Good blurb on the need to bring quantitative and qualitative together in support of better corporate performance. One technology to help make this happen from a user interface perspective is the portal. Other components include data warehouse, OLAP, and enterprise content management (unstructured data warehouse).

Henry Morris of research group IDC says that business intelligence of the variety delivered by CleverPath should be integrated with business processes for greatest efficiency. “If you were running a marketing campaign, you would … track the results of delivering messages to your customers, then you would analyze the results; the collaborative part would be that you would possibly make some adjustments in the way you ran the campaign,” he says, giving an example. Morris adds that a purchasing agent could also use business intelligence to analyze supplier performance, and, on that basis, enter into negotiations with suppliers, potentially via portals.

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Here’s a good article on revamping your intranet. It starts by identifying the warning signs of a fading intranet and then outlines a good approach for tackling the problem. The sixteen steps outlined are in-line with the major steps we’ve used with clients on enterprise content management and portal projects.

Here’s an article by Drew Falkman on cheap or free portal offerings. The article covers Jetspeed (which we’ve implemented internally), jPorta, Liferay, and RedHat CCM which is the new name for the open source content management system, ArsDigita.

Went to see Ben Harper at the Granada last night. Obviously much more intimate than his last show at the Bronco Bowl. The Granada holds about 1500 I think. The opening seemed a little soft–he started with a couple of his quieter songs and I don’t think the vocal levels were adjusted quite right early in the show. My favorites of the evening were a really cool version of Excuse Me Mister and The Woman in You but all of the new stuff sounded great. It was hotter than hell in there though. I had to bail halfway through the second encore for water and a breather. Watched the third and final encore from the ramp.

A Mighty Wind

Saw A Mighty Wind Saturday night. I haven’t stopped chuckling to myself since then. Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy have got major comedic writing talent. As some reviewer said, their attention to detail was incredible. The song lyrics were hysterical yet very believeable. I think it was funnier than Best in Show. We went to Crescent City Cafe for beignets after the show. Obviously it lacks the ambience of Cafe du Monde but the beignets were hot and fresh.

Business 2.0 corporate weblogs article

Weblogs in organizations and finding voice.

An interesting little piece in Business 2.0 about corporate use of weblogs

Business 2.0 – Web Article – Management by Blog?

Most of the companies I’ve observed using blogs are trying it on their customers before unleashing it internally on their staffs. The external need, apparently, is more pressing. Many businesses already have other systems in place for managing internal information, ranging from simple brown-bag lunches to overkill knowledge-management regimens.

I disagree that the external need is more pressing. I suspect that the truth is that the external weblog strategy presents less risk in the eyes of the implementer. Or to put it differently, internal weblog experiments feel risky…The chronological structure of short posts encourages and gently forces continuing practice…Helping weblogs to succeed inside organizations has little to do with technology features. It depends instead on nurturing a grassroots process of tentative practice evolving into confident process. Think Harold Hill in The Music Man not General George Patton in Patton [McGee’s Musings]

I agree with McGee. At least in our firm, blogs offer a way to move knowledge capture closer to the source–it’s a more organic approach to KM than our previous efforts. I do agree with the article author, though, that it really depends on the culture of the organization.

Search for Radio using Google API

Search for Radio using Google API

Here is an EXTREMELY cool way to add search capabilities to your blog using the Google API. All you really need to do is sign up for a Google key (for your Google API searches) and use this code to add a nifty little search box to your blog. I’ve added mine below the calendar in my theme. [Tom’s Blog]

BOOYAH! Great find, Tom. I tried this once using the advanced search through the google search site but I didn’t have any luck. I’ve been looking for a reason to futz with the Google API and I need to search my blog so this kills two birds.