Smart Oilfield Part I: The Principles Behind ‘Smart’ Technologies
May 23, 2010 at 10:59 PM | Posted in Future of IT, Oil & Gas | 1 CommentTags: Control Loops, data, Decision Making, engineers, Oil and Gas, Operations, Smart Oilfield, strategic decisions, Tactical Decisions, Technology
Nothing can demonstrate the possibilities and the value of modern day sensing, telemetry, and cascading close loop controls as well as the use of remotely controlled drones (aka Remotely Piloted Vehicles) for surveillance and air to ground attacks.
Flown from across the world by pilots operating from a cockpit simulator with visuals representing the images being captured by the drone, the pilots control the aircraft using the visual and sensor cues. The pilot’s experience is almost the same as being in the aircraft except that the pilot is not in any physical danger. Modern sensor and control technology combine Continue Reading Smart Oilfield Part I: The Principles Behind ‘Smart’ Technologies…
What is Orienteering?
February 16, 2010 at 12:46 AM | Posted in Business Strategy, Ontology, Search & Orienteering | Leave a commentTags: Discovery, handling knowledge, innovation, Ontology, orchestra, orienteering, Pharmaceutical, pipeline, Robert Frost, Safety Data Integration & Search (SDIS), search, upstream Oil & Gas exploration
If you’re a Boy or Girl Scout, orienteering is an activity that involves a map, compass and wilderness terrain through which you navigate from specific point to point, hopefully getting as muddy as possible along the way.
If you’re a scientist working for a pharmaceutical company or a geophysicist working in an Oil & Gas exploration company, orienteering can mean much the same except that the wilderness is the unchartered landscape of not-yet-discovered knowledge and insights. It can be the key to making important new discoveries and connections that you might never have Continue Reading What is Orienteering?…
Why We Use a Fixed Price Model
February 15, 2010 at 11:54 AM | Posted in Business Philosophy, Elegant Simplicity, IT Architecture, Ontology | Leave a commentTags: Business, Business Philosophy, compatability, Cost of Technology, customers have rights, Differentiator, enterprise software, Fixed Pricing, Ontology, orchestra, risk management, ROI, scope creep, simplicity, Strategy, system integrators
It’s amazing to us that while all other forms of technology – hardware, consumer software, iPhones, etc. – get cheaper and easier to use every year, enterprise software just gets more and more expensive and difficult to implement successfully every year.
That’s why, unlike most technology and SI firms who provide services on a time-and-materials basis, we fix-price our offerings.
There’s a reason this is so unusual in the enterprise technology market: there is Continue Reading Why We Use a Fixed Price Model…
LONG LIVE ONTOLOGIES! PART IV: ORGANIZATIONAL INTELLIGENCE
November 16, 2009 at 11:25 AM | Posted in Future of IT, Knowledge Management, Long Live Ontologies, Ontology | Leave a commentTags: brain, contexts, faceted search, higher-order intelligence, institutional memory, Knowledge Management, neuroscience, Ontology, organizational intelligence, orienteering, search, Security, workflow
The seat of corporate intelligence is the organizational ‘brain’ – a central hub that provisions and securely, intelligently makes available the institutional knowledge resources to its employees, enabling them to discover, learn, and work in concert toward a common purpose.
As we discussed in the last blog, the brain is a complex thing, and we are therefore not going to attempt to recreate it in all its glory. Instead, we seek to borrow a few key principles from the human brain to create institutional memory and a kind of higher-order ‘intelligence’ within the corporate body. Continue Reading LONG LIVE ONTOLOGIES! PART IV: ORGANIZATIONAL INTELLIGENCE…
LONG LIVE ONTOLOGIES! PART III: IT KIND OF *IS* BRAIN SURGERY…
November 6, 2009 at 2:51 PM | Posted in Elegant Simplicity, Future of IT, Knowledge Management, Long Live Ontologies, Ontology | 1 CommentTags: brain, consciousness, creativity, Einstein, human brain, interneuronal, neuron, neuroscience, Ontology, organizational creation, Pharma, Shakespeare, subconscious decisions, upstream Oil & Gas exploration
The human brain is a truly astonishing apparatus.
With up to 33 billion neurons (depending on your gender and age), 10,000 synapses per neuron, and 200 decisions per interneuronal connection per second, your brain is theoretically capable of somewhere on the order of 66 million billion calculations, insights, and decisions every second. Continue Reading LONG LIVE ONTOLOGIES! PART III: IT KIND OF *IS* BRAIN SURGERY……
PointCross 10th Anniversary
November 4, 2009 at 12:00 AM | Posted in Future of IT, Oil & Gas, Pharmaceutical | 3 CommentsToday is our 10th birthday – November 4th, 1999 was the day we started in business with little more than an idea and a trivial amount of seed capital. You have been with us since our early days – encouraging us, supporting us, and guiding us. All of us at PointCross join in thanking you for your belief in us.
I would like to share with you a few of our accomplishments of the past 10 years and some of our aspirations for the future. Continue Reading PointCross 10th Anniversary…
LONG LIVE ONTOLOGIES! PART II: BIRDS OF STEEL FEATHERS
October 30, 2009 at 11:30 AM | Posted in Future of IT, Knowledge Management, Long Live Ontologies, Ontology | 1 CommentTags: airplane invention, anatomical study, Ancient Greece, center of gravity, Daniel Bernoulli, feather alignment, horse power, Kitty Hawk, Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, Mount Ceceri, ontologies, wing structure, Wright brothers
In the last post we discussed how one of the most practical inventions of the last century was invented by departing drastically from its predecessor: wheels instead of hooves and steering wheels instead of reins. In fact, about the only thing that the horse and the car have in common is that they are both run on “horse power.”
But there was another invention from about the same time that had been centuries in the making, and unlike the automobile, it took its inspiration directly from its counterpart in nature. We are talking about the airplane. Continue Reading LONG LIVE ONTOLOGIES! PART II: BIRDS OF STEEL FEATHERS…
LONG LIVE ONTOLOGIES! PART I: DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION (OR HOW THE AUTOMOBILE KILLED THE HORSE)
October 28, 2009 at 9:47 AM | Posted in Future of IT, Knowledge Management, Long Live Ontologies, Ontology | 1 CommentTags: Automobile, Clayton Christensen, Death of the Database, Henry Ford, innovation, IT, Knowledge Management, Ontology, simpler and more affordable
We started the “Death of the Database” series by talking about how the Automobile killed the Horse.
But as we discussed, the automobile didn’t actually kill the horse – it just made the horse moot. The car was a creation so far superior that the horse was no longer a desirable option for most people. The car was faster, more powerful, more comfortable, and easier to maintain than the horse. It was scalable (some of the larger earlier models rivaled small trams in size, and now of course we have the Hummer) and it was adaptive (the Ford Mustang evolved more in a decade than its namesake in the animal kingdom had evolved over the last 2,000 years). It also didn’t hurt that cars were less… messy than horses. Continue Reading LONG LIVE ONTOLOGIES! PART I: DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION (OR HOW THE AUTOMOBILE KILLED THE HORSE)…
THE APPLICATION JUNGLE
October 26, 2009 at 2:41 PM | Posted in Future of IT, IT Architecture, Technical | Leave a commentTags: company’s architecture, enterprise, exponential complexity, Knowledge Management, mess of applications, Ontology, Technology
Most corporations today are a mess of hundreds or thousands of applications all promising to solve one problem or another. We call this jumbled mess the Application Jungle.
The problem is that for the last 50 years or so technology applications have burgeoned inside enterprise walls so that companies can no longer see the forest for the trees. Continue Reading THE APPLICATION JUNGLE…
DEATH OF THE DATABASE – PART VII: WHY DB PLATFORMS TAKE YEARS AND FORTUNES TO IMPLEMENT
October 22, 2009 at 4:00 PM | Posted in Death of the Database, Elegant Simplicity, Future of IT, Knowledge Management | Leave a commentTags: business processes, can-do spirit, complex operations, data, ERP solutions, Hubble telescope, IT companies, Knowledge Management, limitation of databases, MIT, simplicity, system integrators, Technology
Of all of the reasons that databases and most of the applications that sit on top of them should and eventually will die or evolve, we admit that this is the one that bothers us the most.
First of all, a company’s business processes should not be made to bend to a technology solution, and yet that is what many ERP solutions and other traditional database technologies ask of a company.
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