b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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printChannel To Cease Operations
Interview with Tom Genova of Rampage Systems
Ideas Are To Talent As Execution Is To Practice.
RAID-on
Honey, I Shrunk the Conference
IA-CMS Mailing List
More Info For weblogRecentPosts
Networld+Interop and Comdex Atlanta 2002
Monday, September 16, 2002
Defining KM
A series of quotable, and thought-provoking, definitions of KM, ranging from the ethereal to the technical. My own definition? KM is the ordered placement of what you know, so that others may take best advantage of it.
Definitions of knowledge management.What's Your Definition of KM?. Here are some definitions of KM from leading KM theorists and practitioners. [excited utterances] via [
Source: McGee's Musings]
printChannel To Cease Operations
Another small but innovative print e-procurement provider has announced a shutdown -- victim of pressures in the financial crucible formed between the shrinking economy and venture capital expectations.printChannel, a San Francisco-based provider of web technologies for on-line print procurement and order management, was funded by WarburgPincus. printChannel CEO Oliver Pflug last week announced plans to cease operations by November 15.
This closure highlights the difficulties of selling technology and infrastructure services to an industry dominated by small- to mid-size businesses. Technology is often too transient and intangible to be a comfortable purchase for such companies -- those that can build their own will do so. Those that cannot will often just do without.
While there are still a few players offering pure technology services to the print industry, the trend is to have such services come from one of two fronts:
1) Infrastructure services provided by heavy equipment vendors such as Heidelberg and Creo, designed as a value-added service for equipment purchasers.
2) Internal services from larger print providers who tie them closely to tangible goods delivery.
In the end web technologies will become transparent, an expected norm for doing business. The shift from specialized providers to expected service is a normal, but still painful, stage in the maturation of this technology.
Interview with Tom Genova of Rampage Systems
Keith Hevenor of Electronic Publishing interviews Tom Genova of Rampage in this article. Tom touches on the incorporation of PDF into the Rampage workflow, and covers the company's philosophy. The article gives a bit of insight into Rampage's plans for accomodating JDF and for becoming more compatible with some of the larger print production systems (i.e. HeiPort and Creo InSite.)Sunday, September 15, 2002
Ideas Are To Talent As Execution Is To Practice.
Poorly grounded, ill-conceived, unlikely, improbable ideas may well be easy to spew. But executing such ideas, no matter how well done, isn't going to lead anywhere. So yes, Krzysztof, ideas do matter. And the idea that Microsoft grew to be one of the world's most significant companies without innovation is untenable.
Great business without innovation. You don't need an ounce of innovation in order to have a very successful business. At least according to David Wheeler. I guess David's intention was just to show Microsoft in bad light but if you put 2 and 2 together, the inevitable conclusion is that you don't need any innovative ideas in order to have good business, sometimes even extremely good business. I guess many people (those hung up on "innovation") don't get, but it's just one of many examples that "innovation" per se is not equal to "good" or "profitable". Ideas are worthless, execution is what matters. [
Wheeler's point -- that Microsoft products are not innovative -- may or may not be accurate, but it is irrelevant. Gates is one of the most innovative businessmen since Rockefeller. He has steam rolled his competition. He has refined the concept of "good enough" to an art form. He has built a virtual religion on the Redmond campus with tens of thousands of converts. He has arguably created more millionaires than anyone in history. These are not the accomplishments of some mindless troglodyte executing flawlessly on the concept of ditch digging.
Frederick Taylor literally remade the industrial revolution because of his ideas about the nature of execution. Henry Ford remade the auto industry because of his ideas about the nature of manufacturing. Ideas matter. But good ones require development -- deeper thought, better questioning, perhaps even collaboration. Only then does execution matter.
John Nordstrom is credited with uttering the phrase, "Execute, don't innovate." But at the heart of Nordstrom's success is the idea that customer service matters, and Nordstrom's innovation was to find new ways of serving his customers.
Ideas are talent, execution is practice. In professional sports I'll place my money on the team with more talent over the team with more practice any day. Business is no different. All else being equal, execution is the determining factor. But if you're executing flawlessly on the wrong idea, you're doomed.
RAID-on
I have just one suggestion, Hugh. American Invisible has been down but not out due to a failed drive. To keep this hassle to a minimum next time invest in an inexpensive RAID card and an extra drive. Set it for mirror (RAID 1) and the next time you have a drive failure you won't miss a beat. And it takes less than an hour to rebuld a second drive.
At Last!
I can't believe how much time and trouble it takes to install a new C: drive, operating system, Office, drivers, firewall, anti-virus, then persuade Norton that we really did renew our subscription for a year, not just for the initial 90 days that Dell gave us, then restore all our data, then install my blogging software, then configure it, then....
Sorry, I'm ranting. I'll get back to work on Time, Please. I just hope this disk lasts longer than the first one did.
[
Honey, I Shrunk the Conference
Some notes from the PDF Conference at the shrinking Seybold San Francisco. I didn't make it this year (for the first time in years) and the only thing I really regret not seeing was some of the web services sessions, including the one by Jake Savin. Maybe I can pick that up somewhere else.
It's been several years since I attended Seybold San Francisco and, given the economy and the somber time of year, I expected the conference to be scaled back. Still, it was a bit sad to see that the North Hall of Moscone was closed off, and the expo on the South Hall floor was pulled in from the walls, bracketed by black curtains. I remember when it was wall-to- wall in both halls and it would take a day and a half to properly explore all the booths. Had I been ambitious, I could have hit all the vendors on my "surgical strike" list in an hour and a half. So I paced myself by attending sessions, eating, walking around the block, eating, talking to vendors, eating, seeing industry friends, and eating. I did not lose weight on this trip.[more...][
If you're interested in how some big-time publishers are building their businesses around the PDF format this is worth a read.
IA-CMS Mailing List
The geek factor on this list is decidedly higher than on SIGIA-L, but the initial few posts look interesting. Much for me to learn. Some months back Jenny Levine at TSL introduced me SIGIA-L, which seems geared primarily to GUI designers. IA-CMS seems, at first glance, to be oriented more to database structure. Both are areas that need much discussion.
New mailing list. David Heller has just started up a new list, IA-CMS, devoted to the application of information architecture to content management... [
More Info For weblogRecentPosts
This mod to weblogRecentPosts is a stellar improvement for those using Radio as a personal or professional KM tool. Now a quick glance at the Desktop Home Page shows you which posts are published, and to which Categories. Excellent!
Update to weblogRecentPosts.Rapidly becoming one of my how did I live without it productivity tools for Radio blogging.
[Bravo! weblogRecentPosts tells you if it's published or not..
Brian St. Pierre has modified my weblogRecentPosts hack to tell you which items haven't yet been published. His timing couldn't have been better -- I have three unpublished items at the moment, and to see them displayed as such is delightful.
I've incorporated Brian's changes to my copy also, so jump to either of our posts to download the code and read the instructions. :)
[Deadly Bloody Serious]
This required almost no effort to setup -- I had it working in less than two minutes -- and it is precisely the sort of thing that must be built if Radio is too work in a consultative/confidential environment. It isn't enough to take great care in clicking categories. The default Radio setting of sending everything to the Home page practically ensures that you will, at some point, erroneously publish a private post in public. Not good.
While this litle fix won't solve the bigger issue, it is a great interim step and works like a charm.
Tuesday, September 10, 2002
Networld+Interop and Comdex Atlanta 2002
Went down to the Georgia World Congress Center today for Networld+Interop and Comdex Atlanta 2002. It's been a couple of years since I attended, and the show was much smaller than I remember. I guess all trade shows are, these days.But it wasn't just the size that was different. Much (all?) of the vitality was gone. The vendors were smaller companies, though the big boys like Cisco were represented. But it was mostly a network management and component hardware vendor show.
I did think it odd that two of the three keynote speeches are by CxOs of telcoms. This is an industry that is completely wrapped around the axle -- delivers wretched service, spends inordinately on marketing and pathetically on customers, can't make a profit to save its miserable life, is the single biggest barrier to getting broadband to the masses, and is universally agreed to be in its dying throes. So why the hell did they have two of these guys giving keynote speeches? What's up with that?
But I saw a few things that were interesting. I talked to a nice lady at Exabyte who helped me spec an affordable backup system for my home network. For about $800 I can get a nice, helical-scan 8mm tape system that will do everything I need and, supposedly, is quite reliable. I'll be looking into it.
I discovered systems integrator Monarch Computer Systems over in Tucker, GA. They had some really nice AMD-based systems on display, with spiffy, well-designed aluminum cases and properly engineered airflow (unlike my crappy Micron PC case.) I never heard of them, but they won a 2001 Editor's Choice Award for Best Technical Workstation from Linux Journal. They have a middlin' lifetime rating of 5.7 on ResellerRatings.com, but the guys I spoke to seemed knowledgeable enough. I don't know how they are in serving individual consumers, though.
The other thing I saw was several small Asian vendors selling SOHO VoIP access points for ~$125. Teliann, Powernet Technologies, and MIP Telecom all seemed to be Korean companies with roughly equivalent products. It takes two of these things to be worth anything (it's really point-to-point VoIP) and I couldn't get anyone who really seemed to understand my questions about working around (or with) firewalls and such. Still, if you spend a lot on LD to talk to someone with a DSL line maybe it's worth looking into.
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