Knowledge Work

Is the layoff the great American wound? In Louis Uchitelle’s account, it seems a wound in triplicate. It hollows out companies so they can’t compete. It hollows out the country by removing middle-class jobs. It hollows out the middle-class employees who are laid off and then too often drop permanently to a demeaning, low-wage way […]

Many who blame outsourcing providers when things go wrong don’t have the maturity to understand their own responsibilities.
[…]
A well thought-through and managed outsourcing relationship should obviate the need for recourse to contracts, says Jeremy Tipper, managing director of Capital Consulting. And the process should start by the client thinking long and hard about whether it […]

Meet Steven Sinofsky. He does Windows.
Steven Sinofsky is a rare bird on Microsoft’s Redmond campus — a manager who actually delivers software on time. As head of product development for Office, he’s known for meeting release deadlines.
He’s now been put in charge of Microsoft’s Windows group, which has seen endless delays in the release […]

The IT Service Blog republishes a very useful introductory article, which orients readers to the emerging ISO 20000 standard (based on ITIL.)
Contrary to popular belief, ITIL is not a service management standard, but rather a structured approach or process framework on which a growing number of ITSM standards are based. Most prominent among these ITIL-based […]

Most of the information that you can find about recruiting is for the employer, not the employee. (I’m as guilty as this as anyone: for example, The Art of Recruiting, I and II.) Let’s turn the tables, switch modes, and balance the scales by discussing what a hot candidate should ask a private, venture-backed startup […]

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is an XML-based, end-to-end architecture for authoring, producing, and delivering technical information. This architecture consists of a set of design principles for creating “information-typed” modules at a topic level and for using that content in delivery modes such as online help and product support portals on the Web. This […]

In case you’ve been worrying about how the war in Iraq will end, or the coming of avian flu, or the extinction of the universe as we drift into the cosmic void, well, relax. Here’s something you should really fret about: the future of the U.S. economy in the age of globalization.
For a discussion of […]

What if some of the business world’s most dearly held axioms are wrong? What if there is a better way? This is the argument Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton, management professors at Stanford University, make in their new book, out this week, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management. Gathering the […]

• The Earth revolves around the Sun.
• The speed of light is a constant.
• Apples fall to earth because of gravity.
• Elevated blood sugar is linked to diabetes.
• Elevated uric acid is linked to gout.
• Elevated homocysteine is linked to heart disease.
• Elevated homocysteine is linked to B-12 deficiency, so doctors should test homocysteine levels […]

Richard J. Newman of US News and World Report has some good advice, for those of you for whom this is an option: Invest in corporate America. Just don’t work there.
Newman notes that as trends towards outsourcing and offshoring accelerate, US companies are more profitable and competitive than ever.
The job outlook for US workers, however… […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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” […]

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 […]

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 […]