Author: karljeffery

  Triometric, a company based in Surrey, Uk, offers specialist analytical tools for the travel industry, including airlines and online booking agencies. For airlines, it can help understand how customers are using online websites. For hotels, it has business intelligence tools which can help you understand the performance of your ‘inventory’ (ie rooms), suppliers and…

  Are you the sort of person who likes to understand why you are being asked to do something before being shown how to do it? Are you the sort of person who prefers to think through how to do something rather than being given a list of instructions? There are many people like this,…

I’ve been doing a bit of research into software tools which could count as ‘Software for Domain Experts’ and this is as far as I’ve got so far. Microsoft Office must be the dominant ‘software for domain experts’ – for all the bad talk you hear about Excel, it is still a great tool for…

This is how I imagine it works: WORKFLOW SOFTWARE – the expert shows up at work, logs into the computer, and the software presents her with a list of tasks which need to be done by the end of the day. She has to do something specific with all of them (for example approve mortgage…

We are developing ideas about the ‘expert-centric’ company – as a contrast to the ‘process-centric’ company. Clearly all companies need both processes and experts, but our idea is that the emphasis has maybe gone too far towards ‘processes’ and less towards ‘experts’, and we want to find ways to rebalance this. One idea comes from…

I have just spent 10 minutes on the website of Casewise, a business modelling company, and I have to say, I really don’t understand what they do, although it looks relevant to what we have been talking about on this website. You can model business processes, they say The software will understand the company in…

Decision Lens, based in Virginia, USA, is a company which promises to help experts to make decisions. Particular areas of focus are pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, energy, and government. The company promises to provide a “complete process for identifying, prioritising and analysing resource investments”. Particular areas are researching spending, capital assets, IT and government. For example in…

Many companies talk about challenges building up a ‘corporate memory’ – or in other words, what to do when the only person who knows how to do something leaves. In our business process management orientated culture, there is probably an unstated drive to be less dependent on experts, since they can always leave. Is there…

A book which provides some good ideas for Software for Domain Experts is “Making the Most of Mess” by Emery Roe, a professor of catastrophic risk management in Berkeley. The book presents the idea of a manager of any system (Dr Roe starts by talking about electricity control rooms, but it could be a school,…

How do you figure out a business opportunity with Software for Domain Experts? This is too hard a question to answer, but let’s try to dance around it. We can start with an observation that just about everybody who runs something could benefit from better information, displayed in a more manageable way. That probably doesn’t…