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Showing posts with label 2017 at 11:29AM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2017 at 11:29AM. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 28, 2017

CorpGov Today

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http://www.nytimes.com But for all the happy talk about focusing on these issues, many on Wall Street have privately cast a skeptical eye, chalking up all the bluster on the topic to politically correct marketing efforts…
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Sunday, June 11, 2017

Booking.com refused us any wriggle room despite its cancellation promise

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I was planning a family party and was not sure how many hotel rooms we would need

I have been charged with planning a family gathering for my father-in-law’s 80th birthday. As a result I used Booking.com to reserve seven refundable rooms at the Copthorne Hotel in Slough, with a view to cancelling any we would not need when the final guest list was confirmed. With this in mind, I was only searching for hotels that offered “free cancellation”, which these clearly did.

The next morning I was shocked to find that £1,209 had been taken from my account – the full amount for all seven rooms. I contacted Booking.com and the Copthorne, and both said the booking did not have free cancellation. I have since learned we only need four rooms, but both companies are refusing to refund me for the other three.

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June 11, 2017 at 11:25AM

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from Miles Brignall

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One love, one aim … finding the best way to donate to victims of the terror attacks

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Money has poured in to charities and funds set up to help. But as Donna Ferguson writes, make sure it goes directly to the causes you support

After the terror came goodwill and compassion. As communities in Manchester and London struggled to come to terms with the recent terrorist attacks, there has been an upsurge in donations to help those affected.

The official We Love Manchester fund, set up by the lord mayor and the British Red Cross, has raised more than £10m for the victims of the Manchester attack, while a second pool, the UK Solidarity Fund, was established to support those affected in both London and Manchester, as well as victims of any future incidents across the UK.

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June 11, 2017 at 11:25AM

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from Donna Ferguson

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Sunday, May 7, 2017

Why has PIKOM’s Outsourcing Malaysia opened a new Iskandar Malaysia centre?

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Nine major foreign and local companies have now established outsourcing centres and back office operations in Iskandar Puteri.

May 07, 2017 at 11:23AM

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Banking bots highlight conversational commerce trend

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Western Union has built a chatbot that lets consumers wire money by conversing with a digital assistant in Facebook Messenger.

May 07, 2017 at 11:23AM

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Employers add a ‘cheap place to live’ to list of staff perks

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The costs of renting or buying a home are soaring leaving younger workers struggling or completely priced out. Now there are schemes to help

Forget private medical insurance or money off gym membership. If you’re a priced-out young person struggling with London’s sky-high property costs, a cheap place to live that comes with your job would probably be number one on your fantasy list of employee benefits.

But for some young professionals starting out in their careers, this isn’t just a fantasy. A number of employers are starting to offer schemes to help workers deal with the soaring cost of accommodation. This week, publishing group Hachette partnered with the Book Trade Charity on a scheme that will allow some of its trainees who might otherwise find the capital “prohibitively expensive” to rent in north London at way below market rates.

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May 07, 2017 at 11:26AM

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from Rupert Jones

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The Digital Board Composition/Refreshment Inquiries

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swirl-2111548.jpgContemporary boards play the crucial directorial role in business strategy oversight, performance monitoring, business advising and policy setting. They are also the mastermind behind digital transformation. Not only do today’s BoDs need to have sufficient knowledge to understand the digital business ecosystem, but also they need to have the collective insight to present today and foresee the future. The matter of fact is that the changes sweeping the business are hugely disruptive and there is nowhere to hide. Leadership is all about change and directorship is about steering the business toward the right direction. From board composition and refreshment perspective, which challenges do you face, when and how do you tackle the issue of change in the boardroom? And how to build high-performance boards for today and the future?


How do you define diversity and embrace inclusiveness? What do you see as the most important types of diversity in terms of filling decision blind spots at the boardroom? Conventional wisdom defines diversity based on physical identity such as gender or race, but even you have the seemly diverse group of people, but if they practice the same “in box” thinking, without cognitive difference, group thinking is perhaps still one of the biggest pitfalls to compromise decision effectiveness and board maturity. It is the difference in thinking and perspectives that diversified BoDs bring to team decisions. The board should optimize their decision-making processes in the presence of an “outsider,” that causes organizations with boards of more diversified BoDs to outperform organizations with homogeneous boards. To put simply, “diversity of thoughts” should be the decision factor for board to embrace inclusiveness. This diversity along with deep knowledge of the business will allow them to be real “thought partners” with senior management as they consider the longer term goals beyond quarterly earnings. Diversification is a component, and in some cases a very good initiation of multidimensional business value creation. The directors need to be diverse by mindsets, industry background, skills, experience level, and perspective. If boards set the leadership tone for embracing cognitive diversity and appreciate independent thinking, people start to think, understand, learn and work together leading to better decisions and better performance.


How can board set the tone for encouraging innovation and digital transformation? Boards should understand that innovation is not one individual’s or even a department’s responsibility. It is a leadership effect and cultural issue. Boards as top leadership teams should participate or even lead in the area of both innovation management and management innovation. Thus, the board’s composition and refreshment will directly impact on the attitude and aptitude to innovation and digital transformation. The important issue is how the board accommodates diverse opinions and how they assess them and converge the diverse thought into wise decisions for both innovation governance and management innovation.  Although the major responsibility of Board is for practicing governance, which doesn’t mean to stifle innovation, on the opposite, it means to set principles & guidelines for allowing the business to manage innovation in an effective way. With creative new blood, BoDs can make the proper policies to encourage innovation, as well as manage risks. It requires acknowledgement, involvement, and commitment.


fractal-2056131_1280.jpgHow willing are directors to make way for new directors when fresh skills and diversified experiences more closely aligned to the digital strategy are called for? The Board is responsible for ensuring an appropriate mix of skills, knowledge, and experience are present or available for it to fulfill its function. The boards as top directorial roles need to be open-minded, embrace the better way to do things. Digitize boardroom via complementary skills and experience, build creative tension between collegiality and challenge. Even the majority of BoDs are senior executives, they need to break down the “status quo,” present learning agility. They need to educate themselves by hearing different views about the organization, its environment, and strategic alternatives. and show the inquisitiveness to ask the tough and right questions.


The digital board composition and refreshment are all about digital fitness. The best fit for the board depends on the Board’s current makeup, culture, and which “gap” needs to be filled. So the Board composition needs to embrace both cognitive difference, functional difference, and other experience/capability difference. The high mature digital board is built on a foundation of integrity, welcome and embrace diverse thoughts, value those thoughts and behave accordingly. Digital BoDs today are democratic, diversified, cogitative, and proactive, bring different opinions and viewpoints, should have the ability to balance resources, risks and consequences.
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May 07, 2017 at 11:20AM

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from Pearl Zhu

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Furniture shop has gone bust without delivering my Eames-style chair

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I ordered it before the new EU copyright laws came into force but the company has gone into administration

I ordered an Eames-style chair in January from an online furniture company called Wallace Sacks, just before the copyright law came into force on 28 January – as you reported on these pages last summer. I was quoted 12 weeks for delivery. Now I have discovered that the firm has been placed into administration, but think my credit card company will reimburse me. Please bring this sorry saga to the wider attention of Guardian readers.

RH, St Albans, Hertfordshire

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May 07, 2017 at 11:26AM

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from Rebecca Smithers

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Is IT a Building Block or a Roadblock of Digital Transformation

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Nowadays technologies make impacts on every vertical industry and information permeates into every corner of the organization. IT is becoming more critical, but still, there are discrepancies between how IT evaluate its own influence & performance and how IT is perceived by business. Sometimes, business partners think IT is lagging behind the change curve, and IT is seen as a drag on innovation. Even IT should be the irreplaceable building block of differentiated business capabilities,  businesses perceive IT as the roadblock. So how can IT turn around these negative perception and build a strong reputation as a change agent, innovation engine and driving force of digital transformation?


IT is the roadblock when IT is the threshold of business capability and unique competency: The role of digital IT is to identify and blend the ways that information and technology can enable and shape the business capability and capacity by linking all digital aspects (goals, objectives, actions, etc.) together to enforce the business competency. These are then mixed with other business ingredients to create products and processes which generate differentiated business capabilities for strategy management and the business’s long-term growth. Organizations acquire the differentiated capability to reshape products, services, and customer engagement, with the help of digital technologies, IT is no doubt the roadblock. However, if IT only took orders from the business, over-promised and under-delivery, IT is seen as the roadblock which drag down the speed of business changes. Those negative IT perceptions shouldn’t be ignored by senior IT management, they need to realign their operation model from insight out operation driven to outside in customer focused, setting prioritization mechanism, so that customer preferences and requirements are reflected throughout the organization, which will be business beneficial in terms to speed up change and delivery.


IT is the building block when business-IT gaps are shrinking; and it would be the roadblock if the gaps are enlarging: The disconnect between business and IT not only causes miscommunication but even worse to decelerate and fail the business. Bridging the gap between IT and the business are really issues of all about change. The steps, processes, tools and products that organizations use to make decisions and effect the transformation from strategy to deployment. To bridge the gap, you  cannot know only one piece of the equation. CIOs have to know both the business and the technology side of things and take an advisory role in communication and coaching. Listen, engage and nurture relationships with customers and build an integrated view of business insight derived from information extracted from different sources.  Business leaders should also have the desire to understand IT better in order to bridge the knowledge gap and capture business insight for managing a holistic and seamless digital transformation.  Running IT as the building block is not just about fixing things, but leveraging tradeoff, integrating IT and business to build a set of crucial business capabilities such as efficiency, flexibility, agility, risk intelligence, and ultimate organizational agility.


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IT is the building block if IT can become the business solutionary; IT would turn to be the roadblock if it does not “keep the end” – the strategic business goals in mind: In most of the organizations, IT is setting back and waiting for the request, and no wonder often being perceived as a roadblock; to be the building block of changeability, IT needs to gain a better understanding of the business and show that knowledge by talking business to the business; IT has to be configured in a way to understand the business and set the framework to deliver the business and market need. And IT’s ability to execute and communicate. IT needs to transform from an order taker to an order shaker.  IT has to be a strategic advisor to the business to maximize the revenue. IT at all levels needs to understand how the business makes and loses money, and it needs to articulate solutions around this with business language. IT is being not only analytically measured by the business, it is being measured by every customer experience the leadership of the business has with IT deliveries they experienced. That sets a very high standard that internal IT is either a roadblock to slow down the changes or the building block to accelerate digital transformation.


The idea that the IT organization is perceived as the roadblock, overlooked as an innovation driver and is being bypassed by business units comes at an odd time when you consider the robust new technology prospects and pervasive information influence. IT needs to be the building block to develop dynamic digital capabilities and gain the differentiated advantage for the organization’s growth and maturity.
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May 07, 2017 at 11:17AM

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from Pearl Zhu

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Sunday, April 16, 2017

Is this a real need?

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I’m thinking of building a SaaS project that lets people add search to their websites. The current solutions on the market range from Google CSE to Algolia to ElasticSearch and others. Algolia is expensive ($50+ a month), ElasticSearch requires a fair amount of programming knowledge to set up, and Google CSE is very barebones (no filters, analytics, result tweaking & analysis, etc). Plus Google CSE’s future is uncertain with its commercial version shutting down.

My question is, has anyone else every been in a situation where they needed to add search to their website? What solution did you go for, and why?

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April 16, 2017 at 11:22AM

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from /u/smheo123

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