Essence & benefits of community service.

Philanthropy, courtesy, chivalry, conscience, even ulterior motives and many others are the driving forces behind the need to perform community service. The above apply to a single individual or an entire nation. No matter what the driving force, we all have, at some time or the other, voluntarily or involuntarily, performed and continue to perform community service.
In my experience, one of the end results has always been what I characterize as “My good deed for the day”. I walk away with a sense of purpose, accomplishment and fulfillment. Performing community service with a team of family, friends, temple or church goers, professional associations, adds a team spirit dimension making the task or project more valuable and fun. I am fortunate to have a teenage son who shares my values.

On Saturday, April 6th, 2013, my son and I worked with two organizations, Project Management Institute’s Houston chapter and Rebuilding Together Houston, to renovate the home of a financially and medically challenged and aging couple. My initial motivation was to have a sense of belonging at PMI Houston and get my son a certificate showing XX hours of community service. I was impressed meeting many of the stalwarts with impressive credentials, lifetime accomplishments and fascinating lifestyles.

Our team comprised of 10 members with a project manager, subject matter experts, while the rest of us were dedicated & enthusiastic volunteers. The project manager broke down the project into parallel & sequential tasks, with individuals & groups responsible for getting it done within a predefined time. Risks & safety issues initiated the first round of on-site discussions and became part of every conversation, till the very end. We split up into 4 groups, each one working on a task to be completed within a fixed duration. Some of the tasks included removing old & putting new boards, pressure-washing sides, fixing A/C unit, painting, caulking, landscaping, etc. To make the tasks more interesting, each group worked on different tasks at various sections of the project. The project manager effectively communicated with groups, shuffled & reassigned them when needed, updated the checklist of tasks and provided status reports periodically. In the end, we were delighted to see a home in much better shape than when we arrived first. No more rain water leaks, better cooling with A/C, flower beds, rose plants, and an aesthetically looking home.

My son and I talked to the owner of the house. She was very grateful for the volunteer service we provided. Her held-back tears, choked voice and a trembling handshake made us realize that we actually didn’t do her any favor. She did us a favor by giving us an opportunity to realize that we all have a hero inside us. This hero needs to be freed from our chains of greed, selfishness, ignorance and arrogance. This hero needs to be let out and breathe the fresh air of humility, community service, and appreciation for what we have. My personal take-away from community service, which I haven’t already stated above, can be listed as follows:

1. Work on common goals and core values with people we occasionally interact.
2. Learn and share new ideas outside our professional competencies.
3. Acquire and improve skill-sets, both management and technical, we are short on or didn’t even know existed inside us.
4. Quality time with our near and dear ones, while playing the role of a mentor, partner and team player.
5. Social networking with both like-minded and diverse people, peers and role models.

I leave this blog with two slideshows posted on YouTube showing the work we group of volunteers performed on this project.

1. Slide-show 1 of 2
2. Slide-show 2 of 2

Challenges and success stories in the world of IT Management.

Essence of IT collaboration in manufacturing sites.

At various stages of my career, I have seen the segregation of information technology management in manufacturing companies, in a wide variety of vertical markets. This is true even today in oil & gas, petro-chemicals and computer hardware manufacturing firms.

The primary purpose of this segregation was and is to maintain strict access controls, separation of duties, differing IT practices and skill sets. In this blog, I would like to share my observations and recommendations relating to this segregation and future collaboration.

Many manufacturing plants separate IT roles into two major groups – Those working in the Control System (CS) and those in the corporate or enterprise. The IT staff in both these teams report to different directors, C-level executives or vice-presidents. They rarely collaborate, occasionally communicate and hardly draw from each other’s expertise. Each IT team is a self-sufficient group working within their own budgets, resources, tasks and goals.

The separation of IT roles is primarily in the areas of Control System applications and equipment. The organizational structure is also different since IT, within in the Control System team, report to Control System managers, who ultimately report to the COO and not the CIO. The unique tasks and operations managed by IT within the Control System team are some of the following:

1.      Manage IT infrastructure and applications relevant to the Industrial Control Systems (ICS) or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) – Control and monitor industrial processes, collect and utilize historian data, interface with Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC), connect to sensors, perform Analog-to-Digital and Digital-to-Analog signal conversions, etc.

2.      Communication infrastructure – Connect and manage cables, wireless and interfaces such as repeaters, switches, routers, WAPs and firewalls that link the PLC farm, remote terminal units, RS-422/232 based equipment, and back-end application servers or databases to each other. A proper design and deployment will factor in scalability, redundancy, security through VLANs and Access Control Lists (ACLs), and others. Operational tasks include traffic monitoring for bandwidth threshold, drops in connections, and errors or data loss across interfaces.

3.      Security of Control Systems – Facilitate, test and monitor data traversing across the campus that is usually harsher than that in the corporate network. Perform penetration tests with varying degrees of intrusion on computer systems and networks to validate that security continues to be aligned with pre-set goals and levels.

In my view, the following common roles and tasks of both these groups can be collaborated to jointly take on the responsibilities of managing IT in the Control Systems and Enterprise:

1.      Back-end systems – Server hardware, OS, DB and common applications administration, security, X.500 directory, backup & restore, monitoring, maintenance, anti-virus deployment, patch management, and others.

2.      Front-end workstations and terminals – Hardware, OS and common applications management, authentication, helpdesk support, security, and imaging, among others.

3.      Networking gear – Monitoring, standardizes on hardware and design, patching, penetration tests, sharing of spares, etc.

4.      Backup & disaster recovery – Pooling of all site data into common backup targets, verification of data through granular restores and full system recovery, off-site transport of tapes through single reputed carrier, mock drills for disaster recovery at varying levels of outage, and others.

5.      Documentation – Documentation with varying levels of detail for the review and acceptance from different roles within the plant. Documenting policies, procedures, accountability and responsibilities assigned that need to be vetted and verified. Setting up chain of custody for shared responsibilities.

This is not an exhaustive list of shared and segregated tasks and operations by IT within the Control System and Enterprise sections. However, with convergence of data, equipment and services; IT resources can be optimally utilized for redundancy, shared services, added tasks and overall productivity.

Business considerations when selecting domain extensions for your web site.

Choosing the right domain extension(s) for your business is a project that must be given sufficient attention, time and priority. After all, it is one of the important means to get potential customers and business partners to access the list of products and services you offer.

The most sought-after top-level domain extensions are .com, .net and .org. If you haven’t already registered your domain name, chances are that yourcompany.com/.net/.org domain will have already been registered to someone else. With the advent of several generic and country-code domain extensions (.co, .biz, .us, .info, .cc, .tv, .fm, .cn, .in, etc.), it is imperative companies not only choose one or more of the above-mentioned extensions, but also taken into account many of the following vital factors:

1. Name of the domain – This should be as short as possible and preferably without hyphens or underscores. It should be clear enough for anyone to identify it with your company, products, services or nature of activity such as manufacturing, distribution, logistics, IT services, etc.
2. Type of industry – generic top-level domains are available to suite any industry. They are .co (for those who missed .com), .biz, .us, .cc, etc. Domain extensions such as .tv and .fm are typically used by TV stations, multimedia firms and internet radio firms.
3. Domestic and international reach – In a globalized world, it is essential to portray a global presence, even if it were only in cyberspace. I would recommend buying domain extensions in all countries (.cn for China, .in for India, .co.uk for England, etc.) where current and & prospective clients & business partners are based.
4. Global competition – In continuation to point (3), it is essential to cover your bases through domain extensions in current and future business prospects. Absence of registering domain names in multiple countries can hurt the your company if the competition were to buy a domain with your company name on it.
5. Current and prospective names of products and services – To keep in mindcater to the expansion into global markets, acquisitions, and mergers, diversification into multiple and sometimes unrelated products; domain names and extensions should be so accordingly registered, leaving no room opportunity for someone else to buying and parking that domain.
6. Yourcompanysucks.com – It has become a trend for the competition, phishers and saboteurs to buy domains such as yourcompanysucks.com (see http://microsoftsucks.org), populate the website with rant, artificially drum up web traffic and attach this unwanted site to all popular search engines. These not only hurt your business image, but turn off genuine customers.
7. Mistype your companyname – It is important to register at least top level domains with your company name mistyped (See goggle.com instead of google.com). These mistyped domains are usually targeted to siphon away your visitors through either offering competitive products and services or give your company a bad reputation by phishing or pushing malware to unsuspecting visitors.

There are other factors such as business strategy, goals and objectives for the next 3 to 5 years that also help decide the choice of domain extensions and names. The cost of registering domains is pretty cheap, especially when considering propagation of business opportunities, mitigating potential damage to company reputation, etc. All purchased domain extensions names can point to a single web site to and ensure an identical message is conveyed through the same server or hosted site.

Cloud Computing: Failures and lessons learned

Outages experienced by customers of major and minor Cloud Service Providers, over the past couple of years and especially in the past two weeks, have resulted in down times beyond those offered in Service Level Agreements (SLAs). While some have made headlines, many have gone unnoticed and unreported. IT executives, including those already embarked on the Cloud or intending to, are scrambling to find reliable means of capitalizing the benefits of Cloud while mitigating risks posed by them.

Hybrid Cloud infrastructure is the key to ensuring minimum disruption to business. Mission critical data should reside in both the Cloud and the company’s internal or co-located data centers. Access to this data should be provided through multiple routes, including Internet and WAN service providers, for both the customers and business partners. Technologies such as Continuous Data Replication/Protection should be deployed to replicate data needing high availability. SLAs from service providers and IT should be in sync and set realistic and acceptable expectations to the consumers. IT infrastructure should be designed, configured, deployed and thoroughly tested to validate the SLA. Mock drills with varying degrees of impact should be performed by teams including IT and representatives from different facets of the business.

As businesses venture into this relatively new medium of computing, expected hiccups are bound to occur that can violate the SLA. Over time, with proactive monitoring, testing and continuous improvement, a credible SLA can be enforced that is acceptable to the business.