CICS Weblogs

Pearls of Wisdom

One of my hobbies is going to rummage sales. I have found many treasurers over the years. I recently came across a real gem entitled The Four Agreements: A Toltec Wisdom Book - A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz has many good points.

“Thousands of years ago, the Toltec were known throughout southern Mexico as “women and men of knowledge.” Anthropologists have spoken of the Toltec as a nation or race, but, in fact the Toltec were scientists and artists who formed a society to explore and conserve the spiritual knowledge and practices of the ancient one.” (Ruiz, 1997) For more information about the Toltec you can read at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toltec.

In this book Ruiz offers advice about how to gain personal freedom and a happier life. He talks about how we subject ourselves to injustice and how we are our own worst enemy at times. We abuse ourselves by serving as our own judge and paying for our mistakes many times over.

Mega-Creativity - strive for it!!!

As professionals we should not accept the norm. As CICS graduate candidates, we do not settle for minimum. We strive for mega-creativity in a world which settles for mediocrity.

In Leonardo’s Laptop, Shneiderman discusses three levels of creativity. These are everyday, evolutionary, and revolutionary.

The everyday creativity is the low-level. It is the impromptu or personal creativity. The evolutionary creativity is the one which “refines and applies existing paradigms or methods of research.” (pg, 212) The revolutionary creativity is on which focuses on great breakthroughs and paradigm-shifting innovations.

Competitive Intelligence: Role of a Leader

The first time I heard the term Competitive Intelligence (CI), I thought it was some kind of secret government agency that spy on people or handle criminals until Dr. Jay Gillette formally introduced the topic at the leadership seminar last spring. When and why was the term coined? What does the term mean? What does competitive intelligence consist of? While I was doing my research on this topic, I realized that the term has been used in market research for more than a decade now. Why then does the topic feel strange? I will give you a brief history behind the term Competitive Intelligence. I will also define the term with reference to expert’s definitions, expatiate on what competitive intelligence entails and discuss the role of competitive intelligence in the professional world today.

Getting to Yes

I just read an amazing book called Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Withought Giving In by authors Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton and felt that it was a great source for our class. With Research and Development being one of our main focuses, I felt that knowing how to negotiate with others was essential within your company or group as well as outsiders you may be working with. In this book, you learn not only problems you may face while negotiating, but methods of dealing with these problems, specifically when one party is more powerful, won't use principled negotiations, and using dirty tricks.

The first thing that caught my eye in this book (besides the title) is the impressive table of contents. Fisher, Ury, and Patton set up a straight-forward, easy to follow table which makes it very easy to get from beginning to end smoothly, It begins with the problem, moves to the methods, gets more specifics with the yes, but..., and a conclusion, and finally ten questions people ask about Getting to Yes. In this blog, I am going to focus only on the problem and the methods.

Resistance is Futile, Fury Over a Literary Nemesis

In my two year tenure at CICS, I have somehow managed to steer clear of an infamous monster that causes confusion amongst the masses. I thought I was going to get away clean, then I found myself in the dreaded ICS 642 class. I’m sure you’re wondering what horrible thing could be so awful as to make a seasoned writer and professional like me want to pull her hair out. If you have a weak constitution, you may not want to read further….

Ok, you’ve had fair warning.

Directing your attention to "The Attention Economy"

In 2001, Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck published
The Attention Economy [link to wikipedia's entry on the concept]
through Harvard Business School Press.

Here's the money quote:

"In postindustrial societies, attention has become a more valuable currency than the kind you store in bank accounts. The vast majority of products have become cheaper and more abundant as the sum total of human wealth increases. Venture capital dollars have multiplied like breeding hamsters. The problems for businesspeople lie on both sides of the attention equation: how to get and hold the attention of consumers, stockholders, potential employees, and the like, and how to parcel out their own attention in the face of overwhelming options. People and companies that do this, succeed. The rest fail. Understanding and managing attention is now the single most important determinant of business success. Welcome to the attention economy." (p. 3)

This book and its theoretical approach tell us what to do after we go beyond providing information access. Now the work is to get the attention of those awash in information flows. It's worth your attention.

JEG

Henry Luce and the NewspaperMagazine World

With our discussions lately over the history of telecommunications, I decided to find out who was the "big wig" in the newspaper/magazine industry. It turns out it was a man named Henry Luce along with his long time friend and partner Briton Hadden. Since we deal with research in this class, and I hold any kind of writiing close to my heart, I decided this was a great topic to blog on.

Humor ICT Story: 90% of Waking Hours Spent Staring at Glowing Rectangles

Read this quick and humorous story at the Onion entitled 90% of Waking Hours Spent Staring at Glowing Rectangles. The Onion is a well known fake news source which prides itself on writing absurdist humor pieces, but with the look and feel of a real news source. Here's the Wikipedia article on the Onion.

Mastering the Trick of Sampling

Last time I examined Howard Becker's book Tricks of the Trade: How to think about Your Research while You're Doing It, I discussed Becker's trick of sampling in a broad spectrum. To become a "master" in his trick of sampling, I will focus more on sampling in terms of Becker's tips . At a quick glance, sampling according to Becker is the issues involved in data collection. Becker analyzed random sampling, producing an average case. This didn't really appeal to him since he prefers dealing with highly unusual cases. He notices there is a problem with bad sampling which makes the larger population generalized. Becker makes sure the reader knows that he deals with theory development, not theory testing. He wants the reader to think of cases to sample that open our minds or ideas and make us think about things, or question things, that we already know. Because of this, his work is not based on random sampling.

Ask "How?" Not "Why?"

One of the tricks mentioned by Becker in Tricks of the Trade is Ask “How?” Not “Why?” which comes under Imagery. He says that everyone is familiar with this trick but do not use it, they tend to ask “why” because it is more natural. He said, “Somehow “Why?” seems more profound, more intellectual, as though you were asking about the deeper meaning of things, as opposed to the simple narrative “How?” would likely revoke. “ (p.58)

Read C. Tuite's post on rational systems security and how to use email "Subject" lines for real information

As usual, Charles Tuite's blog "Seeing To It"
has nailed another key issue in contemporary information science.

He is one of the thought-leaders produced by the Center for Information and Communication Sciences
master's program at Ball State University.

I recommend you read in its entirety his latest post, "A New Coat of Paint"
Tuite says:

[A]t least a passing comment is needed to address the seemingly endless stream of FUD ["Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt"] coming out of the security segment of the IT world regarding social networking and the associated softwares. The simple fact of life is that the only absolutely secure software is one never installed, and the only safe network is one powered down. There are varying degrees of security and hardening, but it is more guaranteed by the policies and implementations of technology than by any one software.

Note the force of the well-written phrase: "The simple fact of life is that the only absolutely secure software is one never installed, and the only safe network is one powered down."

A New Coat of Paint

"14. All things are the same, familiar in experience, and ephemeral in time, and worthless in the matter. Everything now is just as it was in the time of those whom we have buried." - Marcus Aurelius, Meditation IX

If I began with the thesis statement that Twitter actually existed (other than its name) many years ago, would you believe it? Before I go to that point, at least a passing comment is needed to address the seemingly endless stream of FUD coming out of the security segment of the IT world regarding social networking and the associated softwares. The simple fact of life is that the only absolutely secure software is one never installed, and the only safe network is one powered down. There are varying degrees of security and hardening, but it is more guaranteed by the policies and implementations of technology than by any one software.

To Twitter... when discussing e-mail practices with a colleague, he expressed some confusion at my empty e-mails. That definitely begged for more clarification, and he went on to say that a lot of the messages I send don't have a subject body. The reason for that is that in an age of information overload, there is no need to overstate information. Here are two potential examples of messages:

1) To: People
From:ctuite@bsu.edu
Subj: CM02 will be taken down for maintenance at 17:00 today.

or the second, more standard:

2) To: People
From:ctuite@bsu.edu
Subj: CM02 down for maintenance

To my co-workers - this afternoon, the CM02 server will be brought down so that some maintenance may be performed.

The Logic of Art Works and Truth Tables

Howard S. Becker’s Tricks of the Trade: How to Think About Your Research While You’re Doing It contains many tricks or ways of thinking. It seems pertinent to discuss one of the more confusing tricks, which will be referred to as L-3 (Art Works and Truth Tables or The third trick in the Logic chapter pgs. 166-172). In an attempt to keep it simple, I will relay what I gleaned from the description of this trick.

Strategic Use of Information

Introduction

Strategic Use of Information? What does it mean? What does information have to do with strategy? These are the questions I asked myself the very first time I saw the topic Strategic Use of Information. While I was doing the research on the topic, the words in the topic puzzled me. How do we use information strategically? In Business school, strategy is a vital ingredient for a company to differentiate itself but, how can we use information to differentiate ourselves strategically? In this paper, I will define strategy, explain what strategic use of information means with examples and finally, I will define Strategic Use of Information.

The Search

With all our class dissusion of research tactics, I felt it was appropriate to write about a book that deals with search engines, specifically google. The book is titled The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture and was written by John Battelle.

The Search
In a world where search engines have become the basis of obtaining information, Google has emerged into a dominate force in its field. Google, which is new compared to other search engines, has grown so large, so fast that it is only natural to wonder exactly what Google’s secret is. How did it manage to surpass all competition? While the book The Search, written by John Battelle, focuses on Google and its success, it also examines the other search engines in order to see why this form of retrieving information has taken over our culture and what it truly can do.