Sharing are digital lives and data -- holding it's weight in gold

In today's digital world, we have the ability to share the most intimate details of our lives via, photos, videos, blogs, tweets, Facebook pages. All of your data is being shared and stored in Cyber space on Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, etc. For many of us, this is a great thing and enriches our lives.

The internet and specifically the computer was designed to share data for collaboration by the department of defense. Sharing expertise and information across boundaries  can make you and your organization more successful.

A great case study in information sharing is law enforcement handling of 911 data. Since 911 failures in handling data, the federal government has implemented better processes for capturing, storing, and sharing data. The biggest challenges in law enforcement is track and identifying terrorist / criminals via information gathering.  Once this is completed, investigators need access  to incident reports across many agencies nationwide.

Improving data sharing among all these agencies has improved by developing Global justice XML (GJXDM) data model.  XML helps provide a standard for common vocabulary and structure to exchange data among law enforcement databases.

To improve data sharing across the country, the US department of defense and home land security built the National information exchange model which was an extension of GJXDM. Data sharing has now become more efficient with in  area of public safety, intelligence, homeland security, and emergency and disaster management.

To over come data sharing limitation among disperse system, computer to computer data exchange as been developed using web services or service orientated architectures. To track potential criminals, all agencies keep identity databases. Many of these database are not NIEM-compliant, but are in the process of being upgrade.

One of the major consideration in managing data, is your digital identity. Managing your digital brand has become a hot topic and possible revenue generator.  Come back soon to see the completion of the study and how it can affect our lives.

Is Customer Service a dirty work? Probably not for these companies

The listed companies below got the highest vendor rating in a national publication. This favorable rating should drive some business to these companies. What are these companies doing right to receive such high praise? I will be reviewing how these companies to see how they can help you and my firm Jbrock Consulting

1. Contact Center -- Genesys Telecommunications
2. Web Self Service -- Rignt Now Tehcnologies
3. Workforce Optimization  -- Verint systems
4. Feedback Management -- Allegiance
5. OutSourcing -- Convergys

Looking for some type of data analysis that shows customer satisfaction / loyality is key to repeat business. Surely this is true, but how can you maxmize and turn into new sales?  Business development is key to generating income!

Going Green and Virtualiztion technology

  Go Green thus Virtualizing servers is one of the hostest technologies because it reduces administrtive costs and engery costs.

Typcially, vendors who specialized in Virtualization over sell by teling customers you can host 100 vitrual machines on a virtual server. If a virtual server is hostisng to many virtual machines in a production environement, over loading can result in poor performance and possbile outages.

The typical  consoladation is 6.1 in regards to database, ERP,  and mission critical email. Typically over consolidation helps the budgetary numbers but adversely affect performance.

When specing out virtual servers, you must consider bandwidth usage, memory, CPU, and storage requirements. Even the best performing two quad-core processors experience botltlenecks and peformance hits due to highly transactional applications.

Planning our vitualization involved:

1.  Capacity Analysis -  VMware tools have the ability to perform indepth capacity anlysis that monitor server hardware utilization. What resources can a server contribute to the virtual pool?  With vitual servers you must monitor and manage RAM and CPU spikes and look for  performance degeradation. The key is to create balance work loads among all of the vitual servers.
2. Monitor Peformance Continuoulsy --  Typically you monitor RAM usage, but any I/O  problems must be addressed quickly. Many virtaul users will monitor  reads / writes to disk  to see disk performance.
3. Test all applications -- test all mission critical applications before and after deployment. You must spread out similar work loads among different servers so they will not be fighting for resource. Split up web servers, email servers, file servers to manage demand. To make sure your environement works the best, take into consideration peak usage times to know resource demands. The typical testing phase will last at least one month.
4. Develop bench marks -- trying getting in contact with similar orginations that have virtualized to compare key statistics related to virtualization project.