Some of the major deficiencies of Indian higher education include

1. the scarcity of well-written textbooks authored by reputed professors and published by highly rated publishers,
2. use of help books by students to pass examination and 
3. over-emphasis on rote learning with little or no training on problem-solving. 

To improve the quality of education, it is essential to make good books available at a reasonable cost. The latest research and learning theories suggest that outcome-based learning with interactive text in-text questions and practice problems should provide a way to engage an average student in the learning process and enhance her/his learning experiences. Similarly, mastery in problem-solving is mandatory for nurturing creativity. This, no doubt, is a challenging task.

These ideas formed the basis of our work when we began to develop the manuscript of our book on Wave Optics, one of the most fascinating courses taught to undergraduate science students of major/honours and general degree programmes. We aimed to empower learners and enable them to see its principles at work and develop problem-solving skills by interspersing problems with graded difficulty levels throughout the text. 

A conscious effort was made to help learners apply theoretical knowledge to real-life problems and phenomena with the hope that the book’s utility would be considerably enhanced. As we now know, the emergence of lasers, holography and fiber optics in recent years led to applications in communication, optical computing and medicine. Moreover, their applications have found revolutionary applications in space science, geospatial imaging, and cryptography in space, defence, agriculture, medicine, and mineralogy. We were conscious that a sound knowledge of their fundamental principles and developments would immensely enhance the utility of our textbook. The Wave Optics by Suresh Garg, Sanjay Gupta and CK Ghosh, published by PHI Learning Private Limited, New Delhi, fulfils many of these requirements and should be extremely useful to Indian students. Some of its salient features are:

• Comprehensive coverage of the syllabi of all major universities as well as the new UGC syllabus
• Rigorous treatment of subject matter while retaining a learner-friendly approach
• Several in-text pedagogical questions, solved examples and practice problems to support self-learning.

It is said that a diagram is worth a thousand words. With faith in this dictum, we have tried to explain concepts using diagrams as and where required.

Happy Reading!

To know more about the book, please log on to: https://bit.ly/2XG0ByT

 

 

ERPs are here to stay and seen as a standard option for enterprises. Enterprises could be Small, Medium or large. Appetite for ERPs – whether homegrown or off-the-shelf products is a necessity. Reasons for looking at ERPs are simple, and some of them are: Enterprises would like to borrow the best practices developed in some of the available products in the market instead of reinventing the wheels, have integrated business processes to derive a single version of the truth on information, businesses are always meant to scale, and hence, intended products are expected to be robust, scalable, and secured.

ERP implementations are seen to be a strategic move, and important stakeholders of the organizations, namely, Head of Organization, Business Owners, Head of Finance and IT must be involved in monitoring and guiding the project team from time to time.  

Selecting a product is always a tricky proposition and must be done in a careful manner. Few important takeaways from the well-known implementations are: look at the installed base of the product in the region, support, availability of skill sets within the organization, training and learning curve etc. 

The next important concern and step are to have an implementation partner. It is often seen implementation partner is selected based on the cost, market reputation etc. I personally feel the most important part of the selection is to see the domain expertise of the implementation partner so that effective communication with the businesses can be established. Does the implementation partner have a relevant knowledge base on the domain so that customers can benefit from the same? Therefore, interviewing partner and their team members from these dimensions becomes a crucial parameter.  

Implementation of ERPs is a daunting task, and hence, motivating internal as well as external team members is imperative. We often do this by creating internal team-building exercises, bringing external speakers on motivation, and giving them an off-site environment. Hence, allocating a suitable budget for these activities well in advance (ideally during kick-off) may not be a great surprise to stakeholders. 

Before we go to other trivial steps, namely, data migration and testing, let me take another important aspect of effective communication during the entire implementation life cycle. We must design a communication deck well in advance and distribute and present it to relevant leaders. Communication must include progress, risk and mitigation plans, roadblocks and expectations from management etc. There could be certain facts to be communicated only to top leadership, and project owners must be bold to communicate effectively and with possible suggestions.

Data migration and testing are trivial steps of any implementation. Generally, it is seen that organizations force a team to migrate whatever crap exist in the old system to be migrated to ERP.  There are many suggestions on the data migration, and some are: One can migrate data which is required for statutory assessment (let us take of last 6 – years) and rest put it on Data Warehouse and build Analytics layer, Bank and Insurance companies can look at only live policies of past 30+ years and rest put on analytics layer for an internal team to respond. As far as possible, do not migrate old videos or audio files as it is. One can look at the option of creating a BIG DATA environment. 

Testing is divided into 2 phases, namely, Integration and Model Office Testing. Integration testing is to ensure all the modules are tightly integrated and producing desired results. Model Office testing is in case enterprise have third-party products; ERP has developed interfaces with the product and organization can not function unless they handshake well. Therefore, model office testing is imperative. 

Last but not least, technical and functional documentation will be the treasure of all the above efforts. Good documentation will serve the current team and help the process manual for the organization, and annual audits can also take the help of process audits, etc. Technical documentation is a useful tool for maintenance, next upgrades – major or minor etc. On-going maintenance of documentation is a must. I always recommend an audit of documentation to ensure they are updated regularly in line with the embedded or changed processes. 

Needless to say, many organizations seem to be celebrating ‘Go live’ in a grand way. Acknowledging project team members with proper achievement certificates and awards to motivate them will add employee delight and encouragement. 

Beyond ERPs

The fun begins after about six months to one year of implementation where-in the leadership team expect quick reports, would like to see a design and engineering needs to be addressed in the latest implemented ERP. Appetite for computing grows, and ERP seems to be having limitations. 

This is going to be an interesting and challenging situation for the existing IT team to look at beyond ERP, and some of the reasons are: user requirements are not adequately addressed in current ERP and to fulfil separate licensing and implementation costs to be incurred with long-drawn timelines, implemented ERP is not meant of new intended requirement etc.    Noted business requirements which are beyond existing ERP implementations are Analytics (dashboards, data mining, predictive analytics etc.), Document, Design and Employee Collaborations, Customer Relationship Management, Demand Forecast Planning, High-tech engineering and design solutions to emulate real-life situations (for example, 5D, 6D modelling), Estimation and Risk modelling, automating repetitive tasks etc. 

To address the above business needs, one must research carefully various technologies available in the market in the field of collaboration, content management, analytics, design and engineering, business process automation, estimation and risk modelling. Some of them are available in the SAAS platform, and a few are on-premise as well.  

Most of the Systems Integrators (SI), namely, IBM, HP, Microsoft, AUTODESK etc. are well equipped with the above technologies, and more importantly, they are well integrated with well-known ERPs. There are open-source products available with the support and can also be integrated with ERPs. 

One caution of implementing the above technologies by interfacing with ERP is IT security, and most of the applications are exposed to the outside world. Therefore, addressing security framework is of paramount importance to the organization and must be addressed with proper assessment and recommended to audit the entire environment periodically.

Needless to emphasize, success in implementing extended technologies have to be planned with a partner who possesses the right skills, and the next key for success is not to take too many initiatives in one go…ideally one key initiative at any point in time!!

To understand general implementation methodologies as well as specific methodologies prescribed by Oracle and SAP for the implementation of their products, explore our book ERP TO E2RP: A CASE STUDY APPROACH by Desai and Srivastava.

For more information, please visit ERP TO E2RP : A CASE STUDY APPROACH

 

 

 

During my school days, a computer was a machine occupying a garage space, used only by engineers. Now, within 50 years, I hold it in my pocket like a mobile smartphone, as do 50 crores other Indians! How did this revolution happen? Many of these inventions in information and communication technology have occurred in the last 55 years.

Do you know who invented such groundbreaking inventions in Information and Communication Technology (or ICT)? This is the theme of a remarkably informative and educative book Groundbreaking Inventions in Information and Communication Technology recently authored by V. Rajaraman, who taught at the Supercomputer Education and Research Centre, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, and published by PHI Learning, Delhi.

 

In this book, Prof. Rajaraman lists the history of 15 groundbreaking inventions and innovators who have made these hand-held fast, versatile computers possible. I believe that with computer-based education has become a part of the New Education Policy (NEP), it is vital that students and teachers get to learn the story of these 15 inventions and the innovators, not just as a part of the history and development of these innovators, but as an inspiration for the future.

 

As per Prof. Rajaraman: (1) The idea should be novel; (2) It should fulfill a need; (3) It should improve our productivity; (4) It should change the way in which computing is done, and computers are used; (5) It should lead to innovations; (6) The invention must have a long life and be continuously used and not be transient; (7) It should create new industries that lead to further innovations and may, as a consequence, disrupt some old industries and (8) It should transform the way we live and thereby result in societal changes. It is not necessary that a groundbreaking invention satisfy all these; it is enough if it meets a majority of these.

 

Recent History

Interestingly, many of these inventions to have occurred in the last 55 years — starting from the computer language FORTRAN in 1957 to Deep Learning in 2011. A brief history and description of these, and the innovators associated with them are given in his book. We will take up the first seven innovations here and the rest in the next article.

 

Programming Languages

The first is FORTRAN or Formula Translation, developed by John Backus and his team in 1957. This translated the binary language (0 and 1) of digital computers into everyday language that can be understood and used by all, using the IBM computers and later by other computers as well. (I remember how Prof. Rajaraman taught FORTRAN to all of us — students and faculty — at IIT Kanpur, and several lakhs of others elsewhere through his lectures and books). FORTRAN made computers usable by non-professionals too- to start programming and solve problems. Others designed similar programming languages for specific uses, but FORTRAN is still the language used by scientists.

 

The second is the introduction of what is called integrated circuits or ICs. Until they were invented, signals were amplified using vacuum tubes that were large and became hot during use. When John Bardeen and colleagues invented transistors’ way back in 1947, they reduced the size and power consumption of amplifiers.

 

This caused a revolution in information technology because using these, Jack Kilby (and a few months later, Robert Noyce) could actually make a fully integrated complex electronic circuit on a single silicon chip.

 

The third innovation discussed is databases and how to manage them in an organised fashion. For example, our own Aadhaar Card contains in it a variety of data (age, sex, age, address, fingerprints, and such), put together in a compact fashion. Such a database system is what is referred to as a relational database management system, or RDBMS. Earlier, these files were stored in magnetic tapes, then in floppy discs and now in CDs and pen drives.

 

LAN and Ethernet

The fourth is what is known as local area networks (or LANs), introduced first by Norman Abramson’s group in Hawaii, where they used a wireless broadcast system called ALOHA net to interconnect computers across the islands to share a broadcast medium. Then Robert Metcalfe and David Boggs modified this protocol and put together what they called Ethernet, which has allowed multiple computers to share and exchange messages and files through cable connections. We now use LANs in the office to transfer hard-copies into e-files and to connect various departments in a University.

 

The fifth innovation is the development of personal computers, which has allowed us to work and study from our homes. The first person to design a personal computer was Steve Wozniak in the mid-1970s and brilliantly marketed by Steve Jobs. By 1981, PCs began selling like hotcakes, and by the late 1980s, Apple, IBM and its clones captured the market, with Microsoft supplying the operating system.

To open your phone or a computer, you need a passcode, which is secure and known only to you. And when a bank or a sender sends you a ‘confidential’ message, they too send a secure passcode (e.g., OTP). This aspect is what is known as an encryption system (allows secrecy between the sender and receiver). This public-key cryptography is the sixth innovation.

 

Your computer now has built-in programs that not only allow you to take photographs, movies and send them using applications like WhatsApp, Facetime, and such. This has come about thanks to the seventh innovation called computer graphics, which Prof. Rajaraman discusses in his book in detail. In addition, he discusses in detail the compression of multimedia data that has allowed exchanging audios and videos over the Internet.

 

Source:https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/a-keen-look-at-groundbreaking-inventions-in-ict/article32588770.ece

The book is available in print book format as well as e-book format.

 

In case you want to reach us, visit the webpage of the book at

https://www.phindia.com/Books/BookDetail/9789389347524/groundbreaking-inventions-in-information-and-communication

OR

Write to us at phi@phindia.com