Random musings in IT

Understanding the way a business works, then giving advice on how it could be improved is the lifebread of consultants. This however needs time, preparation, experience and knowledge, int that exact order. Still there are times, when you just have to improvise all of those.

Electronic content management (ECM) is an unavoidable part of running most enterprises, be it small or large. For mid to large enterprises IBM provides a number of tools and technologies to cover all aspects of ECM throughout the document related processes or the document's lifecycle.

Even though the businesses differ in many ways, the users of enterprise content management tools have a very similar set of functions, that they all need to implement. IBM Hungary with my friends at Atoll Technologies, have started the IBM ECM user group, where the users of such technologies could have a conversation of the dos and do-nots about the elements of the portfolio.

Today I've had the chance to participate in two events related to the project management profession. Even though I haven't got much going on in the field at the moment, I've always been keen on keeping an eye on the PM profession, and it has presented two completely different faces.

Today I created some advanced features for the Mindweb application.

I mainly worked on the task management interface. Now the views can be changed using the sidebar. Beside the originally developed tree view,  the task view with different groupings are available,  the same way it's available in FreeplaneGTD plugin.

New version of the Freeplane GTD is released, this version features French translation by Marian Llabrés.

The add-on is available here.

There are times I have to write a longer article, document, or prepare a presentation, where I have no idea how I'm going to get my thoughts structured. This is where document outliner tools come handy.

My primary goal when creating the Mindweb application was, to create a tool for managing my GTD system. As it's based on standard mindmap functionality, there is no reason not to use it as a document outliner.

My blog is running on a self-hosted Wordpress instance, and I have an Android phone. I also do some long commutes, so it would be quite sensible, to use the Wordpress for Android for blogging. Better yet, why use my laptop at all just to write an article, when I can simply hook my bluetooth keyboard, that only gathers dust anyways, and use that for blogging.

The application has a number of features, that are quite well designed and convenient, but there are some glitches and inconviniences, that prevent me from doing so.

My friend from Baconsült has been given the honors to be the judge in the Hungarian chapter of the 1776 Challenge Cup. I went to see, how such a challenge looks like.

The occasion was organized by the Kairos society with the 1776 organization, and was hosted in the Logmein headquarters.

The competing teams each had 5 minutes to pitch, and 3 more to answer questions by the judges.

The teams were of many fields, organized in 2 parts , 7 teams each. Multiple sectors were represented, bio research, electronic finance, e-learning and knowledge management,  just to name a few. The diversity of the teams made the event more interesting, however it also made the choice even more difficult.

It transpired, that the teams, that been around for longer, have an advantage. Their pitches were sharper, more to the point, and usually better presented. Also given the size of the startup scene in Hungary, these teams had the higher ground. Most of the jury knew them already, and they knew what to expect from the investors. Based on their pitches, and knowing nothing of them I'm sure that the results would have been completely different.

I'm not sure that this was a wise decision in any case. The teams will face new unknowns in the next round. The benefit of familiarity will not be on their side in the Tel - Aviv round, and if they make it all the way to Washington DC, they will be up against native speakers.

That said, I must say the teams were really great. Most of the ideas seemed marketable, even though some seemed to copy solutions that are already on the market. Some of the presentations still need more work to make the ideas more approachable and bring the overly complicated ideas, such as biotechnology or complex IT developments understandable to non-professionals.

I'm really looking forward to see these startups on the market, and I'll definietly try to monitor their progress, just to see, how they turn out.

I am quite behind with the blog posts, planned for these days.

This article will serve as a placeholder to keep the ideas that could not get into a proper article.

I just ventilated some of the frustration about lazy and worthless recruiters in a previous article. To prove a point, today I've received the emblematic call, where the caller committed so many of the annoying mistakes, I was not even annoyed by it, it was amazing! (Sorry about misusing the meme)