There’s monitoring and then there is monitoring…. Dashboards have become very popular tools for monitoring and measuring all kinds of activities. Based on the metaphor of the car dashboard, these dashboards are supposed to give you the information that you need at a glance. The flawed assumption is that dashboards Read more…
Information theory is about as arcane as the word arcane. Information theory is not so much about content, but more about how information is transmitted and received. It is also about the efficiency of that transmission. In one definition, information theory is about how many bits are needed to move Read more…
There is this silly concept from human resources about looking for T shaped people. These are people that have wide thin layer of knowledge coupled with a deep specialized knowledge in a specific subject area. All snarkiness aside, I can see why this would be valuable. It provides a lot Read more…
The boundaries between bits of work can be hard to define. And the blurriness of the boundaries is what makes it hard to digitize many processes. What are the constraints in an artificially constrained environment. Much of our work these days is largely a symbolic representation of work through various Read more…
There is an old saying that I remember from the early days of the Internet about how information just wants to be free. This was the counter argument to anyone that was trying to figure how to monetize the Internet. The reality is that information does not have any wants Read more…
How did we get to a place where we actually have a protocol that uses other computers to process data on other computers and somehow this earns some currency that has value. The funniest thing about the Blockchain ( and Blockchain has a lot of funny elements) is the fact Read more…
I wonder if the Pareto optimization rule (aka the 80/20 Rule) applies to data and information? In hindsight, you probably need less than 1% of the information you collect to actually run your business and make decisions. Of course, much like the old joke about advertising, you just don’t know Read more…
You got altered information You were told to not take chances… That pretty much says it all…except for the underlying assumption that someone out there as unaltered information. But the mere process of categorizing information already filters and alters information Information in and of itself is very rich, but the Read more…
What is the cadence of data? Cadence is a concept from both theory of constraints (Eli Goldratt) and lean manufacturing (Womack, Jones, others) that is used to sync the operations of the factory floor to the pace of the slowest operations. The idea behind this kind of pacing is that Read more…
What if you got the information you needed in the format that you needed it at just the moment that you needed it? Yeah, “what if” and then again not bloody likely. It is the promise of tech – from search engines, databases, tablets and all the way down to Read more…