February 19, 2013

Leadership Caffeine-Listen Harder, Please!
In working with leaders at all levels striving to strengthen their performance,listening skills aren’t an issue some of the time, they are an issue nearly 100% of the time.  For too many in leadership roles, either the Symphony of Brilliance (as in, “I know the answer” or, “I’m right”), or, the Symphony of Busyness (“I’ve got so much to do, don’t distract me”) playing in their minds, drowns out attempts at communication emanating from those around them.


How Social Intelligence Can Guide Decisions
This isn’t to suggest that “social” will entirely displace current methods of intelligence gathering. But it should emerge as a strong complement. As it does, social-intelligence literacy will become a critical asset for C-level executives and board members seeking the best possible basis for their decisions.


Five overlooked cost categories for new servers
Acquiring new servers isn't just a matter of cutting a purchase order and paying the bill. Just as any automobile carries additional costs after the initial purchase, IT professionals and business planners need to identify and account for the added costs of new server deployments. Let's consider five general cost categories that can inflate the cost of your next server refresh.


9 Tips for How to Use Operating Level Agreements in Multisourcing
"By establishing OLAs between these groups, the IT function can provide the appearance of seamless service to the business," says Edward Hansen, partner with law firm Baker & McKenzie. Until recently, OLAs were most often internal to an IT organization or a single large service provider, ensuring that the groups within the organization were working together to deliver IT services. But with the rise of multisourcing, OLAs are back in the spotlight.


US Department of Energy: Proving the cloud service broker model
To bring order to this chaos, a new sub-market of the broader cloud-computing market has emerged: the cloud service broker (CSB). Envision some kind of cloud middleman, helping to cut through the plethora of cloud options and services by offering…well, just what a CSB offers isn’t quite clear. And that’s the problem with the whole notion of a CSB. The market has yet to fully define it.


Jacqui Taylor (Global) - Bursting the IT Legacy
In our legacy IT systems, we built to manage the capacity of a peak hour, day or month irrespective of how many of these existed in the business year. This ensured that our IT systems had capability and resources available year round to cope with the relatively few peaks, so unused capacity was the norm and services were therefore expensive. When we build a PaaS we build only the minimum of infrastructure resources (‘provisioned' in Cloud-speak) so that you only pay for what you use at any given time and to meet the peaks we burst additional resources as required, hence the term Cloud Bursting


Hortonworks Sandbox Opens Up Enterprise Apache Hadoop To Newbies
The free, self-contained virtual machine with Hadoop pre-configured has been built using the new Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) 1.2, the industry’s only enterprise-ready, 100 per cent open source platform powered by Apache Hadoop, the release added. Hortonworks is one of the leading commercial vendors of Apache Hadoop, the open source platform for storing, managing and analysing big data. It is now making Hadoop more robust and easier for clients to install, manage and use.


What Data Can’t Do
Commerce depends on trust. Trust is reciprocity coated by emotion. People and companies that behave well in tough times earn affection and self-respect that is extremely valuable, even if it is hard to capture in data. ... Data analysis is pretty bad at narrative and emergent thinking, and it cannot match the explanatory suppleness of even a mediocre novel.


Seven dirty secrets of data visualisation
Data visualisation is a wonderful way of exploring data, finding new insights, and telling a compelling story. But what are the real challenges visualisation developers face - and what don't they want you to know about their work? Here are some of the dirty secrets of the information visualisation (infovis) profession, with an inside look at the process of visualisation development, along with practical tools and approaches for dealing with its inevitable challenges and frustrations.


Google-refine
Google Refine is a power tool for working with messy data, cleaning it up, transforming it from one format into another, extending it with web services, and linking it to databases like Freebase.


European Copyright Society Says Hyperlinks (And Framing) Should Not Be Infringing
Basically, since a hyperlink just points you somewhere it's not transmitting the work, there's no copyright violation. The paper goes into significantly more detail, citing case law around the globe to support its position. It also warns the court that while this may seem like a simple issue, it's vitally important to the health of the internet



Quote for the day:

"Good leaders make people feel that they're at the very heart of things, not at the periphery." -- Warren Bennis

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