Tactics

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…

Read More ...

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…

Read More ...

More on (sic) experience with wikis

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,…

Read More ...

Another caveat for the erstwhile agile developer

If your objective is a "sense of urgency", or maybe "time to value", please don't think this gives you carte blanche to push patchy, chewing-gum-and-bailing-wire solutions out into production. Expect the expectation that the production systems' availability level must be maintained. Confused? It sounds like I'm taking two opposing sides ... I want speed and quality, and doesn't the Iron Triangle force you to pick between the two? It's possible, of course, you just need to practice a little discipline…

Read More ...

The Law of Large Numbers – or, why Enterprise Wikis are Fundamentally Challenged

Some will be taken a bit by surprise to read the title of this post; we have implemented a wiki in our group at work, and I have the evangelist role in promoting the tool. Still, a recent "event" brought home the fact that wikis are not the silver bullets that some breathless articles may make them out to be. To be fair, Hickins' article does call out the "law of large numbers", although the idea is buried in the…

Read More ...

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…

Read More ...

Misapplying the Pareto principle

Here's an interesting phenomenon I've encountered before ... When analyzing a specific section of a business, people seem to naturally focus attention and conversation on the top two or three customers/products/vendors that together represent (say) 20% of the revenues/costs/contracts. Our objective is to look at the data and identify opportunities (increase revenues, cut COGS, aggregate contracts); unfortunately, processing the data for these customers/products/vendors is currently a 100% manual task. Of course; this is why there is apparently so much "opportunity"…

Read More ...

Build a Framework: Your chart junk is my roadmap / vision statement

I remember in the late 90's, seeing many examples of the little train of wedgies that folks used to characterize their business processes: I've used them myself (some of the above samples are mine, I'm comfortable in admitting it) - of course, I typically don't make this stuff up, I adapt from other examples, like everyone else. As I searched for a reasonable picture / schematic / "framework" for a "supply chain", I stumbled across what I believe to be…

Read More ...

Hand writing recognition – harder than colored bubbles

As I sit in meetings, I find myself thinking through "process" of what we are doing at this moment, as much as I think about what the meeting is about. Then I am writing these short notes to myself for future blog items. Good? Bad? Psychotic? It makes me wish for easier tools to convert notes to complete text - but look at this chicken scratch ... I like these pseudo-postings for process think because I am lazy at heart,…

Read More ...

Of course we can pay for that … if it makes business sense

Had a good conversation with a vendor last week. They were looking to increase their business with us, no surprise there, but the rep was actually a bit cynical (in a nice way), and (probably wisely) asked directly what the chances were that we could actually get Project X off the ground? I've seen these great ideas start, but then some manager complains that they have no budget for this kind of thing. In retrospect, it is almost a rude…

Read More ...