How to Outsource-Proof Your IT Department - CIO Magazine Oct 15,2004

"IT is steadily moving from the IT 'ivory tower' to being embedded analysts within the business entity or department. These analysts know the business and do the process redesign, modeling and analysis up front. Later it is handed off to temp consultants or outsourced to be coded to spec. That embedded analyst is not a manager or even a project manager - he is an engineer and architect laying out the plans. The stereotypical introverted hacker/coder may be horrified by the idea of being embedded with the users or user reps and dealing with politics of requirements negotiation between stakeholders, but it is indeed the next step to be 'outsource proof"

"Glauben darf man alles" - Freiheit, Fundamentalismus und Europäische Indentität

Auszüge aus einem Artikel in der dieswöchigen Ausgabe meiner Lieblingszeitung "Die ZEIT":

"Nicht der Fortschritt ist unser höchster Wert, es ist die Freiheit, und das schließt die Freiheit ein, konservativ, reaktionär oder vorsintflutlich zu sein.

Warum Europa nicht nur religionsfern, sondern in Religionsdingen so feindselig verkrampft
ist, warum das Religionsmisstrauen geradezu zum Identitätsmerkmal, zum Definitionskriterium des Europäertums wird – dafür gibt es im Augenblick noch einen besonderen Grund, und wie so vieles Europäische hat er mit Amerika zu tun: Frömmigkeit, das ist Bush, und wir sind Anti-Bush. Die EU will kein intoleranter »Christenclub « sein, das spricht für die Aufnahme der Türkei, aber prompt bekommen viele, besonders im laizistischen Frankreich, Furcht vor der Islamisierung. Das muslimische Kopftuch droht und lauert an jeder Ecke.

Europa leidet unter Fundamentalismusangst: In seiner nahöstlichen Nachbarschaft, und bis hinein in die eigenen Städte, sieht es die islamischen Fanatiker am Werk, und in Texas (bis mindestens zum kommenden Dienstag auch noch in Washington) die christlichen. Der Glaube und die Gläubigen erscheinen als Gefahr für das zivile, aufgeklärte, postideologische europäische Projekt.

Doch steckt in dieser Religionsphobie ein Denkfehler. Fundamentalismus heißt nicht, dass einer glaubt, und sei es noch so fest oder noch so anachronistisches Zeug. Fundamentalismus heißt, dass er seine Überzeugungen den Un- und Andersgläubigen aufzwingen will. Worauf es ankommt, ist die Grenzziehung: zwischen Religion und Politik, Kirche und Staat, geistlich und
weltlich, Moral und Recht, Gesinnung und Handeln. Das eine vom andern zu trennen ist seit den mittelalterlichen Kämpfen zwischen Papst und Kaiser westliche, abendländische Tradition geworden. Man könnte sie auch europäisch nennen. "

"Mosh" - der Songtext: "Wir werden kämpfen" - Kultur - SPIEGEL ONLINE

Rap als Agitation und das vom HipHop-Rabauken Eminem: eine wortmächtige Veranstaltung. Hier der Text des Anti-Bush-Hits - als Übersetzung und im Original.

Open Source Software can lead to outsourcing

In several areas there are excellent open source solutions. Two of these areas are Network /Host / Service Monitoring and Intrusion Detection (IDS). We are using Nagios for Network Monitoring, and its very powerful. It does a number of things we could not have done with proprietary monitoring software like WhatUp Gold or ipMonitor.

However, the amount of time it took to get it up and running, to customize it, add required 3rd party modules etc was enormous - two man months at least. And you need at least 2 or 3 admins who acquire the required knowledge.

For a small IT department with just 2-3 network admins running a complex network with around 50 servers, 3 man months is a big investment of time, because usually besides daily work they can spend just a few hours a day on doing something new.

Economically, this makes the most sense if the acquired knowledge and experience can be applied several times, i.e. for several networks. This is why I chose the headline "Open Source Software can lead to outsourcing".

Commercial software vendors make a significant investment into "productizing" their software solution, i.e. documentation, streamlined setup process for quick deployment, wizards etc. With open source software, this is missing and instead of paying for the license you have to pay for the specialist to get the solution quickly up and running. Of course you can also do it yourself, but that is even more expensive except if your labour cost is very low or if you are a very large organization where you can reuse the acquired knowledge many times. This might be an explanation why open source software is so popular in developing countries, universities, government institutions, and non-profit sectors in general. On the other side, ASP is the logical evolution of commercial packaged software.

Workflow Engines for MS Sharepoint

A quick collection:

K2.NET Enterprise Workflow: http://www.k2workflow.com/solutions/collaboration/sharepoint.aspx
Ultimus: http://www.ultimus.com/index
Captaris Teamplate: http://www.teamplate.com/internal/product/sharepointworkflowwizard.asp
Nintext Smartlibrary: http://www.nintex.com/Product-SmartLibrary.aspx
LMR Solutions: http://www.lmrsolutions.com/products_workflow.asp
Skelta Workflow.NET: http://www.skelta.com/

Some more Business Process Management Vendors:
- Metastorm e-Work
- FileNet's Business Process Manager
- Tibco Staffware Process Suite
- Ascentn AgilePoint BPMS

Product Comparison:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=357095

CASABAC Web GUI Framework

Social Network Software

I'm starting to investigate social network software. The idea is to help people getting to know each other in my church. The following is just a first collection of interesting links and ressources.

Introduction:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Networking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network

Why Social Software is "bottom up" instead of "top-down":
http://www.darwinmag.com/read/050103/social.html

Some of the more popular examples of social network platforms:
https://www.openbc.com/
http://www.meinefreunde.de/
http://www.canyouconnect.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/
http://www.friendster.com/

tribe.net and CanYouConnect.com allows to create your own network, e.g. for a sports club or church.

Commercial Software for creating Online Social Networks (only in English unfortunately):
http://www.alstrasoft.com/efriends.htm

"Vizster": Software for visualizing social networks:
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jheer/infovis/final/

And finally there's even an add-on to the Open Source CMS "Mambo" that provides community functionality: http://www.mambojoe.com/.

Microsoft: Dividing to Conquer

"Windows XP Call Center Edition" or "Windows XP Healthcare Edition". Interesting Idea ...

Next Development Wave: Software Factories from Microsoft

How to Optimize Google Ranking

I recently helped re-launch a website and soon we noticed that we are ranked first in Google when you search for the name of the organization, which is equal to the domain name and also found in the title text of each page of our website ("CZF"). However when you search for other terms that are related to this organization (e.g. search for: christliche gemeinde in frankfurt), then the site is not even among the first 100 hits. What to do ?

"In the past , search engine optimization was synonymous with adding meta tags. These tags provide a web page’s description and associated keywords ... Current ranking methods take many more factors into consideration, with meta tags being only a very small part of the equation. Many search engines (Google, AltaVista, Lycos, etc.) rank web pages according to their link popularity, which is determined by the number and quality of other sites linking to a certain site." (quoted from http://www.webdesignsbyjeffrey.com/faq-4-Improve+your+Link+Popularity.html)

Another hint given by the same author is adding your site to the dmoz.org directory (the czf.de website acutally is not yet in this directory at the time of writing this). The dmoz.org directory powers many other directories and search engines (AOL Search, AltaVista, HotBot, Google, Lycos, Netscape Search).

http://www.seorank.com/ has more information on search engine ranking, however they make money from search engine optimization and I have some doubts that everything is true what they are saying.

Comment added 29 Oct 04: More than one month went by and I still have not heard from DMOZ, i.e. they still have not included my website :-(

Comment added 01 Feb 05: Finally the website can now be found in DMOZ :-)