Continuing a bit on my recent Design meme; I talk about the current relevance of design thinking, and the impact it can have on change management - but if it feels a bit foreign, how can you tell if you have it in you? Do You Think Visually? Interesting how Design always seems to have a strong visual component, even though functional design (like my data warehouse or the structure of my house) is not directly visible. Still, I thought…
A few months ago, I read Dan Pink's book, A Whole New Mind. Excellent stuff, with echoes in his video What Really Motivates Us? (check it out here), and it introduced me to the idea of "right mind thinking". I've had a great respect for and interest in Architecture over the years, and have watched with great fascination (and a bit of jealousy) as my daughter progresses through her Interior Design studies at the University of Cincinnati (she's the quote…
I sent out notes to folks talking about my new situation, and some came back with interesting comments. Here's one from W, a brilliant guy with Big-6 background and plenty of business acumen. However, he (like me) is a coder at heart, and really wants to focus on the technology (not like me). More power to him - but his eMail had a telling statement ... ... this is my 5th month at [BigCo] and all is going well so…
Technical people are often engineers at heart, and really want to see controlled processes in and around their computer systems. We see source code control, configuration management, and process documentation as ways to manage long term maintenance costs and deliver repeatable, reliable results from our systems. In the realm of ERP systems, this would seem to be a common and well-regarded mind set; however, the businesses supported by these systems often demand information transparency, process flexibility, and quick turnaround of…
I saw Stewart's article on customized software in ComputerWorld this week, and googled (Googled?) a bit more and found a pair of good posts from Scavo (Keller/AMR started it all), speaking of an apparent trend back to favoring custom-built software in business today. A few thoughts ... A classic blunder made by many corporate IT groups is to buy into the idea that custom software is easy. It's certainly fun - much easier to develop a brand new piece of…
When implementing centralized reporting systems, you need to make sure you are prepared to go "all the way" - after the implementation is done. We've recently finished the first phase of a project to centralize and consolidate financial reporting in a single tool / platform; pretty common stuff, and this story is relevant to any data warehouse / consolidated reporting platform. A week or so ago, we had an internal IT meeting to review report requests. One of the business…