In this part, I will demonstrate a model that shows what factors that affect the imported best practice, and how these factors can lead to its success, failure, or even perform some adjustments to fit.

We can classify what contributes to the success or failure of the best practices as:

• Environmental factors.
• Business related factors.

Figure 1 : Environmental & Business-related Factors influence the success or failure of the best practice.

1. Environmental factors:

By the Environmental factors we point to variables that are not controlled by the business. These factors would include:

• Economy.
• Culture & Context.
• Competition.
• Technology & Innovation.
• Regulations.

Economical factors can have major role in making what is efficient in one country to  be inefficient in another. Businesses in Countries with advanced and stable economy can focus more in developing practices that fit this stability. Such as, import and export orientation (balance of trade) of the country, Cross domestic production (GDP) or  Cross Domestic Income (CDI), Exchange rates and currency stability, Natural resource economics, and others. Let us take one best practice from an IT company in a country with a strong economy like Germany and  try to apply it in company in such country as Rwanda. Without doubt, adjustments have to be taking to ensure the success of the practice because of the differences in the two economies.

Is a certain county’s economy leaning toward Capitalism, socialism, or in-between, this can have an impact on the best practice success.

Cultural and demographical mix, would make a difference in the best practice implementation. Take a look at “Hofstede’s Framework” for assessing cultures (3), we see how cultures in countries have different orientations toward the Cultural Dimensions, which are:

1. Power distance.
2. Individualism vs. collectivism.
3. Masculinity vs. femininity.
4. Uncertainty avoidance.
5. time orientation.

Here how it differs. If a best practice would heavily relay on collaboration and communication between superiors and subordinates, this best practice can work in countries with short power distance, but could be faces with resistance in country with a long power distance culture.

With intense competition between rivals in many industries, being able to perform using best practices will definitely give you an advantage. But companies are looking to have THE competitive advantage over others. So best practices are affected by the severity of the competition. Sustaining the same best practice for a long time is  not the case in dynamic industries. So yes, best practices are being  and will be affected by the competition levels in industries.

With new technologies and innovations taking place each and every day, people are changing their ways of doing thing, not only on the professional aspects but also on the personal levels.

If we go 20 years behind, we can see how things were done in companies. With new technologies bushing their way to the different aspects of companies, old methods of conducting work became obsolete. Perhaps in the past these methods were considered as best practices, or I might say efficient methods.

Enterprise Resource Planning systems, Business Intelligence systems , CRM’s, SCM’s and other Information Systems trends are all changing the way work is done.

Obviously, some best practices require certain regulations and laws to make them work as planned. But when these regulation are missing to not approves in a country, the best practice become useless. It may require minor or major adjustment to be applicable.

This may rise the point of how flexible these best practices are, with these Environmental factors applying  pressure on the success or failure of the best practices.

2. Business related factors:

Sometimes, the success or failure of a certain best practice depends on factor within the company itself. This does mean that this best practice is not efficient or obsolete, but it is not applicable to this company because of inside factors. I have listed probable business related factor that may influence best practices internally :

• Management & employee practices.
• Costs & Benefits.
• Availability of resources.

We know that when new processes of systems are to be introduced to a company, resistance is going to rise in the horizon. People tend to be comfortable with old ways for several reasons. These reasons include: people with the old way may hide or manipulate information which gives them power and the desired “wrong” fulfillment, or it might be the case laziness!! So this best practice might change the current status to another. This is one case which is related to resistance.

Maybe the new best practice requires the company to be in decentralized form. But the company is highly centralized. This should create confusion to the  management, especially if it is deeply rooted in this kind of management practice. So if it to be applied under this condition, this could result in gigantic failure.

Best practices are established to make work more efficient with less cost. And we know that companies measure success in monetary values. So whatever generates more or cost less is good for them.

But suppose, in one way or another,  that this best practice generated opposite results, sure the company will spot work under this best practice. Maybe the problem is from the company itself didn’t do the practice as it suppose to be done, or other factors (could be Environmental).

Some practices might require certain resources to be available (IT, human capital, money, etc) in order to work as planned. But suppose that one key resource is not missing or not available in the desired quantity or quality, such thing will result in inefficient practice which in turn will lead to worse rather than best performance.

To sum up what is discussed above, best practices are there to help organizations improve their performance, causing cost reduction, enhanced productivity, and increased revenue. Yet, these practices are subject to factors that might affect their effectiveness and success, leading to failure or even much worse performance. These factors could be Environmental, that are beyond  the control of organizations, or  Business- related factors within organizations context.

References:

(3) : http://www.clearlycultural.com/geert-hofstede-cultural-dimensions/

Regardless of the limitations of this study, it proved to be correct in a general form if comparing two countries to each other.

Mostly these best practices are developed in the western countries with certain factors shaping them to be as present. And we see that these practices are exported to countries like here in Saudi Arabia, where some companies adopt them. Now, no wonder that failure rates are high, because these practices are implemented in different conditions from where they shaped. It’s like a plant, that grow in an organic soil and you what to grow it in a dry soil !!. It would die.

We can say that the conditions that form the best practices differ from one county to another. Some of them might be:

• Organizational behavior & management practices.
• Cultures.
• Economy.
• Government regulations & politics.
• Others.

When one of these conditions are changed, the best practice has to be adjusted to fit the situation or become obsolete. Not always the transportation of thoughts or ideas from anywhere grantees the success even if they were the best in their origins.

References:

(1) http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/best-practice.html.

(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_practice

Watch the interview with Michael E. Porter

Every day, managers (Strategic, Middle or Operation ) face problems and try to solve them, and also make decisions. As known to all, the standard way of decision making is to:

• Define the problem.
• Identify possible solutions and evaluate the solutions, and
• Compare, choose, and recommend a potential to the problem.

Defining the problem properly in the first place will guarantee a good start for a correct solution. But what if the manager faces an unknown problem? What if we see the signs of the problem but these sign can be indicators for several problems? How can we precisely identify the problem?

Managers with experience and knowledge in their fields can do proper judgments and make good calls. But in such business environment, like big or multinational corporations, this could be complex task. For example, a company has implemented new system, yet the system is not performing well as expected. Perhaps the employees were not trained to use the system, the interface in poorly designed, or may be other problems. So how can we determine which is the real problem that need to be solved?

I have been reading about a method used by physicians to identify diseases. This method is called “Differential Diagnosis”. It is basically an elimination process to diagnose (solve) an unknown disease (problem). A patient has these symptoms that could indicate several diseases. So physicians list all the possible diseases with such symptoms. With ordering blood tests, checking the medical history, Radiology, and the physicians’ intuition and estimations, the list is narrowed and the disease is indentified. Then what ever solution (surgery, drugs or others) is best to cure disease is done.

Different terminologies same concept in businesses.  So Differential Diagnosis can be useful method to identify unknown problems. A manager can form a team, that will investigate the  symptoms and try to figure out the problems that cause them. Also being able to connect  symptoms with causes and see what fits the problem.

By using tools such as, reports, output measures, asking the employees, past experience, intuition , and anything helps in collecting information to discover the problem.

Let us take one more example to clarify the idea.  A department in a big company, productivity is lower than it should be. errors in the outputs too much high. Also employees are unsatisfied. Three symptoms, each one can lead to different problem, and any combination of these problems also can lead to other problems. One might say : “ The problem with productivity is that employees are not motivated !! ”. Motivation comes in forms of loyalty, salary, competition or respect… etc. How can you be sure !!!!. other one could say: “ I think that the processes are old or obsolete compared to the competition outside ”. The first one could response by saying: “ Aha, what about this, our system in old !!”.  The process goes on until the group sees that these symptoms fit a problem or problems, with any means that help to identify the problem.

It is not going to be easy in the future. Problems in businesses are getting more complicated each and every day. Also dealing with them and understanding their nature. Most of the time we are not deal with the problems. We are dealing with their results. Being able to differentiate between them is a sign of a good manager, and it is the first step for good decision making.

Doingbusiness.org provides objective measures of business regulations and their enforcement across 181 economies and selected cities at the sub national and regional level. Here is what they said about Saudi Arabia in 2008.

Starting a business in Saudi Arabia used to be limited to those who could afford one of the highest minimum capital requirements in the world—$125,000 for limited liability companies. In July 2007 Saudi Arabia slashed the minimum capital requirement and simplified business startup procedures. What once required 13 procedures now takes only 7. The time to start a business fell from 39 days in 2006 to only 15 in 2007. According to Doing Business, the country’s ease of starting a business ranking soared from

Read More In:
http://www.doingbusiness.org/features/ArabWorld2009.aspx

September 03, 2008 — CIO — The best project managers are those who consistently deliver, on time and within budget, projects that meet or exceed stakeholders’ expectations. Those project managers understand that leadership and people skills are even more important to good project management than a sound methodology and project tracking tools, says Fumi Kondo, managing director of Intellilink, a management consulting and training company that specializes in technology implementations.

“The more experienced project managers understand that if you don’t get the people side of project management, it doesn’t matter how good your methodology or your tools are,” says Kondo. “If you’re not managing your users, sponsor or stakeholders, you could deliver on budget, but you might not meet their needs, and they’ll say they’re not satisfied.”

So what soft skills are necessary to become a top-notch project manager? Kondo’s firm analyzed the skill sets of both its own best project managers and those of its clients and came up with the following six attributes.

1. They possess the gift of foresight. Good project managers are able to anticipate and head off problems that can jeopardize deadlines, budgets and user acceptance.

2. They’re organized. Organization seems like an obvious characteristic of a star project manager, but it manifests itself in a variety of ways, including in an ability to stay focused on the big picture and to prioritize competing responsibilities. “In most projects, there are so many things that have to get done that it’s hard to stay on top of everything and in control of everything,” says Kondo. “Being able to prioritize work for your team is a critical aspect of what a project manager has to do.”

3. They know how to lead. Project managers have to interact with and influence a variety of stakeholders including their project teams and project sponsors. Since many project team members don’t report directly to the project manager, the project manager has to find ways to motivate workers over whom they have no direct influence and who can make or break a project. Project managers also need to be able to inspire the confidence of stakeholders and sponsors in the event the budget or timeline needs to be renegotiated or additional resources are needed to complete the project.

4. They’re good communicators. Successful project managers effectively use e-mail, meetings and status reports to communicate their ideas, get decisions made and resolve problems, says Kondo. They also understand that they need to discuss their project in the context of whatever is most important to their audience, she adds.

5. They’re pragmatic. Sometimes project managers can be too analytical, says Kondo. “They analyze things to do death before they move ahead,” she notes, which slows progress on a project. Good project managers focus on getting work done with the resources available to them.

6. They’re empathetic. “Project managers rely on others to be successful,” says Kondo. She adds that project managers can’t effectively influence others if they don’t understand what motivates their stakeholders. They need to learn stakeholders’ concerns about a project, take those concerns seriously and address them.

The Article’s original link:
http://www.cio.com/article/447182/Six_Attributes_of_Successful_Project_Managers

Chrome periodically downloads updates of two blacklists (one for phishing and one for malware) and warns users when they attempt to visit a harmful site. This service is also made available for use by others via a free public API called “Google Safe Browsing API”. In the process of maintaining these blacklists, Google also notifies the owners of listed sites who may not be aware of the presence of the harmful software.

Each tab in Chrome is sandboxed to “prevent malware from installing itself” or “using what happens in one tab to affect what happens in another”. Following the principle of least privilege, each process is stripped of its rights and can compute but can’t write files or read from sensitive areas (eg documents, desktop), this is similar to “Protected Mode” that is used by Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista. The Sandbox Team is said to have “taken this existing process boundary and made it into a jail”; for example malicious software running in one tab is unable to sniff credit card numbers, interact with the mouse or tell “Windows to run an executable on start-up” and will be terminated when the tab is closed. This enforces a simple computer security model whereby there are two levels of multilevel security (user and sandbox) and the sandbox can only respond to communication requests initiated by the user.

Plugins such as Adobe Flash Player are typically not standardised and as such cannot be sandboxed like tabs. These often need to run at or above the security level of the browser itself. To reduce exposure to attack, plugins are run in separate processes that communicate with the renderer, itself operating at “very low privileges” in dedicated per-tab processes. Plugins will need to be modified to operate within this software architecture while following the principle of least privilege.

Chrome includes an Incognito mode (similar to Safari’s Private Browsing and Internet Explorer 8′s InPrivate) which “lets you browse the web in complete privacy because it doesn’t record any of your activity” and discards cookies. When enabled for a window “nothing that occurs in that window is ever logged on your computer.”

The Javascript virtual machine was considered a sufficiently important project to be split off (like Adobe/Mozilla’s Tamarin) and handled by a dedicated team in Denmark. Existing implementations were designed “for small programs, where the performance and interactivity of the system weren’t that important” but web applications like Gmail “are using the web browser to the fullest when it comes to DOM manipulations and Javascript”. The resulting V8 JavaScript engine was designed for speed and introduces new features with that in mind such as hidden class transitions, dynamic code generation, and precise garbage collection.Tests by Google show that V8 is about twice as fast as Firefox 3 and the Safari 4 beta.

After working for 4 months as Grader in my university ,, I really saved the money to buy a new & awesome phone … I had my eyes on the Apple Iphone … but the features weren’t that good :  2G , still not supported here in Saudi Arabia so I must Unblock it & I should order it from ebay.com with an expensive fee … really it wasn’t worth it .

 I was tired from Nokia phones .. yet, everybody kept saying to me to purchase the Nokia N95 !!! I said for the love of god NO !!!!!

When I was surfing the net, looking for new smart phones ,, I saw this phone from a  company based in Taiwan  … HTC … I was like WOW … now that is a phone. I was enchanted by its features, especially that I was looking for the Wi-Fi feature.

It goes also by other names like : HTC Kaiser, HTC P4550, AT&T Tilt 8925

Some photos of this phone :

More Info on the official site of the phone:

http://www.htc.com/www/product.aspx?id=640

We all know that Microsoft is one of the biggest Commercial Companies & one of the dominants. For along time ” and still”,  the old school IT experts , scientists, Bank & Firms managers still have this mentality that something you purchase “system, program .. name it ” is the best. Open Source solutions are like the  forbidden area for them & its like the devil !.

But now we see a Major change in the trend of one of the biggest commercial companies “Microsoft” ! . They are looking for an “Open Source Community Manager “. This very courageous move from the company, maybe in my opinion it came in the right time. You see the GREAT BUZZ about the open source solutions, specially after majors player in the market “like Google” are doing the same strategy.

People ” and me” are sick & tired form these old mentality who say that open source will not survive or succeed. Believe me, the future will be open. So when Microsoft do this thing, maybe they are looking to have their share in the OS Community, maybe this step is PURELY Commercial or they are really have the intention to ADOPT the OS !!!! ?

In My Opinion ….. the first choice is the most likely.

refer to this article for more insight

http://port25.technet.com/archive/2008/05/28/now-hiring-open-source-community-manager.aspx

The E-Readiness Ranking for 2008 has been published, with a lot of questions in my head about the rank of Saudi Arabia & why. Before I go & say me  personal opinion & discuss some matters, let me just remained my self & you of what is “E-Readiness”.

According to the report definitions : Is a measure of the quality of a country’s information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and the ability of its consumers, businesses and governments to use ICT to their benefit.

Measures Used to Evaluate Each Country’s E-Readiness:
The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) had established certain scoring criteria categories and weights. these are:

·         Connectivity and technology infrastructure

·         Business environment

·         Social and cultural environment

·         Legal environment

·         Government policy and vision

·         Consumer and business adoption

In this year’s publish, the United States is the 1st , followed by Hong Kong in 2nd , Sweden in 3rd ,Australia in 4th  & Denmark in 5th .
For Saudi Arabia, we still for 3 years in a row in the rank 46 !! . But if we see the accumulated score, we can see some improvement ( for 2007 was 5.05 of 10 & for 2008 it is 5.23 ). The reason for the increase as the paper said : “In contrast, countries further up the scale, such as Saudi Arabia (46th), Thailand (47th) and Egypt (57th), have moved upwards mainly by improving connectivity.” This will lead me to talk about why we still in behind where in fact we have the ability to be in the first 10 places.

Factors & Potentials :

Many factors play role in shaping the E-readiness here in Saudi Arabia. Such as, Economical, Technical, sociocultural & Political factors, they may vary in the impact. The Saudi market still young & fresh, not many E-commerce sites & nor many companies adopting E-commerce solutions. So potentials are high for this market. And this E-Readiness paper give us a sight about if the country is good for E-investment & Technology in it or not.

Good news & bad News:

Illiteracy in the 21st century is not when individuals can’t read or write, it is when individuals don’t know how to use computers. Unfortunately, Saudi Arabia has a big percent of those illiterate people. Among a population of 27 million, only 17% are using the internet.

The good news is that many efforts are done & continues to make people aware of the technology & people themselves are trying to learn more & more. If we see the improvement in the users of the internet from 2000 to 2007, we will see a huge jump. In 2000 there were only 200,000 interne users, in 2007 4,700,000 people are using the internet, which means an increase by 2,250.0 % , and still growing.

The Government Must Do More ! :

 Regulation & laws for internet & foreign investments should be revised to fallow the global trends. Fortunately, good initiatives are being applied in the internet in general & E-commerce field, Like :

·         Public consultation announcement for Anti-SPAM Policy framework

·         CITC announced the issuance of e-crimes and e-transaction acts

These new roles help both public & business user of the Internet, specially when it comes to buying & selling, Spam Mails, and E-Crimes.

Allowing more competition will serve the Saudi market & make it more richer. Many Tech suppliers & companies à wide variety of choices = Prices goes downà more people will adopt the new Technologies.

Still we are waiting for the Saudi E-Government site, which will be a big leap for the Saudi government, and this for sure will guide the citizens to use the internet more & more.

to be continued ,,,