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Measurement, Metrics and iteration

2009-01-17T08:25:00.000-08:00

Hello Dashboard.

It is Saturday morning, and my first Rant for the year. I choose MEASUREMENT, METRICS and ITERATION because it kept popping up pretty much every where. These past few days I researched these tags on the internet, talked to folks face to face, via email and IM to generate fodder. My hope is for this RANT to provides some ACTIONABLE direction where ever you might be. Where ever I might be.

We are all in the INFORMATION AVAILABLITY business without calling it that, intuitively we tend to Measure, Analyze and Correct our course as we head down this chosen path. Most of it has to do with our very sustenance and quite often it is isolated from other folks sustenance, we tend to be selfish, because the very essence of sustaining ourselves puts us ahead of everyone else. Through time we developed dashboards to alert us and keep us on track.

What does your dashboard look like? Is it designed to provide your measure of AVAILABILITY?

Are you available? Is something stopping you from being available? will you be available down the stretch?. Is there enough information that you can mine to develop an actionable correction to being available? Is your availablity trivial? We need a dashboard to help us measure, analyze and iterate our NON-TRIVIAL AVAILABILITY perhaps.

If you have the right information at the right time, the quality of your action will improve your availability of the non-trivial kind, it has to. Can a dashboard help with achieving the right information at the right time?. To arrive at the right DASHBOARD, requires us to use the "Sum of human conciousness" not just the "Individual human conciousness". My research on the web, the one on one interviews, the email and IM chatter to build the fodder for this Rant proves that point. I could not have done it alone. So it is all about non-Trivial information availability of the collective kind.

Finally it all boils down to TRANSPARENCY. A trasparent DASHBOARD, one that is shared globally?. The more we share, the more eyes there are to help us iterate. The more we iterate, our actionable reponses get better results.

There is a tremendous amount of CONDITIONING that will work against the urge to build your transparent, globally shared DASHBORD of non-Trivial information availability. As you start building that dashboard make sure to leave your confirmational BIAS as the door.

And make it a point to Share something will ya!! Share something to the point that your information is no longer what separates you from the rest. Break down those BRANDS people!!

66 posts for 2008

2008-12-31T18:06:00.000-08:00

Wrapping up for 2008...

Back in March I signed up for a KM class at DePaul. I owe my foray into blogging to that course. For those of you who don't know my story about the Masters program I am doing backwards, I present:

Being a self professed and arrogant "know it all", I expected DePaul to hand me a Graduate diploma because I have 17 years of mileage in information systems which is my second profession, the first one being an Architect which I practiced for about the first 20 years of my professional life. My advisor at DePaul understood where I was coming from but insisted that I have to take the 13 required graduate courses without which there was no go. My company pays DePaul $2400 a class so that works out to about $31 grand. I guess I would do the same if the roles were reversed. Taken that money I mean.

So I started my masters program in dead earnest. From Top - Down!!. Not sure how my choices of classes got by DePaul's admissions team for so long, But I started with the Capstone on down, making sure the only grade I received in each of the classes was an A. I still have about 4 classes to complete, but it is an interesting perspective doing your Masters programs backwards. As you get to the end, you are doing courses that summarizes what you learned!!

Speaking of backwards, normally kids growup go to college, graduate and get to work. Well not mua!! obviously. Here I am at 54, while most of my collegues are VP's and Directors at various companies, I am wrapping up my masters on my way to doing my PhD program. Strange thing is, I am enjoying it. Speaking of that PhD program, truth be told, that is the reason for my blogging this year. So this backwards thing is a pattern obviously, not sure if it was by design, perhaps by some grand design.

I posted 65 times, my idea was to write a 500 word post each weekend, which evolved into "My weekly Rant", all in preparation for the gruelling writing I forsee during the PhD program. They say you have to write 1000 words a day. My very words back in March.

While I have been doing my Masters backwards, it does not for a moment mean I have not been learning. I have grown leaps and bounds, is the honest truth. The power of knowledge can be and has always shown itself in the work I do, day in and day out. After all way back before Knowledge Management templates were even born, I was thinking Automation of repetition. Honest to God ask folks who have worked with me about my passion for Automating, targetting and triangulated reconciliation and they will point you to one that truly believes in "Real Men dont Click" way before it was fashionable.

The courses that made a significant impact on me so far have to be: Virtual Collaboration, Datamining, Supply Chain management, and User Centered Design. I have to admit I grew a few inches with those bad boys. The most important concept I learned this year has to be: "LISTENING" and The most important toolset: "Listening Tools".

It is going to be a challenging year in more ways than one. But it has the makings of a great year, I can feel it already. if all turns out well, our trip to Kenya will be a blast. If all turns out well, I will complete my graduate program. If all turns out well, next year this time I will have decided on my PhD program. if all turns out well, I will see some of those frequent ideas that turn me on, through to fruition.

I therefore dedicate 2009 to "Listening", hopefully we all will grow by leaps and bounds. If you had one wish this year, any wish at all what would it be?

Twitter Brand distribution

2008-12-26T11:48:00.000-08:00

Twitter is media's play toy!!

Click for details

So you want to be an evangelist?

2008-12-26T10:25:00.001-08:00

When I was just a wee lad, me mom said, son I would like it if you became a priest some day. So I grew up with the notion that if I did not become a doctor or lawyer or an Engineer perhaps that would be the way to go. That was a profound notion and I did not really realize it, till now.

Fast forward 40 years: I did not become a priest, but I often think of myself as an Evangelist. It is a self endowed title, and I dont even preach all that often. So what makes me think I am an Evangelist? I have this urge to improve the common good, do selfless acts, improve what is around me without profit. Problem is, I get caught up in sustenance, so most times these lofty thoughts and ideas go by the wayside.

So am I an Evangelist for just having these thoughts and urges to do good by my brotha? umm NO. I think it has to go beyond that. What I found through years of having these thoughts and urges is something that the Priests and Nuns and brothers had figured out long time ago. Here it is in a nut shell:

If you want to do good: your basic nessesities have to be taken care of. If you are independantly wealthy, you are well on your way to becoming an evangelist, unless ofcourse you want to multiply what you have. Start a foundation, adopt kids from Africa, Save the homeless are easier to embark on, if you dont have to worry about being laid off, if you dont have to worry about your kids schooling, if you dont have to worry about Christmas gifts, you get the picture. If you want to do good, you have a better chance if you are a Priest or a Nun, where those important selfish things are taken care of, so you can concentrate on doing good by others.

So become a man of the cloth: You can then truly say you are an evangelist. Otherwise you will always be someone else's boy toy, perhaps Seagate or kmart or whoever will pay your rent, or throw you an occasional bone.

What is your pretty face doing on that avatar?.

2008-12-23T05:54:00.001-08:00

I recently had this idea: It is about Avatars and what they should really represent.

I have a pretty face and I use it as my avatar, folks look at it and go, there's a pretty face, I like that face. I will listen to what that person says, because it is a trustworthy face. We have come to associate trust with a pretty face/appearance. Does not matter if the substance is poor or divisive or hateful, as long as I have a pretty face, its okay.

So how did we get here? At what point did we make appearance primary to Substance? I believe it goes way back, meaning it was always like that, and we are slowly evolving out of this paradigm of form before substance, substance follows form. Form before Function. Form, Form, Form. Gotta be pretty and so on!!

So I should not put my pretty face on my Avatar anymore?. Dont stop that cold turkey. Do a gradual. Keep this in mind: what if your Avatar, said something profound, something that folks seeing it would benefit, something that added to the sum of human consciousness, something that you share, because you can?.

Lots of possibilities for sure, and you thought avatars were just pretty pictures no?

What I learned this year and What I would have like to.

2008-12-16T06:35:00.000-08:00

I will be travelling this weekend, so the Rant is being published a tad earlier. Mostly it is a look back and look forward, but it is all good.

What I would have like to have to learned this Year:
C. Well at least I bought the book and started the exercises. I think I would have been much further along if not for the technical difficulties along the way. The most important one being getting ubuntu running in vmplayer with gcc and base-essentials. Well without that you cant compile the 'hello world' program. So there. This one will carry over to next year.

What I enjoyed learning well this year:
I took my dings on lessons this year, but the most enjoyable as I look back has to be Supply Chain Management and what I learned in that class. The interesting side bar is that, I could not for the life of me understand the Professor. In the end this forced me to learn on my own, which ended up being the best thing that happened this year. So of course I will share and here it is below, all of what I learnt during the Internet Supply Chain Management. Bon appetite!! you can click on the image to zoom in.

There was quite a bit more, but cognition related thoughts surfaced to the top, I wont repeat it here as I blogged about it last week. One recurring theme this past year has been STEALTH KM, I keep seeing this concept surfacing quite often, in pretty much everything. This could possibly be because there has been a renewed emphasis on TRANSPARENCY in my life.

This has also been a year of change professionally. I moved over from IT Operations Line Management to Cross Functional Support. Basically went from Managing System Engineers to mostly Forest view and Project management Stuff. I am still learning to manage Change.

This year brings me closer to finishing my Masters program and the plan is to move on to a PhD program. I have told my family that my epitaph has to say: Here lie the remains of the esteemed Dr. Fernandez!! Morbid If I have to say so myself. It is also a way to lead by example. My kids 12 and 9 are already planning on getting their PhD's done before they are 30. Dad Struggling at 54 is not a pretty picture obviously.

Speaking of Epitaph's: I lost two dear family members this year. Aunty Tressy and Aunty Mattie. My parents generation is currently at the top of the stack, with my siblings and me getting up there. We all have to go sometime, the trick is to go gracefully.

Finally Thanks to those who went above and beyond this year: I got a chance to visit India after 20 years and what struck me most of all is what my Sister Crystal has been been doing and continues to do even today. There is no doubt about the sacrifice she is making for which all my siblings are extremely grateful. My Mom must have done something incredible in her life to have such good care. Next on the list but necessarily in that order: for an incredible amount of patience, day in and day out and 7 days a week, my wife Jen. My kids are the luckiest ones on this whole planet. I truly believe that patience is key to development!!.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and Merry/Happy what ever your heart follows!! 2009 Here we come.

Problem Solving Revisited - A story about Cognition

2008-12-13T08:03:00.000-08:00

Just because I have not ranted these past weeks does not mean I did not have any thing to say, on the contrary I did have quite a bit, but did not know how to put it in words. So I started drawing and sketching and procrastinating instead. I should really change that order to: Procrastinating, Sketching and Drawing. Eventually I realized that a picture is indeed worth a thousand words, so here are a few sketches involving my thoughts these past few weeks.

Problem solving free hand sketch:
I still love to doodle and sketch, and sometime when faced with a problem, I gravitate toward the pencil and paper and the sharpie. Many iterations later, I arrive at a sketch, I want to show folks, but I think I loose something in translation. Remember when our math teacher would say, "Show how you arrived at solving the problem and you will at least get partial credit", well that is really true. So here is the doodle and the final sketch of my problem solving methodology that I arrived at.
1) the Genesis - A Doodles of fair significance:

2) The final Sketch - born out of refinement and discussion:

Problem solving mind map:
Once I arrived at the freehand sketch, it was easy to use a tool like Mindmap and translate that, but as you will see there is something lost in translation.

I lost two loved ones these past few weeks: Aunty Mattie - My Dad's brothers wife and Aunty Tressy - My mom's sister. Each of them impacted me significantly as I was growing up. Each contributed quite a bit in my cognitive development. I owe my problem solving skills in part to them. Thank you.

Going green

2008-11-15T08:09:00.000-08:00

I am on this "less self centered kick" as mentioned in last weeks rant. This week I l am looking at this from a Going Green perspective. Imagine the impact we can make if we could combine three concepts "Less self centered" + "Green" + "Masses". I am sure you want me to to elaborate, so take a seat, put on your listening ears, as I take you through this tour of my going green masses pyramid scheme.

Going Green:
If each household saved just a little bit in electrical energy consumed, the potential Energy savings for the country as a whole has be exponential. I set about trying to find out how to methodically go about saving energy at home, with this intent of publishing a template so others can benefit from my experience. As with any project I started with a baseline of energy consumption in the house. I got that from taking a reading from the Power meter outside. I also walked around the house and documented the devices that was hooked into the electrical circuits int he house. This is a room by room list that includes lights, appliances, and anything can be plugged in to the sockets, even if it currently is not.

Benchmark: Benchmarking power consumption should not last more than a week. A seven day cycle of consumption documented daily should be our goal.

Documentation: Room by Room documentation of light fixtures, appliances, gadgets, computers, monitors, and any device that has the potential to draw current, will be used to tweak our benchmark, and set goals. If our goal translates of 1KWHour per day, it is reasonable to assume that we as a nation have the potential to save 1 Million KWHours per day, by engaging 1 million households in this effort.

Template approach: Any project that involves massive numbers should use templates for consistency, with that in mind, the idea behind this evaluation is to generate those templates and distribute them for others to use.

The Business Model for profiting from this scheme: How does one motivate a million households to save just a fraction of what they use on a daily basis?. How does this project then turn that savings generated by the million households for a larger purpose?.

Answer: Dashboards.
Dashboards provide us view into that what we take for granted. They can help by reminding us that you can tweak this and gain that. The more interactive the Dashboard becomes, the more involved the user becomes. If my dashboard says by turning these 5 lights for 3 hours in a day, I will gain my great grand children a forest, that could be significant motivation?

Calculating costs: Here is a great site on everything Electricity, from average cost of kWh by state to how much does a 100 watt light bulb burn if kept on for a month. Ideally what we need is a gadget that can map our electricity usage, so we can see "real time" how electricity is being used. The idea: if we can see where it is going, we can put in controls needed. I went looking for such a device and found this product by TED that actually has some pretty cool features. The only problem with this solution is that it will cost you around $200 for the gadget + footprint software, then you will have to get an electrician to install it. So lets say around $300 investment. Not many people will go for that is my guess. So what we need is a solution that every household should have, if we we are going to control our spending and making inroads in this area. In fact, I think this should be subsidized so its use becomes ubiquitous.

Collaborative savings: are nothing new, many business models are built requires a community based business model that can leverage the strength in numbers to advantage. The idea is if a million households saved a million Kilowatt hours, what can they collectively gain from that?

That's my Saturday morning Rant, Next week I might be spewing Usability sensibilities as I will be studying all week for the HCI 440 exam. Wish me luck.

On being less self centered

2008-11-08T09:53:00.000-08:00

The elections are over, my HCI 440 class is coming to an end. My next class is in January so I plan on talking about "being less self centered".

Why?
In the end we need to take care of each other, the trickle just wont get us to where we want to go. So my next few posts will focus on the things I do on a regular basis and how over a period of time I have learned to do it smarter.

The Do It Yourself online store: We all have something to sell. So why not own a store, that you call your own and sell. It could be ideas, products or even advice. The point is you need a store and here is how you can set it up and maintain it for $10 a month.

1) Pick an ISP to host your website, this should cost you around $8 a month. Register your domain name for $2 a month, I think you can get it cheaper. Total for ISP and domain = $10. That is the extent of your hard costs.
2) Point your domain name to your ISP's name servers. Or follow their instructions to park your domain there.
3) Install OsCommerce (2.2 rc2 is the one that I installed the other day) using "Simple scripts", Bluehost my ISP has this available for free. I am not affiliated with Bluehost, It just happens I picked them instead of many comparable ISP's out there.
4) For ease of getting OsCommerce developer plugins to work, install OsCommerce in the /Catalog folder. For example, I installed mine as a test here
5) Once installed, login as admin, and change the machine generated password to your choosing
6) Change settings in the configuration submodules, go through each one of them and customize, if is fairly self explanatory. You can always come back here and tweak it further so dont go overboard in this step
7) Install the Easy populate module. You will need this to upload inventory, Later on you will find this really useful for mass updates. Trust me you need this feature, unless you like doing boring stuff manually. I installed "Easypopulate v2.76f-MS2 (with attributes) r1". Modules are easy to install, follow the readme and install documentation and test.
8) Install the Page Editor module, You need this to add pages or modify existing pages, again trust me on this. I installed PageEditorv1.6. Please note that this module requires you make changes to the DB, but the sql script is provided. I followed the install instructions which requires you to copy a few files and update a few. This is a little tedious, but if you want to know what is being modified, follow the manual editing process. If you trust this module, go ahead and copy the files provided. Test the module once installed.
9) Install the PayPal express check out module, you will need to get a paypal API access with the UID/PWD and signature, follow instructions on paypal for this, fairly easy to get it working. The payPay express module for OsCommerce I used for this is: paypal_express_checkout_IPN_v0_4_1. There is a module already installed in the default install, you will need to disable that, install this one and then enable the configuration
10) Install the USPS plugin. Again this requires you to get a UID/PWD from USPS. I installed version USPS Methods 4_1_4. Follow the readme file to get your account created, it takes about a day to get that going.

There you have it. Easy 10 Steps to setup your own online store. Why is this attractive? Simply becuase Amazon will charge you $99 a month to do the same thing and give you attitude to boot. So you dont need Amazon's charity trickling down to you any more!!

Preparing for the HCI 440 final exam

2008-11-06T14:53:00.000-08:00

I have always wanted to be different. While many other bloggers will rant about the historic elections, I will move on to more pressing personal topics, such as my upcoming exams. I had (last few weeks in play) the privilege of attending a HCI 440 course this Fall, as it is winding down, it is fitting I write about my User Experience (pun not intended or intended) this Saturday morning.

Design Theory: My bachelors degree many moons ago was in Architecture, this course in many ways was a rehash of design theories I learned and have forgotten since. There has been a lot of progress in 30 years in the field of design. But the essential fundamentals remain the same. ie. you are designing FOR USERS. The big difference this time around was the amount of involvement of users in the design process. There has been a significant body of research that has gone into cognitive studies understanding why and how we do things. This in my opinion has greatly enhanced the design process. I highly recommend this course to those of you who started out many years ago as I did.

The largest impact in my opinion is the application of design principles, processes and cognitive research that has gone into making what HCI (Human computer interaction) and UCD (User centered design) is today. There are many heavy weights who have contributed to this discipline. Names such as Jakob Nielsen, Bruce Tognazzini are just a few to scratch the surface.

So what exactly did I learn in these 11 weeks? The material we covered in class came from the book: "Beyond Human-Computer interaction" by Yvonne Sharp, Helen Sharp and Jenny Preece. Lots of great material in the book that spans Requirements gathering, Analysis, Design/Prototyping, Iteration, Evaluation and testing. Iteration by far was the most powerful concept that I latched on to. We also worked in a group of 6 to collaboratively design a Mobile application that replaces your remote controls around the house. It appears we will have a fairly decent final prototype by the 11th week.

We also covered various Theories, models and Frameworks that was a segway into Agile and SCRUM methodologies. I got a chance to watch what Jeff Sutherland did at google on the Adword project and what Jensen Harris did with the User Experience team at Microsoft as they developed the ribbon user experience for office 2007. Included here are links for your viewing pleasure if you are into that sort of thing.

Usabilty and User experience goals along with design principles and how cognitive theories tie into these, was fertile fodder. Use of metaphors was a fascinating study as you look around and see the rampant use of metaphors in design these days. Trashcan, desktop, Search engine, Browsing and exploring are all great examples of how metaphors have been used in todays design world.

I will leave you folks with these three thoughts:

The Architects of yesterday will really enjoy and benefit from this course, for it explains many approaches we gravitated to intutively years ago. The medium of design has certainly changed, and so has the process. Yet innovation, creativity and immagination are attributes that we will always strive to in our designs in years to come.

November 13th is World usability day. A lot of good events are planned around the world on this day, a testament to how far we have come. If you are inclined and wish to make time explore the world usability day event map is a great place to start

If you get an opportunity, try out Mozilla labs Ubiquity. It told me that there are some really sharp folks out there creating and innovating. All we have to do is be there to enjoy the USER EXPERIENCE.

That folks, is my Saturday Morning Rant for this Saturday November 8th 2008.

Store our family history on the world wide web for the future generations to read and enjoy?

2008-11-02T10:47:00.001-08:00

First of all, I am going to break the 500 word rule and the Saturday morning Rant Rule. What I want to RANT about this morning is all about different ways to solve a problem, thanks to two of my relatives, One from Atlanta and one from Australia.

The problem at hand:

1) Why should we use Geni to document Family history? Why not facebook, Orkuchee (orkut), myspace, and other social media collaboration outlets that we currently use?
2) Why document Family history at all?.

Two questions with many answers: I hope I can get decent momentum going here. I don't plan on solving this problem, It would be foolish to do it by myself when I have 222 blood relatives on my Mom's side all participating (begrudgingly I think) on Geni. Insted I just plan on presenting some thoughts, that might provoke deeper insight, in the young minds of the Dsouza clan.

Documenting Family history: I have been a big proponent of documenting Family history for a long time now. I remember about 25 years ago a conversation I had with my Aunty Benna (then a principle of Mount carmel's mother ship) about this. The fact that I am still on this kick should mean something. There is also another reason. When I lived in India, not once was I asked to explain, why I have a Hispanic last name. After I came to the US, I have been asked this many a time. So I set out in search of the truth, at least the documented truth. What I found or did not find surprised me and increased my resolve to find out more.

Why not just use the world wide web as the repository for our family history?

I really believe we can pull this off: But to understand how, we need to look at a similar problem space. A few years ago Google came out with the Google desktop. The feature that made it stand out from the rest was its capability to index all your files and even mail. By doing so they gave us an option to do away with filing/categorizing data. The premise was, you store data where ever and however you want to. Then when you need to retrieve a file, you simply search using key words and it pulls it up. So remember the time we used to spend cleaning our files and filing them away, If you were smart and used this indexing, you did not need to.

Let me give you an analogy. Lets say you lived in a college dorm. Your parents are not around to ask you to clean up your room. You just let it pile up. But mentally you arrive at this ingenious solution. Your mind indexed the contents of the room, so whenever you needed something, it was easy to find. So no sorting, no cleaning, no mus, no fuss. Its all there, and you get it when you need it. Indexing at its sophisticated best!!

The premise was simple: They did away with elaborate folder heiarachies to store and retrieve data, instead they just indexed every word in each document. It is an amazing retrieval system which they developed for the world wide web and just scaled it down to the desktop and it was a paradigm shift from the older ways of thinking about information retrieval.

So In theory we the M&M clan should be able to use any social network out there, and post our Zeitegeist as we live. If at any time any one wishes to retrieve how it came to be that Terry lives in Kalamazoo today, about 12000 miles where he was born. You can serch for Terry+Trichur+Fernandez Lane+Kalamazoo and wallah!! you have the answer.

I got out a couple of concepts there so let me tag them so folks can easily get to this information:
Semantic Web, cognition and recall, Indexing, Social media, Social networks, Search algorithms, Information retrieval.

The question is how do I capture the Stories I heard Dennis Britto tell us when we were young?. How can I capture and convey the moment, when he let us put our finger in the hole in his head? Gary V. is perhpas one answer. Any one who has watched Gary V and his incredible story telling, will agree he is Dennis Britto reincarnated. There are other great story tellers out there: Sir Ken Robinson, Larry Lessing, Jon Steward, Ze Frank to name a few. They all have one thing in common, they use other forms of media to convey their stories.

So lots of questions for the future generations in the M&M clan to sink their teeth into. One thing is for sure, When my Uncles, Aunts, Cousins travelled far away from Managalore (uncle George, Aunty Flavy, Uncle Willy, Uncle Jimmy to name just a few) their only medium of communication was writing letters. Whats more, I am sure there were Stories like Edgar told us the other day about a Dog named Puski that we are not priviy to becuase there was not way to use the world wide web as a repository and google was not aournd to index the information. With the result, we lost a lot of history. What are we going to do about it?

Let history repeat it self?

November pictures

2008-11-01T23:14:00.000-07:00

My goal as all goals go, is to write at least 500 words a week on this blog, to help improve my writing skills for the days ahead. So please dont look for any hidden agenda here. I dont think I have ever explained why this blog is called http. Well, the honest truth is, I was in search of a kitchy name for a brand that did not have any true substance other than being a sandbox. So I looked around, liked the metaphorical approach that slasdot, digg, 37 signals and the rest of the folks had taken and decided to invest in http. Remind me to tell you how I took on the moniker of mibdepot sometime.

This particular post is an experiment in sending pictures from my phone to the blog. What you see here is my teeny balcony off my home office, yes I am lucky to have that, and a view of the backyard as the leaves are falling in preparation for the winter from the said balcony.

I have been writing to prepare for some intense research and writing the next 5 years. This brand of this blog is just that. My research,writing and publishing sandbox. Pictures are worth a thousand words they say. So I am playing around with how to get pictures to the blog the unconentional way or any which way possible.

Podcasts and Videocasts will be next I am sure.

Saturday Morning Fall Shot

2008-11-01T22:51:00.000-07:00

Saturday morning Fall Shot in November.

its all about Perspective

2008-10-25T06:45:00.000-07:00

This one is all about perspective when used as a metaphor. Sometimes it is necessary to see beyond our point of view to get a better understanding of what is going on. Sometimes it does not matter, but most times we get to see way more than what is apparent if we change our viewpoint.

We are in the midst of a historic election year and there is just about 10 days till America elects a new president. I will use that backdrop to explain my point about perspective and viewpoints.

In Knowledge management circles there is a concept called "conformational bias". Basically this means that if your thought process is inclined one way, you tend to analyze and dissect events from the point of view of your BIAS. So if you are a democrat, everything the Republican candidate says and does is phooey and vice versa. So if conformational bias can skew our perspective where does the truth lie?.

Lets take a look at John Mccain's (Republican candidate) campaign for a moment: He is running on a ticket where the current president's approval rating is in the single digits, the economy is in a bad state and we are still fighting a war that was never popular. So if you walk in his shoes, he has quite a campaign going. The big question is can we learn something from it?. If you were put in a situation of not having a snowball's chance in hell, but you were knee deep in it, how do stay motivated?

Well it is all about perspective and viewpoints.

Take a game, your favorite game. You are down at half time, so way down that you dont really have a chance of winning, what do you do?. Do you throw in the towel? or do you play the game out and making it a point to learn, so the next game you play, you have learnt from it? My heart goes out to the loosing team, becuase it takes a lot more to play the game out than the winning team. It is easy for the baser side of human emotion to come out when you are put in a state of being a loosing team and it is easy to not concentrate on skill, but rather on unproductive paths.

So if you see charector assasination taking a frontal role or a focus for the loosing side, you know why. it is all about perspective and viewpoint.

So my hats off to the Mccain campaing for still being in the game. And remember when his team does not concentrate on issues that matter, and focus on socialism, race and other base emotional issues, they are just human beings, playing on a loosing team.

The GOP academy and the Madrassa's

2008-10-04T19:05:00.000-07:00

If you join the GOP academy, you can learn how to wink, pronounce NUCLEAR in a folksy way and the subtle art of "Management by Fear". If you join a Madrassa, I am not sure if they teach you how to wink in public, or pronounce NUCLEAR a folksy way, but they will teach you "Management by Fear". So in our heart of hearts the ideology is not very different, so why do we have a big problem about the Madrassas?.

If you answered "They are evil" or "They are the enemy" then you score 100 points on this quiz. Which is what this Saturday morning Rant is all about. Quizzes.

You see, to mobilize the masses you need a common enemy, in the "Management by Fear" approach. You find one, you paint them as evil and you go after them, regardless of cast, creed, culture. It is also very cyclical. Meaning one year your enemy might be this group, next year they will be another and so on. In the past our enemies have been, the Japanese, the Russians, the chineese, the Vietnamese, the Germans, the Moslems, Wall Street and who knows who is next. The fact remains that to stay united, to drown our miseries, to get relief from truth, we need an an ememy. An enemy that we can rally around. That is the corner stone of "Management by Fear".

So what does all this have to do with Quizzess? Well, glad you roped me back to the main theme.

If you asked me a question and I did not know the answer, you are bound to think lesser of me. If this were an exam, the result would be, I would not get a passing grade. However, if you asked me a question and I made you feel that you asked me the wrong question and perhaps you should have asked me the question that I knew a very good answer to, we all come away winners. So remember this. If you are asked a question, and you dont know the answer, formulate your own question, anwer it well and chastise the one asking the question for asking you the wrong question. That my friends is the ultimate in Management by Fear.

So next time you hear of people with power tell you, that the sky is falling, be very afraid, this is has never happened before, ask yourself the question. Is this Management by Fear?. Would it make it any better if I winked and pronounced NUCLEAR in a folksy way?. You are right gosh darn it. You Betcha!!

Continuity

2008-09-27T09:12:00.000-07:00

I had a thought today and it was fairly discontinuous. As I was attending the HCI 440 Class, my mind wandered. We were into Conceptual models and wandering and mental chatter can happen particularly when you are doing a distance online class.

So I thought of continuity. How I can connect thoughts that are discontinuous over time. More of how to categorize or come up with thought buckets.

This past weekend I attended a wedding and memories from that event will go into a Family and friends Event bucket, within that, it would go into a Wedding bucket and so on. Then over time as the thought becomes discontinuous, I can easily store thoughts into its proper taxonomy.

At some point in time collection of thoughts in these buckets turn into intuition. Cognitive sciences are all over this for ages. For example, you tell a child, dont touch fire, the child touches fire, bucktizes the information about how it burns when he/she touched fire and then eventually never touches fire with her bare hands. Interestingly never revisiting that truth ever again, becuase hot is hot and will continue to stay that way.

My exposure to electricity is pretty similar. I always cringe when I change a bulb for fear of touching a wrong part. I dont ever remeber ever getting an electric shock, but some how the cognitive process registerd this into my intution and now I tread lightly.

However I see electricians work with electrical equipment and electricity in general with disdain born out of knowing electricity well. I wish I had that knowledge in everything I did. I wish all of us have that power to undertand. That power can actually eliminate fear. Continuity can be a wonderful thing, for it provides a window into those buckets of the past.

Who Said Ducks Cant Dance?.

2008-09-24T11:10:00.001-07:00

It is true that Ducks cant Dance, but they do Waddle and more importantly they know how to have fun. Perhaps they even drink?

And so it came to pass that last Weekend most of the D'Souza cousins (extended of course) met in Cleveland to celebrate Vinay and Angela's wedding. I had promised myself, I would keep up with the writing even if I were at the wedding, but good times prevailed, and the writing hit the dust.

These past few days, there has been a lot of email traffic with the trendy topics of discussion revolving around, the happy couple, contended parents and of course the duck footed D'Souza cousins. My take: they are not duck footed at all, there are some amongst the cousins who are way too good, making the rest of us look duck footed. But dancing lessons would be a good thing, No?

By Sunday morning, as each of the families started to leave for home, we all felt we should do this again. The place of choice appears to be North Carolina in June of 2009. On Tap: Dancing lessons, Cricket, sunshine on the beach and good food.

I wanted to leave you folks with my thoughts on the wedding:

The rehersal dinner on Friday night was great, loved the place, loved the food and most of all loved the company. Denzil, Ronnie and Lynn did a great job making sure no one was left behind. I know some of you thought the bus driver did not know what he was doing, but he got you there on time. The night before the wedding: We drank and sang and got security to visit us. Always a sign of a great party. The Roce: it is a tradition, a little messy for some but great for the rest. Aunty Celene, Jennifer, Yvette, Antoinette, George, your oveos are the best in the continental US. Loved you guys reading off the blackberry, shows we can be traditional and cutting edge at the same time. The Wedding: On time, short and sweet and that priest was good. The Choir deserves major kudos. You guys sounded so professional, it was truly a treat. Jim Bab and Willie Bab, I am sure were watching, truly proud of thier offspring. The Reception was a great party, great fun and lots of terrific dancing, we wished it did not end.

Vinay and Angela, you guys looked Marvellous, such poise and what great smiles.
Dawn and Jose, you have passed the milestone of milestones and you did it with grace and style. Now for those "grandchillen"
Sannu and Tom: You are the Smartest and cutest couple we know. You make us proud, and it is a pleasure to just hang around you guys. Remember your Mom and Dad want "grandchillen". I had this anecdote that I wanted to share about a goat who knocked down Sannu, when she was yeah tall in Salem. Not sure if anyone remembers, but Mom, Dad and I do. Sannu you were about 15 months old then.
Sydney, Sanjay, Anosh, Michelle and Liam (Angella's brother)
reminded me of the good times we used have at various weddings many
years ago. I still hear the pigs squealing at 5 in the morning, but
what a great memory.
Maya was so excited weeks before we left for the wedding, she
was excited to meet up with Merryl and have fun, it is nice to see
cousins grow up.
My Brotha Denzil, thank you for being you. Thank you for all the hard work and thank you for getting us to the church on time.
Lynn and Peter, Great toast from Lynn, but then I dont think anyone expected anything less.
Aunty Celene, in a wedding steeped in tradition, it was fitting that you
presided as the D'souza elder. Thank you for representing Mommy, I am
sure she would not have it any other way. Shanti for the great konkani
songs after the rehsersal dinner. I am amazed how well you remember all
those songs and yes I will come for your Birthday if you invite me.
Eugie, Merv and Raju, it was great seeing you guys after 25+ years, I agree with Seema, Raj is the handsomest of the lot.
Geetha and Mario, it is always great to see you guys. You have great children and Jennifer owes Michelle big time.
Jennifer and Cyrus, you bring back memories of Chickamaglur, white house, the church next door and ofcourse Balehithlu estate.
Antoinette
and George you guys are simply amazing, those are not just words. The
roce and the Wedding would not have been the same without you guys.
Vernon and Carly, thank you for coming down and sharing. Hope you
will continue to join the gang and keep up the traditon of good times
Yvette
and Mike, You both were spectacular on the dance floor and your singing
is out of this world, I am truly honored to have such great cousins.
Geraldine and Shaidan, You both just blew my mind, you have so much energy and such grace, it was a treat. Thank you.
Ronnie,
Seema you are the coolest couple I know. More importantly, Seema what
magic do you possess? the kids behave like angles when they are at your
table.
Loy and Margaret, it was great seeing you after 20 years.
Vivek this was our first time meeting, it is great to see the next
generation kick into high gear.
Shayla, thank you for being there. Freeda has many reasons to be proud in you.

Validating Truths every so often

2008-09-12T19:14:00.000-07:00

If you are a Project Manager, one of the things you do as you run the project is to review the requirements at certain intervals to make sure your project produces a product that will be used when complete.

It happens in real life as well, take our school system for example. I remember when I was in the 6th grade, I did something I should not have done, I got called into the principles office, where this nun pulled out a long narrow flexible cane, made me stick out my palm and whacked me a few times across it. We don't do that any more in most schools. At least I think we have validated our truth about discipline and use other methods to discipline our children. I don't think we do this enough, because if we did, we would have evolved faster or at least we would have shed some truths that need shedding very badly. Perhaps I should make a list like Earl on his hit show My Name is Earl.

What made me write about this today?. Well as you know I am taking a HCI class at DePaul this quarter. The first assignment was the proverbial usability experience analysis of an "Alarm Clock". It is a cliche in the UX (Usability eXperience)world to use the alarm clock and usability in the same breath because of the ubiquitous nature of the device and the ubiquitous nature of the fact that we wake up every morning to do something. As I set down to write this paper, I realized that we never validated the truth about the the alarm clock. Is it a time keeper or is it a device to wake me up?.

If I were asked to design a device to wake people up today, from scratch as Google did with the new browser, what would I do? What would you do?

Here is what I came up with:

Having used an Alarm clock for over 30 years now, I never once had to validate the truth about Alarm clock design, until I got to this HCI class. As a designer, I believe in validating design requirements often, hence this approach. Consider this is an academic/design exercise and I start with validating the truth as follows:

In my years of using the Alarm Clock, I have come to associate an alarm clock to have 3 major components:

1) Alarm/Alerting mechanism;
When an event occurs, send out an alert indicating it occurred.

2) Time displaying mechanism:
A device that displays universal time that is adjusted for time zones represented by geograpic locations

3) Setup/Configuration process: The user is given hardware and instructions on how to program the Alerting mechanism as well as the Time displaying device.

Validating Truth behind the purpose of the device:

The question is what are we trying to accomplish? If the mission is to be woken up at a specific time, then we need a device to wake us from slumber/sleep/state of rest at at a time we specify before that state or have specified as a recurring event. The whole object is to to be awakened from Sleep. That is the purpose, the object, the criteria we should design for.

Through time and iterations of industrial design, we have arrived at the modern day alarm clock. When I was growing up, my Mom or my sister used to wake me up. I always woke up as they persisted until I woke up. In essence my job was to wake up and the job of reminding me to wake up and persisting till I woke up was removed from me in a state of slumber. The closest that any "Wake up" method of today comes to that effective way of being woken up at a specified time is the Wake up call, where you call into a system, be it the front desk of a hotel or a wake up service and it automatically calls you at a specified time.

If I were given a fresh start were asked to design a Alarm clock today, that is exactly what I would do. with this method, I am not investing in a Clock, but more in a Wake up device.

So my truth (validated) today amounts to this. If I need a Wake up call, I should use the most efficient way of doing just that. If I need a clock, then look for a device that provides the most Accurate time for you and your current state. If you are blind, you should get a audible time display device, If you are deaf you should have a Visual or sensory display and so on.

Should Alarm Clocks be designed as a combination Alerting mechanism + Accurate Time keeper + interface for Users to configure Alerting and Time?
Perhaps they should and if so let us design for each of the 3 parts and then consolidate them to arrive at a good design that fits our UI and UE (user interface and experience needs). Following are guidelines for each of these components:

1) Keep it simple: means using known, stable methods and technology that consistently provides alerts, keeps correct time and provides a simple UI. Failure is within six sigma limits.
2) Keep it redundant: means making sure in case of failure, a back up plan kicks in, keeping Failure with the six sigma limits.

Keep on Validating your TRUTHS, that's my Saturday morning Rant for this week.

Of Content and Content deliverers.

2008-09-05T06:30:00.000-07:00

Last weeks Rant was all about Listening: Natural progression would be to talk about the yang of that Yin. Which brings me this week to "Content and How to deliver it so folks would listen".

Let me start with some examples from current events:

1) Google created a Web Browser from scratch and released it with a COMIC STRIP this week. They spoke through a comic strip.

2) RNC (Republican National Convention) kept the media/analysts away during their speeches, so the Content would not be sliced and diced in real time.

While listening is more of a passive role, meaning you listen to what is being said or deliverd, Delivering content appears to be very dynamic and often times takes ingenuity. Take this scenario:

Back in the 80's the guys at the Xerox Palo Alto labs, wanted machines to talk, so here is what they came up with:

CSMA/CD Carrier Sense Multiple Access / Collision Detection: The low level network arbitration protocol used on Ethernet. Nodes wait for quiet on the net before starting to transmit and listen while they are transmitting. If two nodes transmit at once the data gets corrupted. The nodes detect this and continue to transmit for a certain length of time to ensure that all nodes detect the collision. The transmitting nodes then wait for a random time before attempting to transmit again thus minimizing the chance of another collision. The ability to detect collision during transmission reduces the amount of bandwidth wasted on collisions compared with simple ALOHA broadcasting. (1995-02-23)

In every sense, we converse very much like the Protocol but still are in a state of conflict, are we creating protocols better than we can humanly interact?. When will human communications and interaction learn from switching, multiplexing, compression, stateless and stateful packet filtering?

Why is this relevant? We create in our likeness, so pay close attention as I dissect this using a metaphor approach. On the left is What is our creation and the right side is Human perception.

1) Protocol = grammer

2) Ethernet = Language

3) Nodes = People

4) transmit = deliver content.

5) Collision and detection = from a transmitters point of view, eliminate noise

What is missing appears to be the listening part. Why was that left out?. Perhaps at that time, LISTENING was not important enough to those who developed Ethernet. Circling back to my current events thought from earlier in this post, Google said they created a new browser because things have changed since the first days of the web and the HTTP protocol. So they developed a browser from scratch to meet the new paradigms of today. Quite a concept. So if Ethernet were developed today (again) would the emphasis be on LISTENING? and not so much as TRANSMISSION? Food for thought perhaps which leads us to WE NEED TO VALIDATE OUR TRUTHS OFTEN.

Problem I see with using metaphors to get a point across, is that one can get lost along the way or your reader can loose his way in the maze so the trick is to use these design principles

SIMPLE

DIRECT

VALIDATE the content periodically.

VALIDATING CONTENT , introduces the element of TIME. So the big question is should we validate our TRUTHS from time to time? and when it comes to LISTENING and SPEAKING, do our concepts need validation? Most probably.

Circling back one more time to the RNC convention mentioned above: Quite a few half truths were presented to make the point that we should vote for the Mccain/Palin ticket. Lots of innuendo's, and an approach of instilling FEAR was evident in most of the speeches. The CONTENT and the DELIVERY can be a powerful way to sway our perception even if they are half TRUTHS.

I have rambled on about the other half of the equation that makes up a CONVERSATION today. Not sure if it is a cohesive set of arguments. I will leave you with that for now.

Remember VALIDATE your TRUTHS frequently. The result might surprise you.

Listen Now, Hear me later.

2008-08-30T10:40:00.001-07:00

I suddenly have this urge to listen. Not sure when it started but its there and it is not going away. So this week I am going to talk about LISTENING

One on One listening
Listening in a Group
Listening to the the World
Listening to Oneself
Listening Tools
Deterrents to Listening, the Noise.

One on One listening:
Face to Face listening, mostly falls into two categories, Same time/Same Place and Same time/Different Place but they both involve direct one on one conversations. The stake of each participant in the conversation defines the intensity with which they listen. The higher the stake, the greater the intensity. It could be a conversation with a child, spouse, significant other, a friend, an acquaintance, a relative, colleague, superior, the list goes on. Fact remains that in a conversation you have to listen, which defines the quality of the exchange of information. Listening is a such an integral part of our lives that we seldom stop to measure how well we listen or how much we gain out of a conversation. How well we listen also depends on the deterrents to listening, the Noise that comes into play as we listen. A lot of the noise is our own mental chatter, our predispositions and our confirmational biases that we have grown to accept as part of our make up. Srikumar Rao has talked about mental chatter in his book " Are you ready to Succeed" . Any good Knowledge management book or course will tell you that Confirmational Bias is a strong deterrent to effective listening. So there is a good chance that we dont listen effectively at all and perhaps we should start paying attention.
Listening in a Group:
Again as in the One on One listening, Listening in a Group, falls into the two categories of Time/Place. In a social setting when there are more than a few folks interacting, listening can take on a different path. If the group comprises of like minded people, you will hear what you always wanted to hear and what sustains your interest in the subject. In a group, listening follows the traditional norm of followers and leaders. We tend to listen to a strong leader more than the collective intelligence. We often prefer listening to the trickle down from a few strong leaders still after so many years of evolution. So what does it take to listen to the collective intelligence?. To understand that, we need to look at how the social media movement has generated listening tools and how these tools can provide us plethora of avenues to fine tune our listening skills.
Listening to the the World:
An extension of listening in a Group, listening to the world is becoming far more possible in the 21st century. We do hear more about Wars, famine, hunger, disasters and we hear about them faster than we did in the past. Development in Media and technology has pushed the envelope to the point where we are starting to see an information overload. We cant listen effectively to it all, but we can listen effectively to what we choose to. We are a planet of 6 billion people, of which today may be a billion can tap into the resources through the internet, telling us that we have a long way to go, and we should get there sooner than later.
On a side note, for those of you are into technology, we will run out of IP (IPv4) addresses spaces in the next 3 to 4 years, so get ready for a change to IPv6. We might have to revisiting our addressing technology on the whole.
Listening to Oneself:
Listening to ourself has become so engrained into us that we seldom stop to think of how we do it. Unless ofcourse you are studing the congnitive process in a academic setting. But it is important particularly becuase of the mental chatter I mentioned before. This mental chatter has a way of distracting us from effectively listening. There have been various forms of meditation tracks that have tools to manage the mental chatter, but we seldom have the time or inclination to work at fine tuning the art of Listening to Oneself.
Listening Tools:
In IT Operations management, listening tools are huge, and so are Unattended Event Notifications that are driven out of the listening tools. As human beings we have invented these tools that can help us manage our business. There are some pretty incredible algorithms and slick methods developed that help us with the competitive advantage. So why not scale those techniques down to the individual? We are slowly starting to see a progression in that direction. There are many technology evangelists like Chris Brogan who are pushing the envelop in this area, perhaps we should all STOP and LISTEN.
Deterrents to Listening, the Noise:
Finally deterrents to listening: If you lived on a farm or in a remote place, they say the pace is slower. They say you dont need to multitask as much. They say your head is clearer, the air is sweeter, the water more refreshing and so on and so forth. In fact those of us who can afford it even take vacations to sleepy villages in Portugal to enjoy this serenity. Deterrents to Listening is the lack of serenity perhaps and does not have to be limited to some places/some times? So what does it take to reduce the deterrents to Listening?.

I really belive it takes more that using tools to manage your time better. It take more than following the 7 habits of succeful people, and countless others who have made it rich by writing books about how to effectively manage your precious time.

It really might be as simple as listening to your self once in a while. Leave your confirmational biases at the door, and start LISTENING, it might just make a difference.

Thats my Saturday morning Rant for this labor day weekend. Happy Listening.

Setup an Online Store for $10 a month, while Amazon will charge you $99.99 for the same

2008-08-24T18:40:00.000-07:00

As promised, Here is how I setup an online store for $10 a month, I felt compelled to write this after I realized that Amazon charges $99.99 for the same. I learned this the hard way by porting my store to Amazon and then shut it down, when I realized I was being treated as a dumb customer.

1) Pick an ISP to host your website, this should cost you around $8 a month. Register your domain name for $2 a month, I think you can get it cheaper, Total for ISP and domain = $10. That is the extent of your costs.
2) Point your domain name to your ISP's name servers. Or follow their instructions to park your domain there.
3) Install OsCommerce (2.2 rc2 is the one that I installed the other day) using "Simple scripts", Bluehost my ISP has this available for free. I am not affiliated with Bluehost, It just happens I picked them instead of many comparable ISP's out there.
4) For ease of getting OsCommerce developer plugins to work, install OsCommerce in the /Catalog folder. For example, I installed mine at http://fernandi.com/catalog
5) Once installed, login as admin, and change the machine generated password to your choosing
6) Change settings in the configuration submodules, go through each one of them and customize, if is fairly self explanatory. You can always come back here and tweak it further so dont go overboard in this step
7) Install the Easy populate module. You will need this to upload inventory, Later on you will find this really useful for mass updates. Trust me you need this feature, unless you like doing boring stuff manually. I installed "Easypopulate v2.76f-MS2 (with attributes) r1". Modules are easy to install, follow the readme and install documentation and test.
8) Install the Page Editor module, You need this to add pages or modify existing pages, again trust me on this. I installed PageEditorv1.6. Please note that this module requires you make changes to the DB, but the sql script is provided. I followed the install instructions which requires you to copy a few files and update a few. This is a little tedious, but if you want to know what is being modified, follow the manual editing process. If you trust this module, go ahead and copy the files provided. Test the module once installed.
9) Install the PayPal express check out module, you will need to get a paypal API access with the UID/PWD and signature, follow instructions on paypal for this, fairly easy to get it working. The payPay express module for OsCommerce I used for this is: paypal_express_checkout_IPN_v0_4_1. There is a module already installed in the defaul install, you will need to disable that, install this one and then enable the configuration
10) Install the USPS plugin. Again this requires you to get a UID/PWD from USPS. I installed version USPS Methods 4_1_4. Follow the readme file to get your account created, it takes about a day to get that going.

Once you have all this going, you now have to upload your inventory. Download the inventory from the default install as a template. Clean up the data there and add your own inventory. Make sure you save it as tab delimited format before uploading. Test by uploading a few records first. It is fairly straightforward if you follow instructions in the Easy Populate module.

That is it Folks, your have your online store running. Some very important things to note:
1) when installing OsCommerce using simple scripts make sure you install it in the /catalog directory. Most plugins are written with this structure in mind, so make it easier on your self and do it this way.
2) keep the mods and plugin's to a bare minimum, The first time around I installed numerous plugins, in the end, I lost track of all the changes that went in and was afraid to touch it lest I break something. Notice I have not even installed SSL. Since PayPal is taking care of payments, I dont want to deal with encryption. Also the minute you get into SSL your ISP will have you purchasing a separate IP and the SSL module.
3) The only modules I have added to the stock install of OsCommerce are: a) Easy Populate and b) Page editor. The other two the paypal express checkout and USPS shipping are updates to what is already there, but you need to update to get proper functionality.
4) Test your uploads and mass updates, this will come in real handy later on as your inventory grows.

Thats all there is to it. If you have a lot of money to spare go for the Amazon Seller Central deal for $99.99. But why do that when you can get pretty much the same results for $10.

My journey - August 2008

2008-08-24T09:55:00.000-07:00

Past three weeks have been hectic, for most folks summer is a time to kick back and relax, enjoy beach time with the family. It has been all that and much more, so my Saturday morning rant for this week covers a lot of ground.

The August Journey:

1) Got really busy at work because I had to fill in for my boss who had not taken a 2 week vacation in 10 years, on top of that we had an important FIOS release and a looming strike which added to the normal work load.
2) Family renunion, the annual Casey reunion at Southhaven, I will post pictures when the Jaicks send me some.
3) Amazon SellerCentral snafu, after a week of working with Amazon's seller central to build up the entire Joy of Fabrics online store, I pulled out disillusioned with the games Amazon plays. More on this below
4) OsCommerce tweaking. I had built Joy of Fabrics online store using OsCommerce in 2005. After the disaster with Amazon, I picked it up again and tweaked it down to a science. That was the silver lining of the Summer of 2008.

Work Scene:
Filling in for my boss, was a lot of work but not all that hard. The toughest part was the extra effort in having to understand what his boss wanted to see. One thing I learnt from Knowledge Management classes (Thank you Al Burns) is to figure out what someone wants, and provide that. This falls in the realm of eliciting tacit knowledge and can be hard, particularly if you dont interact with the person frequently. The looming strike and the preparation that went into gearing up for that did add quite a bit of load into the normal routine, but some of us had it much easier than the others. I have friends who were assigned other Jobs and had to train for it for 3 months. It all turned out okay in the end. A new contract for 3 years was finally signed.

Family reunion:
Every year our families meet in Southhaven. It used to be Siesta Key in Florida and then it got too much of a distance for the Grand Parents, so now for the past 4 years, the destination has been Southhaven Michigan a sleepy beach town. The The whole family was there including Linda who came from Nairobi for a few days. Always a pleasure to see the Jaicks, the Fialkos since they dont live around here like Dan, Barb and we do. So it was a week of eating drinking and being merry for the family and birthday celebrations for Ellen, Beth, Sean and Mike. Ofcouse, the Strike situation at work, put me on standby, which meant that I could only join the clan a couple days. But all in all it was a good time.

This was the year that Sydney decided to get a mohawk, and Barb gave him her blessing by saying "You have a good nut Syd". Mike exclaimed "Aw right!!". The rest of us just went with the flow.

This was also the summer that Maya figured out she could do something that most folks in the world cannot do, you guessed it, she can lick her own elbow. The mohawk and the elbow licking, Need I add that it is a proud summer in the Fernandi household!!

Its all about lack of Transparency:
It appears that this theme is a broken record in my mind. I keep coming back to the lack of transparency. These past two weeks, I got a sizable dose of that, from no other than Amazon Seller Central. Short story, I moved the Joy of Fabrics online store to Amazon's Seller Central. It tooks some doing and was fun, took about 2 days of figuring out the upload schema and dns zone files. Then realized that Amazon did some false advertising to get me to move and now that I did, they felt they had me where they could milk it for all they could. I feel sorry for many who do not have the same choices as I did. My choice was to pull out, shut down my store and go back to OsCommerce based online store. I did not like the fact that Amazon's parting gift was an announcement that Joy of Fabrics was shutting down instead of saying that Joy of Fabrics is going elsewhere because they were unhappy with the bad service!!. I am very disapointed with Amazon right now, I some how felt that a web 2.0 company should be above "used car sales techniques". Live and learn I guess.

Amazon and Jeff Bezos if you are listening:
What got you where you are is the "VALUE" you bring to the customer, dont throw it all away with "I got you by your balls, and I will do anything I choose and there is nothing the customer can do" attitude. This customer walked out on you, and this customer will tell other customers and who knows the word might spread.

OsCommerce and Joy Of Fabrics:
Back in 2004, when my wife wanted to sell her fabric creations such as fabric vases, fabric bowls, fabric quilts, she teamed up with a buddy who charged her 40% for selling her products. So I stepped in, built a linux box, got an ssl cert, got OsCommerce working as her storefront. Joy of Fabrics had an online presence with very little startup costs. She did have some sales, but really lacked the PR and Marketting and the SEO push to take it to the next level.

On the technology side, while she could manage inventory and product uploads through the admin gui, I soon realized that this store might be better of in a hosted envrironment. I had really tweaked OsCommerce to get it where I wanted, but the tweaks were so numerous, that managing it, let alone porting it else where, would take some serious doing. Well, our move to Kalamazoo last summer, clinched it. Since then the Store has been in maintenance mode, until I got this note from Amazon Central saying they could host my site for $39.95 a month. So I jumped at the opportunity and you know the rest of the story. The silve lining was, I was now in a mode of getting things to work, so I picked up OsCommerce once again and should add that I am glad I did.

This time the key was to keep the mods down to the barest minimum: Install OsCommerce through simple scripts, Install the easy populate contribution, install the page editor contribution, install the PayPal express check out contribution/modification and finally the USPS shipping contribution/modification. I made sure to do all this in a test bed, so I can document and tune it down to a science. The Amazon Seller Central experience pushed me to tweaking OsCommerce to a "Not Magic Anymore" state. I will document the step by step shortly, hopefully others can take advantage of the experience. Yes folks, you can run an online store for just the cost of your hosting service. In my case, Bluehost costs $8 a month. Compare that to $99.99 a month for the Amazon Seller central attitude driven bad service.

Now if any one asks, why has Terry been so quiet these past few weeks, you know the answer.

Parting note:
Last night we went to watch Kalamazoo Kings baseball. Barb, Jen, Syd, Maya and Myself. We had good seats courtsey of Barb's financial planner. '

Well it was'nt wriggly field, but there is something magical about going to a sports stadium and being part of it.

Hope you are all having a great summer. If you came away with a silver lining, like I did, then it is all Okay in my book.

See you next week.

My 4.5 mile daily bike ride in the hood

2008-08-06T19:22:00.001-07:00

This is a pretty town for a bike ride. Very Hilly (is that really a word?) and no traffic, great to ride and push those endorphins to the maximum production. It takes me about 22 minutes, but I really break a sweat and feel good when done.

My goal is to do this daily, but stuff happens and things come in the way. So I try. Take a look at the elevation at the bottom of the map, which should tell you why I break a sweat. I am actually working my way up to joining a group that rides regularly, I believe they do about 15 miles which is 3 times what I do currently. Will get there. in the mean time enjoy the map.

Now for a little about my bike. I bought this Schwinn LeTour, 20 years ago in Chicago and never used it much. A couple of years ago when my kids started learning to ride I decided to get the bike looked over. The best $400 I spent in a while. The thing rides like a champ. Will post pictures of it soon.

Non Trivial availaibilty lessons for today's Thought Leaders.

2008-08-06T07:25:00.001-07:00

Suppose I were a leader with a whole slew of followers. What does my day look like?. For some it looks like this: (confession: took the following 4 bullets from Chris Brogan's note this morning)

Reading what friends write.
Reading about the “new marketing” industry and the tech industry (fishbowl).
Reading what people recommend.
Reading off the wall stuff that inspires new thoughts (outside the bowl).

The purpose behind these 4 bullets, of course is to "make things" that the followers find useful. But what of availability?

There are two kinds: Trivial and non Trivial. For most thought leaders today, availability does not even enter into the picture. Why? because with Availability there is a sense of immediacy. And the plain and simple truth is most so called thought leaders cant be bothered by that. Remember the God Father? He presided over these sessions where his followers would come to him and he would grant them his wishes. Great availability story there. We all knew exactly where we stood and he was always available to this followers.

Okay I am going somewhere with this and it mostly has to do with Non-Trivial availability. Some time ago, I had a boss who was always available when challenges were Trivial, but the minute it got any where near non-Trivial, the man was no where to be found. He must have thought that if he stays away I will always find a way. So why come in between a good thing.

You see I work in IT operations and Availability is a huge yardstick for us. So this generated a lot of discussion with SELF!!. It made me want to be available for the guys even more. Every time there was a situation, the picture of this boss who was never available when needed most came to mind and I would over compensate. To the point where I had enough material to write a dissertation on the subject.

It all started not too long ago. I was in a Data Mining class, Professor Mobashar (one of the best in my opinon) dropped this idea in passing about mining for availability and why it is important to categorize it into two buckets. Of course that was in the context of machine availability at that time, but boy did it get me thinking. What a concept.

So circling back to our Thought Leaders and what availability means to them. What is YOUR availability to your followers?. What percentage is Trivial availability?. Are you in the availability business at all?

Windows server performance monitoring benchmark taken from Steven Choy article 08042008

2008-08-04T07:18:00.001-07:00

Taken from Steven Choy's article on Server pulse

Hard Disk Bottleneck

LogicalDisk\% Free Space: This measures the percentage of free space on the selected logical disk drive. Take note if this falls below 15 percent, as you risk running out of free space for the OS to store critical files. One obvious solution here is to add more disk space.

PhysicalDisk\% Idle Time: This measures the percentage of time the disk was idle during the sample interval. If this counter falls below 20 percent, the disk system is saturated. You may consider replacing the current disk system with a faster disk system.

PhysicalDisk\Avg. Disk Sec/Read: This measures the average time, in seconds, to read data from the disk. If the number is larger than 25 milliseconds (ms), that means the disk system is experiencing latency when reading from the disk. For mission-critical servers hosting SQL Server® and Exchange Server, the acceptable threshold is much lower, approximately 10 ms. The most logical solution here is to replace the current disk system with a faster disk system.

PhysicalDisk\Avg. Disk Sec/Write: This measures the average time, in seconds, it takes to write data to the disk. If the number is larger than 25 ms, the disk system experiences latency when writing to the disk. For mission-critical servers hosting SQL Server and Exchange Server, the acceptable threshold is much lower, approximately 10 ms. The likely solution here is to replace the disk system with a faster disk system.

PhysicalDisk\Avg. Disk Queue Length: This indicates how many I/O operations are waiting for the hard drive to become available. If the value here is larger than the number of spindles plus two, that means the disk itself may be the bottleneck.
Memory\Cache Bytes: This indicates the amount of memory being used for the file system cache. There may be a disk bottleneck if this value is greater than 200MB.

Memory Bottleneck

Memory\% Committed Bytes in Use: This measures the ratio of Committed Bytes to the Commit Limit—in other words, the amount of virtual memory in use. This indicates insufficient
memory if the number is greater than 80 percent. The obvious solution for this is to add more memory.

Memory\% Available Mbytes: This measures the amount of physical memory, in megabytes, available for running processes. If this value is less than 5 percent of the total physical RAM, that means there is insufficient memory, and that can increase paging activity. To resolve this problem, you should simply add more memory.

Memory\Free System Page Table Entries: This indicates the number of page table entries not currently in use by the system. If the number is less than 5,000, there may well be a memory
leak.

Memory\Pool Non-Paged Bytes: This measures the size, in bytes, of the non-paged pool. This is an area of system memory for objects that cannot be written to disk but instead must remain in physical memory as long as they are allocated. There is a possible memory leak if the value is greater than 175MB (or 100MB with the /3GB switch). A typical Event ID 2019 is recorded in the system event log.

Memory\Pool Paged Bytes: This measures the size, in bytes, of the paged pool. This is an area of system memory used for objects that can be written to disk when they are not being used. There may be a memory leak if this value is greater than 250MB (or 170MB with the /3GB switch). A typical Event ID 2020 is recorded in the system event log.

Memory\Pages per Second: This measures the rate at which pages are read from or written to disk to resolve hard page faults. If the value is greater than 1,000, as a result of excessive paging, there may be a memory leak.

Processor Bottleneck

Processor\% Processor Time: Thismeasures the percentage of elapsed time the processor spends executing a non-idle thread. If the percentage is greater than 85 percent, the processor is overwhelmed and the server may require a faster processor.

Processor\% User Time: This measures the percentage of elapsed time the processor spends in user mode. If this value is high, the server is busy with the application. One possible solution here is to optimize the application that is using up the processor resources.

Processor\% Interrupt Time: This measures the time the processor spends receiving and servicing hardware interruptions during specific sample intervals. This counter indicates a possible hardware issue if the value is greater than 15 percent.

System\Processor Queue Length: This indicates the number of threads in the processor queue. The server doesn't have enough processor power if the value is more than two times the number of CPUs for an extended period of time.

Network Bottleneck

Network Interface\Bytes Total/Sec: This measures the rate at which bytes are sent and received over each network adapter, including framing characters. The network is saturated if you discover that more than 70 percent of the interface is consumed. For a 100-Mbps NIC, the interface consumed is 8.7MB/sec (100Mbps =100000kbps = 12.5MB/sec* 70 percent). In a situation like this, you may want to add a faster network card or segment the network.

Network Interface\Output Queue Length: This measures the length of the output packet queue, in packets. There is network saturation if the value is more than 2. You can address this problem by adding a faster network card or segmenting the network.

Process Bottleneck

Process\Handle Count: This measures the total number of handles that are currently open by a
process. This counter indicates a possible handle leak if the number is greater than 10,000.

Process\Thread Count: This measures the number of threads currently active in a process. There may be a thread leak if this number is more than 500 between the minimum and maximum number of threads.

Process\Private Bytes: This indicates the amount of memory that this process has allocated that
cannot be shared with other processes. If the value is greater than 250 between the minimum and maximum number of threads, there may be a memory leak.

Yesteryear pedagogy and his friend

2008-08-02T09:22:00.001-07:00

Mr. Yesteryear pedagogy and his friend the right Rev. honorable Mob Mentality.

Yesteryear was a fried of mine. He came from a school where it was okay to have slaves and trade them. He also would burn loot and riot if you caricatured his strong beliefs and he had his faithful friend and preacher Mob Mentality to help him in his pedagogy. Wait that's not Yesteryear, that's this year, what am I thinking...

We need to have a course in how not to succumb to the pressure of Mob Mentality. What a novel idea, we need to have a pedagogy on how to think for ourselves.Here is a stinka, If we came to point where the Mob learned to think individually, would that be Mob Mentality as well?. hmm..

Home(less) thoughts...

The Followers and Leaders, the Pew and the Pulpit.

2008-08-02T08:49:00.001-07:00

After so many years of intellectual development what has changed?. Nothing in my opinion. We are still a global culture of Followers and Leaders, the Pew and the Pulpit, the Soap box and the on lookers. Need I continue.

The age of electronic media has changed how we follow or Lead perhaps. The Pulpit is no longer a physical object and the Soap box in Hyde park is no longer just that. But this article is not about leaders or the elite or the trickle down goodness that we have all faithfully condoned and accepted for so long. It is about the faithful, about the followers and the listeners in each of us and how potent the collective consciousness can be.

So what does this all mean? Can we get to a point where there are no leaders, no pulpit and no soap box?. Can the listeners and the followers and the innocent bystanders become a collective whole. How much more effective would we be if the Leaders were just Data Miners and Knowledge experts who provide us the message without imparting their subjective spin on the collective thoughts?. Leadership today is sustained by the power it brings them. Can we change this model. I would like to see our future leaders become leaders not for the power it brings them, but for total selflessness. If not get out of the business.

The Open source model starts out with this selfless concept, but then quickly gets swallowed up by how much power the concept of giving stuff away for free can bring us. So much so today we give away for free and when we have enough followers, we Sell out.

We have always been people centric. We adore and worship the person(s) who deliver the message and deliver it well. In short the message takes a secondary role to the messenger. So much so, even if the the message is bad, as long as it is delivered by our favorite messenger, all is well. We are okay with it. Conformational BIAS is what it all amounts to. But it is driven by our model of Leaders and Followers. Until we break away from that, we will forever be defined by our MESSENGERS and not the MESSAGE.

With that I end my Saturday morning Rant.

In search of an optimal Cognitive process

2008-07-29T06:08:00.001-07:00

If Jung had a son, could he explain this to him. If he did then, it is all worth it is my take.

The Eight Cognitive Processes

Adapted from Linda V. Berens and Dario Nardi, Understanding Yourself and Others®: An Introduction to the Personality Type Code (Telos Publications, 2004) *Used with permission.

Perception

Jung classified the functions into two major groupings. He noted that
there are two major kinds of mental processes. One is perception, a
process of becoming aware of something. In the perceptive process,
there is some sort of stimulation and we become aware of or attend to
that stimulation. It is how we gather or access information. Jung
called this an irrational process since the awareness simply comes to
us. Jung identified two kinds of perception: Sensation and Intuition.
Sensing is a process of becoming aware of tangible information.
INtuiting* is a process of becoming aware of conceptual information.
Sensing and iNtuiting can both be done in either the outer, extraverted
world or in the inner, introverted world.

Judgment

The other kind of mental process identified by Jung is that of
judgment, a process of organizing, evaluating, and coming to
conclusions. Using the judging process, some sort of evaluation is
made. Jung identified two kinds of judgment: Thinking and Feeling, both
of which can be used in either the outer, extraverted world or in the
inner, introverted world. Simply put, Thinking judgments are based on
objective criteria or principles, and Feeling judgments are based on
personal, interpersonal, or universal values.

Se - extraverted Sensing

Experiencing
the immediate context; noticing changes and opportunities for action;
being drawn to act on the physical world; accumulating experiences;
scanning for visible reactions and relevant data; recognizing “what
is”.

Si - introverted Sensing

Reviewing
past experiences; “what is” evoking “what was”; seeking detailed
information and links to what is known; recalling stored impressions;
accumulating data; recognizing the way things have always been.

Ne - extraverted iNtuiting

Interpreting
situations and relationships; picking up meanings and interconnections;
being drawn to change “what is” for “what could possibly be”; noticing
what is not said and threads of meaning emerging across multiple
contexts.

Ni - introverted iNtuiting

Foreseeing
implications and likely effects without external data; realizing “what
will be”; conceptualizing new ways of seeing things; envisioning
transformations; getting an image of profound meaning or far-reaching
symbols.

Te - extraverted Thinking

Ordering;
organizing for efficiency; systematizing; applying logic; structuring;
checking for consequences; monitoring for standards or specifications
being met; setting boundaries, guidelines, and parameters; deciding if
something is working or not.

Ti - introverted Thinking

Analyzing;
categorizing; evaluating according to principles and whether something
fits the framework or model; figuring out the principles on which
something works; checking for inconsistencies; clarifying definitions
to get more precision.

Fe - extraverted Feeling

Connecting;
considering others and the group—organizing to meet their needs and
honor their values and feelings; maintaining societal, organizational,
or group values; adjusting and accommodating others; deciding if
something is appropriate or acceptable to others.

Fi - introverted Feeling

Valuing;
considering importance and worth; reviewing for incongruity; evaluating
something based on the truths on which it is based; clarifying values
to achieve accord; deciding if something is of significance and worth
standing up for.

What you stand to gain through Social Media.

2008-07-26T12:42:00.001-07:00

A few years back, I got my family and friends to sign up with JotSpot, yes before they were bought out by google, to do pretty much the same thing as what can easily done by facebook, Orkut or myspace today. Long before that, there were the IRC channels that I would use to gain insight about veritical topics, but today twitter, friendfeed and the likes makes that easy.

When I joined twitter, it was becuase I was into the "knowledge elicitation" kick, born out of a KM class I was taking at DePaul, thanks to Alan Burns. That was about 3 months ago. Today I have about 46 followers and I follow 37. A drop in the bucket when you compare those numbers to that of Shelisrael, Scobelizer, Chrisbrogan, davewiner or Techcruch and the likes. But while it might be important for some to have a large number of followers, what is important for me, is to be able to get at the important bits of imformation that is flowing through these channells. To understand that in quantitative terms, if each of those listed about have about 10K followers, I have access to the information flowing through their conversations, provided I know how to extract that. That is where the skills of ETL come in handy.

For example, today @Shelirsrael put out a request to get a list of businesses that were using twitter. I wont go into the model of using twitter to enhance the customer service experience, you can do that if you follow the stories of Zappos and the like, but instead in a few minutes, @shelisrael got a link to Twitter Brand Index , which is truly mind boggling.

Most twitter users are very proficient at following conversations, and use it in clever ways, but I am new to this game and every time I stumble onto something that is powerful, I like to share, so here goes.

I am following @shelisrael (one of the 37 that I follow), I see he puts out a request for a list of businesses who use twitter. A little later, he thanks everyone who sent in good information. Thats a trigger. I go to http://search.twitter.com and search for @shelisrael, it lists all his conversations, with the most recent ones on top. From there, I just drill down into conversations and get the information needed.

@Chrisbrogan put out a really nice blogpost on the 5 tools of social media, a while back. I find that a very interesting post or rather a great social media strategy. If you are a intentional social media leverager, it 's a must read. If you are hooked into social media then read his other posts as well.

I will leave you with this for today. If you are new to the twitter scence, and would like to LISTEN and learn, (with a slant into technology, mostly information systems), follow the guys and gals on the list that I follow. I am @mibdepot on twitter and you can get to me via http://twitter.com/mibdepot.

Happy Listening.

It's all about passion

2008-07-23T14:47:00.001-07:00

There is a great tradition at Winchell, it's called a happy hour, once a month, one household hosts and invites the entire neighborhood. Since moving here last year We have been to 3 of these and I must add, the reclusive me does not mind it one bit.

I have met a quite a few folks and like hearing their stories. Particularly what brings them or brought them to Kalamazoo. Okay you are wondering what does this have to do with passion?. Well be patient Kemo Sabe.

At the last happy hour, I run into this couple, both Geologists, who picked Kalamazoo for a variety of reasons, after having lived in many major cities in the US. Well that perked my attention. One thing led to another and we got talking about kids. My friend told me that his son was a national merit scholar. Well I started digging deeper.

After some knowledge elicitation, I got this:

Teach your kids about being passionate about what they do. It does not matter what they do, all that matters is they do the best they possibly can or they become the best they can be in what they do. That's it.

I remember the days when I would often work late, and would leave work around 3 or 4 in the morning, take the train, it would be me and the homeless folks on the train. I would often say to myself, WTF?. and the answer always was, it takes Passion Terry!!.

I share this bottled secret of passion with you, Enjoy.

No News is Good News, BBC just plain shockingly silent and brilliant

2008-07-18T08:53:00.001-07:00

Call me a plagiarizer call me a copy cat, but this one is so brilliant that I have to. No make that I need to, or I must, I shall, I will. I have always contented that imitation is a great form of flattery, so here goes.

Note to the reader: All those words about amount to NADA, just watch this BBC video SILENCE THE NEWS

In Search of Transparency

2008-07-16T11:58:00.001-07:00

Steve Denning's idea of Scaring someone into listening, followed by selling the idea by appealing to their intellectual reasoning is a tad opaque and worse yet, no one wants to listen to "The Sky is falling" Story. So In the interest of getting the message out on Transparency, this is perhaps the first of one of many in the series of blog posts you will see at this site. To start with, here is how you can achieve transparency using CSS assuming you have a file called klematis.jpg

Presenting an image via CSS has a lot in common on how we present ourselves. To start with, it is an image of ourselves presented with physical attributes such as size (width and height), our moniker and Style. Interestingly we also use Opacity pretty regularly. In fact so regularly that we are now trying to conciously be TRANSPARENT. The filter:alpha(opacity=40) therefore is a very significant attribute. It truly means that you are 60% transparent in what you do.

I plan on taking this further to understand, what is the opacity level we should strive to? Should opacity levels vary with differing external inputs? What taxonomy is ideal for differing level of opacity? so on and so forth.

Mental Obesity

2008-07-13T14:49:00.001-07:00

Mental obesity is the deadliest disease plaguing the American public today and we don't even recognize it.

WARNING!! if you don't treat it on time it will KILL you.

We Americans are so used to excess that obesity is fairly commonplace amongst us. If you consciously watch, you will be surprised how conditioned we are to ignore obesity around us. of course this from the point of view of a non-obese person, which I truly can't lay claim to.

It is killing a lot of folks for sure, but we are unable to stop it at the roots. All indicators point to excessive consumption as the root cause of this deadly malady.

Excessive consumption if pervasive, eventually becomes a culture. So we have become an mentally obese nation. The next biggest product we will consume will therefore be none other than a plethora of mental fitness gadgets.

From a conversation with Daniel Casey on 07/12/2008

Why Barack's flip flop troubles me so when there are other important issues

2008-07-11T13:50:00.001-07:00

A couple of days ago, I sent Obama a tweet, asking him why he voted for the FISA bill. Its been over 48 hours now and no response. Which to some extent I expected, but there was that faint glimmer of Hope in me. The audacity!!

As I try to sort this out logically, I see there could have been 3 outcomes:

a) He has been very busy and does not have time to look at the direct tweets his followers send him
b) He does not want to answer, does not care, particularly if it is a difficult question.
c) He only uses twitter (other social networks) as an advertising medium

The day I asked him the question, Jesse Jackson said things he should not have said in an open mike, that took news media by storm and completely overshadowed the FISA vote story. Perhaps Jesse and Obama wanted it that way. Either way it worked, there were some rumblings on NPR about the vote, but that was it.

What ever his reason for not answering my question, item c. got me thinking about the use of social media. What do people use social media for? Could it be as an advertising media for their products?. In this case Obama has around 40K plus followers, if he wanted to sell soap, all he has to do is say, ah..I showered this morning before making my speech at the chicago Police Academy..That Irish Spring Soap, gave me the boost I needed to change today. You get the picture.

Here I am thinking, wow politicians could use this media as a polling mechanism to find out how they should vote on the senate floor. Or wow, they can feel the burden of Joe Average as he struggles on that line to get an Iphone, after having spent $5 on gas to get to the store and so on.

But I think I am wrong. I dont think Obama will ever answer my question. After all why should he. He is just wants to win this election just like McCain does. So come January when I wake up in the morning and the MAP shows mostly red, like it did 4 years ago, I wont be surprised one bit.

What a guy. Why didnt I think of this when I turned 50

2008-07-09T13:44:00.001-07:00

Jon Swanson wants you to help him celebrate his birthday. So he created a list of 8 things you could do for him. Funny thing is if Jesus had told me to do any one of those things, I would have rebelled. But hey, its an internet Buddy asking for a hand, so it is worth doing. Happy Birthday Jon.

Here is his list of 8 things. Please copy this article as many times as you wish.

1. If you know someone who can’t afford to go out to lunch with your office group, slip them a $10 anonymously. Bring them into community. (If you don’t know someone, send something to the local rescue mission.)
2. If you know someone who is fighting cancer or Alzheimer’s or panic attacks or depression, sit with them, listen to them.
3. If you know someone who locked up for something they didn’t do–or even something they did–send them a note. If you can, visit them. Talk to them. The people I know who have been on “ankle bracelets” could use someone being kind.
4. There are people who go shopping at Goodwill and Salvation Army. They can’t afford more than the $2 for a pair of slacks. So pack a bag and drop it off.
5. Sometimes people get to demand your time (bosses in particular). Throw one of those people off-balance by offering to help on the next part of the project.
6. Shake hands with someone who no one else will touch. Or at least look them in the eye and talk to them.
7. Tell God that you can’t figure everything out yourself.
8. Find a little kid–a niece, a neighbor, your own–and listen for how they talk about what they believe. Listen to their trust.

That’s it. Do one of those things for me. Tell them Jon sent you.

(It will be easier to explain an internet friend than explain that Jesus said these things, too.)

Kindness without expecting return

2008-07-08T05:57:00.000-07:00

Winchell is a really nice neighborhood in Kalamazoo. It has all single family homes, families with children and if I were to try to characterize it, the tags would be: Middle to Upper Class, White Collar, Predominantly White, Well maintained yards with ownership age range between 40 and 50. To put it in perspective Frank Lloyd Wright designed parts of the neighborhood around Winchell around the 40's.

A great place for kids to grow up, as it is wooded, Close to the Winchell Elementary school, Woods Lake and overall a nice place.

Around 8PM last night we had visitors. A couple, age range 30 to 40, white female, the male had a darker complexion, could be Hispanic or partly black. They told us they had just moved in to the neighborhood, and this bizarre story:

Their names were Rochelle and Edmund. They had bough the house at 2228 Waite ave this week. Rochelle had a C-section this week and the hospital would not let the kid go home with them. Rochelle claimed she was a nurse, but the hospital made here take CPR lessons. Rochelle's sister who was house sitting the other two kids, left for Indiana with the kids and the car broke down on the highway. The banks are closed and they really need some money for gas.

My wife did not bat an eyelid, asked them how much they needed. Edmund said $30 would do. She went it and got the money and gave it to them. The couple said they would return the money when the banks opened this morning.

After they left, we had this sense that we just got panhandled. So we checked the address Edmund gave us and that realized, he either made a mistake on the address or he did some falsification.

The point of the story goes to, human decency. How often are we kind without expecting anything in return? If you as a couple are walking from door to door looking for money, that cannot be good by any standards. Who are we to second guess and see through falsehoods or truths.

Hammock in July

2008-07-06T15:38:00.001-07:00

Finally after a year, got the Hammock up. It took a bit of doing, finally with a bit of clever use of the neighbor's tree, got it to work. Now for those cool summer naps, in the shade and breeze.

Collaborative Video Blogging

2008-07-04T08:11:00.001-07:00

From the "Always full of Ideas" department:

8 people go on a journey, a vacation of sorts. Age ranges, 10 through 60. Some place exotic. As all trips go, of course we take pictures because we want to remember our trip, our journey to that exotic place. So why not do it right.

What does a camera at a wedding table signify?. It is inexpensive and disposable, where the participants at the table take pictures during the event. A collaborative photo journal of sorts that gives us a better collage if you will of what transpired. It is a better collection of memories taken from exponentially higher number of angles, than that of what the hired Photographer can take physically take by himself. In fact it was one such Photographer who thought of this idea of collaborative Journaling using that disposable camera. The folks at the table have to ONLY point and click. The idea is simple, easy to implement and therefore adoption came easy to the point where every wedding does it today. Brilliant!! as the guiness guys would say.

Extend this idea to our 8 people that go on a journey to an exotic place and then take it further. As a rule when we go on vacations to an exotic place we carry our camera. We tend to have one designated photo journalist for the trip. This designate is akin to the hired Photographer who provided the disposable camera's at the Wedding. What if he or she came up with a way that could get every one to participate in the photo journaling process? But instead of being just photographs, what if our method of chronicling was to podcast or video cast the journey?.

Remember the rules for successful adoption. It has to be simple, inexpensive and easy to implement. Just like the disposable camera at the Wedding table. If we were a student of Collaboration and Knowledge management, this can be a fascinating project of fairly significant proportions. Why? because the days of us just taking static pictures while on vacations might become a thing of the past. This might become as disruptive to Vacations as the internet perhaps.

Collaboration needs good facilitators, for this project we need a good facilitators who are also good story tellers, good Knowledge management experts who can elicit good story telling from the rest of the group. And finally she needs to be an innovater to turn this into a "disposable camera at the wedding table" sort of an idea.

A good innovator's quest most often starts with research, more research and then some more research. Today, research is easy thanks to the many innovators that gave us the internet, search engines, data mining and folks who share content.

In a nutshell, I am looking to create a SIMPLE INEXPENSIVE TEMPLATE for folks who go on exotic vacations, to photo journal from different angles (like our innovative hired photographer at weddings) using good story telling and podcasting.

Off to Kenya next Summer, but before I go, I need to become a innovator, collaborator, KM expert, and Great Story teller!!.

chip in for quiltingBok

2008-07-02T09:05:00.000-07:00

Blogging with Consistency

2008-07-02T08:37:00.001-07:00

Consistently blogging. It could mean a couple of things.

1) Blog every day or blog on a specific frequency
2) Blog consistently about certain topics
3) Blog on a specific frequency about specific topics
4) just Blog

If you are building up a brand, I believe item3 would be the way to go. But we dont always blog to build a brand do we?.

I for one like to blog, staying line with the "Captains Log" approach. Remember Captain Kirk, oh what would we do with out his logs. But it is important to be consistent, and it is also important to Write, not just cut and paste. The writing part is good training. You will thank me for that 30 years later (notice the long tail theory cynicism there) I am sure.

So does this mean I am not consistent? or will not be consistent?. For a fact the content I blog about will be free for you to use and reuse. It also will bring some value to you is my hope.

My Brush with Greatness today.

2008-06-28T11:08:00.001-07:00

Great morning in Kalamazoo, and perfect for playing tennis or getting a tennis lesson from one of the best. Les my neighbor has been a tennis player all his life, at 72 with both knees replaced, the mileage he has had on the courts show through clearly.

So it came to be that we set off in his Prius down Oakland Ave, to the K college campus where 50 odd years ago he had a part time job as the night watchman for these wonderful tennis courts and learned to play the game and kept playing all his life.

We first took a tour of the campus and then settled down to the far courts. Les walked me through the warm up routine, where you touch the intersection of all the white lines, running forward and backward along all the lines. We then settled down to holding the racket. I learned how to hold the racket for the forehand and backhand strokes and about the two types of follow through for the serve.

These courts have seen most of the great players, as you can see from the list of winners here . So needless to say, after two hours I came away with a feeling of having brushed with greatness.

Les my neighbor by the way played Rod Laver and beat him in an exhibition match back in the 50's. So I was one degree removed from greatness today

TEDS Top 10, I dont agree with quite a few, but does not mean these are not good.

2008-06-27T05:22:00.001-07:00

I think there are lot better talks that should have shown up on the list, but we are people and we get wowed and when we get wowed, we flok and rackup pageviews. Hope we dont elect our president that way. If we do, it will be a 180 degree shift. The last guy we elected was on fear factor and this time?

Top 10 TEDTalks of all time

1. Jill Bolte Taylor: "My stroke of insight"
2. Jeff Han: "Touchscreen demo foreshadows the iPhone"
3. David Gallo: "Underwater astonishments"
4. Blaise Aguera y Arcas: "Jaw-dropping Photosynth demo"
5. Arthur Benjamin: "Lightning calculation and other 'Mathemagic'"
6. Sir Ken Robinson: "Do schools kill creativity?"
7. Hans Rosling: "The best stats you've ever seen"
8. Tony Robbins: "Why we do what we do, and how we can do it better"
9. Al Gore: "15 ways to avert a climate crisis"
10. Johnny Lee: "Creating tech marvels out of a $40 Wii Remote"

on George Carlin and Vuja De.

2008-06-24T11:49:00.001-07:00

Full article here:

We all know déjà vu—looking at an unfamiliar situation and feeling
like you’ve been there before. But what's valuable to innovation is
vuja dé—looking at a familiar situation with fresh eyes, as if you’ve
never seen it before, and with those fresh eyes developing a new line
of sight into the future.

Let's face it: Most companies in most industries have a kind of
tunnel vision. They chase the same opportunities that everyone else is
chasing, they miss the same opportunities that everyone else is
missing. It’s the companies that see a different game that win big. The
most important question for innovators today is: What do you see that
the competition doesn't see?

Om Malik sent this link out on twitter which is truly priceless for the the video of Carlin's standup.

http://station.newteevee.com/show/george-carlin/

Are you fit to join the club.

2008-06-23T13:48:00.001-07:00

I noticed that the DSouza cousins group on facebook the otherday and saw a few familiar faces and names. I requested permission to join the group (as it is a restricted group), and received an email with two questions this morning.

1) Are you related
2) Are you cool

Since the email arrived this morning there has been a lot of mental chatter going on on how best to answer this. The first question, is a slam dunk, but the one on coolness, has me thrown for a loopty loop. Am I Cool?. Have I ever been Cool?. It should be a simple Yes or No, but why am I struggling with an answer?.

My 12 year old son is into being cool these days, and it manifests in many different ways. During the winter when there is a lot of snow on the ground, he would rather not wear snow pants because it would make him look less cool. He does not really mind being cold and wet in sub-zero tempratures.

Who decides on how cool one is?. I think I know the answer. Coolness should be the STATE of being where one is comfortable in any situation.

I am not, there fore, I will have to forgo joining the club for now!! Till then.........

To Blog or Not to Blog

2008-06-15T11:34:00.001-07:00

For a while now there has been the rumbling of Social Media and Social Networking. Last year we saw VzConnect (internal to Verizon) and indication form the pundits out there, is that Social Media/Networks is one of the top 4 technologies for the coming years.

Rachel Happe is an analyst from IDG and wrote this article, excerpt below (http://www.thesocialorganization.com/2008/06/executive-blogs-dont-need-to-be-difficult.html )

When I meet with executives I often ask if they blog and the answer is often no - followed by a variety of reasons, some valid, some questionable. But one thing is often true: blogging can take a lot of time. Some executives get around this by having someone in their communications group write their blog posts. Not really ideal and probably less than authentic.

Jeff Schick - IBM's VP of Social Computing - has come up with an ingenious solution. He blogs internally to his team but his posts are simply his daily schedule (most of it anyway) followed by a couple of lines about his impression of the meetings or the outcomes. This gets him out of the endless cycle of "What am I going to write about today" and gives his team some interesting reading.

I like this approach for two reasons: One - what a great tacit training tool. Ambitious employees who want to move up have a great way of seeing what an executive really does all day and of understanding what they might want to start paying attention to within the company. Two - large teams often rarely see their executives and have no idea what they are doing until they show up, ask some questions, and go away again. That can lead to a lot of speculation and even resentment if employees feel like they can't get the attention they need to solve problems. Jeff admitted that since he started publishing his schedule publicly he actually now gets sympathy from many people on his team. That sympathy helps a lot when you've got to turn around and ask the team to do something hard.

Current Security Trends for the Enterprise.

2008-06-11T14:05:00.000-07:00

Recently there was an article by the Chief Security officer from Cisco. He basically is telling us to stop with the "Patching" and approach things differently. I got an opportunity to review a few articles by Garter, Forrester and a few other sources, Here is how the industry sees it:

What are the Biggest risks for Windows - Worms, Viruses or Social Engineering?. What should be the recommended approach for Vulnerability management?.

Introduction

Information collated in this post comes from Gartner, Forrester, Internet Searches for "Enterprise threats" and personal observation. Here is a Short answer to the question: If vulnerability/patch management is Operationalized (automated anti-virus and patching), Worms and Viruses will be contained to a great extent, which leaves Social engineering and threats from Within as the biggest risk.

Gartner identified 3 Key Issues on Infrastructure protection in a publication by Mark Nicolete in March 2008 [1 ]. While the paper does not specifically speak in terms of worms, viruses and social engineering threats, it does provide insight into what Enterprises should focus on. Operationalizing Vulnerability/Patch management while linking the effort with Compliance Projects (configuration management) such as SOX, HIPPA and PCI appear to rise to the top in the TAG cloud for this context.

Nearly Every day, new vulnerabilities are reported, but Microsoft and partner vendors patch most security holes before an actual attack occurs (A few years ago, a worm would propagate faster than the information about the worm, Not so today). The biggest risk to enterprises comes from targeted attacks, many of which are from insiders. In addition, phishing and identity theft attacks have caused the rise of "credentialed" attacks. Loss of sensitive data owing to lack of encryption on laptop computers and from Tape backup vendors is another source as we have seen recently. As attackers increasingly move "up the stack" to applications and users, signature-based solutions become increasingly ineffective. [2 ].

Security purchases were once driven by fear, especially antivirus and intrusion detection systems. Individual solutions were bought to solve individual problems. Now, purchases are more focused on the fulfillment of policy (SOX, HIPPA, PCI) and have a more-holistic view of the organization's security issues [3 ] . The primary driver of the North American SIEM (Security Information and Event Management ) market continues to be regulatory compliance. European SIEM deployments have been focused primarily on external threat monitoring, but compliance has recently emerged as a strong driver in Europe as well. More than 80% of current SIEM deployment projects are funded to close a compliance gap. Security organizations typically have funding for the technology because there is an audit gap, but there is also the realization that the technology should be deployed to improve responsiveness to an external attack and to improve the ability to sense an internal breach. Initial deployments of SIEM technology are focused on user activity and resource access monitoring for host systems, but real-time event management for network security remains a common requirement. [4 ].

From a Forrester survey of 252 Enterprises on what was driving Network upgrades, Security and Business continuity profiled as Number 1 and Number 3 drivers. Sarbanes-Oxley, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), and various European Union (EU) directives are just a handful of regulatory pressures that have network managers scrambling to deploy better access control and data protection. Moreover, companies also need to make sure the network is able to resist common threats from viruses, worms, and other malicious code. [5 ].

Conclusion:

Are there any Windows Specific threats and mitigations to watch for?

What are the "biggest Software risks that a windows platform faces and what are the recommendations to mitigate these threats": Outlook (mail), IE (Browser) and IIS (Webserver) - are the worst offenders from a historical perspective. [6 <http://windowsitpro.com/articles/print.cfm?articleid=9084> ] . Mitigation of these threats can be accomplished by robust monitoring tools, monitoring logs for suspicious activity, services for availability, file systems and Registry for integrity and unauthorized changes, and network packets for suspicious traffic. Threats to the enterprise are evolving and changing over time. Our security policies should be reviewed often to make sure we are keeping pace with the new drivers. Configuration management which encompasses automated Vulnerabiltiy and patch management should be operationalized as far as possible, to free up valuable resources to combat the ever changing threats to the enterprise. If vulnerability/patch management is Operationalized (automated anti-virus and patching), Worms and Viruses will be contained, which leaves Social engineering and threats from Within as the biggest risk to focus on.

Social Media Interaction: Four Buckets

2008-06-07T07:04:00.001-07:00

Four Buckets

Skill+Cycles Bucket = Skycles Bucket

members of the community advertise their skills and cycles available

Need+Cycles Bucket = Nycles Bucket

members of the community advertise their needs

Solution+Cycles Bucket = Soycles Bucket

algorithm matches Needs to Skills and dump it into the solutions bucket

Happiness+Cycles Bucket = Happycles Bucket

Solutions bucket, every one is happy

A community can improve sustenance through Four Buckets.

Smart folks leveraging Social Media networks for Upscale Customer Service

2008-06-05T13:45:00.001-07:00

There are some smart folks out there leveraging social networks to provide customer service of a unique kind. The example I came across is a gentleman at Dell, who appears to be watching the social networks for any dell related questions and then finds you an answer, He also maintains a blog, that is actually a corporate blog with a personal brand. http://richardatdell.blogspot.com/

The other end of the spectrum, I needed some Server power consumption data. Most of my research using google and similar search tools, generated a lot of noise, but nothing precise. I posted a request on Twitter. I got an answer in about 20 min. Sort of a global IRC. How cool is that?.

Here is a pull model for customer service: Search for all the complaints against your company's brand, and on various social networks, compile it and try to find the answer. You will make a lot of customers happy. Your Sr. Management will be happier.

Update to this Story:
I am starting to pay more attention to this trend. I noticed verizon on facebook, so is ATT and few others.
http://www.facebook.com/verizon
http://www.facebook.com/pages/ATT/6114253084?ref=s
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Intel/8602499645?ref=s

Interstingly Verizon has 18000 fans while ATT and Intel are in the hundreds.

Smart folks leveraging Social Media networks for Upscale Customer Service

2008-06-05T13:45:00.000-07:00

IS 456 Class IX and X, The End

2008-06-01T12:55:00.000-07:00

This is the last blog posting for this KM class!!

We had two lectures combined into one this week, owing to some logistical issues. So this will be the last lecture. The theme for today covered: BPM, Barriers of implementation, Metrics for KM and Culture
1) Business process modelling
We defined what a process is and leveraged Swim lane diagrams to model activities to root out inefficiencies. Validation should be automated to eliminate inefficiencies where possible. hand offs is an area that can be scrutinized to improve the process. Duplication of effort is an area of inefficiency by people or by machines. Work that can be done by machines, being done by people, like validation, is a good source of unnecessary effort. Any time task is done by more than one person is a good place to analyze for improvement. Finally always make the modelling diagram easy to understand.

2) Barriers of implementation

Managers overlook four common issues that concern employees."

Being known as an expert

A mechanism for encouraging/motivating knowledge sharing behavior

Track usage, contributions by employees
Collect statistics on which documents are accessed, and whether the document was perceived as relevant or useful.
Reward those employees whose documents are rated as most valuable.

Problems:

Being touted as the expert means more work. (?)
Being touted as the expert stifles one's career. (?)

Requisite knowledge too hard to capture and categorize

We've seen this before...
Problems/Raising the level of abstraction/The bottom line:

Does the cost of capturing insight outweigh the perceived benefits?
Can the contextual factors influencing the knowledge be captured?
Is a telephone or email address a better solution?

Lack of adequate communication and action

Are employees, by and large, leaders or followers?
Whom do they follow?
Problems:

Confusion about what the behavior is supposed to be
Negativity surrounding "appropriate" behavior

Again, what motivates people?

Forcing it

Now, imagine you are the senior manager.
The last point just said to lead, lead, lead.
This one says "Do not overmanage or micromanage".
What are you supposed to do, exactly?
Problems:

Is it as simple as 'hire good people, and get out of their way'?
Employees prefer their peers telling them to do something rather than a senior executive.

3) Metrics

4) Culture

Culture and Climate fall in the same category but are different. Climate is short term, like before a layoff or during a merger. Culture is long term and require multiple CEO's tenure to see a change.

Parting Shot: Dont waste your time trying to Change the Culture, it is a waste time!!!

No final parting shot is complete without the audience knowing what was learned int he 11 week process, so here goes:

Most of what I have learned in class falls under the following themes

Collaboration
Knowledge management systems
Personal Knowledge Management
Problem solving and decision making in in organizations
KM Technologies
Knowledge elicitation - Organizational learning and knowledge transfer

The class also provided me better insight into social networking, blogging and microblogging, Problem solving, decision making, organizational learning and knowledge transfer.

The blogging exercise in class has the potential to help me hone my writing skills that will come in handy as I work on my PhD dissertation.

The Wiki collaboration tool, while cumbersome (sharepoint versus media wiki) provides insight into collaborative writing skills.

The best bang for the buck, I got from class is my exposure to twitter and related tools that let you follow conversations of selected genre. I have been able to gain a lot of insight into KM and related technologies by following conversations in twitter and friendfeed and Google Reader. I highly recommend, a feed based approach in augmenting ones reading on specific subjects and microblogging to follow current trends through conversations.

Adieu!! So long!! Farewell!!

IS 456 Class VIII, convergence in the course.

2008-05-24T04:38:00.000-07:00

WARNING!!!!
Its time to wrap up the course, we have 3 more classes to go:

Todays theme:

KM technologies
Miscellaneous
How to: Knowledge versus Information problem
Stephan Dennings story telling presentation

Next Week:

Metrics
Barriers

KM technologies:

Lot of ground covered here including going back over the content management best practices compilation of papers that started last week. Al used the article on "how to correct myopia in your organization" to work out a template of problem solving using excel. It appeard intitutive.
The topic of best practices in other areas such as Web self service Best Practices,Communities of practice were also discussed.
Discussion also focussed on the differences between Project management and Knowledge management. project management is managing THINGS such as tasks, work breakdown schedules, timelines etc. The question is how do you use Knowledge Management to manage projects. More on that next week

How to: Knowledge versus Information problem

Al in his effort in trying to give an example of "Knowledge versus Information" Problem asked the class if they have ever met a "Jerk", if so what makes him a jerk?. one person said, her boss was one, when asked why, the answer was that he micro managed the her work. This lead to a series of question and answers that boiled down to three things:
What you know, What you know, you don't know and What you don't know, you dont know.

Stephan Dennings Presentation on Storey Telling:

The class endeded with a great slide presentation. Al had managed to pick up Stephan Denning's preso on Storey Telling to share with the class. Lots of good stuff in there including the style of presentation that used very sparse content on each slide, but told a powerful storey. I always compare presentations to Larry Lessigs, and this one got a 7 on a scale of 10. But more importantly is the topic of storey telling with the approach of starting out with a jarring incident to catch the attention, planting the seed with a good story and finally appealing to the reasoning part of the senses to drive home the point. Enjoyed it.

IS 456 Class VII - Homework - Elevator Questions

2008-05-18T15:55:00.000-07:00

1. "I see from your transcripts that you took a course in KM. What is KM?"

Knowledge management can be defined as Structuring, Storing, capturing, disseminating, using knowledge we gain out of this relationships between nodes in an organization.
Knowledge Management focuses on the content of Knowledge in the process of " Acquire Create (and refine) Store,à Transfer/Share Use, Improve Performance".
One view point to describe KM is to look at it as data stored in a database: Data is stored in Fields, Information is stored in Records and Knowledge is the pattern(s) that can be discovered across tables and data sets. Everything can be looked at as a Knowledge Problem if you wear the right glasses/lenses!!.

2. "Tell me how you would apply KM in my organization."

KM can be applied to Discover hidden assets - information and expertise, Eliminate duplicate and redundant projects, Assimilate employees faster into the organization
Innovate faster, and bring products to market faster, Break through knowledge silos to find relevant content and Discover untapped talent and expertise
KM could be applied to reduce the pain that your organization faces in dealing with the mass quantities of information that the organization and its customers are exposed to on a daily basis.
Use KM to effectively manage and contain the tension between the users and the IT department
Use knowledge management to diagnose and solve knowledge and information problems that the organization faces today.

3. "What KM technologies would you recommend here?"

Stealth KM. Since adoption follows the porter curve, it is important to follow the stealth KM model to acquire knowledge before recommending technologies.
Diagnose the existing content management system by understanding how the "Create, Manage and Publishing" process works and supplement that with KM domains of "Capture, Route and Covert".
An effective "Knowledge Search" mechanism to access knowledge when and where needed.
1) Collective Search Toolbar: Delivering collective intelligence to users at their point-of-search.
2) Social Bookmarking and Tagging: Information Discovery and sharing.
3) Social Networking: Social Networking for getting your work done.
4) User Communities: Enterprise information flow business processes

4. "KM sounds great, but how do I justify KM here?"

The best justification for KM is its capability to reduce "Information Pain" faced by the organization.
Each organization is unique, therefore any justification has to be made within the context of the knowledge or informational problems the organization faces.

5. "KM sounds great, but what KM metrics do you recommend?"

Measuring knowledge management (KM) is not simple. Determining KM’s pervasiveness and impact is analogous to measuring the contribution of marketing, employee development, or any other management or organizational competency. It is nonetheless a necessity if KM is to last and have significant impact in an organization.
There are two things that all organizations should keep in mind as they develop measures and metrics. First, it is extremely difficult to create any measure of knowledge sharing that will show an absolute one-to-one correlation between a knowledge-sharing action and a business result. Much like measuring the success of training and development programs, measuring the impact of knowledge sharing requires correlation and some assumption. Second, to truly understand the impact of knowledge sharing and reuse, an organization must first understand the baseline business or process performance before beginning KM efforts. If you do not know where the starting line is, how can you say what your time is at the finish line?
An effective metric or gauge for Knowledge Management might be an index that is comprised of the following four types of measures:
1. Awareness – knowledge of what to document, how to document it, how to access KM data bases, etc.
2. Behavior – participation in KM activities such as committees/teams, making presentations, etc.
3. Outputs – creation of data bases, white papers, lessons learned reports, best practice documentation, etc.
4. Outcomes – impact of new knowledge on key measures of organizational performance such as new product sales, productivity, cost reduction, or quality improvement.
The Department of NAVY put out a good paper on measuring KM. The following url points to this paper. This guide presents a practical framework for measuring the value of investments in KM initiatives. Since the value of KM depends on each organization’s goals and people, it is not a “cookbook” of standard procedures but rather an aid to help you identify and apply appropriate metrics for your initiative. The reader should be familiar with the concepts and approach for KM described in the KCO Toolkit; these topics are not discussed in detail since they are thoroughly covered in the Toolkit.
http://www.providersedge.com/docs/km_articles/Metrics_Guide_for_DON_KM_Initiatives.pdf

6. "Tell me the main barriers to adopting KM I can anticipate. How would you overcome
them?"

Adoption barriers are the most common ones to anticipate. Rogers adoption curve shown below indicates the process/timeline for adoption of Change.

7. "Summarize for me what you learned in that KM class."

Most of what I have learned in class falls under the following themes

Collaboration
Knowledge management systems
Personal Knowledge Management
Problem solving and decision making in in organizations
KM Technologies
Knowledge elicitation - Organizational learning and knowledge transfer

IS 456 Class VII, Dave Simmons and Review of homework VI a

2008-05-17T10:00:00.000-07:00

DAVE SIMMONS guest Speaker:

We had a guest speaker in today. The dude had an interesting background the most pronounced of which being, he was a librarian for over 20 years. Impressive!!. He now is a KM expert and works at GSA in Chicago manging KM for a the building leasing.

Dave's Bio:
Dave Simmons is a Certified Knowledge Manager (CKM) with KM experience in both private and public sectors. Prior to working for the US Government, Dave ran his own business intelligence and research business, was the Director of Prosepect Management and Research for Chicago's Children's Memorial Foundation, and was the Director of Knowledge Management for Global Operations at LEGO Systems A/S in Billund, Denmark (yes, LEGO toys). Dave has worked in information technology and management areas for well over 20 years.

My first thought as I listened to him was, I am a registered Architect in this country with 17 years in Architecture plus I have 15 years in information systems, doing my masters in Information systems, with a KM/Collaboration/Datamining background, Why cant I get a job like Dave's?...The answer, I have not built TRUST with the folks who hire KM experts, perhaps!!

Dave covered quite a few areas in KM/CM , perhaps the most important one being: There are 3 processes within 3 areas of KM. They are: People, Process and Information can be seen in INNOVATION, CUSTOMER INTERACTION and OPERATIONS. The sketch below explains the concept better.

Other interesting nuggets from his talk included Stealth KM and how to go about driving adoption and Collecting lessons learned and leveraging those lessons. Stealth KM in his opinion is collecting information about people/process/information.

Dave is all about relieving INFORMATION PAIN at least that is his mantra. He drives home the point of being humble to build TRUST.

Dave's final thoughts:

KM is more about discernment, we are choked for knowledge but drowning for information.Knowing to discern information is important.Less is more and focussed is better.
Last thing:
Write it down, keep track of your self. Not learning from your own actions if you don’t.
You need to report to your self, you will make a subtle shift with out knowing it so keep track

KM = solve information pain.
Write once use many times.
Connect KM to daily work.
Constantly challenge yourself: is what your doing on a tangent?
Eat an elephant one bite at a time.

The second half of the class reviewed Homework VI a:
I had already submitted this in my previous posting, so this part of the lecture was a review for me. I am posting that part of the home work again, just in case Al did not see my previous post.

HomeWork Week VI part a.

Readings are based on the Enterprise Content Management readings distributed as pdf, titled: Best practices of Content Management.
2 The Chaos of Content
* List 3 sources of tension between IT and the user community, in terms of enterprise content management.
o ANS: The 3 sources of tension discussed are: Growth, Brand and Speed.
Growth: Companies that are trying to grow their on line presence often see this tension between IT and the business unit(user community), where the user wants the best customer experience and IT can only provide the most efficient, with the resources they have
Brand: Consolidating Brand assets centrally when companies are going global is a huge challenge in areas of consistency and meeting localized needs of various cultures and demographics.
Speed: If IT does not have speed to deliver the brand managers will most probably take matters into their own hands, making the task of delivering what the users need quickly and being consistent across the business.

4 Unlock the Value of Content to Maximize Online Business Performance
* Getting the right content, to the right person, is a popular KM phrase.
* How can better content enable enterprises to optimize the customer experience?
o ANS: Optimizing Customer experience can be achieved by delivering the most accurate, Current, persuasive and appropriate content, in short BETTER content. Better content will Strengthen Customer loyalty, Achieve unified brands, messages and corporate images, Accelerate worldwide product launches and promotions, Optimize customer process efficiencies and Provide regulatory compliance and security.

6 Content Management vs. Knowledge Management
* The article mentions some differences between CM and KM. Which of these terms describe CM, and which describe KM?
o ANS:
o Capture: Knowledge Management domain
o Create: Content Management domain
o Route: Knowledge Management domain
o Manage: Content Management domain
o Convert: Knowledge Management domain
o Publish: Content Management domain

* Is CM or KM bigger in scope, i.e. does one belong under the other’s umbrella?
o ANS: Content Management can be defined more as a static " Create/Manage/Publish" process while Knowledge management is broader and envelopes CM owing to its dynamic and holistic "capture/route/convert/measure" approach.

8 Managing Email Overload: The Smart, Secure and Legal Way
* Name 3 drivers that dictate what an email management solution must do.
o ANS:
1) Email as a source of corporate records needed for regulatory compliance and legal discovery
2) Email growth is explosive
3) Email is a source of business critical information

* Name 5 requirements of any email management solution.
o ANS:
1) Retain messages in compliance with corporate and regulatory policies
2) Provide a highly scalable repository that is capable of fast growth and has scalable retention capabilities.
3) Facilitate searching as required for legal discovery
4) Improve system performance
5) Integrate email with other corporate records and content.

* What are some consequences of not having an email management system?
o ANS:
1) Additional time spent on administration of the email
2) Overloaded servers will degrade performance of the email platform
3) Users will be burdened with mailbox limits
4) Risks of non-compliance and or additional hours will be spent during litigation and regulatory requests.
5) Benefits of sharing important information through the company is lost.

10 Today's Search: All The Power. No Pain.
* What are some criteria for evaluating an enterprise search solution?
o ANS:
1) Ease of installation
2) Time needed to learn how to build interfaces and put the server up
3) The ability to easily manipulate the user interface
4) relevance of search results
5) time to search and load over 2.5Million documents in a wide variety of formats and data sources.

11 The Emerging Role of SharePoint in ECM
* Do you think SharePoint is a good choice for students to search a discussion forum on COLWeb? Why or why not?
o ANS: Microsoft’s documentation claims that Sharepoint is an ideal platform for Basic search and retrieval. However depending on its implementation this may or may not be true.
When I went to the discussion form at colweb using IE (http://collaboration.cti.depaul.edu/2008-3/IS356/841) I received a permissions error, indicating I donot have privileges to view this page. When I went to the discussion forum at colweb using Firefox, it does not render the page at all.
The reason: The IT team has not completed implementation of this component. Perhaps it is just a configuration error.

12 Top Five Reasons to Outsource Document Capture
* Name the "top five reasons to outsource your document capture project".
o ANS:
1. Focus on your organization’s core business processes;
2. Improve service levels to clients and reduce transaction costs at the same time;
3. Faster and more secure implementation of compliance and discovery initiatives;
4. Providing near-term cost savings while avoiding technological obsolescence;
5. Cost-effective disaster recovery

13 Will Your Next CMS Scale to Meet Your Demands?
* Is content management something you buy, or something you do? Explain.
o ANS:
CM is something you DO since it is more of a pursuit than a product.

We know your organization, its needs and its appetite, and propensity for change. Finding a flexible, scalable solution that best aligns with a well-defined strategy is a logical goal. Ending up with the most features or the lowest initial is not necessarily a measure of success in a CM implementation.

14 The Value of SharePoint-Based ECM Solutions
* What are the key chunks of functionality that an enterprise content management system should have?
o ANS:
1) Document management, Forms management, Web content management and email management
2) Transactional content functionality such as document scanning and imaging, report management and enterprise class BPM.
3) Achieve enhanced business content control and management,
4) Broaden user adoption across the enterprise
5) Enjoy higher, longer-lasting returns on their ECM investments.
6) Minimize the impact on both the information worker desktop as well as the internal IT operational infrastructure

15 How to Correct Your Organization’s Content Myopia
* What is the best approach to transforming these business areas with Enterprise Content Management (ECM)?
o ANS:
o Accounts payable:
start by scanning, classifying and indexing paper documents as well as capturing electronic invoices. Save time and improve accuracy using tools such as queue-based workflows and automatic notification. Integrate accounts payable information with enterprise resource planning and other line-of-business systems to ensure it gains the widest possible currency.

Contract management
Begin by leveraging collaborative workspaces to share documents, track deliverables and hold threaded discussions. Enable users to access associated contentoffice documents, scanned images, email and more from a common content repository. Develop electronic forms to streamline contract requests and notify others about contract milestones and obligations.

o Client engagement:
Enable collaboration across projects and around the globe. This will provide the capability to track milestones and resolve issues, give clients visibility into processes from project launch to completion, and track key metrics across various projects. Increased delivery throughput, exceeding client expectations and driving new engagement opportunities will be the benefits that this collaborative approach will bring.

o Compliance:
Start by automating the entire content lifecycle to protect content from inappropriate use or disclosure while ensuring its accessibility. Mitigate risk of non-compliance by automatically auditing content during any stage and enforcing policies for retention and, as appropriate, disposal.

o New product development:
Create flexible workspace templates to enforce best practices and track progress across multiple projects through enterprise database rollups, dashboards and reporting tools

o Enterprise marketing:
Streamline the marketing process and provide seamless access to marketing content. Coordinate campaigns, product launches and ongoing branding and marketing communications. Keep projects on track, reduce overall costs and exert greater control over brand assets using media repositories, creative workflows and virtual workspaces.

16 Widgets, Wizzbangs and Whoozits
* New functionality on your web site should be in alignment with "the companies Business Model".
* Give an example of when a discussion forum might not be a good idea on a website.
o ANS: Cell phone provider website where customer turnover is very high. Prospective customers could get turned off by negative comments.

17 Is On-Demand Content Management Right for You?
* In a few paragraphs, explain when SaaS would be an appropriate alternative for content management?
o ANS:
Software as a Service can deliver great project success at a dramatically reduced cost if the CM project has a heavy dependency on Document management and Workflow tools. Along with this criteria, the following evaluation guidelines will assist with assessing the FIT of SaaS as the preferred Choice in CM implementation.

The Breadth test: If your CM requirements needs one or more components not often found in off-the-shelf CM packages, such as send/receive faxes from the application, OCR, Scanner integration, E-Forms and combining form based data, Ability to view proprietary formats and advanced document workflow.

The Speed Test: If your implementation,/adoption rate is required to be RAPID, then SaaS is a better fit than the traditional CM application deployed by the IT/project teams.

The Cash Flow Test: If the project requires lower TCO and lesser Risk, SaaS is a better option than traditional CM deployment.

Evolving needs test: If the needs of the user community are constantly evolving, the In-House CM implementation might tend to become cumbersome. The SaaS option under these circumstances would provide a better fit.

The 80/20 test: The mixture of integration and configuration is referred to as the 80/20 rule. If 80% of the solution is provided out of the box by the SaaS solution, then it should be considered over the traditional CM implementation.

IS 456 Class VI Homework assignments

2008-05-12T10:05:00.000-07:00

Homework for Week VI:
Homework for this week is in two parts, please see both sections below:

Homework Week VI

Start with the Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning.pdf article
* Skim this article, as reading goes, this is rather rough sledding.
* See figure 1. We’ve seen this before, now some things have been added.
* Where does "learning" occur?
o ANS: Learning occurs at the "Refinement" Stage where the Explication, Drawing inferences, Encoding, Evaluation, Selection for inclusion in memory occurs.

Huber article:
* Don’t spend too much time on this article. I wanted you to see Figure 1, that is the main idea.
* This is difficult reading, but still is a widely cited article from way back in 1991.
* It answers the question, how many different ways can the organization learn? See the 4 branches of the diagram.

o Knowledge acquisition is the process by which knowledge is obtained.
o Information distribution is the process by which information from different sources is shared and thereby leads to new information or understanding.
o Information interpretation is the process by which distributed information is given one or more commonly understood interpretations.
o Organizational memory is the means by which knowledge is stored for future use.
* Under which of the branches do you find "media richness? Have you seen this before? Do you agree?
o ANS: Media Richness is found in the "Information Interpretation" branch. We came across media richness when we discussed "Multimedia and the cognitive process" using Mettalica’s song "One" in class. The concept that stood out during the discussion was "BIAS".

* What is unlearning, and where does it fall?
o Ans: Headberg in 1981 defined "Unlearning" as a process through which learners discard Knowledge. He also described it as discarding obsolete and misleading knowledge and termed it intentional and functional in the Organizational learning process. Unlearning falls in the Information Interpretation Branch.

General:
* What is the difference between knowledge management and organizational learning?
o ANS: Organizational Learning focuses on the Process and Knowledge Management focuses on the content of Knowledge in the process of " Acquire àCreate (and refine) àStore,à Transfer/ShareàUse,à Improve Performance". Organizational Learning can be summarized as a goal of Knowledge Management.

* Between knowledge transfer and organizational learning?
o ANS: Knowledge transfer is a sub part of the Organizational Learning Process. The overall Organizational learning process has these components: Acquire àCreate (and refine) àStore,à Transfer/ShareàUse,à Improve Performance

* Between knowledge transfer and knowledge management?
o ANS: Knowledge transfer is a sub part of the Organizational Learning Process. Knowledge Mangement deals with the CONTENT in the Organizational learning Process. The overall Organizational learning process has these components: Acquire àCreate (and refine) àStore,à Transfer/ShareàUse,à Improve Performance

HomeWork Week VI part a.

Readings are based on the Enterprise Content Management readings distributed as pdf, titled: Best practices of Content Management.
2 The Chaos of Content
* List 3 sources of tension between IT and the user community, in terms of enterprise content management.
o ANS: The 3 sources of tension discussed are: Growth, Brand and Speed.
Growth: Companies that are trying to grow their on line presence often see this tension between IT and the business unit(user community), where the user wants the best customer experience and IT can only provide the most efficient, with the resources they have
Brand: Consolidating Brand assets centrally when companies are going global is a huge challenge in areas of consistency and meeting localized needs of various cultures and demographics.
Speed: If IT does not have speed to deliver the brand managers will most probably take matters into their own hands, making the task of delivering what the users need quickly and being consistent across the business.

4 Unlock the Value of Content to Maximize Online Business Performance
* Getting the right content, to the right person, is a popular KM phrase.
* How can better content enable enterprises to optimize the customer experience?
o ANS: Optimizing Customer experience can be achieved by delivering the most accurate, Current, persuasive and appropriate content, in short BETTER content. Better content will Strengthen Customer loyalty, Achieve unified brands, messages and corporate images, Accelerate worldwide product launches and promotions, Optimize customer process efficiencies and Provide regulatory compliance and security.

6 Content Management vs. Knowledge Management
* The article mentions some differences between CM and KM. Which of these terms describe CM, and which describe KM?
o ANS:
o Capture: Knowledge Management domain
o Create: Content Management domain
o Route: Knowledge Management domain
o Manage: Content Management domain
o Convert: Knowledge Management domain
o Publish: Content Management domain

* Is CM or KM bigger in scope, i.e. does one belong under the other’s umbrella?
o ANS: Content Management can be defined more as a static " Create/Manage/Publish" process while Knowledge management is broader and envelopes CM owing to its dynamic and holistic "capture/route/convert/measure" approach.

8 Managing Email Overload: The Smart, Secure and Legal Way
* Name 3 drivers that dictate what an email management solution must do.
o ANS:
1) Email as a source of corporate records needed for regulatory compliance and legal discovery
2) Email growth is explosive
3) Email is a source of business critical information

* Name 5 requirements of any email management solution.
o ANS:
1) Retain messages in compliance with corporate and regulatory policies
2) Provide a highly scalable repository that is capable of fast growth and has scalable retention capabilities.
3) Facilitate searching as required for legal discovery
4) Improve system performance
5) Integrate email with other corporate records and content.

* What are some consequences of not having an email management system?
o ANS:
1) Additional time spent on administration of the email
2) Overloaded servers will degrade performance of the email platform
3) Users will be burdened with mailbox limits
4) Risks of non-compliance and or additional hours will be spent during litigation and regulatory requests.
5) Benefits of sharing important information through the company is lost.

10 Today's Search: All The Power. No Pain.
* What are some criteria for evaluating an enterprise search solution?
o ANS:
1) Ease of installation
2) Time needed to learn how to build interfaces and put the server up
3) The ability to easily manipulate the user interface
4) relevance of search results
5) time to search and load over 2.5Million documents in a wide variety of formats and data sources.

11 The Emerging Role of SharePoint in ECM
* Do you think SharePoint is a good choice for students to search a discussion forum on COLWeb? Why or why not?
o ANS: Microsoft’s documentation claims that Sharepoint is an ideal platform for Basic search and retrieval. However depending on its implementation this may or may not be true.
When I went to the discussion form at colweb using IE (http://collaboration.cti.depaul.edu/2008-3/IS356/841) I received a permissions error, indicating I donot have privileges to view this page. When I went to the discussion forum at colweb using Firefox, it does not render the page at all.
The reason: The IT team has not completed implementation of this component. Perhaps it is just a configuration error.

12 Top Five Reasons to Outsource Document Capture
* Name the "top five reasons to outsource your document capture project".
o ANS:
1. Focus on your organization’s core business processes;
2. Improve service levels to clients and reduce transaction costs at the same time;
3. Faster and more secure implementation of compliance and discovery initiatives;
4. Providing near-term cost savings while avoiding technological obsolescence;
5. Cost-effective disaster recovery

13 Will Your Next CMS Scale to Meet Your Demands?
* Is content management something you buy, or something you do? Explain.
o ANS:
CM is something you DO since it is more of a pursuit than a product.

We know your organization, its needs and its appetite, and propensity for change. Finding a flexible, scalable solution that best aligns with a well-defined strategy is a logical goal. Ending up with the most features or the lowest initial is not necessarily a measure of success in a CM implementation.

14 The Value of SharePoint-Based ECM Solutions
* What are the key chunks of functionality that an enterprise content management system should have?
o ANS:
1) Document management, Forms management, Web content management and email management
2) Transactional content functionality such as document scanning and imaging, report management and enterprise class BPM.
3) Achieve enhanced business content control and management,
4) Broaden user adoption across the enterprise
5) Enjoy higher, longer-lasting returns on their ECM investments.
6) Minimize the impact on both the information worker desktop as well as the internal IT operational infrastructure

15 How to Correct Your Organization’s Content Myopia
* What is the best approach to transforming these business areas with Enterprise Content Management (ECM)?
o ANS:
o Accounts payable:
start by scanning, classifying and indexing paper documents as well as capturing electronic invoices. Save time and improve accuracy using tools such as queue-based workflows and automatic notification. Integrate accounts payable information with enterprise resource planning and other line-of-business systems to ensure it gains the widest possible currency.

Contract management
Begin by leveraging collaborative workspaces to share documents, track deliverables and hold threaded discussions. Enable users to access associated contentoffice documents, scanned images, email and more from a common content repository. Develop electronic forms to streamline contract requests and notify others about contract milestones and obligations.

o Client engagement:
Enable collaboration across projects and around the globe. This will provide the capability to track milestones and resolve issues, give clients visibility into processes from project launch to completion, and track key metrics across various projects. Increased delivery throughput, exceeding client expectations and driving new engagement opportunities will be the benefits that this collaborative approach will bring.

o Compliance:
Start by automating the entire content lifecycle to protect content from inappropriate use or disclosure while ensuring its accessibility. Mitigate risk of non-compliance by automatically auditing content during any stage and enforcing policies for retention and, as appropriate, disposal.

o New product development:
Create flexible workspace templates to enforce best practices and track progress across multiple projects through enterprise database rollups, dashboards and reporting tools

o Enterprise marketing:
Streamline the marketing process and provide seamless access to marketing content. Coordinate campaigns, product launches and ongoing branding and marketing communications. Keep projects on track, reduce overall costs and exert greater control over brand assets using media repositories, creative workflows and virtual workspaces.

16 Widgets, Wizzbangs and Whoozits
* New functionality on your web site should be in alignment with "the companies Business Model".
* Give an example of when a discussion forum might not be a good idea on a website.
o ANS: Cell phone provider website where customer turnover is very high. Prospective customers could get turned off by negative comments.

17 Is On-Demand Content Management Right for You?
* In a few paragraphs, explain when SaaS would be an appropriate alternative for content management?
o ANS:
Software as a Service can deliver great project success at a dramatically reduced cost if the CM project has a heavy dependency on Document management and Workflow tools. Along with this criteria, the following evaluation guidelines will assist with assessing the FIT of SaaS as the preferred Choice in CM implementation.

The Breadth test: If your CM requirements needs one or more components not often found in off-the-shelf CM packages, such as send/receive faxes from the application, OCR, Scanner integration, E-Forms and combining form based data, Ability to view proprietary formats and advanced document workflow.

The Speed Test: If your implementation,/adoption rate is required to be RAPID, then SaaS is a better fit than the traditional CM application deployed by the IT/project teams.

The Cash Flow Test: If the project requires lower TCO and lesser Risk, SaaS is a better option than traditional CM deployment.

Evolving needs test: If the needs of the user community are constantly evolving, the In-House CM implementation might tend to become cumbersome. The SaaS option under these circumstances would provide a better fit.

The 80/20 test: The mixture of integration and configuration is referred to as the 80/20 rule. If 80% of the solution is provided out of the box by the SaaS solution, then it should be considered over the traditional CM implementation.

IS 456 Class V - Homework

2008-05-06T08:06:00.001-07:00

Homework:

Please answer these questions on your blog, based on the articles enclosed in this folder:

Action learning article:

o Focus on the "Problem solving process" picture, Fig. 4-1.

o There are 6 steps. Which is the most important?

§ ANS: “Reframe the problem” is the most important in my opinion, because it reviews the presented problem and digs deeper to understand if it is a knowledge problem or an Information problem. Framing and Reframing the problem are critical steps of creative problem solving. While Framing the problem, presents it, Reframing the problem scrutinizes the problem further, by asking why. So this step by far is the most important as it provides the information necessary for the root cause.

o Note that 2 new steps are described, before 'determine the root cause'.

Understanding & Supporting Decision Making.pdf

o What is naturalistic decision making, and how is it different from the traditional decision making, i.e. the theory-hypothesis-test-conclude?

§ ANS: The naturalistic decision making process uses observation as a s first step prior to testing hypothesis. NDM also tries to understand the role of intuition in the decision making process that the theory-hypothesis-test-conclude model does not include in its framework. The premise of the NDM theory is that the scientify investigation of how people makes decisions begins with observation.

What data mining can't do.docx

o In terms of data, data modeling, data warehousing and data mining, why is more not necessarily better?

§ ANS: Recency and Frequency are two measures that have been around for a long time. Most time they are all we need in the Analytics process. Data collection technology should work toward making these measures more accurate to get a better bang for the buck. Having more data there fore does not necessarily mean it is a good thing, rather, Collecting data geared toward the models you are using should be the right approach. Another train of thought to consider is that suppringly simple spreadsheet models can take you much further, particularly in capturing initial behaviour. As the author puts it “Start Simple”, you will be surprised how much you gain by starting out in the spreadsheet realm.

General Reflections:

Is there a difference between decision making and problem solving?

ANS: Yes, Problem solving follows the premise that there is an awareness of a discreprency, resources to do it and pressure to act. Tools used for problem solving generally provide a Root Cause Analysis and selection of best possible choices among a series of solutions.

Decision making on the other hand, tries to be “more programmed” and tries to eliminate BIAS from the process of decision making to arrive at a rational approach to process. The steps in decision making normally follow: Identification of a problem, --->identify decision making criteria, --->allocation of weights to criteria. --->develop alternatives--->Analysis of alternatives--->selection of an alternative --> implementation of alternative-->evaluation of decision effectiveness.

True or false:

o There are good decisions, and there are bad decisions.

§ ANS: False, there on only “decisions”, based on alternatives, analysis of alternatives and selection of alternatives.

o Better information yields better decision making.

§ ANS: True, Better information (as opposed to Bad information) yields better decision making. It can help you develop better alternates and help you allocate weights better.

o Better knowledge yields better decision making.

§ ANS: True, Better knowledge (more actionable pieces of information) yields better decision making.

End of Homework.

IS 456 Class V - 4/30/2008 - Organizational learning

2008-05-05T11:39:00.000-07:00

Review of Last Class and Homework.
Al reviewed the homework submitted by the students. He chose 10 homework submissions that according to him were well scoped and commented on those. Not sure why he did not pick the ones that were not well scoped and provided feedback, but he is the boss in class, so he chooses!!

Tonight's Threads
Diagnosing and solving knowledge problems in organizations. I have started using MS one note following the discussion in Class IV. Here are some notes that I made on themes such as problem solving and decision making:

Problem solving stages: Make decisions, solve problems or make tasks. Difference between decision making and problem solving:
Some decisions solve problems, or they can create a problem that you have to solve later. Problem solving is probably bigger than Decision making because you have to do a lot more. Reframing the problem is an important step in Problem Solving

Decisions: structured decision, ill structured decisions (mergers and acquisitons)
Problem: awareness of a discreprency, resources to do it and pressure to act. Root cuase, fishbone diagrams etc are problem solving. Decision making: more programmed, Story: irrational exuberance. Al was looking at 14 schools, Schools were asking Al, if they made the short list?.

Al used his decision making approach when picking his first teaching Job:
a. Identification of a problem, --->identify decision making criteria, --->allocation of weights to criteria. --->develop alternatives--->Analysis of alternatives--->selection of an alternative --> implementation of alternative-->evaluation of decision effectiveness.

Naturalistic is decision making under pressure --->trader floor -->fighter pilot etc

Problem solving and decision making in in organizations
See the week 5 zip files on COLWeb--with blog questions enclosed. Some more about analyzing problems, specifically organization design content. Here are the answers to the questions that are required for this homework.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Homework:

Please answer these questions on your blog, based on the articles enclosed in this folder:

Action learning article:

o Focus on the "Problem solving process" picture, Fig. 4-1.

o There are 6 steps. Which is the most important?

o Note that 2 new steps are described, before 'determine the root cause'.

Understanding & Supporting Decision Making.pdf

o What is naturalistic decision making, and how is it different from the traditional decision making, i.e. the theory-hypothesis-test-conclude?

What data mining can't do.docx

o In terms of data, data modeling, data warehousing and data mining, why is more not necessarily better?

General Reflections:

Is there a difference between decision making and problem solving?

True or false:

o There are good decisions, and there are bad decisions.

§ ANS: False, there on only “decisions”, based on alternatives, analysis of alternatives and selection of alternatives.

o Better information yields better decision making.

§ ANS: True, Better information (as opposed to Bad information) yields better decision making. It can help you develop better alternates and help you allocate weights better.

o Better knowledge yields better decision making.

§ ANS: True, Better knowledge (more actionable pieces of information) yields better decision making.

End of Homework.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Multimedia and cognitive processes
An interesting exercise. Al had the class read the lyrics, then listen to the sound track and finally watch the video and soundtrack of Mettalica's song labeled "One". At step he requested the class to write down what the song is about and then compare it to the previous answers. The idea behind the exercise was to understand the influence of media in the learning process, particularly the impact of BIAS. In this particular case study, my analysis was as follows:
1) After reading the lyrics, my impression: the song was about WAR and its RAVAGES.
2) After listening to the soundtrack: I was glad I had read the lyrics, as it was hard to decipher the sound bytes. I guess heavy metal is a hard listen (atleast for me).
3) After watching the Video: I picked up some additional BIAS that came through, such as the Son and father relationship and the soldier sending signals via morse code as a plea for help.

Parting Shot:
4 types of learning we’ll discuss later:
1) Knowledge acquisition is the process by which knowledge is obtained.
2) Information distribution is the process by which information from different sources is shared and thereby leads to new information or understanding.
3) Information interpretation is the process by which distributed information is given one or more commonly understood interpretations.
4) Organizational memory is the means by which knowledge is stored for future use

See you next week.

Tagging memorable Knowledge

2008-04-29T10:20:00.000-07:00

For those of us who wish for an attribute system that TAGS memorable Knowledge:

The scope of this project has the sense that we could choke on it, but so was the scope of the first trip to the moon. Is there a need to focus on memorable knowledge?. Or similar attributes for Knowledge?

IS 456 Class IV - 4/23/2008 - Personal Knowledge Management

2008-04-26T20:25:00.000-07:00

Three Stories Each Week and a Parting Shot: The format this week is a tad different following the theme of the lecture. Its going to be all about PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT. To emphasize my point and Al's, the two stories this week actually there are three will be represented by mind maps created out of the freemind tool.

Parting Shot: After taking down all the notes using the freemind tool, the verdict is "use ONENOTE for class notes", I think it works much better. Next week I plan on doing just that. I Wanted to do this class in Freemind, its done. Now I can truly say been there done that!!

Story One: Assignments due on 4/29. See mind map below, click on it to view it in its own windows and then zoom in and out as needed. Two assignments due on 4/29 along with this blog entry. Al has provided the templates, so there should not be any format issues. I will post them to next weeks blog.
Story Two: Review of last class. Not much in terms of review except for a discussion on what is the difference between this class and the other Knowldege classes. See mind map below, click on it to view it in its own windows and then zoom in and out as needed.

Story Three. KM theme for today - Personal KM management: Lots of KM ground covered via a demo of the MINDMAP tool. Through the demo Al covered KM processes, KM solutions and his Expert system paper. The second demo went into the the Microsoft product ONENOTE and how class notes can be organized. See mind map below, click on it to view it in its own windows and then zoom in and out as needed.
Conclusion:Using the Freemind tool for documenting these stories is a one time experiment, not sure if I will use this again. But it is certainly possible to document it. Reading the material is another matter. It requires the reader to double click the image then zoom into the various parts. Talk about making it harder to get to?. Finally, below is the whole class in one snapshot, enjoy it if you can stand the drill down and read approach!!

IS 456 Class III - 4/16/2008

2008-04-17T14:11:00.000-07:00

Two Stories Each Week and a Parting Shot: The first story will interpret or shall I say document what I gathered in class, the second Story will be about the readings and finally the parting shot. I will start with the parting shot, sort of like reading the conclusion to get a gist before delving into the whole....Today we had a guest speaker, Ed Brill from IBM, contrary to what I was expecting, he kept the IBM sales pitch down to a low key. I noticed he got a little defensive on the subject of Exchange versus Notes but that goes with his territory is my guess.

Parting Shot: Knowledge is about NODES and RELATIONSHIPS as can be seen from the logic modelling done by Burns of Steven Job's paragraph on "Love What you Do", As was discussed last class. It is also about hierarchies as can be seen from the mind map shown below.

Story One: Ed Brill's chat with the class. Ed brought a hefty presentation chalk full of graphics and icons. 42 slides in all. I came away with the impression that Ed communicates better talking to group, than his presentation skills using PowerPoint. Or may be he was using Openoffice's PowerPoint look alike. The chat started with a discussion on Trends in Collaboration, and Virtual collaboration in particular. He touched upon various forms of collaboration including the recent trends in microblogging that is geared toward the mobile space with short burst of 140 words.

The historic perspective: 1990's money --> Engineers, 2008 --> innovation driving differentiation was the next topic of discussion. He then went into a case study of a Chicago firm that hired a CIO to turn things around. Who leveraged the idea of using a blog to capture/elicit innovation from the janitor all the way to the top. Further he went into examples of http://mystarbucksidea.com and http://ideajam.net and http://salesforce.net. All these sites are built on the same concept of capturing/eliciting innovation with a simple, accessible weblog platform. The discussion also touched upon the reward and reputation management space that enhances this form of innovation elicitation. He ended this theme with the parting shot: major trends to watch in the near future would be the hand held device which will play the role of the primary interface. If twitter's success is any indication, he could have nailed this trend.

Much of the next hour was spent on discussing Lotus notes and its development, its competetion and the surrounding software suites at IBM. He walked the class through the new generation features of Notes that integrates Instant messaging and left us thinking about the changing model: "The document should not be the center of the collaboration universe, rather people or something other than the document object paradigm".

The highlight of the evening was his discussion on the power of the blog to mobilize the masses. His story about "searchdomino.com" that was advertising Micorosft's migration tools, was in my opinion very insightful. The outcome of this episode was credibility damage that led to searchdomino loosing its subscription base and in turn its advertising revenue. The pen is indeed mightier than the sword!! This might look interesting in a logical model!!

Story Two: Al's clas notes: Following the Ed's talk, Al continued with the lecture for the evening, with the open discussion about "Information Overload". Next weeks lecture will follow on the logic modeling exercise from last week and discuss mind maps and hierarchy based Knowledge representation. Week 4 reading material has been posted to the document repository on COL web.

Conclusion: Time flies when you are having a good time. Today's lecture was a good example. Having a good guest speaker helps!! For those of you who want to follow me on twitter, I twitter as @mibdepot.

IS 456 Class II - 4/9/2008

2008-04-12T16:58:00.000-07:00

Two Stories Each Week and a Parting Shot: I modified the format for this week to two stories and a parting shot from my previous entry, where in I indicated that there will be three stories each week. The first story will interpret or shall I say document what I gathered in class, the second Story will be about the readings and finally the parting shot. I will start with the parting shot, sort of like reading the conclusion to get a gist before delving into the whole....

Parting Shot: Knowledge is about NODES and RELATIONSHIPS as can be seen from the logic modelling done by Burns of Steven Job's paragraph on "Love What you Do". The whole paragraph when looked through the lens of LOGIC MODELLING can be viewed as the following schematic representation, The theme of the whole class focused on LOGIC MODELLING as you will see from Story Two. So take away for the week, put on the logic modelling hat to get better at KM.

Knowledge management can be defined as Structuring, Storing, capturing, disseminating, using knowledge we gain out of this relationships between nodes.

Story Two: Class notes. The first hour (an entire hour) in class was spent on introductions, with the KM context interspersed in between. The discussion warmed up into Intellectual Assets and Tacit and Explicit knowledge and a brief discussion on Nonanka's article and how Nonaka could have got it wrong. Al then took us through logic modelling process (using examples) using decision tree examples. All examples were geared toward how to translate directives in plain English into "Actions, Conditions and Rules". Powerful stuff. Brought back memories of pseudo code and structured English and programming. This followed a discussion on The models of KM as discussed by Bowman. The Network Model and the Repository Model. The discussion moved on to the definitions of important concepts in KM and a Question on Which is better? Knowledge or Truth?

My thoughts on this (it is my own compilation!!): Truth is a reality that is snapshot in time, it is temporal. While Knowledge is an unending collection, a summation if you will of the content of the collective human mind, that grows, gets modified and is organic. Knowledge modifies truth and transcends the temporal nature of Truth, following the cognitive process in learning.

Story One: the Readings. As an afterthought from last week, I am going to label each article I read, with the date it was created, so I don't confuse old concepts with the new.
1) CFO-"Who you know" - [2003]: A paper that talks about the immense nature of knowledge in existence, expert systems to capture knowledge of the brightest and the best, talks about folks who coined "don't try to bottle it, just try to find it when you need it". Finally discusses why acronyms are being used today, with the computation that it will take us 2018 years to watch all videos that have been captured.
2) Notes on Scheriber: Chapters 2 and 8. [2000]: Discusses Process roles in KM and Knowledge elicitation techniques to extract data for modelling. Elicitation uses two questions: a) how to get experts to tell us what they do and 2) How to determine what constitutes their problem solving competence. It also has a interesting definition of experts: academic/practicing/samurai.
3) Topiary - case study [2004]: is about a Chicago based company that sells KM tools, the two slides at the end on measurement appear to have been slapped together as an afterthought.
4) IA PowerPoint extrapolated from "one more time what is KM" by Harris and Berg []: defines Intellectual assets and talks about tacit and explicit km.
5) Alvi - a review of KM and KMS [2001]: Lots of material on KM with interesting tables, particularly one about taxonomy and examples. (I think I like the work TAXONOMY, just like I liked the world FOLKSONOMY, makes me sound intelligent?). Great discussion on KM I am sure, but I did not find anything to store away for a rainy day!!
6) Bohn - measuring and managing technological knowledge. [1994]: Great paper at that time, I am sure. He concludes with a statement from Lord Kelvin from 1890, which was a nice touch. But to his credit in 1994 he was thinking about using decision trees and variables and how efficiency can be improved by understanding the impact of these decision tree variables better.
7) finally, Nonaka [1991]: Talks about spiral knowledge and forms of Knowledge and combinational relationship between tacit/tacit, explicit/explicit, tacit/explicit and explicit/tacit. Also talks about how Japanese firms in the 1990's produces superior products by using slogan's and themes to motivate and drive quality and innovation.

Conclusion: This is a force of habit, wanting to conclude. It is interesting that all the readings we are doing are a little dated. Nonaka's went back to 1991. Is this a representation of the sate of KM, stale with nothing new?. I remember having to study the great masters in History of Architecture before I studied the contemporary greats. May be the readings from classes 8 on up will focus on today's material. I will be patient.

Whats the hoopla about FREE in the press these days.

2008-04-05T18:28:00.000-07:00

The FREE Business model has been getting some press these past few days, so it is time I clarified where that rabble diverges from mine on the subject of FREE.

I don't have an issue with "Free" or "tending to free" in a competitive business model, after all if you can assure a level of quality and can do it cheaper, why not pass on the savings to the customer and increase your volume of sales and your customer base/loyalty. The issue I have is with the concept of FALSE advertising. If something is not FREE, don't call it that. If you call it FREE, I believe there should not be any strings attached. Don't expect anything in return, other than folks using your product, liking it and if they so choose they can show their gratitude in any form they CHOOSE to.

False advertising appears to be very pervasive in our culture. You see it entrenched in corporate America and in the Political process that we hold so dear. Candidates slamming one another to appeal to the masses appears to be an accepted form of our Genre these days. Is our collective conscience so scrambled that we need to slam our neighbors, brothers and sisters to get ahead?.

IS 456 Class I

2008-04-04T16:16:00.000-07:00

Three Stories each week, totalling 500 words is Al's requirement. At the end of 10 classes this should achieve a letter grade equal to an A in lieu of Exams. Each story will contain 167 words more or less, and the three stories will through the magic of writing and presentation styles tie in to form a whole. If I learned anything from Larry Lessig, his ideas on UGC (user generated content) and how he ties 3 stories to make one argument, then this should be smooth sailing. Sounds simple but the math works as follows. 3 hours of watching Al's class + 2 hours of reading the material he suggests each week (this week it is 7 papers and 2 ppt's) + 1 hour to compile and write this blog will equal 60 hours of effort for this course.

Story 1: Readings for the week: I narrowed in on Steve Job's Stay Hungry - Stay Foolish, commencement speech and was pleasantly surprised that he still pays homage to Lessig in his style of presentation. Did not know he had cancer and recovered among other things. Pollard and his future of KM, came across as a depressing article, he should really style his presentation on Lessig as Jobs did. May be then his stories will connect better. The Knova white paper - 10 Principle for KM, like most folks who write about this subject make KM appear to be everything and a mystery. In this day an age of transparency and connecting with the masses, I wish folks would stop doing this particularly in white papers. Here is how the author describes KM in the starting paragraph: "depending upon the nature of the initiative. KM, as we all know, is not a technology or a set of methodologies…". The author (Tom Tobin) then goes on to list 10 principles of KM, which increases the mystery 10 fold and ends up subscribing to Pollard's doomsday vision of KM. The fourth reading "Performance management" by Cognos's Doug Barton (IBM bought them out), talks about CPM, but fails to define the acronym anywhere in the material. Doug starts out by saying that CPM is financial performance management, but then goes on to talk about everything else, so I came away wondering. The fifth reading "One more time what is KM" by Harris and Berg, talked about Tacit and explicit Knowledge, which caught my eye and appears to be a recurring theme in other papers I read, I took this one step further applied my scant datamining skills and googled "tacit and explicit" + Knowledge and got 38400 hits. This has to be an important concept, I am sure by the end of this course, this concept will rise to the top. I did a word frequency check on Casanato's "Glossary of terms" and got a score of 8 for TACIT and 10 for the term EXPLICIT. I love finding patterns using heuristic word frequency!!. The final reading "Building KM systems" by Bowman, is a well written paper that gets into data mining techniques and structure of knowledge repositories. In his conclusion he talks about the measuring the return of KM systems and the lack of approaches thereof. May be we should design systems with "measuring the return" as a key criterion, we might be in a less of a mess if we did perhaps. I will end with that thought for my first story.

Story 2: Class Notes: The Second Story: What I gained from Class this week. This being the first class, the focus was mostly on an overview, ground rules and who is Al. Did not know that Al is going in for his Juris Doctorate. I am told that on a PhD tract one has to write 1000 words a day, far cry from the 500 words a week that this blog will generate for the next 10 weeks. If in some small way I can contribute to that 1000 words, may be this blog will achieve a higher purpose. So Al, this one is toward your Juris Doctorate: Larry Lessig is the Key!! Beyond that, this course is about KM themes such as: KM Technologies, Diagnosing/Solving Knowledge problems, KM best practices, PKM, BPM/BRM (hot and new) and Knowledge Based systems.

Parting Shot for this week: BPM and BRM will be explored in detail, where in we will learn to document Informal systems using the "Swim Lane Diagram" that depicts work flow.

Story 3: Conclusion:
This is a discussion/Learning course about Data/Information/Knowledge/Wisdom by exploring 7 THEMES over a 10 week period. One view point to describe KM is to look at it as data stored in a database: Data is stored in Fields, Information is stored in Records and Knowledge is the pattern(s) that can be discovered across tables and data sets. Everything can be looked at as a Knowledge Problem if you wear the right glasses/lenses!!. Stay Hungry - Stay Foolish, and I will get there.

signature(s):
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http://joyoffabrics.com
http://terry.fernandez.googlepages.com/

why $0.00 or FREE is the Future of Business

2008-03-29T21:49:00.000-07:00

Interesting video by Chris Anderson on why $0.00 is the Future of Business where he talks about Google, Yahoo and other companies and how things tend to Free.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free

The concept of Free economics is an interesting one, as is explained by this blogpost at Longtail, see http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2006/11/the_rise_of_fre.html

"Made you look" tag and Starting out on ECT 456 at DePaul

2008-03-29T20:50:00.000-07:00

Starting out on a Knowledge management course at DePaul this month. You will see more frequent entries here as I plan on using this is as the required class blog, which is worth 30% of the grade. I am supposed to write 500 to a 1000 words a week, far cry from the 1000 words a day for a PhD student. But I digress.

I would like to continue on my quest to "flush out the Goons" using Knowledge management and Data mining and other tools possibly of the collaborative kind. Nothing is free in the perspective of energy and matter as we all know, yet then why do we (Including myself) fall for these SCAMS of larger this and longer that and more of this?

It appears we as humans, in doing business, NEED to force others to buy our product. To COERCE them into buying our product, we "make them look", then bait them with "EXAGGERATED" qualifications for the product. In short we SCAM. Since most of us are greedy and do not read the fine print, we fall for the scam.

If we catalog all the scams on the Internet, have it grow through collaboration, then generate an adsense/adword type of tag based on the "Collaborated SCAM Catalog" to generate flags on such false advertising, the users will hopefully grow wiser. Through Data mining, I believe it is possible to identify a TAG CLOUD that can help us achieve this automated Flagging. So the premise is simple, bring TRANSPARENCY to claims of a products, be it a political campaign, campaign finance, free computers, free homes and a whole slew of similar products that target the greed of the havenot's or shall I say those who don't have as much but would like more, particularly if it is free.

The most powerful "Made you look" in advertisements is the word "FREE", free computer, free ipod, free desktop, ofcourse of late free home. One approach here would be to identify similar words or phrases and words connected to the primary "Made you Look" subset to an "n" hierarchy. Profiling words and pharses in other words.

Next week, I plan on focussing on the "Made you Look Subset" in a little detail, giving it a structure perhaps.

Man on a Mission - Flush out the Goons

2008-03-01T10:20:00.000-08:00

They say you have to write a 1000 words a day if you are on a PhD track. I am going to try something different. One blog entry a day all geared toward my mission: "Flush out the Con's on the internet".

Eventually tie this into data mining, semantic web and let it autogenerate. So what is this all about:

The other day I was on ebay looking for an iTouch and came accross multiple entries for 0.99 cents. good deal, I said, how can I get one. This ended up being a pyramid scheme where you have to order one product offering and then you have to get 13 referrals. If the referrals all make an order, then you get your iTouch. It got me thinking how many more of these CON's are out there and is it possible to identify them so others benefit?.

So.......

The Flushing Internet CON's was born:

Here is the first one:

http://www.desktopcomputer4free.com/:

They require you to make a purchase, once you do they require you to have 13 referrals and each of the 13 have to purchase an offer!!.

Watch out for advertisments on ebay that tell you how easy this is.

Tomorrow's post: member incentive programs.

Google Maps API

2008-01-04T12:56:00.001-08:00

Truly love Google MAPS API. For many reasons. The most important being, I am able to catalog as shown in this example of QUITLSHOPS IN THE US using LAMP. I am still cleaning up the code, will post the datbase schema and a few tips once done. Most of the work was done by "just plain reading the manual".

Google Maps API

2008-01-04T12:56:00.000-08:00

Truly love Google MAPS API. For many reasons. The most important being, I am able to do this: http://quiltingbok.com/findquiltshops/work/ using LAMP. I am still cleaning up the code, will post the datbase schema and a few tips once done. Most of the work was done by "just plain reading the manual".

Knoppix

2005-09-10T16:32:00.000-07:00

This article shows how to access a non-booting Linux system with a Knoppix CD, get read-write permissions on configuration files, create and manage partitions and filesystems, and copy files to various storage media and over the network. You can use Knoppix for hardware and system configuration detection and for creating and managing partitions and filesystems. You can do it all from Knoppix's excellent graphical utilities, or from the command line.
Knoppix, which is a complete bootable Linux on a CD, has become my rescue disk of choice. An excellent introduction to Knoppix appeared in developerWorks a few months ago ("Knoppix gives bootable, one-disk Linux" by Cameron Laird).
My old mainstays were Tom's Root Boot, "The most GNU/Linux on one floppy disk," and Peter Anvin's SuperRescue CD, "An overfeatured rescue CD." Both are first-rate Linux rescue disks. One of my favorite show-off tricks is to do a complete bare-metal system rebuild, using only a Tom's Root Boot disk and an Internet connection.
As CD-ROMs became standard on PCs, I wore out several SuperRescue CDs. However, it is based on Red Hat 7.2, which is a great Red Hat but is also an old Red Hat. So, 7.2 does not have the hardware support, such as USB or wireless, found in later distributions.
A star is bornKnoppix, the hot new kid on the block, offers some great features:

First-rate hardware detection and support, including PCMCIA, USB, and wireless

Latest and greatest Debian and KDE

Fast booting, usually around two minutes

Commercially produced disks that can be purchased for a minimal price

That last bit didn't become important to me until I moved to an area with no high-speed Internet. Dial-up only, which made 700 MB downloads rather impractical.
Knoppix incorporates the best of Debian, KDE, and its own system utilities. In this article, we'll look at how to do things both from the command line and using graphical utilities. Be sure to use values appropriate for your systems, such as partition numbers, filenames, and network hosts.
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-knopx.html?ca=dgr-lnxw01-obg-SysRecover
Fabric Bowls

Joy Of Fabrics

2005-09-10T16:05:00.000-07:00

Joy Of Fabrics Opened its doors for business in July. Created out of non traditional materials from cyberspace and with the help of opensource modules from ecommerce this site is officially open for business.

Recovering using Knoppix

2004-10-16T13:12:00.001-07:00

This article shows how to access a non-booting Linux system with a Knoppix CD, get read-write permissions on configuration files, create and manage partitions and filesystems, and copy files to various storage media and over the network. You can use Knoppix for hardware and system configuration detection and for creating and managing partitions and filesystems. You can do it all from Knoppix's excellent graphical utilities, or from the command line.

Knoppix, which is a complete bootable Linux on a CD, has become my rescue disk of choice. An excellent introduction to Knoppix appeared in developerWorks a few months ago ("Knoppix gives bootable, one-disk Linux" by Cameron Laird).

My old mainstays were Tom's Root Boot, "The most GNU/Linux on one floppy disk," and Peter Anvin's SuperRescue CD, "An overfeatured rescue CD." Both are first-rate Linux rescue disks. One of my favorite show-off tricks is to do a complete bare-metal system rebuild, using only a Tom's Root Boot disk and an Internet connection.

As CD-ROMs became standard on PCs, I wore out several SuperRescue CDs. However, it is based on Red Hat 7.2, which is a great Red Hat but is also an old Red Hat. So, 7.2 does not have the hardware support, such as USB or wireless, found in later distributions.

A star is born
Knoppix, the hot new kid on the block, offers some great features:

First-rate hardware detection and support, including PCMCIA, USB, and wireless
Latest and greatest Debian and KDE
Fast booting, usually around two minutes
Commercially produced disks that can be purchased for a minimal price

That last bit didn't become important to me until I moved to an area with no high-speed Internet. Dial-up only, which made 700 MB downloads rather impractical.

Knoppix incorporates the best of Debian, KDE, and its own system utilities. In this article, we'll look at how to do things both from the command line and using graphical utilities. Be sure to use values appropriate for your systems, such as partition numbers, filenames, and network hosts.

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-knopx.html?ca=dgr-lnxw01-obg-SysRecover

<a href="http://joyoffabrics.com/">Joy Of Fabricsa>

USB adaptors & DIY antenna = "Poor Man's WiFi" ?

2004-10-15T13:39:00.000-07:00

Make 2.4GHz parabolic mesh dishes from cheap but sturdy Chinese cookware scoops & a USB WiFi adaptor !
The largest (300mm diam)shows 15-18dB gain (enough for a LOS range extension to 3-5km), costs ~US$5 &
comes with a user friendly bamboo handle that suits WLAN fieldwork- if you can handle the curious stares!

Note -the phrase "Poor Man" is not usually considered insulting, but indicates (possibly with a degree of DIY pride) a desire to "make it do, use it up, wear it out" while laterally solving a problem. New Zealand Kiwi's are champions of such #8 wire ingenuity,with electric fences a typical appropriate technology example. Guess our project even has East meets West cross cultural aspects- in the style of Kiwi Fruit evolving from Chinese Gooseberries !? Lab note jottings below pix rather blog style,but arose during an educational WiFi workout & are intended to stimulate others into similar DIY investigation. The author- who first wrangled antenna as a radio ham in the 1960s- is a career educator with a flair for innovation,& has had extensive hands on DIY WiFi experiences - www.manuka.orcon.net.nz has insights into "his" Sardine Can Biquad antenna.

Read more at: http://www.usbwifi.orcon.net.nz/

<a href="http://joyoffabrics.com/">Fabric Bowlsa>