Archive for the ‘Business & Commerce’ Category

Business Analysis : The Flintstone Effect

Business people have problems.  The other thing they have is existing infrastructure: things, people, technologies, systems, teams, policies and so much more. And infrastructure, being part of the environment, informs not just what unfolds within that environment but how people think about what can unfold within that same environment.
This becomes spectacularly apparent when the infrastructure [...]

Thoughts on Enterprise Social Media : Part III

So in my previous two posts, I talked about how intranets need to mesh with the ‘reality’ of a particular organisation or business, and now in this post I just have some final thoughts on how the mechanics of that kind of meshing might look like. Basically, it’s:
Highjacking human interaction for fun and profit
So it [...]

Thoughts on Enterprise Social Media : Part II

In the first post of this tiny series, I basically just oriented myself to the topic and declared my stance on social media to begin with! In this post I look at how social media at work can attempt to make itself relevant, and hopefully quantifiably so.
As I have always said, social media needs to [...]

Thoughts on Enterprise Social Media : Part I

In a short series of 3 nibble-sized posts, I’m going write about some of the things I’m learning about a rapidly expanding field: Enterprise intranets – specifically the inclusion of social media platforms with the attendant folksonomies and enterprise search functionality.
First off, I should declare my stance: I am a social media luddite. I am [...]

data, information, and the necessary delusions of purpose

In the same way that we kid ourselves that we are artists and writers, poets, lovers, mothers, Olympic sprinters, whatever… so too do corporate entities become mired in their own necessary delusions of purpose.
But of course… I persist in my unholy (hollow?) belief that the one true original purpose is the simple, banal processing of [...]

Complex accounting is routing strategy. It’s here to stay.

[updated : 2009-12-19]
The only thing that’s interesting about the copenhagen climate summit is the strategies that nations employ to wriggle out of real and tangible cuts in emissions.
The interconnectedness of environmental and other systems on our planet has made us turn, naturally, to network theory for gaining useful insights. This is becoming more so with [...]

hello, offshoring; goodbye, offshoring.

[Updated 2010-07-23]
There’s been a persistent sentiment that nations like india and china are great offshore partners… so long as the offshore work is restricted to rote analytical or manual labour.

The fable of HOW-WHY (or, a skew-whiff history of Enterprise)

A story:
Once upon a time a long time ago, when people needed to do something they knew WHY they needed to do it: they were cold, they were hungry, they needed shelter for the night, and so on. It was mainly a question of figuring out WHAT to do and then figuring out WHO [...]

Hulu stalks subscription-based revenue… but do they have “the secret”?

Hulu, the tv station in the sky, is wanting to grow its business by adopting a subscription-based revenue model alongside its regular ad-based model. In case you didn’t know, or in case you’ve been putting up with the geo-hobbled Hulu experience served up for non-US denizens, what content there is on Hulu is free mainly [...]

Venture Capital : the love that crushes with its embrace

First off, I know diddley about venture capital and the entire VC industry. However, I have been in a few organisations now which have sought VC-assisted growth, and the ensuing fallout each time has got me wondering if:
1) it’s truly inevitable that things go pear-shaped after VC (if so why does anyone get on the [...]

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