Think about the last time your company was faced with an investment in information technology – as an example. Perhaps you were deciding on a CRM platform, an upgrade to your replenishment or logistics software… – you can imagine such a scenario. Regardless of the exact details, you might recall reviewing a business case for this “technology investment”. Perhaps you were even responsible for the development of the business case. (more…)
Jack Jones, the inventor of the FAIR method for assessing cybersecurity risk, comments on a defense of NIST 800-30 by someone who commented on one of his blogs. I take Jack’s side on this. For those of you who have read my books, NIST 800-30 is one of the standards that promotes methods I spend a lot of time debunking (ordinal scales for risks, risk matrices, etc.).
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It has been a heck of a winter for Portland, OR. The city has had nine school closure days due to snow and other winter weather. Per local reports, the metro area has been effectively shut down on many of these days. Portland’s transportation bureau budgets $300K a year for materials to respond to winter storms, and has 55 snowplows. In contrast, Portland’s GDP is $160 B/year which translates to $635 MM per work day.
At first blush, there is an intuitive sense that spending a fraction of a percent of one day’s GDP is going to be less than the optimal amount, but there are some mitigating factors. (more…)
According to our recently completed “Measurement Challenges” survey, project risk and project management-related issues are the #1 most frequently identified measurement challenges, followed closely by change management and organizational transformation. The survey also showed that while only half have received training to address these problems, the majority feel they need training in statistical methods or even the analytical methods provided in Excel. This is a brief summary of the findings of that survey. (more…)
Given the current pricing of wolf hunting licenses in Wisconsin, it is unlikely that revenue from the wolf licenses offset the negative effects wolves have from killing deer, livestock, and dogs. However, there are two caveats to this statement: first, to make this assessment definitive depends on accurately estimating the worth of the life of a deer in Wisconsin, and may depend on more accurately estimating the monetary equivalent loss for a family who has had a dog killed by a wolf. (more…)
Oracle, PROFIT, 2012
“Google searches, Twitter feeds, and even Amazon sales ranks produce a lot of data—data that can be used to identify trends in real time and help business leaders get ahead. ‘There’s a revolution in data about society,’ says Douglas Hubbard, author of Pulse: The New Science of Harnessing Internet Buzz to Track Threats and Opportunities (Wiley, 2011). Here Hubbard tells Profit what the pulse is—and how to find it.” [view article]
