No, I'm not a Christmas fanatic - but when you live in Chicago, you learn to look for nice weather in the weeks approaching Thanksgiving, to put up the lights before the wind and cold conspire to make it a painful experience. Basically, I gotta burn a vacation day - but why not? It's an opportunity to get away from the hassles of work in Corporate IT ... ... except this year, I finally had to deal with my outdated…
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…
Spoiler alert: It can't be taught ... One of the questions I get - and I'm getting this a lot lately - is how to get people to think more analytically, less literally. We need folks to stop focusing on the mechanical task of manipulating reports with Excel just to compute some answers. How about learning to use Excel, Access, and whatever native query / data download tools are available - to pull some data from the system, just to…
Over the last month or so, a large number of authors in my RSS reader called attention to Dan Pink's 'Drive' video ... httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc Props to Cool Infographics (home of the Caffeine Poster!) with the post that introduced me to the video. Key insight from Randy Krum: is this a video? A well done presentation? Or another innovative infographic? Global Nerdy (a site with style and substance - content does not match the title!) calls out that this idea has…
Took some time today to work with the new communication meme - Google Wave. I wouldn't call it a fundamentally new way to communicate - well, not yet. I think Google is safe to continue with a "preview" label - clearly not even "beta" yet. No horrible bugs - at least on the Windows platform - but some obviously missing features. And, I am not all that impressed with the basic idea - it's just a mashup of Google Docs,…
When I see / read articles like this, or hear the breathless claims of vendors, pundits, and True Believers, I'll privately chuckle to myself. All of this stuff - social networking, collaboration, and innovation - are 21st century takes on good old Knowledge Management (KM), circa 1998. Do these sound like presentations from your recent Enterprise 2.0 conference? Managing Cultural Change to Create a Knowledge Sharing Environment Effectively Managing Information Overload in the Information Age Information Content and Security in…
I recently had the chance to listen in on a roundtable discussion involving a software developer's R&D group, discussing some of their thoughts on architecture. Some interesting ideas around "innovation" ... Innovation vs. Cost Control A question from the floor - how sensitive are the R&D arms of major vendors to existing investments in infrastructure for their installed base? Response was framed with a pair of quotes: "Innovation without disruption" is apparently one of their goals. However, is that just…
I'm exchanging email with someone interested in establishing a skunk works, and they are asking some very interesting questions about the nature of innovation and the ingredients for an "environment of possibilities" ... The Current Environment ... things are ... [as they are] because someone already tried unsuccessful alternatives ... [This] begs the question: when it is required, how can rapid innovation be achieved? Rapid innovation comes when the environment allows it and the skill sets enable it. An "environment…