Jim Miller, a senior solutions architect here at Perficient, attended IBM’s conference Vision 2013 last week. Jim highlighted the sessions he attended during his three days at the conference, and as you can read, he enjoyed every minute of it! To read Jim’s full blog post, including overviews and take-aways of the sessions he attended, click here.
Glenn Kline, Director here at Perficient, is attending IBM Exceptional Web Experience 2013 and listened in on the opening general session lead by Larry Bowden, Vice President of Portals and Digital Experience Software. Glenn said,
“The session focused on IBM’s digital experience direction and how various technologies and concepts are converging today. Mobile, content and rich media, analytics, social, integration and cloud are at the heart of this of convergence.”
To read Glenn’s full overview of the opening general session, click here. And be sure to stay updated on conference news by following @PortalExConf, @Perficient_IBM and #IBMExperience on Twitter.
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Typical office scenario: It’s a Tuesday and you’re in a meeting. There’s a lot being said, people are talking, conversations are being had, plans are seemingly being made. Now an hour has passed, and you come to the realization that you and your fellow meeting goers have little value to draw from it. Be it a lack of planning or lack of leadership, we’ve all experienced the dreaded meeting that seems to go nowhere.
Like many of us, Brad Nunnally, a lead user experience consultant at Perficient, grew tired of not utilizing time to its fullest and put his experience to good use by authoring the book, Designing the Conversation: Techniques for Successful Facilitation.
The book, co-authored by Russ Unger and Dan Willis, focuses on the facilitation skills needed to communicate effectively, especially in a design scenario. It’s a complete guide on how-to extract information from various types of people in a number of different situations, and oh by the way, helps you address any problems that you encounter along the way.
I asked Brad to share with me some insights about his book and the process it took to complete it:
1. What inspired you to write this book?
Brad: It was a combination of several things really. I was tired of being part of meetings or workshops that were poorly planned or resulted in little value to either myself or the others involved. This wasn’t necessary done on purpose, rather it was due to the facilitator having poor facilitation skills. When I shared these experiences with the other co-authors, Russ Unger and Dan Willis, we knew we could use our own knowledge and experience to educate others.
2. Who should read Designing the Conversation: Techniques for Successful Facilitation?
Brad: The three of us set out to write this book for anyone who has to, be it at work or in their personal life, work with others or communicate some idea to a group of people. The first six chapters were written to teach anyone the basics to facilitation and the concepts the lead to successfully facilitating any type of session. The rest of the book is meant to be a field guide for different types of sessions. While the context of the book is in a business or client setting, people from all walks of life can use the concepts presented in the book.
3. How did your experience as a lead user experience consultant at Perficient help you write this book?
Brad: Being a user experience consultant at Perficient these past 6 years, I’ve had many opportunities to work with a diverse group of clients, users, and co-workers. I’ve always strived to be as collaborative as possible with the people I work either, regardless of the content. This desire to be collaborative drove me to learn new skills and activities that could be performed, which in turn helped me refine my facilitation skills.
4. What was the hardest part of writing this book?
Brad: The hardest part for me was taking what I’ve been doing either naturally or out of habit and distilling it into some kind of written form. I’ve always been better at presenting my ideas and knowledge verbally, so sitting down and writing about facilitation was a real challenge. Next to this was coming up with a proper description for the illustrations found in the book to give guidance to Dan Willis. The artwork found in the book really is amazing, and Dan did an amazing job with my, sometimes pretty vague, requests.
5. What do you hope readers will gain from your book?
Brad: That having a conversation with another person, or a group of people, isn’t some mystery that only a few people are good at. There are a few core skills that anyone can pick up, though admittedly some skill come easier to some than others, that will lead to being better at their job and at presenting themselves in a public forum. Russ, Dan, and I wrote this book so that anyone with any level of facilitation skill can learn something new or better hone a skill they already have.
You can follow Brad on Twitter @bnunnally.
]]>Yesterday, I posted a blog on one of our upcoming webinars taking place February 20, Transforming Healthcare through Patient Engagement Using Oracle Solutions.
The webinar will demo how Oracle WebCenter Suite, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle Health Information Exchange create and provide a unique view into an “e-patient” experience. To read the full blog post, click here.
To register for the webinar, click here.
]]>Healthcare patients spend less than one percent of their life within the walls of a healthcare facility. Yet, more than 99 percent of their life that determines if they return to or maintain their health is spent outside of healthcare facilities. Forward thinking healthcare providers recognize this and realize that active, engaged patients are more likely to be healthier.
Join Perficient experts, Melody Smith Jones, manager of healthcare collaborative technologies and Lisa Anderson, practice lead for Oracle CRM On Demand and customer experience for a webinar with a unique view into an “e-patient” experience, including patient use of the internet, social media and hand-held devices. During the session, Melody and Lisa will demo and provide examples leveraging Oracle WebCenter Suite, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle Health Information Exchange. They’ll also discuss how to:
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Provide instant access to patient and clinical information with healthcare portals
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Enable instantaneous access to patient and clinical information using mobile health applications
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Transmit medical images, video and audio for Telehealth diagnosis and treatment plans
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Allow patients to exchange pertinent information and discuss health conditions with healthcare providers using social media
To register for this webinar, click here
Transforming Healthcare through Patient Engagement Using Oracle Solutions
February 20, 2013
11:00 am CST
A Center of Excellence (CoE), sometimes referred to as a “competency or capability center”, is typically a small team within an organization working cross-functionally to build on the organizations past experiences to avoid reinventing the wheel after each project. A few ways the CoE accomplishes this is by:
- Providing leadership
- Best practice knowledge share
- Offering support/training
Basically, the CoE is invested in the organizations overall success and will focus time and resources to specific areas or practices critical to the organizations overall success. The CoE should create value through supporting continuous improvement and eliminating waste.
Jim Miller, an IBM Certified Advanced Solution Expert and lead for Perficient’s national financial performance management practice, recently wrote a white paper on the five guiding principles of a successful CoE. Jim’s five principles that will provide direction and focus for the CoE are:
- Define and Develop
- Examine and Exploit
- Measure and Market
- Govern and Guide
- Stabilize and Support
To learn more about the five guiding principles of a successful CoE, download the white paper here.
]]>Chris Dunn, lead technical consultant at Perficient, recently wrote a blog post on how to migrate an Oracle Hyperion Planning application. His blog provides a single, concise process for migrating EPMA enabled Planning applications between two spearated environments. He makes a few assumptions during the process, but details them and the Oracle specific references he used.
]]>The overall process uses a couple technologies to accomplish the migration of Planning applications, the underlying Essbase database and its artifacts, EPMA metadata, and the Reporting and Analysis repository.
Chris Hayes, solution architect at Perficient, recently posted a blog on the UI redesign of the US Electronic Medical Records System (EMS). In November 2012, the White House announced a challenge to redesign the US EMS. Here’s a snipit from Chris’s blog post:
]]>Last November a design challenged was proposed by the White House – Redesign the Electronic Medical Records system. The challenge drew over 230 submissions and this week, the White House has picked a winner.
Rarely do companies get the chance to propose ideas that could impact millions of people. It’s not just that though. This goes beyond designing just a system to designing something that has the potential to improve healthcare in the US and improve how doctors and patients interact.
In today’s marketplace, metrics and analytics play a key role in helping businesses understand and define how to they interact with their customers and employees.
Glenn Kline, Perficient technical director and Connect 2013 attendee, went to the session “Getting the Most Value Out of Metrics in IBM Connections 4” while at the conference this week. The session was presented by Miguel Estrada and Nan Shi and Glenn shared some of the highlights from the presentation:
Metrics Overview
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Connections provides quantitative and qualitative metrics. Quantitative metrics are measurements and qualitative metrics are descriptive
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They are presented using charts that provide at a glance views
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Connections metrics supported by IBM Cognos Business Intelligence which is part of the Connections deployment
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Can leverage Cognos BI for further analysis on social behavior
To see Glenn’s full review of the Connect 2013 presentation, see his blog post here.
]]>Day four of IBM Connect has come and is almost gone. While the attendees get ready for their evening plans, we can reflect on what they experienced today. And not just from Mike Porter this time, but Technical Director Glenn Kline and Director Mark Polly too. Here’s what they have for us:
IBM Connect: Engaging Users with Dynamic Forms by Mike Porter
IBM Connect: Active Site Analytics and WebSphere Portal by Mark Polly
WebSphere Portal Content Template Catalog IV by Glenn Kline
Florida Blue: Maximizing ROI with WebSphere Portal by Glen Kline
Enjoy!
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Mike Porter, a principal at Perficient, is attending IBM Connect this week and keeping us updated on the latest and greatest happenings around the conference. Even on day 2, he’s attended a number of sessions and shared his thoughts and takeaways. To avoid an information overload, Mike’s broken up a few of yesterday’s presentations, including the Keynote, to better show us what we’re missing from home:
IBM Connect: Web Experience Platform Strategy and Roadmap
IBM Connect Keynote Part 3: Smarter Workforce and Watson
IBM Connect Keynote Part 2: Smarter Commerce & Web Experience
IBM Connect Keynote Part 1: HitRecord and Joseph Gordon-Levitt
If you’re interested in following all of Mike’s blog posts, you can subscribe to his RSS feed here. Stay tuned for more updates from IBM Connect!
]]>Mark Polly, director at Perficient, recently published a blog featuring a video that showcases the benefits and features of Ephox’s EditLive. EditLive is a web-based text editor included in IBM WebSphere Portal and IBM Web Content Manager. It’s also now in Beta for IBM Connections.
]]>EditLive brings lots of great features to people who create and edit content on the web. Traditionally, content was edited in desktop applications like Dreamweaver, MS Word, etc and then copy/pasted into a web based editor. The problems with this approach is that often times features available in those desktop tools are not available in web-based editors, so you lose formatting or, worse, get formatting you can’t possibly fix. EditLive resolves all those issues.