Measurement, Metrics and iteration

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!!

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

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.

In Search of Transparency

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

<img src="klematis.jpg" width="150" height="113" alt="klematis"
style="opacity:0.4;filter:alpha(opacity=40)" />

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.