McKinsey on strategy, services and product

On my sun/oracle blog I wrote a note/précis of an issue of the McKinsey Quarterly. The keynote article, “Distortions & deceptions in strategic decisions” looks at the flawed human values often inserted into major business decisions. They quote a major acquisition decision taken by a dominant player and suggest that the major advocate of the merger wanted it for personal political gain. They look at ways in which these human factors can be brought into the open and evaluated in the decision making process. Despite identifying over-optimism as a frequent occurrence once a proposal has been made, the decision not to proceed is often taken in private and so collaborative decision making cannot neutralise these human shortcomings. One suggestion is to ask the proposer, what their next best proposal is. …

Implementing Tags in a Database??

I was considering why del.icio.us doesn’t offer a cloud for tag based queries, while it does offer the cloud for User based queries, and I received the reply that it was (probably) related to query cost, which set me thinking. What would the del.icio.us database look like? The rest of this blog article looks at how one might model the bookmarks and give a clue as to how one might implement it. …