The word ‘groundswell’ — which normally means upsurge, wave, welling up, and outpouring — is visible currently as “a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations,” the authors observe.

They trace the roots of the groundswell way back before MySpace, thus: “On eBay you buy from other people instead of a store. Craigslist lets you find a job or a babysitter without searching through newspaper want ads. Linux is an operating system created by engineers working together, rather than depending on a big company like Microsoft.”

Li and Bernoff see the now-happening groundswell as ‘an important, irreversible, completely different way for people to relate to companies and to each other,’ not a flash in the pan.

The balance of power has changed, the authors declare. “Anybody can put up a site that connects people with people. If it’s designed well, people will use it. They’ll tell their friends to use it. They’ll conduct commerce, or read the news, or start a popular movement, or make loans to each other, or whatever the site is designed to facilitate.”

Elaborating on the first of the three forces, ‘people,’ the Forrester team describes how people have always depended on, and drawn strength from, each other. “And people have always rebelled against institutional power, in social movements like labour unions and political revolutions.”

Technology, the second force, has made connections ubiquitous (though more in the developed countries than in the rest of the world).

“There’s a social network for every audience: LinkedIn targets working professionals, Piczo is popular with young girls, Brazilians join Google’s orkut, while hi5 and Bebo dominate in Europe.”

And the third force, economics, is all about the fact that traffic equals money, on the Internet, because ‘traffic indicates that consumers spend their time and attention online.’

While advertising is not the only way to make money online, it’s growing so rapidly that any venture that creates significant traffic can count on revenues, assure Li and Bernoff.

Forceful arguments on why you must, and how you can, win in ‘a world transformed by social technologies.’

Wisdom, knowledge, information, and data are all closely related through being on the same continuum, says Keith Gordon in Principles of Data Management: Facilitating Information Sharing ( www.vivagroupindia.com). The book, written in a simple style, is not so much about wisdom or knowledge as about managing data to provide useful information.

The author rues that in many organisations there are some major, yet unrecognised or misunderstood, data problems. “These problems are generally caused by a combination of the proliferation of duplicate, and often inconsistent, occurrences of data and the misrepresentation and misunderstanding of the data caused by the lack of a cohesive, enterprise-wide data definition regime.”

He cautions that there is a possibility of inconsistency whenever it is possible for any item of information to be held as data more than once.

The potential for inconsistency grows worse, Gordon fears, “because of the move away from centralised mainframe systems, the proliferation of separate departmental information systems and the availability of personal desktop computing power, including the provision of spreadsheet and database software.”

Useful starter material.

Kohonen SOM (self-organising map) finds an elaborate discussion in a section on NN (neural network) that Graeme D. Hutcheson and Luiz Moutinho include in Statistical Modeling for Management ( www.sagepublications.com). They describe NN as ‘a collection of interrelated nodes,’ and self-organisation as ‘the progressive formation within the system of sequential, ordered relationships between the interacting dynamic variables.’

The SOM provides ‘a picture or map of a set of a data,’ in an adaptive or intelligent way. “It involves unsupervised learning (i.e. without targets or outputs) and is more closely related to statistical clustering techniques than it is to methods such as regression analysis. It offers a rather novel approach to clustering.”

Though NN techniques have become an accepted part of the toolkit used by marketing researchers, a common tendency, the authors say, is to stick to orthodoxy – ‘characterised by use of the MLP (multi-layer perceptron) with Sigmoid activation, which may be labelled more informatively as a feedforward logistic network’. That way, the network model is used in a way equivalent to non-linear regression or discriminant analysis, the authors bemoan.

In contrast, unsupervised learning implies the absence of a dependent variable. For instance, in Kohonen SOM, “the transformation does not involve the same space as the data, but rather a two-dimensional grid of nodes. The idea is that a set of input data or input vectors is subject to a topology preserving transformation such that they are effectively described by the ‘prototypes’ (the SOM equivalent of clusters).”

In-depth discussion of value.

Electronic procurement, electronic marketing and electronic logistics are the three areas in international business where IT finds maximum utility, say Justin Paul and Rajiv Aserkar in Export Import Management ( www.oup.com).

These, in addition to the deployment of technology in administration. For instance, with EDI (electronic data interchange) it is possible to link the shipping agent’s computer with the systems of the customs office at the port, as the authors explain.

An interesting reference in the book is about findings by Capgemini — that the top five IT-supported logistics services listed by customer companies were warehouse management, transport management, consignment tracking and event management, Web based communication, and transport planning.

Recommended read for students of international business.

Hackers use a variety of tools and techniques to hack into a system and gain unauthorised access, but usually their mind works in a pattern, find Michael Watkins and Kevin Wallace in CCNA Security: Official Exam Certification Guide ( www.ciscopress.com).

The first of a hacker’s seven-step process is ‘footprinting,’ to learn more about the system by performing reconnaissance.

“For example, he might learn the target company’s domain names and the range of IP addresses it uses. He might perform a port scan to see what ports are open on a target system.”

Step 2, he identifies the OS (operating system) and applications on the system. Next, he gains access to the system, popularly through social engineering. “The hacker could pretend to be a representative of the service provider or a government agency. This approach is called pretexting…”

Before you proceed to read about step 4 and more, it may be advisable to have the book handy, as a guide to ensure that your system is safe!

dmurali@thehindu.co.in

Tailpiece

“To control attrition, we replaced the chairs.”

“With ergonomic ones?”

“More importantly, with a strong adhesive!”

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