A short blog post to get me into writing today – a practical tip on how to be sure you always have batteries with you when you need them.
About a year ago I went Mac – mostly good, some bad, but overall a good choice. That means that I regularly take my laptop to uni, hook it up to an external monitor, and transport around my bluetooth Apple keyboard and magic mouse. These are both great devices. Unbeatable in fact. However, they do chew through the battery power (kind of like my 1985 Jaguar XJ6 is with petrol – ouch!).
Now, I like to use rechargeable batteries – I saw a documentary on disposable batteries, not good. Unfortunately rechargeable batteries don’t last as long as your environment-destroying long-life high-power AA. So that I don’t run short on batteries, I transport them around with me in a handy case:
These Eclipse mints are quite good as mints, but they come with this awfully good tin. Which seems too good to just throw away. And so, need meets need results in opportunity. They’re just the right size for transporting AA batteries – but they clunk when you walk around. So – an old technology solution involving cotton balls:
And bingo:
I have two of these, as otherwise it is likely that both my keyboard and mouse will go at the same time. I just cycle these through the battery charger as needed (I put used ones in a different spot to the fresh ones!) and I’m all good.
Bingo – a practical tip for the risk averse who occasionally think of the environment (except when they are driving their 24 litres per 100km Jag.
Last Wednesday evening (25th May 2011) I was invited to present to the CPA Australia discussion group for Information Technology. The topic was to do with my research, and is all about intelligent decision aids and the accounting professional. Thanks to John Halliday of BDO in Brisbane as the discussion group convenor for his suggestion that I present. I am recording this output as TTD
This is the session outline I provided to CPA Australia (note: I was a bit concerned when I showed up at 4:30pm to see signs everywhere saying I was presenting on Sharepoint – no way am I going to do that, although we could always workshop it 🙂 ):
Ever since the pocket calculator replaced the adding machine and the slide rule, accountants have been debating whether today’s accountant is less skilled than those that went before. The increasing reliance upon legislative compliance and ‘best practice frameworks’ has ensured that the modern professional must rely on the computer to carry out their tasks.
This session presents preliminary results from Micheal’s research into whether the sophisticated use of computers (‘intelligent decision aids’) to assist with accounting and audit reduces the professional’s judgment capability – their ‘know-how’. Micheal’s research draws upon interviews with 59 public sector auditors to identify whether this ‘deskilling’ is occurring.
The session identifies the driving forces behind this ‘deskilling effect’ (‘technology dominance), outlines recent research into the phenomenon (and in fact whether it exists or not), and identifies risk factors that may be at play in deskilling yourself and your staff if you rely on computers too much. Potential strategies to reduce this deskilling effect are also outlined and discussed.
This session should be of interest to any professional that relies upon a computer to help them with their professional tasks.
The session in my humble view went quite well. It’s really good to see that John and CPA Australia have a discussion group that is going quite well on an infamously ‘non-core’ topic. Feedback from audience members that I saw was also reasonably upbeat. At any rate, the Powerpoint I presented is given below:
At the urging of Twitter user beautyiswhatudo, I have posted up here my academic template for writing journals and publications according to a somewhat generally accepted approach. The reader can download the Scrivener 2.0.4 template here.
I do have some notes for someone intending to use this template; these notes are included in the Academic template.
To the user:
This Scrivener 2.04 template provides an overall structure of how to proceed with writing an academic paper in Scrivener. Much of this generated table of contents etc is based on research in the social sciences (Information Systems discipline). Other advice has been sourced from the University of Queensland RHD Handbook (included as part of the research materials at the bottom), and from the publication Turabian, K. L. (2003). Identify key terms expressing concepts that unite the report and distinguish its parts: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers (7th Edition ed.). Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
This template will need to be customised for someone seeking to write papers (note: this is a paper for journal or conference publication, not a thesis. A thesis will have more and varied sections.
Note that to use this document, you should note that text within []’s needs to be searched for and replaced. And before you ask, [lorem ipsum] is generally considered to be Latin for ‘Insert Text Here’.
Released as is without warranty express or implied. As the author, you will need to make changes to this template for your use. Nonetheless, if you like it or have an improvement to suggest, please feel free to email me at micheal@michealaxelsen.com with recommendations or feedback.
Thanks: Micheal Axelsen 21/02/2011.
Here is a PDF so you can see what the template looks like; there is considerable metadata inside the Scrivener template with instructions for completing the paper. You can only access that material, though with a copy of Scrivener.
Hope that you find this of some use. I may update this from time to time. As always, feel free to email me on micheal@michealaxelsen.com with feedback, or leave comments below.
[PS: You might be interested in this other post on my blog, where you can see how I use Scrivener, EndNote and Evernote for academic writing: Using Scrivener and EndNote together on Mac OSX]
Well, this is a blog entry, and I have a thing for bad business poetry. In Brizvegas, as you may have heard, we’ve had droughts a-plenty until the last two years, and then the flooding rains that just created a seeping, growing, black mess that crept stealthily towards everyone’s place of business or abode.
Well, that might seem a little melodramatic, but you know what? It’s not. We’re all affected here in Brizvegas, even in little ways such as losing our carparks (my wife doesn’t think that’s so little) or daycare centre (my daughter, yes, same attitude as her mother). My house was perfectly fine, halfway up Mount Cootha, but I went for a ride on my pushbike to see how my daughter’s daycare centre was faring. As I rounded a corner and ran into deep, black water quite some time before I rather thought I would. Squealing on the brakes, I thought to myself, ‘That’s not good!’
I also came to the realisation that my five-year old daughter was not going back to daycare tomorrow.
And so from my back deck, all seemed fine as I looked over the tall trees of Mt Coot-tha, but at the same time some people were cut off from food and petrol – friends of mine were refused service after the floods because they ‘looked grotty’. Well, how would you look after 5 days without power or a shower?
It was an odd flood, bright sunny day, and yet still I noticed the Lexus dealership madly moving cars, and the people at the Brumby’s bakery madly moving flour to the only bakery down the road that wasn’t flooded (it appears they rather had some trouble finding the key, and saved the flour only just in time or the western suburbs would have had to start eating crushed up gumleaves spiced with mud. And then having to drink the wooded Chardonnay left in the wine rack – oh the humanity!)
But the point (and there is one!) is that we precisely do not know what will ever happen to our homes or places of business. Some of us thought we were really very safe at the time. That idea’s comforting, but not always true (I can see a mountain full of trees from my back deck – so one day bushfires are on the cards).
Here’s a video I took of a house normally way, way above the river:
All of us banana-benders are looking at each other now, after inland tsunamis, floods-that-weren’t-supposed-to-happen, and Cyclone Yasi, and saying that if we had a blizzard come down Queen Street we’d let loose a suitable expletive and get down to it.
So how do you as a business prepare for these things?
Well, fortunately we do have best practice approaches available such as COBIT and ITIL. A year or so ago, when I was lecturing at QUT in IT Governance, I asked the students to use COBIT’s framework to help with the development of a business continuity plan. This is what it, rather drily, says:
DS4.2 IT Continuity Plans: Develop IT continuity plans based on the framework and designed to reduce the impact of a major disruption on key business functions and processes. The plans should be based on risk understanding of potential business impacts and address requirements for resilience, alternative processing and recovery capability of all critical IT services. They should also cover usage guidelines, roles and responsibilities, procedures, communication processes, and the testing approach.
The exercise for the student was to take a look around their bedroom and work out what they might lose, what they could afford to lose, and how they might get back on deck. I seem to recall one student came up with a contingency plan that involved explaining to his lecturer how he didn’t need to submit the assignment that week – I believe I may have said he needed to improve that excuse for his risk register.
Anyway, business continuity plans are things that are really hard if you don’t know where to start. So I took that reasonably vague statement above from ITGI’s COBIT and turned it into something like the below. Feel free to borrow it as a template if you like for your business. It’s not great, it’s not fantastic, but it’s a start, and at least you get thinking about what you need to do in the event of problems like droughts, flooding rains, bushfires, cyclones, blizzards, alien invasion, or inland tsunamis. Try adapting this for your purposes:
And so I’m going to leave this blog entry right about here, now that I’ve gotten to use some great phrases like ‘a seeping growing black mess’ (seriously, anyone who saw that floodwater will agree that it was pretty yuck). Readers, please take a look or download the example business continuity plan – a BCP doesn’t need to be hard, it just needs to work. In fact, if it’s big and hard and ugly, it’s likely it’ll never work. ‘Keep it Simple, Silly’ is the appropriate rule of thumb. It’s a good start for some businesses, possibly not for others.
But please don’t find yourself caught on the hop and having to remove those files from the basement where they’re stored to the top floor of your building in your pyjamas and best thongs, like some people I’ve heard of. Or the people at the Lexus dealership, who were frantic because they couldn’t find the keys to the four wheel drive blocking the driveway.
PS: I hope I rickrolled somebody in one of those links up above…
The past week or so of my professional life (it’s all a blur) has been taken up with writing a paper for submission to an upcoming conference. If you’ve ever wondered about the process, it’s been painful. If you are interested, read on to read the abstract of what is now a 12 page paper (it started out at 16 pages – cutting down is annoying).
If you aren’t interested – move along, nothing to see here.
Abstract (I’ll leave the title out as it’s A: long and B: it’s meant to be a double-blind review. Suffice to say it’s about auditing and accounting standard reforms, BIS and IT audit).
Information systems are key components of the internal control system that ensure the business entity complies with the requirements of the financial reporting regulatory framework. This regulatory framework consists primarily of accounting and auditing standards. As the regulatory framework changes, so too do the functional requirements of information systems. Compliance with the regulatory framework is essential to the long-term business success.
This paper is a report of a review of the effect of Australian reforms to auditing standards (the ‘audit risk’ and ‘black-letter law’ reforms) and accounting standards (the ‘A-IFRS’ reforms) upon business information systems and information systems audit. This analysis is verified with audit professionals and the final results reported as an exploratory study. The results identify seven significant computer-based registers for businesses to manage in complying with the financial regulatory framework, and identifies the significant relationships between accounting and auditing standards and information systems audit.
The audit and accounting profession requires a deep understanding of the implications of the financial reporting regulatory framework for business information systems design and the role of information systems audit. This paper provides a valuable contribution to this professional need through considered analysis of the auditing and accounting standards.
Keywords: IFRS, ISA, IS Audit, business information systems
This research is a part of the output of my Australian Research Council Project.
