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 of its new Vista operating system. (Indeed, the recently announced delay of the consumer version of Vista will hold up what would have been the timely release of Sinofsky’s Office 2007 since Microsoft wants to release the two products at the same time).
Business 2.0: The man who could fix Windows
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 ITSM standards are the British Standard BS15000-1:2002 and the Australian Standard AS 8018.1-2004. A South African version of the BS15000 standard also exists.
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) recently adopted the BS15000 standard and is expected to publish the ISO 20000 standard for Service Management by 2006, although many think it likely that this effort will take longer…
Might as well get familiar with ISO 20000 now; you’re going to be hearing a *lot* more about it in the near future.
IT Service Blog - ITIL Inside: ISO20000 and ITIL - The “Need to Know” Guide
Related:
(both available for purchase from The ISO Store)
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 before making the leap to “infinity and beyond” as Buzz Lightyear would say.
Guy Kawasaki: Nine Questions to Ask a 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 document is a roadmap for DITA: what it is and how it applies to technical documentation.
Introduction to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (IBM.com)
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 same, let me call your attention to an article in the March-April issue of Foreign Affairs by Princeton University economist Alan Blinder…
In the new global order, Blinder writes, not just manufacturing jobs but a large number of service jobs will be performed in cheaper climes. Indeed, only hands-on or face-to-face services look safe. “Janitors and crane operators are probably immune to foreign competition,” Blinder writes, “accountants and computer programmers are not.”
Let me break it down for you in even simpler language. I’ve spent the last couple of years working for the outsourcing division of a major multinational consulting firm (I’m moving on to a new job next month, after taking a long-delayed vacation/rest break) and I can state this with a high degree of confidence:
If (a) you are primarily a knowledge worker whose job does not demand your physical presence, and (b) if your job can be reduced to a set of written instructions and described in conventional language that other professionals can understand, you’ve already been outsourced and/or offshored; you just don’t know it yet. (Credit goes to Bruce Sterling via Kottke for the seed that sprouted this observation.)
And if this piques your interest, here are the two most important things I think you need to do to hold on to your (professional-class) job in the New Economy:
- Work on your “soft skills” and on creating hard-to-find (but needed) combinations of skills. If you’re primarily a technical guy, work like hell on your business and communications skills! If you’re primarily on the business side, get technically literate, fast.
- Focus on roles that require your presence. You may dig the idea of working from home, but if you can telecommute to your job from your house or apartment, a guy who’s much hungrier and much cheaper than you are can probably do it from Bangalore, Krakow, Prague or Shanghai.
Will Your Job Survive? (Harold Meyerson, Washington Post)
Related:
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 work of psychologists, sociologists, and management experts, the authors make a compelling case that some of business’s beloved truths are far from self-evident.
USNews.com: Management maxims in need of a makeover
• 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 to see whether the patient needs vitamins.
ACTUALLY, I can’t make that last statement. A corporation has patented that fact, and demands a royalty for its use. Anyone who makes the fact public and encourages doctors to test for the condition and treat it can be sued for royalty fees. Any doctor who reads a patient’s test results and even thinks of vitamin deficiency infringes the patent. A federal circuit court held that mere thinking violates the patent.
This Essay Breaks the Law - New York Times
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… not so much.
There’s a growing wedge between U.S. companies and their American employees. What used to be good for General Motors, so to speak, also used to be good for the Americans who worked for General Motors. In many ways (putting labor disputes aside), the interests of U.S. companies and U.S. workers were closely aligned, especially when borders were harder to breach and trade seemed like more of a zero-sum game.
[…]
What is good for General Motors these days is massive cost-cutting, to help reverse an enormous $10.6 billion loss in 2005 and keep the company afloat. And the way companies cut costs these days is by shipping any work that is transferable overseas and building stuff there, too. In the old days, of course, the fortunes of companies and their workers rose and fell in unison; manufacturers laid off U.S. workers when times were tough and rehired them when business picked up. But jobs that go overseas are gone forever, or at least until assembly line workers and engineers in China and India start to earn the same as their American counterparts. And that’s not going to happen before the unemployment insurance runs out. Companies exist to make money, not to keep people employed. But U.S. companies can increasingly make money while bypassing American workers. “The fate of U.S. workers is no longer part of corporate decision making,” says [coauthor of Outsourcing America Ronald] Hira. That sounds ominous, yet for Americans with the energy to get off the couch and pay attention, it’s an opportunity. Those who are creative, entrepreneurial, well educated, and able to consistently learn the latest skills will thrive. But if you have the choice, it’s probably better to be a stockholder of corporate America than an employee.
Invest in corporate America. Just don’t work there (USNews.com)
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
