Entelechy

Make the Most of Your Tools

Sometimes, when an organization bows to the pressure to introduce technology, it holds onto the very procedures the technology was designed to eliminate. I recently looked at the new Website a past employer (who shall remain nameless.) They used a Content Management System (CMS) for the upgrade.  A resource library on the site contains about one hundred documents - PDF and Word files!

One particularly strange choice: they maintain an online referral directory of graduates of their certification program. The link for students to update their information in the directory leads to a Word document, which instructs readers to send the new information to an administrator's email address. Updates, we are told, happen monthly. Monthly.

Put simply, the organization spent tens of thousands of dollars to select and install a technological solution that would allow people to enter information, let the system format it, and let an administrator approve it with the touch of a button. Yet they use this the power of this system only to post a Word document while retaining the data entry burden.

Technical fixes work best when accompanied not only by training but also by deliberate attention to operational change management.

Photosynth is pretty cool

Check out CNN's 3D image from the Inauguration, made from crowdsourced photographs.

Where Technology Leads ... Art Can Follow

I have a fascination with the wild Pre-Code era, Hollywood movies. I just watched the documentary "Thou Shalt Not: Sex, Sin and Censorship in Pre-Code Hollywood." Interesting how big a role technological change plays in the evolution of movies. Apparently:

The silent films required actors to express emotion with gestures and facial expressions. The advent of sound shifted the emphasis to dialogue. At first cameras that stood still enforced another limitation, though: relatively little motion. In the early 30s, boom microphones and moving cameras followed the actors around, letting loose movement around the sets - shoot outs, car chases, fisticuffs, and even a Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza labeled by one of the commentators as an "orgy" scene, a drunken/drugged party on a Zeppelin.