Let's say you were not feeling well, and felt that you needed to go to the doctor for help. Let's also say that you had a history with this doctor in which your interactions tended to produce lists of all the things that might be wrong with you, but never produced any treatment for these candidate diagnoses. Let's say you were still offered regular follow-ups, to monitor the state of this situation, but your doctor was unable to sketch out a credible path which would lead you to improving your health. Would you still want to continue to see this doctor? Even if you felt that you might have a serious disease, wouldn't you ask yourself if you were already doing all the things that could be done?

Would you take the time to go back to the doctor, just to continue to monitor the progression of your disease? And would your decision likely also depend upon your perception of the seriousness of the disease? Finally, if your condition was indeed serious, but potentially untreatable, wouldn't you perhaps really rather not want to know? Read more »

Netflix has been running their own X-prize ('Netflix prize'), a crowdsourcing competition for a million dollars to come up with a better algorithm for predicting movie preferences than the algorithm Netflix is currently using. That approach, Cinematch, currently captures 2 million new ratings (between 1 and 5 stars) per day, and is used to predict preferences ('if you liked Braveheart, you will also like...') for the 65,000 movies they rent, about 1 billion times per day. They are looking for a 10% improvement in accuracy, which doesn't sound like much, but would mean 10M of ther customers would get better matches each day - which is quite a lot, if you're trying to differentiate yourself to apture the off-line (and soon, online) rental market!. Read more »

For a few minutes, let's think of the data collection, decision-making, and status reporting involved as a person or work group performs their work, and when they need to switch from performing one set of tasks to another. Let's call this monitoring and control the 'Work Operating System' for their production (as an analog of an operating system for a computer). Like a computer system, when a person or work group switches contexts, there is overhead (in both time and energy) involved. Read more »

Processes are as difficult to develop as products, and when considering cultural issues, can be even more difficult.  Unfortunately, developing or improving a process often isn't taken as seriously as a product development effort is... and as a result, the quality of the outputs from such process improvements can have very detrimental impacts on users, who have to try to muddle on, and may find themselves having to build products and fix proceses at the same time.

As an example, I've seen cases in which many different released processes prescribe what is supposed to happen for some activity at a macro level, without breaking down or allocating the steps into meaningful roles that individuals can actually perform. Expectations are set when a process is released that it will produce what it promises; when it doesn't, people are faced with two untennable options - fixing the process, or ignoring it, and they often choose the latter. Read more »