Le dashboard de Vivek Kundra

Superbe IT dashboard que vient de lancer le gouvernement américain pour permettre au public de suivre les dépenses dans les projets TI (l'article du NY Times). Un autre exemple d'ouverture des données.

Mise à jour 14 sept 2009 : le site semble avoir quelques détracteurs et quelques problèmes.

Vivek Kundra, CIO du gouvernement, 34 ans, est à la tête de ce projet. Cet homme semble avoir une très bonne tête et une perspective fort intéressante selon cette entrevue.

I usually point to three areas in terms of what we are doing here. It starts with a shift in philosophical thinking, but there are three pillars. First, there is the question of how you lower the cost of government operations by moving toward consumer technologies rather than technologies focused within the enterprise. What I mean by that is, for too long the public sector has thought for some reason that it's so special that it must have custom applications, it must have radios for the public safety unit that cost $6,000 a piece, it must have applications targeted for the enterprise. And the government chooses to pay for things that it can get for free.

Second, there is the question of how you drive radical transparency in the public sector. We are doing that by democratizing data and opening up the warehouse of government information to the public so people can innovate; they can slice, dice and cube that data to create amazing and creative applications for citizens and government.

And the third big pillar has to do with how you fundamentally rethink IT governance. What I'm doing with IT governance essentially is simplifying it, getting away from complicated methodologies, and getting more focused on process rather than outcome. Here we've moved to a simple "stock market" model where every technology project is treated as a publicly traded stock.

Creating Shared Responsibility

Ce n'est pas révolutionnaire, mais les points listés dans cet article du BI Network s'appliquent autant au domaine de l'intelligence d'affaires qu'à n'importe quelle gestion d'équipe.

Le far-west de l'Asie

Malgré les incidents des derniers jours, je maintiens que j'irai un jour visiter le far-west de l'Asie, Urumqi en tête de liste.

Du management

Article du Harvard Business Review qui date d'octobre dernier, traitant de la profession de manager. Drucker en a parlé abondamment, mais il est encore temps de considérer ce travail comme une avenue en soi.

Les Chinois veulent nos ressources

Rien de nouveau, mais la Chine est toujours en mode acquisition en ce qui a trait aux ressources naturelles canadiennes et australiennes. Le dernier investissement en liste : la minière canadienne Teck.

La lecture selon Google

Qui a lu cet article jusqu'à la fin ?

Avoir un PLAN

Intéressante entrevue avec l'ancien CEO de Continental. Alan Mulally, CEO de Ford, semble suivre la même stratégie.

Q. What do you consider the keys to effective leadership?

A. The most important thing is that you treat everybody incredibly well and lead with a bit of humility. I’ve found that when I go into a company to lead it’s important to have a plan and to make that plan a simple one that everybody can understand. So even before I go into a company, or even if we’re looking at a business here at CCMP, I’m constantly asking the question, “What are the two or three levers that, if done right, if pulled correctly, will really turn this business?” Then what I do is take that and put it into a one-page plan.

I learned back in the days when I was consulting at Bain & Company — and before that when I was at Harvard Business School doing case studies — that they give you more information than you could possibly read. So you needed to quickly step back and say, “What are the two or three things that really matter?” And I find in the world that people don’t really do that often. They just dive into all this detail and start using acronyms and buzzwords and they don’t step back.

Quart-arrière vs. Professeur

Qu'ont en commun le recrutement d'un quart-arrière au football et l'embauche d'un professeur ? Malcolm Gladwell prétend que dans les deux cas, il est très difficile de faire une bonne évaluation permettant de savoir si on est en présence d'un cancre ou d'une vedette. De plus, le choix aura de grandes conséquences directes. Un championnat ou des années de misère dans le cas du football. Et un système d'éducation pour ce qui est du professeur :

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.

Les Chinois et les trains

Sans contraintes régulatoires comme en Amérique du Nord et sans limites de budget, la Chine construit dans le domaine ferroviaire.

Construction on the 29.68-billion-yuan (US$4.34 billion) Shanghai-Hangzhou high-speed railway started yesterday at Fengjing area in Shanghai.

Construction started in July last year on the 300km Shanghai-Nanjing rail line at a cost of 39.46 billion yuan. A 251km rail link between Nangjing and Hangzhou is also under construction at a cost of 31.3 billion yuan.

BD voyage

Lu et même relu dernièrement, deux excellentes bandes dessinées à conseiller à tout amateur de voyage. Tout d'abord, Shenzhen de Guy Delisle qui dresse un portrait de la Chine. Puis, Le Photographe de Didier Lefevre, une histoire tout à fait invraisemblable qui se déroule en Afghanistan.