Performance Controller

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Can you imagine the now indispensable fridge magnet that is so much a part of our lives, with your notes, kids pictures, shopping lists and other important odd and ends. being relegated to the rubbish to be replaced by a screen? 

Well, that is what the giant European supermarket chain, Tesco, have in mind for us with their Extending Ecommerce strategy.

The idea that digital photo frames, with integrated magnets would be attached to your fridge, not long ago seemed farfetched. But now the internet will be there soon too so your shopping choices can be made right at the fridge as you look to see what’s missing.

Nick Lansley, is Head of R&D at Tesco In this video he talks how about this and how Tesco recently released their  API to the developer market.

Like the IPhone where developers develop smart phone applications for the phone users, having access to Tesco’s backend product information will allow markets to develop demand based applications for households and more. Providing on tap such things as  product diet options availability and cost with such access to influence buyers choices in their home as it further extend to enhance the consumer buying experience.

With this type of wide reach, real time access to core business information means we will soon see the evolving value of business intelligence extended directly to the end consumer for practical use in their daily lives .

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Leveraging on “Are we better off leveraging experts?”, this is a question a US consulting firm caught my attention with this week when they followed me on Twitter  In their web site they asked “Why hire an employee when you can rent one?” Their message pitched to sell their value also just makes so much sense as it goes to the very heart of the issue.

This small firm, called Kettle River Consulting, with its unlikely yet instantly recognizable self branding name,  grabs readers well with some clever well placed business basics. One is a challenge they suggest you chew on to “Make Your Server Room Get Along with Your Board Room”.

In their offering on managed services, they present their  case to engage with a compelling argument that the cost is less than staff costs of full-time employees.

They expand this by saying,

Some companies hire one team to write their application and another to maintain it.

The latter team is instantly at a disadvantage, because all of the knowledge of the business processes and the application itself resides with the software developers.

A second drawback might also be personnel-related. To manage an enterprise application, a company needs the continual services of talented developers, database administrators and network operations staff.

If these were all full time employees, the cost of running the application could become burdensome.

When I looked more into Kettle River Consulting, also at twitter.com/KettleRiver, it seems it was founded on an opportunity to delver real customer service that so many others in reality only have in their mission.

According to their site KRC, as they also refer to themselves, was started when an a German marketing firm, who had previously acquired a US software business, then changed direction and decided to close it. This left stranded many long-time and loyal clients with an ongoing  need for the expertise they had relied on for many years.

Another perspective of this company shows up in the “Favorite Quotes the KRC Team have on their profiles; such as,

1. Whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t, you’re right.
2. Data outlives the application in nearly every business.
3. Don’t fear technology, use it to make your life better

I enjoyed reading the KRC site and learning from them on how to be humble and still look very professional. This very human looking company makes so much sense and one I would definitely feel I would like to deal with if I were a local to Minnesota.

This firm albeit small teaches by example some big and valuable lessons for doing business from its equally small yet famous area located in the southwest corner of Carlton County.These days of course with communications being so good even in the Asia Pacific regions, they could ofcourse be local and help others in need on that side of the world.

Here is something else i found out.  The Kettle River area of Carlton County Minnesota, was settled by a large concentration of Finnish Immigrants in the years leading up to the First World War and the influence of those immigrants is still noticeable even today.

Every August the town hosts Ma and Pa Kettle Days, an annual festival that includes a pancake breakfast, parade, a Miss Kettle River pageant, a mud bog on Saturday afternoon and street dances on Friday and Saturday night. . (if you want to learn more on Kettle River my source for this post was Wikipedia)

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On all new potential business engagements, one of the biggest blockers to communication is the ease of access to information.

A prospect will always baulk at giving confidential information, even when it is vital to allow a vendor or consultant to provide a solution. Time and valuable communication are often lost and many times even the opporunity when the simple solution may be to just sign a non disclosure agreement so you can keep talking.

In most cases when I suggest this things start to move along. But then there is the issue of whose NDA form do we use. As people head for the legal department it has the poterntial to stall again. So to make it easy,  I offer ours and often times it is enough and does the job well.

There are any number of forms around for this  For example  http://www.ndasforfree.com/ has some good formats to check for various scenarios Here is one we use that we find has quite simple language and works for us. Please feel free to give it a try or give me some feedback.

Read more…

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Incident reporting: static analysis is the first step normally used to identify losses. Summary statistics first display frequency and severity data by event type and by business line, according to the regulatory categories. This report is of certainly needed for compliance purposes, however it might be not the best tool for the risk management of a financial institution, which has a different structure or nature of activities.

An example of a more useful set of summary statistics would match the organization chart of the financial institution, bank, or company that uses its database. With a capability in viewing the reports in dimension splits by department, by people in charge, or by geographical zone of activity.

For a bank retail network for instance, the reporting may be split by bank branch, and, or by type of client. Even before detailing the frequency and the severity of each type of loss, incident reporting in an organization or in a department should first display the total loss amount caused by operational events.

Several simple measures, long neglected and sometimes never measured in financial institutions in the past, may provide a powerful tool to raise awareness on operational risk within an organization

Next, the analysis can identify the “low severity, high frequency” losses and the “high severity, low frequency” losses, with the remaining events. Both need further investigation, since they can be the symptoms of serious breaches in control within the organization. One of the key criteria in operational risk management is whether a possible loss is capped or not. That is, in case of an operational event, the potential loss amount is limited by any type of control. Capping potential losses is, and should be, a main concern for senior management. To that extent, rare events of large amounts are the first candidates in the identification of uncapped risks.

Likewise, recurrent minor losses require further investigation, at least once. They might also be the consequence of an effective cap of losses in an activity highly exposed to operational risks. Operational losses due to processing errors are frequent but limited due to effective control procedures and systems design. But recurrent losses could also be a more worrying symptom of a systematic breach in control or in process that lead to systematic or frequent losses, with possibly very large amounts at stake.

An incident database is a view of the operational losses in an organization that can provide, if interpreted correctly, a list of priority controls and investigations to be performed. Database analysis provides the facts, but does not identify the risks.

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A client of mine asked “.. will change the hard disk on the ERP server, so she is worried how [they] can check that the data is transferred correctly to the new disk?”

My response was:
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I’m not sure if the ERP Server HD’s are Raid/SAN or any platform. My comments are as follows;

- Strongly caution “Precisely everything has to be the same” — some programs/sw checks on HW indentity, be very careful
- Strongly recommend of doing a full clone of the HD instead of coping/moving
- A complete run through test with the user to check if the functions of the application are as normal as prior to change.
- A change management document from various related party of the change to for later audition.
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Nowadays, with storage technologies like SAN/RAIDS, it seems that ordinary HD swaping is completely out of normal operations.

A friend of mine had a very bad experience when he was informed that the Data were completely backed up – running to find out later that the backed up data couldn’t be restore because they were stored on the same hard drive!

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