Adventures in home working

A few weeks ago I had the good fortune to come across a recorded talk by Thomas Malone on the future of work.  Tom is a great speaker and conveys his key messages very clearly, and the implications of the message is definitely important for anyone working on personal knowledge management or collaboration.  To see why it’s worth reading Tom’s summary:

I think we’re in the early stages of an increase of human freedom in business that may, in the long run, be as important a change for business as the change to democracies has been for governments.

The reason I think that’s happening is because for the first time in human history it’s now possible to have the economic benefits of very large organizations — like economies of scale — and at the same time have the human benefits of very small organizations — things like freedom, flexibility, innovation and creativity. And the reason that’s possible is because a new generation of information technologies — like the Internet, the World Wide Web, e-mail and business intelligence — is now making it possible for huge numbers of people, even in very large organizations, to have enough information to make sensible decisions for themselves instead of just following orders from someone above them in the hierarchy.

There are some powerful messages here, especially for knowledge workers, for example a few of the implications that spring to mind are:

• an individuals personal knowledge management and collaboration solution will become increasingly important
• individuals and small groups will become more self sufficient units
• these units dynamically form relationships with other individuals and teams and collaborate to get things done
• This will result in a significant reduction in the need for stable, traditional command and control hierarchies.

There are some good additional resources available to dig deeper into his ideas:

• An interview with Gartner
• A paper – What do we really want? A manifesto for the organizations of the 21st Century
• A paper – Making the Decision to Decentralize
• A book – The future of work

A couple of days ago I wrote a post that discussed the importance of considering blogs and Wikis as a complementary pair technologies.  Today I came across this great description of a blog on Rod Boothby’s blog:

a blog is an entire CMS implementation for one person, available free and at the click of a mouse, with virtually no set-up but infinite possibilities for customization and configuration.

Sounds pretty impressive put like that,  I just wanted to add though that a blog is only part of most peoples Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system, ie the part of the PKM that handles personal publishing.  Rod goes on to provide a great post that describes the challenges and opportunities associated with enterprise blogging.

Larry takes issue with the fact that people always talk about “Blogs and Wikis” at the same time when in fact they are are very different.  To further the point Larry quotes Tim Bray who said in this post  “I don’t think blogs are really a new thing in the world; but wikis are”.   Whilst I don’t have a problem at all with almost all of Larry’s post which is a useful discussion on Wikis I do think it makes sense to talk about them together.

I have already written about my conceptual hierarchy of IT needs,  at layers 1 and 2 people are seeking reliable access to IT, then seeking to maximise their productivity.  The next two layers are where Blogs and Wikis come in,  layer 3 in my model suggests that people seek first to control their personal voice ie the way that their total contribution to the world is viewed.  This is pretty important in a work context as the way their contribution is viewed affects pretty much everything in their work experience including their pay check.  My contention is that Blogs are a great way for an individual to control their personal voice.  Layer 4 in my hierarchy is Team Success and of course this is where Wikis come in as Wikis are one of the best technologies to support collaborative working and that’s a big part of team success. 

In my previous posts on this subject I make the point that it’s important to address the layers in order,  my point being that if you try to implement a system that meets a persons need to contribute to Team Success,  but don’t have a solution for ensuring that their personal voice can be heard then you will be in trouble.  So if I’m right that’s why it’s important to talk about Blogs and Wikis and that’s why it’s important to do it in that order.

The Lotus Notes/Domino Hints ad Tips blog is excellent, I am a firm believer in the integrated user experience and this blog is already helping me to use Notes more effectively.  Integrated attachment editing is a feature I already new about, but it illustrates my previous post about user experience very nicely.

Prior to Notes 6 you could store documents in a Notes database by attaching them to a Notes document. If you wanted to edit the document, it went like this:

• Right click
• Select Open the document
• Edit
• Save document somewhere, for example “my documents”
• Switch back to Notes
• Delete old version of attachment
• Click attach
• Navigate to “my documents” or to file if my documents is already selected
• Attach file
• Switch to “my documents”
• Delete the file

As a result unless I had to I never stored documents in Notes, in Notes 6 and above you now:

• Right click
• Select Edit the document
• Edit
• Save the document

A really major improvement,  well done Lotus.  Only thing is whilst I really like this feature and the fact that I can keep a replica of my documents on the server and all of my PC’s,  I still don’t use document databases much because the doc links between them only work if I create them on the server copy of the replica,  since I always work in the local replica this breaks the user experience for me.

I wish there were more Lotus/IBM blogs like this though and I wish there were more comments on this one!

Dave Pollard’s blog is consistently excellent,  in this post he talks about the fact that people are often “Too Busy Being Unproductive to Learn to Be Productive”.  Just read this snip:

… most people don’t learn to use these aids unless they either stumble on them themselves, or they are shown by someone how to use them (and write them down so they’ll remember how later). And most of the time we’re just too busy being unproductive to do either. If you’re skeptical, spend a half hour observing a co-worker at his/her PC and you’ll be astonished: It’s like watching someone being tortured — awkward workarounds, unnecessary steps, time wasted searching in the wrong places the wrong way. The cost to every enterprise, and our economy as a whole, must be gargantuan.

The following graphic is a summary of Dave’s suggested approach,  there’s much more detail on his blog:

This comprehensive approach is not available to me right now,  although I can definitely see the benefits.  My start point has been to try and share simple processes that I follow for comment, for example my blog cycle, but if I were to look to create compelling user experiences for my corporate customers then Dave’s approach seems to fit the bill. 

I am becoming increasingly convinced that we need to share our working practices with each other,  so we can develop more effective “end to end” life-cycles.  Too often we think in terms of particular products but it’s rare that a single product supports a whole process.  I have some posts already on my blog on this topic,  but here is another attempt to describe my blog cycle:

• Throughout the day new posts arrive in Newsgator along with enclosures for a few of my favourite Podcasts
• At the end of the day,  I scan through an Outlook Search Folder which aggregates all of the unread posts from every folder into a single list which I scan through
• Some of the small posts I read in place,  but the non trivial ones I click on and open up as tabs in Maxthon.  Because I have multiple screens these tabs open up without disrupting my scanning.  As they open I glance at the tab to check that I have opened the article I want and not just a post that links to it.  I also open up any additional links that look interesting
• I also have a search folder that aggregates all posts with attachments, which are either podcasts or videos. I save Podcast to my Treo and videos to my Tablet
• When I finished scanning I save all the tabs in a Maxthon group “To Read” this gets replicated over to my Tablet.  In the morning I open the group on my Tablet and by the time I have my shoes on all of the tabs have downloaded (usually about 30) along with all the latest comments (I really like comments)
• Pretty much every morning I go for a walk on the beach for and hour or so and listen to the podcasts from the day before
• Mid walk I crash at a cafe and get out my Tablet,  I read each tab and at the end I either:

As you probably noticed,  this post was also an excuse for playing around with Powerpoint 2007!

During the last couple of months I have been discussing some of the business implications of Web 2.0 with Doug Neal,  you can read the result in this document - Management Messages on Web 2.0 – What you need to know about the next generation of the Internet.  The discussion got me thinking about the characteristics of web 2.0 and how they might apply to the enterprise.  Rather than create my own definition of web 2.0 I used this great visual from Dion Hinchcliffes’s blog on the SOA and WebServices Journal site as a start point.

Drawing my own version (not as nice) I then over-layed it (in yellow) with the areas that are addressed by Microsoft’s Office 12 (now Office 2007) and Exchange 2003/2007.  I have a rough and ready PowerPoint presentation on the same topic as this post,  which you can use if you email me for permission first.  You can download it here:

File Attachment: Microsoft and Web 2.ppt (287 KB)

You can see that Office 2007 gets pretty good coverage,  although I have taken the liberty of redefining/substituting Ruby of Rails, BitTorrent and Skype with other web 2.0 essentials VOIP, RSS and XML, to increase the relevance. 

I have explained my rationale in point by point fashion below, and although I have stretched the point in a few cases for effect,  in the end I concluded that Microsoft have done a pretty good job, although their success will throw up significant challenges to many enterprises that are not ready for Web 2.0 thinking, but more on that in another post. 

Because of NDA restrictions I am not able to talk about every feature,  the following is a sample drawn from previously published Microsoft documents, reviews, PDC sessions and videos.

Blogs:  Office SharePoint 2007 includes a blog template

Wikis: Office SharePoint 2007 includes a wiki template

Podcasting: Office SharePoint 2007 allows you to create document libraries, which can contain media files, and then publish them via RSS feeds with enclosures

Filtering: Office SharePoint 2007 allows you to create custom views with filters, these views can can be saved.  Any SharePoint list and in SharePoint everything is a list can be further filtered, sorted, joined etc with other data using Access 2007 and Excel 2007

Sharing & collaboration: this is a core capability of Office 2007 system

Social book-marking: one of the weaker areas of SharePoint,  you can create lists of links and share them but without the elegance and power of Internet social book marking systems

Rich Internet Applications: SharePoint itself is a fairly rich Internet application,  but more interestingly Outlook, Excel, Access, InfoPath and Project are all rich web services clients that allow you to publish via web services protocols and more importantly work on-line and off-line with server side data, but using the power of the rich clients.

Ajax: SharePoint is not a very sophisticated Ajax application, but Outlook Web Access connected to Exchange 2003 is one of the best examples of a great Ajax application, and was in fact the first true Ajax app.

Secure Sharing Extensions: invented by Microsoft for synchronising list data between systems,  I don’t think its used by Office 2007 right now,  but you can bet that it won’t be long.  However Groove, Outlook, Access and Excel are all able to synchronise replicas of SharePoint lists for use off-line.

RSS: SharePoint is a first class RSS engine, allowing you to subscribe to changes in any SharePoint list, and everything in SharePoint 2007 is a list,  the subscriptions can include enclosures.  If you subscribe to changes the feed body will include information on which list fields changed and the delta change.  If you don’t list RSS then you can also subscribe to email notifications, and these can have sophisticated criteria.

XML: XML data is everywhere in Office 2007,  my particular favourite is the ability to extract from XML word documents properties that are automatically promoted into list meta-data when a document is uploaded into a SharePoint document library.  If you change the document, or change the list meta-data both are automatically kept in sync.  You can then perform all manner of actions based on the list meta-data including searching, sorting, filtering, analysis or graphing in Access or Excel etc

VOIP:  Office Communicator 2007 is an excellent VOIP client, with Active Directory integration, presence support and the ability to integrate into PBX systems, audio conferencing systems and web conferencing systems.

Unintentional uses:  Take data in Access or Excel and publish it to SharePoint,  take SharePoint lists, many of them if you want, link to them in Access and Excel and then join them with data from other systems, visualise them, run reports on them etc. 

User contributions: SharePoint makes it very easy for users to contribute data (from Excel or Access) forms (from InfoPath), Emails (from Exchange) Documents (from Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote) Calendars, contacts and tasks (from Outlook) and discussions.

Effortless scalability: Effortless might be stretching it a bit,  but SharePoint 2007 and Exchange 2007 are definitely more scalable than previous versions and seem to be able to meet the needs of most enterprises

Radical decentralisation: SharePoint, Excel Server, InfoPath server definitely push a lot of capability out of the enterprise core and closer to the end-user,  but the real radical decentralisation comes from allowing people to take that SharePoint data into Groove, Excel, Access and Outlook.  Groove even lets you take data from SharePoint and then replicate it to peers in other companies.

Self Service: SharePoint is built on a delegated, self service model

Software as a service: Many enterprises will access SharePoint and Project Server in this way either through an ISP, and OutSourcer or an internal shared services model

Right to remix: The ability to create process portals that integrate web parts, or to aggregate data from multiple SharePoint lists, or SharePoint’s meta-data aware full text search application are all examples of re-mixing.  Also the ability to do application to application RSS subscriptions, however the ultimate in remix power is provided by Excel and Access as described previously.

Participation: RSS and Email subscriptions, discussion databases, off-line and on-line support, web access, rich client access and search are all of these are great examples of technologies that will increase participation.

Mash-ups: At the risk of repeating myself image that you can automatically extract data from Excel and Word, promote it into list meta-data, aggregate that meta-data, subscribe to the result in RSS, or download it and integrate it with other list data, local data or enterprise data in Excel and Access.  The mash-up possibilities are endless,  of course the potential for end-users creating massive support issues must not be forgotten (unintentional uses!!)

Beta: whilst the Office platform itself may not be beta, all of these end-user innovations definitely will be!

User control: users have a terrifying degree of control,  not only can they have personal web sites, personal portal customisations etc they can also extract or take replicas of on-line data and do what they want with it.  All subject to security access controls.

RSS, SOAP, REST:  All of the interactions between Outlook, Access, Project, Excel, InfoPath and SharePoint/Project Server take place using published web services.

Small pieces: PowerPoint slides can now be built up by picking and mixing slides from slide libraries,  XML documents can now publish document properties into SharePoint lists, every thing in SharePoint is built from lists, all examples of small flexible pieces that can be combined into greater wholes

Hard to re-create data:  SharePoint can store links to enterprise data,  for example SQL server data.  These links can be maintained in one place and accessed easily in client applications.  Active Directory data and other line of business data can be indexed by SharePoint search.  Spreadsheets can be published from Excel Server just using Ajax web clients, without the use of Active X controls.  Project data can be accessed using Project Web Access, again without using Active X controls.

Copyrighted & IP Content:  SharePoint document libraries can be protected using rights management policies.  Users with permission can download the documents, but depending on the policy they can be prevented from sharing them, printing them etc.  In addition documents can be set to expire after a certain time.  This is great for controlling leakage of information, but also enforcing copyright and increasing information integrity.

This post is intended to assess whether Microsoft “get web 2.0” in the enterprise, my conclusion is that they do.  It is not meant to address whether Office System 2007 is a great product or not, or to imply that other companies can not do the same or better,  the post is long enough as it is!  If you want to read more of my posts on Office 12,  you can find them here.

WinOE or “workflow for windows”, is probably the must important capability for business announced so far for the longhorn wave:

The Windows orchestration (WinOE) code, built from the ground up by Microsoft’s BizTalk team, is a set of high level XML schemas, .NET classes, application programming interfaces (APIs) and workflow components that will allow Visual Studio 2005 developers create business processes and human-to-human workflow processes.

Microsoft will also have an add-on service available for the Longhorn client and server version of Windows in 2006 and 2007 and will make its fleet of applications including Office 12 and the next Sharepoint Portal Server “WinOE-aware,” several sources said.

Although the book is good,  these templates provide a really easy way to remind yourself of the principles on a day to day basis.  There are a number of alternatives templates for GTD and for Steven Covey’s methods as well.

I am desperately waiting to me able to blog at work!  I find it very frustratng that most of the technical blogs posts I want to post I am unable to, because they can only be released under NDA and even more frustrating that other people at work can not work with me in the collaborative, community building fashion that blogs enable.  We use Notes at work for email, document sharing, discussions etc and are deploying WebSphere as our collaboration portal, so the news that WorkPlace will include blog support is encouraging.  It seems very primitive at this stage, but its a start.