MIT team lights it up -- without wires

The latest MIT news flash could finally allow consumers to cut their power cords: A Massachusetts Institute of Technology research team has figured out how to wirelessly illuminate an unplugged light bulb from seven feet away.
Within the next five years, MIT physicist Marin Soljacic foresees a day when people could forgo the tangle of wires that keeps laptop, iPod, and cellphone users on a short leash. Instead, they could use a carefully designed magnetic field to deliver power to devices over the air. "At this point, this is a proof of principle -- the main point of our research was to see if we could transfer energy wirelessly," said Soljacic, who was inspired by the annoying beeps his cellphone made in the middle of the night when he forgot to charge it. "It occurred to me that it would be so great if the thing took care of its own charging."
Details about WiTricity, or wireless electricity, were reported yesterday in Science Express, an online publication of the journal Science.
In the demonstration, Soljacic and his team generated a magnetic field on one copper coil. Seven feet away, a similar coil specially tuned to resonate with the field received enough power to light up a 60-watt bulb. Typically, a laptop requires about 30 to 40 watts, he said, and an iPod or cellphone might require a few watts.
Already, some products have been developed that allow consumers to wirelessly charge their devices over very short distances.
But if Soljacic's idea bears fruit, consumers could be truly unplugged -- their rechargers and bulky adapters replaced by a device that transmits power wirelessly. The Army Research Office, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy funded his research.

It's All About Process

As long ago as 1931, the distinguished American economist, William Edwards Deming said that "If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing!"

In IT today it is still difficult to describe how a business requirement ends up as part of a functioning business service. This is almost never written down as a single contiguous process. At best we seek to articulate this across several different process methodologies, at worst we recognize no process methodology at all and re-invent the wheel with each new business development.

In IT it is essential that we should know what we are doing. It is equally essential that we should know, record and understand what we have done and how we did it. This is the essence of balanced control with good governance and to achieve this we need to ensure that we follow a defined, consistent and repeatable process.

Process is there to help people and it has some very important attributes that are essential to the delivery of quality IT Services.

A most significant attribute of good process is that it is measurable against industry accepted criteria or standards. When a process methodology refers to certification at a given level, or to compliance with an industry standard then this is usually a result of independent audit and assessment.

Enterprise application integration

In today’s competitive and dynamic business environment, applications such as Supply Chain Management, Customer Relationship Management, Business Intelligence and Integrated Collaboration environments have become imperative for organizations that need to maintain their competitive advantage. Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is the process of linking these applications and others in order to realize financial and operational competitive advantages.

When different systems can’t share their data effectively, they create information bottlenecks that require human intervention in the form of decision making or data entry. With a properly deployed EAI architecture, organizations are able to focus most of their efforts on their value-creating core competencies instead of focusing on workflow management.

For generations, systems have been built that have served a single purpose for a single set of users without sufficient thought to integrating these systems into larger systems and multiple applications. EAI is the solution to the unanticipated outcome of generations of development undertaken without a central vision or strategy. The demand of the enterprise is to share data and processes without having to make sweeping changes to the applications or data structures. Only by creating a method of accomplishing this integration can EAI be both functional and cost-effective.

One of the challenges facing modern organizations is giving all their workers complete, transparent and real-time access to information. Many of the legacy applications still in use today were developed using arcane and proprietary technologies, thus creating information silos across departmental lines within organizations. These systems hampered seamless movement of information from one application to the other. EAI, as a discipline, aims to alleviate many of these problems, as well as create new paradigms for truly lean proactive organizations. EAI intends to transcend the simple goal of linking applications, and attempts to enable new and innovative ways of leveraging organizational knowledge to create further competitive advantages for the enterprise.

EAI is a response to decades of creating distributed monolithic, single purpose applications leveraging a hodgepodge of platforms and development approaches. EAI represents the solution to a problem that has existed since applications first moved from central processors. Put briefly, EAI is the “unrestricted sharing of data and business processes among any connected application or data sources in the enterprise.”

Undoubtedly, there are a number of instances of stovepipe systems in an enterprise, such as inventory control systems, sales automation systems, general ledger systems, and human resource systems. These systems typically were custom-built with specific needs in mind, utilizing the technology.