Knowledge Work

A good, brief introductory article on COBIT at IT Manager’s Journal:

In essence, COBIT incorporates the control objectives observed by enterprises in compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley and other international standards allows for coordination between control requirements, technical issues and business risks. COBIT’s tool sets allow for practices that its developer, the IT Governance Institute (ITGI), believes incorporate or deepen the international IT guidance supplied by ITIL, ISO/IEC 17799, ISO/IEC 13335, ISO/IEC 15408, TickIT, NIST, and COSO. COBIT is available for download from the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA.org).

IT Manager’s Journal | Introducing COBIT

The information architecture group blog Boxes and Arrows has a great post this week on the basic kinds of information-seeking behaviors by users of a web or intranet site, and how to design for maximum information retrievability.

Most information architects already take “known item” (you know what you’re looking for) and “exploratory” (browsing) searching into account in their site designs. 

Donna Maurer adds two new search types - “don’t know what you need to know” and “re-finding,” and provides some helpful design tips and thoughts.

Four modes of seeking information and how to design for them (Boxes and Arrows)

Lifehack has a short, interesting essay on office politics, and on what conduct is both ethical and realistic in the modern workplace:

Too often [office politics] smack of dirty tricks and the use of personal influence in the interests of a few, powerful individuals, conjuring up a picture of secret deals in back rooms and pay-offs in favors given and expected. Ethically, most instances of office politics tend to be dubious.

Let’s assume that office politics are an unavoidable fact of organizational life. We can’t avoid encountering them. The ethical question then becomes how we act when we do.To make sense of this, you need to distinguish between three aspects of political actions:

• Making decisions where there are no rules or precedents to guide you.
• Handling the allocation of resources.
• Creating a “pecking order” of influence.

Ethical Office Politics - lifehack.org

The IT Service Today search engine/portal just keeps getting better and better. Site manager Robin Yearsley has added links to ITIL-focused podcasts, sites and articles, and there’s a hidden “Easter Egg” … if you use their “Tell a Friend” feature to help spread the word to your colleagues, your thank-you gift is an e-mail with links to 20 of the best recent ITIL articles on the Web and in the technical press.

IT Service Today: ITIL and IT Service Management

Google just went into the web-based office software business, acquiring the startup Writely.com. Writely produces a word processor that runs in a standard web browser:

• Share documents instantly & collaborate real-time.
  Pick exactly who can access your documents.
• Edit your documents from anywhere.
  Nothing to download — your browser is all you need.
• Store your documents securely online.
  Offsite storage plus data backup every 10 seconds.
• Easy to use.
  Clean, uncluttered screens with a familiar, desktop feel.

Official Google Blog: Writely so

Half of all malfunctioning products returned to stores by consumers are in full working order, but customers can’t figure out how to operate the devices, a scientist said on Monday.

Product complaints and returns are often caused by poor design, but companies frequently dismiss them as “nuisance calls,” Elke den Ouden found in her thesis at the Technical University of Eindhoven in the south of the Netherlands.

[…]

Most of the flaws found their origin in the first phase of the design process: product definition, Den Ouden found.

In other words, a lot of these products are doomed from birth. The importance of good design cannot be overstated, but good (and simple) documentation and training materials might have saved some of these sales as well.

In the era of the autoconfiguring TiVo, “VCR clock blinking 12:00″ jokes are rapidly becoming an anachronism, but that’s still a good metaphor for bad design. If you can’t accurately set the *clock* on a product like a VCR, you’ve shut yourself off from some of the product’s most interesting features, like delayed/timed recording.

Complexity causes 50% of product returns - Reuters, via Yahoo! News

There is a new and insidious threat to the World Wide Web: a slowly rising tide of “original content” on Internet sites that is at best worthless, and at worst possibly even dangerously inaccurate.

I should know; I’ve been writing some of the stuff myself.

Understanding what’s happening requires a lesson in modern Web economics. If there is a topic in the news, people will be searching on it. If you can get those searchers to land on a seemingly authoritative page you’ve set up, you can make money from their arrival. Via ads, for instance.

A fascinating article from Wall Street Journal reporter Lee Gomes describes this new racket. Gomes answers a help-wanted ad looking for web authors, and is offered $100 (total) to “write” 50 articles, 500 words each, on topics like “colloidal silver.”

What he’s really being paid to do, of course, is plagiarize existing material, changing it just enough to fool the not-so-bright algorithms of the major search engines. And this kind of manipulation, left unchecked, will do significant damage to the information ecosystem of the Web.

Read the entire article: Writer Creates Original Content But Is In For A Surprise (Wall Street Journal via CareerJournal.com)

Do you secretly suspect that you’re working for bozos — or that, horror of horrors, you might have become a bozo yourself?

Here. Take the GBAT - Guy (Kawasaki’s) Bozofication Aptitude Test, brought to you by the nice people at Electric Pulp.

Question one, true or false:

The two most popular words in your company are “partner” and “strategic.” In addition, “partner” has become a verb, and “strategic” is used to describe decisions and activities that don’t make sense.

GBAT (Guy’s Bozofication Aptitude Test) - A Service of Electric Pulp

How many people think they’ve missed their opportunity to be a musician, or an expert golfer, or even a chess grand master because they didn’t start when they were young? Or because they simply lacked natural talent? Those people are (mostly) wrong. According to some brain scientists, almost anyone can develop world-class (or at least top expertise) abilities in things for which they aren’t physically impaired. Apparently God-given talent, natural “gifts”, and genetic predispositions just aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Or at least not in the way most of us always imagined. It turns out that rather than being naturally gifted at music or math or chess or whatever, a superior performer most likely has a gift for concentration, dedication, and a simple desire to keep getting better. In theory, again, anyone willing to do what’s required to keep getting better WILL get better.

Creating Passionate Users: How to be an expert

With this add-in you can permanently remove hidden and collaboration data, such as change tracking and comments, from Word 2003/XP, Excel 2003/XP, and PowerPoint 2003/XP files.

When you distribute an Office document electronically, the document might contain information that you do not want to share publicly, such as information you’ve designated as “hidden” or information that allows you to collaborate on writing and editing the document with others.

The Remove Hidden Data add-in is a tool that you can use to remove personal or hidden data that might not be immediately apparent when you view the document in your Microsoft Office application.

You can run the Remove Hidden Data add-in on individual files from within your Office XP or Office 2003 application. Or, you can run Remove Hidden Data on multiple files at once from the command line. In either case, to run the tool you must have the application installed in which the document was created.

Download details: Office 2003/XP Add-in: Remove Hidden Data (Microsoft.com)

Rod Boothby at Innovation Creators has some thoughts on the next wave in web-based productivity tools; the MBA class of 2006 will be using blogs, wikis, web-based collaboration software for project management, and social networking tools.

Perhaps the best idea for knowledge workers in Rod’s very useful post is the implementation of these technologies to create a “write once, use often” environment:

With enterprise blogs and enterprise Wikis, when you write an article or a post, that information is captured in a structured format. That means it can be turned into many things. For example, most blogging systems, including MovableType and WordPress, will turn your blog posts into a feed. This means that people who use news readers to gather information from the feeds of multiple blogs and sites like the New York Times, can also get a feed from your project.

But why stop with news readers? Today’s office tools could be described as write once, search often and cut & paste even more. Web Office is going to change that. People won’t set out to write searchable text when they post to an enterprise blog or Wiki, but the Web Office technology will produce searchable text that can be easily hyper-linked and searched almost as a kind of side benefit. And what an amazing positive externality it is.

Throughout Web Office, information will become efficiently reusable. For example, random project blog and Wiki posts from one employee can be combined into a full HR report on that person’s performance. Every post, comment and email about a client can be combined into a simple comprehensive report on the state of the company’s relationship with that client. Basic technology such as feeds are already making this possible.

Innovation Creators: The Next Wave in Productivity Tools - Web Office

Think you can’t open Office documents without paying hundreds of dollars for software? Think again. Just visit ThinkFree Office Online and you can open, edit, and create Office documents with this easy and convenient online service, new from ThinkFree.

With ThinkFree Office Online you can:

• Create Microsoft Office-compatible documents from the Web
• Open and edit your Office documents anywhere and anytime
• Post documents directly to your blog without any conversion
• Create powerful Web presentations using a familiar interface
• Convert your existing documents to PDF format

ThinkFree Office Online

The promising web startup SiteAdvisor, which we’ve blogged about before (over at enrevanche) is finishing up their beta period and announcing a three-month-long Free Preview today.

SiteAdvisor’s mission is simple: they trawl the web, 24/7, looking for “unsafe” sites (sites that will attempt to load spyware or other software badness on your PC, or that will result in a deluge of spam if you sign up for information.)

When you sign up with SiteAdvisor, you install a little piece of software that resides quietly in your browser (Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox), and then as you search or surf, the SiteAdvisor indicator checks in with the “bad sites” database and changes color to alert you to signs of potential trouble. (Green is good; yellow indicates a need for caution; red is bad.)

I’ve been using SiteAdvisor since mid-January, as a beta tester, and am happy to report that it’s functioning flawlessly.

If you know anyone who has a PC full of spyware or similar problems, tell them to do all of these things, in this order.

1. Stop using Internet Explorer forever, and switch to Mozilla Firefox.
2. Get rid of whatever security software (if any) they’re currently using, as it clearly isn’t working. (In most versions of Windows, go to the Add/Remove Programs control panel and get that crap off your system.)
3. Download and install AVG AntiVirus (totally free.)
4. Download and install Microsoft AntiSpyware (free through at least July 2006)
5. Download and install the Free Edition of ZoneAlarm Firewall.(Alternate to steps 3-5: If you’d like one piece of commercial software, with technical support, to do anti-virus, anti-spyware, and firewall duties for you, I can’t recommend buying and installing Zone Alarm Security Suite highly enough - about $50.)
6. And finally, to help them keep things clean as a whistle–especially if there are kids in the house who might do things like download music from peer-to-peer networks–urge them to give SiteAdvisor a try, and spend five minutes making sure everyone in the house knows how to use it.

There’s no offense like an excellent defense, they say (and they’re right.)

Also, check out the SiteAdvisor Blog for amusingly told True Horror Stories from the world of Web Badness.

• SiteAdvisor
• SiteAdvisor Blog

Related: SiteAdvisor: The Web’s Download Disasters (enrevanche)