Tom Purves – Product Management, Fintech & AI

Canada’s favorite drugstore shoppers drug mart which sells almost everything including even drugs is having a special “Secret” 20x day tomorrow for their loyalty points scheme. I know, because they sent some e-mail saying today is last chance to register (hint: link), and it’s “sekrit” so you have to register in advance.

So anyway, loyalty points promotions, what a fun excuse for math! What’s a point worth? How many pudding cups do we have to buy to make this particular offer worthwhile?

Most days, Shoppers offer you 10 point for “almost every dollar you spend”. what’s that worth? As it breaks down, here’s the ordinary math this merchant may/not want you to be thinking about:

So on a regular day, 10 points are worth 2cents at best…. but (sans promotions) you’ll need to spend $750 before you get that much out of them. This is roughly on par with other loyalty schemes (I’ve worked out Aeroplan points to be worth about 2.2 cents on the dollar to me) Ah, but 20 x 2% = 40% – not a bad discount at all for your healthcare, toiletry and beauty product needs…

Here’s how much you need to spend to make one of these top secret 20x days interesting:

On Saturday Dec 2nd:

Of course, for best results this depends on finding, $150+ worth of stuff you can use. Buying $375 worth of drugstore crap you didn’t need won’t necessarily get you ahead in beating the system…

go to it… (and if you missed out on this deal, don’t worry, I think they do it again every so often)

exercise for the reader: find one of the Shoppers that carries iPods, try to buy, say, a container load worth at 40% off, resell individually on ebay… etc. 😉

# Link: Scoble covering Enterprise/Office2.0 and connect beam. Excellent discussion follows.

# Rod Boothby of the site Innovation Creators has quit his gig with Ernst & Young to focus on Enterprise2.0 full time. Congrats Rod… what took you so long? 😉 ps, need a new job?

Completely unrelated song of the day. We Are Scientists covering Sigur Rós masterpiece Hoppípolla. The Californian hipsters pull it off acoustic AND in a pretty damn good job of the original “hopelandish. awesomeness.

https://www.thomaspurves.com/music/06%20-%20Hoppipolla.mp3

Euan Semple on his blog has a mini round up on the current state the Knowledge Management movement. Naturally, he’s opinionated on the subject:

“Compare Dave Snowden’s eminently sensible and insightful analysis of the current state of KM with this load of complete bollocks.”

From the first link,

Now don’t get me wrong, the objectives of KM theory and practice persist and will continue to be of great importance. They are clear, simple and important and can be summarised as follows:

1. To support effective decision making
2. To create the conditions for innovation

All the methods and tools of KM from communities of practice to corporate taxonomies are subordinate to those two primary goals. In so far as the IT function supports those goals and continues to use the term KM then it will persist.

A lot of what is happening in the Enterprise 2.0 builds on these exact same objectives as Knowledge Management (Wikepedia link). The twist being that Enterprise2.0 takes the “social”-ish or emergent path rather than the more traditional top-down (as I understand them) methodologies of classic KM.

Euan’s early successes and experiments with introducing some very basic “social media” tools to the sprawling organization that is the BBC was one my own primary inspirations for embarking on the Firestoker project.

If you wan’t to know why… Here is Euan Semple at Lift06 – essential watching, for anyone interested in Enterprise20 or … how to 2.0-the-hell-out of KM

(from the opening line “knowledge management, does anyone even talk like that anymore?…”)