| The Ultimate Business Machine Technology, business And, not least, about by: Bernard Teo
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The Ultimate Business Machine - ArchivesList of Categories : Database * Technology * Commentary * Singapore * Travel * Wed 22 Oct 2003 TrainingCategory : Technology/trainingsystem.txt I'm starting to get more people interested in doing the training than I have students. But, as in everything, you've always got to start with having a great product, and the guys I've talked to have the potential to do good stuff. About the system I'm using to manage the course administration. Almost all of the companies we've built systems for have been PC-based companies. I've always looked for a business we can run which uses our own system and which could show-case the amazing stuff we know we could do only on a Mac. And I think this is it. For a start, imagine the iCal integration. We're setting things up so that once we get agreement on the general outline of a course, how much it would cost, and when it would be done, we want to enter it just once into the database and have the system generate the course synopsis page, update the iCal-based training calendar, generate the course registration page, collect the registration, and send out e-mail updates to the trainer and attendees, all at one go and on the fly. We're getting there with the system. But the point is, if you do IT this way, you start out with imagining how the information will be used (before you even talk about specific technologies). For example, we think it would be great if people subscribe to our iCal calendar, so they can overlay it with their's and the Singapore public holidays calendar, decide if it's a convenient date to attend a course, and book it with just one click. I think a part of the reason why some IT managers hate the Mac is that they have an inkling (though they may not consciously understand it) that the dialogue is going to change concerning their work (with an increased emphasis on the business of helping people understand information), and it's a dialogue they're not comfortable with (coming from a training that focused on cables and connectors and bits and bytes). I've been an arts-inclined student who studied engineering-based subjects all my life. Just how many of my engineering classmates married arts graduates and have a happy life? It's difficult to imagine how they could have a dialogue in the first place. (It's easy to get nostalgic when iTunes is playing music from that era.) |
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