Infoworld’s 10 Future Shocks for the Next 10 Years: The Superstruct Game

September 30, 2008 at 2:33 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Collective intelligence, Management, Talent Management

Marking Infoworld’s 30th birthday 9/23/08 their staff and IDG review the series of past future shocks “from the ascent of the personal computer to horrifying strains of malware to the sizzling sex appeal of the iPhone.” to look ahead to the potential future shocks in the next 10 years.  The list makes an intriguing read:

1. Triumph of the cloud

2. Cyborg chic

3. Everything works

4. Nothing escapes you

5. Smartphones take center stage

6. Human-free manufacturing

7. Perfect image recognition

8. Big Brother never sleeps

9. Unbroken connectivity

10. Relationship enhancement

Infoworld has summoned a thoughtprovoking list, but I wonder from your perspective, how many of these future shocks are already arrived?  Contributor Bob Lewis’s observations about the potential of human-free manufacturing to impact job loss and wage decline particularly caught my attention:

 “Right now, manufacturing in the U.S. is up, while manufacturing employment is down. By 2018, automation will have hit enough labor sectors that while the GDP will continue to grow, fewer and fewer people will receive that growth in the form of wages. This will drive either social collapse or the establishment of a no-apologies welfare state.”

Infoworld’s list makes me think about the individual and organizational challenges the next 10 years of technology innovation will bring.  How will people and enterprizes adapt to put these new tools to work positively?

Stories and analyses emerging from the financial industry failures witnessed in recent weeks and months remind us of the crtical human factor in successful technology adoption.  False human judgements about risk levels built into trading algorithms and platforms failed to highlight the serious and contagious financial losses accumulating in global organizations. Further, as my colleague Victoria Axelrod eloquently articulates (most recently during our KMWorld Open Networks for Co-Generating Knowledge workshop), how rapidly will organizations move to adapt compensation programs to reward more effective ways of working emerging technology enables?

Thoughts anyone?  Meantime if you would like to participate in a collective intelligence project to project the future in 2019, the Institute for the Futures’s SuperStruct Game begins October 6, 2008 here:  http://superstructgame.org/ 

~ Jenny Ambrozek

You Know that Directory of Web Apps? Found It, Sort of …

September 30, 2008 at 10:56 am · Filed under Management, Web Apps

A while back I wondered aloud about where to find a directory to look up Web apps.  A variety of sites and blogs have posts that cover SaaS apps / Web apps.  But I was looking for THE definitive place.

Mashable.com doesn’t give us the definitive directory, but it is getting closer, with its list of 270 Web apps for running a business.  That’s in addition to an earlier list of 230 Web apps from last year.  Add them up and you get 500 Web apps between the two posts.

They range from accounting apps, to calendar apps, to project management apps, to virtual office apps, to email apps, to voicemail apps.

Both posts do a good job of pulling in the smaller providers.  However, many of the industry leaders are missing. So are some of my favorite apps.

For instance, while in last year’s article I saw QuickBase, still I didn’t see other standards such as:  QuickBooks Online; ; Billing Manager; Email Center Pro; eXpresso for sharing Excel spreadsheets; and several other familiar names.

The posts definitely are worth checking out to find some new apps you may not be aware of.  However, there’s still a need for a directory in my view. 

Forrester Web Strategist Jeremiah Owyang Reviews QuickBooks’ Community Strategy

September 30, 2008 at 10:30 am · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Distributed Work, Web 2.0, Web Apps

Services like Intuit’s SaaS QuickBooks represent the kinds of web-enabled databases that will support the workplace of the future (which increasingly will consist of connected communities of customers, employees, vendors and other stakeholders).

In this comprehensive blog post outlining an interview Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang recently carried out with Scott Wilder, one of Intuit’s practice leaders and community champions, they explored Quickbook’s value proposition, capabilities and challenges.

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Intuit Bakes Community Directly in Quickbooks Product

Left Image: This sample screenshot of the embedded community experience from the Quickbooks site.

Over the next few years, expect your friends and network of experts to be interacting with you as you use desktop software –community will be integrated within your products.

This weekend, I had a discussion with Scott Wilder at Intuit, who is one of the practice leaders when it comes to community and how it impacts business. He’s one of those leading the charge at Intuit, who has developed very large communities that thrive beyond the product itself and serve the lifestyle of the community.

Scott discussed his strategy of embedding the community features right in the software products –extending the discussion, network, and peer to peer strategy past awareness, consideration, purchase all the way to support and development. Although this is mainly a supporting objective, when brands embed community this close it’s naturally going to lead to ‘embracing’. Watch this video to learn about all five objectives: listening, talking, energizing, supporting and embracing.

[ Snip … ]

How can this cascade to other products? Microsoft, Dell, Oracle, SAP, IBM, HP, Symantec, Electronic Arts, Hitachi, Adobe, Autodesk, and Apple can start to embed community into their desktop operating system and software. TV shows can start to allow users to embed community actually on the TV set (we saw an early taste of this with Current TV during the elections), and the possibilities can continue on.

[ Snip … ]

All of this points to the larger trend how people are connecting to each other, and forming their own power bases, some companies who embrace this stand to benefit –but only if they are prepared.

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Notable + Quotable: Crossing over, getting things done, “losing weight” and the cloud

September 30, 2008 at 9:31 am · Filed under Notable + Quotable

“Getting Things Done” in The Enterprise
Jason Rothbart ponders, in light of a recent conference session he attended with the author of “Getting Things Done”, how GTD concepts can be implemented on an enterprise level. For all the talk of tools and methodologies, the most important element by far, he says, is “the discipline and commitment to do it.” One key aspect he argues - managment commitment: “There is no way that an entire group will practice GTD if the management team is not fully committed and emphasizes it every day. Managers (and team members) need to conduct meetings with GTD principles and plan work in the same way.”

Is Mainstream Media Really Ready to Get Social?
Steven Hodson touches on the seeming imminent social media crossover into the mainstream - “With its scaling problems seemingly behind it, Twitter may finally be ready to cross that line between the techies and the rest of the Web using world.” - but also suggests that experiments such as CNN’s don’t necessarily indicate that big media companies really get the appeal of Twitter.

Can Web 2.0 Survive the Cancer of Comment Trolls?
A look at the pros and cons of an important feature of many of today’s social media experiences - comments - and the sentiment of some who argue that vitriolic comments, particularly those posted anonymously, are eroding civil discourse and degrading discussion. The article provides examples of a few nasty episodes and offers up a few tips on “giving good comment” and how sites can combat unconstructive comments.

Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?
Daniel Solove, a law professor who’s authored several books on the topic, comments in Scientific American on the issue of privacy, or lack thereof, in the Internet age. The key points made in the article: 1) “Social-networking sites allow seemingly trivial gossip to be distributed to a worldwide audience, sometimes making people the butt of rumors shared by millions of users across the Internet.” 2) “Public sharing of private lives has led to a rethinking of our current conceptions of privacy.” And 3) Existing law should be extended to allow some privacy protection for things that people say and do in what would have previously been considered the public domain.”

How to lose 10 pounds of junk in one day
Digital Nomads’ Chanpory Rith offers his ideas on how to slim down - your daily gadget baggage, that is: “Get a smaller bag. ‘But wait,’ you say. ‘My briefcase/purse/backpack is already too small. I need a bigger bag, not a smaller one!’ But let’s remember Parkinson’s Law: data expands to fill the available space for storage. In short, it’s always too small.”

Are we ready to declare the “time of death” for the enterprise data center?
Dion Hinchcliffe argues that the age of sprawling data centers will soon be over: “The relentless forces of commoditization and competition are having their say as well and cloud computing offers up very substantial bottom-line returns. Throw in an economic downturn and a round of enterprise cost-cutting and the market and cloud computing seem ready to meet…”

Do ‘Clouds’ Get in the Way?
Offering another perspective, this article engages in the hot debate about the actual term “cloud computing”, and quotes an IBM Senior Vice President stepping into user’s shoes: “I know you guys use stupid terms… Just show me the pragmatic results and don’t try to deliver something to that doesn’t meet my business needs.”

Working alone doesn’t have to be all that bad

September 29, 2008 at 11:59 am · Filed under AppGap Tips

A lot of people like the idea of working from home. However, after being at it for some time, a few feel isolated and actually miss the office setting, where you can bump into 10 people on the way to the coffee machine, swap stories, and get instant ideas. Digital Nomads recently ran an article on “coworking” - a rising trend for people to work together in a cafe, a house, or a rented office space, to get the real-world social interaction they might be missing from being away from the corporate environment.

I think it’s understandable that some personality types are really better suited to traditional offices, especially if you’ve worked in one for many years. Personally, though, I don’t see myself letting go of the independence, flexibility, and the generous amount of quality time this lifestyle allows me to spend with my family. If you’re like me, you’ve found that there are many ways to avoid being down with the blues. These are just some of the simple things I do:

Exercise. Walk around the neighborhood every morning, and if you have one, why not take your dog with you? Or if there’s a nearby gym, get a membership and make some new friends.

Play music. Nothing makes a dull afternoon come alive better than playing my MP3 collection while working. I’ve even heard of people being able to concentrate more with heavy metal background noise, but I prefer less aggressive tunes myself.

Take frequent breaks. Every two hours or so, I try to rest my eyes from the monitor, stretch, wash my face, and spend quality time with my family. Eat a lot, but eat healthy.

Do errands. Volunteer to do some errands like going to the grocery, paying the bills, and other things that will let you get out of the house and interact with other people.

Find a hobby. Hobbies can be very relaxing, and provide an outlet for your creativity. Right now, I’m into carpentry, building model airplanes, and gardening.

Get pets. They’re not only adorable, studies have shown that having pets can actually reduce stress, control blood pressure and stave off loneliness.

Maintain contact with friends. With so many ways to communicate, it should be much easier to retain friendships. And at least once a week, maybe you can arrange dinner with your friends.

Watch the news. Working from home usually means you don’t get to go out much, so make sure you’re still in the loop with what’s happening around the world by watching news programs.

Work-related travel. A great way to learn new things and do real-life networking is to attend seminars, conferences and expos if ever they are held near you.

Joint ventures. Establish a working relationship with other related home-based businesses. This way, you can bounce ideas off each other, and maybe even get referrals.

Do you also work from home? What are the things that you practice on a regular basis?

Will the Economy Mean More Telecommuters or Fewer?

September 28, 2008 at 11:53 pm · Filed under Web Commuting

Two recent articles about telecommuting bring up an interesting question:  in tight economic times, is it better to be a telecommuter, or work in an office?

One point of view says it’s better to be a telecommuter.  Businesses can save on office space expenditures, and employees can save $1,200 a year on gas (assuming $4/gallon gas).  Brendan Koerner writes in Wired.com:

“Given that it costs more than $15,000 per year to provide an employee with 200 square feet of cubicle, the savings would be significant — so great, in fact, that companies would still come out thousands of dollars ahead after springing for workers’ broadband and VoIP expenses.

Ditching the office could also provide businesses with a leg up in the scramble to recruit and retain talent. For starters, location would no longer limit a company’s employment pool — gifted Kansans wouldn’t be forced to uproot their lives for opportunities in, say, California. Also, based on the average American’s commute time, driving speed, and vehicle specs — and assuming that gas costs $4 per gallon — a telecommuter would save around $1,200 a year on fuel alone — an instant salary bump, of sorts.”

So, save money on gas and office space — that’s one point of view.

Now here’s the other: in times of layoffs, it’s risky to be a telecommuter because the first to go may be the telecommuters. Karen Burns suggests at U.S. News and World Reports’ On Careers blog that in tough times being a telecommuter can be risky:

“Employers are only human. Humans tend to take the easy way out. And it’s easier to lay off someone you only see rarely than to lay off someone you see every day and who has become an integral part of your work life.

You may have fought to earn telecommuting privileges. You may love the savings in gas and wardrobe expenses. You may know in your very soul that telecommuting has made you a more productive, and hence valuable, employee.

But please consider this annoying-yet-true cliché: out of sight, out of mind. It’s human nature.”

So in times like these which is it for you? Would you rather save money and have the convenience of working from home? Or risk being the first to go if layoffs come?

I’m not saying that companies are going to start making layoffs or that telecommuters would definitely be the first to go if that happened — just thinking about all the potential benefits and disadvantages.

Help! I’m being social-networked to death

September 26, 2008 at 4:11 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Collective intelligence, Communities, Reviews, social networks, social tools

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a recluse, and not ready to become an “Island, entire unto myself” (to quote John Dunne).

But I’m getting more than a little overwhelmed by all these different social networking websites - LinkedIn, PlaxoPulse, Facebook, and there must be a couple of others that I’ve somehow been dragged into joining (though the fact that I can’t remember what they are says something about how (un)important they are to my life and work).

Seriously, though, I know many people find one or more of these networks meaningful and even helpful in their life and their work. And I’ve followed the recent research on “the tribalization of organizations” by Beeline Labs with genuine interest.

But for me right now these network sites seem more peripheral than central to my daily routine. I mean, it’s occasionally nice to find out something about one of my colleagues/associates/friends. But it really feels like most of my interaction with these networks is when someone reaches out and wants to become my “friend” or Linked to me - and about 90% of the time I literally don’t them from Adam. What I find really frustrating is that these folks who either don’t know me at all, or in many cases are a friend of a friend, send me the canned/impersonal Invitation Request - no effort to personalize it or tell me why they want to link up with m, or what’s in it for me.

Again, don’t get me wrong - I do see plenty of potential value in these networks for some people (though I get the sense that many of the folks who are actively using the networking sites are in the job market and are just blasting the linking invitation to everyone in their address book).

So what am I missing? Which of these networks is good for what? Help me - I’m really curious, and for a self-proclaimed futurist, more than a little embarrassed at what a neophyte I am about what is obviously one of the most important stories about collaborative technologies and their impact on both business and life in 2008.

Tags: LinkedIn PlaxoPulse FaceBook socialnetworking futureofwork

Roohit Transforms Web Highlighting into Micro-bookmarking and Micro-sharing

September 24, 2008 at 9:12 pm · Filed under Reviews

Web 2.0 has generated huge amounts of information after enlisting all of us in content creation. However, while the barriers to content creation have fallen this has only raised the challenges to finding, storing and sharing the good stuff within modern version of Borges’ Library of Babel, Babel, Babel. What do you do when you find a good passage within a longer document? Do you send a link to the entire document and let your friend figure out what you like? Do you cut out the passage and lose the context? Do you create a blog post with the quote and a link to the rest. The first two are suboptimal and the last requires time you may not have.

Roohit is designed to address this issue with its Instant Highlighter that enables users to highlight as they surf the web. It also allows users to automatically clip, collect, bookmark, and share online content via e-mail, Instant Messenger, auto-blog or shiny URL: all of this with just One Click. I recently spoke with Rohit Chandra, CEO at RoohIt, He has been involved with the web for some time. Rohit mentioned that he is the patented inventor of the personalized url (e.g., http://joesmith.blog.com instead of http://blog.com/joesmith).

Since RoohIt is a social medium, when users make a highlight, they implicitly cast a vote, thereby providing an in-built method of digging/social bookmarking where they can discover what other like-minded individuals are highlighting. The service is available to anyone at any time wanting to share, collect and archive a small snippet of information of individual relevance for free, with no software download and no sign up required.

RoohIt is designed for simplicity of use. Instead of downloading software, you type roohit.com before the url you are viewing. This transforms your cursor into a highlighter. You can see an example below where I RoohIt enabled my own blog simply by changing the url. Notice the new url and the palette where I can select highlighting colors and decide where to send what I highlighted through email or IM.

You can add a RoohIt button to your browser to automatically start RoohIt. There is also a widget so you can share what you are highlighting in a scrolling box on your blog. You can also share the highlighted page directly to Facebook, delicious, digg or any social bookmarking community. All highlights are saved to a central repository enabling collation of personal snippets and discovery of what other like-minded individuals are highlighting; resulting in a micro-bookmarking archival system. RoohIt is available for free to all of us. The business plan is to sell the feature to major web publishers as an additional feature like print and email to a friend. This makes sense to me.

I like the simplicity of the solution and the fact it takes a familiar activity from the physical world into the virtual world. At the same time, it brings along the advantages of the virtual world. Rohit said they refer to the process as micro-sharing. Perhaps a new web 2.0 genre is born here.

On Reflection …

September 23, 2008 at 11:15 am · Filed under Reviews

I posted earlier a response to the issue of information overload and the apparent correlation to a decrease in reflective thinking. I was at the time looking at a still-unread collection of thoughts from HBR Working Knowledge on “Why Managers Don’t Think Deeply.” It appears that reflective thinking is on the decline not only for the always-connected, always messaging younger generation, but also for their elders, a generation of managers who have not been brought up with the distraction of social tools.

The seed article used GE CEO Jeffery Immelt’s declaration that he would protect and encourage managers to think deeply about innovation, going on to cite research by Gerald and Lindsay Zaltman that there are four things that get in the way of deep thinking:

• Reluctance to take risk
• Fear of disruption from thinking differently
• The potential psychological cost of having changed one’s mind resulting from such deep thinking
• Lack of information providing deep insights on which to base deep thinking.

Over the next nn weeks, 136 replies were posted to the Working Knowledge site. Several themes emerged:

• Lack of time
• Culture that rewards “doing” over “thinking” and that is focused on quarterly results rather than long-term strategy
• Failure of B-schools and corporations to teach methods for deep thinking
• The constraint of the operational, problem-solving role of managers versus the visionary, problem-finding role of leaders
• Inability to overcome the subconscious drivers that account for a large percentage of decisions
• Not enough diversity in one’s life
• Not enough time spent in exercising creativity in nonwork domains, not enough reading

But there were a few voice that suggested that perhaps the model — executives thinking deeply by themselves — might not be appropriate for the collaborative era of collective intelligence we are racing headlong into. What about tapping the wisdom of crowds? What about joint inquiries (a la World Cafe) across a diverse set of people in the organization? Perhaps we should learn to think deeply together, to challenge each others’ thinking as a way to get past stale notions and entrained ideas? Or to use (as one of the respondents suggested) narratives as a way to generate alternate histories?

This is my first post from KMWorld. While here in San Jose, I am also blogging on the KMWorld Blog. My second posting there is relevant to social tools and the future of work: how understanding complexity theory (specifically, Dave Snowden’s Cynefin model) helps us understand social tools and how to implement them.

Save your productivity with RescueTime

September 23, 2008 at 9:26 am · Filed under Reviews

It’s easy to get sidetracked from work. Read your emails here, surf a little there, and before you know it, a few hours have gone by. Then you scratch your head asking, “Where did all that time go?”

I used to have a crude system wherein I’d manually input whatever I did in 30 minutes intervals on a spreadsheet, to study how I spend my time on a day-to-day basis. Obviously, this has some drawbacks, like being cumbersome and the fact that I’m rather forgetful. Fortunately, I found an online time-tracker that can do this automatically for me, and its called RescueTime.

When you sign up for an account, you’ll be asked to download and install their Data Collector. This will track how much time you’re spending on whatever desktop application or specific website you’re actively using/browsing, and sends the data periodically to the RescueTime servers so you can view them online on your Dashboard. Here’s how it looks like:

Many of the popular sites will have their own pre-selected category, like News/Blogs (e.g. The New York Times), Design/Presentation (e.g. Google Docs), and Fun (e.g. YouTube). These categories are based on user suggestions. You may also suggest your own for sites that haven’t been given grouped into their own category. Categories are useful in giving you a bird’s eye view of your computer-related activities. If want to label websites or applications your own way, you can do so by associating them with tags. There can be multiple tags for each site or application. This is perfect if you want to study certain behaviors, and you can be as specific or macroscopic as you like.

Another great thing about RescueTime is that it gives you the ability to set goals, and lets you send real-time alerts as soon as you reach or exceed these goal. The alerts can come via email, RSS, or SMS, depending on your convenience. Also, there’s a group version for corporate use, but for this review I used the personal version.

Of course, there are still some things I think RescueTime can improve on. For example, I’d like to see more customization option for the graphs, such as the ability to select two time periods for side-by-side comparison, similar to Google Analytics. It would also be great if the Dashboard could be viewable both offline and online, and if there could be more options in sending the email summary of user activities, rather than having it fixed to a weekly basis. I’ve read in their corporate blog that off-PC work measurement (meetings, etc) is also in the works, so that’s something I’m looking forward to. This tool is definitely recommended.