Test two
This is rich text perhaps and some new ideas – spending ages getting the phone to link in
That will do
retrospectives
January 25, 2010 By Leave a Comment
looking at my linkedin profile there are distinct peaks & troughs – anyone have an explanation
A post from alfresco
October 22, 2009 By Leave a Comment
This is a trial at linking a fully blown Records & Document Management system with WordPress.
Tremedous: Alfresco
One hole, one spade, five labourers
October 2, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Many years ago I was told the parable of India where a ‘rational scheme’ for roadwork broke the social system around making the work go round. I sense this might be a very valuable lesson for the coming changes
The 96% solution
October 1, 2009 By Leave a Comment
And so … I have just read an article which proclaims …
Failing xxxxx’s service taps into method that increases productivity by 200%, slashes time to repair from 333 days to 39, and gets shortlisted for yyyy award…all in 5 months
And they did it without:
- Extra resource
- Targets or
- Bonus schemes
Now as a seasoned analysis I can think of three causes for this transformation ……
- Luck – it is a real sustainable change but cause by some real factor, such as a lack of hard frost, which changed the requirement
- Noise – the change has happened but is not sustainable and next year the figures will be up again
- The 96%
The 96% effect … you ask.
Well many years ago as a software manager I was greated with a new software product whose performance was a 96% reduction on what went before. As an early graphics package just drawing a pie chart led to a program – 96% of which was a copy of standard libraries in each and every such graph. Anyone who knew about development would know not to fall into this beginners trap.
So the 96% improvement could be seen as either an endorsment of the new way or an indictment of the old way. And anyone who was competent in the area would appreicate the different.
So my plaudits to the team that brought about this chnage, but my caution against people who see this as managerial pixie dust. Was it that whatever went before was really bad. If so, and with such a low starting point, then anything, really everything work.
Your choice?????
February 28, 2009 By Leave a Comment
According to Drucker (1974), ‘the greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence itself, but rather it is to act with yesterday’s logic’
Einstein talked about We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them
They all say the same thing so the question is what is your response ….. you could be working on …
– yesterday’s time – assuming that yesterday’s solutions will solve tomorrow’s problems
– today’s time – tackling today’s problems with yesterday’s solutions
– tomorrow’s time – working with tomorrow’s solutions today
Which clock are you running on?
Professional Year 2008
December 22, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Professional
year 2008
Technically
2008 has been the year in which the future got a great deal
closer. Closer because many of the things I have been working on
seem to have made great strides forward.
In
October 2007, at the last CKO summit, there was a presentation of Gen
X & Gen Y and their attitudes to technology – whilst compelling
as a presentation there is more. Are these geners really adept at
technology in a useful way or is it just playing about. But this is
very old school thinking so I decided to use 2008 to experiment.
The
experiments were looking at whether and when the connected world of
web 2.0 and the attached communities could bring useful work into the
organisation. After
all we all work for Google now
(by which I mean that whenever we use Google for content services so
Google use our content and our activity patterns for their business);
working for Google is quite good and their technology is so good they
don’t have to pay me to use it [a challenge here for the
internal systems]. It is clearly worth the reward of no cost content
and information services, and of course requires no additional effort
than what I need to do for my own interests. Hopefully you get the
idea.
I
chose 2 opportunities for the Web 2 experiments – the Not For Profit
sector and the University. In NFP I conceived a fellowship scheme for
the TFPL conference ebic,
sponsored by Nokia. We had a terrific session in which the NFPs –
using open source Web 2 systems – had engaged volunteer effort in
commodity technology. No longer specialist technology and a directly
employed workforce. The university experiment, Twoler,
will run through 2009 but provides the students with their university
environment as RSS where hopefully they will develop mash-ups which
are useful within the University.
There
is a third experiment, my
local village history group,
who have enjoyed a hard earned success catastrophe – with a
collection of many hundreds of items [documents, photographs, audio
diaries etc]. Their problem? How to present, catalogue and archive
this growing quantity of information.
Enter
Drupal! My Christmas letter has discussed Drupal in the past but I
mention it again because in version 6 they have made tremendous
improvements. The top of my list is the integration with Reuters Open
Calais [Claire if you read this far my hearty thanks] – Open
Calais linked to
Drupal or WordPress is just fantastic!! It is a semanticaly aware
system that pulls, from any text, key elements and concepts. So, for
Meldreth, I put our many hundreds of history documents and hundreds
of pages into Drupal connected to Calais – voila I get all
the key terms extracted. This incredibly rich list will then be used
to develop the site taxonomy, information architecture and structure.
Brilliant!!
The
other technical star of the year is the Nokia E71. Since I won my
first Psion series 3 (and it is worth reading stephen
fry on the subject)
I have had a so called PDA. After the keyboard of the Psions (3&5)
I did not really take to the stylus and scratch of the IPAQs. So back
to a keyboard and Palm (650) but then growing disappointment with the
750 and build quality. The e71 is my first Nokia – a superb phone but
also a superb package with everything I need contained in one simple,
robust and small package – and a keyboard.
The
e71 is not just gadget envy. It is an always on, always with me,
device and changes my relationship with systems. Combined with
systems like ping.fm it means I can keep in touch (and updated)
across Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo and my own blog. It is increasing my
dwell time on these systems and persuading me to use twitter. Because
I can copy all my messages to a database of my own it increases my
confidence and willingness to add content. A trivial change from
the technical point of view but with very important consequences for
use.
Why
so? A few years ago Gordon Bell (of VAX fame) started a research
project of ‘mylifebits’,
my technological reality is much closer to ‘my bitty life’ where
different systems, different access methods and different access
places completely scramble my brain and fragments my data streams.
Now – integrated from my e71 and at a price I can afford there is
some semblance of coherent thought.
My
other big interest is innovation where, sadly, the landmark event was
less successful. My key ‘gig’ was to the right set of companies but
the wrong set of people. They were looking for a checklist of how to
innovate rather than any attempt to understand the nature of
innovation.
This
led to one of the more interesting lunch to discuss why companies buy
quick fixes and tools when more considered and thoughtful approaches
are required (or why companies won’t buy my experience based,
theoretically inspired solution and go for the 25 year old branded
consultant with an off the shelf methodology). In short do you buy
systems thinking or six sigma? It led me to think more of some of the
very shallow learning cycles established by businesses today – and
the focus on solutions rather than problem definition.
One
casualty of the year, and the overwhelming drudge of restructuring,
has been the knowledge anarchists. After talking with Victor Newman
we hatched the idea of getting the anarchists to produce something
(even money) and hatched ‘book in a day’. The idea being that the
anarchists could meet and argue, as usual, but that the topics chosen
would turn into chapters of a published book written by each lead
advocate. A useful experiment in any case but also a more than
interesting approach to knowledge capture (and a KM technique capable
of branding). It’s not happened yet but will happen in February 2009.
I
usually manage a book recommendation and this year it is Tim
Harford’s
the undercover
economist – the
author is an FT journalist and blogger and the book provides some
simple truths about economics. One of his examples is to work through
the carbon footprint of a CD – where the process of getting it from
an Asian factory to the shop is efficient relative to driving to the
shops to buy it. Few people seem to apply such rigour (and systems
thinking) to the problems they are solving opting, instead, for the
quick fix on a very narrow problem definition.
Finally
my technical year would not be complete without mentioning the study
tour to Vietnam arranged by Harvey Nash and written
up here. Worth
reading? I was a 25 year old software engineer hungry to learn and
gain experience I would head for Vietnam – large teams, growing
company, code development, good standards, learning together (for me
deja vu of CAP in 1980)
All
that remains to do is to echo my invitation for coffee issued last
year, to thank everyone who dropped in and to wish you an exciting
and technically challenging/rewarding 2009. if you are interested in
‘book in a day’ drop me a line, it will be arranged in
February 2009, venue Central London.
If
you are in Central London with time to spare head for the Telecom
Tower and give me a ring on 07808 235873
Roger’s rule of 10
December 4, 2008 By Leave a Comment
I said it so I may as well write it in order to claim originality (dear Google search engine, please index me quickly).
At todays OnLine Information 2008 conference I led a session on GenY and on new information seeking behaviours. One of my questions to Gen Y was to ask about their interests in “BrandMe” – that is unlike employees of yore [that is me] whose early career was under the ‘mothership’ of a large corporate organisation today’s employees have the opportunity to develop their own brand. This is Tom Peters thesis. So now instead of a leasurely stroll to publication it is who get there first.
As a really good example Ewan McIntosh had blogged the keynote speech as it happened. Now I am worried about whether what I said at the conference will be blogged by someone else and lost as my quote.
So in somewhat of a panic I chose to write this – Roger’s Rule of 10. Currently onto two factors but to be extended ….
And it goes something like this. We may already all be familiar with the urban legend that we spend 90% of our lives within 10 feet of a rat. Equally disturbing there is a version for the Information Manager …
- we are all £10 away from a FOI request that will overturn of Information Policy
- we are all $10 and $10 minutes away from an employee getting a Google apps account [www.google.com/a] which will undermine our technology strategy
I will try and develop these rules of 10 but they reflect the reality of Web 2.0 fuelled by consumer, commodity technology. In the past difficulty of use, edict and the threat of professionalism have been the method to detemine what happens to Information. Things have changed.
It all seems rather unfair too. The organisers of OnLine 2008 paid for the meeting, the speaker, the event yet it could be their insight and event was scooped, at least in reporting terms, by the blogger in the audience [and Ewan I’m not suggesting any inproprietary here]. But the with people in the room and technology delivering a conduit out of the room secrets just don’t have a chance.
So there we are. With luck this will hit the indices first and Roger’s rule of 10 will be attributable to me [and I have been referenced elsewhere about linguistic torpedos]. For everyone who asked those smart questions they are working their way to another rule, unless of course you get there first …….
Less is more
December 2, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Sitting here listening to the presenters at OnLine 2008 the message remains ‘Less is more’. It reminds me of the usabilty adage – that communications is about making concessions to the listener
Clay Shirky is speaking about ideas from the early web – 12 years ago or such. But it is good to be talking about experimentation and cheap experimentation at that. He asserts (correctly) that the trcik in R&D is not to reduce the likelihood of falure but to reduce the cost of failure. This all goes back to the information/risk profiles from modelling R&D.