Got some rare Re-Tweets today on a techie insult - so snappy, I had to write a post to use it for a title! Deep in the problem analysis and debugging process, the typical IT hack experiences counter-balancing pressures that impact decision making - Capable Independence vs. Speed to Value. Capable Independence is just fancy-talk for the idea that I should know what I'm doing. Ego 1 - Who needs manuals, I wrote this thing from the ground up? Ego…
"That's pretty good, Johnny, but that ain't the way I heerd it. . . ." I recall when all this "blogging" talk started, way back in 1999 or so (thanks to Hallett for a decent history). The idea was to post thoughts and feelings, observations about technology, society, or whatever - anything from a daily diary to a project notebook. Scoble and others became (in)famous for posting multiple times a day. Time marches on, and the medium has morphed over…
I don't travel a significant amount in my current position, but when I do, it seems to come in chunks. I'm about half way through a round of travel this fall - mostly business, but with some personal travel mixed in. Six cities, three countries in less than four months. Some observations at the halfway point ... @ the Data Center: The Surreal Life I'm finishing this entry around 4am - just off my second night in a row on…
"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…
If you are involved with manufacturing these days, you've no doubt heard about Lean Manufacturing. I'll not go deep into this area here, but one fascinating (for me) aspect is the thread (in some quarters) that ERP and computer systems are the enemy of Lean. On the whole, I don't disagree - process improvement, kanbans, and attacking muda are typically very physical exercises; roaming the floor, walking through the processes (gemba walks), reorganizing workspaces for flow, designing and simplifying standard…
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…
Corporate Knowledge Management (KM) is hard. Hard to introduce, hard to teach/coach, hard to require, hard to create. Which, added all up together, often make it hard to use. It may sound like unfounded pessimism, as the Internet is loaded with examples of successful collaborative sites that aggregate and repackage knowledge - it's been doing that for years, ever since there were Compuserve forums and bulletin boards. Unfortunately (for the corporate environment), the Law of Large Numbers takes care of…
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…