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September 12, 2002
Presenting Information in a Human Voice
InfoWorld reviewed the recent Seybold publishing industry conference in San Francisco:
Tim Bray, one of the co-creators of XML, spoke Monday alongside Seybold. He discussed what he sees as other defining changes in the industry, such as improved graphical user interfaces, and stated in passing that as far as tagging data goes, "nobody is doing it" in the publishing business.
In addition to touting XML, Bray, now chief technology officer at Antarctica Systems, promoted Weblogs as a promising tool for publishers. Weblogs are Web sites that feature chronological entries by an author, or "blogger" (for Web logger), and typically reflect his or her personal view.
Used as a marketing tool, a Weblog can provide an inventive way to reach customers and partners with engaging content, he said. Ray Ozzie, inventor of Lotus Notes, and Phillip Windley, Chief Information Officer for the State of Utah, were among the notable bloggers Bray cited.
"You might want to give serious consideration to humanly publicizing your organization," Bray said. "Presenting information in a human voice is the best way to get people to read what you publish."
This is in stark contrast to the recent article in Information Week by Herbert W. Lovelace (a psedonym) called "Beware the Blog" which painted a very suspicious picture of blogs. Obviously, I disagree with "Lovelace" on a number of counts. Because of blogs, I know more about my organization and I hope my organization knows more about me and my thoughts and motives. I don't see how that can be bad.
09:07 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Enterprise Architectures
When people hear the word architecture in the context of computers, they're likely to think of hardware or, at best, systems. An enterprise architecture is much more general than that. An enterprise architecture is a basic structure or design for all the agency’s real-world businesses, such as licensing or law enforcement, related information flows and the technologies that handle them. It’s an exercise in system design and analysis, more than anything, and is meant to ensure that components cooperate and share data. [Government Technology News]
The Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996 requires that all Federal agencies create an enterprise architecture. To put some teeth in that, the Office of Management and Budget has started linking funding to the existence of an enterprise architecture and a demonstrated correlation between the architecture and what the agency is proposing. Organizations like the Federal CIO Council and NASCIO publish information about enterprise architectures in government.
We recently completed an inventory of production databases in the state in an effort to come to grips with what data is stored where. Interestingly enough, there is no mandated planning process for data in Utah. Data represents an huge investment by the State and yet we create it, manage it, and destroy it as a side process to what we do, rather than a core activity.
I've been struggling with how to get a handle on this problem and others. Enterprise architectures would address many of these issues. Perhaps, we should require agencies to have an enterprise architecture and to link funding to it in the same way that OMB has for Federal agencies? The larger question is: how do we make the IT planning process useful and relevant? This will be one of the questions I'll be putting before the ACIO group when they meet.
05:07 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Emery DSL Connection Not Working? Blame Lightening.
From Joel Finlinson's Radio Weblog: [Got a] call from Norm in Emery saying that he cannot connect to the Net. He'd called Emery Telecom and they said that his DSL modem had been fried in the lightning storm yesterday. He went to pick up a new one and about 35 other people were getting new ones too at the same time. He put it in and it still didn't work. The tech support folks now say that its the NIC in the PC and I told him that we'll send Doug out that way to replace/check it out tomorrow.