You’ve just introduced a shiny new process, system, or other element intended to make things more productive. There may be more bells, whistles, and pretty graphics, but how do you know if your new process is an improvement from what you had before? The obvious answer is “What does the data show?” but that [...]
Much to my children’s dismay, my wife and I have become gym rats. It started with my wife. She had been taking a yoga class now and then to relieve stress and counter the lethargy of sitting at a desk all day. In mid-2018, she got serious, joined a small local gym, and began [...]
While my oldest daughter, Gillian, was home for the holidays, she mentioned to my younger daughter, Jennifer, that she never hears from me while she’s at school. At the same time, netlogx announced the ‘positive’ push as part of the 2021 wellness initiative. So how could I let my daughter know I was alive [...]
Information can be a powerful tool as long as you understand what it is. Information is data with context and meaning. Let's use an example: 20B. By itself it's merely a combination of numbers and letters—it doesn't mean anything. With the added context of an airline boarding pass, it tells you where your seat [...]
My wife works for a non-profit company so seldom does her work and mine cross paths, but whaling and security management brought us together. “Whale phishing” or “whaling” is a variation of “spear phishing.” A scammer sends fraudulent emails ostensibly from a known or trusted sender in order to get [...]
How do you know if your program is doing what it’s meant to do? The obvious answer is to develop metrics and a means for tracking that data to see that outcomes meet or exceed expectations. But what do you do if you don’t have access to the data you need but do have access [...]
Like death and taxes, change is inevitable. I worked in state government for 23 years and every election cycle brought change. The extent of the change varied in degrees. One Republican (or Democrat) replacing another Republican (or Democrat) as governor usually meant minor organizational adjustments to come (a tweaked organizational chart with new names and [...]
For our 25th anniversary, my wife and I took our family to Paris and Rome to explore, see the sights, and create an adventure full of all “bucket list” activities. Traveling to these wonders and seeing everything the grand cities have to offer, I found myself awed and aghast at what I can only call [...]
I hate buying things. To be more exact, as a state administrator, I hated buying services. My problem wasn’t with the complexities of the state procurement process – I was a bureaucrat after all and figuring out how to do paperwork was half the fun of the job – but I found determining what to [...]
92 counties. 92 different ways to do the same thing. In 1995, I discovered a truth: figuring out how people do their jobs is complicated. The complication comes not from what they do, but from the different approaches each person takes to get the job done. In 1995, I was a young, naïve consultant in [...]
