I don’t know about you all, but I have a common affliction called TCOK (The Curse Of Knowledge – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge). I expect everyone to know as much about something as I know, so I am always trying to make myself remember that a lot of the things that I show in demonstrations may be completely new to my audience, and I need to ratchet the explanations back a little so that customers and prospects can follow me. Read More

Although this may not be true, I’m sure that Edward Tufte does think about it, because he is the Strunk & White for information design and visual literacy.

When you boil ERP down to the bare bones, it is just a way to gather information, and all our customers really want from an ERP system is to present the information back to them so that they can understand how they are doing. If you can do that in an elegant, and informative way then the ERP system is a success. Read More

On March 16, 2007, something terrible happened. Kathy Sierra stopped publishing her blog because of abusive tweets and threats. Thankfully she didn’t take down her TypePad account, and we can still all read the posts that she made, because they are great, and are the suggested reading for this week’s book club. Read More

Not all great reading comes with an ISBN number. There are a lot of great bloggers out there that you can subscribe to and get ideas from. So I thought that I would share a handful of the better AX blogging sites that I scour every morning to see what ideas I can steal for demonstrations. They all have RSS feeds so it’s easy to send them through to your favorite feed reader, or to send them to Google Reader like I do. Read More

This week’s book club book was suggested to me a couple of years ago, and even though I thought it sounded like a dumb book, about penguins that were about to all fall victim to a Poseidon Adventure style fate when their iceberg home melts under their little feet, I sucked it up and read the 160 page book over two flights and don’t regret it for a second. Read More

Welcome to the first issue of the my book club.  I thought that I would start off this project by introducing a book that was suggested to me by a good friend of mine when it was first published, and I just re-purchased it to re-read after I couldn’t find my original.  Although Accidental Empires was written in 1996, and has to be read old-school style since it’s not available on the Kindle, this is a great history of how all of the major tech companies that are still around got their start. Read More