How to set up a post-grad research social community?

I go through periods of blogging drought. I get ideas of things to write about but there is either a heavy workload or a stimulus missing, which means I sometimes don’t blog for a few weeks. But then I see something, often another blog, which provides the stimulus.

In this case, it was a combination - Dennis’ post about the communities for American accountants and Microsoft Dynamics, and me being on holiday for a week with time to think.

The accountant’s site is described as a place where

Members can share resources, establish personalized research and teaching spaces, keep up with news, trends, and regulations, and take advantage of rich profile information to find colleagues and experts.

The story about professional social networks has personal relevance to me. My wife, a medical doctor and lecturer at the Witwatersrand University Medical School, is starting a new job in January as Graduate Research Facilitator for the medical faculty; the job is to assist and guide doctors doing post-grad research.

One of the issues she discussed with me was that she will be supporting over 100 doctors who are doing post-grad studies while working in about six different teaching hospitals that are located all over Johannesburg. The travel time between hospitals make it very difficult to get to each hospital enough times each week to spend time with the doctors.

Using the Internet is obviously one answer to the problem of distance communication; setting up a social network or wiki would be a way for doctors to raise and discuss issues, and provide some kind of library functionality. Given that this is a university, however, will mean that motivating for the technology, and then getting it set up, is going to take quite some time.

While I cannot help with moving the university’s IT organisation along, I started to wonder if there was a way I could set up a test social network site – as a feasibility study – and as a personal learning experience. The challenge is to find some appropriate open source software, and a really cheap means of hosting it.

Fortunately, the Gartner report on the hype cycle for social software provided me with a list of software to evaluate.

MediaWiki, Socialtext, Twiki and Mindtouch

A major factor in the software evaluation will be what level of programming skill is needed to develop and support a site. I have neither the time nor the inclination to spend too many hours learning some complex technology. (Am I being naive?)

Where to host the software is still unsolved, and given that the cloud services from Amazon, Google & Co aren’t available in SA, I’m stumped at the moment.

If nothing else, it could be an interesing academic exercise.

Does high project failure require "professionalising" IT?

Two recent blogs by Michael Krigsman discusses how high IT project failure rates are, and some of the key reasons.

Study: 68 percent of IT projects fail
Requirements and failure: Interview with CA’s SVP of IT Governance

I am friends with a number of professional engineers – civil, mechanical and electrical – and I don’t believe they would dare to operate if the failure rates of their projects was anywhere near as high.

Michael identifies issues relating to lack of skills, knowledge and competency as the key factors leading to failure. Skills, knowledge and competency are what training and education programs are supposed to develop. People go to university to acquire skills and knowledge. But for professionals like doctors (my wife being one) and engineers, a university degree only starts the process. The engineering companies I know expect to train young engineers for several years before they are ready to be let loose.

But when it comes to IT, customers often think they have the in-house capacity to for projects. I think many people also look at software like Microsoft Office and think that implementing and using software is easy.

Many years ago in South Africa, there was a debate in the Computer Society about whether IT should become a profession. At the time, the proposal was defeated. After reading Michael’s blog, I am wondering whether we should re-look at the proposal. The next step would  be where do you start, and would IT vendors, consultants and users see this as beneficial?

In engineering, aircraft engineers must be a relatively recent addition as a profession. So how did they go from being a bunch of techies to having their own professional status?

BTW, I suspect that the information Michael uses comes from projects in the more well-resourced developed economies, so I wonder how the projects perform for those of us in developing countries?

Please educate the small-medium business market

In recent engagements with prospective customers, I have come to the conclusion that many decision makers in small and medium businesses (SMB) have very little idea about the issues, questions and implications of ERP and CRM applications. Most of the bloggers in the ERP/CRM arena seem to have a focus on larger organisations which have more knowledgeable resources; Jyoti Banerjee’s KiteBlue is an exception.

The problem is that SMB people are focused on the operational issues of their business, and as far as IT is concerned it is mainly around Internet, security and the accounting package. So when they start to look at ERP or CRM solutions, they have very little idea what to look for and what to ask. Which means they either make a decision based purely on price, or they take ages to make a decision because the learning process takes time.

I therefore I am beginning to feel quite critical about the vendor community (SAP, Microsoft etc) who claim the SMB sector is an important market for ERP and CRM, but whose marketing is all about positioning and messaging, and are not trying to educate the SMB market.