Science

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

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ June 20, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

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)

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ June 13, 2010 ⋅ 3 comments

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 past PowerPoint, and [...]

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

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ May 25, 2010 ⋅ 4 comments

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)

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ May 20, 2010 ⋅ 4 comments

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

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ May 9, 2010 ⋅ One comment

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

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ May 4, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

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 [...]

Pardon our Dust: Remodeling cazh1

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ April 25, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

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 [...]

Lost Weekend: Troubleshooting a MySQL Installation

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ March 21, 2010 ⋅ One comment

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 [...]

Bootstrap Market Research: Master Data Management (Results)

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ December 17, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

As previously noted, I’ve been doing a lot of discussion and data crunching around “Master Data Management” lately – so I’ve “bootstrapped” a little market research project. It’s still a work in process – responses are trickling in – but I thought I might take some time to summarize what I am hearing to date. [...]

Bootstrap Market Research: Master Data Management (What, Who, How)

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ November 30, 2009 ⋅ One comment

I’ve been asked a lot of questions about “Master Data Management” over the past few weeks – what does it mean, who does it, and what are some tools and metrics that organizations are using to reign in this important aspect of ERP and analytics systems. I started reaching out to the folks in my [...]

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