Word around the campfire is that Microsoft is looking to make a strategic investment in Foursquare. I like Foursquare quite a bit, so this is pretty interesting to me. Perhaps this is way Microsoft will be successful in Social.
Are we ready to go paperless?
The other week I stumbled across an interesting debate over at ZDNet, where they debate the state of the paperless business. I haven’t read through it yet, but I hope to chip in with my two euro cents shortly. Check out the debate here.
The problem with digitizing processes
They can be pretty difficult to change. Normally, when we digitize processes, we only touch a subset of the overall number of interrelated processes. Project constraints, such as time and resources, tend to limit our view insofar as we try to limit the scope of the development task as much as possible. However, as interrelated processes may either receive data from our process, or feed our process with data, we will inherently run the risk of breaking larger, more complex processes when we make smaller changes.
It seems to be a condition we have to deal with when running development projects. Since we cannot afford to take the entire systems/process landscape into consideration due constraints we run the risk of missing important interactions between high level processes; interactions that are pivotal to making our processes function properly in a business context.
The solution? Who knows? My suggestion would documentation. If proper documentation can be obtained, we might be able to pin point high level interactions in the planning phase, thereby mitigating the risk. It’s a pretty simple solution but for some reason it seems to be difficult to carry out in real life. BPM could actually be a really good solution to this problem. However, as one of my coworkers always says: Habet realitatem intercession.
Where are the Bing apps for my phone?
The Bing team just released what is supposed to be some kick ass apps for Windows Phone 8, but since I am in Denmark I have no access to them.
It really sucks that all the nifty Bing stuff never gets released here in little Denmark.
Update: Turns out I need to take a chil pill. The Bing apps are now available in Denmark.