| The World Wide Web ("WWW" or simply the "Web") is a global information space which people can read and write via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet itself, but the Web is actually a service that operates over the Internet, just like e-mail. The History of the Internet dates back much earlier. The origins of the World Wide Web can be traced back to 1980. Since then it has evolved beyond what its creators imagined would be a file-sharing tool for academic and U.S. government contract researchers. 1980-91: Development of the WWWIn 1980, Tim Berners-Lee, an independent contractor at CERN, built ENQUIRE, as a personal database of people and software models, but also as a way to play with hypertext; each new page of information in ENQUIRE had to be linked to an existing page.Another major development occurred when Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf introduced Transfer Control Protocol (TCP) in 1977 for cross-network connections. Although it had used the older Network Control Protocol (NCP) since its establishment in 1969, ARPANET and its associated networks slowly began a transition to the new protocol during the 1970s. In 1978, Internet Protocol was added to TCP, responsible for the routing of messages. The TCP/IP combination was officially adopted by ARPANET and its partners in 1983, redefining the Internet as networks using the TCP/IP network. The standardisation of network protocols helped lay the foundations for the later growth of the World Wide Web. In 1984 Berners-Lee returned to CERN, and considered its problems of information presentation: physicists from around the world needed to share data, with no common machines and no common presentation software. He wrote a proposal in March 1989 for "a large hypertext database with typed links", but it generated little interest. His boss, Mike Sendall, encouraged Berners-Lee to begin implementing his system on a newly acquired NeXT workstation. He considered several names, including Information Mesh or Mine of Information, but settled on World Wide Web. This NeXTcube used by Berners-Lee at CERN became the first Web server.He found an enthusiastic collaborator in Robert Cailliau, who rewrote the proposal (published on November 12, 1990) and sought resources within CERN. Berners-Lee and Cailliau pitched their ideas to the European Conference on Hypertext Technology in September 1990, but found no vendors who could appreciate their vision of marrying hypertext with the Internet. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web: the first Web browser (which was a Web editor as well), the first Web server (info.cern.ch), and the first Web pages that described the project itself. The browser could access Usenet newsgroups and FTP files as well. However, it could run only on the NeXT; Nicola Pellow therefore created a simple text browser that could run on almost any computer. To encourage use within CERN, they put the CERN telephone directory on the web— previously users had had to log onto the mainframe in order to look up phone numbers. Paul Kunz from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center visited CERN in May 1991, and was captivated by the Web. He brought the NeXT software back to SLAC, where librarian Louise Addis adapted it as a way to display SLAC’s catalog of online documents; this was the first web server outside CERN and the first in North America. On August 6, 1991, Berners-Lee posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet. by:HinduWebsite http://www.hinduwebsite.com/webresources/articles/historyofwww.asp |
Integrating Plans with Actuals
Projects are executed in order to bring in a positive return on investment (ROI). The ROI might be lowering risk, enhancing the organization's strategy, streamlining processes, complying with regulations, or otherwise improving the state of the organization in some way. This potential return must be quantified in financial terms, even if it is only a very rough estimate of the benefit provided. It motivates people to understand why they are working so hard, and a big number is a good motivation.
The other half of ROI is the investment or cost. Project managers and executives cannot know if a project was successful or not unless they understand its cost. In today's globalized knowledge worker world, project costs are mainly derived from the cost of labor. Consequently, tracking time to projects and tasks is an inescapable requirement for measuring project ROI.
If 10% of a project's allocated budget has been spent and only 5% of the work has been completed, there is a problem. Project managers who track employee actuals and find this out early in the project have a fighting chance of recovery. Those who don't will find out much later on that their projects are drastically over budget. This is just one example of how real-time data enables project managers to fix problems before they start.
