Mobile Social Networking

Access by anyone to everyone from anywhere (using a mobile device) will radically change the user experience. “Building smarter systems to give a better experience to users” is the challenge. Atos sees mobile social networking as a fundamental application for social communication.

A mobile device increases the value of social networks as they also become mobile. Due to continuous connectivity, social networking with a mobile device is more symbiotic than with a desktop computer. Atos believes that mobility is already offering social networks new opportunities, like real-time communication on the move, location-based features, and the sharing of personal information (contact lists, calendars) via a mobile device anytime, anywhere if users wish to do so.

This introduces a host of new business possibilities, such as becoming a mobile social networking platform provider or an application provider. Business models (between application provider and end user or between application provider and platform provider) could include per transaction, sponsorship, advertisements, onetime payments, micropayments, payment per subscription or even per click, per visit or per-use.

Source:

Based on whitepaper from Atos’ Scientific Community describing how social networking using a mobile device is different from that using a non-mobile device; the benefits and use cases; the ability to share and collaborate in real time with the real world; and the challenges and business opportunities in this area for consumers, service/platform providers, and application providers.

Authors: Suresh Dhamapurkar (Chief editor), Santi Ristol, Mahesh Chandrasekar

12 ways you can achieve efficient and predictable service delivery

1. Take care of your team – address their concerns, recognise, motivate, mentor, groom, empower, encourage team working
2. Define & agree clear KPIs, RACI matrix with clear responsibilities and accountability for all the stakeholders
3. Practice Lean – Increase value added services, minimise non value added tasks, eliminate wastes
4. Use optimum span of control for managers & team leaders and optimum resource pyramid
5. Follow knowledge management best practices
6. Use standard tools and processes
7. Reuse -frameworks, approach, solution, components, etc.
8. Ensure team mix with right competencies are deployed
9. Ensure right level of governance
10. Define and implement quality gates
11. Automate, semi automate repetitive tasks, reports where feasible
12. Ensure tight control over startup activities for new project/phase or service until steady state reached

Why both productivity and efficiency measures are required for Application Management (AM) & Application Development (AD) bench-marking and tracking output?

Productivity is defined as the ratio of total output produced vs total input supplied.
Efficiency is defined as the ratio of total output produced vs actual efforts spent to produce this output.

In the software application management world output can be measured as number of incidents/queries/bugs resolved, number of standard changes delivered, number of batch jobs scheduled or monitored, number of small/medium/large enhancements delivered etc. Application development work output can be measured as number of Function Points delivered, number of objects (screens, reports, batch scripts, etc.) delivered, total LOCs delivered, total LOCs migrated, etc. Input is typically person efforts (hrs, mandays, etc.).

Efficiency of an individual or a team to resolve say an incident would typically involve actual efforts spent to resolve an incident. Whereas productivity of an individual may also involve waiting time for clarification resolution and other overheads which are not directly adding any value to incident resolution.

So efficiency is required to track real efforts required to produce a unit of output and productivity is required to track what additional efforts are required for other non value added activities or inefficiencies due to waiting for work, infrastructure, no clean order, etc. Highly efficient is the one who produces best output by consuming minimum possible resources.

Organisations need to measure both productivity and efficiency to create a baseline, to monitor performance against baseline and have plan in place for continuous improvement of these important KPIs. They need to focus on getting productivity of individuals/groups in their organisation closer to the efficiency by doing right things to work towards the purpose.