Moving from Search to Find: Anticipate the Next Big Problem

16 April, 2007
Knowledge Management, Purposeful Innovation
0 Comments

I've talked with a couple of IT leads that are thinking about putting in an enterprise search capability. It always seems to come down to two basic options; search integrated with a collaboration / portal platform, or a dedicated appliance, pointed at the G: Drive. You know the G: Drive - every corporation has one (ok, sometimes it's the F: drive, or the Common folder). I'm pretty sure the name is a throwback to the late 80's, when DOS was…

Lighten Up, Francis – Loosen Up That PowerPoint

Ok, the next post will be my Best Practice hints on everybody's favorite insomnia cure - Corporate Presentations! But first, something fun - because I got a really good reaction on my latest attempt at lightening up the boring PowerPoint routine. In the presentation, this was my segue slide from slides to a live demonstration of some software. Everybody recognizes it in an instant, but I made some pretense to leave it up on the screen, so they could see…

Twitter

Twitter was an interesting phenomenon last week - an amazing number of blog posts, news stories, and mashups. Curiosity got the best of me; I tried it myself - and I still don't get what the attraction or the applicability is ... Instant Messaging for your Every Move Simply put, Twitter lets you broadcast IMs to anyone who cares to listen. Since the messages are short, the content is often amazingly trite - like the typical IM exchange, a bit…

Buzzword Management ABCs

A bit of Friday fun ... I was at a trade show a few weeks ago, and noticed a repeating pattern on many slides. I've heard this in vendor pitches and internal presentations as well - every piece of software and/or process must be for the management of something. So, as I sat trapped in a droning presentation, waiting for the "vendor showcase" to begin (free dinner!), I wondered how difficult it would be to hit every letter in the…

Open Source Insights on Enterprise Software Business Models

A recent Slashdot posting pointed to a presentation from EclipseCon earlier this month, given by Brent Williams, an equity research analyst who used to be in the software business. A few things really caught my eye … Take some time to flip through the original presentation; there are some interesting insights about the nature of the enterprise software industry (the SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft crowd). Three of the lightbulbs that went off in my mind ... (Slide 10) [By folding…

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…

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

21 February, 2007
Hands-On, Web 2.0
0 Comments

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…

Continuing Education Pareto Principle (50/30/20)

14 February, 2007
Out of the Box
0 Comments

(okay, I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, just wanted to expound on the idea ...) Everyone's heard of Pareto's wonderful 80/20 rule. I've identified a variant of that rule that applies to all sorts of "continuing education" - like presentations at a trade conference, or skills training for new software packages. It really struck me when I was in grad school, slogging through Accounting and Business Law and marvelling at the range of difficulty in the two subjects.…

Driving to a Decision on your Projects

I've written about the basic project proposal (for consulting groups) or charter (for internal IT) in the past. The point of any project summary document is to tee up the what and the why, using an outline like this: Description: What are we trying to accomplish here? What is our ultimate goal? Objectives: These are project objectives, not business objectives. How will we know we are done? Benefits: Why should we consider doing this? What are we getting? Alternatives: Are…

More on (sic) experience with wikis

1 February, 2007
Web 2.0
1 Comment

no, that's not a typo ... Preamble: This starts out sounding like a diary entry, but some interesting wiki-focused observations are found below - including metrics! Catching up on old items in my feed reader: Back in November, TechCrunch had an item on AboutUs, which at first glance looked at little self-referential, a web site on web sites. Digging in a bit more - we find it's a wiki about web sites, which is still seemed a tiny bit redundant,…