So my last blog gave me the idea to take a shot at a clear definition of a company I want to build.

"Cognitive Metaphors is an information system builder and consultancy specializing in improving navigation of related information and processes to empower detection of corruption and terrorism."

Actually, it's hard to build the elevator pitch for this. There's no one out there selling something defined in this way. Although many out there are doing some version of this. I'd need to drive through example what this pitch means to a prospective customer.

Here's a short plan to do this -

My approach here would be to emphasize this main idea in everything we do. Information systems we build to manage our own company, open source projects we build as marketing to promote our company, information systems we build for our clients would alll will be based on this theme.

1. Build open source projects like Nostalgia or client projects that have a common theme - improving navigation of related information and processes together.
2. Put together well defined documentation for each of these systems and identify all the concrete and potential advantages in the way we built them.
3. Build APIs so other systems of ours can interact with each other to a greater end.
4. Document all success stories of people (clients and open source subscribers) using our systems to detect corruption and terrorism.
5. Repeat steps 1-4.

Corruption to me is defined as:

• Any business process that is not serving "the goal" of making money (the definition of "the goal" is defined in Eli Goldratt's work "The Goal"). Basically, even if you think a process is making money, you need to look at it from a scientific point of view and see if it's operation is bottlenecking or adversely effecting other areas and is actually losing money.
• Any development work to build information systems that cost too much for what they deliver. Financial studies empowered by good information systems should be done against the before and after of a information system being built.
• Quantify any executive whose leadership achievements have not justified their compensation packages. Corruption is also paying someone too much for working ineffectively.
• Business deals that are legally defined and not to the advantage of the company are corruption. If for instance, a business deal is defined that does not account for costs of building information systems to support the deal this is not a fair deal. Also, if in the most conservative model testing of the deal shows we are losing money, it's not a fair deal. If no studies or only a few studies at all are done, this is not a fair deal.

My best annecdote of corruption was a story where I was building a data quality checking process against the Citicorp data warehouse. I had a small memory leak in one of the pieces of code that I built. When I ran a million rows of data through that code, the memory leak became very apparent and choked the system. This is true with any poorly designed system.