derek abdinor

The Queen held out for a while, but finally opened the royal channel on YouTube. Clever to open it during the lull in the news, and also kudos to her PR for doing so.

Geek and Poke toon below

Good piece by Confluence about how they see financial data going in 2008. Some key take-aways from this slightly-edited release:

According to Kirk Botula, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, “There are many forces driving the automation of fund administration functions. These include the global expansion of fund companies, increased frequency of reporting across many different regulatory and accounting regimes, and heightened transparency demands.”

•  Back-office shortages will intensify.
  In 2008, staffing shortages in fund companies’ and service providers’ back offices will intensify, as pressure to support additional mutual fund and alternative investment instruments places even more demands on a limited talent pool. Fund administrators will seek technology solutions that enable them to automate routine processes to reduce staff dependency and eliminate the risk of error.
• Investor pressures will drive expense control.
  Market pressures have been driving down the operating costs that investors are willing to pay. Investors will continue to seek out low-cost products, and this price sensitivity will force fund companies to exert more cost control over their expenses. Leading service providers and fund companies will include the automation of expense payments and budgeting as key initiatives in 2008.
• FAS 157 requirements “in full swing.”
  The Financial Accounting Standards Board’s (FASB) new fair valuation reporting rule, FAS 157, went into effect in November 2007. Fund companies’ fair value committees and their auditing firms continue to be pressured to have the proper data to support the valuations that they set for securities. As they incorporate the newly mandated FAS 157 Level 1, 2 and 3 disclosures into their reports in 2008, fund companies and service providers will demand that their accounting and fund administration systems automate the reporting process. This automation will help reduce the burden on back-office staff and lower the risk of error.
• SEC continues focus on XBRL, short-form prospectus.
  The SEC continues to champion the XBRL language for electronic reporting, and that momentum will continue with its short-form prospectus initiative. This initiative is intended to improve mutual fund disclosure by providing investors with information in a clear and concise format. Confluence believes that, though a commendable endeavor to simplify investor disclosure, the short-form prospectus is another reporting requirement that will burden already-taxed administrative staff without technology to streamline the process.

Companies automating fund administration processes need to pay special attention to issues of data integrity, as well as scalability. Confluence advocates a centralized, “platform-agnostic” database as the backbone of this process.

Serena software, developers of lifecycle management systems and the conceptualisers behind “Facebook Fridays“, embody the spirit of Enterprise social media: they take ideas from the user phenomenon of social media (w2) and apply it to the enterprise with remarkable results.

They’ve adapted the retail and sociological ideas of the Long Tail into how it is relevant for the organisations’ internal mechanisms. And it fits.

The Long Tail theory is essentially that the web is so vast, one can satisfy niche desires without creating uncostly overheads ie: you can sell something of little demand, and also sell that of massive demand simply because storage, and shipping in the online world is not a factor. The same is true of media: some blogs and op-ed pieces have great following, however it does not detract or disqualify from blogs with small audiences. They can co-exist, unlike in the old media world where there are costs and economies of scale associated with any publication.

The way this works in the enterprise is thus: IT has large, visible and critical applications that it has to occupy itself with at any given time. Other needs have to wait, get political backing or get in the queue. However, the influx of digital natives and social media have made knowledge workers competent enought to create their own simple applications or use existing web applications or services that come free.

In order to aid and abet this, Serena has introduced a Mashup Composer. Althought I’ve not played with it, it appears to be something along the lines of Yahoo! Pipes and the Google open APIs. Think of it as the guy in Accounts who had cred because he could write macros. And who replicated himself.

This new approach enables power users in the business and IT to quickly address their everyday needs, while freeing scarce application development resources to focus on more complex tasks.

IT concerns? Of course. The mashups will be built on top of existing architecture, and it seems like it will consume existing web services rather than write to critical databases.

Next Fifteen Communications Group’s annual report claims to be the first to incorporate weblog functionality into it.

‘We have an opportunity to expand the role of the annual report,’ comments Tim Dyson, chief executive of Next Fifteen. ‘We can transform it from a relatively dry summary of what’s gone on over the last year into a means of having a dialogue with our shareholders about all of the issues that the report raises.’

On the annual report microsite, one has a link (in a few sections) linking to a standalone page with a post, allowing comment.

and this links to another different page (new window):

Well done. As one who works in corporate communications. I was wondering when someone would attempt this. Merging investor relations with social media/enterprise 2.0 is a keen interest of mine.

Having said that, I feel some opportunities were missed (I would say that, wouldn’t I?).

1. The blog should be part of the annual report.
Pop-up, pop-out, ajax, iframe: whatever. You cannot post alongside it, you have to open a window to a different site. I pictured reading a page and seeing all the commentary beneath it, instead the post is not part of the annual report (ie: not signed off by the auditors).

2. It says blog but somehow doesn’t feel like it

• No RSS feeds, so one can’t be updated by the blog, one has to visit the page. Enough to disqualify it as a blog per se
• This is a homemade blog if you inspect the code. Valiant effort, but font tags and not half as well optimised as the usual blogging engines
• The links to Digg and Delicious would make IR novices more familiar if you used icons or a whats this?
• No trackbacks or comments RSS – not serious

3. Feels too controlled

Found out about this the same day as the BlogCouncil. This feels like a good IR idea that somehow got hijacked by legal and company secretarial. Written in ASP.Net code goes some way to explaining. Lose the lawyers in the brief, and get some PHP cowboys in.

Nevertheless, congratulations to Next 15. Here’s to seeing more uses of social media in IR!

Ex-Dallas Cowboy football player, turned Reverend of Baptist Church, is miffed with Microsoft’s ‘pro-gay’ stance. Absolutely fascinating thought this is (javascript: void (irony)), my point is thus:

By buying a share or twain he has access to the AGM where he can raise his point.

PS. Through the article, I found out about Hugh McLeod’s idea of the Porous Membrane.
PPS. Corporate Citizen 07