

When I was a kid growing up in India, it was some sort of dream of mine to have my own little secret chemistry lab. There were all these stories in books about kids having their secret dens in their basement, where they made fascinating discoveries or invented cool compounds. Except there were two small problems; we didn’t have a basement (or too many extra rooms) and, more importantly, there was no such thing as a “home chemistry set” to be found in any store in India. So it was with absolute wonder that I imagined every smart or curious kid in the US to be working away into the night in his or her own little lab.

Of course, I learned that it wasn’t really true. But it certainly was true that at least till the eighties many, many kids in the States got a home chemistry set as a Christmas or birthday present sometime in their lives. And many of them had the time of their lives creating colorful solutions, horrible stinks or flashing explosions, even as they learnt the scientific method and gained a love for chemistry. Somehow, this love for “do-it-yourself” science died in the US in more recent times. Perhaps it was because companies became too worried about liability issues that could come from some kid getting injured. Perhaps it was because the state became a big nanny, and people live in constant fear about the next potential chemical weapons attack. Perhaps because of this it became harder to get chemicals. Or perhaps it was because of all these reasons and more. Anyway, the concept of home chemistry kits was slowly lost, and that sadly might have killed the potential scientist in many a kid.

But it looks like there have remained some die hard enthusiasts of home chemistry experiments, and Robert Thomson, the author of the Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture must be amongst the foremost enthusiasts of those. In writing this book, he has thought through every little detail to help anyone, from a high school student to the adult diehard, in establishing a complete, very effective home chemistry lab.

In a world where everything comes in a nicely over-wrapped package, Thomson doesn’t expect you to rely on any kit. On the contrary, he points out how most of the kits out in the market presently have been dumbed down to ridiculous proportions, and also avoid selling any chemical that could be slightly toxic or dangerous (which pretty much leaves only salt and sugar to sell). The book starts with the very basics; the equipment you need, the space you’ll need, and the source for chemicals, and goes through seventeen comprehensive chapters of chemistry. There are simple chapters on making and separating solutions, chapters covering important chemistry basics like redox reactions or acid-base reactions, chapters on chemical stoichiometry and then electro and photochemistry, qualitative and quantitative analysis and finally even a pure fun chapter on forensic chemistry. In all of these chapters, Thomson has been very meticulous in explaining basic chemistry concepts (using simple definitions and very effective examples), providing details on the equipment, and finally, some excellent experimental details. The first chapter draws you right into the book, as Thomson explains how he became interested in home chemistry. He describes how to convert anything, from a kitchen to a garage, into a suitably safe and convenient chemistry lab.

He provides plenty of information on obtaining equipment and reagents that are surprisingly extremely cheap. I was very surprised not just at how many chemicals I could get at the local pharmacy or hardware store, but at how pure many of them were. Many of them were an order of magnitude cheaper than the stuff my own lab buys from Fisher and Sigma-Aldrich, but just about as pure. Perhaps I should tell our lab manager to get our stuff from the retail market. Home chemistry can be very effective and very cheap. And he also makes sure to tell you how you can get stuff that is safe, and will not get you into trouble with paranoid agents. Importantly, Thomson tells you how to avoid serious trouble by avoiding any discussion of making stuff that could blow up (which is a little bit of a pity, since some of the most fun science experiments start or end with a pop and some nasty smells sure to amuse kids).

Thomson also is very clear in telling you how easy it is to hurt yourself (or someone else) by not taking the right precautions at home, and then goes on to tell you the precautions you should take for a safe working environment. Home science is a serious pursuit, but while you have to be careful, you can and should have fun doing it. Thomson remembers that throughout the book. I was particularly pleased with his emphasis on good book keeping, and the importance of a record notebook. Without carefully recording experimental detail and results, science quickly deteriorates from reproducibility and substance to entertaining but irreproducible anecdote.

This book is almost a must have for a high school chemistry enthusiast (any AP Chemistry major), but will work just as well for any kid with a love for experiments, or the adult who has time for a hobby and a passion for science. There’s a lot of learning to be had by doing experiments yourself. This is a book that should be whole-heartedly recommended, and is something I hope many high school chemistry teachers will adopt enthusiastically in their classes. It is also my dearest hope that this book reaches India, and at least some school teachers there get their hand on it. It is a book that can actually make you think.

If you are one of those closet home chemists, this is the book for you. Go get it. Meanwhile, I’m off to observe some copper turning turquoise blue due to oxidation.

The Value of Sustainability to Business

Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 10:16:32 EDT

I firmly believe in the virtues of sustainable development. Forget about the green open-toed sandal brigade, it simply makes economic sense. Resources are limited and if you are not being optimal with your resources now and for the future, what kind of a manager would that make you? Looking around the world, one observes some enlightened global businesses heavily involved in sustainability in their business processes,

Who would like to pay more for electricity usage, or for recruitment costs, or waste an opportunity to be with loved ones rather than struggle through Heathrow, that gateway to hell? Who would actually want to be on the front pages of the tabloids as someone who committed unethical behaviour? There are economic upsides on the revenue side (you can sell more to this emerging sustainable consumer, taxpayer, citizen and shareholder) and on the cost side (your costs are reduced on the manpower, capital, materials, machines etc). But many firms and managers still think of sustainability as "green stuff" which is a shame. One way to remove this doubt is to define sustainability.

At a business dinner with the great and good of the British and the international industry, we were discussing the issue of sustainability. An interesting survey was presented by EIU and BT on this issue. The most prominent sustainability activities carried out in the company are environmental guidelines, PR matters, engagement in community investment projects, corporate charitable donations, employee volunteering, ethical trading and sourcing, supplier code of conduct, etc. Quite interesting, aren't they? A very wide range of activities and all they think of is that "green stuff", but when asked about what sustainability should contain in the context of their organisation, a totally different picture appears:

It should contain environmental impacts, ethical corporate behaviour and corporate values, carbon footprint, long term financial health / competitiveness of an organisation, product responsibility, regulatory compliance, social impact, good governance, community relations, workforce diversity and inclusion.

Can you see any difference from what the C-Suite people said about what sustainability should contain and normal business practice? I don’t. So while you might seriously consider it to be a fad, but work with people's Luddite behaviour. Do not say it is to do with sustainability. Say that it is simply normal business practice. For example, I was briefed by our brilliant sustainability chaps on how we can deploy a simple piece of code on the network which will automatically put monitors on standby after 10-20 minutes and switch it off after 30-60 minutes. When you come back, just move the mouse or hit the monitor on/off button. Guess what that will do to the power consumption of that particular monitor? It will reduce the yearly wattage consumption by over three times. Now you tell me, why on earth will you say no to saving two-thirds of your power costs? If you do, then I have a nice bridge to sell to you.

There is much more to this. Think about ethical behaviour. It is vital for people to behave ethically and it is not really that complicated either. You might spend millions on consultants to come up with ethical rules, but actually it is much simpler. Remember what your mother and father taught you? Be good, be nice, don’t do bad things to people, don’t steal, don't lie, don't bribe, don't break laws, and so on and so forth. I do not really care much about exclusions and lawyerly behaviour. And if you are going to argue with me about ethical behaviour, then let me ask you something. Is this what you will do to your child? Will you teach him/her to look at rules of behaviour and think they are to be broken and give them no moral compass? Then why on earth would you do the same in the office? Please don't come into the office drunk. Please do not steal from the company. Please do not be violent towards the staff, do not swear or abuse people. See what I mean? I was told once in a class of reputational risk management, "Don’t do anything that you would not like to read about in the tabloids tomorrow morning". Pretty simple, isn’t it? Because if you do, then your stock price will take a hit (if you aren't fired, that is) and you can’t have a more compelling economic argument than that. Remember, pulling up the stock price is much harder than pulling it down.

Think about diversity. It simply makes sense, more so in this day and age of tight resources (check out some of the industry turnover figures, it can go up as high as 20-25%). Secondly, it takes about six months to a year to really make an employee effective. Now why on earth would you not put in policies to keep your resources happy and with you? If you have to spend 25% of your time annually in dealing with resignations, hiring, negotiations, etc, then you are a masochist. That is such a waste of time! One could be using that time to develop more business and earn more money. So make an extra effort to manage your workforce smartly, get your employees’ daughters and sons into work to see what their parents do. Nothing like increasing loyalty than to have family in the same firm. Pull in more LGBT people. Make sure there are more women engaged in the firm. Make sure that people find working in the firm a good experience. Not only will you not keep your attrition rate low, you will attract better candidates. Who on earth wants to go and work in a firm which is full of Neanderthals? Well, only another Neanderthal, but then, if that is the case, you wouldn't be reading this essay anyway!

If you have a powerful sustainability policy and execution, then you protect your reputational risk. You get to be proud of your firm, when (not if, be prepared for some things happening which are going to impact your reputation), some bad event happens, then you can say: "look, we are good corporate citizens, we are sustainable folks, and mistakes were made, we apologise, we will make sure it does not happen again", and move on. If you do not show evidence that you are consistently sustainable, then nobody will believe you and your share price will tank, but otherwise, you can protect your job, bonus and stock price!

One final thing, keep a beady eye out on what governments are doing. Normally, I would have said that governments impact about 30-40% of your business via laws, rules and regulations. It is my belief that sustainable regulations will jump massively and we will end up with almost 60-70% of our business being driven or influenced in some way by government regulations. Now government regulations are usually meant for protection or guidance. So just pre-empt the guidance and protection as far as possible, but not too much. No point in putting in scrubbers on your chimneys when the rest of your industry has not, as that will simply drive you out of business. However you can surf this regulatory wave by pushing for industry wide scrubber regulations, trying to get cheap scrubbers, use the fact that you have scrubbers to differentiate your products from your competitors, reduce environmental penalty costs by installing scrubbers, and so on and so forth. It just needs intelligence and smartness to surf and manage the regulatory tsunami which is bearing down on us. And no point in moaning about red-tape, it will remain. Well, do moan, it’s good for the soul!

Overall, while there are many more exclusions and issues, I firmly believe that better management of resources is simply better management. Those who get it will make more money, those who don't, will pay for the first lot. Which lot are you with?

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!

Technorati Tags: Management, Sustainability

Differences Between Free Hosting and Paid Web Hosting

Ashish — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 06:05:52 EDT

If you are an expert or have experience in hosting your presence on the web, then I dare say that this article will not be relevant to you (of course, you are welcome to criticize or add constructive comments). This is based on my experience over the years, with both free and paid hosting (I still have both, using Blogger for my free blog postings, and having paid hosting for some other blogs).

Consider this; you are just starting to create your own website, a place to host your own content, the place of your dreams. You have thought through all that you want to create, and are ready to go. However, now you are stuck with the logistics of where to create your own website. You would really not want to spend a large amount of money, while at the same having a good hosting experience and a set of tools that will help you easily host your content.
You have a choice now; you could either use a free web hosting experience, or you could go in for a paid site. There are advantages and disadvantages to both.

Advantages of free hosting:
1. It's free; this literally needs no explanation

2. Helps when you are new to the web and would like to experiment with the medium

3. The hosting companies provide easy tools to upload content onto the site

4. If using some host such as Blogger, Tripod or Geocities, you are working with companies that have a huge amount of experience in this field

Disadvantages of free hosting:

1. Many of these free hosting companies make money through ad banners - so when somebody comes to your site, they will see ads and popups

2. The revenue from these ads goes to the hosting company, and not to you

3. For many of these free hosting companies, you may get a domain name that is actually a sub-domain, that has the name of the hosting company as part of the name

4. The space provided may seem large initially, but this is actually limited space.

5. If you are looking to appear professional, then it is better to host your own domain.

6. Paid hosting gives you access to many different softwares such as blogging software, Content Management Software, Forums, Emails, Database Access, Shopping Carts, and so on.

7. You get much better support if you are using paid hosting.

8. Search engine rankings can be sometimes poorer if you are using free hosting

9. You may get limitations in terms of restriction on bandwidth - so if your site becomes very popular, visitors may find themselves unable to access the site.

A) For a list of free hosting, refer to this list:
A listing of many free hosts
Netfirms
Bravenet
Mister.net
Tripod
Free Web Hosting Area
Geocities

B) A list of top paid hosts (am using one of them, and almost all of them will appear in a top 10 list:
Global
vistaPages
MidPhase
BlueHost
HostExcellence
IX Web Hosting
HostMonster
HostPapa
Affiliate-free links

The Importance of Usability Testing

DeeptiA — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 01:34:48 EDT

Suppose you are in a tight development cycle. You have to deliver either a new product, or the next version of an existing product. Getting the features of a product right is always a touch task, given that there are a number of competing features that seem important, and prioritizing the features is something that is very important. This decides the priorities that the engineering team (the feature development team) will follow during the development cycle.

How is this priority actually decided? If the company is in in the business of defining an absolutely new product that has not been conceptualized as yet, then getting some feedback from prospective customers is difficult; however, if there are already customers using an existing product (from the same company or a rival company), then it is absolutely essential that these users be polled for the features so that there is a good idea about the features that are most critical (it would also help to identify features that customers would be willing to pay a premium for).

Now consider that we are in the development phase of the project lifecycle, where the UI team works along with the engineering team to define the workflow for the feature. There is a lot of discussion around what the feature should be like (with a possibility of the discussion getting heated as a regular part of feature discussion), and eventually most people agree to what the feature should be like. The UI specs of the feature are drawn up and the feature implementation is based on the spec.

At this point, everything may seem settled, but it is critically important that this final implementation be evaluated for usability issues. At this point, the team needs to find a set of people who would adequately represent the final set of users, and get them to see the feature working in the actual product. Such usability testing will help determine whether the determined final feature is actually something that the users can accept, or whether there are problems that need to be modified.

The timing of such user testing is most critical. Typically, such workflows reach a final form close to the end of the cycle, and this is the form in which users can actually exercise the workflows. However, in a contra effect, this time is also very late in the cycle, and the team will be hesitant to accept changes that are significant, since the amount of time required to make these changes may not be easily available.

What is the solution? The solution that seems to work is to have a much more active involvement with users, starting with showing them mockups as the workflow gets more concrete, active question and answer sessions about what they may be looking for, till the time that they can review the actual product implementation. Further, if a workflow is very new and contentious, then it would make sense to try and complete it earlier. And finally, there needs to be time built into the schedule to take such changes.

Project Management - You Can't Have Your Cake And Eat It Too

DeeptiA — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 14:48:54 EDT

This is a true example from around 6 years back when I was working for an IT software solutions provider (the firm did software projects for different customers). This was a decent sized company that had something like 12000 people on the rolls, doing everything from development to testing to requirements analysis, and so on. I was more into the area of a business analyst, translating the requirements document into a form that the developers working on the project would understand.

This was a new project with a new medium sized bank in the Midwest, and the hope was that we would be able to do this project well enough and give them a system that would work so well for them that they would continue with the company and be the start of a long and serious (and profitable) relationship. Sounds good, right ? Well, read on.

Around this time, our company, which was a publicly listed company was getting on just like the other service companies of that time, doing okay, but not generating great figures. Management was getting hit by analysts, and passed on a directive that every project needs to meet the company defined margin. Exceptions only when pleaded before the executive committee, and not otherwise. Implicit was the expectation that anybody who does a project that does not promise enough margin would need to explain the project.

Now, since our project was with a new customer with whom we had high hopes for the future, we could not charge our expected rates; after all, why would the customer then select us? So, our account manager along with the Vice-President of the unit went ahead and quoted a rate that was at least 20% lower (getting fewer people assigned to the project than necessary). Guess what? Pretty soon, the strains and missing people started to show.

Ego also plays a part. For a Vice-President to go before the committee and plead for more money (a reduction in margin) would reflect adversely. The members of the committee, who might be expected to provide an experience of being able to handle these kind of situations and offer some latitude did not do so since they were never offered this project for review. Pretty soon, somebody senior in the team had the bright idea that weekends could be converted into work hours (maybe 1 weekend in 3 could be off), and this idea was implemented with gusto.

You can guess the rest. People from outside the project did not want to join, quality reviews of the project were hesitant because of the many exceptions, and eventually the customer could make out that the quality was not as desired. Project over, account over, and pretty soon the project manager and other senior team members quit and went to other companies.

This was a disaster caused by the management reacting adversely to poor numbers, and unwilling to exercise the due diligence in doing a project (after all, the first criteria for a project should be to make it successful).

How many of you have had similar experiences?