Aug 3, 2009 | Innovation, Sales, Strategy
Application of public technology in the past has been often seen as a means by which the state can exercise control, and as such has come under severe criticism from civil libertarians. Remember the howl that emerged with the “Australia Card” debate in the eighties.
However, any reasonable view of the currently available technology would see that it has enormously added to the power of the individual to control their circumstances.
Anyone now can become a published author or photographer, a band need not contract to a record company to get its music heard, and the individual has access to vast amounts of information of all types.
The fact that some do not manage this new power has nothing to do with the technology, just about how people use it. Tim O’Reilly argues convincingly that an artists greatest problem now is not piracy, but obscurity, little has really changed, it is just the means to the end that has changed.
Aug 2, 2009 | Demand chains, Innovation, OE, Operations
Standard project management tools are designed to manage a sequential series of activities typified by a building project. They do this very well, as the work flows are dependent on the completion of previous work that is done to well understood, almost generic specifications.
They are far less useful when they are set up to manage processes that rely on the production of information for their success, where iteration between different activities are required, such as those in a product development project or a value chain development and improvement process.
This leads to the conclusion that when developing such a project that requires the production of information to be successful, spend a bit more time in the planning stage to map the flows of information, particularly where there are known dependencies, as well as the work flows. This added investment of time in the planning stages typically yields huge returns during the implementation.
A simple question, asked over and over, can help:
“What do I need to know from other tasks before I can complete this one?”
