Climate Business Network

The all-too-familiar promise of enterprise business intelligence is the ability to optimize decision-making at every level of the organization through a blend of systems and technologies that leverage highly useful, accessible, accurate data. In many industries, BI use is so pervasive that it is essential just to remain competitive! But many organizations never realize the full value simply because they are not agile enough to adapt to the new speed and complexity.

The Good: Great Opportunities

Enterprise BI solutions offer a powerful competitive edge in today’s fast-paced, high-tech, global economy.

For years, organizations have been automating their reporting and online analytical processing capabilities. Recent trends are moving toward advanced analytics as the central focus of BI. This includes data mining, predictive analysis, complex SQL, natural language processing, statistics, and artificial intelligence. Advanced analytics provides a competitive advantage as it allows organizations to detect and model patterns and trends in all areas of their business, such as market shifts, supply chain economics, cost fluctuations, and more.

The Bad: Typical Challenges

Given the myriad of enterprise-BI solution options, just getting started can be challenging. In addition to the standard solutions that have been in use for many years, new Web 2.0 services, virtualization, social networking, and software-as-a-service options are available now, too. With so many choices and possible implications for the business, the decision-makers need to be thinking about how to optimize the balance between customer and shareholder value while considering all the financial and political implications.

The Ugly: The Real Competitive Advantage

Following an enterprise BI implementation, the expectation is that our day-to-day tasks will get simpler and more satisfying. After all, we have streamlined and automated many of the left-brain linear processes, freeing us to focus on expansion and innovation. But the reality is often very different. What many leaders don’t fully comprehend is the destabilizing effect that enterprise BI can have on an organization. Successful BI implementation requires a level of agility that is not inherent in most organizations. Continue Reading

Most business issues discussed world wide are usually more relevant to the bigger economies of the world rather than those of the less developed countries. This is in spite of the excellent growth markets in the third world countries, as most products in the more developed countries have entered the matured state. The telecom industry is a good example of an industry that has thrived in spite of a hostile third world investment climate. Telecoms is now the third largest contributor to Nigeria’s Gross Domestic product (GDP).

The success story is tied directly to the aggressive investment posture of the mobile telephone industry there, where practically all the infrastructure had to be provided privately. In spite of this, the market there remains very profitable with Nigerian subscribers accounting for the largest subscriber base in both MTN, and Zain international networks. This paper however presents his suggestions on how to get around the high production cost, which applies to most industries in the third world.

While it is understood that good infrastructure and a conducive business climate can help attract investments, the biggest markets in the third world may not necessarily reside it those areas.

Furthermore, business culture, and other issues are peculiar to some third world countries and cannot attract significant discussion in most international business journals.

Those markets around the third world need to be identified for sustained growth in many industries to alleviate the effect of the financial meltdown currently being experienced world wide.

More insight into business issues and practices in this part of the world therefore, should add valuable knowledge into international business management practice.

If you’re in online marketing–or if you’re considering starting a home business in this general industry–I strongly encourage you to do yourself a big favor and watch the movie, “Pay It Forward”–and/or read the book of the same name by Catherine Ryan Hyde. Even if you’ve already seen the movie, you might benefit from another review.

This charming story, starring Kevin Spacey, Helen Hunt, and Haley Joel Osment, made its debut in the year 2000. It’s main protagonist is an idealistic 12-year-old boy named Trevor. As a result of getting an extra-credit assignment in school to “think of an idea for world change, and put it into action,” he rediscovers the ancient wisdom of unconditional altruism and enthusiastically puts it into action.

Here’s how he describes it to his mother and teacher: “You see, I do something real good for three people. And then when they ask how they can pay it back, I say they have to Pay It Forward. To three more people. Each. So nine people get helped. Then those people have to do twenty-seven.”

He then turns on his calculator, punches in some numbers and says, “Then it sort of spreads out, see. To eighty-one. Then two hundred forty-three. Then seven hundred twenty-nine. Then two thousand, one hundred eighty-seven. See how big it gets?”

Anyone who has been through a traditional network marketing recruiting session is likely to recognize that this is like hearing a very familiar word, with the emphasis on a different syl-LAB-le, so to speak. In the prevailing network marketing counterpart of Trevor’s “three paying it forward to three” idea, it’s commonly called “three GETTING three.” And what a huge difference that word, “getting,” can make!

Whereas Trevor’s approach is driven by pure altruism, its traditional online marketing counterpart, unfortunately, is commonly tinged by a fair amount of greed. After over four years in network marketing, I’m strongly convinced that this emphasis on getting, instead of giving, contributes significantly to failure–or, at the very least, significantly reduces one’s level of success and satisfaction in network marketing.

I think that a strong case can be made, in fact, that the very heart of successful online marketing consists in helping others, or “paying it forward,” to use Trevor’s term. In this regard, when I’m personally interviewing a prospective business partner, one of the most important things I want to know is to what degree s/he likes helping others. Continue Reading