Knowledge Work

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)

SCOUT Corporate Blogging offers 10 Tips for Becoming a Great Corporate Blogger.

If you blog as part of your business marketing strategy, spend a few minutes and read this post.

SCOUT Corporate Blogging (Backbone Media)

Here’s a classic example of why you need writers and editors who understand the subject matter they’re writing about:

After almost 20 years languishing on the shelf, large companies are beginning to adopt ITIL, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library of IT services best practices guidelines (the British pronounce it “it-ill,” while Americans say “eye-till”). Forrester Research predicts that 40 percent of large organizations will rely on ITIL by 2006 and 80 percent by 2008, up from a mere 13 percent that had implemented it by 2004.

[Ed. note: Hand-waving and hype about the future numbers, which are anybody’s guess, and there are plenty of people in Europe who would point out that ITIL has hardly been “languishing on the shelf for 20 years,” but probably more accurate than not. So far, so mediocre.]

Addressing ITIL and related IT management frameworks COBIT and ISO, a recent Forrester report notes…

Bzzzzzz! Wrong. “ISO” stands for “International Standards Organization,” and you don’t even want to think about how many numbered ISO standards there are, more than 99% of which have nothing whatsoever to do with IT service management. “ISO,” to put it mildly, ain’t a management framework.

Such a little thing.

Such a massively important thing–if you’re trying to sell somebody on the idea that you know what you’re talking about, you just blew it.

I know that Forrester Research has better writers and editors than this, so I’m pretty sure that somebody over at “Intelligent Enterprise” dropped the ball here.

The writer, by the way, most likely intended to reference ISO 9000 (quality management) or, if exceptionally hip, ISO 20000 (IT service management) though there are other possibilities as well.

Governance Gauge: Don’t Worry, “ITIL” Be Alright [sic] (Intelligent Enterprise.com)

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

Quick blogroll update: The Alchemy of Soulful Work has a new home on the Web (they’ve ditched TypePad.)

The anonymous blogger behind Dr. ITIL has resurfaced after a long absence with a new blog: IT Service Blog - ITIL Inside (and a related project, an ITIL-focused search engine.)

With the current corporate focus heavily on “do more with less”, customer complaints at records levels and the never ending global phenomenon in offshoring in India and China - it’s time to take a fresh look at how IT adds value to any business organization.

The adpater layer is Service.

Business folks don’t care about servers, routers, application API’s and firewalls. They just want their services to be always on, perform well and form a reliable part of their working life.

From the top however - how IT adds real value to an organization - rather than cost a ton of money and show little return (as the next project comes in late, delivers little and costs 33% more than expected) it’s clear a new agenda in demonstrating IT Service Value is necessary.

ITIL helps.

We’ll be following this one with interest.

• IT Service Blog - ITIL Inside
• IT Service Today (Search Engine)

Proof that the premier process management program in American business has crossed over into mainstream consciousness is that a rock band in Northern Kentucky calls itself 6 Sigma. Even those who know more about frets than fractions can explain that Six Sigma is a way of increasing efficiency. A less-alliterative management tool, ISO 9000, also has many fervent adherents but, alas, no rock namesake.Within the business community, enthusiasm for process management programs such as Six Sigma, ISO 9000 or their predecessor Total Quality Management (TQM) runs strong after two decades. For example, numerous consulting firms still encourage firms to adopt Six Sigma. And despite the mid-summer departure of James McNerney to become chief executive at Boeing, 3M continues to implement the Six Sigma methods that McNerney brought in 2001 from General Electric.

Yet Wharton management professor Mary J. Benner says now may be the time to reassess the corporate utility of process management programs and apply them with more discrimination. In research done with Harvard Business School professor Michael Tushman, she has found that process management can drag organizations down and dampen innovation. “In the appropriate setting, process management activities can help companies improve efficiency, but the risk is that you misapply these programs, in particular in areas where people are supposed to be innovative,” notes Benner. “Brand new technologies to produce products that don’t exist are difficult to measure. This kind of innovation may be crowded out when you focus too much on processes you can measure.”

TQM, ISO 9000, Six Sigma: Do Process Management Programs Discourage Innovation? - Knowledge@Wharton

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