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I have recently had to face the music after developing something I want to
get patented. It has to do with reading and recall. I can make all kinds of
secondary effects justifications. But, the kicker is that in the daily world
of work, reading is an off-the-books activity, thus there is no quantifiable
value in improving it. There is no debate it seems among the business people
I am working with. It's show me the numbers and I can't.
Reading being off the books also affects the way that business people
perceive technical writing. I would like to see some organization created
that would get reading on-the-books, so what we do could be justified by
real numbers not including cost savings from things like reducing technical
support calls, but rather in improving the performance of our customer's
organizations. We know that we add value. Our customer's CFOs know that they
are paying for productivity and not getting it. Their numbers are not
working out. And, neither are ours.
As long as we are just costs, we will continue to be outsourced. As long as
we are invisible to the customer organization, we will continue to be
outsourced, and we will continue to allocate costs to customers where we
really shouldn't. This needs some real research, some real numbers, and some
real way of getting reading on the books.
Then, maybe there will be some BoK outside of today's "best practices" and
operational excellence perspective that really doesn't apply to software
startups.
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