Five Components

The Key to Success for your Next Job Interview

I'm been clipping some interesting posts over the past few weeks, regarding interviewing techniques and hiring technical people. Rothman's aptly named blog is always good for an insightful article at least once a week - some of the recent postings of note include: A good technical person should always be intellectually curious about how things work. This translates into wanting (demanding!) to understand "the stack", as I call it - the technology pieces from the top (ex. PHP in my…

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Excel vs. RDBMS: Choosing the Technology, Winning the Arguments

Businesses large and small, private and public, for-profit and not, commonly control critical business processes using the EIE platform (which means Everything in Excel - always good for a laugh in your next PowerPoint - jpmacl). Folks in the business get used to the power and control they have with spreadsheets, and who can blame them? Excel is … … fast and flexible … easy to learn Everybody has a copy I don't have to go through IT Remember, most…

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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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A stunningly direct list, suitable for self-evaluations at year end

via Rothmann (who got it from Lester) - MacLeod's list (from the prolific Wade) ... The Career Manifesto (original here) Unless you’re working in a coal mine, an emergency ward, or their equivalent, spare us the sad stories about your tough job. The biggest risk most of us face in the course of a day is a paper cut. Yes, your boss is an idiot at times. So what? (Do you think your associates sit around and marvel at your…

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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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Three Best TLAs of all time, the hegemony of Excel, and the Intuitive Front End

Everybody jokes about TLAs and the proliferation of consultant-speak. My favorites to date include: SPOC - Single Point of Contact: During integration meetings between two merging IT organizations, SPOCs were identified as the key connection points between groups. Panders to the trekkies, but sticks in your mind. WOMP - What's On My Plate: The name of a report we developed in a PMO, listing issues assigned, projects being managed, open programming requests, etc. - one page per person. The WOMP…

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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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