Archive for December, 2009
Looking Forward to 2010
This time of year spawns many retrospective blog posts, “best-of” lists, and self-congratulatory advertisements in disguise.
Celebrate the year to come, not the year that's past.
We’re not going to write about any of that. Infovark is looking forward to the year ahead.
This is a short list of milestones I hope we’ll reach in 2010 — the sooner the better!
- The Infovark 1.1 general release, with fixes for several Exchange-Outlook email problems.
- A refined Infovark user interface, with improved layout and typography. Infovark should be easier to read, with your stuff featured prominently.
- A new task management tool that can be used in stand-alone fashion or with our Infovark application.
- Our first “outside” paying customers: folks we don’t know personally.
- Infovark training videos, user guide, and online knowledge base.
- Contributions to useful open source products, either through cash or code. It’s time we gave back to the technical community.
- Further posts on information management, personal productivity, knowledge work, and software technology. We live in interesting, perhaps revolutionary, times.
These are not predictions — I think we’ve all seen enough speculation in recent years. These are action items. Let’s focus on the great things we can get done together!
Stop Funding the Obsolete
Gil Yehuda thinks we should question the value of having a company phone. He cites a story in Wired about a university that has scrapped its dorms’ computer labs in favor of giving each student an iPhone. They realized most students already had laptops. The computer labs had become redundant.
Hello, operator? Could you connect me with the 21st century?
When I was an IT consultant, I spent 50% of my time on the road. I barely used my desk phone. My laptop’s wifi was flaky. The VPN to the home office barely worked. Our clients couldn’t get in touch with me. The home office couldn’t keep up with me.
Out of frustration, I finally bought myself a Blackberry. Everyone was happier and I was more productive.
When phone networks were expensive to install and maintain, and computing power a scarce resource, it made sense for companies to provide these tools. Organizations can pool money and enforce standards.
But now that many knowledge workers have better tools available to them outside of the office than in it, it may be time to give up central planning and just let folks use the right tool for the job.
What tools does your organization provide? Why do they provide them? Are they business necessities, or another example of legacy thinking?
Information Management in the 21st Century
This post is from a keynote speech I gave to a room of Information Managers at a corporate function for Codice, a specialist IM Consulting Services company based in Brisbane, Australia. When I read it over, it seemed like a nice blog post — I decided I like the way I write speeches much better than the way I deliver them!
Thanks so much for taking the time to be with us this evening.
Now, I know the main reason we’re here is to have a drink and catch up with each other and gossip, and I’ll let you get back to that soon. But I just wanted to steal a little of your time to talk about three things that have been bugging me about information management in the 21st century.
When I was a boy, I wanted to be a teacher… or a fireman… and sometimes an astronaut… and a cowboy. Oh, and the guy who reads the news…
Nowadays, I have trouble explaining what it is I do to my kids.
In fact, I overheard my son talking to one of his friends about me the other day:
“My Dad is over there” he pointed. “He’s a computer nerd.”
And I guess that’s true, in some sense — I am. So, he’s right. But let’s face it, job titles aren’t what they used to be. (Nobody ever handed me a business card with “Cowboy” written on it.) And it’s getting harder to explain what we do to our kids.
As people who care about information management this curious fact should be very important to us:
The way people work is changing.
There are less and less menial jobs as a percentage of the global economy. More and more people are creating information for a living. They’re getting paid to think stuff. And enter it into some computer. And then to do stuff with the stuff they’ve thought up and stored. As a result, the amount of information is increasing.
Okay, so this is something that, in our field, we hear all the time — oh help, we’re sucking on the end of a firehose, information overload! Sales guys love to tell that story. So I’m not going to bore you with it again. But we should all be aware that this trend is occurring — if nothing else, it means a lot more work for us all to do.
The second thing is this:
The mediums that people are using have changed.
The young people who are joining the workforce today are steeped in information.
But the way they see and interact with that information is different — they’ve grown up with Facebook and Twitter and SMS. They think that email is lame. They think that paper is old-fashioned, and harmful to the environment. They are used to being able to reply to any piece of information they see. They share things much more freely, and thrive when given autonomy and freedom — two things that often aren’t exactly the hallmarks of many workplaces.
As Information Managers, we need to understand these mediums and these ways of thinking. We have to be able to manage, preserve, track and harness the content in these systems. They’re not going away.
This brings me to my other third thing:
What people expect from their systems has changed.
When I was at Elementary School, my school librarian was a lady called Mrs Gamble. She must have been about 85, and she was the sweetest thing. (As a fledgling nerd, she and I spent quite a bit of time together.) But there was one way to make her turn absolutely purple — put a book back on the wrong shelf. This heinous crime was punishable by a 10-minute lecture on the Dewey Decimal System, and the importance of proper filing of books so they could be accurately recalled by others.
“Do NOT!” She would shriek, “Ever put a book on the wrong SHELF!”
Thirty years later , Google came along and completely wrecked the world of information management. All of a sudden, in a wholly electronic world, the problem wasn’t that the book was on the wrong shelf. The problem was shelves. (Mrs Gamble would turn in her grave.) Google took a completely different approach to our established concepts of taxonomy, ontology and organization. Managing electronic information means that our old physical approaches could be re-thought. People have preconceived notions of of how information systems ought to behave, because they use them daily in their lives.
So:
- The way people work is changing.
- The mediums that people are using have changed.
- What people expect from information systems has changed.
Delivering Information Management solutions into this landscape is challenging. But the potential rewards and motivation are greater than ever.
And we would love to be able to help you, if we can.
Thanks : )
