Reflections on Session 7

I was amazed at the high level of emotion found in the discussion thread re: offshore outsourcing. Some folks said that we need to be patriotic and not send our jobs to foreign countries while others pointed out that we live in a global economy and the mighty dollar rules. There were some good points -- when national security or quality customer service is involved, we need to keep things internal. Of course, the answer to this is "it depends." You need to look at TCO - the total cost of offshoring - for your organization, specifically, the hidden costs that people often overlook. Check out this CIO magazine article for more information on this concept.

Regarding the use of Fedscope, I am glad that most of the students were exposed to a powerful OLAP tool. They are seeing a Cognos (now IBM) product formerly called PowerPlay, but there are other companies such as BusinessObjects, Microsoft, Oracle, who can produce similar cubes and interfaces. These tools are certainly easier to use than pivot tables in spreadsheets. I am always impressed when I see the insightful trends and relationships students identified and the derived strategies based on these findings.

Although lots of students wanted to recruit and hire more staff, some of the strategies focused on social inequities such as the lack of diversity in various dimensions (gender, race, age, etc.) I am glad this class is cognizant of these social issues. Speaking of social issues, too bad the cubes did not contain any "green" information. I'm sure that a student would to address that timely issue.