Operations

The Joy of Programming, the Challenge of KM

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,…

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Supply & Demand and Expectations for SAP talent in the US

Consider these conversations over the past few weeks: At SAPPHIRE, I spoke with many from the big Fortune 1000-type companies, on outsourcing (or "co-sourcing", a new PC term). Lots of discussion around India; they have memorized the flight schedules, swap stories about social disparity and the caste system, and rattle off all of the cities they have visited. Note that it's not all about India; I talked with organizations who have moved their SAP Center of Excellence (support and/or development) to…

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Selfish KM, Web 1.9, and the ‘Death’ of Tagging

In a recent NetworkWorld piece, Gibbs wrote about the tagging meme, and where it apparently sits on the technology life cycle. No new insights for me there (but possibly fits the CEPP rule for others); I was involved in a number of knowledge management (KM) projects back in my Monsanto days (IAPL) [note to self: too many acronyms, hhh] and we hit many of the classic walls; CRM systems that failed because sales reps guard their customer intelligence Collaboration spaces that…

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Defining an Effective IT Metrics Framework

Had a really good conversation about metrics the other day. We've been discussing ways to express how our systems are performing, delivering value, and staying available - and I'd like to use the same general structure for all systems, regardless of function (transactions, integrations, analytics) or platform (Wintel, AS/400, Open Systems). For each type of metric, we need to understand two dimensions: Performance against some Target. This can either be a baseline (a minimum or average expected score), or a…

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Is there a Design Pattern for “Update else Add”?

They always say data conversions are a labor of love - you pour your heart and soul into the program, to get the most data converted as possible, and then, when you actually do run the code in production - it's a one time event; toss the source files in the bit bucket. Well, that's what it was [almost] like in my first job - we sold Property Management systems along with implementation services, and those services invariably included a…

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Strategies for Malware in Consulting Engagements

Last in a series on some practical legal mumbo jumbo (disclaimer: IANAL) for your Master Consulting Agreements (MCA). This one was particularly interesting to put in; it's really interesting to see who catches it, but it was an amazing (in retrospect) observation that led us to include the language. The Trigger Event: A virus outbreak. We had been hit before, and the executive group was not fond of losing their email for a day or two, so we implemented fairly…

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Strategies for Risk Sharing in Consulting Engagements

I am late is responding to a comment on this post, first in a series about Consulting Engagements. Earlier this week it was Intellectual Property, with another good comment ... so, why all the harsh language about protecting IP that I probably can't commercialize? Ah - welcome to the world of Risk Sharing. The issue is that most businesses, especially SMBs that are simply not used to paying $200 an hour for labor, typically have a tough time wrapping their…

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Strategies for Intellectual Property in Consulting Engagements

Previously, I wrote about Fee Structures in Consulting Engagements, which is the stuff that the consultants are primarily interested in. If the consultant / firm has any strategic skills, their next concerns will be about Intellectual Property (IP) rights. <aside> Not that IP, this IP </aside> Do you really think that they make it all up from scratch for each new customer? Of course not - like any other developer, they have a body of code (and/or project/process methodology) that…

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Quality requirements for technical documentation are lower than user documentation

Ok, don't freak out now ... All I want to point out is that the apparent need for screen prints of every step in the process is a bit overdone, especially when we're talking about technical documents. Screen prints / images in the documentation typically means the electronic documents get unmanageably huge, even if you shrink the .JPGs, and few people know how to do that. Plus, you indirectly commit yourself / your organization to a huge maintenance burden. because…

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Strategies for Fee Structures in Consulting Engagements

Yet another vendor seminar last month, and the idiosyncrasy of the day was an abnormal amount of focus on the fee structure (they were presenting their expertise on a certain platform, and talk of fees was a tad disconcerting). The vendor is, of course, railing against the fixed fee - puts all the risk on them, artificially constrains the project, etc. They didn't mention how the fixed fee enables an upside on their part - if the Vendor (contractor/consultant/them) pads…

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