thetechnologist’s posterous

As any successful business person will attest, one critical need for any business user is the ability to establish and maintain your network of contacts. To that end, a number of applications help integrate your existing contacts, virtually pipe in your business cards, and help you import new contact information more easily.

Existing Contacts: If you have a synced Microsoft Exchange with your workplace, then I highly recommend adding contacts from a computer. Using your computer and Outlook to maintain your contact list is simply faster, provides you with more real estate to visually see everyone’s data, and gives you the opportunity to set up groups of contacts.

In terms of applications to augment your efforts, I recommend adding the following:

1.       CardSnap – CardSnap is a great application if you want to scan your existing business cards and add it to your contacts. The reason I like CardSnap is that information is actually read by a person and processed rather than strict OCR. This means that while it takes longer to get the data, you get the right information back. For me, the data quality is worth the wait. There is no need to have immediate gratification of scanned information if I already have the business card in hand. *Note: Get the Griffin Clarifi case, which has a magnifying glass to help take close-up pictures

2.       Facebook – If you are like me, you have a number of contacts on Facebook, but you do not have their phone numbers. You can use Facebook to access these numbers conveniently over the iPhone. Speaking of which, I need to add my phone number to the directory.

3.       LinkedIn – This application is useful if you have contacts on LinkedIn but not on your other networking sites.

Adding New Contacts:

At the end of the day, there is nothing more practical than getting someone’s business card. On your downtime, you can use CardSnap to get this information loaded. A couple other options are available though as well:

1.       Bump – Right now, the most promising application appears to be Bump, which allows to share contact information by ‘bumping’ your phone against another person’s phone to automatically exchange contact information. I have not had an occasion to use it yet, but it has potential.

2.       Add a contact the old fashion way – You can always type in someone’s information, but an iPhone is nowhere near as simple as a Blackberry with a keyboard. Typing contacts into the iPhone is actually time consuming enough that I have not done it in a social setting. This is where getting a business card instead is more practical.

Alright, it was an exhausting week evaluating these applications and a number more. Next week, I will spend more time evaluating travel applications.

http://www.ctovision.com/2008/04/google-app-engine-ctos-should-check-it-out.html
 
I checked out Google's App Engine, and it is indeed easy to use. There
are a number of full developed applications that you can view though I
have not seen any just yet that I plan on using. Will keep my eye on
this material.
 
Deepak Marwah
 
What is Taxation without Representation?: Currently, more than half a million Americans living in DC pay the second highest amount of Federal taxes per capita in the nation but they have no congressional voting rights. They have no vote for jobs, no vote for health care, no vote for education or any issue debated and voted on by the U.S. Congress.*
 
*http://www.dcvote.org

Click here to download:

GatheringStorm.pdf (6446 KB)

Deepak Marwah
 
What is Taxation without Representation?: Currently, more than half a million Americans living in DC pay the second highest amount of Federal taxes per capita in the nation but they have no congressional voting rights. They have no vote for jobs, no vote for health care, no vote for education or any issue debated and voted on by the U.S. Congress.*
 
*http://www.dcvote.org

Posterous is a web publishing agent that ties some of the best elements of innovation into one site. The system utilizes some of the best elements in technological innovation, and for this reason, I could think of no better place than to launch my blog, thetechnologist. What do I like about posterous? Well, I can sum it up in three basic points:

• It keeps things simple
• It provides flexibility in management
• It offers a robust solution for publishing material to the web

Take a look at the FAQ for more information: http://posterous.com/faq

The purpose of theTechnologist Posterous is to provide thoughtful literature and the opportunity to engage in debate about ideas, trends, and opportunities for technology in the public sector. While the technological revolution has produced many toys, gadgets, widgets, government is increasingly looking for technology that adds true value to citizens, and Web 2.0 is ushering in an age of pragmatism in government that we have not seen before. Both globally and in the U.S., technology has undoubtedly made access to government and to information easier. In my opinion though, the work has just begun and increasingly, there is room for a more direct style of democracy. As an example, you may look no further than your inbox where our new president is asking for your input on shaping this country.

In this fast-paced, Blackberry infused culture, high level executives increasingly need the right information delivered at the right time; similarly, emergency responders need the right information delivered at the right time to succeed in missions. Often times, information flows across a supply chain of systems as opposed to an open, centralized, enterprise information management system. Boosting emergency response capabilities requires an understanding of this supply chain and the related supply chain principles to improve government performance.

Particularly in mission oriented operations, existing applications do not supply information to every stakeholder in an operation. Operations at headquarters can be significantly out of sync with operations at field units, and the centralization of information is not always feasible or necessary. Furthermore, for security reasons, information cannot always be centralized in a warehouse for collective access. As public organizations evolve with information technology, there is an increasing need for communication between these disparate information systems.

To address this issue, organizations should be prepared to investigate and analyze information management with a supply chain lens. As an example, in one organization, the focus may be on improving the accuracy of mission information as it moves from a set of field operators to central command. In this case, supply chain principles such as Six-Sigma, may be used to quantify the quality of information transfer from one location or person to another. In a different organization, there could be challenges in physically moving information from one system to another creating large cycle times. In this case, the analysis of cycle times in physical supply chains could be applied. The concept’s implementation would be tailored to each organizations’ mission and goals though the principle is the same.

To execute these investigations and analysis in organizations, leveraging supply chain management personnel is the obvious choice for improving operations. Concurrently, technical expertise from systems integration personnel and enterprise applications experts may be required to understand how disparate systems can better utilized or how they can plug into existing enterprise applications to improve the flow of information. The combination of the appropriate service professionals would help clients understand how information flows from end-to-end in their organizations.

At end, the idea of an information supply chains only provides the framework. To leverage this framework, organizations must have concrete strategies and objectives with respect to their missions so that the appropriate personnel are employed to complete the job. Stakeholders from the top and the bottom of organization must buy into the idea that end-to-end examinations of the information supply chains can greatly improve the quality and quantity of the data reaching key decision makers. This engagement of mission personnel can create a better, more holistic understanding of information while providing services that can improve their mission performance. In this day and age, front line personnel should be provided the right information at the right time.

The ultimate irony of the internet’s creation is that the efforts were initially disparate and disjointed. Three organizations, working separately to develop similar results in host-to-host protocols, were brought together only by a conference in 1966 – when conferences mandated the attendance of their participants. As the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) organization set out to create the first host-to-host protocol, it did not know that other research was underway for a packet-based network by both the RAND group and NPL . DARPA, NPL, and RAND all operated in parallel unaware of each others work; however, their knowledge sharing, begun at the 1966 conference, lead to shared nomenclature, ideas, and ultimately the Internet.

Communications would never be the same – neither would knowledge management.
 
So what is Knowledge Management exactly? Knowledge Management, according to Wikipedia, “comprises a range of practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute and enable adoption of insights and experiences.” Simply put, knowledge management reduces an organization’s need to reinvent the wheel, allows organizations to capitalize on intellectual property, and provides organizations the opportunity to capture organizational patterns. Effective knowledge management provides much more than a document warehouse, and this article will describe how organizations can improve themselves by leveraging knowledge management from the bottom-up.

Today, knowledge management moves far beyond the reaches of traditional, brick and mortar libraries. Software, hardware, and the supporting infrastructure are all adapting to improve the exchange of multimedia on multiple platforms. With the increased communications in all forms, document, videos, tutorials, and other alternatives, knowledge management no longer must come from the inner reaches of universities or from senior leadership down to the front line staff; rather, knowledge management may now, more than ever, be effectively built from the bottom up.
With the changing demographics in workforces, employees increasingly want to have a voice in their respective organizations, particularly in an age where incoming employees are accustomed to voicing their opinions and ideas on the Internet well before they enter the workforce. Corporations are under increasing pressure to provide an outlet for knowledge exchange. And that goes for not just for traditional top-down organizations. More flexible organizations such as Web 2.0 companies will have to provide methods and tools to vet and store ideas for future use lest they find their employees continually spinning off companies for themselves. Increasingly, employees will expect to interact with their senior leadership in the same way they interacted with their professors in college – in a flatter, more collegiate environment.

Several principles can help private and public companies improve knowledge management:

Get the knowledge management infrastructure right. Knowledge management is different than information warehousing. Collecting documents in a centralized storage area, such as a library or an electronic storage website, does not in itself provide the infrastructure required to develop knowledge, it only provides the basic building blocks. The knowledge management infrastructure should support the development and improvement of knowledge based literature, not just the collection of it. Amazon, the online store, provides the opportunity to collect a wide array of customer preference data and build a customer database from the bottom-up. Amazon is now capable of leveraging customer preferences to offer a host of services including the option to purchase items related to past purchases. This is a prime example of an organization leveraging its knowledge base, as opposed to simply collecting information, to provide improved services and opportunities.

Make knowledge measurable.
When utilizing a knowledge-based infrastructure, the tools should provide an opportunity for measurable results. Amazon, the online store, provides a great platform for measuring the satisfaction of customers with the products available. In the same vein, the collective IQ of employees should be tapped when measuring knowledge-based literature. Senior leadership will never have the insight of the front line staff member; nor will the staff member have the breadth and depth of experience of senior leadership. Ideas should be measurable by all parties so that they can be acted on and shaped over time. For example, YouTube provides a nearly ideal platform for knowledge management. While it is limited by one type of medium, video, YouTube offers the public the opportunity to measure a video’s quality using a five-star rating scale. This simple design allows for mass measurement and allows users to search for the highest rated videos. Similarly, if a knowledge-based document was added to this type of interface, users would be able to quickly and readily access only the most highly rated content. From there, qualitative assessments or comments would allow the user to make better judgments on the usage of a particular document.

Provide incentives for refinement.
Knowledge literature, even when supported by the right infrastructure and a measurable platform, needs the opportunity to be refined. Knowledge in any form, documents, videos, tutorials, etc., should be refined over the course of time. Knowledge literature, like products , can be iteratively improved to incorporate measurable feedback from other employees and stakeholders.

Putting these principles into action will allow organizations to develop both structurally and technologically. But, perhaps more important in this time of information overload, these principles will engage all levels of an organization, encouraging all to take part in developing, measuring, and refining the best solutions. The increased bottom-up participation of the collective intelligence within organizations can only serve to improve knowledge management of an organization. It is imperative though that organizations take the right steps and provide the infrastructure to support this mindset.

Suggested Reading:

1. http://www.hec.unige.ch/recherches_publications/cahiers/2002/2002.09.pdf

2. http://www.systems-thinking.org/kmgmt/kmgmt.htm

3. http://www.deloitte.com/dtt/cda/doc/content/ca_govt_web20_mar08_EN.pdf

Where does our money go exactly? If someone took 1/3 of your cash from your wallet before you left for work everyday, you would probably ask the same question and many do just that. Taxes and transparency in spending is becoming increasingly important in government administration - the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 is a prime example.  While the answers are available by visiting the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) website, you cannot help but notice the challenge  finding the right document and digesting the volume of financial data.

The challenge ahead is that some of the tools readily available are not being used to summarize financial data. For this data to be useful, the public must be able to digest the material more easily. Simple everyday solutions are available and should be implemented- the same time of solutions that help individuals review their personal budgets. To face this challenge head on, the OMB could further engage the public with services that meet the demands of everyday people  - people that do not have the time to review 50 pages of financial data, but do have the curiousity about where taxes are being spent at a high level. Dashboard tools, such as the one posted below, present potential options for the public sector to engage the public and provide transparency. These types of tools should not be simply used as gold plating for existing financial systems; rather, they can be implemented to help serve the public's demand for transparency in public spending. What do you think?

(download)

Click here to download:

Budget Example.swf (676 KB)

Posterous is a web publishing agent that ties some of the best elements of innovation into one site. The system utilizes some of the best elements in technological innovation, and for this reason, I could think of no better place than to launch my blog, thetechnologist. What do I like about posterous? Well, I can sum it up in three basic points:

• It keeps things simple
• It provides flexibility in management
• It offers a robust solution for publishing material to the web

Take a look at the FAQ for more information: http://posterous.com/faq

The purpose of theTechnologist Posterous is to provide thoughtful literature and the opportunity to engage in debate about ideas, trends, and opportunities for technology in the public sector. While the technological revolution has produced many toys, gadgets, widgets, government is increasingly looking for technology that adds true value to citizens, and Web 2.0 is ushering in an age of pragmatism in government that we have not seen before. Both globally and in the U.S., technology has undoubtedly made access to government and to information easier. In my opinion though, the work has just begun and increasingly, there is room for a more direct style of democracy. As an example, you may look no further than your inbox where our new president is asking for your input on shaping this country.

-Deepak Marwah