Following on from the “Site maps on speed” post below, I have been thinking about information sharing on the web. A good, standards complaint website will use proper semanti tags for the information it contains –

,

,

,

etc. I should be pretty easy to write a script that will scrape certain pages and/or sites for all heading tags and display them in a list with a link to go to that page. Kind of like RSS, without the XML. But of course all that depends on the site being well-formed, and although awareness of standards in increasing greatly, we’ve still a long, long way to go.

I’ve also been thinking about two huge projects that my company are about to embark upon. Both involve organisations that think a big, powerful piece of software will solve most (if not all) of their problems. That means that we, potentially, can make a pile of money both writing the software, installing it, training people and supporting it for pretty much as long as we want. It’s not quite a blank cheque, but it’s not far off. However the real problem is not lack of software, its a lack of understanding of their business processes and a reluctance to make radical changes to ensure those processes are performed as efficiently as possible. In other words, the hierarchy might need to change – and the people at the top don’t want that to happen.

So, instead, a piece of software is added to the company that acts like mortar between the people (“bricks”) in different departments. It might bind them together better, providing better communications and transparency of the processes, but are you sure you had the right bricks in the right place to start with? I know I got very close to a sticky death drowning in my own metaphors there, but hopefully you see what I mean.