Problems Faced Before ERP Implementation

Problems Faced Before ERP Implementation Some data, coming from SAP R/3, goes directly into SAP NetWeaver BI data marts. But the rest, which comes from diverse systems that handle billing, customer relationship management (CRM), mediation, provisioning, and prepaid sales, goes first to a third-party extract/transform/load (ETL) system. The ETL system takes the data from every call that customers make every payment, every service call, and more and transforms it based on business rules before storing it in a third-party database About Reliance Infocomm Reliance Infocomm is the outcome of the late visionary Dhirubhai Ambanis (1932-2002) dream to herald a digital revolution in India by bringing affordable means of information and communication to the doorsteps of Indias vast population. Make the tools of Infocomm available to people at an affordable cost, they will overcome the handicaps of illiteracy and lack of mobility, Dhirubhai Ambani charted out the mission for Reliance Infocomm in late 1999. He saw in the potential of information and communication technology a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for India to leapfrog over its historical legacy of backwardness and underdevelopment. Working at breakneck speed, from late 1999 to 2002 Reliance Infocomm built the backbone for a digital India 60,000 kilometres of fibre optic backbone, crisscrossing the entire country. The Reliance Infocomm pan-India network was commissioned on December 28, 2002, the 70th birth anniversary of Dhirubhai. This day also marked his first birth anniversary after his demise July 6, 2002. Reliance Infocomm network is a pan India, high capacity, integrated (wireless and wireline) and convergent (voice, data and video) digital network, designed to offer services that span the entire Infocomm value chain infrastructure, services for enterprises and individuals, applications and consulting. The network is designed to deliver services that will foster a new way of life for India. Clarify clarify CRM is the product of clarify Inc. Customer Relationship Management is a comprehensive business strategy, focused on the process of acquiring, managing, retaining and partnering with selective customers to create superior long-term value for the company and the customers. In a nutshell, CRM strives to identify customers who provide the greatest return to the company, and to optimize relationships with those customers. CRM features Segmenting customers Responding uniquely to the best customers Having a 360 degree view, of a customer Measuring and driving down the cost of customer acquisition Attracting customers using the totality of the experience you provide Need for CRM Customers have the upper hand in most purchase transactions They are inherently less loyal They have rising expectations They no longer tolerate companies that dont get the basics right Advantages of CRM To gain a better understanding of customers wants and needs Allows companies to gather and access information about customers buying histories, preferences, complaints, and other data so they can better anticipate what customers will want. The goal is to instill greater customer loyalty. Used in association with data warehousing, data mining, call centers and other intelligence-based applications Faster response to customer inquiries Increased efficiency through automation Obtaining information sharable with business partners Deeper understanding of Customers Increased marketing and selling opportunities Identifying the most profitable customers Improved products and services through customer feedback Clarify Design Philosophy Flexible Wherever possible rules are held as data in the application Customizable Extremely easy to change look and functionality of screens Can add new fields, tables and relationships to the database Upgradeable We want you to be able to stay current easily Highly scaleable High volume with good response times Comprehensive and open data model More flexibility than most people need Can use any SQL-based tools for reporting, etc Internationalize Ability to deal with multi-currency, different languages, etc Workflow orientated Strong ownership paradigm so nothing falls through the cracks Use of standards The new applications include Clarify Customer Portal which stores customer information and lets customers communicate with a company via methods such as E-mail and online chat. Clarify eOrder lets customers shop online then takes orders and manages them through fulfillment; it works in conjunction with Clarify eConfigurator which determines customer needs and then helps configure complex products. Clarify eMerchandising lets businesses draw from customer analysis data and develop personalized marketing campaigns and product offerings Clarify Applications Call Center: ClearCallCenter Front end for Contact Center Agents Manages overall customer interaction Can be used as sales application or as a front-end to ClearSupport for hybrid sales/service. Operates in both relationship-based call centers and high-volume, one and done sales environments Sales Force Automation: ClearSales Handles prospects and leads Sales force automation Provides management of all aspects of the selling cycle, from lead through completed order. Provides an enterprise-wide view of sales and support activities in accounts for ongoing relationship management activities Customer Support: ClearSupport Is a trouble management system Single point of contact for service requests and problem reporting Comprehensive technical support management system, Handles calls that involve service requests, questions, etc. DSS is a data warehousing department that caters to the needs of the management by delivering vital information to business users to make timely and accurate decisions for business growth leading to effective and efficient operations to gain a competitive edge in the marketplace. DSS is a system that Collects data from multiple sources, Summarizes data as per business needs and creates reports at business operations DSS enables business users to centrally monitor and analyse information, monitor various events and enable them to react to those events by providing a single view of business information. DSS is a business-centric data warehousing department with an integrated workflow mechanism that supports streamlined business processes. It delivers high performance access to all information and applications on CRM, Billing, Product and Network domains. CRM applications delivered by a DSS enable business user to analyse number of customers, trends and usage patterns of individual customers, individual customer records, etc. It also holds information about customer service like Interaction and Cases handled by Call Center, Number of Interactions, Interaction Category, Number of Cases, Case Status, Case Category, etc. Product applications provide all pertinent information about the usage and performance of various products like SMS, R-Connect, R-World etc. Billing applications provide all pertinent information about the billing and outstanding of RIM customers. It holds in information of ADC Service Status, Billing Circle, CIOU Code, Channel Code, Channel Type, City, Customer Type, No.of Invoices, and No. of Payments, OG Barred Status, OTAF Month, Payment Option, Rate Plan, Service wise, Month wise, Zero Payment wise Billing Status. DSS offers three kinds of reports namely: OLAP Reports (http://dss.ril.com/) Business Intelligence Reports (http://dssbi.ril.com) Ad hoc Reports based on the data requested by the business user ETL The acronym ETL is used to describe the processes used by DSS to obtain data from external sources and make it usable to the DSS applications. ETL stands for Extract, Transform and Load. Extraction is the process of selecting and pulling data from the operational and external data sources, in order to prepare it for the warehouse. Also called Data Extraction. A good extraction is based on a Business Rule. Business rules are applied to data using constraints. There are two basic ways that the extract process is performed. Either the system providing information will give the DSS team a feeder file. This file will than be accepted by DSS and used to load tables. The other option is for the DSS team to write SQL code and actually perform in place extractions from source systems. In both of these cases, the timing, data volume estimates and source systems impacts need to be considered Transformation is the process of manipulating data. Any manipulation beyond copying is a transformation. Process includes cleansing, aggregating, and integrating data from multiple sources. Example: Address1, Address2, Address3 could be concatenated as one single field. Transformation is the biggest, most complicated, most resource intensive and most important of DSS process. The transformation takes raw, unclean, unformatted, unsynchronized, sparse, and often corrupt data sources and standardizes, cleans and matches it up enough to make it useful for further analysis. . BO Business Objects is a reporting tool for SQL compliant databases. It allows users to prepare custom reports from a number of databases simultaneously, which in turn facilitates advanced reporting and data analysis. Loading is the last step in the ETL process. Loading is nothing more than taking the outputs from the transformation process and putting it into an Oracle table. The process of moving extracted, transformed into the data warehouse. Generally the data is loaded to the Target table. Target table holds the intermediate or final results of any part of the ETL process. The target of the entire ETL process is the data warehouse. BW The SAP Business Information Warehouse allows you to analyze data from operative SAP applications as well as all other business applications and external data sources such as databases, online services and the Internet. The Administrator Workbench functions are designed for controlling, monitoring and maintaining all data retrieval processes. The SAP Business Information Warehouse enables Online Analytical Processing (OLAP), which processes information from large amounts of operative and historical data. OLAP technology enables multi-dimensional analyses from various business perspectives. The Business Information Warehouse Server for core areas and processes, pre-configured with Business Content, ensures you can look at information within the entire enterprise. In selected roles in a company, Business Content offers the information that employees need to carry out their tasks. As well as roles, Business Content contains other pre-configured objects such as InfoCubes, queries, key figures, characteristics that make BW implementation easier. With the Business Explorer, the SAP Business Information Warehouse provides flexible reporting and analysis tools for analyses and decision-making support in your enterprise. You analyze the dataset of the Business Information Warehouse by defining queries for Infocubes using the BEx Query Designer. By selecting and combining InfoObjects (characteristics and key figures) or reusable structures in a query, you determine the way in which you navigate through and evaluate the data in the selected InfoProvider. The layout of the report needs to be pre-defined before design. Reports are the final deliverable to the users. The process of report definition starts with requirement and ends with its development and testing by Business Analysts. During this process the Business Analysts interacts with report developer closely and fine tunes the outcomes in a back and forth form of process. The developer in turn technically chooses the InfoObjects (characteristics and key figures) already defined in the cube that needs to become part of the report. Benefits From the day we started operating our business, our managers had information about the traffic, how the products we launched into the market were performing, how our customers were using them, how we were acquiring new customers, and our customer interactions, Gupta explains. All these things helped us to provide services with lower costs, which is one of the reasons we were able to win the market. SAP NetWeavers ability to span corporate silos and offer a single view of corporate information lets the DSS team deliver solutions quickly and accurately. For instance, approximately 95 percent of the data is loaded from non-SAP systems, with 18 million records processed daily, and SAP NetWeaver is the key factor that made Reliance Infocomms success possible. An aggregate enhances performance by duplicating the data from an InfoCube and storing it in a summarized form so you can access it quickly for reporting. If you want great performance results with reports and you do use aggregates. Using SAP NetWeavers aggregate tool lets you increase flexibility while designing and can sometimes let you meet more than one business requirement with the same model. SAP Opportunities: 1. Integration Integration can be the highest benefit of them all. The only real project aim for implementing ERP is reducing data redundancy and redundant data entry. If this is set as a goal, to automate inventory posting to G/L, then it might be a successful project. Those companies where integration is not so important or even dangerous tend to have a hard time with ERP. ERP does not improve the individual efficiency of users, so if they expect it, it will be a big disappointment. ERP improves the cooperation of users. 2. Efficiency Generally, ERP software focuses on integration and tend to not care about the daily needs of people. I think individual efficiency can suffer by implementing ERP. the big question with ERP is whether the benefit of integration and cooperation can make up for the loss in personal efficiency or not. 3. Cost reduction It reduces cost only if the company took accounting and reporting seriously even before implementation and had put a lot of manual effort in it. If they didnt care about it, if they just did some simple accounting to fill mandatory statements and if internal reporting did not exists of has not been fincancially-oriented, then no cost is reduced. 4. Less personnel Same as above. Less reporting or accounting personnel, but more sales assistants etc. 5. Accuracy No. People are accurate, not software. What ERP does is makes the lives of inaccurate people or organization a complete hell and maybe forces them to be accurate (which means hiring more people or distributing work better), or it falls. Challenges Even though the company started its DSS before the sales side launched, it still had to deal with multiple data sources across heterogeneous platforms a common issue for most organizations working with business intelligence (BI), and a challenge perfect for SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (SAP NetWeaver BI). Data granularity More granular models require higher data loads and more maintenance. While designing a model, its critical to keep the principles of star schema in mind. Star schema is generally considered the simplest data warehouse schema, and its characterized by very large fact tables that contain the primary information in the data warehouse in conjunction with smaller dimension tables that contain information about particular attributes of the data in the larger fact table. With this in mind, your model should achieve data summarization by a factor of 1:3 so that youre not working with more than 33 percent of your source data. Dimensions Group your information objects into dimensions so that each dimension has a balanced number of records, and put frequently used characteristics into one dimension so you can cut down on the number of table JOINs needed for the OLAP processor to churn out the data. Data deletion If you want to scale, you need to have a data-deletion process in place that the application owners have clearly agreed to and understood, and you need to have the deletion process in place at the modeling stage. Navigational attributes By using navigational attributes in SAP NetWeaver, you can maintain data consistency when dimensions change slowly, and you can reduce data-storage requirements, but you have to analyze this during the modeling stage to get the benefits. Problems the company would have been forced to have multiple copies and different views of the same data. Implementation Timetable 1999 Forms and begins construction of fiber-optic networks Late 2002 Launches and creates first Bl application March 2003 Has commercial launch Mid 2003 DSS starts rolling out Bl application July 2003 Gains 1 million new subscribers Late 2003/ early 2004 Bl applications roll out to additional locations. Six Critical Recommendations Guptas initial decision-support team of three people augmented by BI consultants from around the world has now grown to 65 staff members and counting. Gupta and his DSS team offer some critically important recommendations to those planning an SAP NetWeaver BI implementation. 1] Plan to scale. One way or another, all BI systems get bigger. Some get bigger because businesses keep generating data they dont really need, but most often products, pricing, and markets become increasingly complex, which is true for Reliance Infocomm. In order to compete, the company must span diverse geographies and offer a variety of products and services as business analysts identify shifting customer needs. In addition, the sheer growth in the number of customers presents the most obvious scalability issue. We are expecting the business to grow from 14 million customers to 20 million customers by the end of 2006, Gupta says. Those are the kinds of estimates we have to work with. 2] Involve the business. Simple at first glance, this fundamental rule is often overlooked but is critical to a DSS. At Reliance Infocomm, each analytic application has a business sponsor who owns the application, in addition to business analysts who help to translate the business requirements into IT implementation terms. This all affects how the DSS team sets up InfoCubes for the business units. How you model your business requirement with SAP NetWeaver is the most important thing, Gupta notes. If your model is bad, its not going to work and the information is never going to come out. So, mapping all your business objects into a multidimensional cube is the most important step and SAP NetWeavers features are excellent for modeling. When its time to build analytic applications, the DSS team builds only solutions that have clear business owners attached. This is critical for two reasons: First, business owners come to the DSS team only with business-driven needs (as opposed to IT offering what it thinks the business might need). Second, the DSS team knows it will get launch support to correct unforeseen problems quickly, as well as see that the users start putting the applications to use. How many awesome applications are built each year that fail for lack of use or business alignment? For this DSS team, that just doesnt happen. 3] Ensure data trust. Another problem with many BI installations is a lack of user trust of the systems, and it can happen at any level numbers dont match in front of a line-of-business manager or customers on the other end of the phone dispute the information available to your call-center employees. Business analysts, Gupta says, can be invaluable in resolving problems as the DSS team consolidates data from disparate systems into layers for the InfoCubes. Sometimes there can be a problem with the interpretation of the data, adds Arun Dhall, lead architect for Reliance Infocomms DSS team. For example, when you look at the number of customers acquired yesterday, people who just filled out the application form could be new customers, but as weve defined it, when a person actually registers with the network, thats when they become a customer. Its these common definitions used across the business especially when the numbers are both essentially accurate that build ongoing positive momentum for DSS applications. 4] Delete! Delete! Delete! At 3.5 terabytes (TB) in SAP NetWeaver and 30TB altogether, Reliance Infocomms DSS system is one of the largest in the world, but that doesnt mean it has to grow astronomically. To combat data bloat, We have very clear data-retention policies in place that decide how long the data is stored, Gupta says. We have 400 million records coming over per day, so if we were going to store all this information, it would be multi-hundred TB by now. This again, Gupta says, comes back to the business owners who understand that theres a cost to keeping information and who must decide how long they really need it. From an IT perspective, this policy not only keeps your data growth under control, it helps force the business managers to focus on what they really need from the DSS to achieve the desired results. 5] Dont skimp on look and feel. Many in-house applications are functional, but they look terrible and are hard to understand, which can adversely affect the success of the application more than IT bugs. You should be able to make a report that is not complicated and is easy to understand, Gupta says. If you give users a complex report, they will never use it. At every level, Reliance Infocomm employees are using DSS. Part of every application rollout is end-user education, and the company is now at the point where product managers want their own data marts so they can analyze the information themselves. Also, Gupta says, the information should come out fast. The largest Reliance InfoCube has close to 1 billion rows, and yet it generates consistent response times that let employees act in less than a minute. 6] Always chase and never give up. Guptas DSS team lives by this motto, which basically means that IT is empowered to push hard to find or chase down answers to any technical question or goal. The DSS team is very persistent, Gupta says, and it comes down to a culture of believing that anything is possible. If we can think it, we can do it, says Pramod Kejriwal, development lead for the DSS team. Our philosophy is we dont believe in giving anything up very easily. The philosophy has infected the business owners, too. Anything they think they need to help do their business in a better way, they ask; they should be thinking about business, not [whether something] is technically possible. Into the Future For now, the numbers clearly speak to Reliance Infocomms DSS success: More than 1,500 active users across India, 250 concurrently, more than 150 applications, more than 300 online analytical processing (OLAP) reports, more than 300 SAP NetWeaver BI reports, more than 200 monthly ad hoc reports all working with more than 24TB of data which make Reliance Infocomms DSS, an in-house implementation, one of the largest data warehouses in the world. More fundamentally important, though, is the fact that business users have adopted the DSS implementation as the single and most authentic source of corporate information, Gupta notes, which speaks to the companys ability to scale into the future. On the drawing board, Gupta looks forward to information broadcasting and implementing creative collaboration rooms using a revamped SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer (in SAP NetWeaver 2004s), management cockpit, planning and simulation model, data mining (APD), and actively working on even higher-performance analytics by using SAP Business Intelligence Accelerator (SAP BI Accelerator; also part of SAP NetWeaver 2004s) as an appliance tool with separate hardware that can index an InfoCube, which you can then use to run very fast queries. Whatever comes next, Reliance Infocomm has used SAP NetWeaver BI to create a DSS capable of handling one of the worlds largest BI workloads both now and in the future. Challenges with SAP: 1. Expensive This entails software, hardware, implementation, consultants, training, etc. Or you can hire a programmer or two as an employee and only buy business consulting from an outside source, do all customization and end-user training inside. That can be cost-effective. 2. Not very flexible It depends. SAP can be configured to almost anything. In Navision one can develop almost anything in days. Other software may not be flexible.

Elizabethan Playhouses and Performance Conventions

When Elizabeth became Queen of England in 1558, there were no specially designed theatre buildings. Companies of actors (usually small, made of 5 to 8 members) toured the country and performed in a wide variety of temporary acting spaces, mainly in inn yards, but also in churches, Town Halls, Town Squares, great halls of Royal Palaces or other great houses, or anywhere else that a large crowd could be gathered to view a performance. It is true that they continued to tour throughout Elizabeth’s reign (especially during the Plague in London, when theatres were closed or earned but little money). Nevertheless, given the laws passed by the Queen to control wandering beggars and vagrants – which implicitly affected the acting companies as well – many actors were encouraged to settle down with permanent bases in London. The first permanent theatres in England were old inns which had been used as temporary acting areas when the companies had been touring. E. g. The Cross Keys, The Bull, The Bel Savage, The Bell – all originally built as inns. Some of the inns that became theatres had substantial alterations made to their structure to allow them to be used as playhouses. The first purpose built theatre building in England was simply called The Theatre, eventually giving its name to all such building erected in the outskirts of London and functioning until the closing of the theatres in 1642 during the Civil War. The Theatre was built in 1576, at Shoreditch in the northern outskirts of London, by the Earl of Leicester’s Men who were led by James Burbage, a carpenter turned actor. It seems that the design of The Theatre was based on that of bull-baiting and bear-baiting yards (as a matter of fact, bull baiting, bear baiting and fencing shows were very popular by that time, and they were often organized before the plays started. ). The Theatre was followed the next year (1577) by The Curtain, in 1587 by The Rose and in 1595 by The Swan (to mention but the most famous theatres). In 1599, a dispute over the land on which The Theatre stood determined Burbage’s sons to secretly tear down the building and carry away the timber to build a new playhouse on the Bankside which they names The Globe. By this time, the Burbages had become members of Lord Chamberlain’s Company, along with William Shakespeare, and The Globe is famously remembered as the theatre in which many of Shakespeare’s plays were first performed. (The Globe was destroyed in 1613 in a fire caused by the sparks of a cannon fired during the performance of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. Rebuilt, it was closed and demolished in 1644 during the Civil War. The modern reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London was completed in 1997. ) Before going into more details regarding the structure of the Elizabethan theatre, distinction should be made, however, between two categories of playhouses: the public (outdoor) theatres and the private (indoor) theatres. The former were amphitheatre buildings open to the air and therefore cheaper – The Globe, for instance, charged two pence for a seat in the galleries or a single penny to stand in the yard. The latter (e. g. Blackfriars; The Cockpit) were built to a hall design in enclosed and usually rectangular buildings more like the theatres we know today. They had amore exclusive audience since they charged considerably more – the cheapest seat in a private theatre cost sixpence. The adult companies did not start to use the private hall theatres until after Elizabeth’s death, but they were used by the boy companies (made up entirely of child and teenage actors) in Elizabeth’s reign and were used by Shakespeare’s Company – by this time the King’s Men – and other adult companies in the Jacobean period. Structure and Design of Public/ Outdoor Theatres Public theatres were polygonal – hexagonal outside and round inside (â€Å"a wooden O† as Shakespeare puts it in Henry V). An open-air arena – called â€Å"pit† or â€Å"yard† – had, at one end, a wooden stage supported by large pillars, with trap doors for special effects (to allow ghosts, devils and similar characters to be raised up) and was surrounded by three tiers of roofed galleries (thatched, later on tiled roofs) with balconies, overlooking the back of the stage. The rear stage was covered by a roof – which they called â€Å"Heavens† through which, by means of ropes, they ould lower down the actors playing the gods/ angels, etc. , for flying or dramatic entrances – held up by massive pillars and obstructing the view of audience members from various angles. The stage wall behind these pillars was called â€Å"Frons Scenae† (taken from the name given by Imperial Rome to the stage walls of their amphitheatres ) provided with doors to the left and to the right and a curtained central doorway – referred to as the â€Å"discovery space† – which allowed characters to be suddenly revealed or a play within a play to be acted. The rear wall of this inner stage was covered by tapestry, the only usual â€Å"scenery† used on the stage. Immediately above the inner stage, there was the stage gallery which could be used for multiple purposes: – as an acting space: on either sides, there were bow-windows used for the frequent window/ balcony scenes (e. g. Romeo and Juliet). Thus the arrangement of a front stage and two-storeyed back stage permitted three actions to go on simultaneously and a life-like parallelism of events. – another part of the gallery could be used as a music-room. Music was an extra effect added in the 1600’s. The musicians started playing an hour before the beginning of the play and also played at appropriate moments throughout the performance. – when necessary, some of the boxes of the stage gallery were used for audience seating. They were referred to as the â€Å"Lord’s rooms† and considered the best (and hence the most expensive) seats in the ‘house’ despite the poor view of the back of the actors. (Nevertheless, the audience at large would have a good view of the Lords and the Lords were able to hear the actors clearly. There were also additional balconies on the left and right of the â€Å"Lord’s rooms† called the â€Å"Gentlemen’s rooms†, also meant for the rich patrons of the theatres. As previously mentioned, the stage wall structure contained two doors (at least) leading to a small structure, back stage, called the â€Å"Tiring House† used by actors to dress, prepare and wait offstage. Above the stage gallery, there is a third storey connected with the â€Å"Heavens† extending forward from the tiring-house over the rear part of the stage, which was often used to represent the walls of a castle or a city. Last but not least, on top of this structure, there was also what might be called a fourth storey of the tiring-house, referred to as the â€Å"Hut† presumably used as a storage space and housing suspension gear for flying effects, while the third storey stage cover served as a loading room for players preparing to ‘fly’ down to the stage. On top of the â€Å"hut†, a flag (a black one, if it was a tragedy, a white one, if it was a comedy, or a red one, if it was a history) was erected to let the world know a play was to be performed that day. The access to the playhouse was ensured by one main entrance, where playgoers had to put the admission fee – i. e. 1 penny, for those who watched the play from the yard, standing, called the â€Å"Groundlings† (shopkeepers, craftsmen, apprentices), or more, up to 4-5 pence for the gentry and the great lords sitting in the galleries. The galleries could be reached by the two sets of stairs in the structure, on either side of the theatre. The first gallery would cost another penny in the box which was held by a collector (â€Å"gatherer†) at the front of the stairs. The second gallery would cost another penny. At the start of the play, after collecting money from the audience, the admission collectors put the boxes in a room backstage, called the â€Å"box office. † The Players There were invariably many more parts than actors. Elizabethan Theatre, therefore, demanded that an actor be able to play numerous roles and make it obvious to the audience by changes in his acting style and costume that he was a new person each time. When the same character came on disguised (as, for example, many of Shakespeare’s female characters disguise themselves as boys – e. . The Merchant of Venice or Twelfth Night) speeches had to be included making it very clear that this was the same character in a new costume, and not a completely new character. All of the actors in an Elizabethan Theatre company were male (which might explain the scarcity of female roles in Elizabethan drama). There were laws in England against women acting onstage and English travellers abroad were amused and amazed by the strange customs of Continental European countries that allowed women to play female roles. Exceptions : One woman – Mary Frith, better known as Moll Cutpurse – was arrested in the Jacobean period for singing and playing instruments onstage during a performance of a play about her life (Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl) and some suggest that she may actually have been illegally playing herself in the performance, and women sometimes took part in Court Masques (a very stylised and spectacular sort of performance for the Court, usually dominated by singing and dancing), but otherwise English women had no part in the performance of Elizabethan plays. The male actors who played female parts have traditionally been described as â€Å"Boy Actors† – they were actually boys whose voices had not changed. The rehearsal and performance schedule that Elizabethan Players followed was intense and demanding. Unlike modern theatres, where a successful play can run for years at a time, Elizabethan theatres normally performed six different plays in their six day week, and a particularly successful play might only be repeated once a month or so. For example, in a typical season, a theatrical company could perform thirty-eight different plays. The Elizabethan actor did not have much time, therefore, to prepare for each new play, and must have had to learn lines and prepare his blocking largely on his own and in his spare time – probably helped by the tendency of writers to have particular actors in mind for each part, and to write roles which were suited to the particular strengths and habits of individual actors. There were few formal rehearsals for each play and no equivalent of the modern Director (although presumably the writer, theatre managers, and the most important actors – who owned shares in the theatre company – would have given some direction to other actors). Instead of being given full scripts, each actor had a written â€Å"part†, a long scroll with nothing more than his own lines and minimal cue lines (the lines spoken by another actor just before his own) to tell him when to speak – this saved on the laborious task of copying out the full play repeatedly by hand. There was a bookholder or prompter who held a complete script and who helped actors who had forgotten their lines. Costumes, Scenery and Effects Elizabethan costuming seems to have been a strange combination of what was (for the Elizabethans) modern dress, and costumes which – while not being genuinely historically or culturally accurate – had a historical or foreign flavour. Strict laws were in force about what materials and types of clothes could be worn by members of each social class – laws which the actors were allowed to break onstage – so it would be immediately obvious to the Elizabethan audience that actors wearing particular types of clothes were laying people of particular backgrounds and types. The colours were also carefully chosen so as to suggest: red – blood; black – gloom, evil; yellow – sun; white – purity; scarlet – doctor; gray – friar; blue – serving men. Extensive make-up was almost certainly used, particularly for the boys playing female parts and with dark make-up on the face and hands for actors playing â€Å"blackamoors† or â€Å"Turks†. There were also conventions for playing a number of roles – some of which we know from printed play scripts. Mad women, like Ophelia, wore their hair loose and mad people of both sexes had disordered clothing. Night scenes were often signalled by characters wearing nightdresses (even the Ghost of Hamlet’s father appears in his nightgown, when Hamlet is talking with his Mother in her chamber). The Elizabethans did not use fixed scenery or painted backdrops of the sort that became popular in the Victorian period – hence the playwrights had to provide the actors with spoken descriptions of landscape which with Shakespeare represent memorable poetry. That does not mean, however, that the Elizabethans performed on a completely bare stage. A wide variety of furniture and props were brought onstage to set the scene as necessary – ranging from simple beds, tables, chairs and thrones to whole trees, grassy banks, prop dragons, an unpleasant looking cave to represent the mouth of hell, and so forth. Death brought out a particular ingenuity in Elizabethan actors and they apparently used copious quantities of animal blood, fake heads and tables with holes in to stage decapitations. Heads, hands, eyes, tongues and limbs were dramatically cut off onstage, and probably involved some sort of blood-drenched stage trick. A number of other simple special effects were used. Real cannons and pistols (loaded with powder but no bullet) were fired off when ceremonial salutes or battles were required. Thunder was imitated by rolling large metal cannon balls backstage or by drumming, while lightning was imitated by fireworks set off in the â€Å"heavens† above the stage. One thing that Elizabethan theatres almost completely lacked was lighting effects. In the outdoor theatres, like the Globe, plays were performed from two o’clock until about four or four thirty in the afternoon (these were the times fixed by law, but plays may sometimes have run for longer) in order to take advantage of the best daylight (earlier or later performances would have cast distracting shadows onto the stage). Evening performances, without daylight, were impossible. In the hall theatres, on the other hand, the stages were lit by candlelight – which forced them to hold occasional, probably musical, breaks while the candles were trimmed and tended or replaced as they burned down. Elizabethan actors carried flaming torches to indicate that a scene was taking place at night, but this would have made little difference to the actual lighting of the stage, and spectators simply had to use their imagination. The nearest that the Elizabethans came to lighting effects were fireworks, used to imitate lightening or magical effects. Performance Techniques We know very little, unfortunately, about how Elizabethan actors actually played their roles. Performances probably ran continuously without any sort of interval or Act Breaks. Occasionally music may have been played between Acts or certain scenes, but scholars think this was quite unusual except in the hall playhouses, where candles had to be trimmed and replaced between Acts. We do not even know how long Elizabethan plays usually ran. The law (mentioned above) expected plays to last between two and two and a half hours, but some plays – such as Hamlet, which in modern times runs for more than four hours – seem much too long to have been performed in such a short time. What props and scenery there were in the Elizabethan Theatre were probably carried on and off while the scenes continued, while actors were continually moving forward and backward into the midst of the surrounding audience. All entrances and exits were through the doors at the rear of the stage proper: one actor left through one door while a second actor would appear through the second door to swing into the next scene. That means that there would have been no need to wait for scene changes. The actors were kept in constant motion and, given the design of the stage, they had to face in as many different directions as possible during a scene. Another aspect of Elizabethan performance that we know a little about was the use of clowns or fools. Shakespeare complains in Hamlet about the fact that the fool often spoke a great deal that was not included in his script, and in the early Elizabethan period especially it seems to have been normal for the fool to include a great deal of improvised repartee and jokes in his performance, especially responding to hecklers in the audience. At the end of the play the Elizabethan actors often danced, and sometimes the fool and other comic actors would perform a jig – which could be anything from a simple ballad to a quite complicated musical play, normally a farce involving adultery and other bawdy topics. Some time was apparently put aside for the fool to respond to challenges from the audience – with spectators inventing rhymes and challenging the fool to complete them, asking riddles and questions and demanding witty answers, or simply arguing and criticising the fool so that he could respond. With no modern stage lighting to enhance the actors and put the audience into darkness, Globe audience members could see each other exactly as well as they could see the performers and the Groundlings in particular were near enough to the stage to be able to touch the actors if they wanted to and the front row of the Groundlings routinely leaned their arms and heads onto the front of the stage itself. The Groundlings were also forced to stand for two or three hours without much movement, which encouraged short attention spans and a desire to take action rather than remain completely immobile. This means that the Groundlings frequently shouted up at the actors or hissed the villains and cheered the goodies. Elizabethan audiences seem to have been very responsive in this way – as their interactions with the Fool suggests – and were particularly well known for hurling nut shells and fruit when they disliked an actor or a performance. The Elizabethan audience was still more distracted, however, since beer and food were being sold and consumed throughout the performance, prostitutes were actively soliciting for trade, and pickpockets were busy stealing goods as the play progressed. Elizabethan audiences may have â€Å"viewed† plays very differently, hence the origin of the word â€Å"audience† itself. The Elizabethans did not speak of going to see a play, they went to hear one – and it is possible that in the densely crowded theatre – obstructed by the pillars and the extravagant headgear that richer members of the audience were wearing – the Elizabethan audience was more concerned to hear the words spoken than to be able to see the action. This idea is given extra weight by the fact that in the public outdoor theatres, like the Globe, the most expensive seats were not the ones with the best views (in fact the best view is to be had by the Groundlings, standing directly in front of the stage), but those which were most easily seen by other audience members. The most expensive seating was in the Lord’s box or balcony behind the stage – looking at the action from behind – and therwise the higher the seats the more an audience member had to pay. (Some Elizabethan documents suggest that the reason for this range of prices was the richer patron’s desire to be as far from the stink of the Groundlings as possible. ) Specific aspects of Elizabethan performances: bear-baiting: three bears in ascending size are set upon by an English hound in a fight to the death! fencing: less gruesome, this civilized sport also took place before plays. umb-shows/processions: parades or spectacles, these formal groups used all the most ornate costumes they owned, including crowns and sceptres, torches and swords. Dumbshows appeared at the end of each act to summarize the events of the following act. By the turn of the century, dumb-shows were considered old-fahsioned and corny. Processions were more solemn as actors moved mannequin-like across the stage. jigs: at the conclusion of a play, the actors would dance around the stage. Separate from the plays, these were bawdy, knockabout song-and-dance farces. Frequently resembling popular ballads, jigs were often commentaries on politics or religion. masques: masques were plays put on strictly by the royals. These were celebrations, i. e. royal weddings or winning a battle. Designed as banquets of the senses, these celebrations spanned several days during which each member of the party played a part in the allegorical theme of the banquet. Masques were always held in private playhouses.

Special Economic Zone in Tamilnadu

Special Economic Zone in Tamilnadu, India By Dr. Srinivasan and Mr. Alagarswami â€Å"The protests against land grab for SEZ's have spread like wildlife. † Vandana Shiva ( 2007). The overarching problem this study tries to address is the question why the wild-fire of protest spreads in some regions, while in others it is either doused living behind a dying ember or perceived not as a fire but as a well spring of hope. What can explain the regional differences in public responses to SEZ?The state of Tamil Nadu has been proactive in implementing SEZ policy both at the regional level as well as at the central policy levels. Mukherji and Shivpuri Singh argue that â€Å"the Act has made partial progress towards evolving a procedure for single window clearance of SEZ projects. Issues such as labour regulations; skill shortages; land acquisition; environmental clearance; power availability; a developer’s powers with respect to town planning; transport linkages; access to fina nce; corruption; and the overall propensity to approve foreign direct investments will have a state-level component.In most of these cases, state-level SEZ Acts will determine the extent to which state-level policies are synergised with central policies†(Mukherji and Shivpuri Singh, 2006). Even before the central SEZ Act was passed in 2005, Tamil Nadu had formulated its policy on SEZs in 2003 and passed the Tamil Nadu SEZ Act in 2005. Since 2005, a series of public hearings were organized by various civil society groups, political parties and government agencies. Civil society groups have argued that the bulk of the land being acquired for SEZs is fertile agricultural land, especially in case of the multi-product zones.The state of Tamil Nadu(TN) one of the four southern states of Indian sub-continent is considered â€Å"a pioneer in implementing many developmental programs such as nutrition noon-meal scheme for school children, integrated rural development program, adult-lit eracy programs, Rs. 1 (4. 7 cent) per kilogram of rice for poor, and more recently self-help group based micro-finance initiatives. It has also been a forerunner in implementing industrial policy focused on small scale industries and marginally successful land reform that sought to distribute land to landless farmers.Tamil Nadu has followed a unique trajectory that blended industrial policy and developmental initiatives, which have withstood the vagaries of local politics, corruption and other malaises that have been traditionally associated with governance in India. † (Ref)Tamil Nadu, being among one of India’s most industrialised states, shows certain unique patterns emerging in the establishment of SEZs. The Indian SEZ model was most widely adopted in the state with both negative and positive fallouts.Even before the central SEZ Act was passed in 2005, Tamil Nadu had formulated its policy on SEZs in 2003 and passed the Tamil Nadu SEZ Act in 2005 (Dhurjati Mukherjee, 2007). With 122 notified and proposed Special Economic Zones (SEZs), Tamil Nadu boasts of maximum number of SEZs in the country after Andhra Pradesh and Maharastra. Two large and powerful state agencies State Industrial Promotion Corporation of Tamil Nadu Ltd (SIPCOT) and Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation Ltd-(TIDCO) exercise considerable influence and authority in the acquisition of land.The government is intent on pursuing a policy of aggressive industrialisation, especially of a capital-intensive nature and has proposed to create 10,000 acres land bank in the state as per the 2007 Industrial Policy (TN Industrial Policy Note, 2007). Till date the state has 44 notified, 66 ‘formally approved’ and 19 ‘in-principally’ approved SEZs. Proposals are pending for another 13 SEZs. With over SEZ 54 approvals, State of Tamil Nadu (TN) has one of the highest numbers of SEZs in the country.In Tamil Nadu, 55 SEZs have been approved with 13045 hectares (32, 235 acres) of land as of 2012. In response to the opposition to SEZ in some localities (see chapter on Discourse Analysis for details) as well as in response to national developments in places like Nandigram, where the opposition to SEZ had turned violent, in 2007 , Tamil Nadu released the new industrial policy and announced several measures aimed at mid-course corrections as well as aggressive promotion of SEZ. For example the policy supported the evelopment a land bank of 4,000 hectares to promote industrial development in the state. The new industrial policy announced plans to build a land bank of 10,000 acres eventually to meet the growing demands for SEZ or industrial parks. The state has explicit policy of not acquiring cultivable land. The land for private parks / SEZs should, as far as possible, be barren, non-irrigated and dry land and the government will not allow proposals for industrial park involving more than 10 per cent cultivable land.Tamil Nadu was also the first st ate to make it a policy to support voluntary acquisition of land, rather than forcible acquisition. The policy also stipulates that promoters of private industrial parks would be required to purchase land directly. In its 2007 policy, the state government said that 10 per cent of the area in new industrial parks promoted by the State Industries Promotion Corporation of Tamil Nadu (SIPCOT) and the Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corp (TIDCO) would be set apart for social infrastructure.According to the new policy, in order to have equitable regional development, proposals for special economic zones (SEZ) in industrially backward areas will be given priority. 20 per cent of the allot-able area in new industrial parks / special economic zones (SEZ) or expansion of existing ones promoted by the Sipcot / Tidco would be reserved for small and medium enterprises (SME) including SME vendors to major industries in the same park.The consequences of 2007 industrial policy were that there was a tremendous increase in applications for SEZs. The speed at which the state government has been sanctioning the projects has raised several questions. There were apprehensions and widespread resistance from the farmers, politicians and academicians towards the implementation of the policy in Tamil Nadu. Opposition to SEZ in TN There are growing concerns over the impact of SEZ on local communities such as loss of agricultural land, unfair land transactions, undermining of uthority of local government, environmental degradation and fears of emergent gated communities. The feasibility and profitability of SEZ are also being re-evaluated in the light of growing opposition to SEZ and volatile markets. There have been several cases of reported opposition to SEZ, but many of these issues were eventually settled. Highlighting numerous instances of speculative land-bank acquisitions, the protestors condemned the Government for targeting the most vulnerable sections with eviction.Acquisitio n of bhoodan land Oragadam (Sriperumbadur), panchami land in Cheyyar (Thiruvanamallai), saltpan land in Ennore (Thiruvallur), grazing land in Thervoy (Thiruvallur), tenancy land in Nanguneri (Tirunalvelli), multi-cropping agriculture in Hosur (Krishnagiri), Sivarakottai, Puliampatti, Swamimallmpatty (Thirumangalam), Ranipet and Panapakkam (Vellore), agriculture land and homesteads in Mangal (Thiruvanamallai) are some examples of controversy over land acquisition in Tamil Nadu.Even though local people participated in protest against land acquisition, these protest did not materialise into any concrete action as it had happened in other states. The government of Tamil Nadu commissioned a report to examine the claims of those opposing the SEZ. Civil society organisations held several public hearing on the impact of SEZ in Tamil Nadu. In the public hearings, several critical questions were raised: Are people willingly giving away their land? What is the process of land acquisition in th e state?What role does the government agencies like Industrial Promotion Corporation of Tamil Nadu Ltd (SIPCOT) and Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation Ltd. (TIDCO) play in acquiring land for private companies? The loss of agriculture land, accompanied by livelihood insecurity has been on the raise for over a decade in TN. As per official figures, Tamil Nadu has lost more than one million hectares of cultivable land between 1991 and 2003 (Government of India, 2007 Agriculture Statistics at a Glance 2006-2007. Ministry of Agriculture).The government itself does not know how much agriculture land has been diverted till date as has been made clear by the Planning Commission’s July 2006 report of the Working Group on Land Relations for the11th Five Year Plan. The Ministry of Commerce, government of India does not provide any information on the livelihoods lost as a result of creation of SEZs. At the public hearings the verdict was that the bulk of the land acquired for SEZs is fertile, agricultural land, especially in case of the multi-product zones. A special report on SEZ in Tamil Nadu prepared by Dr.Palanithurai(Palanithurai,2009) makes an attempt to document issues related to land acquisition and peoples opposition to SEZ. The report is extensively based on case studies and interview based evidences to make an argument against SEZ. Especially the report focused on the issue of acquiring cultivable land for SEZ, against the government’s own commitment not to acquire fertile lands. The report refers to authoritarian strategies adopted by the government to force local Panchayats to pass resolutions in favour of SEZ.The report cites the example of SEZ at Cheyyar in Thiruvannamalai wherein the Mathur Panchayat passed a resolution objecting to land acquisition, expressing unwillingness to part with common lands. Similar resolutions were passed in Gram Sabha against land acquisition in eight Village Panchayats. The question that is asked was: â€Å"Will Cheyyar be Tamil Nadu’s Nandigram? † (Palanithurai, 2009). But the issue in Cheyyar took a different turn with many local people settling for a land sale and Panchayats now co-operating with the government and the promoters. Is this a case of coercion or voluntary agreement?The report presents the case of Irunkattukottai near Sriperumbudur and Hundai car manufacturing plant in Kancheepuram district, Valasamudram,in Tuticorin District as examples of opposition to SEZ. In the case of Bairamangalam near Hosur in Krishnagiri district local opposition to acquire cultivable land lead the government and private promoters to withdraw the project (Palanithurai,2009). Perhaps the case that drew much media attention was Oragadam village near Chennai, where the claim was that out of the 950 acres nearly 300 acres were cultivable land (Palanithurai, 2009). However as the development of SEZ ontinued, the opposition soon melted. One reason was that the agricultural land ha s been in the process of being re-developed as real estate since early 1990s and thus many of the land claimed to be cultivable were already being reclassified as housing development property—a move encouraged by the government to meet the growing demands for properties in close to Chennai. Villages in another districts lose to Chennai, Chengulpet was already a highly valued real estate’s with many educational, religious organisations already in position of large tracks of fertile land ready to be reused for non-agricultural development.The report also sites examples of SEZ that had little or no oppositions. â€Å"Perambalur District Perambalur is one of the districts in Tamil Nadu . â€Å"Contrary to the stories of land grabbing and bureaucratic compulsion that reeled off about land acquisition in many other districts of Tamil Nadu, people in Perambalur had altogether a different story to narrate†¦ The entire process of land acquisition was smooth, and the loca l community had no discontentment – not even a speck of disapproval, about having lost the land (Palanithurai, 2009). Despite such variable and mixed responses the report concludes by stating that â€Å"If at all, SEZ should do some good to the local development: (i) let it get established in real barren lands based on actual surveys carried out in identified regions, and not as per the British period records in possession of the government; and (ii) the community unrest in SEZ can be avoided, if the National Policy on Rehabilitation and Resettlement 2007 was taken as guidelines for resettlement and rehabilitation of people affected† (Palanithurai, 2009).But more tellingly the report presents rather dramatic description of â€Å"eviction of people, leveling of houses, handling over the land to the SEZ developers. and paying cash compensation to those who part with lands† and concludes that â€Å"The current tendency of making steadfast move towards eviction of people†¦ would only cause damage to agriculture, mock grassroots level democracy, and aggravate poverty†.These observations in the report have exclusively relied on the people who have lost their land and have grievances against the compensation packages. The report draws its conclusions based on selected individual case studies and incidents of few clear opposition to SEZs/ But what about the other stakeholders. Does SEZ have an impact only on those who lose their land?

The Security Of The Homeland Security Enterprise Essay

The homeland security enterprise has progressed much in the past few decades, especially after the attack on September 11th. It has been necessary for the DHS to grow and adapt as new and more dangerous threats became known. However, as more threats are prevented successfully, newer and sometimes tougher challenges for the DHS arise. In an effort to pinpoint the most important things affecting the nation, strategic plans are used, sometimes in the form of multi-missions plans, in order to separate different jobs to focus on. Since it is the duty of homeland security to keep the American people safe, but also feel safe, it is important that the public remains confident in the DHS. It may be questioned, but the DHS has the capability to identify and handle future challenges that may arise. But, it cannot be at the expense of the American public’s civil liberties. It may be difficult to walk that fine line, but it is imperative that the DHS does in order to keep the country safe. The ability to identify future challenges is paramount for the DHS. In order to do this, adequate collection and analysis of intelligence, both foreign and domestic, is necessary. Once this intelligence is gathered, a strategic plan can begin to be developed in order to address new challenges and threats facing the country. The fact that the country, and world, is constantly in flux introduces the need for the plan to be variable. Homeland security has a strategic plan for the fiscal years 2014 –Show MoreRelatedRisk Management Within The Homeland Security Enterprise1245 Words   |  5 PagesRisk Management within the Homeland Security Enterprise Risk has been defined as the likelihood of a specific outcome and the results or consequences of that specific outcome (Masse, O’Neil, Rollins, 2007). Risk is inherent to every facet of life. There are risks involved in the mundane of driving down the road or walking on a sidewalk. 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