Jeff Angus talks about situations where a deal seems too good to be true in The Mets: Keep Your Eye Off The Prize I had a client that had been shopping for a computer system to manage her "traffic" for a long time. The analysis we did said the systems available...
At the AIChE meeting, Cawas Cooper from Air Products talked about a project that evolved from their Innovation Week, where people were encouraged to come up with new ideas and collaborate with their colleagues to sell the idea to their respective management. Those projects that get management blessing are pursued.
More from the AIChE meeting. Jonathan Worstell of Shell Chemical in Houston talked in a a number of sessions about the importance of Concurrent Engineering. In Worstell's view, the basic problem that Concurrent Engineering solves is that projects are too complex and too long for traditional serial engineering, where each phase...
Judith Meskill points us to an article that mentions some new technology for knowledge workers: knowledge management barriers... The following article is really about getting spammed on a continual basis, finally flipping your proverbial 'bit' and sending an email to the offending spammer threatening them with bodily harm and getting arrested...
If you are trying to contact me via email, there is something seriously amiss with my mail server. It seems to be bouncing mail to the senders, and it is not letting me send mail out. I have other mail servers, so this isn't the end of the world. Hopefully, my...
Some more thoughts about designing experiements based on talks at the AIChE annual meeting.
It is perfect timing for me to be having a conversation with David Buchan about using PersonalBrain with a blog aggregator, given that I've changed jobs.
People are talking about status reports and the new world of work. Writing, in general, is one of those hidden arts. Done well, people thrive. Done poorly, no one knows why people starve.
In case you are wondering, simply creating a policy to enforce behavior of your people won't work. The Computerworld "Security Manager's Journal" this week has a piece on discovering that people aren't following policy. After some hunting and discussion with a number of people, he decides to do a better job...
Allan Bonner talks about some of the history behind knowledge management and the difficulty we have in separating new technology from what might be more interesting in Locating the Human Element: In Search of Knowledge Management We are all striving to manage knowledge in such a way as to benefit workers,...
I've been looking for a description of K-Collector, as I have heard a number of people talk about it, including its creators. Matt Mower calls it a "Knowledge Centrifuge."
People have changed the world ever since they figured out how to bash on things with sharpened rocks. This book covers the evolution of our tools over the eons, from the simple tools of our ancient ancestors to the sophistication of our scientific technique today. The bulk of the book is a fascinating tour of surprising revelations and connections between technological, political and sociological changes.
I have a lot of thoughts running about my head after the AIChE conference. One of the topics that happens to have a lot of blogosphere crossover recently is working with limited resources, whether in the lab or in business.
Management by Baseball takes on the topic of cronyism (hiring your friends and family) in Cronyism From Tropicana Field To Harvard Yard : The Wharton/Harvard MBA-run company I worked for didn't fail because Wharton and Harvard are bad business schools. It failed first because the graduates they hired they hired because...
It turns out that I was over my quota on my webhost and my last blog build failed to create the main index file, though it seems to have created the RSS feeds. We are back in business now....
I was pleasantly surprised today to hear a knowledge management paper presented. The research group of Antonis Kokossis at the U of Surrey has been involved in the h-TechSight project through an EU grant. The basic idea for h-TechSight seems to be that they want to enable organizations to monitor the...
In case it isn't obvious, in a post on making good corporate intranets, Gerry McGovern tells us that senior management engagement is critical. The intranet gets serious: Part 1 The surest sign that an intranet will fail happens when senior management is disengaged. It's easy to get senior managers to make...
I am in San Francisco for the annual AIChE meeting, seeing my old buddies in the chemical engineering world. As such, I am not going to be doing a lot of blogging, I suspect. For fun, check out the Onion article on Mom Finds Out About Blog, and the Blogger.com official...
Management by Baseball has gone with an RSS feed. If you haven't checked out Jeff Angus' material before, have a look. He writes about management via the baseball analogy, clearly two things he enjoys a lot....
This week's Computerworld has "Eyes Everywhere: Business activity monitoring offers a constant watch on business processes," which immediately struck me as quite similar to the John Parkinson talk on the Real-Time Enteprise that I wrote about recently.