July 2003 Archives

The joy of an empty mailbox is equivalent to the joy I once had at getting (surface) mail as a child.

ComputerWorld has an interview with Dan Lovallo, based on his recent article in Harvard Business Review on project management in IT.

A review of David Weinberger's 2002 book, Small Pieces Losely Joined.

A list of Critical Chain Project Management vendors.

Review of Alan Larson's Demystifying Six Sigma from 2003.

In his recent Productivity Principles newsletter -- only available via email -- David Allen describes his system and the response he has to people who ask "how long does it take?" and who are really attempting to evaluate the worth of the investment to learn something new.

From David Hawthorne - "The trouble with standards, according to some old engineering colleagues of mine in the broadcasting business, is that in practice they become both a floor and a ceiling."

I get eWeek for free because I have a technology position and their advertisers want to get in front of my eyeballs. The electronic version isn't very usable.

In an extension of the ideas of social network analysis, Karen Stephenson's Quantum Theory of Trust includes a list of six different types of networks.

The 6th annual Global MAKE Winners have been selected.

A topic near and dear to my roots: engineering calculations and how to make them most easily used by others.

A familiar refrain: make software companies accountable for mistakes, errors, lost time, and even undecipherable dialog boxes. An excerpt from Leonardo's Laptop repeats the issue.

The McKinsey Quarterly, "The psychology of change management" by Emily Lawson and Colin Price highlights interpersonal (transpersonal) psychology as applied to change management in organizations.

Peter Morville discusses international aspect of information architecture in his latest Semantics Column. Semantic Studios - International Information Architecture The ways we categorize are rooted in language and culture. This creates unique challenges for information architects. For example, a web site targeted for a Japanese audience may require a completely different...

Software and hardware should be integrated, so they are best able to work together and provide the business what it needs. At least that has been the thinking of enterprise application integration proponents.

Aventis Pharmaceuticals has a clear mandate for knowledge management in their research & development organization, which they call Drug Innovation and Approval. There is a Knowledge Networks Management organization that reports to the head of R&D, as described at their website.

Jon Powell, the CKO of Hewitt Associates, spoke at the KMPro Chicago meeting today. Powell told us the story of his two years at Hewitt and the KM approach he has taken.

Useful tool for any community that needs to migrate from YahooGroups and still keep its archives.

An article in today's Seattle Post-Intelligencer talks about bloggers who are also employed by Microsoft.

I guess this does sound a little scary for the government to be developing, but isn't it also an ultimate form of a blog?

Given the number of people working the knowledge management conferences and publications, it looks like the pharmaceutical industry continues to be interested in knowledge management.