Category: Journal ISSN 1078-1935

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Journal: What to do with all this data?

Analysis, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Government, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Methods & Process, Mobile, Real Time
Marjorie Hlava Taxodiary Home

October 15, 2010
Posted in Business strategy, News, indexing, metadata

October 15, 2010 – Large institutions have massive amounts of data in this modern age, the question is what to do with all of it. Extracting the right information can help avoid waste, delays, systems failures, even terrorist threats. A perfect example is Toyota’s customer support and repair data. If business intelligence had been applied and management had been looking, they would have noticed that something was going terribly wrong.

NewsBreak brought this to our attention in their article, “Search and Business Intelligence: The Humble Inverted Index Wins Again.” Business intelligence means mining through all that digital data—in legacy systems, databases, and even spreadsheets—and reporting what’s going on. Institutions with all that data know its value. When implemented well, business intelligence can be a huge success to all involved.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.

Phi Beta Iota: The two graphics below, one from the 1990's the other very recent, sum up all that governments and businesses simply do not get, do not practice, and do not leverage.  Dashboards, like Smart Phones, are fairly stupid.  Existing “data mining” systems do not adapt, scale, or make sense in relation to externalities.  It takes humans to do that, and not geek IT humans but rather all-source holistic analytics humans.  We have a ways to go.

Graphic: Four Quadrants J-2 High Cell SMS Low

Graphic: OSINT and Full-Spectrum HUMINT (Updated)

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Journal: Microsoft Ad Trashes OpenOffice.org

Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Standards, Strategy, Technologies, Tools

A recent Microsoft video suggests the company considers OpenOffice.org a significant threat to its own Office suite.

Titled “A Few Perspectives on OpenOffice.org,” the video features a series of horror stories from customers who tried the open-source productivity suite and suffered from excess costs as well as IT resources, performance and compatibility issues.

A series of customer quotes flashes across the screen in the slickly animated video, read aloud by a series of unseen narrators. “If an open-source freeware solution breaks, who's going to fix it?” according to a statement ascribed to a school district official in the U.S.

“When we returned to Microsoft Office after our experience with OpenOffice, you could practically hear a collective sigh of relief across the entire district,” states another comment attributed to a U.S. school system official.

Comments are not enabled on the video's YouTube page.

Microsoft is facing competition from OpenOffice.org on multiple fronts, from the commercial version sold by project owner Oracle, as well as offshoots like the recently announced LibreOffice.

Read rest of article…

See the Video

Phi Beta Iota: Google is in more trouble than Microsoft.  Oracle will not scale, and IBM is not as imaginative as it likes to believe.  Microsoft, however, has no strategy at all.  Attacking OpenOffice in an era of Open Everything is a sure sign that Microsoft leadership is struggling–and this tracks with the decline of the company under Steve Balmer.  We believe there will be a need for Bill Gates to take the helm again, or Microsoft is going to start falling apart and will fail to use the time it has right now–the next two years–to bury the competition by innovating itself into the future.

Guest Comment:

“Microsoft as a corporation is disgraceful. The classic case is when they bribed Nigerian Officials to replace Linux with Windows on school computers. http://www.facebook.com/l/8396a;www.geek.com/articles/news/mandriva-ceo-calls-out-microsoft-ceo-steve-ballmer-2007112/ I prefer to work with an operating system with a Social Contract  http://www.facebook.com/l/8396a;www.debian.org/social_contract or code of conduct: http://www.facebook.com/l/8396a;www.ubuntu.com/community/conduct”

Tip of the Hat to Paul Harper at Facebook.

Robert Steele's response:  Quite right. Not sure we can turn a pig into a cow, but miracles do happen. I predict Bill Gates will return to run Microsoft, the question is, has he learned to listen to others? Jury is still out on that one.

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Reference: Peggy Holman on Government and Change

03 Economy, 11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, Methods & Process, Real Time
Peggy Holman

The Challenge of Power (Extract)

There are virtually always political barriers!

What I have found to be true is that when the issue faced is more important than their position, people in power positions will engage. In other words, they’ll step up when:

  • the situation reaches the point that they realize that they can’t solve it alone;
  • it is critical to their success; and
  • they’ve found a partner to work with that they’re willing to trust.

Essentially, these are the conditions when anyone will engage. It’s just that people with more to lose tend to wait longer. By then, the situation is really messy and they’re desperate.

Don't Hold On

Peggy Holman knows a lot about change in organizations and communities and she wrote Engaging Emergence to help people not only deal with unexpected and chaotic change, but even come out ahead by engaging it proactively.

But proactive engagement means letting go of some things just as much as discovering new things. To help you navigate, Peggy presents her list of The Five Things We Need To Let Go Of To Effectively Deal With Emergence:

1. Give Up Command and Control.

2. Give Up Habit and Routine.

3. Give Up Top-Down Decision-Making.

4. Give Up the Existing Order.

5. Give Up Thinking That You Have the Answers.

Read the full blog with paragraphs and examples for each of the above….

See Also:

Worth a Look: Engaging Emergence

Journal: Self-Organizing Emergence from Chaos

Review: The Change Handbook–The Definitive Resource on Today’s Best Methods for Engaging Whole Systems

Reference: Peggy Holman Free Video on Emergence

Who’s Who in Collective Intelligence: Peggy Holman

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Journal: Lean Sigma, ScrumMasters, & Deja Vu

03 Economy, 04 Education, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Methods & Process

If You're Looking At The Past To Design The Future, You're Going To Crash And Burn

One reason why Apple is innovating and winning, while Nokia is not.

Unfortunately, the headline using a dramatic effect to get attention, but is not an accurate statement.   Be careful about too much credit to Apple's current design efforts. Apple has had several flops in the past. Is this conscious or are they experiencing their own randomness?

It can be easily observed that systems endure with marginal improvements. Of course, if you do not want the undesirable effects that are being generated by your system, making marginal improvements has little hope of removing these undesirable effects, since effects can only be created by deeper cause(s).

So to claim that looking at the past to design the future demands that you will crash and burn is an easily disproved hypothesis. Yet, we also know that when you design a system for the future, you can also build an ineffective system. The world is littered with dead businesses created on the belief that they will have the utopian design.

Continue reading “Journal: Lean Sigma, ScrumMasters, & Deja Vu”

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Journal: BRICS Innovate Externally Not Internally

01 Brazil, 02 China, 03 India, 06 Russia, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence

Full Story Online

How BRIC Innovators Will Defeat You

11:13 AM Thursday October 14, 2010

For reasons yet unclear, BRIC companies and entrepreneurs now consume roughly half my professional time. The Brazilian, Russian, Indian, and Chinese (BRIC) managers I meet are as sharp, credentialed, energetic, and hungry as their Silicon Valley or Rte. 128 counterparts. Sometimes their English is even better. They desperately want to be world-class innovators.

These people aren't interested in launching imitations. They're not looking to be even lower-cost suppliers or sub-contractors to a WalMart or HP or JPMorganChase. They want to be valued as much for their ingenuity as for their prices.

Consequently, they appear particularly open to ideas and experimentation. They know they lag so they'll grasp any reasonable innovation edge they can. Measured by brainpower and grit, there's no reason why BRIC enterprises shouldn't consistently out-innovate their richer rivals. Money isn't the vital variable holding them back. So what's the issue?

Read about the BRIC cultural flaws….

Tip of the Hat to  Pierre Levy at LinkedIn.

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Reference: When NOT to Follow the Leader….

11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Cultural Intelligence

Seth Godin Home

Time to get off the brandwagon

Marketing involves spending money and it's fraught with the fear of failure (because it often doesn't work).

This mix creates the perfect opportunity to play it safe and to follow the leader.

Jumping on the brandwagon, if you must coin a phrase.

Here's the thing: while the second imitator might make it pay, the third, the fourth, the tenth–not so much. The more you try to fit in, the worse you do. The more you rush to follow the leader, the less likely you will be to catch up.

Phi Beta Iota: A major negative feature of bureaucracy, apart from its inherent propensity to magnify fraud, waste, and abuse, lies in its eradication of diversity and innovation.  It is a bureaucracy precisely because the past demanded control and repetition and reliability from small cogs in big machines.  That is NOT what we need now, in fact it is counter-productive.  Live free or die….

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Reference: How Web-Code Geeks Help NGO’s and Media

Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Media, Methods & Process, Non-Governmental, Open Government, Reform, Tools

Jon Lebkowsky Home

Events this week – NPOCamp and Austin News Hackathon

Cross-posted from http://effaustin.org.

Two great events coming up this weekend in Austin, sponsored by EFF-Austin.

Friday, join us at NPO Camp – a Barcamp for Nonprofits and Techs. We had one of these several months ago, and it was a real blast! The idea here is to bring the nonprofit and technology communities together for a day and talk about the technical challenges the NPOs face, while educating the techs about that world. Last event, we had 200+ attendees forming into sessions and pods; all were lively.  Greg Foster, our newest EFF-Austin board member, has done most of the legwork in organizing the event, with major production assistance from Maggie Duval, also a board member and producer of the annual Plutopia event during SXSW. Sign up here.

Saturday, coders and journalists come together to build innovative news applications at the Austin News Hackathon, cosponsored by EFF-Austin and the local Hacks Hackers chapter led by Cindy Royal.  The day will begin with a presentation by Matt Stiles and Niran Babalola of the Texas Tribune, talking about some of the news apps they’ve been developing. Then teams will form to match ideas from journalists with technical expertise from the coders who are attending. These kinds of events are the future of journalism!  This event also benefited from Maggie Duval’s production assistance. Sign up here.

Both events will be catered by Pick Up Stix of South Austin.

Phi Beta Iota: The convergence-emergence that is starting to pick up momentum is happening all around us.  Here we see two example of “cognitive surplus” creating “infinite wealth” as web and code geeks help, respectively, non-profit organizations and journalists.  This is the model of the future–there is plenty of wealth for everyone, we just need to stop corruption at all levels across all domains–we do this with transparency where money is involved, and with open space where money is not involved.

noble gold