July 31, 2007

Rising Rupee & The software Industry

The country is equally happy and sad about the rupee's value rising. All the people who are getting the money in form of $$$ are crying these days. There are few intelligent people who say, that software professionals now should work for six days a week. Few managers think that the salaries should be cut. Most companies think freshers are better, as the cost is low, and they should be hiring freshers like crazy.

These were the same people, who previously never were ready to give opportunities to freshers. I have few points to say/ask all these people who are trying to kill the happiness of IT staff and anticipate success.

1. Do you know how much bench are you maintaining?
2. Do you know how many people are just coming to office and spending time in lawns and cafeterias?
3. Do you know what are your stationary costs for every department?
4. Do you know how many people use laptops in the purpose they are meant to be used?
5. Do you know how many people make personal telephone calls from office?
6. Do you know if all your delivery managers are taking right decisions in sending people to onsite?
7. Do you know how much money is wasted in booking and cancellations of train and air tickets due to wrong decisions by senior management?
8. Do you know how much of money is wasted because of few processes not being automatized?
THE BIG QUESTION
9. Do you know why is the attrition rate so high in your organization?
10. Do you atleast realize that people leave only because of managers not for a name?
11. Do you know what is the cost implication if an employee resigns?
12. Do you have a check whether your managers are trying their best to retain people?
13. Do you have a check on your managers, whether they are acting with their intellects or acting with their egos, when dealing with their subordinates?
14. Do you know how much of money is being wasted because of mismanagement or wrong planning?

These are the areas where one should look to cut costs, mere increase of billable hours/working hours of employees doesn't suffice. On an average, in a reputed company in India, every employee works for more than 10 hours a day. That makes whooping 50 hours. All this time he is subjected to stress.

Companies I think should check how can they make the employees perform better, but not longer. This world is about working smartly, not the other way.

Lets try and make things better smartly, rather than just behaving like confused kids. All comments are welcome.

Reporting Solutions in ILM

Recently I came across a good article in PC World. It says ... MissionControl 2.2 is compatible with Version 1 of Identity Lifecycle Manager (ILM) and includes support for SQL Server 2005 to support its reporting features.

Give a read ...

July 6, 2007

Memory allocation in Tomcat Application Server

Longtime back I was told, if one needs to increase the memory pool size that can be occupied by the Tomcat app server, all we need to do is to tweak the catalina.bat file in the bin.

Just add -Xms A -Xmx A (where A denoted the number of Megabytes), in the catalina.bat file, at the end of line, where the java options are listed.

However from ver 5, its a little bit different and easy. All one needs to do is ...
Click on configure and then ....
Now specify the amount of memory allocation in the Maximum Memory Pool option. This will enable Tomcat to use more memory.