msgbartop
User Experience | Design | Strategy
msgbarbottom

15 Dec 04 Experience Alert: Lap Pillow Offers Solace to Lonely Men

lappillow.jpgSingle or lonely Japanese men may get lucky this Christmas. One popular item for holiday shoppers is the “lap pillow,” with skin-colored polyurethene calves folded under soft thighs — a comfy cushion for napping, reading or watching television.

Tags:

06 Dec 04 The New Competencies in IT

As the mission of IT shops changes from technology mechanic to innovation leader, CIOs must hire a new kind of employee. An excerpt from the book, The New CIO Leader.

Tags: ,

06 Dec 04 New Intranet Papers & Articles

New White papers:

10 ways to continuously improve your intranet
Explores a number of practical ways that an intranet can be improved incrementally without yet another redesign.

Who should own the intranet?
One of the first challenges when establishing an intranet is to determine who should have overall ownership of the site, and where the intranet team should be located.

Related articles:

Improving your intranet, task by task
By improving the way the intranet supports key tasks, immediate business benefits can be delivered in a manageable and cost-effective manner.

Intranet teams: a leadership and coaching role
Intranet teams should play a leadership and coaching role in the organisation, in order to ensure that the intranet is effective, up-to-date and usable.

Tags:

02 Dec 04 How Much Does a Project Cost?

One reason the IT boom has flattened out is that the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for information systems has been found to be far higher than customers at first realized. Rishab Gosh, in a paper for First Monday, quotes these TCO numbers:

- License fees 5-10%
- Hardware and software costs 15-40%:
- Maintenance, integration, support and training 60-85 %

If we had a better grasp of the TCO for design projects, would we take them all on? One of the lessons to emerge from our Round Table was that co-ordination, which has many facets, is a critical success factor: if it’s not done properly, or is treated as an extra, projects (and the people involved) usually suffer. FirstMonday

Tags:

02 Dec 04 Measuring a Consulting Organization’s Performance

Question: What performance measurements do you recommend our firm use to assess our business operations?

Answer: I was hired by a consulting firm to help them improve their marketing effectiveness. The first item they showed me, to begin on the “positive,” was the number of proposals they were generating.

It was an intimidating number, something like 15 a week. And it was completely misguided, because behavior responded to the measures, and scores of people were involved in creating, reviewing, and dispatching proposals that weren’t worth the paper they were printed on. (Many years ago, United Airlines told its call center personnel that customer satisfaction was the highest priority, yet measured operators based on-Guess what?-numbers of calls per hour. This is the epitome of cognitive dissonance.) Read more…

Tags:

01 Dec 04 A Recent Spam Email for the ArTchives

Up and doing!

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

Being a hero is about the shortest lived profession on earth.

Don’t flatter the rich, or appear to willing before the great. What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy only the precursor of the reason.

I am not concerned that I am not known, I seek to be worthy to be known. A woman never knows what she really wants until she fins out what her husband cannot afford.Don’t find fault, find a remedy. Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables.

Goodness is the only investment which never fails. A liberal is a socialist with a wife and two children.

People who work together will win, whether it be against complex football defenses, or the problems of modern society. Some consultants are like the bottom half of a double boiler: They get all heated up but don’t know what’s cooking. Beware of no man more than of yourself we carry our worst enemies within us. Between lovers a little confession is a dangerous thing. To profit from good advice requires more wisdom than to give it. One good thing can be said for inflation: without it there would be no football.

We all know that sponges grow in the ocean but I wander how much deeper the ocean would be if that wasn’t the case. The soviet people want full-blooded and unconditional democracy. The older you get the stronger the wind gets — and it’s always in your face. It is twice the pleasure to deceive the deceiver.

There are only two forces that unite men — fear and interest. No accurate thinker will judge another person by that which the other person’s enemies say about him. What’s the worst thing that can happen to a quarterback? He loses his confidence. What we need is to use what we have.

May the countryside and the gliding valley streams content me. Lost to fame, let me love river and woodland.

Hasta sa masunod atong pagkita

Tags: