Category: Productivity

The Productive Workplace – Sense-making Spaces

Over the last few weeks I’ve been flipping between dystopian and utopian views of the future.

Having set out on a series to think about the productive workplace I decided to focus on the activities that people might perform in the future workplace and chose a framework from the Institute for the Future.

This framework outlines a set of skills that people are going to need to be able to do in a world that has been significantly changed by technology and other social changes.

My intention is to write about each of the different skills that people are going to need and to think about the impact upon the place where they work.

The first skill is “sense-making”:

Sense-making – ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed

But why have I been flipping between utopia and dystopia?

We are just at the beginnings of a massive renegotiation of the line between people and machines. Increasing amounts of what we currently call knowledge work is going to be overtaken by various bits of technology, many people who do process work are already being affected.

If you take that thought beyond what we can currently see you start to veer down one of two paths – dystopia or utopia.

DystopiaThe dystopian view is highlighted by Sherry Turkle who is worried that “as we expect more from technology, do we expect less from each other?” Anyone who has seen the film Wall-E has understood this dystopian view.

Andrew McAfee is more utopian in his view, though isn’t afraid of highlighting significant challenges that are coming:

The thing to keep in mind is that this is absolutely great news. This is the best economic news on the planet these days. Not that there’s a lot of competition, right? This is the best economic news we have these days for two main reasons. The first is, technological progress is what allows us to continue this amazing recent run that we’re on where output goes up over time, while at the same time, prices go down, and volume and quality just continue to explode. Now, some people look at this and talk about shallow materialism, but that’s absolutely the wrong way to look at it. This is abundance, which is exactly what we want our economic system to provide. The second reason that the new machine age is such great news is that, once the androids start doing jobs, we don’t have to do them any-more, and we get freed up from drudgery and toil.

and also:

So the optimistic note, great point that I want to leave you with is that the plain facts of the machine age are becoming clear, and I have every confidence that we’re going to use them to chart a good course into the challenging, abundant economy that we’re creating.

The reality will, most likely, be a combination of dystopia and utopia, but in both pictures of the future we are going to relinquish a lot of what we currently do to the machines.

That’s where sense-making comes in – seeing the deeper meaning and significance.

The challenge of the current age is summed up by Malcolm Gladwell:

“The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.”

In the age to come our challenge is going to continue to be understanding but the tools available to us to create that understanding are going to become increasingly sophisticated. As the machines understand more and more our role will be to find deeper meaning and significance.

Most understanding today is gained by analysing through screens. Much of this analysis is characterised by someone creating a spreadsheet containing a set of numbers that are likely to have come from an application. Those numbers will then be analysed through charts, calculations and formulas. Once a level of understanding has been created that information will be presented into either a document or a presentation. People will receive this material through a transfer system, like email. Quite often, the recipients will then talk it through in a meeting to gain meaning from the understanding.

Most people have thousands of spreadsheets, documents and presentations many of them very similar. The creation of this material will have taken many hours in the production alone. They’ll also spend hours arranging meetings and talking people through the material.

The workplace that supports these activities is one that supports the machines that are used to enact it. People need keyboards, screens, desks and meeting rooms because they are the means of production. That’s why we have the workplaces that we have.

The time spent on production is significantly higher than the amount of time spent creating significance.

It’s already possible to imagine a time where a suitably knowledgeable machine could undertake most of the material production. Certain material that we read through news organisations is already produced by algorithms.

If the machines are producing the material, what will we do? Our job will be to create meaning and significance. For the short to medium-term I image that we are going to continue doing that on a screen and keyboard. Meaning and significance comes from insight and insight comes from perspectives; a screen only gives visual insights and a keyboard isn’t a great way of manipulating something to gain different perspectives

While we work with screens and keyboards we’ll need our beloved desks, but at some point we’ll move beyond the desk being the defining feature of the workplace. Image a workplace with everyone wearing something like an Oculus Rift. Image sitting in your local coffee shop and people doing the same thing. I deliberately didn’t saying “sitting wearing” because may of the interactions may well require us to be moving.

The Library of the Future

The other element of sense-making is concentration and focus. People tend to concentrate best in an environment without distraction. For some that’s a place of silence, for some it’s a place with music or some other ambient sound. We may well, also, start to use sound as a means of gaining perspective. Visual distractions can also be an issue, but I suspect that this will be drastically reduced by wearable devices.

So we are going to need places which are far more flexible for the person than current corporate open-plan offices allow. Perhaps the best way to visuals this personal sense-making workspace as the library of the future.

The Engineers Workshop of the Future

Another vital tool for sense-making is person-to-person collaboration. Once we spend less time producing material and more time making sense of it we will spend more time collaborating with others to gain their insights.

In short; we will spend more time in meetings, but they will be very different meetings. If all the time and effort wasn’t used up creating the material for the meeting how would the meeting be different? What if the material was interactive and would allow for seamless scenario building and story telling? What if the material was multi-dimensional and even multi-sensory?

If meetings were that engaging would people be happy with being a voice at the end of a teleconference when others were standing in a room that allowed them to change the shape of the discussion by virtually replacing one thing with another thing? Will they be happy with being their via video even? They may be happy being virtually there as a robot that gives multi-dimensional views.

It’s not all about technology though. People will also collaborate using the tools that we’ve used for centuries – pictures and diagrams. So a meeting space will also have to support multiple different mechanisms for collaboration.

Will this use of space spark a new renaissance in the use of facilities that currently sit idle as people work from home; or perhaps it will generate a whole new set of virtual worlds where people collaborate? Either way it’s unlikely that these insight and meaning meetings will take place in a boardroom style facility with a projector at one end. These places will be more like the engineers workshops of old, full of trusted tools, inhabited by people with different skills, a place where people come together around a problem, a place for prototyping, a bit scruffy perhaps.

Some videos that you might find interesting:

The Productive Workplace – Activities and Skills

The purpose of a workplace is to support the activities that need to be undertaken so that they can be done in the most productive way. Is it as simple as that?

In a sense, yes, I think it is as simple as that, what I don’t think is simple is an understanding of what those activities might be.

It’s clear from many workplaces that the view of activities is limited to two basic activities:

  • Individual working at a desk – either in an open plan room or in a small office
  • Teams meeting in a room

The other thing to note is that desks and meeting rooms are often kept very separate. Because of this the meeting room is somewhere that you go to for a planned interaction; it’s not an ad-hoc space. There’s often a special meeting room set aside for video conferencing, this is normally the loneliest meeting room of them all.

That’s quite a narrow view of modern working, it might fit some types of modern work where the activities being undertaken are primarily task based, but that’s not what the knowledge worker requires today or in the future.

In a world where people can undertake many of their activities from any network connection a workplace needs to offer more than the other places available if it is going to be used. That’s not to say that a workplace needs to be the best place for all activities, but it needs to offer something that the other places can’t or don’t.

Rather than focus on the current activities that the current workplace doesn’t support I thought I would consider the future activities.

As a framework for this thinking I’m going to use some work done by the Institute for the Future for the University of Pennsylvania Research Institute – Future Work Skills 2020 – where they identify key work skills for the future. We are going through a significant shift in the nature of work and people’s definition of a job will be radically different in the future, but it’s not easy to see what those definitions might be. The skills required in these jobs are, however, becoming easier to see as they are influenced by some significant drivers for change. They characterise these change drivers like this:

  • Extreme longevity – increasing global lifespans change the nature of careers and learning
  • Rise of smart machines and systems – workplace automation nudges human workers out of the rote, repetitive tasks
  • Computational world – massive increase in sensors and processing power make the world a programmable system
  • New media ecology – new communication tools require new media literacies beyond text
  • Super-structured organisation – social technologies drive new forms of production and value creation
  • Globally connected world – increased global interconnectivity puts diversity and adaptability at the centre of organizational operations

From these drivers for change drivers they then define a set of skills for the future workforce:

  • Sense-making – ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed
  • Social intelligence – ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desire interactions
  • Novel and adaptive thinking – proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond what is rote or rule-based
  • Cross-cultural competency – ability to operate in different cultural settings
  • Computational thinking – ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning
  • New-media literacy – ability to critically assess and develop content that uses media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication
  • Trans-disciplinarity – literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines
  • Design mind-set – ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes
  • Cognitive load management – ability to discriminate and filter information for importance and to understand how to maximise cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques
  • Virtual collaboration – ability to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence as a member of a virtual team

From this list, and the associated more detailed report,  a number of things that characterise the activities involved.

That will have to wait for another day though because I think that each one will need some space to explore them. As an example, though, here’s something to think about – social intelligence requires the ability to “quickly assess the emotions of those around them and adapt their words, tone and gestures accordingly”, to do that though you need to interact on a basis that communicates emotions, social interaction.

What are the social interactions of the future?

Will a conference call continue to be regarded as an acceptable social interaction? Is it possible to adequately discern emotion on a conference call?

Will a slide-lead presentation continue to be regarded as an acceptable social interaction? Does it offer the best level of interaction?

Factors of the Productive Workplace – A Little Personal History

Before embarking too far on this series looking at the Productive Workplace I thought I would expand on my history, it might explain some of my viewpoint.

Today I do most of my work sat at an L-shaped desk in a set of six identically shaped desks all bolted together with mini-dividers between them.

In my first working environment I was sat at a rectangular-shaped desk in a set of six.

What goes around comes around, but the journey between these two places has been varied. Even between these two places there is quite a difference in the working environment both on and away from the desks.

(I’ve written about some of this before in a series of posts titles My Changing Workplace, these focus on the technology within the workplace rather than the workplace itself)

These are a few of the places I have known:

The First Place

My first working environment was characterised by the number of storage cabinets. All of these cabinets were within easy reach of a desk with each set of six desks divided by a set of cabinets. This is on top of the storage that each desk possessed; every one of them had what we called a ‘mortuary drawer’ which would pull out the full depth of the desk and could contain several thousand sheets of paper in hanging filing.

Paper was everywhere because paper was the primary tool for working.

There was a certain character to those steel construction leather topped desks that I loved. It was my desk and I went there every day.

There were some computers, but they had to be shared and were on a special set of desks dedicated to that purpose.

The wall coverings were corporately dull being some form of beige or grey, I’m not too clear on which.

The office was large with something like ten sets of desk with six desks in each set. These sets of desks were divided by the cabinets. Some of the cabinets were decorated with pictures of the product that we were working on.

If I was going to a meeting it would most likely be in the meeting room at the end of the office. This contained a blackboard, tables and chairs. The table and chairs filled the room. More beige and grey with a few pictures of the product that were all working on.

Most of the people who I worked with were in this office, those that weren’t were on the same site.

I did some of my best learning in this office about different people’s attitudes to work. It was quite a productive place because we knew what we had to do and did it.

The First L-Shaped

My first L-shaped desk was in a first-floor office which was attached to a production facility. I used to like walking into the production facility to see what was being made.

This L-shaped desk was one of a set of four all bolted together into a cross shape.

The number of storage cabinets is lower and they have moved away from the desks. Most of them are pushed up against the wall that we share with the production facility.

(I’m currently looking at a set of storage cabinets which look very similar to the ones that I remember from those days. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are the same ones.)

Another change is that we all have a screen and keyboard on our desks. You’d expect that as we were a Computer Services department, but this was becoming the universal configuration.

I don’t remember their being meeting room in this office; we were on a large site and I think that we used meeting rooms in other buildings.

The chairs are different too. We’ve moved from traditional four-legged chairs to ones with wheels and pneumatic lift mechanisms.

On Monday I would come to my desk and that is pretty much where I would work until Friday. Occasionally I would go down to the computer room, but mostly because something had gone wrong.

This was also a large office with 60 to 80 desks in it.

Most of the people who I worked with were in this office, some were on other locations in the same country.

I did some of my best technical learning in this office; I was a member of a team who were discovering something new every day. We were all sat together and everything that one person learned the rest of us also learnt.

Let’s Try Something Different

For one particular project a team of us were provisioned with our own working space. The person running the team negotiated that we should design the office as a team rather than being given the corporate standard office layout.

Within this space we sought to create a number of working environments with in-built flexibility. There was a central large table were everyone was encouraged to start the day with lots of ad-hoc interaction. If you wanted to work together on something for a short period of time this is where you would be. There were a few shielded off desks for quiet focussed working. Some people spent more time here than others. There was a meeting room created from a small office; this was primarily used for conference calls. We had lots of whiteboards and were experimenting with a form of electronic whiteboards.

Everything was free-standing to allow us to change the configuration on a regular basis which we did on many occasions.

The enabler for most of this was a level of standardisation and inbuilt mobility. Every device was a laptop and every laptop used the same power supply. There were enough extra power supplies to allow people to get power wherever they were. We also deployed early wireless which removed the need to reconfigure the network every time we reconfigured the room. It also allowed us to move between working locations with little friction. Being an early form of wireless it wasn’t without problems though and sometimes people would have to move to use a physical connection to do what they needed to do.

No one had their desk, people worked where they needed to work. Although we were doing an international project most of the key participants were local and ideas flowed with few barriers.

This was a highly creative place to work and learn.

Working from Home

For a time I was doing a job that required me to interact with people around the globe, but no-one locally. For much of this time I worked from home.

During this time I had a desk set up in an upstairs spare bedroom with a laptop and that would be my primary tool for work, apart from the never-ending routine of conference calls. I had an internet connection, a laptop, my music, my choice of fresh coffee, a DECT speaker-phone for calls and a large monitor. Everything I needed to work.

Behind my desk was a sofa-bed where I would sit for long calls and reading.

When I was focussed this was a dream work scenario, but it had many drawbacks. I loved the quiet and the ability to focus without interruption. The lack of personal interaction was a problem though; I would have days when I would deliberately go down to the local coffee shop just to interact with someone. But who was I supposed to interact with, everyone I was working with were miles away from where I was. Boundaries were another problem; I wasn’t great at delineating the beginning and end of the working day.

I’m not sure that it was a very creative place to work.

(There’s a bit of a side story to this working from home period. In the winter I would struggle to stay focussed on work and I couldn’t explain it. Years later we discovered that the gas boiler that was in a cupboard in the office had been dangerously wrongly connected. Rather than venting the exhaust fumes outside it was venting them into the loft space from where they were descending into my home office. No wonder I couldn’t concentrate, I was being poisoned.)

The Small Shared Office

A change of role brought with it another change of location. This time I was working in a small shared office. There were two desks in quite a large room which also included a small table and chairs. There was also quite a lot of whiteboard provision. Although I shared this office the person that I shared it with rarely came in so it was either empty or it was being used by another colleague looking for a spare desk for a day.

Most of the key players for this role were in similar offices on the same floor. There was also some open-plan desks were other members of the team would sit.

We would have many ad-hoc discussions in one of the offices around the whiteboard, but we were also able to shut the door and get on with activities that required individual focussed attention.

An Assortment of Meeting Rooms

Having worked in many countries and on many sites I’ve seen an assortment of meeting rooms.

The most memorable meeting room is one that was decorated as a Greek tavern, including a large rustic wooden table, which was in Stockholm and was where I was working on the 11th September 2001. Most meeting rooms have been much less memorable; places where little thought has gone into the usage of the space other than for traditional sit around at a table with a set of meeting papers type meeting. There are few meetings like this anymore. Most meeting rooms don’t even acknowledge the now ubiquitous video project as the main focus.

I have, however, had some fabulous invigorating meetings in environments that contributed to the experience.

Back to Today

I’m currently back working in an open-plan office with low-level dividers and L-shaped desks bolted together in rows. This is a choice; I could be working from home but decided not to. There are a number of reasons for this but I’m not going to go into that now.

The walls are grey as is the carpet and the desks.

Light has always been important to me and in most of the places where I’ve worked I’ve tried to get a seat near a window. My current desk is right next to a window unfortunately it’s behind me but that’s better than most.

It’s my suspicion that most of us are working in environments that hinder our productivity, creativity and collaboration and not enhance them. My experience suggests to me that a better working environment can be created and it doesn’t necessarily need to be expensive, but it does need thought.

"Bring your own Everything" by Steve Richards

Steve Richards has recently been writing about Knowledge Workers desire to Bring Your Own Everything:

Today the popular enterprise solution for Knowledge Workers is to allow them to ‘bring your own device’ maybe ‘bring your own apps’ even ‘bring your own technology’ but for me the genie us out of the bottle.  Knowledge workers and the high performance teams they work in want to ‘bring their own everything’ and just plug into the enterprise for only essential services.

from Bring Your Own Everything by Steve Richards

Steve then goes on to list a set of things that Knowledge Workers expect to bring with them, and it’s quite a list:

  1. place of work
  2. professional network
  3. personal knowledge management resources
  4. processes
  5. tools (including but not exclusively technology)
  6. and maybe even bring their own team

On the point of “and maybe even bring their own team” my personal view is that the current hierarchical organisational constructs of enterprises and large employers is already under significant pressure and will end as we know it.

The need for industrialised organisations is rapidly going away in many spheres of work.

The new organisation constructs will be much more network like and far less hierarchical. This shift to the network will make the idea of “bring your own team” a reality for many, actually I think the result will be more like “bring your own organisation”.

Factors of the Productive Workplace – Introduction

Prior to the Christmas and New Year 2013 break I spent some time considering the reasons that Bring Your Own is transforming the equipment that we use to do our work, particularly in the knowledge-worker** environment.

The primary drivers are a desire by people to be more productive, creative and collaborative. There are, of course, many factors that influence these things beyond just the tools being used. The major factor, I suspect, is the place itself.

I have overheard many statements that go something like this:

All I need to be productive is my MacBook and a Starbucks.

and

I’m much more productive at home.

I don’t think I have ever heard someone say:

I am most productive at my desk in the open-plan office.

I have heard:

I spend a couple of hours working at home to get something useful done; then I come into the office.

Why is that? Why do organisations persist with offices at all; if these statements are true?

Why are some organisations clamping down on home working if that’s where people are productive?

Why are so many people sat in open-plan offices with their headphones in (like I am now)?

What makes an organisation create a workplace like this:

Or like this?

Or like this?

Is this really a great place to work?

Why did we move away from offices like this?

How did we end up with offices like this?

Or like this?

What makes someone create a personal home workspace like this?

Or this?

There are hundreds more here.

If humour is best when it’s based in reality why is the cubicle such a rich source of comedy for Dilbert?

In short: What are the factors that go into creating a productive, creative and collaborative workplace? And how large an influence is the place itself?

I don’t know the answer to those questions at the moment, I haven’t done enough research, but I have some ideas.

This is just an introduction after all.

** I’m looking for a new term to replace knowledge-worker because I don’t think it really describes the new types of work and the skills required.

In the Office before Christmas

There is a time before all major holidays when the office starts to take on a different character. The primary reason for coming in to the office is to interact with people, but what is there is no one to interact with, what’s the impact on productivity?

In many workplaces this different characteristic takes on an even more significant shift at the end of the year when people are looking to use up the remainder of their holiday allowance.

This is a slightly humorous fictional view of what I’ve seen occur on numerous occasions, and has a little bit of relevance to the reality I’m currently sitting in:

The Office Before Christmas

BYOD and the Cultural Shift to Networks

This post is really a conclusion of my posts on BYOD, there are two reasons for this. The first is that the link to BYOD is becoming increasingly tenuous. I’m not really writing about BYOD, the real subject is the future of work and the workplace. The second reason is bound to the first one; I’m not really that interested in BYOD as a subject, I’m much more interested in the massive shift in culture that is happening across numerous industries.

The clouds breakThe presentation below by Fred Wilson, Managing Partner of Union Square Ventures at LeWeb 2013. In it he highlights the shift from an investor perspective:

When we look at the future, things that we say to ourselves again, and gain, and again, are; networks not hierarchy, everything is going to be unbundled and you are a node on the network.

I’ve been pondering for a while the question of whether the cultural shift is being driven by technology, or whether technology is being developed to meet perceived cultural needs.

Fred’s view, expressed in the presentation, is that it’s the technology that is driving the change, by significantly lowering the transaction costs. I’m not going to disagree with him, I don’t think I have enough insight. If it is the technology that is driving the shift then we’ve still got a long way to go.

BYOD is one small representation of the cultural shift, and probably not the most significant manifestation.

H/T to Phil Windley

BYOD and the Data Strategy

A quick recap of where we’ve got to in this discussion on BYOD over recent weeks.

The Forbidden CornerI started this discussion because I was interested in the statistics that supported BYOD and it’s impact on productivity. My conclusion was that people instinctively felt that there was a productivity benefit and surveys support it, but there is little hard evidence, and lots of repeated evidence. The primarily benefit stated for BYOD through enabling mobility within the workforce. I received some feedback from people suggesting that the productivity benefit from mobility was only part of the story and that the value was far broader. While reading articles in this area I also came across a number of people focussing on the risks of BYOD many of them from security and virtualisation software vendors.

To bring my thoughts together I created a Concept Map showing what I’d collected to date.

The concept map got me thinking about some of the challenges particularly in the area of personal knowledge management in a BYOD world.

One of the ways that people cover off the risk element is to utilise a Choose Your Own Device (CYOD) approach, actually Forrester made some statements about BYOD being killed off because of this approach. I’m sceptical of the CYOD approach.

My own view is more aligned to that stated by Gartner that BYOD is really an application strategy.

To have a workable applications strategy you also need to have a data strategy and that’s the thought behind this post.

In an interview with the BCS in 2006 Tim Berners-Lee said this:

Customers need to be given control of their own data – not being tied into a certain manufacturer so that when there are problems they are always obliged to go back to them. IT professionals have a responsibility to understand the use of standards and the importance of making Web applications that work with any kind of device.

They need to take the view that data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.

Tim Berners-Lee

This challenge was written to IT professionals like myself, and it’s a challenge that we often get disconnected from. We get so wrapped up in storage, compute, networks, operating system, utilities, security, devices and applications that we forget that it’s the data where the value is.

As we create more and more data from an exploding pool of sources we have the ability to derive increasing value from that data. Applications help us to mine and to visualise the data, but it’s the data that is precious. In simple terms, it’s not Excel that gives the value to the spreadsheet, it’s the insights that the data gives.

The opportunity and the challenge of a BYOD world is to think about all of the new ways of using data and to build a rich strategy and a set of operating processes that gain the best value.

The traditional approach for organisations has been to build a network castle and to make sure that all of the data stays inside that castle. In a world where there is massively more data of better value outside the castle walls that approach no longer makes sense.

Data being worked outside an organisation’s control is not always a bad thing, likewise data being worked inside an organisation is not always a good thing. Often the best thing that you can do is to work the data completely in the open and participate in the community.

Organisations and individuals need to think through their approach to data in this new context. Here are some areas where a shift in thinking is required:

Ownership

Modern intellectual property law is vast and complex including patents, copyright, authors’ rights, trademarks and even database rights.

Join any organisation and you’ll be asked to sign a contract that makes a claim over the material that you create. Post pictures to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Flickr and each one will make a claim about the ownership of the data posted in their terms of use. When Instagram changed their terms of use in 2012 there was an outcry and the changes were soon reversed. Many people feel the need to put a caveat on their Twitter profile to assert that the views expressed are their own.

Alongside these systems other open systems have been created, such as creative commons, for those wanting to take a more collaborative approach.

Organisations and individuals need to think through their strategy for data ownership. If an individual can create personal data and organisation data how do you measure which is which. It’s no longer adequate to define the ownership of data by the location where it was created or the time of day when it was updated. What data should be placed into the public arena with open ownership? What data should be retained inside a personal or organisational boundary? Relinquishing controlling ownership of data and letting it be used by others may be more valuable than placing it behind a locked door.

Protection

Once you’ve worked out the strategy for data ownership organisations and individuals need to think about how they are going to protect it. What is an appropriate level of protection? What data are others going to be able to modify? What about organisation data on a personal device, what is the appropriate level of protection? The most appropriate answer to this may be to put no protection in place.

Integration

How is the data going to be integrated with other data? Value is often derived from joining pieces of information together but that’s only possible if the ownership and protection of the data allows it.

There’s going to be some interesting opportunities and challenges working across the personal and organisation boundaries.

My friend Stu Downes has recently written about Personal Digital Assistants and the challenge that they are going to create.

Availability

How does an organisation or individual ensure that the data will always be available?

If you store your diary in a free cloud service what guarantees have you got that it’s still going to be available in 6 months time, but more importantly, how can you get your data out and put it somewhere else?

If someone squirrels the organisation data away into a privately owned file store how can the organisation ensure that it has access to it in the future should it be needed?

Integrity

As you see the value of sharing data in the public arena and let others contribute to it, how do you ensure data integrity? Take Wikipedia as an example, for the most part working in the public arena has resulted in a highly valuable asset, but the small number of errors creates a huge integrity problem. If you publish an organisation’s information into the public arena how can someone consuming it be confident in its integrity?

Integrity has been a problem for file stores for a very long time. How do you know that the file in use is the current file? If someone is working on a BYOD device how can you ensure that they’ve got access to the current file and hence the current data?

Another integrity challenge is the reference-ability of data. What is the real source of the data? Does the source have integrity?

Retention and Legal Hold

How does an organisation ensure that it has retained the right amount of data for legal purposes? How do you even define what needs to be retained and build a defensible system of control?

How do you place data that’s on a personal device under legal hold? How do you place files in a personal cloud file store under legal hold?

Life-cycle

There are a number of life-cycle challenges to data. How does someone know that the data being used is the current data? If data has been superseded by other data how does someone know, especially if it’s being integrated into other data?

Does the ownership of data change as it goes through its life? Can it transition from being personal data to being organisation data? Can it transition from being protected within the organisation to being placed in the public arena?

Lots of questions that people are wrestling with every day, or openly ignoring. I suspect that there are more on the ignoring side than on the wrestling side though.

Johnny Cash's To-Do List

I have a love-hate relationship with to-do lists. I know that when I’m working the list I’m more efficient, but it also feels too restrictive a bit like working on a treadmill.

My current practice is to use a hybrid productivity schedule which includes a to-do list which I’m planning to write about at a later date when I’ve worked it for more than a couple of weeks. So far it’s working quite well.

While thinking about it though I came across a to-do list that apparently belongs to Johnny Cash which I quite like:

Via Fast Company & Lists of Note

 

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) v Choose Your Own Device (CYOD)

IDC’s top prediction for 2014 in Asia-Pacific is this (according to ZDNet):

“Death” of BYOD, birth of CYOD

So what’s the difference between bringing and choosing? Whether I purchase my iPhone or Samsung Galaxy S4, or my employer does, what’s the difference?

Wintry Walk on Fare Snape Fell

This is what IDC are reported to have said in ZDNet:*

“I hate to be the bearer of bad news but one thing is that BYOD doesn’t have a great [return on investment] ROI, there isn’t one,” said Charles Anderson, head of telecoms and mobility for IDC Asia-Pacific. He was speaking as a panelist at the research agency’s event, which highlighted CYOD as one of 10 key trends for next year.

Anderson pointed out there were also costs associated with supporting users, devices, security when accomodating BYOD. Beyond mobilizing a person, there was little value in that, he added. “These people are going to bring their devices into the enterprise and what are they going to do with them? You give them access to e-mail, but they’re already at work, so they probably have access to e-mail already.”

And:

“What CYOD is really about, it’s IT regaining some of that control and securing applications, and delivering tangible business benefits,” explained Anderson.

Those are certainly interesting views, ones which I’ve heard a number of times, but I think that they miss the point of BYOD.

The difference between BYOD and CYOD is not just about sourcing. The point of a CYOD approach is that it’s really a return to the managed environment. It’s a choice between managed Android, managed iOS, managed Windows and/or managed OSX. In some cases it might even include a managed Linux. But, as the report on the IDC event points out it’s about “IT regaining control and securing applications”.

In the BYOD Concept Map that I put together I included CYOD as a leg off the “creates concerns about” side. Security and business impact are a concern and so you create an envelope that reduces that concern, an envelope of management, an envelope of restriction and control. But you are under pressure to give some choice, so you let people choose from a limited subset of devices and operating systems.

I can fully understand why businesses want to do that. You want people to focus on work and hence you want to control the set of applications that they have access to because you don’t want the situation where (as it says in the ZDNet report) “people were basically watching YouTube videos all day long”. Likewise, you want to secure your data, so you want to limit the places where it can go. We’ve tried these approaches before to combat these very same problems, and they don’t really work, they give the vernier of working.

Beyond my view that these types of control don’t really work I also think that the CYOD approach misses some significant concepts of BYOD:

The first concept that I think that CYOD overlooks is where the value of BYOD is coming from. There is huge value in making people more mobile which both CYOD and BYOD enable; beyond that, and probably more significantly, the value of BYOD comes from the innovation and productivity advantage of choice itself. It’s not primarily the choice of device that drives that value; it’s the choice of applications. You’re not going to see that value expressed on any device TCO calculation, or even in an ROI calculation for the capability, but that’s where the value is coming from.

The second concept that I think that CYOD is overlooking is that of the changing culture. All of the millennial digital natives out there are going to begrudgingly choose their device and also utilise their own personal device. They’ll use whichever device they need to in order to get the job done, but their first choice will be their personal device over which they have full choice. The company provided CYOD device with limited choice will only be used when it needs to be.

Some people will be happy with a CYOD approach, it may well be the best choice for the current majority workforce, but it’s an interim half-way house much like private cloud is a transitional approach.

Now, I do have to acknowledge that I’m speaking from a Western European perspective with significant insight into the North America market, so perhaps things are radically different in Asia-Pacific where this prediction was specifically aimed.

Rather than the “death” of BYOD it’s my view that we’ve barely seen the start of a dramatic shift in the ways that we work and even what we call work.

Hat-tip to Matt for highlighting this report to me.

* I’d normally try to read the original source report, in this case from IDC, but I’ve not been able to find it, even though I have access to IDC reports.

BYOD and Personal Knowledge Management

Not so long ago people would go to work at a set time and work exclusively on equipment and applications provided by the employer. At the end of the day they would go home and do whatever they wanted to do using their stuff. But now the line between work and life is now a complete jumble for many.

Wintry Walk on Fare Snape Fell(I am going to refer to work-and-life in this post as if they are two distinct things as a way of contrasting the challenge, but that whole concept is also going through significant disruption which I may cover at a later date)

Personal knowledge management used to be similarly straightforward with work stuff in one place, life stuff in another place. Take diaries as an example, I used to run a home diary and a work diary. If truth be known, Sue used to run my home diary and I would focus all of my energy on the work diary. This situation was only complicated when either the work requirements or the life requirements would break into one of the other’s area. School plays during the day would require a special entry in my work diary to make sure I was there. Likewise overnight business trips would need a special entry in the life diary.

This situation was never ideal, but worked quite well with few issues. One of the huge advantages of this situation was the people at my employer could see my availability and schedule meetings with me because my availability was visible to all.

In a BYOD world it would be, just about, acceptable to make both my diaries available on all my devices, but that’s not really resolving the challenge or addressing the changing culture. Running multiple diaries has never been ideal and leads to all sorts of issues when things clash.

The real requirement is for me to see a single diary, I don’t mind whether it’s made up of a number of diaries, but I need to see it as one. That diary needs to be embedded into my mobile experience so that I can use all of the functions of my mobile device. Portions of my availability need to be visible to different interested groups. I need to be able to set parameters on my availability for those groups because I don’t want a completely blended lifestyle where I’m available to everyone 24 by 7. I want event information from one group (project team) to be available to another group (family) so that sensible decisions can be made. In other words I want a completely blended diary experience which has been personalised to my requirements and way of working.

I could just opt out and run a single personal diary with no visibility to others but that would not be very helpful to people who want to schedule time with me. I used to have a boss who did that and it was impossible to schedule anything with him, particularly as the only diary that he regarded as truth was the paper one in his hands at all times.

Another alternative is to run two diaries and to copy everything from one to another. The natural choice for doing this would be to make the life diary the master and to copy everything from the work diary into it, but that just leads to another challenge, what to do about data privacy. Would my employer really want my family to have access to a report with sensitive financial information in it? A diary entry isn’t just about the scheduling information; it’s also about all of the associated content.

My purpose in this discussion is to use diary information as an example of the complications of running any form of personal knowledge management system in a world where work technology and life technology are the same, and where the separation between them is a complete jumble. The same challenges apply to to-do lists, note taking, reading lists, document stores, and all manner of personal knowledge management techniques.

These challenges are multiplied when we want others to collaborate with us in our personal knowledge management system.

We are going to see many ways of resolving these challenges that break the current paradigms and move us to a far more personal way of working. Doodle is an example of a different way of thinking about team scheduling that works across personal diaries. There are many people thinking about the to-do list and note taking most of which are being delivered as cloud services built to interact with personal applications. This continued shift to personal is going to significantly change the way that individuals and teams interact, collaborate and do work. As always the technology shift is the smaller part of a much larger cultural shift.

As a person I’m the one who is enabled and approved for access to all sorts of data. In the future I am expecting to be able to have a personal life assistant which is going to need access to all of my sources of data to enact upon them, but that’s another challenge requiring another paradigm shift.

BYOD Concept Map (Version 1)

Continuing the theme of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) I wanted to capture some of the thinking that was going on in my head.

One of the ways I use to bring my thoughts together are Concept Maps.

Here’s the one I produced for BYOD:

Bring Your Own Device Concept MapThese maps are useful because the highlight, challenge or re-enforce things. Here are some things I observed:

  • It re-enforced my view that it’s not really about the device hardware, or even the operating system. As such BYOD is not the correct name, but I’ll stick with it for now because that’s what others are using and it wouldn’t be the first thing that’s misnamed.
  • It highlighted the dangers of restrictive controls and their impact on the overall benefits of BYOD. If the real value is derived from personal choice and, in particular, application choice then restrictive controls that remove these freedoms crush the overall value.
  • It challenged my lack of thinking about the broader changing cultural. Are the millennial changing the way they work because technology is enabling it, or would that change be happening anyway? What is the best way of approaching different generations that work in different ways?
  • It also challenged my lack of thinking about the increased creativity and increased collaboration aspects.
  • It re-enforced my view that the high focus on operating system security is misplaced and we should really be focussing on applications and data, particularly the security of data when stored in data stores embedded in applications. What do you do when someone leaves an organisation? Is it no longer realistic to expect that they will remove all of the data that they have access to from their personal applications?

As with all Concept Maps it’s limited in scope and complexity to help in understanding, hence it’s a work-in-progress, but I’m calling it Version 1 because it’s good enough for now. Some of these things are likely to change as I think about them. I’m happy to be challenged on any of the elements within the map if you think it can be improved.

If you prefer a PDF of the map it’s here: Bring Your Own Device Concept Map.