Accounting

Juan is a freelance Software Developer which means he does not have social security and his occupation being a freelancer is similar to a carpenter in your neighborhood. Juan has lost so many opportunities because of miscommunication, a common game played by corrupt individuals in the work place. As Juan recalls, this is how it usually happens:

1. Jessica the client’s representative to communicate the client’s requirements to Juan initiated the talks after brief conversation.

2. According to her, the previous IT Consultancy firm they hired left them without ever solving the problem they have with the ERP Software they recently bought. And handed over to Juan a 100-page software documentation. She did not elaborate nor mentioned the overall purpose or at least the processes involved so Juan requested that she must explain this in detail but the only thing she can reply is its all written in the software documentation. Juan could not comment but he seemed to have noticed that Jessica is not willing to share her knowledge.

3. The following day, Juan started working with Jessica. Jessica told him that in one of her testing, the software failed to deliver the desired result and presented a scenario where she encountered the error. The scenario is A-B(see figure below).

4. Juan replied and explained to Jessica how huge and complicated the existing program logic of the ERP Software and told her that the revision can still be done on per scenario basis and that means, Juan will only implement the changes based on the scenario that Jessica described so far.

5. Jessica willingly agreed.

6. Juan finished the revision in a few hours and informed Jessica to test it.

7. The following day , Juan was surprised when he learned that Jessica is mad at him because the revision he implemented is not working. And because of this, Jessica reported this matter to her boss and based on her report, she is not satisfied with Juan’s performance.

8. Juan could not do anything about this since the damage has been done but despite this situation, he conducted his own investigation and found out that Jessica used test date not suited for the A-B scenario and it was for the A-D-B scenario.

The IT industry is plagued by people similar to Jessica so be careful always.

The following really happens in real world.

1. Choose a Software that uses out of this world technologies but is created by college dropouts in the garage.

2. Choose a highly competent manager who is a friend of your mother’s daughter.

3. Hire 40 programmers coming from different backgrounds and they must be your brothers, cousins, lovers.

4. Do not use proven development methods and processes, they suck!

5. To ensure quality output, hire additional testers who are work from home bored moms.

6. Choose hardware made from China but disguised as made in USA or Japan.

7. Before developments begin, just neglect the actual requirement, everything can be done just imagining.

8. Choose the team leader who is closest to your heart.

9. The testing phase must be done in parallel with development as much as possible, testing must be done ahead of development.

10. Technical documentations suck, so just ignore them.

Accounting Software programmers need to be efficient and creative in delivering the expected functionality but unfortunately, there are many instances wherein these 2 factors will be greatly affected. Bugs in the integrated development environment(IDE) itself is the major contributor if not the worst. With these bugs, it is not only efficiency and creativity that get affected, usually productivity and the reputation of the programmer themselves also suffers a lot.

One such example of a horrible bug is when a field is never initialized and was accessed by passing its value to another variable will cause the whole software to crash. Of course there is a way to work around this bug by if-then-else which is really cumbersome, repetitive and boring and sometimes others would think it is stupid. Having such a bug will give the impression that the software is created in a garage by a bunch of college dropouts.

This should be one of the main consideration in the software selection process. Work around may be good but had it been known from the very beginning, perhaps the software was never chosen at all.

Program Documentation is one of the most important document in the IT Industry. It describes in details how each function in the software works and it is the blueprint and forms the basic foundation of a good software. A fully documented software can attract more investors because they know that there is an excellent documentation. A software having excellent documentation means that even if the original programmers are no longer around, the evolution of the software can still continue. And nowadays, the documentation itself is already the software that is just going to be compiled and be distributed to end users, now that is really absolutely fantastic and programming is made even more interesting and exciting.

Designing and coding is done in one stage also offers cost savings and software development is much faster and very efficient.  It also offers huge advantages over traditional software development life cycle. Software Architects can now easily transform their ideas directly from the flowchart they prepare allowing them to exploit their creative skills to its full potential.

Boys are always fascinated with technology especially in third world countries. This is the main reason why big American technology companies are being used by real estate developers to lure boys initially to get employed in this so called technology companies.  In the 80’s and 90’s there was a big boom of hitech manufacturing companies that only employs girls and only aging male foreigners as investors. The industry has become a scheme to hide large scale prostitution in third world countries. Cheap labor and abundance of girls, it is really a magnet to aging Americans, Europeans and Japanese. India missed this boom because of the fact that Indians easily attracts static electricity because of their natural aroma.

Then in the new millinium, internet usage exploded and online software development became a big hit in third world countries. These third world countries failed in the hitech manufacturing boom in the 80’s and 90’s and here they are again with Software Development which again is fast becoming a trend for girls to get employed in flashy offices with a little bit higher salary than offered by manufacturing companies and what is better is they dont get to wear smacks anymore. A decade has passed but none of the third world countries ever achieved first world status. Very interesting isn’t it? India and China are leading the outsourcing boom and the Philippines strongly in third place.

The Big Blue and most of its fellow so called technology companies has been maximizing their presence in these third world countries. They have deviced several processes to maximize their profitability and are therefore fully secured when trouble comes in. They can easily sell low quality software in these countries.

One of the marketing schemes employed by these so called technology companies is to advertise that they need skill sets that they have identified where their software is needed. For sure, a lot of people are looking for better opportunities so they will take the bait. Initially they will hire these people and will be deployed in a dummy project not knowing that the company that hired them has sent a proposal to their former employer offering so called better services. Then before these people reaches 6 months of employment, they get fired.

Google has invented algorithms that can be easily used by today’s Technology companies as scamming schemes. It has not confirmed but a giant technology firm has gotten away with numerous lawsuits because they have been applying this algorithms in their business dealings…it is a huge account(government in a third world country).

Here is the scheme: Company A manufactures hardware and has tie-ups with software vendors. In order for them to avoid lawsuits should a major ERP implementation fails which will be caused by their hardware, what they do is set up small technology companies that would sell their hardware and this dummy hardware vendor will enter into a contract with another third party software vendor. This is called 3-level shield. But if the implementation succeeds, the mother company will take majority of the credits. This is the equivalent of Google’s Linkwheel algorithm.

There are several scamming schemes that can be derived from Google’s Pagerank Algorithm. But so far the above mentioned method has proven to be very effective.

The major challenges in online market research is data gathering. There are several websites that provide online surveying services enabling their customers by just signing in and select numerous people that qualifies to answer their questions. But this is just one method of gathering the information needed. A very large data is needed most of the time to spot the trends and know more effectively what their respective markets prefer. Online Marketing can be made easier with a computer program called Web Spider. An Accounting Software can also have this module to monitor progress online market research activities.

An Online Marketer needs to know where people go most of the time when they are online. And basically the first step that he will look for is to know the top ten online activities. Immediately, he will think that they are in facebook, twitter, reading email, doing some online research on google, watching video on youtube, participating in online discussion boards and playing online games.The next step is how will he ever be able to catch his targeted market’s attention aside from placing extensive ads in facebook, twitter and google adwords. The main objective is to basically reach out to the targeted market and not the whole world, especially when he is marketing an Accounting Software and he just want it only be visible to people involved in Accounting related profession. Pay per click(PPC) advertising can be very expensive and more often will not be very effective if the main goal is just to increase brand awareness and recognition.

A web spider or a crawler can help online marketers gather more accurate information from the web. It is a computer program just like what most popular search engines use. Web Crawlers are the ones responsible for gathering vital information which later on will be classified and will be further transformed into useful information. Google uses crawlers to classify websites based on what the rules that has been set by Google’s Computer Scientists. The algorithm used is very sophisticated and uses Artificial Intelligence related technologies.Online marketers can not take advantage of available data gathered by Google because most of the time, their requirement is different from the rules set by Google. These rules are unique in every products and services so a customized web crawler is often needed.

Very large Accounting Software usually slows down as the data grows rapidly. All tasks can be broken down into smaller tasks to produce the result in a faster way and more efficiently. This idea is behind the principles of Parallel Programming. If you have noticed, Intel and AMD has been producing multicore processors for almost 10 years now because they know that Personal Computers can be a lot more faster and energy efficient if the microprocessors have several cores. Parrallel Programming is also going to see its glory days when the Quantum Computer is already a reality.According to Blaise Barney, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory:In the simplest sense, parallel computing is the simultaneous use of multiple computer resources to solve a computational problem:

• To be run using multiple CPUs
• A problem is broken into discrete parts that can be solved concurrently
• Each part is further broken down to a series of instructions
• Instructions from each part execute simultaneously on different CPUs

Historically, parallel computing has been considered to be “the high end of computing”, and has been used to model difficult scientific and engineering problems found in the real world. Some examples:

• Atmosphere, Earth, Environment
• Physics - applied, nuclear, particle, condensed matter, high pressure, fusion, photonics
• Bioscience, Biotechnology, Genetics
• Chemistry, Molecular Sciences
• Geology, Seismology
• Mechanical Engineering - from prosthetics to spacecraft
• Electrical Engineering, Circuit Design, Microelectronics
• Computer Science, Mathematics

Parallel Programming is currently supported by Microsoft .Net framework on a high level. An ideal parallel programming environment on a high level software development environment would be:

• A process can be defined dynamically
• The CPU can be selected during run time
• The programmer can assign which process will be assigned to the CPU

If Parallel Programming is exploited, I am sure that hardware cost will be reduced and Accounting Softwares will become more efficient.

The main application of Fuzzy Logic is optimization just like what I have previously posted. A highly optimized business process always results to faster and more efficient delivery of goods and services translating to huge savings. This is the main reason why so many Accounting Software today has integrated an algorithm that is highly optimized to make processing of Accounting Data so much faster.

To demonstrate how Fuzzy Logic works, we will solve a common problem: controlling the temperature in the room. Fuzzy Logic is used to maintain the temperature at an optimized level. The optimized level here is predefined by the end user. Supposed our optimized level normal temperature level is between 22 to 24 degrees centegrade.

Fuzzy set theory defines fuzzy operators on fuzzy sets. The problem in applying this is that the appropriate fuzzy operator may not be known. For this reason, fuzzy logic usually uses IF-THEN rules, or constructs that are equivalent.

Rules are usually expressed in the form:
IF variable IS property THEN action

In our example, the simple temperature regulator that uses a 2 fans and an aircon might look like this:

IF temperature IS very cold THEN stop fans and aircon
IF temperature IS cold THEN turn down fans and aircon
IF temperature IS normal THEN maintain level
IF temperature IS hot THEN speed up fan and turn on aircon

There is no “ELSE” – all of the rules are evaluated, because the temperature might be “cold” and “normal” at the same time to different degrees.

There is no doubt that there exists an unofficial communication pipeline with questionable information merely to stir up controversy in the workplace. This can offer devastating results to every organization if not handled properly. It can not be eradicated.  It is there as a means to be leveraged by toxic employees and managers to advance there economic and political  interest.

I used to be at this high tech ERP Consulting firm that includes Accounting Software implementation, and there is one employee who always gets updated news ahead of everyone else. She starts spreading this unofficial information before the actual announcement. Her information is quite accurate but I suspect, the management is using her to stir controversies. But I view her as making the organization weaker and other bullying employees can leverage her situation and can fall victim and suffer major catastrophic consequences. She’s playing a dangerous game I must say.

Spreading out rumors can promote distrust and disrespect among employees and can become a major conflict and hinder growth and development of the organization. It should therefore be squelched fairly quickly to prevent people from getting hurt.

Tracing the source of the rumor can be easy using Social Networking Analysis(I heard this term while watch an episode of the tv series “Numb3rs”).  Social network analysis [SNA] is the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, computers, URLs, and other connected information/knowledge entities. I don’t claim to be an expert on this subject so I advice you to just check what it is by googling the keyword “Social Networking Analysis” for further reading.

Two years ago, I featured an issue about the two giant business software makers(Oracle and SAP) fighting over copyright infringements “Oracle sues SAP over ’stolen’ software“. The details of the matter is that SAP has stolen propreitary algorithms from Oracle and used it to gain at least 400 new clients.

And today, it is all over the news that Orcale won the case and SAP will pay Oracle $1.3B in damages.  You can read the rest of the story here. Copyright infringement is a serious offense in the IT Industry. You can see the reason and explanation why it is so in my previous post entitled “Copyright Infringement in the Software Industry“. Enforcing copyrights is vital to maintaining a healthy technology industry and funding innovation.

The effect of the Jury’s decision is very devastating to SAP’s reputation and a golden moment for Oracle. So who do think will reign as leader in the Business Software Industry particularly Accounting Software? Despite this issue, innovation, existing support industry, competency of the consultants will still be the name of the game…I am not sure if people in the industry should look at this issue seriously.