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Monday, March 25, 2002 |
Radio skills, interests and opportunities
I posed a question over the weekend about using Radio as what John Robb calls K-Logs. This post from Meryl brings me back to the notion that Radio could become an incredible knowledgebase product for small businesses. Around here, we define small as $5 to $50 million in sales or 10 to 100 people. The cost effectiveness of applying Radio and RCS to the collaboration needs of that kind of company seem incredible. How soon can we do it - how fast can I learn?
Freelance / Small Business Web Development. Many talented individuals are taking the freelance or small business leap into Web design. Webreference pointed to an article that shows the steps for a freelance project. From there, I... [meryl's notes]
Connecting another dot in this picture, John reports that Dan Gillmor is doing a personal weblog, and Dan explains that it will be about customer service. I've worked for many years in the field of quality, customer service and business process design. In spite of endless investments in technology, many companies continue to deliver miserable customer service as a rule; and, others who pride themselves on great customer service have hideous lapses.
The other dot I'm connecting to all of this is Russ Lipton's Speak in Your Own Voice. Clearly, I've got interests other than Radio. Much of my own weblog since January 13, 2002 (when I first started) has been about my experiences as I've attempted to learn Radio. I want to use Radio to write, but I also want to use Radio to help people and companies improve their lots in life. Some of those horrendous customer service stories might be prevented! Some owners and executives might get their eyes opened. Part of the challenge relates to corporate cultures that have developed around the personalities of founder/owners. Other aspects of solving the problems deal with things like, "you can't manage what you can't measure, " or "what gets measured gets done."
Lately, I've been really massaging the categories I have set up in Radio. I think it will become very useful to be able to separate posts between quality/customer service topics and information technology/weblog topics. So far, I've got 16 categories. They cover a broad spectrum of my interests. They represent my voice!
5:52:02 PM 
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Bandwidth's Vital Role
In the financial community today, there is much talk about fiber glut, bandwidth glut and some other equally ill-defined and poorly understood terms. Imagine when each of these weblogs - as well as BigMediaCo's - contains links to full motion video. Demand for bandwidth may well have been deferred by the burst of the dot.com bubble, but to think it is permanently diminished is to overlook a host of future needs.
Dane links us to this.
Bell Labs sets distance record for optical transmissions. 2.56Tbps over 4,000km [The Register]
11:13:08 AM
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Process Alignment
There's a science associated with designing business processes. There's a similar science associated with re-engineering business processes. And, there's an old question that bounces around the groups of people who do this sort of work: "How can you re-engineer something that wasn't engineered in the first place?" What an incredibly complex job it will be to blend these two cultures which have such radically different roots.
Hewlett's Man for the Merger Details. Webb McKinney, a 32-year veteran of Hewlett-Packard, is expected to lead the team that plans how the company and Compaq would fit together. By Steve Lohr. [New York Times: Business]
10:46:37 AM
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On Effective Writing
Regardless of the topic, weblogs attempt to communicate to quite a cross-section of the world's readers. As you by now realize, I quote Warren Buffett a lot. As I struggled to understand some difficult (at least for me) Radio topics, I was reminded of a writing assignment Warren Buffett accepted some years ago. In August of 1998 the Securitites and Exchange Commission issued a document called A Plain English Handbook - How to create clear SEC disclosure documents. Warren Buffett was asked to write a Preface to that document.
Here's a portion of what he said: "Write with a specific person in mind. When writing Berkshire Hathaway's annual report, I pretend that I'm talking to my sisters. I have no trouble picturing them: Though highly intelligent, they are not experts in accounting or finance. They will understand plain English, but jargon may puzzle them. My goal is simply to give them the information I would wish them to supply me if our positions were reversed. To succeed, I don't need to be Shakespeare; I must, though, have a sincere desire to inform. No siblings to write to? Borrow mine: Just begin with Dear Doris and Bertie."
If you want to read more, the SEC's document can be found here.
9:23:55 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Steve Pilgrim.
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