Technical Debt and the Cost/Benefit of Knowledge Retention

A rather rigorous, Financial-sounding title for a high-concept line of thought ... Thanks to Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror, for calling my attention to this article by Martin Fowler on Technical Debt: Technical Debt is a wonderful metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham to help us think about this problem. In this metaphor, doing things the quick and dirty way sets us up with a technical debt, which is similar to a financial debt. Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs…

Real Business Users and SharePoint

Introducing buzzword-compliant technology like a wiki, or integrated collaboration spaces like SharePoint, will typically go well with a motivated audience like your internal IT department. But if you really want to understand how this stuff works, try it with "real people" - line employees in sales and marketing, operations, and finance. Sure, you've heard complaints from these folks (they have better PCs at home, the SAP/Oracle UI is brutal compared to Amazon and AT&T U-Verse, and why can't they just…

Wikis in High School

Last month, Vinson wrote about the use of wikis in school projects, and it reminded me to dust off some notes I took from a conversation with my daughter Sean MacLennan, late last year. It was a history project about World War II, and the class was asked to compose their reports on a wiki. Sean is a pretty good writer, and she likes to write, so I was interested in her thoughts on the wiki as a medium, and…

Five Stages of Twitter Relevance

I'm already fielding internal (as well as external) questions about the application of Twitter in a manufacturing company, and I'm developing a reasonably good model, I think - one that will apply to the hard-core, salt-of-the-earth, manufacturing business leader that I've worked with at many organizations. This "maturity model" approach has been used before; back in December of 2008, Bhagarva sketched out the Five Stages of Twitter Acceptance - but that model only helps existing bloggers and social networkers understand…

Field Notes: Video Conferencing for Business Conversations

This past week saw my first experience with video conference calling - something obvious to consider in these tight economic times. Some observations - I got quick feedback that my original camera position was disconcerting for the others. I had put it off to the side, which made me look “off camera”, almost in profile, while in conversation. As I thought about it, I agreed - because if I was looking at me, it would be weird / annoying. I…

KM Overcomplicates: Heisenberg Impact on a VBA Quickie

8 February, 2009
Application Development, Knowledge Management
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Got a simple request from one of the folks in Operations; we're sending out Excel spreadsheets for some quick data gathering, might we do a little basic input validation before they send in garbage that needs to be scrubbed? This person is very sharp, knows a decent bit about what is possible, and this is definitely not something that is worth a major project engagement; "throwaway technology", a particular fave of mine. His request was simple - just want to…

Back to the Future: Twitter “microblogging”

"That's pretty good, Johnny, but that ain't the way I heerd it. . . ." I recall when all this "blogging" talk started, way back in 1999 or so (thanks to Hallett for a decent history). The idea was to post thoughts and feelings, observations about technology, society, or whatever - anything from a daily diary to a project notebook. Scoble and others became (in)famous for posting multiple times a day. Time marches on, and the medium has morphed over…

Dueling Collaboration Portals

I noticed an interesting phenomenon this afternoon; we are experimenting with SharePoint as our internal project management / collaboration portal. A nice platform to choose, because it's popularity is growing, and there are a wide selection of add-on products and development partners ready, willing, and able to help us spend our money to make it even better. The interesting part is that we are running into other companies who are also working with SharePoint. Specifically, third-party consulting firms that want…

Best Practices for Process Documentation: Use Cases (3 of 3)

21 September, 2008
Knowledge Management, Project Management
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I've been writing about iterative documentation and checklists, and it's easy to see how these are applicable to a number of common IT processes ... Build a server Apply OS patches Move new code into production Initiate a project / programming request Unfortunately, there are plenty of other areas in IT that you think should / could have a definable process ... yet there is always some magic to them, a variable recipe that's difficult to capture in a cookbook…

Best Practices for Process Documentation: Checklists (1 of 3)

I've written before about process documentation and the need for checklists - especially for repeatable and complex processes that you may not perform every single day. A written process solves a multitude of issues: Security: For complex processes with integrated platforms, a detailed list keeps you from forgetting key settings, switches, and process steps that you might forget Reality: No matter how "advanced" or "highly engineered" these systems are, there is always something that must be done in just the…