Updated: 3/27/08; 6:12:59 PM.
A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Blog
Thoughts on biotech, knowledge creation and Web 2.0
        

Tuesday, October 8, 2002


I am reading a new Forrester report:  Managing Business Velocity at the Edge.  Here are some highlights in regards to weblogs (Forrester's research is worth owning if you have the budget):

General Electric recently touted it 'corporate cockpit' of key business metrics -- viewable by only 45 executives across the company.  But a $125 billion company with 300,000 employees can scarcely turn on a dime with that degree of information hoarding.

Employees are the early warning systems of business change.... Weblogs capture and cultivate knowledge, opinion, news about customers, technology, and markets.

Teams:  Encourage Weblogs of evolving ideas.  To harness internal expertise, firms should encourage employees to link their ideas to external supporting evidence using weblogs.  For example, an engineering team at Motorola can bolster internal R&D thinking with outside expertise -- like Glenn Fleishman's Weblog on 802.11b standard for personal wireless technology.

The person-to-person connections enabled by IM, shared workspaces, and weblogging confound published system-based communication paths -- like approval processes, lead routing, and technical problem escalation.  The result is a behavior change at every level.  Executives must accept that the best information may pop-up in the virtual hallway.

Recommended vendors:  Groove, Jabber, and UserLand

[John Robb's Radio Weblog]

I am really beginning to feel that GE was a good model for running a business in its time (1950s to now) but limiting information to a handful of top guys will not make them quick. To compete, you have to move faster than the others, to get to decision points faster. Immunex did not have smarter people than others. We just got to decision points faster, were comfortable with making tough decisions, then we moved on. If you don't move quickly and adapt, I guess you can become a holding company, simply buying the knowledge of others. Would this be a parasite in the information age?   10:46:47 AM    



Genome of potential bioremediation agent sequenced. Scientists at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) and collaborators elsewhere have deciphered the genome of a metal ion-reducing bacterium, Shewanella oneidensis, that has great potential as a bioremediation agent to remove toxic metals from the environment. US Department of Energy [EurekAlert - Biology]

This could be an inportant environmental tool for bioremediation. I'd be interested in seeing what metabolic pathways it has developed that are unique.  12:09:39 AM    



Chemists create synthetic cytochromes. When animals metabolize food or when plants photosynthesize it, electrons are moved across cell membranes. The "extension cords" of this bioelectrical circuit are mostly iron-containing proteins called cytochromes. University of Illinois scientists have created synthetic cytochromes by making a small cyclic peptide that binds to the iron millions of times more strongly than without the peptide. National Institutes of Health [EurekAlert - Biology]

Nice use of chemistry. Cytochromes are some of the most stable proteins and their interaction with heme is quite strong. The synthetic peptides bind iron in the heme much, much more tightly than natural cytochromes. It will be interesting to see what uses these synthetic cytochromes can be put to. Because just being a good binder does not a protein make.  12:03:58 AM    



 
October 2002
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
    1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30 31    
Sep   Nov






Click here to visit the Radio UserLand website.
Subscribe to "A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Blog" in Radio UserLand.

Click to see the XML version of this web page.

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


© Copyright 2008 Richard Gayle.
Last update: 3/27/08; 6:12:59 PM.