Friday, December 3, 2010

Futuristic growth synopsis for 2010...

I remember last year (2009) a time like this when we were planning for this year (2010), with something like a nostalgia.  Days have gone fast and I cannot believe it is the end of a "new" year again. With the benefit of hind-sight, I would like to point out some of our key growth areas. Ofcourse we have had our challenges but I will leave this to another post in the near future. Futuristic has been in operation for the last four years. Each year we witness growth of which we would like to thank our estimeed clients, partners and staff members for this. Our growth has been in a number of areas:
  1. Growth in our Software Development Unit with a products portfolio comprising of Enterprise Resource Planning Health Management Information System (in implementation at the Karen Hospital encompassing both clinical and final modules and other mid sized hospitals in the East African region), Legal Case Management Software implemented at a number of institutions including the KPLC, Document Management and Archiving Systems implemented in a number of utility companies,College Management Information System implemented at the NIST among other educational institutions, Rescue and Membership Management Information System implemented at the FDSA among others . The local market has continued to realize the importance of customised software and how well designed and properly implemented software is critical for better service delivery, resource management, profit maximization etc. Every organisation has unique business processes which gives it a competitive edge. These business processes should not be tampered with to suit a particular software application but instead the software application should be customised to suit the business processes. It is unfortunate that a number of organisations implement their software solutions without this consideration.
  2. On the side of training, we have been involved in a number of corporate trainings for this year including:
  3. On eLearning and Content development, we have been able to participate in a number of content digitalisation projects (notable here is the COL's Open Schools Project  and , Inoorero University ). Through our partnership with the WikiEducator and FLOSS4Edu, Futuristic has facilitated a number of content development trainings and content development workshops in countries like Ghana, Nigeria, Namibia and Botswana
  4. Our Consulting unit has also seen some growth in their IS Audit section, providing this service to organisations like AAR , ICDC and URA. The demand for our Business Continuity Planning and Disaster Recovery Planning services has also been on the rise, with clients like AAR being on our list.

In this month of December, we shall be evaluating ourselves and  carry out numerous planning activities to ensure that we will be able to increase our growth by serving our customers better, recruiting the best and becoming more innovative in the way we deliver value to our customers.

Wishing you all a merry christimas and prosperous new year!


Friday, July 9, 2010

Self Discipline in Open and Distance Learning...

Self discipline is a term you constantly hear about when you are about to embark on difficulty and/or challenging ventures including weight loss, studying, exercises, projects etc. I will disclose here that I never paid much attention to what this "Self Discipline" really means until I was recently involved in a training exercise (as a trainer) through an online workshop.

I have trained, in many occasions, various groups of people from different backgrounds, religions and cultures. This has mainly been through face to face workshops.Few times have I had online training sessions. This was an attempt to teach a technical course online. So I set up the learning environment, prepared my lessons and invited my participants. We were all ready to roll.

We started off well, sendng a list of the things that we needed to have ready before we actually start and asking the participants to perform some pre-workshop tasks. This was a good test as we were able to identify those that are competent enough to do this.

We moved on with the course and by the time we had gotten to lesson 5 of 10, 35% of the participants had dropped off. I decided to do an investigation. I got the following interesting remarks:

1) "Too busy", I got caught up in other office related activities
2) "Too Technical to do online"
3) "This is a new thing to us that I am not used to"
4) "Will do it but I am lagging behind"
5 "Nothing"

Web2.0 - Its possible!

If they ever told you that it is not possible then they lied to you. Today, we are on our final day for the Web 2.0 Learning opportunity at the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), Nairobi. A total of over 27 participants from various organisations participated. We have a combination of different professionals from different backgrounds and it has been great fun.

Check out this for a participants view of the workshop