Steve's Seaside Life

Tagged: Productivity

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Why I love working in the end-user and work-group computing field!

I have worked in this area for most of my working life and it continues to amaze me that it is still an area of IT that has the – untapped – potential to transform peoples lives.  Most of the customers I work with are struggling to deal with all the information they have to cope with in their work and home life (which are becoming more integrated).  They live high-bandwidth lifestyles!  Its with great interest therefore that I read the following results from the Information Work Productivity Council (IWPC) which is an independent group of companies and academics that have joined together to study the issue of information work productivity. The goal of the Council is to build a model that measures productivity in today’s information-centric business environment. 

They recently published the results of a survey into how the average user spends their time at work.  According to the study, the average user:

  • Spends 3 hours and 14 minutes a day using technologies to process work-related information—just over 40% of an 8-hour work day
  • Devotes 1.58 hours/day to e-mail (49% of the information processing time, and 20% of an 8 hour day
  • Spends 47 minutes, or 24% of IP time on telephone and voice mail
  • Receives …

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Tablet PC Podcast

James, author of the jkOnTheRun weblog, covering all thing mobile, emailed me yesterday to let me know about his new podcast on all things Tablet.  I have recently been getting into podcasts and listen to them when I am out walking or swimming.  This time though I listened to James at 5* speed in Windows Media Player at home while I followed the products and sites he mentioned in my browser.  All in all the combination of the 5* speed and the excellent content made for a very useful 10–15 minutes.  Podcasting has definately got a future!

Check out the podcast, James covers a wide range of topics, including: 

  • The under utilisation of speech recognition
  • Inking strategies and the effect of inking on the creative process
  • Alternative pen input applications including ritePen, OrangeGuava and a rumour of a Tablet enabled version of ActiveWords.

Here is a list of the main sites he mentioned, snipped from his blog.

Tablet PC Buzz– Spencer Goad, Rob Bushway
Tablet PC Talk– Chris de Herrera
What is New– Lora Heiny
Tablet PC Weblog– Marc Orchant
Tablet PC Questions– Layne Heiny (newsgroup)
Tablet PC Post– Lora & Layne; …

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Report writing – second edition

Imagine my surprise when the day after writing this post on my frustrations with the existing medium for writing and delivering reports, I see a very similar post on the subject of writing books and insightful comment.  Although in this case the frustration is not so much with the paper medium (which has worked and continues to work pretty well) but with the fact that we have not exploited the electronic medium.  The following extract talks to the lost opportunity, without which Joe does not believe eBooks will really take off:

The biggest barrier I see is this recognition that an e-book needs to be developed with the delivery platform in mind. Wouldn’t it be great if you could introduce the concept of a hyperlink to a printed book so that someone could just touch a phrase they don’t understand and they’re magically taken to a definition of that phrase or the first place it appears in the book? Instead, you have to flip back to the index, look it up, and then jump to that page. Oh, and while you’re doing that, you need to keep a thumb on your original page so that you don’t lose your …

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Maxthon gets RSS

MaxthonrssI am just blown away by Maxthon, far and away my favorite browser.  Even more impressive is the fact that its primarily developed by one person with a community of plug-in developers.  of course its developed upon the foundation of IE, which provides its core functions but the level of innovation is staggering.  It reinforces my belief that a few good programmers who understand their market are better than a team ten times the size.  If you want to read about productivity in programmers, read peopleware, but if you want the best browser get Maxthon and donate.  What promoted me to write today, RSS reader integration.  But there are loads of other great features I have written about in the past.

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Thinking

I am being bombarded by information and initiatives that relate to thinking from all directions.  I thought it would be interesting to list the main ones and try and identify the many different perspectives.

Structure and rigour.  It all started with David Pollard’s structured problem solving process, which although not a perfect fit for me was an interesting insight into how formal and rigorous the process could be.

Quick and intuitive.  Then I read reviews of books that discussed rapid decision making, I have not explored them further but they support my gut feeling that my intuition is a valuable skill that I should nurture.  I don’t have a very good memory for facts, but am good at remembering relationships. I have specifically avoided learning memory improvement techniques because I worry that whilst I will be better at remembering names my intuition and innovation will suffer.

Innovation.  I came across a blog entry on types of innovation, quickly followed by one of my colleagues sending me a presentation, which led to me exploring innovation processes, in particular TRIZ and some of the tools that support it. 

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Beagle – innovation in action

Its great tgo see that even in a application space dominated by the big boys MS, Google, yahoo etc there is room for innovation, check out Beagle on Linux http://nat.org/demos/, great UI, Command Line, API etc.  Of course being a die hard X1 user it won’t tempt me, especially now...

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Maxthon/MyEI2 Groups

I have mentioned the topic of groups a few times,  let me elaborate.  Maxthon (used to be called MyIE2) is a shell around IE.  You can open a whole load of web pages as tabs (no suprises there).  As I go through my RSS feeds I click away on links of interest and probably end up with 20-30 articles I want to read, I then Click GROUPS – SAVE AS GROUP, and it generates a file of links. 

I then either wait for a robocopy autosync to my tablet or click a shortcut and the group file gets copied to my Tablet within seconds.  I Open the group on the tablet (two clicks) and all the files are downloaded and ready to browse offline (one tab each). 

…

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Home office ideas

If you read my blog then you know I am pretty passionate about office design in general and have a category devoted to related issues.  So I was interested to see dave’s ideas for creating an office for writing, where in particular he describes the benefits of consolidating all of his computing needs onto a single device.  Bryan responds that he is struggling to cope with 3 computers. 

I found both interesting perspectives, especially since I have quite a number of computers, and largely find the experience quite rewarding.  Here is a snapshot of how I work.

I have a main machine, its powerful, and drives three 19″ monitors, and a great wireless keyboard and mouse.  When I sit at this workstation its optimised for writing, analysing and information gathering.  I have everything to hand and hopefully will soon be getting a optimised chair so I can work for more than half an hour without too much pain.  My main PC is a Windows 2003 Server which allows me to work without admin priv, and always have an admin RDP session open for when I need it.

I have a lab server because my main machine needs …

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Way too many portals

Its seems that everyone has a solution on the way for inter-enterprise collaboration.  Use their portal and only their portal or application!  The problem is that OpenText, Microsoft, IBM, Groove etc all want you to use their solutions, for example:

Workplace creates a unified front end for technologies facing suppliers, customers, and employees, according to Larry Bowden, vice president of the Workplace division at IBM. Each of those users has different roles, but they are tapping the same back-end information sources through Workplace, he added. ?Collaboration among peers within an organization is moving toward organizational productivity, which shifts toward [collaboration] between organizations,? he said.

Well that’s not my vision of collaboration!  I want something more along the lines of POP3, RSS and Trillian (a bit of a mix of standards and products I know but hopefully you get the idea).  All you enterprises out there can use whatever collaboration solution you want, but when I connect to you and integrate all your portals into my Personal Knowledge Management environment I want to aggregate you using bog standard protocols and the clients of my choice.  Of course these enterprise portal applications could be aggregated by portlets as well for people who don’t have the …

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Simply does it

Adam Bosworth has posted a nice talk on the importance of simplicity:

I gave a talk yesterday at the ICSOC04. It was essentially a reminder to a group of very smart people that their intelligence should be used to accomodate really simple user and programmer models, not to build really complex ones. Since I was preceded by Don Ferguson of IBM and followed the next day by Tim Berners-Lee, it seemed especially wise to stick to simple and basic ideas. Here is the talk

I could not agree more.  One of my observations is that simple protocols used to access well defined services lead to explosive innovation.  HTML/HTTP, POP, IMAP, RSS etc are all great examples.  Hopefully someone will figure out how to achieve the same innovation when things get just tht little bit more complex.  For XML/Web Services in general we are not there yet – too complex – and we are still waiting to see the widespread adoption of innovative clients and servers hopefully that’s where tools like the Infopath/Office XML/Longhorn Shell/WinFS, Indigo and Haystack  and OOo/XForms etc will come in.