A good deal of our work is focused on the core of Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), and the relationships among budgeting, forecasting and strategy.

However, in the case of a major strategic turnaround at Tollpost*, as we will see below, it was in a way simpler. There were numerous things that were “broken” at Tollpost, and a simpler approach, focused on operational excellence, was deployed. You don’t always need strategy management to drive a return to profitability. But let us start at the beginning.

Background

It appears that strategy formulation works well, yet still 70% of all strategies fail. The fault, dear Brutus, must be in strategy execution. Let’s look at some of the reasons:

Strategic Goals: Some key questions. What are the key goals that make up the strategy? How do the goals relate to each other? How do we know when the strategy is complete?  What are the key performance indicators that define strategy success?

Management Fatigue: Once a strategy has been formulated, there is a long road ahead to get the strategy up and running. Perhaps senior management may get bored. Boredom is contagious and can quickly infect the strategy project.

Twitter just revised its privacy policy this week, and in a good way as it responded to concerns about providing user data to external parties such as government. Not every community or enterprise has insights on the best way to phrase these privacy policies, even though attorneys do try… 

As someone who actively looks at privacy policies for both enterprises and communities, I wanted to share with you some of the issues that need to be defined if you maintain a user community or collaborative site where users can potentially be tracked.  I am writing a Quark on this, so if you are interested in more information, or want to share a best or worst practice, let me know.

A privacy policy should be a trust building experience, to encourage participation and provide some guidance on what is happening and what rights the users has to either not have information shared, or what rights they have to correct or edit the information.

For the user, a privacy policy should:

As one of the first cloud ERP providers, NetSuite is looking to grow its customer base across multiple industries and up-market to larger customers. Those efforts include NetSuite’s renewed focus on the manufacturing sector, as unveiled at NetSuite’s annual user conference, which I attended this week. Bottom Line: NetSuite is making the right decision and good progress to build out manufacturing functionality as part of its core system, but there is still much work to be done to achieve functional parity with other cloud and on-premises solutions in the marketplace. Nevertheless, the rapid development capabilities of NetSuite's platform offer hope that it will get there quickly.

The BBC reports (http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18102793) that the Metropolitan Police (the Met, aka Scotland Yard) in London is spending GBP50K to obtain 16 terminals which can read your mobile phone at selected Police Stations in London.  This demands thought -- and analysis suggests some interesting implications.

Not only will the Met be able to read the data (which includes telephone calls and SMS messages but also all your private apps and data and those of your employer enterprise, if stored on the device) but it will be able to retain indefinitely -- even if you are not charged with an offence (unlike DNA, which has to be destroyed if there is no charge).  It is to be hoped that Civil Rights movements will protest loudly, and win.

However, that does not mean that you should not plan.  But the implications are diverse. For example, what happens if you: