How To Understand The Difference Between Value-Proposition and a Product or Service
One of my startup heroes Steve Blank wrote in a blog post that “value proposition is the fancy name for your product or service” It is with some trepidation that […]
Information and Affirmation
@timrayner01 points out that so-called information-sharing is never neutral, disengaged – it is a positive act of communication.
“Don’t think of what you share as information. Even if what you share is information, by sharing it, you are telling the world that it is information that you affirm in some way. It is the affirmation that counts. We share what we love. Even when we share details about things we despise, they are things we love to hate. Love is the key to understanding how we contribute to social media commons. We populate the commons with expressions of love.”
Tim Rayner, The gift shift: what’s social about social media? (August 2012)
So even scorn is a form of affirmation. The comedian who devotes his spleen to the latest reality show is thereby contributing (in a complex post-modern fashion) to the show’s success. Daniel Smith describes this as alternative consumption, and sees Charlie Brooker as a modern version of Baudelaire.
Daniel Smith, Spleen and Modernity: Baudelaire and ‘alternative’ consumption (July 2010)
The Royal Television Society may pretend that Charlie Brooker represents the high-brow alternative to Simon Cowell. But Brooker’s material is basically the same as Cowell’s, it just has a different sentiment. They obviously need each other.
Jonathan Harwood, Cowell and Morgan beaten by Brooker and Theroux (The Week March 2010)
Information and Affirmation
@timrayner01 points out that so-called information-sharing is never neutral, disengaged – it is a positive act of communication.
“Don’t think of what you share as information. Even if what you share is information, by sharing it, you are telling the world that it is information that you affirm in some way. It is the affirmation that counts. We share what we love. Even when we share details about things we despise, they are things we love to hate. Love is the key to understanding how we contribute to social media commons. We populate the commons with expressions of love.”
Tim Rayner, The gift shift: what’s social about social media? (August 2012)
So even scorn is a form of affirmation. The comedian who devotes his spleen to the latest reality show is thereby contributing (in a complex post-modern fashion) to the show’s success. Daniel Smith describes this as alternative consumption, and sees Charlie Brooker as a modern version of Baudelaire.
Daniel Smith, Spleen and Modernity: Baudelaire and ‘alternative’ consumption (July 2010)
The Royal Television Society may pretend that Charlie Brooker represents the high-brow alternative to Simon Cowell. But Brooker’s material is basically the same as Cowell’s, it just has a different sentiment. They obviously need each other.
Jonathan Harwood, Cowell and Morgan beaten by Brooker and Theroux (The Week March 2010)
The Antifragile Enterprise: Complexity Exists, but Let’s Not Overcomplicate it or IT.
The Enterprise is a complex system. I have accepted that fact. I think many of us in the enterprise architecture profession have also accepted this fact as well, or at least I hope we have. But then again there is nat…
The Calculus of Cost 2
@remembermytweet and @tetradian explore the Types of Cost (Jan 2013).
Alex identifies a number of different types of cost, which as Tom points out are largely monetary costs. But what is a cost anyway?
An enterprise incurs a great deal of cost. and these can be broken down and classified in various ways. Accountants like to express all costs in monetary terms – so for example, human effort is translated into labour cost.
But that only works if the enterprise is directly paying for the labour, in the form of wages or contractor bills. Wasting the customers’ time doesn’t count as a direct cost to the enterprise, although it may well have an indirect cost in terms of customer complaints and lost revenue.
We might also think of anxiety as a cost. As Seth Godin comments in relation to the airline industry, “By assuming that their customer base prefers to save money, not anxiety, they create an anxiety-filled system.” Eleven things organizations can learn from airports (Jan 2013). See also my post on Anxiety as a Cost (Jan 2013).
Even for direct labour, the human cost may not be fully reflected by the wages and monetary overheads associated with employment. Many employees do unpaid overtime and incur other personal costs, and this is only visible to the enterprise accountants when it results in high levels of sickness and staff turnover.
So we need to remember the difference between a real cost and its monetary measure.
Improving Signal-to-Noise in Risk Management
One of the most important responsibilities of the information security professional (or any IT professional, for that matter) is to help management make well-informed decisions. Unfortunately, this has been an illusive objective when it comes to risk. Continue reading →
The Antifragile Enterprise: Complexity Exists, but Let’s Not Overcomplicate it or IT.
The Enterprise is a complex system. I have accepted that fact. I think many of us in the enterprise architecture profession have also accepted this fact as well, or at least I hope we have. But then again there is natural response to things in which we do in order to address “complexity.” There is a tendancy to…
How Should we use Cloud?
How should we use Cloud? This is the key question at the start of 2013. The Open Group® conferences in recent years have thrown light on, “What is Cloud?” and, “Should we use Cloud?” It is time to move on. Continue reading →
Enterprise Architecture is not aimed at creating models. Is that so?
Architecture, in general, is about models. Hence, enterprise architects are to devise architecture, that is to model the enterprise. If you don’t do that, then you are not doing architecture.
Our relationship to technology isn’t only utilitarian. It…
Our relationship to technology isn’t only utilitarian.
It is also emotional.
Technology empowers us, it amplifies us in the world, and gives us super powers.
Maybe productivity is a not just a function of the design, but also of our attachment to it.
A…
Our relationship to technology isn’t only utilitarian. It…
Our relationship to technology isn’t only utilitarian.
It is also emotional.
Technology empowers us, it amplifies us in the world, and gives us super powers.
Maybe productivity is a not just a function of the design, but also of our attachment to it.
And maybe that emotional connection best expresses itself aesthetically – in personalisation, decoration and symbols of individuality.
And just maybe the reverse applies and standardising, commoditising, and depersonalising technology degrades the productivity of those who have to use it.
Types of Cost
When planning and measuring business benefits there are three basic contributing elements: revenues, costs and intangibles. If you look for guidance on “types of cost” most sources decompose cost types […]