Managing & Technology — www.ddmcd.com

Website copyright © 2002-2025 by Dennis D. McDonald. From Alexandria, Virginia I support proposal writing & management, content and business development, market research, and strategic planning. I also practice and support cursive handwriting. My email: ddmcd@ddmcd.com. My bio: here.

Incorporating Social Networking Systems with Mergers & Acquisition Planning

Feb 15

Feb 15 Incorporating Social Networking Systems with Mergers & Acquisition Planning

Dennis D. McDonald

Consolidation, Energy, Mergers & Acquisitions, , , Strategy

In 2003 I published an article titled Mergers & Acquisitions: What Executives Should Know about I.T. It was based on management experiences I had on a multi-year post-merger project that consolidated the data and software of two large public energy utilities.

Feb 13
Feb 13 Personal Data Portability: What Happened to End Users?

Dennis D. McDonald

Collaboration, DataPortability, Definitions, OpenSocial, Privacy, , , Software, Standards

I’ve made some attempt to keep up with public discussions of DataPortability.org. I’ve had a suspicion that the project is experiencing the growing pains that technology industry standards groups sometimes experience when there is no single strong and deep-pocketed voice willing to weigh in, knock heads, and force progress along a single path.

Associations, Management Control, and the Role of Social Media Tools

Feb 13

Feb 13 Associations, Management Control, and the Role of Social Media Tools

Dennis D. McDonald

Associations, Business Models, Collaboration, Email, Enterprise 2.0, Industry Analysis, Management Tools, , , Software, Web 2.0, communications

Jamie Notter’s post Web 2.0: Participation, Trust, and Beta comments on an earlier post by Virgil Carter titled Web 2.0: Culture, Belief System, or Tool-Kit?

Feb 12
Feb 12 Have Big Conferences Changed in 20 Years?

Dennis D. McDonald

Conferences, Partying

Luis Suarez’ recent 10 Things I Learned from IBM’s Lotusphere 2008 to Help Prepare for Lotusphere 2009! reminded me of the days when I was a frequent conference goer, presenter, booth-manager, software demonstrator, occasional keynoter, and overall party-goer.

Feb 11
Feb 11 Experimenting with Reuters' Calais Automatic Tagging Tool

Dennis D. McDonald

Calais, How To, Semantic Web, Software, Tagging

Reuters recently released Calais to developers. Calais is a set of software tools and rules that read text and automatically assign various tags based on an analysis of the text. Calais outputs tags in the following categories:

Feb 6
Feb 6 How Reliable are Widgets and RSS Feeds?

Dennis D. McDonald

How To, RSS, Tagging, del.icio.us

One of the nice things about modern web standards and publishing technology is the ability we non-programmers now have to rapidly combine data from different web based sources through use of easy to handle scripting tools.

Old Media Versus Social Media in Emergency Situations

Jan 28

Jan 28 Old Media Versus Social Media in Emergency Situations

Dennis D. McDonald

Demographics, Disaster Response, Emergency, Homeland Security, Local Government, Newspapers, , , Telecommunications, communications

Project Blogs, Email, and Dual Collaboration Channels

Jan 21

Jan 21 Project Blogs, Email, and Dual Collaboration Channels

Dennis D. McDonald

Blogging, Change, Collaboration, Email, Project Blog Survey, Project Management

Jim MacLennan, a seriously thoughtful corporate IT manager, recently published Update on Blogs as PM Tools - Tales from the Front Lines. There he made the following statements about the challenges of adopting blogs and wikis in support of project management:

Social Data Portability, Privacy, and DRM

Jan 15

Jan 15 Social Data Portability, Privacy, and DRM

Dennis D. McDonald

Copyright, DRM, Industry Analysis, OpenSocial, Personal Data Ownership, Privacy, , , Standards

When Bob Weber published his post-CES DRM 3.0 Has Arrived he made the point that, while DRM for music may be dying, the entertainment industry’s interest in Digital Rights Management is still quite strong. This got me to wondering whether this “next generation DRM” might have some relevance to current interest in social network portability.

Jan 15
Jan 15 Ten Realities of Managing and Using Technology to Generate Business Value

Dennis D. McDonald

Best Practices, Business Models, Cost Analysis, Lists, Management Tools, Market Research, Standards, Strategic Planning, Strategy, Technology

Years of managing, studying, developing, consulting on, and using information technology have taught me about the realities of using technology for business advantage. Here are ten of these realities:

Jan 15
Jan 15 Three More Favorite Podcasts

Dennis D. McDonald

Lists, Podcast, Science

Here are 3 more of my favorite podcasts:

Collaborative Decision making in Disaster Response Situations

Jan 8

Jan 8 Collaborative Decision making in Disaster Response Situations

Dennis D. McDonald

Collaboration, Definitions, Disaster Response, Emergency, Expertise Management, Governance, Homeland Security, ,

Professor Murray Turrof recently sent me a draft of a paper that will be presented at the upcoming 5th International ISCRAM Conference in Washington DC in May of 2008.

Jan 7
Jan 7 Using Collaboration Technologies to Accelerate Innovation in Federally Funded R&D Programs

Dennis D. McDonald

Collaboration, Procurement, Project Management, R&D Management, , , communications, eGovernment

I’ve been looking for ways to describe the different types of collaboration processes that technology can support.

The "Who" and "What" of Technological Illiteracy

Jan 3

Jan 3 The "Who" and "What" of Technological Illiteracy

Dennis D. McDonald

Conservation, Energy, Ethics, Governance, Homeland Security, Privacy, Security, Technological Literacy, Technology

Definitely worth listening to is Command Line’s December 19 podcast technological illiteracy among our leaders. His theme: we need to do something about the lack of knowledge our leaders have of how technology operates and impacts our lives.

What Should Project Managers Know about Social Media and Social Networking?

Dec 26

Dec 26 What Should Project Managers Know about Social Media and Social Networking?

Dennis D. McDonald

Change, Collaboration, Facebook, Governance, Management Tools, Project Blog Survey, Project Management, ,

I’m a member of the online group SdB+PM Forum, a collective of 825 senior project managers who are also members of the Linkedin professional networking group.

Dennis McDonald's Blog's Top Ten Posts of 2007

Dec 20

Dec 20 Dennis McDonald's Blog's Top Ten Posts of 2007

Dennis D. McDonald

Change, Enterprise 2.0, Lists, , , Strategic Planning, Strategy, Web 2.0

Here are my blog’s Managing Technology posts for 2007, sorted in descending order by the unique page views recorded by Google Analytics.

Dec 19
Dec 19 Already, Five More Favorite Podcasts

Dennis D. McDonald

Here we go again — the following list joins my previous two which are here and here:

Using Social Networking to Support Local Energy Management and Conservation

Dec 18

Dec 18 Using Social Networking to Support Local Energy Management and Conservation

Dennis D. McDonald

Collaboration, Conservation, Energy, Homeland Security, Local, ,

Thanks to Brian Magierski via a Twitter message I found out about a ZDNet video interview with Pat Lawicki, the CIO of PG&E in San Francisco. Pat is a former client of mine from when she was the CIO at the energy utility NiSource.