Sorting with Sound

via Geek.com — yes, I subscribe to stuff like this in my RSS reader …

I thought this was interesting on two levels …

The Engineering student within appreciates the differences in sorting techniques (although I think I could speed up that bubble sort …)
I also think these videos provide a simple illustration of the power of [...]

The Magic In the Middle

I don’t know where I first heard that phrase, or what it originally meant, but I have been using it a lot in the last few weeks …
Consider the entire user population for any web site or application. You can generalize all user populations into three Pareto-inspired groups …

Top 20% – [...]

Defining Business Benefits: Hard and Soft

All projects should have a clear objective, a practical plan,
and an understanding of the costs and benefits to get the thing done.
Easy to say, but a lot of project teams struggle to crisply and clearly define specific business benefits. One way to move the process forward would be to have a clear [...]

Calculating the Business Benefit of Effective Training Material (4 of 4)

In previous notes, I’ve written about the importance of training and, by extension, effective training material. It’s a common requirement in many organizations …
… well, actually more of a “nice to have”, am I right?
Truly effective training material is difficult to create (at least, to create material that does the job), and difficult [...]

Capturing Knowledge, and Making in ‘Transferable’ (3 of 4)

We’ve talked about the importance of training material, and ways to make it “findable”. The next level of “active laziness” is to build material that doesn’t require the Subject Matter Expert’s presence to be effective. Need to train 100 people in 10 states – all within one week? You need to move [...]

Capturing Knowledge, and Making in ‘Findable’ (2 of 4)

Previously, I talked about the critical importance of capturing knowledge, and capturing it effectively. Let’s assume, for now, that the organization has bought off on the idea that capturing this information is worth doing – and, that they are doing it well. Let’s also assume that all of our content is stashed on a reasonably [...]

A “New” Critical Requirement for Business Projects (Part 1 of 4)

As we continue the deep dive into questions like “how do I get information required to run my business?”, we inevitably get to training – more specifically, training on …

… the business / functional domain, and [your company's] self-image and self-awareness in that domain (who we are, and how we talk)
… process [...]

A Hierarchy of Information Requirements

It’s a common problem statement – ‘I don’t have enough information to (run my business unit, manage this process, identify opportunities, etc.)’. The solution designer, when faced with a question like this, starts with a little detective work; the problem is too broadly stated.

More Amazing Social Media Statistics

A follow-on from my last post; speaking of interesting Social Media statistics … would you believe …

If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s 4th largest
80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees
In 2009, Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
80% of Twitter usage is on [...]

Pardon our Dust: Remodeling cazh1

It’s all Blogger’s fault – they announced earlier this year that the FTP method for publishing blog posts will stop by May 1. I took that as a sign – I rework the look / feel of things around here every three years or so (this is Version 4.0 of the web site, as it [...]