In which vocabularies are expanded

Nice one, Howard!

“Enterprise software products are complex, powerful tools. Their complexity is one of the reasons businesses sometimes fail to fully realize the expected return on investment from these products.

“For enterprise employees, who must use these enterprise applications, this complexity poses a considerable challenge. When an organization deploys an application, it expects users to learn the new system, integrate it into their existing work processes, and become proficient enough to allow the organization to realize the system’s full benefits. Far too often, however, enterprise employees find these new systems hard to learn, hard to master, and difficult to integrate into existing processes.”

Enterprise systems are rarely engineered for usability, and this is their downfall: by being cumbersome to use and difficult to customise, enterprise systems will cost your business tends of thousands of dollars in wasted staff time — many, many hours of waiting, backtracking, checking, workarounds and delays, not to mention the helpdesk support.

Fourteen experts, including researchers from the University of Texas, Stanford University, Microsoft and Facebook, predict the directions of social media research in 2009. This field of social analytics is about using data to better understand human behavior and preferences, particularly in online social environments. Such data has enormous potential to generate new business opportunities for onine service providers — and, if you’re an Orwell fan (as am I), to raise the spectre of Big Brother clothed in many uncomfortable shades of grey.

Over the last 12 months Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum, the Australian War Memorial, Washington’s Smithsonian Institution and other cultural organisations have been contributing images to the Flickr Commons. The (US) Library of Congress has published a report on its Flickr Commons pilot project, essential reading for academic libraries and other institutions that are considering joining the program.

Similarly, the Dilbert strip for 21 December 2008 has a particular resonance for me — and perhaps for others who work in large organisations? I recently worked with a colleague on compiling a history of the last decade in IT/library management at our organisation: the IT part of the publication looked very much like the list of milestones in this cartoon.

A report in the Guardian reminds us that effective project management isn’t as easy as it looks. A UK Department of Transport computer integration project was supposed to save over £50 million. It ended up costing more than £80 million and delivering less than £40 million in operational savings. As well, the new system failed to meet most of its performance targets. Ouch.

At Australian universities, indigenous student enrolments have increased markedly in the last 10 years.

Andrew Norton points to flaws in the THES ranking of universities — is ANU really a better university than Stanford?

MIT’s Open CourseWare initiative reached a milestone recently: two subjects, physics and linear algebra, have each attracted more than a million visits to their web pages.

New Zealand’s national broadcaster, TVNZ, launched its on-demand broadband service 18 months ago. The online service now outpaces conventional TV viewing, with 30,000 hours of programs watched online each month.

Judah Phillips suggests some ways to build your skills in the emerging professional field of web analytics.

The US Association of Research Libraries has produced a free resource kit for designing technology-enhanced classroom and library spaces.

It’s a not-always-obvious truth that “Publishers provide many useful services, but they do not provide peer review. It is the peers themselves who do that essential work.” Paul Courant follows this idea to its logical conclusion: “Given that publication in the literal sense (making public) is now easy and cheap in the technical sense, it seems almost certain that informal review will grow relative to formal review.”

How much does intellectual property theft cost the law-abiding nation? The US Customs and Border Patrol office says 750,000 jobs are lost because of IP piracy, and other government agencies claim up to US$250 billion is lost to the US economy each year. In fact, says Julian Sanchez, “Try to follow the thread of citations to their source, and you encounter a fractal tangle of recursive reference that resembles nothing so much as the children’s game known, in less-PC times, as “Chinese whispers’ …”.

UK universities are handing out a new booklet telling chancellors what’s expected of them — and with good reason. “The traditional role of university chancellors, who count Oliver Cromwell and Winston Churchill among them, is to act as cheerleaders by promoting their institutions far and wide. And while some chancellors in Europe still wield power, their UK counterparts are unpaid figureheads, who give their time and experience for free. Universities are increasingly picking chancellors with celebrity caché to boost their profiles.” The booklet, Beyond Ceremony, is available online (PDF 1.7 Mb).

A tag cloud of more than 1000 university home pages. See also the snapshot data showing how many universities mention blogs on their home page, or use jscript, CSS for print, various coding standards, iTunes and other features.

Ben Eltham summarises key points from the Cutler Review of the National Innovation System (PDF 3 Mb). The review addressed a complex problem: our national productivity has stalled and our innovation activities have flatlined since the early 2000s. Why, how and what’s to be done? Predictably, Cutler calls for increased funding to support innovation — but not necessarily focused on the areas of science and technology.

David Weinberger ponders whether the Internet is improving democracy and concludes that it’s impossible to know — yet. “When all you can see of yourself is what the sanitised mass media show you and what you can see around you in your physical environs, the differences the Net makes visible unsettle us profoundly.”

The Digital Media and Learning Competition will provide a total of US$2 million in grants for “pioneers who use new technologies to envision the future of participatory learning.” This year’s theme is “participatory learning” and there’s a junior category for 18-25-year-olds. The 2008 competition is open to non-US institutions and individuals.

Now in her fifth year at university, Mary Kate Hurley finally feels like a proper medievalist: “all too often I’ve felt like the only difference between being a medievalist and being a twentieth century-ist is that my texts aren’t in Modern English. But this is different, somehow. This foray into the world of manuscripts feels older, somehow. And yet, to access this knowledge, to learn how to decode these old texts, I’m not really confronting the things themselves… I’m still getting my input, so to speak, through a technological medium. My first thought is — what is lost by transcribing from a virtual manuscript, a picture on an internet site? But even as I write that question I realize that the question that’s more interesting is the one that reminds me that medieval manuscripts themselves… [are] forms of technology, if in many cases less ‘shiny’ than my computer screen.”

Writing in Educause Review, Carole Goble and David de Roure assert, “We have an increasing understanding of the practices of data curation, but we should not neglect the curation and cataloguing of the processes that we use to work with the data… an absence of curated processes leads to ignorance of availability and creates obstacles to adoption. Active curation of these resources with accurate and flexible descriptions to check their availability, reliability, and general quality of service is required.”

The University of Western Australia will adopt the Bologna model for its degree programs: five 3-year bachelor degrees will replace the current 70-odd courses and a range of professional postgrad degrees will provide specialised and vocational training. The undergrad degrees cover a slightly different range of disciplines from those at Melbourne University, which implemented the Bologna model this year. UWA will also offer a four-year undergraduate degree, the research-intensive BPhil.

Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig wants to change the US political system. In this 1-hour lecture he discusses political corruption, the negative influence of private interest groups, the influence of money on academia and the systemic factors that prevent moral and fact-based decision-making in Washington DC.

How to make corporate web sites more accessible: practical advice for web staff. You might be stuck with Vignette, you may never get 100 per cent valid code and your colleagues might insist on using Microsoft Word to create their content — but you can make a positive difference with a few relatively simple strategies.

Via Michael Geist, we learn that Senator Kim Carr is advocating Open Access:

“We are and will remain a net importer of knowledge, so it is in our interest to promote the freest possible flow of information domestically and globally. The arguments for stepping out first on open access are the same as the arguments for stepping out first on emissions trading – the more willing we are to show leadership on this, we more chance we have of persuading other countries to reciprocate. And if we want the rest of the world to act, we have to do our bit at home.”

What a pity he chose to adopt the unfortunate term “Venturous Australia” to describe the desired outcome of investment in innovation. Is he too young to remember the painful years of “Incentivation“?

Here’s one for the designers among us: test your color hue perception with this drag’n'drop chart. I scored 29 (lower is better).

Your staff directory is an important part of your web site or intranet. Make it even more useful by linking staff data from other parts of the organisation.

David Donathan observes that, “Unfortunately, there are always those who just don’t get it. You know — those who think organizations need to adapt to remain competitive, that change is good and results in greater efficiencies, that failure to adapt to ‘modernalities’ is evil and counterproductive. Since they usually mean well and truly believe they are trying to improve our situation, we don’t want to cull them from the herd…” Donathan offers 10 steps for dealing with change agents before they ruin everything.

At BBC Radio Labs, information architect and web developer Michael Smethurst is using Ruby on Rails to create a semantic online database of 113 years of Proms concert information. Smethurst describes his first steps and foreshadows future developments, including linking the Proms records to external sources of information; keep an eye on the Radio Labs blog to find out what happens next.

CERN’s LHC Computing Grid will transfer, store and process the largest datasets ever produced. Its success relies partly on an “open-source middleware platform called Globus… designed to gather that information seamlessly as though it’s sitting in a folder on one’s own desktop PC… [In the future, a similar system could enable] home computers to provide instant weather forecasts by accessing information from nearby environmental sensors. Or it might help sift through a life’s accumulation of personal medical records or years of home video footage looking for dimly remembered events. Ironically, CERN’s next great contribution to the Internet could be all but transparent to the end user.”

Microsoft’s US$300 million Vista advertising campaign was doomed before it hit the airwaves: a sad case of yesterday’s guys selling last century’s ideas.