November 2009 Archives

Over the past couple of decades I have lived the personal productivity software upgrade life many times--on Windows, Apple and Linux platforms. I often think that we really rent the software we use (rather than buy it) because we are on a never-ending upgrade treadmill with a new "toll" every 18 months or so.

These upgrades mostly add value. Often, though, they also add confusion and frustration, because they change things for no apparent reason--and they make me learn a new way to do something I already know how to do just fine.

Over the years software vendors have gotten better at helping with these transitions, but they still do a generally poor job. Despite the fact that my PC has plenty of spare processing power and storage, the software I use largely doesn't take advantage of these resources to keep track of what I do most, what configuration values I set (and I have plenty of options to set such values), what I have most trouble remembering how to do (because it's complex or because I don't do it very often) and so on.

Continued at CIO Insight

You hear a lot in the media about how the U.S. is a "mature" broadband market and how we need only to fill in the gaps in broadband network coverage to provide a globally competitive connectivity infrastructure.

Sounds great, but the reality is very different. In comparison with the leading broadband environments in the world, we are a slow backwater.

Only here could someone offer as a cost-effective alternative dial-up services with good compression algorithms overloaded on a narrowband circuit. Only here could service providers claim that 256kb/sec asymmetric DSL service is "world-class broadband."

My 3G cell phone does better than that, at least for data, at about the same price.

Continued at CIO Insight

Here are John's thoughts about business intelligence.

I would never make it in marketing.

I hated the term "AI" when it first surfaced (one of my friends back then used to call it "artificial common sense".) I feel just the same way about "BI."

It's business analytics, not intelligence that we get from mining, filtering and analyzing the flows of transactional and contextual information in which every business swims. Not that it isn't valuable to do the analysis--it is. It makes you potentially better informed about many aspects of business operations. It just doesn't guarantee to make you any smarter.

Continued at CIO Insight

John recently wrote about ways to improve productivity in the workplace.

I am always looking for ways to make people more productive. Often, that means eliminating wasted time from their working days. I remember one example for quite a long time ago, when I found a situation in which team members were scattered across many separate locations over several floors in a building.

By moving everyone around to a set of common locations (took a week to plan and a weekend to actually move) we saved almost 10 percent of their working day that had been spent moving around to meetings or to find people who didn't answer their phones because they too were walking around looking for people who...

Continued at CIO Insight

I have always believed that knowledge management wasn't something you did, but rather something you got when you did a whole slew of other things right.

I also believe that the key enablers are a subtle combination of culture, process and technology, which makes it just about impossible to build a KM "product" or even a KM "platform." Many places I have worked or consulted disagreed and spent lots of resources and dollars on KM efforts that delivered neither knowledge nor management to any appreciable degree.

In the few places that listened and believed, I saw some modest successes, but the culture factor is really hard to "engineer." And without that factor you tend to get better collaboration and isolated pockets of excellence, but not the Holy Grail.

Continued at CIO Insight

Despite a major simplification push, John is not seeing much of a gain in KTLO.

I've never been a fan of best-of-breed infrastructure approaches. Too many moving parts usually overcome the promised improvements from using the best part in every place.

Nor am I a fan of technological monocultures. No vendor is the best at everything all the time. So for most of my career, I have tried to balance the two approaches: on one hand, enough of a vendor mix to keep everyone honest, plus get some benefits from truly superior technologies; on the other, sufficient simplicity to keep total cost of ownership and operations, plus reliability, at a reasonable level.

That may be about to change.

Continued at CIO Insight