Taylor.Blog

 
 

MLB and Technology

I read this article in the Harvard Business Review this month where they compared Innovation managers with MLB General Managers. I am going to extend this article a little further by discussing the step before making decisions in innovation or in the major leagues.

Innovation comes in many different sorts, most of the time innovation comes from things that you already have in the market and you are looking at trends in the consumer use and then practical application of the product to real world situations. The only way you can get this kind of information is by data analysis (i.e. Statistical research just like in the MLB).

Take the Swiffer as an example, all it is, is a paper towel draped over a rectangle that has a handle attached to it. It is pretty obvious, however genius because it’s another use case of something that P&G already had, probably didn’t cost too much to manufacture. The real cost was in creating the brand, which is a huge success. How did P&G determine that Swiffer could be successful? They did data and use case analysis. I am willing to bet they had a team of business analysts working with product managers to determine what the marketability of Swiffer would be, and it came out to be a green light.

Now, apply that same process to an MLB team. As a GM you have a bench of players, each with different skills. You have scouting reports (the data) on the teams you will be playing, you also have the stats for your current players. Going into a game there is not much a manager doesn’t know about what’s on the other team. Instead it’s the prediction of the market that you need to be concerned with. The way you can predict is by analyzing the data you have available to you and being able to make educated decisions. If the team you are going to be playing against has a lot of left-handed batters in their line-up you would obviously want a strong arm in right field. It is much more complex than that though, probably why I’m not a GM in the MLB.

The point is you can determine what your success might be by looking at arranging the same objects you have already created in a different sort and applying a strategy to it, to me that is what innovation is, rearranging information to make a completely different decision, a case of the whole being far more valuable than the sum of its parts.

I thought the article was really fascinating and I have been waiting for an article that would tie the MLB to business, but being in technology I apply the article to the technology world and good data analysis is step 0 for innovation.

Next time I will discuss runtime events and exception handling in the major leagues!

posted on 10/16/2009 by Michael Taylor   View Comments (0)  Add Comment

Wow, it's been a while already!

Wow it has been a while already since I posted that GridView Template thing huh? Well things seem to be going pretty good around here. We are about to start the launch of Guest List Manager which I am looking forward to quite a bit. I think we put some really neat touches to the process of Guest List Management.

Through the development process we came up with some new techniques for handling our AJAX and JSON return values. We were able to standardize them down to a single point. We used our JSON string converter which is a method that takes an object (of any type) uses Reflection to find out what object it is. The second parameters is a string param array of all the fields you want returned. The reason for doing that is so you don’t get EVERY SINGLE field for an object returned in your JSON, which can be a large string and pointless, because in AJAX the point is to display or get only the information you need and nothing more.

Through that we were able to make some neat features that I will cover in future blog postings. I will also post some thoughts on our application stack theory that we have been developing over the course of the past year. We have built up quite a large code base so now we can look back at the methods we used to do our development and find the common points throughout all of our projects and have some really solid foundation to work from.

 

Test line

The ultimate goal is to provide a development platform that’s not tied to any one data source or any one application. Nothing too proprietary but available for all you web developers out there. Have a nice weekend, mt.

posted on 4/24/2009 by Michael Taylor   View Comments (0)  Add Comment

Simple ASP .net GridView Template with methods

Let's say you have a gridview and you have just a bunch of IDs that you got from records in a database that need to be bound to a gridview. However your datasource is just a bunch of fields that are foreign keys for other tables, but for user friendly purposes want to display some data about the foriegn key'ed data.

-----------ASP.net Markup---------------

<asp:GridView ID="gvData" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="False">
<Columns>
<asp:TemplateField HeaderText="ProcessedValue1">
<ItemTemplate>
<asp:Label ID="lblData" runat="server" Text='<%# GetFriendlyData(Eval("ID")) %>'></asp:Label>
</ItemTemplate>
</asp:TemplateField>
</Columns>
</asp:GridView>

-------------Code Behind------------------

protected string GetFriendlyData(object ID)
{
//SomeClass can be any class that you have where you can access
//the database and get a record out of it.
SomeClass sc1 = SomeClass.GetObject(Convert.ToInt32(ID));
//FirstName and LastName are just fields of SomeClass, these can be
//whatever you want obviously
return String.Format("{0}, {1}", sc1.LastName, sc1.FirstName);
}

I will expand on this to take it to the next level because there are some pretty cool things you can do with a GridView and the template fields at binding time.

 

posted on 3/17/2009 by Michael Taylor   View Comments (0)  Add Comment

What's This?

We originally had a blog set up on blogspot but for some reason no blogging application does exactly what we would like it to do. Thus we modified the simple CM system we made to handle a blog of sorts. Soon we will add the ability to make comments on each of these articles. But for now, you get to just listen.

This blog will be my connection to the technology community, more specifically the place where we can contribute to the advancement of technology development on the web. There is so much to say that it's hard to determine where to start but we will just start posting some articles here and see where it goes from there.

Stay tuned!

mt

posted on 3/16/2009 by Michael Taylor   View Comments (0)  Add Comment

83systems llc, 2009