October 2008 Archives

The old pattern of a project-based information management, has shown some weaknesses, especially when it comes to outsourcing. Thinking about new approaches, Prof. Dr. W. Brenner from the Institute Of Information Management at the University of St. Gallen has written in 2006 together with R. Zarnekow and U. Pilgram the book "Integrated Information Management. Applying Successful Industrial Concepts in IT", which takes a look at the state of the art and the future of information management.

During the master's course "Information Management" I and my dear group colleagues had to deal with this book, with the special focus on the product-based approach (which is in fact, a more precise model of the Framework of Zarnekow, Brenner and Pilgram).

Briefly explained, Integrated Information Management is an approach which looks at the complete value chain of a company. There is, in contrast to the purely on IT focused "Plan - Run - Build"-Pattern, a more generic pattern, derived from well known patterns and concepts of the manufacturing industry. This is the heart of the model and consists of the steps "Source - Make - Deliver". On top of this the "Govern"-Task is responsible for the alignment between corporate strategy, IT-strategy and the operational level. This implies, that everything starts with IT-Governance, otherwise no integrated information management can be established. This core-pattern can be repeated for every process step / business unit along the value-chain.

The product-based approach is, as already mentioned, a more concrete way to implement the integrated information management. First we have to shed some light on the role, which the IT Service Provider plays in such a environment. Traditionally he has been a project partner and has done project management. Now ithe IT department is transformed to a service provider, which negotiates on based on products. This shifts the focus away from technical language and implementations to business speaking respectively to business support. This implies several changes, which you can see in the presentation.
And as usual, change has its own challenges. We have outlined them too on the presentation.

You can download the file here:

IM_Productbased.pdf

Today I had a look at my system.log of my MacBook Pro. There I had to face a bad surprise. A program from Smithmicro, the famous vendor of StuffIt, which I had installed months ago and have already uninstalled, causes big trouble on my system. Somewhere in the launchd, so syslog has reported, is an agent, which calls a folder (and certainly the program in it), that does not exist anymore.

My first idea was to somehow destroy this program using the Terminal of OS X, since I have some experience with command line tools from my Debian-server. But you can not call launchd directly, it has just the option to call it in the debug modus, which I did not want, since I knew the problem.

A quick search with Google revealed the tool Lingon in the macosxhints forum.

The program is quite small and thus easy to download. After unzipping you can directly used it. For the usual security issues/protection within OS X you will be asked to enter your administration password, since launchd is a system daemon and requires root right.

You can now edit your launchd configuration, with adding new services (or agents, as they are called in Lingon), plists and so on. When you have selected one agent, you can reveal it via the "File > Show in Finder"-option.
This is how I found my old entries really fast and deleted them. Just to say it here, that is not the way to do it safely. Make a backup of your file first. But since I have a complete Time Machine Backup every day of my system I have decided to do it the quick and dirty way...

I today expected once more a bad example of an integration of applications within a company. Ticketcorner, a company selling event tickets and taking huge pre-sales fees for this business in Switzerland, Germany and Austria, has about three different channels for us customers and different formats of tickets.
As a fan of Swiss National League A ice hockey, I wanted to purchase on Friday a ticket for the match of my favoured team for Saturday. This should not be such a big deal, since we are at the beginning of the season, so I did not expect that much people coming for this match. And additionally I can order my tickets online via Ticketcorner.ch and use the so called "Print@home"-function to print out my tickets at home, without going to a point of sale. Additionally the company promises that you can exactly choose your seat via the internet portal.
Now I sit there, late night on Thursday, trying to order my tickets for the desired seats, but I had no chance to change the seats. And there has been no information at all about why there is this function not available. I went to bed and tried again on the next morning 8 o'clock. Again no chance to choose your preferred seat.
This forced me then to choose the next "convenient" channel, calling up the salespeople over there and asking what can they do for me. I expected that there must be an integrated system running in the background, so it would be easy for them to let me choose my seats and put them into my account to my "print@home"-list. Instead I get the information that this is not possible. They only can deposit me the tickets at the box office, so I would have to turn up half an hour earlier than I usual do, just to get my tickets.
This is something I can not believe in today's networked economy, especially for a company having a clear multi-channel strategy on serving customers. Integrating the quite new function of "print@home"-tickets into the system should not be that difficult and it is a duty anyway.

In the end I got my tickets, after I had visited every channel Ticketcorner offers. But even their sales partners, such as Swiss Post, have not been informed about the disfunction of the seat reserving system. So in the end I have been at two different point of sales personally, have had a phone call with a friendly lady and have spent a lot of time on the homepage of this company.
I hope not to make such a big effort the next time I need a ticket for an ice hockey match.

A friend of mine recently showed me how he surveys webpages which have no syndication with the free online tool Watchthatpage.
Sure I had to go an look at the page myself and think this is a really good an simple concept for watching pages. You just provide in your profile a list of pages you want to watch and choose how often watchthatpage should check the contents on the desired target to deliver you the changes by mail.

Really simple to use and free of costs for the most purposes.