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

Event: 16 Sept 2010, Wash DC, Miller-McCune-Live! Debate (Is Washington for Sale to Special Interests?)

Commerce, Corporations, Government, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests
Event link

September 16 @ 8:30am (breakfast will be served at 8:00am)

National Press Club
First Amendment Lounge
529 14th Street, NW
Washington, D.C.

Moderated by Miller-McCune Editor-in-Chief John Mecklin, the panelists are Rolf Lundberg, Jr., U.S. Chamber of Commerce; Craig Holman, Public Citizen; and Frank Baumgarter, co-author of Lobbying and Policy Change.

Continue reading “Event: 16 Sept 2010, Wash DC, Miller-McCune-Live! Debate (Is Washington for Sale to Special Interests?)”

NIGHTWATCH Extract: Our Friends, our Enemies

08 Wild Cards, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Military

Iraq: Insurgents conducted at least 34 coordinated attacks in 16 cities 0n 25 August. The bombings and other attacks killed 77 people and wounded nearly 400 more. Baghdad experienced five attacks.

NIGHTWATCH Comment: The attacks showed the breadth of the insurgents' operational area. They appear to be the work of a single group, apparently Sunni Arabs or secular Arabs.

The attacks also establish a baseline of the insurgents' ability to coordinate attacks over space and time. This was not a trivial display of the capability to coordinate attacks over long distances. They appear to be a test of the feasibility of taking the next escalation step in the insurgency.

Some outside entity is funding a new, most likely Sunni Arab, insurgency and has afforded its leadership the command and control capability for today's attacks.   Look to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

Phi Beta Iota: Emphasis added above.  The US Government (not America the Beautiful or the big-hearted American public) is called a “useful idiot” in most of the world precisely because it mixes hubris and naivete with vast amounts of money spent without a strategy and without accountability.  It took too long to understand the Saudi funding behind the global spread of virulent Wahhabism, while the equivalent funding to the Bush family and others assured that at the political and policy level, our enemies the Saudis would remain conveniently and unethically our friends.

See Also:

Journal: Nuclear War Against Iran…Again
23 Worst Tyrants/Dictators (Yes, there’s more than 23) and Oops, there’s Saudi Arabia..
NIGHTWATCH Extract: Dictators vs Iran in Middle East
Review: Breaking the Real Axis of Evil–How to Oust the World’s Last Dictators by 2025
Review: The CIA in Iran–The 1953 Coup and the Origins of the US-Iran Divide
Review: The Health of Nations–Society and Law beyond the State
Review: Threshold–The Crisis of Western Culture
Review: Wars of Blood and Faith–The Conflicts That Will Shape the 21st Century
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Empire as Cancer Including Betrayal & Deceit

Journal: Brains Beat Algorithms….Again

04 Education, Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Citizen-Centered, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Tools
Full Story Online

Today's issue of Nature contains a paper with a rather unusual author list. Read past the standard collection of academics, and the final author credited is… an online gaming community.

Scientists have turned to games for a variety of reasons, having studied virtual epidemics and tracked online communities and behavior, or simply used games to drum up excitement for the science. But this may be the first time that the gamers played an active role in producing the results, having solved problems in protein structure through the Foldit game. (Also related, TED talk on how gaming can make a better world).

See Also:

Graphic: Jim Bamford on the Human Brain

2010: Human Intelligence (HUMINT) Trilogy Updated

20 Things Learned From Traveling Around the World for Three Years

Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Media

Gary Arndt, Author of Everything-Everywhere.com
August 23, 2010

On March 13, 2007, I handed over the keys to my house, put my possessions in storage and headed out to travel around the world with nothing but a backpack, my laptop and a camera.

Three and a half years and 70 countries later, I've gotten the equivalent of a Ph.D in general knowledge about the people and places of Planet Earth.

Here are some of the things I've learned:

1) People are generally good

2) The media lies

3) The world is boring

4) People don't hate Americans

5) Americans aren't as ignorant as you might think

6) Americans don't travel

7) The rest of the world isn't full of germs

8 ) You don't need a lot stuff

9) Traveling doesn't have to be expensive

10) Culture matters

12) Everyone is proud of where they are from

13) America and Canada share a common culture

14) Most people have a deep desire to travel around the world

15) You can find the internet almost everywhere

16) In developing countries, government is usually the problem

17) English is becoming universal

18) Modernization is not Westernization

19) We view other nations by a different set of criteria than we view ourselves

20) Everyone should travel

Full article here to see elaborations for each of the twenty entries

Reference: Citation Analytics 201

About the Idea, Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Analysis, Articles & Chapters, Augmented Reality, Balance, Budgets & Funding, Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, History, ICT-IT, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), Maps, Methods & Process, Multinational Plus, Policies, Policies-Harmonization, Policy, Political, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Processing, Real Time, Research resources, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy-Holistic Coherence, Threats, Tools, Tribes

Phi Beta Iota: Most serious analysts now understand Citation Analytics 101.  It's time to move to Citation Analytics 202, and there is no better way to introduce the art of the possible than by pointing to Kevin W. Boyack, Katy Borner, and Richard Klavans (2007), “Mapping the Structure and Evolution of Chemistry Research (11th International Conference of Scientometrics and Infometrics, pp. 112-123.

Full Article with Color Graphics
Graphic as Printable Single Page PPT

There are several take-aways from this article, which is more or less the “coming out” of the Klavens-inspired infometrics field now that he has won his law-suit and has unchallenged access to all Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) access [this was one of the sources we used to win the Burundi Exercise before the Aspin-Brown Commission in 1995].

Continue reading “Reference: Citation Analytics 201”

Journal: DoD, WikiLeaks, JCS, Security Ad Naseum…

07 Other Atrocities, Civil Society, Corruption, Ethics, Government, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), IO Impotency, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Media, Methods & Process, Military, Officers Call, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy

Defense News August 23, 2010

Experts: DoD Could Have Prevented WikiLeaks Leak

By William Matthews

While senior Pentagon officials resort to bluster in hopes of preventing the WikiLeaks website from posting any more secret Afghan war documents on the Internet, security experts say there is a lot the U.S. military could have done to prevent the classified documents from being leaked in the first place.

Steps range from the sophisticated — installing automated monitoring systems on classified networks — to the mundane — disabling CD burners and USB ports on network computers.

“The technology is available” to protect highly sensitive information, said Tom Conway, director of federal business development at computer security giant McAfee. “The Defense Department doesn’t have it, but it is commercially available. We’ve got some major commercial clients using it.”

Full Article Below the Line (Not Easily Available on Internet); Lengthy Comment Follows Article

Continue reading “Journal: DoD, WikiLeaks, JCS, Security Ad Naseum…”