I got a call a few weeks ago that put me in a slightly cranky, slightly bemused mood. This is not a recent phenomenon - it has happened at every company in my career. A few of the big-name vendors (including IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, HP, and others) have no problem peppering different people in a company with requests for basic information (What systems are your running? Do you have a general ledger system? Do you use computers? Do you…
It's much easier to install the software than it is to get participation ... you need to put some thought into the why? and the who? ... Why are we doing this? Jack Vinson posted this list from C.G Lynch (CIO.com): Seven Reasons for Your Company to Start an Internal Blog Your enterprise e-mail applications are not easy to search - access to "buried in a colleague’s inbox" Your e-mail is lost in the eye of the "cc storm" -…
After my last post ... more experiences at work, and observations in the trades and other blogs, regarding Web 2.0 tools for use in business ... Improving Knowledge Capture is Half the Battle In last week's Information Week magazine, the story of Procter & Gamble's push towards collaboration - the tools can meet some resistance. A critical quote: We consistently hear that information posted to the intranet is incremental work. Similarly, in my organization, I have folks continuing to send…
Alternate Title: Battling Collaboration Memes As mentioned previously, we are trying out SharePoint where I work, and I'm finding it interesting, maintaing 3+ blogs, including this one. Actually, the focus of the internal stuff is quite different, as Dennis McDonald and others have been noting. Lot's of details and stories to write about, but one key learning we've captured recently ... With the SharePoint toolset, we can set up Announcements, Blogs, Discussion Forums (Fora?), and Wikis - sometimes all on…
Just a quick post this evening, capturing some thoughts that have been forming over the past week or so. When evaluating people for a role as project lead or project manager (PM), what exactly does one look for? I suppose many will point to PMI certifications, adherence to principles in the PMBOK, "excellent communication skills", and multiple, complex, high-profile, high-quality projects under their belt. But what about the intangibles - the stuff you can't really learn from a book? I…
Here's a typical IT scenario: each quarter, you need to check audit user access to a critical application. Your internal security standards require that you revoke access for those who haven't been on the system for over 90 days. I've seen this before, and the process (at the time) had many challenges: It's manual; we did a quick-and-dirty set of steps years ago to cover the minimum requirements, that involves extracts from application logs, file transfers MS Access and MS…
An interesting thread, started by VC guy Fred Wilson, on the overweighting of youth vs. experience when it comes to entrepreneurial activity. Clay Shirkey weighs in with a thoughtful analogy to Bayesian theory, basically saying that the young are blissfully ignorant of the trials and tribulations of the Real World. For investors, entrepreneurs, and corporate hiring managers, it pays to have a sensitivity to the different mindset of the coming crop of college graduates. I got a chance to sit…
Eric Savitz posted an interesting article (via Techmeme) reviewing a VC discussion earlier this month, on how the enterprise software business looks increasingly like big pharma. Their focus was the contemporary businesses, but one quote got me thinking: ... the salient attribute of big pharma ... is the plausibility of a new entrant to raise capital and get to be a real business before they are acquired. Things were much the same in the 90's, when the "little guys" of…
Catching up on old links that I wanted to comment on - here is a selection regarding some PowerPoint best practices, including five of my personal favorites that I don't often see in those ubiquitous articles / postings detailing the Secrets of Presentation Success ... Under-Emphasized PowerPoint Best Practices Never Embed Objects: I grew to dislike embedded objects years ago, when computers could barely handle the launch of an Excel instance from within Word, or Visio from within PowerPoint. This…
alternate title - Techs Managing Techs; not Required, but it Helps This evening, catching up with my RSS feeds, I happened upon this old screencast from Jon Udell, looking over the shoulder as he and Anders Hejlsberg take a look at LINQ, a work-in-process set of extensions for the .NET framework. Udell captured my curiousity with this description of the session ... You have to be a certain kind of person to enjoy watching Anders run LINQ through its paces,…