Business Information Systems

Before all you newborn bloggers, hopefully not too worn out after a term of writing and reading, sign off and possibly pack your blogs away forever (or at least until you join me again in the internship supervision course a couple of years from now (which includes class time in second life), why don’t you have a listen to this video on the all-new-singing-and-dancing WordPress 3.0 – your wordpress.com blogs are automatically in 3.0 – perhaps you like the theme, too. It gives you collapsable page headers and many things more. Enjoy!

 

You've stood on your head long enough: now go reap the harvest of your hard blogging work!

The last coaching session is over: once again, I am very impressed by the results and the spectrum of topics. It is now up to you to do something with it.

Some blogs were more research-focused than others – these are necessarily not in the same shape as blogs since they were completed later. Some topics are revisited from previous semesters though you approached these topics with a fresh mind (IBMan, food, culture).

Whatever state your blog is in: keep looking at the google analytics indices as you tell friends and family about your achievement (using well-known channels on which you communicate, like facebook). If your project contains a commercial idea, consider developing it: after all, you are business students!

As for me, I’m glad once again that we did this and I am looking forward to your professional project presentations in the course of the coming weeks!

And if you haven’t done it yet: why don’t you take a virtual stroll down your colleagues’ blogs – it’s the summer of serendipity!

With WordPress 3.0, a major blogging software has made a major update. You might find the description of the genesis of this update interesting – we’ve not talked much about Open Source software but both as a project management “movement” and as a commercial entity, it is an approach worth watching for business students (I bet you didn’t even know there was a “wikinvest“, did you?)

Not every one of the visitors of your new project blog sites will be as awed as the fine young man in the picture. But the truth is: until you show your stuff to strangers, you won’t know! You’ve worked hard on your sites but when you’re on a project for a while, you don’t see the wood for the trees anymore – it’s important that you bring in some outsiders to look at your tackle and size it up, give you ideas about missing links, missing information, design flaws, content glitches – and also in order to plain tell you how awesome your work is! (See here for usability testing tips.)

An interesting article appeared in Knowledge @ Wharton today making the point that e-commerce gets more personal in the age of mobile networks. Though none of you are trying to sell any products over your sites, you’re all in the e-commerce of information and many of the inferences of this article apply. It also says that ‘focus groups’ are overrated, measurements however aren’t: begin to look at those numbers Google Analytics surprises you with (see our student module, too)!

So get up and do those usability tests with friends, family, strangers, if you haven’t done them! You’ll be thinking about presenting your project sooner than you know it – the next three weeks will fly by, they always do at this time.

This is how blogging is fun – both comic relief and serious dialog: check out the HWR’s New Info Tech blog today, created in and by Bruce Spear’s class, with a whiney post on “Twitter Sucks” (which will make you feel grateful that I spared you). However, next time round, this is what we’ll do: co-create this very blog as a group blog. Good weekend everyone and bring a good sun burn back to class!

In the meantime, your own project blogs are coming along very nicely and I have dubbed your work as a whole “summer of serendipity” mostly because I have the impression that I haven’t seen too much of you as a group (except during our coaching sessions which were always well attended). Good luck for the final stretch!

HWR inside view: "You'll learn process modeling or you'll eat my spinach, dammit!"

As a deepening follow-up to my last post on blog organisation, please use this week to take a look at Bruce Spear’s article “Multi-dimensional WordPress”, which argues convincingly using many examples and illustrations in favor of turning blogs from a one-dimensional “journal with links and pics” into a story on the page. Since we finally started with business process modeling (BPM), please read the seminal article by Tom Davenport which is contained in your reader, for next week. We’ll use the expert map method to unlock the secrets of this paper.

After taking a look at MS Visio, a simple drawing program, this week and experiencing – via the “biography” exercise – how different process maps can look like without an agreed grammar, we will turn to Event-driven Process Chains (EPC) (see example below) as a simple and yet powerful way to model processes, which is also the basis of the process language used in the design of SAP, one of the most widely used Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems.

EPC example of a simple ordering process - devil's in the detail.

And lastly: your individual blogs. Some of you were concerned this morning that you have not had feedback from me. Now, the main feedback, in such a large group of bloggers, should come from your peers – as you will remember, you are supposed to leave at least one comment per week on the blog of another student from this course, preferably not the same student time and time again. I will make sure to get to your blogs in the course of the next few weeks at least once before the final evaluation via – must I spell it out – the rubric! Hope this helps!

We’re not doing too great with our regular course work, partly because of the combination of bank holidays and sickness…but we’ll get there. Your student projects on the other hand are coming along really nicely. I am dying to see how they’ll look like in a couple of months. But for now, we need to take another look at the organising basics:

The illustration shows six different, important dimensions of your blog. How much you emphasise each (or more than one) of them decides which message your blog will send – and it allows you to stir your readers’ expectations. Read more »

"After class, all we wanted to do was rest."

…much, much more to come. Not much more to add though after today’s session where we discussed blog examples mixing poetry, art, music, philosophy, psychology and information science…frankly, I was blown away by the combined creativity already visible in your blogs – including today’s featured blogs:

• “Shakespeare’s Sonnets” (with podcasts!),
• “Go with the Mood” (art & music),
• “A small idea with big impact” (microfinance), >
• “Pissed Off” (weekly, free righteous anger),
• “A Power Blog” (on power!) and
• “Did you know…” (on anything you always wanted to know but probably never dared to ask).

Even Knowledge @Wharton, probably the world’s foremost online business school publication, features blogging as one of the greatest innovative tools of the future.

I must admit, after this very passionate start, I am kind of tired today. One reason is that I gave a talk at a large conference, which always takes it out of me. Here’s my blog entry about the event. I still have enough presence of mind, of course to remind you to look at the article by O’Reilly on Web 2.0 in your reader for next week.

Otherwise, all project groups are now well under way. You’ve received the instructions on how to establish your self-hosted WordPress blog and you know that you can create your own support group via Ilias. Right? And you also remember that, if in doubt regarding procedures, facts, technology…always post your question to the forum first. Of course you knew that, stupid me.

Source: weeklyreader.com

Another HWR professor (Bruce Spear, who, incidentally, will take over this course in the fall when i go into my research sabbatical) wrote this to me today:

” I’ve learned of another of my students today having presented her blogging during a job interview and the interviewer was blown away, said this made her stand out from the rest, was curious about what she’d done, and offered her a job. She turned it down for something better, but when she told her story her classmates sat up straight in their chairs. “

do i need to say more?

…why? Because they carry messages about where your comfort zones are. You don’t need to back down every time fear grips you, but better be aware. So was it today, when we talked in class about your fears and, more likely, concerns related to blogging on the Internet. I’m just going to highlight two from our discussion today:

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