Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Experts are far more productive than the average. But if we eliminate the average, how will anyone become an expert? Expert managers can manage 10 times the work of the average manager. Expert fill-in-the-blank can do 10 times the work of the average fill-in-the-blank. But how will the expert become an expert […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Want to know what computer software is doing? Go to the source of knowledge regarding it. I run a bash script daily to put my Internet viewing log online. (See here.) This script runs through a series of folders, us old guys still call them directories as in the Unix days, copies […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Often, perceptions and other ghosts cause us to believe things. Go back to a fundamental question. The world is coming to an end. Nothing is right. Everyone is against this. What else have I told myself? What else did I “know?” All were hunches, perceptions, gut feel, and such. Sigh. All is […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Want to see knowledge management in action? Go to, of all places, the library. No, we won’t go to the library to find a book all about knowledge management. We will go to the library to see knowledge management in real life. Look about. We are surrounded by reusable modules of knowledge […]

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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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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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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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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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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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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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