Codewalk

Pythagoras Trees

I find Oak trees to be very beautiful. The shape of an Oak tree is not symmetric but it feels like there is some definite pattern. The closest I can think of is Mathematical/Fractal concept of 'Pythagoras Trees'.

The image to the right has been generated based upon certain mathematical rules. Pythagoras tree belongs to the family of plane fractals. This is a shape replacement fractal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Observe the similarity with the real Oak tree.

 

Initial Shape

We start with a square.

Replacement Shape

We replace square with the following shape.

Iterations

At every iteration the squares at the top are replaced with the replacement shape. The following image is after two iterations.

After ten iterations the image looks as shown right at the begining of the article. Pythagoras tree was first constructed by Albert E. Bosman (1891–1961), Dutch mathematics teacher, in 1942. The name for this fractalcomes from the fact that the replacement shape is traditionally used to depict Pythagoras Theorem. Other variations can be achived by varying the base angle.( 90 degrees in the above example).

Did Al Gore Invent The Internet ?

The joke continues to this day! I am writing this blog  because many still believe it is true !

The source of this mis-information seems to be from an Al Gore's interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN's 'Late Edition' TV program on 9 March 1999. It is important to note that Al Gore said that he 'created Internet' rather than claim that he 'invented the Internet'.

During my service in United States, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and evironmental protection, improvements in our educational system.

 In the words of Vincent Cerf:

As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high-speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship - the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication. As an example, he sponsored hearings on how advanced technologies might be put to use in areas like coordinating the response of government agencies to natural disasters and other crises.

Webby Award

In 2005, Al Gore was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award 'for three decades of contributions to the Internet' at the Webby Awards.

Conclusion

Al Gore did not invent the Internet. He did not claim to have invented the Internet. However, as a congressman and later as vice president, he promoted science and technology which ultimately resulted in the development/creation of Internet.

WolframAlpha - Computational Search Engine.

Traditional search engines search for the 'search phrase' or a combination there of and present the results. Computational search engine uses the knowledge it has indexed and calculates what the user wants. 

Computational Search is fundamentally new way to get knowledge and answers—
not by searching the web, but by doing dynamic computations based on a vast collection of built-in data, algorithms, and methods.

Wolfram Alpha operates as follows:

• Linguistic analysis - new kinds of algorithms for 1000+ domains
• Curated data - 
10+ trillion pieces of data from primary sources with continuous updating
• Dynamic computation - 50,000+ types of algorithms & equations
• Computed presentation - 
5,000+ types of visual and tabular output

Wolfram Alpha in Action

1. Searching for "10 M&Ms" will present you with the nutrition information. As you can see this information was dynamically computed just for you on demand.

2. You can compare the population trends of California, Texas and country of France. The search phrase used was "population history California, Texas, France"

3. You can do your research for your fantasy football. You want to find out "NFL teams with more than 15 rushing touchdowns and more than 20 passing touchdowns in 2011"

4. Finally, if you are lost - then you can ask 'Where am I' ? You will be presented with details about your IP address, geo-location etc.

Conclusion

This blog merely scraped the surface of possibilities. Please use WolframAlpha search engine and learn its numerous other uses.

Computational Search is a very powerful concept and WolframAlpha is just one implementation of this concept. The future should see many more advances in this area.

WolframAlpha - website.

 

 

Humor in RFC (Request For Comments).

RFC stands for Request For Comments, which is a memorandum published by Software Engineers through the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Normally these are fairly technical documents describing new concepts, proposals or descriptions of the inner workings of Netwoking Protocols.

Most of the networking concepts and protocols used to power todays Internet have been described by RFCs. For example the Hyper Text Transmission Protocol or HTTP that delivers the web content to our browsers is described in HTTP - RFC 2616. Another fundamental protocol, SMTP,  that drives the e-mail is desribed in SMTP - RFC 5321. 

Computer Scientists Have Humor Too

On April Fool's day 1990, David Waitzman described, a humorous but scientifically correct, networking protocol where the information packets are exchanged using carrier pigeons! He described this in an RFC -  IP over Avian Carriers (IPoAC) - RFC 1149.

Quote from the RFC

Multiple types of service can be provided with a prioritized pecking order. An additional property is built-in worm detection and eradication. Because IP only guarantees best effort delivery, loss of a carrier can be tolerated. With time, the carriers are self-regenerating. While broadcasting is not specified, storms can cause data loss. There is persistent delivery retry, until the carrier drops. Audit trails are automatically generated, and can often be found on logs and cable trays.

 

On 28 April 2001, IPoAC was actually implemented by the Bergen Linux User Group. They sent nine packets over a distance of approximately five kilometers (three miles), each carried by an individual pigeon and containing one ping (ICMP Echo Request) and received four responses. with a packet loss ratio of 55% (due to user error), and a response time ranging from 3000 seconds (~54 minutes) to over 6000 seconds (~1.77 hours)

During this experiment some of the pigeons bumped into window glass panes. Apparently Alan Cox , who is a big Linux fan, remarked that "Oh, no! Windows causing problems again!"

Humor Continues

David Waitzman described an improvement of his protocol in RFC 2549, IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service (1 April 1999). On 1 April 2011, and 13 years after the introduction of IPv6, Carpenter and Hinden published RFC 6214 which is adaptation of RFC 1149 for IPv6.

Pigeon versus Telkom SA

On 9 September 2009, the marketing team of The Unlimited, a regional company in South Africa, decided to host a Pigeon Race against Telkom SA.  The race is to send 4 gigabytes of data approximately 60 km apart. The pigeon carrying a microSD card beat the Telkom ADSL line with the data transfer over Telkom's ADSL line. Total time was two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds from uploading data on the microSD card to completion of download from card. At the time of IPoAC Pigeons's victory, the ADSL transfer was just under 4% complete!

Quest for Speed - Amdahl's Law

Amdahl's law is named after Gene Amdahl, who was a computer architect and high-tech entrepreneur. This law states the limitation of parallel computing.

Any given program consists of a portion that can be made parallel  and the other which has to be sequential(cannot be made parallel).

So if

p = portion of the program that can be made parallel

1 - p = portion of program that cannot be made parallel.

Amdahl's law states that the maximum speedup tends to 1 / (1 - p)

Example:

If a program has 5% sequential portion and 95% parallelizable portion. Lets say that this program takes 100 hours to complete on one processor(sequential).

Then the maximum possible speedup is 1/(1-p) = 1/5% = 20 times. 

So now the parallel version of the program can run at the most 20 times faster - in 5 hours.

 

Let us look at a more complete explanation.

The speedup S(N) is achieved using N processors and executing the program in parallel. The sequential part ( 1 - p ) does not diminish. However, the parallelizable part, P can be distributed over N processors to be processed in parallel - taking only P/N time. 

So if we use infinite number of processors then the time taken by the  parallelizable portion P/N approaches zero. So we are left with S = 1 / (1 - p )

 As an example, if P is 90%, then (1 − P) is 10%, and the problem can be sped up by a maximum of a factor of 10, no matter how large the value of N used.  So to get performance boosts using parallel programming, it is very important to reduce the component (1 – P) to the smallest possible value.

Conclusion

Throwing more hardware (more processors) will only improve the performance up to a certain point. To achieve further performance improvements (speedup), the program needs to be re-coded to reduce the sequential portion of the program.

 

 

 

Should we use Hungarian Naming Convention?

Hungarian notation is a variable naming convention in programming languages, in which the variable name is prefixed with letter(s) which indicate its type or intended use. In this article, I describe the Hungarian variable naming convention and discuss if we should use Hungarian notation while coding or not.

Charles Simonyi Versus Charles Petzolt

Charles Simonyi, a software architect at Microsoft was the inventor of Hungarian notation. Charles Simonyi proposed that the variable name be prefixed with 'type' information. Simonyi meant 'semantic type' - or what that variable represents - when he used the word 'type'. This later came to be known as Apps Hungarian

For example: rwPosition -- where 'rw' prefix indicates that this is a 'row'.

People mis-interpreted Simonyi's original text and assumed 'type' to mean a 'data type' instead of the 'semantic type'. So the prefixes started indicating the 'data type' of the variable. Charles Petzolt released the immensely popular book: 'Programming Windows' which used this notation. This later came to be known as Systems Hungarian

For example: bBusy -- the prefix 'b' indicated boolean which is a data type.

Systems Hungarian

In Systems Hungarian, as we have seen, the prefix describes the data type of the variable. This information is useless overhead as any modern IDE like Eclipse or NetBeans provides us with this information.

For example: Eclipse IDE provides information about the variable costTable that it is a two dimensional integer array. We do not need the variable name to indicate the 'data type'. The variable name 'costTable' has to indicate what this variable is all about - semantic meaning - from the name we can infer that this holds the 'cost' of some object.

 

Apps Hungarian

In Apps Hungarian, the emphasis is on 'semantic type' - which is what the variable represents. This information cannot be supplied by IDE or other tools. The programmer is the one to supply this piece of information.

Some examples of variable names enhanced by a 'semantic data type' prefix.

• diffX -- the prefix indicates difference.
• countX -- the prefix indicates count.
• maxX -- the prefix indicates maximum value permitted

If we rewrite the above example using Systems Hungarian, we would get the variable name as: iX - which only indicates that variable X is an integer but does not provide with any information about what kind of data that is.

Here is the original paper by Charles Simonyi: Hungarian Notation

Conclusion

Apps Hungarian is very relevant as it places emphasis on the 'semantic type' of the variable. This information can only be supplied by the programmer and not by IDE or tools. Traditionally 'prefix' was often a single character. However, this restriction can be relaxed so that the code is easier to read and more useful.

 

Search For The One True Indentation Style

In this anecdote, I describe how I got caught in the indentation style wars and how I dealt with the situation. I conclude by describing my take on code indentation and how to deal with different style schools.

Intern Gets A Coding Assignment

Long, long ago, I was working as a junior programmer for a Unix/C software shop. As the newest member of the team everybody was eager to coach me in the various aspects of software design and programming. The most zealous of them all were my team lead and my software development manager!

I was ecstatic that I was getting so much help from the team! Everything was cool and I was assigned my very first coding assignment. I was to develop a load generator test program. I was well versed with 'C' and 'Unix' and was fresh from college with all the enthusiasm. I was eager to apply all I know to code a 'real' program.

Problems With The Brace

The little coding project was going along smoothly when I was faced with a peculiar problem. Algorithm was not it. The issue was - you guessed it - my indentation style!

It was not my indentation style per se that was the problem but the fact that my team lead was from K&R brace school while the software development manager was fromAllman brace style. Each of them wanted to review my code - daily - and insisted that I follow their favored indentation style!

 

 

K & R Brace Style

if (some > all) {
    doSomething();
    i++;
    ....
    ....
}

The K and R refer to Kernighan and Ritchie and they introduced the indentation style in their legendary book The C Programming Language. This indentation style keeps the first opening brace on the same line as control statement, indents the statements within the braces, and puts the closing brace on the same indentation level as the control statement (on a line of its own).

 

Allman Brace Style

if (some > all)
{
    doSomething();
    i++;
    ....
    ....
}

The Allman style is named after Eric Allman (of SendMail fame). It puts the brace associated with a control statement on the next line, indented to the same level as the control statement. Statements within the braces are indented to the next level.

A Stupid Clever Solution

As the lowest leaf node in the org tree, I did not want to displease either my team lead or my manager. Luckily or unluckily for me, my team lead made his rounds in the morning and my manager made his rounds after lunch. So I devised an ingenious solution.

I started maintaining two sources one indented in K&R style for my lead and another set of source code indented in allman style for my manager! The K&R style code made it to the source control repository where as the Allman style code existing on my desktop. I expended considerable energy in indenting these two pieces of sources and even more energy in keeping them in sync.

Tool Support

In retrospect, I should have used a code formatting tool like C Beautifier to format my source code to suit various indentation needs. Modern day IDEs like Eclipse allow you to specify the code indentation style in great detail. These tools allow you to browse the code in your style without changing the whole world.

One True Grand Indentation Style

It is common for programming teams and software companies to have a prescribed coding style. It would be impossible, impractical and very expensive to insist that all code conform to the prescribed coding style.

 

This is because the code in a project is often from diverse sources - ranging from open source libraries to the code library from a different group within the company. We all realize the futility of reformatting open source library to conform to our coding style.

Instead of battling the diversity of code, why not use tools to provide you with a dynamic browing view conforming to your own indentation styles!. In modern IDEs one can click on a brace and instantly find the matching brace for that block!

Conclusion

Stop waging 'coding style wars' and trying to unify all the code under one true indentation style. Use the tool support in IDEs to browse code in your preferred format - on demand - rather than reformatting the sources. Use IDE support and make the most of syntax coloring, brace matching and other code browsing features to comprehend the code.

 

How to Find What You are Looking For?

The first tool of choice is an internet search engine. My favorite happens to be Google. Searching for a term generates thousands of search results. Sifting through these results needs a strategy. In this article I talk about a few ways to use more 'relevant search query' and to hone-on on your desired results.

Help is Hidden

Google's search is known for three things. First is the speed its search, which is blazingly fast. Second its search results, which are very relevant. Third its user interface which is minimalist and barely contains anything else besides a text field to enter your search query.

This simplicity belies its power. This seemingly simple search string holds the key to unleash Google's (hidden) power. The search string can be altered in specific ways to let Google's search engine know more about what we are searching for.

Don't Shout

It does not matter if you capitalize your search query or not. So searching for 'Hotel' is the same as searching for'hOteL' which is same as 'hotel'.

Order. Order...

Order in which your words appear in your search query matters a lot. So searching for 'Sky Blue' will produce different results and the search query string 'Blue Sky'.

Is it Fruit or Fruits?

'Fruit' is spelled differently than 'Fruits'. So technically they are two distinct words. However, Google now uses stemming technology and when appropriate, it will search not only for your search terms, but also for words that are similar to some or all of those terms. English language has enough quirks so - don't count on this feature to work 100% correctly.

Either one would do.

You are looking for a restaurant in San Francisco serving either italian or chinese food. The query could be'Restaurant San Francisco Italian OR Chinese'. Note that the word 'OR' has been capitalized.

Amazon was a River

Now Amazon is an internet bookstore and an e-commerce giant! Search for 'Amazon' will generate thousands of results and the top ten results will probably be about the internet bookstore and its services. This is not what we want. We want the Amazon - the river.

Change the search query and utilize the plus '+' operator. Now the search query looks like Amazon +river - this indicates that we want to see search results which have both the word amazon and the word river in them. This time the top ten search results are about Amazon River.

Lamps and Genies

You are looking to decorate your home with some electric lights. You are also looking for some old oil lamps - the genie kind. Search for 'Lamp' generated results about the LAMP platform. LAMP - stands for Linux ApacheMySQL and PHP.

Change the search query to exclude results with Linux. This can be done by prefixing the 'minus sign before the word Linux. Now the search query looks like 'Lamp -Linux'. Now are results are about lighting.

Looking for definitions

Prefix the word the operator define: and you have the query string. So to get the definition for life the query string would be 'define: life'.

Google as World Clock

To get the current date and time in London use the operator 'time:'. The query string would be 'time:London'.

Would You Need a Brolly?

Is it going to rain when you get off the airport in London? You can find out using the 'weather: ' operator. The query string would be 'weather:London'.

Is the US Dollar Weak?

Is the US trade deficit decreasing the value of US Dollar? The way to find out would be to see its value in Pounds.

 

Try the query string: '1 USD in GBP'.

Search a Particular Website

What do you do if your favourite website does not implement search feature or is clumsy to use? Use the site:operator of course.

Look at the following search query: 
        'site:sfbay.craigslist.org OR site:sandiego.craigslist.org Aquarium'.

This would search San Francisco Bay Area's craigslist and San Diego's craigslist website for Aquariums.

Who Links to Jonathan Schwartz's Blog?

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Micro System's CEO, is a pioneer CEO blogger. How do you find out all the web sites that have a link to his blog? Use the 'link: ' operator. The search query would be 'link: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/'.

Google as Calculator

Just type the math expression into the Google search box.

Some examples include:

• '5 * 6' would display 30 - the product of 5 and 6.
• '5 ^ 2' would display 25 - which is 5 raised to the power of 2.
• 'SQRT(625)' would display 25 - which is the square root of 625

 

Conclusion

Internet search in general and Google in particular have become indispensible tools in our quest for specific and relevant information. The search query syntax and special operators allow us to harness the full-power of Google. Google continues to improve its search and is constantly making improvements and adding new features. So some of the syntax and behaviour mentioned in this article may change. So keep looking out for new developments all the time. I hope that this article would have tickled you to explore some of the other Google search features.

 

P. S.: The rock bank U2 "still haven't found what they were looking for." However, the good news is that'Nemo - the clown fish' has been found.

 

Effective Code Reviews

Code review is the systematic examination of source code by a team, primarily to improve software quality. Sometimes, the review team can be different from the team that originally developed the software. I present a few guidelines and share my thoughts on what makes for an effective code review.

The Environment

There are a few pre-requisites for code reviews to be effective. These range from organizational culture, team dynamics and experience of the team with of the code review process.

1. Sponsorship: The company's senior management should believe in improving software quality. They should allocate the necessary resources and time. Ofcourse, architects, team-lead and the team members should be quality conscious and be convinced of the need for code reviews to achieve superior code quality. They should feel that code reviews are a worth their time and not just another check-box in some process document. This is the number one requirement for an effective code review.

2. ROI Expectations: Code reviews, when conducted properly, will improve the code quality. Sometimes, code quality cannot be measured by defect count alone.

   Code reviews

   • tend to improve the overall code structure and there by aid maintainability.
   • promote refactoring which improves code re-use.
   • improve the code to handle the corner cases.
   • improve the test cases and there by improve test coverage.
   • fix critical and rare defects - most of the multi-threading and concurrent access bugs tend to fall into this category.
   • improves team morale.

   As you may have realized, many of the results brought about by the code reviews sometimes cannot directly be quantified. So it becomes difficult to establish the Return On Investment (ROI). It is important to establish the ROI expectations correctly. The returns on time and effort spent on code reviews will be realized over a longer time period.

3. Team dynamics: The team should be self-conscious and guide its own operations. The team should have clear objectives and the atmosphere should be informal where people feel free to express their opinion.

4. Transparency: The team should document their guidelines and policies. Some of the examples are:

   • coding conventions
   • database naming and design guidelines
   • secure coding practices
   • other policies that the team decides

    

   Code reviews can become very subjective. People forget as to what guidelines/conventions were agreed upon. Sometimes these guidelines / conventions may have been updated. So documenting these guidelines / conventions is very important. These documents serve as a reference and force the team to be objective in deciding if certain code meets certain policy / convention or not. If the team feels the need and agrees then a new guideline / convention may be added or an existing one updated.

5. Team building: The team should use this occasion to:

   • build rapport with their team mates
   • learn from the subject matter experts and increase their domain knowledge about the product
   • learn architecture, design patterns and other best practices from more senior team members
   • educate their fellow team members.

Code Review Process

Team should discuss and agree upon a code review process. This should be documented and should be frequently updated based on team's feedback.

1. Agenda & Scope: Code review should be treated similar to any other team meeting. It should have an agenda and scope. The scope should include the code being reviewed and it should address if there is any special emphasis - like performance, security etc.

2. Preparation: The review team should get the code being reviewed well in advance along with all the relevant documentation. The review team members should go through the code individually and list their concerns before coming to the code review.

3. Tools & Automation: Team should take advantage of the many tools that are available to perform code analysis. Many of them are highly configurable and team should come up with these configuration rules. These code analysis tools should be automated and be a part of the build process. These tools will help to catch simple bugs and effectively save a lot of time/tedium for the team.

   Some of the tools in this category are:

   • PMD
   • Checkstyle
   • FindBugs

4. Code review: The individual team members have a list of issues that they would have prepared prior to the code review meeting. The review team addresses these issues in order. The issues fall into the following categories:-

   • code does not follow naming convention - this should have been addressed by the coding and naming convention documents and tools
   • code has a defect
   • code has a defect that rarely occurs - as mentioned these are very critical and mostly related to multiple threads or concurrent access.
   • code has a security issues - buffer overflow and pointer magic fall into this category.
   • code violates business rules - clarify with domain experts

5. Action items: Code review is an intense activity. Lot of ideas are generated and discussed. It is very very important to take notes and capture important ones as action items in the change management system. Some of the issues captured will be defects. Some would get filed as new features or future ideas. Yet some other action items can be to update the business rules or other documents. In all the cases the issues will be given proper priority and handled as 'change requests'.

   By capturing the action items in the change management system, code review process can be well integrated with the development process.

6. Follow up: To gain adequate benefit of the code reviews, the team has to allocate sufficient time or resources to follow up the issues raised by the code review. That is why it is very important to capture the issues raised by the code walk into a change management system so that these are given proper priority and so that the issues are not lost.

7. Offline & Virtual Teams: If the team is geographically distributed or if the team is huge then it presents its own challenges while conducting code reviews. The code review process remains largely the same except that the communication now happens through e-mail, message boards and WIKIs.

Some pit-falls

Code reviews present their own unique challenges. These are some of the pit-falls to watch out for.

1. Witch-hunting: Don't mis-use code reviews just to criticize and settle old-scores with your colleagues. The reviewee should trust the reviewer to provide him with honest and constructive feedback. Likewise, the reviewer should be willing to share his domain knowledge and subject expertise to improve the design/code quality. Lack of trust can either totally prevent any form of feedback so as to not to offend the reviewee or it can go to the other extreme and feel like witch-hunting.

2. Deadlock: Sometimes team members do not agree with each other on the proposed solutions to an issue raised during code review. The existing policy and convention documents fail to resolve this argument. In such a case it is best for the team-lead or architect to come to a conclusion and resolve this issue. If the issue is not time-critical then capturing this issue in the change management system (or issue tracker) and moving on may be a good alternative.

3. Lack of Trust: Code reviews are mistakenly perceived as management's lack of trust on the programmer. Such an attitude and perception is counter productive. Management must make every effort to promote trust and prevent such perception.

 

Does IT Matter?

The debate has always existed but was brought to the forefront by, now hugely controversial but very relevant, essay by Nicholas Carr in the May 2003 issue of Harvard Business Review. All of us, who have spent our careers in IT, have faced and will continue to face this question. So it is very important to understand the argument.

Carr says, "Technology’s potential for differentiating one company from the pack - its strategic potential - inexorably diminishes as it becomes accessible and affordable to all."

IT as a Commodity

It is incorrect to lump the whole of IT as ‘commodity’. Indeed, parts of IT infrastructure are fast becoming a commodity but the total software solutions that power today’s businesses are not.

The costs of computer hardware, storage, networking and the like are fast decreasing steadily, the speed has increased and the capacity doubled. Operating systems have become more capable and some of them are even available as open source. Similarly storage technologies increasingly support standards and it is possible to replace storage providers. All of the above are available to every business and may be classified as commodity.

Some of the software applications are standard - office productivity software like word processors and spreadsheets, web browsers, e-mail applications etc. However, the software that businesses developed like software used to sift and correlate the drug data to create new drugs or the software that helps in underwriting insurance are not a commodity.

IT as a Utility

Carr compares IT with electricity and states that IT is an utility. I would love to see that day but we are not quite there yet. Although the individual parts of the IT infrastructure are commodities, the skill to use them and create an efficient, scalable architecture is not. It is not trivial to build and manage today’s data centers. So businesses that realize this and out-source the IT infrastructure will benefit.

However, it is encouraging that utility computing is catching on. Sun Microsystems leases their Sun Grid at $1 per CPU-hour. Amazon provides storage with their S3 platform and charge 15 cents per GB-month of storage.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is also becoming commonplace. Firms like Salesforce make a software application available on utility pricing model.

The utility pricing of IT infrastructure and Software applications will further give a boost to businesses. The differentiator is not the infrastructure but the applications that run on the infrastructure. Electricity is a utility but the differentiator is how the various businesses use the electricity.

Innovation as a Strategic Differentiator

Everybody seems to agree that innovation is the key differentiator. Certain innovations would have impossible to implement without the improvements in IT. So businesses that use IT as an enabler of innovation succeed.

Before undertaking multi-million IT projects, businesses should have a long term vision and understand that IT is just an enabler to implement their business strategy and not the strategy itself. IT is a tool not a panacea. Just because the company implemented the latest ERP application all its problems will not be solved!