Category: Commercial Intelligence

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Journal: Contractors Accountable for Toxic Results

03 Economy, 09 Justice, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Ethics, Officers Call

Strike Two on “Just Following Orders” Defense

David Isenberg
David Isenberg Author, Shadow Force: Private Security Contractors in Iraq

Posted: September 9, 2010 04:28 PM

To paraphrase Yogi Berra it's déjà vu all over again for KBR.

In my Aug. 31 post I wrote about a significant pro-veteran ruling in the Oregon KBR Qarmat Ali litigation. This is the case where Oregon National Guard troops allege KBR's liability for negligence and for fraud arising out of plaintiffs' exposure to sodium dichromate and resultanthexavalent chromium poisoning while assigned to duty at the Qarmat Ali water plant in 2003.

Paul Papak, the federal district judge rejected the motion by KBR and co-defendants to dismiss the suit for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction and rejected it.

Read Entire Posting at Huffington Post

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Journal: ESRI Puts GeoPortals into Open Source

Commercial Intelligence, IO Mapping, IO Sense-Making, Tools

On the move to open source (or some other non-open source license like CC) and which license will be used:

“Reason for making Geoportal open source? Like anyone, Esri responds to trends in the IT industry, we listen to requests from our users to take a more collaborative approach to development, and source code was already part of the Geoportal license: It just made sense to do this now. The choice for creative commons has not been finalized, but is a good model for the approach we’re looking for. We are still reviewing the most optimal license model.”

Read Rest of Update

Phi Beta Iota: If Oracle were to leverage Sun Office and immediately offer the eighteen analytic functionalities defined in Diane Webb's CATALYST, all as open source, that would be a game-changer.  In the meantime, hats off to ESRI for finally getting the picture on F/OSS.

See Also:

Graphic: Analytic Tool-Kit in the Cloud (CATALYST II)

Memorandum: USSOCOM Software List and STRONG ANGEL TOOZL

2001 Porter (US) Tools of the Trade: A Long Way to Go

1988-2009 OSINT-M4IS2 TECHINT Chronology

Worth a Look: 1989 All-Source Fusion Analytic Workstation–The Four Requirements Documents

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Journal: UN on Food Security, It’s All Connected

Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Government, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence

Full Article Online

Renewed instability in global food markets requires urgent response, UN expert said

An independent United Nations human rights expert today called on governments and the international community to promptly tackle the renewed instability of global food markets, noting the related social unrest that has hit some countries in recent weeks.

Tip of the Hat to Charles Rault at LinkedIn.

Continue reading “Journal: UN on Food Security, It's All Connected”

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Journal: World’s Top Risk Data Managers

Analysis, Augmented Reality, Commercial Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Geospatial, info-graphics/data-visualization, IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process, Policies, Research resources, Strategy, Threats, Tools

Berto Jongman Recommends...

A Safety Net for Global Capitalism

Inside Munich Re, the World's Risk Center

By Uwe Buse

EXTRACT 1:  An endless supply of data, probably unparalleled in its breadth and depth, flows from every continent to a cluster of buildings on the edge of the English Garden in Munich. An encyclopedia of life, its dangers, its injustices, its coincidences, is being assembled there. There is probably no other place on Earth where the risks of the modern world are being studied more intensively and comprehensively than at the headquarters of Munich Re, the world's risk center.

EXTRACT 2: Today Munich Re wins accolades for its restraint, while its shareholders are eagerly awaiting the results of a new project. The goal of the project under development in Oechslin's department, more comprehensive than any other project before it, is to redefine the limits of knowledge by developing a global risk model.

Full Story Online

Phi Beta Iota: This is a superb article that ably documents how much can be known–and shared–that most governments and international organizations are simply not conscious of, or if conscious, exploiting microscopic bits of the data for nefarious purposes.  These are the kind of people that could and should be at the heart of creating a World Brain and Global Game.

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Journal: Sharing is Contagious

Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence
Full Story Online

“Sharing is Contagious” charts how we are increasingly growing up sharing files, photos, knowledge, and daily thoughts—and how these collaborative behaviors are moving into other areas of our lives. From bike-sharing to co-working to peer-to-peer rental, a dotted line is forming between “what’s mine,” “what’s yours,” and “what’s ours.” Technology and peer communities are enabling old market behaviors including bartering, swapping, trading, renting, lending, and sharing to be reinvented in ways and on a scale never possible before.

Tip of the Hat to Pierre Levy at LinkedIn.

Phi Beta Iota: The authors of the book are on a marketing buzz curve–we are actually entering the age of collection production of just enough just in time everything, and “consumption” of every sort is passe. Less than a minute ago.  Our Collective Intelligence will create infinite wealth in part by exposing and eradicating all fraud, waste, and abuse.

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Journal: Return on Investment Missing from IT World

Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process
Full Blog Online

BI implementations fail because they are sold to the IT departments and not to the business users. The use case and ROI needs to be built with the business users. If that is not done, it results in:

  • high probability of self-ware
  • lack of ROI for the business user
  • a pure IT project not driven by the needs of the business

Phi Beta Iota: For decades we have been railing against the substitution of technology for thinking; the absence of processing power and analytic desk-top tool-kits, and so on.  We have also pointed out that “BI” is nothing more than data mining, that competitive intelligence ignores context, and that only commercial intelligence with a 360 view as well as historical and future forecast aspects will do.  Peter Drucker said in Forbes ASAP on 28 August 1998 that we have spent the past 50 years focused on the T in IT, and need to spend the next 50 focused on the I.  That is what this web site and the Earth Intelligence Network, a 501c3 seeking donors, are focused upon.  The World Brain and Global Game, connecting all minds to all information in all languages all the time, is achievable.   Paul Strassmann was the first to point out in a very credible documented way that the ROI for most IT investments in the Fortune 500 is negative to neutral.  IT is not pulling its weight because IT has no strategy and no intellectual frame of reference, e.g. connecting dots to dots, dots to people, and people to people so as to achieve specified outcomes.

See Also:

Steele Brief to NSA in Vegas 2000

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Worth a Look: New Political Risk Quarterly

Commercial Intelligence, Worth A Look
Home Page

RISK AREAS

Governance risks

  • Regime stability
  • Rule of law
  • Democratic governance

Political violence risk

  • Conflict and political violence
  • Terrorism risk
  • Extrajudicial and unlawful killings
  • Kidnappings

Business and macroeconomic risk

  • Regulatory Framework
  • Business environment
  • Macroeconomic environment
  • Business integrity and corruption

Phi Beta Iota: All well and good, but nothing here about whether the government has a holistic strategy, adequate decision support, Whole of Government planning and programming, and so on.  This is a good start that could be made vastly better by embracing the larger contruct of political-legal, socio-economic, ideo-cultural, techno-demographic, and natural-geographic.