Knowledge Work

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

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

A few updates have been made to the Knowledge Worker Free/Open Source Toolbox, which provides a list of freeware and/or open-source alternatives to popular commercial software.

Most notably, we’ve added a very good free, open-source functional replacement for Microsoft Project to the tools list: Open Workbench.

Open Workbench is an open source Windows-based desktop application that provides robust project scheduling and management functionality and is free to distribute throughout the enterprise. When users need to move beyond desktop scheduling to a workgroup, division or enterprise-wide solution, they can upgrade to CA’s Clarity™ system, a project and portfolio management system that offers bidirectional integration with Open Workbench.

Links to Open Workbench and other open-source tools can be found at the Toolbox (hosted here.)

Knowledge Worker Free/Open Source Toolbox (Updated February 27, 2006)

Most U.S. workers say they feel rushed on the job, but they are getting less accomplished than a decade ago, according to newly released research.

Workers completed two-thirds of their work in an average day last year, down from about three-quarters in a 1994 study, according to research conducted for Day-Timers Inc., an East Texas, Pennsylvania-based maker of organizational products.

The biggest culprit is the technology that was supposed to make work quicker and easier, experts say.

“Technology has sped everything up and, by speeding everything up, it’s slowed everything down, paradoxically,” said John Challenger, chief executive of Chicago-based outplacement consultants Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc.

Americans work more, seem to accomplish less - Yahoo! News

Okay, time for a little rant on productivity.

The researchers cited in the article above have observed a couple of dynamics at work. First, technology raises the bar: it makes it possible for you to do more, so you’re expected to do more. Second, it enables multitasking, perhaps to an unhealthy degree: you’re constantly taking little bites out of all the tasks before you, but are you ever really finishing anything?

I would add a third observation: the technology that we use to do our jobs is often much more complicated than it needs to be, and we spend an inordinate amount of unproductive time trying to make the damned stuff behave. The cluttered interfaces and bloated feature lists of much modern PC software do *not* make positive contributions to usability and productivity.

I’ve had a lot of different job titles, but for the most part I write for a living. Several years ago I switched from a bloated, cluttered word processor (Microsoft Word) to a full-featured but much cleaner text editor (TextPad) as my primary composition tool. Only after I’ve written the basic copy and am ready to apply styles and formatting do I cut and paste into Word or OpenOffice (if I’m producing printed matter or a PDF) or Nvu (if I’m publishing to the Web)

Should you really need a day of training and a third-party manual the thickness of a small city’s phone book to get productive with a project management tool like Microsoft Project?

Does Microsoft Outlook really need to have an interface like a 747 flight simulator just so you can send and receive e-mails, make little notes to yourself, and keep an address book and to-do list?

(I’m not picking on Microsoft, honestly–but when you dominate a market like they do, you make yourself a fat target.)

Try one of 37Signals’ products (Basecamp or Backpack - ultraclean, usable project management and personal information management software, respectively) and then tell me you’d willingly go back to Project and Outlook.

A new site called Nuvvo offers Web-delivered e-learning to both teachers and students.  If you’re an instructional designer, Nuvvo provides a pretty spiffy toolkit for course development.

Nuvvo is your way to teach on the web. Everyone knows a little bit about something, and this free, AJAX-enhanced eLearning web service is designed to bring out the teacher in all of us. Sign up and build a course in minutes; advertise your course on our eLearning Market to get the word out. Get teaching with Nuvvo, Web 2.0’s answer to eLearning.

Nuvvo Free On-demand eLearning

Jonathan Grubb describes “some personalities that come out in meetings, especially at big software companies”: 8 types of meeting attendees.

If you’ve done any time in project or staff meetings, you’ll recognize a number of these archetypes (The Talker, The Killer, etc.) as well as some contributed by Jonathan’s readers in the comments.

Personally, I have always been in complete, bewildered awe of The Stealth Lurker:

The Stealth Lurker
You might think this guy is a real lurker, but he isn’t. He’s the one who says nothing for the whole meeting then offers a single quietly stated opinion near the end. Then, no matter what everyone else agreed on, his plan gets implemented. How did it happen? Who knows. This guy has some power you don’t understand. Get to know him.

Sound advice.

Jonathan Grubb: 8 types of meeting attendees

The dominance of English as the world’s top language — until recently an advantage to both Britain and the United States — is now beginning to undermine the competitiveness of both nations, according to a major research report.

The report commissioned by the British Council says monolingual English graduates “face a bleak economic future” as multilingual competitors flood into the workforce from all corners of the globe.

A massive increase in the number of people learning English is under way and likely to peak at around 2 billion in the next decade, according to the report entitled “English Next.”

More than half of all primary school children in China now learn English and the number of English speakers in India and China — 500 million — now exceeds the total number of mother-tongue English speakers elsewhere in the world.

Global spread of English threatens US, UK: study - Reuters via Yahoo! News

Today I want to talk about the all-out assault on the English language and the role technology plays in that unprovoked and dastardly attack. I especially want to talk about the ways dumbing down the language is not only seen as acceptable, but is tacitly encouraged as the status quo.Any number of my acquaintances excuse the bad writing and atrocious punctuation that proliferates in e-mail by saying, in essence, “Well, at least people are writing again.” Horse droppings. People have never stopped writing, although it’s reaching a point where you wish a lot of them would.

[…]

Business jargon is simply the art of saying nothing while appearing to say a lot.

As a result, we have CEOs of major corporations who lack the basic writing skills to pen a simple, in-house memo in plain-spoken English. We see marketing swine get paid princely sums to lie about their products in language so bloated with jargon that their lies — and even their half-truths — are unintelligible. We see company flacks churning out impenetrable press releases that no editor in his right mind would consider reading, let alone using. We see business reporting reduced to the trite and formulaic because the reporter is either too uncritical or too lazy to take a hard look at what lies behind the smoke and mirrors.

Wired News: Literacy Limps Into the Kill Zone

After more than two years of rumor and speculation surrounding its plans to create a new suite of Office servers designed to complement its desktop Office offerings, Microsoft on Thursday revealed its final Office 2007 server packaging line up.

While the company is introducing several brand-new servers as part of its next-generation office-productivity family, there is no comprehensive family of server offerings akin to the one that company insiders, testers and customers had been expecting. Instead, Microsoft has opted to roll up into a single new server, christened “Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007,” several server offerings that many company watchers expected to launch as standalone products.

…[T]he big kahuna on the Office Server 2007 side is Office SharePoint Portal Server 2007. That offering will combine Microsoft’s current Content Management Server, SharePoint Portal Server and what was expected to debut as a standalone Excel Server into a single product. Until quite recently, Microsoft was using the name “Office Server” to refer to Office SharePoint Portal Server 2007, company officials acknowledged.

SharePoint Portal Server 2007 will act as a backend for a variety of new client-based Office services. It also will incorporate a variety of workflow engines, designed to mesh with Windows Workflow Foundation, the next-generation Windows workflow technology that Microsoft is baking into Windows Vista, Longhorn Server and other future Windows releases.

Microsoft Rethinks Its Office 2007 Server Line Up (Microsoft Watch)

A new blog that will be of interest to the IT Service Management and Business Process Improvement folks: ITIL4Real, a blog which aims to document an actual ITIL implementation project from its inception.

ITIL4Real: An ITIL project in the real world

The globalization of work tends to start from the bottom up. The first jobs to be moved abroad are typically simple assembly tasks, followed by manufacturing, and later, skilled work like computer programming. At the end of this progression is the work done by scientists and engineers in research and development laboratories.

A new study that will be presented today to the National Academies, the nation’s leading advisory groups on science and technology, suggests that more and more research work at corporations will be sent to fast-growing economies with strong education systems, like China and India.

Outsourcing Is Climbing Skills Ladder - New York Times (February 17. 2006)

Oracle tried to acquire open-source database maker MySQL, an indication of the profound changes the software giant is willing to make as it adapts to the increasingly significant collaborative programming philosophy.

MySQL Chief Executive Marten Mickos confirmed the acquisition attempt in an interview at the Open Source Business Conference here but wouldn’t provide details such as when the approach was made or how much money Oracle offered.

He did, however, say why he turned down Oracle’s offer: the desire to keep his company’s independence. “We will be part of a larger company, but it will be called MySQL,” Mickos said.

Oracle tried to buy open-source MySQL (CNet News via TechRepublic)

This is a mighty good idea: a new service called Campfire allows you to create private “chat rooms” for your business or enterprise. This would be a terrific adjunct to, or even in some cases replacement for, teleconferencing or videoconferencing.

Instant messaging is great for one-on-one chats, but it’s not optimized for group chats of 3 or more people. Further, instant messaging is network dependent — if you are on AIM, and your client is on MSN, you can’t instant message. Campfire, on the other hand, is all about simple and quick network-agnostic group chats. It’s a self-contained, password-protected web-based chatroom that allows groups of up to 40 people to chat and easily share files together. No instant messaging software is required — all that’s required is a web browser.

Campfire is the newest project from 37signals–the same folks who also run Basecamp (web-based project management) and Backpack (personal and small business information organizer). They’re currently offering a 30-day free trial; it’s worth a look, especially if you collaborate on projects with people in farflung locations.

Simple group chat for business: Campfire