Contents

iii
Preface xiii
SECTION I 15
1. IS DATA INFORMATION? 16
ASCENDING THE DATA PYRAMID 18
Learning from a tragedy 18
DATA ENCODING WITH MORSE 21
Fun with Morse code 23
TAKING A BYTE, BIT BY BIT - BINARY ENCODING 25
ASCII Encoding 27
Why encode at all? 28
Morse or ASCII, which is better Encoding efficiency 29
2. INFORMATION THEORY 31
SHANNON SHOWS THE WAY 32
Predictable people carry less Information 33
Shannons Equation 34
Information Entropy 36
RELAY RACES AND DATA TRANSMISSION 37
The Noisy Channel coding problem 40
When a Byte is a bit off 41
3. INFONOMICS 43
IS INFORMATION LIKE A LOAF OF BREAD? 44
How can we price information goods 45
How the market prices Information goods 47
LACK OF TRANSPARENCY IN INFORMATION GOODS 49
NETWORK EXTERNALITIES AND POSITIVE FEEDBACK 49
POWER LAWS ARE NORMAL FOR INFORMATION GOODS 50
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING 52
NEW RULES FOR THE INFORMATION HIGHWAY 53
Control Demand, not Supply 53
Forge Alliances 55
Leverage Standards 55
Strategies to sell Information products 56
VALUE OF INFORMATION 57
Business Managers Guide to IT iv

Aereo is it indulging in copyright violation? 59
ITCs e-Choupal and the Network Effect 60
4. TECHNOLOGY INTELLIGENCE 62
INNOVATION - HOW TECHNOLOGY EVOLVES 63
Technology S-Curves 64
Technology Adoption 67
TECHNOLOGY INTELLIGENCE, DO YOU HAVE IT? 69
Steps to develop Technology Intelligence 69
How AT&T developed Technology Intelligence 75
NO ESCAPE FROM DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY LAWS 76
Moores Law of Computing power 76
Metcalfes Law of Networking 78
Kryders Law 78
Declining Communication costs 79
Rise of Open standards 81
Technology Integration 81
Future Technology Trends whats your bet? 82
SECTION II 85
5. IT\IS INFRASTRUCTURE 86
THE DATA CENTER FACILITY 89
HARDWARE INFRASTRUCTURE - DEVICES 91
Clients, Servers and Restaurants 91
Virtualization 93
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) 94
Grid Computing 95
N-TIER CLIENT\SERVER ARCHITECTURE 95
SELECTING CLIENTS AND SERVERS 97
RBS saves costs with Virtual Desktops 99
Bank of America and Grid Computing 100
6. NETWORKING 101
COMMUNICATIONS BASICS USING STRING THEORY 102
Contents v

Modulation What FM radio can teach us 103
CONNECTING THE BITS A TYPICAL NETWORK 106
Telecommunication processors 107
Circuits and Packets Types of switching 108
TRANSMISSION MEDIA 109
Undersea Cables 110
THE INTERNET 111
VPNS, INTRANETS AND EXTRANETS 113
Virtual Private Networks or VPNs 113
COMMUNICATIONS ISSUES 115
Bandwidth versus Throughput 115
Latency 115
The Last Mile problem 116
What Network Technology to use 117
How much Bandwidth do I need? 118
7. GOING WIRELESS 119
THE WIRELESS REVOLUTION 119
Electromagnetic Spectrum 120
The Antenna 123
Communication Satellites 123
Global Positioning System or GPS 124
Cellular Networks 125
OTHER WIRELESS TECHNOLOGIES 127
Wireless Lans or WiFi 127
Bluetooth 127
Nike puts Bluetooth sensors in your shoes 128
RFID or Radio Frequency Identification 128
An RFID application in a Dairy Farm 129
RFID application in Textiles 130
NFC or Near Field Communication 130
Wireless Web 131
Wireless Mesh Networks 131
Wireless Power 131
Business Managers Guide to IT vi

8. SYSTEMS SOFTWARE 132
OPERATING SYSTEMS 133
Which Operating System do I choose? 134
Middleware 135
OTHER SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE 136
SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT SOFTWARE 137
Programming Languages spoilt for choice 137
OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE 139
SOFTWARE LICENSING 139
WEB SERVICES 141
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) 142
SOA enhances Strategic alliances among companies 145
Is SOA dead? 146
9. DATA STORAGE AND MANAGEMENT 147
THE DATA LIFECYCLE 147
DATA STORAGE TECHNOLOGIES 148
DAS or Direct Access Storage 148
NAS or Network Attached Storage 148
SAN or Storage Area Networks 148
RELATIONAL DATABASE FUNDAMENTALS 150
The humble Filing cabinet where it all started 151
Relational Databases 152
Structured Query Language - SQL 153
NON-RELATIONAL DATABASES 155
How much Storage do I need? 157
10. APPLICATION\BUSINESS SOFTWARE 159
CLASSIFYING INFORMATION SYSTEMS 160
ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS 162
Transaction Processing Systems 163
Supply Chain Management (SCM) 166
SABMiller revamps its SCM 169
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) 170
Contents vii

ERP helps a small manufacturer 174
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) 176
Hiltons CRM where Customer Really Matters 179
Sales Force Automation (SFA) 181
McGraw-Hill Education adopts Salesforce 181
Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) 181
Qwest implements KM 183
Decision Support Systems (DSS) 183
Executive Support\Information Systems (ESS\EIS) 185
P&G improves its Decision Making 186
E-COMMERCE 189
Benefits of E-Commerce 191
E-Commerce Business Models 192
Business to Consumer - B2C 194
Business to Business - B2B 195
GHX reduces Healthcare costs 197
11. INFORMATION SECURITY & AVAILABILITY 198
INFORMATION SECURITY 200
Six Key Concepts 200
ATTACKS BY OUTSIDERS 201
Malware 201
Hacking 202
THE INSIDE JOB 205
HUMAN ERRORS 206
The Fat Fingers issue 206
The popular 123456 password 206
SOFTWARE VULNERABILITY 208
WIRELESS & MOBILE SECURITY ISSUES 208
INFORMATION SYSTEMS AVAILABILITY 209
Backup sites 210
Designing Recovery plans 210
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) 211
Business Managers Guide to IT viii

Availability Math 211
MyBizHomePage Cyberattack 213
12. SECURING INFORMATION SYSTEMS 215
Classifying Information assets 215
The Five Layers of Security 216
INFORMATION SECURITY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM 222
INFORMATION SECURITY STANDARDS & REGULATIONS 222
ISO 27001 222
COBIT 223
SOX 224
HIPAA 224
PCI-DSS 225
FISMA 225
ITA-2000 226
Regulatory Compliance with Cloud Computing 227
Caught, in the Indian IT Act 2000 228
SECTION III 229
13. SOCIAL MEDIA 230
WHATS SOCIAL MEDIA? 231
Classification of Social Media 232
WHATS DRIVING IT? 232
Technology Web 2.0 232
Human Psychology 234
Economics 236
SOCIAL NETWORK SERVICE (SNS) 239
Advertising tools for Social Media 240
LEVERAGING SOCIAL MEDIA 241
SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS 243
MOBILE SOCIAL MEDIA 245
THE NOT SO SOCIAL, MEDIA 245
Playing Holi with Asian Paints 246
Social Media helps Bollywood 247
Contents ix

14. MOBILE APPLICATIONS 249
WHATS DRIVING MOBILE APPLICATIONS? 250
Titans Mobile app powered by Light 252
TYPES OF MOBILE APPLICATIONS 253
MOBILE COMMERCE OR M-COMMERCE 254
Mobile Financial applications 254
Mobile Shopping 255
Mobile Advertising 256
Indias missed call advertising 257
Mobile applications in Entertainment 258
Location Based Services (LBS) 258
MOBILE APPLICATIONS IN ENTERPRISES 259
Wagamama puts its POS on mobile 260
Mobilizing the POS 260
THE FUTURE OF MOBILE APPLICATIONS 261
ISSUES WITH MOBILE APPLICATIONS 263
Can Traders go Mobile? 264
Open Wallet Mobile service from Airtel 265
15. ANALYTICS AND BIG DATA 266
DATA WAREHOUSING 267
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE 268
DATA MINING 269
ANALYTICS 271
Market Basket analysis - analytics by example 272
Coupons in a Grocery store 275
Business Applications of Analytics 275
Steps in performing Analytics 277
Analytics through Collective Intelligence 278
BIG DATA 279
Big Data analytics 280
Barclays uses Sentiment analysis 282
Business Managers Guide to IT x

Path Intelligence finds the way 283
GE uses Big data analytics to move windmills 283
Wither Big data analytics? 284
Issues with Big data 285
Data Analytics helps find Cancer cures 286
Netflix and the future of TV Shows 287
16. CLOUD COMPUTING 289
CLOUD AND LAUNDRY SERVICES 289
KEY FEATURES 291
IaaS or Infrastructure as a Service 292
PaaS or Platform as a Service 293
SaaS or Software as a Service 293
SaaS ERP at Oxford Bookstore 295
Multi-tenancy 296
CLOUD COMPUTING CONFIGURATIONS 297
THE WINDS BEHIND THE CLOUD 298
Supply Side Economics 298
Demand Side Economics 299
BENEFITS OF THE CLOUD 300
WHERE THE CLOUDS ARE DRIFTING 302
DARK CLOUDS 303
Dominos Pizza Group Embraces Hybrid Cloud 305
Pfizer and Cloud Computing 306
SECTION IV 307
17. PLANNING INFORMATION SYSTEMS 308
BUSINESS STRATEGY 308
STRATEGY ANALYSIS 309
Porters 5 Forces Model 310
SWOT Analysis 311
Implementing Strategy - Strategy Maps 311
Contents xi

THE PROJECT PORTFOLIO 313
Project Portfolio Management 314
Making a Business Case 315
Project Scoring and Selection 317
Time to realign the IT investment portfolio 319
18. BUSINESS ANALYSIS 320
GETTING INTO THE USERS HEAD - ELICITING REQUIREMENTS 322
Walking the ramp with Data Models 324
Getting Classy Class & Object Modeling 326
Understanding Interactions Sequence diagrams 327
Business Rules 327
DID WE GET IT RIGHT? VERIFICATION AND VALIDATION 328
How to choose Test data 329
How many test cases would you need? 330
Comair forgets to Test and crashes 330
19. DEVELOPING INFORMATION SYSTEMS 331
THE SYSTEMS APPROACH 331
SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT LIFECYCLE 332
Systems Investigation 333
Systems Analysis 334
Systems Design 335
Systems Implementation 336
Systems Maintenance 336
TYPES OF SDLC 337
Waterfall Model 337
Agile Development 338
State of Agile today 341
Waterfall versus Agile which one? 342
20. PROJECT MANAGEMENT 343
PROJECT MANAGEMENT 343
Project Management Processes 344
PERT Program Evaluation and Review Technique 345
Business Managers Guide to IT xii

Critical Path Method (CPM) 346
RISK MANAGEMENT 349
OUTSOURCING 351
When a SAP implementation finished ahead of schedule! 353
The Mythical Man-Month 354
Appendix A Cloud Computing Vendors 355
Appendix B Enterprise Software 356
Appendix C Social Media Applications 358
References 359
Index 365

xiii
Preface
This book is a result of 20 plus years in the IT industry that included stints as a software
engineer in a product startup company to executive positions managing IT operations of
large banks like ANZ and Lehman Brothers. As they say in the business Ive danced on the
ball room floor and watched from the balcony. During this period Ive had the opportunity to
work in the business side of a bank in Australia and for the first time got a peek over the
fence at the other side, where I came from, the IT department. This dual perspective
convinced me of one thing: that Business and IT always worked with the best intentions in
mind, it just happened to be their own.
There is a gap between Business and IT in perception, expectations and communications.
This book takes a step back to look at one root cause: the lack of understanding of IT by the
business, and of explanations from IT that dont do service to their cause. There is a school
of thought that believes managers should not have to know details. I dont subscribe to this,
and my experience in the companies I worked for hasnt convinced me otherwise. Business
managers must have a good understanding of IT, simply because it is such a fundamental
part of a companys DNA.
The central philosophy of this book is to give a business manager the depth of knowledge
they need to get IT to deliver their business strategy, and for IT to understand what the
business looks for. I have not made an attempt to skimp on technical details too much. This
industry revels in jargon and is unavoidable in any technology book. While making no
claims the book is jargon free, Ive attempted to leave no jargon unpunished sorry
unexplained, providing analogies from restaurants to laundry services to explain the
complicated bits. The contents of the book are divided into four sections:
Section I is where we dot the Is and cross the Ts to establish a fundamental
understanding of the drivers of Information and Technology, which we address
separately;
Section II delves into the technology itself from hardware, software, data storage to
applications and security and availability;
Section III takes you through the latest trends in IT captured by the acronym SMAC or
Social Media, Mobile Applications, Analytics & Big Data and Cloud Computing. The
reader will see that the foundations of Information and Technology laid in Sections I &
II help explain the new trends;
The final Section IV deals with the process of strategizing and building IT\IS systems.
Business Managers Guide to IT xiv
At various points you will encounter boxes headed with special notations
Important Point is a short summary of the important details covered in preceding
paragraphs.
Did you Know interesting facts about real life examples and analogies to better
understand a subject.
Every author has a tendency to forget the audience they write for when engrossed in the
creation of a book. Its good to be reminded that, books are written for people not for
shelves in book shops. Feedback is the proof a book is in the right hands meeting its
purpose, so do provide me your feedback at sunderra@gmail.com.
S.Sunder Rajan
Bangalore, 2014