Ive been looking at using Wiki’s to document the business rules for Data Warehousing projects (more on that later) and in the process found some interesting articles that provide some good ideas of the processes that you should think about when starting a Wiki.
Use a wiki for internal documentation over at ittoolbox.com outlines 13 steps to consider when setting the Wiki up, before releasing it to the general population.
Best Practices for Wiki Standards and Procedures also at ittoolbox.com also gives a few simple steps to think about.
Wikipatterns.com have a raft of tip, with a great focus on how to spur wiki adoption.
The use a concept of adoption patterns, some which are positive and some are negative, and they align their articles to help you encourage or discourage these behavours. Or in their words:
“Applying patterns that help coordinate people’s efforts and guide the growth of content, and recognizing anti-patterns that might hinder growth - can give your wiki the greatest chance of success.Wikipatterns.com is a toolbox of patterns & anti-patterns, and a guide to the stages of wiki adoption.”
In fact the idea of adoption patterns could also probably be applied to Business Intelligence and Data Warehousng projects as well, something I think I might ponder on.
When determining the minimum CPC you should pay for a keyword (and also wether to make your keyword active or inactive in Google adwords or not) they evaluate the quality of your ad content (amongst other things).
Google explain the quality score in their help as:
“Your Quality Score reflects your keyword’s CTR and the relevance of your ad text and landing page. Keywords with high Quality Scores are more relevant for users, more effective for your ad campaigns, and have lower minimum CPC bids. ”
When evaluating wether to make one of your keywords active or inactive Google combines your Maximum CPC and your ads Qaulity score to determine of the keyword status.
Google explain the keyword status concept in the AdWords Help Center - What does my keyword’s status mean?
Of course your Maximum CPC is obvious, but your quality score is not. But there is a hidden column that you can display to make everythng clear…..
Been using the latest Joomla beta release for my sporadic blogs, but have finally decided to make the move to wordpress.
Major reason was a number of articles pointing to indications that using dedicated blogging software rather than Content Management Software helps improve your searcj rankings (can’t remember where I read that but will try and track it down).
So install went fine, migrated my content (manually, lucky there weren;t that many posts).
Custom theme next, then maybe some time spent lookign for toys to add…
Get more referrals now!
Bill Cates
ISBN-10: 0071417753, ISBN-13: 978-0071417754
This book covers how to build referrals that make selling easier.
Very oriented towards direct selling and focussed on industries such as insurance and mortage brokers.
Too “high pressure sales-e” for me and a little to cheesy at times. Wouldn’t bother reading unless your a insurance (or used car) salesman.
Two gems I did however get out of it:
1) Short outline of “contact spheres” on page 121 that sound interstig and willl require more investigation.2) Good checklist of areas to cover when compiling a market profile (inspired by Jim Cathart)
- The Market - whats the industry you are targetting
- The Demographics - how many are there and where are they
- Memberships - which organisations do they belong to
- Publications - what do they read
- Meetings - what meeting do they attend
- Influencers - who are the influencers in the industry
- Needs, Fears and Goals
That last gem might have made it worth reading (but it is a big might)
Which way is the bus below travelling?
To the left or to the right?
Can’t make up your mind?
Look carefully at the picture again. ?
Still don’t know?
Pre-schoolers all over Australia
were shown this picture asked the same question.
90% of the pre-schoolers gave this answer.
“The bus is travelling to the right .”
When asked, “Why do you think the bus is travelling to the right?”
They answered:
Interesting post over at Church of the Customer Blog about customer service (or lack of it)
What tweaked my interest was the comments:
One company that’s setting new standards for customer service call centers is Netflix. For instance, Netflix has:
- Eliminated e-mail-based customer service inquiries.
- All questions, complaints and suggestions go to its Hillsboro, Oregon call center, not an offshore vendor.
- Customer support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
- The wait time to talk to a customer service rep posted on the Help page of the website. Current wait time as I write this: less than 1 minute.
- A policy that allows call center reps to talk to customers as long as is needed — no incentives to get off the phone quickly.
- Two blogs, one written by the team who adds the social elements to the site, and one written by CEO Reed Hastings
It understands the value of a customer support center as a competitive advantage. Now if only more telecom and wireless companies did.
If only our local telco’s could deliver this kind of service.
I don’t know about you but in my expereince TelstraClear is at least a 15-30 minutes wait to get the call center and I am still waiting after one phone call and an email 3 days ago for Vodafone to get back to me.
As I have mentioned before, working in an office with a large contingent of Mac users is a whole new experience.
Its the subtle things that take a while to notice, but really bring home how different Mac users really are to the rest of us (I justify the rest of us being the windows majority as Apple only has 5% market share - something that is fun to mention to a Mac users during a conversation).
As a Windows user the first thing I always do on a new PC (after downloading a couple of hundred MB of security patches from Microsoft and installing firefox of course) is change the default start page for Internet Explorer to something other than the microsoft.com webpage. Mac users never seem to change the default page they leave it pointing to Apple.com.
Taking this one step further they don’t just wait for apple.com to finish loading and enter their detsination url, or stop it loading like I do, they wait for it to load, have a quick peek to see if anything new has appeared and then carry on their task.
Now while this must be analytics hell for the Apple.com online marketing guys, think about the amount of messaging that this enables Apple to do, and probably is one of the reason they refresh the content of their front page so often.
You should have heard the office when they put the new iPods up on the frontpage the other day, talk about rapture…..
I am (not suprisingly) spending more time reviewing SaaS solutions out there to see how they work.
One thing I noticed is that I never bother to read the terms and conditions or privacy statements of these offerings.
Even when there is a big tick box, its tick it as fast as I can to get to the good stuff.
I wonder how many people bother to read them?
I wonder how many don’t carry on with the process after reading them?
Moving from a company that only had Windows users to a company with a large contingent of Mac users has been an experience, often akin to a religious war.
Apart from the fact that I have sworn at my windows PC at least once a day for the many years I have worked (my orginal PC had a green screen and then I upgraded to amber) and I have yet to hear the Mac guys swear at theirs (although the constant referal to their baby is disconcerting) they are actually right about MIcrosoft vs Apple design as highlighted in the video below.
Moving from working for a Enterprise Software vendor to working with Small Businesses using Open Source software then to a Software as a Service startup has been an interesting mindshift.
One thing I was interested in is the differences for a small business in using Open Source solutions compared to SaaS solutions.
In my experience one of the major reasons small businesses (as compared to IT practitioners) use Open Soucre is trhe perception that it is free (as compared to IT practitioners who use casue they can hack the code to do what they want).
However small businesses often hit the limit of their expertise in installing and using Open Source solutions fairly quickly and then have to invest in people like me to help them through.
In a post on Trumba about Five Benefits of Software as a Service they compare them from a cost point of view:
“Open Source - Potentially costly. In addition to any license fees you might have to pay, factor in the infrastructure costs of servers, security, and IT personnel.”
“SaaS - Comparably low. You pay a subscription fee but the vendor bears all the security and infrastructure costs, leaving your IT personnel free to focus on missioncritical tasks.”
They also list the five major benefits of SaaS as:
- Save money.
- Save time.
- Focus your technology budgets on competitive advantage rather than infrastructure.
- Gain immediate access to the latest innovations.
- Join a community of interest.
the key they say is:
“Regardless of what specific application you might be evaluating, you stand to benefit from SaaS in five major ways. When you subscribe to a software service instead of purchasing a software license.”
This is the same expectation small business get when using Open Source solutions. So if I compare Open Source vs SaaS on these:
Save Money
Open Source - You won’t spend money on license but you will probably spend money on services
SaaS - You may spend less money on subscription (than a perpetual license) but you will definitly spend less money on servcies.
Save Time
Open Source - You won’t spend time on building software but you will still spend time installing and maintaining it
SaaS - You won’t spend anytime installing and maintaining software
Focus on competitive advantage
Open Soucre - You can modify the software to your hearts desire so definitely get competitive advantage
Saas - It all proprietary code on a server so no competitive advantage (although Salesforce.com with its APEX framewqork is probably getting there)
Gain Immediate Access to Innovations
Open Source - You have access to Alpha and Beta versions if you want to take the risk but on average you are still waiting 6-12 mioths for major releases.
SaaS - Typically a new release is 2-4 weeks, which you get automatically next time you longin
So overall SaaS seems to have it on these points.
However if somebody came up with a true hybrid solution, i.e. SaaS but where you could modify it to get competitive advantage, then that would change thr rules.
SugarCRM seem to offer that, but under the covers it is just a way of piutting lipstick on SaaS.
