Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Technography and dynamic templates

Author:Dave Rogers
Posted:3/23/1999; 8:18:03 PM
Topic:Technography and dynamic templates
Msg #:4417 (In response to 4412)
Prev/Next:4416 / 4418

Thanks Bernie!

Honestly, the document camera preceded my arrival last May. They were using it as an analog version of technography, sort of. The facilitator would place a copy of the agenda on the document camera and project it on the screen, and then slide a piece of paper down the page, revealing each topic in turn. At first, the novelty was appealing, but after a while, it was clear it wasn't really adding much to our meetings.

Then Dave turned me on to Connected Executives and the rest is history. I forwarded that link to every one of my department heads and the CO. Our ESC facilitator is my budget analyst and she really gets into this stuff too. So we work together to find the best ways to present information. The document camera is now used for things like icebreakers, documents which aren't available electronically, and that's about it.

We archive all of our agendas and minutes on our LAN, unfortunately, not all of our Regional ESC partners can access our LAN. We're working on getting them up on a website by converting them to HTML from Word, but I've got a small staff and I have to work with a large bureaucracy that's providing my ISP support, and the military has just imposed a great deal of regulation over what goes on a website, so it's really impeding progress right now. I have recently become sensitive to making these links persistent, so I have some architecture issues to resolve with my IT staff very soon.

We do forward these documents electronically, usually right at the meeting, so no one has to carry away paper unless they want really want to. I forgot to mention we do have a printer in the conference room as well.

I'm also somewhat hamstrung by e-mail clients. Currently the command's internet e-mail client is cc:Mail 6.x, which is awful from a technography point of view. I can't click on a link in an e-mail message and jump to that site in a browser, I have to cut and paste. Very laborious and distracting. But what is cool, is our LAN e-mail client is Outlook and our Navy message traffic (the old-fashioned kind that went by teletype and radio) is distributed on Outlook. In a recent meeting, someone made reference to a Navy message that addressed a particular aspect of a topic we were discussing. I was able to switch to Outlook (which is always running so we can review the calendar if need be) run a search for that message, found it, and projected it for everyone to review. Very cool stuff. And when a Navy message refers to a URL, I can click on it and boom, we're there.

In our command ESC (I sit on two ESC's, a local and a regional) our facilitator uses an outline in word to present the agenda, and we are currently working on tree diagrams for all our critical processes. Tree diagrams are, of course, really outlines. Well, our TQL advisor rather insisted we present the trees graphically, so she links each of the critical process topics to a diagram in AllClear. The only thing I have to teach her is to quit hitting the close program box when she completes a tree, seeing the splash screen each time she hits a link and waiting for the app to launch is distracting. But she's getting better at this than I am. All the trees are shared on the lan as well.

We have a lot of work to do in the human interaction area, as dealing with rigid military hierarchies can be stifling. If I'm not sensitive and I disagree intensely with someone's (junior to me) point, they tend to shut down and not play. If I disagree strongly with a senior, they get distracted by the rank issue and try to shut me down and neither of us has any fun. We're getting better at injecting fun, but we have a long way to go because of our culture.

But I must say, these have been by far the most productive meetings I've ever attended. We're getting better all the time, and that is fun.

Dave Rogers

There are responses to this message:

This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:48:59 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.