Category: Innovation

Online connections worth £365 a month?

According to an article by Maggie Shiels over on the BBC your online connects could be earning you an extra £365/month.Eden Project Fun

But before anyone goes totally negative on the whole online friends routine, a study by IBM and MIT [460Kb PDF] has discovered that there is money to be made from those buddies.The IBM collaboration with MIT’s Sloan School of Management tracked the electronic communications of over 7,000 volunteers for three years. The aim of the work was to put a dollar amount on the effect of those electronic and virtual relationships.

Researchers found that having strong connections to managers (yes, sucking up to the boss) can boost the bottom line. On average, it adds up to $548 (£365) in extra revenue a month.

She’s referring to this research (the link in the BBC blog post wasn’t quite right when I read it).

It’s quite a long report and I have to admit that I haven’t had chance to read it, but can it really be that simple. The conclusion of the report says this:

By analyzing one of the largest organizational electronic communication networks ever collected and combining it with detailed performance data, we show initial evidence that not only are network topology characteristics associated with productivity, human capital of inside one‘s social network and tie strength to the appropriate human capital are also positively correlated with information worker productivity. We find that having strong links to management is associated with higher revenue generation, but simply knowing many managers and have minimal correlations with performance. This demonstrates the importance of distinguishing one‘s social network not only by its network topologies but also the content of the network such as the cumulative human capital inside the network and the strength of ties connecting to this type of capital.

In my really simplistic words – relationship with your management network can lead to higher earnings. I suspect that for many people that is instinctive. If you get on well with those within your management structure you will go further. If you do a really good job, but are obnoxious then you won’t go as far. Simply adding your manager to your Facebook buddy list doesn’t, for me, constitute a relationship.

Network intelligence (my phrase) is going to be an important skill in coming years, online community adds to the networking capabilities, but also requires a higher level of network intelligence.

Is there a business opportunity here that I’m missing, perhaps “NI” training could be a real earner.

Update: Business Week also covered the same research.

Socialising with Customers

I’ve spoken to a few people about social networking, and many of them really struggle to understand the “business value” of the types of interactions that social networking technology allows. The following video has some interesting insights for the changing interaction between organisations and customers.Swans, swans, swans

Probably the most interesting quote comes from Scott Monty of  Ford:

“We’re not interested in advertising on social networks. It’s about getting in there and interacting with people. Now, more than ever, people can self publish, put up their own content and be there own publishing houses, they have a voice and they expect to be heard. And when a large organisation pays attention to them and starts conversing with them it really lifts the lights for a lot of people”

That’s quite a powerful statement about customer’s changing expectations. The part that struck me, though, was to think about all of the customers that we all have.

I work for an IT service organisation and we are definitely seeing this shift in expectations. It’s no longer acceptable to have a service desk that people phone into, people want to take the relationship much further than that.

Future Vision – The Microsoft View

If you think that I was rambling on in my post about Broader Networks, Larger Storage, Faster Processing then you should perhaps watch this video:

It’s from a session given by Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop.

Broader Networks, Larger Storage, Faster Processing

Crossthwaite ViewsIn many ways the fancy, even magical, world of IT can be broken down into three basic elements; storing stuff, calculating stuff and moving stuff. Everything we see around the Internet is driven by the inexorable progress of broader networks, larger storage and faster processing.

Ten year trends for networks, storage and processing show them getting ever faster, broader and larger.

We may not yet know how we are going to use all of this extra capacity, but one thing we can say is that the past shows us the future.

I started my IT journey at a time when we regarded kilobit networks as broad, megahertz processors as fast and megabyte storage as huge.

When I started in IT as a career I supported IBM DISOSS on the mainframe and the nearest thing anyone got to a desktop device was an IBM DisplayWriter. There were also a few VAX machines around used by those specialists in the engineering organisation.

The DISOSS system I supported, for those of you too young to know any better, was an early email system. It was so early, in fact, that it was pretty much bounded by the mainframe on which it ran. There was no connection to the internet, and limited connections to other parts of the organisation. SMTP was frowned upon as not being ready for the enterprise.

Apart from the DisplayWriters everyone else accessed the system via a dumb terminal over a dedicated SNA network; TCP/IP wasn’t ever discussed. We now have access to megabits of bandwidth at our houses, all of it running TCP/IP of one form or another.

I carry around more storage in my bag than was available within the multi-room mainframe that I started on.

The way that we use applications and services has changed radically. The internet has seen to that.

Information was an expensive commodity back then, most information is now effectively free. Search is expected and it’s free too.

Text was the only way of communicating, even tables within text were difficult. Every day I deal with diagrams photographs, graphical representations. Every time I start Audacity to edit some audio I am blown away by the realisation that I am doing this on a consumer PC with free software.

Years ago I used to have a set of floppy disks in a draw. Managing the data on these disks would take a significant amount of time. I probably had less than 100MB stored, but managing it was a complete pain. I now manage over 1TB of data, but only spend a minimum amount of time managing it.

I used to spend more on a CompuServe email account than I now spend on hosting this blog where I get unlimited storage. The paid-for email account could only handle a tiny amount of storage and it couldn’t handle attachments at the beginning. I now have a choice of multiple free email services allowing me to store hundreds of gigabytes and easily handle large emails.

To use someone else’s words, remember: “you aint seen nothing yet”.

Idea herding

Swans, swans, swansFor a few days now I’ve been thinking about issues of reuse and exploitation.

How do we get people to reuse things?

How do we get people to exploit what is already there and expand upon it?

The phrase that keeps going through my mind is “herding cats”, so I’ve decided to turn my thoughts to “herding ideas”.

When it comes to idea I think that some are like sheep and some are like cats – that’s about as advanced as my thoughts have got so far.

Lotus Notes Tabs – My Usability Problem

Grandma in GrizedaleI have a bit of a usability problem with Lotus Notes tabs.

It’s a simple thing but it catches me out every day and has become an annoyance that I feel like I need to write about.

When I start Notes the first thing I do is to take a quick look in my inbox and then open my calendar. The two tabs that I have open look like this:

As I open items to read the tab bar starts to fill up and the size of the tabs starts to reduce.

The number of tabs that I need to open depends on the size of the screen that I am using. On my laptops it’s only four items before I get to this:

I’m now stuck, which is my calendar, which is my inbox. Opening more items just makes the situation worse. If I had a shorter name it would be less of an annoyance, but I don’t have a short name.

I’m not sure why Lotus couldn’t do something with the icons to show me which view of my mail file I am looking at, perhaps it’s configuration issue I can work my way around, or even the way that Notes has been deployed to me, but I haven’t done anything to create this situation.

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Facebook and me

ParaglidingIt’s been a few weeks since I started using Facebook.

I’m mostly enjoying the experience. I have a few friends, some from work, some from my personal life. I’ve even had a couple of surprise people contact me from my dim and distant past.

I’ve added a few applications and there are a few active groups that I have joined.

It’s not changed my life but it has got me thinking: If Facebook were my corporate portal would it do a better job? I’ve not concluded that one yet, but I am struck by the amount of effort corporate organisations have to put in to get people to use their specially built portal when Facebook gets thousands of new subscribers and active participants every day.

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BBC Update: Bookmark with:

Rain in Lancashire? How much deeper are you going to go?The BBC has modified its pages to provide a link to some of the more popular bookmark sites.

It’s another step into the mainstream for del.icio.us, Digg, reddit and the rest. It also marks the seemingly relentless march of Facebook.

I’ve just posted a really interesting article about plumbers to my Facebook profile. Nice!

Is this new, or did I miss it being released. It’s quite new, I know that much.

The 'Info-glut'

Adventures in Teenbed-Ageroom: Jiimy tries to scale the mount called Revisionpaperwork

Greg at EOD joins the rant about the glut of information and it’s definitely one of the more entertaining ones.

 

The conclusion:

 

 

“As of now, my fancy-pants, community-generated, emergent-behaviour data-sorting heuristic is: a calendar. If I haven’t gotten to something in a week, it dies. Stick that in your attention economy and smoke it. I’m re-booting. Feed list: empty. In-box: empty. TiVo: OK, OK, I still need to watch “24.” But other than that: empty.”

 

There is a lot to be said for the time based approach.

 

My dad always used to follow a three draw approach. When his in-tray became full he would put everything out of it into the top draw in his desk. If someone asked him about something he would go and find it, if it was in his top draw it would get put back into his in-tray. Every time his top draw became full he would take everything out of it and place it in the bin without even looking at it. If it had become that old he clearly wasn’t going to get to it and it probably wasn’t relevant anyway. GTD encourages people to do something similar and Greg’s approach sounds equally sensible.

 

It’s definitely time for people to realise that they need to take control no-one else is going to do it for them.

An Approach to To-Do Lists that would even appeal to Unstructured Workers

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43 Folders has this great little approach to dealing with a to-do list.

As I’ve said before, items can sometimes linger on your TODO list a lot longer than you’d like, and it can be tricky to understand exactly why that is in each case. I’m convinced cringing is often a factor.

Being that it’s Monday, and a lot of us are planning this week’s activities, why not join me in a modest exercise.

  1. Print out your TODO list (alphabetically, if possible)
  2. Read it over—beginning to end
  3. Go back and circle each item that makes you cringe, or that causes you some kind of existential angst
  4. Per cringe item, think honestly about why you’re freaked out about it. Seriously. What’s the hang-up? (Fear of failure? Dreading bad news? Angry you’re already way overdue?)
  5. Now, again, per cringe item, add a new TODO that will a) make the loathsome task less cringe-worthy, or b) just get the damned thing done
  6. Cross the original cringe items off your list
  7. Work immediately on the new, cringe-busting TODO

If you could do this for just one item on your TODO list today, wouldn’t you be a little better off? Is there a quick call you could make, a draft you could edit, an email you could return, or some other piddling 2-minute task that would plane some cringe off of your hated tasks?

Imagine if you did this today for five items on your list. Now imagine you began each Monday with a Cringe Bust. Might be a handy way to pick off old items and let some unnecessary anxiety out of your working week.

(For extra credit, find the item on your list that’s been making you cringe for the longest. Anybody else turning up items that have been inducing cringes for over a month? Ouch. I suck.)

I like this approach because it appeals to the semi-structured/unstructured Graham Chastney. I’m definitely not one of these people who can look as a to-do list and prioritise it and then work through in priority order. It just doesn’t appeal and it’s in that word that the true me is revealed. There are loads of other tasks that may be more important but that just isn’t enough, they have to appeal in some way or another. And I’m OK with a philosophy that defines one of the factors as the cringe factor. Of course I also assess my to-do lists from other appeal factors.

  • Is this task interesting?

  • Does this task have value (as defined by me of course)?

  • Is this task for someone I like working with (because I don’t suffer fools)?

  • What is the reward for this task (that is rewards to me of course)?

  • Do I know that in completing this task that I will just get another one given to me (so actually there isn’t any point in completing this one)?

  • Do I think that if I don’t do this task the reason t do it will just disappear (as so many do)?

  • What is the pain involved in not doing this task (because life isn’t without pain anyway)?

  • Is this task overdue yet (because I don’t need to worry about it if it isn’t)?

Yes I know this list should be something more like:

  • Is this task of value to the company?

  • Has this task been requested by my superior?

Tough, it doesn’t. Those two narrow factors just don’t appeal. And yes I really do believe that my employee should give me tasks that appeal (if they want the best out of me).

More on the Form Factor Pschology v Car Psychology

Above Scorton

Steve has commented (and again) on my form factor piece.

He has compared his IT to the vehicles he has in his household. It occurs to me that I should do the same, so here goes.

We have three PC’s in the house, but only 2 cars.

  • Sue uses the middle of the road HP desktop – and she drives a Toyota Yaris. Functional and easily parked.

  • I use the HP Media Center PC upstairs – and drive a Ford Mondeo Ghia X. Basically a middle of the road car with a few bells and whistles.

  • I also use my works ThinkPad T41 which I think is also synonymous with a Ford Mondeo.

  • We all have mobile phones – and we all have bikes.

Office Efficiency

One of my ‘other’ jobs is to help a volunteer organisation in their use of IT. This organisation is only small and consists of six members of staff. My daytime job is to help large corporate to get the most out of their IT investments.

Both of these jobs give me an interesting insight into the ways that people interact with IT. One of them is all about detail, the other is all about high level big picture. On a personal level I tend to use one as a counter-balance to the other.

Large corporation try to increase office efficiency by investing huge amounts of money in large projects. These projects tend to focus on a radical change across a whole corporate base; new email system, desktop refresh, application upgrade, new application. In most instances the training for these changes focuses on the way that the change works; this is the way that you send email in this new system; this is the way that you schedule meetings; etc.

In my work with the volunteer organisation I have realised how diverse the use of IT is in the day to day things. There are now many different routes to achieve the same thing. In Windows (for instance) think of the different ways that you could open an existing Word document; you can use the folder views via something like ‘My Documents’; you can open up Word and do a File-Open command. Previously people would try to assess the efficiency of these types of operations by looking at the number of steps that needed to be undertaken; the one with the least steps being the most efficient. While in theory this is correct, I have come to the realisation that actually the one which is the most efficient is the one which works best for the individual. The biggest efficiency problem these days is not the time it takes for the computer to undertake an operation, it’s the time it take the individual to map out in their head the operations. And the pictures and maps that people use to do this are not linear ABC type maps, they are more like mind maps.

The only truly inefficient thing is the task map that someone has in their head which takes them on a route around the task, rather than getting straight to the task. So the challenge for corporate training is to find these inefficient tasks and routes and assist people in finding a new route. This type of education and learning is radically different to the way that we educate people today. Firstly, we need to make people realise that their productivity is their responsibility and not the responsibility of IT. But that is a difficult one to sell to some people. We then, also, need ways of understanding the ways that people are using their IT. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to say “I notice from our logs of the system that you keep going to your “My Documents area by first opening My Computer” did you know that you can get there quicker by doing this.”

That type of logging is clearly not available today, all we get are ‘event logs’ which tells us about problems and issues, but tell us nothing of the way that people are working.