I used to work with one of Malaysia's Solid Waste Management Company, The largest Solid Waste Management Concession holder untill today. I'm interested to quote on one of the popular tag called " Think before you throw!" This will discourage people to simply throw rubbish anywhere they want.
This also applies in our daily life. Means, we must think before we do anything, before we take any actions, before we react, or before we tak any response on certain consequences. In a normal situation, we do not have such problem to think first before we 'throw'. However, given a certain degree of pressures, emotions or other related parties' urgency, we might fall into a 'throw later think' syndrom!
To avoid from being trapped with the 'throw later think' situation, one must be able control his/her emotion at any time, and to control emotion requires passion. Surely this is not a brain job. It is a combine heart and minds job. Scientifically, we shall be guided with multi-intelligence; This is where the IQ,EQ,SQ,PQ and UQ applies in our life.
My point is, to avoid 'throw later think' trap, we shall now start building our muscle in the area of IQ,EQ,SQ,PQ and UQ. I will explain more of the ..Q in the near future.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Expanding "Thinkers" (My Blog name) scope!
As Stephen Covey wrotes in his decade's popular book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, to be effective, one must work on the circle of influence, and to expand the circle of concern.
The same goes to this blog. Previously, most of the articles posted were from other authors or contributors. Those articles chosed based on my circle of concern! No doubt they are all excellent articles and lots of lesson learned. Yes, I will continue posting (with author's consent - express or implied)good articles as usual.
Now is the time for me to directly contribute to 'write', to share my thought, my concern, my experience and others as well, nothing more than to expand our circle of concern. I believe as an individual, we are all unique in nature.
The same goes to this blog. Previously, most of the articles posted were from other authors or contributors. Those articles chosed based on my circle of concern! No doubt they are all excellent articles and lots of lesson learned. Yes, I will continue posting (with author's consent - express or implied)good articles as usual.
Now is the time for me to directly contribute to 'write', to share my thought, my concern, my experience and others as well, nothing more than to expand our circle of concern. I believe as an individual, we are all unique in nature.
The Journey begin
I intend to share and write my ideas many times since my early adulthood. Well, not as serious as to be a full journalist. At least, to be able to write from my heart to what I want to 'book' or share my thought to others. Not now, may be later.
I believe, as a novice, I keep on fighting with my level of confidence due to my lack in writing, Be it in Bahasa or English. Untill someone discover 'blogs' as a practical and unique platform for rookie writers like me. That's why I name my first topic as above "The journey begin". From now on, I will continue write and share my thought as and when I feel it is necessary for others to share and view their thought as well.
I believe, as a novice, I keep on fighting with my level of confidence due to my lack in writing, Be it in Bahasa or English. Untill someone discover 'blogs' as a practical and unique platform for rookie writers like me. That's why I name my first topic as above "The journey begin". From now on, I will continue write and share my thought as and when I feel it is necessary for others to share and view their thought as well.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Knowledge Management & Manage Knowledgement
Comment by Michele Martin:
Ross Mayfield has an excellent post on using wikis for teambuilding that also has some interesting discussion of what he sees as a dichotomy between “Knowledge Management” and Manage Knowledgement”:
Manage Knowledgement is a way of describing KM that’s backwards but works. With KM, users were supposed to fill out forms as a side activity to extract their tacit knowledge. Then some form of artificial intelligence would extract value. Turns out, users resisted and the algorithms didn’t match reality. With MK, through blogs and wikis, the principle activity is sharing, driven by social incentives. Contribution is simple and unstructured, isn’t a side activity and there is permission to participate. Intelligence is provided by participants, both through the act of sharing and simply leaving behind breadcrumbs of attention.
This is a more organic approach to managing and sharing knowledge that I think is centered in how people really work, as opposed to artificial constructs. That’s not to say that there still isn’t something artificial about blogs and wikis in some sense, but I think they lend themselves to our more social natures, capitalizing on our uses of social currency. I’m not aware of any “knowledge management” systems (with a capital KM) that sprang up on their own, nor am I aware of droves of people wanting to participate in KM systems just for the fun of it. The growth of social media outside of any corporate mandates, the fact that people are using these tools “under the radar,” suggests to me that they are already better-suited in many ways to human interaction than previous KM systems might have been.
Of course, within this new paradigm of sharing knowledge people need to not only learn the specific technology skills associated with these tools, but they also have to learn new processes. For example, as Ross points out, when we begin using social media tools, we have to have conversations about how to make the best uses of them:
Simple conversations occur that lead to simple agreements like “let’s use these four tags, for these four kinds of information — and lets agree to pay attention to pages and posts with this tag on a daily basis.” While it seems mundane at first, the team not only develops a shared language, but a way of working with it.
We can see, then, that we have two very different sets of literacies that need to be developed–the technological skills to be able to edit a wiki or comment on a blog post, but also the people/process skills necessary to negotiate the kinds of tags you’ll share or to write a blog post that effectively summarizes what you learned at a conference. This is what makes developing new work literacies difficult for many people, I think–it’s asking us to combine technology and people skills in ways that can be challenging to those of us who may have tended to specialize in one or the other. There’s an even greater integration of people and technology skills than we may have experienced before
Ross Mayfield has an excellent post on using wikis for teambuilding that also has some interesting discussion of what he sees as a dichotomy between “Knowledge Management” and Manage Knowledgement”:
Manage Knowledgement is a way of describing KM that’s backwards but works. With KM, users were supposed to fill out forms as a side activity to extract their tacit knowledge. Then some form of artificial intelligence would extract value. Turns out, users resisted and the algorithms didn’t match reality. With MK, through blogs and wikis, the principle activity is sharing, driven by social incentives. Contribution is simple and unstructured, isn’t a side activity and there is permission to participate. Intelligence is provided by participants, both through the act of sharing and simply leaving behind breadcrumbs of attention.
This is a more organic approach to managing and sharing knowledge that I think is centered in how people really work, as opposed to artificial constructs. That’s not to say that there still isn’t something artificial about blogs and wikis in some sense, but I think they lend themselves to our more social natures, capitalizing on our uses of social currency. I’m not aware of any “knowledge management” systems (with a capital KM) that sprang up on their own, nor am I aware of droves of people wanting to participate in KM systems just for the fun of it. The growth of social media outside of any corporate mandates, the fact that people are using these tools “under the radar,” suggests to me that they are already better-suited in many ways to human interaction than previous KM systems might have been.
Of course, within this new paradigm of sharing knowledge people need to not only learn the specific technology skills associated with these tools, but they also have to learn new processes. For example, as Ross points out, when we begin using social media tools, we have to have conversations about how to make the best uses of them:
Simple conversations occur that lead to simple agreements like “let’s use these four tags, for these four kinds of information — and lets agree to pay attention to pages and posts with this tag on a daily basis.” While it seems mundane at first, the team not only develops a shared language, but a way of working with it.
We can see, then, that we have two very different sets of literacies that need to be developed–the technological skills to be able to edit a wiki or comment on a blog post, but also the people/process skills necessary to negotiate the kinds of tags you’ll share or to write a blog post that effectively summarizes what you learned at a conference. This is what makes developing new work literacies difficult for many people, I think–it’s asking us to combine technology and people skills in ways that can be challenging to those of us who may have tended to specialize in one or the other. There’s an even greater integration of people and technology skills than we may have experienced before
Changing Knowledge Worker Attitudes
Comment by Michele Martin;
I commented on Tony’s post re: how growth and learning are happening at a slower pace than business needs that part of the problem from my perspective is that many knowledge workers regard training and professional development as the responsibility of the organization, not their own, particularly once they’ve completed their initial education for their occupation. Having heard too many times, “I’d do X, but the company hasn’t trained me on it yet,” I believe a fundamental change of attitude is in order.
This is something I’ve written about previously on my blog in a post called Who’s in Charge of Learning? Here’s some of what I wrote:
In a knowledge economy, knowledge and information is power. The more you know, the more you can do with it, the more marketable you are. You can’t AFFORD to let an organization tell you what you should be learning–too many organizations, businesses and nonprofits alike, are so busy struggling for survival that they aren’t even sure what needs to be learned anyway. All of a sudden they look up one day and say “Oh no–we need people who can do X or Y.” Waiting for someone else to tell you what you should learn is a sure ticket to the unemployment line.
I think we’re operating from old knowledge and learning paradigms that developed in an industrial age when companies owned the means of production. As a worker, you couldn’t make a living if you didn’t have access to the (expensive) machinery owned by the company. So you waited for the company to tell you what you should learn–they knew best. But now, WE own the means of production–it’s in our heads. It’s what we know and can do. Do we really want to turn that over to the organization to decide? Or do we want to be the people who say “I’m going to take charge of my own learning. I’m going to be curious and pay attention to what’s changing and where things are going and I’m going to pro-actively prepare myself for those things, regardless of whether or not the organization tells me I need to learn this.”
To me, this is really why personal learning and creating a personal learning environment is so critically necessary. I don’t believe that we can rely on the organizations that employ us to drive what we learn. Yes, we need to be responsive to what they need us to know–we need to attend the trainings our bosses suggest, etc. But as individual workers, I don’t believe that we can afford to wait around for someone else to tell us what to learn. We shouldn’t be waiting to receive permission or be empowered. We should be seizing that power and doing everything with it that we can. Our knowledge and skills are the only “job security we have.” And we’ve seen time and time again what happens when we turn over job security to someone else.
This is something I passionately believe. Yes, organizations need to provide staff development. But if we rely on organizations to do all of it, then when we end up unemployed, we have only ourselves to blame. I also think that this attitude makes organizations less adaptable and creative.
In response to my comment on his post, Tony asked what we can do to begin changing this culture of disempowerment. I believe that we have to start with making people conscious of the fact that they own the most precious resource in just about any organization today–the power of their ideas, social connections and thought processes. In a connected age, turning over the development of these things to an organization is not only foolish, but dangerous, in part because the very nature of the wirerarchy is for the power to be in the nodes, in each of us individually. There will be no further development if control is centralized; growth flourishes when we all take responsibility for our own nodes and connections.
As part of this issue of taking responsibility for professional development, I think there’s a larger issue of people managing their own careers differently. This is where I think Dan Pink’s ideas on how we pursue professional development have some real merit. In a nutshell, they are:
There is no career plan–you can’t truly anticipate where things are going to go. There is only a way of pursuing a career. Therefore you need to make choices about your career and what you do based on their intrinsic value–because these activities will benefit you regardless of where they may lead.
Build on your strengths, not your weaknesses.
Improve your life by improving the lives of others (i.e., customers, your team, etc.). It’s about how you can add value to anything.
Persistence trumps talent. This also suggests that you can’t just rest on your laurels–you have to focus on continuous improvement.
Make excellent mistakes.
Leave an imprint. Make an impression.
That’s the start of my answer to what we can do to start changing attitudes and thinking differently. What ideas do you have?
I commented on Tony’s post re: how growth and learning are happening at a slower pace than business needs that part of the problem from my perspective is that many knowledge workers regard training and professional development as the responsibility of the organization, not their own, particularly once they’ve completed their initial education for their occupation. Having heard too many times, “I’d do X, but the company hasn’t trained me on it yet,” I believe a fundamental change of attitude is in order.
This is something I’ve written about previously on my blog in a post called Who’s in Charge of Learning? Here’s some of what I wrote:
In a knowledge economy, knowledge and information is power. The more you know, the more you can do with it, the more marketable you are. You can’t AFFORD to let an organization tell you what you should be learning–too many organizations, businesses and nonprofits alike, are so busy struggling for survival that they aren’t even sure what needs to be learned anyway. All of a sudden they look up one day and say “Oh no–we need people who can do X or Y.” Waiting for someone else to tell you what you should learn is a sure ticket to the unemployment line.
I think we’re operating from old knowledge and learning paradigms that developed in an industrial age when companies owned the means of production. As a worker, you couldn’t make a living if you didn’t have access to the (expensive) machinery owned by the company. So you waited for the company to tell you what you should learn–they knew best. But now, WE own the means of production–it’s in our heads. It’s what we know and can do. Do we really want to turn that over to the organization to decide? Or do we want to be the people who say “I’m going to take charge of my own learning. I’m going to be curious and pay attention to what’s changing and where things are going and I’m going to pro-actively prepare myself for those things, regardless of whether or not the organization tells me I need to learn this.”
To me, this is really why personal learning and creating a personal learning environment is so critically necessary. I don’t believe that we can rely on the organizations that employ us to drive what we learn. Yes, we need to be responsive to what they need us to know–we need to attend the trainings our bosses suggest, etc. But as individual workers, I don’t believe that we can afford to wait around for someone else to tell us what to learn. We shouldn’t be waiting to receive permission or be empowered. We should be seizing that power and doing everything with it that we can. Our knowledge and skills are the only “job security we have.” And we’ve seen time and time again what happens when we turn over job security to someone else.
This is something I passionately believe. Yes, organizations need to provide staff development. But if we rely on organizations to do all of it, then when we end up unemployed, we have only ourselves to blame. I also think that this attitude makes organizations less adaptable and creative.
In response to my comment on his post, Tony asked what we can do to begin changing this culture of disempowerment. I believe that we have to start with making people conscious of the fact that they own the most precious resource in just about any organization today–the power of their ideas, social connections and thought processes. In a connected age, turning over the development of these things to an organization is not only foolish, but dangerous, in part because the very nature of the wirerarchy is for the power to be in the nodes, in each of us individually. There will be no further development if control is centralized; growth flourishes when we all take responsibility for our own nodes and connections.
As part of this issue of taking responsibility for professional development, I think there’s a larger issue of people managing their own careers differently. This is where I think Dan Pink’s ideas on how we pursue professional development have some real merit. In a nutshell, they are:
There is no career plan–you can’t truly anticipate where things are going to go. There is only a way of pursuing a career. Therefore you need to make choices about your career and what you do based on their intrinsic value–because these activities will benefit you regardless of where they may lead.
Build on your strengths, not your weaknesses.
Improve your life by improving the lives of others (i.e., customers, your team, etc.). It’s about how you can add value to anything.
Persistence trumps talent. This also suggests that you can’t just rest on your laurels–you have to focus on continuous improvement.
Make excellent mistakes.
Leave an imprint. Make an impression.
That’s the start of my answer to what we can do to start changing attitudes and thinking differently. What ideas do you have?
Do your star performers see a reason to stay put?
Recruiters want your top people. And they know how to win them over.
They invite your best and brightest to break free of their current positions and conjure up visions of the work they’d love to be doing.
Harvard Management Update spoke to talent-management and retention experts for their advice for managers who want to let their direct reports know that their career aspirations are heard and valued.
Overcome the fear factor
Why do managers have such a hard time discussing career development? Usually, it’s ‘‘the fear factor”, says Maggie Sullivan, executive vice-president of a human resources consultancy in New Jersey.
Help them chart their career path
Before you initiate the first conversation, consider that many employees are not completely sure of what they want, says Timothy Butler, author of Getting Unstuck: How Dead Ends Become New Paths (Harvard Business School Press, 2007) and director of career development programmes at Harvard . If you’re talking to a particularly talented and versatile member of your team, y ou can help her identify the most promising possibilities by asking questions such as:
n What assignments have you found most engaging?
Which of your accomplishments in the last six months made you proudest?
n What makes for a great day at work?
Make a plan
After you and an employee have identified one or two career targets, your conversations should focus on how to get him there.
Keep talking
Once you and your star employee have a plan, keep the conversation going.
Be frank and specific
Career development discussions can be uncomfortable when the manager points out the employee’s weaker areas. To keep the discussion focused and positive, cite specific examples.
Anne Field is a business writer based in New York — © (2008) New York Times
They invite your best and brightest to break free of their current positions and conjure up visions of the work they’d love to be doing.
Harvard Management Update spoke to talent-management and retention experts for their advice for managers who want to let their direct reports know that their career aspirations are heard and valued.
Overcome the fear factor
Why do managers have such a hard time discussing career development? Usually, it’s ‘‘the fear factor”, says Maggie Sullivan, executive vice-president of a human resources consultancy in New Jersey.
Help them chart their career path
Before you initiate the first conversation, consider that many employees are not completely sure of what they want, says Timothy Butler, author of Getting Unstuck: How Dead Ends Become New Paths (Harvard Business School Press, 2007) and director of career development programmes at Harvard . If you’re talking to a particularly talented and versatile member of your team, y ou can help her identify the most promising possibilities by asking questions such as:
n What assignments have you found most engaging?
Which of your accomplishments in the last six months made you proudest?
n What makes for a great day at work?
Make a plan
After you and an employee have identified one or two career targets, your conversations should focus on how to get him there.
Keep talking
Once you and your star employee have a plan, keep the conversation going.
Be frank and specific
Career development discussions can be uncomfortable when the manager points out the employee’s weaker areas. To keep the discussion focused and positive, cite specific examples.
Anne Field is a business writer based in New York — © (2008) New York Times
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Employers' Biggest Legal Mistakes
by Rob Gilmore
[Workforce Week August 19-25, 2007 Vol. 8 Issue 34]
Ten things that can explode into costly lawsuits, unionization and an unhappy workforce.
What are the biggest employee-related mistakes employers make these days? And how can you defuse these potential time bombs before they explode into costly disputes? Here's a quick overview of the top 10 employer mistakes and how to avoid them.
1. Failing to establish an effective sexual harassment policy.
Recent Supreme Court decisions hold employers liable for their supervisors' actions unless complaining employees fail to take advantage of company complaint procedures. In light of these rulings, implementing policies and procedures for dealing with sexual harassment is more important than ever. It is also essential that supervisors be trained on these policies and procedures. Finally, an employer must act in a timely manner to investigate all sexual harassment complaints that are brought to its attention.
2. Failing to pay overtime to nonexempt employees.
Many employers pay employees a salary regardless of the number of hours they work and whether they are subject to the wage and hour laws. Unless they are exempt as administrative, executive or professional employees, you must pay them time-and-a-half their regular hourly pay for all hours worked in excess of 40 per week. When in doubt about whether an employee is exempt, pay him or her hourly wages. This will avoid having to pay back wages if you're audited by the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division.
3. Failing to complete I-9 forms for new employees.
Many employers merely photocopy employee-produced documents without filling out the parts of the forms that describe the documents. This can be a costly mistake if the Immigration and Naturalization Service audits you. (One employer was reportedly fined $100,000.) You are not required to photocopy employee-produced documents, but even if you do, you must fill out the forms completely.
4. Failing to take and document disciplinary actions.
Supervisors, not wanting to be perceived as villains, hate to write up employees. Then, when the company can no longer tolerate unsatisfactory performances, the files do not document the poor records and you have no grounds on which to justify discharges. This leaves you open to lawsuits alleging discrimination. Employees who have been discharged for poor performance often have glowing evaluations in their files. This can expose you to lawsuits.
5. Failing to quickly discharge poor performers.
Employers are advised to progressively discipline employees and to give one warning too many rather than one too few. But often a time comes when failure to act is as bad as overreacting. If you have retained employees for many years despite poor attendance records, multiple infractions and even several "final" warnings in their files, you are asking for trouble. These employees are most likely to sue when finally discharged. The best course is to discharge a poor performer as soon as prudently feasible. The more seniority an employee has, the harder to justify discharging him or her.
6. You must be sure that laying off a group of employees has no disparate impact on any protected group.
To avoid lawsuits, verify that the group doesn't contain a disproportionately high percentage of age-protected employees or employees of a particular ethnic or racial group or sex compared to the rest of the work force. The decision of who will be laid off should be based on objective criteria, such as qualifications, experience, and ability to perform certain work essential to the company. If the decision to lay off one employee as opposed to another is based on such criteria, make sure the file supports this decision.
7. Failing to get a signed release from a terminated employee.
As an employer, you may have a legitimate reason for terminating an employee. However, you fear a lawsuit if the employee is a member of a protected class. Many employers are reluctant to use releases because they fear the release may educate the employee about rights and litigation possibilities of which he might otherwise be unaware. But this may be a case of sticking your head in the sand. In light of media attention given to employment discrimination verdicts, employers should not rely on a hope that workers do not know their rights. The right approach to avoid litigation often is to get signed releases from departing employees, particularly if any severance or separation pay is provided to the employees.
8. Conditioning employment offers on medical exams.
The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) bars employers from asking applicants about their disabilities or requiring medical exams before offering employment. You can ask applicants to take job-relevant medical exams only after offering jobs. The burden is on you to establish the medical exam's relevance to job requirements. In addition, employers often fail to accommodate their employees' disabilities after they are hired. The ADA requires employers to reasonably accommodate their employees' disabilities.
9. Failing to take proactive steps to keep your work force union free.
Employers must constantly communicate with their employees to deal with their grievances. If employees do not believe their employer is interested in their issues, they may look outside the workplace for representation.
10. Failing to retain labor and employment counsel to avoid making the first nine mistakes.
The proliferation of complex statutes prevents most employers from keeping on top of employment law without professional help.
[Workforce Week August 19-25, 2007 Vol. 8 Issue 34]
Ten things that can explode into costly lawsuits, unionization and an unhappy workforce.
What are the biggest employee-related mistakes employers make these days? And how can you defuse these potential time bombs before they explode into costly disputes? Here's a quick overview of the top 10 employer mistakes and how to avoid them.
1. Failing to establish an effective sexual harassment policy.
Recent Supreme Court decisions hold employers liable for their supervisors' actions unless complaining employees fail to take advantage of company complaint procedures. In light of these rulings, implementing policies and procedures for dealing with sexual harassment is more important than ever. It is also essential that supervisors be trained on these policies and procedures. Finally, an employer must act in a timely manner to investigate all sexual harassment complaints that are brought to its attention.
2. Failing to pay overtime to nonexempt employees.
Many employers pay employees a salary regardless of the number of hours they work and whether they are subject to the wage and hour laws. Unless they are exempt as administrative, executive or professional employees, you must pay them time-and-a-half their regular hourly pay for all hours worked in excess of 40 per week. When in doubt about whether an employee is exempt, pay him or her hourly wages. This will avoid having to pay back wages if you're audited by the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division.
3. Failing to complete I-9 forms for new employees.
Many employers merely photocopy employee-produced documents without filling out the parts of the forms that describe the documents. This can be a costly mistake if the Immigration and Naturalization Service audits you. (One employer was reportedly fined $100,000.) You are not required to photocopy employee-produced documents, but even if you do, you must fill out the forms completely.
4. Failing to take and document disciplinary actions.
Supervisors, not wanting to be perceived as villains, hate to write up employees. Then, when the company can no longer tolerate unsatisfactory performances, the files do not document the poor records and you have no grounds on which to justify discharges. This leaves you open to lawsuits alleging discrimination. Employees who have been discharged for poor performance often have glowing evaluations in their files. This can expose you to lawsuits.
5. Failing to quickly discharge poor performers.
Employers are advised to progressively discipline employees and to give one warning too many rather than one too few. But often a time comes when failure to act is as bad as overreacting. If you have retained employees for many years despite poor attendance records, multiple infractions and even several "final" warnings in their files, you are asking for trouble. These employees are most likely to sue when finally discharged. The best course is to discharge a poor performer as soon as prudently feasible. The more seniority an employee has, the harder to justify discharging him or her.
6. You must be sure that laying off a group of employees has no disparate impact on any protected group.
To avoid lawsuits, verify that the group doesn't contain a disproportionately high percentage of age-protected employees or employees of a particular ethnic or racial group or sex compared to the rest of the work force. The decision of who will be laid off should be based on objective criteria, such as qualifications, experience, and ability to perform certain work essential to the company. If the decision to lay off one employee as opposed to another is based on such criteria, make sure the file supports this decision.
7. Failing to get a signed release from a terminated employee.
As an employer, you may have a legitimate reason for terminating an employee. However, you fear a lawsuit if the employee is a member of a protected class. Many employers are reluctant to use releases because they fear the release may educate the employee about rights and litigation possibilities of which he might otherwise be unaware. But this may be a case of sticking your head in the sand. In light of media attention given to employment discrimination verdicts, employers should not rely on a hope that workers do not know their rights. The right approach to avoid litigation often is to get signed releases from departing employees, particularly if any severance or separation pay is provided to the employees.
8. Conditioning employment offers on medical exams.
The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) bars employers from asking applicants about their disabilities or requiring medical exams before offering employment. You can ask applicants to take job-relevant medical exams only after offering jobs. The burden is on you to establish the medical exam's relevance to job requirements. In addition, employers often fail to accommodate their employees' disabilities after they are hired. The ADA requires employers to reasonably accommodate their employees' disabilities.
9. Failing to take proactive steps to keep your work force union free.
Employers must constantly communicate with their employees to deal with their grievances. If employees do not believe their employer is interested in their issues, they may look outside the workplace for representation.
10. Failing to retain labor and employment counsel to avoid making the first nine mistakes.
The proliferation of complex statutes prevents most employers from keeping on top of employment law without professional help.
360 Degree Feedback
Evaluating performance based on just the manager's review isn't always the most effective way to grow people within global organizations. Looking for a more balanced assessment of performance? Look in every direction with 360 Degree Reviews.
Now you can receive performance feedback from a variety of different sources including self and peer review - and even external sources - to get more insightful and realistic assessments of employee performance, competency gaps and development needs.
The 360 Degree Multi-Rater shapes the course of each employee's progress with:
Multiple-Input Ratings. Get comprehensive assessments from every relevant source
Detailed Gap Analysis. Identify areas for improvement and development, 'hidden strengths' and 'blind spots'
Pre-Populated Forms. Save enormous amounts of time over a standard paper-based system by using the role-based competencies and behaviors built into our simple, web- based forms
Comprehensive Writing Assistant. Create concise and meaningful assessments using suggested review text created by experts
Legal Scan. Automatically spot non-compliant language, significantly reducing HR review time
Now you can receive performance feedback from a variety of different sources including self and peer review - and even external sources - to get more insightful and realistic assessments of employee performance, competency gaps and development needs.
The 360 Degree Multi-Rater shapes the course of each employee's progress with:
Multiple-Input Ratings. Get comprehensive assessments from every relevant source
Detailed Gap Analysis. Identify areas for improvement and development, 'hidden strengths' and 'blind spots'
Pre-Populated Forms. Save enormous amounts of time over a standard paper-based system by using the role-based competencies and behaviors built into our simple, web- based forms
Comprehensive Writing Assistant. Create concise and meaningful assessments using suggested review text created by experts
Legal Scan. Automatically spot non-compliant language, significantly reducing HR review time
Which will become pervasive, Business Intelligence (BI) or Corporate Performance Management (CPM)?
Lately I have read articles and analysts’ reports discussing whether Corporate Performance Management (CPM) rather than business intelligence (BI) will become pervasive in the future. This seems to be a discussion about apples and oranges where we are talking about two entirely different things. CPM is a business application or process while BI is a technology.
All CPM projects use BI but not all BI projects involve CPM implementations. Using this logic, BI might become pervasive while CPM may not, however, if CPM does become pervasive then BI, since it is a technology used in CPM applications, will also become pervasive.
Why the confusion and the discussion of an either/or situation? Too often in our industry we confuse tools and vendors with business applications or processes. Too often products become identified with a term and then everyone’s projects become identified with that product. Let’s look at the consumer (IT and business) and the supplier (software vendors and their partners).
On the consumer side, it is human nature relating to associate the product/vendor used in an IT project as The application rather merely as the tool used for a particular application. Too often, over the years, I have heard that Oracle, DB2, Business Objects, Cognos or fill-in-your-own-IT-vendor was not very good for a particular DW, BI or reporting project. Asking a few questions during an assessment or project review, however, it is uncovered it was not really the tool that was the problem but rather the data (integrity, quality, availability or timeliness) or how the tool was implemented.
On the supplier side, some vendors follow every hype cycle or IT industry buzzword and label their products or solutions using their products as the latest and greatest fill-in-your-buzzword! Since many consumers do not have time to really analyze fact from hype, the label sticks and the product becomes associated with the business application or process.
And the jumbling of products with business applications or processes is reinforced by industry analyst reports, articles in industry publications, white papers, webinars/seminars/podcasts and case studies. If everyone says it, then it must be true!
By Rick Sherman
All CPM projects use BI but not all BI projects involve CPM implementations. Using this logic, BI might become pervasive while CPM may not, however, if CPM does become pervasive then BI, since it is a technology used in CPM applications, will also become pervasive.
Why the confusion and the discussion of an either/or situation? Too often in our industry we confuse tools and vendors with business applications or processes. Too often products become identified with a term and then everyone’s projects become identified with that product. Let’s look at the consumer (IT and business) and the supplier (software vendors and their partners).
On the consumer side, it is human nature relating to associate the product/vendor used in an IT project as The application rather merely as the tool used for a particular application. Too often, over the years, I have heard that Oracle, DB2, Business Objects, Cognos or fill-in-your-own-IT-vendor was not very good for a particular DW, BI or reporting project. Asking a few questions during an assessment or project review, however, it is uncovered it was not really the tool that was the problem but rather the data (integrity, quality, availability or timeliness) or how the tool was implemented.
On the supplier side, some vendors follow every hype cycle or IT industry buzzword and label their products or solutions using their products as the latest and greatest fill-in-your-buzzword! Since many consumers do not have time to really analyze fact from hype, the label sticks and the product becomes associated with the business application or process.
And the jumbling of products with business applications or processes is reinforced by industry analyst reports, articles in industry publications, white papers, webinars/seminars/podcasts and case studies. If everyone says it, then it must be true!
By Rick Sherman
Monday, August 20, 2007
Managing Performance in a Virtual World
VIRTUALIZATION CHANGES THE GAME for performance monitoring and management. Read on for a primer on optimizimizing virtual environments, without compromising performance. Automation and adaptability is key….
Ah, virtualization…the promise of infinite flexibility and an example of software and hardware working together in perfect harmony to solve real problems within the data center. Without question, virtualization is a technology that is transforming the IT landscape and the practice holds significant promise to those who are looking to improve availability and IT processes — and ultimately make IT more responsive to business needs.
Virtualization provides too many benefits to just stand by and watch. According to the Yankee Group, 9 out of every 10 enterprises will have implemented virtualization into their IT infrastructure by the end of 2007. While the business case for adopting virtual infrastructure technology is clear and compelling, it is important for companies to understand the performance characteristics of virtualization so they can first put the right management tools and business drivers in place. One area in need of attention is application and performance monitoring and how that process will be able to function effectively in a virtualized environment.
Most companies recognize the value that application and performance monitoring brings to the table. Keeping a close watch on all systems and applications to ensure they are available, and then having the technology in place to resolve the issues and report back to the business with a clean bill of service health provides a level of assurance that can't be quantified in dollars and cents. ("Priceless") But just when everyone gets comfortable, virtualization comes along and changes the IT infrastructure into a dynamic and fluid (and chaotic!) entity.
Given that virtualization implies continual change, managing performance in a virtual environment will require the ability to adapt constantly to changing behavior patterns. While it has always been a challenge to manage the performance of all the moving (and changing) parts that comprise a company's IT systems, virtualization technologies promise to make it all that much more complex.
Certainly, existing systems management tools have been good at understanding infrastructure availability, but they lack visibility into the behavior of virtual resources and application performance. With Gartner reporting that 27 percent of IT executives have no confidence in their current performance monitoring tools, how can companies have confidence in virtualized environments if there is no confidence in the physical world?
DON'T HATE - AUTOMATE!
The industry is going to continue to see an up tick in the request for virtualization technologies, so we'd better get used to dealing with added complexity and constantly changing environments. The bottom line is that enterprises will never be able to scale their virtual and physical data center environments without automation.
Why? Because we have reached a point where it is humanly impossible to keep track of all of the constantly changing components and events within IT that affect the quality of service and the user experience. However through automation - and the availability of self-learning and continuously adaptive technology — we are able to achieve a level of business intelligence that allows us to understand system behavior and anticipate user interactions, heading off any anticipated problems before they even occur.
This approach makes performance management more intuitive and efficient. Using intelligence in this capacity - to automate the decision-making processes --represents a shift in thinking about managing IT, and the industry is following suit as more and more system administrators turn to automated, behavior-based tools in order to scale along with the increase in user demand.
What do you think accurate, realtime knowledge is worth to a system administrator who is in the IT trenches struggling to return a critical server to operation? Or a team in a data center where there is literally no physical room to house servers? Or maybe the question is better positioned as "what is the cost of downtime and will I have to pay Dr. Evil 'One Billion Dollars' to get up and running again?"
BEST PRACTICES: GET PREDICTABLE!
IT is supporting a mind-boggling number of increasingly complex and unpredictable user and technology interactions. Without the restrictions imposed by siloed, proprietary infrastructure platforms, performance has become difficult to predict. To restore predictability and bring performance consistency to virtual environments, IT management needs to adapt in the following ways:
SELF-LEARNING CAPABILITY: Heuristics and behavior analysis have been used in the IT security realm for years. Real-time behavior analysis provides the same benefit of self-learning anomaly detection in the data center. Rather than trying to model constantly changing performance variables, performance management should analyze behavior in real time and correlate infrastructure performance quickly to application performance and vice versa.
AUTOMATED THRESHOLD MANAGEMENT: As part of the self- learning capability, thresholds should be adaptive. Performance management tools for virtual environments should be able to learn and build behavior profiles for servers, virtual machines (VMs) and applications and also adapt thresholds for changing behavior.
VISIBILITY INTO INDIVIDUAL VM AND SYSTEM BEHAVIOR: With so many moving parts in a virtual infrastructure, it can be nearly impossible to isolate the cause of an application performance issue. It is critical to have visibility into the health of each VM and the health of the overall system.
PROACTIVE CAPACITY PLANNING: Performance management tools need to offer resource allocation and capacity planning before deployment as well as in production. The value of virtualization is flexibility and resource optimization. Tools that can deliver that optimization from the onset are the most valuable.
CONCLUSION
The benefits of virtualization are compelling, but successful adoption depends on having the right skills, management tools and business drivers in place. One critical area of importance is application and performance monitoring and how that process will be able to function effectively in a virtualized environment.
Companies will need to get a better grip on managing performance in a virtual environment by implementing management systems capable of learning and adapting to constant change. Self-learning performance management technology provides visibility into the behavior and the interdependencies of the virtual and physical resources and--most importantly--the applications and business functions they support.
By Jean-François Huard
Ah, virtualization…the promise of infinite flexibility and an example of software and hardware working together in perfect harmony to solve real problems within the data center. Without question, virtualization is a technology that is transforming the IT landscape and the practice holds significant promise to those who are looking to improve availability and IT processes — and ultimately make IT more responsive to business needs.
Virtualization provides too many benefits to just stand by and watch. According to the Yankee Group, 9 out of every 10 enterprises will have implemented virtualization into their IT infrastructure by the end of 2007. While the business case for adopting virtual infrastructure technology is clear and compelling, it is important for companies to understand the performance characteristics of virtualization so they can first put the right management tools and business drivers in place. One area in need of attention is application and performance monitoring and how that process will be able to function effectively in a virtualized environment.
Most companies recognize the value that application and performance monitoring brings to the table. Keeping a close watch on all systems and applications to ensure they are available, and then having the technology in place to resolve the issues and report back to the business with a clean bill of service health provides a level of assurance that can't be quantified in dollars and cents. ("Priceless") But just when everyone gets comfortable, virtualization comes along and changes the IT infrastructure into a dynamic and fluid (and chaotic!) entity.
Given that virtualization implies continual change, managing performance in a virtual environment will require the ability to adapt constantly to changing behavior patterns. While it has always been a challenge to manage the performance of all the moving (and changing) parts that comprise a company's IT systems, virtualization technologies promise to make it all that much more complex.
Certainly, existing systems management tools have been good at understanding infrastructure availability, but they lack visibility into the behavior of virtual resources and application performance. With Gartner reporting that 27 percent of IT executives have no confidence in their current performance monitoring tools, how can companies have confidence in virtualized environments if there is no confidence in the physical world?
DON'T HATE - AUTOMATE!
The industry is going to continue to see an up tick in the request for virtualization technologies, so we'd better get used to dealing with added complexity and constantly changing environments. The bottom line is that enterprises will never be able to scale their virtual and physical data center environments without automation.
Why? Because we have reached a point where it is humanly impossible to keep track of all of the constantly changing components and events within IT that affect the quality of service and the user experience. However through automation - and the availability of self-learning and continuously adaptive technology — we are able to achieve a level of business intelligence that allows us to understand system behavior and anticipate user interactions, heading off any anticipated problems before they even occur.
This approach makes performance management more intuitive and efficient. Using intelligence in this capacity - to automate the decision-making processes --represents a shift in thinking about managing IT, and the industry is following suit as more and more system administrators turn to automated, behavior-based tools in order to scale along with the increase in user demand.
What do you think accurate, realtime knowledge is worth to a system administrator who is in the IT trenches struggling to return a critical server to operation? Or a team in a data center where there is literally no physical room to house servers? Or maybe the question is better positioned as "what is the cost of downtime and will I have to pay Dr. Evil 'One Billion Dollars' to get up and running again?"
BEST PRACTICES: GET PREDICTABLE!
IT is supporting a mind-boggling number of increasingly complex and unpredictable user and technology interactions. Without the restrictions imposed by siloed, proprietary infrastructure platforms, performance has become difficult to predict. To restore predictability and bring performance consistency to virtual environments, IT management needs to adapt in the following ways:
SELF-LEARNING CAPABILITY: Heuristics and behavior analysis have been used in the IT security realm for years. Real-time behavior analysis provides the same benefit of self-learning anomaly detection in the data center. Rather than trying to model constantly changing performance variables, performance management should analyze behavior in real time and correlate infrastructure performance quickly to application performance and vice versa.
AUTOMATED THRESHOLD MANAGEMENT: As part of the self- learning capability, thresholds should be adaptive. Performance management tools for virtual environments should be able to learn and build behavior profiles for servers, virtual machines (VMs) and applications and also adapt thresholds for changing behavior.
VISIBILITY INTO INDIVIDUAL VM AND SYSTEM BEHAVIOR: With so many moving parts in a virtual infrastructure, it can be nearly impossible to isolate the cause of an application performance issue. It is critical to have visibility into the health of each VM and the health of the overall system.
PROACTIVE CAPACITY PLANNING: Performance management tools need to offer resource allocation and capacity planning before deployment as well as in production. The value of virtualization is flexibility and resource optimization. Tools that can deliver that optimization from the onset are the most valuable.
CONCLUSION
The benefits of virtualization are compelling, but successful adoption depends on having the right skills, management tools and business drivers in place. One critical area of importance is application and performance monitoring and how that process will be able to function effectively in a virtualized environment.
Companies will need to get a better grip on managing performance in a virtual environment by implementing management systems capable of learning and adapting to constant change. Self-learning performance management technology provides visibility into the behavior and the interdependencies of the virtual and physical resources and--most importantly--the applications and business functions they support.
By Jean-François Huard
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