No Silver Bullet for Group Collaboration over Distance?

Lots of organizations have to deal with the challenge of implementing standard work and best practices over physical distances. With sales offices, distribution centers, and manufacturing locations scattered across the country, what's the best way to get people who know their stuff to collaborate on process improvement - and then take that knowledge back to their home office? While wrestling with this challenge, one executive I know preemptively ruled out videoconferencing. It's a common suggestion, but the general feeling was…

Desperately Needed Features for eMail Clients/Servers

Via Knowledge Jolt, here's an article from KM world with some interesting statistics about folks engaged in enterprise search - but it was a tangential quote from the author that caught my eye. When asking corporate knowledge workers about using public Internet search engines, she found that ... ... although only 2 percent [of corporate searchers] said they used the company intranet, 13 percent stated that they were looking for internal company information. That's puzzling. Not puzzling to me! They're…

The Innovation Generation and User Interfaces

I don't intend for all my posts about Millennials joining the workforce to be anti-youth. There are some significantly good things this new generation can bring to established organizations - ways of thinking that foster innovation and forward-progress in how organizations use information. For example, let's talk about user interfaces (UI). I'm not an old man, but I remember the advent of IBM's Common User Access standard. DOS-based computers and early GUIs introduced UI variety, and the resulting lack of…

Why are those Old Programmers so slow in picking up on the Intarweb?

6 April, 2008
Application Development, Career Management
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A significant difference between us old-line IT coders and the new graduates is the variety of our platforms and tools. I'm not talking about the large number of languages and tools learned over the course of a career - we all have a healthy collection of certifications and acronyms peppering the bottoms of our resumes. I'm talking about the amazing array of stuff required to get development done on a single project, "right now". Over the past few weeks, I've…

The Innovation Generation – Communication Styles

I've seen many articles in recent weeks about the tech-savvy Millennials and their impact on future work. I concede, even welcome the changes that business will need to introduce in response to these new expectations, but I don't see the massive change that some writers seem to think is inevitable. The world will not change to accommodate the Millennials, but relevant and effective new working styles will definitely be adopted where they make business sense. I will certainly agree that…

Optimizing the Wrong Part of Knowledge Management

16 March, 2008
Documentation
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I sat in on the report-out session from a kaizen event this week, and something occurred to me as I reviewed a ton of interesting findings in a very short time ... Best Practice Self-contained deliverables are the most powerful tools for knowledge knowledge transfer you can have in your organization. I'm talking about a document that stands on its own, and effectively communicates an idea without needing the author nearby to explain anything. The topic doesn't matter - conceptual…

Success, Failure, and Insights after 12 Months of Internal Web 2.0

10 March, 2008
Social Media, Web 2.0
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Different areas of our IT department are using internal blogs, wikis, and collaboration spaces, with varying degrees of participation, readership, and success. Some observations: Blogging is Easy ... The blogs and wiki(s) have effectively removed the hassles of capturing and distributing information quickly. One important early decision was to not implement an editorial approval process for the wiki, and most blogs are wide open for public comments. No more excuses or complaints about a lack of documentation; if the explanation…

My Networking CV (or, What’s In It For Me?)

26 January, 2008
Social Networks
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As social networking sites proliferate and mature, we're all learning how to use these interesting new resources. True, it is just a modern take on "professional networking" - purposeful connections with different special interest groups, to share ideas and lay the foundation for current or future "opportunities". I'm involved with a couple of organizations like this - I like to connect with peers, and I like to know what's going on in my city and in the industry. Recently I…

SQL Hack for Reporting Project Phase and Status

20 December, 2007
Hands-On, PMO
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It's been a while since I've posted some code, but I did a nice little SQL hack today that I've been puzzling over for a while. I freely admit that I may have made this more difficult with the original data model, but the die has been cast. Consider a single SQL table that captures project updates as comments note that this table also allows me to change the "phase" (ex. Design, Development, Test, Production) and/or Status (ex. Proposed, Red,…

PM Anti-Patterns That Increase IT Project Cycle Time

Lots of conversation at work these days about PMO, resource prioritization, and reducing cycle time for IT projects. I feel a series of posts coming on ... IAPL, we launched a project to bring test discipline to our technology efforts. The team was writing standards and guidelines for test scripts, implementing integrated testing tools supplied by the ERP vendor, and adding steps to our project methodology requiring test scripts for all system changes. As the project dragged into a fourth…