Mr. Murdoch and the Journal

Fuente: Strategy Op. Ed.:

"For we strategists, negotiating between value creation and institutional objectives remains the great unsolved challenge. Where ethics and social responsibility is involved the response is relatively easy: Do the right thing. But the Journal’s social contribution consists in giving voice to a particular economic and political ideology and doing it better than anyone else; while of great social value, it is not a social obligation. People like me depend on the Journal (and the Times) to give us the news and opinion straight and don't mind paying for it. The question is whether there are enough us and enough profit to make it worthwhile for these newspapers to continue doing things as they have decades.

The Times and The Journal are businesses, not public goods. Their shareholders are free to decide if they wish to maximize their wealth by selling the brands to those, like Mr. Murdoch, who are likely to change editorial and journalistic policy in the pursuit of value creation. The same shareholders are also free, as both the Journal and the Times have asked in their editorial pages, to risk economic value for more 'institutional value'. I like to call such companies 'maintenance-for-profit' companies in that they defend an institutional position though it may reduce economic rents. This differs from social entrepreneurship, which consists of setting up companies whose mission is to solve clearly defined social problems while also turning a profit for owners"

La revista que se secuestra los viernes

Fuente: Libertad Digital

"Era tan evidente que ese iba a ser el resultado inevitable de esta medida que es difícil no pensar que ha sido algo buscado. El aprieto en que Conde Pumpido y Del Olmo han metido a la Casa Real es mayúsculo. La institución monárquica será vista por muchos como responsable de un ataque a la libertad de expresión y vista como retrógrada e intolerante. Si lo medimos por los resultados, no cabe duda de que quienes han ordenado el secuestro de El Jueves son mucho más culpables que la propia revista de 'dañar el prestigio de la Corona', el delito del que acusan. Y que a estas alturas, con todo lo que ha avanzado la tecnología, el juez instructor del 11-M haya pedido la recogida del molde empleado para la impresión del número demuestra que no ha dedicado a este caso el celo y la prudencia debidos."

How the world really shapes up

Fuente: Daily Mail

"But a new series of extraordinary maps shows our planet in a very different light.

Rather than defining each country by size, these computer-generated modified maps - or cartograms - redraw the globe with each country's size proportionate to its strengths, or weaknesses, in a whole series of categories.

For instance, when it comes to military spending, the U.S. appears bloated, but Africa is huge when HIV prevalence is mapped.

The cartograms were produced in a unique collaboration between the universities of Michigan in the U.S. and Sheffield. Here are images and more details on some of the most fascinating..."

The Apotheosis of David Beckham

Fuente: Strategy Op. Ed.: The Apotheosis of David Beckham

"...the individual now defines himself purely and simply as product.

If this sounds like Karl Marx's version of wage labor to you, forget it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead of the proletariat selling their bodies to the capitalists, it is the capitalist entrepreneur who sells his body to the avaricious proletariat in the digital format so desired. It is a fair transaction, transparent and honest. A legitimate exchange along well-defined utility curves.

Of course, David Beckham did not invent this idea. The concept is explained beautifully in Chapter 1 of Robert Grant's Contemporary Strategy Analysis, the standard strategy textbook in many MBA programs. Grant gives three examples of "Person as Product", based on three individuals who developed successful strategies"

Business Intelligence: mito o realidad

"Tras haber centrado el tema del mes de octubre a 'Business Intelligence', hemos considerado interesante las reflexiones, a modo de balance, de estos dos expertos en la materia. Concretamente, en este artículo repasan conceptos básicos sobre BI y se detienen en algunas de las técnicas más representativas con objeto de contribuir a su divulgación. Superadas las falsas expectativas que siempre rodean a algo novedoso, los autores creen que BI es uno de los más poderosos auxiliares del directivo, porque le permite realizar su principal función, tomar decisiones, en condiciones óptimas de información. Faltan profesionales con experiencia, lo que representa una clara oportunidad para una nueva generación de técnicos y directivos con una formación híbrida, en cuestiones de negocio y en el manejo de herramientas tecnológicas de BI."

Fuente: C E D E:

BEA CTO: we need 'business intelligence' applied to SOA

Fuente: ZDNET.COM via news.google.es

"We see SOA (Service-Oriented Arquitecture) governance as the ability to understand why you're doing it and who is allowed to do what, and then adding traceability and management view into the SOA stack. It's about how it's done, why it's done, who did it and where did it happen, more than what it is that did happen," he told Rich Seeley of SearchWebServices.

"The first thing you need for governance is the ability to put all the artifacts somewhere so you can actually see them in a cohesive manner…. Once you have information in the repository, you can really start looking at it in a more holistic way, and say: 'Okay why did it change? Who changed it? What does it mean that they did this? Was it done under an agreed-upon workflow and policy?'"

Levy said BEA intends to support the use of dashboards to manage and monitor changes within the SOA repository. "You'll see more 'business intelligence' types of views on top of the central repository and you'll see policy definition against that," he said. "There's no difference between policy against change management policy and policy against security access. One is an IT policy, the other is a governance policy, but the concept of policy applying to the artifact did not really change."

Un comentario interesante:

... I think it's oversimplifying to suggest there will be one repository to report off of. And there's no way (in practice) to create a data warehouse for SOA. So I think it's more likely you'll see federated repositories, similar to what the ITIL/CMDB (Configuration Management Database) folks are doing. You'll need to capability to query across several, some in relational and some in XML, in real time, to create those dashboard views people are looking for

Introduction to Datawarehousing and Business Reporting

Business Intelligence
Tutorial
Fuente: Nicholasgoodman blog

GIS, inseparable del Business Intelligence

Fuente: TodoBI

Hacía tiempo que no colaboraba en TodoBI. Se trata de un artículo en el que se presentan los fundamentos de GIS y algo de su relación con Business Intelligence.

"Tras construir el GIS los usuarios disponen de un sistema fiable que les permite acceder de forma rápida, homogénea y organizada a conjuntos de información que han sido integrados según las necesidades de la empresa y a la que antes no tenían acceso, tenían una visión limitada y parcial o que el proceso de conseguirla era lento, costoso en cantidad de horas-hombre invertidas, proclive a errores o muy difícil de conseguir de forma integrada, por ejemplo por diferencias de formatos (CAD, papel, formatos digitales, PDF, etc).


Herramientas GIS


Como mayores valores añadidos de un GIS destaca su capacidad, al igual que en Business Intelligence, de realizar análisis complejos aunque sobre entornos geográficos y la mejora de la toma de decisiones asociada, el acceso fácil y rápido a información exacta, completa, relacionada y actualizada y la generación de mapas e informes de gran calidad. En general, al implantar un GIS, se reducen los costes operativos, se incrementa la productividad y se ahorra mucho tiempo en la gestión de mapas.
"