It’s 7:20 a.m., and patients haven’t yet started to arrive at this busy physician’s office in the middle of a university hospital campus. I’ve been invited here to meet with a doctor who has some very strong opinions about the EPIC medical records system his employer has installed at a cost of $100 million inRead More »
Tag: Technology
The Wisdom of the Widget Maker
May 10th, 2011
Sometimes, in their rush to deliver data, companies that create electronic products lose track of important information about their customers that was routinely gathered by their industrial ancestors. The widget manufacturers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had a pretty good idea of how well their products fit an existing need and how well theyRead More »
Hire a Professional!
May 3rd, 2011
When a software system just isn’t delivering on its promise, one of the usual suspects is an awkward design that makes the system difficult to use. But if you’ve diagnosed the probable cause, what’s the remedy? Fine-tuning the design of business software is commonly treated as a troubleshooting issue that’s addressed after a system isRead More »
Crash Scene
April 26th, 2011
Sometimes, when I’m called upon to investigate a business process that’s gone awry, I feel like a first responder arriving at the scene of a major traffic accident: The collisions that occur between idealized business processes and human nature can be pretty ugly. The good news is that many of these pileups can be prevented.Read More »
Avoiding Buyer’s Remorse
April 19th, 2011
Even though we know better, we’ve all done it: finding ourselves falling so hard for some sleek new marvel of engineering that we don’t take enough time to think it through. When a cell phone purchased on impulse doesn’t fit our needs quite as well as we expected, we can replace it this afternoon andRead More »
Lost in the Cloud
April 12th, 2011
You’ll have to admit that it’s amazing—the way in which much of our everyday business software has floated away from local servers in the workplace and settled into the cloud. A few decades ago, business software was typically housed in a mainframe computer so gigantic that it needed its own office. As smaller central processingRead More »
Portable Data: What Have You Got to Lose?
April 5th, 2011
Yet another wakeup call was sounded to every business that maintains confidential records (that would be all of us) when British Petroleum acknowledged last week that the company had lost track of a laptop containing the names, Social Security numbers, addresses, and phone numbers of 13,000 Louisiana residents who had filed claims for compensation forRead More »
Managing Risk
March 29th, 2011
It’s not as though we hadn’t been thinking about risk management long before the earthquake and tsunami struck Japan. For most of us, risk is always top of mind because we continually face risk from every direction—the risk of change, the risk of maintaining the status quo, the risks posed by forces of nature, andRead More »
The Process of Innovation
March 15th, 2011
The leaders of many companies recognize that their future success will be determined by their ability to do business differently from their competitors—to innovate. They’ve set high standards for the efficiency of their operations and the quality of their work, and they’ve checked those boxes. Now they’re asking themselves, Does our business actually work theRead More »
Design to Delight!
March 8th, 2011
Why shouldn’t it be more fun to come to work? For many businesses, striving to create a great experience for the workforce just isn’t part of the corporate culture. Cynics will argue that you can never make people happy, and that even if you could grant every wish, it’s not realistic for most businesses toRead More »
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