In the Darwinian employment ecosystem, anyone with principles will choose the best option for themselves: either slave away in a job they hate, or choose somewhere that fits with their principles (Next generation of employees doesn’t respect IT rules).

The result? Some firms will prosper by “breaking all the rules” and creating new models that make a profit securely AND give their employees a satisfying experience. The rest will either die, or become profit-centric grindhouses.

Anyone intelligent enough and capable enough will always choose the line of least resistance. Deriding people for trying to be efficient is missing the point: people demand job satisfaction or it’s not worthwhile.

Darren

After years of relative stability, the world of business intelligence (BI) is now experiencing a sea change (Business intelligence: The Great Underachiever). The old rules of thumb no longer apply and companies cannot assume that yesterday’s BI strategies continue to be viable.

There are fundamental shifts that are currently occurring in businesses and for users that include: placing more stock in number crunching and objectively measuring performance; users interacting with personal data more and more; new tools such as Facebook, Gmail and other more specialised solutions raising expectations for end users; and finally, businesses deriving genuine business insight from large quantities of data more quickly and for dramatically less cost and effort than ever before.

These rule changes mean that businesses need to make fact-based decisions, based on analysis of data from a variety of data sources, in ways never before possible, whereas users want a compelling, effective experience. At Jaspersoft, we have identified seven new trends that are currently occurring in BI that will impact the way we use BI in the future.

These include: the increase in self-service BI; BI on mobile platforms; social features incorporated into BI; BI in the cloud providing flexibility; the increase in open source; BI helping to analyse the increase in “big data”; and BI providing real-time insight.

Tom Cahill, Jaspersoft

SAP’s Stefan Gruler's assertion that the real issue is “Are we allowed to use it?” puts the cart before the horse (SAP says technology can track and analyse consumers’ every move). A more pertinent question might be, “Are we allowed to know it?”

What right has any organisation to “know” the content of private conversations between individuals, such as those exchanged via social networking sites? If you have no right to the information in the first place, then how you might use it to your commercial advantage becomes a moot point.

The News of the World phone hacking furore is a case in point.
Steve Pauline

Facebook’s future depends on us (Facebook takes steps to become a genuine business platform).

I hope all those who are concerned about their privacy online stand up and make sure that Facebook doesn’t come to own the web. The privacy issues it has been involved with lately show just how unsafe it is.

I am so tired of these lapses that I am just waiting for a safer social networking platform such as MyCube or Diaspora to take off in the UK, so that I can use social networking without having to think about my privacy.

Danny Murphy