lev_lafayette's blog

Topic 4: Internal analysis

Submitted by lev_lafayette on Tue, 11/02/2010 - 09:06

Organisational success is largely dependent upon the effectiveness (and efficiency) of the interface between the external and internal environments of an organisation.

Before a strategic position for an organisation can be developed, the following is required:
1. an external analysis that identifies opportunities and threats: the external environment
2. an internal analysis that identifies its strengths and weaknesses: the internal environment
3. a match between internal and external factors
4. strategic options that capitalise on strengths and assist with overcoming weaknesses

External analysis

Submitted by lev_lafayette on Tue, 11/02/2010 - 09:05

The external environment of an organisation is the physical and intangible region from which an organisation's resources are drawn and revenue is generated, and in which competitors battle for both of these. Although the external environment can be defined or categorised in different ways, it is

The strategy formulation process

Submitted by lev_lafayette on Tue, 11/02/2010 - 08:57

A recent McKinsey survey of executives (September 2006) on strategic planning, strategy implementation and utilisation identified the following:
- Most companies have a formal strategic planning process, but some don't use it to make their most important decisions
- Fewer than half of respondents were satisfied with their company's approach to making strategic decisions, although senior managers were more satisfied than other levels of management

An introduction to strategic management

Submitted by lev_lafayette on Tue, 11/02/2010 - 08:53

Strategic management may be defined as:

The process of identifying, choosing and implementing activities that will enhance
the long term performance of an organisation by setting direction, utilising
technology and innovation and by creating ongoing compatibility between the
internal skills, resources and capabilities of an organisation and the changing
external environment within which it operates. (Viljoen & Dann 2003: 5)

Installing and Testing Valgrind on Linux

Submitted by lev_lafayette on Thu, 10/21/2010 - 23:49

Valgrind is an instrumentation framework for building dynamic analysis tools. Which is a fancy way of saying that it's a debugging suite that automatically detects many memory management and threading bugs, which is a very good thing. Valgrind can handle dynamically generated code, so long as none of the generated code is later overwritten by other generated code. It can also perform detailed profiling to help speed up your programs. It comes with extensive documentation.

Installing MATLAB DCS/PCT on a Linux Cluster with PBS and TORQUE

Submitted by lev_lafayette on Wed, 10/20/2010 - 04:10

MATLAB is a numerical computing environment allowing matrix manipulation, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, and high-level programming language. Typically it is run on desktop installs, which is quite problematic if one is doing a large computational problem.

Minor Issues in Installing the NCDF Libary Package for R

Submitted by lev_lafayette on Mon, 10/18/2010 - 05:27

It seemed a trivial request, and once you've realised a couple of minor issues it is; install the NCDF library, a common scientific data format, for R, the well-known statistics software.

There is a usual way to install a package in R. Simply load the program and run the install.packages function; but this didn't quite work.


R
>chooseCRANmirror()
>install.packages(c("ncdf"))

Forking Mandriva and OpenOffice.org: Poor Management versus Competent Technology

Submitted by lev_lafayette on Thu, 10/14/2010 - 13:03

There have been two fairly significant forks in the Linux world in the past few weeks; one is a large number of the developers of Mandriva now concentrating on on that technology under the new title Mageia. As advocates of that this new Linux distribution state: People working on it just do not want to be dependent on the economic fluctuations and erratic, unexplained strategic moves of the company..

Installing CGAL on a 64-bit AMD Opteron Cluster running CentOS 5 Linux

Submitted by lev_lafayette on Tue, 10/12/2010 - 10:13

CGAL (Computational Geometry Algorithms Library) provides efficient and reliable geometric algorithms in the form of a C++ library data structures and algorithms for triangulations, Voronoi diagrams, polygons and polyhedra, arrangements of curves and their applications, mesh generation, geometry processing, subdivision and parameterization, as well as estimation of local differential properties, and approximation of ridges and umbilics, alpha shapes, convex hull algorithms, search structures , interpolation, shape analysis, fitting, and distances, and kine

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