Archive for Scenarios
by Celine Roque
August 14, 2009 at 8:11 am · Filed under
Culture, Distributed Work, Scenarios
Last week, I read an article on Engadget about the imminent death of the PC, saying that “PCs are simply getting too complex, difficult and expensive for most consumers to master and maintain.” The author never defined what he meant by PC, so let me take Wikipedia’s definition and share my thoughts on the subject.
“A personal computer (PC) is a generic name for a general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end user, with no intervening computer operator.”
Nowadays, the term applies to a myriad of devices. Desktop computers, laptops, and even some smartphones are essentially PCs in various forms. Computers used to be purely office machines that took up a whole room, and now they are small enough to fit in our pockets. I don’t think that PCs as we know them will die out anytime soon (though it’s also unwise to say they’ll go on forever), but they will continue to evolve and diversify in order to better serve our various needs. It’s fascinating to think about how all these changes will affect the way we work in the future.
What will happen when computers shrink to a size small enough that we can carry them on our key chains? What if smartphones become competent enough to also serve as a desktop when paired with a monitor, keyboard and mouse? Is a shift from stationary to mobile platforms for the enterprise feasible? To what extent? And what role can cloud computing play in this? How will software change in response to hardware? And what role will the Internet play in all this when 4G’s speed and coverage comes along?
In thinking about technology as we push it to it’s limits, we should not forget that we, the users, also have ours. There’s only so much detail our eyes can detect no matter how you increase resolution. Keyboards that are too small can become very uncomfortable. A typical office worker doesn’t need the power of a gaming rig just to create spreadsheets.
If you could nudge technology one way or the other, what would you like to see? What would make your work life better?
by Celine Roque
May 15, 2009 at 1:19 pm · Filed under
Scenarios, Web Apps
At 7:48am Pacific time on May 14th, I was sound asleep in my corner of the world. Good thing, because if I had been working at that time, I would’ve been among the unlucky ones who, for at least an hour, experienced an Internet without Google. The thing is, today, the search giant is no longer just that. We depend on it so much now on virtually all aspects of our online activities, so a widespread outage involving most of its services is a little unnerving. A post from Geeky Guide said it best:
I have a lot of my life invested in Google’s portion of the “cloud”, I have to admit. I route all my email through Gmail and I collate all my RSS feeds via Google Reader. I schedule events and reminders on Google Calendar and I maintain a decent number of friends on Google Talk. This blog is on the Blogger platform, my domain is supported by Google Apps and my RSS feed is run by FeedBurner (now a Google product). I run AdSense programs, AdWords advertising campaigns and I study all this through Google Analytics. I manage two wikis via Google Sites, I get updated via Google News and I even have a few Google Alerts set to notify of key updates. I maintain a number of documents and spreadsheets on Google Docs, manage a few email lists via Google Groups and I still have some leftover stuff on Google Notebook. Don’t forget watching videos on YouTube and even maintaining links on Google Bookmarks! The list goes on and on… So yeah, a Google outage is a near catastrophe for me. I’m like Google’s primary demographic and it just kills me when any of these services go down, what more all of them.
He’s not alone. Most of us probably use a few of the services mentioned on a regular basis. The outage didn’t last that long, but it’s enough for Google to seriously reexamine its whole architecture to prevent a recurrence on a grand scale. CNET said they got reports of the incident coming in from California to New York, and from as far as the United Kingdom to Malaysia. Urs Hoelzle, Google’s SVP for Operations, wrote the following explanation of what happened on the Google Blog:
Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia. And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected. That’s basically what happened to some of our users today for about an hour, starting at 7:48 am Pacific time.
An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions. We’ve been working hard to make our services ultrafast and “always on,” so it’s especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens. We’re very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we’ll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won’t happen again. All planes are back on schedule now.
There’s no perfect network and downtimes seem to be a part of life, but when an error (reportedly from GMail) can snowball into a virtual system-wide failure, things have got to change. Trust is a tricky thing, so I hope Google makes good on their promise.
by Celine Roque
July 25, 2008 at 11:19 am · Filed under
Scenarios
With the rising cost of fuel, more professionals are starting to think about telecommuting. But will it actually come to a point where doing so becomes the norm for knowledge workers? I believe so, but there are a lot of obstacles and conditions that need to be set in place first.
One of these conditions is that employers need to become receptive. Opinions on teleworking vary from company to company, with some supervisors being more resistant to the idea than others. This is because teleworking makes changes to existing business processes, and this change is easily misconceived as costly and a waste of resources. In this case, the success of a teleworking proposal depends on the employee who pioneers it and produces better results than her office-based counterparts.
Another important factor in moving teleworking into the norm is the affordability and accessibility of the technology required for online work. We’re already seeing this happen as wireless internet becomes more prevalent, and as affordable laptops, ultramobile PCs, and dumb terminals are developed further. The affordability of the services and technology is especially important for entry-level knowledge workers, and to those working in developing countries. At the rate the technology is going, the required technology for teleworking will become globally commonplace within the next few generations.
Also, it’s more likely that Millenials or the generations after them will be the ones to make the move. Having grown up with the technology, they’ll be more comfortable with and accepting of it than older generations were when the personal computer was first invented.
Currently, knowledge workers are becoming more familiar and aware of teleworking strategies, to the point that offshoots such as co-working and long term travel-working are emerging. As best practices, strong methodologies, and employer reception rises, there’s a good possibility that teleworking will eventually be a norm. Personally, I have to admit that I’m taken by its current outsider status, but I know I’ll be equally thrilled when all knowledge workers experience the advantages that comes with teleworking.
Do you think teleworking will eventually become the norm? Why or why not? If you think it will be the norm, how long will it take?
by Patti Anklam
May 7, 2008 at 9:11 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, KM, Scenarios, Web 2.0
Via Shawn Callahan this morning, a link to a scenario about the future of work by Dave Pollard. (These two apparently had a swell conversation in Melbourne this week.) In his post, Knowledge Management in 2020, Dave describes the work lives of two professional consultants at a global consultancy, “Omni,” and an entrepreneur who is an Omni client.
Omni’s business is focused on “personal productivity improvement, facilitation, cultural anthropology, and design and communication skills development services.” Managing the rich flow of information available via blogs and RSS feeds is core to Omni’s work; for itself and its clients, it digests, interprets, summarizes, and offers recommendations on the immeasurably large flow of raw information now available. Omni has “abandoned” their traditional website in favor of a its collection of blogs and interactive directory of people.
This is obviously a vision of the future of work for a small slice of the population, but it also triggers thinking about the importance of rediscovering (as Dave says) the value of information intermediaries, and this need will apply in many business and work scenarios. RSS was supposed to help us filter and customize, but Pollard supposes a legion of these intermediaries like the Omni professionals described in the scenario.
What a great conversation that must have been! Wish I’d been there. Now I wonder if future applications will allow us to enable eavesdropping via podcast…
Thought...
