One of the side-effects of being laid up at home after a minor operation on my foot is that I have time to read about fitness, instead of trying to get to the gym and actually do something about it… Like many people I’m a convert to the power of interval training to give measurable fitness effects whilst minimising the time spent on a boring cardio machine at the gym, and I’ve started to think about what workouts I might need to get back into the fitness habit when my foot is recovered.
Bill Ives’ Portals and KM blog has been in my feedlist for a while. This morning I spotted that he has been very prolific recently (across several platforms) on the related subjects of Software as a Service (SaaS) and enterprise mashups. At FASTForward, he reports on Why and How to SaaS, a view by Jeff Kaplan of THINKStrategies, and links back to an earlier conference presentation by Pete Fields at Wachovia bank
I’ve just heard that I have passed my PRINCE2 Practitioner qualification, thanks to the excellent help of Pearce Mayfield. I’ve been familiar with the PRINCE2 method for a number of years, and have certainly applied the principles to local methods, but have resisted getting into it too formally because of the bureaucratic nightmare I have seen many organisations make from it. One of the best things I can say about the Pearce Mayfield training is that through it I have seen, by contrast, how to make PRINCE2 a living and breathing approach to delivering a project.
I’ve just heard that I have passed my PRINCE2 Practitioner qualification, thanks to the excellent help of Pearce Mayfield. I’ve been “broadly familiar” with the PRINCE2 method for a number of years, but have resisted getting into it too deeply because of the bureaucratic nightmare I have seen many organisations make from it. One of the best things I can say about the Pearce Mayfield training is that through it I have seen, by contrast, how to make PRINCE2 a living and breathing approach to delivering a project.
One ex-colleague points to a CIO Magazine article about another – Paul Cheesbrough’s decision to migrate users at the Daily Telegraph from MS Office to Google Apps. It’s an interesting choice, one I’ve pushed people to think about, and I can identify with the collaboration benefits that Paul has identified. But will it suit all of his users? The key thing to remember about cloud apps is that you don’t control the storage of your data, and you often don’t control the circumstances in which it gets released.
Or “Simplifying an ‘architecture framework’ for agile strategy” How often have you faced the situation where you need to get something done, and you know there’s all sorts of advice and guidance available, but you only have a limited time to implement something? My current challenge is to relatively rapidly put together some strategic roadmaps for the systems in a business area. In the past I’ve spent a very small amount of time studying TOGAF, just enough to appreciate the coverage of the model and to feel overwhelmed by the amount of material and unfamiliar language.
Delivering successful IT-enabled business change (PDF), published by National Audit Office November 2006. Summary IT-enabled business change essential for reforming public services. Many examples of failure, report examines 24 examples of success to draw out key factors, projects from £k20 to £M800+. For the critical success factors identifies key questions to assess likelihood of success. Critical Success Factors (and related questions) Ensuring senior level engagement Is the board able to make informed judgements about the department’s capacity to manage change?
A few months ago I spent some time exploring my wife’s family tree. One fragment of jigsaw was a census return from 1851 showing one of her 3–greats-grandfathers, then age 16, living with his parents at 13 Cambridge Street in Soho. I looked at the current London street map and found there is no Cambridge Street in Soho any more, and that was the end of my curiosity. Skip forward to last week, and I finally got around to reading Ghost Map by Steven Johnson.
In a comment, Neil Burton of Web Spiders picks up on my rhetorical question why would I want my employer to own my social graph? __by asking In this case [an enterprise social networking tool provided by the company] is your social graph actually intellectual property of the company? would a company who gave you a tool want you to use the benefits of this when moving to another organisation (who could be a competitor)?
This is well worth reading: […] The Life of the Mind is not professorship, not building a long curriculum vita, it’s not being a talking head with a big wizardy beard and a floppy hat on Discovery Channel. It’s the cultivated ability to span boundaries, cross borders of disciplines, bring what you’ve learned over there to bear over here, where they haven’t seen the connection.The Life of the Mind is merely acting on the belief that what we see around us fits together.