Knowledge Work

Let’s face it: never before has knowing about emerging consumer trends been as important as it is now. Luckily, finding out about trends has become much, much easier. In a world that’s fully connected, where tens of thousands of smart professionals and amateurs are spotting, observing, thinking, and innovating, and putting their findings online for all to see, insanely valuable resources are up for grabs.

Yes, this avalanche of trends, insights and new business ideas may cause information overload, but there is definitely an exciting innovation overload, too. The only thing that separates YOU — passionate CEO, marketer, entrepreneur — from being in the know is the time to devote to absorbing these sources, if not adding to them yourself.

Trend Unit: Why we all can and should be trend watchers 

We’re definitely into act two of the outsourcing drama. TPI notes that the first-generation deals are all now coming up for review—they expect to see €36.5bn of renewals in 2006 rising to €40.8bn in 2007—over a fifth of the total market. Although historically 90% of renewals go to incumbents this still represents a huge opportunity for the “chasing group” as many of these deals date from a period where the choice of providers was very narrow. IBM and EDS in particular will have to look to their laurels, as it’s clear that clients are casting the net wider. TPI figures reflect this diversity—in the $40m plus bracket, 36 different providers signed more than two contracts, up from 29 in the previous year. Clearly this is partly due to the fact that outsourcing is becoming attractive to smaller and smaller clients. There’s certainly anecdotal evidence to suggest that smaller clients often feel a bit overlooked in the Big Six world. But the Big Six’s share of the Top 50 deals also declined—with more deals going to European and Indian providers.

The march of the Indian providers makes fascinating reading. In 2004 they took just 1% of both contracts and total contract value. Last year this had increased to 6% of contracts and 4% of value. It’s easy to see why Wipro, for example, was able to grow profits by 24% this year.

Figures like this are almost impossible to extrapolate, but I suspect this is only the beginning of the story as far as Indian providers are concerned. They are still facing huge inertial friction with European and US clients—the brands are not well-known, they do not have the client contact based on consultancy or IT assignments. But all that can change very rapidly. Ten years ago very few western executives would have had call to visit India. Now, as a result of outsourcing, many companies have active commercial links with the Sub-continent. It’s not scary or unknown any more. That growing familiarity with Indian business culture may be the biggest threat to the dominance of the Big Six.

Consulting Times: Outsourcing enters a new era

Not too long ago, a senior manager asked me to write a short page of talking points explaining why it was a good idea to have professional communicators–in this case, technical communicators–on staff.  Here’s what I came up with. Maybe you can use it too (or refine it–comments are welcome!)

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What do technical communicators do?

• Research, write, edit and refine technical and marketing documentation, either as lead authors or as team participants.
• Policy and procedure manuals
• Proposals and RFPs
• Training materials
• Web pages
• Product manuals and online help
• White papers
• Reports and presentations
• Project documentation
• Research and recommend best practices for communications.
• Set and propagate documentation standards and style guidelines.
• Manage your documentation library and collaboration tools.

Why should you care?

An experienced technical communicator can help you save money, make money, establish and maintain a competitive advantage, and comply with legal and regulatory requirements.

Save money

• Reduce support and overhead costs by delivering improved training material and reference documents.
• Increase buy-in from colleagues and clients by delivering persuasive and easy-to-understand policy and procedure documentation.
• Help your staff “do it right the first time” by providing clear directions, reducing the necessity for costly rework and revision due to ambiguity and misunderstanding.
• Bring new employees and client staff up to speed quickly by providing clear documentation and training material; they will become more productive, faster.

Make money

• Win new business by crafting more compelling proposals and RFPs.
• Add considerable value to the services that you deliver and the processes and tools that you support by being able to offer high-quality training and documentation and turning it into a selling point.

Establish and maintain a competitive advantage

• Clear communication helps you align business and IT goals and practices to improve your organization’s effectiveness.

Comply with legal and regulatory requirements

• Stay out of the liability zone by clearly documenting your policies and procedures and communicating them to clients and staff.
• Comply with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, and related global and industry-specific statutory requirements.

Apologies for the long blogging gap; I’m just back from a business trip where I had limited connectivity at best, and just catching up.

Since we’ve just come through performance review season, I’m pointing to this very good Christian Science Monitor article from January 31, on the topic of getting paid what you’re worth. Salary concerns apply to everyone, of course, but the main worker bee they talk to seems to be an IT guy, and I found many of the comments in the article (his included) interesting.

The most interesting factoid: per Salary.com, while 60 percent of all employees feel that they are underpaid (a little or a lot), only 20% actually are, by their figures… and 20% of the working population is overpaid, given their skill sets. (Thus the fetching title of the piece, “Overpaid and underworked?” — which turns the traditional complaint on its head.)

But another interesting point is that some of the information asymmetry that traditionally benefitted employers more than employees on salary matters is going away: people are talking more about what they make, and also have access to information on the Internet about the fair-market value of their work.

Salaries have long been cloaked in secrecy for many workers, making comparisons difficult. Now, online salary data sites enable workers to measure their pay against comparable positions in their field and location.

“You network with your peers, and absolutely they talk about salaries,” [IT consultant interviewee] Eric says. “At least they talk about ranges. Just looking around at what ranges are offered, you have an idea of the market rate. The consensus among my peers is that the way to get a good raise is to switch companies.”

Overpaid and underworked? | csmonitor.com

Blogging will be light for the next day or two and likely “lumpy” afterwards; my usual posting schedule (before and after working hours, East Coast time) will be way off, as I’m heading to London for a week on a business trip, and Internet access (and time to write) will have to adjust to that new schedule.

Although I’m going to be kept pretty busy with work, I’m really looking forward to visiting some old friends (Carrie and I both have childhood friends now living and working in London) and drinking some real ale. Hopefully I’ll also manage a trip to Brick Lane for a cheap, fiery curry or two while I’m in town… London has it all over New York when it comes to Indian food.

StopBadware.org is a “Neighborhood Watch” campaign aimed at fighting badware. We will seek to provide reliable, objective information about downloadable applications in order to help consumers to make better choices about what they download on to their computers. We aim to become a central clearinghouse for research on badware and the bad actors who spread it, and to become a focal point for developing collaborative, community-minded approaches to stopping badware.

Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Oxford University’s Oxford Internet Institute are leading this initiative with the support of several prominent tech companies, including Google, Lenovo, and Sun Microsystems. Consumer Reports WebWatch is serving as an unpaid special advisor.

StopBadware.org

Hiding confidential information with black marks works on printed copy, but not with electronic documents, the National Security Agency has warned government officials.

The agency makes the point in a guidance paper on editing documents for release, published last month following several embarrassing incidents in which sensitive data was unintentionally included in computer documents and exposed. The 13-page paper is called: “Redacting with confidence: How to safely publish sanitized reports converted from Word to PDF.”

Instead of covering up digital text with black boxes, it is better to delete any information you don’t want to share, the NSA suggested.

Editing tips from the NSA: CNET News.com

Update: On the TECHWR-L mailing list, user Sue Gallagher points us to a very useful redaction tool for users of Microsoft Word 2003:

The Microsoft Office Word 2003 Redaction Add-in makes it easy for you to mark sections of a document for redaction. You can then redact the document so that the sections you specified are blacked out. You can either print the redacted document or use it electronically. In the redacted version of the document, the redacted text is replaced with a black bar and cannot be converted back to text or retrieved.

Sensitive government documents, confidential legal documents, insurance contracts, and other sensitive documents are often redacted before being made available to the public. With the Word 2003 Redaction Add-in, users of Microsoft Office Word 2003 now have an effective, user-friendly tool to help them redact confidential text in Word documents.

Microsoft Word 2003 Redaction Add-In

Here’s a good overview of how to avoid some all-too-common mistakes when constructing a PowerPoint presentation: 8 mistakes when creating PowerPoint presentations (SympleByte.)

I have long been a fan of O’Reilly Media’s technical books, and a happy subscriber to “Safari Bookshelf,” their online library; in its most basic form, for about $10 a month the Safari plan entitles you to read up to five O’Reilly books on-screen at the same time. It’s a tremendous bargain and value.

Safari is about to get a lot more interesting. O’Reilly has just announced “Rough Cuts,” a way to gain access to very early editions of books on emerging technologies as they are being developed.

Safari Books Online is pleased to announce the launch of the new Rough Cuts service. Rough Cuts gives you early access to content on cutting-edge technologies — before it’s published. It lets you literally read the book as it is being written.

The four inaugural Rough Cuts titles come from O’Reilly Media and share our focus on hot emerging technologies: Ajax Hacks, Flickr Hacks, Ruby on Rails: Up and Running, and Ruby Cookbook. In February, O’Reilly will follow up with Ubuntu Hacks, Ajax Design Patterns, and Perl Hacks. The Pearson Technology Group will join the Rough Cuts service later this quarter with: Macs on the Go, Real World Adobe Creative Suite 2, Secrets of Videoblogging, Imagination Challenge and ASP.NET 2.0 Unleashed.

This is a great idea and should prove to be an interesting experiment; O’Reilly has consistently found ways to remain relevant as a print publisher in an increasingly Web-based world, and this idea shows a lot of promise.

Socrates. He would be a very simple person… who should leave in writing or receive in writing any art under the idea that the written word would be intelligible or certain; or who deemed that writing was at all better than knowledge and recollection of the same matters?

Phaedrus. That is most true.

Socrates. I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence.

(Plato, Phaedrus - translated by B. Jowett)

If you ever have to teach anyone anything–as part of your job, on a volunteer basis, for any reason at all–or if you ever give presentations, or write user documentation, you could do worse than spend fifteen minutes with this blog post:

…[H]ere’s a crash course on some of our favorite learning techniques gleaned from cognitive science, learning theory, neuroscience, psychology, and entertainment (including game design). Much of it is based around courses I designed and taught at UCLA Extension’s New Media/Entertainment Studies department…

This is not a comprehensive look at the state of learning theory today, but it does include almost everything we think about in creating our books. And although it’s geared toward blogs/writing virtually everything in here applies regardless of how you deliver the learning–you can easily adapt it to presentations, user documentation, or classroom learning.

Creating Passionate Users: Crash course in learning theory

Related:

• Crash Course in Learning - Summary
• (Summary PDF file - 500K)