Google celebrates the wildebeests

They don’t feel the cold, for they are not crossing anywhere in this city to endure the severe chilly mornings. It’s August and there is no doubt that the cold stops for breakfast in Nairobi, a month that thousands of wildebeests and zebra cross the open plains of Serengeti and the Mara.  

It is not only the crocodiles that celebrate this one cross of the Grumenti River, but Google does too. It honors this by featuring a migration doodle on its Kenyan homepage google.co.ke created by Samuel Githu, the first Kenyan guest artist to collaborate with them.

Samuel artistic piece is featured at a prime time, a time when the wildebeests and zebras migrate to greener pastures to fill their tummies as season changes. On the other hand, they patiently wait choking on their own saliva, the predators wait to strike and take advantage of this migration.

The doodle decorates the Google’s logo, over the years doodles have been used to match the company with specific events, anniversaries and science. Google homepage customization started in 1999 by Dennis Hwang, a 29 year old who referred to his artistic art as “doodles”.

The light pipes under our feet

In most corporations, people, communication and knowledge are few clicks away. Clients and service providers no longer have to be on the same location because of the availability of fiber optic. Fiber connections allowed vendors and clients to transmit data and enjoy instantaneous communication from different parts of the world.

Apparently, use of fiber emerged in 1980s, solving a major problem of signal degradation/loss experienced when working with copper to transfer data over networks.  Copper networks needed repeaters to boost their signals after a distance of 100m, approximately 320 feet. For instance it would be 4 - 8 times (copper 1000mbps, fiber 4 – 8gpbs) faster to back up data from a server to a SUN unit with fiber connectivity.

This means with the speed of 4 – 8gpbs, an equivalent of 25000 pictures or 25 hours of video will be backed up faster on a fiber based than copper network.

Now, everyone will agree we need a strand of one “light Pipe” to our houses or offices, I mean who doesn’t love high internet speeds, transmitting gigabytes of files in seconds or perhaps buffering online videos in a flash! If we really have this appetite for fiber then why don’t we fully utilize this capacity of data at our disposal? 

In January 2011, Rwanda completed work on its 2,300 km cable at a cost of $60 million, Korea Telecom laid the fiber. Tanzania is still working on their 10,000 km cable at a cost of approximately $170 million; Burundi on the other hand got a grant of $10.5 million to lay 1300km of cable. Uganda too acquired a Chinese loan of about $102 million to lay 2100 km long of cable.  Compared to the four countries, Kenya’s private sector has been on the fore front of laying fiber in the country, by June 2010, they had laid 5000km of cable; the government is also investing $60 million in a fiber cable of its own.

These five partners have invested in terrestrial fiber optic to build a large interconnected region on the continent. With all these cables do we have enormous data capacity to utilize them or local telecom companies just installed extra strands in metropolitan areas as a concern against future capacity shortages? Or did the private sector especially in Kenya invest too much to prepare for the much anticipated internet explosion which has led to the growth of dark fiber in the country that is not lit (industry jargon for operating).

What happens to the unlit strands! What if they become obsolete before we completely utilize them? Think about the much turbulence of technology, innovation of lasers that will definitely leap beyond the capabilities of already installed fibers. Let’s hope businesses will grow and more fiber capacity will be needed, at that time the unlit fiber will be used to sustain the next wave of growth.

Green electronics

The explosion of high tech laptops, notebooks, smartphones, tablets and other ‘toys’ is creating a worrying trend to the environment conservationists – electronic scrap or what is now being referred to as ‘e-waste’.

Newer, faster and more efficient gadgets are being introduced at a very fast pace. How long do you stay with your old device before catching up with new technology? Three years? Eight? Once you upgrade and get a newer device, how do you dispose of your old one?

Once thrown in the garbage, electronics are collected and trashed at dumpsites, where they are smashed, burned until everything that was once safely ensconced inside spills out and over the course of months, years, and decades, moves into the air, ground, and water.

For instance, in Accra children smash up old computers, tare them apart then burn them to reveal the wires inside. They would later sell these wires to metal buyers as copper. These children got sick, vomited and experienced headaches due to fumes from the burning wires. After which, ashes containing lead, a neurotoxin and cadmium which damages lungs and kidneys is littered on the ground and washed away to the ocean when it rains.

When a single cellphone lies around on the ground, is not a concern. But when billions of these are disposed, they tend to release large doses of chemicals (like Colton in cellphones) to the ground which becomes a health hazard. Critical health concerns such as cancer have been linked to this, for example premature aging and defected damaged genes caused by chemicals which altered DNA structure of workers in China.

In Kenya e-waste is piling up though not as much as in the US, due to the way old and unloved electronics are handled locally. For instance, institutions like “Computer for Schools Kenya” in collaboration with the city council of Nairobi started a plant to recycle old CRT monitors as a way of managing e-waste.

The number of cellphones and PCs that are trashed is overwhelming, mostly cellphones because Kenyan market is flooded with lots of Chinese models that are cheap and tossed once they get spoilt, same to PCs.

Initially before the world environmental laws from organizations like “Greenpeace international” stood firm to control e-waste, there existed unregulated trade in dumping electronics. This is when electronic corporations like Nokia, started making durable handsets that are free from brominated compounds, chlorinated flame retardants and antimony trioxide. Some of the other corporations include Samsung, Phillips, Apple, Sony among others.

Ultimately, Kenya begins to understand the dangers that come from hazardous materials which lay inside electronics. In 2010, Hewlett Packard made a move and established the HP East Africa Computer Recycling plant in Kenya. Located in Mombasa, this facility assesses IT waste for re-use and refurbish if appropriate. The long-term aim of the facility is to capture up to 20 per cent of IT e-waste in Kenya.

In Kenya, the National Environmental Management Association (NEMA) drafted laws in 2008 to guide against e-waste in the country. Since then, citizens have been patronized to have strong green principles towards e-waste from conferences and seminars organized by the body with support from the government.

In order to reduce e – waste in the country, a second solution calls for users to sell their used up but functioning electronics on online classified ad sites, or donate them to a responsible local charity or organization. Navtej Dhadialla, an Apple maniac from CIO East Africa, disposes his old gadgets by selling them off to local stores.

VSAT still a resource in Africa

The entry of fiber optic networks has led to shrinking of business in VSAT technology in Kenya. Fiber connectivity has increased internet speeds on traditional terrestrial networks to an extent of having an over capacity on the same.

High speed direct fiber to organizations has led them to invest less on VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminal) and concentrate more on the affordable terrestrial WAN links. VSAT has been initially used for remote weather forecasting, broadcasting etc. Well, today VSAT technology is still in business, their networks offer up to 99.4% uptime for major companies like airlines and banks.

Why organizations still depend on VSAT.

Realiabilty

Airports and the Kenya navy cannot fully relay on fiber and WIMAX connectivity due to their down time. Fiber connectivity has upto 84% of uptime; therefore it means at some point 16% of this connectivity will be down.  This latency is not allowed due to the nature of business run by these institutions.

VSAT networks are recommended for mission critical applications. When their links are down, it’s easy to troubleshoot the problem because of the nature of their laid infrastructure, the problem either lies on the sending station, the satellites or the receiving station. This compared to a fiber cut, which will take time to locate and replace the cables for the link to be up again. 

Back up to terrestial networks

Many banks in East Africa have branches in rural areas; these numerous branches connect to servers at their head offices. VSAT provides connectivity in sparsely populated rural areas where terrestrial networks like fiber are expensive to install due to the cabling involved and installation of many base stations (BTS).

In as much as banks use the terrestial networks, these lines cannot achieve 100% uptime. VSAT hence provides standby emergency back-up services. When the terrestial networks experience downtime, banks can purchase bandwith exclusively for backup then dynamically distribute them to branches experiencing a down time. VSAT provides bandwidth up to 2 mbps downlink and 512 kbps uplink high speed internet access for temporary emergency situations.

Security

Government mandate, states that its information should be carried on secure networks.

As part of Kenya’s technological evolution, the government has been working towards streamlining the voting system into a more efficient and effective electoral process. It was a successfully implementation of an electronic voter registration and voter tallying system, to cater to the Kenyan constitution referendum voting process. The system though was only on pilot stage in preparation for the 2012 general elections.

The Interim Independent Electoral Commission (IIEC) needed to implement a system that would rapidly, reliably and credibly transfer data from each polling station nation-wide, to their tallying centre. Satelite communication becomes a desirable way to send this information in future elections.

Satellites support encryption of all data transmitted between two sites or multiple sites, which make the creation of Virtual Private Networks (VPN) possible. VPNs use “virtual” secure networks that are connected through public networks (like the internet) to remote sites.  With this, VSAT networks find more acceptances in government and defense connectivity because anyone who incepts the data cannot decrypt it for malicious use.

Inter-operation with other terrestrial networks i.e. WIMAX, fiber networks

Through partnerships with local terrestrial service providers, VSAT service providers are getting stronger in comprehensive network provision and management.

They can offer, for example, MPLS networks in metro areas and VSAT networks in the rural areas for the same company – both of them can inter-operate with each other acting as a single network!

An example, Alldean Satellite Networks, a Kenyan satellite service provider offering both domestic and cross-border connectivity to virtually anywhere in Africa, they have done cellular backhaul projects for major telcos in the counrty.

VSAT in Africa

In Africa, organizations are still using VSAT networks to control their operations and other services. For example Alldean networks, a local VSAT provider offers its services to local banks, the government and they were behind the set up of communication links in one of the major airport in the country.

In addition, customers can now send money directly to the mobile “wallets” of Safaricom M-PESA subscribers in Kenya from 45 countries and territories. The expansion of the service to more than 80,000 locations worldwide is based on the VSAT network communication technology.

On the 4^th – 7^th of July, 2011, the “Broadcast, Interactive, Internet and Hybrid TV in Africa” conference will be held in Johannesburg, South Africa. As industry leaders from all over the world gather together to understand the latest innovations in TV, satellite remains the backbone and has a bigger foot print in TV broadcasts. This shows that the communication technology is still in business.

Why KNEC should look at their servers!

When the Kenya National Examination Council (KNEC) released the 2010 examination results late February this year, my kid brother spent lots of money trying to access his results from a cyber in town. The KNEC portal took time to load and display the results, Ian turned to sending an SMS request on the same, in vain.

The council so far has done well by keeping abreast with technology solutions to deploy exam results via their website and the short message service. Despite this bright initiative by KNEC to increase efficiency in results collection by former candidates, their systems fail when a number of requests are sent to the servers at that specific time.

This however is not the first time former candidates experience this problem, it has been an issue over the years since KNEC implemented this response system. Let us have a look as to why this happens and possible solutions that can be implemented to address the problem.

Server optimization

KNEC provides examination results in two major ways, i.e. either students access them on their website or send request messages to their servers.  Well, SMS becomes the better option because of accessibility to internet facilities might be hard in some parts of the country. Though, this becomes a tricky affair, why! Because service providers only lease bandwidth for SMS transmission, they are not really involved with how the servers synchronize these lines of passage.  

Therefore the SMS system does not carry the blame as much other than proper management of this traffic which mainly involves having sufficient bandwidth to do so.

The real issue here again lies on their servers; KNEC should conduct a proper optimization of their database systems for these new result outlets to work efficiently.

Scalable shared hosts

Take an example of Amazon S3 and Media Temple VPS server facilities. These two have ability to serve replies to thousands of result requests simultaneously hence without any delays.

As everything boils down to the KNEC servers, I believe they are on a shared host that is not scalable under heavy load. My take, the council should operate scalable servers which have virtual storage spaces where by when new data is moved on the private servers, it replaces the old data which then can be stored in web based support hosted on local servers.

Sensible dedicated virtual servers

A clear picture on the fundamentals of this issue; All the other modules of the KNEC website excluding the examination results database occupies a few megabytes, lets says 30MB on the higher level.

A MySQL database with 360,000 records, a rough estimate of candidates who sit for KCSE examination each year gets to occupy around 30GB of the storage system.

When we compared KNEC servers with what MediaTemple as an example, http://mediatemple.net/webhosting/dv/ are offering as a dedicated virtual server is imaginable. Not only is it efficient but the capacity is enormous too. For USD 150 per month the council gets 100 GB of hard disk space, which in this case it can hold 30 years of student’s records inclusive of other modules of the website.

Narrowing down to the random memory (RAM) capacity needed, MediaTemple offers 2GB RAM for this package, and considering a complex web script only operates comfortably with 4MB of RAM capacity.

KNEC claims that the problem lies with heavy SMS traffic experienced during core times when they release results. According to our analysis, this problem is accounted to a bracket of issues, not only the clogged traffic but also server optimization problems. Relating back to my example as they claim; MediaTemple package includes 2TB (Terebyte) of bandwidth capacity to carry SMS while each SMS request needs only a KB of the bandwidth.

When it comes to cost it’s a whole point all together, let’s do the math; the cost of hosting this service at MediaTemple is USD 150 a month, when we convert to Kenyan Shillings it means out of the 360,000 possible text request, 12000 requests covers the cost of hosting KNEC services in these efficient servers. This is when the council charges KSH 10 for every SMS exam result request send by a former student.

Loosing brand power in social media sphere

A simple description of Facebook, Twitter, My Space, LinkedIn or Flickr collectively, can be refered to internet and mobile based publishing technologies that allow individuals to share information in various forms with each other and the general public.

Soon enough as social media keeps dominating business communication; it is growing and follows the e-commerce evolution. Despite this new age of conversing, social media is not a piece of cake, there are many risks that prevail an organization as employees engage in using Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn among other social interractive online forums.

Problem at hand, Is your brand at risk

The ever increasing adoption of social media by business also begs the question: What if any legal risks are attached to social media adoption by an enterprise.

In as much as a good percentage of individuals perceive business outreach via social media networks boosts devotion and improves customers’ loyalty to a company. Though, lack of formal guidelines on the way employees interact with the social media may have serious repucursions.

On an international view, social media presents two general threats to enterprises -- phishing attacks and disclosure of intellectual property, said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at San Francisco-based nCircle Inc.

As pressure builds from multiple fronts. Sales and marketing teams want to engage and sell to customers through social computing. Users want more freedom to access personal accounts from the workplace. HR teams want to be able to recruit, hire and retain social media-savvy employees, yet they might not be aware of the risks involved in engaging with these forums.

Some of the risks involved include loss of reputation and possible liable suits when employees blab or posts photos and videos about what they shouldn't. There are also risks of malware attacks, identity theft, phishing and privacy breach of sensitive data.

A practical example of Telcom limited in South Africa, suffered the rath of customers hate site actions. Due to monopolizing the telecommunication industry, the company handled its customers in a bad way. They responded by creating a page “Telkom hellcom” that ruined the company’s reputation.

Individuals can also masquerade as companies or people on social media sites and put out false messaging that is interpreted by the public as being real. This can affect stock prices and it can impact what shareholders think of a company thus impacting investment and the bottom line.

Lots of inappropriate information is passed in these environments that might cost organization image. According to Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit in 2010, business managers should be held responsible for security in social media forums and not the IT department.  

Governing social media, get involved, share and apologize

In East Africa, Millward Brown, a global research company carried a research on 25 coporate companies on what policy measures they have taken when interacting in the social forums. None of them have written policies in place to govern the use of social media.

Organizations should make sure that the corporate communication policy not only covers the media and press, but also social networking. Though, many East African companies have tried wholesale blocking of these sites.

By doing this on corporate PCs obviously doesn't prevent anyone from using alterative means, to go out and make the same outrageous mistakes that could harm the company.

This however is a temporary solution because according to Millward Brown research statistics, the social way of sharing information is growing at an alarming rate.

Social media is rewriting the rules of IT security and changing the security perspective of enterprises. The way these communication forums are packaged, it is very hard to control data breeches like in case of emails. Enterprises can only counter this by responding positively to what customers say about them.

Due to the sophisticated techniques of securing social media content that arent fully effective, employees must understand what confidential data is. So when they are on these sites, they understand the ramifications of what they are doing.

Mobile money transfers, hackers homework!

Recently I happened to attend the launch of an Ethical Hacker training programme that was introduced in the Kenyan market by EC-Council and SIMOS Consultancy firm. What really attracted my attention is the way various security ethusiats talked about numerous angles of breaches that we face especially with the consumerization of tech products that we engage in due to increased internet connectivity.

Am not talking about individual people but also companies and organizations have trusted this systems to build their brands and run their business on. To some it is unavoidable especially the telcoms with their numerous services and as they try to reduce the amount of liquid cash we carry in our pockets.

What am i driving at, for instance are the numerous amounts of monies sitting in the cloud platforms during various exchanging systems owned by Kenyan telcoms? For example the MPESA, YuCash, Zap and OrangeCash, how secure are these amounts of cash lying in this space! And how long will it take for black cyber criminals to hit on us?

Let me be a little bit technical, we have all used celphones, at some point between our conversations; we experience noise (technical interruption of communication signals). When this happens, the transeivers try to reconstruct this message and at this period is when our conversations are tapped by external listeners. Now think about what happens when subscribers try sending money between this communication channels and this happens!

Mobile money actually has brought a huge change in the way we transfer cash from one place to the other. Our sim cards have become money wallets but again will these send hackers back to books on how to best they can have Kenyan money sitting in simcards and hovering all over the space!

…I don’t trust Wezesha laptops deal...

Thanks to the ICT government intiative of giving a helping hand to the university & college students a chance of embracing the digital world. Wezesha is a bright idea; I mean soft loans for me to get a laptop, who would refuse. Funded by the World Bank this is a brilliant take that brings up a technology oriented person as he/she narrows in to specific disciplines of undergraduate studies.

As a tech ethusiast I took a step ahead and did some math, clearly something aint right. Am not just being paranoid about stuff but lets look at the calculations.

We analysized the laptops available in this deal and noticed some 'anomalies';

For instance, the Samsung N150 is stated as costing KES 19,100 courtesy of Safaricom, but the same on the Safaricom Shop goes for KES 29,999, a difference of KES 10,899. Now, the voucher given to students is worth KES 9,600...

And then this HP Compaq CQ56-152si costs KES 41499 via the program but a similar of its kind with the same specifications on chekelea.com costs KES 41,440! 

This Toshiba Satellite C660-1EL costs KES 40,999 with the voucher while the same costs KES 39,760 without the voucher.

I would say my fellow tech analyst and I arent money minded but lets have a clear picture of things.

Technology for your eyes

Its amazing how the world is shifting into technology, does it mean one time we will completely stop working? From watching over our health to the way we do things at some point there is an element of technology used. My take, in the years to come the world will be a gadget, am not sure whether life will be boring or interesting at some point, because we will have turned into technology slaves.

Recently I run into some cool stuff I think would be wise to share, a revolution to your eyes! The Rocket sun glasses species. This technology of eye engineering will not only protect your eyes from the sun rays but also computer display and office lights.

The Gunnar Optiks Rocket Amber, one of this tech glasses uses raw technology to squeeze the last bit of eyesight-preserving skill from its “indoor glasses.” its amber lenses filter out the high end of the visual spectrum, reducing eyestrain under harsh fluorescent lights.

For the riders’ goggles, Wiley XL-1s has an ultra foam rubber seal that forms a fitting layer between the frame and your eyes. This layer will keep out dust and insects while riding the motorcycle at high speeds. In addition, the Wiley XL-1 has light-adjustable lenses that provide crystal-clear clarity.

For those who want flexibility, the Oakley Split jacket is one of its kinds. With its switchlock technology, it’s easy to change the lens without breaking them. The frame has the easiest and reliable lens changing system. Though all these pairs come at an expensive price, just for yours eyes.

The Tablets pool

In November 2010 ViewSonic fished out their new gadget, the ViewPad 7 Android tablet from their pool, at first everybody turned their necks to catch a glance when the Apple Ipad was mentioned and it was indeed the in thing in the market especially when reference was made to the tablet family. Right now, tech companies have opened their flood gates in the tablet business. I don’t know maybe it’s the business mobility era that the world is into.

Well, I need a break from this because where do I take my ageing desktop PC let me not even mention the laptops we are clinch on. The technological improvement on gadgets innovation from various companies is so immense that am spoilt for choice. Each and every company in the electronic development space is coming up with a tablet, to ease the daily routine transactions and minor processes needed by an individual. To add on that, this tablets do not come with only basic functionality but a lot of high tech navigation power with different kinds of backlight for various applications use.

A glance to a few of these tablets, the gPad  which is a product of Rydeen, a company that engages itself with car technology, the Adam with a 1024 by 600 Pixel Qi display which is its selling point is from the Notion Ink a company from India.  Archos who initially baked portable media players also came up with the Archos Home 7 Tablet, among others. We can walk the talk about tablets the whole day but competition is at hand to kick others from winning the users hearts, for instance am not shouting and not biased too on Apple but word has it there is a powerful baby Ipad coming soon, so watch out.

The growth of the hard drives.

Computer hard disk drives can be compared to storage containers in our daily lives. Unlike a cabinet used to store paper records and files, Wikipedia defines a hard disk drive as a non – volatile random access device used to store changing digital data. In other words the hard disk gives a computer the ability to recall things when there is no power.

International Business Machines (IBM) introduced them in 1956 and over the years they have evolved in terms of their storage capacity, their speed to read and write data and they have been less vulnerable.

Hard disk drives are the physical storage areas for secondary data that is to be processed by a computer system via a volatile temporary memory (RAM) to the processor (CPU).

Enough of what it is and what a hard drive does, this storage device has over the years evolved since the 1960s. Punch cards were the core storage devices in the 20^th Century; they were fed into IBM 350, which was a commercial computer system. From 1979 to today: Six hard drives have reduced in size from 8-in. (inch) model, followed by 5.25-in., 3.5-in., 2.5-in., 1.8-in. (used by Apple IPod first in 2001) to 1-in.

Today, isoSafe have introduced an indestructible portable hard drive, not even a short gun could damage it. This was show cased in the ongoing International Consumer Electronic Show http://www.cesweb.org/default.asp, which is the world largest technology show.

The show, dubbed CES 2011 has been an ongoing event, takes place in the begging of each year in Las Vegas, kicked off on the 6^th of 2011 ends 9^th.  The hard drive is build not only to with stand physical impact but also with a HydroSafe water barrier technology that prevents damage to the data due to water leaks up to 72 hours in water.

The hard disk has not only developed in terms of physical strength, size and sleekness but also its capacity. isoSafe hard drive is 2 Terabyte huge, if I can compare this storage to a normal 8 GB flash drive, it means this hard drive can hold data of 250, 8 GB flash drives. In other words, 2 Terabytes can hold approximately1333 high definition (HD) movies.

This is a breakdown of computer storage capacities.

· 1 Bit = Binary Digit (A Bit is the smallest unit of data that a computer uses. It can be used to represent two states of information, such as Yes or No.)
·  8 Bits = 1 Byte
· 1000 Bytes = 1 Kilobyte 
· 1000 Kilobytes = 1 Megabyte 
· 1000 Megabytes = 1 Gigabyte

· 1000 Gigabytes = 1 Terabyte (a Terabyte could hold about 3.6 million 300 Kilobyte images or maybe about 300 hours of good quality video.)

· 1000 Terabytes = 1 Petabyte

There is nothing constant as change; everything is evolving to the betterment of life. Since we are on hard drives as storage device, let’s watch the future and see what technologies like the “cloud computing” have for us in terms of data storage & what happens to the physical hard drives that exist. 

Kenya Internet Exchange Point

Kenya hosts a physical infrastructure that interconnects local networks directly and enables these networks to exchange traffic via a local exchange point, rather than doing this through expensive and distance offshore networks. The internet exchange point has enabled the local service providers (ISPs) to exchange traffic between their networks on a communal agreement ground.

The elimination of third party networks comes with a lot more merits to the local internet connection because it means cost will be cut down due to reduced bandwidth to the remote exchange servers. This is as a result of direct interconnections which cut down parts of the traffic which must be delivered through the upstream transit providers and hence reduce the average per – bit delivery cost of their service.

 Another advantage that is experienced is the constant high connection speed especially in areas which have poor long distance connections, eliminating the need to route local traffic over expensive international links only to return to the country which they originate from. To add on, the availability of local routing network connection through the internet exchange point improves the efficiency in routing and eases troubleshooting and makes the connections fault tolerant.  

With the upcoming technology of cloud computing, most Kenyan ISPs will benefit from the pool of resources and infrastructure pulled together to handle the internet exchange points without fully investing on initial capital needed to set up the infrastructure. Though at the moment any costs incurred by the IXP is shared among all its participants.

ICT as a resource in SMEs

The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector faces a great challenge especially in the small and medium sized enterprises where the top management level perceive Information Technology as a cost center rather than a tool or ability which strengthens the employee output and boosts the business level in this globally competitive environment. In as much as there is a lot of obsolescence in regard to ICT infrastructure with the ever changing technology after a period of time, managers should appreciate how a company’s operations are integrated and the achieved goals and targets that has been perpetuated by their Information technology infrastructure.

The managers should understand that having a technological move towards ICT will champion their business operations and how they will gain a competitive advantage for corporate objectives. For a company to do well and achieve efficiency, examples of systems like the Customer Relations Management and Business Process Outsourcing  should be employed depending on the nature of these entities no matter what costs required for resources and infrastructure needed to support these systems if they are going to streamline the operations.

Despite the period needed as deployment time for ICT related projects, returns will take quite some time and these is where lack of patience and tension towards these systems from the managers is felt especially with the amount of investment done to acquire and establish the systems. Same to these is the user adoption period but when the users become familiar with the systems then technological growth is experienced though all the benefits will not be realized at the same time.

All in all, in as much as we are insisting on these ICT systems and the values they add to our organizations, there are risks involved. For instance in the markets, changing customer demands and competitors pressure delay such projects due to a lot of research that should be done by the adopting company. Furthermore, technology implementation is affected by early obsolescence and incompatibly. For the success of any ICT project, a timed road map should be drawn with specific ICT goals and objectives and it should include key issues that depend on it in the organization.

Websites Voodoo to businesses

In today’s world no business can well survive without carrying out advertisement and branding, marketing of their goods and services and also maintaining customer/client relationship networks. This is not an era of traditional ways in which business was conducted, nowadays businesses have employed the use of websites as their core marketing tool to generate leads and also process clients/customer data, accommodate all kinds of different platforms. The website as it relies mostly on feedback it enables a business entity to know how its performance curve is by capturing records of how many clicks the site experiences at a defined time scale. This shows the number of hits and how prominent the business is in the internet globally increasing the client base because of its presence in the internet.

 A business will achieve best by having a good website that is capable of operating as a central key that harmonizes data from enormous sources and manage the flow of information in and out on behalf of the business. It will provide useful information on product or service, pricing information, available support features and specifications to the customers. Ideally this can be available in both online and downloadable forms for further review by the clients at their own time.

 The website gives business owners a chance to validate their products/services objectively and provide an opportunity for customers to compare and contrast then give feedback for future improvements in this case. Trust is gained by a potential buyer of product when several customers have posted their satisfaction comments and opinions; websites provides this interaction tool which also has downloadable content of previous successes of the business operations.