Monday, December 18, 2006

Plan before CMS implementation. It would seem to be a statement of the obvious that organisations should do their planning before embarking on the implementation of their new content management system (CMS). Yet all too often this doesn't occur. Let's state this more strongly: the day after the contract is signed with the CMS vendor, the vendor will show up asking: so, what are we actually implementing? If there is not a clear and simple answer to this, the project will go poorly, and the vendor will be more than a little frustrated (which itself may have consequences). This briefing explores the specific details that should be worked out up-front, ideally before the tender or RFP is even sent out. Product versus project In many cases, the selection of a new content management system is seen as a technology project with the goal of obtaining a new 'product' or piece of 'infrastructure'. When driven from this perspective, it is seen as reasonable to 'put a CMS in place', and then consider how best to make use of it. The first problem is that vendors will be asked to provide a fixed-price quote for the implementation, which will then be locked in as part of contract negotiations. When the vendor turns up on day one of implementation, they therefore expect that everything will be in place for an immediate start. At the end of the day, vendors want the implementation project to go smoothly, not least because it means that they will get paid sooner. With a 6 week implementation plan standard for mid-market vendors, there is only limited scope for additional planning and design. [CMb 2006-22, read the full article] [Column Two] 10:00:39 PM    comment [] UIEtips Article: Watch and Learn: Recommendation Systems are Redefining the Web. UIEtips 12/13/06: Watch and Learn: Recommendation Systems are Redefining the Web In this issue of UIEtips, Josh Porter dives into the fast-emerging world of recommendation systems. You'll discover what Josh thinks are the most important benefits of these systems, what their serious drawbacks are, and where recommendation systems will be going in the future. [UIE Brain Sparks] 9:54:55 PM    comment []

Sunday, November 12, 2006

Interesting article from  CM Briefing Intranet kiosks or remote access? on access to staff who do not use PC tools as part of their regular jobs.  Example - - nurses. References a major airline who undertook to increase at home access for their employees and achieved a 90% online usage rate.  CM Briefing 2006-19, read the full article] [Column Two] 5:33:48 PM    comment []

Saturday, October 14, 2006

Things you really need to learn. Both Stephen Downes and Guy Kawasaki have some thought provoking notions embedded in their lists. Neither will take you anywhere near as much time to read as they took to write their advice, so you can count on getting a pretty good return on your investment by leveraging their wisdom. Stephen Downes - Things You Really Need to Learn - Half an Hour Your school will try to teach you facts, which you’ll need to pass the test but which are otherwise useless. In passing you may learn some useful skills, like literacy, which you should cultivate. But Guy Kawasaki is right in at least this: schools won’t teach you the things you really need to learn in order to be successful, either in business (whether or not you choose to live life as a toady) or in life. Here, then, is my list. This is, in my view, what you need to learn in order to be successful. [Link] [Tags: Schools] [Comment] [McGee's Musings] 9:29:49 PM    comment []

Friday, October 13, 2006

Great quote. This is a great passage from Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson: “Your younger nerd takes offense quickly when someone near him begins to utter declarative sentences, because he reads into it an assertion that he, the nerd, does not already know the information being imparted. But your older nerd has more self-confidence, and besides, understands that frequently people need to think out loud. And highly advanced nerds will furthermore understand that uttering declarative sentences whose contents are already known to all present is part of the social process of making conversation and therefore should not be construed as aggression under any circumstances.” I don’t think the above is always true but there are a good number of our fellow nerds for whom this is pretty accurate. [Nerdherding for Beginners] 8:16:45 PM    comment [] Wikipedia Founder Staffs For-Profit Wikia Spinoff - Victoria Shannon, Linux Insider. Wikia plans to hire as many as 20 engineers in Poland next year. The two-year-old company builds community Web sites and software now used by more than 1,500 communities in 48 languages, ranging from a psychology site to fan sites like those focusing on " [Techno-News Blog] 8:09:49 PM    comment []

Thursday, October 05, 2006

A Bit on Virtual Online Meetings. Full Circle Online Interaction Blog, October 5, 2006. [Conversation] [Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ Edu_RSS Most Recent - RSS old] 9:54:39 PM    comment [] A Learning Objects Literature Review. What would you say if given the opportunity to review the learning objects literature in approximately 5,000 words? I've had to answer that question for the upcoming Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology. A few months back, I asked everyone to share their favorite learning objects pieces and got quite a response. Today I'm happy to present the community with two fruits of my efforts. First, the preliminary draft of the paper. Before you complain, yes, it's a Word document, but OpenOffice will open it. If you have any comments on the draft I would love to hear them in the next few days (don't have much time left before i have to submit the final copy). Feel free to use Change Tracking and send me your edits, or just leave higher level remarks in the Comments below. (I'm well aware that I'm missing citations and things; I'll be cleaning those up in the mean time.) Second, I'm happy to introduce everyone to the iterating toward openness, October 5, 2006. [Conversation] [Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ Edu_RSS Most Recent - RSS old] 9:52:01 PM    comment [] Q&A with Andrew Field About a True Learning Org. (forgive the formatting on this post -- yikes) At the end of the day, the entire point of helping kids learn, be thoughtful, engage, dream big, and re-think older conventions is so that they'll one day grow up to be an innovative human being who can make a difference. Whether team member or leader, I can think of no other value in the education game. Save to make use of all those #2 pencils and scantron sheets! (he smiles) Recently, I had the opportunity to do a follow-up Q&A with Andrew Field, CEO of Printing for Less, the Montana-based (market leader) commercial e-printing team that I had the good fortune of visiting in August while with Scoble and the rest of the mad crew who went "Off the Grid" for a little Web2.0 and future of the web talk. One of the most linked to posts I've ever done was the reflection of my visit where I began to discuss the vibrant 'learning' environment that Andrew and team have created in their corporate headquarters. Ima think:lab, October 5, 2006. [Conversation] [Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ Edu_RSS Most Recent - RSS old] 9:23:57 PM    comment [] Scott Wilson, et.al. - Personal Learning Environments: Challenging the Dominant Design of Educational Systems - DSpace at Open Universiteit Nederland. Good overview of the concept of the personal learning environment, focusing mostly on theoretical design concepts rather than technical implementations. Not surprisingly, I am in general in favour of this approach. Click on the link to the PDF (View/Open, lower right hand side) (note how the use of Handle here is pretty useless, and subverted by the much more useful direct link to the resource?). [Link] [Tags: Personal Learning Environment, Culture Jamming] [Comment] Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ OLDaily RSS 2.0, October 5, 2006. [Conversation] [Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ Edu_RSS Most Recent - RSS old] 9:18:13 PM    comment [] It's Not Just About Sales Goals. Feeling stuck? Batteries low? Need a motivational shot in the arm? Try setting a Big Hairy Goal for yourself [BusinessWeek Online -- ] 8:15:04 PM    comment [] Searching for Spock on the Web. Blog: When I Googled "Star Trek," the search engine returned 61,900,000 related sites. This many choices can be pretty frustrating to... [CNET News.com] 8:09:47 PM    comment []

Monday, October 02, 2006

Themes and insights from SHiFT. Back home. Some SHiFT impressions that will stay: Very convincing optimism of Euan Semple regarding the power of bottom-up processes in business settings that eventually will change organisations as we know them. Although I fill like being on the same ship thinking about long-term effects, I can't avoid thinking of practicalities on the way there – this is something that came back over conversations with many others around SHiFT. Lack of compatibility with current cultural norms --> "old" culture that shapes participants, difficulties with risk- and responsibility-taking behaviours at personal level (also: Mediated) management resistance (especially middle-management) Need to change organisational structures and processes. Euan said that "quiet revolution" will eventually happen when current bottom-up processes reach tipping point – wonder if we will deal with "revolution" or "evolution" scenarios. Technology upscaling problem – you may start experimenting with wikis and blogs at "do it yourself" server without a budget and formal support, but if the whole thing works it would have to "professionalise" to scale up (probably meaning relying on paid software, involving IT department, getting helpdesk, etc.). My experiences are that once you go beyond early adopters to majority you can't rely on "do it yourself" technology any more (happy to hear any specific arguments if you believe that I'm wrong :). Creating a space for "globally distributed near instant person to person communication" doesn't always means totally thought-free self-organisation. What seems to hide behind the success stories is the role and specific approaches of people who initiate and support the change (position and reputation in an organisation, insider knowledge of organisational culture that allows choosing ways that are likely to work, experience in facilitating change and self-organisation, specific tricks to make things work, etc…). Discussions with Beverly Trayner and Stephanie Booth about helping unprepared participants to get involved with a community technology Attitudes: not being used to decentralised, participant-driven ways of communication - need for someone in the beginning to "start filling the page", not expecting everyone "jumping into it" immediately, but designing strategies of involvement Fear of making mistakes (especially strong in some cultures, e.g. in Portugal according to Beverly) as a barrier – making own mistakes to give an example (although the culture could be too strong that you as a facilitator may start fear to make mistakes yourself) Lack of technology skills – slow introduction, preferably with private sync support (ideally f2f, otherwise IM/Skype/phone) Communicating concepts through comics by Kevin Cheng (slides and related reading) – thinking of all those little drawings in my presentations that people seem to like to much :) Extended thinking on design - Peter Merholz and Luke Wroblewski stop designing products design as an added value once things start to work (find that diagram of Donald Norman) abductive thinking growing co-dependencies between technology, people and business "The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak." by Hans Hofmann (here) Blogging SWOT by Monica Andre and Margarida Cardoso - will be back on that soon. The image of earthquake coming from David Galipeau. Talking about balance with Martin. Side observations - feeling of discrimination by the Mac majority (can't they just accept that there are people who pray other gods?), talks about consulting rates and too much sweet pastries I couldn't resist :) Overall: SHiFT guys did a great job putting it all together - for me that was a good mix of familiar topics and stretching beyond current boundaries SHiFT notes by Luke Wroblewski and by Suw (between other things) I should be back to Lisbon to walk around - hardly had any time [Mathemagenic] 8:18:42 PM    comment [] In This Movie, the Audience Picks the Scene. Using a new software program called NAV, the film “The Onyx Project” presents viewers with links to click that serve as departure points from one scene to the next. By RICHARD SIKLOS. [NYT > Technology] 8:01:13 PM    comment [] Corporate leak probes walk a fine line. (InfoWorld) - In one telling moment during the recent Congressional hearings on the Hewlett-Packard Co. board scandal, ousted chairman Patricia Dunn offered the "everybody does it" defense. Asked by one legislator about HP’s hiring private investigators who obtained phone records under false pretenses, a practice called pretexting, to identify who’d leaked confidential information, Dunn replied, "I believe these [pretexting] methods may be quite common at companies around the country." If so, that is chilling to business ethicist Kirk Hanson. "As an ethicist I’m horrified that HP’s managers relied on the assertion that it was borderline, but legal, and never asked whether it was ethical," says Hanson, executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, in Santa Clara, California. If HP adopted what Hanson called "black ops" as standard investigative practices, he wonders how many other companies have done it. HP, some of its employees and companies it hired to investigate boardroom leaks to news media still face potential civil and criminal liability for their actions. Other companies find themselves in a dilemma over how to control information within the law. Companies may have a moral or legal responsibility to respect people’s privacy, but they also have a legal and fiduciary responsibility to protect confidential business information. And under the federal Sarbanes-Oxley Act in effect the last four years, they have obligations to investigate certain leaks, Hanson says. Companies have a right to investigate their own employees if they’re suspected of leaking information. Employees should presume no right to privacy in their use of company computers, e-mail programs or telephones. One commonly used tactic to probe security breaches doesn’t even involve electronic snooping. Companies exclusively give suspected leakers seemingly important but relatively benign information. If it turns up in the media, the company has identified the leaker. But Hanson sees a bright line separating how a company can investigate its own employees and how it can investigate outsiders. The HP reaction to leaks to reporters contrasts with the recent practice of Apple Computer Inc. when proprietary information got out. Although Apple is known for its devotion to secrecy, it went to court rather than to private eyes when confidential information leaked in 2004. Apple, of Cupertino, California, sued in state court to force two Web sites to reveal sources for stories they posted about a possible new Apple product. A state appellate court ruled May 26 that the writers on those Web sites enjoy the same First Amendment rights as mainstream journalists and, thus, were protected by California’s shield law from having to reveal their sources. Apple dropped the case. It did not reply to a request for comment on this story. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act requires companies to develop a whistle-blowing reporting system so employees can raise issues about improper behavior within the company, said Hanson. That has prompted companies to develop an investigative capability in the event improper or illegal activity is alleged. "So (under SOX), companies have developed much enhanced investigative capability," he said. Companies also have to keep confidential information safe because disclosure could be a criminal act or a breach of fiduciary responsibility, said Rob Enderle, senior analyst at Enderle Group, a technology market research firm. If word leaks that a board is contemplating an acquisition, for instance, the company or people in it could be prosecuted for insider trading if people used that knowledge to make stock trades. Given the potential liabilities, corporate investigations of leaks are "common," said Enderle. "The stuff with the pretexting goes to the extreme, but looking at company phone records or e-mails, that is very common. Hiring an outside contractor is also common." In fact, leak investigations enjoy broad support among corporate directors. In a September telephone survey of 226 board members at publicly traded companies in the U.S., 73 percent said a company's chairman should be empowered to use any legally available means to identify a board-level leaker, according to Ponemon Institute LLC. About 71 percent of the respondents said it would be okay for a board chairman to review the e-mail messages of other members, in addition to other types of confidential data stored on company computers. Fifty percent said that reviewing telephone records of individuals obtained via pretexting is proper as long as that approach hasn't been outlawed. But HP’s tactics of tailing reporters, attempting to install a tracer on a reporter’s e-mail program, pretexting numbers of people outside the company and even considering planting spies in newsrooms as janitors or clerical workers is "bizarre" to Rick Belluzzo. "The reaction by HP was totally out of proportion with the situation," said Belluzzo, chairman and CEO of Quantum Corp., a network storage equipment maker. His résumé includes president of Microsoft Corp. and a 23-year stint at HP, where he rose to the position of executive vice president of its computer division. While he understands the importance of keeping certain information confidential and making employees and directors sign confidentiality agreements, HP overreacted to information leaks that are sometimes going to happen anyway. "It’s an impossible task to control information flow. Some leaks are inevitable," Belluzzo said. By Robert_Mullins@idg.com (Robert Mullins). [InfoWorld: Top News] 7:58:12 PM    comment []

Sunday, October 01, 2006

H.P. Director’s Cellphone a Frequent Target. George A. Keyworth II and his family were victims of repeated attempts to use pretexting to gain their cellphone records. By MATT RICHTEL. [NYT > Technology] 5:01:17 PM    comment [] Hewlett Lawyer’s Liability Is Unclear, Experts Say. Hewlett-Packard’s general counsel resigned over the company’s spying case, the fourth official to leave the company in the last week. By KATIE HAFNER. [NYT > Technology] JCS comment:  been following this story since it first broke and I'm still not getting it.  Call me naive, call me hopelessly idealistic about what senior execs should be expected to know or sense might be wrong but I just can't believe that anyone in a technology company like HP, especially someone who is general counsel could possibly accept an explanation that pretexting is legal. The pretexter is impersonating another individual to obtain information they could not get under legal means.  How do we know that?  Cause when HP tried to find out the same stuff in 2005, they apprarently used legal methods and came up dry.  I'm not just getting where they leaders are coming from.  It is one thing to admit - - hey, we were desperate and made a mistake.  Corporate espionage is a bitch, etc.  But it is another to appear so out of touch and stupid about technology and social engineering that you don't even have the common sense or experience to question how could someone this information legally?  Do they believe their own information is exposed so readily and legally to all?  Do they conduct their day to day encounters to protect themselves?  I doubt it.  If they were my country mother, I'd say "OK, you wouldn't be expected to know that given you've never even signed on to a PC or used the IN-TER-NET."  But these guys?  Come on, please don't make me pretend that I believe you are that stupid... It doesn't fly and makes me feel as insulted as I feel angry that you thought you could get away with something this stupid. 4:58:09 PM    comment [] Introducing collaboration technologies to the enterprise is a challenge. Dennis McDonald has written a piece on the challenge of introducing collaboration technologies in the enterprise. To quote: Successful collaboration tool introduction is based less on the characteristics of the tool itself than on the motivation users have to use the tool, plus a heavy helping of Ease of Use. People who are already open to and involved in collaboration are more likely to adopt technological tools that support collaboration than people who aren't already open to or involved with collaboration. [Column Two] 4:46:21 PM    comment [] The ideal designer & PM. Scott Berkun has written an article on the ideal designer and project manager. To quote: One question I'm often asked is what is the ideal designer? - I get this from managers or VPs in tech companies, trying to figure out what's wrong with the relationship their managers / leaders have with the design staff. [Column Two] JCS;  This article is writen from the design perspective of a web designer but applies equally as well to the ideal of an instructional designer.  Good insights and influences my thinking about what I'm looking forward in a colleague whether I'm in the management role or the design role. 4:42:55 PM    comment [] Local Officer Is Key in Hunt For Pedophiles . She is sweet-looking and no more than 11 years old. She does not seem to realize there is a camera snapping her photo as she reaches inside the bottom of her bathing suit. And she surely doesn't know that her picture will be traded like a baseball card over the Internet by hundreds, if not... By Candace Rondeaux. [washingtonpost.com - Technology - Industry News, Policy, and Reviews] JCS Comment - - Man is this sick stuff.  I don't get what is sexual abour a infant or a pre-pubscent child.  And, at the same time, I'm not comfortable yet that data of who looked at what can be discoverable.  I wonder, if someone subscribed to the Communist paper (the daily worker ?) during the McCarthy era, was that discoverable? 4:13:44 PM    comment [] Journalists suck at math and it's hurting society. Veteran science journalist Peter Calamai had a piece in the Sunday Star about the implications of the rampant innumeracy -- and numerophobia, if I can call it that -- within the journalistic population. Canadian Journalist, October 1, 2006. [Conversation] [Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ Edu_RSS Most Recent - RSS old] 4:08:36 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2006 Judy Smith. Last update: 12/18/2006; 10:00:43 PM.