Enterprise Architecture, IT Strategy & Others

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  • Infrared LED – A Testing Procedure

    The crude testing of Infrared LED did not work as per my previous posting. I continued to investigate. I realized, I was trying to test the functionality of the Infrared led by my naked eye. We can not see the infrared and so, I’m not the qualified person to test the infrared LED using the naked eye. The videos I watched had the infrared LED emission. So the cameras can capture the Infrared but not the naked eye.

    Took my cell phone video camera and looked the LED through it. BINGO.. it works. Tested the TV remotes. ie. Looked the TV remotes through the video/photo camera and I could see the infrared light.

    I wanted my blog more focused on the IT strategy and enterprise architecture. I promise, after my white board project, I will try to limit the computer, electronics engineering discussion as much as possible.

  • Wiimote – WhiteBoard Project

    I do not like playing computer games. In my opinion, playing computer games is wasting time. I have been using the computers since 1989 (second year in my computer engineering course) and since then I must have had spent totally less than 10-15 hours playing computer games. 90% of that time, I spent playing the snake game in MS-DOS.

    My son, who is in the first grade, has been asking me for a quite a while, to buy him a Nintendo Wii and I bought him one just last week. I was amazed by the design. I found simplicity, elegance, adaptability, usability in the architecture of the system. I felt, it is like iPod in the gaming industry. (Well, this is the first gaming console I bought, may be, all other gaming console are like this. But I do not know). I was so impressed by their design and architecture. Curiously and quickly, I jumped into the tenure of understanding the internals of Nintendo Wii. Meantime, I played Wii sports (tennis and golf) with my son.

    In my short tenure, I realized

    • Developing games in Nintendo Wii has a huge market
    • The Nintendo development SDK is not widely available
    • The internals of Nintendo is not available for public
    • The Wii remote (widely called Wiimote) is an infrared emitter communicates via blue tooth.
    • Kids are addicted to these games (spoke to 5-6 kids , my friend’s son/daughters, my son’s friends)
    • It is very expensive and not readily available in the market
    • Does not have open standard browser
    • Nintendo Wii has an wireless connection (a minimum security is a must) and connects to internet

    Nintendo wii remote has more attention in general than the Nintendo console. Johnny Chung Lee‘s enthusiasm and his videos effortlessly motivated me to try/experiment his findings. The Wiimote white board project is most interesting to me since it will have both professional and personal benefits. I started working on this projects a couple of days ago. (weekend project). Here are my findings.

    • None of my five home computers had an internal bluetooth. Bought Voice star (Cat. No. 17-1000[A], FCC ID. S76Bt-36)bluetooth 2.0 adapter from Radioshack. It is $10 USD.
    • Bought battery holder, 1.5 v battery, Infrared LED, switch
    • Tried to establish the connection between Wiimote and laptop (HP dv9913cl Notebook PC, 64 bit Windows Vista, bluesoleil 6.2.227.11 driver )
      • I tried all combination. It did not work. I spent almost 15 hours in the attempt to make it functional. Tried all possible combinations I could think of. Nothing worked.
      • When the Wii console is switched on, the Wiimote already establishes the connection with the Wii console. It does not connect to the bluetooth adapter/dongle.
      • I got stuck at, Wiimote not found in the Human interface devices HID list. Further debugging reveled that the bluesoleil driver was not loaded in to the kernel. I was able to make pair the Wiimote and PC in the bluesoleil console. When I tried to open the device, I got the the above error message. I read in few forums, including Johnny Chung Lee comments, that there are few challenges in the 64 bit windows operating system.
    • Tried to estabilsh the connection between Wiimote and laptop (Dell Inspiron, E1505, 32 bit Windows XP, Windows bluetooth driver)
      • Was not able to open the driver. The wiimote was not found in the HID list.
      • Installed bluesoleil (the driver came with the voice star adapter)
      • Installed .NET framework 3.0 and uninstalled .NET framework 3.0 (noticed more errors and felt it was not going to help even though some forums documented that .NET 3 framework will resolve the issues I faced)
      • The Wiimote was able to open by the driver (the application using the driver)
      • Played around with Wiimote Smoothboard , Wii Play drums, Wii Test application, glovePIE applications. All of them worked great.

    In the process of building the pen. Looking for an elegant pen design from Parker web sites. I also came to know that the infraredpens.com run out of stock and looking for a new design and inventory.

    Made few crude testing to ensure the infrared LED works. Not successful. Could be problem with the battery or in the connection. Need to have a good design before the development. Does this statement sound familiar?

    After the findings, I change my position on the Wii game potentials in the market. Once this kind of discoveries and re-engineering continues, there is no need to buy the console. The console function can be simulated in the PC/Laptop. It will become integral of the PC. Get the Wiimote (around $40 USD) and get the games which can be configured in the PC/laptop and get the same feature we are getting in the Wii console.

    That is long way to go.. until then, buy Nintendo stock!!

  • Maturity Assessment – A General Approach

    Maturity assessment in an organization is part of current state analysis. In strategy formation or in the enterprise architecture projects, understanding the current state is one of the major milestone. The maturity assessment includes project management, project portfolio management, application portfolio management , process management, IT financial control management, IT investment management, risk management, etc. The maturity level can be determined based on the answers on the following questions. It is more general (abstract) model and it can be applied almost any functional area except the people management.

    • Is there a process exist today in an organization?
    • Is the process documented?
    • Is the process communicated to the organization? (people are aware of the existence of the process)
    • Is the process consistently followed?
    • Is the process institutionalist ?
    • Is the process managed?
    • Is the process optimized?

    For any maturity assessment, the level of maturity can be determined by depth of the “yes” answer in the list. If none of the above question has a yes answer, then the maturity of that area is in level 0.

    Let us take a project management maturity assessment in an organization. Project management’s key objective is to manage cost, quality and time. It is triple constraint in the project management. There are frameworks available from PMBOK to perform the project management in an organization. PMBOK framework suggests that there are nine knowledge area and five process groups.

    Five process groups

    1. Initiation
    2. Plan
    3. Execution
    4. Control and Monitor
    5. Closure

    Nine knowledge areas

    1. Integration Management
    2. Time Management
    3. Scope Management
    4. Cost Management
    5. Risk Management
    6. Quality Management
    7. Human Resource Management
    8. Communication Management
    9. Procurement Management

    Take each member of the process group and ask the above questions. For instance let us take initiation process. During this phase, for any projects, the organization must make sure there is a business case. cost benefit analysis, benefit realization plan etc. Identify the major steps in the initiation phase and ask the above questions. Collate the answers to determine the maturity level in the initiation process. Repeat the steps for all members of process groups. Collate all the answers from all the process groups and will determine the project management maturity level in the organization.

    The above model can be applied to portfolio management assessment, IT financial management assessment, IT investment management and etc..