Blog of Chinh Tran

Bloom's Taxonomy Revised Bloom's Taxonomy Evaluation Create Synthesis Evaluate Analysis Analyze Application Apply Understanding Understand Knownledge Remember Bloom's Taxonomy, Benjamin Bloom, 1950 Revised Bloom's Taxonomy, Lorin Anderson, 2001 Best practice reference sources: http://www.celt.iastate.edu/teaching-resources/effective-practice/revised-blooms-taxonomy/ http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/Bloom's+Digital+Taxonomy

In the past 20 years or so, manufacturers have been able to reduce waste and variability in their production processes and dramatically improve product quality and yield (the amount of output per unit of input) by implementing lean and Six Sigma programs. However, in certain processing environments—pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and mining, for instance—extreme swings in variability are a fact of life, sometimes even after lean techniques have been applied. Given the sheer number and complexity of production activities that influence yield in these and other industries, manufacturers need a more granular approach to diagnosing and correcting process flaws. Advanced analytics provides just such an approach. Advanced analytics refers to the application of statistics and other mathematical tools to business data in order to assess and improve practices (exhibit). In manufacturing, operations managers can use advanced analytics to take a deep dive into historical process data, identify patt

Most large companies invest heavily in application development, and they do so for a compelling reason: their future might depend on it. Software spending in the United States jumped from 32 percent of total IT corporate investment in 1990 to almost 60 percent in 20111 as software gradually became critical for almost every company’s performance.2 Yet in our experience, few organizations have a viable means of measuring the output of their application-development projects. Instead, they rely on input-based metrics, such as the hourly cost of developers, variance to budget, or percent of delivery dates achieved. Although these metrics are useful because they indicate the level of effort that goes into application development, these metrics do not truly answer the question: how much software functionality did a team deliver in a given time period? Or, put another way, how productive was the application-development group? Flying blind With big money and possibly the company’s competiti

Large technology-led transformation programs are important for creating business value and building strategic capabilities across industries. With many organizations spending around 50 percent of their IT budget on application development, the ability to execute software programs faster and at lower cost is essential to success for many transformation projects. However, the quality of execution leaves much to be desired. A joint study by McKinsey and Oxford Uni­versity found that large software projects on average run 66 percent over budget and 33 percent over schedule; as many as 17 percent of projects go so badly that they can threaten the very existence of the company. Some large-scale application-development projects are particularly challenging because of their complexity and high degree of interdependency among work streams. This category includes development of systems for telecommunications billing, insurance claims, tax payments, and core retail-banking platforms. These proj

The adoption of IT in healthcare systems has, in general, followed the same pattern as other industries. In the 1950s, when institutions began using new technology to automate highly standardized and repetitive tasks such as accounting and payroll, healthcare payors and other industry stakeholders also began using IT to process vast amounts of statistical data. Twenty years later, the second wave of IT adoption arrived. It did two things: it helped integrate different parts of core processes (manufacturing and HR, for example) within individual organizations, and it supported B2B processes such as supply-chain management for different institutions within and outside individual industries. As for its effects on the healthcare sector, this second wave of IT adoption helped bring about, for example, the electronic health card in Germany. It was also a catalyst for the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act in the United States—an effort to promote the adoptio

July 2014 | by’Tunde Olanrewaju As European consumers move online, retail banks will have to follow. The problem is that most banks aren’t ready. Across Europe, retail banks have digitized only 20 to 40 percent of their processes; 90 percent of European banks invest less than 0.5 percent of their total spending on digital. As a result, most have relatively shallow digital offerings focused on enabling basic customer transactions. Neither customers nor digital upstarts are likely to wait for retail banks to catch up. Recent analysis shows that over the next five years, more than two-thirds of banking customers in Europe are likely to be “self-directed” and highly adapted to the online world. In fact, these same consumers already take great advantage of digital technologies in other industries—booking flights and holidays, buying books and music, and increasingly shopping for groceries and other goods via digital channels. Once a credible digital-banking proposition exists, customer

As friction increases between China and Vietnam over the South China Sea, an important question is how Vietnam’s military, famed decades ago for its resilience and guerrilla warfare, measures up. For the last two months, Chinese and Vietnamese Coast Guard vessels have been jostling each other around a billion-dollar Chinese oil rig that Vietnam says was unilaterally placed in its waters by Beijing. (Beijing says the waters are Chinese.) Warships from both countries lurk in the distance, and from time to time, the Chinese send air force fighters into the rig’s vicinity to show they mean business. Prof. Lyle J. Goldstein, associate professor at the China Maritime Studies Institute at the Naval War College in Rhode Island, is well qualified to examine the capacities of the Chinese and Vietnamese militaries. The two armies worked together in Vietnam to topple the French in the 1950s, and to defeat the Americans in the Vietnam War. In 1979, the Chinese invaded Vietnam — to teach its neigh