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.

When visiting a local company last month, I was given a glimpse of their requirements for their new Knowledge Services Framework vision and requirements.  It was inspiring and incredible.  They had mapped all the functions that they perform, identified existing systems that matched, and then had measured each of them to the following vision.

Here is their requirements as presented.  The highlights are theirs.

leverage consumer applications proven to augment existing work processes (parity plus)

specifically targeted to business requirements and opportunities

access with only a browser and an internet connection

no reliance on proprietary systems or technology

development based on open industry standards

built upon a semantic web framework

embraces and enables BYOC model

no operating system dependency

provides web service capabilities

tuned options for mobile devices

no browser dependency

no net cost increase

no desktop footprint

100% cloud ready

Vision into Reality

Okay, very pretty and exciting, but we all know from experience that idealistic visions are usually really good on slides, but falter in reality.  Can this be made to work in a large (multi-billion dollar), established company with a full suite of legacy products?

After what I saw, I would say Yes.

They had looked at their existing systems and if they didn’t meet the requirements, the vendors were told the issues and given a chance, over 1-2 years, to update their product.  When they didn’t, they were replaced.  This isn’t the act of rash adopters.  This is planned and thought-out.

For new functionality, like blogs and enhanced collaboration spaces, they identified new products, many of them open source, that met their requirements.  With open standards, like CMIS, they were plugged-in to the architecture.

They are building a private cloud that allows them to install applications into either Amazon’s platform or locally based upon their needs.  They are currently using Amazon’s cloud primarily for development now, but will start mixing it up shortly.

Someone brought in a Mac and said that he now did all his work on it.  He had one Windows image to work with a legacy piece of software that needed IE, finance related I believe, but he demonstrated the freedom from the tightly configured company-owned laptop.  With a browser and Internet connection, he was good.

They are looking into Semantic capabilities.  They want to uniquely adapt the social web with the semantic web in context of [their] business processes.  They have a firm grasp of what they are trying to accomplish and are talking to multiple people about how do execute.  They aren’t leaning on one "expert", but seeking a complete picture.

How Do You Measure Up?

I’ve read a lot of people talking about transforming the Enterprise with new technologies.  I’ve seen them talk about enabling people to work.  This is a complete transformation.  Will users leverage the new stuff?  Well, they’ll have to use a lot of it because it will be where critical information is stored.  The champions have also been selling the idea across the company as the technology evolved to meet their requirements.

It is some cool stuff, potentially the coolest I have seen in technology world to date.  I wish them all the luck in the world and hope that I get an opportunity to help out.

This is one project I would not delegate to my team.  I’m not worried that they couldn’t deliver, I just want to play with the cool toys in the beautiful architecture.

So I missed the keynote due to a conference call that was not to be missed.  I also realized that coffee is going to be a battle in lines.  Luckily I had heard those rumors and planned ahead and brought chocolate covered espresso beans.

To kick things off, I’m going to listen to the Governor of Vermont, Jim Douglas.  He is going to be talking about how HIE (Health Information Exchange) is important for the States in their interactions with the Federal Government.  Let’s see what I can learn.

• (This is a little more like a speech, with a healthy political bent, than I would have liked. Will likely lead to less notes.)
• Wants to turn patients into consumers of their own health information.
• Vermont uses health teams centered around the Primary Care Physician (PCP) to break down silos of information at different locations.
• (A lot of examples of WHY to go electronic and have interoperable information.  Vermont seems to be making some solid strides in that direction, but I suspect that many here already are sold.)
• Federal and State officials, providers, insurers, vendors, and patients need to all work together to make HIE work.
• What will work in one state may not work everywhere.  Same applies to physicians.  Need to maintain flexibility on the details.
• Long-term funding for information exchanges is important after the recovery money runs out.
• Health IT is not the end, but the means to the end. (Obvious, but important to reinforce)
• Vermont has a 0.2% assessment on insurance claims to assist with sustainable funding for HIE.
• State lines cannot demarcate HIE as hospital systems and patients don’t stay in one state. (Where I live in DC metro, we have Virginia, Maryland, and DC, so this is an important point.)

Enough of the Q&A as I need sustenance.  Heading to a pair of Federal Health Community Synergy Sessions next.

Disclaimer

All information in this post was gathered from the presenters and presentation. It does not reflect my opinion unless clearly indicated (Italics in parenthesis). Any errors are most likely from my misunderstanding a statement or imperfectly recording the information. Updates to correct information are reflected in red, but will not be otherwise indicated.

Artsetter is a Paris based online art gallery. I have now been accepted as one of their artists. I had to go through a voting process
and I appreciate those of you who voted for me.  Now I put up an initial gallery of 24 paintings. I will add
more and perhaps some drawings and photos.

I encourage you to visit the Artsetter site and
comment on my work as feedback is really appreciated. When you get to the site
you can find my gallery under the gallery tab. For now it is listed in new
galleries but that may evolve.

 Here is what I wrote in my
profile. I paint with acrylics and also do simple line drawings. My focus
is directly painting what I see. The goal is not photo realism but an
integration of painting and seeing. I primarily do still life or painting from
a model at the moment. I have experimented with landscapes from direct
observation. I recently did a series on breakfast. These were done from photos.
I do not go beyond what I see as I have always imagined paintings as I look at
the world. Now I am having fun creating some of these images. I live and work
in the Boston area (US) but also paint from my travels. I grew up in New
Orleans and it remains a favorite place. I would like to paint there.

Here is a sampling of the initial
works in the gallery. You can click on the images to enlarge them. 

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.

”Throughout the primate world, social networks provide a fast conduit for innovation and information-sharing that help the group as a whole to adapt to its environment.”

Alex Wright, “Glut – Mastering Information Through The Ages”

The future workplace will be hyper-connected, meaning that we will use multiple means of communication, so that we can be more innovative, quickly adapt to a changing environment, and access and use all the best resources we need to do what we need to do, no matter where the resources are located.

More and more, work will be treated as something we do, not a place (building). Knowledge / creative work is highly collaborative by nature and we can’t let time, space and organization stop us from collaborating with the right people at the right time. Virtual collaboration will become the norm and face-to-face meetings will be seen as one of the many ways of meeting each other.

The previously so common 1:1 relationship between organization and enterprise will be very uncommon. A typical enterprise will be made up of people from many different organizations, and a typical organization will be involved in many different enterprises. People might belong to an organization, but it is secondary to the work do and who they work with.

The network will need to replace the hierarchy as the primary model for organizing resources. As work becomes more and more network-oriented, so will the way we organize ourselves and other resources.

New generations that enter the workplace will be always connected, they will be more open to making new connections, and they will be more connected than any generation before them. The will understand and nurture the value of their relationships, with a solid understanding that “no man is an island” and that their success and well-being depends on with whom they are connected, how they are connected, and how they mutually benefit from using these connections.

Our focus will shift from producing and organizing documentation to communicating and interacting in real-time, with documentation as a by-product. We will need to spend more time on building and maintaining relationships and less on trying to find information and people, recreating information we cannot find, and creating documentation as an activity separated from our daily work.

Right now, we are just seeing the dawn of the hyper-connected age.

Here are more 2010 predictions. Forrester
has issued a report, Collaboration Needs Will Fuel A
Smartphone Surge, by Ted Schadler with
Matthew Brown, Brownlee Thomas, Michele Pelino, and Peter Schmidt, with the
subtitle: The
Surge Can Be Funded Through A Bring-Your-Own Smartphone Strategy.  I appreciate receiving a review
copy.  It predicts that 2010 will
be the year of the smartphone surge.

The Forrester team
surveyed 3,904 information workers nad found great excitement about about
smartphones, “attracted by the ability to email, collaborate, and work with
documents from anywhere.” While only 14% percent of information workers across
the US, Canada, and UK already use smartphones, another 64% would like to. This
compares with general consumers usage at 78% with mobile phones and 11% with
smart phones. That yet to be fulfilled demand in information workers, along
with some employers’ willingness to share monthly mobile costs, sets the stage
for the surge. This calls for KM and other information professionals to
determine a strategy for effective and coordinated usage. There is also the
numbers to pressure mobile carriers to cut costs across plans.

I imagine that most
smart users also use a fraction of the capability of their devices. I know I
do. I see my colleagues using much more capability.  The report provides along list of potential capabilities and
their current usage from email (92%) to enterprise apps (7%). Some others
include: personal contacts (84%), work calendar (83%), IM (48%), emergency
response (17%), and team collaboration (12%). The last one should go up
dramatically if the report is correct it its predictions.

Location flexibility
is the top reason (60%) for using a smartphone over a laptop. The increased
reach will provide the ROI for smartphone, according to Forrester report. While
this seems obvious, there seem to be two reasons here: the portability of the
device and the extended access, and these will continue to evolve. Having
greater wifi access will mitigate one difference and such devices as the tablet
might go into the other.  However,
I think the convergence of capabilities into a single type of device that takes
two forms will balance that out.

In other words,
content that used to come through many channels such as music, TV, Web, phone
now comes through one device (see for example,  TV Moving
Closer to Mobile Phones and the Web and Who Will Win TV Sets or Computers? I now have all my music and
photos on my iPhone, as well as my laptop and have stopped using separate
devices for them. However, this device will take two forms, one that sits on a
desk and perhaps even connects to a larger monitor and one that fits in your
pocket.  There will be an increased
need to synch these devices and that needs to be part of the smartphone
strategy.

There is much more in
the report including suggestions on how to start your smartphone strategy. 

I am interrupting the usual business oriented weekday posts to ask
you a favor.  Artsetter is a Paris based online art gallery. I like their approach as they take the risk out for
the buyer and the seller. When you purchase an art work, Artsetter holds the
money through a French bank. Then the artist ships to the buyer. Once the buyer
receives the art work, Art Setter releases the money to the artist taking what is a very
modest commission for the industry. They allow each artist to set up their own gallery. Art Setter is creating a community as each member can vote on others and create favorites. Any one can apply to join.

I am trying to set up an online gallery for my art on the site. I
have applied and now need 50 votes over the next 30 days. Can you vote for me?
You have to first register at their site but it is quick and there is nice art
by a number of artists. Here is the home page of the site.

My five paintings have been cropped by the site to fit a square format.
This is one They are all rectangles. However, once I set up my gallery I will
be able to display the full painting. You can see the complete images of five I
submitted below. You can click on any image to make it large.

Once you get to the site go to the candidates tab. Be patient it
takes a few moments for the first one to appear. I have been coming up first as
I was the last one when I last looked but someone may have come in after
me.  In the case I do not come up first, scroll through the others to find
my application.

There are quite a few excellent painters and photographers. I voted
for a number of them myself.  This
Is not a competition. You can vote for as many as you want.  Thanks for your consideration.  Let me know what you think. 

Publishing Decision Tree V2

Originally uploaded by sggottlieb

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Twitter is still growing rapidly with 9.4 million new users in January 2010 alone and more than 1 billion tweets per month. I’m approaching my first Twitter anniversary and by recently implementing a simple guideline for whom I follow, I’ve found that the tool has become much more useful. I know that many of our members are considering whether Twitter may actually have some value for their working lives, so I thought I would share a note on how I use the tool.

On a busy working day, the only 2 use cases for my usage of Twitter are:

1. Follow interesting individuals and companies to easily stay up-to-date. I used to go through my RSS feeds at least daily, but now I do it only once or twice a week, as Twitter provides me with most of the information.
2. Ask questions and get feedback from peers. Twitter works really well when I want some feedback, but don’t want to send too many e-mails to my contacts. Since we are all flooded with e-mails, Twitter is a neat alternative, where everybody can easily decide whether they would like to reply to a question on Twitter or not.

I used to casually follow other Twitter users and back in August posted a listing of 10 online professionals to watch on Twitter in 2009. Since then I’ve implemented what I call a

Twitter quantity-rule: To reduce noise, I consequently unfollow users with more tweets than followers.

Silicon Valley tech blogger Louis Gray called this the Twitter Noise Ratio back in April 2008.

This means that I might lose out on contributions from some great minds that use Twitter like a fire-hose. I simply found that it drowned in noise and it was impossible to keep up with the folks I really wanted to keep up with. As a side effect, this means that today I am actually only following 2 of the 10 on my 6 months old list (@jdavidhobbs and @kasthomas. Sorry @jeanmariepascal, you have a nice tweet vs. follower ratio, but too many French tweets for my language skills!)

These days I rarely visit twitter.com, except to check the tweets vs. followers ratio for a given user. Instead I use TweetDeck to view and write tweets. TweetDeck makes re-tweeting easy and automatically shortens URL’s to save characters. I also have a few search columns open, including one for fun to follow @ChuckNorriz.

Having read this far you might be thinking: How do I get more followers? Kas Thomas, analyst at CMS Watch, has described How do you get 10K Twitter-followers legitimately? My followers have arrived in a less systematic way, some tweets are popular and are commented on or re-tweeted, while others don’t get any response. I try to include a Twitter hashtag when relevant and a @username when I want to highlight or thank somebody.

That’s basically it. Twitter is many things to many people. Jed Cawthorne, Senior Specialist, Knowledge Management at Canadian Tire Corporation recently posted a good example of how Twitter can be very helpful at work. How do you use Twitter in a work context?