Recently

Categories
By Topic
Categories
By Audience

Theme and CSS
IT Support
Hosting and comments

Friday, July 19, 2002

User-centered Software Design

I've been looking for an Information Architect/Information Retrieval specialist to help me better understand the basics of good information systems design. I'm amazed at the wealth of knowledge available to us all via the weblog community and how some of the people in it make complex things so comprehensible.

James Robertson at Column Two posted this helpful example created by Donna Maurer, showing how user stories clarify and enhance requirements documents.

It is an interesting approach and one that I, being neither an engineer nor designer, like quite a lot. It gives the software designer a human goal to achieve.

I thought the accessibility series over at dive into mark used this pretty well, too.

Personas and scenarios. Donna Maurer has written a very practical blog entry on using personas and scenarios. To quote Donna: These were so powerful! It is amazing how much extra information stories can give.
[Column Two]

Triangulating on Shared Knowledge

Today John Robb made a thought-provoking post on Yahoo! Groups: K-Log and it should be passed along. The essay he refers to really hit home given some of the research and study I'm currently doing, and it is well worth reading. There is much good thought taking place right now on how to bring people within a business together on both emotional and intellectual levels. I think the scandals rocking corporate America have a lot to do with that. [...more]

Making Companies Human

A nice complement to today's thoughts on klogging and business strategy.

Weblog as the interface to a person.
Time for people. Paolo Valdemarin: Time for people. "Time for anonymous companies is over, we have all had enough, it really looks like it's time for people, time for weblogs." [Jake's Radio 'Blog]
Also this comment by Paolo:
I have had a company web site for about the last 7 years, but I have never received much feedback from it. Since I have opened my blog I'm receiving lots of messages from people all over the world. This is happening because they perceive the weblog as the interface to a person, while the company site belongs to a faceless entity, even if for some of those 7 years, behind that company web site there was only one person: me. [emphasis added]

If you start connecting the dots between the weblogs and k-logs space with the recent books such as Free Agent Nation , Bobos in Paradise, and The Rise of the Creative Class you can see the acceleration of a fundamental shift in the relation between employer and employed.

Pay attention; it will affect you.

[McGee's Musings]

Building Business Relationships via the Blog

If you read only one post today, make it this one. This post from Rick came across my aggregator and triggered my thinking. When I put it with the post from Jim and the essay from John I wound up seriously "Triangulating on Shared Knowledge".

Put Your Business Where Your Blog Is.

Just put together a few thoughts on how blogs serve as business relationship-builders. I now have a couple examples of this blog leading directly to business relationships that are playing a significant role in sales opportunities. Those relationships would not have existed but for the blog.

While leads me to a new mantra: put your business where your blog is.

[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]

Radio vs. Traction -- A Personal View

Jim McGee asked, so I thought I'd try to find an answer.

Jim McGee asks:

Traction? How about Radio?. What more do you get than buying individual licenses for Radio which you can get for about 1/10 the cost of Traction? [ McGee's Musings]

Jim is referring to the review (quoted below) of Traction Server by Jon Udell in InfoWorld, and since I'm trying to get a little traction of my own -- developing a strategy for small to mid-size business information/KM infrastructure -- I decided to investigate it from a business perspective.

Here are the areas I thought important to consider in comparing Traction to Radio: [more...]



Multi-Author Weblog Tool Description and Discussion

Radio discussion thread describing install and use, and discussing initial reactions to the Multi-Weblog Author tool. This looks like a very cool thing. AFIK, it takes a group of RSS feeds from individual weblogs and aggregates them into posts on a single page or category.

I can see this being very useful for group journaling as described in "In the Same Room Does Not Mean on the Same Page", for tracking software development projects (when combined with threaded discussion, doc mgmt, RCS, etc.), and for lending a sense of coherence to a group of company weblogs across departments or even the entire enterprise.

A scenario: (I need to draw a picture of this) I can see a sort of pyramid structure -- each individual has a weblog where they narrate their work and record important insights, experiences, or problems. Each has a category for Team, Department, Division, Company, etc. where they post items relevant to a specific audience. The Team Leader runs a Multi-Weblog Author Tool, aggregating the "Team" feeds from each employee. Someone at Department, Division, and Company levels do the same.

These aggregate weblogs generate their own RSS feeds and could, again, be subscribed by any individual in the company -- leading back to each employee and providing the opportunity to comment and contribute at all levels of the organization.

This is real transparency. Combined with a culture that doesn't penalize people for saying what they think, this could be a powerful way to keep employees informed and to let employees inform the company.



Author Names in Multi-Weblog Author Tool

Thomas Burg is using Radio as a multi-author k-log and an internal reporting tool. He is looking to automatically add the author's name to each post. This thread in the discussion group cover a source macro and customizing the RSS file.

Search this site:
July 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      
Jun   Aug

Contact

Terry W. Frazier
1041 Honey Creek Road
Suite 281
Conyers, GA 30013
 
770-918-1937 office
404-822-6014 mobile

  Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.     blogchat: If diamond is GREEN click to chat

Wide.angle
K.log
Un.commontary
Tech.knowlogy
Legal
Body.politic
Books
Radio.active
Design.graph
Ref.useful
Atlanta.area