Working Up

Working Up in Project Management, Systems Engineering, Technology, and Writing

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Analog Had Its Advantages

March 23rd, 2017 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Somteimes I miss the analog days. They covered a lot of my mistakes. Handwritten notes let me fudge and smudge and avoid mistakes—like spelling. I could smudge the “i” and the “e” together and put the dot of the “i” somewhere in the middle, and no one could tell that I didn’t […]

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Tags: Knowledge · Learning · Technology · Work · Writing

Free Knowledge

November 14th, 2016 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips O’Reilly creates a large section of “free” books on technology. Once again, they have raised expectations of other publishers. I have long liked O’Reilly publishing. At first, the books with the excellent sketches of animals caught my eye. The content was usually as good or better than the covers. I attended a […]

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Tags: Knowledge · Learning · Library · Publishing

Knowledge Management and Job Insecurity

November 10th, 2016 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips This is what I find to be the biggest obstacle to managing knowledge in an organization. Knowledge management is pretty simple: when someone learns something, record that information. When someone else needs that information, they don’t have to learn it again for themselves. The expense of learning is not repeated. I have […]

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Tags: Knowledge · Management

Knowledge Management in the 1980s

November 7th, 2016 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips I recount my first knowledge management effort in the early 1980s. Premise: knowledge cost resources, so save it. I was a newly graduated engineer in 1980. The US government sent me to the end of the earth to maintain electronic equipment. We had a lot of that stuff, and it failed fairly […]

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Tags: Change · Communication · Knowledge · Management

Deep Learning: Today’s Hot New Programming Language

May 12th, 2016 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips New deep learning tools have turned a technology field into a general-purpose programming language. I worked with neural networks 25 years ago (yes, I am that old). Recently, big, big neural networks have returned to favor as deep learning. Clever techniques have reduced this to a programming language instead of an area […]

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Tags: Knowledge · Learning · Technology

How do You do Your Job?

February 8th, 2016 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips It can be most helpful to many if you would write what you do to accomplish your job. How do you do your job? Can you answer that question? Most people I have met cannot. I find that quite frustrating. Part of my job is to describe to possible customers how my […]

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Tags: Communication · Knowledge · Learning

ITIL Foundation Certification

October 29th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips I earn a ITIL Foundation-level certification. For the past six or eight years I have heard of ITIL  certification. I didn’t pay much attention to it as I wasn’t an Enterprise IT person and did see a way that I could qualify for it. A recent look at it changed my mind. […]

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Tags: Change · Computing · Education · Employment · Knowledge · Learning

Us as the User Guide

February 16th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Don’t look to the provider’s user manual; look to the rest of us. I don’t know why it has taken me so long to write about this topic. Almost everyone already knows this, but for the record… I ran into this situation again this week. I was learning how to use a […]

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Tags: Communication · Consulting · Education · Ideas · Internet · Knowledge · Learning

They Can Read It at Home

January 15th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips One thing teachers today have to realize is that the learners can read it all at home at their leisure. The title of this post will haunt educators of all types. It has haunted college professors for decades. They can read it at home So why “lecture?” I remember the TV show […]

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Tags: Communication · Education · Knowledge · Learning

Kids do the Strangest Things—So Watch

December 29th, 2014 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips People with no experience in a situation do the unthinkable. Often, the unthinkable leads to the impossible, and we want to know about the impossible. Kids do things that are just, well, I struggle to describe them as they are out of the ordinary. Here are a few examples: My oldest son […]

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Tags: General Systems Thinking · Ideas · Knowledge · Learning