A friend passed along this article from the Wall Street Journal today. To me, the fact that IBM is jumping into the social networking field is yet another validation that capabilities like blogs, wikis, and personal profiles are "going mainstream" in the corporate world. IBM Plans to Join Social-Networking Field By WILLIAM M. BULKELEYJanuary…
Even in small organizations, lots of things happen that are too quickly forgotten. Who worked on that project last year? Where did we store the document that outlined this procedure? Didn’t the CEO tell us that we should focus on margin this quarter? One way to capture this type of activity or knowledge is through…
In Sharepoint 2003, creating custom site definitions required diving into the file system, copying obscure directories, editing XML files, etc. Now, in MOSS 2007, you can create custom site templates from the MOSS interface. Create a site using whatever out-of-the-box starting template you want. Then configure it by adding or removing whatever Web Parts you…
From Techweb via today’s Boston Globe’s Business Filter column: Middle managers are drowning A new report says that middle managers are swamped by useless information and spend about a two hours a day looking for the data they need. And often, once they obtain the data, half of it has no value to their jobs….
Back in the day, when I worked at Renaissance Solutions (an unfortunately defunct boutique management consulting firm), we talked about the ideas of Solution Calls and Puts (think options on the stock market). I didn’t ever get comfortable with the words that we used for the ideas, but basically it was a clearinghouse metaphor for…
I saw a slideware software demo today that really impressed me. (I can’t disclose the source, as it was a confidential preview of an upcoming release.) Suffice it to say that the product will live in the the workflow space. What really got to me was how far applications like this have come. Most people…
“Look at a man’s Sharepoint sites and you will see software. Work a day in a man’s Sharepoint sites and you will know the man.” – Me (with an assist from NJB) paraphrasing someone much more quotable Don’t ever trust software for what it (or its makers, or its proponents) claim it can do. I can preach…
I finished up my first Web service today using Visual Studio 2005 and C#. As I do whenever I start with a technology that’s new to me, I turned to the Web to try to find a good example. After quite a bit of searching, I found this article to be a great starting point. It makes the…
When I joined the company, we talked about all sort of systems that we would need to get up and running pronto. Things like a CRM solution, subscribing to a sales suite like salesforce.com, etc. I made the rather bold statement that we should just use some spreadsheets to track things. There were several reasons…
Many people are familiar with the idea of looking at a sales pipeline and discounting the potential revenue by the probability that the deal will close. (e.g., a $1M deal that has a 10% chance of closing is discounted to $100k). For relatively small organizations, it turns out that using this thinking and applying…