presentation

Welcome from Sunny PNG

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It has been a long time between posts – this seems to be the downfall of most bloggers.

Some time ago I was asked by CPA Australia to present on the topic ‘Management Information Reporting, including the IT Aspects’ at the annual CPA Australia/CPA PNG joint conference in Port Moresby. I accepted despite the trepidation one gets when you know you’ll have a 10-week-old baby, as well as a fractious two-year old, to look after (or rather, that you will have to leave with your loving wife when you go overseas!).

This blog post is coming from PNG (Crowne Plaza Hotel). I am here with Jim Dickson (International Director CPA Australia), Professor Colin Clarke (Vice President CPA Australia), and Patrick Hoiberg (former ‘king poobah’ of the ICAA),

The conference started yesterday with an opening by Jim Dickson and a keynote address by Colin Clarke, and then my presentation (after morning tea, of course).

The reaction seems to have been very positive (the audience was very kind, all 600 of them!), and I enjoyed giving the speech although we ran out of time for questions at the end (I had planned on an hour and a quarter but I had not reckoned on the logistics of the situation – getting 600 people to their seats is no easy task so every session tends to start late). If I can coax Jim Dickson to give me some photos, I will post them online here (tends to brighten up a blog!).

The IT Governance guide has rated a mention or two along the way, and everyone who has seen it has been very impressed. Jan Barned tells me sales have probably gone into the 200s already, which is very impressive for a newly launched guide. I understand I have a launch luncheon to attend on 1st December in Melbourne – so that should be good.

When I have access to my web storage (when I get back to Brisbane on Sunday) I will post the presentation slides and the text of my speech as near as I can get it, and we’ll have that sorted then.

It’s been very energising in PNG, and it seems to have been worth it.

All About Information Taxonomies – Yet Another Blog

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Further to the Ark Group presentation on information taxonomies on Wednesday, Ark Group have put forward a moderated forum for the further discussion and comment on Information Taxonomies.

You can click here for further information.

The welcome message is reproduced below:

“Welcome to the Ark Group Taxonomy Forum. Following on from Designing a Business Focused Taxonomy, we felt that it would be useful to start a discussion forum. The way that the discussion and topics progress is entirely up to you – the members.

Ideally, all discussions should be targeted towards particular business issues that you face with your taxonomy project. Please feel free to introduce yourself and organisation and your particular area of interest.”

To make omelettes, you have to break eggs – but do it very, very carefully!

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Last week I presented to Ark Group’s Business Information Taxonomies Conference on the topic “Understanding the Purpose of Your Taxonomy and Ensuring Business Adoption” at the Avillion Hotel.

My uploaded presentation can be found here.

In case you are wondering, a (very loose) definition of information taxonomy is a way of classifying and categorising the creation of unstructured information in a way that lets you more easily identify what is contained in the document, and how it relates to areas of your organisation. Although this helps with the search process (you can determine at a glance what a document is about rather than full-text searching for it).

One of the interesting things I discovered at the conference was the presentation by Verity on their tools, one of which (Verity Profiler) claims to be able to automatically classify a document into a taxonomy with about 85% accuracy.

The underlying theme of my presentation, however, was that generally people in business are very good at presenting the benefits of an information taxonomy, but are rarely able to really articulate a low-risk methodological approach to actually implementing the information taxonomy (or business classification scheme) in a way that actually has people use it.

So the benefits are fairly clear, but our ability to state how it is to be done, and to convince business management that it will actually achieve real outcomes, is often less clear.

So as I say, to make omelettes, you have to break eggs – but do it very, very carefully in case you break the business too!

Life Is Tough, but it’s Tougher when You’re Stupid

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On Friday I attended (with John Halliday, our Director of IS Audit, and several clients) a presentation by Internet Security Systems on “State of Security: An X-Force Briefing”.

This was, to say the least, interesting, and it is fascinating to have a little chink of insight into the cloak-and-dagger side of information security. The presentation was somewhat American – if you are Australian you’ll know what I mean, if you’re American you’ll wonder what the fuss is about. Suffice to say, the presentation was a little militaristic and “X-Files”, but it works in getting the message across, and their deep and undying devotion for “moronic hackers” that are “dumb and stupid” is clear. The cloak-and-dagger effect is reinforced through their regular assessment of the internet’s security condition: as of this writing we are at “AlertCon 1”.

They are clearly doing some good work in the area of operation system vulnerability detection and prevention for their clients. You are rather left with the impression that the only good hacker is a hacker behind bars, but then if you are wanting someone on your side on issues relating to technical IT Security, I don’t think you could ask for a better ally.

Quote of the day, reflecting a rather hard-nosed view of the world and a message to users that they need to be proactive in managing their information:

“Life is tough, but it’s a whole lot tougher if you’re stupid”

Kind of says it all, really.

Organising Your Work

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Somewhere along the way we may, just perhaps, have lost focus on the purpose of computers and personal information systems. This presentation (it’s a little tongue-in-cheek) provides some good tips on organising yourself and some handy hints.

I should note that this presentation was developed by Microlaw in the United States.