I'm still fairly inexperienced, but here's my two cents. Whenever confronted with a collaboration project, I ask myself: Will it solve a problem or create one? A common fallacy I've seen assumed is; local optimizations will directly translate into global gains in efficiency. This result is often not the case unless you affect a bottleneck in production. This is called the theory of constraints (proposed by Goldratt; see "The Goal"). My post is no substitute for the actual material, so go and read the book.
If your new tool doesn't affect a bottleneck, it is more likely that you will make production worse. Here's an example of how this effect works in manufacturing. Assume part X and Y are required to make a final product. Product Y is currently produced at the same rate as X. It is very easy to make part Y twice as fast as X, but X's rate can't change. Should you make Y faster? If you do, you will end up continuously building up piles of inventories of Y that won't yield actual sales. Building inventory costs you a lot more money, so optimizing Y is a bad idea.
Here's how it works in service industries (this is a contrived example). As a sales manager you decide, since CRM optimizations are making your competitors money, you need a CRM solution. Your company makes widgets that are top of the line and require three times as much time to complete as your competitor. You deploy CRM, expecting to increase customer satisfaction, but your end of year reports indicate a decrease. What happened? It might be that the CRM tool made your sales force operate twice as fast. Taking more orders means that you now have twice as many people waiting on a production line that was barely meeting demand to begin with. So by using CRM, you have twice as many people breathing down your neck
Back to my question. If your solution doesn't address a bottleneck one of two things could happen. The best case is, it won't be used because people can meet demand with the tools they have; the cost of switching will prevent change. The worst case is, the solution gets adopted and you start building unwanted inventory or tickets in your system increasing your cost. In either case, you should adopt the empirical method; start with a hypothesis and prove it with measured data. That's really the only way of determining if your tool is a solution or a problem.
I never claimed that the insights were totally invaluable; you get gems from time to time.
While, I agree that fedspeak is hard to unravel and intentionally so, they do publish very thorough statistical analysis of the economy. Moreover, their conclusions are often based on these statistics and very rarely influenced by political expediency (the Fed was designed this way); take a look at the history around the end of George H.W. Bush's term in office and his re-election if you don't believe me.
You occasionally get opponents like Senator Henry B. Gonzalez, who wanted FOMC meetings televised to increase their transparency. The intention is good but the effect would be bad in my opinion; either you have a market that reacts violently to the meetings or a set of very tight lipped federal bankers. Neither is good for the economy.
You're right; there is no holy grail and a lot of the reporting and economic forecasts are biased. However, in my experience real economic data and interpretation from economists I trust is often a more valuable use of my reading time.
Or you can just subscribe to the blogs of your favorite analysts
Unfortunately, a lot of the traditional news I've read in the past (National Post, The Economist) is very alarmist and often irrational, without much actual content. I've had to resort to publications from the federal reserve, blogs from economists, and my own education for anything descent.
I'd also still rank Slashdot as a source for fairly reliable content; a lot of the fluff gets filtered out.
Agreed. You really can't tame inflation unless you cut the money supply. That has only been done once to my knowledge (in the states).
To his credit however, Clinton did put political expediency on hold to drive down the deficit. That being said, I distrust politicians as a rule
The flow chart is a most thoroughly oversold piece of program documentation. -- Frederick Brooks, "The Mythical Man Month"