What Ralph Knows

Actually, it is more a link log of sites that I am interested in following.   It is at “What Ralph Knows About Software Development”.  I like Tumblr for this kind of thing  because it allows me to clip pictures and text, and it is a bit more visual than just having bookmarks.  Anyway, it should be a good list of Software Development sites and articles, especially about Software Development Methodologies.

Wordle is an application that analyzes the words in your webpages and then displays a graphic image of the importance of the words used in the website.  In my case, I analyzed my business website: Coherence Group, Inc.  I had not realized that the word applications was used so much on the site, but it makes sense.  Most knowledge work is done via the computer these days, and we all interact with applications most of the time.  Taking advantage of the new web-based tools to provision the content required to execute your job is a critical function.  Therefore a lot of my work involves updating legacy apps so they are searchable and have interactive features.

This is a great slide presentation which describes how a number of premier professional service firms use thought leadership in their marketing. Bob Buday pointed this presentation out in his new blog Thought Leadership Space.  In this presentation Tim Parker demonstrates how firms create awareness of their business insight and build relationships with potential clients via their points of view.

After the very latest Windows update, I started experiencing Word crashes on exit.  The solution was in Ed Bott’s Windows Expertise.  It was in the post Word 2007 mystery crash solved.

Ed wites:

“Today, I ran across a new Knowledge Base article, 940791, which described a set of symptoms that were a perfect match for mine:

You install an automatic update for Microsoft Office Word 2007 on a Windows Vista-based computer. Additionally, the computer must be restarted after the automatic update is installed. However, if Word 2007 is running when you restart the computer, you may experience the following symptoms:

• The mouse does not work when you use Word 2007.
• You cannot open a Word document from the Search window in Windows Vista.
• You cannot open a Word document from Windows Desktop Search.
• Word crashes when you try to start or to exit Word.

 

The fix is fairly simple, As explained in the original article, just delete the following Registry subkey:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Data

Mystery solved.”

VisualCV is a service that allows users to create a resume that includes video, pictures, and a portfolio of your best work.  It provides a free hosting and authoring environment dedicated to highlighting your experience.  You can see my VisualCV here.

I worked at  Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge delivering executive education programs.  Once, I took this photo of the front of the school to send it to my children to show them where I worked when I traveled to the UK.  I took it from my mobile phone.  Several months ago the publisher of travel guides, Schmap, emailed me saying they wanted to use one of my photos.  I agreed, and now it is published in Schmap!! England.  Here is what it says about the University of Cambridge in the description that accompany's the photo:

University of Cambridge

The Old Schools

Trinity Lane

Cambridge, CB2 1TN

Tel: +44 1223 33 7733

registrary@admin.cam.ac.uk

www.cam.ac.uk

Most first-time visitors to Cambridge come with one aim: to see the university. But where is it? There is no sole university site, but rather the university's 31 colleges are scattered around the city. The university is said to date from 1209, when students fled riots in Oxford and settled in Cambridge. The oldest, Peterhouse, was founded in 1284; the newest, Robinson, in 1977. The colleges come in all shapes and sizes: from small postgraduate Clare Hall, built in the late 60s, to the grand Tudor expanse of Trinity. Every student is affiliated to a college, and each college is self-governing and financially independent. The university controls the faculties, subject departments, central administration (the Old Schools and the Senate House), museums, the printing press and the Botanic Garden.
Review © 2007, Wcities

Law Times - May 26, 2008 page 11.  Daryl-Lynn Carlson wrote an article for the Law times describing how law libraries and the knowledge management functions are merging in many firms.  In fact, this has been happening for some time in professional service firms.  The work of librarians is so similar to the work of knowledge managers, it provides a natural way for librarians to increase their skills and participate in a more valuable role for the firm.  Librarians become expert at answering questions that require research into the law or business.  The work of the law firm adds value to  the work done by a librarian and with the research can deliver recommendations to a client.  Keeping a record of these decisions and the context of the decisions is critically important.  Who better than  a Librarian to index the content, create the access framework, and retrieve the data. 

This type of change should be driven by the management of law libraries.

Even with all the turmoil in the financial markets E&Y Sees Initial Offerings Surging in the U.S. - Capital Markets - CFO.com.  I have been extremely impressed with Nouriel Roubini's predictions about the capital markets, and I still think he is right.  Mr. Roubini feels that financial markets and financial institutions are under severe stress.

"The E&Y report, however, points out that although subprime jitters slowed the new issue market after the U.S. liquidity crunch started in the second quarter of 2007, the third-quarter interest rate cut put the domestic IPO market back on track toward record issuance levels in the fourth quarter. Although the U.S. economy continues to slow, it says, the Federal Reserve is expected to continue easing interest rates, with recaps at financial institutions maintaining their pace from the first quarter."

"E&Y notes, however, that despite the recent uptrend, the U.S. IPO market is losing global market share. From 2004 through 2007, it says, the volume of IPOs worldwide more than doubled, from $130 billion to about $280 billion. And the U.S. has been a minor participant in that growth. Most of the growth has come out of Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), largely Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, and to a significant degree Asia."

It is worth a look at this set of videos on YouTube.  Nouriel Roubini has been consistently right on the severity of the banking crisis and its effect on the US and global economies.  He is now predicting a 12 to 18 month recession.

RGE - Nouriel Roubini's Global EconoMonitor and the community of economic bloggers that it aggregates provides a rich source of thoughtful debate about the economy. For example, in Noriel Roubini's EconoMonitor there are links to posts about the Brazilian economy, the global credit crisis,  whether there is a bubble in oil prices.  I like Nouriel Roubini because he is honest and his analysis of the recent turmoil in financial markets has been consistently gloomy, but accurate.

This is a really nice video on how HR Block listens to customers on Twitter.  It gives a good example of how to engage customers in a very different way and in a way that might yield far greater value.

Most companies have a rich store of metadata about their employees, sales leads, customers and suppliers, yet they fail to use this data when they build portals and knowledge management systems.

Here is an example: a lot of data is collected about target customers during the sales process. Sales people know what industries their customers participate in, who the key executives are, the size of the business and what products or services they deliver. In addition, sales people frequently involve subject matter experts from the company to help configure the product or service offerings for the customer. By mining the rich store of data in the CRM system, a knowledge manager can identify the customer, the solution that the customer bought and the names of the internal subject matter experts that have the tacit knowledge about the solution.

If knowledge managers identify the stores of information in the enterprise, then they don’t have to collect all that information in an exercise called knowledge harvesting. Part of the job of a clever knowledge manager and system developer is to find the existing metadata and import it into the knowledge management system so that it does not have to be reentered or worse, recreated. Metadata can be inherited from many different applications, for example, data about people and their expertise frequently resides in HR systems. From electronic resumes we can find where people went to school, the languages that they speak and identify their previous experience. All of this can become metadata for applications that help to find people with specific experience.

Frequently, executives, employees, and knowledge managers worry about the volume of incremental work created by a knowledge management system, but analysis of data sources can actually lead to reducing the amount of work in business processes and accelerating critical information flows.

Photosynth is a really exciting technologies that can transform digital images into virtual landscapes with incredible clarity. Blaise Aguera y Arcas is an architect at Microsoft Live Labs.

 

Harvard Law faculty votes for 'open access' to scholarly articles on May 7 2008, making the ideas generated at the Law School. Articles authored by Harvard faculty will be made available in an online repository, whose content will be searchable and available to search engines.  This type of 'open access' is very important to scholars and a real innovation in the legal industry.

A hilarious explanation of how we got into this situation.

 

Knowledge Management In The Real World is a slide deck presented to the Lawrence Technology University by Stan Garfield that explains HP's current approach to knowledge management.  The KM processes are enabled using Windows SharePoint Services.

I have been in the process of redesigning and rewriting much of my business focused site: Coherence Group, Inc. This site discusses the value proposition for knowledge management and the work that I do developing taxonomies and guiding the information architecture of client sites. The new site was developed using Movable Type, which I am finding increasingly easy to use. My other business interest continues to be Bridge Consulting International. Bridge focuses on building the capabilities of a company's leadership through learning and other developmental activities. Bridge's headquarters are in the the UK, but we maintain a presence in the U.S. in Boston and Atlanta.

Tony Karrer, the author of eLearning Technology notes in a post that there is a 1% rule in collaborative environments.  The rule is that for every 100 people that sign up:

• 90 will lurk (read with no active participation)
• 9 will participate in a limited fashion (maybe rate or comment periodically)
• 1 will regularly post content

This has been my experience too and usually I am the one that is the most enthusiastic contributor!  I have tried many things to overcome this which Tony discusses in the post:

• Incentives or requirements (students must blog - it's graded)
• Community cohesion
• Focus (short time frame, limited topic)
• Integrated as natural activity

It is very hard work to make online communities work.

 

Harvard Law Review - THE END OF THE GLOBALIZATION DEBATE: A REVIEW ESSAY by Robert Howse asserts that the globalization debate has ended and that there is no more antiglobalization "side" to the argument:

"Today the protesters who march against globalization are not marching in favor of the state. Instead, they are mostly advocating a set of values and causes that transcend state boundaries and that require global action."

The article reviews four books that contribute to the globalization debate:

1. CAPITAL RULES: THE CONSTRUCTION OF GLOBAL FINANCE. By Rawi Abdelal. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. 2007. Pp. xi, 304. $49.95.
2. IN DEFENSE OF GLOBALIZATION. By Jagdish Bhagwati. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. With new afterword, 2007. Pp. xiii, 330. $16.95.
3. TERRITORY, AUTHORITY, RIGHTS: FROM MEDIEVAL TO GLOBAL ASSEMBLAGES. By Saskia Sassen. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press. 2006. Pp. xiv, 493. $37.95.
4. MAKING GLOBALIZATION WORK. By Joseph E. Stiglitz. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 2006. Pp. xxv, 358. $16.95.

Office Live Workspace is a free web-based extension of Microsoft Office, which I have been using with several of my work teams.  This tools lets you access your documents and share your work with others. Because you are working in the full featured Office applications and only saving the files online, it lets you  retain the rich features of Office while easily collaborating with others.  Here is an example of a workspace screen:

 

Sometimes I star an article in Google Reader that I don't fully read, although I know it relates to something I am thinking about.  I just re-read 10 marketing resolutions for 2008: Church of the Customer Blog. Number 2 suggests that you should build a model of how customers, employees, and partners can meet, share and participate with you company and with one another. Well, it is something I don't do and is a great idea.  The work that I do in knowledge management would really benefit from a conversation with all of my customers, and, since I like the work, and the people I work for, it would be fun.

I have been thinking a lot about my business website lately because I need to update it and an article in Duck Tape Marketing Blog gives good advice: A lesson in marketing from my dear sweet wife  suggests that you have to tell a potential customer on your website what to do with the information that they are reading on your page.  There should be some instruction, if, indeed you want someone to buy something.

It has taken me a long time to set-up my new computer and get all the services I use working correctly again.  Now, I have Windows Live Writer connected to my blogs, I upgraded Movable Type to 4.1, I have Windows Vista Ultimate working, plus all my applications.

I bought the same computer that I had the last time, a Dell Precision laptop M4300, but this time it has two processors and wow, that makes a difference in the speed of the machine.

Since I have been working hard as I simultaneously configure everything, my blogging frequency has suffered, but I am back...

This video floated up in my Google reader, from a blog called: if:book, A project of the Institute for the Future of the Book.  "Orson Whales" is a photomontage of a book painted and photographed by Alex Itin set to music by Led Zeppelin and John Bohham, the drummer. 

Orson Whales from Alex Itin on Vimeo.

I liked this cartoon enough to republish it here.