Dan Baker, telecoms researcher and good friend to talkRA, has launched a hotly-anticipated online magazine, the Black Swan Telecom Journal, dedicated to the topic of business assurance. Packed full of content, the journal promises to concentrate on professional learning through case studies, how-to advice, and commentaries about industry trends and practices. Dan is stepping into a sizeable gap in the market, and I expect he will quickly attract a significant readership. Black Swan provides professional content from a wide range of authors, with the articles comparable to those you might find in medical or technical journals, though written in straightforward business language. As you would expect from a journal about business assurance, the articles cover revenue assurance, fraud, cost optimization, risk, analytics, security, and more besides. But do not take my word for it – I recommend you read the journal yourself, now available at bswan.org
The name Black Swan is taken from the title of Nassim Taleb’s book about the limits of knowledge, overconfidence in prediction, and the tendency to rationalize about the failures of data analysis and forecasting. I was thrilled when Dan asked me to contribute an article to his journal, and being a huge fan of Nassim Taleb myself, I could think of no better subject than to take Taleb’s maxims about robustness and give them a telecoms twist. My article, ‘From Risk to Robust’, can be found here.
