Stop Thinking, Start Doing – Else Your Career/Skills/Network Will Fade Away …

Hugh Pickens posted an interesting comment on Slashdot last week ... pulling ideas out of an excellent NY Times article ... "I have a DVD remote control with 52 buttons on it, and every one of them is there because some engineer along the line knew how to use that button and believed I would want to use it, too," says David Heath, co-author of "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die." The "curse of knowledge," is…

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,…

Integrated Supply Chain Benefits Go Beyond the Internal Stuff

12 November, 2007
M&A, Supply Chain
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I met Lora Cecere this evening, well-known AMR analyst for Supply Chain - a good conversation about the deeper potential for supply chain integration technology. The topic: are there bigger benefits here? Is it really only limited to optimization of your own supply chain? Don't get trapped into thinking that the business benefit of supply chain integration is limited to increased visibility - look at the different scenarios. A simplistic view of an integrated supply chain shows all the elements,…

Alternative KM Tools (3 of 3)

In my first two posts about alternative KM tools I wrote about audio - digital voice recorders and voice-recognition software. One could consider this "old-school" technology, because the stuff has been around for a long time. Another technology that's been around for a long time is PC-based video - around, but possibly not as accessible as it is now. YouTube and the various Internet video sites are a relatively new phenomenon, mostly because breakthroughs and video technology that reduces file size…

Alternative KM Tools (2 of 3)

In my first post about alternative KM tools, I wrote about audio files, and my new productivity enhancer - the digital voice recorder. One thing I noticed when replaying these sessions and capturing the notes; since I could cue and review all parts of the conversations, I was taking more notes than I used to (when working from handwritten notes and memory). The added accuracy and completeness of my notes was a mixed blessing; it was taking longer and longer to…

Alternative KM Tools (1 of 3)

This will be the first in a series of posts about Knowledge Management (KM) tools that are a bit different than traditional documents, presentations, and diagrams. I'm not talking about mind mapping, wikis, and other web 2.0 tools currently in vogue; these "alternative tools" have been around for a while, but I've only just started using them, with great success. Actually, it's not as much about new tools at it as it is about new media; I am specifically thinking…

Aggravating Vendor Behavior – Ever Heard of CRM?

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…

Hidden Gold in Automating Recurring Processes

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…

Deja Vu: Comparing Enterprise Software to Big Pharma from the 90’s

19 May, 2007
ERP, Web 2.0
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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…

Five Under-Emphasized PowerPoint Best Practices

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…