thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

Apparently the coach at a local NRL* team used to say “small disciplines lead to great accomplishments”. I haven’t been able to find the quote but I like it.

Many times when there is a change in business, it is the small things that show up first. As someone who spends a lot of time around business software and development teams I’ve noticed many companies beginning to try out open source applications and systems.

The reasons they do this are many and varied. One reason is that the budget is not available for more traditional licensing models. Anyway the people in the company who need to supply a service may well be providing you with s/w that is open source because it fits the need and they can trial it easily.

This won’t probably show up in management at first as it is “off the radar” because it didn’t use any obvious budget. Bootstrapping is the other reason  many small disciplines get adopted and cast a much larger shadow. Bootstrapping is an innovation practice where you use whatever you can to make do.

So in the context of business software it is not unusual to find small sub systems being used. The reason they stay there is that they often work better than the obvious vendor system. 

The other key reason is that expectations are much lower so if the IT department or another team installs something to try out then the emphasis is on the actual results rather than the sales pitch.

The management team will then get to hear only about the success of the software because if it doesn’t work then its gone and no one will mention it.

As with anything - small steps all add up. So when we say small disciplines lead to great accomplishments we are really talking about the results of innovation and experiementation at some level. That is; people trying things out and as long as the company has flexibility and freedom to do this when it works we can all share in the success of the idea.

Note: *NRL stands for National Rugby League and I’ve been told the coach was John Lang at Penrith Panthers but happy to be corrected if someone has a more accurate source.

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One recent project (mid 2005) was to investigate CRM applications for the Mac environment. At the time I only found about 3 and Daylite from Marketcircle was by far the best. What makes it better is the tight integration between the core system and the mail, calendar etc. (PIM). In my view sync needs to be 2 way but the latest version has improved these functions.

In the non Mac world this has been a key painpoint and struggle for many years with third party developers bridging the gap on many crm apps.

Now that many corporate managers are asking for, and getting Macs as their regular work machine - applications like Daylite will be high on the list to try out.  I’ve seen a number of users try the dual partition environment so they can use OSX and view their Windows space. As a comfort factor and as a way to leverage their investment in previous software this makes sense but increasingly native Mac applications will take over.

In a very time short time “business applications for the Mac” won’t be the oxymoron it was when I started looking.

In a product review column at mymac is a review of the latest version (V.3.1)   by John Martellaro. He gives Daylite 5 out of 5. A quote from him.

If you work in an intensive, collaborative environment, especially project management, sales or customer support, you need to keep track of who you talked to, important information about them, what was said, and what’s next. Daylite, with very little up-front learning curve, allows you to manage all that complex information. That includes dropping Apple’s Mail application e-mails into a searchable relational database.But more importantly, Daylite 3 is very cool, extremely pleasing to the eye, well designed, a joy to use, and solid in its functionality. Even if you’re working alone, Daylite 3 will help you manage all the information that’s generated by meetings, Websites, e-mail and phone calls and help you organize your work. 

If all this reminds you of SoHo Notes (which uses the same database), Daylite is similar in functionality, but appears to me to be more organized towards the specific goal of time, contact and project management. SoHo Notes, seems to me to be more of a information manager specializing in different kinds/formats of information with some added alarm clock features. I am a registered user of both, and I prefer to use Daylite for project and customer management and SoHo Notes for the organization of technical data related to my writing career.”

Enough said - what is your experience?  

Finally I have made the move from lists, email discussions, posts on other sites and more conventional web pages to something that is more dynamic and easier to manage.

I am using WordPress and I really like the different themes and functions now available. Finally is is possible for non-programmers to drop in the code functions that are needed by using widgets and plugins.

“The only difference between a problem and a solution is that people understand the solution.”- by Charles Kettering.

Update: 26 August 2007. By knowing the best questions we can ask about a topic we are part of the way towards an answer.

Various tests such as Myers- Briggs and others identify me on the visionary spectrum.

As this blog has developed various themes on the use of creativity and the future of industries and sectors have emerged. It has also become aparent that the cultural feedback loop is very important. Music, books, radio, video and other media all have their place online and as we discuss responses and ideas we can get closer to thinking more usefully about what happens next and whay we can do to make that a better outcome for ourselves, our friends and our communities.