« June 25, 2002 | Main | June 27, 2002 »
June 26, 2002
Budget by Deliverables
Bob Woolley talks about budgeting by deliverables from Dean Meyer:
Budget-by-deliverables is simple in concept. A successful budget process requires crystal-clear definitions, across-the-board activity-based costing, and consistency across all groups in the organization. This might be an interesting way to look at IT budgeting in State government. See http://www.ndma.com/products/em/bbd.htm [Bob Woolley's Technology Weblog]
I read through this a while ago as well and it made great sense to me. Dean says:
Budgets should be presented in a different way. The organization should total the rows, not the columns. This is termed "budget-by-deliverables," distinct from budgeting by cost factors.
Seems simple enough, but I think it requires a cultural change in the whole organization to make it fly.
09:24 PM | Recommend This | Print This
War Chalking
Black Belt Jones has a web site devoted to warchalking--drawing icons to indicate wireless network status in particular areas. As we deploy wireless networks in the state, maybe we should use these icons to indicate to people where the access points are and how they work. We've even been talking about establishing access points in places where police congregate on breaks (fill in the obvious joke here) so that they can get network access. These symbols would help with that.
08:17 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Fighting Spam
An article in the New York Times technology section talks about fighting spam. I recently started using SpamAssassin on my personal POP server. So far, I'm quite pleased with the results. The program uses rules to score mail as SPAM. Right now, I'm just redirecting it to a different mailbox and reading it to make sure it works and doesn't throw out too many things I'd really like to see. So far, nothing I can't live without.
08:05 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Living in Utopia
The problems of WorldComm and the collapse of Adelphia lead one to believe that the capital markets for broadband are going to be out of sorts for some time. What's a techie living outside the current broadband footprint to do?
One answer may be projects like the Utopia project being undertaken by a number of Utah cities and towns. Utopia is an interlocal agency (a government agency in Utah formed by the member governments and governed by an MOU) that is undertaking the infrastructure piece of the broadband puzzle and hoping to attract companies to provide services (like ISP services, video on demand, and even mundane things like meter reading) on the infrastructure they create.
The fact of the matter is that even when the capital markets improve, there will be more attractive places to build out broadband infrastructure than small (and even mid-sized) towns in Utah. Utopia is an answer to that problem.
I'm sure some will object that government ought not to be doing this. Certainly some will say "if it doesn't make sense for private industry, why should government do it?" I have a few responses:
- Government has access to different sources of capital than private industry and in many cases, something can make sense, from a capital standpoint, for government that doesn't make sense for a private business. The required rates of return can be much lower, for example.
- Government has different motivations than private business do. Governments are about managing a society, not tuning a profit, and so public policy issues may make this a valid project for government to tackle.
- Governments have been in the infrastructure business for a long time.
Utopia certainly has a long way to go before the dream is reality, but I'm happy and grateful to see someone trying.
02:31 PM | Recommend This | Print This
WSIL: Finding Web Services
One of the facets of web services that has always seemed like "the emporer's new clothes" to me is UDDI. I've never understood how I'd use it in real life (at least until such time that there are significant web services that function as commodities). Tarak Modi, in a recent article on the difference between UDDI and WSIL says:
Let's say that your company needs to wire significant amounts of money from one place to another on a regular basis and you wanted to automate this process by utilizing a readily available Web Service. To do so, assume that you did a search in a UDDI registry and three such services showed up. Based on the discussion above, two of the three entries will probably be invalid. The next question is, do you even know or trust the vendor that is publishing the third entry? How can you be sure that this is a legitimate company? Even if you know and trust the vendor, you will probably not be able to or even want to use the service without entering into a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with the vendor.
WSIL is an alternative (and perhaps compliment) to UDDI that allows web service vendors to advertise the offer on their own site. The standard insists that the WSIL document be placed in a file called inspection.wsil in the web root of the site. After that, it would be a simple matter for Google to pick these up and categorize them . Viola, instant web services directory.
Seems like the way to go to me.