Intelligent Enterprise: A new Ventana Research report finds that most companies are falling short on the basics of performance management. Here are five sets of diagnostic questions as well as best practices for broader, more responsive and more effective planning and budgeting.

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Those that have read my blog know that I do get on my soapbox from time to time about the state of education in the United States.  I can't help but be concerned about the future for America's young adults.  Too many students are not opting to stay in school to continue their education. If U.S. students continue their lack of motivation in pursuing an education, I can't help but be gloomy on America's place in the 21st century as a world leader.

Taking a different viewpoint, BusinessWeek recently posted an article on academics in the United States stating that U.S. schools are not doing that bad.  The schools could be doing better, but they're not terrible.  The article uses the Two Million Minutes documentary as its backdrop.  The BusinessWeek author points out that academic performance doesn't always dictate the sucess a person may have in the world of business.

SitePoint: "Instead, we wanted to clarify the issues surrounding site valuations, and give site owners a clear picture of the factors that were affecting their sites' values. We wanted also to provide starting points from which you could work to translate those factors into dollar values."

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"Blogging as a business is business. It takes business training and skills to make money with your blog."

-Lorelle VanFossen, "Business School for Bloggers: How to Make Money With Your Blog", Blog Herald, April 7, 2008

I joined the new Content Wrangler Community with hopes of improving my social networking with other content management professionals. Scott Abel discusses his goals for the community on his blog.

The Content Wrangler Community is the new social network dedicated to people who value content as a business asset, worthy of being effectively managed. This is the place where technical communicators, medical and science writers, marketing pros, online community managers, document engineers, information architects, localization and translation pros, taxonomists, bloggers, documentation and training managers, and content creators of all types hang out. It’s much more than a blog. It’s a place to join your peers, to share, to collaborate, to contribute, to find the information you need.

Hopefully this community will take-off in a beneficial way as I've seen similar online communities not become any more than a "mailing list" of "friends" promoting their own agenda.

"Given that tendency [IT business experience], you'd think that when I had the opportunity to create it all from scratch, I would remember the fundamentals. But at our first audit, I was informed that we needed to increase our focus on the fundamentals. Why had I neglected the very things I'd been preaching about for years? In hindsight, it's pretty easy to see the things I needed to be doing better:"

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"Steve Rubel over at Micro Persuasion
has a nice writeup on the Trust Issue regarding startups and I just
cannot agree more. History has shown that any startup which wants to
gain a big userbase and wants to keep it needs to invest in trust.
There are many examples already where it failed."

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Last December, I mentioned my excitement about Drupal's project lead, Dries Buytaert, along with Jay Batson starting a company called Acquia. While it was known that the $7 million startup would focus on Drupal for the enterprise, what was not known was the products and services that would be offered by the company. In a press release today, Acquia finally unveiled its roadmap to commercially support Drupal.

The company announced the two initial products and services it will be offering, Carbon and Spokes. Carbon is Acquia's commercial supported version of Drupal which will focus on social publishing applications. Spokes is an update will be an enhanced update notification sercice that provides "site owners personalized alerts with actionable recommendations". At this time I'm, not clear as to whether Spokes will be available for just Carbon or for all Drupal distributions. Both services will be available through a subscription offering.