Increase in social networking

Am given to understand that there is a spurt in social networking - especially since the advent of industry downturn. Well, no hard facts to prove it but am witnessing an increasing number of people very active in social networking these days possibly driven by the need of the hour to seek if anyone anywhere has anything for them. Tried a few names in twitter including jobless, jobsless, no work etc to see the magnitude of networking. Not surprisingly, 'no work times' had more than 240 following, jobsless had an equal number. What intrigued me was the messages in these profiles - free healthcare for the jobless, free software, free movies etc. So, no wonder why there is increased networking - freebies are ubiquitous.
Wonder how this network will evolve? Will it result into job-sharing? Will it give rise to new social-networking based business models?

Is Business Intelligence really Intelligence?

An interesting article in CIO.com reinforced my increasing skepticism that IT thrives on complexity. Companies worldwide invested in data warehousing – to store corporate data and structure them with rules and then adopted business intelligence to obviously get ‘intelligence’ from the data stored. What then is analytics? According to Scott Staples, Co-CEO at Mindtree – Business Intelligence is a misnomer. The gorillas in the industry coined the term – a concept possibly to create new avenues in the database market, targeting companies that were now seeking ways to slice and dice data and generate reports. That was intelligence ten years back – just churning out reports. The scenario is very different today with mobile workforce and an economy that warrants decision-making in a jiffy. Organizations are required to know themselves and the ecosystem better than others, implying analysis of ‘whatever information residing across the organization’ anywhere anytime. That’s where analytics come into play – empowering today’s organization with ‘intelligence’ at the point of action. Wonder why it’s not called Business Intelligence 2.0 – remember web 2.0? Well, it seems until and unless there is a new concept – technology adoption doesn’t gain traction. How is the concept of utility computing any different than today’s buzz word – cloud computing? Most technology firms today seem to have specialists who can churn out ‘buzz concepts.’