Quality Alchemist (品質煉金術師): HKQAA Seminar on New Trend in IT Management

2014年7月12日星期六

HKQAA Seminar on New Trend in IT Management

The Seminar entitled "Sustainability Management Series: The New Trend in IT Management" was organized by Hong Kong Quality Assurance Agency (HKQAA) on 11 July 2014. The seminar aimed to share the business continuity management, cloud computing and TRIZ in IT industry to achieve sustainable business development.

The first speaker was Mr. William Wong (Product Manager, HKQAA) and his topic was “Introduction to sustainable management and risk management system”. In the beginning, he briefed the benefits of Business Continuity Planning and Management and found that the most important was to better understanding of your business.

Mr. Wong mentioned Business Continuity Management (BCM) used to preserve critical business functions in the face of disastrous events. Disasters were separated into Natural, Man-made and Act of God. Disasters could be defined in terms of the business impact such as it harmed critical business processes (included time-based definition and probability of occurrence). The value of BCM was Business Impact Analysis (BIA).

For Information Security, Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability (CIA) were three key elements to be considered. However, Availability would be the main focus in BCM objectives (related to Maximum Acceptable Outage (MAO), Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption (MTPD), Minimum Business Continuity Objective (MBCO), Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO)). The following slide showed different recovery strategies for Data Centre included Hot Site, Warm Site, Cold Site, Mirror and Mobile).

Then Mr. Wong introduced the Business Continuity Management System (BCMS) Standard “ISO 22301” which was published in 2012. There were 6 key elements included “BIA/Risk Assessment”, “Resources/Planning”, “Testing & Exercise”, “Incident Response/Communications”, “Internal Audit/Corrective Actions” and “Management Review”. Mr. Wong said IT was to support business operation and BCM covered IT continuity.

The second speaker was Mr. Rex Kan (Corporate Sustainability Manager, Fuji Xerox (HK) Ltd.) and his topic named “Business Continuity & ISO 22301”. Mr. Kan briefed the history of Fuji Xerox which established in 1962.

Then Mr. Kan mentioned Fuji Xerox Good Company Concept which included three key elements “Strong”, “Kind” and “Interesting”.

After that Mr. Kan shared their risk management and got the ISO 22301 certificate from HKQAA in which combined three system named ISO 22301, Japanese Version of Sarbanes Oxley Act (J-SOX) and Hong Kong Authorized Economic Operator (AEO) from the Customs and Excise Department, HKSAR.

An example of Business Impact Assessment was shared. The key risk classification included “Human Resource”, “Legal/IP”, “Disaster/Accident”, “Accounting/Finance” and “Planning/R&D”.

The third speaker was Mr. John Kong (SAP Technical Manager, Compass) and his presentation was “Cloud Computing Application and New Technology”.

In the beginning, Mr. Kong introduced “What is Cloud / Cloud Computing?” Some popular cloud application in consumer market such as Dropbox, iCloud, Office 365 and Google Drive were mentioned.

Five cloud computing services were discussed and they were Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Content-as-a-Service (CaaS) and Process-as-a-Service (PaaS).

Finally, Mr. Kong said if occupation of Central or other disasters were happened, we needed to consider System Backup Management, Backup System, Disaster Recovery (DR) System & Plan, and Work Anytime & Anywhere. At the end, he pointed out four Business Intelligence included Cloud, Mobile, Big Data and In-Memory Computing which were the top 10 strategic technology trends for 2012 & 2013.

Dr. Michael Li (President, ISIHK) was the last speaker and his topic entitled “TRIZ – Fast and Effective Innovative Solution Method”. Firstly Dr. Li briefed TRIZ and its history. The full name of TRIZ in English was “Theory of Solving Problems Inventively). Dr. Li said “Innovation is to remove psychological barriers and inertia and to make systematic attempts to see a problem from a new prospective.”

The he mentioned five basic concept of TRIZ included “Function”, “Contradiction”, “Ideality”, “Resources” and “Technology Evolution”. The principles behind TRIZ were “Similar problems have similar attributes thus similar solutions and thus can be solved by similar procedures”. There were five levels of solution such as Routine solution (Level 1), Simple solution (Level 2), Multiple solution (Level 3), New solution (Level 4) and Extreme solution (Level 5). After that Dr. Li mentioned there were two types of innovation and they separated into Operation and Market. Samsung usually employed Operation Innovation.

Dr. Li then focused on information system and mentioned to optimize an information system at all levels, converting inputs into outputs in the most beneficial and least harmful way possible. He also said Improvement is equal to maximize existing resources to the FULLEST degree possible! He defined “Good System” should be converting inputs into outputs in the most beneficial and least harmful way possible, as well as, providing real value to people, organizations and society. For Information Technology (IT), it does not exist in isolation, does not function in isolation. So it is part of large systems involving many others things including people. It could be considered IT system to be based on system, time and space.

TRIZ is Burn people’s mind and Trigger people’s brain that it trains our brain connecting two previously unconnected thoughts (Left and Right Brain) to lead to a new insight. After mentioned 40 Inventive Principles, Dr. Li introduced a solution algorithm in four steps.
1. Define a problem
2. Ideal final result status
3. Determine contradiction
4. Resolution of contradiction