Thursday March 17, 2005

Yet Another Reason to WFH

Yet another reason to Work From Home. Your co-workers might just have a video camera and an evil agenda. I almost feel sorry for that guy. Some day he will have children, and funny Internet humor lives forever.

bill.

( Mar 17 2005, 04:14:51 PM EST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Tools and Business Processes

It is never wise to engineer a tool without modelling the process first. Successful tools merely automate, enhance, and expedite business processes already in place. If you analyze the dataflow and interfaces between data and participants in a business process, your "algorithm" has already been written. Enhancing business processes through the use of tools without disrupting them is also an excellent method for ensuring Change Acceptance.

Think about that one the next time someone says "We need a tool that does ..." The correct phrasing would be "A tool could expedite this cumbersome manual process." Creating a process that fits a tool is a sure way to anger the users and create inorganic dataflow that conflicts with the business operation.

Tools that execute patterns of human behavior, or emulate the cognitive processes of the human mind are the Holy Grail of software systems.

< /rant>
bill.

( Mar 17 2005, 01:55:31 PM EST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Brickify - Geek Word of the Day

brickify (v) :
1. To render an otherwise perfectly good piece of computer hardware unbootable and worthless through either installation of bogus software, or by configuring something completely wrong.

See also fatfinger, bonehead, toast, PoS, beta, pre-release, and overlapping partitions

From the Canadian "Brick(lin)", a defunct Acrylic car, and the Geek-term "iffy", or of doubtful reliability (often a synonym for Bricklin).

( Mar 17 2005, 09:32:59 AM EST ) Permalink Comments [2]