BizTechTalk

Healthcare 2.0-3.0 and Taumed.com

This is a live interview I recorded with Tauseef Bashir, CEO of Taumed (www.taumed.com) while we were both attending the FASTforward 07 user conference (put on by FAST Search and Transfer - www.fastsearch.com). Taumed is a consumer-oriented medical information platform embracing many Web 2.0 concepts and using quite advanced search techniques to fully leverage the knowledgebase of 'professional' and user-generated content to help people be more fully informed *before* walking in or talking on the phone to their healthcare providers. This was recorded in a public area, so you will hear some background conversational murmuring - the thrill of lobby-based recording! Very interesting material though - Taumed is an interesting case study in Information Intelligence (what we have been calling KM, Search, Portals, etc. in the new 2.0 and beyond realm). Enjoy - and discuss at www.BizTechTalk.com.


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Permanent Innovation (ii2007 Session Teaser)

An interview with Langdon Morris of the Innovation Labs (www.innovationlabs.com), and author of the book, Permanent Innovation (www.permanentinnovation.com). Langdon will be speaking on this topic at our April 2007 event, Innovation Insights (or ii2007 to those in the know). In this 10 minute interview we discuss 3 of his 10 Principles of Innovation. If you find this interview interesting, don't miss Langdon's session at the event - see www.ii2007.com for more details on his session, and the other 20 or so sessions on Innovation topics from a wide variety of industries.


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The Principle of Perfection

The Principle of Perfection - an interview with Matthew E. May, author of "The Elegant Solution: Toyota's Formula for Masting Innovation" - we discuss many topics surrounding innovation, Matthew's experiences in working with Toyota over an 8 year period, the idea of continuous innovation and continuous improvement (here goes the BIG I Innovation and small i innovation discussion again!). Defining perfection, differences between perfection in the East (Japan in particular) versus West, Toyota's pursuit of perfection coming from an initial infection by an American (Deming), and many other intriguing discussion points!

Questions, comments? Please feel free to post to the blog - www.biztechtalk.com, and we'll see about continuing and deepening the conversation.

What are you and your organization doing to systematically improve your innovation capability? Let's discuss it here, or feel free to call 781-268-0716 and leave me a message regarding this post. Any interesting comments I get I will post to the blog (unless you prefer not to get your 15 megabytes of fame). NOTE: There is a limit of 2 minutes per recording, so you will need to be somewhat brief. Have your caffeine fix in advance of the call ;).

Reference URLs for Matthew E. May and the book being discussed are:
www.elegantsolutionbook.com
www.aevitas.com

And take a peek at his blog "Elegant Solutions" as well - all good resources!


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Interviewed by David Weinberger at FASTforward 07

I've been so wrapped up in interviewing other people, that the pendulum has finally swung back a bit, and now I am the subject of an interview by none other than David Weinberger.

This is a video interview (I've been outdone!), and we're discussing the intersection of full-text search and tagging (ala del.icio.us and others). I'm thinking David and I should banter some more - he has a great sense of humor and dives VERY deeply into the topics he follows.
Watch the video over at the FASTforward blog.

Re: Matrix Cam Spies Bullets (Wired News)

This story over at Wired News "Matrix Cam Spies Bullets" jumped off of my Gmail account (and the embedded top of page RSS reader) for two reasons - it's Wired (I still have the first issue that I randomly picked up while living in Austin, TX many years ago - and I'm still a subscriber now), and The Matrix is a movie that I almost didn't see, but that clearly launched a revolution in film and science fiction storytelling.

But why mention the article here?

First let me sum up the story - Nova Sensors has a method for tracking objects (such as bullets) that are moving VERY fast. Combine this with adaptive armor or weapons that can deflect/destroy inbound objects, and it changes the game of warfare. It's science fiction come to life - and continues to show the evolution of warfare into smarter weapons and smarter defenses.

So, the tie to my interests - I continue to see people both overestimating and underestimating what it means to be Innovative.

This article nicely hits both ends of the spectrum - with a quote from Mark Massie, president of Nova Sensors:

"This is truly breakthrough technology in terms of new capabilities for infrared focal plane arrays."

This is what people generally think of when they think Innovation - what I've been calling "BIG I Innovation."

Later in the article:

Robert Fisher, a professor at the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics in the United Kingdom, says the idea is not new, but getting it to work is. "It looks like a perfectly feasible approach," he says. "There have been laboratory developments of a variety of these foveal sensors over the past 10 years, but the biggest issue has been money. Obviously the military has a different kind of market and they have been able to get funding."

And here is the "small i innovation" flipside that I've been talking about - an idea which is not new, but which is being productized, and perhaps in a different realm than initially conceived.

As you may have noticed, I've been studying TRIZ, the Russian Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (see/hear the podcasts on those fronts), and a key concept in TRIZ is that someone, somewhere, has solved the exact problem (or problems) that you currently have, and the task is merely to reformulate your problem generically so as to find the solutions that will best fit your specific version of the problem.

I'd learned this concept years ago when I was teaching myself PERL (a scripting language used very heavily in web applications in Web 1.0 days) - the concept there was "There's More Than One Way To Do It" (or TMTOWTDI ["Tim Towdy"] as it's known in the PERL community). Why that concept didn't hit me earlier in my research into innovation - I'm not sure.

Point being, innovation (BIG I or small i) isn't about magic and creating something from nothing out of the ether. Blind stumbling is not a reliable method for inventing, or innovating, or being creative. Tools that allow you to more systematically DO innovation (personally, organizationally, nationally, worldwide) DO exist, and even the most naturally innovative people in the world would be even more innovative if they were to systematically approach innovation.

What are you and your organization doing to systematically improve your innovation capability? Let's discuss it here, or feel free to call 781-268-0716 and leave me a message regarding this post. Any interesting comments I get I will post to the blog (unless you prefer not to get your 15 megabytes of fame). NOTE: There is a limit of 2 minutes per recording, so you will need to be somewhat brief. Have your caffeine fix in advance of the call ;).

Fun with Facets

Freshly back from a 3-day private session of our Proving Ground on Information Architecture and Taxonomy, hosted by the Library of Congress (the Federal Library and Information Center Committee or FLICC, specifically), and my mind is still reeling from all that was discussed, and all that we did not get a chance to cover.

For the last 2-3 years, I've typically thrown in a 30-45 minute section that I continuously update on some of my latest thinking around Folksonomies, Freeform tagging, and Facets. I mention quite a wide variety of systems during this section, and largely am looking to provide some food for the brain for the people who are attending, pointers to commercial systems, and when at all possible, pointers to free and/or opensource solutions - so it's possible to get some experience without committing to a full-fledged project.

Timing is everything, and recently on the (normally very silent) facetedclassification Yahoo! group, there was a posting about the Flamenco Project, an opensource project around faceted navigation and search, hosted by the UC Berkeley School of Information. I have not (yet) tried to install the project, but the tutorials and overview are very nice - and may further help cement both the benefits of faceted organization schemes, and also the WORK that is required to do this on any significant scale.

If anyone has used this system, I would love to hear more about how you are using it, if the payback you are seeing has been worth the effort, and if you have hit any scalability issues (or others) that have led you to alternative paths.

If you have experience with any other facet-based systems, whether commercial or not, I'd be interested in hearing more about your experiences as well. Having more examples to show on this front, and better ways to explain both the end result and the upfront and ongoing maintenance, would be much appreciated as I seek to continuously improve my presentation materials.

Feel free to call 781-268-0716 and leave me a message regarding this post. Any interesting comments I get I will post to the blog (unless you prefer not to get your 15 megabytes of fame). NOTE: There is a limit of 2 minutes per recording, so you will need to be somewhat brief. Have your caffeine fix in advance of the call ;).

Tell me a story - the good, the bad, the... unpleasant

In my continuing quest to hear directly and unfiltered from my readers, listeners, clients, colleagues, press, friends and family - I have created a dial-in phone line so you can reach me 24/7. The number is 781-268-0716 and will go straight into my recorded intro, where I describe the process and introduce topics of interest.

NOTE: There is a limit of 2 minutes per recording, so you will need to be somewhat brief. Have your caffeine fix in advance of the call ;).

Sidenote, if you know of an alternative system that allows longer recordings, feel free to comment here or mention in the voice message you leave.

What am I interested in? What are you interested in? What successes or failures have you had in your organization - specifically around fostering innovation, knowledge sharing, improving enterprise (inward) focused search, collaboration, web 2.0, social networking - the gamut of all that you may have seen me cover via this blog, in presentations I have done in person, or the consulting work that I and my colleagues may have done for you over the course of the nearly 13 years that I have been with this business unit. Doing tagging in your enterprise? Let's hear it. Social networking creating a flow of experts and extended contacts in and across your organization and to partner networks? Tell me more!

In short, anything that is making your job the best on the planet, or driving you insane, let's hear it!

Any commentary on my podcast interviews or blog posts, those are fair game as well - you can of course use the traditional comment/trackback mechanics on this blog, rather than leap to a phone.

The system I'm using makes it very easy to embed the audio clips within blogs, and so my intent is to use these conversations as jumping off points for future podcasts, blog articles, and more formal whitepapers and presentations.

If you do not want the audio made public - just state that in the message that you leave. If you would prefer to not leave a message through this system, and instead call me - call our main offices at 617-247-1511, and ask for extension 3011.

Thanks in advance for your time, and I look forward to hearing from you!

New URL - Update your bookmarks and feed readers

I've decided to rebrand this blog to more directly reflect the concepts I'm aiming to discuss - either via the written blog entries, or the podcast interviews I've done and plan to do as we continue to move along.

The new URL is www.biztechtalk.com (shorter and catchier) - so please update your bookmarks and feed readers. If you are subscribed to the feed via e-mail (feedblitz) or via the feedburner RSS feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/dan_keldsen) - then there is no need to update, those will continue to function. Any reference to delphigroup.blogs.com or delphigroup.blogs.com/dan_keldsen/ should be instead changed to www.biztechtalk.com.

Stay tuned for another podcast coming up! If you have recommendations on people I should be interviewing - feel free to comment here, or contact me through the gmail account mentioned on my LinkedIn profile.

More soon...