Mobility has become a defining characteristic of knowledge work. A recent Basex survey revealed that more than 40% of knowledge workers work in nontraditional, non-Dilbertian environments on a regular (two or more days per week) basis.

On the road again.

Indeed, knowledge workers have become increasingly mobile and find themselves working from whatever location they happen to be in, be it a home office, the dentist’s waiting room, or an airport lounge.  The range of devices they employ has expanded to include not just desktop PCs and laptops, but netbooks and smartphones as well.

Therefore it is becoming increasingly important to enable access to documents, spreadsheet, and presentations without tying the user to one specific computer or location.

In most organizations, there has always been a kind of second class citizenship for the mobile worker when it comes to tools and support.  Among many managers, the prevailing thinking has always been that people will typically work at the office and, as a result, the best tools are to be found there.  Sometimes tools have been limited on the grounds of corporate network security (a home user could inadvertently put an enterprise network at risk).  But given that a clear plurality of workers work remotely today, this kind of segmentation makes little sense.

It is important to note that, even among mobile workers, there exist different groups, namely those who typically work from the same computer, be it a PC in a home office or a laptop that travels with the worker, and those who work from multiple devices such as public or shared PCs, netbooks, and smartphones.  To boot, one must then differentiate the power users from the occasional users.

At the moment, the former group will most likely have standard Windows productivity software such as Microsoft Office installed on the device.  However, the latter group, whose numbers are growing, will still need to be able to access tools that are more than sufficient to support their work, regardless of device or venue.

Such tools need to provide a variety of functionality, including the ability to create and edit documents (for the purposes of this discussion documents can include word processing documents, spreadsheets, and slide shows), and critically, provide links to corporate data stores to allow the knowledge worker to access files that do not reside on the device being used – and keep files behind the firewall.

Those who are working from home office PCs and laptops will almost certainly have a copy of Microsoft Word to use, but the ability to access files that are stored in a document repository is often limited.  The established strategy to deal with lack of access or poor controls on access has been to maintain local copies of documents.  This is for two reasons: ease of access and to preclude the possibility of someone else opening and/or editing the document at the same time.  Unfortunately, this strategy can lead to more problems than it resolves including a proliferation of document versions and the potential loss of critical work if a machine goes down and is not backed up.

One potential solution may be online desktop productivity tools, a market that has been largely dominated by Google and Zoho.  With the forthcoming release of Microsoft Office 2010, the company is also unveiling a line of online tools that are complementary to their desktop counterparts.  We’ll examine the new offerings next week.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.

“…rule-following employees are worth zip in terms of the competitive advantage they generate”.

Gary Hamel, “The Future of Management”

Watson Wyatt, a human resources consultancy, does a large-scale annual survey looking at return on investment for communication strategies. One section of this year’s report focused on Social Media as used by 328 organizations that collectively represent 5 million employees in various regions around the world:

• The most prevalent reasons for not increasing the use of social media stem from a lack of resources and knowledge, rather than legal restrictions
• Companies that are using social media to engage employees are using these tools to address a variety of topics. The most prevalent topics are collaboration and team building, adapting to change, and promoting health and wellness.
• Highly effective communicators are using social media tools 2-3 times more than the low-effectiveness group of companies to reach employees. Most participants (65 percent) expect to use social media more next year.

The latest buzzword in document creation is collaborative work.

Who will drop in next?

While there exist various approaches to support collaborative work and varying definitions of what the term means, they all revolve around tools that allow knowledge workers to work together on documents.

Indeed, collaborating in the creation of a document can take different forms.  With cloud-based solutions such as Google Docs or Zoho Writer, collaboration means sharing, i.e. the document is distributed via a link in an e-mail message as opposed to sending along an attachment.  Since only one reviewer at a time can open the document, the annoying document version conflicts that plague workers in the information age are eliminated.

Working together on documents is nothing new, but the processes that are most prevalent are also very inefficient.  Indeed, a majority of knowledge workers send documents as e-mail attachments to multiple reviewers, which then causes version confusion, difficulties in incorporating edits, and missed edits and comments.  A remarkable 20% of knowledge workers say they print out hard copies to send to coworkers.

A different approach to solving this vexing problem is to allow knowledge workers to work on a document at the same time from different locations, be they in a real-time collaborative work session or simply working on the same document independently of one another.

In the forthcoming Office 2010 suite (currently in beta), Microsoft has added Co-authoring to Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote.  The new feature requires SharePoint Server 2010 to link the applications and store documents.  Co-authoring allows people to work on a document concurrently, so that one person could be working on introductory text while a subject matter expert fills in details on charts.  Areas that are being accessed for edits are locked to prevent conflicts; the locking is possible on multiple levels including sentences, paragraphs, objects, textboxes, fields, headers and footers.

When entering a document, the user is alerted to other authors who are working on the document via a notification box on the bottom of the screen.  By hovering over the box, the authors who are working on the document at that time are displayed, with contact information so that communication by phone, instant message, or e-mail can be initiated with a click.

If an author is working on a section, it is locked to prevent simultaneous edits by others and changes and additions are only shown to other authors when the document is saved.  If changes have been made to the document, bubble notifications appear to show other users what edits have been made and who made the changes.

People expect the knowledge economy to run on twenty-first century time, which means that knowledge workers need immediate feedback on documents from multiple collaborators at once.   Microsoft’s Co-authoring functionality has the potential to support faster movement of information while improving what today is a grossly inefficient and error-prone process.

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex.

This year's KM World Conference &
Exhibition has moved to Washington, D.C. It will be November 16 – 18, 2010 at Marriott Renaissance, The Enterprise
Search Summit 2010 will be at the New York Hilton on May 11-12. It is nice to see these two conferences on the East
Coast. I went last year in the November to the combined
conference in San Jose.

I will be presenting at the Enterprise Search
Summit 2010 with my Darwin Colleague, Thierry Hubert. We are presenting on Deriving Order From Chaos Through Discovery and
Awareness. Our session is on Wednesday May 12 at 1PM. The Enterprise
Search Summit says that the “emphasis for Enterprise Search Summit is on how enterprise
search enables Information Access. Search can no longer be viewed as a
stand-alone application. It is increasingly part of everything we do and has
become the de facto gateway to information in the enterprise.” I would
certainly agree.

The KM World announcement said that this year's
theme is KnowHow: the Knowledge-Driven
Enterprise. “The knowledge of how to do something smoothly and
efficiently with technical skill and expertise — also known as
"knowhow" — drives every enterprise, agency, and organization.
Creating knowledge bases, sharing them effectively, using them for
decision-making and innovation.”

This sounds familiar but it is great that it is
still very relevant. The session shave a 2.0 flavor like last year. I hope to
be able to attend. Deadline for speaker submissions is March 1. Here are my notes
from the combined event KM World and Enterprise Search Summit last year.

My KM World and
Enterprise Search Summit Notes: Resetting the Enterprise With 2.0 Collaborative
Tools

My KM World and
Enterprise Search Summit Notes: The Role of Social Techniques in Search &
How It Impacts Your Organization

My KM World and
Enterprise Search Summit Notes: Evolve From a Tactical E-Discovery Approach to
Search and E-Discovery

My KM World and
Enterprise Search Summit Notes: Enterprise Search Technologies

My KM World and
Enterprise Search Summit Notes: Fundamentals of Enterprise Search

My KM World and
Enterprise Search Summit Notes: From Birth to Billions: The Life Story of
Google Enterprise Search

My KM World and
Enterprise Search Summit Notes: Is Semantic Technology Real?

This brings back
memories. The Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) award has been around
for some time. Back when I was with a large consulting company and involved in
our knowledge management practice, I spoke at the awards meetings in London several
times.  These were the days of
better travel funding and the relatively early days of KM. I am pleased that
this award is still around and still relevant.

For the first time, Apple was named the
overall Global MAKE Winner. North America took top honors with 7 Winners,
followed by Asia (5 Winners) and Europe (3 Winners). Teleos in association with
The KNOW Network conducts this award. There were also 5 'Global' Winners whose
organizational structures reflect the 21st global knowledge economy.

A panel of experts made the picks based on these
criteria:

- creating an enterprise knowledge-driven culture

- developing knowledge workers through senior
management leadership

- developing and delivering knowledge-based
products/services/solutions

- maximizing enterprise intellectual capital

- creating an environment for collaborative
knowledge sharing

- creating a learning organization

- delivering value based on stakeholder knowledge

- transforming enterprise knowledge into
shareholder/stakeholder value

The 2009 winners include some long time winners
and some major companies that you would not associate wit KM in the 90s. 

The Gilbane Group is gearing up quickly for another one of their conferences. The Gilbane Content Management Conference in San Francisco will be held May 18-20, 2010. This year’s conference will cover a number of topics including Web technologies, content management, and collaboration tools.

Web, content, and collaboration technology have reached a new level of maturity. This is true in terms of technology, but more importantly, it is true in terms of what businesses expect to be able to do with these tools. Web and enterprise content management permeate every aspect of an organization. Public facing internet sites are the front door to an organizations’ products and services, and where customers, partners and investors engage with the corporate brand and develop perceptions. Internal websites, whether in the form of intranets, blogs, wikis, or portals, provide knowledge workers increasingly efficient ways to collaborate and share knowledge. Customer and internal-facing applications share requirements that call for a number of enterprise content, publishing and infrastructure technologies, such as multi-lingual, social media, search, and integration software.

Gilbane San Francisco is organized into four tracks so that whether you are responsible for marketing, IT, a business unit, or an internal function, you will be able to easily navigate among the conference sessions. The four tracks include:

• Customers & Engagement
• Colleagues & Collaboration
• Content Technology
• Content Publishing

CMS Report is proud to be a media sponsor for Gilbane San Francisco 2010. If you plan on going to the conference, CMS Report has some good news that is going to save you some money. Our sponsorship of the conference entitles CMSReport.com readers to receive a special $200 discount to the conference. To receive the $200 discount, you’ll need to use the code “cmsreport” when you’re asked for it during the registration process.

read more

Rob Larsen shows you how to create cross-browser, HTML5 enhanced WordPress themes using nothing more than a little extra JavaScript, basic WordPress knowledge and some knowledge of the new elements.

The world of the knowledge worker is document centric.  As a group, knowledge workers spend significant time creating, managing, reviewing, and editing documents.

Danger lurks in the document jungle

[For the purposes of this discussion, we define a document as written communication created using word processing software, a typical example of which is Microsoft Word.]

A recent Basex survey of 300 knowledge workers revealed (not surprisingly) that 95% of them create and review documents on a regular basis.

The prevalence of word processing tools and e-mail have made it easy, some would say too easy, to send documents anywhere and everywhere for input from colleagues, business partners, customers, and suppliers.

A mere twenty years ago, document review was very different.  Fewer documents were being generated overall so there were fewer to review.  The review process was paper based, documents were typically stored in file cabinets, and, since making corrections and revisions often meant retyping a document, people only made important corrections and tried to get it right the first time around.

Today, the typical knowledge worker creates one to two documents a day comprised of one to two pages each.  He also receives three to five documents that are between three to five pages long for review each week.

Why the disparity in size and quantity between documents created and documents received?  People who create longer documents also create more of them and are more likely to send them out for review.  In addition, 22% of documents are not sent to anyone for review and a similar number are sent to only one colleague.

What happens when a document comes back to its creator with these edits and comments is also interesting since most documents come back with multiple edits, changes, and comments.

Despite the tools available both within word processing software and externally, the typical knowledge worker uses a fairly inefficient process to review documents, 60% of knowledge workers say they e-mail the documents as attachments to several reviewers at once.  46% report that they then compare edits and comments manually once they have received them back from reviewers.

As a result, almost 40% of knowledge workers say they miss edits and comments in the documents they get back from review.  Fewer than half of the knowledge workers surveyed say they get documents back in a timely fashion.  Another 25% of knowledge workers say they intentionally leave people out of the review process for fear of slowing it down.

All of these inefficiencies come with a significant cost to the bottom line.  Errors in documents that are overlooked can result in lost sales and lower profits.  The multiple hours a typical knowledge worker spends each week trying to manage the review process could be put to far better use.

The future for document review and revision is far from dismal.  Software companies ranging from start-ups to industry giants are tackling the problem.  Nordic River, a version management company based in Sweden, offers TextFlow, a browser-based tool that generates marked-up review copies of a document based on changes and comments made in individual versions of a document.   Microsoft, in the forthcoming Office 2010 suite, will introduce Co-authoring, a set of tools that allows for multiple users to edit a document at the same time.

Jonathan B. Spira is the CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.

Microsoft Office may be one of the world’s most widely deployed software packages.

A backstage pass…

Indeed, with a user base of 500 million, any changes or updates to the suite are significant for that fact alone.

In the upcoming Office 2010 release, there are many areas that have been retooled and refined; however, for the typical knowledge worker, the most obvious will be the user interface.  In this research brief, we will look at how the user interacts with a document through the new Navigation pane and Backstage view.

The new Navigation pane in Word enables users to move around a document, search for content, and change the structure and organization of headings.  This replaces the old Document Map and Thumbnail panes and brings those feature sets into one place along with Find.  Users browse through a document by heading, page, or search results.  Content in a section is moved around a document by dragging-and-dropping the tab for the heading.  Additionally, the outline of a document can be manipulated to promote or demote sections.  When sections are moved, all headings and subheadings automatically adjust.

Office 2010 also features a new way to manage documents, the Backstage view.  This new functionality extends across the entire Office suite.  The Backstage view appears when the user clicks on the File tab from within an application.  The view that opens up provides the user with access to tabs that show document info,  permissions, versioning, printing options, and sharing options.  The user has multiple options for sharing including e-mailing the document as an attachment or link, or via a blog post.

Backstage also includes Accessibility Checker, which allows users to identify elements of a document that may cause problems when used with assistive technologies.  These functions were previously found in various Ribbon menus and, with 2010, have been separated out from functions that are needed for actual content creation.  The goal of Backstage is to help users work with documents, processes and workflows, as opposed to when you work in the document.

Features such as presence are incorporated into Backstage, making it possible to initiate contact with document authors and to see related documents.  Backstage is extensible, meaning that it can be customized to allow for a range of application data to be brought into the view.

The interfaces for Backstage and Navigation are smooth and intuitive to use, and the concept of separating these features and giving them their own panes that group like-minded features together is a good one.  Obviously getting used to features being in a different place takes some time, but Backstage and Navigation are both positive changes that increase usability .

We will be examining other important new features and enhancements in Office 2010 in the weeks to come.

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex.

Microsoft Office is undoubtedly one of the most world’s most widely deployed software packages.
Indeed, with a user base of 500 million, any changes or updates to the suite are significant for that fact alone. In the upcoming Office 2010 release, there are many areas that have been retooled and refined; however, for the typical knowledge [...]