Knowledge Work

I have a spare laptop of recent vintage around the house, and had some time on my hands this weekend–Carrie was working; I, uncharacteristically was not–so I downloaded and installed the public beta of the much-delayed and rescoped “Longhorn,” the operating system that Microsoft is now calling Windows Vista.

I’ve also installed the public betas of the Office 2007 applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook) plus Visio and Project.

My initial thoughts on Vista are all stock market-related.

• If you own Microsoft stock, strongly consider selling it now.
• If you don’t own Microsoft stock, but have a margin account with your broker, strongly consider shorting (at least) a few hundred shares of it before the public release of this abortion (currently slated for November 2006 for business editions, and January 2007 for consumer editions.)
• Go long on Apple. Their new Intel Core Duo-based machines, which can run both OS X and Windows, are perfectly positioned to take advantage of Microsoft’s impending stumble.

I am currently evaluating Ubuntu Linux as a potential desktop OS alternative, and am very happy (to say the least) with its performance, but in all honesty, if I go with a Unix-like OS in the near future, it’s going to be Apple OS X.

My thoughts on the new Office applications are soon to follow. One item of note: Microsoft Word 2007 supports a number of common blogging platforms natively.

Related:

• PC Magazine, Inside Windows Vista Build 5308
• Ubuntu Linux
• Apple Mac OS X

Jakob Nielsen (guru of all things web-usability-related) did a salary study, and here’s what he found (as reported by ZDNet.com):

1. Entry-level staffers were paid unrealistically high salaries during the bubble, when dot-com companies were desperate to hire any warm body that walked in the door
2. Experienced staffers were also paid more during the bubble, but their salaries have declined less in subsequent years
3. As a result of the different trends for entry-level and experienced staff, the premium on experience has increased in recent years: it’s currently about $5,000 per year of experience, compared with about $3,000 in 2001.

Web Usability experts not appreciating in value | Digital Micro-Markets | ZDNet.com

Related: Jakob Nielsen’s Salary Trends for Usability Professionals

Tarus Balog of the OpenNMS Group is a little exercised, and justifiably so, about a new crop of firms that see “open source” as nothing more than a marketing buzzword:

Open source software development is not just about providing the source code for your application. It is much more about building a community around a shared project. That takes time. I think the biggest myth about open source software is that you say “hey, I’m open source now” and suddenly thousands of qualified people give up nights and weekends to work on your code. You can’t stick nine pregnant women in a room for a month and get a baby, it just doesn’t work that way.

But some people are trying.

[…]

You can’t hang a tarp in front of a cathedral and have it become a bazaar.

Word.

Adventures in Open Source » “Open Source” is not a Marketing Term

(Related: “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” by Eric S. Raymond.)

Problems with the balance between the demands of profit-driven corporations and peoples’ need to live a satisfying life won’t be cured by policy statements and procedure manuals. That isn’t where the causes lie. They’re inside peoples’ heads: obsessive achievement drive, ambition gone mad, laughable greed for money and power, and blithe disregard of anything not linked to short-term results. Macho, “grab ‘n go” bosses don’t treat underlings like cattle to be milked of every ounce of effort because they’ve selected incorrect HR policies. They do it because they have dysfunctional values and massively over-inflated egos.

Work/life balance is an issue of civilization. It’s driven by simplistic, financially-derived goals, an unthinking ideology of “winner takes all,” and contempt for those unable to keep up. It’s the result of achievement motivation run wild. Until executives (and wannabe executives) realize they’ve created a monster that’s out of control — one that will eventually devour their lives and health too — no amount of policy-writing will make any difference.

Source: The Truth About Work/Life Balance - lifehack.org

This seems to be a very simple proposition to me, but then I’m a simple man.There are 168 hours (24 x 7) in a seven-day week.

Allowing ten hours a day for sleep, meals and personal hygiene, this leaves us with 98 potentially productive hours to work (and conduct our lives!)  Let’s call it 100, because you’re gonna skip lunch at least a day or two. (This assumes that you have no religious prohibitions against working on one of the days of the week, an assumption we’ve made to simplify the math.)

I don’t know anyone in New York in any professional job who works a strict 40-hour week, though they must be out there.

But if you are consistently spending much more than half of your available waking hours on the job–if you’re consistently exceeding the 50-hour-a-week mark by a wide enough margin–that should be a gigantic red flag that your work and your life are out of balance.

And you should do something about it.

Why work 8 hours/day for someone else when you can work 16 hours/day for yourself?

So you want to be a consultant…?

How? Talk technical-sounding rubbish. If it works for new-age airheads spouting ignorant garbage about quantum physics, it can work for you, too:

I’ve been to quite a few consultancy presentations where all kinds of jargon and graphs are flashed up on the screen. The consultants will drop terms like “inverted blade-center uptime matrix” into the presentation while showing some baffling data on the screen. If I look around the room while this is going on, everyone will be nodding and wide-eyed. The audience is baffled by the cool-sounding words and the clever-looking graphs.

If, at this time, you ask the consultant what exactly an “inverted blade-center uptime matrix” is, they’ll often try to fob-you off with even more meaningless jargon. If you persist in trying to pin them down, they’ll start acting like you must be some kind of incompetent idiot for not understanding this stuff. And the audience will probably be on the consultant’s side - they don’t want to be seen as incompetent idiots.

Consultants behave this way because they know that’s how to get a sale. Bombard people with clever-sounding stuff they don’t really understand, and they’ll assume that you’re some kind of genius. It’s a great way of making money.

Stock analysts, economic forecasters, management consultants, futurologists, investment advisors and so on use this tactic all the time. It’s their chief marketing strategy for the simple reason that it works.

Just make a far-fetched claim - like you know where the stock-market will be this time next year - and dress it up in some fancy language, graphs, and figures. All sorts of otherwise intelligent people will virtually beg you to take their money.

Enron built an entire global company using this scheme. Often, during the late-90s press coverage about how wonderful Enron was, the writer would admit no-one knew quite how the company was making its money. They were quick to assure their readers that this was nothing to be alarmed about, however. This was the most admired company in the world, after all. Just listen to all that fancy energy-market jargon that the managers spout.

It sounded clever, so it must be true.

Only it wasn’t.

The Easiest Way To Fool Smart People (Paul’s Tips)

Most of management theory is inane, writes our correspondent, the founder of a consulting firm. If you want to succeed in business, don’t get an M.B.A. Study philosophy instead.

The Management Myth (Atlantic magazine, June 2006; subscription required)

…for the reduced volume of blogging over here.

I’ve been working hard, but also taking a lot of training lately.

• Last month, I sat for (and passed) the ITIL Foundation certification exam.
• I’ve made a couple of quick (and very pleasant) trips to the Bay Area of California for administrative classes conducted by BMC Software, who produce the Remedy line of service-management products.
• And this month (this week, in fact) I have been immersed in a PRINCE2 Practitioner class. (PRINCE2–PRojects IN a Controlled Environment–is a project management methodology developed by the Office of Government Commerce, the same folks who brought us ITIL.)

PRINCE2: whew.  It’s a lot of material to get through–a 400 page text, plus supplementary material, in a week of classes–but our instructor (from Advantage Learning in the UK) must be doing something right, as 100% of the class passed the PRINCE2 Foundation exam yesterday.

Now, on to the Practitioner exam Friday. Once I recover from that, blogging should resume its normal operational tempo next week.
Related:

• ITIL
• PRINCE2
• Office of Government Commerce (UK)
• Advantage Learning (UK)

Dan Geer is an extremely well respected security expert. When he worries about something, people listen.

One of the things he has worried - and warned - about is the danger represented by IT ‘monocultures’ - the situation that arises when everyone uses the same software, for example, and therefore everyone shares the same vulnerability to a computer virus or other security threat.

[…]
As it happens, Dan’s bomb went off a few days ago, with the breakout of the “Backdoor.Ginwui” virus, a malicious bit of code that Symantec introduced in an alert as follows:

It has been reported that Backdoor.Ginwui may be dropped by a malicious Word document exploiting an undocumented vulnerability in Microsoft Word. This malicious Word document is currently detected as Trojan.Mdropper.H.

The ConsortiumInfo.org Standards Blog: “Monocultures and Document formats: Dan’s Bomb Goes Off”

Recent e-mail thread, names redacted and text lightly edited to protect the innocent and/or guilty:

from: [email protected]
to: Barry

Hi Barry,

I am looking for an information architect for [gigantic investment bank] in NYC. Please e-mail me your resume and hrly rate and I will get back to you. XML and investment banking are a must.

****

from: Barry
to: [email protected]
bcc: friendandcolleague

Hi [Recruiter],

I’m off the market now, but I will pass this requirement on to friends who might be looking.

- bc

*****

from: friendandcolleague
to: Barry

i will pass it along

man it’s getting hot out there

:)

*****

from: Barry
to: friendandcolleague

Hot enough to make me worry about another tech bubble, actually.

- bc

*****

from: friendandcolleague
to: Barry

oh man

here are two agenda items i saw on a whiteboard in a room i was in for a meeting

“new paradigms”
“reinvention”

nda: sign here please

*****

from: Barry
to: friendandcolleague

Yes. It’s time to break out the Bullshit Bingo board again.

http://www.bullshitbingo.net/cards/bullshit/

*****

from: friendandcolleague
to: Barry

see also http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html

The fact of the matter is that making a significant change in a product that is in use in your organization can be more difficult to extricate yourself from than a tar pit—particularly if it means a big loss of revenue to a vendor. A perfect example is the state of Massachusetts’ attempt to go with an open document format. Clearly, Microsoft did not want that happening. But this is certainly not limited to Microsoft. Any indication to a vendor that they may be replaced can scale from verbal protests, to lawsuits to having your service cut off. So, if you are considering such a shift, you’ll need to do a lot of careful planning.

TechRepublic Blog: 50 ways to leave your (vendor)

Successes or failures of employees in the workplace can be traced to what kind of father they had, a psychologist argues in a new book.

In “The Father Factor,” Stephan Poulter lists five styles of fathers — super-achieving, time bomb, passive, absent and compassionate/mentor — who have powerful influences on the careers of their sons and daughters.

Children of the “time-bomb” father, for example, who explodes in anger at his family, learn how to read people and their moods. Those intuitive abilities make them good at such jobs as personnel managers or negotiators, he writes.

How “Daddy” affects your job - Reuters via Yahoo! News

From the latest issue of New Scientist magazine (subscription required) comes an article entitled “Change the way you see the world” (and it will):

We love our maps. At first glance, people are shocked by them: the shapes look familiar, yet everything is absurdly distorted. Without even thinking, they have learned something about the world they live in.

Most of our data comes from sources such as United Nations reports and is often tucked away in appendices. No one wants to look at those figures, and it would be hard to provoke any excitement by confronting someone with spreadsheets filled with numbers. But you just can’t help looking at these pictures. After all, a new view of the world, rather like the famous Earthrise photo taken by Apollo astronauts, is a compelling sight.

The maps referred to here are produced by the statisticians and cartographers at Worldmapper.org, and they use a simple but powerfully effective method to convey information: they shrink or swell portions of the world map to indicate the magnitude of the statistics being shown.

Here’s a pair of maps that speak volumes:

New Scientist: Change the way you see the world (subscription required) If you don’t subscribe to New Scientist–and you should; it’s a very readable weekly that wipes the floor with every other magazine that even attempts to communicate with a lay audience–you can go directly to Worldmapper.org and groove on the mappage therein.

Related: Worldmapper.org

Hat Tip: BLDG BLOG via Althouse

The Freaknomics boys are at it again, with an article in the Sunday New York Times about “expert performance.”

Simply put, research shows that people who are very good at what they do — star ballet dancers, soccer players, neurosurgeons — are not born with “natural talent,” but acquire their skills through ruthless discipline and practice.

Ericsson and his colleagues have thus taken to studying expert performers in a wide range of pursuits, including soccer, golf, surgery, piano playing, Scrabble, writing, chess, software design, stock picking and darts. They gather all the data they can, not just performance statistics and biographical details but also the results of their own laboratory experiments with high achievers.

Their work, compiled in the “Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance,” a 900-page academic book that will be published next month, makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers — whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming — are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of clichés that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these particular clichés just happen to be true.

Ericsson’s research suggests a third cliché as well: when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love — because if you don’t love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don’t like to do things they aren’t “good” at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don’t possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better.

A Star Is Made - New York Times

The OpenDocument format has become an ISO standard.

OpenOffice 2.0 fully supports this standard.

Go download it now.

Related:

• Free/Open Source Software Toolbox for Knowledge Workers (at Campbell-Online.com) 

Solveig Haugland has just posted a brief primer on how to use your word processor, and it should be required reading for anyone who writes as part of their job.

It’s cleverly masked as a article about how to format your documents so that they will be easier to share between word-processsing platforms, but it is, in fact, a lesson on basic word processing. (I think she didn’t want to hurt the audience’s feelings by pitching it as, “Hey, idiots… time to finally learn how to correctly use that program you’ve been using incorrectly all your life…”)

Most word processors, Word and OpenOffice included, are set up to work out-of-the-box for people who have absolutely no clue what they’re doing, and who will use the software like a virtual typewriter–inserting hard returns when they need spaces, or, horror of horrors, using tabs and hard returns when they need indentation.

Making an analogy between formatting a document and packing and labelling boxes when moving to a new house , Ms. Haugland writes:

When you use very specific formatting like tabs to indent text and carriage returns to switch to the next line, it’s like trying to control exactly where your spatulas are supposed to go in the new house [instead of putting them in box labelled “kitchen”]. No two office suites are alike, and the more manual, highly controlled items you have in your document, the more likely the formatting will get messy when you go from one office suite to another. But if you use the formatting capabilities to indent and add spacing–well, that’s more like just labeling a box Kitchen and putting the box somewhere that makes sense.

The formatting tips in this article will also give you more professional-looking documents that are easier to update when the content or formatting rules change.

Word and OpenOffice are both very powerful tools for document production. If you’d like to leave the ranks of the Clueless and learn a little about how to actually use some of the formatting features of your word processor, this is a good article to start with. Once you realize that your computer is more than a fancy electronic typewriter, a world of possibilities will open up.

Smart formatting for better compatibility between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office (Solveig Haugland, SearchOpenSource.com)

Copyblogger is all about “how to sell with blogs, e-mail and RSS.” It looks like an excellent resource for small businessses and consultancies looking to leverage the power of the Web to market themselves.

Copywriting 101 is a set of articles about persuasive writing for the Web:

Copywriting skills are an essential element to the new conversational style of marketing. Whether you’re looking to sell something or to build traffic by earning links from others, you’ll need to tell compelling stories that grab attention and connect with people. This tutorial is designed to get you up and running with the basics of copywriting in ten easy lessons.

Copyblogger

Long seen as a method to maximize employment opportunities and salaries in the post-dot-com-bust era, a study released today finds that pay for certified IT skills falls short of the pay for non-certified skills.

The Q1 2006 Hot Technical Skills and Certifications Pay Index, released April 25 by Foote Partners, a New Canaan, Conn., IT compensation and workforce management firm, found that pay premiums for non-certified IT skills grew three times faster than for certified ones in a six-month period spanning 2005-2006.

The study suggests that there has been a change in employers’ acceptance of the value of non-certified tech skills versus certifications in maintaining competitive pay for their workers.

Sounds like employers are getting fed up with the performance of “paper MCSEs“–people who took cram courses to pass a Microsoft certification exam, but when faced with an actual server with actual problems in the real world, have no real idea of how to proceed. And they’re finding out that certifications are no substitute for experience and a proven track record.
There *are* some certifications that seem to be growing in value… and, interestingly, they are not pegged to particular products or technologies for the most part:

Fourteen certifications have grown in value, showing an 11 percent or higher growth over the last year, including SCNP (Security Certified Network Professional), CISM (Certified Information Security Manager) and MCT (Microsoft Certified Trainer).

In the New York City market, we are also seeing demand for ITIL certification (and, to a lesser extent, CMMI training) for IT specialists, developers, and managers. And, of course, PMI-certified Project Management Professionals (PMPs) are in high demand.

eWeek: The Downside of Certification

Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 7 as a public beta.

I’ve downloaded and installed it without difficulty. Still kicking the tires, but so far I haven’t seen anything that would make me leave Firefox.

Internet Explorer 7: downloads (Microsoft.com)

Robin Yearsley serves up two terrific posts this morning at the IT Service Blog.

One of them is a pointer to a white paper (in PDF format) called Root Cause Analysis for Beginners. (In a former job, I had to develop and teach a root cause analysis class to our problem resolvers, and I wish that I had known of the existence of this white paper; I would have given a copy to every student.)

I hear some of the process-challenged among you asking, “What’s root cause analysis?”  Here, let authors James J. Rooney and Lee N. Vanden Heuvel of the American Society for Quality break it down for you:

• Root cause analysis helps identify what, how and why something happened, thus preventing recurrence.
• Root causes are underlying, are reasonably identifiable, can be controlled by management and allow for generation of recommendations.
• The process involves data collection, cause charting, root cause identification and recommendation generation and implementation.

If you’re not doing root cause analysis on identified problems, then you’re not really doing problem management (as a generic concept) and you’re certainly not doing Problem Management in the ITIL sense.

The second gem is a pointer to an article from CIO, comparing ITIL, COBIT, and ISO 17799 (a standard for information security) with respect to their requirements for security and controls. (This is an area of particular interest to CIOs around the world, due to regulatory laws like Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA in the U.S. and similar legislation elsewhere.)

It turns out that the three standards work well together:

ISO 17999 provides security controls. It does not provide implementation guidance and does not specifically address how these processes fit into the overall IT management processes.

ITIL is strong on delivery and support processes. It describes how to structure operational processes but is weak on security controls and processes.

COBIT is focused on controls and metrics. It also lacks a security component but provides a more global view of IT processes at the IT organization management principles than ITIL.

Root Cause Analysis For Beginners (IT Service Blog)
ITIL, CoBIT and ISO: Overlap or Complement? (IT Service Blog)