derek abdinor

A folksy look at putting thoughts on one of my accidental hobbies down.

1. You’ll make mistakes until you find out what your garden is able to be
2. You’ll lose plants through things that are out of your control. You’ll lose even more flowers as they are more delicate. But you’ll gain through windfall and pleasant surprises, so it all balances in the end
3. Until you figure out where the sun shines on your garden and where the rain falls in it, you’re going to be losing
4. Some plants are made for your environment. A half-hour’s drive away and they struggle
5. Weeds are tough. Weeds try to look like plants, grow rapidly and will take over your garden. You have to decide if you are willing to recognise and fight weeds or let them flourish and pass them off as flowers
6. Some favourite parts of your garden have to be sacrificed. You ‘ll know when that time comes, and when you have to take your secateurs to it. Making the call and living with the consequences is a decision you have to make.
7. Plants get a shock when being planted, even more so when being transplanted. Give them time and they’ll catch up
8. Many shrubs like to be left alone and get along with it
9. Harvesting your vegetables is a primal joy, to be time right. When you harvest too late, they go to seed. When you harvest too early, the taste and future growth is lessened
10. Pruning and paring back is ugly at first – but its as necessary as providing fertiliser.
11. You could fake a garden by bringing in an interior decorator and moving pots and grown plants around. However, they won’t be attuned to the soil and will suffer the usual shock of being planted – as they aren’t seedlings they’ll suffer more
12. A garden is an investment in time and tactics
13. You can’t stop the bugs. Just like you can’t stop the growth
14. Put a plant in a small container and it will outgrow it. You can cut it back for so long, but eventually it will die
15. Shrubs and trees create structure, flowers create focal points. The former can be beautiful, the latter can tie things together – but each has its primary role.

In light of the Rupert Murdoch announcement and the poor show for established newspapers around the world, the only model that makes sense to me is the paid referral:

News websites should be built so that the link to the article is not seen or copied. If you want to forward the article/email/retweet you get credits to view another two articles.
The recipients of your link get to see the article, natch. The site continues with advertising on the article page.

If you aren’t a broadcaster, you can get a widget or feed of the news into your website/facebook page. If you agree, you will get access to the site or an email digest or both.

Sound familiar? Is Googlenomics – let the crowd do the viral work for you and have a net to maximise the reach.

A bill of rights for more transparency and governance has been presented to the US Senate. With many echoes of the South African King Code on Corporate Governance it attempts to formalise risk, proxy and remuneration issues.

From Compliance Week:

May 19, 2009

Shareholder Bill of Rights Act Introduced

The highly anticipated Shareholder Bill of Rights Act of 2009 has reportedly been introduced in the Senate today and press releases opposing and supporting the legislation are already flying.

As Compliance Week has reported, the bill, sponsored by New York Democrat Charles Schumer, would, if passed, require companies to:

• Provide an annual non-binding shareholder vote on executive compensation;
• Provide shareholders a vote to approve golden parachutes;
• Give shareholder access to the proxy for board nominations;
• Split the chairman and chief executive roles;
• Hold annual director elections;
• Implement majority voting for directors and
• Establish risk committees comprised of independent directors

The Council of Institutional Investors issued a statement applauding the Act, which it says would “go a long way toward making boards of directors and managers of public companies more accountable to shareowners.”

Meanwhile, the Business Roundtable issued its own statement, in which its President, John Castellani, calls the bill “an unnecessary intrusion” into matters governed by state corporation law and matters currently being addressed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, stock exchanges, and public company boards.

The text of the bill is available here, courtesy of Davis Wright Tremaine’s Corporate Finance Law Blog.

Posted by: maguilar (Melissa Klein Aguilar)  @ 4:03 pm 

XBRL Standard could highlight financial risks
CNET News – 15 December 2008

IBM’s data council has called for a taxonomy to allow for better reporting against risk and losses. The reporting meme du jour is that risk management was missing in action the last few years which may have assisted this current crisis stay undetected for so long.
What does it mean? A special taxonomy will allow companies to report granularly those financial items that will be of interest when assessing risk and losses. This will allow internal and external analysts search financial statements rapidly to ascertain risk and risk management.

IBM Council Predicts Data Will Become an Asset on the Balance Sheet and Data Governance a Statutory Requirement for Companies Over Next Four Years
7 July, 2008

The critical nature of data in business means it need to be moved along the C-Suite to the CFO’s basket. Data integrity, security and quality will need to be reported on in asset and risk terms, I quote:

• Data governance will become a regulatory requirement in an increasing number of countries and organizations. In some countries, organizations will have to demonstrate data governance practices to regulators as part of regular audits. This will likely affect the banking and financial services industries first, and will emerge as a growing trend worldwide.
• The value of data will be treated as an asset on the balance sheet and reported by the Chief Financial Officer while the quality of data will become a technical reporting metric and key IT performance indicator. New accounting and reporting practices will emerge for measuring and assessing the value of data to help organizations demonstrate how data quality fuels business performance.
• Calculating risk will be used more pervasively across enterprises for small and large decision-making and will be increasingly automated by information technology. Today in most organizations, risk calculation is done by a select group of individuals using complicated processes. In the future, risk calculation will be automated providing greater transparency to more easily examine past exposure, forecast direct and indirect risk, and set aside capital to self-insure and cover risk.
• The role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) will change, making this corporate officer responsible for reporting on data quality and risk to the Board of Directors. The CIO will have the mandate to govern the use of information and report on the quality of the information provided to shareholders.
• Individual employees will be required to take more responsibility for recognizing problems and participating in the governance process to facilitate greater operational transparency and the identification of risk. They will be aided by new categories of operational software that will demonstrate common data governance problems and allow employees to self- govern; sponsor and vote on new policies; provide feedback on existing ones and participate in dynamic data governance. 

Dealstream Securities traded derivatives on the JSE Securities Exchange, specialising in listed single stock futures and CFDs. Alleged problems with its trade in CFDs led to them running out of liquidity with its clearing memberand they were pulled off the markets a few days ago.

Assuming that the investment/trading community is probably griping about this topic in the Bull Run or bottling it all up is not the case anymore. Social media is mostly cheap and free, and it makes the information that only a few people have (in this instance, that offices were locked up) go viral in a short space of time.

I listened to the guys who set up TroubleAtDealStream on the radio last night. They were angry about their margins losses through the sudden disappearance of Dealstream, so they sent each other SMS messages and got together. Some of them decided to set up the website at the above address. Sure its not a blog or wiki in the true sense, but its a really helpful resource and embodies collaboration and many-to-many publishing. See also Dealstreamfraud

What do we take away from this? The investment community realises that publishing and making their voices heard is easy, too easy if you’re using existing websites or properties. Does your IR deparment have a social media strategy?

Appendix:
Other examples of chatter around Dealstream:

Twitter mentions
Fin24 blogs
Forums
Comments on news articles (Moneyweb)
Technorati tags
Customer forums (HelloPeter)

I reckon that technology-ignorant clients are a double-edged sword. The Law states that whatever sophisticated concept you manage to run by them with no resistance, thou shalt be smitten with much rebuking about low-end things, eg:

• this content management tool doesn’t accept my MS Word tabs and indents! Shriek!
• I just want to print one piece of paper off this website page, not all 20! Rant!
• Search on my site doesn’t find the document I put up on the intranet last week! Rail!

An essential point about client education was made by Dominic Jones in a different forum: XBRL. I quote:

Most US investor relations officers (IROs) are not directly involved in disclosure technology and have a very poor understanding of it. This is mostly because about 75% of investor relations sections on US corporate websites are outsourced to hosting services. IROs have generally been entirely hands off when it comes to these sites so they’ve lost out on a lot of important learning over the years. They don’t understand what HTML is, so XBRL is even more alien to them.

As much as we think of expediency and taking problems out of the clients’ hands (or outsourcing those to us in these times), it makes us party to them not knowing more about the technology issues. The cycle continues.

Taking a leaf out of the “teach a man to fish” parable, I’m going to escalate the training of clients. Not just in terms of social knick-knacks, but along the lines of: What Every IRO Should Know.

Jack Dorsey Presents Twitter from biz stone on Vimeo. Found via Jayz.

I recently had the need to get information on Vignette (story server) in a hurry, and followed a certain methodology which is no doubt common to many.

In order:

1. Google
2. Vignette’s site
3. Wikipedia
4. Phone dev friends
5. Twitter
6. Post a question on LinkedIn

You could seperate the first 3 into old-style information harvesting (even wikipedia), #4 into common sense, and #5 and #6 into “leveraging social media”. Well, the winner by a country mile for answers was LinkedIn! Let me share with you those that were public answers:

Vignette server: difficult to develop a website on top of it or not?

Answers

Krishna Kumar: Sr. Vice President & Group Editor – DARE at CyberMedia India Ltd
If you are talking fo getting it done by a consultant, that can be costly.

And the cost may have nothing to do with the complexity.

Vignette is supposed to be one of the most scalael and highend content servers out there, having hosted sites for Olympics, etc.

The server (plus various additional modules) itself is very costly. And consultants with experience on vignette do not come cheap

kkkg

Eric Small: Director, Consumer Product, with extensive technology background, focus on web communities and UGC
If you’re at the point you’re even asking this question, you’ve got a difficult task ahead of you. Vignette, or any enterprise-level CMS, is meant to solve the problem of large-scale content management. By and large, when you get to this point, your web site is going to be complex (and thus difficult). Otherwise you wouldn’t be considering spending that much $$$.

Use the CMS Watch report at www.cmswatch.com/cms/report/ to make sure you’re getting the right vendor. And get someone in your organization to read the CMS Bible by Boiko (ISBN 978-0764573712) to get a good sense of the process of building out a CMS-driven system. If you have the leverage (and you should with this kind of investment) insist on a prototype before signing on the dotted line.

By the way, if all of this seems out-of-scale for what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be looking at Vignette. For smaller implementations there are good open-source solutions like Drupal and OpenCMS.

Luis Mendez: Solutions Architect
Vignette can be very complex. But this will be the case with any combination of portal server, web server, application server, content management server, and dynamic business objects delivering along with search, security, and high performance environment.

It really depends on how you want to foray into the Vignette products themselves.

On one hand, you can use the Vignette out of the box content managers and have everything sent out via RSS, XML and so forth. That’s easy assuming all content management is done through the apps that come preconfigured out of the box.

On the other hand, doing things like delivering secured data with integrated directories and other ACLs on both the content management and the content delivery is another bowl of wax.

There are of course other issues to deal with such as client side request through frameworks like AJAX, how portlets communicate with one another in multiple states and how all of that translates into where you content is going to come from.

Getting a Vignette consultant on board would be an expensive proposition because they can help you traverse all of these topics. They are typically well versed in all areas of the web and then some!

===/===
What did we learn? That LinkedIn is powerful as it filters a lot of the noise and is targeted at professionals,  that you will get an answer from strangers and friends alike and that anyone wanting hard skills in this economy should hit the Vignette books. Thanks all!