Stu Downes

In the UK we are getting older as a population, information overload is common, and we need to transfer knowledge.  Over the past few weeks I’ve read a few articles which discuss the shortfalls in both professional education and identify needs in workplace professional development.

Craig Roth discussed MBA courses and the use of simulations to help candidates understand the need to filter data with dashboards and KPI’s and extended the thought processes to take a view on information management:

I’m not just joking about how screwed up the average corporation is.  These difficulties exist in even the best of organizations, making attention management an essential discipline if one desires to be an effective information worker and good managerial decision maker.

I’d extend Craig’s concerns into schooling at secondary level and above.  My first point is we just don’t train our young people to filter and focus on priorities – I’m not saying its easy as I struggle with this every day.  However we aren’t even arming them with the mental skills to prioritise their schoolwork, study, research or plan effectively. 

When our young folk enter the enterprise and become knowledge workers we have excellent graduate schemes which offer training, but these may not be enough.  Dave Snowden recently blogged about the apprenticeship and the lack of a similar model for management:

Maybe its time we stopped treating management as something that can be taught and then practiced, and instead focus on creating a professional model of management education which is based on praxis. Of course that would mean HR giving up their cult like toys; competence models, assessment centers, psychometric tests and the like. It would mean KM people starting to create long term projects rather than information management with a candy coating of communities of practice. Physical presence can be augmented by virtual connectivity but it can never be fully replaced. Above all we should be authentic to humans as humans, and to the social ecology of their interaction. We are not cogs in machine, we cannot be engineered, but out evolution can be stifled by inauthentic attempts to make it so.

We can see that we have a problem over the horizon in many countries, including the UK.  We aren’t getting younger, we’re all getting older.  This will put increased pressure on organizations to transfer knowledge to fewer people.  Information overload will get worse, especially for the younger worker.  Prioritising will become more important.

The statistics from the UK Office of National Statistics show that as soon as 2018 we could see more people over 40 working than under 40, that assumes 300,000 people of pensionable age continue to work.  The column label is missing but that’s millions of people.

The beauty of demographics is they aren’t the same in all areas of the world, but the headlines for the UK are:

• population rising
• we are living longer
• there will be less workers under 40 compared to those over 40
• if people work beyond the pensionable age then everything changes (and they will, I probably will!)
• older knowledge workers are more likely to want to work part time – that then makes knowledge transfer and priority setting for those that remain more important

One thing I’ve not dealt with well here is whether globalization will solve the problem.  Will we truly get to the point that global teams drawing on skills from areas with younger populations will fill the demographic gap in the UK ….. that’s a bit heavy for an already long post so I’ll mull over that one with you over a virtual pint.

 

About 3 months ago the growing family forced a new car upon us. Opting for a Ford s-max I wasn’t expecting much and it came with integrated satnav/Bluetooth. While the satnav is almost useless I now won’t buy a car without Bluetooth. Funnily enough I don’t love it for the phone, which is too distracting for me, I love it for the audio. Podtrapper is my podcast app on the berry, excellent, but better is as soon as I select Bluetooth audio input on the radio it starts podtrapper where I left off and I can skip forward from the steering wheel. It’s just something simple which makes listening easy. Thanks also for the USB point to stop Bluetooth draining the battery. So I’d always recommend podtrapper and I’d now recommend a car with Bluetooth for audio as well as the phone.

 

I’m looking forward to the day when every web application, both internet and intranet can be used offline.  Its not a new request in that Lotus Notes performed this for what seems forever and recently new additions have started to emerge in the form of Google Gears and others.

So why do I ask or suggest we should drive in this direction?  I have a simple thought triggered by a recent read (Capture IT, a future workplace for the multi-generational workplace), and I’ll paraphrase:

If the task worker got 50 times more efficient in the 20th century then in the early portions of the 21st century the knowledge and information worker should also see a 50 times improvement in efficiency. 

How do we do this?  Well in hundreds of ways, some existing, some emerging, some not even considered.  One such method will be to make the information flow more efficient.  I am not talking RSS here I am talking about the integrating the data we work with today with our working requirements, our working styles, our experience of work.  Hence do we sync or do we surf?  My opinion is that we will start to build systems which understand our information consumption habits, understand our working requirements and sync that data, or maybe cache is a better word as we are likely to be living more in the cloud.  And that cloud, as Steve rightly asserts will no longer be simply corporate data but will increasingly be the mixture of personal knowledge, collaborative network knowledge, and corporate network knowledge.  Graham also recently asserted that user experience should focus on application speed today, tomorrow maybe its more about information access speed and knowledge transfer capabilities.

Some thoughts, a bit random, but something to ponder for me, and possibly you.

 

I was interested to see this video which I read about on the OfficeLabs blog, the video shows the use of a 3D camera to control and advance a PowerPoint presentation using hand gestures.  The PowerPoint had been developed using the pptFlex plugin:

What was more interesting about this what all the way through I was thinking Johnny Lee.  Then at the end “kapow” there it was he now holds a position with Microsoft Research in addition to his academic position.

Anyone got a spare Wii controller?  You can do it with a Wii using the instructions here.