Blog posts on information technology

Posts selected fromManagement Blog - Engineering Blog - Investing Blog and other blogs

• Patent Review Innovation

  Michael Crichton wrote an essay critical of the current patent law: This Essay Breaks the Law. I believe the US is making significant mistakes in how we are proceeding with the patent system, see: The Patent System Needs to be Significantly Improved.

  That’s the basic concept behind a pilot program sponsored by IBM (Charts) and other companies, which the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office appears poised to green-light. The project would apply an advisory version of the wiki approach to the patent-approval process.

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• Internet Access at Work (2006)

  Providing internet access at work can create some management issues. However, the correct solution to those problems is not to be overly restrictive on access to the internet.

  ...coach and work with your employees to make sure they behave responsibly. The information available on the internet can aid employees in doing their job in many ways. And it can also aid them in living their lives – don’t discount this benefit.

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• Toyota IT Overview

  IT solutions should support your processes not dictate them. I am a big fan of avoiding inflexible, proprietary (off the shelf) software. I am willing to spend money on in house developers to create customized IT solutions that support the business processes instead of IT solutions that dictate business processes.

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• Knowledge Management – Management is Prediction

  ...There are several reason these ideas have not been adopted but one is that they require some effort to document and then evaluate (and often those are missing). So many see any time spent improving the system as waste (based on their actions not that they would say such a thing) – they are only happy when producing today or fire fighting to enable producing today.

  ... A good deal of thought is needed on how to use the technology tools to implement the ideas, but new technical solutions are providing options. Blogs, Wikis, improved search for stored data, the ease of creating intranet applications…. are some additional tools that can be used to improve.

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• Metrics and Software Development

  I find looking at outcome measures (to measure overall effectiveness) and process measures (for viewing specific parts of the system “big picture”) the most useful strategy.

  The reason for process measures is not to improve those results alone....

  process measures are helpful in serving as indicators that something is going wrong (or potentially going better than normal). Process measures will change quickly (good ones can be close to real time) thus facilitate immediate remedies and immediate examination of what lead to the problem to aid in avoiding that condition in the future.

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• Data Visualization Example

  In Myths About the Developing World, Hans Rosling shows some great graphics to display data on health care outcomes.

  The presentation also gives a concrete example of faulty knowledge (people thinking things which are not so - related to theory of knowledg). See gapminder.org for good additional material.

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• Google Website Optimizer

  I think this tool is a very smart move by Google. As I described before, Google’s potential revenue is related to how profitable advertising with Google is for customers. If Google can improve the return of advertisers, the advertisers have more reason to advertise on Google to draw more potential customers. This service would be a good item to apply Barker’s implications wheel to and see what the downstream implications are – I think they are positive for Google 

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• Information Technology and Management

  I see people adopting technology as the end rather than to facilitate. IT solutions should support the organization and help the organization improve performance. The technology should not tie the organizations hands (as it can so easily do when implemented without an understanding of systems thinking, variation, process improvement, sub-optimization, psychology…).

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• The New Age of Robots and What it Means for Jobs

  Industrial robots are the most advanced application of robots in business today but they are still far from plug and play solutions. They require skilled experts to have them work effectively; but the capabilities and usability have greatly increased over the last 20 years. Respect for people (and all that entails about the management system) is an important part of creating a management system to have the most success integrating robots.

  The ability of us to create technological solutions to accomplish tasks that required people has exploded in the last 20 years and will continue to. Lawyers are finding much of what they do can be done by a computer. Much, doesn’t mean all, obviously. Search and rescue in disaster areas is another task that robots are playing an increasing role in; and the use of robots will likely continue to grow quickly. Technology is taking over many aspects of medical care that were not long ago seen as requiring highly trained and experience medical professionals (reading scans, diagnosing illness…).

  
  I think many of these advances are moving so quickly that we are not properly thinking about the long term future of our organizations. The disruption these changes will take will be difficult to predict and plan for.

  ...

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