My research interests
A colleague of mine recently asked me what my IT research interests are. It got me thinking; I am interested in lots of things, but only a few that I am prepared to put serious time and effort into. Here they are:
- Personal Knowledge Management
- Team communication, collaboration and co-ordination, especially ad-hoc inter-business scenarios, but also more formal team, project and programme collaboration
- Mobile working
- Home working
- Workplace design and workstation ergonomics
- Office tools and associated office systems, especially the transition to XML enabled office tools interacting with collaboration services and client/server XML aware databases for unstructured and semi-structured data
- Client technologies, and platforms, especially as they relate to the above
- Information lifecycle management
- Personal productivity, especially as it relates to the above
- Best practices and processes associated with the above
- Client application development and delivery technologies and associated user interface approaches
- Digital rights management and evolving trust and assertion based security models
- Consumerization of technology and the impact of consumer provisioning experience on enterprise service provisioning
- Enterprise infrastructures and especially how these need to evolve due to extended enterprise and flexible enterprise pressures as well as some of the above
- Enterprise infrastructure programme management and programme design
- User satisfaction criteria as distinct from budget holder satisfaction criteria
- The totality of the end user experience, rather than vertical optimisation of individual processes
- DCO, TCO and TVO modelling and business case development, especially as it relates to the above
Eighteen research topics is an impressive record by anybody’s standard. However, “research” in my terminology (and I am not asking anybody to align his with mine) implies focusing on one or more topics and going in depth. There is a difference between “research interests” and “interesting topics to research”. I understand the temptation not to let anything go unnoticed; so many ‘juicy’ topics!
Where our analysis differs on this is in that the areas of interest I have are all related. The type of research I do is focussed on how changes in one area affect the others. So if you define research as spotting trends, influences and disruptive changes to established solutions then these related 18 areas do not seem so “impressive” a list. Of course I rely on many other sources for detailed research into particular areas.
You are right though; if anyone offered me the opportunity to study any of these areas in detail, then they could also be classified as “interesting topics to research”. Every so often projects present themselves that provide that opportunity.
In second examination of the ‘list of 18’ I concur that the actual topic s are fewer; there are multiple aspects of each on the list.
Alas! Programmes that allow one the luxury of experimental application of novel ideas are few and far between. So far between that by the time my next one appears on the horizon I will be retired 🙁
Of the topics you listed, Information (Lifecycle) Management is the most intractable, IMHO. The challenge of ‘legacy’ data is mountainous. I blogged about data cleansing on Diktyoma yesterday. Contamination of information stores and sources is what makes Folklore different from History.
Pleased that I convinced you, I agree that ILM is one of the biggest challenges. In fact one of the biggest problems is to try and get most people to see beyond technical Data Life Cycle Management “solutions”, that do nothing but hide the problem for a year or so.
I read your article (http://diktyoma.blogspot.com/2004/10/data-cleansing.html) wow, people accuse me of writing documents that are too complicated, you invent a whole new reality to make your point!
On the issue of DLM rather than ILM I am sure that this will appeal to you!
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/bonwick/20040925#128_bit_storage_are_you