December 2002 Archives

I am building a site for my wife, barbara poole, who is a figurative painter, so I have not been posting lately.  Also, it is almost the New Year and I am very busy.  I should pick up the cadence soon.   Her site will focus entirely on her paintings, like Kay Ruane's site which I wrote about on December 26.   It will also include a weblog, which I am in the process of enabling.

In addition to my job search, a new business idea is emerging.   The business, currently called CCA: Content and Collaboration Architectures, will focus on designing and building environments for creating and sharing intellectual capital.   This is a huge concern in medical, pharmaceutical, biotechnology and healthcare companies, so the initial service offerings will focus on solutions for that vertical market.

Follow the link for a good post on metadata and the reasons for RDF (Resource Description Framework).   "Hopefully, by spreading these little chunks of Creative Commons RDF around the Web, we can promote interest in the broader vision of aSemantic Web, and help kickstart its development. I hope you'll join us and get creative."

I missed several days of posting during my holidays, but I am back and still on vacation.   It snowed like crazy last night, but not enough to dampen our Christmas party.   My friend Doug Bolin launched a new site for his wife Kay Ruane, who makes beautiful images in black and white with pencil.   Visit the site. This is one of her pictures:

NY Times: "Although Dr. Poindexter's system has come under widespread criticism from Congress and civil liberties groups, a prototype is already in place and has been used in tests by military intelligence organizations." [Scripting News]

LibraryLookup: How Web Services are Evolving. Jon Udell's LibraryLookup is a brilliant demonstration of how Web services are going to evolve. I've already plugged it into... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Riedel Wine Glasses. Can I Have A Glass For This? Yes, you can. Riedel make the best glasses in the world (well, with a little competition...), painstakingly suiting each drink to the best shape and size of container, for the benefit of nose, mouth, eyes and hold. A very recent addition, not yet found on their official list, is the bourbon glass, made with expert advise from Fred Noe, of the legendary Noe family, overlords of Jim Beam. Form means content indeed! More's the pity that the great majority of drinks are served in inappropriate glasses and therefore never fully enjoyed. [MetaFilter]

I fully agree with this, the glass makes a huge difference in the enjoyment of the the wine.  Most glasses are much to small and restaurants don't seem to be aware how much difference the glass makes.

Ernie the Attorney: Outline of Law Blogs. [Scripting News]

great list.

THE PROMETHEUS DECEPTION, Robert Ludlum, St. Martin's, Suspense/Thriller, ISBN: 0312253

Today I drove to see my daughter's hockey game.   The drive was made tolerable only by an intense spy nove on tape.   Nicholas Bryson, in THE PROMETHEUS DECEPTION,spent 15 years of his life as a deep cover operative for The Directorate. The idea behind The Directorate is simple. The alphabet soup agencies --- FBI, CIA, NSD, etc., --- spend as much time one-upping each other as they do preserving national security. Hence, The Directory is created. It is a quasi-legal organization whose existence is a close-held and guarded secret, known only to the President of the United States and a few of his closest advisors. Bryson over time becomes The Directorate's most prized operative. It quickly becomes the only life he knows.  

K-Logs

Here is a link to lists of k-logs from John Robb.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/klogs/links

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/klogs/files/

My New Business Ideas

New Hampshire in the rain and ruminations about the job market, XML, Linux, and IT cost reduction     

It is no fun driving in torrential rain from Boston to New Hampshire!  But I drove slowly and got a lot of thinking done, however, about XML, software development, open source software, and the kind of business I want to create.   Over the past two weeks, a contingency recruiter who wanted to work with me called over 70 companies to see if they needed someone in knowledge management.   He called consulting firms and law firms and no one wanted to hire someone in a leadership position in knowledge management.   Now maybe he  did not know how to describe the value that I could add, but no one responded positively.   I am wondering if knowledge management is a tired concept.

The business that I may create, if I can build enough momentum is focused on content management, knowledge management with a primary focus on dramatic cost reductions by transforming the content management processes, transforming the applications, using XML, and running the apps on low cost linux systems maybe using grid computing rather than on high cost windows based systems or proprietary software like Lotus Notes.

After the drive, I relaxed and watched �The City of Lost Children�.

La Cite des Enfants Perdu; The City of Lost Children  (you can tell I love the visuals)

Tonight, on our cinematic Christmas tour de force, we saw "La Cite des Enfant Perdus"  a movie that I unfortunately did not know about.  It is an extrordinary movie of nightmarish images.  "That mastery of imagery and montage is what keeps Jeunet and Caro's film from being a mere clutter of dazzling images. The City of Lost Children is something of a fable set in a city in either the future or an alternate reality. The movie has to do with a scientist named Krank (Daniel Emilfork), who is aging prematurely because he lacks the ability to dream. Fighting to reverse the aging process, he sends his blind minions out to kidnap the city's most potent dreamers�the children�and bring them back so he can invade the children's dreams and make them his own."

After seeing this movie I am fascinated by the films of  Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro.   Most recently Jean-Pierre Jeunet create Am�lie, another of my recent favorite movies.   Researching the film makers I found they also did Delicatessen (1991), a cult favorite in France which presents a post-apocalyptic black comedy about cannibalism!   What a treat!  :)

The Road Warrior

Well tonight we found the right movie...The Road Warrior.  What a great film!  And how refreshing to see Mel Gibson do an excellent job at a movie after the first Mad Max.  This movie is a strong candidate for the most thrilling movie ever.  What more appropriate commodity to be fighting over than gasoline?

Tomorrow we will go to see the Two Towers in the movie theatre

Ray of light for tech investors. Software firm Oracle and handheld computer maker Palm lift technology investors' spirits with better than expected results. [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]

I am always looking for good news!

While I am on holidays we like to watch movies, every night sometimes on DVD. Tonight we watched Mad Max. 

I mistakenly thought I had gotten the second installment, but this one was great any way. There were tons of firey car crashes and chases.   I can' wait to see all the others again, in anticipation of Mad Max 4.  Visit the Mad Max web ring for more details.

At the same time I am reading two books

These are books that have been recommended in the weblogs I have been reading, so, not to be left in the dust I am reading:

   Emergence  by Steven Johnson, who I link to in my Blogroll.    Steve writes essays and articles for magazines.   I like his writing, especially on his web log.

 I am also reading "Small Pieces Loosely Joined by David Weinberger.

   .

The New Yorker

I just finished two articles in the New Yorker magazine.  The first was:  MANHUNT by SEYMOUR M. HERSH; The Bush Administration's new strategy in the war against terrorism; Issue of 2002-12-23 and 30; Posted 2002-12-16.  This is an article that dissects the Bush administrations new tactics for fighting terrorism, including assassination.   It also details Rumsfelds ongoing battle with the Clinton generals.   

I also read Norman Mailer's essay: "Birds and Lions"  Scenes from a writer's life.   It presents a good picture of how a writer develops and how hard it is to truthful about yourself and the world you live in.   I think Norm Mailer is a spectacular writer.   I saw him read in Province Town two years ago.  He read about going into space and Cassius Clay in Africa.   He's old now, but very sharp and insightful.   The first book I read by Norman Mailer was "The Naked and the Dead".   I read it in Paris where he wrote the book.

I am on my Christmas Vacation

I probably won't look to hard for a job, but I will continue to write in the weblog.   I think, however that I will change the subject a bit and start  to discuss a number of the other things that I like besides technology, computing, information science, taxonomies, XML, content management, and Google.   So now I will talk about art, painting, music, and what I am reading.

Let me start by talking about an artist that I heard speak at the Carpenter Center at Harvard the other night.  Damian Loeb is a figurative painter who is inspired by movies and the act of narrating a story pictorially.    His panoramic paintings require time to view and to comprehend the story.   His technique is fabulous.  Unfortunately during the lecture he did not show any slides.   He said it was a lecture and that people came to hear him talk about his images rather than to have him uncomfortably show stuff and tell a bit about the picture.   He also did not lecture, but rather just spoke about his images, the way he constructs his images and his approach to painting.

2002 Year-End Google Zeitgeist Search patterns, trends, and surprises

"2002 Year-End Zeitgeist offers a unique perspective on the year's major events and hottest trends based on more than 55 billion searches conducted over the past year by Google users from around the world. Whether you are tracking the global progression of the "Las Ketchup" craze or finding out who really is the queen of the Internet, the 2002 Year-End Zeitgeist enables you to look at the past year through the collective eyes of the world on the Internet."

For a google fan, these lists recap the year and the pulse of the worlds interests, primarily in pop culture.  "Las Ketchup" demonstrates how memes spread globally.

A burst of schemas. For different reasons many XML 2002 presentations proposed the use of multiple validations and transformations for advanced needs, rather than using a single schema. [xmlhack]

Interesting to follow the Links to the XML conference proceedings where the papers give a lot of insight into XML schemas and their application in web publishing

Reuters

I am also getting some pull from Reuters who are thinking about the synergies between content managment, knowledge management, and their CRM initiatives.  This is a strategic requirement for them.

The Balanced Scorecard Collaborative

I am having a bit of good luck with the balanced scorecard collaborative.  I think they will see me after the new year.   They are interested in learning and knowledge managemnet for their clients.

Sites to watch for news and what's next is an article chronicling 7 tech notables in the Boston area and their use of weblogs.
[Blogging Alone]  

Rats, I am still not on the list, although I don't think my comments would add to much to the technology debate.   They left out Mitch Kapor, who has moved to California, but was a former Bostonian.

Here is a list with links:   Dan Bricklin; John Robb; David Weinberger; Ray Kurtzweil; Jeremy Allaire; Ray Ozzie; Bob Frankston; Mitch Kapor; Ralph Poole

Theodore Roosevelt Quote

"It's not the critic who counts; not the person who points how the strong
man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The
credit belongs to the person who is actually in the arena, whose face is
marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and
comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great
devotions; who spends themselves in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows
in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if they
fails, at least fails while daring so greatly, so that their place shall
never be with those timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."

Technology in Healthcare Series
"Medical Management � Making it Work with New Technologies"
Sponsored by: SkyWorld Interactive
Supported by: New England HIMSS
Moderator: David Stievater, Healthcare Strategy Consultant, Stievater & Associates
Panelists: Rick Berard, Head of Internet Development, Global Commercial Strategy, Biogen, Inc.; Tom Hawkins M.D., Director of Web Services, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care; and Lee Steingisser, MD and Senior Director of Clinical Development, McKesson Health Solutions
Tuesday, December 17th � 8:00am � 10:00am
Registration/Breakfast - 8:00am-8:30am; Panel - 8:30am-10:00am
Hosted by: Accenture, 100 William Street, Wellesley Office Park, Wellesley
Pre-registration: MIMC Members - $35; Non-members - $70
Please note: $10 additional for on-site registration
A panel of industry analysts, health plans, and technology implementers will describe their success stories in applying new technologies to allow them to realize the promised value of Medical Management. Applications of technology in this area include improved data mining of claims and medical history to target individuals most likely to benefit from medical management, new tools provided to individuals and providers allowing them to manage their health collaboratively, and communications via wireless and Internet networks that provide insight to medical professionals allowing them to assist their patients before possible illnesses become emergencies.

There are lots of good discussions happening around Boston, however I only find out about them the day before the event, and they cost a lot too.   $70 for a breakfast with Accenture.  It seems I have missed another good industry event.

Locus for action. There is no room for people in intranets.  This has been my impression too.

Who Needs an Intranet?. Martin White has an interesting answer for managers of small companies wondering about intranets -- you probably don't need one! I concur, companies under about 50 employees, with everyone located in the same facility, can likely forego the expense and ha [b.cognosco]

I think this is where I begin to diverge from mainstream thinking on Intranets.  My thinking here is along the same lines as my previous post on whether an Intranet is a factory or a gallery.  I agree with Martin that a 50-man organisation doesn't need a gallery intranet to reflect upon work done or to showcase the HR policy set.  But who does?  More often than not I think these sites are built with an eye on senior management approval.  Hence: glossy, bright colours, simple headlines and little substance.

However if an intranet is living work, an embodyment of the spinning flywheels and turning cogs of the organisation, then why is it any less relevant to a 50-man, or even 5-man organisation?  To me it's just as relevant.  In a small organsiation there are less people doing the work, everyone needs to be that bit more focused on it (don't I know it!)  In a large organisation there are more cracks for things to fall through, but the idea is the same.

An intranet should help to collect things together and provide a locus for action.  The intranet should be part of the process, embedded in the work not separate to it.  As Terry says in response to the gallery post:

In "The 21st-Century Intranet" Jennifer Gonzalez describes four types of intranets ranging from the asynchronous broadcast model to the symmetrical interactive model. Almost none of the later exist and I belive it is becasue of the point you make -- there is almost no room for people. Even the idea of adding people to the intranet draws gap-mouthed stares from executives in many companies.

I don't think a change in workflow alone will do it. As numerous k-log threads have discussed, the cultural and personal barriers are greater than a simple change in workflow can address. But a comprehensive approach, will solid management support, could drastically change the nature of intra-company communication.

The basic point is this: If the Intranet is about the people, and their work, then why does the number of people matter?

More on Wired Correspondence. I've made two edits to yesterday's entry. First, I've put a pointer to the actual Wired article on Chandler at... [Mitch Kapor's Weblog]

Maybe I was a bit wrong in my earlier post about Chandler.  In this post Mitch explains a bit more about his vision for the application and it does sound interesting.

At the end of last week I received a number of good leads for jobs:

Accenture: Content Management

Omidyar Foundation: VP of KM

Massachusetts Medical Society:  A information platform for transforming medical reimbursement; knowledge managemnet in biotech

And a friend and I are working on creating content management/knowledge management company, I will explain more about this later, as the idea matures.

Mitch Kapor tries to take the high road, but Wired puts him on the low one -- with "10 Things I Hate about Outlook." Oy. Same old stuff. Apparently it's impossible for anyone to do anything without it being about Microsoft. This is what a true monopoly looks like, in the mind of supposed journalists. I see the same thing re open source. The world is very simple. There's Microsoft and there's open source. They're like two puppets beating up on each other. Mitch tells us that they won't let him not be the kind of puppet they want him to be. Hey at least they know he exists. This, by the way, is why weblogs are so important. They allow us to route around this outage. [Scripting News]

However, having read Mitch's weblog, I can not figure out what value Chandler will add above Outlook.  It is, however, open and they have a number of very good people, I wish that they were working to be a bit more creative however.   We will see.

"The most important information is the information you create youself."  I read that in the microcontent news blog. I think in his article about microcontent clients.

Is your intranet archival or vital?.

A good thread on intranets and klogging. Matt Mower has two posts, too long to repost: Contributing to an intranet and More like a gallery than a factory. And Spike Hall's Workshop or Trophy case: Strangers are Shown Trophies. I think their comments bear on the whole knowledge as object artifacts, as things, vs. knowledge as communication shared.

AOL Moving into Blogging? [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

There certainly is a rush to blog!

Health system elicits interest
The Daily Transcript
By Jennifer Heldt Powell
Friday, December 13, 2002

"Social-service advocates fed up with a fragmented, costly health and human services system welcomed a proposed change presented yesterday by Gov.-elect Mitt Romney's top health care adviser. Charles D. Baker Jr., chief of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Inc., outlined a plan yesterday to reorganize the Executive Office of Health and Human Services. Instead of 15 separate agencies serving different types of clients, there would be seven departments based on functions such as case management, information services, purchasing and personnel.  As an analogy, Baker said, it would be like treating health and human services as a single store rather than a mall.  The plan, presented at an event sponsored by the Pioneer Institute, would make client services more efficient and save money by eliminating redundancies, Baker said. Also, the state might find more ways to snare federal matching funds. The plan was developed over the summer long before Romney was elected. But Baker, who heads Romney's health care transition team, said he will push it. "I would expect the incoming administration to engage this debate," he said."

John Robb. Electronic Portfolios for Students (a K-Log?) [klogs] [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

I have written about blogs in education in this weblog before.  I think it is a great idea and I think building an electronic portfolio of work is an excellent idea for aggregating the work.

Google labs

Google have added a new search viewer to their site which shows you a few seconds of each site until you get the one you want. Not sure it's on the main menu yet so here is a link http://labs.google.com/gviewer.html. Try it!   I am a big google fan so I will keep this site up to date with their innovations.

Announcing Froogle!. New, from Google: Froogle! "Froogle is a new service from Google that makes it easy to find information about products for sale online. By focusing entirely on product search, Froogle applies the power of Google's search technology to a very specific task: locating stores that sell the item you want to find and pointing you directly to the place where you can make a purchase."... [Google Weblog]

Former KPMG Consulting lays off 4 percent of staff. Company says move is in response to market demand [InfoWorld: Top News]

State seen slipping as biotech center

By Naomi Aoki, Globe Staff, 12/11/2002  Quote from the Boston Globe. 

assachusetts, a major center of biotechnology since the field's birth nearly 25 years ago, may be in jeopardy of losing its stronghold, at a time when the industry is poised for a new wave of growth and other regions are aggressively vying for an increasing share of the nation's biotech jobs, companies, and tax dollars.  According to a report released yesterday by the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council and the Boston Consulting Group, the state is already falling behind in the competition to be the premier center of biotechnology, and if it doesn't act soon to reverse the trend, it stands to lose out on nearly 100,000 new jobs and $1 billion in tax revenue in the next eight years"

Forrester: '03 IT spending forecast is mixed. Early data forecasts 1 percent IT spending growth [InfoWorld: Top News]

I vote that companies spend more!

KM And The Pharmaceutical Industry
Joseph Horvath � KM Director, Millennium Pharmaceuticals
Thursday, December 19th, 2002  --  4 pm-5:30pm
 
News As our Web site undergoes reconstruction, please register by e-mail this month
to REGISTER@KMFORUM.ORG
 
Location � Earley & Associates � 400 Hillside Avenue Needham, MA -- $15 at the door
 
Directions at www.earley.com or call 781-444-02872 x202 for more info
 
Details
Joseph Horvath leads the development and implementation of  knowledge management strategy at Millennium Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, MA. Before joining Millennium, Joe was an executive consultant with IBM Business Innovation Services and a research manager with the IBM Institute for Knowledge Management, which he helped establish. He was Associate Research Scientist at Yale University where he researched tacit knowledge and organizational learning. He holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from Brown University.
 
Presentation:  
Knowledge Management Strategy at Millennium Pharmaceuticals
In an industry where breakthrough treatments come from breakthrough science, Millennium Pharmaceuticals was founded in 1993 with a strategy to make innovation more manageable. It has partnered with, merged or affiliated with more than a dozen global companies in a revolutionary collaborative approach to research. The company develops treatments for patients in the areas of cancer, cardiovascular, inflammatory, and metabolic disease. Millennium leads the way in understanding the roles that genes, proteins, and molecular pathways play in disease and applies that knowledge to drug discovery and development.  Joe Horvath will discuss how KM is changing this industry, Millennium�s development of key, strategic knowledge bases and the role KM plays in catalyzing and supporting the company�s work.
 

Reminder � Reserve your seat this month via e-mail to REGISTER@KMFORUM.ORG

Job's I applied for:

empolis:  

Microsoft:  I wrote again about the Business Productivity initiative that they have underway. 

The Balanced Scorecard Collaborative  :  Balanced Scorecard Collaborative, Inc. is a new kind of professional services firm that facilitates the worldwide awareness, use, enhancement, and integrity of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) as a value-added management process.