The KIT ─ Knowledge & Information Technology
Issue No. 2 - 15 June 2009
In This Issue
Stanford iPhone Apps Course: 1M+ Downloads
Multimedia Expert Knowledge Capture
Service Oriented Communications Podcast
Doing Well by Doing Good
Seen Recently
Twittering Away...
CB photo
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"The KIT" is not going to be bi-weekly in general, but I already gathered enough new stuff to fill a second issue.
Issue No. 1 was sent to 502 people, and your feedback has been very positive (only one person unsubscribed himself).  Thank you, and enjoy No. 2!
As you will see, I'm happy to provide free publicity to interesting people, products or services in my domain. If you want me to mention you in a future issue, send me your 100-word maximum insert for consideration.
Claude Baudoin
Stanford iPhone Apps Course Downloaded more than one million times
Stanford's course CS193P, iPhone Application Programming, has been recorded in its entirety and made available on YouTube. By June 1, it had been downloaded more than one million times.
Why is this important? Because the "years of the single platform" are coming to an end. The iPhone can do so many things that people want it to free them up from having to use a PC for many tasks.
This will make IT infrastructure management tougher... unless companies also adopt the procurement model where employees are given an annual individual IT budget, a set of capabilities they must have (e.g., document formats they must be able to read and create) and are left to buy and self-support what they prefer.
Multimedia Expert Knowledge Capture
It's easy to put a camera on a tripod at the back of a room where a speaker is sharing his valuable knowledge... and to end up with a totally unusable DVD because of poor lighting, poor sound, poor or no editing, and more importantly poor planning.
iCap Leverage (Sugar Land, Texas) offers an "instructional system design" approach and multimedia recording and processing capabilities to help with knowledge capture. c�b� IT & Knowledge Management will partner with them to deliver the end-to-end consulting service to retain and distribute the knowledge of your key experts, using a "storytelling" approach when, as is often the case, it best fits the culture of the participants.
Service Oriented Communications Podcast
At the March meeting of the SOA Consortium in Washington D.C., Todd Landry (Senior VP, NEC Sphere) spoke about "communication services [that] are now available to business applications via an open standards-based enterprise communications service cloud."  The podcast is available here.
Doing Well by Doing Good
Salesforce.com devotes 1% of its profits to subsidize non-profit organizations. Of course, this is "funny money": they give 10 free licenses, and an 80% discount on additional ones, to non-profits, but this cost them very little -- especially since this is software-as-a-service (SaaS). Yet this is of significant value to associations that need to track members and donations. And of course, the officers of these group may well carry over their positive impression of the vendor into their professional lives.
Seen Recently...
"A C-level position for IT will no longer be warranted unless it evolves beyond the operational, shared-service mentality."
-- Patrick Gray, "The CIO Is Dead" article in TechRepublic, 2-Jun-09
"Enterprise Architecture is about Business relevance, not IT elegance. If a proposed technology or application does not directly differentiates Raley's in the marketplace, then we must select the lowest cost alternative that meets or exceeds our requirements and/or industry best practices/standards."
-- the email signature of Ken LaCrosse, IT Architect, Raley's
Twittering Away...
The relevance of 140-character messages to the exchange of complex knowledge is stil unclear, but it doesn't prevent people from trying! The Sage Circle runs a directory of IT analysts (including some from Gartner, Forrester, etc.) who use Twitter.
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