James MacLennan

This author has written 417 articles

Vintage Technology

Here's one of those videos making the rounds via eMail. I found this in my inbox at work, from an observant friend who apparently likes the same web sites I do (although I had originally this as a great example of minimalist site design). httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdSHeKfZG7c It's interesting to note how the magical becomes the mundane. I did find it interesting that certain "timeless" concepts (a deck of cards? a marbles game?) have more resonance than these artifacts of a bygone…

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Chargebacks vs. Allocations – Defining IT’s Relationship with the Business

Some IT departments prefer chargebacks, while others do not. My own preference is to allocate IT costs to the business units, based on some reasonable balance of simplicity and accuracy. General services could be allocated by headcount, COGs, or revenues, with each business unit taking their proportional share. Some easily identifiable items might be allocated more directly - maintenance costs for specialized engineering, warehouse management, or financial systems, for example, could be allocated more directly to those departments. I've written…

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Estimating Bird-Dogging Time for Project Tasks

New year, new projects, and new adventures in getting folks to think in project management terms. I've written before about Calendar time vs. Effort time, but this past week we came up with a new distinction that is worthwhile to call out. When working with the business and getting folks to estimate how much time it will take to complete a task, there are actually three different things that most people will talk about - and folks need to be…

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Fun with Ngrams – Art, Science, Programming

A recent gift from Google Labs - the NGram viewer, a fascinating tool that searches the Google Books database for words and phrases, and charts their relative frequency. For example - let's take some of the themes of this blog ... Apparently, Art and Science have grown closer, and enjoy a somewhat parallel existence together. Design (Inspiration) started strong, had a bit of a lull, but is enjoying a bit of a renaissance (as it were). And unfortunately, "management" is…

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Learning About Data Visualization

Even though there is an art to visualization design, it stands to reason that this is a skill that can be taught / learned. I remember going to campus visits with my daughter, and hearing about a textbook considered to be a timeless classic - teaching students how to draw. What a concept - I guess I had always imagined an innate, magic ability (that I, of course, never had). Then again, musicians start learning to read and write music…

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Art and Science of Data Visualization (Part 2)

Just a little more theory and background on Data Visualization, to eat up the rest of your weekend. Unlike the McCandless video, this video will take some time investment - but well worth it, if you want to charge your batteries on this topic. (via Flowing Data) From earlier this year, Martin Wattenberg gives a talk on data and visualization. Some interesting points: Data visualizations work well with large data sets Interesting insight comes from borrowing ideas from different knowledge…

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External Radiance Projection 2010: A Christmas / Upgrade Story

No, I'm not a Christmas fanatic - but when you live in Chicago, you learn to look for nice weather in the weeks approaching Thanksgiving, to put up the lights before the wind and cold conspire to make it a painful experience. Basically, I gotta burn a vacation day - but why not? It's an opportunity to get away from the hassles of work in Corporate IT ... ... except this year, I finally had to deal with my outdated…

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Art and Science of Data Visualization

"Data Visualization" has been an extremely active and popular topic for a few years - we can use Google's Timeline search feature to see the growth in interest since 1980: That local high in July of this year was due in no small part to David McCandless' Information is Beautiful talk at TED this past summer. It appeared in my RSS stream here, here, and here, so I got the hint, spent 18 minutes watching it, and got suitably jazzed…

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Gartner Symposium 2010

Last week, I was able to attend this annual Gartner event - something akin to SAPPHIRE, the SAP uber-users group meeting, without the vendor specific rah-rah. An interesting event - 7400 attendees, over four days. A typical conference - multiple sessions along major tracks, and I bounced between sessions dealing with these issues: Master Data - Continuing to look for the latest information - this is still a fast growing software market, and ideas around things like "data governance" (people…

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Designing for Devices

My last entry on design for a bit - just some thoughts on the added complexity when designing applications for multiple client devices. Fast Changing Device Landscape The "last mile" of user/computer interaction has seen a number of exciting innovations over the past year or so. Phones are getting physically smaller, yet have bulked up their connectedness and capabilities - and the shrinking screen, now touch-sensitive, has blown up into the ubiquitous iPad and a host of next-gen touchscreens. Yes,…

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