Nu CEO’s zich toenemend realiseren dat de inkoopfunctie overduidelijk voor een strategisch concurrentie voordeel kan zorgen, staat het investeren in deze functie regelmatig op de directie-agenda. Investeringen in inkoopvaardigheden en -processen zoals het aannemen en ontwikkelen van hoog gekwalificeerde inkopers en het investeren in de nieuwste IT systemen om inkoopprocessen te automatiseren zijn aan de orde van de dag. Hoewel de investeringen in inkoop zich dubbel en dwars terugverdienen overwegen CEOs ook om deze investeringen middels de uitbesteding aan een Procurement Outsourcing dienstverlener te beperken en over een langere termijn af te schrijven. Hiermee bereiken ze hetzelfde effect tegen lagere kosten per jaar. lees verder…

The Next Web is coming up. This conference is set up by Patrick de Laive, Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten and Arjen Schat, who I met at LeWeb3 in Paris. Patrick has been keeping me updated on this conference, which promisses to be great. ‘Unfortunately’, I will be on holiday for a few days from tomorrow morning. Bad timing, since a conference like this is rare in the Netherlands.

As a teaser (smart marketing guys) they posted an iChat Video interview with a few Internet Influentials who answer 5 basic questions in almost 20 minutes. Tim O’Reilly from O’Reilly Media, Steve Rubel from Edelman and Micropersuasion.com, Matt Mullenweg the founder of WordPress, Marten Mickos the CEO of MySQL, Eric A. Meyer (CSS and HTML guru) and Jay Adelson, CTO and co-founder of Digg.com all give their opinion and share their insights on this exciting subject.

http://2007.thenextweb.org/2007/05/28/the-next-web-documentary/

Everybody - enjoy the conference and let me know how it was!

Information flows in crisis situations
Here an example of some basic statistics: the more fire trucks come to a fire the higher the damage of the building. The presumption that more firefighters lead to higher damage is clearly wrong…it seems that if a crisis situation becomes bigger than initially thought additional problems occur in managing the crisis. As more coordination effort is needed to deal with a crisis we see new management structures are included in the operation leading to a plethora of coordination problems:

1. the added desicionmakers (city council/provicial coordinators for example) are usualy not professional crisis managers (like a firefighter is), often not trained well enough in crisis decision making (Routine is key in this kind of training).
2. they jump into an escalating situation without all the contextual knowledge loosing a lot of time catching up on all the events. This information asymmetry is very hard to deal with especially if you consider point 1.
3. information is dispersed and forming a clear picture of the crisis situation takes a (too) long time which puts new groups that have decision-making power in a fortex of imperfect information flow in which forming a clear line is often not possible without making many assumptions (which leads to error).

According to an article in het NRC of 22 May 2007 there are hardly any pressuregroups who worry about declining privacy as a result of intensified security measures. Despite expert warnings about the rising level of state control in Holland the existance of citizenship groups is marginal.

Apparantly Dutch society is not highly interested in citizenship rights. Dutch people are seldom bothered by principles, but more so by pragmatism. Dutch people adhere strongly to the idea that privacy limiting measures are no problem for people not involved in criminal activities. Understandably citizens of states with a recent authoritarian past have much stronger feelings about limitation of their citizenship rights.

But, should Ducth society be more worried about the development of new technologies? According to Bert-Jaap Koops (professor in the Technology Regulation at the University of Tilburg) the consequences of the development and use of privacy limiting technologies are difficult to estimate. On the one side they could provide a higher level of security, on the downside this kind of thechnology can easily be abused.

A crucial question in this regard also is whether basic citizenship rights of people who are criminal suspects should not be safeguarded as well as the basic rights of those who behave well?

Source: www.nrc.nl

It was only a few days ago that I came back from “The Meadows” better known as Las Vegas. As everyone very well knows, people usually go there for to either gamble or to get married. Well, in my case it was neither… I went there as a retreat from the hectic pace of my daily life. Not sure, if Las Vegas was a good choice, but I guess putting a few thousands of kilometers between me and work for a week will do just fine :)

“We know what it takes to be a Tiger.” 

The best description of Las Vegas that I’ve heard so far was ”Disneyland for grown-ups”. And it definitely lived up to my expectations, especially the hotels were very impressive! lees verder…

On the 15th of May the Dutch Border Police has started using a new security scan at Schiphol Airport. Most people who have ever travelled trough a commercial airport are well known with the “old fashioned” body scan which searches for metal objects. The aspect which makes the new body scan new is that it sees right through clothes. By doing so it thouroughly checks passengers for weapons or other dangerous objects.

Looking at the security aspects it is defintely an improvement in comparison with the old scans which for example did not detect weapons made of plastic. Another advantage is that it also takes away the need for physical body checks. Resulting in decreased waiting time at customs and no more physical checks which are never to be taken personally but do always feel a little akward.

On the other side some critical questions have also been raised. A total visual body check is by some parties seen as a grave breach of physical integrity. For a lot of people being checked out naked is not exactly what you would call a nice beginning of your holiday. In addition there is no “if you have nothing to hide you do not have to be afraid” to this scan: every passenger, whether suspect or not, will have to pass through the scan.

Yet again, a difficult choice between flight safety and privacy…

The Economist last week noted that capturing terrorists is a problematic undertaking. To find potential terrorists Peter Clarke the head of the counter-terrorism branch of London’s Metropolitan Police said on April 24^th: ?We are seeing networks within networks, connections within connections and links between individuals that cross local, national and international boundaries?

El Qaeda is not you typical old fashion terror organization but operates as a franchise. Essentially a set of ideas (read format) which likeminded people can draw from in the creation of their own terrorist cell. There is no center or headquarters, which makes dealing with it extremely difficult. The main driver of the organization is its ideology. The biggest misconception about El Qaeda is that it needs mass support; essentially the grass root comprises of a very small number of participants who are loosely associated (or not at all).?

A recent article at the Washington institute stated that terrorist organizations are dynamic; the threat is ever-changing. Defensive measures produce new vulnerabilities that need to be protected, while technological innovations allow for operational opportunities.

For a fifth consecutive year, top analyst firm Gartner places Accenture in the “Leaders” quadrant of CRM service providers in Europe and North America. Earlier this year, the analyst IDC also published a favorable report on Accenture’s CRM business, Accenture Gets It; CRM Is Still All about the Customer, which discussed the strategic direction of our CRM practice in line with Horizon 2012.
lees verder…

This saturday will be exactly 2 years ago that I defended my thesis and officially graduated from University. “I still remember the day like yesterday…” ;) This also means that I’ve been working for almost 2 years… So it is about time that I start to look for a place of my own, since the stuff that I’ve collected over the years have grown out of my tiny room. It’s exactly at this point that I come across this article on highly educated people leaving my beautiful hometown Rotterdam and that the city is therefore getting “dumber”, while they predict a shortage of highly educated people if this continues. Click here for the article. It is actually a very nice idea to help the graduates to find a place to live in Rotterdam, although I might have grown out of that category…

Accenture is in de Verenigde Staten opgenomen in de lijst van de 50 bedrijven die het best werken aan diversiteit door DiversityInc. Toen ik dit vernam riep dat onmiddellijk de vraag bij mij op of er een dergelijke top 50 diversiteitsbedrijven lijst in Nederland bestaat. lees verder…