Dear !

In this issue, you'll read:
On the crisis
New solution offering: Docledge
For system analysts and modelers: Sparx Systems community site
Free web resources and articles

On the crisis

As I write this, I am watching a documentary on the crisis of 1929. The middle class was the most beaten social class. Today we also see that this is the class that is hit the most as well. Yesterday I saw that Belgium was officially declared out of recession (some graphics were provided). In another article, I read that most Belgians do not have more than 6 months of cash as a buffer to face unexpected conditions. What all this gives is that there is tremendous stress associated with these situations. Stress is not very healthy of helping people improve.

In my line of work, I do help organizations to dramatically improve their way of working.

In a lot of projects, an individual is clearly not performing the way it should be. The easy way would be throw the person out of the project and get a replacement. But this usually doesn't work. Why? The person is often just a symptom of a larger organizational problem. Poisoned dynamics, lack of accountability, and insufficient knowledge of the essentials of the job have contributed to the situation.

How do these two things (crisis and symptoms of organizational problems) correlate? Well, the crisis is the large scale version of the organizational one. Also, the large scale is the combination of the smaller scale elements, leading to unstable and unpredictable dynamics.

The whole thing means that to dramatically improve situations, one has to identify how the constitutive elements do interact together, and how to break the sick dynamics to replace them with productive ones.

The key ingredients to get that done is to have people trust you, follow through on initiatives instead of getting started and not supporting afterwards, and generally showing discipline in getting things done. This in turn requires courage and vision. That's also why changes have to start at the top of the organization. That's why leaders have to behave in a way that clearly set them as exemplars of the wanted behavior. This is the first step for success. The other one is to have the members of the organization trust the leaders so that the leaders can leverage their motivation and energy in realizing the organization objectives.

Let's be clear on the objectives. If this is only shareholder's interests, forget it, it will not hold water. This must provide an answer to other expectations, like contribution to society, advancement of the technology, and generally an impact on the world. You do not want your people to view themselves as stone cutters, but rather as cathedral builders

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New solution offering: Docledge

Get peace of mind when it comes to your documents with Docledge. Docledge is offered as a SaaS (Software as a Service) and allows you to store your documents safely in one or more remote cupboards. Well, what's so special about that? Well, the fact that Docledge indexes your documents in a full text fashion, using OCR and other powerful ways. No more time lost in finding out an important paper! Everything is easily accessible. It's like Google search meets Google books for your own documents. You scan your documents and the Docledge client helps you sending the results to the central servers in your safe cupboard. You can put your own metadata but most of the time it is useless to do it: the OCR will take care of everything.

One typical use case is when you have to find a document that you've already given to your accountant. And you have to do fast because of a deadline. Just having the ability to retrieve that document is worth thousands and will easily dwarf the tiny monthly cost of Docledge.

All in all, you can consider that this will be a monthly cost of EUR 100 for 5 people in your company.

There are a lot of possibilities. For examples, I am working with Docledge to build up a solution for teachers who need to carry a ton of paper for their courses. The idea is to have everything in their secure cupboard and access it from the classroom, using the Internet. If you are interested in supporting me in this endeavor, just contact me! (philippe.back@highoctane.be)

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For system analysts and modelers: Sparx Systems community site

Sparx Systems, the makers of the excellent Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect modeling tool have created a new community site where people will get access to resources created by and for the community. It is located at: http://community.sparxsystems.com

I've been approved as a contributor and am interested in knowing which aspects of the tool you would like me to help you understand.
I plan to create videos on aspects of the tool and post them there, as well as a bunch of templates I do have built over the years.

If you use the tool, feel free to register as well.

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Free web resources and articles

I've made a number of free resources available on my website. You can find them on:

http://philippeback.eu/file2

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