Custom House Definition

Source: Wikipedia
A custom house or customs house was a building housing the offices for the government officials who processed the paperwork associated with importing and exporting goods into and out of a country. Customs officials also collected customs duty on imported goods.

The custom house was typically located in a seaport or in a city on a major river, with access to the ocean. These cities acted as a port of entry into a country. The government stationed officials at such locations to collect taxes and regulate commerce.

Due to advances in electronic information systems, the increased volume of international trade, and the introduction of air travel, the term "custom house" is now often an historical anachronism. There are many examples of buildings around the world that were formerly used as custom houses but have since been converted for other uses, such as museums or civic buildings.

In the United Kingdom, since 1386, the phrase custom house has been in use over the term customs house. This was after a "Custom House" was erected at Wool Wharf in Tower Ward, to contain just the officials of the Great Custom on Wool and Woolfells. The singular form was, used even though in later years the Custom House was the location of other Customs officials as well.

Cultural synergy in business

Keywords: cultural synergy;cultural assimilation

Definition of cultural synergy

Cultural synergy is a term coined from work by Nancy Adler of McGill University which describes an attempt to bring two or more cultures together to form an organization or environment that is based on combined strengths, concepts and skills. The differences in the world's people are used in such a way that encourages mutual growth by cooperation.

In a more general sense, cultural synergy can be observed in the creation new or reproduced cultural forms that are distinct from the cultures from which those forms are derived. In either case, cultural synergy may be expected to be more prevalent as globalization takes place.[citation needed], and the concept and/or phrase can be found in discussions of globalization.

Cultural Assimilation

The concept goes back in the 1970's in the USA , at a time when the American management was thought to be the one and only business model. This is what is commonly known as the concept of Ethnocentrism , which some specialist consider to be cause of the general ignorance among American managers towards the influence of culture on management. It was only a matter of time (after the postwar economic success of other foreign countries) until American management realized that Ethnocentrism can have negative consequences and started to incorporate different approaches for their management.

Moreover, the flow of immigrants coming to work in the USA contributed to the change of conducting management, as the managers started to consider Cultural Pluralism , a completely different view from what they were used to have, known as the "melting-pot", which was based on forcing the immigrant workforce to adapt to the American culture.

Definition of Synergy

The word comes from ancient Greek: synergia means working together. Andrew Campbell and Michael Goold, two British academics, define it as “links between business units that result in additional value creation”. It is, they go on to say, “a Holy Grail for large multi-unit companies”. It is something akin to the philosopher's stone: seeming to create extra value without consuming resources.

Synergy means cooperation that occurs between diverse groups of people with different viewpoints that work together. The aim of synergy is to increase effectiveness by combining various knowledge, perceptions and viewpoints together. It is a common belief that “when solving problems, groups are often smarter than the smartest people within them”.Synergy is extremely important in business, as it gathers resources needed for successful operations and it complies with our present society where diversity is considered to be a value.

Organizational Change

Organizational Change has a very broad meaning and it can be major or minor, depending on the number or individuals from a specific organization it affects. From changing the water supplier to completely transforming the marketing strategy, every change is important and has consequences.

On one hand, cultural synergy can be understood as a major organizational change, as it merges cultures and customs within a company and presumably finalizes with a change of the better, creating a more solid company culture, bonding the employees.

On the other hand, the phenomenon has not been sufficiently studied and researched, and it is also known that it can be chaotic for the employees, as they are being put through unfamiliar circumstances. Read more...

Critical success factor

Keywords: Critical success factor

Definition

Critical success factor (CSF) is a management term for an element that is necessary for an organization or project to achieve its mission. It is a critical factor or activity required for ensuring the success of a company or an organization. The term was initially used in the world of data analysis and business analysis. For example, a CSF for a successful Information Technology project is user involvement.

"Critical success factors are those few things that must go well to ensure success for a manager or an organization and, therefore, they represent those managerial or enterprise areas that must be given special and continual attention to bring about high performance. CSFs include issues vital to an organization's current operating activities and to its future success." 

Critical success factors should not be confused with success criteria. The latter are outcomes of a project or achievements of an organization necessary to consider the project a success or the organization successful. Success criteria are defined with the objectives and may be quantified by key performance indicators (KPIs).

Concept history

The concept of "success factors" was developed by D. Ronald Daniel of McKinsey & Company in 1961. The process was refined into critical success factors by John F. Rockart between 1979 and 1981. In 1995, James A. Johnson and Michael Friesen applied it to many sector settings, including healthcare.

Relation to key performance indicators

Critical success factor vs. key performance indicator:

• Critical success factors are elements that are vital for a strategy to be successful.
• A critical success factor drives the strategy forward, it makes or breaks the success of the strategy (hence “critical”).
• Strategists should ask themselves 'Why would customers choose us?'. The answer is typically a critical success factor.

KPIs, on the other hand, are measures which quantify management objectives, along with a target or threshold, and enable the measurement of strategic performance.

An example:

• KPI = Number of new customers. (Measurable, quantifiable) + Threshold = 10 per week [KPI reached if 10 or more new customers, failed if <10 li="">
• CSF = Installation of a call centre for providing superior customer service (and indirectly, influencing acquiring new customers through customer satisfaction).

Collaborative leadership

Keywords: Collaborative leadership

Definition

Collaborative leadership is a management practice which is focused on the leadership skills across functional and organizational boundaries.

Term Exploration

The term started to appear in the mid-1990s in response to the twin trends of the growth in strategic alliances between private corporations and the formation of long term public private partnership contracts to rebuild public infrastructure.

“Kurt Lewin was first to apply cooperative system in scientific method in 1947 about individual nutrition in the United States.”

In her 1994 Harvard Business Review article "Collaborative Advantage", Rosabeth Moss Kanter talks about leaders who recognize that there are critical business relationships "that cannot be controlled by formal systems but require (a) dense web of interpersonal connections...". And in a book published in that same year Chrislip and Larson looked at the attributes of great civic leaders in communities across the US and found some similar attributes. "Collaboration needs a different kind of leadership; it needs leaders who can safeguard the process, facilitate interaction and patiently deal with high levels of frustration"

In 2013, Harvard Business Review authors Nick Lovegrove and Matthew Thomas (co-founders of The InterSector Project), explore the complex relationship between the business, government and social sectors as it relates to their role in addressing the most pressing challenges facing society – issues like managing resource constraints, controlling health care costs, training the twenty-first-century workforce, developing and implementing smart-grid and intelligent-urbanization technologies, and stabilizing financial systems to foster sustainable economic growth. Their research suggests that the future of collaborative leadership depends on the ability of leaders to engage and collaborate with the business, government and social sectors (see below for the distinguishing characteristics of such leaders).

Hank Rubin author and President of the Institute of Collaborative Leadership has written "A collaboration is a purposeful relationship in which all parties strategically choose to cooperate in order to accomplish a shared outcome." In his book "Collaborative Leadership: Developing Effective Partnerships for Communities and Schools" Rubin asks "Who is a collaborative leader?" and answers "You are a collaborative leader once you have accepted responsibility for building - or helping to ensure the success of - a heterogeneous team to accomplish a shared purpose . Your tools are (1) the purposeful exercise of your behavior, communication, and organizational resources in order to affect the perspective, beliefs, and behaviors of another person (generally a collaborative partner) to influence that person's relationship with you and your collaborative enterprise and (2) the structure and climate of an environment that supports the collaborative relationship."

David Archer and Alex Cameron in their 2008 book Collaborative Leadership: How to succeed in an interconnected world, identify the basic task of the collaborative leader as the delivery of results across boundaries between different organisations. They say "Getting value from difference is at the heart of the collaborative leader's task... they have to learn to share control, and to trust a partner to deliver, even though that partner may operate very differently from themselves." Read more....

Business Triage

Keywords: business triage;pivot score

Definition of Business triage

Business triage is a decision making system that provides a framework for business decision making, outcome goal prioritization, and resource allocation in many business environments. Business triage involves categorizing desired outcomes and goals and the processes that support them based on their relative importance to achieving a stated measurable goal or outcome. Using the same triage categories employed by military medical and disaster medical services, business processes are categorized as essential/critical (red) important/urgent (yellow), or optional/supportive (green).

In a business triage model, resources are allocated based on the outcome/goal and process category/rank, with resources first dedicated to red, then yellow, and finally green categories. In the event that resources become limited, resources are first withheld from green, then yellow categories. Resources are only withheld from red categories if failure to achieve outcomes/goals is acceptable.

History

First described in the late 1990s, business triage grew out of the need for a reproducible method for the allocation of limited resources (especially money) by start-up and expanding businesses. The concepts utilized in business triage were drawn from the real-world experience of managing limited resources in the high-stakes environments of battlefields and disaster scenes (medical triage). Process analysis methods similar to those used by information technology professionals and later business continuity professionals were added to better identify the processes that support the desired outcomes and goals.

Application and technique

The application of business triage to businesses requires a detailed examination of the desired outcomes and goals for the business in question. Internal outcomes and goals such as building maintenance and employee safety must be included in the inventory along with the more obvious external outcomes and goals such as product sales and delivery of services to the end customer. The more detailed this examination, the more accurate and helpful the subsequent use of resources will be.

Once the internal and external outcomes and goals examination is complete, these must be categorized based on their relationship to the core mission and values of the company. Outcomes and goals are categorized into three prioritised categories.

Within each category, the desired outcomes and goals are ranked based on the "threat" presented to the company if the outcome or goal is not achieved and the level of "outrage" that will occur should the threat be realized. This "threat" and "outrage" relationship is calculated as a PIVOT score where:

The greater the PIVOT Score, the higher the relative priority within the triage category.

After outcomes and goals are triaged, the processes that support each outcome or goal are triaged according to the same relationships described above. Processes are first categorized with the same categories as above.

Again, within each category the processes for each outcome are ranked based on their respective PIVOT Score with the higher relative priority within a triage category given to the processes with the greater PIVOT Score.

Available resources, including money, materials, and personnel are allocated based on the relative triage and ranking of the desired outcome/goal to the processes that contribute to achieving that outcome/goal, with the highest ranking process receiving resources before lower ranking processes within each outcome/goal grouping.

Source: Wikipedia

Business rule mining

Keywords: business rule mining;System integrators;Legacy software applications

Definition

Business rule mining is the process of extracting essential intellectual business logic in the form of Business Rules from packaged or Legacy software applications, recasting them in natural or formal language, and storing them in a source rule repository for further analysis or forward engineering. The goal is to capture these legacy business rules in a way that the business can validate, control and change them over time.

Overview

Business rule mining supports a Business rules approach, which is defined as a formal way of managing and automating an organization's business rules so that the business behaves and evolves as its leaders intend.

Business rule mining example

It is also commonly conducted as part of an application modernization project evolving legacy software applications to service oriented architecture (SOA) solutions, transitioning to packaged software, redeveloping new in-house applications, or to facilitate knowledge retention and communication between business and IT professionals in a maintenance environment.

Alternative Approaches

Alternative approaches to rule mining are manual and automated.

A manual approach involves the hand-writing of rules on the basis of subject matter expert interviews and the inspection of source code, job flows, data structures and observed behavior.

Manually extracting rules is complicated by the difficulty of locating and understanding highly interdependent logic that has been interwoven into millions of lines of software code.

An automated approach utilizes repository-based software to locate logical connections inherent within applications and extract them into a predetermined business rules format.

With automation, an effective approach is to apply semantic structures to existing applications. By overlaying business contexts onto legacy applications, rules miners can focus effort on discovering rules from systems that are valuable to the business. Effort is redirected away from mining commoditized or irrelevant applications.

Further, best practices coupled with various tool-assisted techniques of capturing programs’ semantics speeds the transformation of technical rules to true business rules. Adding business semantics to the analysis process allows users to abstract technical concepts and descriptors that are normal in an application to a business level that is consumable by a rules analyst.

System integrators, software vendors, rules mining practitioners, and in-house development teams have developed technologies, proprietary methodologies and industry-specific templates for application modernization and business rule mining.

Source: Wikipedia

What to do when evolving in a degrading business environment?

Keywords: Business uncertainty;commercial good practice;Donald Rumsfeld;pattern of uncertainty

Uncertainty is a "force" that shouldn't be ignored

A wealth of work on the topic had been published, but as much of it was written by academics, it was theoretical and not based on commercial good practice. Much of it was dated and nothing had been written since the global financial crisis that unleashed a new era of uncertainty for organisations to cope with. Our initial instinct that the 2008 crisis was out of the ordinary proved correct. When it occurred, many senior executives assumed that it was another turn in the boom-and-bust cycle that had characterised macroeconomics in developed economies since the end of the second world war. They reacted accordingly, cutting costs and “hunkering down” for what they supposed would be a painful but short period of austerity. However, the crisis has ushered in a period of unprecedented uncertainty, with the economic unknowns augmented by political and social unknowns arising from such developments as the Arab spring and the anti-capitalist and anti austerity protests in a number of developed countries. Business uncertainty is here to stay. Not for nothing did a secretary-general of the United Nations recently comment that the first years of the 21st century may well prove “a decisive moment in the human story”, requiring co-operation by politicians and business leaders across all boundaries to respond to the interconnected threats the world currently faces.

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We

also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know

there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown

unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary, 2001–06

Historians may well look back on the first years of the 21st century

as a decisive moment in the human story. The different societies that

make up the human family are today interconnected as never before.

They face threats that no nation can hope to master by acting alone

– and opportunities that can be much more hopefully exploited if all

nations work together.

Kofi Annan, UN secretary-general, 1997–2006

Donald Rumsfeld got it right. When he used the above analogy, he was speaking at a press briefing in 2002 about the absence of evidence linking the government of Iraq with the supply of weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups. His words were criticised at the time as an abuse of language by, among others, the Plain English Campaign. However, Geoffrey Pullum, a linguist, disagreed, saying the comment was “completely straightforward” and “impeccable, syntactically, semantically, logically and rhetorically”. Whatever the rights and wrongs linguistically, the quotation provides a perfect starting point for this book. We are now living in a world which combines known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns, and the growth of the last category presents business leaders with a new and little-charted management challenge.

The uncertain world order

The need to focus on the challenges of an uncertain world has never been more urgent. Much of the academic and consultancy work undertaken on managing uncertainty was conducted in the 1990s and the first few years of the 21st century and the resulting analysis was largely theoretical. Furthermore, it is now apparent that the research and analysis were carried out during a period when world economies were enjoying what proved to be an Indian summer of growth and stability.

New patterns of uncertainty

Arnoud De Meyer is a former professor of management studies at INSEAD, an international business school, and the Judge Institute of Management at Cambridge, and now president of the Singapore Management University. De Meyer anticipated Rumsfeld’s analogy when he postulated four types of uncertainty that firms may encounter as separate phenomena or in some form of .... Download the entire article