Monday, April 27, 2009

Technology driven workforce

We are faced with technology by the bucket load both at home and work. At work technology and teams leverage one for the other. In current times teams in any organization act as enablers of business and this is possible due to the powers of technological innovations, by a large measure. In organizations it is the people who make the difference; hence organizations should exploit the powers of technology to capitalize on this human energy. Day-by-day technology is affecting employees at all levels of organizations, from the executives to middle management and the front line staff.
Integration of the two would mean not only harmonious co-existence but also leveraging one for the other. This influx in technology has caused changes in the way human resources plug in to the workflow. The following aspects have proven to be helpful in using technology power for the betterment of business results.

Tech Savvy
Tech savvy employees can handle most of the administrative aspects on their own due to the availability of online systems for aspects right from leave application to travel booking to time sheet logging. These online tools make life easier and help the organizational tiers to focus more on strategic aspects of work.

A Critical Tool
Technology is no more looked upon as an add-on business requirement rather it is considered a major tool for information gathering and sharing, knowledge management, data analysis and interpretation, problem solving, decision-making and communication.

Process Capabilities
Business is about managing capabilities and not mere task level functions. The power of latest electronic tools can be used to capture and integrate information and inputs on the current processes. The processed information can then be used to gain a better understanding of the loopholes in the existing value chains and in turn help to build robust strategies to overcome the loopholes. Modern technology in a way helps businesses to reduce operating costs and increase efficiency by automating and streamlining existing business processes.

Integration of technology and organizational workforce means not only harmonious co-existence but also leveraging one for the other. Leveraging of technology for workforce management implies digitizing and automating the workflow patterns thereby resulting in time and cost-savings.

To survive the shockwaves of turbulent times businesses, both large and small need to be upfront in building their technology base and also be willing to spend on training needs of the workforce so that they can harness the powers of technology in the right sense.

©®Chitra Lele

Sunday, April 5, 2009

My views of having an Object Oriented approach to Security

The need for a new approach arises because the existing approaches are unable to stem the security issues increasing day-by-day. The root cause of any security problem, be it a virus attack or hacking, is simply bad software, which in turn comes from incorrect application of Software Engineering principles.

My proposal will not address all security threats,but will definitely set stage for building a robust Security Architecture and System.

Building blocks of this approach
1) Any problem domain can be characterized as a set of objects that have specific attributes and behaviors.
2) Objects are inherently oriented towards security through scope specifiers for its attributes.

This makes it easy to view systems and users decoupled in a scenario background, taking advantage of the best features of Object Oriented systems, even for a system that was not specifically designed to be Object Oriented.

The Value Addition of OO apporach:-
The existing approaches are more of 'find-and-patch' or 'make-fix' nature. However, the object-oriented approach insists incorporating security mesaures into the system time and again at every stage right from the Concept initiation stage to Post-Implementation maintenance stage.
The second advantage of the OO Approach is based on the main principles of the Object Oriented Architecture - Reusability. Any project built using this apporach can be re-used elsewhere without any hassle.

©®Chitra Lele