Most Recent Articles

Deja Vu: Comparing Enterprise Software to Big Pharma from the 90’s

Eric Savitz posted an interesting article (via Techmeme) reviewing a VC discussion earlier this month, on how the enterprise software business looks increasingly like big pharma. Their focus was the contemporary businesses, but one quote got me thinking: ... the salient attribute of big pharma ... is the plausibility of a new entrant to raise capital and get to be a real business before they are acquired. Things were much the same in the 90's, when the "little guys" of…

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Five Under-Emphasized PowerPoint Best Practices

Catching up on old links that I wanted to comment on - here is a selection regarding some PowerPoint best practices, including five of my personal favorites that I don't often see in those ubiquitous articles / postings detailing the Secrets of Presentation Success ... Under-Emphasized PowerPoint Best Practices Never Embed Objects: I grew to dislike embedded objects years ago, when computers could barely handle the launch of an Excel instance from within Word, or Visio from within PowerPoint. This…

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The Joy of Programming, the Challenge of KM

alternate title - Techs Managing Techs; not Required, but it Helps This evening, catching up with my RSS feeds, I happened upon this old screencast from Jon Udell, looking over the shoulder as he and Anders Hejlsberg take a look at LINQ, a work-in-process set of extensions for the .NET framework. Udell captured my curiousity with this description of the session ... You have to be a certain kind of person to enjoy watching Anders run LINQ through its paces,…

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Project Status Dashboards Best Practice (and a PowerPoint trick)

For a simple, easily understood indication of project or task status, nothing beats the Traffic Light metaphor (Red / Yellow / Green). My IT organization is putting together standards for Project Status indicators in our PMO application; an interesting series of discussions and emails around the assignment of those Green / Yellow / Red (GYR) status lights ... Words: What do we display on the screen? Green / Yellow / Red means ... Good / Fair / Poor? Hmm, nobody…

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Supply & Demand and Expectations for SAP talent in the US

Consider these conversations over the past few weeks: At SAPPHIRE, I spoke with many from the big Fortune 1000-type companies, on outsourcing (or "co-sourcing", a new PC term). Lots of discussion around India; they have memorized the flight schedules, swap stories about social disparity and the caste system, and rattle off all of the cities they have visited. Note that it's not all about India; I talked with organizations who have moved their SAP Center of Excellence (support and/or development) to…

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Do blogs fit in the enterprise? Specific examples (WIIFMs) …

Vinson points out a post from Lee, asking if blogs have a place in the enterprise. Jack's response is interesting, diving into a better way to understand what a blog could be, and the potential for connections. Adventures In Knowledge also chimed in, with a defense of the power of connections. Good stuff, and I tend to agree ... but it's all conceptual, and doesn't resonate with folks who are change-resistant. As my IT organization moves inexorably to a new…

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Moving from Search to Find: Anticipate the Next Big Problem

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…

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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…

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The Key to Success for your Next Job Interview

I'm been clipping some interesting posts over the past few weeks, regarding interviewing techniques and hiring technical people. Rothman's aptly named blog is always good for an insightful article at least once a week - some of the recent postings of note include: A good technical person should always be intellectually curious about how things work. This translates into wanting (demanding!) to understand "the stack", as I call it - the technology pieces from the top (ex. PHP in my…

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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…

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