gimmicks will always get you in the end
So Lehman Brothers are accused of managing by gimmicks, specifically – according to the BBC – an accounting “gimmick” known as Repo 105. “This is a legal accounting device that involves shifting around assets to reduce the size of a company’s balance sheet.”
Picture credit: Okinawa Soba
Apparently they got away with this gimmick for many years,
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The UK Chancellor is expected to massively scale back the world’s largest IT project, in a desperate effort to save money.
picture credit: Mike Rawlins
For the past five years, I have believed that the NPfIT has been the poster child for the Trillion Dollar Bonfire – as a poorly conceived, massively flawed and consequently expensive programme.
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Picture credit: mint imperial
The credit crunch is making it harder to get funds for technology investments so here is my own IT business case evaluation tool to help you make sure that your business case really has strong enough legs to stand up, before you pitch.
As an interim director I have had to review hundreds of business cases, often under serious time pressure and financial constraints, which led me to create a simple business case evaluation tool that has helped me greatly over the years and I think that you will find it useful.
Here are the ten business case criteria that I use to evaluate an IT business case:
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Book review: Bootstrapping: Weapon of Mass Reconstruction by Sramana Mitra
Some say that small businesses will lead the way out of the global economic downturn, presumably because hard times create necessity – the mother of invention.
I am not so sure, although I would be pleased to be proven wrong.
I suspect that the credit crunch will give us a handful of golden acorns – but not a forestful. Continue reading article »
The apparently slow demise of print publications and the downward trend of online advertising revenue is making more publishers and content providers think seriously about introducing so-called ‘paywalls’ – where original content and information is available only to paying readers.

Picture credit: Aubrey Arenas
I have been watching this for some time now and wonder if this really is the way to go, or is it just a publisher’s pipedream?
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