Balance Scorecard

In talking about the balance scorecard in class I found this article where in a interview recently last month with Robert Kaplan the inventor of the balance scorecard method and his advice on how companies should proceed. Kaplan maintains that there should be a continued focus on the Balance Scorecard method but that companies should add the element of risk management or disaster management.

Ch. 12

The section that intrigued me the most was on business intelligence and business analytics. About a month ago I started to notice at the bottom of my web browser the term Google analytics while a link was loading and I never understood what the heck that meant until now. It is definitely amazing how a analytic application can track so much imperative information for a company based on web hits. I wonder what my company's analytic software would look like? It would be amazing to be able to track customer movements within my store on a daily basis. For instance how many times a item was looked at or how many times an item was picked up to project trends. I'm sure that is not too far off in the distant future.
I found a article on Industry Week that talks about business intelligence in the current economic times. the author of the article narrows down 5 key trends that companies will rely on concerning BI.

Ch. 10

In reviewing chapter 10 I was definitely interested by the use of the business case to justify costs of a IT project. It seems like a very useful tool and I feel this tool ties chapter 10 IT Funding with Chapter 11 Project management. I say this because the business case outlines what the project should encompass and its objectives as well as the projects outcomes. It also outlines the cost of the project and what that would look like and allows for adjustment throughout the project. I found this video by Jason Hiner that definitely ties the two chapters together. It is very interesting and is from the IT perspective.

Ch. 9

In chapter 9 it starts out with the example of TJX and using the normative theories of business to justify or criticize TJX's actions during the security breach. Personally, I believe that TJX was completely wrong in not letting consumers know right away of the breach. They were selfish and only thought of their bottom line. TJX knew if it informed right away about the breach in December that it would lose holiday sales in a already soft holiday sales season. I also found a video from a professor at Bentley that talks about RFID tags and privacy issues that may arise. She touches on the normative theories and looks at RFID from all three perspectives.