business process

The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Definitive Guide to Dimensional Modeling
by Ralph Kimball and Margy Ross
Published 30 Jun 2013

Chapter 3 Retail Sales Chapter 11 Telecommunications Chapter 18 Dimensional Modeling Process and Tasks Business Processes Business processes are the operational activities performed by your organization, such as taking an order, processing an insurance claim, registering students for a class, or snapshotting every account each month. Business process events generate or capture performance metrics that translate into facts in a fact table. Most fact tables focus on the results of a single business process. Choosing the process is important because it defines a specific design target and allows the grain, dimensions, and facts to be declared. Each business process corresponds to a row in the enterprise data warehouse bus matrix.

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Step 1: Select the Business Process A business process is a low-level activity performed by an organization, such as taking orders, invoicing, receiving payments, handling service calls, registering students, performing a medical procedure, or processing claims. To identify your organization's business processes, it's helpful to understand several common characteristics: Business processes are frequently expressed as action verbs because they represent activities that the business performs. The companion dimensions describe descriptive context associated with each business process event. Business processes are typically supported by an operational system, such as the billing or purchasing system.

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You need to listen carefully to the business to identify the organization's business processes because business users can't readily answer the question, “What business process are you interested in?” The performance measurements users want to analyze in the DW/BI system result from business process events. Sometimes business users talk about strategic business initiatives instead of business processes. These initiatives are typically broad enterprise plans championed by executive leadership to deliver competitive advantage. In order to tie a business initiative to a business process representing a project-sized unit of work for the DW/BI team, you need to decompose the business initiative into the underlying processes.

Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI
by Paul R. Daugherty and H. James Wilson
Published 15 Jan 2018

Experimentation: actively observing for spots in processes to test AI and to learn and scale a reimagined process from the perspective of the missing middle. The age of standard business processes is coming to an end, and companies will no longer be able to rely on a strategy of replicating best-in-class practices from leading firms. And this is why experimentation is crucial. Executives must continually conduct tests to derive business processes that will work best for their unique set of conditions. A large part of that effort will require trial and error to determine what work should be done by humans, and what work would best be done by a collaboration between humans and machine (the missing middle).

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One implication of the fact that people can work differently and better with the help of AI is that companies are gaining efficiencies and saving money. But perhaps more importantly in the long term is that companies are also starting to rethink their business processes. And as they do, they uncover the need for new kinds of jobs for people, and wholly new ways of doing business, which is our focus in part two of this book. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. This is a complex journey. (For some historical perspective, see the sidebar “A Brief History of AI” at the end of this chapter.) Before we rewrite business processes, job descriptions, and business models, we need to answer these questions: what tasks do humans do best, and what do machines do best?

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Human resources, IT security, and banking compliance departments all use processes that are often made up of well-defined, repetitive tasks. This was the “second wave” of business process improvement. This chapter examines innovative improvements in enterprise processes—a trend that’s been building for years but, thanks to technological advances, has only recently become viable for most organizations. We give examples that address basic questions that anyone interested in deploying AI for enterprise-wide processes should be asking. What will such work look like in this new era of business process transformation? Which tasks are best suited for humans and which are best for machines?

Writing Effective Use Cases
by Alistair Cockburn
Published 30 Sep 2000

Looking back, I now can see the crux of the problem was different people on the team approaching the problem from different perspectives. I was working from business process to technology. Some other people were working from technology to the business process. Needless to say, the design scope for each use case wasn't clear between the two groups. The business-process-to-technology group never got to writing the system use cases, and the technology-to-business-process group never got to writing the business use cases. Instead, they sort of hit each other in a head-on collision, with each group trying to coerce the others as being their business/or system use case.

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Compare Use Case 25:“Actually Login (casual version)” on page 121 with Use Case 5:“Buy Something (Fully dressed version)” on page 22. Prior business modeling with vs. without use cases. Some teams like to document or revise the business process before writing the functional requirements for a system. Of those, some choose use cases to describe the business process, and some choose another business process modeling form. From the perspective of the system functional requirements, it does not seem to make much difference which business process modeling notation is chosen. Use case diagrams vs. actor-goal lists. Some people like actor-goal lists to show the set of use cases being developed, while others prefer use case diagrams.

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There are examples of business use cases in other parts of this book, specifically: * Use Case 2:“Get paid for car accident” on page 18 * Use Case 5:“Buy Something (Fully dressed version)” on page 22 * Use Case 18:“Operate an Insurance Policy” on page 72 * Use Case 19:“Handle Claim (business)” on page 78 * Use Case 20:“Evaluate Work Comp Claim” on page 79 Modeling versus designing Saying, "We are using use cases for business process reengineering" may mean any of: * "We use them to document the old process before we redesign it." * "We use them to create outer behavioral requirements for the design to meet." * "We will use them to document the new process, after it gets redesigned." All of the those are valid and interesting. I ask that you understand which one you intend. I carefully say business process modeling or documentation instead of business process reengineering or design when talking about use cases. A use case only documents a process, it doesn’t reengineer or redesign it.

Infonomics: How to Monetize, Manage, and Measure Information as an Asset for Competitive Advantage
by Douglas B. Laney
Published 4 Sep 2017

So with the help of analytics software from Emcien, it produced a demand-shaping pattern analysis for determining the optimal number of product configuration options, resulting in a $110 million bump in revenues and a 5 percent increase in sales efficiency.18 Optimizing Business Processes Ultimately, any form of information monetization is the result of some business process or combination of business processes. BI tools generally are standalone with respect to the business processes that they support. Even when embedded into business applications, they tend to present charts or numbers in an application window. Ideally, output is updated to reflect the user’s activity and needs, but less often is it used to affect the business process directly. Evolving to complex-event processing solutions, recommendation engines, rule-based systems, or artificial intelligence (AI), combined with business process management and workflow systems, can help to optimize business processes more directly, either supplementing or supplanting human intervention.

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Increased information velocity implies an increased speed of business. At even low levels of velocity, humans become incapable of ingesting and using information efficiently, at which point business process effectiveness can suffer. This is the point at which advanced analytic applications are required that consume and respond to swift streams of data (think of algorithmic stock trading.) These apps can make recommendations either to users responsible for administering an operational business process or be integrated with the business process applications themselves. Monetizing the Increased Variety of Information While many BI solutions can report on information from multiple sources on demand, or make use of integrated data in data warehouses or marts, they don’t truly take advantage of this diversity of data.

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Formula The PVI is a simple ratio that calculates KPI improvement by incorporating a given information asset, extrapolated over the usable life span of any given instance of data: (Or for multiple KPIs, the overall PVI can be expressed as the mean of their individual PVIs.) Where: KPIi = Business process instances using the information asset (informed group). KPIc = Business process instances not using the information (control group). T = The average usable life span of any data instance. t = The duration over which the KPI was measured. Implementation Using the PVI model ideally requires running a controlled experiment in which certain instances of a business process incorporate a certain information asset that other instances do not. It is a classic A-B test. A positive PVI demonstrates that the data is valuable for this process; a negative PVI indicates that the additional data somehow impedes the process.

Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning
by Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris
Published 6 Mar 2007

What’s left as a basis for competition is to execute your business with maximum efficiency and effectiveness, and to make the smartest business decisions possible. And analytical competitors wring every last drop of value from business processes and key decisions. Analytics can support almost any business process. Yet organizations that want to be competitive must have some attribute at which they are better than anyone else in their industry—a distinctive capability.3 This usually involves some sort of business process or some type of decision. Maybe you strive to make money by being better at identifying profitable and loyal customers than your competition, and charging them the optimal price for your product or service.

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Chapter 4 addresses internal processes, and chapter 5 deals with external processes, such as those involving customers and suppliers. 4 COMPETING ON ANALYTICS WITH INTERNAL PROCESSES Financial, Manufacturing, R&D, and Human Resource Applications ANALYTICS CAN BE APPLIED TO many business processes to gain a competitive edge. We’ve divided the world of analytical support for business processes into two categories: internal and external. The next chapter will address external applications—customer- and supplier-driven processes—and this one will focus on internal applications (refer to figure 4-1). It’s not always a perfectly clean distinction; in this chapter, for example, the internal applications sometimes involve external data and entities, even though they are not primarily about supply and demand, customers, or supply chains.

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Each stage of the data management life cycle presents distinctive technical and management challenges that can have a significant impact on an organization’s ability to compete on analytics.9 Data acquisition. Creating or acquiring data is the first step. For internal information, IT managers should work closely with business process leaders. The goals include determining what data is needed and how to best integrate IT systems with business processes to capture good data at the source. Data cleansing. Detecting and removing data that is out of date, incorrect, incomplete, or redundant is one of the most important, costly, and time-consuming activities in any business intelligence technology initiative.

Service Design Patterns: Fundamental Design Solutions for SOAP/WSDL and RESTful Web Services
by Robert Daigneau
Published 14 Sep 2011

Instantiate and invoke these commands from within the web service, or forward them to an asynchronous background process. Workflow Connector (156) How can web services be used to support complex and long-running business processes? Use a Workflow Engine to manage the life cycle and execution of tasks within complex or long-running business processes. Identify a web service that will trigger each logical business process. Use Callback Services to receive additional data for these long-running processes, and forward messages from these Callback Services to the Workflow Engine. Design Considerations for Web Service Implementation The following factors should be considered when writing web service code. • Atomicity: Web services should be atomic and adhere to an “All-or-Nothing” philosophy.

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= customerId){ customer = Customer.getById(customerId); } else{ customer = Customer.initForNewAccount( request.getCustomer()); } PriceList pricing = new PriceList( request.getVehicleClass()); Money cost = pricing.getRentalCost( request.getPickupLocation(), request.getDropOffLocation(), dateRange); customer.chargeAccount(cost); RentalLocation rentalLocation = RentalLocation.getRentalLocation( request.getPickupLocation()); RentalHold rentalHold = new RentalHold( request.getRequestId(), customer, request.getVehicleClass(), pricing.getListId(), dateRange, rentalLocation); rentalHold.submit(rentalHold); session.commit(); } } Command Invoker 156 C HAPTER 5 W EB S ERVICE I MPLEMENTATION S TYLES Workflow Connector Web services are to be used by a complex business process that runs for minutes, hours, days, or weeks. How can web services be used to support complex and long-running business processes? Workflow Connector Web services are often used to launch complex business processes that run for extended periods of time. A web service may, for example, trigger tasks that reserve flights, hotels, and car rentals for a vacation package. Processes like these can take several minutes, hours, or even days to complete.

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Fortunately, business developers can leverage powerful workflow technologies. 157 Workflow Connector 158 C HAPTER 5 W EB S ERVICE I MPLEMENTATION S TYLES Use a Workflow Engine to manage the life cycle and execution of tasks within complex or long-running business processes. Identify a web service that will trigger each logical business process. Use Callback Services to receive additional data for these long-running processes, and forward messages from these Callback Services to the Workflow Engine. Workflow Engine Issue Failure Callback Message Failure Client Trigger Service Charge Account Success Workflow Connector Complete Flight Reservation Book Hotel Issue Confirmation Callback Message Complete Auto Rental Callback Service Business Partners Logical Business Process In the broadest use of the term, workflow describes how tasks performed by humans or computers can be arranged to fulfill a specific business objective.

Big Data Analytics: Turning Big Data Into Big Money
by Frank J. Ohlhorst
Published 28 Nov 2012

The use of Big Data analytics is thus becoming a key foundation for competition and growth for individual firms, and it will most likely underpin new waves of productivity, growth, and consumer surplus. THE CASE FOR BIG DATA Building an effective business case for a Big Data project involves identifying several key elements that can be tied directly to a business process and are easy to understand as well as quantify. These elements are knowledge discovery, actionable information, short-term and long-term benefits, the resolution of pain points, and several others that are aligned with making a business process better by providing insight. In most instances, Big Data is a disruptive element when introduced into an enterprise, and this disruption includes issues of scale, storage, and data center design.

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Calculating risk can be a complex endeavor. However, since Big Data analytics is truly a business process that provides BI, risk calculations can include the cost of doing nothing compared to the benefits delivered by the technology. Other risks to consider are security implications (where the data live and who can access it), CPU overhead (whether the analytics will limit the processing power available for a line of business applications), compatibility and integration issues (whether the installation and operation will work with the existing technology), and disruption of business processes (installation creates downtime). All of these elements can be considered risks with a large-scale project and should be accounted for to build a solid business case.

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This is a subset of statistical applications in which data sets are examined to come up with predictions, based on trends and information gleaned from databases. Predictive analysis tends to be big in the financial and scientific worlds, where trending tends to drive predictions, once external elements are added to the data set. One of the main goals of predictive analysis is to identify the risks and opportunities for business process, markets, and manufacturing. Data modeling. This is a conceptual application of analytics in which multiple “what-if” scenarios can be applied via algorithms to multiple data sets. Ideally, the modeled information changes based on the information made available to the algorithms, which then provide insight to the effects of the change on the data sets.

The New Ruthless Economy: Work & Power in the Digital Age
by Simon Head
Published 14 Aug 2003

In my field work I found again and again that information technology was being used to renew a long-established industrial culture whose values had supposedly been displaced by those of the "new economy." These established practices included the standardization, simplification, and measurement of tasks; the preoccupation with monitoring and control; the persistence of hierarchical relationships between managers and employees; and the unceasing efforts to speed up "business processes" with "business process reengineering." These practices have not only survived in U.S. manufacturing, where they have been embedded for over a century, but they have also crossed over and colonized the service industries which now dominate the U.S. economy. The most spectacular example of this colonization is the rise of "managed care," which is essentially the industrialization and reengineering of health care.

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Relying on computers and their attendant software, reengineering and ERP automate, simplify, join together, and speed up business processes. Reengineering and ERP do this by imposing upon these processes the standardization, measurement, and control of the old industrial assembly line. Despite their heavy reliance on advanced digital technologies, the two practices therefore remain profoundly "old economy" phenomena.11 Reengineering was a buzz word of management theorists in the early and mid-1990s and then, like so many management fads, it seemed to fade away. But businesses have kept reengineering their business processes. In 1995, when the reengineering tide was high, a survey conducted by two of the Big Six accounting firms found that between 75 and 80 percent of America's largest companies had already begun reengineering and "would be increasing their commitment to it over the next few years."12 By 2000, when the practice had morphed into ERP, the leading IT consultancy, AMR Research of Boston, could state that "most companies now consider core ERP applications as part of the cost of doing business, a necessary part of the organization's infrastructure."13 There is scarcely a business activity that has escaped the attention of the reengineers.

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For the 80 percent of Americans now employed in these service occupations, reengineering in its various forms has become a dominant force in their working lives. In the mid- and late 1990s, reengineering evolved into ERP, a form of hyper-reengineering that brings together single business processes and tries to weld them into giant mega-processes. Led by the German software maker SAP, the reengineers of ERP are inspired by a vision in 5 6 THE NEW RUTHLESS ECONOMY which business processes great and small—from the ordering of office furniture to the drawing up of strategic plans—all can be made to operate together with the smooth predictability of the mass production plant. But getting these ERP systems to work is turning out to be much more difficult than corporate reengineers had expected, and the subversive figure of Rube Goldberg and his fantastic machines keep peeping out from ERP's sprawling, unwieldy structures.

Social Life of Information
by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
Published 2 Feb 2000

For them, knowledge comes more from fellow practitioners than from cross-functional connections. These contrasting sources of meaning and understanding present business process reengineering and process views of organization with difficulties for several reasons. First, business process reengineering tends to be somewhat monotheistic. There is not much room for variation in meaning in its camp. The process view is expected to explain all. Second, despite talk of rebuilding from the bottom up and empowerment, business process reengineering tends to be relentlessly top down. Indeed, some suggest that it is of necessity Page 98 a top-down, command-and-control procedure. 14 (It is not surprising that one of the most enthusiastic and successful reengineers has been the army.)

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Opportunities for them to craft, change, own, or take charge of process in any meaningful way are limited.16 While lip service is paid to them, improvisation and "local" knowledge have little place in these schema, particularly if they challenge the coordination of process. And fourth, business process reengineers tend to discourage exactly the sort of lateral links that people pursue to help make meaning. Focused on longitudinal cross-functionality, they dislike, and often try to discourage or even disempower, occupational groups, job categories, and local workplace cultures. Encouraging cross-functional links between occupations, business process reengineering tends to see the contrasting links within occupational groups as non-value adding. Here, then, we see in another form the problems that beset the worker at home alone, which we discussed in chapter 3.

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This sort of self-deception is, we suspect, especially acute in organizations who focus on process, unreconstructed or reengineered, and the information it provides to the exclusion of all else. Lateral Thrust We have described the process view as a "longitudinal" view. It seeks to overcome divisions of labor and establish cross-functional links. As such, its goals are admirable. Business processes provide the backbone of organization, structure amid the spontaneity of practice. But in pursuit of this backbone, business process reengineering has generally been indifferent to practice and even hostile to the solidarity of occupational groups and occupational cultures. Specialist in Hammer and Champy's work is almost a term of abuse. 38 Lateral ties, ties that do not follow the lines of process, are readily dismissed as "non-value adding."

Hands-On RESTful API Design Patterns and Best Practices
by Harihara Subramanian
Published 31 Jan 2019

The subsequent sections describe their needs, key drivers, capabilities, and how to use them. Beginning with service orchestration Business processes are being accomplished through a variety of service implementations. However, there's a sequence for involving services. Typically, a business process indicates the sequence of services to be leveraged. Orchestration is a way for service composition through a centralized coordinator. This coordinator/brain guides and fulfils the business process requirements, just like a conductor in an orchestra—he/she leads the team as the central authority. By employing such an intermediary among different microservices, the issues that come from tight coupling go off once for all.

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Microservice composites can run not only on resource-intensive servers but also on resource-constrained and networked devices, which is the real beauty of microservices. Tending toward the API-driven world Integration and collaboration are important needs for software to achieve business processes. Old and modern software applications run on multiple kinds of IT platforms and infrastructures. Software solutions automate most business processes. However, business applications have to spontaneously synchronize with other software packages in order to bear fruit. Processes, applications, and data have to be integrated to guarantee a comprehensive yet compact view for executives and end users.

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Choreography facilitates scalability and a shared-nothing architecture. Hence, experts and exponents are of the view that, by combining these two architectural styles, most of the emerging application scenarios can be elegantly tackled. As we all know, business processes are becoming complex due to various reasons as days go by. Though a process consolidation toward optimization happens on one side, business processes continuously grow to become complicated and long-running. Processes also have to involve geographically-distributed and different microservices. Hence, process governance and management become painful. As the number of contributing microservices is growing rapidly, the number of fine-grained interactions among microservices is bound to increase exponentially.

Mastering Structured Data on the Semantic Web: From HTML5 Microdata to Linked Open Data
by Leslie Sikos
Published 10 Jul 2015

Importing Ontologies importsOntology {_"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1#", _"http://schema.org/Person"} 139 Chapter 5 ■ Semantic Web Services Mediators can be optionally defined in the header with the usesMediator keyword to link different WSML elements (ontologies, goal, and web services) and resolve heterogeneities between the elements (see Listing 5-40). Listing 5-40. Using a Mediator usesMediator _"http://example.com/importMediator" Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) Business processes require sophisticated exception management, enterprise collaboration, task sharing, and end-to-end control. The Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL), often abbreviated as BPEL (Business Process Execution Language), is an XML-based standard language for specifying web service actions for business processes. BPEL is suitable for Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), and is implemented by industry giants such as Oracle and based on earlier execution languages, such as IBM’s Web Service Flow Language (WSFL) and Microsoft’s XLang.

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Define a long-running transaction model based on compensation actions and scoping to support failure recovery for parts of long-running business processes. 9. Use web services as the model for process decomposition and assembly. 10. Build on web services standards. In order to define logic for service interactions, BPEL defines business process behavior through web service orchestration. BPEL processes transfer information using the web service interfaces. BPEL can model web service interactions as executable business processes, as abstract business processes, or through the behavior of processes. The BPEL programming language supports 140 • Message sending and receiving • XML and WSDL typed variables • A property-based message correlation mechanism Chapter 5 ■ Semantic Web Services • An extensible language plug-in model to allow writing expressions and queries in multiple languages1 • Structured-programming constructs, such as if-then-elseif-else, while, sequence, and flow • Logic in local variables, fault-handlers, compensation-handlers, and event-handlers • Scopes to control variable access Some of the popular BPEL engines are Apache ODE, BizTalk Server, Oracle BPEL Process Manager, SAP Exchange Infrastructure, Virtuoso Universal Server, and WebSphere Process Server.

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The ten original design goals of BPEL are the following: 1. Define business processes that interact with external entities through web service operations and that manifest themselves as web services. Both the operations and the web services are defined using WSDL 1.1. 2. Define business processes based on an XML serialization. Do not define a graphical representation of processes or provide any particular design methodology for processes. 3. Define a set of web service orchestration concepts to be used by external (abstract) and internal (executable) views of a business process. 4. Provide hierarchical as well as graph-like controls. 5.

Succeeding With AI: How to Make AI Work for Your Business
by Veljko Krunic
Published 29 Mar 2020

An example here would be house cleaning robots (like Roomba [51]) or smart thermostats (like ecobee [37] and Nest [36]). In the case of a fully autonomous system, AI guides the system’s operation and makes its decisions without needing human involvement.  Automation of the business process—AI automates some steps in the business process. Sometimes this is done to replace human labor; other times, it’s done to process datasets that are so large that humans can’t possibly handle them.  AI as the product—You can package AI tools as a product and sell them to other organizations. An example is an AI product capable of recognizing images on traffic signs that will be sold to manufacturers of autonomous vehicles.

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Whatever autonomous cars we have in the future, it’s a safe bet that some of their capabilities will be fixed at the time the car is manufactured and will be difficult to change later. 2.5.3 Using AI to automate part of the business process One of the uses of AI that’s getting increasing attention in both industry and the popular press is the use of AI to perform actions that previously required humans. This section shows you how to apply AI to optimize existing business processes. AI automating part of the workflow Suppose you have a facility that’s using CCTV cameras and security guards to monitor it. Looking at the screens is part of the workflow of the security guards.

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Business Area of AI Application Decision Support System AI as Part of a Larger Product Fully Autonomous System Automation of Business Process Replacing Human Labor AI as the Product Applying AI Capabilities to Large Datasets Figure B.3 An AI taxonomy based on the high-level role it plays in business. You could use this taxonomy to guide you in eliciting available business actions you can help with AI. This figure is a repeat of figure 2.5. Answers to question 5:  In the problem formulation presented in section 6.5.5, the role of AI is limited to just rejecting the document, as in, “For sure not related to litigation.” You are automating a step in the business process, and therefore such a use of AI would best fit under the category of automation of the business process. 239 Answers to chapter 7 exercises  Note that if we were to extend the use of AI to help the attorney with all aspects of the e-discovery, then it would be better classified as a decision support system.

Monolith to Microservices: Evolutionary Patterns to Transform Your Monolith
by Sam Newman
Published 14 Nov 2019

Something like our Warehouse service may be used by all those orchestrators; such a model makes it easier for you to keep functionality in the Warehouse service itself to allow you to reuse functionality across all those flows. BPM Tools? Business process modeling (BPM) tools have been available for many years. By and large, they are designed to allow nondevelopers to define business process flows, often using visual drag-and-drop tools. The idea is developers would create the building blocks of these processes, and then nondevelopers would wire these building blocks together into the larger process flows. The use of such tools seems to line up really nicely as a way of implementing orchestrated sagas, and indeed process orchestration is pretty much the main use case for BPM tools (or, in reverse, the use of BPM tools results in you having to adopt orchestration).

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The main reason is that the central conceit—that nondevelopers will define the business process—has in my experience almost never been true. The tooling aimed at nondevelopers ends up getting used by developers, and they can have a host of issues. They often require the use of GUIs to change the flows, the flows they create may be difficult (or impossible) to version control, the flows themselves may not be designed with testing in mind, and more. If your developers are going to be implementing your business processes, let them use tooling that they know and understand and is fit for their workflows.

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Now, with this architecture as it is presented, how would you build up a mental model of what the process is supposed to be? You’d have to look at the behavior of each service in isolation and reconstitute this picture in your own head—far from a straightforward process even with a simple business process like this one. The lack of an explicit representation of our business process is bad enough, but we also lack a way of knowing what state a saga is in, which can also deny us the chance to attach compensating actions when required. We can push some responsibility to the individual services for carrying out compensating actions, but fundamentally we need a way of knowing what state a saga is in for some kinds of recovery.

Using Open Source Platforms for Business Intelligence: Avoid Pitfalls and Maximize Roi
by Lyndsay Wise
Published 16 Sep 2012

More and more companies are starting their BI implementations from a vantage point of dashboard delivery3 instead of from traditional reporting or OLAP4 cubes, with the goal of taking advantage of self-service models.5 Consequently, businesses are transitioning from historical analysis towards the monitoring of key performance indicators (KPIs) or metrics to help them monitor performance and to identify the cause and effect of various business processes and activities. The use of metrics makes business analytics more business-process centric by making sure that business decisions and the way in which they are being applied within the organization are tied to the management of business performance. For instance, sales dashboards are very popular. The general goal of many of these dashboards is to identify how products are performing within various regions and to let sales managers manage their staff.

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Depending on the structure of vendor services and longer term usage, companies may have to face the fact that these costs will increase over time, and in some cases astronomically, depending on overall use. Business process re-engineering getting things done faster unfortunately, this represents the most subjective part of any ROI and TCO calculation, but is also one of the most important soft factors of BI adoption. Here, organizations require the ability to evaluate general inefficiencies and identify how BI can help make business processes more effective. In many cases, organizations can leave this out of equations unless there are specific equations that apply or that can be identified. 5 These prices are based on my general interactions with vendors and don’t represent a study of hundreds of offerings.

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In relation to metrics, business rules help define the algorithms by looking at the calculations that are required to create the appropriate analytics. In some cases, this includes complex algorithms that are developed by IT based on the input from business, and in other cases, these business rules and calculations already exist within current spreadsheet or analytics applications. Business processes. The business processes put these factors together. In essence, they provide a broader view of how individual departments work and what that means for the broader organization. On a high level, this requires an understanding of how each department works at a management level and how that relates to other departments.

The End of Accounting and the Path Forward for Investors and Managers (Wiley Finance)
by Feng Gu
Published 26 Jun 2016

Thus, the second attribute of our proposed information system is comprehensive disclosure about the mapping of investments (outlays) to resources (assets): ■ Usefulness attribute no. 2: Inform investors with specificity about the investments (expenditures) made in the process of building the enterprise’s strategic assets (customer acquisition costs for telecom and internet companies, for example). One such investment, R&D, is currently reported in the income statement, whereas most other investments—brand creation and maintenance, technology acquisitions, employee training, consultants’ work on business processes, media content creation, IT support of business processes, and like investments—are lumped in the income statement with regular expense items, generally in SG&A, and hence are obscured from investors. We challenge anyone to explain the logic underlying the current practice of separately reporting in the income statement innocuous expenses, such as interest, but not, say, the generally larger and much more consequential information systems expenditures.

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For years we have documented in academic journals the failure of the accounting and financial reporting system to adjust to the revolutionary changes in the business models of modern corporations, from the traditional industrial, heavy asset-based model to information-intensive, intangibles-based business processes underlying modern companies, as well as documenting other accounting shortcomings. While not alone in this endeavor, our impact on accounting and financial reporting regulations has regrettably been so far very limited. But we now sense an opportunity for a significant change, motivating this book.

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The reason: During these recent decades, intangible (intellectual) assets have increasingly bolstered corporate value and competitive edge, whereas tangible (physical) assets are essentially “commodities,” equally available to all competitors, and therefore unable to create considerable value and confer competitive advantage. The patents of Apple and Pfizer, the brands of Coca-Cola and Amazon, the highly efficient business processes (organizational capital) of Walmart and Southwest Airlines drove these companies’ success, rather than their machines, physical premises, or inventory. The increasing dominance of intangibles among corporate assets is widely recognized, with its consequences having become known as the “knowledge economy,” except, that is, by accountants, who strangely persist in ignoring the intangibles insurgence.

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines
by Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby
Published 23 May 2016

This brings us to the next hurdle for smart machines: actually performing some of the tasks implied by their analysis rather than leaving them for humans to execute. Of course this is easiest when the task itself is purely digital. An example would be the task of tracking the work done and decisions made in a standard business process. So-called business process management (BPM) tools help people maintain control over complicated operations by monitoring workflows, measuring output, and analyzing performance. “Intelligent business process management” can even go so far as to intervene according to programmed rules to improve performance. But humans are still the ones designing the work processes in the first place and writing the rules for machines to enact.

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They could imagine, for example, companies that really care about their customers proactively reaching out to contact them about problems and issues before the customer seeks help. Zuin knows that the first wave of automation probably will involve taking some people out of business processes, but she hopes for a second wave involving reshaping business processes and work designs to take advantage of technologies like Amelia and IPcenter. In short, she’s pulling for augmentation rather than just automation. Entrepreneurs —We don’t think that entrepreneurs in the automated decision software space are necessarily different in systematic ways than any other type of technology entrepreneur.

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Only the step-up people have the knowledge and objectivity to consider what should be automated and what shouldn’t, and how to combine these capabilities in a way that is both efficient and still pleasing to customers and other stakeholders. What Those Who Step Up Look Like You’re a candidate for stepping up if . . . • You are in a position to have some oversight over automated systems and how they are implemented within your organization; • You are interested in technology and how it can improve your business processes; • You’re comfortable leading change initiatives and have done so successfully in the past; • You are a “big picture” person—you see the forest more than individual trees; • You are quantitatively oriented enough to assess performance and outputs of an automated system and process; • You’re not a programmer by any means, but you’re not intimidated by computer systems and are comfortable with their application; • You don’t hesitate to intervene when something isn’t working well anymore; • Your predominant goal is not to put all humans out of work.

The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology
by William Mougayar
Published 25 Apr 2016

That said, POCs can be used to narrow down a portfolio of committed projects, but you need to move beyond them. Issue 12: Business Process vs.Technology I have long argued that implementing the blockchain is 80% about business process changes and 20% about figuring out the technology behind it. Of course, this assumes that you want to be ambitious enough to tackle the required toughness in changing business processes. If you think that the blockchain technology is not ready yet, or has some weaknesses that might be solved later, then use that time to start reengineering your business process, and by the time you are done the technology will be ready. Issue 13: Use Cases Saturation Brainstorming to find use cases is good as an initial entry point, but it is not enough.

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So the tipping point was to compete by reframing the opportunity, for example, peer-to-peer lending, unconventional home loans, really fast approval cycles, efficient robot investing, and so on. Creating Opportunities It is more difficult to figure out opportunities, because that requires applying innovation, being creative, and making profound changes. These are more difficult objectives to achieve, because business process changes are involved, and it takes a longer time to change them. When you sum it up, the blockchain is about 80% business process changes, and 20% technology implementation. Creating new opportunities includes entering new markets and/or providing new services that the blockchain enables and that were not possible before. It requires a more imaginative process of dreaming up what’s possible and what wasn’t done before.

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The first chapter was essential for laying out the multiple capabilities of the blockchain technology, paving the way for your understanding of its usage, and making you believe that peer-to-peer transactions can be finalized on the blockchain, without known intermediaries, except for the blockchain itself. Blockchain is not a one-trick pony. It is a multi-headed beast that takes many forms. If you see it as a technology, then you will implement it as a technology. If you see it as a business change enabler, then you will think about business processes. If you discern the legal implications, you will be emboldened by its new governance characteristics. And if you see it as a blank sheet of paper for designing new possibilities that either didn’t exist before, or that challenge existing legacies, then you will want to get very creative at dreaming up these new opportunities.

Big Data at Work: Dispelling the Myths, Uncovering the Opportunities
by Thomas H. Davenport
Published 4 Feb 2014

Just for the historical record, FORCE stood for: • Fact-based decision making • Organization of analysts and other resources • Continual review of business assumptions and analytical ­models • Reinforcing culture of analytical decisions and “test and learn” • Embedding analytics in major business processes All of these factors are also important to big data, but many of them are discussed elsewhere in this book. So in this section I’ll consider only two of the letters—C (culture), and E (embedding analytics—and big data—in major business processes). We did end up writing chapters on those topics in Analytics at Work, so I will refer you to that book for comments on them with regard to traditional analytics. The following sections relate to some special issues for big data.

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And we know more and more about the irrational decision processes that many humans Chapter_06.indd 149 03/12/13 12:24 PM 150 big data @ work employ; why wouldn’t we prefer more automated analytical decisions in many cases? Analytics in the small data era were just beginning to become more automated when big data came along. Now we have no choice but to embed big data–based analyses into business processes. Some ­analysts refer to this as smart BPM (business process management); others, such as James Taylor, are advocates of the term enterprise decision management. Regardless of what we call it, it needs to happen more in the future. It’s already true in many aspects of the financial services industry, but it needs to move into many other industries as well.8 Take, for example, an application that manages arrivals and departures at Heathrow Airport, created by Heathrow Airport Holdings, previously known as the British Airport Authority.9 The airport gets 65 million passengers a year and runs at 98 percent runway capacity for its thirteen hundred flights per day, so making good decisions rapidly about what to do with arriving and departing planes is critical to its success.

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An analyst can build models, run them, observe what happens, and if he doesn’t like something, change it, all in one minute. This cycle used to take eight hours—if you could do it at all. The train of thought is much more continuous, which means a higher quality of research.”5 If your company is primarily interested in time reduction, you need to work much more closely with the owner of the relevant business process. A key question is, what are you going to do with all the time saved in the process? Respectable business-oriented answers include: • We’re going to be able to run a lot more models and better understand the drivers of our performance in key areas. • We’re going to iterate and tune the model much more frequently to get a better solution.

Beautiful security
by Andy Oram and John Viega
Published 15 Dec 2009

Send email to index@oreilly.com. 269 3-D Secure protocol, 77 e-commerce security, 84 security pitfall in, 71 Ayres, Ian, 164 Azure cloud operating system, 152 B B.J.’s Wholesale Club, 50 backend control systems, 18–20 backward compatibility LANMAN password encoding, 6 learned helplessness and, 2 legacy systems, 7 PGP issues, 117 balance in information security, 202–207 banking industry (see financial institutions) banking trojans, 141, 249 banner ads exploit-laden, 89–92, 143 honeyclients and, 143 banner farms, 98, 99 Barings Bank security breach, 38–49 Barnes & Noble, 50 Bass-O-Matic cipher, 117 behavioral analytics, 254 Bell Labs background, 171, 173 software development lifecycle, 174–178 Bellis, Ed, 73–86 Bernstein, Peter, 33 Bidzos, Jim, 117, 118 Biham, Eli, 117 biometrics, 37–38 BITS Common Criteria for Software, 193 Black Hat Conference, 161 blacklisting, 252, 254 Blaster virus, 248 blogging, 166 BoA Factory site, 65 Bork, Robert, 241 Boston Market, 50 botnets army building software, 67 attack infrastructure, 66 challenges in detecting, 231 client-side vulnerability, 131 CPC advertising, 100, 101 cyber underground and, 64 functionality, 64, 69, 230 peer-to-peer structure, 66 BPM (Business Process Management) levels of effective programs, 157 multisite security, 156–158 potential for, 154–158 supply chain composition and, 155 270 INDEX BPMI (Business Process Management Initiative), 157 breaches (see security breaches) bridge CAs, 111 Briggs, Matt, 140 brute-force attacks, 28, 251 buffer overflows security vulnerability, 15, 131 SQL Slammer worm, 225 Business Process Management (see BPM) Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI), 157 business rules engines, 157 C California AB 1950, 207 California SB 1386 balance in information security, 203–205 on data sharing, 36, 38 on reporting breaches, 55 passage of, 207 call options, 40 Callas, Jon, 107–130 Capture-HPC honeyclient, 138, 145 CardSystems security breach, 211 Carnegie Mellon CMMI process, 185 Carr, Nicholas, 157 Carter Doctrine, 201 CAs (see certificate authorities) cashiers (cyber underground) defined, 65 drop accounts, 70 CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), 36 Center for Internet Security (CIS), 45 Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), 201 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 36 certificate authorities, 112 (see also introducers in PGP) certification support, 111 DSG support, 203 establishing trust relationships, 27 hierarchical trust, 109 SET requirements, 78 certificates, 109 (see also specific types of certificates) defined, 111 revoking, 120–122 self-signed, 109 verifying, 109 Web of Trust support, 113 certification defined, 111 OpenPGP colloquialism for, 112 OpenPGP support, 111 CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act), 207 Charney, Scott, 201 Chuvakin, Anton, 213–224, 226 Cigital, 171, 188 Citi, 79 CLASP methodology, 187, 188 click fraud botnet support, 66, 101 CPA advertising, 102 federal litigation, 102 client-side vulnerabilities, 133 (see also honeyclients) background, 131–132 malware exploitation, 15, 132, 141–143 naïveté about, 8–9 Clinton, Bill, 17 cloud computing applying security to, 152 builders versus breakers, 151 defined, 150 identity management services, 154 CNCI (Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative), 202 CNN network, 16 COBIT regulation, 214 Code Red virus, 248 Commerce, Department of, 180 commercial software (see software acquisition) Commission Junction affiliate network, 102 Commission on Cyber Security for the 44th Presidency, 201 Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database, 131 communication cyber underground infrastructure, 65, 66 information security and, 207–211 Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI), 202 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), 207 confidentiality of data, 85 confirmation traps defined, 10 intelligence analysts, 12 overview, 10–11 rationalizing capabilities, 13 stale threat modeling, 12 contagion worm exploit, 131 cookies, stuffed, 102 cost per action (see CPA advertising) cost per click (see CPC advertising) Cost Per Thousand Impressions (see CPM advertising) COTS (see software acquisition) coverage metrics, 46 CPA advertising functionality, 100 inflating costs, 102–103 stuffed cookies, 102 CPC advertising click-fraud detection services, 101 functionality, 100–101 syndication partnerships, 100 CPM advertising basis of, 98 fraud-prone, 100–103 credit card information as shared secret, 75–76, 85 card associations and, 82 checking site authenticity, 26 consumers and, 81, 83 current market value, 66 CV2 security code, 76 cyber underground and, 65 devaluing data, 71 e-commerce security, 73–75 financial institutions, 82 identity theft, 23–25 merchants and service providers, 81, 83 PCI protection, 44 proposed payment model, 86 spyware stealing, 69 SQL injection attacks, 69 TJX security breach, 50 virtual cards, 79 cross-certification, 111 cross-site scripting, 188 crowdsourcing, 161 Crypto Wars, 118 CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies), 201 culture, organizational, 200–202 cumulative trust, 110 Curphey, Margaret, 169 Curphey, Mark, 147–169 CV2 security code, 76 CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) database, 131 cyber underground attack infrastructure, 66 attack methods, 68–70 cashiers, 65 combating, 71–72 communication infrastructure, 65 CSI-FBI Study, 63 data exchange example, 67 fraudsters and attack launchers, 65 goals of attacks, 63, 226, 230 information dealers, 64 INDEX 271 information sources, 68 makeup and infrastructure, 64–66 malware producers, 64 money laundering and, 70 payoffs, 66–71 resource dealers, 64 Cydoor ad network, 90 D Danford, Robert, 144 Data Encryption Standard (DES), 4 data integrity, 85 Data Loss Database (DataLossDB), 36, 55–58 data responsibility incentive/reward structure, 72 social metric for, 72 data theft as cottage industry, 67 botnet support, 66 combating, 71 from merchant stores, 68 incident detection considerations, 237 spyware and, 69 data translucency additional suggestions, 245 advantages, 244 disadvantages, 245 overview, 239–242 personal data and, 244 real-life example, 243 data-sharing mechanisms DHS support, 36 security flaws in, 35 databases data translucency in, 239–246 logging support, 221 security breaches and, 239 Dave & Buster’s, 50 Davies, Donald, 148 DCS systems, 18 DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks on major ISPs, 16 botnet support, 66, 231 client-side vulnerability, 131 honeyclients and, 138 LANs and, 28 deceptive advertisements, 94–98 Defense, Department of, 213 Dell computers, 131 Deloitte & Touche, LLP, 201 denial of service (see DDoS) Department of Agriculture, 196 Department of Commerce, 180 Department of Defense, 213 Department of Homeland Security, 36 272 INDEX deperimeterization, 156 DES (Data Encryption Standard), 4 designated revokers, 121 DHCP lease logs, 237 DHS (Department of Homeland Security), 36 Diffie, Whitfield, 112 digital certificates (see certificates) Digital Point Systems, 102 Digital Signature Guidelines (DSG), 202–203 direct trust defined, 109 root certificates, 110 directionality, 227 distributed denial of service (see DDoS) distribution channels, 166 DKIM email-authentication, 124 Dobbertin, Hans, 119 doing the right thing in information security, 211– 212 drop accounts, 70 Drucker, Peter, 163 DSG (Digital Signature Guidelines), 202–203 DSW Shoe Warehouse, 50 Dublin City University, 144 Dunphy, Brian, 225–237 Durick, J.D., 138 dynamic testing, 190 E e-commerce security 3-D Secure protocol, 76–78 analyzing current practices, 74–75 authorizing transactions, 84 broken incentives, 80–83 confidentiality of data, 85 consumer authentication, 83 data integrity, 85 exploiting website vulnerabilities, 68 friendly fraud and, 84 merchant authentication, 83 new security model, 83–86 not sharing authentication data, 84 portability of authentication, 85 primary challenges, 73 proposed payment model, 86 SET protocol, 78 shared secrets and, 75–76, 85 virtual cards, 79 EAP (Extensible Authentication Protocol), 51 Earned Value Management (EVM), 173 eBay CPA advertising, 102 DDoS attacks on, 16 principle of reliability, 160 ECPA (Electronic Communications Privacy Act), 207 Edelman, Benjamin, 89–105, 210, 250 Edwards, Betsy, 178 Einstein, Albert, 147 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), 207 email log handling, 221 malware exploits, 248 EMBED tag, 94 encryption LAN Manager sequence, 4 PGP support, 107, 116–120 security certificates and, 22, 24 SET support, 78 Encyclopædia Britannica, 94–98 event logs (see logs) EVM (Earned Value Management), 173 executables, malware exploits and, 143 exportable signatures, 125 extended introducers, 123 Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP), 51 F Facebook social network, 159, 165, 166 failing closed, 8 failing open, 8 false negatives, 236 false positives, 217, 236 Federal Sentencing Guidelines, 209 Federal Trade Commission (see FTC) financial institutions banking trojans, 141, 249 credit card information, 82 cyber attacks on, 68 drop accounts, 70 exploiting website vulnerabilities, 68, 187 federated authentication programs, 210 infosecurity and, 208 Finjan security firm, 65 Finney, Hal, 117 firewalls energy company vulnerabilities, 18 host logging, 232 log handling, 216, 221 need for new strategies, 248 SQL Slammer worm, 225 watch lists, 231 Flash ActionScript, 93 Forester, C.

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Identity management services such as OpenID and Windows Live ID operate in the cloud, allowing them to bind users together across domains. Connecting People, Process, and Technology: The Potential for Business Process Management Virtually every company will be going out and empowering their workers with a certain set of tools, and the big difference in how much value is received from that will be how much the company steps back and really thinks through their business processes, thinking through how their business can change, how their project management, their customer feedback, their planning cycles can be quite different than they ever were before.

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Business rules engines may analyze asset management systems and decide to take an analysis query that comes in from San Francisco and route it to China so it can be processed overnight and produce an answer for the corporate analysts first thing in the morning. This same fundamental change to the business process of security research will likely be extended to the intelligence feeds powering security technology, such as anti-virus engines, intrusion detection systems, and code review scanners. BPM software will be able to facilitate new business models, microchunking business processes to deliver the end solution faster, better, or more cheaply. This is potentially a major paradigm shift in many of the security technologies we have come to accept, decoupling the content from the delivery mechanism.

Digital Accounting: The Effects of the Internet and Erp on Accounting
by Ashutosh Deshmukh
Published 13 Dec 2005

This warehouse can contain business rules, best practices, business process information and even decision support systems. Data can be in text or multimedia formats. This module can also be used to create a training and documentation database. This enterprise-wide database can be used to cut down on learning curve and training costs. Another building block of SRM tools is the SAP exchange infrastructure. This exchange infrastructure supports different standards such as XML, WSDL and SOAP, along with different communication protocols. The objective is to enable collaborative business processes by cutting across various systems and protocols used within the organization.

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Financial supply chain is optimized by automating, outsourcing Web enabling and rationalizing financial workflows and business processes. The tools to achieve these objectives are available. However, the costeffectiveness and efficacy of these tools is not proven. The optimal investment in information technology for financial supply chain management is a difficult question to answer, and the answers are probably unique for each organization. It seems that consultants and software vendors will thrive in this area for a while! Corporate Performance Management So far, a number of philosophies and tools that manage a variety of business processes were explored; for example, ERP, CRM, SRM, SCM, BI, treasury management, and planning and budgeting software.

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FEDI formats are now capable of handling payment and collection activities in the business world. The Internet and Digital Accounting The advent of the Internet and e-commerce/e-business has continued and in many ways accelerated the trend.1 The Internet and e-commerce not only promised to change intraand inter-business processes but also challenged the very foundations of established business practices. All business areas, accounting and finance included, came under intense scrutiny as dot com businesses mushroomed. The rise and fall of the e-revolution had been spectacular and breathtaking. The hype and hysteria surrounding these new technologies have been replaced with more realistic appraisal of their costs and benefits.

Business Metadata: Capturing Enterprise Knowledge
by William H. Inmon , Bonnie K. O'Neil and Lowell Fryman
Published 15 Feb 2008

First, let’s define some of the critical terms of stewardship and ownership. 3.3.1 Ownership Definition Often business managers desire full control over all resources necessary to maintain and monitor the business processes, as well as the data and metadata for the IT applications. The potential exists that a business unit can “own” the processes, procedures, and IT applications used only within their organization. Ownership, therefore, is defined as the process of exercising sole authority over the resources being governed. However, ownership is not possible for enterprise-level business processes, data, applications, or metadata. As enterprises mature, it seems natural that more business applications develop into enterprise-level applications.

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Business Metadata Praise for Business Metadata “Despite the presence of some excellent books on what is essentially “technical” metadata, up until now there has been a dearth of wellpresented material to help address the growing need for interaction at the conceptual and semantic levels between data professionals and the business clients they support. In Business Metadata, Bill, Bonnie, and Lowell provide the means for bridging the gap between the sometimes “fuzzy” human perception of data that fuels business processes and the rigid information management models used by business applications. Look to the future: next generation business intelligence, enterprise content management and search, the semantic web all will depend on business metadata. Read this book!” —David Loshin, President, Knowledge Integrity Incorporated These authors have written a book that ventures into new territory for data and information management.

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Defining metadata quality should be one of the early activities of the Business Metadata Stewardship Council. The level of data quality can be different for local departmental metadata, for example, Employee Annual Reviews, versus enterprise metadata, such as Customer Call Management. In addition, the level of data quality for metadata may differ based on the importance of the business processes supported by that metadata. The Data Warehousing Institute has published a data quality report4 that many organizations follow when defining their data quality programs. Organizations considering the following quality components for data should also be considering these conditions for each metadata object. 1.

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future
by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson
Published 26 Jun 2017

Hammer and Champy’s basic message was that companies should think of themselves not as conducting tasks within departments (for example, buying raw material within a purchasing department), but instead as executing business processes—such as taking, assembling, and shipping a customer’s order—that inherently cut across departments. This sounds obvious now, but at the time it was considered both novel and important. Peter Drucker, the preeminent business guru of the twentieth century, said at the time, “Reengineering is new, and it has to be done.” The process lens typically revealed many tasks that were unnecessary and could be eliminated, or as Hammer and Champy put it, obliterated. The business process reengineering movement was accelerated in the mid-1990s by two advances: enterprise-wide information systems and the World Wide Web.

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The web enabled companies to extend their business processes beyond the four walls of the company and all the way to the consumer—a trend that became known as e-commerce. People started to use the web not only to search for and learn about a company’s products, but also to order and pay for them. This combination of efficiency and convenience has proved irresistible. Just ten years after the launch of Netscape, e-commerce accounted for approximately 10% of nonfood, nonautomotive retail sales in the United States. For two decades, then, web-enabled enterprise systems have been facilitating more and more business processes by doing the routine things: keeping track of account balances and transactions, calculating the right quantity and timing for raw-material deliveries, sending paychecks to employees, letting customers select and pay for products, and so on.

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Acton, Brian, 140 additive manufacturing, 107; See also 3D printing Adore Me, 62 adults, language learning by, 68–69 advertising content platforms and, 139 data-driven decision making for, 48, 50–51 Facebook and, 8–9 radio airplay as, 148 advertising agencies, 48 advertising revenue Android as means of increasing, 166 Craigslist’s effect on, 139 free apps and, 162 print media and, 130, 132, 139 African Americans identifying gifted students, 40 and search engine bias, 51–52 aggregators, 139–40 AGI (artificial general intelligence), 71 agriculture automated milking systems, 101 drones and, 99–100 “food computers,” 272 machine learning and, 79–80 robotics and, 101–2 Airbnb future of, 319–20 hotel experience vs., 222–23 lack of assets owned by, 6–7 limits to effects on hotel industry, 221–23 network effects, 193 as O2O platform, 186 peer reviews, 209–10 rapid growth of, 9 as two-sided network, 214 value proposition compared to Uber, 222 Airline Deregulation Act, 181n airlines, revenue management by, 181–82 air travel, virtualization in, 89 Akerlof, George, 207, 210 albums, recorded music, 145 algorithms; See also data-driven decision making bias in systems, 51–53 and Cambrian Explosion of robotics, 95–96 comparing human decisions to, 56 O2O platforms and, 193 Quantopian and, 267–70 superiority to System 1 reasoning, 38–41 “algo traders,” 268; See also automated investing Alibaba, 6–8 Alipay, 174 AlphaGo, 4–6, 14, 74, 80 Alter, Lloyd, 90 Amazon automatic price changes, 47 bar code reader app, 162 data-driven product recommendations, 47 development of Web Services, 142–43 Mechanical Turk, 260 as stack, 295 warehouse robotics, 103 Amazon EC2, 143 Amazon Go, 90–91 Amazon S3, 143 Amazon Web Services (AWS), 75, 142–43 American Airlines (AA), 182 amino acid creation, 271–72 analog copies, digital copies vs., 136 “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, The” (Page and Brin), 233 Anderson, Chris, 98–100 Anderson, Tim, 94 Andreessen, Marc on crowdfunding, 262–63 and Netscape, 34 as self-described “solutionist,” 297 on Teespring, 263–64 Android Blackberry vs., 168 contribution to Google revenue/profits, 204 iOS vs., 166–67 Angry Birds, 159–61 anonymity, digital currency and, 279–80 Antikythera mechanism, 66 APIs (application programming interfaces), 79 apophenia, 44n apparel, 186–88 Apple; See also iPhone acquiring innovation by acquiring companies, 265 and industrywide smartphone profits, 204 leveraging of platforms by, 331 Postmates and, 173, 185 profitability (2015), 204 revenue from paid apps, 164 “Rip, Mix, Burn” slogan, 144n as stack, 295 application programming interfaces (APIs), 79 AppNexus, 139 apps; See also platforms for banking, 89–90 demand curve and, 157–61 iPhone, 151–53 App Store, 158 Apter, Zach, 183 Aral, Sinan, 33 Archilochus, 60–61 architecture, computer-designed, 118 Aristophanes, 200 Arnaout, Ramy, 253 Arthur, Brian, 47–48 artificial general intelligence (AGI), 71 artificial hands, 272–75 artificial intelligence; See also machine learning current state of, 74–76 defined, 67 early attempts, 67–74 implications for future, 329–30 rule-based, 69–72 statistical pattern recognition and, 72–74 Art of Thinking Clearly, The (Dobelli), 43 arts, digital creativity in, 117–18 Ashenfelter, Orley, 38–39 ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits), 287 assets and incentives, 316 leveraging with O2O platforms, 196–97 replacement by platforms, 6–10 asymmetries of information, 206–10 asymptoting, 96 Atkeson, Andrew, 21 ATMs, 89 AT&T, 96, 130 August (smart door lock), 163 Austin, Texas, 223 Australia, 100 Authorize.Net, 171 Autodesk, 114–16, 119, 120 automated investing, 266–70 automation, effect on employment/wages, 332–33 automobiles, See cars Autor, David, 72, 101 background checks, 208, 209 back-office work, 82–83 BackRub, 233 Baidu, 192 Bakos, Yannis, 147n Bakunin, Mikhail, 278 Ballmer, Steve, 151–52 bandwagon effect, 217 banking, virtualization and, 89–90, 92 Bank of England, 280n bank tellers, 92 Barksdale, Jim, 145–46 barriers to entry, 96, 220 Bass, Carl, 106–7, 119–20 B2B (business-to-business) services, 188–90 Beastmode 2.0 Royale Chukkah, 290 Behance, 261 behavioral economics, 35, 43 Bell, Kristen, 261, 262 Benioff, Mark, 84–85 Benjamin, Robert, 311 Benson, Buster, 43–44 Berlin, Isiah, 60n Berners-Lee, Tim, 33, 34n, 138, 233 Bernstein, Michael, 260 Bertsimas, Dimitris, 39 Bezos, Jeff, 132, 142 bias of Airbnb hosts, 209–10 in algorithmic systems, 51–53 digital design’s freedom from, 116 management’s need to acknowledge, 323–24 and second-machine-age companies, 325 big data and Cambrian Explosion of robotics, 95 and credit scores, 46 and machine learning, 75–76 biology, computational, 116–17 Bird, Andrew, 121 Bitcoin, 279–88 China’s dominance of mining, 306–7 failure mode of, 317 fluctuation of value, 288 ledger for, 280–87 as model for larger economy, 296–97 recent troubles with, 305–7 and solutionism, 297 “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” (Nakamoto), 279 BlaBlaCar, 190–91, 197, 208 BlackBerry, 168, 203 Blitstein, Ryan, 117 blockchain as challenge to stacks, 298 and contracts, 291–95 development and deployment, 283–87 failure of, 317 and solutionism, 297 value as ledger beyond Bitcoin, 288–91 Blockchain Revolution (Tapscott and Tapscott), 298 Bloomberg Markets, 267 BMO Capital Markets, 204n Bobadilla-Suarez, Sebastian, 58n–59n Bock, Laszlo, 56–58 bonds, 131, 134 bonuses, credit card, 216 Bordeaux wines, 38–39 Boudreau, Kevin, 252–54 Bowie, David, 131, 134, 148 Bowie bonds, 131, 134 brand building, 210–11 Brat, Ilan, 12 Bredeche, Jean, 267 Brin, Sergey, 233 Broward County, Florida, 40 Brown, Joshua, 81–82 Brusson, Nicolas, 190 Burr, Donald, 177 Bush, Vannevar, 33 business conference venues, 189 Business Insider, 179 business processes, robotics and, 88–89 business process reengineering, 32–35 business travelers, lodging needs of, 222–23 Busque, Leah, 265 Buterin, Vitalik, 304–5 Byrne, Patrick, 290 Cairncross, Francis, 137 California, 208; See also specific cities Calo, Ryan, 52 Cambrian Explosion, 94–98 Cameron, Oliver, 324 Camp, Garrett, 200 capacity, perishing inventory and, 181 Card, David, 40 Care.com, 261 cars automated race car design, 114–16 autonomous, 17, 81–82 decline in ownership of, 197 cash, Bitcoin as equivalent to, 279 Casio QV-10 digital camera, 131 Caves, Richard, 23 Caviar, 186 CDs (compact discs), 145 cell phones, 129–30, 134–35; See also iPhone; smartphones Census Bureau, US, 42 central bankers, 305 centrally planned economies, 235–37 Chabris, Chris, 3 Chambers, Ephraim, 246 Champy, James, 32, 34–35, 37, 59 Chandler, Alfred, 309n Chase, 162 Chase Paymentech, 171 check-deposit app, 162 children, language learning by, 67–69 China Alibaba in, 7–8 concentration of Bitcoin wealth in, 306–7 and failure mode of Bitcoin, 317 mobile O2O platforms, 191–92 online payment service problems, 172 robotics in restaurants, 93 Shanghai Tower design, 118 Xiaomi, 203 Chipotle, 185 Choudary, Sangeet, 148 Christensen, Clay, 22, 264 Churchill, Winston, 301 Civil Aeronautics Board, US, 181n Civis Analytics, 50–51 Clash of Clans, 218 classified advertising revenue, 130, 132, 139 ClassPass, 205, 210 and economics of perishing inventory, 180–81 future of, 319–20 and problems with Unlimited offerings, 178–80, 184 and revenue management, 181–84 user experience, 211 ClassPass Unlimited, 178–79 Clear Channel, 135 clinical prediction, 41 Clinton, Hillary, 51 clothing, 186–88 cloud computing AI research, 75 APIs and, 79 Cambrian Explosion of robotics, 96–97 platform business, 195–96 coaches, 122–23, 334 Coase, Ronald, 309–13 cognitive biases, 43–46; See also bias Cohen, Steven, 270 Coles, John, 273–74 Collison, John, 171 Collison, Patrick, 171–74 Colton, Simon, 117 Columbia Record Club, 131 commoditization, 220–21 common sense, 54–55, 71, 81 companies continued dominance of, 311–12 continued relevance of, 301–27 DAO as alternative to, 301–5 decreasing life spans of, 330 economics of, 309–12 future of, 319–26 leading past the standard partnership, 323–26 management’s importance in, 320–23 markets vs., 310–11 as response to inherent incompleteness of contracts, 314–17 solutionism’s alternatives to, 297–99 TCE and, 312–15 and technologies of disruption, 307–9 Compass Fund, 267 complements (complementary goods) defined, 156 effect on supply/demand curves, 157–60 free, perfect, instant, 160–63 as key to successful platforms, 169 and open platforms, 164 platforms and, 151–68 and revenue management, 183–84 Stripe and, 173 complexity theory, 237 Composite Fund (D.

Becoming Data Literate: Building a great business, culture and leadership through data and analytics
by David Reed
Published 31 Aug 2021

For this reason, data is often incubated (and constrained) within an existing function, such as marketing or finance, while it begins the task of establishing standards, common data models and integration of data sets, and then feeds back reports, insights and data products to the business. Research carried out by DataIQ in 2020 revealed that these internal business processes and operations were as likely to be the focus of the data office as more external customer-facing activities. When asked about their business purpose for collecting personal data, out of the top four reasons given, two were customer-oriented – optimising the customer journey (80.6%) and tailoring content to each individual (61.2%) – while two were entirely business process-oriented – fuelling analytics (73.5%) and measuring business performance (69.4%). This demonstrates both the breadth of tasks in which the data office may find itself involved and also the key role data now plays in driving the business and its decision-making.

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The approach taken at that telco was to build up a fund by including an incremental levy or data tax on all business projects in the run-up to and during digital transformations. Just like the tolls paid by traffic to cross a real bridge and thereby pay for the cost of its construction, gaining smaller contributions towards a larger project means that no single business process or department leader is left facing the whole bill. This can also establish the data office as a stand-alone function with cross-functional support from within the business, giving it greater independence and resilience. Accelerating growth of digital technology and its adoption by organisations, governments and consumers will be the indisputable trend of the 2020s.

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For example, each business function might create its own BI manager role in order to remove that task from other roles. The closer to the point of use that a task sits, the more likely it is to have a role created for it (e.g. marketing will often have its own database manager), while tasks that sit further away from a business process often do not have a specific role created for them (e.g. data governance). As a consequence, task duplication is almost inevitable within a conventional organisation (see Table 2.2), while task neglect is typical because of a lack of function ownership. Table 2.2: Data tasks within conventional organisations Task Role Function Data validation Data quality manager Data management, Marketing Privacy policy definition In-house counsel, data protection officer Legal, compliance, DPO office Data mastering MDM manager Data management, Line of business Metadata management None None Role duplication is an extension of task duplication within conventional organisational structures.

Industry 4.0: The Industrial Internet of Things
by Alasdair Gilchrist
Published 27 Jun 2016

This enables customization of products during manufacturing, which can lead to profitable production of even lot sizes of one. Of course, there is a slight issue here, as business processes require a flow of tasks with the output from one task being the input of the next task. Traditionally, on a production line that would be relatively straightforward and a paper exercise. However, smart manufacturing and smart parts and products can influence the actions of the production line, which means the business processes become more complex. Business Processes Industrial Internet business processes will need to cater to parallel processing, real-time responses to process control, and collaborative machines (CPS) on the production line.

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They were determined to interconnect and test wherever possible multiprotocol interoperability with real devices through all the possible different couplings of protocols (among the selected standards). Also, they wanted to test and demonstrate various innovative Internet-based application scenarios related to the Internet of Things, including business processes related scenarios. In addition, they planned to test and demonstrate the potential of the multi-protocol card, IPv6 proxy’s for non-IP devices, and estimate the potential scalability of the system. Furthermore, they would deploy and validate the system in a real testbed environment with real end users in order to test the various scenarios.

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There are many industrial systems deployed today that are interconnected (M2M) and they combine a mixture of sensors, actuators, logic components, and networks to allow them to interconnect and to function. The difference with the Industrial Internet approach is that these industrial systems (ISs) will become Industrial Internet systems (IISs) as they become connected to the Internet and integrate with enterprise systems, for the purpose of enhanced business process flow and analysis. The IISs will provide operational data via its sensors to enterprise back-end systems for advanced data processing and cloud-based advanced historical and predicative analytics. The advanced cloud services will drive optimized decision-making and operational efficiencies and facilitate the collaboration between autonomous industrial control systems.

CTOs at Work
by Scott Donaldson , Stanley Siegel and Gary Donaldson
Published 13 Jan 2012

Donaldson: In your career path toward becoming a CTO, what have you found that captures your imagination and curiosity the most? Kaplow: So there's technology for technology's sake, right? This is the one-hand-clapping problem. But what really intrigues me is how to manage the technical business process. How do you work with people and organizations to get them to use new technology? How do you help the technical business process move forward to help the client manage the change required to incorporate technology or change the business processes that they're using to deploy technology or provide services? So that's where a lot of the teaching role and the mentoring skills come into play. In a lot of cases it's sort of a force-of-wills thing, especially in the position I'm in now, because I'm not a government employee.

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Donaldson: That's an interesting point—there's an enormous amount of data and information that you're collecting. The process by which you synthesize that into something and distill it into something is bite-sizable. Are there special technologies that you're supporting to do that or is it more of a business process procedure supported with run-of-the-mill-type technology to do that? Hrelic: It's a combination of both. If the business processes are not right or are broken, no technology is going to make it work. So we try to look for technologies that make it easier, but it's a constant battle, and it's very difficult, especially since we're talking about traditional publishing, which is writing and a combination of voice and video.

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When I became an IBM Fellow, I moved up and was the chief architect for the IBM Software Group as a whole. About two days after that, I get called in to review a project to build a B2B (business to business) system based on WebSphere and Software Group products. It took 14 physical machines to build and run the “Hello World” business process. I didn't know what the right answer was, but I knew it was less than 14. When I left, it would all run on a ThinkPad. It was a big ThinkPad, but it would all run on a ThinkPad. And that was all just advice and consent, and the fact that when I gave advice and consent, my technical colleagues would hash it out and figure out how to do it; then it was game time.

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes
by Phillip Brown , Hugh Lauder and David Ashton
Published 3 Nov 2010

The experiment with back-office functions reflected the growth in offshore call centers and business process outsourcing (BPO). There was little point using staff in New York or London to process invoices or very basic data-entry jobs when it could be done in real time in India or Vietnam at a fraction of the price. Although the company was in the early stages of developing wealth management and investment banking within the country, there was rapid growth of the middle office that includes research and analytical jobs for its New York and London offices. “For five analysts in New York or London, you could have at least fifteen in India.” Before 2000, business process and analytical work were done close to the main business centers, but with the rapid development of Internet capability, secure networks, and standardized software, they have drawn a clearer distinction between work and place.

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In much the same way that workers in emerging economies were assumed to lag far behind on the evolutionary path to knowledge work, Chinese and Indian companies were also assumed to stand little chance of competing against the technological superiority of American enterprise. Yet Chinese and Indian companies are using state-of-the-art technologies, business processes, and management techniques combined with The Quality-Cost Revolution 55 low-cost innovation strategies that enable them to compete for profits with American corporations for the full length of the value chain. The growing capacity of companies from emerging economies to move up the value chain and compete in world markets was described by an Indian executive working for an American consultancy company.

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Its application has become more widespread with consequences for employees in a wide range of industries and occupations. The Industrialization of Knowledge Work Leading consultancy companies are playing an important role in applying digital Taylorism to a range of service industries, including retail, health, and finance, that typically focus on business processes, including receiving orders, marketing services, selling products, delivering 74 The Global Auction services, distributing products, invoicing for services, and accounting for payments. Digital Taylorism enables innovation to be translated into routines that might require some degree of education but not the kind of creativity and independence of judgment often associated with the knowledge economy.

Reactive Messaging Patterns With the Actor Model: Applications and Integration in Scala and Akka
by Vaughn Vernon
Published 16 Aug 2015

One way is to create a domain-specific language (DSL) and interpreter. The DSL is itself the high-level programming language that allows you to describe the rules of various business processes. One such language is Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), and there are several tools available that read, interpret, and manage business processes that are defined with it. When using such an approach, the Process Manager itself cannot be a core part of your process definition because the interpreter must be able to manage a wide range of business processes. That kind of Process Manager is not specific to your business domain. In other words, the Process Manager itself is highly reusable, in a similar way as any high-level programming language compiler/interpreter.

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See Reactive applications routing complex application processes, 23 why software development is hard, 1–5 Architectural routers, 228 Artificial intelligence, reactive systems used by, 7 Asynchronous messaging, characteristics of actors and actor systems, 13–14 At-least-once delivery in Guaranteed Delivery, 177, 179–183 Transactional Client/Actor and, 353 At-most-once delivery purging messages and, 414 Transactional Client/Actor and, 353 Atomic Scala (Eckel and Marsh), 29 Authenticator filter, 136, 138 Availability, trade-off with consistency, 115–116 Await conditions, in Dynamic Router example, 239–240 B Backpressure, reducing demand on cluster-aware routers, 98–99 BalancingDispatcher, standard Akka dispatchers, 375 Batch-Receiver, Message Sequence and, 218 Batch-Sender, Message Sequence and, 218 BDD (Behavior-Driven Development), 101–102 Behavioral tests, 101–102 Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), 101–102 Body, message parts, 130 Bottlenecks, Message Brokers and, 309 Bounded Context, Domain-Driven Design (DDD), 334, 345 BoundedMailbox, 411 BPEL (Business Process Execution Language), 292 Bridges. See Message Bridges Bus. See Message Bus Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), 292 C C# actors, 420–425 Dotsero toolkit for, 417 C++, Smalltalk compared with, 29 Cache, CPU, 107, 111–112 Canonical Data Models Message Bus and Message Broker dependence on, 310 uses of, 333–334 Canonical Message Model actor systems requiring a canon, 335–336 case classes, 131–132, 134 defined, 313–314 Message Bus interface for services sharing, 192–193 overview of, 333–335 TradingBus and, 194–198 CAP theorem (Brewer), 115–116 Case classes Canonical Message Model, 131–132 in defining message types, 42 local event stream of Publish-Subscribe Channel, 156–158 matching, 133–134 in Recipient List example, 247 Scala tutorial, 39–40 Catchall actor, in Dynamic Router example, 240 Causal consistency, 402, 405 Channel Adapters data format translation and, 310 Message Bus and, 192 Message Envelope as, 313 overview of, 183–185 packing/unpacking trading messages, 135 translating data, 143 Channel Purger defined, 393 example, 414–415 overview of, 414 Channels.

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Depending on the kind of business, you can anticipate some of the required application software. Do any of the following application categories overlap with your enterprise? Accounting, Accounts (Financial and others), Aerospace Systems Design, Automated Trading, Banking, Budgeting, Business Intelligence, Business Process, Claims, Clinical, Collaboration, Communications, Computer-Aided Design (CAD), Content/Document Management, Customer Relationship Management, Electronic Health Record, Electronic Trading, Engineering, Enterprise Resource Planning, Finance, Healthcare Treatment, Human Resource Management, Identity and Access Management, Invoicing, Inventory, IT and Datacenter Management, Laboratory, Life Sciences, Maintenance, Manufacturing, Medical Diagnosis, Networking, Order Placement, Payroll, Pharmaceuticals, Publishing, Shipping, Project Management, Purchasing Support, Policy Management, Risk Assessment, Risk Management, Sales Forecasting, Scheduling and Appointment Management, Text Processing, Time Management, Transportation, Underwriting However incomplete the list, much of this software can be acquired as licensed commodities.

The Art of Scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise
by Martin L. Abbott and Michael T. Fisher
Published 1 Dec 2009

There are two basic forms that a technology organization can take within a business. One is to be a support service where technology supports the business processes of manufacturing, sales, or any number of other business lines. The other form that technology can take within a business is to be the product for the business, such as with SaaS, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), hardware product companies, or Web 2.0 companies. Being a support service and supporting other key business processes is a fine calling. As a technologist, being the product that the business is founded around, while often more stressful, is great as well.

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See also X-axis; Y-axis; Z-axis. initial point, 327 point of intersection, 327 Axes of scale, architectural principles, 203, 207–208 B Back office grids, 464 Back office IT systems AKF Scale Cube for applications, 352–353 AKF Scale Cube for databases, 372–373 Backbones, clouds, 435–436 Backup storage, cost of, 413 Backward compatibility, architectural principles, 201 Barrier conditions agile development, 275–277 Agile Manifesto, 275–277 ARBs, 274 code reviews, 274 cowboy coding, 277 definition, 274 examples, 274–275 hybrid development models, 278 performance testing, 275 production monitoring and measurement, 275 to rollback, 281 waterfall development, 277–278 Baseline, establishing for stress testing, 265 Batch cache refresh, 379–381 Behavior (team), evaluating, 97 Benchmarks, performance testing, 258–259 Berkeley, use of cloud computing, 447 Board constituency, ARB, 223–225 Books and publications “Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View . . .”, 447 Autonomic Computing Manifesto (IBM), 427–428 Good to Great, 71 The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure, 428 The Mythical Man Month, 429 Mythical Man Month . . ., 49 Resonant Leadership, 68 Bottlenecks, identifying for stress testing, 266 Boundary conflicts, 15 Boyatzis, Richard, 68 Brooks, Frederick P., 49, 429 Brooks’ Law, 429 Buffers, vs. caches, 378 Build grids, 462–463 Build steps, check list, 463 Building components vs. buying architectural principles, 203 being the best, 236 case study, 240–242 I NDEX competitive components, identifying, 239 cost effectiveness, 239–240 cost-focused approach, 234–235, 237–240 creating strategic competitive differentiation, 238 decision checklist, 238–240 effects on scalability, 233–234 “not built here” phenomenon, 236–237 ownership, pros and cons, 238–239 strategy-focused approach, 235–236, 237–240 TAA conflicts, 305 TAD, checklist, 304 TAD conflicts, 305 Bureaucracy, effect on business processes, 130 Business acumen, balancing with technical, 28–29 Business case for scale. See also Corporate mindset, changing. Amazon outage example, 116 customer acquisition costs, 116 downtime costs, 114–117 intraorganizational costs, 116–117 lost customers, 116 Business change calendar, 175 Business growth rate, determining headroom, 186–187 Business metrics, monitoring, 476–477 Business processes. See also Standards; specific processes. bureaucracy, 130 capability levels, 125, 126–128 CMM (Capability Maturity Model), 124–125 CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integrated), 124–125 complexity, managing, 128–130 continuous process improvement, 178–179 culture clash, 130 definition, 122 effects on creativity, 123–124 excessive mundane work, 127 feedback from teams, 131 maturity levels, 125, 126–127 need for improvement, warning signs, 127 periodic maintenance, 131 problem causes, 130 problems, avoiding, 131 purpose of, 122–124 repeatability, 126–128 repetitive management, same task, 127 resolving procedural uncertainty, 123 rigor, 126–128 same task, multiple procedures, 127 standardization, 123 Business unit owners, roles and responsibilities, 27 Buy when non core, architectural principles, 203 C Cache ratio, 379 Cache-hits, 379 Cache-miss, refreshing caches, 379–381 Cache-misses, 379 Caches adding data, 382 batch cache refresh, 379–381 vs. buffers, 378 cache ratio, 379 cache-hits, 379 cache-misses, 379 CDNs (content delivery networks), 389–390 datum, 378 definition, 378 get method, 382 hit ratio, 379 marshalling, 381 memcached, 382 object, 381–384 reading from, 379 retrieving data, 382 structure of, 378 tags, 378 unmarshalling, 381 updating.

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See also AKF Scale Cube for applications. requestor or customer, 333–334, 344–347 resources, 331–332 services, 331–332 Srivastava, Amitabh, 46 Stability, definition, 165 Staffing for scalability. See also Leadership; Management; Organizational design; Teams. adding/removing people, 12, 13 importance of people, 10–11 Stakeholders, organizing to match their interests, 13 Standardization, business processes, 123 Standards, organizational design influences on, 44–45. See also Business processes. State within applications, AKF Scale Cube, 335 defining, 401 saving, 403–404 Stateless systems, architectural principles, 202, 206–207 Status communications, crisis management, 160–161 Storage costs of data backup storage, 413 initial cost of storage, 412–413 Strategic advantage value of data, 415, 416–417 Strategic competitive differentiation, building components vs. buying, 238 Strategy-focused approach, building components vs. buying, 235–236, 237–240 Strength, weaknesses, opportunities, threats (SWOT) analysis, 82 555 556 I NDEX Stress testing analyzing data, 268 bottlenecks, identifying, 266 checklist of steps, 268–269 criticality of services, ranking, 265 data collection, 267 definition, 264 drawbacks, 269 environment, creating, 266 establishing a baseline, 265 executing tests, 267 failure, testing, 265 goals of, 264–265 interactivity of system services, 265 key services, identifying, 265 monitors, identifying, 267 negative testing, 264, 265 objectives, identifying, 264–265 positive testing, 264 recoverability, testing, 265 for scalability, 270–271 service behavior during failure, 265 services affecting performance, identifying, 265 simulating a load, 267 system interactions, negative, 265 Structured programming, 402 Sun Grid Engine, 429 Support persons, RASCI, 38 Support services business, 109–110 Swapping, excessive, 190 Swim lanes along natural barriers, 320–321 by the biggest sources of incidents, 320 by customer boundaries, 312–313 definition, 310, 311 isolating the money-maker, 320 by service boundaries, 313–314 splitting.

The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
by Gene Kim , Kevin Behr and George Spafford
Published 14 Jul 2013

What you and John are talking about are just different slides of what is called the ‘COSO Cube.’” I force myself to keep listening, furiously taking notes so I can Google these terms later. I hear him continue, “Here’s what you and John need to do: Go talk to the business process owners for the objectives on Dick’s second slide. Find out what their exact roles are, what business processes underpin their goals, and then get from them the top list of things that jeopardize those goals. “You must understand the value chains required to achieve each of Dick’s goals, including the ones that aren’t so visible, like those in IT.

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This will make them ten times more painful, because they’ll classify us as a Level 1 merchant for the rest of eternity. They may even raise our transaction fees from three percent to—who knows how high? That could halve our retail store profit margins and—” He stops mid-sentence and opens up his three-ring binder to a calendar. “Oh, shit! The PCI auditors are on-site today doing a business process walk-through. They’re on the second floor, interviewing the order administration staff about our operations. They’re even supposed to use this conference room!” “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I say as the feeling of panic starts to set in, which amazes me considering that it’s been three days of constant adrenaline.

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First, I’ve never seen any organization do anything even remotely like this before. Second, I’m very concerned that if we do this, we’ll lose our shot at getting all the audit issues fixed. As Steve has already said, those audit findings could kill the company, too.” “You know what your problem is?” Erik says, pointing a finger at John. “You never see the end-to-end business process, so I guarantee you that many of the controls you want to put in aren’t even necessary.” John says, “What?” Again, Erik waves John’s question away. “Don’t worry about it for now. Let the inevitable happen, and we’ll see what we can learn from it.” Steve turns to John. “I understand your concerns about security.

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass
by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri
Published 6 May 2019

People hired through contract staffing companies like Leapforce worked on EWOQ, identifying and ranking new webpages to fine-tune links between ads and users’ search queries.22 According to press accounts and people we interviewed and surveyed who work on multiple on-demand platforms, Twitter and Facebook use internal tool kits that function much like MTurk and plug VMS-provided workers into their platforms to monitor and review content.23 Kala does similar tasks on UHRS for Microsoft. Before Kala started doing ghost work on UHRS, she worked for a small company that processed back office files from a U.S. business. Her company, one of many so-called business process outsourcing (BPO) shops handling work from the United States, was located in the heart of Bangalore’s Electronic City neighborhood, not far from tourist-choked Cubbon Park.24 Perhaps it is ironic that the company’s biggest contract was with one of the oldest and largest labor organizations based in the United States.

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This is why, in Indian cities that lack free public utilities like tap water and sewer systems, there are high-speed broadband internet infrastructure and power grids to feed technology parks. The sharp growth in readily available internet connections, combined with a native English-speaking workforce and its long history of advanced educational training centers in science and engineering, made India the first epicenter of business process outsourcing (BPO). But outsourcing was never simply about cost cutting. It was also about the growing resistance to unionization and evading long-standing labor regulations. As companies expanded their reliance on a far-flung network of contingent staff, they shrank the number of on-site, full-time employees who were eligible to collectively bargain or to push for increasing workers’ benefits.

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The first was the need to spend hours wading and sorting through spam or suspicious offers for “at-home work,” searching for legitimate work on a legitimate platform. Because there are no legal requirements screening who posts work to on-demand marketplaces, workers had to make sure they weren’t signing up to a site that was simply looking to harvest their email address or that would open them up to identity theft. Lijo, 24, works for a business processing organization and lives in Bangalore, India. He learned about MTurk from a flyer stapled to a tree. He called the number, and the person who answered told him an account on the platform cost 1,000 rupees (almost $14). Unaware that registration on MTurk was actually free, Lijo negotiated the price down to 600 rupees ($8.25)—all he could afford at that time—and bought an account.

CIOs at Work
by Ed Yourdon
Published 19 Jul 2011

Locked into helping drive deliverables, literally cutting a version of the product every day. In about nine months, we built a product that was the ERP for the travel agencies business process, the ability to take your reservation, process it on the GDS in the back end. And then provide you with all the services you required. I came into the business process side at American and very quickly was noticed as somebody who understood technology but also understood business process. I was starting to manage teams as a whole, but more importantly, I understood what the customer wanted. And we were able to translate that into the requirements, or the user stories, as you call them today, in agile terms, for what needed to be built.

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And because computer hardware is still an expensive part of the IT budget, CIOs are looking more and more closely at the benefits of virtualization and cloud computing—indeed, those technologies are a “done deal” in the majority of organizations that I interviewed. But simply making existing business processes more productive and efficient is apparently not as exciting as it once was. After all, business organizations have been using computers, for almost 50 years now, to make the number-crunching, paper-pushing, mundane operational activities of the organization less time-consuming and expensive.

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So it’s just a fascinating space, because we are in the Web 3.0 business in that our customers are already watching media, socially interacting in-store, and buying product. It’s now about how do you make the technology—the technology’s come alive for the segment—how do you then apply it effectively to the business processes you already have? Yourdon: One of the things that you just said intrigued me, in terms of being aware of a customer profile. Obviously, there’s a real-time aspect to that too—but how fast would my profile change and to what extent can you anticipate my future profile and perhaps offer me opportunities or games or transactions that I might not have thought about on my own?

Ethics of Big Data: Balancing Risk and Innovation
by Kord Davis and Doug Patterson
Published 30 Dec 2011

But even though it is simple and easy to fix that gap in customer’s understanding, that fear of the unknown risk creates a barrier to conversion that all organizations are familiar with. Making it too easy to opt out can easily be seen as detrimental to both the consumer and the business model. Even understanding the temptation to choose the path of least resistance in order to support specific business models, designing and implementing business processes and tools to make it less likely or more difficult for people to opt out begs the question of what values are motivating the choice of which model to implement. Which value is most important: acknowledging and respecting people’s fear of the unknown risk and honoring their interest in reducing it, or making it slightly more difficult to support a business model?

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The question remains open, however, of the exact distinction between “personal information” and the set of all information that Google knows about you, which, when combined in the right way, could potentially expose enormous amounts of personal information. The tacit agreements we enter into as individuals with organizations who have access to vast amounts of personal data generate more risk than making those agreements explicit and easily understood and accessible. Manifestation of Values In many ways, an organization’s business processes, technical infrastructure configuration, and data-handling procedures can be interpreted as a manifestation of their values.[5] Seen this way, values are inherently expressed by these data-handling practices. Although it might not be completely possible to reverse-engineer a company’s values by deconstructing their data-handling practices, it certainly is possible to learn more about what has been considered important enough to include by simply reading the policy statement.

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Big-data startups can exploit an advantage here. By understanding core values in advance of building out their operational processes and technology stack, they can actually take action to build their values directly into their infrastructure. In some ways, an organization’s technology configuration, business processes, and data-handling practices can be viewed as a physical manifestation of their values. General topic themes are a good start. As a reminder, many organizations already have mature business capabilities that can contribute much to inquiry and analysis. Compliance, human resources, legal, finance and accounting, data architecture, technology and product planning, and marketing all have unique and informed perspectives.

Demystifying Smart Cities
by Anders Lisdorf

To reach back to the introduction of this book: this is an example of how the smart city landscape today is built according to “the Way of the Pack Donkey” following the path of least resistance and little or no central planning and coordination. Another reason for this lack of central governance and control of IoT implementations is a skill gap in central technology organizations. A central technology organization in a city is typically an IT department. They were built at a time when computing and digitalization of business processes were expanding and are focused on core traditional technology initiatives like running a data center, providing computers to employees, and developing and maintaining information systems like financial and HR systems. Very little of this work can be generalized or reused when faced with a device that has its very own unique and peculiar way of functioning.

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Systems of record A system of record is a system that serves as the authoritative source of information for its particular type of information. An example could be a payroll system, which serves as the authoritative source of who gets what in salary at what time and why. A system of record is used to manage business processes that the city is responsible for like social services, education, permits, HR, taxes, and so on. These are the backbone of the city and determine how it runs and are often also characterized as mission-critical applications because they need to run in order for the city to work. If a payroll system is down, it better be up and running smoothly come pay day; otherwise, city employees will go home, and important city functions will shut down.

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Often vendors will also sponsor various kinds of training, which is another important way for the city to learn about new technologies. The vendor-sponsored engagements should be clearly delimited in terms of solution and time. If the engagement becomes one where a solution is offered and continues to be used for real business processes without an endpoint, it should be a cause for concern. Depending on the extent of the collaboration, it may also be a good idea to have a legal agreement on IP and NDAs in place. Public-private partnerships – Sometimes vendors or other private organizations take the collaboration to a higher level than the vendor sponsored.

Nagios: System and Network Monitoring, 2nd Edition
by Wolfgang Barth
Published 19 Aug 2009

Eventually, the status with the highest priority wins out: CRITICAL trumps WARNING, trumps UNKNOWN, trumps OK. The definition and use of expressions is explained in 8.5.7 Simple business process monitoring from page 199. -c ausdruck / --critical=expression If the expression is true, the status is set to CRITICAL. Eventually, the status with the highest priority wins out (see --warning and 8.5.7 Simple business process monitoring). -u expression / --unknown=expression If the expression is true, the status UNKNOWN is set. The status with the highest priority (see --warning and 8.5.7 Simple business process monitoring) wins out. -o expression / --ok=expression If ausdruck is true, the status OK is set.

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In addition, check_multi now also provides performance data referring to the overall processing: |MULTI::check_multi::plugins=5 time=0.18 net_ping::check_icmp::rta=0.048 ms; 500.000;1000.000;0; pl=0%;5;10;; system_ntp::check_ntp::offset=0.0022 66s;60.000000; 120.000000; First check_multi announces that it has called 5 plugins and has used a total of 0.18 seconds for processing. This is followed by the performance data for the other plugins, each supplemented with the service description and plugin name. If a plugin issues more than one variable, the service description and plugin name are not repeated. 8.5.7 Simple business process monitoring In order to evaluate business processes, you generally want to know whether a particular process is working—for instance, whether or not a customer can perform online banking. Individual pieces of information on all hosts and services involved are not relevant from this perspective and are also not always useful if systems are designed redundantly in different forms.

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The former is kept deliberately simple, and all the details for the command line are repeated in the service definition: define command{ command_name check_multi command_line $USER1$/check_multi $ARG1$ } define service{ host_name elix01 service_description homeoffice check_command check_multi!-f /etc/nagios/check_multi/homeoffice.cmd -n homeoffice -r 31 ... } If the mapping of business processes with check_multi isn't enough for you, you should take a look at the somewhat more complex addon Nagios Business Process View and Nagios Business Impact Analysis from the Sparda-Datenverarbeitung eG, Nuremberg, Germany, which is available on the Nagios-Exchange.[91] In contrast to check_multi, which appears as the only Nagios service and which also needs to be managed only once by Nagios, this addon uses services already defined in Nagios, which means that Nagios performs each individual check as usual.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
Published 20 Jan 2014

Coming up with those can take years, or even decades, and this creates lags between the introduction of a technology and the productivity benefits. We’ve clearly seen this with both electrification and computerization. FIGURE 7.2 Labor Productivity in Two Eras Perhaps the most important complementary innovations are the business process changes and organizational coinventions that new technologies make possible. Paul David, an economic historian at Stanford University and the University of Oxford, examined the records of American factories when they first electrified and found that they often retained a similar layout and organization to those that were powered by steam engines.9 In a steam engine–driven plant, power was transmitted via a large central axle, which in turn drove a series of pulleys, gears, and smaller crankshafts.

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Less than ten years after its introduction, entrepreneurs were finding ways to use the Web to reinvent publishing and retailing. While less visible, the large enterprise-wide IT systems that companies rolled out in the 1990s have had an even bigger impact on productivity.10 They did this mainly by making possible a wave of business process redesign. For example, Walmart drove remarkable efficiencies in retailing by introducing systems that shared point-of-sale data with their suppliers. The real key was the introduction of complementary process innovations like vendor managed inventory, cross-docking, and efficient consumer response that have become staple business-school case studies.

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In a statistical analysis of over six hundred firms that Erik did with Lorin Hitt, he found it takes an average five to seven years before full productivity benefits of computers are visible in the productivity of the firms making the investments. This reflects the time and effort required to make the other complementary investments that bring a computerization effort success. In fact, for every dollar of investment in computer hardware, companies need to invest up to another nine dollars in software, training, and business process redesign.16 The effects of organizational changes like these became increasingly visible in the industry-level productivity statistics.17 The productivity surge in the 1990s was most visible in computer-producing industries, but overall productivity grew even faster in the early years of the twenty-first century, when a much broader set of industries saw significant productivity gains.

The Future of Technology
by Tom Standage
Published 31 Aug 2005

But with the recent proliferation of systems, and a greater reliance on suppliers and outsourcing, the 68 SECURING THE CLOUD number of users who may need access to a company’s systems has grown rapidly. “On top of that, most modern companies now have their actual business processes deeply embedded in their systems,” he says. Indeed, their business processes are the systems. According to Mr Scott, “All these forces working together create a huge problem. Who is accessing these systems, and how can I manage it?” One outfit offering solutions to this identity-management problem is Silicon-Valley-based Oblix. Its software sits between users and a company’s existing software systems (accounts, inventory, e-mail, and so on).

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Schneider National goes even further. It has an it steering committee that acts like a venture-capital firm, screening all proposed it projects and picking those with the best business plans. But the firm’s in-house entrepreneurs do more than produce good roi numbers. They also point out the necessary changes in business processes and organisation to ensure that employees are willing to use the new it system. “People can undermine any technology,” says Mr Lofgren. Given the chill in the industry, it is no wonder that companies everywhere are rationalising their existing it infrastructure and keeping purse strings tight.

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Some firms are openSource: Gartner Dataquest *Forecast ing up their networks through online business-to-business exchanges, for example, where they list what they want to buy or sell and invite bids. Everything from paper clips to car components is bought or sold in this way. There is widespread agreement that “web services”, in which companies open up their core business processes directly to other firms over the internet, will become increasingly important in the next few years. But by opening its systems to outsiders, a company may also attract unwanted visitors, or attacks from nosy competitors. Joint ventures, in which two firms collaborate and share information, can also cause problems.

Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow
by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais
Published 16 Sep 2019

Much like a software architecture document gets outdated as soon as the actual software development starts, an org chart is always out of sync with reality. Naturally, we are by no means the first to acknowledge the imbalance between formal organization structures and the way work actually gets done. Geary Rummler and Alan Brache’s book Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space on the Organization Chart set the stage for continuous business process improvement and management. The recent focus (at least within IT) on product and team centricity, as illustrated by Mik Kersten’s book on moving from Project to Product, is another major milestone. We like to think that Team Topologies is another piece of this puzzle—in particular, having clear and fluid team structures, responsibilities, and interaction modes.

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They also need a remit that is broader than pure technology—they need to have a say in organizational structures and personnel issues, i.e. they need to be a manager too.12 Fundamentally, we need to involve technical people in organization design because they understand key software design concepts, such as APIs and interfaces, abstraction, encapsulation, and so on. Naomi Stanford puts it like this: “departments and divisions, systems, and business processes . . . can be designed independently as long as interfaces and boundaries with the wider organization form part of the design.”13 Restrict Unnecessary Communication One key implication of Conway’s law is that not all communication and collaboration is good. Thus it is important to define “team interfaces” to set expectations around what kind of work requires strong collaboration and what doesn’t.

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For example, an insurance company may need to conduct lengthy physical checks on factory machinery in order to provide an updated insurance quote; or a bank may need to await delivery of proof-of-address documents before opening a new bank account. The lower-level systems on which these higher-level business services rely might provide specialist payment mechanisms, data cleansing, identity verification, background legal checks, and so forth, each of which needs multiple teams working on it to evolve and sustain the service. Business process management (BPM)—perhaps augmented with machine learning (ML)—can help to automate some of the work in these cases; but engaged, aware teams still need to configure and test the BPM workflow scenarios. Some of these services and subsystems may be built and provided in house, but others may be provided by external suppliers.

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 7 Nov 2017

Hence we call them intangible investment. Table 2.1 sets out some examples. On the left-hand side are tangible business investments: buildings, ICT equipment like computer hardware, non-ICT equipment, and vehicles. On the right are intangibles: software, databases, design, mineral exploration, R&D, and business processes, for example. These intangibles in the right column are those elements of spending that business and national accountants have been reluctant to count as investment, though, as we shall see, over the last forty years some of them have been included as such. TABLE 2.1. EXAMPLES OF TANGIBLE AND INTANGIBLE BUSINESS INVESTMENTS Tangible investments Intangible investments Buildings Software ICT equipment (e.g., computer hardware, communications equipment) Databases Noncomputer machinery and equipment R&D Vehicles Mineral exploration Creating entertainment, literary or artistic originals Design Training Market research and branding Business process reengineering Source: Adapted from the System of National Accounts (SNA) 2008, para 10.67 and table 10.2, and Corrado, Hulten, and Sichel 2005.

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EXAMPLES OF TANGIBLE AND INTANGIBLE BUSINESS INVESTMENTS Tangible investments Intangible investments Buildings Software ICT equipment (e.g., computer hardware, communications equipment) Databases Noncomputer machinery and equipment R&D Vehicles Mineral exploration Creating entertainment, literary or artistic originals Design Training Market research and branding Business process reengineering Source: Adapted from the System of National Accounts (SNA) 2008, para 10.67 and table 10.2, and Corrado, Hulten, and Sichel 2005. The SNA also includes as tangible assets weapons systems and cultivated biological resources. As intangibles it includes R&D, mineral exploration and evaluation, computer software and databases, and creating artistic originals.

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Computerized information Software development Patent, copyright, design IPR, trademark, other Yes, since early 2000s Database development Copyright, other Recommended in SNA 1993, but OECD suggests uneven implementation Innovative Property R&D Patents, design IPR Yes, recommended in SNA 2008, introduced gradually since then Mineral exploration Patents, other Yes Creating entertainment and artistic originals Copyright, design IPR Yes in EU, in US since 2013 Design and other product development costs Copyright, design IPR, trademark No Economic Competencies Training Other No Market research and branding Copyright, trademark No Business process re-engineering Patent, copyright, other No Note: R&D should be thought of, in line with official definitions, as scientific-oriented spending as distinct from, say, artistic or design endeavors. “Other” in column 3 refers to things like trade secrets, contracts, etc. Column 3 refers to formal intellectual property: we would expect all intangible investment to produce tacit knowledge as well.

Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future
by Scott D. Anthony and Mark W. Johnson
Published 27 Mar 2017

Chapter 2 details how success with transformation A starts with determining the customer problem, or the job to be done, around which you should reposition your core and then innovating your business model to deliver against the job, measuring and tracking new metrics that reflect the new model, and burning the boats by executing rapidly. In parallel, Xerox began to experiment with new service lines designed to optimize repeatable business processes. It built a line of businesses that produced hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, and then in 2009 it spent more than $6 billion to buy Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), a company that specialized in business process automation. This is transformation B: creating a new growth engine. Whereas transformation A is often defensive in nature, the disruption that forces it opens opportunities to solve new (but related) problems in different (but related) ways.

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But the forces of industry change are relentless. Revenues dipped from $21 billion in 2012 to $18 billion in 2015, and Xerox’s stock fell by almost 50 percent from January 2015 to January 2016. Later that year, influenced undoubtedly by pressure from activist investor Carl Icahn, Xerox announced plans to split into two companies: a business process-outsourcing company called Conduent, with 96,000 employees and $7 billion in revenue; and a copier and printer business, with 39,000 employees and $7 billion in revenue. The two offshoot businesses are individually more vibrant than either would have been a decade ago but no doubt will again confront the challenge of disruptive change in their respective markets.

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Beyond having to deal with general trends driving down so-called snail mail, SingPost also confronted the challenge of the 2007 expiry of its exclusive licenses for receiving, collecting, and delivering postcards, which constituted a significant portion of its business. After its IPO, SingPost diversified its core business by introducing bill payment services at post offices (2005), building a direct mail business (2007), and offering mail room management and other business-process outsourcing solutions for small businesses (capabilities tied to its 2009 acquisition of Quantum Solutions, described below). To appeal to younger consumers, in 2010 it launched a business called KPO in the city’s tourism and shopping belt, integrating a trendy pub and café that is open at night and on weekends.

The Cultural Logic of Computation
by David Golumbia
Published 31 Mar 2009

While Friedman’s apparently middle-class “Mom and Dad” certainly benefit from the availability and convenience of computerized tools, the main benefits Friedman describes empower centralized corporations to distribute their own work widely, and in some sense even more fully subordinating their workers to management. Surprisingly, though, despite the ways in which Friedman’s first three benefits replicate colonial logic and largely benefit large corporations, the rest of his ten “forces” are even more explicitly focused on corporations. In fact, they are largely devoted to exactly the kinds of business-process tools discussed in Chapter 7: ERP, CRM, and other supply-chain management software. Friedman champions open source software, especially Linux, but primarily because IBM realized that it could profit from the distributed community that had created it (which is itself largely made up of corporate employees working without compensation in their free time); arguably, we still talk about Linux precisely because of its utility to profitmaking corporations.

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Whether this specialization led to the discipline of inventory and materials control is not clear, but we can assume that certain people were allocated the The Cultural Logic of Computation p 164 task of purchasing material for the business, and others were employed to sell the finished product. . . . This logic of breaking down the responsibility for production between different functional areas is evident in ERP systems, even though their objective is to integrate all operations and support more efficient sharing of data about business processes. (O’Gorman 2004, 26) Computing does not merely enable accountants to keep better records of monetary transactions; it provides whole new levels and kinds of power and control over money. This power and control, as businesses almost immediately realized, could be extended to every aspect of running a business; today, ERP vendors see “backoffice” functions (such as operations, logistics, finance, and human resources) and “nontransaction-based systems” or “front-office” functions (such as sales, marketing, and customer service), as integral components of ERP systems.

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The kinds of constituents that can be identified by computers are to greater and lesser degrees formalized; they are “business models,” abstractions from the real world that allow the computer to manage them as representations; and the strategies suggested by computation are those that the computer finds it especially direct to provide. ERP business process analyses look for so-called “inefficiencies” in the system, finding places, for example, where a resource is sitting idle when it could be doing work. We know that “profit” will never fail to be included as the primary value toward which the system is skewed. In some systems of discourse, cultural studies has uncovered what seem to be covert marks of orientations toward capital; in ERP systems these orientations are explicit. 

Architecting For Scale
by Lee Atchison
Published 25 Jul 2016

If you provide an unpredictable response to an unpredictable reaction from a downstream service, you just propagate the unpredictable nature up the value chain. Sooner or later, that unpredictable reaction will be visible to your customers, which will affect your business. Or, worse, the unpredictable response injects invalid data into your business processes, which makes your business processes inconsistent and invalid. This can affect your business analytics as well as promote a negative customer experience. As much as possible, even if your dependencies fail or act unpredictably, it is important that you do not propagate that unpredictability upward to those who depend on you.

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To keep your risk matrix up to date and accurate, you should schedule regular reviews of the matrix with the appropriate stakeholders, including your development team and partners. This can be monthly, but it should not be any less often than quarterly. The exact recurrence cycle depends on your business processes. If you have a planning cycle starting soon, performing a regular review of the matrix before that process begins is ideal. Risk Matrix Review Attendees Note that it is useful to change your risk matrix reviewers regularly. By requiring different individuals to review and comment on your risk matrix, you’ll get a fresh perspective and the review will be less likely to turn into a “same old rut” type of meeting.

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Tier 2 A Tier 2 service is one that is important to your business but less critical than a Tier 1. A failure in a Tier 2 service can cause a degraded customer experience in a noticeable and meaningful way but does not completely prevent your customer from interacting with your system. Tier 2 services are also services that affect your backend business processes in significant ways, but might not be directly noticeable to your customers. The following are some examples of Tier 2 services: Search service A service that provides a search functionality on your website. Order fulfillment service A service that makes it possible for your warehouse to process an order for shipment to a customer.

The Art of SQL
by Stephane Faroult and Peter Robson
Published 2 Mar 2006

This may be a minor inconvenience if the data is stored for informative purpose only. It becomes a major issue if the unknown values are supposed to help us define a result set, and this state of affairs is indicative of a flawed model. All columns in a row should ultimately contain a value, even if business processes are such that various pieces of information are entered from more than one source and/or at different points in time. A stamp collector might likewise keep some room in an album for a series temporarily absent from the collection. But even so, there is a risk of wasting storage if it is actually reserved because one always tailors for the maximum size.

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Operations Against Actual Data Many developers like to create temporary work tables into which they extract lists of data for subsequent processing, before they begin with the serious stuff. This approach is often questionable and may reflect an inability to think beyond the details of the business processes. You must remember that temporary tables cannot offer storage options of the same degree of sophistication as permanent tables (you see some of these options in Chapter 5). Their indexing, if they are indexed, may be less than optimal. As a result, queries that use temporary tables may perform less efficiently than well-written statements against permanent tables, with the additional overhead of having to fill temporary tables as a prerequisite to any query.

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For example, partitioning can be a valuable aid in optimizing a physical design, but it should never be applied in a haphazard way. Because there is such an intimate relationship between process requirements and physical design , we often encounter profound conflicts between alternative designs for the same data when that data is shared between two or more business processes. This is just like the dilemma faced by the general on the battlefield, where the benefits of using alternative parts of his forces (infantry, cavalry, or artillery) have to be balanced against the suitability of the terrain across which he has to deploy them. The physical design of tables and indexes is one of those areas where database administrators and developers must work together, trying to match the available DBMS features in the best possible way against business requirements.

Keeping Up With the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics
by Thomas H. Davenport and Jinho Kim
Published 10 Jun 2013

When Tom did some research on how companies improved fifty-seven different decisions a few years ago, he found that analytics was the factor that was most often mentioned as a means to bring about improvement.11 But “culture and leadership changes” were second, “better data” was third, and “changing the business process” was fourth. On average, the companies interviewed mentioned more than five different factors that were responsible for the improvement in decisions. That means that analysts have to be more than analysts; they have to be consultants in business change. When Results Don’t Imply Actions We expect that the results from quantitative analysis will lead to action, but sometimes perfectly good results don’t translate into specific actions, although they are still useful to know.

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While the math person can never fully understand the origins of the business intuition—by definition—the math person must understand what the intuition is and speak the language of the business person. Intel’s approach is to send one of its “math people” off into the business—at least to listen, learn, and after a suitable time, ask questions. At most, the analyst can be trained, as a new hire would be, to participate in the business process. In both cases the mission is to understand the formal and informal organization, how the group is incentivized and rewarded, and so forth. Kempf judges the low bar for success as when the math person thinks he or she understands the business problem. The high bar is when the business person thinks the math person understands the business problem.

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* * * What Business Decision Makers Should Expect of Quantitative Analysts If you’re a business executive who is working with quantitative analysts, here’s what you should legitimately expect of them: They should have a good working understanding of your business overall, and of the specific business process that the quantitative analysis will support. They should understand your thinking style and the types of analyses and outputs that will influence your thinking. They should be able to develop effective working relationships with key people in your organization. They should use the language of your business to explain what benefits and improvements analytics can provide.

Building Microservices
by Sam Newman
Published 25 Dec 2014

The downside is that the explicit view of the business process we see in Figure 4-2 is now only implicitly reflected in our system. Figure 4-4. Handling customer creation via choreography This means additional work is needed to ensure that you can monitor and track that the right things have happened. For example, would you know if the loyalty points bank had a bug and for some reason didn’t set up the correct account? One approach I like for dealing with this is to build a monitoring system that explicitly matches the view of the business process in Figure 4-2, but then tracks what each of the services does as independent entities, letting you see odd exceptions mapped onto the more explicit process flow.

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Customer creation at first glance could be considered a simple set of CRUD operations, but for most systems it is more complex than that. Enrolling a new customer may need to kick off additional processes, like setting up financial payments or sending out welcome emails. And when we change or delete a customer, other business processes might get triggered as well. So with that in mind, we should look at some different ways in which we might want to work with customers in our MusicCorp system. The Shared Database By far the most common form of integration that I or any of my colleagues see in the industry is database (DB) integration.

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One important factor to consider is how well these styles are suited for solving an often-complex problem: how do we handle processes that span service boundaries and may be long running? Orchestration Versus Choreography As we start to model more and more complex logic, we have to deal with the problem of managing business processes that stretch across the boundary of individual services. And with microservices, we’ll hit this limit sooner than usual. Let’s take an example from MusicCorp, and look at what happens when we create a customer: A new record is created in the loyalty points bank for the customer. Our postal system sends out a welcome pack.

Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less
by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou
Published 15 Feb 2015

It formulated innovation strategy, selected the product portfolio and co-ordinated efforts across groups, delegating authority, allocating resources and evaluating results to make sure they supported company strategy. As a result, Lego’s managers considered not only new products but also pricing plans, business processes and channels to market. Integrate technical and business design A specific form of cross-functional integration that is crucial to innovation is that between technical and business design. As Matt Bross, former chief technology officer at BT, a British multinational telecommunications company, noted:14 “There are no breakthrough technologies, only breakthrough market applications.”

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Similarly, Unilever has an online portal where it challenges the public to help solve social problems such as improving access to safe drinking water, reducing salt and sugar in food items, and storing renewable energy. Ideas from the public help Unilever develop better products and improve its business processes while contributing to society. Phase 3: co-marketing, co-branding and co-distribution Some 92% of consumers place more trust in suggestions and recommendations from friends and family than in advertisements. Indeed, only 10% of consumers trust brands at all. As a result, once a new product or service is available, companies need to mobilise communities of prosumers to create demand for it, by turning them into brand ambassadors who promote and even sell their favourite products and services.

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The GVIC is blazing a trail for companies in business model innovation (BMI). Although BMI is the starting point for frugal innovation, most large companies begin on the wrong foot. They first try to reduce the fat from their existing bloated businesses using techniques such as value engineering, business process re-engineering and lean manufacturing. This subtractive approach has two limitations: first, there is only so much waste that can be removed; and second, the leaner business model may still not address the real needs of the firm’s targeted customers. You cannot re-engineer a company to death; you need a new model.

The Decline and Fall of IBM: End of an American Icon?
by Robert X. Cringely
Published 1 Jun 2014

Sales are the only important thing in IBM and everything else is secondary. If customers are not buying, it has to be someone's fault. Punishing people is the way IBM fixes its problems. Because IBM's leadership has no outside world experience, punishing people is the only solution to their problems. They do not understand the business process or the fact that management might need improvement. They do not understand that investments in improvements are periodically needed to insure the health and effectiveness of every operation. Since Palmisano started setting public earnings targets in the investment community, IBM's new customer is Wall Street.

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Most of these businesses are tiny. A few of them are not even well conceived as businesses. It takes special skills and commitment to grow a business from nothing to the $1 billion range. IBM probably doesn’t have what it takes. Do you remember eBusiness? (A termed coined by IBM in 1997 that meant transforming key business processes using Internet technologies.) And I’ve already mentioned On Demand, the utility computing service system for large enterprises. These are examples of businesses IBM planned to grow to billions in sales, but are businesses that no longer even exist today. The Blue Gene supercomputer project belongs here, too.

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For the last 10 years, IBM’s Services divisions have been subjected to relentless cost reductions, layoffs, massive offshoring of work, and a scary process of dumbing down the talent. The result is an organization that can barely do the basics and has become a huge frustration to its customers. The problems in services are deep and serious. Most of the great processes IBM developed over the years have been lost. The new business process—Engagement, Transition, and Steady State—has become a “throw it over the wall” process. Each step in the process passes on incomplete, often incorrect work and documentation. IBM underprices the work, and then earmarks its profit. What money is left is used to start up and support the account.

What Happened to Goldman Sachs: An Insider's Story of Organizational Drift and Its Unintended Consequences
by Steven G. Mandis
Published 9 Sep 2013

My rotations to a different geographic region and through different divisions were typical at the time for a certain percentage of selected employees in order to train people and unite the firm. Throughout my career at Goldman, I served on firm-wide and divisional committees, dealing with important strategic and business process issues. I also acted as special assistant to several senior Goldman executives and board members, including Hank Paulson, on select projects and initiatives such as improving business processes and cross-department communication protocols. Goldman was constantly trying to improve and setting up committees with people from various geographic regions and departments to create initiatives.

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When the New York M&A department hired me, it was making about a dozen offers per year to US college graduates to work in New York, out of what I was told were hundreds of applicants. While in the department, I was asked to be the business unit manager (informally referred to as the “BUM”). I addressed issues of strategy, business processes, organizational policy, business selection, and conflict clearance. For example, I was involved in discussions in deciding whether and how Goldman should participate in hostile raids, and in discussing client conflicts and ways to address them. The job was extremely demanding. After a relatively successful stint, I felt I had built enough goodwill to move internally and do what I was more interested in: being an investor.

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At Citi, I had the chance to compare the practices and approaches of a Goldman competitor that had a big balance sheet (supported by customer deposits to lend money to clients) and that had grown quickly through acquisitions—two things Goldman did not really do. Before working at Citigroup and during the financial crisis, I advised McKinsey & Company on strategic, business process, risk, and organizational issues facing financial institutions and related regulatory authorities worldwide. McKinsey is one of the most prestigious and trusted management-consulting firms in the world, with some fifteen thousand people globally. There are many differences between the firms, but as with Goldman (before Goldman became a public corporation), McKinsey is a private partnership that has a revered partnership election process.

Imagining India
by Nandan Nilekani
Published 25 Nov 2008

India thus literally stumbled onto services growth, one that happens to be the emerging story for the international economy. Today, the exploding global, IT-led services economy is impacting more business processes than we thought possible, as technology transforms more and more processes across the value chain into work over wire—from research and development (R&D) to medical diagnostics and, in one rather unusual case, even on-scene news reporting when Indian “reporters” watched conferences by video and typed up news reports for a U.S. paper. As a result the world market for offshored IT services and business processes has nearly tripled since 2001—it is now estimated to be a $300 billion opportunity, of which service providers have so far captured just 10 percent.

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The change was largely driven by the rise of India’s outsourcing industry. The 1990s had marked the rise of Indian IT companies including Infosys, and our key advantage in competing in the global services market—our purple poker chip—has been India’s large numbers of affordable, educated and English-literate workers. In the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector in particular, more than 65 percent of jobs are defined as voice-based jobs, and English-language proficiency is the main requirement for these companies. These firms were closely aligned with global corporations, and both productivity and wages were linked quite closely to global market averages.

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Information technology in the new Indian landscape Increasingly, India’s new identity has technology embedded in our fingerprints. IT in India has proved itself lithe and surprisingly agile, penetrating the nooks and corners of a country in ways we would have been unable to predict even a decade ago. IT-led business processes and supply chains are bringing in once marginal rural communities into the market, and also expanding access to scarce resources. Electronification is reaching out across India’s divides, whether they are geographical, cultural or economic. The technology is playing an emerging role in uniting communities under single national systems, which are quickly making geographical distances irrelevant.

Platform Scale: How an Emerging Business Model Helps Startups Build Large Empires With Minimum Investment
by Sangeet Paul Choudary
Published 14 Sep 2015

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SCALE The ability of a business to scale is determined by its ability to aggregate the inputs to business – labor and resources – and coordinate them efficiently toward value creation and delivery. Pipe Scale In a world of pipes, businesses achieved scale by aggregating labor and resources internally and used value-creating business processes to transform these inputs into functioning products and deliverable services. As these organizations grew larger, they increased process efficiency and managed value creation through command-and-control hierarchies. In a world of pipes, aggregation also helped firms exchange created value for commercial gain.

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In addition to behavior design, network effects also create stickiness. As the value of the platform increases with greater participation, consumers and producers are organically incentivized to stay engaged on the platform because the platform provides increasing amounts of value to both parties. DATA SCIENCE IS THE NEW BUSINESS PROCESS OPTIMIZATION Pipes achieve scale by improving the repeatability and efficiency of value-creation processes. The world of pipes required process engineering and optimization. Process engineers and managers helped improve internal processes and make them more efficient. In a platformed world, value is created in interactions between users, powered by data.

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Nokia, BlackBerry, and traditional carriers sourced their apps contractually, whereas the iPhone created an open platform, allowing anyone to create apps for it. Increasingly, many industries that have traditionally been considered non-tech, including retail, transportation, and consumer goods, are opening up APIs to encourage innovation by coalescing an external ecosystem of developer-partners. THE INVISIBLE HAND IS THE NEW IRON FIST The business processes that enabled pipe scale have historically been managed via hierarchies. As value creation in a platformed world moves to networks, we need a new form of management and culture, both inside and outside the organization. Hierarchies are based on rules and compliance, which require a unidirectional flow of information from the top down.

Principles of Web API Design: Delivering Value with APIs and Microservices
by James Higginbotham
Published 20 Dec 2021

Resource-Based API Design A resource is a digital representation of a concept, often an entity or collection of entities that may change over time. It consists of a unique name or identifier that can reference documents, images, collections of other resources, or a digital representation of anything in the real world such as a person or thing. Resources may even represent business processes and workflows. Resource-based APIs focus on interactions across a network, independent of how they are stored in a database or manifested as objects. They offer different operations, or affordances, as possible interactions with a specific resource. Additionally, resources support multiple representations that allow a web app, mobile app, and reporting tool to interact with the resource using different media formats such as JSON or XML.

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And if it does a crummy job, we “fire” it and look for an alternative. Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon and David S. Duncan APIs are the most common manifestation of digital capabilities as they power web and mobile apps, partner integrations, and workforce solutions. They allow the casual or expert developer to take advantage of data, business processes, and internal systems programmatically to produce desired outcomes. Organizations must develop the skills to identify digital capabilities (see Figure 3.1) and use them to shape the API design to help users produce results. Figure 3.1 The Align Phase begins with identifying digital capabilities The ADDR Process starts with defining the digital capabilities necessary to deliver customer outcomes.

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For domains not familiar to the team, it may be necessary to explore the problem space further before the activities and activity steps are clear. EventStorming is the recommended technique to understand and align on requirements in a collaborative way. Using EventStorming for Collaborative Understanding EventStorming is a collaborative process to help surface the business processes, requirements, and domain events as a visual model. It is a tool designed by Alberto Brandolini that has been adapted in different ways to fit the needs of organizations around the world. EventStorming is most effective when conducted as an in-person session. Remote sessions may be used, when necessary, though it will result in limited dynamic conversation.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
by Tim O'Reilly
Published 9 Oct 2017

As we’ll see in the next chapter, that’s what I did in my continuing struggle to understand the import of open source software. 2 TOWARD A GLOBAL BRAIN MY FOCUS ON THE INTERNET RATHER THAN ON LINUX EVENTUALLY led me in very different directions from other open source advocates. They wanted to argue about the best open source licenses. I thought that licenses didn’t matter as much as everyone else thought they did. I was fascinated by the massive next-generation infrastructure and business processes Google was building. Others were interested in these things too, but they thought very few companies would need Google’s kind of infrastructure, or to use its techniques. They were wrong. This is my next lesson. If the future is here, but just not evenly distributed yet, find seeds of that future, study them, and ask yourself how things will be different when they are the new normal.

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I told free software advocates like Richard Stallman that even if they had all of the software that Amazon or Google had built on top of Linux, they wouldn’t have Amazon or Google. These sites didn’t just consist of a set of software programs. They consisted of massive amounts of data and the people and business processes used to gather, manage, and build ongoing services using that data. As I had been exploring this line of argument, the tectonic processes of technology were adding new continents that had to be reflected in the map. In June 1999, Internet file-sharing site Napster turned the industry on its head by allowing users to share music files with each other free of charge across the net.

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Hal Varian calls this “computer kaizen,” referring to the Japanese term for continuous improvement. “Just as mass production changed the way products were assembled and continuous improvement changed how manufacturing was done,” he writes, “continuous experimentation . . . improve[s] the way we optimize business processes in our organizations.” But DevOps also brings higher reliability and better responsiveness to customers. Gene Kim characterizes what happens in a high-performance DevOps organization: “Instead of upstream Development groups causing chaos for those in the downstream work centers (e.g., QA, IT operations, and Infosec), Development is spending twenty percent of its time helping ensure that work flows smoothly through the entire value stream, speeding up automated tests, improving deployment infrastructure, and ensuring that all applications create useful production telemetry.”

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together
by Thomas W. Malone
Published 14 May 2018

We also see it when companies learn from trade magazines, conferences, and other media about best practices developed elsewhere in their industries. Another obvious way IT can help superminds learn is by automating work that humans already know how to do. For instance, in the 1990s, many organizations did business process reengineering (BPR) projects where they analyzed their business processes and tried to improve them, often using computers to automate some of the work. In these early reengineering projects, introducing computers was often a big and expensive disruption. But today, to take advantage of the continuing opportunities for more computer support, we should design our processes from the beginning in a way that makes the boundary between what people do and what computers do as flexible as possible.9 CYBER-HUMAN LEARNING LOOPS One way to do this is by creating cyber-human learning loops, in which people and computers work together and get better and better over time, often by letting the computers do more and more of the work (see the diagram below).10 To make a cyber-human learning loop, we need to systematically track as much data as is practical about the inputs, actions taken, and outputs and then analyze this data to continually improve performance.

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When you pick one of these options, the system could automatically give you a template for the kinds of details you should specify for each type of strategy. A Strategy Recombinator In addition to just suggesting individual possibilities to consider, software tools could also suggest combinations of possibilities. In 1999, Avi Bernstein, Mark Klein, and I used a semiautomated approach like this to develop ideas for new business processes. We called it the Process Recombinator,4 and I think a similar approach could work for strategies, too. For instance, if people created several possible answers to key strategic questions (such as those involving choices among products, customer segments, and competitive advantages), then it would be easy for a system to automatically generate many possible combinations of these options for people to quickly evaluate.

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An early example of the idea of cyber-human learning loops is Doug Engelbart’s concept of “bootstrapping” collective intelligence. See Douglas Engelbart and Jeff Rulifson, “Bootstrapping Our Collective Intelligence,” ACM Computing Surveys 31, issue 4es (December 1999), doi:10.1145/345966.346040. Unlike the concept of business process reengineering, which was popular in the 1990s, cyber-human learning loops assume that change is continuous rather than the result of occasional large redesign projects. See Michael Hammer and James Champy, Reengineering the Corporation (New York: HarperBusiness, 1993). In that sense, cyber-human learning loops can be seen as an example of a continuous improvement process.

The Facebook era: tapping online social networks to build better products, reach new audiences, and sell more stuff
by Clara Shih
Published 30 Apr 2009

With WorkLight, the company’s employees, distributors, and suppliers are able to view the information and interact with the business processes relevant to them in a secure fashion behind the corporate firewall. For example, information such as oil prices, competitors’ actions, even weather, can all be pushed to the right stakeholders directly inside Facebook and other sites that are already being routinely accessed by these individuals (see Figure 12.1). From the Library of Kerri Ross C h a p te r 1 2 Th e Fu t u re o f S o c i a l B u s i n e s s 207 Figure 12.1 WorkLight’s solution for enterprise social IT allows companies to publish data and business processes to Facebook and other traditionally consumer sites to make employees more productive.

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According to the company, mainframe technology helped Mutual of Omaha grow relative to the competition by allowing much more rapid processing of insurance claims, speeding transactions such as benefits checks and premium payments, slowing the growth in number of clerical employees, and eliminating repetitious data handling. Mainframes freed Mutual of Omaha employees from manual processes and stacks of handwritten paperwork. Mainframes also allowed Mutual of Omaha to streamline operations. Business processes that previously spanned multiple functions, with each function handled separately across the company, were gradually combined into one application, saving the company time, effort, and money. The following excerpt, taken from an internal Mutual of Omaha document dated March 15, 1956, reveals the rationale and foresight of company executives in introducing mainframes. **************** What is the matter with our present system?

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A phone call was the predominant call to action. It wasn’t until nearly a decade later that we began to realize and then slowly tap into the unique attributes of the Internet to do things that simply were not possible prior to the Internet: search engine marketing, user-generated content, automating manual business processes in Web applications, and allowing people to interact with those applications. It took a generation of visionaries, early adopters, and believers to make Web 2.0 a reality. In the process, companies came and went—Netscape, CompuServe, Webvan, Napster, Pets.com, to name a few. Nor should you expect that the kings of today’s era will reign in tomorrow’s era.

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work
by Richard Baldwin
Published 10 Jan 2019

Perhaps this naming stems from the fact that the software does exactly what Barnes used to do, and in exactly the same way. Or maybe it is because the RPA seems vulnerable—Poppy cannot handle the tricky cases. Those she has to hand off to Barnes. This sort of personification is pretty common when it comes to software robots. Ann Manning, a worker at the business processing company Xchanging, for example, trained an RPA and then called it Henry. “He is programmed with 400 decisions, all from my brain, so he is part of my brain and I’ve given him a bit of human character,” she explained.7 When a Texas Mercedes dealership implemented a virtual assistant to respond to car queries and set up appointments, the human sales representatives called it Tiffany, and customers loved “her.”

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A third way AI automation is creating jobs in rich nations is by reshoring back-office jobs that had been offshored to countries like India. The idea of replacing high-cost workers doing routine manipulation of information that can be sent down a wire is an old one. Since the 1990s, many companies have sent these jobs overseas. This created a whole industry called business process outsourcing (BPO) that is today dominated by companies like Infosys. RPA is good at many of the tasks that BPO companies now do. The cost savings are almost coercive. According to Genfour, which was acquired by Accenture in 2017, “While an onshore FTE [full-time equivalent worker] costing $50K (total cost) can be replaced by an offshore FTE for $20K, a digital worker can perform the same function for $5K or less—without the drawbacks of managing and training offshore labor.”14 Since the AI software cannot handle all cases, bringing back-office jobs back to America and Europe will create some jobs for white-collar humans along with lots of jobs for white-collar robots.

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The workers being replaced will be training their robot replacements. Here is how one RPA software company explains it. “WorkFusion automates the time-consuming process of training and selecting machine learning algorithms . . . WorkFusion’s Virtual Data Scientist uses historical data and real-time human actions to train models to automate judgment work in a business process, like categorizing and extracting unstructured information.” This thing, in other words, is a white-collar robot that figures out what parts of the job can be done by a white-collar robot. And it does it by watching what the humans are doing and have done. The program even has a helpful times-up bell.

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 4 Apr 2022

The problems we see are the morbid symptoms of an economy caught between an irrecoverable past and a future that we cannot attain. We documented the transformation from a largely material economy to one based on ideas, knowledge, and relationships in our 2017 book, Capitalism without Capital. There we noted the shift towards investment in intangible assets (such as software, data, R&D, design, branding, training, and business processes). This shift has been ongoing for more than four decades. As we show in this new book, this change in itself explains some of the features of the Great Economic Disappointment, from rising inequality of esteem to the persistent gap between leader firms and laggard firms. As we were writing Capitalism without Capital, we became aware of a totally unexpected aspect of the story of intangible capital.

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Nor is intangible investment a minor extension of R&D. Innovation in industries that were most hit by COVID-19 (retail, entertainment, hotels, and restaurants) is not included in the R&D data because those sectors do almost no R&D. Instead, they invest in intangible assets: training, marketing, design, and business processes. And the companies that do R&D do it in harness with a host of other intangible assets, such as marketing spending on new pharmaceuticals. Indeed, the change in R&D is itself remarkable, as Efraim Benmelech, Janice Eberly, Dimitris Papanikolaou, and Joshua Krieger have documented.41 In the United States, pharmaceutical firms account for around a dollar of every ten dollars of R&D spending (up from thirty cents of every ten dollars during the 1970s).

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However, software, data analysis, and new management practices make close observation much easier, with the result that the activities of workers who once had to be trusted can now be observed in detail, compared, and assessed. Amazon’s ability to monitor how many packages its warehouse staff ships per hour, how many calls call centre workers handle per hour, and how much time customer service reps spend between calls is grounded in intangibles—the software and business processes used to measure and reward employees’ performance. Similar technologies and practices increase inequality among white-collar workers. For example, Luis Garicano and Thomas Hubbard showed how better systems for monitoring performance and hours billed allowed law firms to differentiate between their highest performers and the rest.10 The stars ended up being paid more, while the laggards got left behind or were fired.

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion
by John Hagel Iii and John Seely Brown
Published 12 Apr 2010

To address this dilemma the company launched a creation space consisting of forums, wikis, videos, and blogs targeting a diverse set of relevant participants. The SAP Developer Network (SDN) provided a forum in which software developers could create and share knowledge about platforms and products sourced from SAP and its partners. The Business Process Expert (BPX) Community welcomed people specializing in business procedures and protocols. And Industry Value Networks (IVNs) brought together customers to address issues specific to particular industries—for instance, bank managers looking to develop software interfaces to help them collaborate more effectively.

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Over time, these individuals are increasingly coming together to form teams engaged in shared creation activities. Sometimes these efforts are organized by SAP. For example, twelve hospitals came together in an Enterprise Services Community Definition Group and worked together to define the key service interfaces for several business processes. They achieved their objective in less than six months. But in a growing number of cases, these collaborative creation efforts are driven by teams of individuals who connect on their own initiative around interesting technology opportunities and challenges. ESME, the Enterprise Social Media Experiment, provides one interesting example of this emergent collaboration.

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ESME, the Enterprise Social Media Experiment, provides one interesting example of this emergent collaboration. Initially this effort started as an online conversation among a group of individual software programmers from around the world who became intrigued with the possibility of taking the concepts behind Twitter and applying them to business process problems that occur inside the enterprise. Twitter had emerged as a messaging platform in the consumer space, but it was not very stable; it needed higher levels of security and more functionality to support further development of ideas generated in messages if it was going to be useful in a corporate context.

Digital Bank: Strategies for Launching or Becoming a Digital Bank
by Chris Skinner
Published 27 Aug 2013

Buyology: the Science of Understanding Business Relationships If you accept that the future of banking will be based upon which banks are the best buyological scientists then that is the premise that the bank designer would use to build the Digital Bank. The bank would be based upon digitised techniques of customer understanding to build processes from the customer viewpoint. At the end of designing, they would then go to a digital architect to build the digital design. This goes to the core of Business Process Re-engineering (BPR), which is why we talk about process redesign, when we’re designing, and process implementation, when we’re architecting. The architect has been called in recently because the bank’s foundations are suffering from subsidence. The foundations were built on cement and bricks-and-mortar, and those foundations are cracked due to the revolution of technology in the last 50 years.

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For example, data mining days began in the 1990s with the whole focus being upon data usage for sales. Get more cross-sell, get more relationship depth, get more profit, get rid of loss-making customers ... nothing was really focused upon customer service in that era. It’s similar to the days of Business Process Re-engineering, where the push was for banks to reinvent the customer relationship from the external interaction viewpoint inwards ... instead, most banks opted for purely incremental improvements to internal processes to lower costs. Now there is a big change. That big change is the information economy and the ability of new players to use information as a competitive weapon.

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Talk to anyone and they define it different ways and, in all of this confusion, the decision maker is left confused. Nevertheless, we are moving from a world of finance where technology was core to efficiency in its first wave, and differentiation was core in its second. Initially, mainframe compute power and then Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and virtualisation created efficient computing capabilities for financial firms. Then the ease of modular computing, service-oriented architectures and Ajax Web 2.0 has made computing applications the differentiating factor between a winning bank and an also-ran bank. Now we are moving to an age where computing and applications just don’t matter.

The Connected Company
by Dave Gray and Thomas Vander Wal
Published 2 Dec 2014

This is revolutionary!’” Jobs went back to Apple, and the rest is history. Xerox may have learned its lesson. Today, the company is focused on moving from being a copier company to a services company. Since 2006, revenue from services—such as outsourcing its customers’ document management and other business processes—has risen from 25% to almost 50%. The jury is still out, but Xerox may be turning itself around. How Kodak Faded Away Kodak introduced one of the first consumer cameras in history, in 1888, with the slogan, “You press the button, we do the rest.” For 100 years, it sold cameras and film.

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That’s just the one region in the U.S. and then there’s another thousand in Europe that are connected in various ways. It’s actually a bit cleaner and easier to figure out but it’s still quite complex. Every team is throwing out new versions asynchronously and managing it and what you end up with is this chaotic system that’s actually quite resilient. Unlike many business processes that are designed to be efficient, closed systems, complex systems like Netflix’s are designed to be resilient. This means they continue to work even when many of the parts are broken. If a wheel falls off of your car, you can’t keep going. You have to stop. But when a Netflix service breaks, the system as a whole continues to function without that part, because the system is designed to be failure tolerant.

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Making changes in one part of the process might solve a problem for that unit but cause problems for others. The goal of podular design is to reduce that interdependency by enabling autonomous teams to focus on clear outcomes that deliver value to customers. Chains Versus Nets You can think of any business process as a chain: a series of steps that people go through to get things done. Processes don’t depend on the intelligence or creativity of the people who run them, so much as their consistency and ability to perform a specialized task. The manager of the process is responsible for the intelligence of the system.

The Trade Lifecycle: Behind the Scenes of the Trading Process (The Wiley Finance Series)
by Robert P. Baker
Published 4 Oct 2015

There are two noticeable features:   IT has a relationship with all other business functions The other business functions do not tend to communicate with one other. 256 THE TRADE LIFECYCLE Regulatory authorities Management Audit Operations IT Systems Finance Front Office Legal Product Control Market risk control Counterparty risk control FIGURE 19.1 IT in the middle This puts IT in a unique position carrying high responsibility. The burden of investigating and improving workflows and business processes often falls to IT. This can even be when there is no need for a new IT system to solve the problem. We know of several cases where IT has improved the business simply by alerting one business function to a process already in existence in another or by getting two business functions to streamline their processes to take notice of each other rather than acting independently.

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Once that is accomplished, responsibility must be undertaken and followed through to the completion of the project. Proper management should ensure that problems come to light early and are resolved. Communication is essential to ensure all of this occurs. Investigation to uncover real problems An IT system is generally built to solve a business problem or facilitate a business process. IT has a responsibility to uncover the real problem it is trying to solve before embarking on development. Sometimes it is discovered that a solution to a similar problem already exists or that re-using existing IT components is sufficient without the need for new work; IT is often the only department with such knowledge.

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Some quants aid the traders with pricing and risk management while others are involved in the control function helping to quantify market and counterparty risk exposures. PART Four Behind the Scenes CHAPTER 21 Developing Processes for New Products (and Improving Processes for Existing Products) nvestment banking is an evolving business. Processes are continually required to solve new problems or improve existing practices. Sometimes changes come because of the desire to trade new products, other times regulators may impose new requirements or the need to catch up or overtake competitors forces banks to consider change. Here we consider processes.

Mastering Private Equity
by Zeisberger, Claudia,Prahl, Michael,White, Bowen , Michael Prahl and Bowen White
Published 15 Jun 2017

The best VC funds will therefore draw on a strong bench of partners, who not only have an intimate understanding of the challenges faced by their portfolio companies, but also come with their own hard-earned experience to give credible advice. Venture partners mentor management teams, help develop the marketability of a start-up’s product or service, identify and fill holes in its team, and facilitate the development of business processes required to scale up. Venture capitalists are also a key resource for start-ups when raising new rounds of capital, both in shaping the fundraising message and identifying potential investors in their network. SYNDICATED DEALS: While “club deals”10 are rare in growth equity and buyouts, venture rounds are quite often funded by multiple VCs.

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As growth equity investors rarely employ debt to magnify returns on their equity stake, their focus will be on driving change at the operating company (through strategic, operational and financial initiatives), or professionalization and governance optimization, as shown in Exhibit 3.21 Exhibit 3.2 Value Creation in Growth Equity Professionalizing governance and business processes provides the necessary backbone to execute value creation initiatives. Given the initially lean set-up of VC-backed companies and the resource constraints in SMEs, many of the structures and processes governing their business operations and decision-making have previously been implemented in an ad-hoc fashion.

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The situation often requires the existing management to be replaced or at a minimum to be complemented with a few seasoned experts with industry and/or turnaround experience to stabilize the business and reassure debt holders, suppliers and customers of the changes to come. With a clear understanding of the time at its disposal, turnaround investors will look for low hanging fruits to solve the cash flow shortage, improve operating performance and rapidly turn the cash flow positive. Once the company’s existing business processes have been stabilized and the threat of immediate failure has been removed, the PE team will shift its sights to improving the productivity of its assets and allocating capital and resources to restore the company back to a sustainable going concern. Ensuring survival in the short term and recovery in the long term is the target.

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
Published 27 Feb 2018

Here is sampling of possible use cases, and it is by no means an exhaustive list: •  Inviolable property registries, which people can use to prove that they own their houses, cars, or other assets; •  Real-time, direct, bank-to-bank settlement of securities exchanges, which could unlock trillions of dollars in an interbank market that currently passes such transactions through dozens of specialized institutions in a process that takes two to seven days; •  Self-sovereign identities, which don’t depend on a government or a company to assert a person’s ID; •  Decentralized computing, which supplants the corporate business of cloud computing and Web hosting with the hard drives and processing power of ordinary users’ computers; •  Decentralized Internet of Things transactions, where devices can securely talk and transact with each other without the friction of an intermediary, making possible big advances in transportation and decentralized energy grids; •  Blockchain-based supply chains, in which suppliers use a common data platform to share information about their business processes to greatly improve accountability, efficiency, and financing with the common purpose of producing a particular good; •  Decentralized media and content, which would empower musicians and artists—and, in theory, anyone who posts information of value to the Net—to take charge of their digital content, knowing they can track and manage the use of this “digital asset.”

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A more radical way to extract value from blockchain solutions in supply chains would involve the issuance of unique tokens of the kind discussed in the previous chapter, special digital assets that represent goods and services moving along a supply chain. This has the potential to bring flexibility to business dealings in the export-import field and innovate new business processes. Tokenization, when combined with GPS data and other information recorded in a blockchain, would let the owner of goods in transit transfer rights to any buyer anywhere at any time, without the shipment having to be recorded by a port. Companies whose products were among the $14 billion worth of cargo trapped at sea when South Korea’s Hanjin Shipping Co. declared bankruptcy in 2016 might have welcomed this option.

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Intermediate goods that would otherwise be encumbered by a pre-established chain of unsettled commitments can instead be put out to bid to see if other buyers want to take on the rights and obligations associated with them. This would attract alternative sources of impromptu demand, which could have a market-clearing effect on resource management. Enhanced visibility on business processes, when coupled with the ability to find liquid markets for goods-linked digital assets, means that industrial actors could be incentivized, like never before, to be both environmentally responsible and profitable. It’s similar to the principle, explored above, of using price signals to optimize a solar microgrid.

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It
by Michael E. Gerber
Published 3 Mar 1995

“In fact, there isn’t a function or position within the company that is free of asking marketing questions, if by marketing we mean, ‘What must our business be in the mind of our customers in order for them to choose us over everyone else?’ “And so, seen from the appropriate perspective, the entire business process by which your company does what it does is a marketing process. “It starts with the promise you make to attract them to your door. “It continues with the sale you make once they get there. “And it ends with the delivery of the promise before they leave your door. “In some companies that process is called Lead Generation, Lead Conversion, Client Fulfillment.

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“And it is getting them to come back for more that is the Primary Aim of every business. “Because what McDonald’s knows, and what Federal Express knows, and what Disney knows—indeed, what every extraordinary business knows—is that the customer you’ve got is one hell of a lot less expensive to sell to than the customer you don’t have yet. “And that’s why the business process of Lead Generation, Lead Conversion, and Client Fulfillment is so critical to the growth of your business. And that’s what marketing is. The whole process. Not just a part of it but the entire thing. “And it never stops! “And so, while the VP/Marketing and the VP/Operations and the VP/Finance each have their own specific accountabilities, they share one common purpose—to make a promise their customer wants to hear, and to deliver on that promise better than anyone else on the block!

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“And so, while the VP/Marketing and the VP/Operations and the VP/Finance each have their own specific accountabilities, they share one common purpose—to make a promise their customer wants to hear, and to deliver on that promise better than anyone else on the block! “And the place where they join each other is at the position of COO. The COO is the driver of all this. The COO connects each part of the business process. The COO maintains the integrity of the whole by acting as the arbiter of the Strategic Objective he is accountable for fulfilling, of the rules of the game he is accountable for maintaining, of the game the business has chosen to play. “And it is there, at that point in the middle, where Hierarchy and Process meet.

Blockchain Basics: A Non-Technical Introduction in 25 Steps
by Daniel Drescher
Published 16 Mar 2017

So fostering standardization of peer interactions could be another long-term accomplishment of the blockchain. Streamlining Processes As a consequence of standardization and automation, business processes will become more transparent and streamlined. Many organizations reviewed and analyzed their business processes as a side effect of preparing themselves for transition to the blockchain. Hence, the review of existing business processes and redesigning and streamlining them could be another accomplishment of the blockchain that may persist. Increased Processing Speed Disintermediation, standardization, streamlined processes, and automation lead to a significant speed up of processes.

Leadership by Algorithm: Who Leads and Who Follows in the AI Era?
by David de Cremer
Published 25 May 2020

The largest software company in Europe, SAP, has also eliminated several thousands of jobs by introducing AI into their management structure. The framework for today’s society is clearly dominated by the assumption that humans will be replaced by technology whenever possible (human-out-of-the-loop) and that it only makes sense for humans to be part of the business process when automation is not yet possible (contingent participation). Several surveys indicate that it is only a matter of time. For example, an Accenture study revealed that 85% of surveyed executives want to invest more extensively in AI-related technologies by 2020.³¹ Likewise, a PwC survey revealed that 62% of executives are planning to deploy AI in several management areas.³² Furthermore, a survey by Salesforce Research revealed that, in the service industry, 69% of organizations are actively preparing for AI-based service solutions to be applied.

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As such, leaders need to build new work cultures in which biases and distrust are reduced as much as possible to assure that giving feedback will not be seen by employees as an opportunity to simply oppose the algorithm. 2. Identify which data is most important Algorithms can make external data transparent so that we can more easily identify significant trends to help optimize business processes and value created. However, an algorithm cannot achieve any of this if it is not fed with data. So, who decides what kind of data is given to the algorithm? These are important questions because intelligent machines will produce better insights and identify more useful trends if the data is of high quality.

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Purpose makes for data If it is unclear and not well-defined what kind of data needs to be used, the resulting outcome from any algorithmic effort will be so much less useful to the pursuit of company goals. Dewhurst and Willmot (2014) call this failure of algorithms acting in optimal ways, the “garbage in/garbage out” principle.¹⁶⁸ If algorithms have to assist in making decisions and the appropriate data is not employed, why should we then expect that business processes and outcomes will become optimized? Algorithms cannot address the quality of data issue, so it is up to leaders to make those choices. Leaders set the priorities and those priorities will guide the collection of high-quality data. This reality also requires leaders to be clear about and embrace the purpose of the organization they are leading.

The AI-First Company
by Ash Fontana
Published 4 May 2021

A far better solution would be a single app that takes the photo, has text fields for the report, and automatically sends the report to a queue for the loss adjuster to process. Disputed claims can be kicked back to the assessor for reassessment if necessary. This data on what type of damage should be repaired or replaced, how much it will cost to repair, what cars are valued in what way, etc., is most valuable and very hard to gather. Business process data goes in and out of workflow apps all day, every day. Companies can use this data to build an intelligent system—that is, a system that goes beyond recording work to automating work by predicting a next step, and even automatically filling out parts of a form. Continuing the example above, imagine an application that enters the car’s specifications; determines from photo files the extent of the damage; and calculates the total cost.

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However, outsourced operations can be cheaper than insourced operations, thanks to the tools they build for their labelers or the rates they negotiated with workers. Companies tend to experiment with both insourcing and outsourcing, achieving a balance over time, depending on their labeling needs. Outsourcing can take many forms. There are consulting firms, business process outsourcing firms, and others that will create custom labeling operations with associated expenses and margin for them. On the other hand, there is a burgeoning crowdsourcing industry in which individuals work for a small fee on a per-task basis. The aforementioned Mechanical Turk and Upwork are examples of marketplaces for task-based labor.

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Larger customers, on the other hand, may demand restrictive terms of use for their data and discounts for contributions. Create a data coalition. AI-First companies can organize customer data coalitions to beat behemoths. Build workflow software to gather data. Data about business processes flows in and out of workflow apps all day, every day. AI-First companies can use this data to build an intelligent system that goes beyond recording work to automating it by predicting a next step. Pull data from other software. Linking, normalizing, and updating data across disparate sources is a valuable service.

Strategy: A History
by Lawrence Freedman
Published 31 Oct 2013

The Rhetorical Appeal of a Managerial Salvation Device,” Journal of Management Studies 35, no. 4 (July 1991): 419–441. 19. Michael Hammer, “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate,” Harvard Business Review, July/August 1990, 104. 20. Thomas Davenport and James Short, “The New Industrial Engineering: Information Technology and Business Process Redesign,” Sloan Management Review, Summer 1990; Keith Grint, “Reengineering History: Social Resonances and Business Process Reengineering,” Organization 1, no. 1 (1994): 179–201; Keith Grint and P. Case, “The Violent Rhetoric of Re-Engineering: Management Consultancy on the Offensive,” Journal of Management Studies 6, no. 5 (1998): 557–577. 21. Bradley G.

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The notion that management was a new profession of increasing importance, essential to the performance of modern businesses, was recognized in the establishment of business schools. The first was the Wharton School at Pennsylvania, founded in 1881. The management in question, however, was of potentially unruly workforces as much as complex business processes. The “labor issue” was a major preoccupation. Joseph Wharton wished the school to teach “the nature and prevention of strikes” as well as “the necessity for modern industry of organizing under single leaders or employers great amounts of capital and great numbers of laborers, and of maintaining discipline among the latter.”1 A quarter of a century passed before the Harvard Business School opened in 1908.

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This risk was greatest in areas that were hard to grasp, whether because of the sophistication of the financial instruments or the potential of the new technologies. Within companies, any activities that might be holding down the price, not providing the value that was being extracted elsewhere, came to be targeted. Thus they encouraged remorseless cost cutting. Business Process Re-engineering The Japanese success over the postwar decades could be taken as a triumph of a focused, patient, coherent, and consensual culture, a reflection of dedicated operational efficiency or else a combination of the two. Either way, the pacesetter was the car manufacturer, Toyota. Having spent the Second World War building military vehicles, the company struggled after the war to get back into the commercial market.

Principles of Protocol Design
by Robin Sharp
Published 13 Feb 2008

The function of the uppermost layer, associated with Service Flow, is to make it possible to compose simpler web services into more complex ones. A major aim of this is to be able to provide services for performing complete business processes, in which documents from various sources are passed round and processed in some way. One of the main candidates for use in this layer, Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), of which the latest version is known as WS-BPEL [265], focusses directly on this issue. However, the way in which this layer works is 364 11 Application Protocols currently not completely standardised among various suppliers of Web services, and we shall not go into more details about it here.

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Bartlett, K.A., Scantelbury, R.A., Wilkinson, P.T.: A note on reliable full-duplex transmission over half-duplex links. Commun. ACM 12(5), 260–261 (1969) 6. Baumann, J.: Mobile Agents: Control Algorithms, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1658. Springer-Verlag (2000) 7. BEA, IBM, Microsoft, SAP AG, Siebel Systems: Business Process Execution Language for Web Services Version 1.1 (2003) 8. Bellovin, S.: Internet RFC 1948: Defending Against Sequence Number Attacks (1996) 9. Bernstein, P.A., Goodman, N.: Concurrency control in distributed database systems. ACM Comput. Surv. 13(2), 185–221 (1981) 10. Bernstein, P.A., Shipman, D.W., Rothnie, J.B.: Concurrency control in a system for distributed databases (SDD-1).

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OASIS: Web Services Security: Username Token Profile 1.0 (2003) 262. OASIS: UDDI Spec Technical Committee Specification: UDDI Version 3.0.2 (2004) 263. OASIS: Web Services Security: SOAP Message Security 1.0 (2004) 264. OASIS: Web Services Security: X.509 Certificate Token Profile (2004) 265. OASIS: Web Services Business Process Execution Language Version 2.0 (2007) 266. W3C: Canonical XML (2001). This is identical to Internet RFC3076 267. W3C: XML Schema Part 1: Structures (2001) 388 References 268. 269. 270. 271. 272. 273. 274. 275. 276. 277. W3C: XML Schema Part 2: Datatypes (2001) W3C: XML Encryption Syntax and Processing (2002) W3C: XML-Signature Syntax and Processing (2002).

Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know About Data Mining and Data-Analytic Thinking
by Foster Provost and Tom Fawcett
Published 30 Jun 2013

Deployment In deployment the results of data mining—and increasingly the data mining techniques themselves—are put into real use in order to realize some return on investment. The clearest cases of deployment involve implementing a predictive model in some information system or business process. In our churn example, a model for predicting the likelihood of churn could be integrated with the business process for churn management—for example, by sending special offers to customers who are predicted to be particularly at risk. (We will discuss this in increasing detail as the book proceeds.) A new fraud detection model may be built into a workforce management information system, to monitor accounts and create “cases” for fraud analysts to examine.

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Be Ready to Accept Creative Ideas from Any Source Once different role players understand fundamental principles of data science, creative ideas for new solutions can come from any direction—such as from executives examining potential new lines of business, from directors dealing with profit and loss responsibility, from managers looking critically at a business process, and from line employees with detailed knowledge of exactly how a particular business process functions. Data scientists should be encouraged to interact with employees throughout the business, and part of their performance evaluation should be based on how well they produce ideas for improving the business with data science. Incidentally, doing so can pay off in unintended ways: the data processing skills possessed by data scientists often can be applied in ways that are not so sophisticated but nevertheless can help other employees without those skills.

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Regression Analysis Some of the same methods we discuss in this book are at the core of a different set of analytic methods, which often are collected under the rubric regression analysis, and are widely applied in the field of statistics and also in other fields founded on econometric analysis. This book will focus on different issues than usually encountered in a regression analysis book or class. Here we are less interested in explaining a particular dataset as we are in extracting patterns that will generalize to other data, and for the purpose of improving some business process. Typically, this will involve estimating or predicting values for cases that are not in the analyzed data set. So, as an example, in this book we are less interested in digging into the reasons for churn (important as they may be) in a particular historical set of data, and more interested in predicting which customers who have not yet left would be the best to target to reduce future churn.

The Nature of Technology
by W. Brian Arthur
Published 6 Aug 2009

They think in terms of purposes and work these backwards into individual operations in their mental world, much as a composer works a musical theme back into the instrumental parts that will express it. A domain is also a world in another sense. It is a realm that its users, not necessarily designers, can reach into to carry out mundane tasks, a world where certain manipulations are possible. The procedure for use is always the same. Some object (or activity or business process) is physically entered into a world. Image processing specialists literally enter an image into “digital world” by scanning it into the computer, or photographing it digitally. Once there the object is passed from one operation to another, worked on, transformed, and sometimes combined with other activities and objects within that world.

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I would prefer to say that the elements of the economy—industries, firms, business practices—do not so much “adopt” a new body of technology; they encounter it. And from this encounter, new processes, new technologies, and new industries are born as a result. How does this happen? Think of the new body of technology as its methods, devices, understandings, and practices. And think of a particular industry as comprised of its organizations and business processes, its production methods and physical equipment. All these are technologies in the wide sense I talked of earlier. These two collections of individual technologies—one from the new domain, and the other from the particular industry—come together and encounter each other. And new combinations form as a result.

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Business operations—commercial banks, oil companies, insurance companies—of course still reflect the era of large, fixed technologies. But increasingly, as with the operations of putting together a startup company, or venture capital, or financial derivatives, or digitization, or combinatorial biology, they are about combining functionalities—actions and business processes—for short-term reconfigurable purposes. The economy, in a word, is becoming generative. Its focus is shifting from optimizing fixed operations into creating new combinations, new configurable offerings. For the entrepreneur creating these new combinations in a startup company, little is clear.

Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done
by Larry Bossidy
Published 10 Nov 2009

So much thinking has gone into strategy that it’s no longer an intellectual challenge. You can rent any strategy you want from a consulting firm. Leadership development? The literature on it is endless. Innovation? Ditto. Nor is there any shortage of tools and techniques that can help leaders get things done—approaches to organization structure and incentive systems, business process design, methodologies for promoting people, guides to culture change. We talk to many leaders who fall victim to the gap between promises they’ve made and results their organizations delivered. They frequently tell us they have a problem with accountability—people aren’t doing the things they’re supposed to do to implement a plan.

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The SBUs were rolled into a new organization of four lines of business (LOBs) centered on broad market segments. E Solutions would offer a complete range of services for the “extended enterprise,” linked electronically with suppliers and clients, from supply chain networks to Internet security. Business Process Management would provide businesses and governments with administrative and financial processing and client relationship management. Information solutions would sell IT and communications outsourcing, managed storage, and management of desktop systems. And A.T. Kearney would specialize in high-end consulting, along with executive search services.

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And we were. BUILDING BLOCK FOUR: LINKING HR TO BUSINESS RESULTS If you’re starting to think that human resources is less important in an execution culture, let us correct that impression. It’s more important than ever but its role has to change radically. HR has to be integrated into the business processes. It has to be linked to strategy and operations, and to the assessments that the line people ultimately make about people. In this new role, HR becomes recruitment-oriented and a far more powerful force for advancing the organization than it was in its typical staff function. As Don Redlinger, the senior vice president of HR at Honeywell International, explains, “The paradox in working for somebody like Bossidy is that he’s the CFO and the chief human resources officer and the chief strategist, but he has such a systemic view of how you make an organization perform that human resources people prosper in that environment.

API Marketplace Engineering: Design, Build, and Run a Platform for External Developers
by Rennay Dorasamy
Published 2 Dec 2021

It is extremely important to differentiate between application and business logic. Routing a request to a middleware service to create a customer is an example of application logic. The process to create the customer record is an example of business logic. As the Marketplace is a new channel to the enterprise, it should leverage centrally owned and controlled business processes. Figure 8-7Logic microservice orchestration The northbound interface of this component is typically the swagger definition which is published on the API Gateway. This simplifies the integration between API Gateway and microservice. Another key function of this component is policy enforcement.

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To achieve this, a custom portal was required to facilitate the onboarding process, from requesting company registration documentation, to the acceptance of terms and conditions to the supply of banking information – based on the API product. It is key to note that the web application is an access mechanism and key to this objective is a well-defined business process flow. Administration : This allows an interface to the Support team to change runtime configuration data such as property values and endpoint configuration data. The benefit of providing a UI is that it ensures consistent, uniform access, which is secured, audited, and versioned – so changes can be tracked and rolled back if necessary.

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The key difference, however, is that this was an API product with defined contracts we needed to maintain, and we had to satisfy the requirement of state changes which would be managed per third party. The technical solution is discussed in further detail later in this chapter. The pros and cons of this approach are illustrated in Table 9-3.Table 9-3Pros and cons of a Shallow Sandbox strategy Pros Cons Caters for APIs with complex business processes spanning multiple backend systems Not fully representative of the Live solution as it is processed in a parallel flow Ability to manage state per third party Additional software components to maintain and support The custom solution allows easy configuration and update to handle new requirements Smaller resource footprint as microservice and middleware components are not deployed Use-Case This approach allows a neat and elegant solution to keep the Sandbox APIs aligned with the Live implementation.

Manage Your Home Build & Renovation Project: How to Create Your Dream Home on Time, in Budget and Without Stress
by David Cambridge
Published 14 May 2013

I have already outlined in the previous section that skipping aspects of the project is a massive risk therefore if you are truly serious about protecting what is important to you; you have to be prepared to do things right throughout the course of the project. It is no good starting out full of good intentions only to become lazy along the way, be professional. If this was your job you would be governed by business processes and systems, there are correct ways of doing things and you must be accountable. You cannot go and just spend your employers’ money without the necessary authority and approval so treat your project in exactly the same way. Why not even make this commitment to yourself now? I……………………………………………………………..

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THE TENDER RETURN Tender offers should be returned fully in accordance with the requirements of the tender invite and on time, using the required document formats completed in a clear and well-presented manner. This will be an immediate indicator that they are serious about working on the project and how reliable their business processes are. If individual bidders fail to provide the necessary detail in their returns then you need to seriously consider their ability or desire for the works. DEALING WITH TENDER CLARIFICATIONS You should allow the builders to be able to submit queries and clarifications relating to the tender documentation.

The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset That Drives Extraordinary Results
by Andrew McAfee
Published 14 Nov 2023

To prevent such a collapse, the business geeks take a radical step: they stop a lot of coordination, collaboration, and communication. It’s hard to overstate how big a change this is from the dominant approach of the late industrial era. When I was starting my academic career in the mid-1990s, business process reengineering was all the rage. This approach to improving performance was based on defining key business processes that cut across several functions (taking an order for a hundred widgets from a customer, for example, involved looking up inventory at the warehouse, having finance do a credit check, telling accounts receivable to generate an invoice, and so on), then specifying in great detail all the coordination required to make the process run smoothly.

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Reengineering and other approaches that emphasized cross-functional processes and well-defined coordination and collaboration were extremely popular. Executives loved the idea of having a tightly synchronized company that operated like an orchestra in which everyone was playing from the same sheet of music. In 1995, a group of CEOs in conversation on the Harvard Business School campus described the virtues of sychronized business processes: PAUL ALLAIRE [CEO, XEROX]. After all, if you have processes that are in control, you know how the organization is working. There’s no guesswork, because variances are small and operating limits are well defined. You get quality output without a lot of checking… CRAIG WEATHERUP [CEO AND PRESIDENT, PEPSI-COLA NORTH AMERICA].

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Finally, Sales Slow,” Wall Street Journal, April 13, 2021, www.wsj.com/articles/americans-have-too-much-toilet-paper-it-is-catching-up-to-companies-11618306200. 53 “pockets of lower than normal availability”: Lisa Baertlein and Melissa Fares, “Panic Buying of Toilet Paper Hits U.S. Stores Again with New Pandemic Restrictions,” Reuters, November 20, 2020, www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-toiletpaper/panic-buying-of-toilet-paper-hits-u-s-stores-again-with-new-pandemic-restrictions-idUSKBN2802W3. 54 sychronized business processes: David A Garvin, “Leveraging Processes for Strategic Advantage,” Harvard Business Review, September–October 1995, https://hbr.org/1995/09/leveraging-processes-for-strategic-advantage. 55 The 2016 letter opens with an explanation: Amazon Staff [ Jeff Bezos], “2016 Letter to Shareholders,” About Amazon, April 17, 2017, www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/2016-letter-to-shareholders. 56 “unencumbered by competing responsibilities”: Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, Working Backwards (London: Pan Macmillan, 2022), 54. 57 “Amazon is hundreds”: Benedict Evans, “The Amazon Machine,” Benedict Evans (blog), February 4, 2021, www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/12/12/the-amazon-machine. 58 “cross-functional projects”: Bryar and Carr, Working Backwards, 72. 59 “eliminate communication, not encourage it”: Bryar and Carr, Working Backwards, 72. 60 “At the next Quarterly Business Review”: Hastings and Meyer, No Rules Rules, 63. 61 a management process called V2MOM: Marc Benioff, “Create Strategic Company Alignment with a V2MOM,” The 360 Blog, Salesforce.com, December 5, 2022, www.salesforce.com/blog/how-to-create-alignment-within-your-company/. 62 “When I was at Oracle”: Marc R.

Data Mining: Concepts, Models, Methods, and Algorithms
by Mehmed Kantardzić
Published 2 Jan 2003

Although the implementation of a data warehouse is a complex task, described in many texts in great detail, in this text we are giving only the basic characteristics. A three-stage data-warehousing development process is summarized through the following basic steps: 1. Modeling. In simple terms, to take the time to understand business processes, the information requirements of these processes, and the decisions that are currently made within processes. 2. Building. To establish requirements for tools that suit the types of decision support necessary for the targeted business process; to create a data model that helps further define information requirements; to decompose problems into data specifications and the actual data store, which will, in its final form, represent either a data mart or a more comprehensive data warehouse. 3.

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In the business community, data mining can be used to discover new purchasing trends, plan investment strategies, and detect unauthorized expenditures in the accounting system. It can improve marketing campaigns and the outcomes can be used to provide customers with more focused support and attention. Data-mining techniques can be applied to problems of business process reengineering, in which the goal is to understand interactions and relationships among business practices and organizations. Many law enforcement and special investigative units, whose mission is to identify fraudulent activities and discover crime trends, have also used data mining successfully.

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They are usually special-purpose visualization tools that can help end users draw their own conclusions and decisions, based on graphically condensed data. OLAP tools are very useful for the data-mining process; they can be a part of it, but they are not a substitute. 1.6 BUSINESS ASPECTS OF DATA MINING: WHY A DATA-MINING PROJECT FAILS Data mining in various forms is becoming a major component of business operations. Almost every business process today involves some form of data mining. Customer Relationship Management, Supply Chain Optimization, Demand Forecasting, Assortment Optimization, Business Intelligence, and Knowledge Management are just some examples of business functions that have been impacted by data mining techniques. Even though data mining has been successful in becoming a major component of various business and scientific processes as well as in transferring innovations from academic research into the business world, the gap between the problems that the data mining research community works on and real-world problems is still significant.

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It)
by Salim Ismail and Yuri van Geest
Published 17 Oct 2014

A study by the G8 in 2013 estimates there are 688,000 social enterprises, generating $270 billion annually. These organizations come in many forms (Benefit or B Corporations, Triple Bottom Line, L3Cs, the Conscious Capital movement, the Slow Money movement) and leverage their MTPs to integrate social and environmental issues—as well as profits—into their business processes. This trend started with the rise of corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs in organizations. In 2012, 57 percent of the Fortune 500 published a CSR report—double the number from the previous year. The difference is that CSR initiatives are add-ons to most companies’ core business; for social enterprises, CSR initiatives are the core business.

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Bill Fischer, co-author with Umberto Lago and Fang Liu of the book Reinventing Giants: How Chinese Global Competitor Haier Has Changed the Way Big Companies Transform, makes the important observation that the “business model and corporate culture are inextricably linked.” The authors tracked Haier for over a decade, along the way identifying four key stages that large organizations must navigate to reinvent their cultures: Build quality Diversify Re-engineer the business process Reduce distance to customer Zhan Ruimin, a former Haier administrator who was appointed CEO by the Chinese state in 1984, implemented the quality-building step early on in his tenure. A famous anecdote has him handing out sledgehammers and joining staffers in destroying a few dozen subpar refrigerators.

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LinkedIn) ( ) OKRs are used across our organization with full transparency (e.g. Google - everyone can view each others’ performance) Experimentation & Risk 16) Does your organization constantly optimize processes through experimentation, A/B testing and short feedback loops? (e.g. Lean Startup methodology)* ( ) No, we use traditional business process management (BPM) ( ) We use the Lean approach (or similar) for customer facing areas like marketing ( ) We use the Lean approach for product innovation and product development ( ) We use the Lean approach for all core functions (innovation, marketing, sales, service, HR, even legal!) 17) To what extent do you tolerate failure and encourage risk-taking?

Bank 3.0: Why Banking Is No Longer Somewhere You Go but Something You Do
by Brett King
Published 26 Dec 2012

Blog: A contraction of the term “web log”—a type of website usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. BPO: Business Process Outsourcing—the practice of outsourcing some or all of the business’s back-office processes to an external company or service provider; common with call centres and IT support. BPR: Business Process Re-engineering—re-engineering business processes to either reduce costs or improve the flow of a process for customers. CapEx: Capital Expense CES: Consumer Electronics Show Churn: This refers to customers moving from a service provider within one specific product category to another, based on price, value or some other factor.

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The best analogy is to imagine that your bank is publishing a product catalogue and investor information magazine, based on your product, to customers daily. Sales Intelligence and Automated offer capability Real-time and precognitive offer serving for existing customers delivered in the form of prompts, offers, or service messages, especially within the internet banking portal. BPR (Business Process Re-engineering) on select processes Reduction of layering between sales and service departments, including the removal of duplicate “skills” within “competing” product units. Creation of “customer dynamics” capability as owners of customers, rather than product competing for revenue from same.

Tomorrow's Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future
by Richard Susskind
Published 10 Jan 2013

There may not be a tipping point, but we are likely to witness a significant upsurge in new competition for law firms. Additionally, in this second stage, law firms and in-house departments will find ways of running their own back offices (technology and accounts, for example) at far lower costs. This could be through business process outsourcing or shared services facilities. And there is also likely to be a shift in this second stage towards greater investment by in-house legal departments in legal needs analysis and legal risk management. Owners and leaders of businesses will want to have a far clearer sense of what are the urgent and unavoidable legal expenses and may confine their legal spend to these alone.

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Price comparison systems, reputation systems, and online auctions for legal services (see Chapter 5) will be used frequently, creating an electronic legal marketplace quite unlike the traditional basis of legal trading that has endured for decades and more. It is not that computer systems will replace all legal work by, say, 2020. Of course not. But around that time and from then on it will become commonplace across the legal profession for all substantial and successful legal businesses to be converting their business processes from human handcrafting to ever more sophisticated and intelligent IT-based production. We have seen such changes in many other sectors of our economy and there is no reason to think that the law should be immune from IT. If analogous technologies can transform the practice of medicine and audit, then lawyers should be open to similar overhaul.

The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume
by Josh Kaufman
Published 2 Feb 2011

I had no idea that companies like Procter & Gamble even existed until I applied for the job that swept me into the corporate world. Working for P&G was an education in itself. The sheer size and scope of the business—and the complexity required to manage a business of that size—boggled my mind. During my first three years with the company, I participated in decisions across every part of the business process: creating new products, ramping up production, allocating millions of marketing dollars, and securing distribution with major retailers like Walmart, Target, Kroger, and Costco. As an assistant brand manager, I was leading teams of thirty to forty P&G employees, contractors, and agency staff—all of whom had competing projects, plans, and priorities.

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As decades passed, this self-reinforcing feedback loop resulted in a few dominant behemoths in each industry. Business schools became obsessed with how to capture market share and create gigantic companies quickly via ever-larger mergers, raising the financial stakes with each acquisition. For entrepreneurs, venture capital became a must-have aspect of the business process—how else could you afford to build a factory or a national brand in a few short years? “Economies of scale” in production meant large companies could outcompete smaller rivals by offering similar products at lower prices. Investors wanted to see huge returns on their money quickly, prudence be damned, rewarding speculators who wrote business plans promising a huge exit in a short amount of time.

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Value Delivery: How quickly can you serve each customer? What is your current returns or complaints rate? Finance: What is your Profit Margin ? How much Purchasing Power do you have? Are you financially Sufficient ? Any Measurements directly related to these questions are probably KPIs. Anything that’s not directly related to a core business process or a system’s Throughput is probably not. Try to limit yourself to only three to five KPIs per system. When collecting Measurements, it’s tempting to build yourself a “dashboard” that contains every piece of information you’d ever want to see. Resist the temptation : if you overload yourself with too much data, you’ll be far less likely to see Changes that are critically important.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia
by Anthony M. Townsend
Published 29 Sep 2013

This raw data is fed into “urban informatics” systems that combine data-crunching hardware and software to process the signals into usable intelligence and let us visualize and discover patterns that can help us make better decisions. Finally, an “urban information architecture” provides a set of management practices and business processes to tell people how to use the results of these computations to get their work done and cut through red tape and bureaucratic barriers. As the company argued in a 2010 white paper, “the smart city is so different in essence to the 20th century city that the governance models and organisational frameworks themselves must evolve.”33 Together, these three layers will allow us to rewire governments by design, transforming the way they work internally and together with outside partners and citizens.

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To understand how all of this might help cities, look at the effect of technology on air transportation over the last few decades. For customers, interactions with airlines often have a Kafkaesque tenor of confusion and disdain. But behind the scenes, an arsenal of sensors, informatics, and information-driven business processes are at work, coordinating the movements of millions of passengers, crew, baggage, and planes. It was estimated in the late 1990s that “50,000 electronic exchanges of all sorts” were required to get a single Boeing 747 off the ground, from booking seats to ordering food and fuel.34 In today’s highly instrumented and networked air transport network, millions of digital transactions orchestrate each flight.

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Watson, it would take a new name—International Business Machines Corporation. Big Blue Fast-forward to 2011, a big year for the company that came to be known as “Big Blue.” It’s the one-hundredth anniversary of the merger that launched Hollerith’s punch-card enterprise on its way to global domination and built a big business processing the big data of government and business. Throughout the twentieth century, IBM’s pinstripe-suited engineers personified corporate America. But in 1993, after a long decline driven by growing competition in its mainframe and personal computer businesses, Big Blue hit rock bottom, posting an $8.1 billion operating loss.

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 14 Jul 2001

Quite the opposite. Over time, the push was for even broader patent protection—this time to cover business processes as well as software inventions. A software-implemented business process patent is a patent for a process of doing business, sufficiently novel and nonobvious to earn the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's favor.85 Most thought such processes beyond the reach of patent law. This was not because patent law never covered processes—it plainly did. But the expectation was that it would not cover business processes because adequate return from the process itself would create a sufficient incentive to invent. 86 In 1998, however, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit put this idea to rest.

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But the expectation was that it would not cover business processes because adequate return from the process itself would create a sufficient incentive to invent. 86 In 1998, however, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit put this idea to rest. The patent law reached business processes just as any other, and patents for business methods were, the court held, not invalid because of the subject matter.87 The case in which this issue arose was one where a financial services company had developed a new kind of mutual fund service, one that would manage a pool of mutual funds through a software-based technology. The court upheld both the software patent and the patent on the business method. Both, the court said, were inventions that the patent law could reach.

Mastering Prezi for Business Presentations
by Russell Anderson-Williams
Published 24 Jul 2012

You might design a Prezi and deliver a presentation to colleagues yourself, but you could reinforce the message by using the same Prezi file and adding narration, then sending out the link for everyone to view it. [ 41 ] Using Audio Or you might have a business critical process that needs explaining quickly to colleagues around the world. Create a Prezi with narration, share it online and save yourself the airfares! Using this technique you could start to build an entire library of business processes, inductions, and training that your colleagues are able to explore in their own time. Creating an environment When new members of staff join your business they normally spend a few days in a classroom environment having training. There's a projector and a whiteboard, and for the most part they engage in good conversations with the trainer and each other and learn a lot.

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[ 184 ] Chapter 9 Using these diagrams and drawings gives you a great chance to explain concepts and ideas to your colleagues with ease. You can see from the preceding screenshot that there's a good range of useful drawings and diagrams that you're used to seeing in business presentations. You can easily create organograms, timelines for projects, or business processes and cycles, simply by using the templates available and inserting your own content and imagery. By using the Theme wizard explained earlier in this chapter, you can make sure your drawings and diagrams use your corporate colors. Prezi text editor The text editor in Prezi has had a wonderful makeover in recent months.

Money, Real Quick: The Story of M-PESA
by Tonny K. Omwansa , Nicholas P. Sullivan and The Guardian
Published 28 Feb 2012

The Central Bank had also engaged Consult Hyperion, an IT consultancy firm, to conduct an operational risk audit, according to a case study by the Alliance for Financial Inclusion, an international group of Central Bankers and financial regulators. Consult Hyperion tested the end-to-end encryption of the SIM card functionality, which held all of the confidential customer data; reviewed the use of hardware security modules at the M-PESA servers; and ensured that all business processes had embedded security procedures, including live backup. The consultants also checked to ensure that all of the M-PESA systems allowed for comprehensive reporting and management so every transaction could be monitored, individually and en masse. Because Safaricom was not a bank, it was not technically under the jurisdiction of the Central Bank.

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It started with electronics shops selling and repairing phones, morphed into software developers working on their own to develop apps to build a better platform, and now has the full support of the Kenyan government as it looks to foster IT as a pillar for future economic growth. The government, with support from the International Finance Corporation (IFC) of the World Bank, is constructing a sprawling 5,000-acre technology park (Malili Technology Park) to promote BPO (business process outsourcing) as well as content and app development. “The ICT revolution is starting to connect to other sectors and starting to influence the old economy and causing an enormous amount of growth,” says Wolfgang Fengler, lead economist at the Nairobi office of the World Bank. A key focal point for new startups is iHub (“innovation” Hub) in Nairobi, co-founded by Eric Hersman, also the co-founder of Ushahidi.

Wealth Without a Job: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Freedom and Security Beyond the 9 to 5 Lifestyle
by Phil Laut and Andy Fuehl
Published 12 Sep 2004

It is not just the emotional intensity that changes as you move toward the upper right-hand corner of the diagram. The sales cycle takes longer and the whole thing becomes more complex because there are more steps. Sometimes several people must agree before you can make the sale. The $5 to $20 item is business at its simplest. It compresses the four basic business processes described in Chapter 9 into one simple operation. Moving to something bigger produces greater emotional intensity and a longer sales cycle. Learning to Receive Learning to receive? Yes, that’s right, even though most people have never heard those words in the same sentence. Typically, receiving is viewed as a fortuitous, unintentional accident rather than as a skill.

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Any sort of personal growth activity that aids you directly in the resolution of internal conflicts and childhood conditioning is certain to facilitate your accomplishment of any significant project. Sample Plan Here is the beginning of a sample plan someone wrote to expand a proofreading and editing business. This plan is modeled to include the four distinct business processes from Chapter 10: 1. Finding prospective customers 2. Presenting your product or service, so prospects buy ccc_laut_ch14_249-262.qxd 7/8/04 12:28 PM Page 257 Sample Plan 3. Producing your product or service, delivering it and collecting payment 4. Follow-up Date Jun 12 Purpose Jun 14 Prospecting Jun 14 Closing Jun 15 Prospecting Jun 15 Prospecting Jun 17 Prospecting Jun 17 Personal ???

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See also Power affirmations Ah-ha moments, 62 Analytical mind, 135–137 Anger, 112, 121, 124–126 Answering machines, 229 Anxiety, sources of, 6, 56, 94, 119, 211 Associated position, in perception, 109–110, 155, 194–195 Attorney, functions of, 190–191 Auditory representational system, 201, 203, 206–207, 224, 232, 235, 240, 263–264 Authority figures: Authority Size method, 103–104 perceptions of, 101–103, 171 Authority Size method, 103–104 Awareness, importance of, 62–63, 111, 260 Bad habits, 17 Baseball Diamond method, 50–52, 95, 132, 199, 224, 259 Behavioral flexibility, 41 Belief system, 72 Belligerence, 160 Birth experience analogy, 113–114 Birth without Violence (Leboyer), 113 Blame, 31–35, 77–78 Bonds, in family dynamics, 80–82 Boundaries, in family dynamics, 81–82 Burnout, 16 Business model: business process, 180–181 hiring strategies, 181–182 network marketing, 182–183 prospective customers, 180 top-down view, 179–180 Business opportunities, recognition of, 143–144 Buy and hold strategy, 23, 26 Career, Power Affirmations method, 176 Career development, 16–17 Cause and effect, 31–33, 121 Certainty, 68 Change, benefits of, 12.

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement
by David Brooks
Published 8 Mar 2011

Some did Dynamic Systems Theory, some did Six Sigma Analysis, or the Taguchi Method or Su-Field Analysis (structural-substance field analysis). There was TRIZ, a Russian-made model-based technology for producing creativity. There was Business Process Reengineering. Erica looked this one up on Wikipedia. According to one of the management books quoted on the site, BPR “escalates the efforts of JIT [Just In Time] and TQM [Total Quality Management] to make process orientation a strategic tool and a core competence of the organization. BPR concentrates on core business processes, and uses specific techniques within the JIT and TQM ‘toolboxes’ as enablers, while broadening the process vision.” Erica read sentences like that, or heard them at meetings, and she just had no clue how they applied to the problems at hand.

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Dubner, “This Is Your Brain on Prosperity,” New York Times, January 9, 2009, http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/this-is-your-brain-on-prosperity-andrew-lo-on-fear-greed-and-crisis-management/. 13 Daniel Gilbert of Harvard Gilbert, 180. 14 incompetent people exaggerate Erica Goode, “Among the Inept, Researchers Discover, Ignorance Is Bliss,” New York Times, January 18, 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/18/health/among-the-inept-researchers-discover-ignorance-is-bliss.html. 15 the more sectors they entered Jerry Z. Muller, “Our Epistemological Depression,” The American, February 29, 2009, http://www.american.com/archive/2009/february-2009/our-epistemological-depression. 16 BPR “escalates the efforts” “Business Processing Reengineering,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_reengineering. 17 John Maynard Keynes John Maynard Keyes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (New York: Classic Books America, 2009), 331. 18 “If the better elements” Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (New York: Hackett, 1995), 44. 19 In this scientific age Francis Bacon, “Preface to the Novum Organum,” in Prefaces and Prologues, vol. 34, ed.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
by Marc Goodman
Published 24 Feb 2015

In the lobby of Innovative Marketing’s growing headquarters, workers hung a colorfully backlit five-foot-square glass logo that they suspended behind a bank of receptionists, busy answering phones and greeting employees at the start of their day. Beyond the ultramodern reception area, executives were abuzz establishing business processes and putting systems in place to provide the corporate structure required to grow the firm. Soon, department after department was added, including software development, quality assurance, finance, billing, marketing, human resources, translation and software localization, research and development, production, outsourcing, and technical support.

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He sets goals and targets for his staff and oversees the distribution of criminal proceeds, especially at bonus time. The CEO is supported by a leadership team, including other C-suite executives. CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER The CFO keeps track of key crime syndicate metrics, including how much crimeware has been sold, how many accounts have been hacked, and what their balances are. He will use commercial business process tools, including financial reporting systems and databases to handle accounts payable (to crime contractors) and payroll for the criminal workforce. He also maintains a sophisticated network of clandestine financial contacts for purposes of money laundering, is responsible for managing front-company merchant accounts, and oversees global transactions in a variety of currencies, including online-payment service companies that eschew any “know your customer rules,” such as Liberty Reserve.

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Consequently, we’ve entered the Industrial Age of Crime, with malicious computer code churned out in assembly-line fashion, specifically developed and scripted to run on autopilot, toiling away day and night committing offenses while hackers earn healthy profits in their sleep. Committing Crime Automagically Though Crime, Inc. engages in constant business process improvement, it is not committing new crimes from scratch each and every time. In the age of Moore’s law, these tasks have been readily automated and can run in the background at scale without the need for significant human intervention. Crime automation allows transnational organized crime groups to gain the same efficiencies and cost savings that multinational corporations obtained by leveraging technology to carry out their core business functions.

Four Battlegrounds
by Paul Scharre
Published 18 Jan 2023

While Maven’s tools were technically impressive, they were not (yet) delivering on AI’s hype. Shanahan said the most impactful work the JAIC had done was in “robotic process automation tools” (“I wouldn’t even call it AI,” he acknowledged). Rachael Martin, mission director for business process automation at the JAIC, explained that they were focused on using automation, analytics, and data augmentation to modernize business processes across the department to “either introduce efficiencies, or find cost savings, or find new insights, or be more predictive about the way that we conduct our business.” Martin said that DoD finance and accounting offices have been “the most forward leaning in implementing automation” because they have a strong motivation to reduce human error to improve auditing and accountability.

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Position in AI Race,” FedScoop, September 9, 2020, https://www.fedscoop.com/esper-ai-announcements-ai-race/. 206“either introduce efficiencies, or find cost savings”: Rachael Martin, interview by author, April 29, 2020. 206“Game Changer”: “The JAIC’s Business Process Transformation Mission Initiative Delivers,” Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, May 14, 2020, https://www.ai.mil/blog_05_14_20-mi_business_process_transformation_mission.html. 206“amateurs talk tactics”: “Where does the quote of ‘Amateurs talk strategy; professionals talk logistics’ come from? Is it true or not?” Quora, June 20, 2019, https://www.quora.com/Where-does-the-quote-of-Amateurs-talk-strategy-professionals-talk-logistics-come-from-Is-it-true-or-not. 207precision-guided weapons: Barry D.

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The story of the JAIC demonstrates the many challenges—technical and bureaucratic—the Defense Department faces in adopting AI. 24 FOUNDATION Project Maven turned out to be exactly what Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work had hoped for when he launched the project. Maven was a spark that ignited the spread of AI across DoD. Following Maven’s success, in 2018 DoD founded the JAIC, which developed AI applications for predictive maintenance, humanitarian assistance, and back-office business processes. More significantly, though, JAIC helped initiate a process of creating institutional resources for AI for other parts of the military to tap into, accelerating the process of AI adoption across DoD. The JAIC’s creation was not preordained and was almost halted by what Pentagon insiders call “antibodies” in the bureaucracy—individuals who stand to lose from change and mobilize to stifle new initiatives.

The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction
by Jamie Woodcock and Mark Graham
Published 17 Jan 2020

Globalization and outsourcing The final precondition that has deeply shaped the gig economy in its current form is a combination of political economy and technology: the effects of globalization and outsourcing. This is a development and intensification of the outsourcing of call centres from high-income countries to low- and middle-income countries, for example, from the UK to India (Taylor and Bain, 2005). This laid the organizational basis for wider business process outsourcing that has become today’s online outsourcing. However, globalization has not only meant the shifting of work and trade to different parts of the world, but also brought about a generalization of what Barbrook and Cameron (1996) have termed the ‘Californian Ideology’, referring to the encouragement of deregulated markets and powerful transnational corporations.

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Some jobs are thus more geographically sticky than others. Digital platforms have, however, made a lot of work less sticky. As work becomes ever more modularized, commoditized and standardized (Scott, 2001), and as markets for digital work are created, ties between service work and particular places can be severed. While the business process of outsourcing that emerged in the 1990s allowed large companies to take advantage of a ‘global reserve army’ by moving their call centres to cheap and distant labour markets, cloudwork changes the volume and granularity at which geographically non-proximate work can take place. A small business in New York can hire a freelance transcriber in Nairobi one day and New Delhi the next.

Designing Web APIs: Building APIs That Developers Love
by Brenda Jin , Saurabh Sahni and Amir Shevat
Published 28 Aug 2018

Real-life example Now that we have described the different aspects of audience seg‐ mentation, let’s examine a concrete example of segmentation analy‐ sis. Table 8-1 shows how the developer segmentation looks for Slack. Table 8-1. Developer audience segmentation Attribute Identity Description Enterprise developer (aka IT developer, corporate engineer, internal developer). Developer proficiency Proficient at implementing business processes, but not necessarily on the Slack platform. Enterprise developers are used to SDKs and frameworks rather than using the raw APIs. Building a Developer Strategy | 149 Attribute Platform of choice Preferred development language and frameworks Common use cases Preferred means of communication Market size and geographical distribution Description Windows and Linux scripting, web developers, SharePoint or Confluence.

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; } ); As you can see in Example 9-1, the developer states that they are looking to hear hello, hi, or greetings by way of a mention, direct mention, or direct message, and what they reply with, in turn, is Hello! This would have been an order of magnitude more complex to code if it weren’t for the Botkit framework. With Botkit, the developer just defines the business process, and the framework takes care of all the rest. Sometimes, you don’t need an opinionated framework. If your API is simple and intuitive, you might want to reduce maintenance cost by just providing code samples or SDKs, and leave the additional complexity to your developers. You might also take into account the proficiency of your developers.

Network Security Through Data Analysis: Building Situational Awareness
by Michael S Collins
Published 23 Feb 2014

I’ve seen this particular phenomenon show up when dealing with insiders, particularly people worried about shoulder surfing or physical surveillance. They’ll move their activity to evenings and weekends in order to make sure their neighbors don’t ask what they’re doing, and then show up fairly visibly in the traffic logs. Business processes are a common source of false positives with volume analysis. For example, I’ve seen a corporate site where there’s a sudden biweekly spike in traffic to a particular server. The server, which covered company payroll, was checked by every employee every other Friday and never visited otherwise.

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The alternative approach is to actively probe the addresses in a network and record the ones that don’t respond; those addresses should be dark. Passive collection requires gathering data over a long period. At the minimum, collect traffic for at least a week to ensure that dynamic addressing and business processes are handled. $ rwfilter --type=out --start-date=2013/05/01:00 --end-date=2013/05/08:23 \ --proto=0-255 --pass=stdout | rwset --sip-file=light.set # Now remove the lit addresses from our total inventory $ rwsettool --difference --output=dark.set initial.set light.set An alternative approach is to ping every host on the network to determine whether it is present

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delisting (address removal), DNSBLs Denial of Service (DoS), Volume and Time Analysis depth-first search (DFS), Components and Connectivity dig (see domain information groper) Digital Envoy’s Digital Element, IP Intelligence: Geolocation and Demographics Dijkstra’s Algorithm, Labeling, Weight, and Paths discrete variables, Variables and Visualization disruptibility, Enhancing IDS Detection Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) bandwidth exhaustion, DDoS and Routing Infrastructure consistency in, DDoS and Routing Infrastructure false-positive alerts, DDoS and Routing Infrastructure force multipliers, DDoS and Routing Infrastructure mitigation of, DDoS and Routing Infrastructure routing infrastructure and, DDoS and Routing Infrastructure types of attacks, DDoS, Flash Crowds, and Resource Exhaustion distributed query tools, Data Storage for Analysis: Relational Databases, Big Data, and Other Options distribution analysis common mistakes in, The Quantile-Quantile (QQ) Plot modes, Histograms normal distribution, Exploratory Data Analysis and Visualization, The Quantile-Quantile (QQ) Plot uniform distribution, The Quantile-Quantile (QQ) Plot DNS (domain name system) basics of, DNS finding ownership with whois, Using whois to Find Ownership forward querying using dig, Forward DNS Querying Using dig–Forward DNS Querying Using dig name allocation, DNS Name Structure name structure, DNS Name Structure reverse lookup, The DNS Reverse Lookup DNS Blackhole List (DNSBL), DNSBLs–DNSBLs DNS reflection, DDoS and Routing Infrastructure domain information groper (dig) display options, Forward DNS Querying Using dig forward DNS querying with, Forward DNS Querying Using dig mail exchange records and, Forward DNS Querying Using dig multiline option, Forward DNS Querying Using dig querying different servers with, Forward DNS Querying Using dig resource records and, Forward DNS Querying Using dig domains differences between, Domains: Determining Data That Can Be Collected host, Domains: Determining Data That Can Be Collected, Domains: Determining Data That Can Be Collected network, Domains: Determining Data That Can Be Collected, Domains: Determining Data That Can Be Collected service, Domains: Determining Data That Can Be Collected, Domains: Determining Data That Can Be Collected DoS (see Denial of Service) dotted quad notation, Network Layers and Addressing, Filtering Specific Types of Packets dst host predicate, Filtering Specific Types of Packets dst-reserve field, pmaps Dynamic User and Host List (DUHL), DNSBLs E echo request/reply, Checking Connectivity: Using ping to Connect to an Address EDA (see exploratory data analysis) .edu addresses, DNS Name Structure ELF (extended log format), HTTP: CLF and ELF email (see mail exchange) end-rec-num command, Choosing and Formatting Output Field Manipulation: rwcut ephemeral ports, Port Number epoch time, The Characteristics of a Good Log Message epoch-time switch, Choosing and Formatting Output Field Manipulation: rwcut error codes, The Characteristics of a Good Log Message ESP (protocol number 50), Packet and Frame Formats /etc/services file, Port Number ether dst predicate, Filtering Specific Types of Packets ether src predicate, Filtering Specific Types of Packets event construction, Actions: What a Sensor Does with Data, Classification and Event Tools: IDS, AV, and SEM Excel, An Introduction to R for Security Analysts exploitation attacks, Attack Models exploratory data analysis (EDA) bivariate description, Bivariate Description–Contingency Tables goals of, The Goal of EDA: Applying Analysis multivariate visualization, Multivariate Visualization–Multivariate Visualization operationalizing, Operationalizing Security Visualization–Rule seven: when performing long jobs, give the user some status feedback purpose of, Exploratory Data Analysis and Visualization univariate visualization, Univariate Visualization: Histograms, QQ Plots, Boxplots, and Rank Plots–Generating a Boxplot variables and, Variables and Visualization workflow, EDA Workflow extended log format (ELF), HTTP: CLF and ELF Extended Unique Identifier (EUI), MAC and Hardware Addresses F factors, Data Frames false-negative alerts, Basic Vocabulary, Classifier Failure Rates: Understanding the Base-Rate Fallacy, Enhancing IDS Detection false-positive alerts anomaly-based IDSes, Basic Vocabulary beacon detection and, Using Beaconing as an Alarm business processes, The Workday and Its Impact on Network Traffic Volume definition of, Classifier Failure Rates: Understanding the Base-Rate Fallacy detection system evaluation and, Enhancing IDS Detection inventory process and, The Goal of EDA: Applying Analysis locality-based alarms, Using Locality as an Alarm reducing, Enhancing IDS Detection volume-based alarms and, Using Volume as an Alarm with variant user-agent strings, Identifying NATs farking, DDoS and Routing Infrastructure Fibre Channel, What If It’s Not Ethernet?

Zero to Sold: How to Start, Run, and Sell a Bootstrapped Business
by Arvid Kahl
Published 24 Jun 2020

Keep Your Software and Processes Simple Simplicity can only be accomplished if every part of your operation is as simple as possible: your product, your software, your infrastructure, and even how you go about your daily business. Many of the ways to make your software product simpler can also be applied to your business processes. Optimize for Hot Paths In your software, some modules or functions will be executed more often than others. If your product is an image-thumbnail-generating cloud service, the part that resizes user-uploaded files into different ready-to-be-delivered images will run all day long. If you can speed up this single process by 5%, your entire service will be 5% more efficient.

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Check for Problem/Solution Alignment Every few months, determine if your business is still solving the problem it set out to solve. Most products are engineered for particular use cases. Those use cases could transform over time. Industries adopt new practices, and workflows change. Your tool may be front and center right now, but a change to the business process or a regulatory requirement may make your product less effective. Talk to your customers and see if they find friction where there was none before: Do they still deal with the problem frequently? Does the product provide as much value as it used to a few months ago? Have they noticed that your product has become harder to use for certain tasks?

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Equity Funds have been started that use Income Sharing Agreements instead of shares to create returns from investment. Earnest Capital does this, and its Shared Earnings Agreement is publicly available. Understanding that a long-term profit-sharing relationship is more compatible with the sustainable business processes of a bootstrapped business makes this kind of agreement very interesting for founders who want to keep control and benefit from external funds at the same time. Similarly, some VCs such as Indie.vc wants to support founders on their journey beyond initial profitability similarly. They take an initial percentage of ownership, which can be redeemed through a portion of the monthly revenue.

Designing Great Web APIs: Creating Business Value Through Developer Experience
by James Higginbotham
Published 14 Apr 2015

Use-case validation Using existing use cases, step through each one to identify any gaps in your API. This is especially useful if user interface mockups haven’t been completed yet, or if some of the API will not have a user interface associated with it. This is often the case for APIs designed for machine-to-machine integration rather than end-user functionality. Business-process diagrams For APIs that will be supporting business-workflow processes, first diagram the workflow(s). For each step in the workflow, map your API model to each step to ensure that you can accomplish all necessary aspects of the workflow. As you validate your APIs, look for methods that are missing.

Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques: Concepts and Techniques
by Jiawei Han , Micheline Kamber and Jian Pei
Published 21 Jun 2011

In general, the warehouse design process consists of the following steps:1. Choose a business process to model (e.g., orders, invoices, shipments, inventory, account administration, sales, or the general ledger). If the business process is organizational and involves multiple complex object collections, a data warehouse model should be followed. However, if the process is departmental and focuses on the analysis of one kind of business process, a data mart model should be chosen. 2. Choose the business process grain, which is the fundamental, atomic level of data to be represented in the fact table for this process (e.g., individual transactions, individual daily snapshots, and so on). 3.

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Bibliographic Notes Bibliography Index Front Matter Data Mining Third Edition The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems (Selected Titles) Joe Celko's Data, Measurements, and Standards in SQL Joe Celko Information Modeling and Relational Databases, 2nd Edition Terry Halpin, Tony Morgan Joe Celko's Thinking in Sets Joe Celko Business Metadata Bill Inmon, Bonnie O'Neil, Lowell Fryman Unleashing Web 2.0 Gottfried Vossen, Stephan Hagemann Enterprise Knowledge Management David Loshin The Practitioner's Guide to Data Quality Improvement David Loshin Business Process Change, 2nd Edition Paul Harmon IT Manager's Handbook, 2nd Edition Bill Holtsnider, Brian Jaffe Joe Celko's Puzzles and Answers, 2nd Edition Joe Celko Architecture and Patterns for IT Service Management, 2nd Edition, Resource Planning and Governance Charles Betz Joe Celko's Analytics and OLAP in SQL Joe Celko Data Preparation for Data Mining Using SAS Mamdouh Refaat Querying XML: XQuery, XPath, and SQL/ XML in Context Jim Melton, Stephen Buxton Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques, 3rd Edition Jiawei Han, Micheline Kamber, Jian Pei Database Modeling and Design: Logical Design, 5th Edition Toby J.

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or “none”). Ideally, each attribute should have one or more rules regarding the null condition. The rules may specify whether or not nulls are allowed and/or how such values should be handled or transformed. Fields may also be intentionally left blank if they are to be provided in a later step of the business process. Hence, although we can try our best to clean the data after it is seized, good database and data entry procedure design should help minimize the number of missing values or errors in the first place. 3.2.2. Noisy Data “What is noise?” Noise is a random error or variance in a measured variable.

The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest
by Yochai Benkler
Published 8 Aug 2011

Instead, we increasingly see mixed motivational structures deployed in firms as knowledge and innovation become key and organizations must continually adapt and improve to survive. As we’ve seen, many of today’s most successful companies operating in the most competitive markets are turning away from purely reward- and monitoring-based strategies, and instead are developing new business processes that allow for greater expression of common purpose, commitment to norms, and personal autonomy. Thus they are strengthening employees’ affective commitment to the organization and its purposes. The result is that our workplace is changing: unevenly, imperfectly, but nonetheless, in some of the leading organizations, substantially and positively.

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Or as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., put it 250 years later, “If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience.” Building laws and governmental structures, business processes and technical systems aimed at Holmes’s “bad man” has always seemed less risky. At least, we reasoned, the worst won’t happen. Always aiming to constrain the bad man might be the safer option. It might even be perfectly rational. But it also makes us always miss out on what would happen if we did trust.

My Start-Up Life: What A
by Ben Casnocha and Marc Benioff
Published 7 May 2007

If there was any better candidate for an interim position, we couldn’t imagine who it would be. We invited Andy to our house one summer evening to talk about Comcate. We asked Andy about his prior company, which had imploded in the dot-com burst. He went on. And on. And on. He used buzzwords like “leverage,” “boil-the-ocean,” and “business processes.” We should have seen this as a warning sign—he simply hadn’t let go of his old company, for one, and two, he seemed long on platitude and short on substance. This being said, he did possess some important entrepreneurial experiences and seemed charismatic. After Andy left, we had our customary postmortem standing meeting in our dining room, since meetings are always more efficient when done standing.

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Or any business. What is your cost of sales? Do you have an efficient lead-generation system? Is each customer basically the same or is each unique? >> There are other questions companies ask themselves. For example, do we build scale or buy scale? Building scale means developing repeatable business processes (I know that sounds buzzword-ish) to grow the client base and revenue stream while preventing expenses from rising at the same rate. Most of the best companies achieve scale through organic growth, because a slow and steady march from ten clients to five hundred is often more manageable than instantly going from ten to five hundred, as is the case in a “buy” situation.

Beautiful Architecture: Leading Thinkers Reveal the Hidden Beauty in Software Design
by Diomidis Spinellis and Georgios Gousios
Published 30 Dec 2008

We achieve horizontal scalability by throwing ever more message handlers at a tier. We can standardize interaction styles across partner and industry boundaries and business processes that cannot be contained by a single context. It represents a decontextualized request capable of solving very difficult interaction patterns. When strict service decomposition and description alone (i.e., SOAP and WSDL) proved insufficient to solving our interaction needs, we moved up the stack and introduced new business processing and orchestration layers. A proliferation of standards and tools has thus complicated an already untenable situation. When we cross domain and organizational boundaries we run into conflicting terms, business rules, access policies, and a very real Tower of WS-Babel.

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The first task of the architect, then, is to work with stakeholders to understand and prioritize quality concerns and constraints. Why not start with functional requirements? Because there are usually many possible system decompositions. For example, starting with a data model would lead to one architecture, whereas starting with a business process model might lead to a different architecture. In the extreme case, there is no decomposition, and the system is developed as a monolithic block of software. This might satisfy all functional requirements, but it probably will not satisfy quality concerns such as changeability, maintainability, or scalability.

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It is just as easy to remove the sensitive data but include it in a different resolution context when it is needed. Managing single-point access control might not be a big problem for conventional Enterprise architectures. However, given the increased presence of workflows, explicitly modeled business processes, and the like, we have plenty of opportunities to consider a user of one application needing to invoke a capability or service in more than one context. If we are passing actual data between systems, the application developers become responsible for knowing about the access control issues when crossing application boundaries.

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You
by Sangeet Paul Choudary , Marshall W. van Alstyne and Geoffrey G. Parker
Published 27 Mar 2016

This phenomenon alone would lead to significant disruption of traditional industries, as platform businesses displace pipeline businesses at the top of the Fortune 500 rankings. But the era of platforms-eat-pipelines is disrupting businesses in many other ways as well. In particular, the rise of the world of platforms is reconfiguring the familiar business processes of value creation, value consumption, and quality control.8 Reconfiguring value creation to tap new sources of supply. As self-serve systems, platforms grow and conquer markets when they minimize the barriers to usage for their users. In particular, every time a platform removes a hurdle that makes the participation of producers more difficult, value creation is reconfigured and new sources of supply are opened up.

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Service platforms like Upwork bring thousands of skilled professionals under a single roof, making it easy for potential employers to evaluate, compare, and hire them. THE INCUMBENTS FIGHT BACK: PIPELINES BECOMING PLATFORMS Platform businesses, then, are disrupting the traditional business landscape in a number of ways—not only by displacing some of the world’s biggest incumbent firms, but also by transforming familiar business processes like value creation and consumer behavior as well as altering the structure of major industries. What can incumbents do to respond? Are entrenched companies that operate familiar pipeline businesses doomed to capitulate as platforms reshape and ultimately take over their industries? Not necessarily.

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There are a number of examples of such struggles for control of a particular platform’s user base. Consider SAP, the German-based multinational giant that produces software for large enterprises to use in managing their internal operations, customer relationships, and other processes. SAP, which operates a large business processes platform, has partnered with the U.S.-based firm ADP to provide payroll processing services to its users, partly in order to take advantage of ADP’s superior access to cloud computing capabilities. However, ADP has substantial customer relationships of its own and can serve as the platform host linking customers to a number of data/computing/storage partners.

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models
by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann
Published 17 Jun 2019

However, its inertia remains the same (since its mass remains the same), and it is still similarly difficult to change its velocity. To relate the concept to a real-world example, sending faxes is continually losing momentum. However, the act still has a lot of inertia since the technology is entrenched in many business processes. As a result, the momentum behind sending faxes decreases very slowly. In your life, you can take advantage of this concept by seeking out things that are rapidly gaining momentum. For example, you could join an organization that is just starting to take off or start a new organization that leverages an innovative technology or idea that is beginning to go mainstream.

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Warren Buffett popularized the term moat, making an analogy to the deep ditch of water surrounding a castle to describe how to shield yourself from the competition, thereby creating a sustainable competitive advantage. Moats are situationally dependent. The following are some cases in which they are used (not mutually exclusive): Protected intellectual property (copyright, patents, trade secrets, etc.) Specialized skills or business processes that take a long time to develop (for example, Apple’s vertically integrated products and supply chain, which meld design, hardware, and software) Exclusive access to relationships, data, or cheap materials A strong, trusted brand built over many years, which customers turn to reflexively Substantial control of a distribution channel A team of people uniquely qualified to solve a particular problem Network effects or other types of flywheels (as described in Chapter 4) A higher pace of innovation (e.g., a faster OODA loop) Elon Musk notably sparred with Warren Buffett on the concept of moats.

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It arguably had significant moat protection in all the categories mentioned above, successfully fending off competitors and reaping outsized profits for a century: Protected intellectual property: It held many photography patents and trade secrets. Specialized skills or business processes that take a long time to develop: They had a vertically integrated supply chain serving all sides of the market, from cameras to film to printing. Exclusive access to relationships, data, or cheap materials: It had many exclusive business deals, and being the biggest in the industry, it could negotiate to secure supplies more cheaply than competitors.

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone
by Satya Nadella , Greg Shaw and Jill Tracie Nichols
Published 25 Sep 2017

That’s the essence of our mission, but our employees and our business partners, ranging from Accenture to Best Buy, Hewlett Packard to Dell, wanted to hear more. They wanted to know our business priorities. To deliver on this promise of empowerment, I said that we must galvanize all of our resources around three interconnected ambitions. First, we must reinvent productivity and business processes. We needed to evolve beyond simply building individual productivity tools and start designing an intelligent fabric for computing based on four principles—collaboration, mobility, intelligence, and trust. People still do important work as individuals, but collaboration is the new norm, so we build our tools to empower teams.

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The first is engaging their customer base by leveraging data to improve the customer experience. Second, they must empower their own employees by enabling greater and more mobile productivity and collaboration in the new digital world of work. Third, they must optimize operations, automating and simplifying business processes across sales, operations, and finance. Fourth, they must transform their products, services, and business models. Every company is becoming a digital company, and that process begins with infusing their products with intelligence. Experts estimate between 20–50 billion “connected things” will be in use by 2020, presenting a significant opportunity for companies to drive their own digital transformation.

Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs
by Andy Kessler
Published 1 Feb 2011

But no one likes them. They call them money changers behind their backs. It’s at the twentieth that things get interesting, because then it’s the entrepreneurs who shine. Someone who’s figured out how to turn dust into gold, created some gotta-have business application or bioengineered some drug or created a business process that transforms retail—” “And so it’s their turn for the spotlight?” I ask. “You would think. But lots of people who still work for big companies or the government can’t get their arms around entrepreneurs. They got rich, too rich, so many people just assume they were lucky or had some monopoly or somehow stole the money from working stiffs who bought their stuff.”

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The key is to be able to charge for value rather than cost. That’s not always obvious and certainly not always easy. And like Vanderbilt with his ferry service and railroads, don’t ask, just do it. You can sort it all out later after your competitors are weakened. Like Craigslist not charging for classified listings. Just do it. Ideas and business processes are the ultimate zero marginal cost product—you have to be creative on how you sell them. Ideas are a dime a dozen and overpriced! My rule is simple. If you can do something with zero margin cost, do it. Because if you don’t do it, someone else will. Give it away and build some other business around it.

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization
by Michael O’sullivan
Published 28 May 2019

Political factors include the degree of political stability or the strength of a country’s institutional framework. The rule of law, tax policies, and the protection of intellectual and physical property rights are important legal factors. Examples of socioeconomic factors include research-and-development capabilities, business processes or employee training, and education. Stating that governments should focus more on education and should prosecute it in a clever and progressive manner is, to the ears of cynics, rehearsing the obvious. However, the reality is not so easy. Many countries get education wrong. Greece is an example.

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Memorably, they note, “The greatest expansions of world trade have tended to come… from the barrel of a Maxim gun, the edge of a scimitar, or the ferocity of nomadic horsemen.”5 Ominously, so have the greatest economic contractions. Echoing this, thanks to advances in technology (especially transport via boats and trains), during this early period of globalization costs fell dramatically in much the same way as communications, travel, and business process costs have been disrupted over the last twenty years. Consider a few examples: the process of surfacing roads developed by John McAdam meant that it took thirty-six hours to travel from Manchester to London in 1820, compared to five days in 1780; the expansion of canal networks across the world greatly facilitated transportation by steamer; and the opening in 1869 of the Suez Canal, over one hundred miles long, “brought Asia 4,000 miles nearer to Europe.”6 Against this backdrop, the level of world trade surged, so that by 1913 merchandise exports as a share of GDP in Western European economies reached a level of 17 percent, up from 14 percent in 1870 (subsequently falling to around 6 percent by 1938 and rebounding to above 17 percent again in the 1990s).7 Similarly, the fantastic power that capital markets seem to wield today makes it difficult to appreciate that the financial world could have been anything as developed as it is now.

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Political factors include the degree of political stability or the strength of the institutional framework. Legal factors include the rule of law, tax policies, and intellectual and physical property rights protection. Examples of socioeconomic factors include research-and-development capabilities, business processes, or employee training and education. There are arguably five specific pillars of intangible infrastructure: education, health care, finance, business services, and technology.32 Though developing countries can achieve a record of high growth through physical investment (i.e., physical infrastructure), they need to cultivate intangible infrastructure in order to achieve a high and sustained level of productivity growth and human development.

Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age
by Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne
Published 9 Sep 2019

The fundamental philosophy of a free market economy encourages business innovation, with regulation putting certain conduct off-limits but otherwise leaving companies broad freedom to experiment. One of the biggest features in the GDPR is in effect a privacy bill of rights. By giving consumers certain rights, it requires that companies not just avoid certain practices but create new business processes. For example, companies with personal information are required to enable consumers to access it. Customers have a right to know what information a company has about them. They have a right to change the information if it’s inaccurate. They have a right to delete it under a variety of circumstances.

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Recognizing this, Europe’s GDPR required that companies give consumers the practical ability to go online to view and control all the data that had been collected from them. It’s not surprising that its implications for technology are so sweeping. Start with the proposition that any company with millions of customers—or even thousands of customers—needs a defined business process to manage these new customer rights. Otherwise it will be swamped with inefficient and almost certainly incomplete work by employees to track down a customer’s data. But more than that, the process needs to be automated. To comply quickly and inexpensively with the GDPR, companies need to access a customer’s data in a unified way across a variety of data silos.

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When New Yorkers saw the first automobile roll down the street in the nation’s financial capital, how many predicted that the invention would lead to the creation of new jobs in the financial sector? The route from the combustion engine to consumer credit was indirect and unfolded over time, bolstered in no small part by other intervening inventions and business processes such as Henry Ford’s assembly line, which made possible the mass production and thus the cheaper and broader availability of automobiles. Similarly, the automobile transformed the world of advertising. Seen by passengers traveling in a car at a speed of 30 miles per hour or more, “a sign had to be grasped instantly or it wouldn’t be grasped at all,” giving rise to the creation of corporate logos that could be recognized immediately wherever they appeared.32 Yet it’s doubtful that the early purchasers of automobiles imagined they would contribute to new jobs on Madison Avenue.

The Practice of Cloud System Administration: DevOps and SRE Practices for Web Services, Volume 2
by Thomas A. Limoncelli , Strata R. Chalup and Christina J. Hogan
Published 27 Aug 2014

The provider handles all the details of hardware, operating system, and platform. Some common examples include Salesforce.com, which replaces locally run sales team management software; Google Apps, which eliminates the need for locally run email and calendaring software; and Basecamp, which replaces locally run project management software. Nearly any business process that is common among many companies is offered as SaaS: human resources (HR) functions such as hiring and performance management; accounting functions such as payroll, expense tracking, and general ledgers; IT incident, request, and change management systems; and many aspects of marketing and sales management.

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If this maximum QPS is significantly less than the previous release, Google does not upgrade to that kernel. • User Acceptance Testing (UAT): This testing is done by customers to verify that the system meets their needs and to verify claims by the producer. Customers run their own tests to verify the new release meets their requirements. For example, they might run through each business process that involves the service. System testing involves developers making sure that they don’t ship products with defects. UAT involves customers making sure they don’t receive products with defects. Ideally, any test developed for UAT will be made known to the developers so that it can be added to their own battery of tests.

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The computers often relied on 8-bit and later 16-bit processors, with RAM and disk storage measured in kilobytes and megabytes, not gigabytes and terabytes. CPU speed was measured in MHz, and GHz was science fiction. Data was stored on slow floppy disks. A 10MB hard drive was a luxury item, even though it was fragile and being dropped would destroy it. Scaling A company’s computer systems served internal customers, applications, and business processes. They needed to scale with the growth of the company. As the company’s business grew, so would the number of employees and the computing requirements. Even for fast-growing companies, this growth was relatively predictable and often bounded by the much slower rate at which new employees were hired.

This Is Service Design Doing: Applying Service Design Thinking in the Real World: A Practitioners' Handbook
by Marc Stickdorn , Markus Edgar Hormess , Adam Lawrence and Jakob Schneider
Published 12 Jan 2018

In other words, service design works for public services, B2C, B2B, and internal services. Service design is an intensely practical and pragmatic activity, and this makes it inherently holistic. To create valuable experiences, service designers must get to grips with the backstage 27 activities and business processes that enable the frontstage success, and address the implementation of these processes. They must tackle the end-to-end experience of multiple stakeholders, not just individual moments. And they must find a way to make it pay, considering the business needs of the organization and the appropriate use of technology. 28 With these characteristics, it is no wonder that many organizations are implementing service design methods under whatever name, and that many more are employing service design agencies.

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In this way, service design as a management approach has some similarities to other iterative management processes. 11 However, service design differs through using more human-centric key performance indicators, more qualitative research methods, fast and iterative prototyping methods for both experiences and business processes, and a specific approach to leadership. Its inclusion of internal stakeholders and view across the customer journey often results in changes to organizational structure and systems. 12 Origins and Progress People – especially ones with a design school background – often speak of service design as if the term included all activities involved in planning and designing services.

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Depending on the skill set of your prototyping teams, you might have to involve specialists and split the work into separate work streams to achieve higher fidelity – for example, UX designers working on improving an existing app, service designers prototyping human-to-human interactions or required business processes, and an architect redesigning the office space. Even though they will work at different iteration speeds, it is still important to plan in regular sessions (e.g., weekly or biweekly) to give feedback and to adjust the prototyping plan. Depending on the complexity of your prototypes, you might also want to consider establishing a first sprint-like structure. 30 Keep iterating between the details of a single (inter)action, object, or app and the wider picture of the end-to-end experience.

Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur
by Derek Sivers
Published 20 Jun 2011

But no matter what business you’re in, it’s good to prepare for what would happen if business doubled. Have ten clients now? How would it look if you had twenty at once? Serving eighty customers for lunch each day? What would happen if 160 showed up? Notice that “more of the same” is never the answer. You’d have to do things in a new way to handle twice as much business. Processes would have to be streamlined. Never be the typical tragic small business that gets frazzled and freaked out when business is doing well. It sends a repulsive “I can’t handle this!” message to everyone. Instead, if your internal processes are always designed to handle twice your existing load, it sends an attractive “come on in, we’ve got plenty of room” message.

Automating Inequality
by Virginia Eubanks

By removing human discretion from frontline social servants and moving it instead to engineers and private contractors, the Indiana experiment supercharged discrimination. The “social specs” for the automation were based on time-worn, race- and class-motivated assumptions about welfare recipients that were encoded into performance metrics and programmed into business processes: they are lazy and must be “prodded” into contributing to their own support, they are sneaky and prone to fraudulent claims, and their burdensome use of public resources must be repeatedly discouraged. Each of these assumptions relies on, and is bolstered by, race- and class-based stereotypes.

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When we inhabit an invisible poorhouse, we become more and more isolated, cut off from those around us, even if they share our suffering. What else is new about the digital poorhouse? The digital poorhouse is hard to understand. The software, algorithms, and models that power it are complex and often secret. Sometimes they are protected business processes, as in the case of the IBM and ACS software that denied needy Hoosiers access to cash benefits, food, and health care. Sometimes operational details of a high-tech tool are kept secret so its targets can’t game the algorithm. In Los Angeles, for example, a “Dos and Don’ts” document for workers in homeless services suggested: “Don’t give a client a copy of the VI-SPDAT.

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World
by Dambisa Moyo
Published 3 May 2021

The topic of AI has also taken a central role in the discussion, as boards and companies look for ways to incorporate new technology into their operations and seek to understand how it will change the ways they compete with their peers and engage with their customers. AI—which has come to encompass automation, analytics, and machine learning—will likely transform all critical business areas, including information, business processes and workflow, the workforce, and risk management. Automation, especially, can be difficult for boards to manage. For example, despite the financial upside of cutting personnel costs through automation, boards must consider the broader social ramifications of reducing a company’s employment levels.

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Many boards and companies struggle to automate their operations because the new business model can threaten existing businesses that are generating enormous profits. Older companies’ reluctance to innovate and embrace cost-cutting technologies is what gives newcomers an opportunity to disrupt whole industries. Another innovation, blockchain, also promises to upend traditional business processes. Blockchain is the decentralized, secure record-keeping technology behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. It can be used to speed up global transactions, such as a US-based company buying a barrel of oil from the Middle East. Where a transaction like this has traditionally taken many weeks or even months, with lots of paperwork and numerous middlemen—including accountants, lawyers, and banks—blockchain makes it so that it can be done in a matter of minutes.

Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies
by Charles de Ganahl Koch
Published 14 Sep 2015

We have learned that sustained, successful product development requires not only high-quality R&D, but a marketing and manufacturing organization that sees opportunities and has the capability, discipline, focus, resources, and culture to capture them. No matter what industry or industries you are in, innovation and integration are required throughout all of a company’s business processes, from supply to manufacturing to marketing. Human resources, accounting, legal, compliance, and other support services have the same requirement. OUR NORTH STAR Koch’s Vision benefits us in two ways: first as a set of fundamental principles that guide our behavior—a North Star—and second, as a strategic guide.

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When used properly, this technology enhances knowledge processes through the increased speed and lower cost of acquiring, storing, and distributing information. For one, the adoption of open architecture by large platform providers such as SalesForce.com and SAP is spawning a revolution in new business process apps. This is enabling disruptive changes in our operating efficiency and sales and marketing effectiveness. To fully benefit from these innovations, our businesses are working to revise their visions to include more transformative use of information technology. A prime example of this is GP’s Commercial Tissue Business, which is using new communications technology to further improve its effectiveness in working with distributors and end users.

Women Leaders at Work: Untold Tales of Women Achieving Their Ambitions
by Elizabeth Ghaffari
Published 5 Dec 2011

That role requires working with both operations and the business to understand what the corporate strategy is and how we will implement the IT systems and the business processes supported by the IT systems. When I moved into that role, our corporate strategy was evolving quite a bit. IBM had divested itself of commodity products, such as the ThinkPads and PCs, in order to move forward. We acquired a lot more software companies. We'd bought PricewaterhouseCooper's Consulting, which took us into a whole new services business. There was a genuine need to make changes to our business processes to be able to support that new corporate strategy. So my role, first, was to help our senior executives understand our current limitations and why we needed to make a change.

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She has been a leader at IBM since 1998, when she began taking on portfolios of responsibility at the vice president level. She was in charge of development of the Lotus brand (1998–2002), followed by strategy for the Software Group (2003–2004), and then information management (2004–2006). She became vice president of Business Process and Architecture Integration (2006–2007) and then headed Enterprise Business Transformation (through April 2011). Before coming to IBM, Ms. Horan was vice president of the Software Group and the AltaVista business unit at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC; 1994–1998). She was also vice president of Development and Engineering at the Open Software Foundation (1989–1994).

Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives
by Satyajit Das
Published 15 Nov 2006

Sticking-to-the knitting or focus Let’s get back to doing what we once did if anybody can remember what it is and how to do it. Decentralization Massive duplication, confusion and creation of thousands of petty empires. Matrix structures Everybody reports to everybody, no one knows who they work for and there is no accountability. Flat organizations Managers who can’t manage now manage tens of direct reports. Business process reorganization A process by which you cut everything that is essential, leaving only everything that you don’t need. DAS_C03.QXP 8/7/06 4:25 PM Page 73 2 N Beautiful lies – the ‘sell’ side 73 Befuddling buzzwords permeated all conversation: transformation, best-ofbreed, competitive advantage, paradigm, silos, concept, reinvention, template, benchmark, insourcing, outsourcing, off-line, online, CRM, KPI, TQM, B2B; B2C, etc.

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However, the text is different. 6 ‘What Worries Warren’ (3 March 2003) Fortune. 13_INDEX.QXD 17/2/06 4:44 pm Page 325 Index accounting rules 139, 221, 228, 257 Accounting Standards Board 33 accrual accounting 139 active fund management 111 actuaries 107–10, 205, 289 Advance Corporation Tax 242 agency business 123–4, 129 agency theory 117 airline profits 140–1 Alaska 319 Allen, Woody 20 Allied Irish Bank 143 Allied Lyons 98 alternative investment strategies 112, 308 American Express 291 analysts, role of 62–4 anchor effect 136 Anderson, Rolf 92–4 annuities 204–5 ANZ Bank 277 Aquinas, Thomas 137 arbitrage 33, 38–40, 99, 114, 137–8, 171–2, 245–8, 253–5, 290, 293–6 arbitration 307 Argentina 45 arithmophobia 177 ‘armpit theory’ 303 Armstrong World Industries 274 arrears assets 225 Ashanti Goldfields 97–8, 114 Asian financial crisis (1997) 4, 9, 44–5, 115, 144, 166, 172, 207, 235, 245, 252, 310, 319 asset consultants 115–17, 281 ‘asset growth’ strategy 255 asset swaps 230–2 assets under management (AUM) 113–4, 117 assignment of loans 267–8 AT&T 275 attribution of earnings 148 auditors 144 Australia 222–4, 254–5, 261–2 back office functions 65–6 back-to-back loans 35, 40 backwardation 96 Banca Popolare di Intra 298 Bank of America 298, 303 Bank of International Settlements 50–1, 281 Bank of Japan 220 Bankers’ Trust (BT) 59, 72, 101–2, 149, 217–18, 232, 268–71, 298, 301, 319 banking regulations 155, 159, 162, 164, 281, 286, 288 banking services 34; see also commercial banks; investment banks bankruptcy 276–7 Banque Paribas 37–8, 232 Barclays Bank 121–2, 297–8 13_INDEX.QXD 17/2/06 326 4:44 pm Page 326 Index Baring, Peter 151 Baring Brothers 51, 143, 151–2, 155 ‘Basel 2’ proposal 159 basis risk 28, 42, 274 Bear Stearns 173 bearer eurodollar collateralized securities (BECS) 231–3 ‘behavioural finance’ 136 Berkshire Hathaway 19 Bermudan options 205, 227 Bernstein, Peter 167 binomial option pricing model 196 Bismarck, Otto von 108 Black, Fischer 22, 42, 160, 185, 189–90, 193, 195, 197, 209, 215 Black–Scholes formula for option pricing 22, 185, 194–5 Black–Scholes–Merton model 160, 189–93, 196–7 ‘black swan’ hypothesis 130 Blair, Tony 223 Bogle, John 116 Bohr, Niels 122 Bond, Sir John 148 ‘bond floor’ concept 251–4 bonding 75–6, 168, 181 bonuses 146–51, 244, 262, 284–5 Brady Commission 203 brand awareness and brand equity 124, 236 Brazil 302 Bretton Woods system 33 bribery 80, 303 British Sky Broadcasting (BSB) 247–8 Brittain, Alfred 72 broad index secured trust offerings (BISTROs) 284–5 brokers 69, 309 Brown, Robert 161 bubbles 210, 310, 319 Buconero 299 Buffet, Warren 12, 19–20, 50, 110–11, 136, 173, 246, 316 business process reorganization 72 business risk 159 Business Week 130 buy-backs 249 ‘call’ options 25, 90, 99, 101, 131, 190, 196 callable bonds 227–9, 256 capital asset pricing model (CAPM) 111 capital flow 30 capital guarantees 257–8 capital structure arbitrage 296 Capote, Truman 87 carbon trading 320 ‘carry cost’ model 188 ‘carry’ trades 131–3, 171 cash accounting 139 catastrophe bonds 212, 320 caveat emptor principle 27, 272 Cayman Islands 233–4 Cazenove (company) 152 CDO2 292 Cemex 249–50 chaos theory 209, 312 Chase Manhattan Bank 143, 299 Chicago Board Options Exchange 195 Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) 25–6, 34 chief risk officers 177 China 23–5, 276, 302–4 China Club, Hong Kong 318 Chinese walls 249, 261, 280 chrematophobia 177 Citibank and Citigroup 37–8, 43, 71, 79, 94, 134–5, 149, 174, 238–9 Citron, Robert 124–5, 212–17 client relationships 58–9 Clinton, Bill 223 Coats, Craig 168–9 collateral requirements 215–16 collateralized bond obligations (CBOs) 282 collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) 45, 282–99 13_INDEX.QXD 17/2/06 4:44 pm Page 327 Index collateralized fund obligations (CFOs) 292 collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) 283–5, 288 commercial banks 265–7 commoditization 236 commodity collateralized obligations (CCOs) 292 commodity prices 304 Commonwealth Bank of Australia 255 compliance officers 65 computer systems 54, 155, 197–8 concentration risk 271, 287 conferences with clients 59 confidence levels 164 confidentiality 226 Conseco 279–80 contagion crises 291 contango 96 contingent conversion convertibles (co-cos) 257 contingent payment convertibles (co-pays) 257 Continental Illinois 34 ‘convergence’ trading 170 convertible bonds 250–60 correlations 163–6, 294–5; see also default correlations corruption 303 CORVUS 297 Cox, John 196–7 credit cycle 291 credit default swaps (CDSs) 271–84, 293, 299 credit derivatives 129, 150, 265–72, 282, 295, 299–300 Credit Derivatives Market Practices Committee 273, 275, 280–1 credit models 294, 296 credit ratings 256–7, 270, 287–8, 297–8, 304 credit reserves 140 credit risk 158, 265–74, 281–95, 299 327 credit spreads 114, 172–5, 296 Credit Suisse 70, 106, 167 credit trading 293–5 CRH Capital 309 critical events 164–6 Croesus 137 cross-ruffing 142 cubic splines 189 currency options 98, 218, 319 custom repackaged asset vehicles (CRAVEs) 233 daily earning at risk (DEAR) concept 160 Daiwa Bank 142 Daiwa Europe 277 Danish Oil and Natural Gas 296 data scrubbing 142 dealers, work of 87–8, 124–8, 133, 167, 206, 229–37, 262, 295–6; see also traders ‘death swap’ strategy 110 decentralization 72 decision-making, scientific 182 default correlations 270–1 defaults 277–9, 287, 291, 293, 296, 299 DEFCON scale 156–7 ‘Delta 1’ options 243 delta hedging 42, 200 Deming, W.E. 98, 101 Denmark 38 deregulation, financial 34 derivatives trading 5–6, 12–14, 18–72, 79, 88–9, 99–115, 123–31, 139–41, 150, 153, 155, 175, 184–9, 206–8, 211–14, 217–19, 230, 233, 257, 262–3, 307, 316, 319–20; see also equity derivatives Derman, Emmanuel 185, 198–9 Deutsche Bank 70, 104, 150, 247–8, 274, 277 devaluations 80–1, 89, 203–4, 319 13_INDEX.QXD 17/2/06 4:44 pm Page 328 328 Index dilution of share capital 241 DINKs 313 Disney Corporation 91–8 diversification 72, 110–11, 166, 299 dividend yield 243 ‘Dr Evil’ trade 135 dollar premium 35 downsizing 73 Drexel Burnham Lambert (DBL) 282 dual currency bonds 220–3; see also reverse dual currency bonds earthquakes, bonds linked to 212 efficient markets hypothesis 22, 31, 111, 203 electronic trading 126–30, 134 ‘embeddos’ 218 emerging markets 3–4, 44, 115, 132–3, 142, 212, 226, 297 Enron 54, 142, 250, 298 enterprise risk management (ERM) 176 equity capital management 249 equity collateralized obligations (ECOs) 292 equity derivatives 241–2, 246–9, 257–62 equity index 137–8 equity investment, retail market in 258–9 equity investors’ risk 286–8 equity options 253–4 equity swaps 247–8 euro currency 171, 206, 237 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development 297 European currency units 93 European Union 247–8 Exchange Rate Mechanism, European 204 exchangeable bonds 260 expatriate postings 81–2 expert witnesses 310–12 extrapolation 189, 205 extreme value theory 166 fads of management science 72–4 ‘fairway bonds’ 225 Fama, Eugene 22, 111, 194 ‘fat tail’ events 163–4 Federal Accounting Standards Board 266 Federal Home Loans Bank 213 Federal National Mortgage Association 213 Federal Reserve Bank 20, 173 Federal Reserve Board 132 ‘Ferraris’ 232 financial engineering 228, 230, 233, 249–50, 262, 269 Financial Services Authority (FSA), Japan 106, 238 Financial Services Authority (FSA), UK 15, 135 firewalls 235–6 firing of staff 84–5 First Interstate Ltd 34–5 ‘flat’ organizations 72 ‘flat’ positions 159 floaters 231–2; see also inverse floaters ‘flow’ trading 60–1, 129 Ford Motors 282, 296 forecasting 135–6, 190 forward contracts 24–33, 90, 97, 124, 131, 188 fugu fish 239 fund management 109–17, 286, 300 futures see forward contracts Galbraith, John Kenneth 121 gamma risk 200–2, 294 Gauss, Carl Friedrich 160–2 General Motors 279, 296 General Reinsurance 20 geometric Brownian motion (GBM) 161 Ghana 98 Gibson Greeting Cards 44 Glass-Steagall Act 34 gold borrowings 132 13_INDEX.QXD 17/2/06 4:44 pm Page 329 Index gold sales 97, 137 Goldman Sachs 34, 71, 93, 150, 173, 185 ‘golfing holiday bonds’ 224 Greenspan, Alan 6, 9, 19–21, 29, 43, 47, 50, 53, 62, 132, 159, 170, 215, 223, 308 Greenwich NatWest 298 Gross, Bill 19 Guangdong International Trust and Investment Corporation (GITIC) 276–7 guaranteed annuity option (GAO) contracts 204–5 Gutenfreund, John 168–9 gyosei shido 106 Haghani, Victor 168 Hamanaka, Yasuo 142 Hamburgische Landesbank 297 Hammersmith and Fulham, London Borough of 66–7 ‘hara-kiri’ swaps 39 Hartley, L.P. 163 Hawkins, Greg 168 ‘heaven and hell’ bonds 218 hedge funds 44, 88–9, 113–14, 167, 170–5, 200–2, 206, 253–4, 262–3, 282, 292, 296, 300, 308–9 hedge ratio 264 hedging 24–8, 31, 38–42, 60, 87–100, 184, 195–200, 205–7, 214, 221, 229, 252, 269, 281, 293–4, 310 Heisenberg, Werner 122 ‘hell bonds’ 218 Herman, Clement (‘Crem’) 45–9, 77, 84, 309 Herodotus 137, 178 high net worth individuals (HNWIs) 237–8, 286 Hilibrand, Lawrence 168 Hill Samuel 231–2 329 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 189 Homer, Sidney 184 Hong Kong 9, 303–4 ‘hot tubbing’ 311–12 HSBC Bank 148 HSH Nordbank 297–8 Hudson, Kevin 102 Hufschmid, Hans 77–8 IBM 36, 218, 260 ICI 34 Iguchi, Toshihude 142 incubators 309 independent valuation 142 indexed currency option notes (ICONs) 218 India 302 Indonesia 5, 9, 19, 26, 55, 80–2, 105, 146, 219–20, 252, 305 initial public offerings 33, 64, 261 inside information and insider trading 133, 241, 248–9 insurance companies 107–10, 117, 119, 150, 192–3, 204–5, 221, 223, 282, 286, 300; see also reinsurance companies insurance law 272 Intel 260 intellectual property in financial products 226 Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG) 285–6 International Accounting Standards 33 International Securities Market Association 106 International Swap Dealers Association (ISDA) 273, 275, 279, 281 Internet stock and the Internet boom 64, 112, 259, 261, 310, 319 interpolation of interest rates 141–2, 189 inverse floaters 46–51, 213–16, 225, 232–3 13_INDEX.QXD 17/2/06 4:44 pm Page 330 330 Index investment banks 34–8, 62, 64, 67, 71, 127–8, 172, 198, 206, 216–17, 234, 265–7, 298, 309 investment managers 43–4 investment styles 111–14 irrational decisions 136 Italy 106–7 Ito’s Lemma 194 Japan 39, 43, 82–3, 92, 94, 98–9, 101, 106, 132, 142, 145–6, 157, 212, 217–25, 228, 269–70 Jensen, Michael 117 Jett, Joseph 143 JP Morgan (company) 72, 150, 152, 160, 162, 249–50, 268–9, 284–5, 299; see also Morgan Guaranty junk bonds 231, 279, 282, 291, 296–7 JWM Associates 175 Kahneman, Daniel 136 Kaplanis, Costas 174 Kassouf, Sheen 253 Kaufman, Henry 62 Kerkorian, Kirk 296 Keynes, J.M. 167, 175, 198 Keynesianism 5 Kidder Peabody 143 Kleinwort Benson 40 Korea 9, 226, 278 Kozeny, Viktor 121 Krasker, William 168 Kreiger, Andy 319 Kyoto Protocol 320 Lavin, Jack 102 law of large numbers 192 Leeson, Nick 51, 131, 143, 151 legal opinions 47, 219–20, 235, 273–4 Leibowitz, Martin 184 Leland, Hayne 42, 202 Lend Lease Corporation 261–2 leptokurtic conditions 163 leverage 31–2, 48–50, 54, 99, 102–3, 114, 131–2, 171–5, 213–14, 247, 270–3, 291, 295, 305, 308 Lewis, Kenneth 303 Lewis, Michael 77–8 life insurance 204–5 Lintner, John 111 liquidity options 175 liquidity risk 158, 173 litigation 297–8 Ljunggren, Bernt 38–40 London Inter-Bank Offered Rate (LIBOR) 6, 37 ‘long first coupon’ strategy 39 Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) 44, 51, 62, 77–8, 84, 114, 166–75, 187, 206, 210, 215–18, 263–4, 309–10 Long Term Credit Bank of Japan 94 LOR (company) 202 Louisiana Purchase 319 low exercise price options (LEPOs) 261 Maastricht Treaty and criteria 106–7 McLuhan, Marshall 134 McNamara, Robert 182 macro-economic indicators, derivatives linked to 319 Mahathir Mohammed 31 Malaysia 9 management consultants 72–3 Manchester United 152 mandatory convertibles 255 Marakanond, Rerngchai 302 margin calls 97–8, 175 ‘market neutral’ investment strategy 114 market risk 158, 173, 265 marketable eurodollar collateralized securities (MECS) 232 Markowitz, Harry 110 mark-to-market accounting 10, 100, 139–41, 145, 150, 174, 215–16, 228, 244, 266, 292, 295, 298 Marx, Groucho 24, 57, 67, 117, 308 13_INDEX.QXD 17/2/06 4:44 pm Page 331 Index mathematics applied to financial instruments 209–10; see also ‘quants’ matrix structures 72 Meckling, Herbert 117 Melamed, Leo 34, 211 merchant banks 38 Meriwether, John 167–9, 172–5 Merrill Lynch 124, 150, 217, 232 Merton, Robert 22, 42, 168–70, 175, 185, 189–90, 193–7, 210 Messier, Marie 247 Metallgesellschaft 95–7 Mexico 44 mezzanine finance 285–8, 291–7 MG Refining and Marketing 95–8, 114 Microsoft 53 Mill, Stuart 130 Miller, Merton 22, 101, 194 Milliken, Michael 282 Ministry of Finance, Japan 222 misogyny 75–7 mis-selling 238, 297–8 Mitchell, Edison 70 Mitchell & Butler 275–6 models financial 42–3, 141–2, 163–4, 173–5, 181–4, 189, 198–9, 205–10 of business processes 73–5 see also credit models Modest, David 168 momentum investment 111 monetization 260–1 monopolies in financial trading 124 moral hazard 151, 280, 291 Morgan Guaranty 37–8, 221, 232 Morgan Stanley 76, 150 mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) 282–3 Moscow, City of 277 moves of staff between firms 150, 244 Mozer, Paul 169 Mullins, David 168–70 multi-skilling 73 331 Mumbai 3 Murdoch, Rupert 247 Nabisco 220 Napoleon 113 NASDAQ index 64, 112 Nash, Ogden 306 National Australia Bank 144, 178 National Rifle Association 29 NatWest Bank 144–5, 198 Niederhoffer, Victor 130 ‘Nero’ 7, 31, 45–9, 60, 77, 82–3, 88–9, 110, 118–19, 125, 128, 292 NERVA 297 New Zealand 319 Newman, Frank 104 news, financial 133–4 News Corporation 247 Newton, Isaac 162, 210 Nippon Credit Bank 106, 271 Nixon, Richard 33 Nomura Securities 218 normal distribution 160–3, 193, 199 Northern Electric 248 O’Brien, John 202 Occam, William 188 off-balance sheet transactions 32–3, 99, 234, 273, 282 ‘offsites’ 74–5 oil prices 30, 33, 89–90, 95–7 ‘omitted variable’ bias 209–10 operational risk 158, 176 opinion shopping 47 options 9, 21–2, 25–6, 32, 42, 90, 98, 124, 197, 229 pricing 185, 189–98, 202 Orange County 16, 44, 50, 124–57, 212–17, 232–3 orphan subsidiaries 234 over-the-counter (OTC) market 26, 34, 53, 95, 124, 126 overvaluation 64 13_INDEX.QXD 17/2/06 4:44 pm Page 332 332 Index ‘overwhelming force’ strategy 134–5 Owen, Martin 145 ownership, ‘legal’ and ‘economic’ 247 parallel loans 35 pari-mutuel auction system 319 Parkinson’s Law 136 Parmalat 250, 298–9 Partnoy, Frank 87 pension funds 43, 108–10, 115, 204–5, 255 People’s Bank of China (PBOC) 276–7 Peters’ Principle 71 petrodollars 71 Pétrus (restaurant) 121 Philippines, the 9 phobophobia 177 Piga, Gustavo 106 PIMCO 19 Plaza Accord 38, 94, 99, 220 plutophobia 177 pollution quotas 320 ‘portable alpha’ strategy 115 portfolio insurance 112, 202–3, 294 power reverse dual currency (PRDC) bonds 226–30 PowerPoint 75 preferred exchangeable resettable listed shares (PERLS) 255 presentations of business models 75 to clients 57, 185 prime brokerage 309 Prince, Charles 238 privatization 205 privity of contract 273 Proctor & Gamble (P&G) 44, 101–4, 155, 298, 301 product disclosure statements (PDSs) 48–9 profit smoothing 140 ‘programme’ issuers 234–5 proprietary (‘prop’) trading 60, 62, 64, 130, 174, 254 publicly available information (PAI) 277 ‘puff’ effect 148 purchasing power parity theory 92 ‘put’ options 90, 131, 256 ‘quants’ 183–9, 198, 208, 294 Raabe, Matthew 217 Ramsay, Gordon 121 range notes 225 real estate 91, 219 regulatory arbitrage 33 reinsurance companies 288–9 ‘relative value’ trading 131, 170–1, 310 Reliance Insurance 91–2 repackaging (‘repack’) business 230–6, 282, 290 replication in option pricing 195–9, 202 dynamic 200 research provided to clients 58, 62–4, 184 reserves, use of 140 reset preference shares 254–7 restructuring of loans 279–81 retail equity products 258–9 reverse convertibles 258–9 reverse dual currency bonds 223–30 ‘revolver’ loans 284–5 risk, financial, types of 158 risk adjusted return on capital (RAROC) 268, 290 risk conservation principle 229–30 risk management 65, 153–79, 184, 187, 201, 267 risk models 163–4, 173–5 riskless portfolios 196–7 RJ Reynolds (company) 220–1 rogue traders 176, 313–16 Rosenfield, Eric 168 Ross, Stephen 196–7, 202 Roth, Don 38 Rothschild, Mayer Amshel 267 Royal Bank of Scotland 298 Rubinstein, Mark 42, 196–7 13_INDEX.QXD 17/2/06 4:44 pm Page 333 Index Rumsfeld, Donald 12, 134, 306 Rusnak, John 143 Russia 45, 80, 166, 172–3, 274, 302 sales staff 55–60, 64–5, 125, 129, 217 Salomon Brothers 20, 36, 54, 62, 167–9, 174, 184 Sandor, Richard 34 Sanford, Charles 72, 269 Sanford, Eugene 269 Schieffelin, Allison 76 Scholes, Myron 22, 42, 168–71, 175, 185, 189–90, 193–7, 263–4 Seagram Group 247 Securities and Exchange Commission, US 64, 304 Securities and Futures Authority, UK 249 securitization 282–90 ‘security design’ 254–7 self-regulation 155 sex discrimination 76 share options 250–1 Sharpe, William 111 short selling 30–1, 114 Singapore 9 single-tranche CDOs 293–4, 299 ‘Sisters of Perpetual Ecstasy’ 234 SITCOMs 313 Six Continents (6C) 275–6 ‘smile’ effect 145 ‘snake’ currency system 203 ‘softing’ arrangements 117 Solon 137 Soros, George 44, 130, 253, 318–19 South Sea Bubble 210 special purpose asset repackaging companies (SPARCs) 233 special purpose vehicles (SPVs) 231–4, 282–6, 290, 293 speculation 29–31, 42, 67, 87, 108, 130 ‘spinning’ 64 333 Spitzer, Eliot 64 spread 41, 103; see also credit spreads stack hedges 96 Stamenson, Michael 124–5 standard deviation 161, 193, 195, 199 Steinberg, Sol 91 stock market booms 258, 260 stock market crashes 42–3, 168, 203, 257, 259, 319 straddles or strangles 131 strategy in banking 70 stress testing 164–6 stripping of convertible bonds 253–4 structured investment products 44, 112, 115, 118, 128, 211–39, 298 structured note asset packages (SNAPs) 233 Stuart SC 18, 307, 316–18 Styblo Bleder, Tanya 153 Suharto, Thojib 81–2 Sumitomo Corporation 100, 142 Sun Tzu 61 Svensk Exportkredit (SEK) 38–9 swaps 5–10, 26, 35–40, 107, 188, 211; see also equity swaps ‘swaptions’ 205–6 Swiss Bank Corporation (SBC) 248–9 Swiss banks 108, 305 ‘Swiss cheese theory’ 176 synthetic securitization 284–5, 288–90 systemic risk 151 Takeover Panel 248–9 Taleb, Nassim 130, 136, 167 target redemption notes 225–6 tax and tax credits 171, 242–7, 260–3 Taylor, Frederick 98, 101 team-building exercises 76 team moves 149 technical analysis 60–1, 135 television programmes about money 53, 62–3 Thailand 9, 80, 302–5 13_INDEX.QXD 17/2/06 4:44 pm Page 334 334 Index Thatcher, Margaret 205 Thorp, Edward 253 tobashi trades 105–7 Tokyo Disneyland 92, 212 top managers 72–3 total return swaps 246–8, 269 tracking error 138 traders in financial products 59–65, 129–31, 135–6, 140, 148, 151, 168, 185–6, 198; see also dealers trading limits 42, 157, 201 trading rooms 53–4, 64, 68, 75–7, 184–7, 208 Trafalgar House 248 tranching 286–9, 292, 296 transparency 26, 117, 126, 129–30, 310 Treynor, Jack 111 trust investment enhanced return securities (TIERS) 216, 233 trust obligation participating securities (TOPS) 232 TXU Europe 279 UBS Global Asset Management 110, 150, 263–4, 274 uncertainty principle 122–3 unique selling propositions 118 unit trusts 109 university education 187 unspecified fund obligations (UFOs) 292 ‘upfronting’ of income 139, 151 Valéry, Paul 163 valuation 64, 142–6 value at risk (VAR) concept 160–7, 173 value investing 111 Vanguard 116 vanity bonds 230 variance 161 Vietnam War 182, 195 Virgin Islands 233–4 Vivendi 247–8 volatility of bond prices 197 of interest rates 144–5 of share prices 161–8, 172–5, 192–3, 199 Volcker, Paul 20, 33 ‘warehouses’ 40–2, 139 warrants arbitrage 99–101 weather, bonds linked to 212, 320 Weatherstone, Dennis 72, 268 Weil, Gotscal & Manges 298 Weill, Sandy 174 Westdeutsche Genosenschafts Zentralbank 143 Westminster Group 34–5 Westpac 261–2 Wheat, Allen 70, 72, 106, 167 Wojniflower, Albert 62 World Bank 4, 36, 38 World Food Programme 320 Worldcom 250, 298 Wriston, Walter 71 WTI (West Texas Intermediate) contracts 28–30 yield curves 103, 188–9, 213, 215 yield enhancement 112, 213, 269 ‘yield hogs’ 43 zaiteku 98–101, 104–5 zero coupon bonds 221–2, 257–8 

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However, the text is different. 6 ‘What Worries Warren’ (3 March 2003) Fortune. 13_INDEX.QXD 17/2/06 4:44 pm Page 325 Index accounting rules 139, 221, 228, 257 Accounting Standards Board 33 accrual accounting 139 active fund management 111 actuaries 107–10, 205, 289 Advance Corporation Tax 242 agency business 123–4, 129 agency theory 117 airline profits 140–1 Alaska 319 Allen, Woody 20 Allied Irish Bank 143 Allied Lyons 98 alternative investment strategies 112, 308 American Express 291 analysts, role of 62–4 anchor effect 136 Anderson, Rolf 92–4 annuities 204–5 ANZ Bank 277 Aquinas, Thomas 137 arbitrage 33, 38–40, 99, 114, 137–8, 171–2, 245–8, 253–5, 290, 293–6 arbitration 307 Argentina 45 arithmophobia 177 ‘armpit theory’ 303 Armstrong World Industries 274 arrears assets 225 Ashanti Goldfields 97–8, 114 Asian financial crisis (1997) 4, 9, 44–5, 115, 144, 166, 172, 207, 235, 245, 252, 310, 319 asset consultants 115–17, 281 ‘asset growth’ strategy 255 asset swaps 230–2 assets under management (AUM) 113–4, 117 assignment of loans 267–8 AT&T 275 attribution of earnings 148 auditors 144 Australia 222–4, 254–5, 261–2 back office functions 65–6 back-to-back loans 35, 40 backwardation 96 Banca Popolare di Intra 298 Bank of America 298, 303 Bank of International Settlements 50–1, 281 Bank of Japan 220 Bankers’ Trust (BT) 59, 72, 101–2, 149, 217–18, 232, 268–71, 298, 301, 319 banking regulations 155, 159, 162, 164, 281, 286, 288 banking services 34; see also commercial banks; investment banks bankruptcy 276–7 Banque Paribas 37–8, 232 Barclays Bank 121–2, 297–8 13_INDEX.QXD 17/2/06 326 4:44 pm Page 326 Index Baring, Peter 151 Baring Brothers 51, 143, 151–2, 155 ‘Basel 2’ proposal 159 basis risk 28, 42, 274 Bear Stearns 173 bearer eurodollar collateralized securities (BECS) 231–3 ‘behavioural finance’ 136 Berkshire Hathaway 19 Bermudan options 205, 227 Bernstein, Peter 167 binomial option pricing model 196 Bismarck, Otto von 108 Black, Fischer 22, 42, 160, 185, 189–90, 193, 195, 197, 209, 215 Black–Scholes formula for option pricing 22, 185, 194–5 Black–Scholes–Merton model 160, 189–93, 196–7 ‘black swan’ hypothesis 130 Blair, Tony 223 Bogle, John 116 Bohr, Niels 122 Bond, Sir John 148 ‘bond floor’ concept 251–4 bonding 75–6, 168, 181 bonuses 146–51, 244, 262, 284–5 Brady Commission 203 brand awareness and brand equity 124, 236 Brazil 302 Bretton Woods system 33 bribery 80, 303 British Sky Broadcasting (BSB) 247–8 Brittain, Alfred 72 broad index secured trust offerings (BISTROs) 284–5 brokers 69, 309 Brown, Robert 161 bubbles 210, 310, 319 Buconero 299 Buffet, Warren 12, 19–20, 50, 110–11, 136, 173, 246, 316 business process reorganization 72 business risk 159 Business Week 130 buy-backs 249 ‘call’ options 25, 90, 99, 101, 131, 190, 196 callable bonds 227–9, 256 capital asset pricing model (CAPM) 111 capital flow 30 capital guarantees 257–8 capital structure arbitrage 296 Capote, Truman 87 carbon trading 320 ‘carry cost’ model 188 ‘carry’ trades 131–3, 171 cash accounting 139 catastrophe bonds 212, 320 caveat emptor principle 27, 272 Cayman Islands 233–4 Cazenove (company) 152 CDO2 292 Cemex 249–50 chaos theory 209, 312 Chase Manhattan Bank 143, 299 Chicago Board Options Exchange 195 Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) 25–6, 34 chief risk officers 177 China 23–5, 276, 302–4 China Club, Hong Kong 318 Chinese walls 249, 261, 280 chrematophobia 177 Citibank and Citigroup 37–8, 43, 71, 79, 94, 134–5, 149, 174, 238–9 Citron, Robert 124–5, 212–17 client relationships 58–9 Clinton, Bill 223 Coats, Craig 168–9 collateral requirements 215–16 collateralized bond obligations (CBOs) 282 collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) 45, 282–99 13_INDEX.QXD 17/2/06 4:44 pm Page 327 Index collateralized fund obligations (CFOs) 292 collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) 283–5, 288 commercial banks 265–7 commoditization 236 commodity collateralized obligations (CCOs) 292 commodity prices 304 Commonwealth Bank of Australia 255 compliance officers 65 computer systems 54, 155, 197–8 concentration risk 271, 287 conferences with clients 59 confidence levels 164 confidentiality 226 Conseco 279–80 contagion crises 291 contango 96 contingent conversion convertibles (co-cos) 257 contingent payment convertibles (co-pays) 257 Continental Illinois 34 ‘convergence’ trading 170 convertible bonds 250–60 correlations 163–6, 294–5; see also default correlations corruption 303 CORVUS 297 Cox, John 196–7 credit cycle 291 credit default swaps (CDSs) 271–84, 293, 299 credit derivatives 129, 150, 265–72, 282, 295, 299–300 Credit Derivatives Market Practices Committee 273, 275, 280–1 credit models 294, 296 credit ratings 256–7, 270, 287–8, 297–8, 304 credit reserves 140 credit risk 158, 265–74, 281–95, 299 327 credit spreads 114, 172–5, 296 Credit Suisse 70, 106, 167 credit trading 293–5 CRH Capital 309 critical events 164–6 Croesus 137 cross-ruffing 142 cubic splines 189 currency options 98, 218, 319 custom repackaged asset vehicles (CRAVEs) 233 daily earning at risk (DEAR) concept 160 Daiwa Bank 142 Daiwa Europe 277 Danish Oil and Natural Gas 296 data scrubbing 142 dealers, work of 87–8, 124–8, 133, 167, 206, 229–37, 262, 295–6; see also traders ‘death swap’ strategy 110 decentralization 72 decision-making, scientific 182 default correlations 270–1 defaults 277–9, 287, 291, 293, 296, 299 DEFCON scale 156–7 ‘Delta 1’ options 243 delta hedging 42, 200 Deming, W.E. 98, 101 Denmark 38 deregulation, financial 34 derivatives trading 5–6, 12–14, 18–72, 79, 88–9, 99–115, 123–31, 139–41, 150, 153, 155, 175, 184–9, 206–8, 211–14, 217–19, 230, 233, 257, 262–3, 307, 316, 319–20; see also equity derivatives Derman, Emmanuel 185, 198–9 Deutsche Bank 70, 104, 150, 247–8, 274, 277 devaluations 80–1, 89, 203–4, 319 13_INDEX.QXD 17/2/06 4:44 pm Page 328 328 Index dilution of share capital 241 DINKs 313 Disney Corporation 91–8 diversification 72, 110–11, 166, 299 dividend yield 243 ‘Dr Evil’ trade 135 dollar premium 35 downsizing 73 Drexel Burnham Lambert (DBL) 282 dual currency bonds 220–3; see also reverse dual currency bonds earthquakes, bonds linked to 212 efficient markets hypothesis 22, 31, 111, 203 electronic trading 126–30, 134 ‘embeddos’ 218 emerging markets 3–4, 44, 115, 132–3, 142, 212, 226, 297 Enron 54, 142, 250, 298 enterprise risk management (ERM) 176 equity capital management 249 equity collateralized obligations (ECOs) 292 equity derivatives 241–2, 246–9, 257–62 equity index 137–8 equity investment, retail market in 258–9 equity investors’ risk 286–8 equity options 253–4 equity swaps 247–8 euro currency 171, 206, 237 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development 297 European currency units 93 European Union 247–8 Exchange Rate Mechanism, European 204 exchangeable bonds 260 expatriate postings 81–2 expert witnesses 310–12 extrapolation 189, 205 extreme value theory 166 fads of management science 72–4 ‘fairway bonds’ 225 Fama, Eugene 22, 111, 194 ‘fat tail’ events 163–4 Federal Accounting Standards Board 266 Federal Home Loans Bank 213 Federal National Mortgage Association 213 Federal Reserve Bank 20, 173 Federal Reserve Board 132 ‘Ferraris’ 232 financial engineering 228, 230, 233, 249–50, 262, 269 Financial Services Authority (FSA), Japan 106, 238 Financial Services Authority (FSA), UK 15, 135 firewalls 235–6 firing of staff 84–5 First Interstate Ltd 34–5 ‘flat’ organizations 72 ‘flat’ positions 159 floaters 231–2; see also inverse floaters ‘flow’ trading 60–1, 129 Ford Motors 282, 296 forecasting 135–6, 190 forward contracts 24–33, 90, 97, 124, 131, 188 fugu fish 239 fund management 109–17, 286, 300 futures see forward contracts Galbraith, John Kenneth 121 gamma risk 200–2, 294 Gauss, Carl Friedrich 160–2 General Motors 279, 296 General Reinsurance 20 geometric Brownian motion (GBM) 161 Ghana 98 Gibson Greeting Cards 44 Glass-Steagall Act 34 gold borrowings 132 13_INDEX.QXD 17/2/06 4:44 pm Page 329 Index gold sales 97, 137 Goldman Sachs 34, 71, 93, 150, 173, 185 ‘golfing holiday bonds’ 224 Greenspan, Alan 6, 9, 19–21, 29, 43, 47, 50, 53, 62, 132, 159, 170, 215, 223, 308 Greenwich NatWest 298 Gross, Bill 19 Guangdong International Trust and Investment Corporation (GITIC) 276–7 guaranteed annuity option (GAO) contracts 204–5 Gutenfreund, John 168–9 gyosei shido 106 Haghani, Victor 168 Hamanaka, Yasuo 142 Hamburgische Landesbank 297 Hammersmith and Fulham, London Borough of 66–7 ‘hara-kiri’ swaps 39 Hartley, L.P. 163 Hawkins, Greg 168 ‘heaven and hell’ bonds 218 hedge funds 44, 88–9, 113–14, 167, 170–5, 200–2, 206, 253–4, 262–3, 282, 292, 296, 300, 308–9 hedge ratio 264 hedging 24–8, 31, 38–42, 60, 87–100, 184, 195–200, 205–7, 214, 221, 229, 252, 269, 281, 293–4, 310 Heisenberg, Werner 122 ‘hell bonds’ 218 Herman, Clement (‘Crem’) 45–9, 77, 84, 309 Herodotus 137, 178 high net worth individuals (HNWIs) 237–8, 286 Hilibrand, Lawrence 168 Hill Samuel 231–2 329 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 189 Homer, Sidney 184 Hong Kong 9, 303–4 ‘hot tubbing’ 311–12 HSBC Bank 148 HSH Nordbank 297–8 Hudson, Kevin 102 Hufschmid, Hans 77–8 IBM 36, 218, 260 ICI 34 Iguchi, Toshihude 142 incubators 309 independent valuation 142 indexed currency option notes (ICONs) 218 India 302 Indonesia 5, 9, 19, 26, 55, 80–2, 105, 146, 219–20, 252, 305 initial public offerings 33, 64, 261 inside information and insider trading 133, 241, 248–9 insurance companies 107–10, 117, 119, 150, 192–3, 204–5, 221, 223, 282, 286, 300; see also reinsurance companies insurance law 272 Intel 260 intellectual property in financial products 226 Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG) 285–6 International Accounting Standards 33 International Securities Market Association 106 International Swap Dealers Association (ISDA) 273, 275, 279, 281 Internet stock and the Internet boom 64, 112, 259, 261, 310, 319 interpolation of interest rates 141–2, 189 inverse floaters 46–51, 213–16, 225, 232–3 13_INDEX.QXD 17/2/06 4:44 pm Page 330 330 Index investment banks 34–8, 62, 64, 67, 71, 127–8, 172, 198, 206, 216–17, 234, 265–7, 298, 309 investment managers 43–4 investment styles 111–14 irrational decisions 136 Italy 106–7 Ito’s Lemma 194 Japan 39, 43, 82–3, 92, 94, 98–9, 101, 106, 132, 142, 145–6, 157, 212, 217–25, 228, 269–70 Jensen, Michael 117 Jett, Joseph 143 JP Morgan (company) 72, 150, 152, 160, 162, 249–50, 268–9, 284–5, 299; see also Morgan Guaranty junk bonds 231, 279, 282, 291, 296–7 JWM Associates 175 Kahneman, Daniel 136 Kaplanis, Costas 174 Kassouf, Sheen 253 Kaufman, Henry 62 Kerkorian, Kirk 296 Keynes, J.M. 167, 175, 198 Keynesianism 5 Kidder Peabody 143 Kleinwort Benson 40 Korea 9, 226, 278 Kozeny, Viktor 121 Krasker, William 168 Kreiger, Andy 319 Kyoto Protocol 320 Lavin, Jack 102 law of large numbers 192 Leeson, Nick 51, 131, 143, 151 legal opinions 47, 219–20, 235, 273–4 Leibowitz, Martin 184 Leland, Hayne 42, 202 Lend Lease Corporation 261–2 leptokurtic conditions 163 leverage 31–2, 48–50, 54, 99, 102–3, 114, 131–2, 171–5, 213–14, 247, 270–3, 291, 295, 305, 308 Lewis, Kenneth 303 Lewis, Michael 77–8 life insurance 204–5 Lintner, John 111 liquidity options 175 liquidity risk 158, 173 litigation 297–8 Ljunggren, Bernt 38–40 London Inter-Bank Offered Rate (LIBOR) 6, 37 ‘long first coupon’ strategy 39 Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) 44, 51, 62, 77–8, 84, 114, 166–75, 187, 206, 210, 215–18, 263–4, 309–10 Long Term Credit Bank of Japan 94 LOR (company) 202 Louisiana Purchase 319 low exercise price options (LEPOs) 261 Maastricht Treaty and criteria 106–7 McLuhan, Marshall 134 McNamara, Robert 182 macro-economic indicators, derivatives linked to 319 Mahathir Mohammed 31 Malaysia 9 management consultants 72–3 Manchester United 152 mandatory convertibles 255 Marakanond, Rerngchai 302 margin calls 97–8, 175 ‘market neutral’ investment strategy 114 market risk 158, 173, 265 marketable eurodollar collateralized securities (MECS) 232 Markowitz, Harry 110 mark-to-market accounting 10, 100, 139–41, 145, 150, 174, 215–16, 228, 244, 266, 292, 295, 298 Marx, Groucho 24, 57, 67, 117, 308 13_INDEX.QXD 17/2/06 4:44 pm Page 331 Index mathematics applied to financial instruments 209–10; see also ‘quants’ matrix structures 72 Meckling, Herbert 117 Melamed, Leo 34, 211 merchant banks 38 Meriwether, John 167–9, 172–5 Merrill Lynch 124, 150, 217, 232 Merton, Robert 22, 42, 168–70, 175, 185, 189–90, 193–7, 210 Messier, Marie 247 Metallgesellschaft 95–7 Mexico 44 mezzanine finance 285–8, 291–7 MG Refining and Marketing 95–8, 114 Microsoft 53 Mill, Stuart 130 Miller, Merton 22, 101, 194 Milliken, Michael 282 Ministry of Finance, Japan 222 misogyny 75–7 mis-selling 238, 297–8 Mitchell, Edison 70 Mitchell & Butler 275–6 models financial 42–3, 141–2, 163–4, 173–5, 181–4, 189, 198–9, 205–10 of business processes 73–5 see also credit models Modest, David 168 momentum investment 111 monetization 260–1 monopolies in financial trading 124 moral hazard 151, 280, 291 Morgan Guaranty 37–8, 221, 232 Morgan Stanley 76, 150 mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) 282–3 Moscow, City of 277 moves of staff between firms 150, 244 Mozer, Paul 169 Mullins, David 168–70 multi-skilling 73 331 Mumbai 3 Murdoch, Rupert 247 Nabisco 220 Napoleon 113 NASDAQ index 64, 112 Nash, Ogden 306 National Australia Bank 144, 178 National Rifle Association 29 NatWest Bank 144–5, 198 Niederhoffer, Victor 130 ‘Nero’ 7, 31, 45–9, 60, 77, 82–3, 88–9, 110, 118–19, 125, 128, 292 NERVA 297 New Zealand 319 Newman, Frank 104 news, financial 133–4 News Corporation 247 Newton, Isaac 162, 210 Nippon Credit Bank 106, 271 Nixon, Richard 33 Nomura Securities 218 normal distribution 160–3, 193, 199 Northern Electric 248 O’Brien, John 202 Occam, William 188 off-balance sheet transactions 32–3, 99, 234, 273, 282 ‘offsites’ 74–5 oil prices 30, 33, 89–90, 95–7 ‘omitted variable’ bias 209–10 operational risk 158, 176 opinion shopping 47 options 9, 21–2, 25–6, 32, 42, 90, 98, 124, 197, 229 pricing 185, 189–98, 202 Orange County 16, 44, 50, 124–57, 212–17, 232–3 orphan subsidiaries 234 over-the-counter (OTC) market 26, 34, 53, 95, 124, 126 overvaluation 64 13_INDEX.QXD 17/2/06 4:44 pm Page 332 332 Index ‘overwhelming force’ strategy 134–5 Owen, Martin 145 ownership, ‘legal’ and ‘economic’ 247 parallel loans 35 pari-mutuel auction system 319 Parkinson’s Law 136 Parmalat 250, 298–9 Partnoy, Frank 87 pension funds 43, 108–10, 115, 204–5, 255 People’s Bank of China (PBOC) 276–7 Peters’ Principle 71 petrodollars 71 Pétrus (restaurant) 121 Philippines, the 9 phobophobia 177 Piga, Gustavo 106 PIMCO 19 Plaza Accord 38, 94, 99, 220 plutophobia 177 pollution quotas 320 ‘portable alpha’ strategy 115 portfolio insurance 112, 202–3, 294 power reverse dual currency (PRDC) bonds 226–30 PowerPoint 75 preferred exchangeable resettable listed shares (PERLS) 255 presentations of business models 75 to clients 57, 185 prime brokerage 309 Prince, Charles 238 privatization 205 privity of contract 273 Proctor & Gamble (P&G) 44, 101–4, 155, 298, 301 product disclosure statements (PDSs) 48–9 profit smoothing 140 ‘programme’ issuers 234–5 proprietary (‘prop’) trading 60, 62, 64, 130, 174, 254 publicly available information (PAI) 277 ‘puff’ effect 148 purchasing power parity theory 92 ‘put’ options 90, 131, 256 ‘quants’ 183–9, 198, 208, 294 Raabe, Matthew 217 Ramsay, Gordon 121 range notes 225 real estate 91, 219 regulatory arbitrage 33 reinsurance companies 288–9 ‘relative value’ trading 131, 170–1, 310 Reliance Insurance 91–2 repackaging (‘repack’) business 230–6, 282, 290 replication in option pricing 195–9, 202 dynamic 200 research provided to clients 58, 62–4, 184 reserves, use of 140 reset preference shares 254–7 restructuring of loans 279–81 retail equity products 258–9 reverse convertibles 258–9 reverse dual currency bonds 223–30 ‘revolver’ loans 284–5 risk, financial, types of 158 risk adjusted return on capital (RAROC) 268, 290 risk conservation principle 229–30 risk management 65, 153–79, 184, 187, 201, 267 risk models 163–4, 173–5 riskless portfolios 196–7 RJ Reynolds (company) 220–1 rogue traders 176, 313–16 Rosenfield, Eric 168 Ross, Stephen 196–7, 202 Roth, Don 38 Rothschild, Mayer Amshel 267 Royal Bank of Scotland 298 Rubinstein, Mark 42, 196–7 13_INDEX.QXD 17/2/06 4:44 pm Page 333 Index Rumsfeld, Donald 12, 134, 306 Rusnak, John 143 Russia 45, 80, 166, 172–3, 274, 302 sales staff 55–60, 64–5, 125, 129, 217 Salomon Brothers 20, 36, 54, 62, 167–9, 174, 184 Sandor, Richard 34 Sanford, Charles 72, 269 Sanford, Eugene 269 Schieffelin, Allison 76 Scholes, Myron 22, 42, 168–71, 175, 185, 189–90, 193–7, 263–4 Seagram Group 247 Securities and Exchange Commission, US 64, 304 Securities and Futures Authority, UK 249 securitization 282–90 ‘security design’ 254–7 self-regulation 155 sex discrimination 76 share options 250–1 Sharpe, William 111 short selling 30–1, 114 Singapore 9 single-tranche CDOs 293–4, 299 ‘Sisters of Perpetual Ecstasy’ 234 SITCOMs 313 Six Continents (6C) 275–6 ‘smile’ effect 145 ‘snake’ currency system 203 ‘softing’ arrangements 117 Solon 137 Soros, George 44, 130, 253, 318–19 South Sea Bubble 210 special purpose asset repackaging companies (SPARCs) 233 special purpose vehicles (SPVs) 231–4, 282–6, 290, 293 speculation 29–31, 42, 67, 87, 108, 130 ‘spinning’ 64 333 Spitzer, Eliot 64 spread 41, 103; see also credit spreads stack hedges 96 Stamenson, Michael 124–5 standard deviation 161, 193, 195, 199 Steinberg, Sol 91 stock market booms 258, 260 stock market crashes 42–3, 168, 203, 257, 259, 319 straddles or strangles 131 strategy in banking 70 stress testing 164–6 stripping of convertible bonds 253–4 structured investment products 44, 112, 115, 118, 128, 211–39, 298 structured note asset packages (SNAPs) 233 Stuart SC 18, 307, 316–18 Styblo Bleder, Tanya 153 Suharto, Thojib 81–2 Sumitomo Corporation 100, 142 Sun Tzu 61 Svensk Exportkredit (SEK) 38–9 swaps 5–10, 26, 35–40, 107, 188, 211; see also equity swaps ‘swaptions’ 205–6 Swiss Bank Corporation (SBC) 248–9 Swiss banks 108, 305 ‘Swiss cheese theory’ 176 synthetic securitization 284–5, 288–90 systemic risk 151 Takeover Panel 248–9 Taleb, Nassim 130, 136, 167 target redemption notes 225–6 tax and tax credits 171, 242–7, 260–3 Taylor, Frederick 98, 101 team-building exercises 76 team moves 149 technical analysis 60–1, 135 television programmes about money 53, 62–3 Thailand 9, 80, 302–5 13_INDEX.QXD 17/2/06 4:44 pm Page 334 334 Index Thatcher, Margaret 205 Thorp, Edward 253 tobashi trades 105–7 Tokyo Disneyland 92, 212 top managers 72–3 total return swaps 246–8, 269 tracking error 138 traders in financial products 59–65, 129–31, 135–6, 140, 148, 151, 168, 185–6, 198; see also dealers trading limits 42, 157, 201 trading rooms 53–4, 64, 68, 75–7, 184–7, 208 Trafalgar House 248 tranching 286–9, 292, 296 transparency 26, 117, 126, 129–30, 310 Treynor, Jack 111 trust investment enhanced return securities (TIERS) 216, 233 trust obligation participating securities (TOPS) 232 TXU Europe 279 UBS Global Asset Management 110, 150, 263–4, 274 uncertainty principle 122–3 unique selling propositions 118 unit trusts 109 university education 187 unspecified fund obligations (UFOs) 292 ‘upfronting’ of income 139, 151 Valéry, Paul 163 valuation 64, 142–6 value at risk (VAR) concept 160–7, 173 value investing 111 Vanguard 116 vanity bonds 230 variance 161 Vietnam War 182, 195 Virgin Islands 233–4 Vivendi 247–8 volatility of bond prices 197 of interest rates 144–5 of share prices 161–8, 172–5, 192–3, 199 Volcker, Paul 20, 33 ‘warehouses’ 40–2, 139 warrants arbitrage 99–101 weather, bonds linked to 212, 320 Weatherstone, Dennis 72, 268 Weil, Gotscal & Manges 298 Weill, Sandy 174 Westdeutsche Genosenschafts Zentralbank 143 Westminster Group 34–5 Westpac 261–2 Wheat, Allen 70, 72, 106, 167 Wojniflower, Albert 62 World Bank 4, 36, 38 World Food Programme 320 Worldcom 250, 298 Wriston, Walter 71 WTI (West Texas Intermediate) contracts 28–30 yield curves 103, 188–9, 213, 215 yield enhancement 112, 213, 269 ‘yield hogs’ 43 zaiteku 98–101, 104–5 zero coupon bonds 221–2, 257–8 

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 29 Nov 2011

In August 1995, Business Week revealed that CSC Index, an ambitious young management consultancy, and two would-be gurus with close ties to the consultancy, Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema, had been employing methods that are more often associated with the grubbier parts of the record industry to turn The Discipline of Market Leaders, a slim and rather banal volume, into a best-seller.1 They had brought so many copies of the book—always making sure to use small bookshops that were tracked by the New York Times in compiling its best-seller list—that thousands of copies had to be stored in tractor-trailers. The Business Week exposé was one of the final chapters in the most remarkable management story of the 1990s, the story of the rise, triumph, and eventual fall of business-process reengineering, or reengineering for short. Reengineering was the most successful business fad of the Clinton era—a fad that persuaded companies around the world to break themselves up into their component parts and then put themselves back together from the ground up. It was also the most ambitious: Michael Hammer, the man who invented the idea along with James Champy, liked to give his job description as “reversing the industrial revolution.”

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Companies also embraced harsher management techniques. Bain’s annual survey of management techniques discovered that three techniques long associated with (sometimes brutal) cost-cutting crept back to the top of the management pops—benchmarking (at number one), outsourcing (at number five), and, yes, business process reengineering (at number eight).14 BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico arguably played an equally important role in CSR’s problems. BP had been a world leader of CSR. In 2000, the company that was then known as British Petroleum launched a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign to rebrand itself as the jolly green giant of the oil world, with a new motto, “Beyond Petroleum”; a new logo, a green-and-yellow sunburst; and a mountain of bumph about “corporate sustainability.”15 The company’s brand awareness jumped from 4 percent in 2000 to 67 percent in 2007, and BP was regarded as the world’s most “environmentally conscious” company.

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Some gurus latched on to the rather tiresome metaphor of jazz improvisation (and, even more tiresomely, jazz musicians began to make appearances at management conferences). John Kao, a business professor and entrepreneur, argued that strategists should forget about modeling themselves on Herbert von Karajan and instead unleash their inner Charlie Parker. More importantly, an army of younger thinkers shifted attention to business processes (which could be reengineered) and “core competencies” (which needed to be cultivated). Yet, in the end, this emphasis on “process” was unsatisfactory: what is the point of tuning up your engine to perfection if you have no idea where you are headed? Even during the height of the reengineering craze, many companies continued to be committed to dreaming up “strategic visions”—grand views of the future that provided them with a general sense of mission without imposing the costs and constraints of central planning.

Advanced Software Testing—Vol. 3, 2nd Edition
by Jamie L. Mitchell and Rex Black
Published 15 Feb 2015

The reason this entire keyword mechanism exists is to make it easy for non-programming testers to directly build executable test cases. The easier we make the metalanguage to use, the lower we can drive our variable costs, like training and support. 6.2.4 Creating Keyword-Driven Tables Learning objectives TTA-6.2.4 (K3) Create a keyword table based on a given business process. In our experience, the best way to create a keyword grammar is to mine the manual test cases that already exist. The abstract tasks that will eventually end up as keywords are already likely defined there. The scope of the keywords’ actual functionality will usually come from the knowledge of the actual testers who run those tests.

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When started, the framework likely sets up the environment, initializes the log, picks up the first test to be run, picks up the first keyword, executes it, picks up the next keyword, and so on. At any time, a failure causes the virtual machine to back out of the current test, log the error (possibly including taking and storing a snapshot of the screen), clean up the environment, and prepare to run the next test case. As part of the front end, there also should be a business process by which a tester can request a new keyword to perform a certain task. Suppose we were automating MS Word testing. A tester might ask for a keyword that allows them to create a table in a document, with row and column count as parameters. Once the tester asks for it, the automator would make the keyword available so that testers could immediately start using it in their test cases.

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They can use these tools at any point in the life cycle once the website to be analyzed exists. 6.3.4 Model-Based Testing Tools Learning objectives TTA-6.3.4 (K2) Explain how tools support the concept of model-based testing. The phrase model-based testing can, as a practical matter, mean a number of different things. At a high level, you can say that model-based testing occurs when a model (e.g., a state transition diagram, a business process flow, or the web of screen linkages in a user interface) describes the behavior or structure of a system and that model is used to generate functional or nonfunctional test cases. This process can be supported by tools: To generate the tests, either at a logical level or concrete level of detail To execute the tests against the system To do both of these things, either sequentially (generate then execute) or in parallel (just-in-time generation for execution) Model-based testing is interesting in that it is a practical, real-world testing approach that grew out of academic research, especially on the subject of state-based systems.

The Great Post Office Scandal: The Fight to Expose a Multimillion Pound Scandal Which Put Innocent People in Jail
by Nick Wallis
Published 18 Nov 2021

The note continues to the conclusion there is ‘no evidence’ any problems have been found ‘of the nature suggested by JFSA.’3 Arbuthnot remembers Vennells and Perkins, ‘were clear that they believed their systems worked well, but they were equally clear that they wanted and needed to find a way through that would solve the problem to the satisfaction of everyone.’ Perkins and Vennells suggested the Post Office appoint a team of independent forensic accountants to have a proper look at their IT and business processes. Arbuthnot and Letwin thought this was a very good idea. Within three months, Second Sight were on the scene. ____________________ 1 The top in-house lawyer in any company. 2 Taken from a Faith in Business profile of Paula Vennells which reviews her speech to the 2017 Faith in Business Conference at Ridley Hall.

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THE DETICA REPORT Second Sight and Simon Clarke were not the only independent observers to take one look at the Post Office and see it was in a complete mess. In April, as Second Sight’s Interim Report was being prepared, a company owned by BAE Systems called Detica NetReveal was brought in to examine the Post Office’s fraud repellency, business processes and IT. The report, delivered in October 2013, is highly critical. Several of Second Sight’s recommendations ‘resonate strongly’ with the report’s authors, not least the ‘habitual desire to assign responsibility to an individual rather than to conduct root cause analysis.’ The authors go on to list just how bad things are within the network, noting the Post Office’s ‘insecure systems and processes’, ‘inconsistent audits’, ‘lack of robust controls and records’, accompanied by ‘inadequate processes and documentation.’

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In fact, Second Sight were not told it had been commissioned, were never spoken to by the report’s authors, nor were they shown its contents when it was handed to Susan Crichton, Lesley Sewell and other members of the Post Office board. Within the space of a few months in the latter half of 2013, the Post Office had been told by three teams of experts it had duff business processes, duff IT and needed to examine its entire prosecution and asset-recovery strategy. How would it respond? ____________________ 1 Common shorthand in a lot of Post Office and court documents for Subpostmaster. Sometimes shortened still further to SPM or even SP. THE MEDIATION SCHEME Whilst the secret CK Sift Review was ongoing, the Post Office kept up its public-facing show of willingness to cooperate with MPs and the JFSA.

Career Essentials: The Cover Letter
by Dale Mayer
Published 28 Jul 2011

Built prototypes for hydraulic jack systems for the automotive industry. Coordinated activities for 200 volunteers, speakers, accommodations, and meals. Designed and implemented a new document management system to secure the intellectual property of the company. Guided 120 employees through implementation of new business process. Headed four committees for the new hospital to establish new policies, strategies, and methodology as day–to–day operations started. Motivated employees to complete the time management guidelines put in place by new board members. Simplified accounting processes and payroll system for company and its two sister companies.

Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy
by Erik Brynjolfsson
Published 23 Jan 2012

Many industries are winner-take-all or winner-take-most competitions, in which a few individuals get the lion’s share of the rewards. Think of pop music, professional athletics, and the market for CEOs. Digital technologies increase the size and scope of these markets. These technologies replicate not only information goods but increasingly business processes as well. As a result, the talents, insights, or decisions of a single person can now dominate a national or even global market. Meanwhile good, but not great, local competitors are increasingly crowded out of their markets. The superstars in each field can now earn much larger rewards than they did in earlier decades.

Stake Hodler Capitalism: Blockchain and DeFi
by Amr Hazem Wahba Metwaly
Published 21 Mar 2021

Hacking is not an option, and it would take an extremely craze and talented, smart hacker to crack the code and infiltrate your documents on this platform. Speed To manually process documents, you will have to spend lots of time and paperwork before accomplishing this feat. On the other hand, smart contracts use software code to automate assignments, therefore cutting hours off taking care of business processes or any other documented stuff. Savings Since the presence of an intermediary is taken away from the picture, smart contracts save you money by this exemption. For instance, you may have to pay a broker or notary to witness your exchange or help you monitor it. Accuracy Computerized contracts are known for their speed and cheapness and their ability to avoid the errors that come from filling out piles of forms.

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think
by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier
Published 5 Mar 2013

abstract_id=1819486). [>] On Rolls-Royce—See “Rolls-Royce: Britain’s Lonely High-Flier,” The Economist, January 8, 2009 (http://www.economist.com/node/12887368). Figures updated from press office, November 2012. Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee, Michael Sorell, and Feng Zhu, “Scale Without Mass: Business Process Replication and Industry Dynamics,” Harvard Business School working paper, September 2006 (http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/07-016.pdf also http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5532.html). [>] On the movement toward increasingly large data holders—See also Yannis Bakos and Erik Brynjolfsson, “Bundling Information Goods: Pricing, Profits, and Efficiency,” Management Science 45 (December 1999), pp. 1613–30. [>] Philip Evans—Interviews with the authors, 2011 and 2012. 8.

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Research paper presented at Oxford Internet Institute’s “A Decade in Internet Time: Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society,” September 21, 2011 (http://ssrn.com/abstract=1926431). Brown, Brad, Michael Chui, and James Manyika. “Are You Ready for the Era of ‘Big Data’?” McKinsey Quarterly, October 2011, p. 10. Brynjolfsson, Erik, Andrew McAfee, Michael Sorell, and Feng Zhu. “Scale Without Mass: Business Process Replication and Industry Dynamics.” HBS working paper, September 2006 (http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/07-016.pdf; also http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5532.html). Brynjolfsson, Erik, Lorin Hitt, and Heekyung Kim. “Strength in Numbers: How Does Data-Driven Decisionmaking Affect Firm Performance?” ICIS 2011 Proceedings, Paper 13 (http://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2011/proceedings/economicvalueIS/13; also available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines
by William Davidow and Michael Malone
Published 18 Feb 2020

Inflation-adjusted annual earnings for production employees peaked in the 1970s and is down by 14.6 percent.7 The bottom 50 percent of U.S. taxpayers, approximately 68 million people, had an average adjusted gross income of about $14,800.8 Those incomes are supplemented by transfer payments on the order of $13,000 per household.9 Nobody knows how many autonomous workers are now on the job; all we have is guesses and estimates. But the estimates of the job losses that are to come are staggering. A recent study by Frey and Osborne looked at 702 occupations and concluded that 47 percent of American jobs might be automated in the future.10 McKinsey estimates that 85 percent of the simpler business processes can be automated. Many of those processes are in companies that provide services. Using automation, one European bank was able to originate mortgages in fifteen minutes—instead of two to ten days—cutting origination costs by 70 percent.11 A more recent study by McKinsey estimates that 400 to 800 million jobs around the world will be lost to automation by 2030.12 In 2011, W.

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To understand why, consider that the physical infrastructure of today’s society evolved in response to basic information transfer problems. In order to efficiently exchange the information necessary to buy and sell goods, produce things of value, learn, or be entertained, people had to gather in physical places. Our existing infrastructure assets, and the business processes supporting them, can be seen as information transfer proxies. As noted earlier, consumers go to retail stores in part to find out what is available at what prices—in other words, to get information. Workers go to office buildings to gain access to files and communicate with co-workers. Walmart stores and office buildings are essentially giant file cabinets.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us
by Dan Lyons
Published 22 Oct 2018

Just like Taylor, they are probably well meaning but almost certainly dead wrong. Significantly, both Agile and Lean Startup originated in Silicon Valley, and both were invented by computer scientists. Both use the metaphor of the organization as a kind of machine, a computer that can be reprogrammed, rebooted, and updated with new businesses processes. Metaphorically speaking, the processes are the software. As with actual software, you can write a version of a program, see how it runs, then tweak it, optimize it, and keep iterating. The big drawback with the metaphor of company-as-computer is that in a computer you’re dealing with chips, which are made to be reprogrammed—but we humans are not.

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Technology would empower us and give us more autonomy and freedom. It could democratize the workplace and give rank-and-file workers a greater voice in how the company was run. But some started to worry—including some who had invented the new ways of working. In the 1990s Babson College business professor Thomas Davenport helped create something called business process reengineering. This was a strategy for using computer technology to restructure organizations. It was supposed to be a good thing, but when corporations embraced “reengineering,” they just used it as an excuse to fire lots of people. Davenport, who was seen as the father of reengineering, was appalled.

The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking
by Barbara Minto
Published 2 Jan 2010

A Disturbing Event can be: External- a change initiated else\vhere in the cnviron1nent within which the structure/process takes place, e.g. Entergence of a new contpetitor Conversion to a new technology Shift in goverr11nent or custm11er policy Internal-a change initiated by the contpan;~ e.g. Added a business process Installed a nevv con1puter syste1n Expanded into a new m.arket Redirected the product line Recently Recognized-a recognition or evidence of an obvious or likely need for change, e.g. Lagging performance in a product/process Sub-par operating resu Its Market research that in1plies a possible shift in customer attitude.

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se support Exhibit 37, for example, shows the elements of sales and marketing available to the retailer to influence the consumer to buy Thus, one of the things you would need to determine would be whether share of market is down (R1) because they don't make the custmner sufficiently aware, because they don't convince hin1 to bu)" etc. Another typical analysis at the beginning of a study is to try to understand the business process and key trends in an industry, as a basis for identifying danger areas. Here, you segment the industry (Exhibit 38) and determine volume and competitive structure for each segment. You can also atte1npt to detern1ine \vhere value is added, how costs behave, where profits are n1ade, where profits are sensitive, and where assets are committed.

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Mar 2016

The transparency offered by the digital media landscape has the potential to lay bare the workings of industrialism. Meanwhile, digital technology itself provides us the means to reprogram many business sectors from the ground up, and in ways that distribute value to their many human stakeholders instead of merely extracting it. But doing so requires a rather radical reversal in the way we evaluate business processes and the purpose of technology itself. By reducing human beings to mere cogs in a machine, we created the conditions to worship growth over all other economic virtues. We must reckon with how and why we did this. MASS MASS MASS For a happy couple of centuries before industrialism and the modern era, the business landscape looked something like Burning Man, the famous desert festival for digital artisans.

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Workers log into one of the platforms from home or an Internet café and then choose from a series of tasks on offer. They might be paid three cents each time they identify the subject of a photo, transcribe a sentence from a video lecture, or list the items in a scanned receipt. These are invariably mundane tasks—the sorts of data entry that wouldn’t even exist were so many business processes not already tied to computer databases, and ones that will certainly be carried out by computers themselves sooner than later. But for now, these tasks are the province of the click workers, a growing population of several million so far, who invisibly help computers and Web sites create the illusion of mechanical perfection.

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy
by George Gilder
Published 16 Jul 2018

If your product is “free,” it is not a product, and you are not in business, even if you can extort money from so-called advertisers to fund it. If you do not charge for your software services—if they are “open source”—you can avoid liability for buggy “betas.” You can happily evade the overreach of the Patent Office’s ridiculous seventeen-year protection for minor software advances or “business processes,” like one-click shopping. But don’t pretend that you have customers. Security is the most crucial part of any system. It enables the machine to possess an initial “state” or ground position and gain economic traction. If security is not integral to an information technology architecture, that architecture must be replaced.

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Instead of paying—and signaling—with the fungible precision of money, you pay in the slippery coin of information and distraction. If you do not charge for your software services—if they are “open source”—you can avoid liability for buggy “betas”. You can happily escape the overreach of the patent bureau’s ridiculous seventeen-year protection for minor software advances or “business processes” like one-click shopping. But don’t pretend that you have customers. Of all Google’s foundational principles, the zero price, is apparently its most benign. Yet it will prove to be not only its most pernicious principle but the fatal flaw that dooms Google itself. Google will likely be an important company ten years from now.

PostgreSQL 9 Admin Cookbook: Over 80 Recipes to Help You Run an Efficient PostgreSQL 9. 0 Database
by Simon Riggs and Hannu Krosing
Published 23 Oct 2010

As I said, the number of tables in a relational database is a good measure of the complexity. Complexity of what? Well, a complex database might be designed to be deliberately flexible in order to cover a variety of business situations, or a complex business process might have a limited portion of its details covered in the database. So, a large number of tables might reveal a complex business process or maybe just a complex piece of software. The most distinct major tables I've ever seen in a database is 20,000, not counting partitions, views, or work tables. That clearly rates as a very complex system. Number of distinct tables ("entities") Complexity rating 20,000 Incredibly complex.

Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success
by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown
Published 24 Apr 2017

What’s more, the authors emphasized that the problem will be getting worse in the future, writing that “all signs point to an increasing risk of stalls in the near future,” due to the “shrinking half-life of established business models.” Among the causes of stalled growth they cite are problems “in managing the internal business processes for updating existing products and services and creating new ones,” and “premature core abandonment: the failure to fully exploit growth opportunities in the existing core business.”12 Growth hacking is a powerful solution to both of these problems. Put simply, every company needs to grow their base of customers in order to survive and thrive.

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With plans to greatly expand sales in the coming years, the company has brought in talent from both the Facebook and Uber growth teams, and has announced, “We’re building a growth team from scratch to design, build and optimize scalable solutions to accelerate adoption.”17 THE NEED FOR SPEED Growth hacking is also the answer to the urgent need for speed experienced by all businesses today. Finding growth solutions fast is crucial in today’s ever-more-competitive and rapidly changing business landscape. By revolutionizing the long-established business processes for developing and launching products, institutionalizing continuous market testing, and systematically responding to the demands of the market in real time, growth hacking makes companies much more fleet-footed. It enables them to seize new opportunities and correct for problems—fast. This gives those who adopt the method a powerful competitive advantage, one that will become even more powerful as the pace of business continues to accelerate.

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
Published 23 May 2011

This dialogue—especially with your most active customers—inevitably draws them into your development process. You end up collaborating with your customers to create better products. That’s taking the power of psychic income and building it into your business. Whether you start with listening to, talking with, energizing, or supporting the groundswell, you’ll end up with customers in your business processes, especially those related to product development. That’s what we mean by embracing the groundswell, the topic of chapter 9. Part Two: Tapping the Groundswell Embracing the Groundswell In a tiny town in central Pennsylvania lives a guy named George. George loves his dog, Pooch.

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Organism combines elements of social networks, collaboration software, and corporate intranets. According to David Feldt, a senior vice president in the Toronto office who drove the creation of Organism, “It helps the teams really get to know each other and ultimately work more effectively together.” Organic realized that people’s business process revolved around knowing each other and, more important, around the work that each person did. “Organism became an entry point for the wiki,” Chad explained. “Anything that gets updated on your profile is documented in the wiki.” Now whenever new employees join Organic, they get a page on Organism and are expected to keep it up to date with their client deliverables.

Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline . . . And the Rise of a New Economy
by Daniel Gross
Published 7 May 2012

These travels have given me a chance to see firsthand many of the trends that are shaping our world. I’ve spent time with oil CEOs in Houston and solar panel makers in Boulder. I’ve visited a Prius factory in Japan and a bustling Chang’an-Ford auto plant in Chongqing, China, gas turbine factories in South Carolina and a business process outsourcing outpost in Bogotá, Colombia. I’ve chatted about the credit crunch with Warren Buffett and Blackstone Group’s chairman Stephen Schwarzman. I’ve toured thriving fish factories outside Saigon, publishing offices in Istanbul, gas stations in Soweto, and an aluminum smelter on a glacial fjord in eastern Iceland.

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Edwards Deming, the chief evangelist of the gospel of quality, had to go to Japan to find a receptive audience in the 1950s. But after a couple of tough decades in which foreign competition began to erode American advantages, U.S. manufacturers rediscovered efficiency with a vengeance in the 1980s and 1990s. Total quality management, the discipline of reengineering, and the glories of business-process outsourcing transformed the manufacturing industry. In services, Walmart’s insanely efficient supply chains relentlessly drove costs out of the system and set a global standard for rational logistics. McKinsey’s armies of whip-smart technocrats roamed the globe, peddling expensive advice on how to rationalize operations.

Lessons from the Titans: What Companies in the New Economy Can Learn from the Great Industrial Giants to Drive Sustainable Success
by Scott Davis , Carter Copeland and Rob Wertheimer
Published 13 Jul 2020

Union workers celebrated when CEO Trani announced his retirement in 2003. Manager reviews of the period were also tough. Trani had churned through his ranks of senior managers, losing more than he retained. He had made important strides on cost-cutting, but notably little on building sustainable business processes or a culture of success. In 2004 the company brought in John Lundgren, and SBD began to build a strong base business system. An early step was to implement Lean manufacturing, the foundation for any competent manufacturer. At SBD the move to Lean was the result of some hard lessons learned.

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Board members don’t always add value to businesses, as with GE’s board rubber-stamping mistakes in the Immelt era or CAT’s board failing to ask incisive questions on the company’s China coal mining failure. In the best cases, however, corporate leaders bring expertise and forceful challenges, and that’s what Kampouris did. His push was a central part of what became the core business process: the Stanley Fulfillment System, or SFS. He challenged the company on the level of working capital it held even after making progress with Lean, arguing that it could make substantial improvements while providing better customer service. Working capital is simply money that’s tied up: inventory or accounts receivable (money not yet paid to the company), offset by bills that the company hasn’t paid yet.

Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy
by George Magnus
Published 10 Sep 2018

It is, basically, an efficiency term that captures the impact of technical progress and institutional arrangements that enable total GDP growth to exceed the sum of its labour and capital parts. Think, for example, of things like changes in knowledge and ‘know-how’, as opposed to information; the impact of new technologies on new products and processes; competition rules, the operation of the rule of law, and the security of contracts; the way factories or offices are organised; business processes and management techniques; and the effects of high levels of trade and commercial integration. These things all enter into economic accounting gymnastics, and are subsumed under TFP. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman famously drew attention to the concept of TFP when discussing the outlook for dynamic Southeast Asia in 1994 in an article entitled ‘The Myth of Asia’s Miracle’.9 Krugman’s argument was that Asia’s economic success could only be properly understood and assessed by distinguishing additions to from improvements in labour, capital and technology.

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Yet there is a broader and more pervasive aspect to a GPT, which is the more indirect contribution it makes as an enabling mechanism of hundreds of complementary innovations and new products and processes in other industries and sectors. These could change the way factories and offices are structured and work, the entire transportation infrastructure in the case of driverless vehicles, business processes and corporate governance, skill structures and educational attainment, the organisation of preventative and social care, the location of manufacturing and much more. The essential point about these complementary changes is that they are disruptive, unpredictable and prone to trial and error, experimentation, and failure.

Chaos Engineering: System Resiliency in Practice
by Casey Rosenthal and Nora Jones
Published 27 Apr 2020

A system may be engineered to tolerate failure but until you explicitly test failure conditions at scale there is always a risk that expectation and reality will not line up. Google’s DiRT (Disaster Recovery Testing) program was founded by site reliability engineers (SREs) in 2006 to intentionally instigate failures in critical technology systems and business processes in order to expose unaccounted for risks. The engineers who championed the DiRT program made the key observation that analyzing emergencies in production becomes a whole lot easier when it is not actually an emergency. Disaster testing helps prove a system’s resilience when failures are handled gracefully, and exposes reliability risks in a controlled fashion when things are less than graceful.

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When we make a decision based on intuition, it is often impossible to recall the observations that contributed to that intuition (as useful as it might be to do so!). Because of this, relying on human intuition (something which in general cannot be documented or disseminated) as a key part of the business process can be risky. If a site reliability engineer (SRE), after staring at a dashboard for a few moments during an outage, begins narrowing their investigation to a particular suspect service, we might want to ask them why that set of signals led to that action. How often could they answer? Perhaps this is why we can train SREs so effectively to deal with incidents by putting them in front of incidents, but we aren’t very good at training SREs based on the accumulated knowledge of past SREs.

The Unusual Billionaires
by Saurabh Mukherjea
Published 16 Aug 2016

Garware Paints, Jenson and Nicholson) or were focusing on only the premium segment of the industry (e.g. ICI). This allowed Asian Paints to widen its gap versus peers during this phase. Exhibit 11: Asian Paints’s share price chart during 1991–97 Source: Bloomberg, Ambit Capital research. Business Process Re-engineering and Acceleration of Market Share Gains Phase 3: 1997–2015 On 31 July 1997, Choksey passed away at the age of eighty-one. At that time, media reports indicated dissent between Choksey’s son Atul and the remaining three promoter families. The magazine, India Today, reported12 as follows in its September 1997 issue, ‘While Choksey’s co-promoters—Abhay Vakil, Ashwin Choksi and Ashwin Dani—dismiss charges of infighting, there’s no denying that many of Choksey’s plans for the company had not met with their approval.

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For these recruits, the motivation to join Axis Bank was twofold: first, the security provided by working for a bank promoted by a behemoth such as UTI; and second, the unique experience of building a new organization from scratch. Gupta’s approach to building a team from the SBI group also provided a sense of continuity for the new recruits. I got a sense of the dedication of Axis Bank’s first cadre of recruits when I met V.K. Ramani, who went on to become executive director (ED) for technology and business processes and retired in 2009. Ramani joined Axis Bank in 1995, after working for more than twenty years with SBI. ‘In PSUs, people spend half the time answering (to their superiors) rather than doing (their work). In fact, a doer needs to answer more. At Axis Bank, we had a mission and a thrilling attitude.

Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty
by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo
Published 25 Apr 2011

In 2002, Robert Jensen of the University of California at Los Angeles teamed up with some of these centers to organize recruiting sessions for young women in randomly selected villages in rural areas where recruiters would typically not go, in three states in northern India. Not surprisingly, compared to other randomly chosen villages that did not see any such recruiting efforts, there was an increase in the employment of young women in business process outsourcing centers (BPOs) in these villages. Much more remarkably, given that this is the part of India probably most notorious for discrimination against women, three years after the recruiting started, girls age five to eleven were about 5 percentage points more likely to be enrolled in school in the villages where there was recruiting.

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Banerji, Rukmini Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee (BRAC) Bank of America Banking Correspondent Act Bankruptcy Banks problems with Barker, David Basic skills, focus on Basix Becker, Gary Bed nets buying income gain and subsidized Beliefs faith and weak Ben Sedan, Allal Bhopa diseases, doctor diseases and Bloomberg, Michael Bongaarts, John Boyce, Jim Brain process Breast-feeding Bribes Burgess, Robin Business process outsourcing centers (BPOs) Businesses borrowing by investment in poor and Businesses (continued) profits for small/medium starting Calories consumption of production and Capital capitalists without human Case, Anne Castes Casual labor Centers for Disease Control Chattopadhyay, Raghabendra Chavan, Madhav Child mortality Children educated family size and as financial instruments higher-caste/lower-caste income and Chlorin Chlorine Cica Das Citibank Civil liberties Civil society Cohen, Jessica Coimbatore Collier, Paul Common Wealth (Sachs) Community Driven Development Conditional cash transfers (CCTs) Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) Consumption Contraception access to availability of Corruption fighting Cortisol Credit Curriculum Dai Manju Das, Jishnu Data Deaton, Angus Debt freedom from Decentralization Decisionmaking family Default rates Demand wallahs Democracy in practice Depression Development economics Deworming Dhaliwal, Iqbal Diarrhea treating Dickens, Charles Diet poor and rich and Discrimination Diseases Doctor diseases, bhopa diseases and Doctors allopatic government private/public Dreze, Jean Drought Dry sand, making Duflo, Esther fertilizer and panchayat survey by Dupas, Pascaline study by Earth Institute East India Company College Easterly,William bed nets and demand wallahs and democracy and poverty traps and on RCT Economic growth Education family size and girls and income and investing in parental interest in poverty and primary quality reengineering remedial secondary value of Education for All Summit (2000) Education policy demand wallahs and supply wallahs and tools of choice in top-down “Efficient household” model Einstein, Albert Elders, caring for Emergency (1975–1977) Emptat, Ibu Entrepreneurs micro- rules of thumb and Entrepreneurship microcredit and poor and problems with rates of return for technologies and Ethnicity Experiment Faith Family extended function of Family planning encouraging Family Planning and Maternal and Child Health Program (FPMCH) Family size education and savings and Farmers insurance and suicide of Farming Fertility control over decrease in income and rates therapies Fertilizer buying using Field, Erica Financial instruments, children as Financial sector Financing Fish sauce Fogel, Robert Food aid availability of budget for consumption of income and prices Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Food prices Foreign aid Foster, Andrew Foundation for International Community Assistance (FINCA) Free markets Fruit and vegetable sellers Funerals, spending on Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, Sanjay Gates Foundation Gibbons, Donna Governments credibility for foreign aid and local problems for Gram Panchayat (GP) Gram Vikas Grameen Bank Green, Donald Green, Jennifer Green Revolution Hammer, Jeff Harlem Children’s Zone Hartman, Betsey Harvest Plus Hatch, John Health free market economists and improving investing in maternal Health care effectiveness of family size and immunizations and learning about overtreatment and problem of spending on Health insurance market for problems with providing Health shocks Health trap Helms, Brigit HIV/AIDS Hope Hospitalization Hunger Hyderabad businesses in schools in survey in Ibu Emptat Ibu Tina shock on fortunes of ICICI ICS Africa Ideology Immunization benefits of health care and incentives for information about rates Immunization camps Income agricultural children and decline in drought and education and fertility and food and growth of illness and malaria and steady/predictable Indian Council of Medical Research Indian Institute of Management Indian Institute of Technology Information collecting imperfect Infosys INPRES Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) Institutions bad colonial economic innovation by international manipulating political See also Microfinance institutions Insurance demand for fraud health informal poor and understanding weather Insurance companies, poor and Interest rates poor and International Child Support Intervention education government public supply-side top-down Investments Iodine Iron Iron law of oligarchy Iyer, Lakshmi Jensen, Robert Jobs buying good Johnson, Simon Jolie, Angelina Karlan, Dean KAS, bankruptcy of Kecamatan Development Project (KDP) Kennedy (farmer) Keynes, John Maynard Khanna,Tarun Khetan, Neelima Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) schools Kremer, Michael on chlorine dispenser fertilizers and SAFI and Kristof, Nicholas L-shape curve Law Commission of India Learning and Educational Achievement in Pakistan Schools (LEAPS) Learning to Read Lehman Brothers Lei, Miao Levy, Santiago Loans collecting on emergency government-sponsored home-equity home improvement local long-term project mandatory political priorities and poor and problems with repaying London School of Economics Lotteries, business grant M-PESA Macro programs, micro insight for Madiath, Joe Malaria eradication of Malnutrition Malthus,Thomas Maquilladoras Margin, changes at Marginal return Maternal mortality Matlab program Mbarbk, Oucha Medicare Medicine Meillassoux, Claude Microcredit effectiveness of limits of poor/future and Microfinance contracts movement Microfinance (continued) poor and poverty and repayment discipline and Microfinance institutions (MFIs) borrowing from insurance for loans from microcredit and monitoring by poor and subsidizing of successful borrowers and zero default and See also Institutions Micronutrient Initiative Micronutrients Migration Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) Miller, Nolan Miracles, underutilized Modimba, Anna Modimba, Michael Moneylenders MFIs and problems for Monitoring Mor, Nachiket Moral hazards Moyo, Dambisa Mullainathan, Sendhil Munshi, Kaivan Murthy, Narayan National Family Health Survey (NFHS 3) NGOs Nilekani, Nandan Nudges Nurses Nutrition calories and family size and income and obesity/diabetes and poverty traps and pregnancy and Olken, Benjamin Olympic Games, poor countries and Omidyar, Pierry One-child policy OPORTUNIDADES Opportunities Opportunity International Oral rehydration solution (ORS) Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Orwell, George Otieno, Wycliffe Pak Awan Pak Solhin poverty trap and Pak Sudarno Pande, Rohini Parmentier, Antoine Paternalism Paxson, Chris Pensions Performance Pitt, Mark Police Act (1861) Police Reform Commissions Policies anti-poverty developing education food good/bad macroeconomic one-child politics and population social Political economy Politics economics and ethnic good policies and women and Population control Population Council Population growth Population policy Population Services International (PSI) Poverty breaking cycle of decrease in education and eradicating extreme fertility and hunger and microfinance and self-control and Poverty Action Lab Poverty trap education and escaping health-based inverted L-shape and nutrition and S-shape curve and Pradhan Prahalad, C.

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
by Paul Mason
Published 29 Jul 2015

Management theory became a generalized discipline, not secret knowledge, with a whole cohort of consulting firms dedicated to spreading successful techniques rather than hoarding them. In this sense, the wartime economy gave birth to one of the most fundamental reflexes within the capitalism of the long boom: to solve problems through audacious technological leaps, pulling in experts from across disciplines, spreading the best practice in a sector, and changing the business process as the product itself changed. The role of the state in all this contrasts with the meagre role of finance. In all normative models of long cycles, it is finance that fuels innovation and helps capital flow into new, more productive areas. But finance had been effectively flattened during the 1930s.

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Drucker divides the history of industrial capitalism into four phases: a mechanical revolution lasting most of the nineteenth century; a productivity revolution with the advent of scientific management in the 1890s; a management revolution after 1945, driven by the application of knowledge to business processes; and finally an information revolution, based on ‘the application of knowledge to knowledge’. Drucker, a pupil of Schumpeter, was consciously using the Kondratieff long cycles here (although merging the first two together), but seen from the viewpoint of the individual firm. This leads to Drucker’s most profound observation: that none of these turning points can be grasped without understanding the economics of work.

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond
by Chris Burniske and Jack Tatar
Published 19 Oct 2017

Over time, investors in these projects would be rewarded through dividends or appreciation of the service provided. The vision of a decentralized autonomous organization like The DAO is somewhat like autonomous vehicles—whereas humans used to have to drive cars, the cars increasingly can drive themselves. Similarly, whereas humans used to be needed for all aspects of business processes, often in manual paper pushing, approval, orchestration, and so on, a decentralized autonomous organization can codify much of those processes so that the company better drives itself. As exciting as the concept was, The DAO was nearly Ethereum’s undoing. The creators of The DAO implemented a crowdfunding effort.

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Circle the Wagons Industry consortiums have been extremely popular among incumbents investigating how to apply distributed ledger technology to their industry. On one hand, a consortium makes perfect sense, as a distributed ledger needs to be shared among many parties for it to have any use. A collaborative consortium helps financial services companies—many of which have historically been competitors that keep their business processes close to their chest—learn how to share. On the other hand, these consortiums can hit snags if too many big names and big egos become involved. One of the most famous consortiums is R3, which launched on September 15, 2015, with big names such as JPMorgan, Barclays, BBVA, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, Royal Bank of Scotland, State Street, and UBS.

When Cultures Collide: Leading Across Cultures
by Richard D. Lewis
Published 1 Jan 1996

Ideas from low levels are allowed to filter freely upward in the hierarchy. Indonesia In colonial times, leadership came from the Dutch. Under Sukarno and Suharto leadership was exercised principally by the military and was therefore autocratic. The indifferent nature of many Indonesians to the business process has, 120 WHEN CULTURES COLLIDE however, resulted in a lot of business management being entrusted to a resident Chinese professional class, which has the commercial know-how and international connections. Overseas Chinese shareholding in many Indonesian companies encourages this situation.

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Culture Values loquacity hierarchy desire to please family no work ethic in the Protestant sense age is respected polygamy is permitted but rare face saving courtesy gentleness friendly hospitality unity and conformity avoidance of confrontation adat customary law usually prevails over Islam Concepts Leadership and Status Leaders are expected to be paternalistic and are usually from chosen families or emanate from the higher ranks in the army. Leaders often seek consensus, which is the mode followed by all persons. In colonial times, leadership came from the Dutch. Under Sukarno and Suharto, leadership was exercised principally by the military and therefore was autocratic. The indifferent nature of many Indonesians to the business process has, however, resulted in a lot of business management being entrusted to resident Chinese. The Chinese professional class has the commercial know-how and international connections. Overseas Chinese shareholding in many Indonesian companies encourages this situation. 456 WHEN CULTURES COLLIDE Space and Time Indonesians are used to being crowded.

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You should enjoy the conversation and leave the initiation of the serious business talk in Colombian hands. They have an innate sense of timing in this respect. It is not unusual for preparatory discussions to be accompanied by some refreshment—even lunch or dinner. Colombian businesspeople regard hospitality as an integral part of the business process. Remember that personal relationships dominate business deals. Once issues are tackled, the senior Colombian may outline the general approach to the project, painting with a broad brush, avoiding details at this stage. Accord this senior figure great respect (reciprocating the deference he or she will accord you).

Applied Artificial Intelligence: A Handbook for Business Leaders
by Mariya Yao , Adelyn Zhou and Marlene Jia
Published 1 Jun 2018

Companies that don’t traditionally build end-user technology often don’t have CTOs, which can make transitions challenging if they want to create digital experiences for customers without relying on external agencies. CIO Chief Information Officers manage technology and infrastructure that underpin their company’s business operations. The CIO runs an organization’s IT and Operations to streamline and support business processes. Unlike the CTO, the CIO’s customers are internal users, functional departments, and business units. CIOs typically adapt and integrate third-party infrastructure solutions to meet their unique business needs and do less custom development than CTOs do. For non-technology companies, the CIO can be the right stakeholder if the primary benefits of adopting AI lie in improving analytics and business operations rather than in functions that affect external customers, such as in sales and marketing.

The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World
by Jacqueline Novogratz
Published 15 Feb 2009

A doctor friend of Satyan’s replied that open defecation was one of the biggest public health issues the area faced, reminding us that some health investments are best undertaken through effective awareness campaigns, not through medicines or direct services. Against this backdrop, we sat in a circle under tall green trees outside Satyan’s childhood home, cows lolling in the distance. Satyan pulled out his computer to show us the work he was doing to establish a business processing outsourcing (BPO) unit here. Already, he’d secured wireless, and sure enough, in this tiny village so far away from everything, we were able to check my e-mail and read the New York Times. Inside a small house, six young men sat inputting data for a bank in Delhi, all earning more than they had ever dreamed they could.

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See Blue bakery Banks, 7, 268 Bartering, 65–66 Bassani, Bilge Ogun, 39–40, 53 Beatrice (Jamii Bora member), 273–74 Biko, Stephen (Steve), 101 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 264, 270 Bilo (Kenyan security guard), 92 Blackwell, Angela Glover, 154–55 Blackwell, Unita, 159–60 Blue bakery accounting and accountability problems of, 79–80 Consolata and, 75, 78–81, 81 expansion of, 87 financing, 75–76 founding of, 72–76 Gaudence and, 75, 80–81, 85–86 growth of, 79, 82–83, 87–88 Honorata and, 73–77, 78 Josepha and, 75, 83, 86 legacy of, 164 lessons learned from, 86, 88 messages of, 88 painting building of, 85–86 postgenocide, 163–64 Prisca and, 74–78, 79–85, 88 Prudence and, 72 quality control and, 88 sales tactics of, 78–79, 80–81 setbacks of, 83, 86–88 success of, 113 Blue sweater story, 1–3, 272 Bohri woman, 236–37 Boniface (Rwandan driver), 37–39, 42, 47, 64–67, 72, 78–79, 83, 86, 106–7, 163 BPO, 233 Brazil, 7–8 Bride price, 62–63 Bright, Rita, 156–57 Brown, Tim, 230 Buddha, 146 Buffet, Warren, 284 Burundi, 13, 51 Business processing outsourcing (BPO), 233 Buxbaum, David, 220, 226 C Cambodia, 144–45 Capitalism, future of, 136 Carnegie, Andrew, 143 Catfish factories (Mississippi Delta), 159–61 Catherine (Acumen Fund fellow), 278 Cesare (Rwandan doctor), 90 Charity, traditional, 76, 151, 211, 218, 228–29 Charles (Novogratz’s friend), 84–85, 108–10, 113, 120–25 Charlotte (restaurant proprietor), 205–7, 262 Chase Manhattan Bank, 5–7, 11, 56, 64 Chloroquine, 255–56 Choices, 115 Chowdhury (Indian guide), 118–19, 267 Churchill, Winston, 17 Cisco Foundation, 217, 220–21 Cissy (Ugandi woman), 17–19 Citibank, 238 Citizens Foundation, 280 Collaboration, 280 Collette (Honorata’s mother), 167–68, 174–75 Colombia, 158–59 Committee decision making, 139 Community and community work, 4, 55, 284 Consolata (blue bakery worker), 75, 78–81, 83 Constance (Rwandan parliamentarian), 46–49, 63–64 Conviction, 284 Conway, Sir Gordon, 213–14 COOPEDU (credit union), 206 Corruption, 98–99, 184, 211–12 Cost of Good Intentions, The (report), 148–49, 151 Cote d’Ivoire, 15, 19–28, 63 Cry Freedom (film), 101 D Dalit caste, 247 Damascene (office assistant), 112 Dativa (bank executive director), 203 Davidson, Stuart, 215–17 Democracy, attempts to impose, 187–88 Dhammayietra (pilgrimage), 144–45 Dieu Donne (Zairean artist), 57, 126, 204 Discipline, 272 Diversity, 154–55, 188 Doctors without Borders, 171 Dot-com boom, 213, 217 Drayton, Bill, 214–15 Drip irrigation projects, 247–51 Drishtee, 231–33, 275 Duncan (engineer), 131–32 Duterimbere.

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age
by Duncan J. Watts
Published 1 Feb 2003

I had given one too many talks on the small-world problem by that stage, and as I motored through my usual spiel, I was mostly hoping not to put anyone to sleep. So it was much to my surprise that as I was packing up afterward, Chuck came rushing up to me waving his hands urgently and insisting that we had to talk. Inasmuch as I understood anything about Chuck’s work, it concerned the evolution of modern manufacturing and business processes, and so had nothing to do with me. Furthermore, I couldn’t understand a word he was saying. Although Chuck, as I eventually discovered, is a fantastically interesting thinker, his manner is that of the intense, Harvard-trained intellectual that he is, replete with intimidating vocabulary, labyrinthine reasoning, and abstract conclusions.

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Furthermore, no one person’s role in the overall scheme is ever precisely specified in advance. Rather, each person starts with a general notion of what is required of him or her, and refines that notion only by interacting with other problem solvers (who, of course, are doing the same). The true ambiguity of modern business processes, in other words, is not just that the environment necessitates continual redesign of the production process but that design itself, along with innovation and trouble shooting, is a task to be performed, not only at the same time as the task of production but also in the same decentralized fashion.

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality
by Katharina Pistor
Published 27 May 2019

In a recent book entitled Capitalism without Capital, Haskel and Westlake argue that the market value of leading corporations today is not determined by the physical assets they own and use to produce goods, but by intangibles: the patents, copyrights, and trademarks they own, and the branding and business processes they have developed.25 However, the authors limit the definition of capital to physical things that you can see and touch, and therefore conclude that we live in a wondrous new world of capitalism without capital. This happens when one relies on the outward appearance of things and ignores the code that determines their look, for appearances can be deceiving.

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Haskel and Westlake are not oblivious to law; in their book, they even compile a table that lists variants of intangibles and map them into their treatment in law on one hand, and in national accounts on the other.26 As they show, about half of the intangible investments are not recognized in national accounts; but law has a label for all of them, called patents, trademarks, property rights, and a catchall category of “other,” which can be deciphered as trade secrets as well as business processes. Still, the authors hesitate to draw the obvious conclusion that there is a powerful link between law and intangibles, indeed, that the law is the source code for transforming ideas, skills, know-how, even processes, into capital. The reluctance of these accounting experts to cut through their own belief structure resonates with the late US Supreme Court Justice Scalia’s personal struggle over the scientific basis of the BRCA case against Myriad.

The Nature of Software Development: Keep It Simple, Make It Valuable, Build It Piece by Piece
by Ron Jeffries
Published 14 Aug 2015

Middleware occupies the essential interstices between enterprise systems. It is the connective tissue that bridges gaps between different islands of automation. (How’s that for a mixed metaphor?) Often described as “plumbing”—with all the related connotations—middleware will always remain inherently messy, since it must work with different business processes, different technologies, and even different definitions of the same logical concept. This “unsexiness” must be part of the reason why service-oriented architectures are currently stealing attention from the less glamorous, but more necessary, job of middleware. Done well, middleware simultaneously integrates and decouples systems.

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In other words, are there performance bottlenecks that prevent us from signing up more new users? Is some crucial service returning errors that turn people off before they register? The specific needs here vary according to your domain, but you should plan to watch the following: Watch each step of a business process. Is there a rapid drop-off in some step? Is some service in a revenue-generating process throwing exceptions in logs? If so, it’s probably reducing your top line. Watch the depth of queues. Queue depth is your first indicator of performance degradation. A non-zero queue depth always means work takes longer to get through the process.

The Little Book That Builds Wealth: The Knockout Formula for Finding Great Investments
by Pat Dorsey
Published 1 Mar 2008

Companies that provide services to businesses are in many ways the polar opposite of the restaurants and retailers. This sector has one of the highest percentages of wide-moat companies in Morningstar’s coverage universe, and that’s largely because these firms are often able to integrate themselves so tightly into their clients’ business processes that they create very high switching costs, giving them pricing power and excellent returns on capital. Data processors like DST Systems and Fiserv fall into this category, as do companies with impossible-to-replicate databases, like IMS Health (prescription drugs) or Dun & Bradstreet and Equifax (credit histories).

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World
by Bruce Schneier
Published 3 Sep 2018

It’s a comprehensive guide for private-sector organizations to proactively assess and minimize their cybersecurity risk. Standards regulating business processes, like how to prevent, detect, and respond to cyberattacks, are also important. If done right, these can motivate businesses to improve their overall Internet security and make better decisions about which technologies to buy and how to use them. Less obviously, standardizing these types of business processes also makes it easier for business executives to share ideas, impose requirements on third-party partners, and tie security standards to insurance.

That Used to Be Us
by Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum
Published 1 Sep 2011

So a company that does not practice constant innovation by taking advantage of every ounce of brainpower at every level will fall behind farther and faster than ever before. Before the world became hyper-connected, American companies moved jobs around the world—that is, they outsourced parts of their business process—to save money that they then reinvested in new products, services, and people in the United States, because they could. Now companies move jobs around the world to do “crowdsourcing” and distributed innovation, because they must. They find the most creative brainpower, the most productive workforce, the most inviting tax rules, and the best infrastructure in or near the fastest-growing markets, because they must.

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Nazis Nelakanti, Raman Venkat Nepal Netflix Netscape Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) Nevada New Deal New Haven (Connecticut) public schools New Jersey New Leaders for New Schools New York City; JFK Airport; Penn Station; public schools New Yorker, The New York Mets baseball team New York State New York Stock Exchange New York Times New York Times–Discovery Channel New York Yankees baseball team New Zealand Nike Nixon, Richard Nixon Peabody law firm Nobel Prize No Child Left Behind Act (2002) Noida (India) Nordhaus, William North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA; 1994) North Carolina Northport (Alabama) Northwestern University NPR nuclear power Nuclear Regulatory Commission nuclear weapons Nueva School (Hillsborough, California) O Oakwood Medical Investors Obama, Barack; budget and deficit under; Clinton appointed secretary of state by; education encouraged by; energy policy and; health-care plan of; inauguration of; overseas travel of; review of regulations ordered by O’Connell, Jerry O’Connor, Carroll Ohio Old Lyme (Connecticut) Middle School Olson, Mancur Olympic Games O’Neill, Paul One Percent Doctrine, The (Suskind) OODA loop Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD); Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) Otellini, Paul Out of Our Minds (Robinson) outsourcing; climate change and; of customer service; immigration policies versus; of parts of business processes P Pacific Railway Acts (1862; 1864) Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza, Shah of Iran Pakistan Palmeiro, Rafael Palmisano, Samuel PalmPilot Parks, Rosa Partners for Livable Communities Pasteur, Louis Patent Act (1790) Patent and Trademark Office, U.S. Paul, Rand Paul, Ron Paul, Vivek PCs, see personal computers Peace Corps Pearl Harbor, Japanese attack on Pearlstein, Steven Peking University Pell Grants Pence, Mike Pentagon; terrorist attack on, see September 11 People magazine People of Plenty (Potter) People’s Daily Perez, Raul Perino, Dana Perkins Pancake House (Minneapolis) Perot, H.

Machine Learning Design Patterns: Solutions to Common Challenges in Data Preparation, Model Building, and MLOps
by Valliappa Lakshmanan , Sara Robinson and Michael Munn
Published 31 Oct 2020

There are several groups of model stakeholders we’ll be referring to in this chapter: Model builders Data scientists and ML researchers directly involved in building ML models. ML engineers Members of ML Ops teams directly involved in deploying ML models. Business decision makers Decide whether or not to incorporate the ML model into their business processes or customer-facing applications and will need to evaluate whether the model is fit for this purpose. End users of ML systems Make use of predictions from an ML model. There are many different types of model end users: customers, employees, and hybrids of these. Examples include a customer getting a movie recommendation from a model, an employee on a factory floor using a visual inspection model to determine whether a product is broken, or a medical practitioner using a model to aid in patient diagnosis.

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While a feasible goal for a research project could be to eke out 0.1% more accuracy on a benchmark dataset, this is not acceptable in industry. For a production model built for a corporate organization, success is governed by factors more closely tied to the business, like improving customer retention, optimizing business processes, increasing customer engagement, or decreasing churn rates. There could also be indirect factors related to the business use case that influence development choices, like speed of inference, model size, or model interpretability. Any machine learning project should begin with a thorough understanding of the business opportunity and how a machine learning model can make a tangible improvement on current operations.

Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations
by Garr Reynolds
Published 14 Aug 2010

But in the end, it’s always up to us to learn it, and most of our learning now is a result of our own efforts and our lifelong commitment to continuous improvement through education outside the classroom. Long-Term Improvement: Kaizen The Japanese term kaizen () means “improvement,” literally change + good. In relation to business processes, however, kaizen more closely resembles “continuous improvement.” Kaizen is rooted in the principles of total quality management brought to Japan after World War II by statistician W. Edwards Deming and others. Kaizen is key to the steady improvement and innovation of successful companies in Japan such as Toyota.

The Little Book of Hedge Funds
by Anthony Scaramucci
Published 30 Apr 2012

By my early 30s, I believed I had acquired sufficient experience investing in diverse strategies across various asset classes to start my own fund. While I was well prepared to begin managing money, I underestimated the importance of having a deep background in business management and leadership, which I have learned on the job. Studying and applying principled business processes is as important as honing your investment skills if your goal is to scale a hedge fund successfully. 3. What hedge fund strategies do you use? Multistrategy with a focus on event-driven special situations. 4. What do you see as the future of the industry? Firms with great leadership, high quality teams, thoughtful idea generation processes, and well-articulated investment frameworks will continue to grow.

Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly
by John Kay
Published 30 Apr 2010

If we know enough about such a problem—its objectives, its possibilities, its interactions—we do not have to worry about sharing our high-level objectives with those who are chiseling the stone. We can describe the problem comprehensively from the outset and hence specify appropriate actions. We can pay our agents bonuses and fire them when they fail to meet our targets. That is what Lenin, the modernist architects and the business process reengineers believed. But they were wrong. The Soviet Union collapsed, the Pruitt-Igoe project was demolished and the people who transformed the business world were not the men who employed armies of reengineering consultants. The people who did transform the business world were those, like Google’s Sergey Brin and Apple’s Steve Jobs, who adopted a more oblique approach to business transformation.

Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage
by Roger L. Martin
Published 15 Feb 2009

It was a bold reorganization, in which P&G created the first global market-facing organization (MDO) in its industry and a truly integrated, global shared services organization (GBS). In 2002, P&G took an even more momentous step with GBS. Realizing it had gone as far internally as it could to drive scale, the leaders of GBS made the strategic decision to outsource key business processes. Rather than outsourcing to one integrated provider, P&G opted to establish relationships with best-of-breed partners that were leaders in their field, including Hewlett-Packard for IT infrastructure and accounts payable, Jones Lang LaSalle for facilities management, and IBM for employee services.

Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything
by Peter Morville
Published 14 May 2014

And we started making maps for mobile and cross-channel services and experiences to help our clients and colleagues to see and understand what’s possible and desirable. We realized that, in the modern era of cross-channel experiences and product-service systems, it makes less and less sense to design taxonomies, sitemaps, and wireframes without also mapping the customer journey, modeling the system dynamics, and analyzing the impacts upon business processes, incentives, and the org chart. As our practice evolved and the gap between classic and contemporary information architecture grew, our community struggled to explain itself, so much so we earned a hashtag (#dtdt) for “defining the damn thing.” And while accusations of navel-gazing were not without merit, this was a necessary, productive struggle that helped us shed a web-centric worldview in favor of a medium-independent perspective.

The Art of Profitability
by Adrian Slywotzky
Published 31 Aug 2002

Dell’s inventory turns went from six a year to sixty. Cemex’s response time on customer orders went from 180 minutes to twenty minutes. Oracle’s customer interaction cost went from $350 to twenty bucks. “But 10X productivity isn’t all of it—not by a mile. Digital allows you to literally reverse your business processes, from push to pull and from guess to know.” “What do you mean?” Zhao asked. Steve was starting to get on a roll. “In many cases—not all, but many—becoming digital lets a company’s customers design the product or service they really want to buy. Think 150 THE ART OF PROFITABILITY of Dell’s online configurator, or Herman Miller’s z-axis design system, or Mattel’s My Barbie.

Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea Into a Global Business
by Mikkel Svane and Carlye Adler
Published 13 Nov 2014

The company, which was named after its founder, had a great reputation, and one of its areas of business was help desks and customer service solutions. My job was to resell various customer service desk software products and deliver the consultants and services to properly implement the software, from a technical and business process perspective. The German group had acquired a company in Denmark and then two additional companies, one in Finland and one in Sweden. When I joined I had to let a lot of people go and hire new people. It wasn’t a terrific time for the local business. We were at an interesting crossroads at Materna in Scandinavia.

The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth
by Robin Hanson
Published 31 Mar 2016

Today, the average age of firms in the S&P500 is 18 years (Foster 2012), which is roughly the doubling time of our world economy. This suggests that the economic doubling time is close to the timescale on which business context changes enough to require big changes in business processes. This is confirmed by the fact that today large firms often attempt to “re-engineer business processes,” that is, to redesign their main business organization and processes from a clean slate. For any given part of a large organization, this process happens roughly every economic doubling time. The re-engineering process is often associated with layoffs and substantial worker retraining.

Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Inside Technology)
by Geoffrey C. Bowker
Published 24 Aug 2000

Yet these latter decisions and standards may affect markets, differential benefits from particular technologies, and the visibility of constituencies, among other impor­ tant public goods (Kindleberger 1 983). They are important in organ­ izing work, and they are often used explicitly as vehicles for professional and organizational transformation, via accounting and legitimization processes. They appear, as parts of accounting schemes, in technologies of organizational change such as business process re­ engineering and total quality management; in addition to record­ keeping and accounts, they also classify people and their importance in organizations. For several years we have been investigating this quiet politics of voice, work, and values in information infrastructure, seeking to clarify 230 Chapter 7 how it is that values, policies, and modes of practice become embedded in large information systems.

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To not be continually erased from the record, nursing informati­ cians are risking either modifying their own practice (making it more data driven) or waging a Quixotic war on database designers. The corresponding gain is great, however. If the infrastructure is designed in such a way that nursing information has to be present as an inde­ pendent, well-defined category, then nursing itself as a profession will have a much better chance of surviving through rounds of business process reengineering and nursing science as a discipline will have a firm foundation. The infrastructure assumes the position of Bishop Organizational Forgetting, Nursing Knowledge, and Classification 2 75 Berkeley's God : as long as it pays attention to nurses, they will continue to exist. Having ensured that all nursing acts are potentially remem­ bered by any medical organization, the N I C team will have gone a long way to ensuring the future of nursing.

Your Computer Is on Fire
by Thomas S. Mullaney , Benjamin Peters , Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip
Published 9 Mar 2021

A triumphant Friedman declares, “I was in Bangalore, India, the Silicon Valley of India, when I realized that the world was flat.” In the documentary Other Side of Outsourcing, Friedman represents a bustling India in which young people have achieved unprecedented mobility because of their jobs in the technology industry. However, in 2017, the Indian IT and business process management (BPM) industry only directly employed 3.9 million people, which is less than 1 percent of India’s population. It indirectly employed twelve million people, or less than 2 percent of India’s population. Significantly, critics have argued that Friedman’s celebration of the private sector in global India negates the state’s historic role in actively promoting the IT sector and in establishing scientific and technical institutions.30 Instead of equalizing disparities, IT-enabled globalization has created and further heightened divisions of class, caste, gender, religion, etc.

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See African American(s) Black Girls Code, 255, 263 Block switching, 83 Blockchain, 44–45 Body economic, 79 national, 77–78, 86, 86t Boeing, 19–20, 23 MCAS, 19 737 Max tragedies, 19–20 Bolivia, 45 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 39 Borsdorf, Johannes H., 168–169 Boston Marathon Bombing, 120 Business Process Management, 308 Brandenburg v. Ohio, 373 Brazil, 103–104, 234, 324 BSD (programming language), 273 Bug. See also Thompson hack feature, not a, 4, 7, 18–19, 148–151, 153, 214, 223, 262, 303 Bureaucracy, 78, 80, 86t, 88, 109, 150, 175 Burmese, 339, 344, 354 Bush, Randy, 324–326 Bush, Vannevar, 348 C (programming language), 273–277, 279, 281–284, 286 backslash, 279, 281–282 commands, 279, 282–283, 285, 287 C++, 273, 275, 290 C#, 273 Objective C, 273 Cable, 5, 100–102, 104, 107, 111, 321 infrastructure, 103–104 internet, 95, 98–99 materials, 94 networks, 5 television, 315, 317 undersea, 72, 93, 99 Caldwell, Samuel Hawks, 348–350 Call centers, 5, 56 Amazon, 37 Indian, 105, 298, 302, 305, 307 Cambridge Analytica, 118 Capital, 6, 31, 202, 316, 378, 380 cultural, 299 global, 88 intensive, 277, 313–314 investment, 44, 301, 314–315, 332 physical, 46, 107 venture, 15–16, 53, 175, 255–256, 267 Capitalism, 46, 87, 171, 368 welfare, 160–161, 167, 170–174 Carceral state, 206, 208 Carlin, George, 59 Carnegie Mellon University, 257 Cart Life, 241 Cartography, 95–96, 107 Catholicism, 171, 173–175 CCM (Commercial content moderation), 56–58, 62, 66, 122 CDC (Center for Disease Control), 20 CDU (Christian Democratic Union), 170 Cellular phones (cell), 7, 306, 317, 332, 365, 378 and M-PESA, 7, 322, 326–328, 333 Safaricom, 326–328, 333 SIM card, 326–328 Chex Quest, 237 Child pornography, 6, 117–125, 127–130 limit case, 129 server storage, 383 Child Victim Identification Program, 122–123, 125 China, 7, 45, 104, 227 accent bias, 188, 189t apps, 332 Communists, 348 IMEs, 351, 357 Input Wars, 351 language, 188 People’s University (Beijing), 357 rising superpower, 153 writing interfaces, 381 Chinese keyboard, 345, 345f, 348–350, 353, 367 Chinese typewriter, 346, 350 dian, 351, 352f, 352 difficulty score, 344–345 MingKwai keyboard, 346–349, 347f, 353 and QWERTY keyboard, 338–339, 342, 346, 350–351, 353–354, 357 retrieval system, 346–347, 349–350, 353 script, 221 search writer, 350 Christian, 161, 170–171, 187 Central Intelligence Agency, 80 Cisgender, 154 Clark, David D., 71 Class bias, 4–6, 88, 136, 161–162, 174, 184, 265 capitalist, 171 dominant, 180–181, 190 equality, 80, 86t exposure, 301–302 India, 299, 302–303, 308 investor, 53 lower, 162 management, 142 Marxist, 171–173 meritocracy, 138, 150 middle, 73, 80, 86, 139, 241 technocratic, 21 upper, 300- 302 upper-middle, 18 working, 79, 141–142, 288, 301, 309 Cloud definition, 33–34 and electricity, 33–34, 44 enables other industries, 46 as factory, 7, 35–36, 42–43, 45–46, 321 and infrastructure, 33–35 kilowatt-hours required, 34 physical, 31–32, 34, 44–46 supply chain, 45 Code Arabic, 191 Assembly, 275, 277, 281, 286 Black Girls Code, 255, 263 breaking, 138–139 (Colossus) Code.org, 253, 255, 259 Code2040, 255, 260 Coding, Girls Who Code, 253, 255, 263 cultural, 302 digital, 284, 289 dress, 145, 164–165, 298 education, 6 empire, 76 #YesWeCode, 253, 264–266 HLL (high-level language), 275, 277–278, 284, 290 Hour of Code, 253, 263–264 is law, 126 platforms, 321 robotics, 201, 203, 205 social media, 59 source, 273–292 passim (see also Source code) switching, 184, 190 typing, 188, 351 writers, 24, 145, 256–259, 262–267, 300, 381 Yes We Code, 255 Code.org, 253, 255, 259 Code2040, 255, 260 Coding, Girls Who Code, 253, 255, 263 Cold War, 137, 152, 169 computer networks, 75–76, 83–84 network economy, 87 technology, 17–18, 94, 137 typewriter, 227 Collision detection, 242–243 Colonialism, 19, 91, 93, 105, 109, 245 cable networks, 93, 99, 101 colonization, 186, 378 digital, 331 Europe, 110, 147–148, 343 internet, 111, 129 language as, 186–188 metaphors, 94 stereotypes, 96, 102, 104 technocolonialist, 103–104 Colossus, 17, 139, 143 Comcast, 35 Commercial content moderation (CCM), 56–58, 62, 66, 122 Commodity computational services, 33 Common sense, 73, 96 Communications Decency Act, 60–61 Compaq, 318 Complex scripts, 188, 222, 344–345, 350 CompuServe, 320, 325 Computer anthropomorphized (see Robots) conservative force, 15 control and power, 23 critiques of, 5 men, 142 utility, 35, 320 humans as, 43, 140, 384 Computer science, 18, 58, 66, 112, 367 artificial intelligence, 58, 66 education, 256, 263 Thompson hack, 275, 291 women in, 254 Computing, 135–155 passim artificial intelligence, 56 Britain and, 21, 138, 148–152 Chinese, 350–351, 353–354 and class, 142–143 cloud, 78, 87 companies, 13, 18–19 devices, 40–41, 45 education, 368 and empire, 147–148 environment, 382 global, 350, 377 hacking, 289–291 history of, 7, 17, 35, 38, 43, 46, 137, 153–154 Latin alphabet, 357 masculinity, 263 management, 23 manufacturing, 39 media, 4–8, 377–380 meritocracy narratives, 137, 153–154, 381 networks, 77, 199, 320–321 personal, 354 power, 328 software, 318 typing and, 220, 226, 337, 339, 341, 344 underrepresented groups and, 253, 255–256, 264, 266 and women, 17, 43, 135, 139–142, 144–147 Concorde, 145, 146f Congress, 11–12, 82, 154 Content antisemitic, 265 app, 319, 321 child abuse, 118–119, 122, 125 commercial content moderation (CCM), 56–58, 62, 66, 122 filtering, 57 illegal, 62 internet, 317, 319 moderation, 54–57, 123, 126, 380–382 moderators, 5, 380–382 review, 121, 128–130 social media, 59, 61–63, 66, 232, 321, 329–331 terrorism, 57, 66, 130 violent, 117 web, 317 Contractor, 35, 53, 56, 266 CorelDraw, 298 COVID-19, 14, 20, 377 Cox, Chris, 61 Creating Your Community, 266 Creative destruction, 4 Crisis, 4, 6, 16, 21, 150, 235, 297, 383–384 Covid-19, 20 identity, 58–60 point, 13 Y2K, 104 CSNET, 81 Cybernetics, 75, 78–80, 83, 86, 86t, 88 cyberneticist, 77, 81–82 Cyberpunk, 100–101, 107, 110 Cybersyn, 75, 79–80, 85, 86t CyberTipline, 125 Dalton gang, 287–289 DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), 383 Dartmouth College, 235 Data biased, 66, 205 due process, 206 objective, 205 processing, 38, 40–41, 119, 206, 300 socially constructed, 205 value-neutral, 372 Data broker Salesforce, 87 SAS, 87 Data entry, 5, 104, 150, 367 David, Paul, 337–338, 351, 353, 357–358 Davies, Donald, 83 Death, 15, 120, 186, 371, 373, 379 Covid-19, 12 gaming, 233–234, 236 life-or-, 6, 206, 266 technology and dying well, 378 Decolonization, 91, 104, 111–112 Deep Blue, 7 De Kosnik, Benjamin, 108–109, 110 Dell, 318 Delphi, 290 Democratic Republic of Congo, 45 Denmark, 44, 128–129 de Prony, Gaspard, 39–40 Design values, 73–76, 84–88 American, 81–84 Chilean, 79–81 Soviet, 77–78 state, 75, 78, 80, 83, 86, 86t Devanagari, 339, 342, 344, 350, 354 Developing world, 93, 103, 105, 180, 325, 330–332 Devi, Poonam, 304 Diamond, Jared, 338, 351, 353, 357–358 Difference Engine, 40 Digital coding, 284, 289 colonialism, 91, 93–94, 103, 331 computers, 38, 41, 138 connectivity, 379 economies, 13, 22, 29, 31, 33, 35, 45, 145 forensic work, 123, 126, 128, 354 future, 101 gaming, 241 imperialism, 186–187, 191 inclusion, 303 infrastructures, 126, 151, 155 invisibility, 98, 100, 204 labor, 6, 147, 101, 354 materiality, 5 networks, 83 platforms, 66, 118, 199, 201 politics and, 110, 112 predigital, 96–97, 152 revolution, 29, 32 surveillance state, 119, 130 technology, 40, 64, 123–124, 200, 382 vigilantism, 120 Disability, 12, 15, 160 Disasters, 11–15, 19–20, 22–24, 54, 204, 338, 364 Discrimination.

Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 4 Mar 2003

Other companies—notably IT firms and accountants—established consulting businesses. The accountants at Arthur Andersen were so jealous of the fees being charged by their colleagues at Andersen Consulting that they tried to invade the business themselves, a move that led to one of the most expensive divorces in corporate history. This was a time when fads such as business-process reengineering sped around the world at a dizzying pace, and when businesspeople rushed to buy books that distilled the management wisdom of Siegfried and Roy, the English rugby captain, Star Trek, and Jesus, CEO. As the company jumped through these hoops, its relationship with the rest of society changed again.

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation
by Kevin Roose
Published 9 Mar 2021

Still, these boring robots represent the kind of cost-saving technology that businesses are willing to pay big money for. By some estimates, RPA is one of the fastest-growing parts of the AI industry, and is expected to be a $6 billion industry by 2025. RPA providers’ websites are filled with glowing “success stories” from large corporations that have used their products: “Sprint Automates 50 Business Processes in Just Six Months” “Dai-ichi Life Insurance Saves 132,000 Hours Annually” “600% Productivity Gain for Credit Reporting Giant with RPA” These case studies are carefully worded to avoid any mentions of job cuts or layoffs. (Notice that they say things like “saves 132,000 hours” rather than “replaces 65 people in the finance department.”)

The Age of AI: And Our Human Future
by Henry A Kissinger , Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher
Published 2 Nov 2021

Early attempts to create practically useful AIs explicitly encoded human expertise—via collections of rules or facts—into computer systems. But much of the world is not organized discretely or readily reducible to simple rules or symbolic representations. While in fields that do use precise characterization—chess, algebraic manipulation, and business process automation—AI made great advances, in other fields, like language translation and visual object recognition, inherent ambiguity brought progress to a halt. The challenges of visual object recognition illustrate the shortcomings of these early programs. Even young children can identify images with ease.

The Thank You Economy
by Gary Vaynerchuk
Published 1 Jan 2010

Even if you could take over someone else’s fan base to boost your numbers, those numbers exist only because of the relationship that’s been built, a relationship entirely dependent upon a sustained authentic interaction between brand and customer. Rihanna can’t buy Kanye West’s fans; Blue Bell can’t buy Ben and Jerry’s fans. Amazon can buy Zappos, but it can’t buy Zappos’ fans. Amazon could do what many acquirers do—fold the newly acquired company into the parent company, adapt the Zappos business processes to match their own, take over the Zappos warehouses, suck all the soul out of it and leave nothing intact but the logo. Amazon would have the customers, sure, but it would not have the customer relationships. If Zappos were no longer the Zappos they knew and loved, the customers would abandon ship, and ultimately Amazon would gain nothing from the acquisition.

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination
by Adam Lashinsky
Published 31 Mar 2017

Yet its charm was wearing thin as its pugnacious and seat-of-the-pants ways bordered on reckless and irresponsible. In other words, while the automobiles that carried its customers may have moved down-market from luxury sedans to common passenger cars, Uber itself needed a considerable upgrade. The company required everything from top talent with experience running global enterprises to the business processes more associated with the giant corporation it was becoming rather than the Silicon Valley upstart it had been. Its failings were particularly apparent in its approach to safety, in terms of the protection of both the information entrusted to it and the people in its cars. In short, Uber’s data, drivers, and riders weren’t as secure as they needed to be.

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World
by Aaron Hurst
Published 31 Aug 2013

Yesterday was spent working through alternative models for public-private partnerships to provide emergency transportation for expecting mothers in remote areas. This afternoon, my team is building a mezzanine of philanthropic and commercial investments to drive economic growth that incorporates smallholder farmers. Tomorrow, we are helping a NGO redesign its internal business processes to more efficiently support external cross-sector collaboration. Next week, we are looking at expansion plans to provide youth support services in sub-Saharan Africa. Harmony: Bentley Davis When I ran the free clinic, we also had a dental clinic. We had a part-time hygienist who took care of cleanings and preventative care, but treatment was harder to find.

Sabotage: The Financial System's Nasty Business
by Anastasia Nesvetailova and Ronen Palan
Published 28 Jan 2020

Enabled by the policies of deregulation and centred on the use of sophisticated financial engineering, these techniques transformed the financial system from the kind that Veblen analysed at the dawn of finance capitalism to its modern incarnation. Despite the great transformation, however, sabotage remains a central principle of business making in finance in the twenty-first century. Veblen wrote about industrial sabotage focusing on the business processes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today’s financial markets are very different from the ones of Veblen’s day. The forms of sabotage in the financial system have changed and evolved over time. The principle, however, has remained: if you want to make money – real money – in finance, you need to find ways of sabotaging either your clients, your competitors or the government.

The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)
by Phil Thornton
Published 7 May 2014

Time is money In order to see how the move away from the natural state would affect the economy, Hayek developed a theory of how the production process worked. Time is an important element in Hayek’s thinking about the role that capital – the stock of machinery, buildings, vehicles and other assets used in the business process – plays in the economic cycle. He saw that capital had a different value to businesses in different parts of the economic cycle and that it was the constant attempt to find an equilibrium that caused business cycles and unemployment. Chapter 6 • Friedrich Hayek125 In the scenario where there is an increasing supply of credit and a fall in the market interest rate below the natural rate, investment plans that were not affordable suddenly look profitable with lower interest rates.

Smart Grid Standards
by Takuro Sato
Published 17 Nov 2015

The focus of HAN SRS is on Smart Grid Standards 218 Interoperability Categories Description 8: Economic/Regulatory Policy Organizational 7: Business Objectives Political and Economic Objectives as Embodied in Policy and Regulation Strategic and Tactical Objectives Shared between Businesses 6: Business Procedures Alignment between Operational Business Processes and Procedures 5: Business Context Awareness of the Business Knowledge Related to a Specific Interaction Informational 4: Semantic Understanding Understanding of the Concepts Contained in the Message Data Structures 3: Syntactic Interoperability Understanding of Data Structure in Message Exchanged between Systems 2: Network Interoperability Mechanism to Exchange Messages between Multiple Systems across a Variety of Networks 1: Basic Connectivity Mechanism to Establish Physical and Logical Connections between Systems Technical Figure 5.12 UCAIug HAN SRS v2.0 interoperability framework.

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Interoperability 347 Interoperability Categories Description 8: Economic/Regulatory Policy Organizational 7: Business Objectives Political and Economic Objectives as Embodied in Policy and Regulation Strategic and Tactical Objectives Shared between Businesses 6: Business Procedures Alignment between Operational Business Processes and Procedures 5: Business Context Awareness of the Business Knowledge Related to a Specific Interaction 4: Semantic Understanding Understanding of the Concepts Contained in the Message Data Structures 3: Syntactic Interoperability Understanding of Data Structure in Messages Exchanged between Systems 2: Network Interoperability Mechanism to Exchange Messages between Multiple Systems across a Variety of Networks 1: Basic Connectivity Mechanism to Establish Physical and Logical Connections between Systems Informational Technical Figure 8.2 Different layers of the Smart Grid’s interoperability.

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation
by Carl Benedikt Frey
Published 17 Jun 2019

Yet preexisting business processes remained intact for the most part. In 1990, Michael Hammer, a management scholar and former professor of computer science, published his famous essay “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate.” In the article, which appeared in the Harvard Business Review, Hammer argued that productivity gains would not come from using automation to make existing processes more efficient.69 Managers trying to do so had gotten it wrong from the outset. Unleashing the full potential of automation, he declared, required analyzing and redesigning workflows and business processes to improve customer service and cut operational costs.

Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing
by Adam Greenfield
Published 14 Sep 2006

In programming, for example, software engineers use tools like Object Management Group's Unified Modeling Language (UML) to specify application structure, behavior and architecture with the necessary degree of rigor. (UML and its analogues can also be used to map less technical procedures, e.g., business processes.) Make no mistake about it, "specify" is the operative word here. UML allows programmers to decompose a situation into a use case: a highly granular, stepped, sequential representation of the interaction, with all events and participants precisely defined. Such use cases are a necessary intermediate step between the high-level, natural language description of a scenario and its ultimate expression in code.

Let My People Go Surfing
by Yvon Chouinard
Published 20 Jun 2006

Most important, we’ve tried to teach everyone we work with to think the way we do: that the whole supply chain has to be a functioning, interconnected system. Borrow Ideas from Other Disciplines Because the world is changing, we can never assume that the way we have done things in the past is adequate for the future. We constantly evaluate the ideas of the moment for improving business processes—from MRP (materials resources plan), to just-in-time, to quick response, to self-managed teams, if we think these approaches may result in a better product delivered on time and at a reasonable cost. The drive for quality in production in any organization has to go beyond the products themselves.

Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929
by Markus Krajewski and Peter Krapp
Published 18 Aug 2011

His library supply department will “serve as a guide in selecting the best forms of the various library supplies.”16 The necessary cataloging tools are custom-made and delivered at a discount, “in such a way that they can be used for the catalogues of all libraries.”17 Dewey is convinced that library efficiency can be increased only with uniform cataloging techniques on uniform materials of consistently high quality. In his view, internal business processes in library management and reader service, above all the catalogs, will need to be submitted to strict standardization procedures. With the help of generalized forms, rules, and systematic arrangements for everything from centralized and standardized printing of index cards, to drawers and boxes to fit them in, to inkwells and pens, he begins to “synchronize” libraries.

Travel While You Work: The Ultimate Guide to Running a Business From Anywhere
by Mish Slade
Published 13 Aug 2015

I check my emails while putting my contact lenses in and brushing my teeth in the morning. But Rob has this down to a fine art, and it really does help him stay focused in the morning: it means other people's priorities don't get in the way of his #1 priority – whether it's writing a book, recording a podcast, planning a webinar or mapping out a business process. Prevent distracting and non-urgent emails from entering your inbox. Unsubscribe from EVERY mailing list you find yourself on but never read. This is easier done than said! All you have to do is visit Unroll Me (www.worktravel.co/unroll) and they can handle it all for you. Sign up for new lists using the Gmail "plus sign" trick (more here: www.worktravel.co/plustrick).

Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get From Start-Up to IPO on Your Terms
by Jeffrey Bussgang
Published 31 Mar 2010

To reach those financial milestones and achieve that “overnight” success is a rarity in the world of start-ups. At my former company, Open Market, we were lucky to go public during the market’s heyday in 1996. It seemed so easy to me back then. The company was barely two years old and had no systematic business processes, few customers, little revenue, and nascent technology. At our IPO party, one of the wise old hands put his arm around my shoulder and laughed at me. “Jeff,” he said, “you have no idea how rare this is and how lucky we are. This sort of thing just doesn’t happen.” Boy, was he right. Thirteen years later, I still haven’t attended another IPO party.

The Productive Programmer
by Neal Ford
Published 8 Dec 2008

It combines engineering and craft in highly coupled ways, requiring good developers to exhibit a wide variety of skills: analytical thinking; extreme attention to detail on multiple levels and aesthetics; an awareness of macro and micro level concerns simultaneously; and a keen, fine-grained understanding of the subject matter we’re writing software to assist. Ironically, developers have to understand business processes at a much lower level than the actual practitioners of the business. Business people can use their experience to make on-the-fly decisions when novel situations pop up; we must encode everything in algorithms and explicit behavior. The original vision for The Productive Programmer was to provide a long list of recipes for productivity.

Exploring Everyday Things with R and Ruby
by Sau Sheong Chang
Published 27 Jun 2012

The exceptions are scientists and mathematicians, who long ago pounced on the tools that enable them to do their work much more efficiently. If you’re someone from these two camps, you are likely already taking full advantage of the power of computers. However, for programmers and many other people, writing computer programs started with providing tools for businesses and for improving business processes. It’s all about using computers to reduce cost, increase revenue, and improve efficiency. For many professional programmers, coding is a job. It’s drudgery, low-level menial work that brings food to the table. We have forgotten the promise of computers and the power of programming for discovery.

Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty
by Vikram Chandra
Published 7 Nov 2013

A 1959 Price Waterhouse report warned that “high quality individuals are the key to top grade programming. Why? Purely and simply because much of the work involved is exacting and difficult enough to require real intellectual ability and above average personal characteristics.”20 Such individuals weren’t easy to find, and as corporations looked for competitive advantage by computerizing their business processes, a shortage resulted. Corporations set up training programmes, fly-by-night vocational schools sprang up guaranteeing jobs: “There’s room for everyone. The industry needs people. You’ve got what it takes.”21 In 1967, Cosmopolitan magazine carried an article titled “The Computer Girls” that emphasized that programming was a field in which there was “no sex discrimination in hiring”—“every company that makes or uses computers hires women to program them … If a girl is qualified, she’s got the job.”

Smart Cities, Digital Nations
by Caspar Herzberg
Published 13 Apr 2017

Cisco’s technologies would be applied to the Smart + Connected City pilot project. Unlike Songdo, the first phase was applied to a specific target. The Tianfu High Tech Park was planned out to 3.7 million square meters of construction (1.3 million, over 300 acres, were actually under construction or finished by 2012). Already established as a hub for software development, business process, and IT outsourcing, it was by definition a mix of green- and brownfield development. This was not just another business park. Besides its enormous size, TSP was home to dozens of IT and telecom companies. Anchor tenants included IBM, GE, Dell, Siemens, and many more. The expansion, as detailed in an MoU released in July 2009, outlined how business and education were meant to intersect.

China's Disruptors: How Alibaba, Xiaomi, Tencent, and Other Companies Are Changing the Rules of Business
by Edward Tse
Published 13 Jul 2015

Why? The simplest explanation is a gap in expectations. Chinese companies have yet to produce basic technological research in power systems or chemicals, for example, or a product or service that has had the same impact on Western markets as the iPhone or Facebook, or a praised and adopted business process such as Japan’s “just-in-time” production system. But translating this into “China isn’t innovative” misses the point entirely. Focusing on what has not happened in China means not seeing what is actually taking place. ONLY THE INNOVATIVE GROW “For entrepreneurial companies, innovation is do or die,” says Yihaodian’s chairman Yu Gang.

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It
by Tien Tzuo and Gabe Weisert
Published 4 Jun 2018

That’s when we decided to start a new company called Zuora. We wanted to build a brand-new subscription billing and finance platform. Like a lot of companies at the time (Zendesk and customer support, Okta and passwords, Xero and bookkeeping), we were trying to solve a big, boring, pain-in-the-ass problem. To an entrepreneur, any business process that is universally hated, hopelessly complex, and massively expensive constitutes a huge opportunity. Keep in mind this was all happening in the midst of the Great Recession of the late 2000s. On-premise software got hit hard. Retail got decimated. Car sales went off a cliff. Advertising evaporated.

Bulletproof Problem Solving
by Charles Conn and Robert McLean
Published 6 Mar 2019

The 70s and 80s were characterized by intense interest in strategy development. That was displaced by an era from the 90s onward that focused on execution, including deep attention to getting things done, as exemplified by the book Execution by Ram Charan and Larry Bossidy, and a number of books on business process redesign.1  However, a ruthless focus on execution assumes you have strategic direction right and can adapt to new competition, frequently from outside your industry. This can no longer be assumed. As this new era of the problem solving organization takes hold, we expect it will trigger even more interest in how teams go about sharpening complex problem solving and critical thinking skills—what is called mental muscle by the authors of The Mathematical Corporation.2  The other side of the equation is the increasing importance of machine learning and artificial intelligence in addressing fast‐changing systems.

Engineering Security
by Peter Gutmann

If you’re faced with any of the following problems then you need to realise that only a situation-specific strong method will have any chance of working, or at least that after several decades of intensive effort no-one’s yet discovered a weak method that works. In addition in many cases there is no (known) technical solution to the problem, so addressing it will require changing your requirements, or the environment in which it occurs, or your business processes, or something else outside the reach of a straightforward technological solution. As a book on antipatterns in IT puts it, “fleeing the situation is always a potential refactoring, and often the most desirable one” [688]. Secure Bootstrapping of Communications Securely initiating connections with an entity that you’ve never communicated with before over a network is the killer problem, the elephant in the room, and the mixed metaphor of Internet security protocols.

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Other analyses are rather more pragmatic, pointing out that “X.509 certificate specifications appear to include a vast repertoire of extensions with elastic semantics” [381]. The fact that many PKI implementations completely ignore large portions of certificate standards isn’t just out of laziness, it’s a sanity self-preservation mechanism for the people coding them (having said this, it’s not just PKI that suffers from these sorts of problems. A survey of business process modelling languages, another area that’s notoriously prone to design-by-committee, concluded that “formal validation of models expressed in any one of these languages is anywhere from undecidable to unthinkable” [382]). The best general summary for all of these extra extensions is to avoid them if at all possible.

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For example banks who use certificates in ATMs have already found this out the hard way, with one large bank having to employ fifty full-time staff just to handle the certificate management issues. Before you even think about taking on a project like this you have to consider very carefully the consequences of holding your business processes hostage to your PKI, and whether there isn’t some better way of doing things than this. As a PriceWaterhouseCoopers security practitioner commented, “getting the software to run is the easy part, getting it to do what you want is the hard part” [541]. Another analysis by a PriceWaterhouseCoopers program director concurs, pointing out that “PKI requires an enterprise to commit itself to establishing novel and incredibly complex policies and procedures in addition to deploying public key technology” 730 PKI [505].

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations
by Thomas L. Friedman
Published 22 Nov 2016

Both managers and workers are having to absorb these new technologies—not just how they work but how factories and business processes and government regulations all need to be redesigned around them. The same thing, notes Brynjolfsson, happened 120 years ago, in the Second Industrial Revolution, when electrification—the supernova of its day—was introduced. Old factories did not just have to be electrified to achieve the productivity boosts; they had to be redesigned, along with all business processes. It took thirty years for one generation of managers and workers to retire and for a new generation to emerge to get the full productivity benefits of that new power source.

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought
by Andrew W. Lo
Published 3 Apr 2017

Most of the financial industry relies on unpatentable business processes to make a living, as Myron Scholes discovered when he confronted Texas Instruments about its use of his formula. As a result, the financial industry necessarily practices “security through obscurity,” using trade secrets to protect its intellectual property, like Coca-Cola and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Hedge funds and proprietary trading desks are as opaque as the law will allow, even to their own investors. But the average financial institution also needs to limit disclosure of its business processes, methods, and data, if only to protect the privacy of its clients—how would you like it if your monthly bank statement appeared on WikiLeaks?

Architects of Intelligence
by Martin Ford
Published 16 Nov 2018

That paradox was finally resolved in the late ‘90s, when we had enough demand to drive productivity growth, but more importantly, when we had very large sectors of the economy—retail, wholesale, and others—finally adopting the technologies of the day: client-server architectures, ERP systems. This transformed their business processes and drove productivity growth in very large sectors in the economy, which finally had a big enough effect to move the national productivity needle. Now if you fast-forward to where we are today, we may be seeing something similar in the sense that if you look at the current wave of digital technologies, whether we’re talking about cloud computing, e-commerce, or electronic payments, we can see them everywhere, we all carry them in our pockets, and yet productivity growth has been very sluggish for several years now.

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That already tells you that even in retail, one of the large sectors which we’d think of as highly digitized, in reality, it turns out we really haven’t yet made much widespread progress yet. So, we may be going through another round of the Solow paradox. Until we get these very large sectors highly digitized and using these technologies across business processes, we won’t see enough to move the national needle on productivity. MARTIN FORD: So, you’re saying that globally we haven’t even started to see to the impact of AI and advanced forms of automation yet? JAMES MANYIKA: Not yet. And that gets to another point worth making: we’re actually going to need productivity growth even more than we can imagine, and AI, automation and all these digital technologies are going to be critical to driving productivity growth and economic growth.

The Numerati
by Stephen Baker
Published 11 Aug 2008

They had to sign up for Second Life and attend as their own avatars. By staking IBM's blue flag in a simulated world, Palmisano was pointing to the company's future. Already, engineers around the world use computer simulations to design electric turbines and fine-tune the traffic flows in major cities. The way IBM sees it, entire business processes will one day be simulated. Picture managers, their fists grasping joysticks, trying out new industrial approaches and calibrating operations as if they were running their own version of the video game The Sims. If Takriti and his team master their next assignment, the avatars on the screen will be the mathematical models of IBM's workers.

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
by Sheryl Sandberg
Published 11 Mar 2013

As helpful as these formal programs can be, they are not always offered, and in some situations, senior people are not available to give guidance. The good news is that guidance can come from all levels. When I first joined Facebook, one of my biggest challenges was setting up the necessary business processes without harming the freewheeling culture. The company operated by moving quickly and tolerating mistakes, and lots of people were nervous that I would not just ruin the party, but squash innovation. Naomi Gleit had joined Facebook right out of college several years earlier. As one of Facebook’s earliest employees, she had a deep understanding of how the company worked.

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America
by Barbara Ehrenreich
Published 2 Jan 2003

Instead of thinking, “White Stag navy twill skort,” and doggedly searching out similar skorts, all I have to do is form an image of the item in my mind, transpose this image onto the visual field, and move to wherever the image finds its match in the outer world. I don't know how this works. Maybe my mind just gets so busy processing the incoming visual data that it has to bypass the left brain's verbal centers, with their cumbersome instructions: “Proceed to White Stag area in the northwest corner of ladies', try bottom racks near khaki shorts. . . ” Or maybe the trick lies in understanding that each item wants to be reunited with its sibs and its clan members and that, within each clan, the item wants to occupy its proper place in the color/size hierarchy.

Makers
by Chris Anderson
Published 1 Oct 2012

The Gartner Group describes this boom-bust-boom trajectory as the “Hype Cycle” of tech-driven change. After the “Peak of Inflated Expectations,” there is the “Trough of Disillusionment.” Then comes the “Slope of Enlightenment,” and finally the “Plateau of Productivity.” We’ve been through the first three already. Now we’re enjoying the last. By the time a business process is too boring to comment on, it’s probably starting to actually work. So while the rest of us are having our heads turned by the latest buzzy social media thing, sites like MFG.com are quietly going about their work of turbocharging the world’s real economic engine, making stuff faster, cheaper, better.

The 80/20 Principle: The Secret of Achieving More With Less
by Richard Koch
Published 15 Dec 1999

As with many other quality problems, Pareto’s Law prevails here too: if you remedy the most critical 20 percent of your quality gaps, you will realize 80 percent of the benefits. This first 80 percent typically includes your breakthrough improvements.2 Another writer, focusing on corporate turnarounds, comments: For every step in your business process, ask yourself if it adds value or provides essential support. If it does neither, it’s waste. Cut it. [This is] the 80/20 rule, revisited: You can eliminate 80 percent of the waste by spending only 20 percent of what it would cost you to get rid of 100 percent of the waste. Go for the quick gain now.3 The 80/20 Principle was also used by Ford Electronics Manufacturing Corporation in a quality program that won the Shingo prize: Just-in-time programs have been applied using the 80/20 rule (80 percent of the value is spread over 20 percent of the volume) and top-dollar usages are analyzed constantly.

Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything
by Stephen Baker
Published 17 Feb 2011

“That enables us to look at a million times more input.” With this speed, companies increasingly will be able to carry out research, and even run simulations, while the customer is paying for a prescription or withdrawing funds. Computers with speed and natural language are poised to transform business processes, perhaps entire industries. Compared to what’s ahead, even today’s state of the art looks sluggish. Consider this snapshot of the data economy, circa 2011: A man walks into a pharmacy to renew his blood pressure medication. He picks up some toiletries while he’s there. He hands the cashier his customer loyalty card, which lowers his bill by a dollar or two, and then pays with his Visa card.

Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less Here's How
by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Published 10 Mar 2020

So when he saw an article about how Tower Paddle Boards—an online, direct-to-consumer company that sells stand-up paddleboards—had moved to a five-hour workday, he was intrigued. Stephan Aarstol founded Tower in 2010. An appearance on the TV show Shark Tank won him an investment from Mark Cuban, and the company had grown steadily since then. As an e-commerce company, Tower was constantly experimenting with new technologies and business processes, and Stephan was convinced that they could use the same technologies to change how his employees worked, not just how they sold paddleboards. If they focused on their most important work, cut out distractions, and used technology to automate routine tasks and make their hard jobs easier, he thought, they could dramatically improve their performance—and give him more time for surfing.

5 Day Weekend: Freedom to Make Your Life and Work Rich With Purpose
by Nik Halik and Garrett B. Gunderson
Published 5 Mar 2018

Fine-tune Your Processes Once you have general processes in place and the right people to run them, you add automated procedures by leveraging technology in order to become more efficient. Processes are the big-picture steps outlining how you want something to happen. Procedures utilize technology to support processes, eliminating human labor where possible, and therefore creating scale in your business. Processes are about outlining how to do the right things in the right way. Procedures are about doing those things as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible. Once you’ve developed your processes and procedures, include them in an operations manual, which you can use to train and manage people. 5.

Mastering Blockchain: Unlocking the Power of Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts
by Lorne Lantz and Daniel Cawrey
Published 8 Dec 2020

In 2019, PayPal invested in a company called Cambridge Blockchain for its identity technology, which has also been a challenge. Facebook, which possesses lots of information about its users, may have already solved that problem, as outlined in the next section. Libra Most enterprise blockchain experiments are focused on behind-the-scenes business processes. However, there is an opportunity for companies to use cryptocurrency and blockchain fundamentals to offer new features to users and customers. It’s early in this game, but consumer-focused companies like Facebook want to bring blockchain to everyone, particularly in terms of making payments on the internet.

The Finance Book: Understand the Numbers Even if You're Not a Finance Professional
by Stuart Warner and Si Hussain
Published 20 Apr 2017

To add value, the MAP should ‘make the numbers talk’ and provide a ‘story’ of what has happened and its impact on projections. The order book and other ‘lead’ versus ‘lag’ indicators of performance. Non-financial information. Kaplan and Norton’s ‘Balanced Scorecard’ suggests balancing financial information with the following additional perspectives: Customer – for example new, repeat and lost customers Internal business processes – for example productivity and efficiency measures Learning and growth – for example new product development and training. As indicated in the Need to know section above, MAPs are not one size fits all, and their size, complexity and contents will differ from organisation to organisation, depending on the size of the company and the requirements of its users.

What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful
by Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter
Published 9 Jan 2007

Effectively anticipates future opportunities 61. Inspires people to focus on future opportunities (not just present objectives) 62. Develops ideas to meet the needs of the new environment Ensuring Customer Satisfaction 63. Inspires people to achieve high levels of customer satisfaction 64. Views business processes from the ultimate customer perspective (has an “end to end” perspective) 65. Regularly solicits input from customers 66. Consistently delivers on commitments to customers 67. Understands the competitive options available to her/his customers Maintaining a Competitive Advantage 68.

The Alpha Masters: Unlocking the Genius of the World's Top Hedge Funds
by Maneet Ahuja , Myron Scholes and Mohamed El-Erian
Published 29 May 2012

The great hedge fund managers, guys like Bill Ackman, David Einhorn, David Tepper, Kyle Bass, and Alan Fournier, are super-passionate. If you aren’t going to match them, don’t bother.” Second, while you’re being passionate about investing, don’t forget about running your business. “Make sure you spend enough time, maybe 20 percent of your time, thinking about your business process in your organization,” advised Loeb. “Ask yourself, what kind of culture do you want? What are you going to look for in hiring people? How do you want to organize yourself? How are you going to pay your team? How are you going to measure and reward performance? You will have to answer all of these questions eventually.

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery
by Stewart Lansley
Published 19 Jan 2012

The founders of Facebook, Google and Yahoo have presided over a profound and entirely positive business and social revolution. Some venture capitalist companies have a strong record in encouraging the formation of new products and services. There are thousands of successful modern entrepreneurs who have become rich by founding new companies, inventing new products or improving business processes. They include the British inventor and engineer, James Dyson, the owner of the Swedish global Ikea chain, Ingvar Kamprad, and Tim Waterstone who modernised bookselling in the UK by setting up his national book chain using a £1000 redundancy cheque from WH Smiths. Each of these has become rich by creating new wealth, business and jobs.

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us
by Nicholas Carr
Published 28 Sep 2014

We’ve reached a similar juncture in the history of automation. Society is adapting to the universal computing infrastructure—more quickly than it adapted to the electric grid—and a new status quo is taking shape. The assumptions underlying industrial operations and commercial relations have already changed. “Business processes that once took place among human beings are now being executed electronically,” explains W. Brian Arthur, an economist and technology theorist at the Santa Fe Institute. “They are taking place in an unseen domain that is strictly digital.”16 As an example, he points to the process of moving a shipment of freight through Europe.

Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms
by David S. Evans and Richard Schmalensee
Published 23 May 2016

Very large merchants installed the new terminals because of this liability shift and because of fraud concerns. The chip-and-pin terminals, also known as EMV terminals, generally have the capability of taking contactless payments. So if a merchant has a chip-and-pin terminal, it can generally turn on NFC. However, installing these chip-and-pin terminals and redesigning computer systems and business processes to accommodate them is costly. In addition, it is more cumbersome to dip a card into a chip-and-pin reader—you have to stick the card in and then wait for the transaction to be approved before taking it out—than to swipe. Many merchants have weighed the costs of making the switch against the cost of fraud and decided not to upgrade for now.

Rethinking Money: How New Currencies Turn Scarcity Into Prosperity
by Bernard Lietaer and Jacqui Dunne
Published 4 Feb 2013

Around 1990, computers started to talk to each other, and all kinds of connections started to happen. The individual machines—servers—are like neurons, and the axons and synapses are the communication pathways and linkages that enable them to be in conversation with each other and to take appropriate action. So, we can say that another economy—a second economy—of all of these digitized business processes conversing, executing, and triggering further actions is silently forming alongside the physical economy.” 4 The upshot of this second economy is that while it’s an engine of growth and prosperity, it does not provide jobs. In fact, it erodes entire sectors of traditional jobs. Much of the job creation that has taken place over the past 20 years has been in small enterprises.

The Strange Order of Things: The Biological Roots of Culture
by Antonio Damasio
Published 6 Feb 2018

The arrival of nervous systems, capable of mapping and image making, opened the way for simple minds to enter the scene. During the Cambrian explosion, after numerous mutations, certain creatures with nervous systems would have generated not just images of the world around them but also an imagetic counterpart to the busy process of life regulation that was going on underneath. This would have been the ground for a corresponding mental state, the thematic content of which would have been valenced in tune with the condition of life, at that moment, in that body. The quality of the ongoing life state would have been felt.

Upscale: What It Takes to Scale a Startup. By the People Who've Done It.
by James Silver
Published 15 Nov 2018

Corporates must feel like they’ve got nothing to lose from working with you - and, potentially, everything to gain When I was at lastminute.com, 30% of the business was B2B - and our suppliers were brands like BA, Virgin, Lufthansa, Alitalia and Air France. We made sure they didn’t have to change their business processes to work with us - that’s why we accepted, for example, faxes (yes, it was that long ago). We did all the heavy lifting we could on our side, rather than on their end - although that changed over time when we became bigger. The second thing we did was help them recognise that they could learn from us about the innovation that was starting to sweep across our industry.

Busy
by Tony Crabbe
Published 7 Jul 2015

This probably all sounds a little circular as an argument but that’s because it is, and that’s the genius of it. For example, imagine your brand is “clarity.” Once you have decided to make this your brand, you can constantly challenge yourself to live up to it. Look for chances to innovate by making business processes more clear, or run a project to identify how to make the decision-making process of clients more clear. (You might even call that project “Clarity!”) All your presentations, meetings and emails can be designed in such a way that they provide very visible clarity. Your emails become short and to the point, starting with the main point at the top and in the subject line.

The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 9 Sep 2019

Much of the CO2 abatement in these industries will come from plugging into a smart Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure that will allow them to power their production with renewable energy and to manage their transport and logistics supply chains with short-haul electric vehicles powered by green electricity and with long-haul hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered transport on road, rail, and water routes. Big Data and algorithm governance of supply chains and logistics operations will also increase these companies’ aggregate efficiencies in ever more circular business processes. When it comes to plastic packaging and to steel, cement, and other construction-related materials, it will also be necessary to find fiber-based biological substitutes. Recently, some of the world’s leading chemical companies have begun to join together with genetics and life science companies in accelerated R&D efforts designed to find cheaper alternative biological-based products and processes.

Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century
by Jeff Lawson
Published 12 Jan 2021

He has a great analogy for what building a successful small team is like: building a single brain made up of all the necessary functions. Creating teams this way helps avert what he thinks is a major issue at many companies, even though it’s standard practice: siloing developers away from the business processes. As he puts it, “This is an organizational design problem in a lot of ways. The typical thing is for companies to say, ‘Okay, we have a business unit here, and then we have an engineering team in the company here, and they have an interface.’” The “interface” he’s skeptical of refers to Product Requirements Documents (PRDs), Kanban tasks, or other systems of throwing work over the wall.

User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product
by Jeff Patton and Peter Economy
Published 14 Apr 2014

I started with an overview of how story mapping works and an overview of the big steps in the school’s student management process. Up until I showed them this picture (the backbone of the story map), the team members each had an idea of what they did, but, as Alice the sponsor said, it was probably the first time they all had a clear picture of their own business process and how all the steps interacted. From there we brainstormed what people wanted the system to do. The scope was massive, and the stories were many. The beauty was that these were creative people and they were used to the “appreciative enquiry” method, so braindumping everything they could think of that the system needed to do was something they took to like a baker makes bread.

Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale
by David N. Blank-Edelman
Published 16 Sep 2018

Many organizations have sought to “manage” the dense, noisy, intra-incident situation with varying degrees of success. Two popular methods of managing the costs of coordination are the use of classification schemes to parcel out resources and the assignment of formal roles for personnel during the incident. Classification schemes Many incidents have only minor impact on customers or business process. Fewer incidents have major impact. Addressing incidents can be expensive and disruptive. By classifying incidents, organizations seek to manage resource consumption: more important incidents get more resources, while less important ones get fewer. It is sometimes quite difficult, however, to understand the significance of an incident in progress.

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Inability to cope with flexible schedules indicates a rigid organization or an unhealthily low bus factor.10 A healthy SRE team does not need 100% uptime from its SREs any more than a service needs 100% uptime from its servers.11 Another common form of stigma is to assume that people with mental disorders can’t handle intellectually or emotionally challenging work. It’s true than an employee with ADHD might miss a step on a checklist, but the lack of automation is what made that business process fragile. Anything that requires a human brain to store information will fail eventually, whether that’s because of a mental disorder affecting concentration or because that brain’s owner is awake at 3 AM or hungry or has three other pager alerts firing. (Or all three.) Ultimately, everyone has cognitive and emotional limitations, and expecting flawless operators is a poor strategy for success.

More Joel on Software
by Joel Spolsky
Published 25 Jun 2008

But I keep hearing that enrollment in CS departments is dropping perilously, and one reason I hear for it is “Students are afraid to go into a field where all the jobs are going to India.” That’s so wrong for so many reasons. First, trying to choose a career based on a current business fad is foolish. Second, programming is incredibly good training for all kinds of fabulously interesting jobs, such as business process engineering, even if every single programming job does go to India and China. Third, and trust me on this, there’s still an incredible shortage of the really good programmers, here and in India. Yes, there are a bunch of out-of-work IT people making a lot of noise about how long they’ve been out of work, but you know what?

What Would Google Do?
by Jeff Jarvis
Published 15 Feb 2009

Bruzzo said it is vital for the company to “close that loop in an authentic way and show the commitment on the part of Starbucks to respond to what we’ve heard, which is about putting those ideas in action or building those ideas together with customers.” In short: “We’re truly going to adopt it into our business process, into product development, experience development, and store design.” To do that, he assigned 48 “idea partners” from all over the company to enter the discussion with customers, using the forum as a laboratory. They were to become champions for ideas back in their departments “so that literally customers would have a seat at the table when product decisions are made.”

The Pragmatic Programmer
by Andrew Hunt and Dave Thomas
Published 19 Oct 1999

The Y2K problem came about from two main causes: a failure to see beyond current business practice, and a violation of the DRY principle. Businesses were using the two-digit shortcut long before computers came on the scene. It was common practice. The earliest data processing applications merely automated existing business processes, and simply repeated the mistake. Even if the architecture required two-digit years for data input, reporting, and storage, there should have been an abstraction of a DATE that "knew" the two digits were an abbreviated form of the real date. Tip 53 Abstractions Live Longer than Details Does "seeing further" require you to predict the future?

The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences
by Rob Kitchin
Published 25 Aug 2014

As Porway notes, what is really needed is for data scientists and domain experts to work with each other to ensure that the data analytics used make sense and that the results from such analytics are sensibly and contextually interpreted. Likewise, Lazer et al. (2009: 10–11) call for collaboration between ‘computationally literate social scientists and socially literate computer scientists’ (2009: 10–11), and with respect to business, Minelli et al. (2013) contend that data science teams should be coupled with business process experts to leverage appropriate insights (see also Table 9.1). Data-driven science Rather than being rooted in empiricism, data-driven science seeks to hold to the tenets of the scientific method, but is more open to using a hybrid combination of abductive, inductive and deductive approaches to advance the understanding of a phenomenon.

Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel
by Tom Wainwright
Published 23 Feb 2016

Alan Blinder, a former vice chair of the Federal Reserve, has predicted that offshoring will be “the next Industrial Revolution,” with 30–40 million service-sector jobs in the United States eventually ripe for the offshoring treatment.1 As wages in the developing world catch up with those in the West, there are signs that the movement is slowing down a little. But the change has already been immense: nearly one-quarter of American employees now work at an organization that has moved at least some of its business processes overseas.2 The advantages of offshoring have not been lost on the drugs industry. Like other firms, cartels want to reduce their costs. And even more than legitimate companies, they have reason to shop around for the most relaxed regulatory environment in which to operate. In Central America, you don’t need to go far to see that the conditions that have lured the textile and car factories to the region have also proved irresistible to the drugs business.

Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry
by David Robertson and Bill Breen
Published 24 Jun 2013

Later, when LEGO gained momentum and began generating profits, it took on the more ambitious innovations, reconfiguring and redefining. But LEGO always made sure it continued to seek out the everyday innovations that simply enhanced an already profitable line. So long as it innovated around its customers, sales channels, business processes, and the rest, LEGO wouldn’t always have to churn out a Bionicle-size blockbuster every year. Sometimes a simple makeover of an already successful line would suffice. The LEGO innovation matrix, with some of the major innovations from the development of Slizer, RoboRiders, and Bionicle. As it turned out, Bionicle racked up its peak sales in 2002 and then began a long but very profitable return to earth.

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification
by Paul Roberts
Published 1 Sep 2014

This tilt toward “incremental innovation” is most familiar to us in the consumer-product space, where firms such as Microsoft have made a fortune converting older technologies into a steady stream of modest upgrades timed to deliver steady quarterly earnings and share price appreciation. But incremental innovation is even more evident at the structural level of the economy. As we saw in chapter 2, much of our innovation now focuses on making basic businesses processes, such as manufacturing and logistics, more efficient. So we automate assembly lines. We streamline the process for making a bank loan. We digitize the supply chain linking a retailer in the United States with a manufacturer in Asia. These innovative efficiencies have helped bring down prices for consumers.

The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home
by Dan Ariely
Published 31 May 2010

To me, this humorous commercial demonstrated a crucial question of how people relate to their own and others’ ideas: how important is it for us to come up with an idea, or at least to feel that it is ours, in order to value it? The attraction to one’s own ideas has not escaped the collective folk wisdom of the business world, and, like other important business processes, this one also has an unofficial term attached to it: the “Not-Invented-Here” (NIH) bias. The principle is basically this: “If I (or we) didn’t invent it, then it’s not worth much.” Any Solution, as Long as It’s Mine With our understanding of human attachment to self-made physical goods (see the previous chapter on the IKEA effect), Stephen Spiller (a doctoral student at Duke University), Racheli Barkan, and I decided to examine the process by which we become attached to ideas.

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality
by Don Watkins and Yaron Brook
Published 28 Mar 2016

Working with other people enables us to be far more productive, and it gives us access to a far greater number of goods and services, but it doesn’t change the essential issue: to acquire wealth, we have to think and produce as an individual. This is true whether the individual is the car mechanic who has to learn how to diagnose and repair a broken alternator, or a doctor who has to learn how to diagnose and repair a clogged artery, or the manager who has to learn how to diagnose and repair a broken business process. Regardless of the productive endeavor we choose to pursue, the creation of human values requires individual thought and effort. That’s not some regrettable fact about nature—that is precisely how human beings pursue success and happiness. We often equate success with money, and while money is certainly not irrelevant to success, it is not the whole story.

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril
by Satyajit Das
Published 9 Feb 2016

A pair of trousers could be made using yarn spun in Bangladesh that was then woven into fabric and dyed in India, China, or Vietnam; the zipper might be manufactured in Japan and the buttons in China; and the whole could be stitched together in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, or Honduras. Each stage was undertaken in the most efficient location, with businesses and nations embracing a transnational system of production. Firms aggressively sought competitively priced raw materials, labor, and locations. With the ubiquitous call centers and processing hubs, business process outsourcing and multinational manufacturing became the norm. The reintegration of China, India, Russia, and Eastern Europe into the world economy increased the global labor pool from approximately 1.5 billion workers to nearly 3 billion. Costs fell as businesses relocated production to the cheapest locations.

The Investopedia Guide to Wall Speak: The Terms You Need to Know to Talk Like Cramer, Think Like Soros, and Buy Like Buffett
by Jack (edited By) Guinan
Published 27 Jul 2009

The cash conversion cycle measures the time between the outlay of cash and cash recovery. This cycle is extremely important for retailers and similar businesses. CCC highlights how quickly a company can convert its products into cash through sales. The shorter the cycle is, the less time capital is tied up in the business process and thus the better it is for the company’s balance sheet. Remember, cash is king. Related Terms: • Accounts Receivable • Cash and Cash Equivalents—CCE • Inventory • Working Capital • Inventory Turnover Cash Flow What Does Cash Flow Mean? (1) A revenue or expense stream that changes a cash account over a specific period.

Winning Now, Winning Later
by David M. Cote
Published 17 Apr 2020

Often when teams have trouble creatively it’s because their thinking is overly constricted by reality as they know it and they can only think of ideas that derive from the existing reality. To have a more productive discussion, they must become reanchored to a different position. I’d ask them to take a day and pretend they could build their business, process, or product from scratch. What would it look like? How would they design it? Usually suspending reality broke the logjam and allowed people to think of a future that was very different from the present. In one instance, one of our union factories was struggling to redesign their inefficient work rules, all forty-three pages worth.

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity
by Byron Reese
Published 23 Apr 2018

Often overlooked was the fuller explanation of the report’s conclusion: Our results to date suggest, first and foremost, that a focus on occupations is misleading. Very few occupations will be automated in their entirety in the near or medium term. Rather, certain activities are more likely to be automated, requiring entire business processes to be transformed, and jobs performed by people to be redefined, much like the bank teller’s job was redefined with the advent of ATMs. The “47 percent [or 45 percent] of jobs will vanish” interpretation doesn’t even come close to passing the sniff test. Humans, even ones with little or no professional training, have incredible skills we hardly ever think about.

Lying for Money: How Fraud Makes the World Go Round
by Daniel Davies
Published 14 Jul 2018

If you can’t measure something, you can’t manage it is something of a caricature* of modern management science, but it expresses a deep truth; management is an information-processing job, and the development of large corporations has been made possible by the parallel development of reporting structures, quality and output measures and other tools for getting that information from the machines into the offices. Modern management science could fairly be said to have started with The Principles of Scientific Management by Frederick Winslow Taylor in 1911, which first advocated the ‘time and motion study’ and the scientific analysis of business processes, starting with a famous study of how many rest breaks a man should take while shoveling iron ore onto a truck. And it could almost as fairly be said that a very great proportion of management theory since Taylor has been made up of calls to measure different things, in order to correct for the biases introduced by the previous round of changes.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator
by Maria Ressa
Published 19 Oct 2022

A former colony of the United States, the Philippines’ nearly 113 million people10 boasted of an English-speaking, often college-educated, labor force familiar with Western culture. That’s one reason why our country has long been a source of cheap labor for the West. In 2010, the Philippines overtook India as the world’s top call center, business process outsourcing (BPO), and shared services hub.11 More significantly, we became a prime source of internet scams, from the days of Hotmail and email spam. Many foreign businesses experimenting in gray areas came to the Philippines because it had few or no internet regulations, and what regulations it did have, it didn’t enforce.12 Some parts of the Philippines developed a reputation for services euphemistically known as “onlining” that spammed email addresses around the world.13 Our country was also where the hate factory 8chan, later 8kun, best known as a forum for violent extremists, was based and later linked to QAnon: the American father and son suspected of creating it had been living on a pig farm south of Manila.14 A lot of that changed after a global crackdown between 2010 and 2012, when internet security researchers and law enforcement agencies dismantled spambots and technology evolved to control them.

The Art of Software Security Assessment: Identifying and Preventing Software Vulnerabilities
by Justin Schuh
Published 20 Nov 2006

* * * Note Some industries do impose their own security requirements and standards, but they typically involve regulatory interests and apply only to certain specialized environments and applications. This practice is changing, however, as high-profile incidents are moving regulators and industry standards bodies toward more proactive security requirements. * * * The good news is that attitudes toward security have been changing recently, and many vendors are adopting business processes for more rigorous security testing. Many approaches are becoming commonplace, including automated code analysis, security unit testing, and manual code audits. As you can tell from the title, this book focuses on manual code audits. Auditing an application is the process of analyzing application code (in source or binary form) to uncover vulnerabilities that attackers might exploit.

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What’s most important is that you incorporate the exposure of the threat (how easy is it to exploit and who the vector is available to) and the amount of damage incurred during a successful exploit. Beyond that, you might want to add components that are more pertinent to your environment and business processes. For this chapter’s threat-modeling purposes, the DREAD rating system developed by Microsoft is used. No model is perfect, but this one provides a fairly good balance of commonly accepted threat characteristics. These characteristics are briefly summarized as follows: Damage potential—What are the repercussions if the threat is exploited successfully?

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The dashed lines represent an indirect relationship, and the solid lines indicate a direct relationship. The MVC components are described in the following sections. Figure 17-4. Mode- View-Controller (MVC) architecture Model The Model component is software that models the underlying business processes and objects of a Web site. It corresponds to the business logic of an enterprise Web application. In an n-tier architecture with a separate business tier, the Model component refers to the software in the Web tier that’s responsible for driving interaction with the business tier. View The View component is responsible for rendering the model’s contents into a view for the user.

Masterminds of Programming: Conversations With the Creators of Major Programming Languages
by Federico Biancuzzi and Shane Warden
Published 21 Mar 2009

On a big project that I’ve been involved in we have imposed a requirements tax. If anybody uses the word “requirements” standalone, they have to add $2.00 to the entertainment fund. If they want to talk about use cases, or if they want to talk about story cards, or they want to talk about performance metrics, or they want to talk about business cases or business process models, those are all acceptable terms. They don’t incur a tax, because now if you say, “I need to have the use cases or the functional specification, or a mockup of the application that needs to be developed,” that’s a precise request. I see projects getting into trouble when they don’t get that part right.

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But again, we couldn’t have known that…we built these first systems; we couldn’t have known that’s where the most volatile pieces would be, and that’s some of the changes that are going on right now in that space. Is that open for visualization? You bet. We see the opportunity for being able to find new languages to express business rules. My personal opinion is the UML was quite sufficient and we saw some interesting political things happening that led to BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) coming out as a very separate thing from the UML. Microsoft might argue that M is an attempt to do that. Grady: Absolutely, which goes back to the point I raised earlier: will M be successful? The marketplace will decide. People might not even realize they want a separate layer for business rules.

Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems
by Martin Kleppmann
Published 17 Apr 2017

. • If customers order more items than you have in your warehouse, you can order in more stock, apologize to customers for the delay, and offer them a discount. This is actually the same as what you’d have to do if, say, a forklift truck ran over some of the items in your warehouse, leaving you with fewer items in stock than you thought you had [61]. Thus, the apology workflow already needs to be part of your business processes anyway, and so it might be unnecessary to require a linearizable constraint on the number of items in stock. • Similarly, many airlines overbook airplanes in the expectation that some passen‐ gers will miss their flight, and many hotels overbook rooms, expecting that some guests will cancel.

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We saw that strong integrity guarantees can be implemented scala‐ bly with asynchronous event processing, by using end-to-end operation identifiers to make operations idempotent and by checking constraints asynchronously. Clients can either wait until the check has passed, or go ahead without waiting but risk hav‐ ing to apologize about a constraint violation. This approach is much more scalable and robust than the traditional approach of using distributed transactions, and fits with how many business processes work in practice. By structuring applications around dataflow and checking constraints asynchro‐ nously, we can avoid most coordination and create systems that maintain integrity but still perform well, even in geographically distributed scenarios and in the pres‐ ence of faults. We then talked a little about using audits to verify the integrity of data and detect corruption.

Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems
by Martin Kleppmann
Published 16 Mar 2017

If customers order more items than you have in your warehouse, you can order in more stock, apologize to customers for the delay, and offer them a discount. This is actually the same as what you’d have to do if, say, a forklift truck ran over some of the items in your warehouse, leaving you with fewer items in stock than you thought you had [61]. Thus, the apology workflow already needs to be part of your business processes anyway, and so it might be unnecessary to require a linearizable constraint on the number of items in stock. Similarly, many airlines overbook airplanes in the expectation that some passengers will miss their flight, and many hotels overbook rooms, expecting that some guests will cancel.

…

We saw that strong integrity guarantees can be implemented scalably with asynchronous event processing, by using end-to-end operation identifiers to make operations idempotent and by checking constraints asynchronously. Clients can either wait until the check has passed, or go ahead without waiting but risk having to apologize about a constraint violation. This approach is much more scalable and robust than the traditional approach of using distributed transactions, and fits with how many business processes work in practice. By structuring applications around dataflow and checking constraints asynchronously, we can avoid most coordination and create systems that maintain integrity but still perform well, even in geographically distributed scenarios and in the presence of faults. We then talked a little about using audits to verify the integrity of data and detect corruption.

Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work
by Dr. Paul Babiak and Dr. Robert Hare
Published 7 May 2007

A neighborhood bakery, usually run by family members, wouldn’t offer them the opportunities they require, at least not as long as it remains small and tightly controlled. For example, the bakery might evolve into a major, national player in the baked goods industry. Initially, the owners may decide to open a second shop across town. They will need to staff this one and train the new help in their business processes. They may hire a maintenance person to keep the increased number of ovens and other kitchen appliances running, a phone operator to handle telephone orders, and specialty bakers who can create new and different treats to help differentiate this bakery’s product from competitors’. Eventually, the owners may decide to buy or lease trucks so they can deliver large orders to commercial customers, hire a full-time accountant to do the books, bring on cleaning staff, a marketing team, and so forth.

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World
by Adam Grant
Published 2 Feb 2016

Grant, Francesca Gino, and David A. Hofmann, “Reversing the Extraverted Leadership Advantage: The Role of Employee Proactivity,” Academy of Management Journal 54 (2011): 528–50. companies in India: Sucheta Nadkarni and Pol Herrmann, “CEO Personality, Strategic Flexibility, and Firm Performance: The Case of the Indian Business Process Outsourcing Industry,” Academy of Management Journal 53 (2010): 1050–73. evaluated their strategies at the midpoint: Anita Williams Woolley, “Effects of Intervention Content and Timing on Group Task Performance,” Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 34 (1998): 30–46. the midpoint of a task: Connie J.

The Road Ahead
by Bill Gates , Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson
Published 15 Nov 1995

Would Cicero have given better speeches in the Roman Senate?" Such critics have a notion that because great things were achieved without modern tools, it is presumptuous to suggest that better tools might elevate human potential. We can only speculate on how an artist's output might be helped, but it is quite clear that personal computers improve business processes, efficiency, and accuracy. Consider the average reporter. There have been great journalists through history, but today it's much easier to check facts, transmit a story from the field, and stay in touch electronically with news sources, editors, and even readers. Plus, the inclusion of high-quality diagrams and pictures has become easier.

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society
by Eric Posner and E. Weyl
Published 14 May 2018

Notice, however, that the buyers of data in these settings are for the most part not the siren servers we have been discussing. Instead, they are smaller companies, academic researchers, and financial firms with no direct access to data. Many of these businesses have exciting prospects. Work Fusion, for example, offers a sophisticated incentive scheme to workers to help train AIs to automate business processes. Might AI firms hire workers to label maps and road images and sell the labeled data to companies producing self-driving cars? However, the total size of these markets is tiny compared to the number of users who produce data used by the siren servers. The number of workers on mTurk is in the tens of thousands, compared to billions of users of services offered by Google and Facebook.25 The data titans (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.) do not pay for most of their data.

WEconomy: You Can Find Meaning, Make a Living, and Change the World
by Craig Kielburger , Holly Branson , Marc Kielburger , Sir Richard Branson and Sheryl Sandberg
Published 7 Mar 2018

—Ashoka editorial in Forbes magazine. (Ashoka is the largest network of social entrepreneurs worldwide, with nearly 3,000 Fellows in 70 countries) Key Traits of the Social Intrapreneur7 More ambitious for social change than for personal wealth and advancement Willing and able to take risks Has an understanding of business process and priorities as well as sustainability imperatives Adept at fighting and surviving cynicism, caution, and the status quo Never stops learning, innovating, and simplifying Tania's plan, rolled out in the fall of 2009, made community involvement one of the four pillars of KPMG's business strategy in Canada.

Advances in Financial Machine Learning
by Marcos Lopez de Prado
Published 2 Feb 2018

The negative aspects are that analytics may be costly, the methodology used in their production may be biased or opaque, and you will not be the sole consumer. 2.2.4 Alternative Data Kolanovic and Krishnamachari [2017] differentiate among alternative data produced by individuals (social media, news, web searches, etc.), business processes (transactions, corporate data, government agencies, etc.), and sensors (satellites, geolocation, weather, CCTV, etc.). Some popular satellite image or video feeds include monitoring of tankers, tunnel traffic activity, or parking lot occupancies. What truly characterizes alternative data is that it is primary information, that is, information that has not made it to the other sources.

Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets From Inside Amazon
by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr
Published 9 Feb 2021

My standard answer was, “I can’t predict what he’ll say, but these are the principles that typically inform his response.…” During my time with Jeff, several pivotal Amazon businesses came to life, including Amazon Prime, Amazon Web Services, Kindle, and Fulfillment by Amazon. Several Amazon business processes, now firmly entrenched in being Amazonian, were introduced, including writing narratives and using the Working Backwards process. I was aware of my good fortune and the rare opportunity my job afforded me to work side by side with Jeff and the Amazon senior leadership on a daily basis for over two years.

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car
by Anthony M. Townsend
Published 15 Jun 2020

More important, however, we need to expose the code that controls these menacing machines before they hit the streets. Our current approach is to sit back and hope that our old-fashioned methods of pouring concrete and passing regulations will rein them in. But it’s clear that this orchestrating software is sly. Even as it appears to do one thing, it secretly works to other ends. Benign business processes like dispatching taxibots become an exercise in subtle algorithmic discrimination. The simple task of routing rides, multiplied a millionfold each day, allows companies to usurp control from government traffic engineers. That camera we thought was measuring our readiness to take the wheel back from computer control is secretly profiling us for ad pitches.

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them
by Nouriel Roubini
Published 17 Oct 2022

It would restrain movement of capital investment, mobility of labor, students, and scientists, even the transfer of data, the lifeblood of the information age. “China Drafts Tough Rules to Stop Data from Leaving Its Borders as Beijing Tightens Grip on Information,” the South China Morning Post reported in October 2021. The Cyberspace Administration of China wants to review all business-processing data before it exits the country.30 The United States is also imposing restrictions on Chinese ownership of apps that can collect data of US citizens. Since data is the new oil, the crucial driver of big business, this is the beginning of a much wider form of protectionism and trade restrictions.

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite
by Duff McDonald
Published 24 Apr 2017

Two talented editors, Alan Webber and Bill Taylor, decided it was time to move on and left to found Fast Company magazine, one of the most successful business magazine launches in history. The most “influential” article published under Kanter: Michael Hammer’s July–August 1990 piece, “Re-engineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate.” While the concept made sense—“the fundamental rethinking and radical design of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical measures of performance”—it also heralded “a return to the mechanistic ideas of Frederick Winslow Taylor.”11 Or worse: The stamp of approval bestowed by HBR facilitated the hijacking of the term as a “shallow intellectual justification”12 for widespread downsizing in the early 1990s.

…

Report of the President of Harvard College and reports of departments, p. 504. 5“New Dean, New Era for Harvard B-school,” BusinessWeek, January 24, 1970, p. 59. 6http://www.harbus.org/2005/kenneth-r-andrews-hbs-3270/. 7David W. Ewing, Inside the Harvard Business School (New York: Crown, 1990), p. 213. 8http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6054.html. 9John McArthur, letter to the president of Harvard, 1985–86, p. 313. 10Ewing, Inside the Harvard Business School, p. 216. 11“Business Process Re-Engineering,” Economist, February 16, 2009, http://www.economist.com/node/13130298. 12Ibid. 13http://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/21/business/the-media-business-harvard-business-review-cancels-an-article-on-ibm.html. 14D. C. Denison, “Untarnished Reputation,” Boston Globe, March 19, 2002. 15Paul Hemp, “Harvard Confirms Harris Out as Editor of Harvard Business Review,” Boston Globe, January 9, 1993. 16Diane E.

Culture works: the political economy of culture
by Richard Maxwell
Published 15 Jan 2001

In sum, the very nature of modern advertising suggests that it will always have problems convincing the public of its inherent worth. Advertising and the Consumer By World War I, national manufacturers had become increasingly dependent on advertising to secure “brand loyalty” in order to sell their products. This elevated advertising’s role within the larger business process and several advertising interest organizations began to appear. The Associated Advertising Clubs of the World (AACW), with local advertising clubs as its members, was formed in 1914. The American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA or 4As), a group consisting of large advertising agencies closely connected with national advertising, followed suit in 1917.

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die
by Eric Siegel
Published 19 Feb 2013

They all seem to sell pretty much the same thing and act in pretty much the same ways. To stand above the crowd, where can a company turn? As Thomas Davenport and Jeanne Harris put it in Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, “At a time when companies in many industries offer similar products and use comparable technology, high-performance business processes are among the last remaining points of differentiation.” Enter predictive analytics. Survey results have in fact shown that “a tougher competitive environment” is by far the strongest reason why organizations adopt this technology. But while the launch of PA brings real change, so too can it wreak havoc by introducing new risk.

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane
by Brett King
Published 5 May 2016

If anything, the atomic age was about thinking big, and capitalising on the rapid technological growth and improvements that came about because of World War II. In the digital or information age, there was an initial push towards process efficiency, such as the early mainframes (like ERMA5), and further automation in the factory and production space. In the 1990s, this extended to business processes and operations being automated at an enterprise level with enterprise-wide software solutions like SAP. However, the Internet went further and disrupted distribution mechanics such as we saw in the book and music industries. The Augmented Age will bring about a huge rethink of processes involving dynamic decision-making, pattern recognition and advisory services as machine intelligence optimises those processes and feedback loops.

Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins
by Garry Kasparov
Published 1 May 2017

Invitations to lecture about the importance of superior process in human-machine collaboration came in from Google and other Silicon Valley companies as well as investment firms and business software companies who told me that they had been trying to make this case to potential customers for years. Alan Trefler, the founder and CEO of Pegasystems in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a serious chess player and chess programmer in his youth. Pega makes business process management software and Trefler was quite excited about my article. “That’s exactly what we do, I’ve just never been able to explain it that well!” It’s a little amusing to see versions of it referred to now as “Kasparov’s law,” although I guess we don’t usually get to decide such things for ourselves.

Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners
by Michael Erard
Published 10 Jan 2012

Because Indian languages don’t have the z, the word is pronounced “soo” (in the south) or “joo” (in the north). This sort of native inflection can keep people from getting jobs in the booming call-center industry in Hyderabad and Bangalore, two huge, bustling cities that are home to high-tech companies and the “business process outsourcing” industry. Eapen’s school was one of dozens teaching the “soft skills”: team building, negotiation, and English pronunciation. Students were paying him 6,000 rupees (about $126 US) to help them neutralize their accents in English; he himself has a crisp British accent, which he honed working in Kuwait and Dubai.

The Paypal Wars: Battles With Ebay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth
by Eric M. Jackson
Published 15 Jan 2004

Our users embraced verification and helped market it for us, often coming up with their own phrases like “I’m PayPal verified, so bid with confidence!” to include in their listings. It was a display that likely caused concern for our friends at the auction behemoth—our customers had begun using PayPal for a purpose other than transmitting payments. PayPal had started to play an ever-increasing role in our sellers’ business processes and even their online identities. The growing bond between PayPal and its users was strengthening by the day. In the course of just two months, the product team unleashed a flurry of new features to collect transaction fees while driving down the cost of funds entering the system. While the job was not finished by any stretch, X.com’s business model had undergone a substantial realignment and the producers had made progress on implementing the new strategy.

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work
by Iain Gately
Published 6 Nov 2014

Advocates of virtual commuting overlooked the impact of globalization on their dream, and its unintended consequence of outsourcing, in the sense of sending jobs overseas. Employers in both the EU and the USA, obedient to the letter if not the spirit of pro-telework legislation, decarbonized (and gave their ex-workers more social time) by Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), i.e. relocating their call centres and sundry other corporate functions to Asia. In consequence, a Westerner looking to telecommute in their own country would be best advised to emigrate to India, Mexico, Bangladesh or some other developing nation, where literacy is high and talk is cheap.

Conscious Capitalism, With a New Preface by the Authors: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business
by John Mackey , Rajendra Sisodia and Bill George
Published 7 Jan 2014

A Journey Worth Taking Building a conscious business is a challenging but wonderfully rewarding and meaningful undertaking, whether such a business is created from scratch or is the outcome of a transformation. We recognize that many leaders have become weary of change. It seems there is a new set of buzzwords to deal with every few years—from total quality management to the reengineering of business processes to Six Sigma and numerous others. But Conscious Capitalism is no flavor-of-the-month fad. The ideas we have articulated result in a more robust business model than the profit-maximization model it competes against, because they acknowledge and tap into more powerful motivations than self-interest alone.

SQL Hacks
by Andrew Cumming and Gordon Russell
Published 28 Nov 2006

If you can't hide them, at least let your users have some control over them. 7.9.4. Choosing a Primary Key Generating an artificial sequence should be your last resort; if there is a combination of columns that you know will be unique you should make up a composite key on those. In the case of an invoice, the number is probably useful to the business process, but even then you should think carefully. If your organization has more than one location you should not attempt to use a single sequence across the enterprise. There is no safe way for the Metropolis office to share the same sequence as the Smallville office. One day you will find that the Smallville folks have lost electrical power and that will prevent the Metropolis office from raising an invoice.

High-Frequency Trading: A Practical Guide to Algorithmic Strategies and Trading Systems
by Irene Aldridge
Published 1 Dec 2009

For example, the addition of new trading strategies into the trading portfolio should undergo rigid product review processes that analyze the return and risk profiles and other profitability and risk factors of proposed capital allocations, as described in Chapter 5. In addition to detailed process Risk Management 271 guidelines, operational risk can be hedged with insurance contracts offered by specialty insurance firms and by entirely outsourcing noncritical business processes to third-party vendors. Legal risk is most effectively managed via the causal analysis used for its measurement. The key risk indicators are continuously monitored, and the effect of their changes is assessed according to the causal framework developed in the estimation of legal risk. CONCLUSION This chapter has examined the best practices in risk management followed by successful high-frequency operations.

Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 28 Jan 2020

In intellectual property regimes, details like the length of the patent and the standards that have to be satisfied to get a patent really matter. Corporations, as we have noted, have every incentive to try to make protection as strong as possible—with wider patents and longer terms, and for a wider range of areas, such as business process innovations. The extremes in America are almost comical, as was the case of Amazon’s patent, since expired, of the “one-click ordering process.”8 But here, as elsewhere, European corporate giants would not hesitate to imitate the United States. 4. Intellectual property rights are a social construction, designed to promote societal well-being, and are a means to an end, not an end in themselves.

Risk: A User's Guide
by Stanley McChrystal and Anna Butrico
Published 4 Oct 2021

Workforce: The availability and cost of talent, to include required training, labor relations, and other considerations. FlyVA considers employment costs (primarily wages and health care), training, availability of needed talent (primarily pilots and skilled mechanics). Internal Management: The airline’s ability and processes to operate itself. While FlyVA has a set of established business processes, it reviews the viability of those processes to identify any that must be significantly overhauled, and whether the airline has the experienced talent in place to execute them. Because IT is so integral to almost every process in the airline, FlyVA specifically reviews the strength of its systems to execute existing and projected processes.

Bean Counters: The Triumph of the Accountants and How They Broke Capitalism
by Richard Brooks
Published 23 Apr 2018

The pitch persuaded his bosses to invest in a new administrative services division through which to sell the technology, with Glickauf in charge. His breakthrough wasn’t long in coming. When General Electric sought his advice at a new plant in Kentucky, Glickauf adapted the UNIVAC to its particular needs, taking the company’s business processes such as running the payroll to new levels of efficiency.13 Spacek saw the future of consulting. It clearly lay in selling expensive systems to the firm’s own audit clients. Even some Andersen partners were wary, given the obvious conflicts of interest. But Spacek was untroubled. As long as the firm simply advised the client and didn’t make decisions on its behalf, any conflict was negligible.

The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets
by Thomas Philippon
Published 29 Oct 2019

Research and development, patents, mineral exploration, and artistic IP—all falling under the rubric of innovative property—may be captured, but some design and other product development costs may escape official notice. And such economic competencies as employee training, market research, and business processes may not be captured by the data at all. The quality of our measure of intangible investment varies widely across categories. In the domain of economic competencies, for instance, we measure very little. It is easy to see why: these are mostly in-house efforts whose contributions to the creation of long-lived assets is ambiguous.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab
Published 7 Jan 2021

More specifically:32 The Principles of governance pillar includes metrics and disclosures on the company's stated purpose, board composition (relevant experience, gender, membership of underrepresented groups, stakeholder representation), stakeholder engagement (which topics that are material to stakeholders were identified? How were they discussed with stakeholders?), anti-corruption efforts, mechanisms to report on unethical and unlawful behavior, and risks and opportunities that affect the business processes; The Planet pillar includes metrics on climate change, such as all relevant greenhouse gas emissions (and plans to get them in line with Paris targets), land use and ecological sensitivity of business activities, and water use and withdrawal in water-stressed areas; The People pillar includes metrics on diversity and inclusion, pay equality (for each relevant group: women vs. men, minor vs. major ethnic groups, etc.), wage level (ratio of CEO compensation to median compensation, ratio of entry level wage to mandated minimum wage), and risk for incidents of child, forced of compulsory labor, health and safety (number of accidents, and explanation on how to avoid them), and training provided; and The Prosperity pillar includes metrics on employee turnover and hires, the economic contribution a company makes (positively, in form of wages of community investments, or negatively, in government aid received), financial investments and R&D expenditures, and total taxes paid (including corporate income taxes, VAT and sales taxes, property taxes, employer-paid payroll taxes, and others).

Nomad Capitalist: How to Reclaim Your Freedom With Offshore Bank Accounts, Dual Citizenship, Foreign Companies, and Overseas Investments
by Andrew Henderson
Published 8 Apr 2018

Anka told me that not only could she retrieve the documents, but that she could handle the residency process for me herself, and likely with far more competence than the lawyer who made a living shuffling paperwork. While attorneys are often a great source of contacts (and I have made a lot of money from connections made through good ones), I have also often found myself helping my non-western-world attorneys organize their business processes to complete my case. One of the biggest services I offer the people I help is making it easy for them to complete simple processes that local lawyers (and governments) make complicated for some reason. Over the years, I have developed great relationships with attorneys that started with me organizing their workflow in order to streamline the process for my clients and me.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab and Peter Vanham
Published 27 Jan 2021

More specifically:32 The Principles of governance pillar includes metrics and disclosures on the company's stated purpose, board composition (relevant experience, gender, membership of underrepresented groups, stakeholder representation), stakeholder engagement (which topics that are material to stakeholders were identified? How were they discussed with stakeholders?), anti-corruption efforts, mechanisms to report on unethical and unlawful behavior, and risks and opportunities that affect the business processes; The Planet pillar includes metrics on climate change, such as all relevant greenhouse gas emissions (and plans to get them in line with Paris targets), land use and ecological sensitivity of business activities, and water use and withdrawal in water-stressed areas; The People pillar includes metrics on diversity and inclusion, pay equality (for each relevant group: women vs. men, minor vs. major ethnic groups, etc.), wage level (ratio of CEO compensation to median compensation, ratio of entry level wage to mandated minimum wage), and risk for incidents of child, forced of compulsory labor, health and safety (number of accidents, and explanation on how to avoid them), and training provided; and The Prosperity pillar includes metrics on employee turnover and hires, the economic contribution a company makes (positively, in form of wages of community investments, or negatively, in government aid received), financial investments and R&D expenditures, and total taxes paid (including corporate income taxes, VAT and sales taxes, property taxes, employer-paid payroll taxes, and others).

Into the Raging Sea
by Rachel Slade
Published 4 Apr 2018

And we also brought carryover employees who had great backgrounds and experience from the TOTEm and Sea Star organizations as they assimilated into TOTE Services. “In July 2014, we stood up our new headquarters here in Jacksonville in what I thought was a well-planned-out, seamless transition in a purpose-filled space that fit my philosophy of transparency, communication, and teamwork. And then, from that point [we] have continued to emphasize business processes, continuous improvement in all that we do, which by the way is a cornerstone of the ISM system. And we are now well established and very pleased to be here in Jacksonville. Great city and great people.” Tom Roth-Roffy wasn’t sure what to do with all that corporate-speak, so he continued to pursue hard facts.

Backup & Recovery
by W. Curtis Preston
Published 9 Feb 2009

For some systems, however, you may find that a longer RPO and RTO is acceptable or unavoidable for major disasters. Create Consistency Groups It is often necessary to recover several systems to the same point in time. This is primarily caused by applications that pass data to one another. Consider a manufacturing company with the business processes of sales and custom manufacturing. There are possibly several different computer systems involved in this process, including the customer, orders, procurement, and manufacturing databases. If this business has a customer expecting a product, hopefully all four systems know that. What would happen, for example, if it was manufacturing a custom product and lost the original order, or it had the order, but didn’t know which customer it went to?

…

What would happen, for example, if it was manufacturing a custom product and lost the original order, or it had the order, but didn’t know which customer it went to? What would happen if it took the order, but the manufacturing database became corrupted, and the company did not know it was supposed to be making a product? This would represent a serious integrity problem. Therefore, if your company has several systems that perform related business processes, those systems need to be in the same consistency group. In addition to determining an RTO and RPO, you must identify those systems that are related to each other because they need to be recovered to the same point in time. It is also important to identify a consistency window, or a window of time during which not all affected systems are changing.

The Irrational Bundle
by Dan Ariely
Published 3 Apr 2013

This type of transparency is a sort of commitment device that companies can use to force themselves to behave in a trustworthy way, even when they are tempted to do otherwise. And since in such a publicly exposed world it is harder to get away with flagrant mis- behavior anyway, why not embrace more positive and trustworthy types of business processes? Some special companies see trust as a public good (like clean air and water), and customers return the trust. One company in which I personally have a lot of faith is Timberland, the maker of outdoor clothing. I once attended a talk by Jeff Swartz, the CEO, in which he detailed many of the ways that Timberland is trying to reduce CO2 emissions, recycle, use sustainable materials, and treat its employees fairly.

…

To me, this humorous commercial demonstrated a crucial question of how people relate to their own and others’ ideas: how important is it for us to come up with an idea, or at least to feel that it is ours, in order to value it? The attraction to one’s own ideas has not escaped the collective folk wisdom of the business world, and, like other important business processes, this one also has an unofficial term attached to it: the “Not-Invented-Here” (NIH) bias. The principle is basically this: “If I (or we) didn’t invent it, then it’s not worth much.” Any Solution, as Long as It’s Mine With our understanding of human attachment to self-made physical goods (see the previous chapter on the IKEA effect), Stephen Spiller (a doctoral student at Duke University), Racheli Barkan, and I decided to examine the process by which we become attached to ideas.

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence
by George Zarkadakis
Published 7 Mar 2016

President Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ initiative9 used complex operational research algorithms run on fast supercomputers to guide counter-attack weapons so effectively that the Soviet Union was rendered a military lame duck. The investment and interest in developing computing technologies in the West was not driven by the profound military applications of computing alone. The industry quickly realised the huge potential of this new technology in increasing productivity and automating business processes. The 1960s saw the development of business-specific computer languages (such as COBOL)10 that were applied in solving problems in finance and manufacturing. Hardware also developed in leaps and bounds, and by the early 1980s most businesses in the developed world used computers in various degrees.

The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise
by Nathan L. Ensmenger
Published 31 Jul 2010

The focus of electronic computing shifted from scientific and military agendas (which emphasized mathematics and highly optimized code) to electronic data processing (EDP) and information management (in which more commercial considerations of cost, reliability, generality, and the availability of peripherals dominated). As general-purpose electronic computers became less expensive, more reliable, and better integrated into existing business processes and information technology systems, they were adopted by a larger and more diverse range of companies. Most of these companies did not possess large engineering or even data processing departments, making the availability of high-quality applications programs and systems tools even more essential (and conversely, their deficiencies even more noticeable).

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto
by Stewart Brand
Published 15 Mar 2009

Day laborers, for instance, no longer hang around a street corner waiting to be picked for work. Instead, job offers arrive by SMS from a computerized clearing house. The International Telecommunications Union estimates that in the poorest countries each additional cellphone installed adds $3,000 to the GDP, primarily due to the increased efficiency of business processes. The great monetizer is prepaid SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) cards—a business worth $3 billion across Africa in 2007, run by local entrepreneurs. SIM cards are sold at vegetable stands and the like, along with “scratch cards” that reload the SIM with additional minutes. Some people carry just a card and borrow a phone when needed.

The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World
by Steven Radelet
Published 10 Nov 2015

Across all developing countries, output in services has been increasing by more than 5 percent per year since 1995, so that the total value of services (in real terms after accounting for inflation) has increased 150 percent. In some countries, there is a particularly important shift toward more modern services such as software development, technical services (engineering and architecture), outsourced business processes (from insurance claims to transcribing medical records), and call centers, all of which create jobs and increase skills over time. Advances in technology and much deeper global connectivity have allowed developing countries to provide services to other countries as never before: developing countries accounted for 14 percent of global service exports in 1990; two decades later, the share had jumped to 21 percent.

Saturn's Children
by Charles Stross
Published 30 Jun 2008

And the willingness to own and use such a vile device is the defining characteristic of members of the aristo class. As our Creators dwindled, they came to rely on their servants to keep more and more of the machinery of civilization running. Secretaries were granted limited power of attorney; companies relied on their business processes being executed mechanically. Some of those servants established shell companies, bought their own bodies out, and acquired legal personhood—as long as the forms of corporate identity were obeyed. And some of the less scrupulous independent persons began buying other bodies. Override controllers are readily available, and the embryonic aristos had no compunction about taking over indigents, unfortunates, and anyone they could buy.

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution
by Pieter Hintjens
Published 11 Mar 2013

Some musician friends, invariably poor like every musician I ever met, explained that they had to pay collection society fees when they played a concert of their own original music. They could otherwise have stayed off the radar, signed no contracts, sold no CDs in the high street shops, played no concerts in the big venues. The music industry made, and still largely makes, its profits by controlling the whole business process from raw artist to final user experience, allowing no real competition at any point along this chain. They gouge the artists so badly you would think by now no artist would even talk to them. Yet, there are always more young eager faces waiting in line. Artists seem to scramble over each other to be exploited.

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be
by Moises Naim
Published 5 Mar 2013

It breeds skepticism and mistrust of any authority, and an unwillingness to take any distribution of power for granted. One of the best examples of all three revolutions simultaneously at work is the Indian outsourcing industry. Young, educated Indians who belong to the country’s burgeoning middle class have flocked to work at urban call centers and other business process outsourcing (BPO) companies, which in 2011 generated $59 billion in revenue and directly and indirectly employed almost 10 million Indians.39 As Shehzad Nadeem observed in Dead Ringers, his study of the impact of Indian call centers on their workers, “The identities and aspirations of the ICT [information and communications technology] workforce are defined increasingly with reference to the West. . . .

Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles
by Ruchir Sharma
Published 8 Apr 2012

That’s a very high urbanization rate for a nation with an average income of only $2,500, and because the concentration of people and business drives growth, it’s a big economic plus. The Philippines also has some basic advantages over Indonesia—including a well-educated English-speaking population. For three decades it squandered those advantages, but there are signs of a turnaround, the most dramatic being the rise of the Philippines as a rival to India in “business process outsourcing”—the industry that provides the operators who answer calls for customer service at almost any major global company. Call centers did not exist in the Philippines a decade ago, and now it’s a $9 billion industry employing 350,000 people. These centers are starting to open outside metro Manila and pop up all over the islands of the Philippines, to the point that some analysts think it may turn into another successful case of Southeast Asian archipelago capitalism.

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory
by Kariappa Bheemaiah
Published 26 Feb 2017

Currently when making a transfer, apart from the sender’s and receiver’s banks, the flow of money includes the involvement of non-bank companies (such as Western Union), the correspondent bank which deals with foreign exchange, the clearing networks (such as SWIFT and ACH 21), and regulators from central banks and financial authorities that monitor KYC and AML standards. As there are many separate players involved, the information about the sender needs to be verified by each participant, which results in repetitive business processes, accumulated costs, delays, errors, and multiple operations. However, as we have seen in Sidebars 2-2 and 2-3, this system is currently in a state of flux. Companies like M-Pesa are allowing the unbanked to send and receive payments without depending on the traditional players, and companies like Transferwise 22 are reducing the FOREX risk that is involved in cross-border transactions.

Docker: Up & Running: Shipping Reliable Containers in Production
by Sean P. Kane and Karl Matthias
Published 15 Mar 2018

Adding virtualization, automated testing, deployment tools, or configuration management suites to the environment often just changes the nature of the problem without delivering a resolution. It would be easy to dismiss Docker as just another tool making unfulfillable promises about fixing your business processes, but that would be selling it short. Docker’s power in the way that its natural workflow allows applications to travel through their whole lifecycle, from conception to retirement, within one ecosystem. Unlike other tools that often target only a single aspect of the DevOps pipeline, Docker signifi‐ cantly improves almost every step of the process.

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy
by Christopher Mims
Published 13 Sep 2021

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear the whole enterprise epitomized a stock market bubble so inflated, an era of optimism so wild-eyed, it was as if investors, especially the ones who were supposed to know better, had truly lost their minds. Webvan, slightly more sane than Kozmo and therefore only a tenth as famous, just delivered groceries, and only in a limited area. In 1999, at the absolute height of the dot-com madness, Mick was hired onto the “business process team” at Webvan. “They’d already opened their first warehouse in Oakland in the summer of ’99,” he recalls, “and we were asked to look at next-generation processes to scale this thing to profitability.” Like its competitor Kozmo, Webvan was losing money on every order. The real black holes for cash were fulfillment—getting the orders out of the warehouse—and delivery.

In the City of Bikes: The Story of the Amsterdam Cyclist
by Pete Jordan
Published 20 Aug 2012

So the following day, 100 policemen worked the same areas. Their take: 85 bikes. On Thursday and Friday, more house-to-house seizures in parts of Amsterdam-South, Watergraafsmeer and the Overtoom area netted decreasing returns.* One of Mayor Voûte’s excuses for the campaign’s poor results was that about 80 police officers were too busy processing the flood of applications for exemptions from bike requisitioning. On Friday morning, an eyewitness reported seeing a thousand such applicants lined up outside city hall. That week alone, about 10,000 applications would be approved, while only around 50 were rejected. Almost immediately after the first exemption permits had been issued, Resistance counterfeiters in Amsterdam began creating falsified permits for its members.

Philanthrocapitalism
by Matthew Bishop , Michael Green and Bill Clinton
Published 29 Sep 2008

Will they have the humility to listen to others who have been grappling with these problems for far longer? Will they be willing to learn from their mistakes? Will they stick at it when the going gets tough? A FEW MILES from the proliferating skyscrapers of Bangalore, the center of India’s booming high-tech business-process outsourcing industry, is a camp of metal huts housing the families of laborers who have come from far-off villages to work on the city’s many construction sites. A bright yellow bus stops in the dirt square, and immediately it is surrounded by about thirty children, aged four to ten. Once on board, they sit—three per screen—by computers where specially developed software teaches them language and mathematical skills.

The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime
by Mj Demarco
Published 8 Nov 2010

Remember, the rich are a minority, and you want to be in that minority. It starts with a producer mindset. Producer Reorientation When you encounter an advertising message that coaxes you to buy something, examine it from the producer perspective. How does this company make money? What is the aim of its message? What kind of business processes are involved in offering this product or service? Is this company making a profit? What is the revenue model? Is this product manufactured overseas or locally? I've never bought a product on late night television, because I'm on the same team. As a producer, I see the infomercials for what they are: producers (the minority) serving the consumer (the majority).

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians
by Joe Quirk and Patri Friedman
Published 21 Mar 2017

I could have been born in India, which would have been great in its own way, but instead I’m a first-generation US citizen, part of an Indian diaspora which has the luxury of solid infrastructure and flexible opportunities. Why is health care access based on your political institution? Medicine has become a global business, yet health care access is a local privilege.” After BrainReactions, Nishant joined Deloitte Management Consulting, where he helped consumer goods and manufacturing companies improve their business processes and sales output. Eventually he said, “Who cares? Why am I helping major corporations sell and produce more? Isn’t this the problem with our civilization—in the West? I applied to graduate school to explore the economics of our human growth, and luckily enough got into the London School of Economics to get a master’s in Sociology of Science and Medicine.”

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything
by Matthew Ball
Published 18 Jul 2022

Industry In Chapter 4, I highlighted how and why the Metaverse would start with consumer leisure and then move into industry and enterprise, rather than the reverse, as happened with prior computing and networking waves. The expansion into industry will be slow. The technical requirements for simulation fidelity and flexibility are much higher than in games or film, while success ultimately depends on reeducating employees who have been trained around now-legacy software solutions and business processes. And to start, most “Metaverse investments” will be premised upon hypotheses, rather than best practices—meaning investments will be constrained and the profits often disappointing. But eventually, and with the current internet, much of the Metaverse and its revenues will exist and occur out of sight from the average consumer.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Mustafa Suleyman
Published 4 Sep 2023

Working on a zero-hours contract in a distribution center doesn’t provide the sense of pride or social solidarity that came from working for a booming Detroit auto manufacturer in the 1960s. The Private Sector Job Quality Index, a measure of how many jobs provide above-average income, has plunged since 1990; it suggests that well-paying jobs as a proportion of the total have already started to fall. Countries like India and the Philippines have seen a huge boom from business process outsourcing, creating comparatively high-paying jobs in places like call centers. It’s precisely this kind of work that will be targeted by automation. New jobs might be created in the long term, but for millions they won’t come quick enough or in the right places. At the same time, a jobs recession will crater tax receipts, damaging public services and calling into question welfare programs just as they are most needed.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life
by Adam Greenfield
Published 29 May 2017

As far as industry is concerned, though—and in this instance it really is their perspective that weighs heaviest and counts most—automation also means far less elaborate technologies, like the touchscreen ordering kiosks McDonald’s began introducing into its locations in the fall of 2014. In fact, automation means anything that reduces the need for human workers, whether it’s a picking-and-packing robot, a wearable biometric monitor, a mobile-phone app or the redesign of a business process. Like McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook, some executives insist that bringing service-sector automation on line won’t eliminate jobs, but merely allow them to deploy their employees in more “value-added” roles.26 Former McDonald’s head of US operations Ed Rensi argues just the opposite; as part of a campaign against efforts to increase the US minimum wage to $15 an hour, he noted that “it’s cheaper to buy a $35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who’s inefficient, making $15 an hour bagging french fries.”27 Whichever of these two perspectives does prevail—and the pitiless logic of shareholder value strongly bolsters Rensi’s position—it is clear that whatever human participants do remain in the waged labor force are in for a particularly rough ride in the years to come.

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet
by Jeffrey Sachs
Published 1 Jan 2008

With sufficient growth in exports and domestic saving, the commercial economy becomes an emerging-market economy, characterized by the nearly complete coverage of basic infrastructure (roads, power, telecoms, ports), basic education (universal literacy and primary education), basic health services, safe drinking water, and sanitation. The economy by now is an exporter of both manufactures and services. Manufacturing exports include industrial products (automobile components, semiconductor products, consumer appliances), information-based services (business process operations, software, business consulting), and perhaps construction services as well. Foreign investment plays a growing role in economic development. Foreign investors bring not only capital but also know-how, technology, and linkages to global production and distribution systems. Major government responsibilities include the extension of secondary education and vocational training, improvements in port services (for example, paperless customs clearance, efficient containerization), the promotion of the financial sector (for example, through a sound regulatory system), and various environmental investments to stop or reverse environmental losses that accompanied the early stages of economic development.

The Tangled Web: A Guide to Securing Modern Web Applications
by Michal Zalewski
Published 26 Nov 2011

But in practice, models built on these foundations are bound to be nearly useless for generalized, real-world software engineering for at least three reasons: There is no way to define desirable behavior for a sufficiently complex computer system. No single authority can define what the “intended manner” or “secure states” should be for an operating system or a web browser. The interests of users, system owners, data providers, business process owners, and software and hardware vendors tend to differ significantly and shift rapidly—when the stakeholders are capable and willing to clearly and honestly disclose their interests to begin with. To add insult to injury, sociology and game theory suggest that computing a simple sum of these particular interests may not actually result in a beneficial outcome.

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution
by Charles R. Morris
Published 1 Jan 2012

al Prompting the reasonable complaint from a competitor, “I should not think of gitting a patent for . . . applying a trip to welding a gun barel any moure than plating a scythe or a hoe it seems to me that a strange fanatism has operated on sum peope for gitting patents for some simple things.” The complaint anticipates today’s controversies over software “business process” patents. The trip-hammer had been around a long time, so Waters appears to have patented the application to barrel welding, rather than the tool. am The frame arrangement described here was used for gun stocks. The original patent application shows a shoe last, a more compact shape, and is arranged differently.

Asset and Risk Management: Risk Oriented Finance
by Louis Esch , Robert Kieffer and Thierry Lopez
Published 28 Nov 2005

The controlling aspect of a risk management function is difficult to define, as one is very often limited to certain back-office control checks and there is also a tendency to confuse the type of tasks assigned to internal audit with those proper to risk management. 22 Asset and Risk Management Insu ranc e Property, Causality, liability Risk management Multi-line Multi-risk Insurance products Financia l Capital markets / Treasury risk Market risk, Liquidity risk Analytics & modelling Strategic Operatio Credit analytics Strategic risk nal Engineering COSO operations compliance Quality Control Selfassessment Strategic, business, process & cultural Risk management Integrated risk management COSO financial ess Proc Financial internal control Figure 2.6 Integrated Risk Management Source: Deloitte & Touche 2.2.1.2 Back office vs. risk management With regard to the back office vs. risk management debate, it is well worth remembering that depending on the views of the regulator, the back office generally deals with the administration of operations and as such must, like every other function in the institution, carry out a number of control checks.

The Invisible Hands: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Bubbles, Crashes, and Real Money
by Steven Drobny
Published 18 Mar 2010

This makes modeling the macro “algorithm” more challenging. However, we adhere to a very strict and logical process of modeling commodity market variables and the dynamics of equity supply chains. So the heavy modeling process really gets underway once the primary macro themes are determined. It is more a business process with a specific investment discipline and framework for assessing the fundamentals that drive our markets. Where many people think commodities have discrete supply and demand components, we have always tried to look at supply in the context of demand. The real goal is to figure out when a market will break out of the range of a balanced convenience yield for a given product, where a “convenience yield” is the benefit or detriment that accrues to the holder of a physical commodity as a function of relative inventory levels (see box on page 239).

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World
by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott
Published 9 May 2016

,” August 24, 2015; https://en.rsf.org/russia-has-russia-gone-so-far-as-to-block-24-08-2015,48253.html, accessed September 25, 2015. 37. Scott Neuman, “China Arrests Nearly 200 over ‘Online Rumors,’” August 30, 2015; www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/08/30/436097645/china-arrests-nearly-200-over-online-rumors. 38. GetGems.org, September 2, 2015; http://getgems.org/. 39. “Factom: Business Processes Secured by Immutable Audit Trails on the Blockchain,” www.factom.org/faq. 40. Interview with Stephen Pair, June 11, 2015. 41. Miguel Freitas, About Twister. http://twister.net.co/?page_id=25. 42. Mark Henricks, “The Billionaire Dropout Club,” CBS MarketWatch, CBS Interactive Inc., January 24, 2011, updated January 26, 2011; www.cbsnews.com/news/the-billionaire-dropout-club/, accessed September 20, 2015. 43.

From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry
by Martin Campbell-Kelly
Published 15 Jan 2003

Indeed, it was estimated that the leading ERP package, SAP’s R/3, cost 5–10 times as much to install as the software itself. In the 1990s, the installation of ERP software became a huge new business for computer services and consulting firms, and they and the producers of ERP software grew symbiotically. The 1993–94 vogue for business process re-engineering encouraged firms to sweep away years of evolutionary growth in their software systems and replace them in one fell swoop. It happened that ERP software offered a better solution for wholesale re-implementation of a corporate software system than the less-well-integrated products of firms such as Dun & Bradstreet.

A History of Future Cities
by Daniel Brook
Published 18 Feb 2013

Hindu-Muslim tension had long plagued India, but in the new world of Bombay, as the English-speaking globalized elite pulled away, enjoying Western consumer goods like computers that cost more than they paid their maids and drivers in a year, the tensions became especially acute. Frustrations simmered in the chawls where lifelong jobs in the unionized mills and formerly state-owned enterprises were disappearing. Laid-off industrial workers invariably lacked the English skills needed for the new business process outsourcing jobs that soon multiplied as Western multinationals sent back-office work to the cheapest English-speaking workforce on earth. Once organized as industrial workers into unions affiliated with various left-wing political parties, working-class Bombayites were now organized along ethnic and religious lines into criminal gangs and political parties that often crossed the line into being hate groups.

Inventors at Work: The Minds and Motivation Behind Modern Inventions
by Brett Stern
Published 14 Oct 2012

This allows us to mix it up across all four disciplines very quickly to come up with what we feel are the right solutions for the company. Now in the context of that, Graham take it away from a customer research perspective. Marshall: From a customer research perspective, we want to innovate around our customers’ business processes rather than around our product or device. So, our innovations flow from doing a lot of observational research, informed by intuitive insight about what the customer really wants to be doing. Croley: And it is also important to know that when you ask customers what they want in a future device, what they say they need doesn’t necessarily jive with what you observe they need in the workplace.

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts
by Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind
Published 24 Aug 2015

Stepping forward instead are data scientists, process analysts, knowledge engineers, systems engineers, and many more (see Chapter 6). Today, professionals still provide much of the content, but in time they may find themselves down-staged by these new specialists. We also see a diverse set of institutions entering the fray—business process outsourcers, retail brands, Internet companies, major software and service vendors, to name a few. What these providers have in common is that they look nothing like twentieth-century doctors, accountants, architects, and the rest. More than this, human experts in the professions are no longer the only source of practical expertise.

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor
by William Easterly
Published 4 Mar 2014

University of California at Berkeley researcher Kentaro Toyama cites surveys that show when a village gets hooked up to the Internet on a PC, “the dominant use is by young men,” who are “playing games, watching movies, or consuming adult content.”3 On the other side of the ledger, India’s IT industry has captured 35 percent of the world market for business-process outsourcing while India ranks 114th in the world in average Internet connection speed.4 Wiring the world to end poverty overlooks how many less-faddish technologies are still lacking among the poor. The development audience gets excited about farmers in a remote but wired village finding out prices in real time for their crops.

The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought
by Ayn Rand , Leonard Peikoff and Peter Schwartz
Published 1 Jan 1989

This policy rests on the notion that the content of one’s consciousness need not be processed. It is only a newborn infant that could regard itself as the helplessly passive spectator of the chaotic sensations which are the content of its consciousness (but a newborn infant would not, because its consciousness is intensely busy processing its sensations). From the day of his birth, man’s development and growth to maturity consists in his mastery of the skill of processing his sensory-perceptual material, of organizing it into concepts, of integrating concepts, of identifying his feelings, of discovering their relation to the facts of reality.

If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy?
by Raj Raghunathan
Published 25 Apr 2016

This is because we know, from personal experience, that we are happier doing something meaningful than doing something meaningless. The findings on flow (discussed in chapter 2B), for example, are entirely consistent with the idea that being meaningfully busy makes us happy. Implications of the Need to Be Busy: Process (vs. Outcome) as a Source of Happiness The fact that we are happier when we are busy than when not, and the fact that we are even happier when doing something meaningful—rather than meaningless—has a very important implication. It suggests that we don’t need to depend on outcomes for happiness—we could derive all our happiness from the process of working toward outcomes.

Making Globalization Work
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 16 Sep 2006

When the 1952 law was passed, though, a congressional report said that “anything made by man under the sun” was patentable. Since then, there has been a vast expansion of what is patentable. In 1980, the Supreme Court, in Diamond v. Chakrabarty, ruled that genetically modified bacteria were patentable. Since then patents have been extended to business processes. 24.See James Meek, “The Race to Buy Life,” Guardian, November 15, 2000, available at www.guardian.co.uk/genes/article/0,2763,397827, 00.html; and the Center for the Study of Technology and Society, “Genome Patents,” at www.tec soc.org/biotech/focuspatents.htm. 25.The firm is based in Salt Lake City, Utah, and was co-founded by Walter Gilbert, who won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his contributions to the development of DNA-sequencing technology. 26.See Claude Henry, Patent Fever in Developed Countries and Its Fallout on the Developing World, Prisme N° 6 (Paris: Centre Cournot for Economic Studies, May 2005); and Andrew Pollack, “Patent on Test for Cancer Is Revoked by Europe,” New York Times, May 19, 2004, p.

How I Became a Quant: Insights From 25 of Wall Street's Elite
by Richard R. Lindsey and Barry Schachter
Published 30 Jun 2007

We became friends and he was eventually a big influence on my decision to pursue quantitative trading. Quant Research and the Mathematics of Portfolio Trading I want to start with some general comments about how I view research in financial mathematics. I believe that one incredibly important application of quantitative research is in improving business processes. Many business units in finance are governed by rules of thumb and best practices that have never been fully analyzed. I believe this was certainly the case in program trading. There are undoubtedly many more problems that are not yet seen as problems in this light. At the time I joined Morgan Stanley, it was not really a research problem to ask whether there is a mathematically optimal way to trade portfolios.

The Peripheral
by William Gibson
Published 23 Oct 2014

The regret of a man who knew both what he had lost and that he had well and truly lost it. “You misunderstand me,” he said. “But this isn’t the time. I’m sorry. Your sister . . .” “How can you expect me to believe you didn’t know?” “I’ve been on a media fast. Only recently learned that I’ve been fired, for that matter. Busy processing.” “Processing what?” “My feelings. With a therapist. In Putney.” “Feelings?” “Some horribly novel sort of regret,” he said. “May I see you?” “See me?” “Your face. Now.” Silence, but then she did open a feed, showing him her face. “Thank you,” he said. “You’re easily the most remarkable artist I’ve ever met, Daedra.”

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy
by Adam Tooze
Published 15 Nov 2021

In the UK, the crisis exposed the fact that 9 percent of children did not have a computer, laptop, or tablet at home.14 According to UNICEF, more than two-thirds of children worldwide were without access to home internet connections—830 million young people.15 In India, the IT and outsourcing industry struggled to adjust. Employees often lacked home internet connections, and tight security rules demanded by Western clients limited remote working. High-end software developers set up secure connections for their staff. The business process outsourcing (BPO) industry with its 1.3 million workers resorted to arguing that their operations belonged to the essential financial service industry and were thus exempt from the lockdown.16 Western clients, facing an avalanche of complaints about long wait times, were only too happy to endorse the claim.

Worn: A People's History of Clothing
by Sofi Thanhauser
Published 25 Jan 2022

Although it is nicknamed the Manchester of India, neither Coimbatore nor its surrounding countryside evoked the North of England. Orange-flowering Gulmohar trees lined the road, along with spiky trees in the juniper family, full of thorns that the local goats cleverly ate around. Farther back from the road, the landscape was lousy with engineering colleges. The prospect of jobs in local BPOs (Business Process Outsourcing firms) incited parents here to sell their possessions in order to send their children to engineering schools, Sivanpillai said. In fact, the engineering colleges had become such a boom industry, and so many had been built, that the colleges had to send recruiters to other states to find students to fill their nearly empty classrooms.

Python for Data Analysis: Data Wrangling with Pandas, NumPy, and IPython
by Wes McKinney
Published 25 Sep 2017

Python was a good candidate language for this, but at that time there was not an integrated set of data structures and tools providing this functionality. As a result of having been built initially to solve finance and business analytics problems, pandas features especially deep time series functionality and tools well suited for working with time-indexed data generated by business processes. For users of the R language for statistical computing, the DataFrame name will be familiar, as the object was named after the similar R data.frame object. Unlike Python, data frames are built into the R programming language and its standard library. As a result, many features found in pandas are typically either part of the R core implementation or provided by add-on packages.

Adam Smith: Father of Economics
by Jesse Norman
Published 30 Jun 2018

The introduction in recent years of feedback methods that allow buyers and sellers to evaluate each other, reducing informational gaps and improving incentives on both sides to perform well, has only added to the platforms’ extraordinary market power. And they have proven to be highly effective in identifying, and destroying or purchasing, potential competitors. In the words of the online investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, ‘Competition is for losers.’ These companies have grown through brilliant innovations in technology and business processes, which they have used to offer new services of immense value to individual and corporate consumers. The possibilities for future social benefit are far-reaching, from artificial intelligence to smart manufacturing to the deep integration of machines into human biology. Yet the possibilities for abuse are arguably no less great.

Open: The Story of Human Progress
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Sep 2020

And they could find customers that no plan would have taken into account. It could be the rich man who used it as a status symbol, the hobbyists and hackers who just wanted to tinker with it, the gamers and the businesses who suddenly found a use for it that the inventors had not thought of. IBM had not expected the large consumer demand for business processing services, but when they did, it changed its business model accordingly. When Windows didn’t take off, Microsoft planned to replace it with an operative system it had developed with IBM in the late 1980s, and Window’s support team was cut to virtually zero. No one was more surprised than Microsoft itself when Windows 3.0 sold two million copies in the first six months, and it quickly changed the whole company’s focus accordingly.

Docker: Up & Running: Shipping Reliable Containers in Production
by Sean Kane and Karl Matthias
Published 14 May 2023

Adding virtualization, automated testing, deployment tools, or configuration management suites to the environment often just changes the nature of the problem without delivering a resolution. It would be easy to dismiss Docker as just another tool making unfulfillable promises about fixing your business processes, but that would be selling it short. Docker’s power is in the way that its natural workflow allows applications to travel through their whole lifecycle, from conception to retirement, within one ecosystem. Unlike other tools that often target only a single aspect of the DevOps pipeline, Docker significantly improves almost every step of the process.

Handbook of Modeling High-Frequency Data in Finance
by Frederi G. Viens , Maria C. Mariani and Ionut Florescu
Published 20 Dec 2011

The German Society of Financial Analysts and partially Standard & Poor’s use a qualitative framework based on ‘‘best practices’’ and require a lengthy due diligence process for each company under study, while the Gompers approach is purely quantitative. In a different line of research, Kaplan and Norton (1992) introduced the BSC as a management system that helps organizations define their vision and strategy and translate them into specific actions. The BSC provides feedback on internal business processes, performance, and market conditions in order to review the strategy and future plans (Kaplan and Norton, 1993, 1996a,b,c). Large US companies, such as General Electric and Federal Express, and nonprofit and public organizations have implemented the BSC approach (Ampuero et al., 1998; Voelpel et al., 2006).

Multitool Linux: Practical Uses for Open Source Software
by Michael Schwarz , Jeremy Anderson and Peter Curtis
Published 7 May 2002

Then it constructs a conversation between two nonexistent Mac addresses, and then it sends out lots of packets. Then it pings every computer again. All of the computers that are in nonpromiscuous mode are ignoring all this bogus traffic—which means they respond just as quickly as they did the first time. The sniffing station, however, is busy processing all this bogus data, so its response will be slower than it was the first time. Antisniff is very effective, but it's not foolproof. There are sniffers that will evade it. Regardless of this, it's a useful tool. It is, however, a bit arcane. It's relatively self-explanatory to compile and run, and it has a handful of options.

The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid
by C. K. Prahalad
Published 15 Jan 2005

Initially, they accepted these initiatives because no one was displaced by the egovernance initiatives. No changes were made to the underlying processes. As might be expected, in the initial stages, the potential for “speed money” was not severely compromised. However, in the second phase of implementation this will start to change. The regulations and governmental business processes can be simplified. Interconnected systems will be able to identify pockets of graft and corruption. Records cannot be easily altered or lost. The change will not come easily. It is the support of the citizens and the pressure from them for change that can reduce the political price for moving forward with these initiatives.

Programming Android
by Zigurd Mednieks , Laird Dornin , G. Blake Meike and Masumi Nakamura
Published 15 Jul 2011

Mapping Google is most famous for its search engine, but not far behind that comes the acclaim of Google Maps. When creating Android, the folks at Google could easily see the potential in LBS and how well that fit with their mapping expertise. Most LBS applications end up displaying a map. Meanwhile, Google already had the technology to display and update interactive maps, and the business processes in place to allow others to use those maps and add features for their own websites. It still required a significant leap to make that mapping technology available to application developers for mobile phones, but Google has certainly answered the challenge in Android. The Google Maps Activity One of the applications that comes with Android is the Google Maps application itself.

Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World
by Bruce Schneier
Published 1 Jan 2000

Historically, computer security has three aspects: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Confidentiality is not much more than the privacy we talked about in Chapter 5. Computer security has to stop unauthorized users from reading sensitive information. This has changed somewhat with the advent of electronic commerce and business processes on the Net— integrity is much more important—but this bias remains in most computer-security products. The bulk of computer-security research has centered around confidentiality, primarily because the military funded much of the early research. In fact, I’ve seen confidentiality and security used as synonyms.

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 31 Mar 2014

Only 15 percent of corporate executives felt that the IoT would have only “a big impact for only a small number of global players.”25 Already, more that 75 percent of global companies are exploring or using the IoT in their businesses to some extent and two in five CEOs, CFOs, and other C-suite level respondents say they have “a formal meeting or conversation about the IoT at least once a month.”26 Equally interesting, 30 percent of the corporate leaders interviewed said that the IoT will “unlock new revenue opportunities for existing products/services.” Twenty-nine percent said the IoT “will inspire new working practices or business processes.” Twenty-three percent of those surveyed said the IoT “will change our existing business model or business strategy.” Finally, 23 percent of respondents said that the IoT “will spark a new wave of innovation.” Most telling, more than 60 percent of executives “agree that companies that are slow to integrate the IoT will fall behind the competition.”27 The central message in The Economist survey is that most corporate leaders are convinced that the potential productivity gains of using the Internet of Things across the value chain are so compelling and disruptive to the old ways of doing business that they have no choice but to try to get ahead of the game by embedding their business operations in the IoT platform.

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right
by Philippe Legrain
Published 22 Apr 2014

As in the case of education, it would be best if healthcare professionals went along with the necessary changes. But insofar as they are unwilling, their vested interests must not be allowed to hijack change. Healthcare should be driven by patients’ preferences, not doctors’ desires. Testing what works When companies operating in competitive markets innovate, their new products, technologies and business processes are subject to a market test: are they profitable or not? But in the case of public policies, that isn’t so. While voters can throw out the whole government, their views on individual policies are generally not decisive. Often, administrations tend to proceed on the basis of political prejudice (or lobbying) rather than informed decision-making.

The Fissured Workplace
by David Weil
Published 17 Feb 2014

By 2000 an estimated 45% of janitors worked under contracting arrangements, and more than 70% of guards were employed as contractors.43 Cutting Deeper As the pressure to focus continued, business units within many corporations sought further ways to shed activities and reduce costs while protecting the parts of the business central to profitability. Management scholars and consultants promoted the idea of streamlining business processes that had, over time, become encumbered, slow, and wasteful. Companies had allowed many operations to become flabby, in this view, and were weighed down by internal processes that were often redundant, inefficient, quality-plagued, and unproductive. To compete more effectively, companies needed to strip their business practices to the core, analyze what the critical features of them should be, and rebuild them accordingly.

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It
by Steven Brill
Published 28 May 2018

See also this December 2016 Congressional Research Service report on Department of Defense contracts: https://fas.org/​sgp/​crs/​natsec/​R44010.pdf. D-FARS is a tribute: Brill, “Donald Trump, Palantir, and the Crazy Battle to Clean Up a Multibillion-Dollar Military Procurement Swamp.” A study by a Defense Department: “Transforming DoD’s Core Business Processes for Revolutionary Change,” January 2015, http://www.dtic.mil/​dtic/​tr/​fulltext/​u2/​a618526.pdf. Defense Acquisition University: See the university’s website: https://www.dau.mil/. See also Brill, “Donald Trump, Palantir, and the Crazy Battle to Clean Up a Multibillion-Dollar Military Procurement Swamp.”

Capitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan
Published 15 Oct 2018

The sewing machine, which was invented in 1846 and produced in large numbers by the 1870s, increased productivity by more than 500 percent. New tabulating machines meant that the 1890 census was compiled in less than a year, compared with an estimated thirteen years for the 1880 census. Teleprinters, which appeared in 1910, displaced 80 to 90 percent of Morse code operators by 1929. Better business processes are as important as better machines. Mass production was arguably America’s greatest contribution to human productivity. In nineteenth-century Europe, the production of complicated systems such as guns or clocks remained in the hands of individual master craftsmen. In America, Eli Whitney and other innovators broke down the manufacture of the machine into the manufacture of uniform parts.

Mastering Blockchain, Second Edition
by Imran Bashir
Published 28 Mar 2018

This will provide an ability to allow "as a service" deployments of blockchain service. Currently, this project is in the incubation stage. The source code of Cello is available at https://github.com/hyperledger/cello. Composer This utility makes the development of blockchain solutions easier by allowing business processes to be described in a business language, while abstracting away the low-level smart contract development details. Hyperledger composer is available at https://hyperledger.github.io/composer/. Quilt This utility implements the Interledger protocol, which facilitates interoperability across different distributed and non-distributed ledger networks.

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future
by Mervyn King and John Kay
Published 5 Mar 2020

Since 1800, national income per head in the US has risen more than twenty-five-fold and in Britain almost twenty-fold, and life expectancy has doubled. 11 Economic and social life has been transformed. None of that would have been possible without the collective intelligence which has produced constant advances in technologies and business processes and extended the division of labour; none of it possible without better public and private health care and the social risk-sharing which helps people survive personal and natural catastrophes. Modern humans rely on social kinship networks to buffer many risks: serious illness, redundancy, relationship breakdown.

Snow Crash
by Neal Stephenson
Published 15 Jul 2003

As Hiro pulls it from her hand, the hypercard changes from a jittery two-dimensional figment into a realistic, cream-colored, finely textured piece of stationery. Printed across its face in glossy black ink is a pair of words BABEL INFOPOCALYPSE The world freezes and grows dim for a second. The Black Sun loses its smooth animation and begins to move in fuzzy stop-action. Clearly, his computer has just taken a major hit; all of its circuits are busy processing a huge bolus of data—the contents of the hypercard—and don't have time to redraw the image of The Black Sun in its full, breathtaking fidelity. "Holy shit!" he says, when The Black Sun pops back into full animation again. "What the hell is in this card? You must have half of the Library in here!"

Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process
by Kenneth S. Rubin
Published 19 Jul 2012

A test that defines the business value each product backlog item must deliver. It may verify functional requirements or nonfunctional requirements such as performance or reliability. It is used to help guide development (Crispin and Gregory 2009). 3. Formal testing with respect to user needs, requirements, and business processes conducted to determine whether or not a system satisfies the acceptance criteria and to enable the user, customers, or other authorized entity to determine whether or not to accept the system (IEEE 610). acceptance-test-driven development (ATTD). A technique in which the participants collaboratively discuss acceptance criteria, using examples, and then distill them into a set of concrete acceptance tests before development begins.

Pandora's Box: How Guts, Guile, and Greed Upended TV
by Peter Biskind
Published 6 Nov 2023

Then John put his hand over the receiver, looked at me and said, ‘We’re buying it,’ meaning my pitch. He knew what he wanted. He didn’t need a treatment. Who fucking does that?”24 Landgraf left NBC because, he says, “I was just very frustrated at that time with the state of broadcast television. I felt like the business process was conspiring to dull down the vision of the artist.” He arrived at FX in time for the second season of Nip/Tuck, the first season of Rescue Me, and Season 3 of The Shield. “I was really blown away by the uncompromising, aggressive originality of those shows,” he remembers. “They didn’t seem to care what you thought of them.

Who Stole the American Dream?
by Hedrick Smith
Published 10 Sep 2012

(Not Here),” HDNet, January 18, 2011, http://​www.​hd.​net/​programs/​danrather. 44 Accounting firm Deloitte “Deloitte to Treble Headcount in India,” Diligent Media Corp., November 28, 2009, http://​www.​dnaindia.​com. 45 American IT outsourcing firms Ron Hira, interview, January 7, 2011. 46 Even Perot Systems “Perot Systems, Founded by an Offshoring Foe, Increases Offshoring,” Computer World, February 12, 2009, http://​www.​computer​world.​com. 47 India has burst upon “The Other Elephant,” The Economist, November 4, 2010, http://​www.​economist.​com. 48 India has largely leapfrogged over manufacturing “Information Economy Report 2010,” United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, October 14, 2010, http://​unctad.​org, 49–40, figures III.4 and III.5. The report estimated global exports in IT services and business processing at $92 billion to $96 billion and India’s share at 35 percent, but it said these figures underestimate the overall global IT offshoring market. NASSCOM, India’s National Association of Software and Service Companies, put India’s exports in this field at $50 billion in the executive summary of its Strategic Review 2010, “Global Sourcing Trends,” http://​epi.​nasscom.​in/​upload/​SR10/​Executive​Summary.​pdf. 49 “The Indian firms had a disruptive business model” Hira, interview, January 7, 2011. 50 “Cross border job shifting” IBM Directors’ Presentations on Offshoring, internal IBM document, March 13, 2003. 51 “Hiring over There” “Cutting Here, Hiring over There,” The New York Times, June 24, 2005. 52 Job reductions would save IBM $1.8 billion “Amid Layoffs, IBM Scours the Globe for IT Talent,” CRN TechWeb, September 23, 2005, http://​www.​crn.​com. 53 The cuts were being rolled out in modest batches “IBM Quietly Cuts Thousands of Jobs,” CBS, January 27, 2009. 54 IBM had fired another five thousand employees Steve Lohr, “Piecemeal Layoffs Avoid Warning Laws,” The New York Times, March 6, 2009; Steve Lohr, “Tallying I.B.M.’s Layoff Numbers,” The New York Times, March 30, 2009; William Bulkeley, “IBM to Cut U.S.

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World
by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
Published 28 Sep 2010

Today, smart companies and organizations are taking initiatives to help their employees cope with the new technology-rich world. They give their employees training in time management and becoming values-based enterprises. They ensure that integrity is part of their corporate DNA. They design business models, structures, and business processes to ensure that work systems best serve the organization and maximize collaboration and the effectiveness of its people. But on the personal front, most of us muddle through this new networked and open world, stumbling from decision to decision or crisis to crisis without an overarching strategy.

America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System
by Steven Brill
Published 5 Jan 2015

According to the McKinsey report, it didn’t look like those working on his most important and complicated domestic policy initiative had gotten that memo. With less than six months to go before launch there was “indecision” about the system’s requirements, the McKinsey report said. In fact, the staff was “still engaged in program design,” which threatened “a materially high risk of system instability.” There was “no end to end business process view across” the many agencies involved outside CMS, such as the IRS and Homeland Security (which had to vet citizenship and legal immigration status), or even “fully within” CMS itself. “Fast, targeted, locked-down decisions” were needed “for [the] implementation effort,” but there was “no single, empowered decision making authority.”

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World
by Ruchir Sharma
Published 5 Jun 2016

The late CEO Lorenzo Zambrano brought his Stanford training to the task of turning Cemex into the world’s most advanced cement company, transforming its signature product into what he liked to call, in Silicon Valley argot, a tech-based “solution.” Cemex has nine research labs, focused on everything from improving its business processes to developing stronger ready-mix concrete. In Colombia, the company has convinced the government to buy more expensive new cement that lasts longer, which ends up saving the country money on repaving its mountainous road network. Mexico’s central government recognizes the potential of Monterrey’s entrepreneurial culture to transform an economy still dominated by state monopolies, and it has contributed to some $400 million in new investments that have poured into the city’s research facilities since 2009.

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech
by Jamie Susskind
Published 3 Sep 2018

The more productive and scarce it is, the greater the wealth it is likely to generate.8 In The Second Machine Age (2014) Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson suggest that in the future, production will depend less on physical assets and more on intangible ones like intellectual property, organizational capital (business processes, production techniques, and the like), and ‘user-generated content’ (YouTube videos, Facebook photos, and online ratings). They also emphasize the importance of so-called ‘human capital’.9 Elsewhere they suggest that ‘ideas’ will grow in economic importance, and the ‘creators, innovators, and entrepreneurs’, capable of generating ‘new ideas and innovations’ will reap ‘huge rewards’.10 I agree with McAfee and Brynjolfsson on the importance of intellectual property: patenting something lends it an artificial scarcity which, with a bit of luck, can send its value through the roof.

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind
by Raghuram Rajan
Published 26 Feb 2019

For example, every time Disney’s copyright on Mickey Mouse is scheduled to expire, a new act extends copyright protection.59 Perhaps the United States would benefit if companies could not “evergreen” their copyrights or their patents with minor improvements so easily. As Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles argue, the United States established a Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in 1982, which lowered the earlier standard for granting a patent.60 It also extended protection to software, business processes, and even the human genome. Since then, the number of patents issued has exploded. After moving up and down around a steady level in the two decades before 1983, patents have grown over fivefold since then, from 61,982 in 1983 to 175,919 in 1993 to 325,979 in 2015, even while productivity—the desired consequence of true innovation—has slowed.61 Yet another source of protection is non-compete agreements preventing employees from quitting a firm to work at a competitor’s, in part to prevent them for transferring secrets to rivals.

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?
by Brett Christophers
Published 17 Nov 2020

In what follows, I draw on three examples, all of which are large and well-known contractors, including – to use the classification I introduced above – one specialist and two generalists. The specialist is BAE Systems (see also Chapter 3), a defence, security and aerospace contractor, primarily for the public sector. The generalists are two companies we have previously encountered: Serco and Capita, the latter gloriously described by Joel Benjamin as ‘the Vampire Squid of business process outsourcing, its money grabbing tentacles extending through every layer of Government, from pensions to council finance, from parking and congestion charges to NHS GP primary care support, funeral services, and even the privatised food safety agency’.50 I have already identified some of Serco’s main contracts.

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated
by Gautam Baid
Published 1 Jun 2020

Switching Costs Switching costs come in many forms and may be explicit (in the form of money and time) or psychological (resulting from deep-rooted loss aversion or status quo bias). These costs tend to be associated with critical products (such as Oracle’s SAP software) that are so tightly integrated with the customer’s business processes that it would be too disruptive and costly to switch vendors, or with products that have high benefit-to-cost ratios (such as Moody’s). Network Effects The network effect advantage comes from providing a product or service that increases in value as the number of users expands, as with Airbnb, Visa, Uber, or the National Stock Exchange of India.

The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived: Tom Watson Jr. And the Epic Story of How IBM Created the Digital Age
by Ralph Watson McElvenny and Marc Wortman
Published 14 Oct 2023

IBM could rent these less powerful machines for lower rates and have the option to restore them to their previous capacity if the demand was there. The sales force had never tried to sell IBM machines to smaller firms. Suddenly, they had an entirely new set of customers that they could call upon and show how IBM tabulators could make their accounting and other business processes more efficient. And T.J. Watson, the master marketer, was right: midsize companies eagerly snapped up the lower-cost machines. T.J. was also eager to restart all those shuttered overseas IBM subsidiaries, to resurrect the IBM upon which the sun never set and the possibility of world peace through world trade in the devastated countries of Europe and Asia.

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig
Published 14 Jul 2019

The University of Chicago’s Center for Data Science for Social Good applies machine learning to problems in criminal justice, economic development, education, public health, energy, and environment. AI applications in crop management and food production help feed the world. Optimization of business processes using machine learning will make businesses more productive, increasing wealth and providing more employment. Automation can replace the tedious and dangerous tasks that many workers face, and free them to concentrate on more interesting aspects. People with disabilities will benefit from AI-based assistance in seeing, hearing, and mobility.

…

It is difficult to predict exact timelines for automation, but currently, and for the next few years, the emphasis is on automation of structured analytical tasks, such as reading x-ray images, customer relationship management (e.g., bots that automatically sort customer complaints and respond with suggested remedies), and business process automation that combines text documents and structured data to make business decisions and improve workflow. Over time, we will see more automation with physical robots, first in controlled warehouse environments, then in more uncertain environments, building to a significant portion of the marketplace by around 2030.

…

C., 358, 1089 Buolamwini, J., 1046, 1089 Burch, N., 48, 223, 224, 637, 1087, 1088, 1107, 1111 Burgard, W., 79, 667, 984, 985, 987, 1089, 1090, 1095, 1112, 1115 Burget, L., 929, 930, 1106 burglar alarm, 431–132 Burkov, A., 738, 1089 Burns, C., 473, 1107 Burns, E., 126, 1089 Buro, M., 205, 224, 1089 Burstein, J., 356, 1089 Burton, R., 550, 1089 Busbee, T. A., 1064, 1102 business process automation, 1050 Buss, D. M., 550, 1089 Butler, S., 51, 1061, 1089 Bylander, T., 402, 1089 Byrd, R. H., 735, 1089 C c (action cost), 83 C-space, 946 C-space obstacle, 947 C4 (Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus), 928, 930 C4.5 (decision tree learning algorithm), 733 Cabeza, R., 29, 1089 Cabral, J., 357, 1105 caching, 126, 259, 648 Cafarella, M.

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
by Steven Levy
Published 12 Apr 2011

Responding to the company’s ventures beyond search, outsiders had been charging that Google was out of control, tossing balls into the air like a drunken juggler. And that was before Google decided to remake the energy industry, the medical information infrastructure, the book world, radio, television, and telecommunications. She conceded that to an outsider, Google’s new-business process might indeed look strange. Google spun out projects like buckshot, blasting a spray and using tools and measurements to see what it hit. And sometimes it did try ideas that seemed ill suited or just plain odd. Finally she burst out with her version of the corporate Rosebud. “You can’t understand Google,” she said, “unless you know that both Larry and Sergey were Montessori kids.”

Pro AngularJS
by Adam Freeman
Published 25 Mar 2014

I don’t want to get into a long lecture about the design of web forms, but I do want to say that the best way of approaching this issue is to focus on what the user is trying to achieve. And when things go wrong, you should try to see the problem (and the required resolution) the way the user sees it. Your users don’t know about how you have built your systems, and they don’t care about your business processes; they just want to get something done. Everyone can be happy if you keep the focus on the task the user is trying to complete and strip everything else out of the process. Performing Basic Form Validation AngularJS provides basic form validation by honoring the standard HTML element attributes, such as type and required, and adding some directives.

Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems
by Betsy Beyer , Chris Jones , Jennifer Petoff and Niall Richard Murphy
Published 15 Apr 2016

Implementations are ephemeral, but the documented reasoning is priceless. Rarely do we have access to this kind of insight. This, then, is the story of how one company did it. The fact that it is many overlapping stories shows us that scaling is far more than just a photographic enlargement of a textbook computer architecture. It is about scaling a business process, rather than just the machinery. This lesson alone is worth its weight in electronic paper. We do not engage much in self-critical review in the IT world; as such, there is much reinvention and repetition. For many years, there was only the USENIX LISA conference community discussing IT infrastructure, plus a few conferences about operating systems.

The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times
by Giovanni Arrighi
Published 15 Mar 2010

The escalation of the competitive struggle between the city-states, by inflating Genoa’s public debt, strengthened the hand of the city’s moneyed interests, but not sufficiently to overcome the power of the landed aristocracy. The latter controlled the means of violence and the sources of ground rent in the surrounding countryside and continued to participate in the city’s governmental and business processes if and when it was in its own interests. Nevertheless, the fact that the power of money could not overcome the power of the sword did not mean that the moneyed interests could not organize themselves more effectively to match the solidarity of the landed aristocracy. This indeed is what was achieved by the incorporation of the private creditors of the Genoese government in the Casa dz’ San Giorgio.

The Rust Programming Language
by Steve Klabnik and Carol Nichols
Published 14 Jun 2018

To better understand why we need two separate loops, imagine a scenario with two workers. If we used a single loop to iterate through each worker, on the first iteration, a terminate message would be sent down the channel and join called on the first worker’s thread. If that first worker was busy processing a request at that moment, the second worker would pick up the terminate message from the channel and shut down. We would be left waiting on the first worker to shut down, but it never would because the second thread picked up the terminate message. Deadlock! To prevent this scenario, we first put all of our Terminate messages on the channel in one loop; then we join on all the threads in another loop.

The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World
by Anu Bradford
Published 14 Sep 2020

The GDPR calls for lawfulness, fairness, and transparency in processing the data.10 It also limits the quantity and purpose for which data can be collected, and requires that all the entities—whether private companies or government agencies—collecting and processing the data ensure the integrity, security, and accuracy of the data.11 Data can further be stored only for a limited period.12 The GDPR also adds new obligations, such as the “right to be forgotten” that gives the data subject the right to ask for erasure of certain data,13 and “privacy by design,” which requires manufacturers to design their products and services with GDPR obligations in mind.14 It requires member states to establish independent data protection authorities to guarantee the enforcement of the protections embedded in the GDPR, together with establishing a European Data Protection Board.15 The GDPR further provides for heavy sanctions, increasing the expected deterrence effect of the regulation: noncompliance with GDPR may result in administrative fines of up to €20 million or up to 4% of the company’s total worldwide annual turnover of the preceding financial year, whichever is higher.16 The GDPR has a broad territorial reach.17 It applies to all companies processing personal data of “data subjects”—that is, persons residing in the EU whose personal data is being collected, held, or processed—regardless of the company’s location or where the data processing takes place. The GDPR thus also applies to controllers or processors not established in the EU, as long as these actors offer goods or services to EU residents or monitor behavior that takes place within the EU. Non-EU businesses processing the data of EU citizens will also have to appoint a representative in the EU. The EU believes that its high privacy standards are compromised if the protected data is made available in other jurisdictions. For this reason, the EU bans the transfer of data from the EU to third countries that fail to ensure “an adequate level of protection” of data privacy rights.18 What constitutes “adequate” is defined case by case by the EU.

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar
by Paul Theroux
Published 9 Sep 2008

On my trip of 28,000 miles and hundreds of encounters, I met two people who supported the American president: the man in Baku who wanted the United States to invade Iran, and Rajendra. No one else. Everybody in India – and in the States too – talked about outsourcing. India was making shirts and shoes and electronics, and the growth areas were IT (information technology), BPO (business process outsourcing) and KPO (knowledge process outsourcing). These were labour-intensive businesses that had helped swell Mumbai to its present size of twenty million, overfilled its trains with commuters, packed its hotels and restaurants, and impelled developers to look at Dharavi slum as a property development opportunity.

Write Great Code, Volume 1
by Randall Hyde
Published 6 Aug 2012

The point behind SCSI was to off load as much work as was reasonably possible to the device controller, freeing up the host computer to do other activities. But all this extra complexity and cost to improve system performance was going to waste because in typical personal computer systems the host computer was usually waiting for the data transfer to complete. So the computer was sitting idle while the SCSI disk drive was busy processing the SCSI command. The idea behind the IDE interface was to lower the cost of the disk drive by using the host computer’s CPU to do the processing. Because the CPU was usually idle (during SCSI transfers) anyway, this seemed like a good use of resources. IDE drives, because they were often hundreds of dollars less than SCSI drives, became incredibly popular on personal computer systems.

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
by Edwin Lefèvre and William J. O'Neil
Published 14 May 1923

Q: Most investors today seem to believe that the banking and credit problems witnessed in the past two years are unique, yet a study of Livermore’s era seem to show that investors 100 years ago faced many of the same concerns. Why do you think that every generation seems to confront the same problems of credit excesses, and it is possible for the cycle to ever be truly smoothed out by better understanding of economics and business processes? Jones: That is a very interesting question, and I would be reluctant to think that men will ever be smart and farsighted enough to avoid the next bubble unless man’s basic greed can be excised. We know wars are not good, but they seem to be a permanent staple of humanity. Why not bubbles?

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
by Thomas E. Ricks
Published 30 Jul 2007

The U.S. civilian occupation organization was a house built on sand and inhabited by the wrong sort of people, according to many who worked there. "No clear strategy, very little detailed planning, poor communications, high personnel turnover, lots of young and inexperienced political appointees, no well-established business processes," concluded retired Army Col. Ralph Hallenbeck, who worked at the CPA as a civilian contractor dealing with the Iraqi communications infrastructure. Personnel was an especially nettlesome issue. Hallenbeck said that in addition to being young and inexperienced, most of the young CPA people he met during his work as a contractor were ideologically minded Republicans whose only professional experience was working on election campaigns back in the United States.

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
by Daniel J. Levitin
Published 18 Aug 2014

So there’s a Pareto optimum for organization when the tree is well structured. Work flow charts can be similarly analyzed Work flow chart taken from Cardoso, J. (2006). Approaches to compute workflow complexity. In F. Leymann, W. Reisig, S. R. Thatte, & W. van der Aalst (Eds.), The role of business processes in service oriented architectures. IBFI: Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany. To ensure you’ll be able to locate important documents Merrill, D. C., & Martin, J. A. (2010). Getting organized in the Google era: How to get stuff out of your head, find it when you need it, and get it done right. New York, NY: Crown Business.

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right
by George R. Tyler
Published 15 Jul 2013

Too many CEOs there perhaps obsess about scoring American-style Reagan rents rather than obsessing like the Germans or Swedes about positioning firms for the next decade. Here is how Australian productivity consultant Tom Bevington and University of Melbourne management professor Danny Samson explained the outcome of their analyses in mid-2012: “One of the things that has happened in the last 30 years is that business processes have become more complex and this trend is accelerating as a result of outsourcing, off-shoring, service bundling, production extensions…. The research behind our book identifies how organizations can, by managing their ever more complex interfaces, lift productivity by about 20 percent quickly and at little or no capital cost and efficiently engage their staff in the delivery.”24 Weak American Nonfinancial Sector Profits and Investment Despite the surge in American corporate profits during the Reagan decline as labor and other costs compressed, much of that increase benefited financial firms rather than nonfinancial firms in manufacturing vital to productivity growth.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future
by Sebastian Mallaby
Published 1 Feb 2022

In the ensuing two decades, the share jumped to 49 percent.[37] Looking to the future, venture capital will advance even more because of a fundamental shift in the economy. In the past, most corporate investment was tangible: capital was used to purchase physical goods, machines, buildings, tools, and so forth. Now much corporate investment is intangible: capital goes into R&D, design, market research, business processes, and software.[38] The new intangible investments fall squarely in the sweet spot of VCs: in explaining venture capital back in 1962, Rock said he was financing “intellectual book value.” In contrast, intangible assets pose challenges to other sorts of financiers. Banks and bond investors try to protect themselves from losses by securing “collateral”—claims on a borrower’s assets that can be seized and sold if the borrower defaults.

Building Secure and Reliable Systems: Best Practices for Designing, Implementing, and Maintaining Systems
by Heather Adkins , Betsy Beyer , Paul Blankinship , Ana Oprea , Piotr Lewandowski and Adam Stubblefield
Published 29 Mar 2020

Rather than requiring a strict yes/no, an escape valve of “maybe,” paired with an additional check, can dramatically ease the pressures on a system. Many of the controls described here can be used either in isolation or in combination. Appropriate usage depends on the sensitivity of the data, the risk of the action, and existing business processes. Multi-Party Authorization (MPA) Involving another person is one classic way to ensure a proper access decision, fostering a culture of security and reliability (see Chapter 21). This strategy offers several benefits: Preventing mistakes or unintentional violations of policy that may lead to security or privacy issues.

The Enlightened Capitalists
by James O'Toole
Published 29 Dec 2018

As B&J’s grew, and its competition with Häagen-Dazs for market share became more intense, business issues common to all organizations arose, problems relating to manufacturing capacity, distributor relations, and introduction of new products. In Chico’s words, the company may have been “fumbling successfully,” but it had become evident to the board that it lacked the business processes and management systems needed for efficient organizational coordination and financial control. Thus, the decision was taken to begin the process of transitioning from leadership by the founders to professional management. Even Ben said he agreed. Choosing a new CEO at Ben and Jerry’s turned out to be as fraught a process as it was at many of the other companies discussed in these pages, and with similarly dismal results.

Architecting Modern Data Platforms: A Guide to Enterprise Hadoop at Scale
by Jan Kunigk , Ian Buss , Paul Wilkinson and Lars George
Published 8 Jan 2019

Multiple Clusters for Resiliency Architecting a system for resilient operation involves ensuring that elements are highly available, and designing out any single points of failure such as power or cooling, as discussed in Chapters 6 and 12. Ultimately, every cluster sits within a single point of failure simply due to geography—even a cloud deployment built using multiple availability zones (AZs). Total system resiliency can therefore only be assured by using multiple datacenters in different geographic regions, ensuring that business processes can withstand even catastrophic events, such as earthquakes, floods, or political instability. Although it can be tempting to consider deploying a single cluster over multiple locations, the bandwidth and latency requirements almost certainly make this unfeasible. However, deploying an independent cluster at each of two sites is an entirely practical and achievable solution, leading to our first reason for deploying multiple clusters: disaster recovery (DR), which is discussed in Chapter 13.

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 6 Dec 2016

Checklists Ramit and I are both obsessed with checklists and love a book by Atul Gawande titled The Checklist Manifesto. I have this book on a shelf in my living room, cover out, as a constant reminder. Atul Gawande is also one of Malcolm Gladwell’s (page 572) favorite innovators. Ramit builds checklists for as many business processes as possible, which he organizes using software called Basecamp. Google “entrepreneurial bus count” for a good article on why checklists can save your startup. ✸ Who do you think of when you hear the word “successful”? “I think of a guy I recently met named Mark Bustos. He has an awesome Instagram account (@markbustos) and is a very high-end hairdresser in New York.

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Hardback) - Common
by Alan Greenspan
Published 14 Jun 2007

There was a failed coup against Boris Yeltsin, and Nelson Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize. There were disconcerting outbreaks of violence in the United States: the bombing of the World Trade Center, the siege at Waco, and the killing and maiming of scientists and professors by the Unabomber. In corporate America, something called business-process reengineering became the latest management fad, and Lou Gerstner began an effort to turn around IBM. Most important from the Fed's standpoint, the economy seemed finally to have shaken off its early-1990s woes. Business investment, housing, and consumer spending all rose sharply, and unemployment fell.

The IDA Pro Book
by Chris Eagle
Published 16 Jun 2011

This struct serves as the base class for several other classes that build on the concept of an address range. It is seldom necessary to include this file directly, as it is typically included in files defining subclasses of area_t. auto.hpp This file declares functions used to work with IDA’s autoanalyzer. The autoanalyzer performs queued analysis tasks when IDA is not busy processing userinput events. bytes.hpp This file declares functions for working with individual database bytes. Functions declared in this file are used to read and write individual database bytes as well as manipulate the characteristics of those bytes. Miscellaneous functions also provide access to flags associated with instruction operands, while other functions allow manipulation of regular and repeatable comments.

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
by Jessica Livingston
Published 14 Aug 2008

Newmark: When it comes to features visible from the outside, yes. Internally, we figure out on a continuous basis . . . we figure out what tools we need, and then we do them. That’s working to this day, because it’s the job, for example, of customer service to figure out how they can do their jobs better and then to tell tech what they need. This is business process reengineering, which companies used to talk about a lot in the late ’80s, but usually didn’t follow through. Livingston: Did you have investors knocking at your door, offering you money? Newmark: They started in ’99, and we had a flurry of that last year. That’s how I have some idea of how much I stepped away from.

Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency
by James Andrew Miller
Published 8 Aug 2016

I’m a frustrated artist—I’m not a writer and I’m not a painter, but I love artists, and I am blown away by how creative people come up with ideas and then turn them into reality. I wanted to get close to them, to understand how they work, and at the same time couple the creative process with the business process. I didn’t want to be a buyer. I wanted to learn it from the sell side, because if I was a buyer and worked at a studio, then I was working at only one place. But if I was an agent, then as a seller, I was able to go anywhere. RON MEYER: I was working at a men’s clothing store called Zeidler and Zeidler making about $35 a week, sharing an apartment with four other guys at some fleabag place in Hollywood.

Ajax: The Definitive Guide
by Anthony T. Holdener
Published 25 Jan 2008

Protocol(s): SOAP Service account: Only invited participants Developer key: No Cost: Unknown Microsoft MapPoint Category: Mapping Overview: Mapping service API link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/mappoint/mappointweb/default.aspx Description: Microsoft MapPoint is a hosted, programmable web service that application developers can use to integrate high-quality maps, driving directions, distance calculations, proximity searches, and other location intelligence into applications, business processes, and web sites. Protocol(s): SOAP Service account: No Developer key: Yes Cost: Basic and volume licensing available MSN Messenger Category: Chat Overview: Chatting service API link: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/live/bb245811.aspx Description: The MSN Messenger Activity SDK contains technical information about how to develop and test single-user and multiuser applications by using the Activity object model.

Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies
by Tim Koller , McKinsey , Company Inc. , Marc Goedhart , David Wessels , Barbara Schwimmer and Franziska Manoury
Published 16 Aug 2015

EXHIBIT 26.3 Value Driver Tree Intrinsic value Financial value drivers Short-term value drivers Medium-term value drivers Long-term value drivers Long-term growth Sales productivity Commercial health Strategic health • Core business • Growth opportunities Operating-cost productivity Cost structure health Capital productivity Asset health ROIC Organizational health Cost of capital CHOOSING THE RIGHT METRICS 583 This framework shares some elements with the balanced scorecard introduced in a 1992 Harvard Business Review article by Robert Kaplan and David Norton.5 Numerous nonprofit and for-profit organizations have subsequently advocated and implemented the balanced-scorecard idea. Its premise is that financial performance is only one aspect of performance. Equally important to long-term value creation, Kaplan and Norton point out, are customer satisfaction, internal business processes, learning, and revenue growth. Our concept of value drivers resembles Kaplan and Norton’s nonfinancial metrics. Where we differ is in advocating that companies choose their own set of metrics for the outermost branches of the tree, under the generic headings set out here, and tailor their choice to their industry and strategy.

Great North Road
by Peter F. Hamilton
Published 26 Sep 2012

It’s starting to look like we’ll be pulling an all-nighter.” “Sure thing, boss.” As Sid’s nominal deputy, Ian Lanagin just qualified for one of the little private offices along the side of Office3. He greeted the eight officers and constables working the zone consoles in the main section, all of them busy processing forensic data from the taxi, which was slowly coming in, along with results from the dump site; three were still checking cargo deliveries; while one poor junior constable was tasked with calling local restaurants and finding out what meals they were serving last Thursday evening—a long shot based on the autopsy results of the victim’s stomach contents.

Spain
by Lonely Planet Publications and Damien Simonis
Published 14 May 1997

Festivals & Events The Dia de Sant Joan is held in Ciutadella in the third to last week of June. The high point is 23 June, the eve of the saint’s feast day, although the atmosphere in the streets builds over preceding evenings. It is one of Spain’s best-known and most traditional festivals, featuring busy processions, prancing horses (Menorcans pride themselves on their riding skills), performances of traditional music and dancing, and lots of partying. Sleeping Hostal-Residencia Oasis (971 38 21 97; Carrer de Sant Isidre 33; s/d €40/55) Set around a spacious garden courtyard, this quiet place close to the heart of the old quarter has pleasant rooms, some of them done up in the past two years and most with bathrooms.

Programming Python
by Mark Lutz
Published 5 Jan 2011

Coding alternatives for adders and sorters A few coding pointers here: if you look closely, you’ll notice that sorter.py reads all of stdin at once with the readlines method, but adder.py reads one line at a time. If the input source is another program, some platforms run programs connected by pipes in parallel. On such systems, reading line by line works better if the data streams being passed are large, because readers don’t have to wait until writers are completely finished to get busy processing data. Because input just reads stdin, the line-by-line scheme used by adder.py can always be coded with manual sys.stdin reads too: C:\...\PP4E\System\Streams> type adder2.py import sys sum = 0 while True: line = sys.stdin.readline() if not line: break sum += int(line) print(sum) This version utilizes the fact that int allows the digits to be surrounded by whitespace (readline returns a line including its \n, but we don’t have to use [:-1] or rstrip() to remove it for int).