The MSc Thesis

The day arrived and last Monday I presented my master's thesis. It has been a long and tough way but now I'm happy with the result and with the stages that come along. Of course, I could do a better job if more time would have been available, but as mi adviser told me, it overtakes the standards of the task :-o . Nevertheless, this does not end here. Some opportunities have appeared now to apply the methodology and results to my day to day work and also positive perspectives arise on the academic field. A PhD? It is too early to know and I have promised my partner a period of relative rest.
Anyhow, and although this blog was started for the master, I hope to continue posting here the highlights (and down-lights) of my work, the random thoughts and the silly ideas that may appear in the future.

Mission (partly) accomplished!

The thesis work is more than fifty pages long and partly boring ;-) It is available here, and released under Creative Commons license, so if you enroll on having a look do it under your own responsibility, you are warned! Just kidding, any feedback is highly welcomed.

I post here the Abstract

The SIM card: An exercise of Technology Watch chasing state of the art and new opportunities.

The SIM card has become, thanks to its embedding in Mobile Handsets of GSM and other systems, the permanent companion of the subscriber and the more spread Smart Card of the world. In this work an exercise of TechnologyWatch has been done on the developments around the SIM Card along with a theoretical and literature review on the TW process. Technology Watch, and the broad concept of Competitive Intelligence, are introduced from a scholarlypoint of view and a review of literature on TW from the year 2003 to the present is done. This Theoretical Framework is then put on test with a Case Study about the SIM Card.
Using sources and data at three levels: Research, Development and Innovation and having in mind the corpus of the Technology Watch discipline, an analysis is done finding interesting knowledge, qualitative and quantitative, on the recent past and present development of the SIM card. This information is also used to do some prospect on the subject.
Some of the findings have been to identify the main publications at the research level, the Relevant International Patent Classifications and interesting sources for Market analysis for SIM Development. Moreover, a list of Institutions and Companies working in the subject is provided as well as the 2008 more published topics in the industry. The system and techniques used to do all this process are also described in detail.
This work is a start point in order to construct a system for continuous environmental scanning on SIM card developments as to detect weak signals and early trends to take advantage of them. Thus, it must be considered as a seminal work of a broader approach to Technology Watch in the SIM card business. It may be of interests of scholars, because the broad review on the literature, as well as practitioners, because the practical orientation of the Case Study, and managers of related industries because the information extracted from the data analysed.

Wikis

The year is started and once the first part of my Master Thesis is written, I do a pause to write a brief post about Wikis. I'm a strong supporter of Wikis. Not only of the servers themselves but also of Wiki Philosophy: Collaboration, Openness, Control... Control? Yes, Control, I really think that the versioning system of Wikis is very powerful and enables control about what is published, when and by whom. Would be Wikipedia possible without editorial control?
I have found an interesting whitepaper from a site that talks about Wikis. Although it is a commercial Whitepaper I found it quite interesting. Particularly some parts like these excerpts:

Though the type of wiki employed may differ from company to company, the types of tasks for which wikis are used are basically the same. Specifically, daytoday usage of the application typically falls into the following three categories:

Project Management

• Wikis may be used as a central repository for capturing constantly updated product features and specifications
• Wikis may provide a central repository for simple issue tracking and resolution
• The iterative nature of wikis allow team members to track thedevelopment history of projects over time
  

Collaboration

• Internally, wikis allow simple text-based collaboration on internal documents such as company guidelines, reports, and productspecifications
• Externally, wikis are useful for collaboration with customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders on key business documents and ongoing projects
  

Knowledge Management

• Because wikis can be easily updated by anyone in the organization, wide-ranging company documents, such as guidelines and FAQs are more easily kept accurate and up-to-date

Actually in the R&D department of my company is used for the 3 purposes. Interisting also these comments about evaluating the value of Wikis in the enterprise, that i find true but quite dangerous ;-)

In assessing the potential impact of wikis, one might do well to take a lesson
from the early days of e-mail. Although many tried to detail the cost savings
associated with e-mail by measuring the related reductions in postage, increases
in worker productivity, and various other metrics, these estimates paled in
comparison to the actual value brought by e-mail itself. This major discrepancy
occurred primarily because e-mail ultimately changed the way people worked,
not just how they exchanged documents.

You can find the whole document here.