On Monday I changed departments. After three years of working with telecommunications and enter-/infotainment products I thought it is time to move on and learn something different. I will be working as an internal project management consultant. My first major job is to lead the introduction of agile software development in our organisation. I guess, I will post more about agile development in the future.
While being in Boston, I attended the open floor session of the SD Best Practice 2006 conference. I will consolidate my findings from there and publish some of it here too. I was impressed by the many talks and tools for Agile Software development methods.
Next week I will be on a course – learning about the standard development method at my company. This is a classical waterfall model. Since I have been using the Agile Method SCRUM in my last project this will be an interesting contrast and surely a source for discussions.
Today our company invited the department of Computer Science at the Technical University Vienna to present current research topics and results as well as to discuss possible collaborations. I am curious about the result of this event.
In a workshop Alexander Schatten discussed issues of Agile Development of businesses as well as software and he mentioned the following quote:
Die Krisis des Wissens wird, wie gesagt, kognitiv getrieben von der neuen Relevanz des Nichtwissens, und sie wird operativ davon getrieben, dass es nun darum geht, die richtigen Fehler schneller zu machen als die Wettbewerber, um Lernprozesse zu intensivieren, die im Kern darin bestehen, Expertise im Umgang mit Nichtwissen zu entwickeln.1
in English:
The crisis of knowledge ist cognitively driven by the new relevance of nescience. Operationally it is driven by the necessity to make the right mistakes faster than the competitors to intensivate learning processes, what means developing expertise in handling nescience.
Knowledge management typically deals with the knowledge of an organisation but I like the idea of managing what we do not know better. However, wow do we know that a particular topic, technology, etc. will be relevant in the future? A company basically only invests in knowledge it can utilise later.
1 Willke Helmut. Dystopia, Studien zur Krisis des Wissens in der modernen Gesellschaft. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, Erste Auflage, 2002