Stu Downes

Last week I was on holiday. For the first time I decided that I’d take the laptop the ground-rule being that I would avoid email and IM - thus focusing on reading the flow from feeds and twitter.  In the week prior I had subscribed to absolutely every feed where I had been linked to from other articles.  Well it was great and I learned so much:

How to make your own magnetic whiteboard with paint alone … oh and then you can make it interactive if you wish with one of these

How to make vista boot using all available CPU cores rather than the default of 1

That I must actively use Skype V4 - on my home PC due to corporate policies.

That I must watch how these students made an interactive multi-touch surface

This GTD list for excel may help me?

That I need to force myself to use email less and talk more, its easy to fall into the email trap

That maybe I should try these productivity tools - I need a change I’m not 100% with the way I work today.

That I need to watch these screencasts on LiveMesh

That I need to book my place at UKLUG

But most of all that I need to keep reading.  I need to read more off topic (i.e. away from collaboration).  Now these are things that I have long known I needed to do.  I’m also having had time to reflect wanting to use my time better, working from home more rather than the office to allow more time for exercise in order to increase brain function.

Collaboration

I’ve been reading with interest some recent stirring of the debate around the digital natives starting to enter the enterprise.

On one side, Jason Hiner’s post from TechRepublic:

"What’s going to change

• Many users will bring their own equipment (primarily laptops and smartphones)
• Users will often select their own apps and tools
• More workers will be mobile and will telecommute at least part-time
• IT won’t have as much centralized control of resources (unless you’re in a high-security environment)
• Data security, privacy, and confidentiality will be even more complex to manage

What can IT do

• Think like shepherds rather than generals
• Make user education a top priority and use a peer-to-peer rather than paternal delivery
• Start looking at technologies like application virtualization for locking down your most important apps and data, no matter where they’re accessed from
• Develop specific policies for telework in collaboration with HR and senior management "

On the other Larry Dignan’s post from ZDNet:

"So what really happens when these Millennials run into IT departments at large corporations where they are most likely to work? They will run into a brick wall and realize that it makes sense to centralize some IT functions. They’ll realize Web 2.0 is insecure. They’ll realize you can’t share intellectual property on Twitter. They’ll realize that remote data wiping is pretty cool when you lose your phone. Bottom line: If there’s any touchy feeling collision course between Millennials and business, the latter will win.

Why? Ultimately these people have to get jobs–and often these jobs are at places like Johnson & Johnson and General Electric. Sorry folks you won’t be bringing your own management practices–and latest greatest Web 2.0 apps–to those places. You may bring along your helicopter parent (another classic Gen Y stereotype), but mom can’t compete with Six Sigma. Your Baby Boomer mom will get chewed up by Six Sigma"

My position on this is slightly different.  I asked some colleagues from another team the kind of questions they were asked by students at graduate recruitment events.  While not a scientific result they weren’t asked about bringing their tools and technologies into the enterprise.  I also find it difficult to even comprehend making a business case that is based around catering for the needs of the millennial.  What I do observe are the following business challenges and this is where I feel our focus should be:

• Knowledge Transfer : getting information, tacit knowledge, years of understanding flowing between the generations.
• Time management : the older information workforce are generally financially secure, many no longer wishing to work full time, many just wanting part time hours (my father is a classic example of this).  How does the enterprise make best use of their time?  Do they face them to customers in a consulting role?  Do they utilise them within the enterprise to coach and mentor?  How do we manage that valuable time.
• Effective working : how do we remain effective as organisations during this massive change within the workforce, how do we make best use of the technology - which lets face it the digital immigrants have written and the digital natives utilised.  My point here is that the natives haven’t asked for this technology but they’ve adopted its availability.
• Adoption : Following on from my last bullet how do we as "IT" find and deploy tools which will be widely adopted and give best value to the organisations where they are adopted.

Its a complex area but a transition is taking place, web 2.0 is emerging within the enterprise in a form more aligned to business needs - will the millennials entering the workforce enhance that rate of adoption.  Personally I doubt it, there are many of us in the web 2.0 world who are the immigrants driving the technology into the enterprise, the natives aren’t quite at that level of influence yet, but it’ll be good when their voices are influencing things too!

Collaboration

Well a few folks have been talking about wordle.net, a neat little java applet which creates a tag cloud from text you paste into it.  Great I though I wonder what would happen if I compared my first blog posts with my recent posts.  So here is today what is on my home page today (Collaborative Product Manager):

And here is from when I started this blog (Lotus Collaborative Technical Lead):

The other thing I noticed is that on Monday 23rd this blog is 3 years old.  Now while I don’t hold much significance to that its amazing how things change in that period and how much time flies!

Collaboration

Working in a team developing collaborative solutions you won’t be surprised that we spend an awful lot of time “eating our dog food” over the last 2 years.  This has resulted in some interesting observations:

• My team members in different continents who I have never been able to meet really appreciate the basic ability to see me and relate to me.
• Putting on a headset and answering a video call isn’t as natural as answering the telephone for the first few weeks.
• You are more likely to share information through screen sharing than you would just on the telephone.
• Its quite strange to see yourself, so I’d recommend turning off the “PIP” as soon as you’re happy with the camera image.
• Even with poor lip synch I find video more beneficial than audio only.  I spoke with a senior manager who I respect last week and they said once they met someone video was a distraction.  I have to say that I haven’t found this to be the case.
• Folks are reluctant to start a video call without checking first, how many folks check before calling your mobile?
• Folks, of both sexes, can be concerned about their appearance - especially at times when we do work “out of hours”.

As with most collaboration technologies it is behaviour which is important, understanding this will help alleviate barriers to adoption.  Time to dig into the huge piles of research out there.  Technology wise, I do worry that the network backbone in many countries may not be sufficient to cope with the demands in 5 or 10 years time for HD video units in most homes and on most desks.  Wow a post on video without the word Green, darn done it now

Collaboration

I recently came across Richard’s blog Inside Out.  Its one of the problems I find in today’s information rich internet, keeping up to date with the best sources of information [that may be a subject for a future post].  Richard discusses social software and collaboration whilst also sharing his experience within BT.  Some of his interesting recent posts include:

Who owns collaboration?

“if it isn’t clear who owns the business requirements for collaboration, the danger is even greater as techies start enthusiastically deploying tools to fill the void and meet local needs, rather than concentrating on common capabilities that solve enterprise wide business problems”

I couldn’t agree more with this statement.  This is something I always try to encourage when evangelising collaboration.  The business requirements are the key here.  The challenge is understanding the zone that exists between business requirement and technology solution.  One of the issues with the recent proliferation of collaboration technologies is to really understand what the best solution is for the problem.  It is important to also ensure that a balance is struck between the business need, the process owners requirements, the information owners requirements, and the pragmatic technological solution to a problem.  So we need a breed of person to sit in the middle of all these different opinions to ensure that at the end of the process a workable solution is in place which is simple to use, works efficiently and is widely adopted.  Simple

Collaboration

Excellent video interview from 2 gentlemen who were key in implementing web 2.0 technologies in the CIA notably an application called Intellipedia:

Via Collaboration Loop

Collaboration

The observant reader will notice that in the feed you’ll see a post from a social bookmarking site (I’m trying mag.nolia.com).  Sadly it formatted terribly on the blog web site so I’ve deleted it.  I’ll let you know how my experiment with social bookmarking goes.  I did have a delicious account but it had been idle for a while.  I’m hoping some of the features I like in magnolia make the experience a long-term one.  Watch this space.

Collaboration

Stowe has an interesting article which references some work from science daily which claims that IM reduces interruptions.  Well its a scientific survey and as a scientist by trade of course I believe all peer reviewed articles

To me the work just doesn’t ring true.  IM is now my biggest disrupter.  At CSC (ps check out the new brand) we’ve had IM for years now.  But interestingly I initially saw a decrease in disruption … BUT … I now feel that IM is a disruption to me.  I regularly stay off IM and just use twitter for status updates and avoid IM (and email) for periods to get work done without interruption, generally in the UK morning before colleagues in the US awake.  I accept none of us can work in isolation but times without disruption are essential.

I do feel the survey, however scientific, missed the mark.  Status = online = disruption for me, in my view (not scientifically recorded) I get more disruption now on IM than I used to have just on the telephone.  Its just too easy to IM someone, dialling someone needs change of focus from computer to telephone and dialling.  IM takes no such input.  I’d be interested if the survey was repeated over time and analysed companies with varying maturity, and scale, of IM adoption.

…I wonder what voice integration to IM will result in … one for the scientists I feel.

Collaboration

Am I alone in this dilemma of experimentation?  Lets take a common work pattern for a tablet user.  How should I best use the device to take notes in meetings or conference sessions?

InkSeine?

InkSeine I don’t find to be a great meeting tool note taker.  Its a great research tool as I mentioned in my last blog post.  The reason I don’t like InkSeine for meeting notes (and others may disagree) is that it is a notebook, its got no scroll and hence once you’ve filled the screen you can’t expand the page to add more content, you have to move to the next page. 

OneNote? or Journal?

When I had no other tools on my tablet OneNote was my only tool.  I’ve blogged in the past about how I used it effectively.  However I have been using mindmanager for about 3 months now … and it seems to be replacing onenote as the primary tool.

MindManager?

MindManager allows me to structure notes and do all the additions of content with gestures, including the really valuable ability to sketch:

(so before anyone asks this was one of my ambulance training courses about pulse oxymetry).  Trouble is times onenote is best, and times MindManager is best and that leads to fragmented meeting notes on my tablet.  Anyone any tips to overcome this fragmentation? 

I think pen gestures in Mindmanager are one of the best features.  My tip to all is to spend some time to learn all the gestures you’ll use.  You won’t use all the gestures but you WILL need some of them:

I don’t think there is a correct answer to which is the right tool to use, I’d love to hear how other people overcome these challenges?  Graham has been doing a series of posts on his tools, I find these immensely valuable, links to others content appreciated.

Collaboration

Thanks to a meeting about a month ago with Steve I’ve been experimenting with InkSeine, a journal tool for tablet users to use and combine journal with research.  The video from MS gives a great overview.

I am finding this tool amazingly powerful as a research tool.  I think it will work better with multiple monitors which all operate with touch technology.  The UI looks very similar to some of the images we’ve seen released for windows 7.  My only concern is sharing research information from InkSeine.  Most research is shared so what formats will we eventually be able to save to which would be based on some form of common standard (thinking hyperlink enabled PDF at a minimum).

For now, as a tool to gather my thoughts and aggregate content from the Internet and my local disk I am very impressed.

Here I have 2 sample searches:

Collaboration