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Clayton Christensen – Capturing the Upside

In Capturing the UpsideClaton Christensen talks about his theory of disruptive innovation. The talk is hosted on IT Conversations and was given at the Open Source Business Conference in 2004. It gives a very good overview of his theory to the average listener. Christensen is the author of The Innovators Dilemma where he lays out his theory about how established companies are displaced by startups with inferior technology.

I’ve read The Innovators Dilemma. Most casual readers will probably put it down because it isn’t easy reading. However it is exremely well thought out and very interesting. If someone is interested I’d recommend they listen to the free talk first before investing the book.

IT Toolbox has links to slides that go along with the presentation.

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Process Architecture

As an organization grows it must develop processes to deal with the work that needs to be done. Those processes are either created internally or brought in from the outside. While most organizations will have some processes from both sources, they will usually lean toward one source or another. When their value to the consumer is based on having a unique product, organizations tend to use generic processes because their product is what differentiates them in the marketplace. When they offer a product that has become a commodity or is readily available from other vendors they tend to use custom processes in order to differentiate themselves to customers.

Progressive Insurance is a good example of a company that is using custom processes while a Rogers and Holland Jewelry is an example of a company that uses generic processes. Progressive works hard to create processes that add value. Their basic product is available from numerous other sources and there is very little differentiation. However their process of sending adjustors to the wreck site with the ability to issue a check to their client on the spot is what allows them to be much more efficient than their competitors. Their processes are what allow them to have lower prices in an industry where everyone offers an identical product.

Rogers and Holland on the other hand uses pretty much the same processes as the rest of their competitors. They differentiate themselves by their product not their process. The processes that support a purchase from Rogers and Holland are not significantly different than those at Zales or any other jewelry store. The product is what varies.
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Triggering actions by email

Sometimes you need to trigger events by sending email. For example lets say you want to create an email address that will accept messages and show them on some type of LED display. There are a number of ways to do this, but the simplest is to set the .forward file for the email account to pipe the contents of every message it gets into a program. The program can parse the message and do whatever else you want it to do.
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Sakai Project

The Sakai Project is an opensource effort to create a content management solution specifically for schools. The web based software allows instructors to create classes and schedules for those classes. Students can sign up for multiple classes. Their individual schedules show the information from all classes in which they are registered.

Individual classes can have, assignments, resources, chats, discussions, etc. Assignments can be graded and recorded by the instructor. It looks like there is an add on that will let instructors create online quizes, but right now it will only work with an Oracle database.

The application is very easy to demo. You can download it with a version of Tomcat, so all you have to do is type start.sh to get it running. It seems like a very useful application even though some key features are still in development.