How to Draw an Owl

On Documentation One recent afternoon I found myself in deep conversation with potential consulting partners, holding out for a difficult requirement: "Excellent Documentation". That's a tough one to quantify, let alone describe; why hold out for something at once critical and ineffable? Doesn't every project talk about the importance of providing documentation, yet rarely deliver it? Don't most people flip past the pages of detailed work process, going right to the keyboard to bang away, expecting tool tips and intuitive…

Fragmentation of Social Sharing Environments

22 October, 2011
Social Media, Web 2.0
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Progress requires innovation, success spawns imitation, competition requires differentiation - and after 7+ years of “Web 2.0”, there are multiple sharing environments vying for our attention (and participation). Content Creation Blogging has morphed beyond it’s “personal diary” origins; Blogger, Wordpress, and the various CMS platforms have moved to become a long-format publishing platforms that continue to evolve. My own experience with this blog (cazh1) and internal blogs at work has shown that “posts” are more essays, articles, documentation on what…

Change and the Crop Duster

Drive south through the state of Indiana on I-65, and before you hit Indianapolis you will come across an impressively large array of wind turbines, the new vertical symbols of energy self-reliance and innovation. I remember not so long ago, when this section of the road was just miles of cornfields, as far as the eye could see. The tallest things out here were telephone poles and the occasional power line - but that was then, and this scene is…

A Nice Knock-Down Argument

Sales and the Gantt "Why exactly does he want to meet again?" I could sense the exasperation in Karl's voice, faintly; the sales manager wasn't about to slip out of his professional demeanor over some perceived technical triviality. But for the fact that the request was coming from his newly-hired PMI maven, he probably would have found a convenient excuse to skip the invite. "I just don't understand why we need this meeting ... the projects are moving forward, we…

Idle Time is a Good Thing for IT

Lots of good conversations recently about managing IT, Finance, and other constrained resources for projects. We have implemented tools to model available time; when trying to understand what new work can get added to the pile, it helps immeasurably when you understand how much time you have available, plus what else has been committed. This has become a powerful process for managing chronically constrained resources - but one side effect is that other folks on the team can find themselves…

The Hegemony of Large Numbers – Ignoring Common Sense

Ok, maybe I'm stretching the meaning there, but that's a cool sounding title, and what I see as an interesting phenomenon. People get excited about Large Numbers, and think they have meaning and importance simply because they are Large Numbers. Big Errors For example - years ago, when an application manager was whirling around the office in a minor uproar, worrying that that someone accidentally keyed in a $1B line item on an invoice. That's $1,000,000,000,000 - for the Unit…

Twitter and the First Amendment

Apparently, 2011 is the year when Twitter, Facebook, and smartphone videos are graduating from Social Networking toys to evolutionary, revolutionary Sociology tools. Can they be controlled by governments or big business? It's been argued that any such controls might run afoul of Amendment No. 1 from our Bill of Rights ... how amazing for a clever hack that originated in a daylong brainstorming session. Freedom of Speech, Assembly, and the Press What is a tweet? 140 characters - one or…

Market Driven Data Quality (Data Darwinism)

A contrarian idea to improve data quality; let "market forces" like peer pressure, earn-in, and competitive prioritization encourage data owners to do their own quality monitoring.

Vintage Technology

9 February, 2011
Out of the Box, Diversity
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Here's one of those videos making the rounds via eMail. I found this in my inbox at work, from an observant friend who apparently likes the same web sites I do (although I had originally this as a great example of minimalist site design). httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdSHeKfZG7c It's interesting to note how the magical becomes the mundane. I did find it interesting that certain "timeless" concepts (a deck of cards? a marbles game?) have more resonance than these artifacts of a bygone…

Chargebacks vs. Allocations – Defining IT’s Relationship with the Business

Some IT departments prefer chargebacks, while others do not. My own preference is to allocate IT costs to the business units, based on some reasonable balance of simplicity and accuracy. General services could be allocated by headcount, COGs, or revenues, with each business unit taking their proportional share. Some easily identifiable items might be allocated more directly - maintenance costs for specialized engineering, warehouse management, or financial systems, for example, could be allocated more directly to those departments. I've written…