Below you'll find a list of all posts from 2004
You wouldn’t think that books discussing agronomics would have much to say relevant to Organizational Structure, IT Management or Knowledge Management. You’d be wrong, of course, but you can see how people would think that. I’d like to show how some of the ideas being debated in the agricultural industry’s fringes can illuminate our own issues. James C. Scott, in …
Jack Vinson has an interesting report on a recent presentation by Bob Hiebeler of St. Charles Partners. The fascinating part was the discussion of “best practices”: it got me thinking about James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) and what it implies for …
There. I’ve just shown how there is no need to have an insurance business in America. Send it all to India.
I’ve mentioned articles by Phillip Armour of Corvus International (Deer Park, IL) before: he writes a regular feature in Communications of the ACM called “The Business of Software” and normally features some of the tougher, management-oriented problems of development. This month he tackles how software is measured and points out the ridiculous use of “Lines of Code” or LOC. (Of …
There have been a spat of IT articles in HBR in the past couple of years, showing that IT has finally made it from the weirdo to the standard practice status. “Getting IT Right” seems to follow from “The REAL New Economy” and “IT Doesn’t Matter”. Charlie S. Feld and Donna B. Stoddard make an argument for “three interdependent, interrelated, …
While reviewing training literature recently, I stumbled on Daniel R. Tobin’s The Knowledge-Enabled Organization: Moving from “Training” to “Learning” to Meet Business Goals through some serendipitous web searches. My enquiry first led me to his website that dealt with “The Fallacy of ROI Calculations for Training“. An obvious ploy to perk up my ears. The article is an abbreviated version …
Mètis — “practical intelligence, using conjectural and oblique knowledge, which anticipates, modifies and influences the fate of events in adversity and ambiguity” according to Baumbard — has reminded me of something that I read some time back. This led me to see some connections between knowledge management, Elliott Jaques’s Requisite Organization and wisdom. (And thanks to jmmj for conversation on …
For the past eleven years, Blaha and his associates have been reverse engineering software for evaluating products. He came up with some terrifying results.
Mahmoud et al. say that introductory programming courses have unacceptable failure rates, with “reported withdrawal, failure and D-grade rates approaching 50%”. In an interesting take on the problem, they decided to change they way they teach instead of complaining that the students had to change.
!["Bessemer converter (iron into steel) Allegheny Ludlum Steel e Corp Brackenridge, Pa (LOC)" [crop]. Ca. 1940. Alfred T. Palmer via Library of Congress](https://i0.wp.com/www.manasclerk.com/wpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/1a35063u-Bessemer-converter-iron-into-steel-Allegheny-Ludlum-Steel-e-Corp-Brackenridge-Pa-LOC-1600x995.jpg?fit=862%2C536&ssl=1)
Since IT projects are particularly prone to ignoring risk and escalation of commitment, reviewing some of the research on how we make decisions will benefit any IT manager or PM.
