First Month with the Surface Pro 3

I haven't written one of these hands-on hardware / software evaluation posts for some time - it's not that kind of blog, really - but I've been asked a lot of questions about my Surface Pro 3, and this is an easy way to let many folks know the answers. Also - I am making some interesting discoveries with the new device - some you might not think about at first. Am I surprised by some of these issues? Yes…

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Tracking in the Enterprise – Correlation versus Causation

We've got the activity captured, and now we have "effectiveness" ratings for the people in the group - how will we put them together and see a relationship? Mechanically, this is a simple XY scatter graph - a standard chart type in both Excel and Google Docs. Let's take a look at a sample data set that illustrates the idea: This is the picture I expected to see: the more you use the system (the X axis), the more results…

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Tracking in the Enterprise – Comparing Results for Multiple Systems and Groups

For our back-of-the-napkin experiment in tracking the useful value produced by enterprise systems - our next step will move away from the technical tools for a bit, and take a look at results. Specifically, we want to understand who is "delivering the goods" - and some sense of their success relative to others. At first, the question sounds simple - how do you measure success? Metrics are a common element of any business activity, and people are often paid, and…

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Tracking in the Enterprise – Logging Utilization Simply and Consistently

We're trying use metrics to visualize the correlation between system use and business results - any system, regardless of the platform / technology - and we'd like to draw the same picture of input vs. results for any system. I'm stealing some inspiration from Tufte here - let's keep the story simple, clean, and consistent, so my audience can focus on the question (WIIFM). And it's a meant to be a universal question - doesn't matter what system we are…

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New Way of Working Part 1 – and an Interesting New Direction

Sure, I've been mobile for some time, but it's late spring in Chicago, and after such a hard winter, I am trying to take better advantage of the balmy weather and these newfangled mobile devices to get work done in alternative places, using alternative methods. The work is a bit different as well; I'm taking a hard run at some "digital strategy" topics, and forcibly breaking away from the manic focus on cost and productivity. Well, maybe "manic" is a…

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Innovating with Ideas – Real World Remixing

Three good stories from the past week - great for me, since I am hearing feedback and "remixing" for things published here on this blog. But good, because they are nice examples of people taking ideas and tweaking them to fit their particular situation: Phil saw my presentation earlier this year on IT Strategy, and latched on to the bridge between the tactical "run the business" (RTB) work (for IT, operational support tasks), and the strategic "enhance the business" projects…

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Lost Weekend: Troubleshooting a MySQL Installation

Spurred on by Blogger's decision to stop supporting FTP for publishing blogs, I have finally started the long process to implement a WordPress blog - hosted by myself, not Wordpress.com. To be fair, I am making this longer than it necessarily needs to be, but I am continuing my efforts to maintain a comprehensive Admin guide for all of my development efforts - configuring servers, installing software, etc. Needless to say, this adds overhead and time, but it's worth the…

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