Want to Increase Your Productivity? Look at This Adorable Kitten.

When economists talk about boosting productivity, they usually talk about increasing the adoption of new technologies and optimizing workflows. Japanese researchers, however, have come up with a very offbeat approach: Showing workers lots of pictures of adorable, fuzzy, baby animals.

A team of researchers at Hiroshima University recently conducted a study where they showed university students pictures of baby animals before completing various tasks. What they found, in research published last week, was that those who saw the baby animal pictures did more productive work after seeing those photographs – even more than those who saw a picture of an adult animal or a pleasant food.

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Don’t Look Now, There’s a GPS Tracker in Your Kit-Kat Bar

Nestle Embeds GPS Trackers In Candy Bars To Hunt Down Eaters. Select Kit-Kat bars in the UK will contain GPS devices, which Nestlé will use to find the buyers and give them a cash prize.

Customers buying Kit-Kat bars in the United Kingdom could be unwrapping a 21st-century version of Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket-a GPS unit the candy-maker will use to find them, apprehend them and give them a prize. Nestlé claims to be the first to market its chocolatey wares with a GPS-based promotion.

Crazy? Sinister?

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But What Type of Big Data Works in Classrooms?

There’s big talk these days about “big data” in education—looking for patterns of behavior as students click through online classrooms and using the insights to improve instruction. One start-up company that manages online discussion forums for thousands of courses recently performed its first major analysis of behavioral trends among students, and found what its leaders say amounts to advice for instructors.

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Inside Walmart Labs - How the World’s Largest Retailer Hopes to Sell More By Getting Social

One of the most head-scratching tech headlines of April 2011 was the news thatKosmix, a Mountain View, CA-based startup best known for building a Twitter filtering tool called TweetBeat, had been acquired by Walmart. Yes, that Walmart—the one with 9,000 big-box stores spread across the American heartland.

There was speculation that Walmart’s real interest was in Kosmix’s founders, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, who have unbeatable pedigrees in the world of e-commerce technology. The pioneering comparison shopping site they co-founded in 1996, Junglee, was acquired by Amazon in 1998 for $250 million; inside Amazon, the pair helped to create the e-retailer’s huge marketplace of third-party retailers and came up with the technology behind Amazon Mechanical Turk. Perhaps Walmart—which paid $300 million for Kosmix, according to AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher—wanted Harinarayan and Rajaraman to work similar miracles for Walmart.com?

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Pros and Cons of Bringing Your Own Device to Work

The concept of “bring your own device” (BYOD) is a growing trend for business IT. There are a variety of benefits to allowing users to supply their own PCs and mobile devices, but there are also some concerns. Make sure you understand both in order to embrace BYOD with confidence.

It used to be that IT departments drove technology, but that has changed dramatically in recent years. The consumerization of IT revolution — sparked by the iPhone — has shifted the IT culture so that the users are the ones getting the latest, cutting edge technologies first, and they want to bring those devices to work.

Let your users bring their own device, but consider the potential issues as well.

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EPM Management Processes

Performance management is all about taking decisions on the operation of both the business model and any associated strategy improvement initiatives. What goals should we go for? What things have to be done to achieve those goals? How much will it cost? How much did it cost? What will it cost in the future? Is the outcome worth it? What changes should we make? And so on.

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Components of an EPM Framework

In my last article I argued the case for an EPM framework that would provide a clear definition of what EPM is and how to identify systems that support it. The reason is that for many, EPM has become synonymous with planning and reporting, and while these are some of the capabilities of an EPM solution, unless their implementation is linked to strategic goals and driven through continuous management processes, the result will fall far short of what is actually required.

In this article I’m going to outline the components of an EPM Framework.

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Beware of Software Demonstrations!

So you’re looking for a system that can help you improve your ability to execute strategy.You’ve been using a spreadsheet for many years to budget and although it is infinitely flexible, you are worried about the integrity of the data and the fact that no one quite knows how the macros and VB scripts work. Oh, and you never seem to have adequate data to make ‘real-world’ decisions.

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