Friday, April 05, 2002

 
Posted by Kate 11:36 AM
Much Ado About Much. This has been a busy week. First I became a grandmother, joining Mike and Linda in that milestone event in life where one must confront the march of time. I assure you that I'll not go gently into that role if it means growing up. Second, I've been given editorial control over a collection of documents that Mike and Linda have produced over the past two years. My task is to take policy, process and procedures, project plans and related artifacts and turn them into generic, fill-in-the-blanks templates for change control, issue management and service level management processes.

Value Proposition. The documents will be offered at an attractive price by TEAM Zarate-Tarrani. The value will be as follows:

1. Documents will be in Microsoft Word and Excel formats, and all graphics will be in Visio. We have decided that Office 97 and Visio 5 are the best formats because most companies have upgraded to those products or beyond. The value in this approach is that the documents can be easily tailored to meet an organization's specific requirements and reflect the current situation with respect to process maturity.
2. See before you buy. Samples of each of the documents will be provided, in their entirety, in Adobe PDF format. We'll lock the documents to prevent printing, selecting and copying text, or making modifications to protect our intellectual property, but potential customers can see exactly what they'll be getting before risking a penny.
3. Pricing: $49.95 is the standard price per document. We chose this price because it's a compromise between outright giving the documents away (something that we considered) and recognizing that people do not value what is freely given regardless of the intrinsic value of the artifact.

If you are interested please let us know.

More About Value and Tools. Refocusing on my technical specialities (my skills are much more than technical editing), I want to share an article about the relative value of project management and related articles that address KM tools and their real and perceived value, and the maturing and convergence of portals and KM as reported in Portal/KM Mix Gains Mind Share.

Ending Note. Although I consider myself to be a sophisticated consumer of IT services, I find myself with one foot in the IT profession, and the other foot is almost in that domain. I now find articles, such as Standards to Drive Services to be essential to my job, which indicates the increasing shades of grey that distinguish the boundaries between IT and business. Another indication is my recent reading list, which includes Know Your Enemy: Revealing the Security Tools, Tactics, and Motives of the Blackhat Community (an outstanding book that adds personality and psychological profiling to IS security), e-Data: Turning Data into Information with Data Warehousing (see Mike's 28 June 2001 and Linda's 30 June 2001 reviews), and The CRM Handbook: A Business Guide to Customer Relationship Management. I'll know into what I'm being transformed when the moon is next in its full phase. Until then I'll classify myself as a grandmother who refuses to morph into an adult.