Short
Essays

¶ … Hawkens (1992) tells us that business has generally been seen as the problem to the environment, and whilst that is true, business may also be a part of the solution.

The horizontal analysis focuses on the year-over-year changes to the financial statements. At DCI, the company has seen disappointing performance the past three years. The company has seen its revenues grow over that…

economy has recently emerged from recession. During 2009, real GDP declined 2.6%, the largest drop during the study period beginning in 2009. This came following flatlined GDP in 2008.

Reitmans was able to improve its profitability in 2005, compared with 2004. The company's gross profit improved to 13.55% from 9.99%; its operating profit improved to 9.7% from 5.98%; and its net profit improved to…

It is a new era of transparency and compliance in accounting practices within public and private companies, and this is completely changing the role of annual reports and strategic plans.

¶ … reaching climate change legislation in the United States is dependent on a multitude of domestic and international actors, and appears to be a diminishing possibility every day as political and practical barriers…

Ducati -- passion leading from bankruptcy to success

The business name will be "Bird Wise" and provides a pet-related service. It will be located in Florida with the plan to expand services to new markets in the regional area as well as to develop a national online presence. The primary objectives of the business are as follows. First, develop a professional network of referrals through vets, pet shops, bird breeders, humane societies, and bird clubs. The second objective will be to develop a web presence using direct promotion and social media. A third objective will be to generate an effective price structure for the various services that will be offered to clients. The fourth objective will be to develop a client base of no less than five clients by the six month milestone. Client relationships will generally be short-term in duration (purchasing services for one to three months), so meeting client goals will require acknowledging this depending on their progress and prior relationship with their bird. It has been estimated that five clients should generate roughly $4000 a month in revenue.

Never before has the creation, aggregation, aligning of information to the needs of an enterprise and its effective and secure use meant more to the viability of businesses globally. The most powerful lesson learned in this course is that data, information and knowledge are the most powerful competitive forces any enterprise can rely on today to differentiate itself in maturing markets while seeking out entirely new, high growth opportunities. The combining of analytics, advanced accounting and financial reporting applications, pervasive adoption of enterprise applications for Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM) and many other tasks are accelerating how quickly enterprises can minimize risks while seizing opportunities. Another invaluable lesson learned in this course is how critical it is to plan for change from a personnel, process and systems perspective. The combining of people, processes and systems is critically important for the technologies that the many systems are based on to succeed. This course has shown that only by concentrating on people as the most critical part of any technology-related and automation-based strategy will any effort succeed. It is the ability to manage change and mitigate the resistance to it while automating key tasks through an enterprise-wide strategy that delivers the most effective and longest-landing benefits. The integrating of people, processes and systems in a triad that is framed with a governance framework that ensures consistency and ethical operation is essential to compete in the 21rst century. Setting The Foundations Of A Learning Framework Throughout this course the foundational elements and concepts of how to be an Information Technologies (IT) strategist have been learned. As this course progressed my perception of what an IT leader has changed. From seeing the CIO as the leader of IT systems definition, deployment and management to seeing the same role as more of a strategist that relies on IT systems to assist in strategic objectives being attained, my perception of what kind of CIO I want to be has drastically changed. No longer wanting to be the provider of the IT dial tone, I want to be an IT strategist that leads enterprises to attain their strategic goals through the intelligent use of technologies. This shift in perception of what a technology leader is, and has been in the past compared to what needs to be done in the future, was very illuminating. The delineation of the foundational elements of any IT system, including how to delineate data from information and how to transform tacit and explicit knowedlge into expertise, all have been learned in this course. These concepts, along with the many techniques learned regarding change management, governance, and the need to align IT systems to strategic plans and initiatives, made this class a pivotal one. The many processes that are required for transforming data and information to knowledge can lead any IT department to become myopic; only by concentrating on the overarching strategic objectives and plans, and continually asking who is being served with the efforts of IT departments can any strategy hope to succeed. The cases studied and the cautionary tales of failed IT projects all reverberate with a common thread of losing sight of just who the customer for the programs or projects were and why the systems were developed in the first place. These cautionary tales also showed how powerful successful change management programs are, specifically how IT and business leaders need to concentrate on relying on technology-based systems to support the sociotechnical aspects of an enterprise. The sociotechnical aspects of any enterprise need to be kept in balance as technology is used to bring greater accuracy, clarity, insight, intelligence, knowledge and precision into the decision-making processes of enterprises. Orchestrating all of these factors in unison with each other makes the galvanizing force of a strategic plan and its associated objectives a critical aspect of any IT strategy.

This essay is a review of Lawrence Levine's work "Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom" and a comparison of the author's argument against an alternate view. Specifically, Levine suggests that African social culture survived the slavery era, contrary to the popular perception that it was extinguished by the enslavement process and the realities of American slavery.