Another Take on Enterprise Open Source

18 February, 2009
Open Source
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Today's best conversation was with Christopher Young, of B2BSX, a startup software exchange where corporate IT departments can buy and sell their development efforts, and make a little cash to offset stressed budgets. It's an interesting idea, and spawned some ideas in a couple of different directions. Andy Hardy, IT Director Every company I've worked for has toyed with the idea of selling some of their custom-developed stuff - well, every company except the first one, since it was a…

KM Overcomplicates: Heisenberg Impact on a VBA Quickie

8 February, 2009
Knowledge Management, Application Development
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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…

News for Wombats: Taming Unreasonable Requirements

I've heard from a couple of friends about some "classic" project requests - dilemmas they have recently faced. These unreasonable requests can be turned into something achievable and, potentially, more relevant / meaningful to the requestor, by approaching the problem from a different direction. Request for Data: the Analytics Project Classic scenario #1 arrives courtesy of the external Experts, analytic genii (sic) promising to reveal secrets of profitability and sources of revenue buried deep within our data sets. Their "simple…

Best Practices for Requirements Gathering Sessions

7 December, 2008
Requirements
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It's been a while since I've led a requirements session for an interactive application - but no worries, I found it's like riding a bike. After a few minutes the old habits come back, and iterative ideas and cascading creativity starts to flow. What has changed, however, is the application platform, the office environment, and the various knowledge capture tools at our disposal. So, in the spirit of knowledge retention and sharing, here's a brain dump of ideas that I…

Enterprise 2.1: Exiting the Trough of Disillusionment

"What will you do with that car if you actually catch it?" -- what the cat asked the dog (from the Chicago Reader, circa 1989) So you've gone all "Enterprise 2.0", spinning up a wiki, a blog, and a SharePoint or Drupal server inside your firewall. Now what happens? The groundswell of interest in "cool tools" brings a wave of users and a burst of feed reader activity - for a few weeks. Before long, however, the organization will get…

Data Visualization: ‘Life’ of Open Source Projects

Part of the "art" of communicating IT and business abstractions - technical challenges, project roadmaps, budget performance, customer relationships, IT effectiveness - is landing on the right visualization. A picture tells a thousand words, and if you can draw the picture well, your target audience will grasp these concepts quickly, and (potentially) get insights that were otherwise difficult to attain. I have a large backlog of web links to point to, posts to write that I'll probably start cutting into,…

Opportunistic Insights from the RSS Stream

I've written about using RSS for internal as well as external information sources. This past week, I found a couple of interesting tidbits in my feed reader (behind the firewall) ... Eyes on the Skies: It's that time of year again; oil price volatility will continue if any big storms create problems for refineries in the Gulf - something new to keep an eye on. Never fear - our friends at NOAA kindly put out an RSS feed for storm…

The Right Web2.0 Tool for the Audience (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook)

9 May, 2008
Web 2.0
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The volume of Twitter posts popping up in my feed reader is ticking upward, a phenomenon I find interesting because of something I noted recently on LinkedIn. A few weeks ago, a new feature appeared, enabling me to report what I'm working on - Twitter for the office crowd. Always willing to try some flair, I jumped on the bandwagon, and set up a recurring ToDo for updating my LI-net on the day's focus. That lasted less than two weeks…

Why are those Old Programmers so slow in picking up on the Intarweb?

6 April, 2008
Career Management, Application Development
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A significant difference between us old-line IT coders and the new graduates is the variety of our platforms and tools. I'm not talking about the large number of languages and tools learned over the course of a career - we all have a healthy collection of certifications and acronyms peppering the bottoms of our resumes. I'm talking about the amazing array of stuff required to get development done on a single project, "right now". Over the past few weeks, I've…

Success, Failure, and Insights after 12 Months of Internal Web 2.0

10 March, 2008
Web 2.0, Social Media
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Different areas of our IT department are using internal blogs, wikis, and collaboration spaces, with varying degrees of participation, readership, and success. Some observations: Blogging is Easy ... The blogs and wiki(s) have effectively removed the hassles of capturing and distributing information quickly. One important early decision was to not implement an editorial approval process for the wiki, and most blogs are wide open for public comments. No more excuses or complaints about a lack of documentation; if the explanation…