Golf Anyone?
June 24, 2008
Golf and business. Business and golf. There are definitely two schools of thought on this topic. There are the avid golfers that SWEAR more business gets done on a golf course than in the office and then there are the non golfers who absolutely scoff at that idea.
I was part of the 2nd group for most of my sales career and I have done pretty ok without golf. I think Mark Twain said “golf is a terrible way to ruin a good walk.” For most of my life I was in total agreement with Mark on this one.
But I guess if I am brutally honest with myself I have always been curious about the “golfer.” I was probably even a bit jealous and here is why.
I have been on sales calls with coworkers or former bosses and I have witnessed with my own eyes a conversation between a potential prospect and the sales person go from lackluster to love when one asked the other “do you golf?” and the other said “yes!”
From that point forward, whatever these two individuals were discussing before this question was broached was just completely forgotten and the next hour would be spent talking about this golf course or that one, this new driver they just bought, or the “hole in one” they almost had on Tuesday and on and on and on…..I would just roll my eyes and wonder how in the world this happens? What is the allure of this sport?
Well, recently I had the chance to give this sport a chance. I was involved in a scramble with a bunch of girls who really didn’t keep score just wanted to socialize and get out in the sun and enjoy the day. It was very non threatening way to try it so I did.
Well folks, it has been a month since that first round and I will have to tell you that I have played almost every week and I cannot wait to do it again!
I guess there is something to be said for being on a beautiful course – no cars, no noise just trees and gorgeous grass for miles. It truly does have a way of taking your mind off the daily grind.
It is pretty tough too! I am amazed how on one hole on the course I can look like Tiger Woods (okay maybe not that good but not bad) and the next hole I am trying to figure a way to put 15 strokes on my score card without anyone noticing (yep – 15 strokes – did that!) I guess the unpredictability keeps you honest and it keeps the game interesting that is for sure.
But mostly I am excited that I can now answer yes when the golf question is inevitably going to be asked by one of my prospects over lunch.
Believe it or not, it is working – business and golf. I have a prospect that I have been working really hard to find common ground with and guess what – I have it – GOLF! He is spending more time with me now than he has in the past. I can talk the talk with him and it is fun!
So I guess as I move into the 2nd part of my life I am going to have to disagree with Mark Twain on this one. Golf is actually making my good walk a lot less boring!
The Power of The Wiki
June 24, 2008
Have you ever been in a meeting where you’re working with your customer, you’ve brought additional technical support, and your own people simply were not aligned when it boiled down to your customer’s needs? Perhaps the support folks couldn’t find the location and called you 5 minutes before the meeting for you to realize they were still 10 minutes away. Maybe folks showed up with khakis and a polo when formal attire is required. Or were they flying blind hoping to pick up context during the converstion. No, you’ve never been there before.
Enter the Wiki. The Wiki is an easy to setup and easy to use resource for small departments to large global enterprises that allows information sharing on a real-time basis. What kind of information? Well, any, really. The web-based interface allows point and click reading and editing of information in the wiki. No special formal training is necessary to get started.
Some great ways to leverage a Wiki is to help your folks gain a comfort level about a client before a customer visit. Your wiki may contain local hotel information, good places to eat with your folks reviewing local restaurants, and probably directions including nuances and local landmarks from an airport or hotel. You may choose to enter interesting details of the people your folks might talk to on a client site. For instance, “Joan is responsible for the eCommerce systems and has some strong relationship with marketing, including Manuel and Bruce.” Organizational information will help your folks navigate the communication channels on site. Then simple information about dress code and company culture will help your folks feel comfortable the minute they walk in the door.
Most importantly, the Wiki gives your folks a chance to gain alignment on your clients’ business needs. If sales and delivery update a wiki with relevant information, you now have a platform where all the participants should be up to date about the particular project or initiative. You and your company will gain credibility as you capture your tribal knowledge in a formal way that allows new participants to join the conversation mid-stream in a knowledgeable fashion.
As the Wiki becomes more mainstream you can find its use even in the most protected areas of our government workings. InformationWeek ran a short piece about the CIA leveraging Wiki technology to augment learning and information sharing across their own organization as well as with other government agencies. The CIA’s advice? Organize your wiki by topic and not corporate structure. Start small. And make barriers to use low.
- Andy
CRM 2.0?
June 20, 2008
Conversations continue to take place bi-directionally between customers and businesses as they move away from the traditional uni-directional, tailored messages pushed to a customer base. And the tools available to support these bi-directional conversations continue to proliferate.
Newly minted Web 2.0 enterprise thought leaders experience “ah-ha” moments after truly interacting with a customer for the first time – as if they were blinded by a shining sun as they emerge from a winter’s hibernation. Before now, customer interaction in the back office may be limited to an executive’s annual ride in the delivery truck, or manning the cash register for an hour to “get in touch” with the front line. But even in these cases the conversations taking place took place between the executive and the employee – not necessarily the customer.
Drucker explains that Quality is giving the customer what they asked for. Peters described the Hedgehog concept as the one thing that an organization excells at better than any other organization in the world. Now that organizations have the tools to find out what all the customers are saying, the challenge becomes aligning customer feedback with the corporate mission. The risk of listening to all the customers is the distraction of delivering outside an organization’s Hedgehog concept.
What I find interesting about how far business has come with respect to listening to and interacting with customers is that these “new” concepts have been around since the beginning of civilization. Why does it take so long for a business to change it’s model to align itself with the normal human communication behaviors? Developing a Hedgehog concept is nothing different than, say, an ancient hunting tribe deciding to hunt black bear and not any other kind of bear, or moose, or bird because the tribe understood everything about the black bear and how it, more than any other bounty would best support the needs of the tribe. “Listening to the customer,” and concepts like crowd-sourcing, are these so much different than sitting around a campfire at night and discussing with the neighbors what works best and why?
Fast forward a few thousand years and we find these new communication strategies are generally bottom-up strategies. Technological limits tended to necessitate top-down strategies as delivery of radio, television, and newspaper messaging happened in one-way fashion. As technology changes, opportunities to generate two-way communication exist somewhat ubiquitously. And younger consumers will expect open lines of communication. They are getting back to their roots. We better be ready to deliver.
So when eWeek runs a piece on CRM 2.0 this week (June 16th, p32 – I can’t find a link) I have to bite my lip. Yes, there are some great platforms out there like Salesforce Ideas and Dell IdeaStorm that allow customers to suggest ideas and allow the crowd to vote on them. Yes, the conversation between businesses and customers has been enhanced in some amazing ways. I just need to swallow my pride when I think that many open source projects pioneered these strategies 10 years ago, forget who gets the credit, and just be glad that we’re arriving.
- Andy
How Have Leadership Principles Changed?
June 19, 2008
At times I feel old-school when it comes to leadership. My perspective of a good leader is a servant leader who can listen well and concretely respond to followers while providing a compelling vision for what an organization can accomplish. Followers, in turn, actually want to follow as they vest themselves in both the vision and the leader because the leader, along with all other responsibilities, has their interest in mind, and has proven this through speech and action. In business, where next quarter’s numbers matter more than pretty much anything else, and six-week cycles rule as companies release earnings guidance mid-quarter, implementing a vision is difficult at best. And servant leadership exists in two places:
- In theory as investors pound at the door demanding attention and earnings.
- In practice after a company has filed for bankruptcy or has missed earnings enough times to force out the current “leader.” In this case, the new leader is given the ability to implement a vision with a leash. Earnings better turn around in 18 to 24 months. Think Bob Nardelli at Chrysler.
George Andrews wrote a piece in the June 18th Journal about the influence of Peter Drucker on Asian business management principles (subscription required for full access). In China last year, 6,000 managers gathered to discuss Drucker’s principles, and next year’s conference expects a 20% rise in attendance. 14 acadamies exist to expressly spread the Drucker word. Why the enthusiasm?
“With China building up its manufacturing capacity…it’s probably more useful for Chinese management students to examine U.S. industrial triumphs of past decades, rather than get distracted by the fanfare associated with the various postindustrial ventures of today’s America.”
You see, when Drucker describes leadership, says Henry To, CEO of the Drucker acadamies, “he says that integrity must come first. He says leaders need to listen to their employees and be followers, too.” Andrews concludes that Drucker’s philosophy is “out of step with the tastes at many leading business schools, where the preference is for conclusions based on large statistical studies.
And what philosophy has Drucker forwarded that is out of step?
- The essential activities of business are innovation and marketing; it’s a mistake to fixate on profits.
- Good management should make work productive and the worker effective.
- Set objectives. Set separate ones for each crucial area of the business.
- Take social responsibility seriously. An enterprise exists only as long as society believes it does a necessary and useful job.
- Quality is what the customer wants, not what’s expensive and hard to do.
- Knowledge workers in modern organizations may manage no one, yet their decisions’ impact can be comparable to what executives do.
Mr. To explains that “Drucker’s fondness for business history is considered a virtue, not a fault. ‘I tell students: “The truth will not be outdated.” ‘ ”
I’d agree. Am I out of my mind?
- Andy
Technology and Accountability
June 18, 2008
So, the other week I went down to Miami Fl, to visit the Law school I will be attending and find a place to live. Since I recently turned 25, I now have the freedom to rent a car, yay! So, upon buying my ticket via Orbitz, I also made arrangements to rent a Pontiac G6, styling indeed. In case you have never been down to Miami, the drivers down there have a unique style about them, they’re nutz. Naturally, I purchased insurance for the car; just in case something unfortunate may happen. I got conformation of the tickets, car and insurance policy which I promptly read through. Upon arriving at the rental car station to pick up my car I realized that I didn’t have my insurance policy with me. It had been a few weeks and I was a little rusty on the particulars. The lady behind the counter did her best job of bamboozling me about how the Orbitz insurance packages umbrella and what I paid for doesn’t give me adequate coverage. She made a passionate argument but still my intuition knew better, yet I had no proof. Luckily a person that I was traveling with had the answer in the form of their trusty IPhone. We quickly went to my e-mail and looked at the insurance that I had purchased. Then I had the pleasure of slowly describing to the saleswoman why I wouldn’t be purchasing their insurance. We still got a Garmin though.
Moral of the story, with modern technology and information at your fingertips, don’t EVER try to lie to a customer. You will be held accountable. I know that the person behind the counter was just trying to do her job and get as many mark ups as she could, but lying is never the way to go about it. With the IPhone and Blackberries being ubiquitous, it’s just too risky. Though I had really no complaints about the trip and the logistics providers from a functional standpoint, it was the disingenuous service that really irritated me. When I knew she was lying, she broke my trust and quite frankly, insulted my intelligence. I then understood her MO and her expectation of myself, which was that I was a sucker. We all know my mantra, The Tuesday Model. Well she pretty much zigged when she should have zagged on all concepts. Needless to say that I doubt I’ll use the same rental-provider again. Moreover, as stated in my last post, a satisfied customer will tell a few people, but an upset or offended customer will tell everyone. And thus, my inspiration for today’s blog post of what not to do to a customer, who fortunately for them shall remain nameless… at least in this post.
Does your organization “digg” Enterprise 2.0?
June 17, 2008
Some time ago, it made big news when the first Baby Boomer started collecting Social Security. It is now big business to advise Baby Boomers on retirement strategies, retirement communities, places to retire to, etc. Baby Boomers (ages 44-62) are the biggest workforce out there today, but it won’t be that way for long. Gen X (ages 29-43) doesn’t have enough workers to replace the retiring Baby Boomers. And those from Gen Y or the Millennials (ages 8-28), who are coming into the workforce for the first time, have very different expectations of the workplace and a very different view of technology. After all, Gen Y has been around since the birth of the internet and has grown up with online connectivity.
Surveys show (and probably this would be no surprise to most of you) that Millennials are the ones who have embraced Web 2.0 with open arms compared to the other two groups. Gen X is a close second to Millennials when it comes to using different Web 2.0 technologies. But Millennials are more likely to use Instant Messaging, use Social Networking Sites, download digital media, and play online games. Millennials are more apt to send or receive multimedia messages on their mobile phones, send or receive text messages on their mobile phones, etc. Most Millennials are constantly connected to technology, be it their MP3 players, mobile phones, etc. Millennials also tend to use a very different language when it comes to sending text messages or IM – they have many different acronyms like for example, BRB means “Be right back”, and they tend to use emoticons i.e. characters like 
and 
, quite liberally. Millennials have been using social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook for quite a while. They DIGG stuff or BURY it! They share bookmarks via del.icio.us. They “twit” interesting content! They are more likely to publish a video to YouTube or podcast or publish a blog or web page.
As Millennials enter the workforce, they are going to be very keen on continuing to use Web 2.0 tools that they use constantly in their personal lives. Matter of fact, some surveys show that a good chunk of the population that uses sites like Facebook or MySpace tend to visit those sites several times daily and they tend to hang around for a while on each visit. So what does this mean for the enterprise?
Organizations and companies that want to attract and retain technology-savvy talent need to look at the use of Enterprise 2.0 technologies in their environments. Social networking tools should be embraced with appropriate governance. Consider leveraging the power of mashups to integrate different applications and present them in a slick interface. Look at re-designing applications keeping in mind that Gen Y tends to view the web and web sites and experiences quite differently. Some statistics suggest that Millennials tend to get easily bored and will not wait for a web page that takes longer than 3 seconds to download. Millennials tend to migrate away from companies they perceive to be stodgy or behind the times. Millennials are very comfortable with virtual worlds – how could you leverage that organizationally? Leverage the power of crowd-sourcing and folksonomies. If Baby Boomers are retiring, and there’s not enough of Gen X to replace them, how would you attract Gen Y to those jobs? Are there ways of using Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis and podcasts to capture the knowledge in the minds of Baby Boomers before they retire so as not to lose all that precious capital?
Ready or not, the Millennials are coming and the workplace is changing! The question of interest is, “Are they coming soon to your organization” and are you ready? Will they “digg” your use of Enterprise 2.0 technologies?
Part 2, Collaboration Tactical Verticals – expanded! (Statement 10)
June 17, 2008
Highly optimized teams perform at high levels – their productivity exceeds the sum of the parts. Moreover, each member contributes at a higher level and becomes more productive. Of course they also feel more committed and take pride and ownership of accomplishments. If done right, the team is the vehicle to bring game-changing, record-breaking innovations to market!
It’s no wonder that the investment in teams is the single best investment!
Gartner predicts that “by 2008, 50% of individual performance will be determined by the individual’s participation in projects and other collaborative work. This will cause an accelerated demand for collaboration, informal project coordination, social networking, expertise location and social process support technologies.”
It is now a business minimum to monitor activities on an almost 24/7 basis – just watch your spouse on vacation try to put away that blackberry! With travel costs soaring (gas prices), we are now relying more on mobile technology, web conferencing and high-resolution videoconferencing – especially as our virtual teams become the norm, expanding across time zones, and national, linguistic and enterprise boundaries.
The needs are real, very real. And if not met properly, shadow IT steps in to fill that need. The result…email grows out of control to morph into some kind of collaborative document repository, and source for best practices and even stretching to perform workflow. There are also non-coordinated initiatives in play that lead to multiple standards and duplication of costs and efforts. At some point, these will need to be reconciled. It is not different then the company that allows master data management to consist of enterprise level spreadsheets to hold data in a persistent manner. Yikes!
Lets start by stating the need that your success will depend upon the appropriate standardization and scoping of the collaboration stack. I view it as a 2 dimensional thought. The first dimension is strategic – it’s the enterprise level (horizontal) of collaboration. This is the level that everyone (knowledge workers, that is) in the organization is aware of and has come to depend upon. This builds upon the intranet concept, bringing to the organization additional corporate-wide tools. This is a good step in changing the corporate’s culture – but that is another blog yet to be written. The second dimension is the title of this blog “tactical verticals”. This is the ability to scale collaboration services ‘when the time is right’. Better said, when initiatives exhibit different configuration of characteristics, then there is a corresponding configuration of collaboration services. Hopefully, these are kept to a few in number and truly driven by need.
It’s always good to start at the foundation. So, lets group collaboration a couple of ways and list out our potential services. There are web-based and non-web based technologies”
Web-based collaborative technologies: Email, Web Conferencing, Team Sites, Document Versioning, RSS Reader, Forums, Chat, IM, Surveys, Shared Calendaring, Social Software, Knowledge Mgt. Systems, Blogs, Wikis
Non-web based collaborative technologies: Telephony, Faxing, Voice Mail, Video Conferencing, Workflow, Project Mgt. Systems, Code Control
But, lets group them by functional capabilities:
Electronic Communications
PC Based eMail
Mobile eMail
Wikis
Community Sites
Team Sites
Document Versioning
Blogs
RSS Reader
Electronic Conferencing
Forums (message boards, discussion groups)
Online Chat
Instant Messaging
Internal Survey Tools
Web Conferencing
Collaboration Management
Electronic Calendars
Workflow Systems
Knowledge Management
Social Software Systems
What are your next steps…? There are many angles to consider, but for this blog (tactical verticals), I would suggest:
* Take inventory of your current toolsets
* Determine who owns ‘collaboration’
* Decide upon a horizontal enterprise-wide standard
* Develop tactical vertical attributes (when do you need IM, voting, work flow, wikis, etc…)
* Configure a collaboration stack for each scenario
* Perform a gap analysis (what do you need that you don’t have)
* Determine standards (products/technologies/best practices) for each
Take the next steps…look at:
– Value
– ROI
– Current Culture
– Transitioning
– Marketing
– Etc…
Having tactical verticals ensures that you can scale your collaboration stack when you need to – the goal here is to match the team’s need with the appropriate technology. Simply allowing everyone access to everything may introduce the wrong controls and lead to chaos and confusion. You have one shot at this – you can’t un-ring the bell! Once these tools are embedded in people, processes and technology, they are hard (if not impossible) to remove. The key to consider is to keep your options few, so that you don’t end up with a dozen different configurations to manage. Click here for my 13 points regarding collaboration
Good Luck!
~ Scott Felten
Part 2, Collaboration Definition! Expanded. (Statement 1)
June 17, 2008
“Consensus is the lack of leadership!” – Margaret Thatcher. I am in total agreement with that statement. As a matter of fact, I absolutely love it and have lived by it for many years. Question: Is collaboration simply a way to gain consensus? If so, then is it valid to say that “Collaboration is the lack of leadership”? I say, yes…and no!
Definition “People working together on creative, non-trivial issues that requires deep thinking and an exchange of ideas in an iterative and cumulative manner by domain experts.”
I will try to state this as simply as possible and demonstrate why “Collaboration may or may not be the absence of leadership”.
But first we need to understand teams. So, let’s look at team dynamics (attributes of a team). If you have read any of Jon Katzenbach’s books (The Wisdom of Teams and Peak Performance, as well as Real Change Leaders and Teams at the Top), you will walk away with a better understanding about the various aspects of teams.
There are 3 dimensions to any team.
• The Challenge – Business problem to be solved
• Work Style – Type of work, level of communication
• Leadership Approach – Applying the right leadership style
The type of business problem dictates the work style and leadership approach for the team.
Coordination-oriented Teams.
Is the business problem familiar to the organization, is it based on a known process and is it time sensitive? This dictates a team of highly specialized experts in their domains, working individually on their part of the solution and time is the driving factor. Coordination is key for this type of team. It is lead by a leader that coordinates individual contributions. In this case, the collaboration level is not as deep. It may be a common repository for terms and reference documents as well as the place where final deliverables are held and project plans are maintained. Often times the implementation of this level of collaboration is tactical – the company sets up a base set of collaboration features for ‘any team’ – its just the standard corporate collaboration configuration.
In the case, collaboration is simply a minimum level of service offered by the organization – a strategy set awhile ago. Here, consensus may in fact be the lack of leadership; as the type of business problem and work style demands a high degree of individual leadership. Here the leader needs to be the main broker of communication; keeping track of the project’s schedule and deliverables. Here the leader would make decisions (of course a good leader always seeks advice). I would agree that on this end of the spectrum, collaboration may be the lack of leadership. In this case, poor leaders may fall in to the trap of allowing the group to lead.
Collaboration-oriented Teams.
However, if the business problem you are trying to solve is unfamiliar to the organization, it is likely that your team will need to invent new processes. In this case, while time is certainly a factor, the best solution takes priority (implementing a poor solution in this case is disastrous). For these team attributes, collaboration is key. This type of team often shares in the work and often rotates leadership responsibility as domain experts lead discussions. Here the team is mission lead. All team members work collectively and share information at a high velocity. In this case, the collaboration level is deep. It may have custom designed work flows and voting/survey tools. Each member is available via online chat. Document management with versioning and edition features are enabled. There is a high velocity of meetings handled by web conferencing. Also the use of wikis and team electronic calendars are priority 1 – so that the mission continues!
In this scenario, collaboration is tactical – it is deployed because the business challenge demands a high velocity of collective work – a high degree of communication and thought sharing. In this case, the role of the leader rotates as people. Here collaboration is not simply gaining consensus, rather here collaboration is leadership!
I have painted both ends of the spectrum. The truth is always in the middle. Keep in mind that during the different lifecycles of a project, your team dynamics will ebb and flow from individual coordination to team collaboration. The trick is to choose a level of collaboration that will scale to your need! More to follow! Click here for my 13 points regarding collaboration.
Happy Collaborating!
~ Scott Felten
Describe Your Day
June 12, 2008
When analyzing information, one tends to always limit one’s view to a certain time frame. Whether by a specific date or over a span of days, data is often meaningless unless you can put a box around it. Obviously other filters come into the mix (product, geography, corporation, etc.), but the common denominator is most often time.
Having been a part of a number of data warehouse projects, the “Date” dimension is a common debate session and is often re-invented from project to project. Why? When it comes to high pressure deadlines and deliverables, why can’t we have a cookie cutter Date dimension that can be tailored and tweaked as necessary to meet your project needs? Well, we can, but first we must decide on what the cookie cutter attributes would be for the dimension.
Take a few moments and see how many different ways you can describe a day. Tick, Tick, Tick. How many did you come up with….5, 10, 20? I came up with 84 (including a few found courtesy of internet searches) and then stopped. Some examples….actual date (duh Dave!), Month name, Week starting date, Quarter number, Weekend indicator, Fiscal Year, Last day of Month indicator, Day number of the year, etc. Obviously some of these attributes can be readily calculated using database SQL functions, however when dealing with large data volumes, reading directly from a table vs. computing on the fly is preferable from a performance standpoint. You also don’t want to burden an end-user to have to understand how to strip out the day portion of a field formatted in MM/DD/YYYY.
The Date Dimension is one of the few dimensions in the data warehouse that you can pre-populate once and forget about it. With 365 days per year you can populate your table with 50 years of data for the low low cost of 18,250 records (give or take a leap year or two)…peanuts in DW speak. Now give your user 84 different ways to describe a day. Pretty powerful analytics to browse through. How many sales are closed on the last day of the month? What is the average attendance of a baseball game on a weekend compared to a weekday or a holiday? How many weeks has your system been operational since its inception?
One common debate topic on the Date dimension is whether or not one should use intelligent or non-intelligent surrogate keys. Surrogate keys provide a means to relate a metric/fact (i.e. Sales revenue) to a dimension (i.e. Date, Product, Sales Rep) that describes that metric/fact. Common practice is to use non-intelligent surrogate keys in order to not tie the data warehouse to business codes that could conceivably change over time. An example of a non-intelligent key would simply be a numeric field that automatically increments each time a new dimension record is added to the table. Meaningless to you and me, but insures that the connection between the metric/fact and attribute will never be broken. One could argue that the Date dimension is not susceptible to changing over time. For instance, if we took today’s date and converted it to an intelligent key of 20080612, this would never change over time. I could then write queries directly against my business metrics and limit them based on my interpretation of a date without having to perform a database join to the Date dimension resulting in a faster query. Something to consider though is a common practice of placing records within a dimension to associate metrics that have an “invalid” or perhaps “not applicable” dates associated with the transaction. If my Date dimension has a intelligent numeric surrogate key, that I have to come up with some bogus key (i.e. perhaps 9999999) to hold an “invalid” value or maybe -1 to mean “not applicable”. Now it becomes difficult to interpret these values on the fly. With a non-intelligent key, you are able to make these “non-dates” easily identifiable by simply including another attribute such as Type of Date.
What about Time of Day? Time is a bit different. How many different ways can you describe 1:00? AM/PM, Work shift (maybe). Normally time attributes are linked within the context of a day. For this reason you normally don’t see a separate Time dimension and in fact, it is becoming more acceptable to just include the date/time combination as another kind of metric on your transaction while still allowing for the additional 84 ways to describe the day.
So while we are often pressed to work faster and better everyday, it makes sense to take some time out to build your toolbox of re-usable components. The Date dimension is a good place to start. Create the dimension in a data modeling tool such as Erwin. You can then create various data definition language (DDL) scripts to a variety of database platforms (Oracle, Microsoft, etc.). Build a one-time CSV file to populate the table and you can even eliminate the need to ETL the data into the table by creating Insert commands with the scripts. Might not be the fastest way to actually insert the data into the database, but with a one-time operation that will occur on your time, why bother with something more elaborate?
Anyone tell me if 5/20/2041 is a US holiday without checking?
Dave
LUCRUM RADIO: Episode 1, Doug Ross
June 12, 2008
Lucrum Radio is our new podcasting series. It will feature interviews and discussions with thought leaders in business and technology, providing a forum for sharing knowledge with the world.
Episode 1 of LUCRUM Radio got us off to a great start. It features an interview with Doug Ross, CTO of Western Southern Insurance. In the podcast, moderated by fellow LUCRUM employee Andy Erickson, Doug and I discuss topics such as collaboration technology, crowd-sourcing, organizational dynamics, the integration of IT and Marketing, and the role technology can play in differentiating an organization from the competition.
Give the podcast a listen, and let us know what you think…
Special Thanks to Doug Ross for his willingness to participate in the project, and for doing such an amazing job of delivering insightful, innovative thinking.
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