61–70 of 434 posts
I love the idea of figuring out how we can stop reinventing the wheel. Too much of this work really has no benefit to society yet keeps getting done, over and over. I wish for a way to pull the brakes and re-evaluate what it is that we are all doing exactly, and for whose benefit.
+100 "I would love to see the following analysis: A map of repetitious tasks, spreadsheets, and manual data extraction by function in the Fortune 500. Budget breakdown of current software spend, by function, by line, in the Fortune 500. A view of what Accenture, CapGemini, and Deloitte keep building over and over for large enterprises. Undoubtedly a subset of these custom consulting projects can be turned into SaaS s…
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> Of course, all of this may be a dumb corporate-run idea and maybe people should really focus on forming good relationships with their neighbors in meatspace and talk to them in person aka HUMINT. But then how do we filter out the political rants, insanity, dumb jokes, hoaxes, and common scams?
Thankfully, people usually do a decent job of filtering themselves in meatspace. At least, they are better at it in person than they are online.
Our city did a traffic survey of a local street that is the primary route for everyone going from surrounding neighborhoods to downtown and found the average speed was ~2 mph over the posted limit, with the 85th percentile at ~5 mph over the speed limit. These are reasonable speed for such a wide road. The city then added several 'safety' features to it, and found in a subsequent survey that the changes actually did little to slow traffic. One feature is a pair of speed bumps. Some drivers slow to about 5 mph to go over the bumps, increasing the risk of rear end accidents. Other drivers veer into the bike lanes to go partially around them without slowing down. Everyone else slows down a reasonable amount, but then subsequently accelerate back up to the speed limit on a block where jaywalking is common. Some of the features they added are, in my opinion, beneficial, like turning a side street into a one way road after frequent accidents from people turning left out of it.
But you can't talk about it on Nextdoor. The second you criticize the speed bumps you'll be ignored (if you're lucky) or attacked. Nuance is not allowed. You're either for all the changes, even the dangerous ones, or you're a crazy speed demon. Meanwhile, if you post about 'the children' who you are afraid for (even though no one has any evidence of a child ever being hurt by a driver on this road), you're going to get upvoted a lot within the first ten minutes.
There are a couple interesting gene therapy companies workout on hearing (akuous and decibel among others). Lots of ophthalmology gene therapy companies also, as well as more traditional companies. Hair regeneration has been a popular area of research for a while
Most companies work on biomarkers as part of the drug dev process. However building a business around just biomarkers is hard -- you need to develop your own drugs based on those biomarkers. Diagnostics is really tough bc reimbursement and pop health is tough bc incentive alignment is nearly impossible in many contexts
Correct me if I'm wrong, but No 5 already exists?! I'm from Europe. I have an app on my phone that shows me the pollution in the city I am. I check on it every time I'm in different places. It's called AirVisual. I installed it from google play, I have android.
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* I'd love to see that as well * At the same time: - A LOT of companies are uncomfortable making some of this data SaaS / external. I'm not saying they're right, but it's there - A LOT of companies are unique, or strongly believe they're unique, and that they need bespoke / highly customized software. I'm not saying they're right... ;) - I'm a techie, so it's taken me a decade to realize that implementing a new backo…
> companies are uncomfortable making some of this data SaaS / external SaaS can be on-premises. > Sally in accounting refuses to change The tools need to adapt to the user, the user shouldn't need to adapt to the tool. That said, if there are obvious efficiency gains (e.g. you can stop typing "COMPLETED" three hundred times a day and just click a button that fills the field for you; even better, the process marks it…
True; the distinction between SaaS and COTS becomes moot in practical terms then, and all of my comment still applies.
>>The tools need to adapt to the user, the user shouldn't need to adapt to the tool.
Again, that's:
- True for an IT project whose goal is to support whatever the user is currently doing (and what many of us are trained to do / think in current IT paradigm).
- Not True for a business transformation project whose goal is to change business processes for the better - and, basically incidentally, deliver a COTS ERP to support them through an IT portion of the project.
We are not talking about where the button is or how many times it takes to click or what the icon looks like. We are talking fundamental business processes and workflow, which are core to how a business operates internally.
For business processes which are company's core business, presumably they have them figured out. That's great, and IT should support them.
For back-office ERP, this is not your company's core business; you're probably not a special snowflake; and the market's average/best practices are likely miles ahead of your legacy over-complicated business processes. YOU need to change if you want to reap the benefits of shiny expensive new software.
There is extremely limited point in implementing a new back-office ERP (HR, Financials, CRM, EPM, etc) if you're not willing to approach it as BT project; radically change how you do things; and expect a shiny new tool to make you more competitive automagically without your processes and maybe even culture/habits changing.
My fundamental point remains: what the big consulting companies do with ERP / backoffice implementation (when done right) are primarily BT projects, and incidentally involve IT implementations; and treating them as IT projects, whether that's Sally in accounting refusing to change or Bob the developer accommodating Sally thinking it's the right thing to do, will cause them to fail. (generalizations and oversimplifications abound in above statement; but it really takes a very very large and repeated application of a mental sledgehammer to dislodge some universally-good but specifically-counterproductive ideas and habits from the ERP space)
I've used their API to look at California wildfire data.
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Non-DIY plus subscriptions plus corporations rarely leads to "consumer-centric". More often it's almost solely profit-driven.
What's wrong with subscriptions? If you are getting an ongoing service (like Spotify, or HBO, or magazine delivery, etc...) it seems that an ongoing fee makes sense.
Plus, it seems that the new breed of service companies isn't satisfied with just providing a service in exchange of money. They also use the opportunity to exfiltrate as much data about you as they can get.
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ERP is hard. VERY hard.
It is, but there is also a lot of artificial complexity created for lock-in purposes. A lot of ERP systems move away from well-trodden programming tools to their own custom stuff. I know of ERP systems have their own source control version control systems. Why? They're often awful to use. The programmers that use them are often business-focused haven't really used stuff outside that ecosystem. So they don't know how…
I did some work for a place where, they embedded groovy as their 'write custom rules stuff from the UI' language - that was at least easier to reason about, and to debug/test offline (not automated, but somewhat easier than a DSL that only runs inside the system).