Monday, June 16, 2003

Blog Critics Beware Declan McCullagh reports on a proposed regulation coming from the Council of Europe: "The all-but-final proposal draft says that Internet news organizations, individual Web sites, moderated mailing lists and even Web logs (or "blogs"), must offer a "right of reply" to those who have been criticized by a person or organization." Better be more careful on who you criticize in your blog.  It might put you in prison. I just ran across this fabulous online map service for Europe. 5:04:10 PM    comment []

Adapt Business Process when Implementing Online Systems An article in the Daily Herald (Provo, UT) blames an online tax system for errors in the processing of two Utah County tax payments.  In actuality, there was no problem with the online system, per se, rather with the accounting processes associated with reconciliation of those payments.  Here's a response from the UII product manager: "I talked to Karen Jordan, Deputy Treasurer, at Utah Co. Treasurer today, and she said to ignore the article and apologized. They were not mad or concerned about the two payments. It was a learning curve for them on how to handle rejected payments. What happened was, they mentioned it in a county commission meeting, and reporter from the Daily Herald was there. I guess it was a slow news day, especially since this was resolved over 7 months ago." The lesson is that agencies need to adapt business processes accordingly when implementing new online systems. 3:57:27 PM    comment []

Productivity in the Workplace I just received this video in my inbox on how to improve productivity in the workplace. 2:46:36 PM    comment []

IBM and Web Services I went to IBM's "e-business on demand Competitive Technical Briefing" this morning and came away impressed that we are underutilizing WebSphere in the State.  But then, don't we underutilize just about every software product that we own?  The presentations focused on topics like developer productivity, web services, and e-business.  IBM has done a good job at evolving WebSphere into a very productive development environment. It has been almost a year since Utah IT workers were challenged to focus their web development on a web services model.  We still have a long way to go. 2:27:21 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2003 David Fletcher.