Finding the Web services 'sweet spot'

Daniel Foody writes in CNET-News, 29th Jan.2004, Finding the Web services 'sweet spot':

Does Web services management belong in the domain of the application platforms? Does it belong in the domain of the systems management platforms? Is it truly a new market? Those in the industry state with absolute certainty that they know the answer. Unfortunately, their answers vary. As you would expect, it's not as clear-cut as any of the industry folks might have you believe.

Heterogeneous central visibility is foreign to application platforms but typical of systems management products. On the other hand, active in-network control is something foreign to systems management products but typical of application platforms. Coordinating in-network control across heterogeneous projects requires a careful blend of functionality drawn from both systems management and application platforms. This is the "sweet spot" of Web services management.

XML:DB native XML database API and its implementation in Apache Xindice

Peter V. Mikhalenko reports in CNET-Asia-Builder, XML:DB native XML database API and its implementation in Apache Xindice

The XML:DB API is designed to enable a common access mechanism to native XML databases. The API enables the construction of applications to store, retrieve, modify and query data that is stored in an XML database.

XML:DB API can be considered generally equivalent to technologies such as ODBC, JDBC or Perl DBI.

Apache Xindice is a native database designed from the ground up to be especially valuable when you have very complex XML structures that would be difficult or impossible to map to a more structured database.

Knowledge augmentation

Denham Grey writes Knowledge-at-work: Knowledge augmentation: "key practices that lead to effective knowledge creation, increase awareness and assist teams to leverage their tacit understandings"

• Discover and share distinctions & heuristics
  
• Engage in collaborative reification (writing)
  
• Speed learning cycles - OODA loops
  
• Conduct community inquiry
  
• Write patterns
  
• Use Patterns
  

CIPS Connections - Bill French Interview

Stephen Ibaraki of CIPS Connections, interviews Bill French of MyST Technologies.

Template Files for Web Projects

e-consultancy.com has published a set of Template Files for Web Projects : including the following:

• Contract for Web Services
  
• Web Project Plan
  
• Usability (various)
  
• Site Map
  
• Functional Specification
  
• Technical Specification
  
• Content Plan
  
• Privacy Policy
  
• User Agreement
  
• Wireframes
  
• Style Guide
  
• Maintenance and Service Level Agreement
  
• Site Evaluation Framework
  

(A more comprehensive version is available for purchase.)

Creation does not guarantee renumeration

Leon Gettler of The Age, on 16th Jan. 2004, writes Creation does not guarantee renumeration:-

Paul Geroski, the British Competition Commission's deputy chairman and a professor of the London Business School, has found that businesses are erratic innovators because they don't want to risk cannibalising their systems.

He found that growth patterns followed a "random walk". This was because big businesses have fixed costs: they refuse to tackle a problem until they reach some threshold of poor performance, and only swing into action when things get so bad that they either have to change or go bust. Even then, they only tackle it in one big hit......

....According to learning organisation theories, one of the best sources for innovation and doing things better is the workforce. Surveys, however, show that many employees say no one listens to their ideas or asks for their opinions.

The reality is that creativity is a social process, which means it requires organisation. Organisations, however, stifle creativity because good management is about efficient repetition. Creativity, on the other hand, usually involves unrepeatable moments of inspiration.

This leaves innovation and organisation in a state of constant tension.

Colored boxes - one method of building full CSS layouts

Russ Weakley of MaxDesign has written a tutorial Colored boxes - one method of building full CSS layouts (13-Jan-2004):

This article explains one method of building a full CSS layout from start to finish. The method, based on positioning colored boxes and testing across a range of browsers, can be used to build a wide range of full-CSS layouts.

Cosmology Overview

Noted in Astronomy 123, Cosmology and the Origin of Life Quote:- "Early Cultures were curious and motivated to explore the world no one was ignorant because everything was new but the process of learning can beget ignorance through the death of imagination."

Knowledge, Learnig Organizations and "Infinite" Games

Chris Macrae (wcbn007@easynet.co.uk) wrote Knowledge and LO & Infinite Game LO3 in "Learning Org - LO30872":-

Although you might look at the organisation as a number of parts there
is an entity, which operates as a whole. The cohesion can be used to
great benefit, but requires expanding views to move away from simple
cause & effect management to looking at the way in which the
organisation exhibits a system in its own right.

Now today its estimated that 95% of the people employed can do their jobs better than their bosses can. When you're managing subordinates who know how to do what they're doing better than you, you don't manage what they do, but manage the way they interact...

If you look at organisations that fail or have trouble, it is frequently what they didn't do, not what they did. Yet, if you are in an organisation where the culture dictates that "making a mistake is a bad thing", then to maximize personal security the best strategy is to minimize the changes you bring about. If we want to change, we have to start to record mistakes and systemically learn from them.

WHAT IS THE INFINITE GAME - to improve play rather than to win the game.

In the Finite game who wins and who loses is the whole point of playing in the first place.

The main contrast, according to Carse, between Finite and Infinite games are:

• Purpose is to win versus purpose is to improve the game
  
• Improves through fittest surviving versus Improves through game evolving
  
• Winners exclude losers versus winners teach losers better plays
  
• Winner-takes-all versus winning widely shared
  
• Aims are identical versus aims are diverse
  
• Rules fixed in advanced versus rules are changed by agreement
  
• Rules resemble debating contests versus rules resemble grammar of original utterances
  
• Compete for mature markets versus grow new markets
  
• Short-term decisive contests versus Long term
  

Should a "Big 5" Firm Implement Your CMS?

Choosing a CMS Implementation Consultant

Featured Opinion -- CMSWatch by Matthew Clapp, Independent Consultant

The Big 5 excel at technology strategy and process....typically make the greatest impact at the early stages of a project, when assessing organizational readiness, helping with change management, and re-engineering business processes.

One of the biggest hurdles implementing a new CMS is understanding your company’s business process -- in CMS terms, your workflow. It always amazes me how many companies do not have this well documented.

...major software vendors offer commissions or what the Big 5 calls “fees,” for recommending that vendor’s products. These fees frequently range from 25-35% of the software list prices.

I would encourage you to explore the following approaches:

1. Consider investing in objective research before you pick up the phone to call in outside consultants.
   
2. Bring in a Big-5 firm when you really need help understanding your company’s business processes and you require an overall content management strategy.
   
3. Take principal responsibility for product selection and avoid outside consultants with conflicts of interest.
   
4. Send your staff to CMS training (general and product-specific), and if you plan to run the project in-house, think about bringing in a couple of your vendor’s PSO staff.
   
5. Call in a smaller technology company to complete the implementation when you need to outsource the work and want CMS-specific expertise.

Content Management and Information Architecture -- Lou Rosenfeld Interview

CMSWatch 23rd May 2003:
(Lou co-authored the best-selling book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (O'Reilly), often known as the "Polar Bear" book).

Within a CMS, the information challenge is first and foremost one of management as opposed to making the information findable, which is what we’re concerned with in information architecture (IA).

• Where does IA end and CM begin?
  

  The content management world, however, is different in that it has a suite of technologies that drives the development of the CMS field.
  In our world, there’s really nothing out there really that would be considered IA software. So, we are kind of technology agnostics...
  

  
  
• What are the top three things I should look for in an IA consultant to a CMS team?
  
• What are the key deliverables that I should expect?
  

How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It On the Web

www.miskatonic.org/library/facet-web-howto.html: Denton, William, Nov.2003
Faceted classifications are increasingly common on the World Wide Web, especially on commercial web sites (Adkisson 2003). This is not surprising--facets are a natural way of organizing things.

This paper will attempt to bridge the gap by giving procedures and advice on all the steps involved in making a faceted classification and putting it on the web. Web people will benefit by having a rigorous seven-step process to follow for creating faceted classifications, and librarians will benefit by understanding how to store such a classification on a computer and make it available on the web.

Refs. include:-
Van Dijck, Peter. 2003. XFML Core ­ eXchangeable Faceted Metadata Language. http://www.xfml.org/spec/1.0.html

Communities of (Knowledge) Contribution

Information Economics Journal (Butler Group) - by Roger James, Visiting Professor in Computer Science at Southampton University, UK.

"To capitalise on the value of knowledge companies should design their information structures to encourage collaboration and attract new partnerships. An 'asset' based, proprietary company taxonomy will be seen as irrelevant, like trading in Esperanto - perfectly formed but of little practical use. For knowledge management the new focus is on the communities of contribution and away from the palaces of production.

Much of knowledge management (KM) thinking has, like poor IT implementations, delivered new implementations of the old ways of working. In these early years knowledge has been treated as other physical goods characterised by audit and the disciplines of husbandry and protection. Knowledge, in stark contrast to physical goods, can increase in value if shared or if given away (as the distinguished history of advertising proves). Knowledge assets have to be exploited to attract new trading partnerships, new collaborators and new means of production.

... a previous article focused on doing the right things with the wrong information, much of KM is today concerned with doing the wrong things with the right information. Like all other architectures of communication, knowledge can encourage participation and needs to be open to others."

So, what is a CMS?

StepTwo KM Column:June '03: CMS: A working definition

"A content management system (CMS) supports the creation, management, distribution, publishing, and discovery of corporate information.
It covers the complete lifecycle of the pages on your site, from providing simple tools to create the content, through to publishing, and finally to archiving.
It also provides the ability to manage the structure of the site, the appearance of the published pages, and the navigation provided to the users. "

Weblog Application Server | MySmartChannels

Bill French writes: "Enterprise blogging technology requires a Weblog Application Server that must (for a start):

• Provide granular access permissions—not all posts are for all eyes
  
• Easily aggregate postings of multiple authors
  
• Provide cross-author searching
  
• Discover semantic relationships between postings automatically
  
• Support behind-the-firewall deployment
  
• Support SSL connections for secure transmission of company confidential material
  
• Provide content agility—the ability to easily repurpose content for different use cases"
  

Software Testability: On the Train or on the Tracks

Opinion by Linda Hayes, DECEMBER 19, 2003 - Computerworld:

Companies have spent millions of dollars buying costly, specialized test scripting tools, then millions more trying to work around automation-hostile software development practices. Most of them (90%, according to one analyst report) have reached frustration limits, shelved it all and retreated back to manually testing their software. Ironically, refusing to invest development effort into testability ultimately sacrifices all three goals: it takes longer to get the software out, it costs more money to test it, and crucial features are more likely to have defects.


It's insane but true. Companies have refused to invest an extra 5% of time in development to potentially shrink schedules and budgets by 30% or even more. Who wouldn't make a no-brainer investment like that?

...the application was impenetrable to every test tool we tried, and so I went to the lead developer and suggested that the team compile in an agent that would give us access to the objects for testing...

In the past year, I have seen a sea change taking place in attitudes toward testability. Whereas five years ago developers would barely tolerate QA, recently I have seen more and more agree to design in testability -- all the way from compiling in an agent to adopting naming standards and conventions to developing a complete testing application programming interface (API).

Squeezing value from KM

Computerworld Singapore - Vol. 10 Issue No. 10, 15 December 2003 - 6 January 6th: A knowledge management solution is all about establishing what information matters, what information exists internally and externally, where it is stored, who needs access to it and how they will access it. By Melanie Liew

Knowledge Management (KM) is an all encompassing approach to harnessing the knowledge within an organisation, from capturing it to ?sharing it. It is predicated on existing organisational intelligence, the organisational culture and the platform that is in place.

That, according to Clare Hart (left), president and chief executive officer, Factiva, is KM in a nutshell."

Learning-Org Nov 2003: My Theory of Organizational Learning LO3

Learning-Org Nov 2003: My Theory of Organizational Learning LO3: A draft "Theory Underlying Organizational Learning"
by: Richard Karash, submitted to the Learning-Org discussion list for comment.