Is God formless and impersonal or does He has a form and personality?

The Lord’s impersonal and all-pervading energy is called Brahman. And Bhagavan is the personal form of the Lord, who is the energetic source and never under the influence of illusion. For e.g. The form of the sun as a planet and the formless sunlight can never be separated, as they exist simultaneously. They are different aspects of the sun. Similarly, there are two different schools of transcendentalists who focus of different aspects of the same truth. The impersonalists strive to attain liberation in the Lord’s impersonal, formless light, while the personalists strive for the eternal loving service to the Lord’s all attractive form. There is no contradiction.

Similarly, the soul is part and parcel of the Lord, simultaneously one with God and different from God. Qualitatively we are one with God, being eternal, full of knowledge, and full of bliss. But quantitatively, we are always but a part, just as the sunray is but a tiny part of the sun and yet has the same qualities as the sun. We are both one with God and different from God. God is the independent controller, but when the soul misuses his God-given independence, he forgets his relation to the Lord and falls into illusion and subsequent suffering.

The two schools, personalists and impersonalists, both approach different aspects of One God.

Question answered by His Holy Grace AC Bhaktivedanta Swami Srila Prabhupada

Why should we Discover?

There are times when a company wants to change the way they are working in order to bring in efficiencies at different levels. This change has become mandatory to them because their current process or systems are not able to help them meet their strategic goals and therefore making a negative impact on their overall performance. In such cases the company management decides to change systems that they think is the bottleneck and embarks on a mission that will remove the bottlenecks. This experiment can help them meet their immediate goal or solve the problem they are facing. In the long term these bottlenecks will start surfacing again in different forms. Even well thought long term solutions need to be revamped and modified periodically but the cost of doing this will be much lesser because this will be done less frequently because of long term visibility and changes will be controlled.

To save companies from getting into a situation where there is chaos in the projects they initiate, they run into cost and effort overrun because of unknowns surfacing every now and then, there is no clarify in the next step that has to be taken, the recommended approach is an initial discovery phase. The discovery phase will help the company in taking a step back, analyze the current situation and pain points and come up with possible solutions to overcome the challenges that are facing. A discovery phase is suggested for every project if the company is not very sure of the details of the project. If the company who is outsourcing the project knows (1) the requirements that the project should meet (2) the problems that the project should overcome (3) possible approaches that can be taken to solve the problem then the discovery phase may be avoided. But this is not true in most cases. Companies outsourcing projects normally does not know (1) the detail requirements of the project (2) possible solution options or approaches (3) how the solution is going to help them and what kind of benefits its going to bring (4) the impact a good solution will have in its ROI (4) if that is the right project for them to do now.

It is very important for a company to understand whether the step they are taking is right or not. In such cases, it is recommended for any company to invite a vendor to do an initial discovery. The company can themselves do the discovery of they have the right resources. A typical discovery phase may have the following activities:
1. Workshops with the company stakeholders to understand the problems they are facing
2. Come up with possible solutions for the problems and have discussions on the same with the stakeholders from the company
3. Discuss the benefits and disadvantages of each solution or approach and point out the recommended approach
4. Help the company to understand the ROI from the initiative or project
5. Come up with cost, effort and schedule plan for the implementing the identified approach or solution
The above mentioned 5 steps will, at least, help a company take the next step with more confidence and will help in gaining the support from the company senior management. The business model of a discovery can depend on the company and the vendor doing the discovery. In some cases it can be offered for free based on conditions and in other cases it can be charged based on a pricing model. But, apart from the activities discussed above, such a phase will also give an opportunity for the company to evaluate the vendor on various aspects like project management, communication, customer awareness, technical depth, execution ability, process etc. This also increases the comfort level the customer has for the vendor and brings in a degree of trust and confidence in the vendor. So, I think, the discovery phase is a phase which will benefit the vendor and the company and should be followed in almost all cases.

Today, because of recession, cost cutting measures, increased pressure to drive initiatives that will help in bring down cost companies discourage a discovery. Another reason for rejecting a discovery phase is the misunderstanding of knowing that this phase will not bring in any tangible benefits to the organization. Sometimes, the vendor is not able to depict the real advantage of a discovery phase to the company or did not execute the previous discovery it in a way that brought benefits to the company. I think this is the most important phase before any project execution and the vendor should bring in its best resources to do this phase. Also, the company should bring in required stakeholders from the departments involved and ensure that there is commitment from them and everyone is aware and working together with the vendor for a successful discovery.

TOWARDS A SUCCESSFUL BI IMPLEMENTATION

When companies grow they need systems that will streamline and optimize operation performance, help them in making better decision based on data and trends and come up with strategies that are in line with the business goals of the organization. This is possible through Business Intelligence. In an effort to implement a BI system, companies either plan to (1) have a team that will be dedicated to write the software, (2) outsource the job of developing the systems to a vendor or (3) implement a product that will meet the BI requirements. Option (3) is, in most cases, better than option (1) and (2) because it can be implemented faster and in most cases will cost lesser. The most important factors of a BI implementation is to know and understand why BI is required, the goals that should be met, the strategies that will help in meeting the goals and product that will fit the immediate and the long term needs of the organization. Reports say that companies, over a period of time have purchased and implemented different BI products under different leaderships. CIOs come and go and they leave their mark in the company in terms of a product implementation or changes to the software environment based on what they feel are the best. This drains out the resources of the company and never gets them what they really want. In this article, I will try to focus on how a company can take the right steps to successfully implement a BI system that will meet the strategic business goals of the company.

Most of the companies get all their reporting needs by having someone write SQL queries against the database and export the reports to excel. When their business and database grow, their current systems fail to meet all their reporting needs. Some reports become very complex to be generated. Some might take a very long time to get generated. In such cases, companies typically give the responsibility of implementing a BI system to one of the IT managers who would then consult a BI product company or a System Integrator for advice and implementation. During the engagement, a BI product is identified (not using scientific means, but in most cases driven by budget availability) and implemented to take care of their operational and other reporting needs. The advantage is that this approach will meet the short term goals and possibly improve report generation speed and also make the generation of a few complex reports possible. But the disadvantage is that this approach (1) will not meet the long term needs (2) will not, in most cases, have full support from the management and the users because they don’t understand the benefits or none are consulted, (3) will be used mostly as a reporting system without taking the full advantage of BI features and (4) since the IT managers have minimal business knowledge the final system fail to deliver the expected business benefits.

A BI system implementation should aim at getting an accurate picture of the current performance of the enterprise. The BI system should be capable of responding to changes in the market. It should be able to integrate financial consolidation with the operational performance. Basically, a BI system should be able to guide the enterprise in the right direction after deriving insights from the current data that is fed into the system. In order to make full use of the BI implementation and cater to the long term needs of the organization, the company should take a few initial steps:
1. The company should know why they need a BI system and the expectations from the same. For e.g. the goal can be centralization of key business process or getting a 360 degree view of the global customer base.
2. The company should ensure that the senior management and the other essential stakeholders across processes are involved in the decision making and understand the goal. All the stakeholders should be on the same page and should be committed to working towards the mission of taking the BI system implementation successfully towards it goal. All the stakeholders should be given the BI training specially designed for the stakeholders. Without this a company can be sure that it will never reach its goal set to be achieved through the BI implementation.
3. Hire a BI consultant with proper knowledge of the domain. This consultant will study the current landscape of the systems and advice an approach that will help the company reach its goal. The initial study done by the consultant should be able to generate the following output:
a. Conduct a cause and effect analysis to develop business process models to evaluate the decision alternatives and identify the KPIs that will meet the business needs
b. Draw the requirements of the BI system that is aligned with the goals of the implementation. The BI consultant should come up with the requirements of the system after discussions with the stakeholders and understanding the goal.
c. A conceptual view of the various sources, single version of truth (data warehouse) and the final BI system
i. Clear understanding of the ‘as is’ and ‘to be’ model
d. The BI product that will fit the needs of the organization
e. A roadmap showing the implementation path to reach the final goal. If the sources are high in number the company can adopt a phased approach. The roadmap should be able to depict the evolution of a full fledged BI system that will touch upon almost every area of the business to achieve the final goal.
f. The requirements can be floated as an RFP or given to the preferred Systems Integrator for the implementation.
i. Choosing the right System Integrator or vendor should be one of the tasks for the BI consultant. The right vendor choice will go a very ling way in determining the success of the BI implementation and whether the implementation will help the company in meeting the goals.The success of any BI implementation will depend on having the BI consultant work with the Systems Integrator till the implementation is over. The stakeholders from the company along with the BI consultant should work closely with the vendor to ensure that the BI application functionality is rightly aligned to the business goals. The stakeholders should also have a very good understanding of the ROI that can be generated out of this initiative and this should be revisited and checked regularly. Last but not the least the whole program should have a clear governance structure defined in place that will ensure proper planning, risks and their mitigation, definition of roles and responsibilities and overall management of the program.

Era of On-demand

Soon we will see an era that will change the way people buy, use and experience software. Customers will be able to choose between buying as a whole or just based on usage or any other similar factor. This will help us to see software as a commodity like electricity. We do not have a power plant at our home to use electricity. We buy as much as we need and pay for what we use. On Demand Information Management concerning content management and business intelligence will gain a lot from the on demand model. Today it take a lot of time and money for a company to implement a full fledged CMS or BI system. Based on certain parameters it will be prudent for some companies to adopt the on demand model because this will allow them to save on the upfront cost.

Imformation Management Principles

Information Management is critical to the success of any enterprise today. Corporate should take measured steps to ensure that the information gathered and stored in different system over the years are put to good use. This will open doors that will provide insights for the company to make better decisions. Some guidance on principles on Information Management can be found at http://www.monash.edu.au/staff/information-management/principles/