Posts Tagged ‘productivity’
Two Strategic Visions for Enterprise 2.0
Enterprise 2.0 advocates seem to be splitting into two camps. Their goal is the same: finding ways to apply collaborative tools to improve the way businesses operate. But they differ on what strategy to use. Dennis Howlett cautions Enterprise 2.0 advocates to tread carefully.
The root of the debate is whether you feel it’s better to focus on organizational effectiveness or individual productivity. Oscar Berg highlights some influential articles from both sides and notes that there seems to be a bias toward personal efficiency in most of the arguments made to support Enterprise 2.0
I think he is right that there is a bias for personal efficiency. I think it’s a healthy one, though others disagree.
The two strategies
Every organization is composed of multiple functions. These are normally grouped into logical departments such as accounting, marketing, product development, and so forth. The proponents of organizational effectiveness ask the question, is there a better way to arrange these parts? Can we reduce the friction between these components?
Now, let's see... should marketing report to sales or...?
If you fall in this camp, you want to do things like improve interdepartmental communications, establish clear lines of authority and areas of responsibility, break apart organizational silos, ensure smooth hand-offs, and improve business processes.
Those that focus on knowledge worker productivity, on the other hand, focus on whether the parts themselves can be improved.
Adopting bright ideas to save time and effort.
If you fall in this camp, you’re concerned about knowledge sharing, expertise location, cultivating talent and skills, and making sure that individuals have the right information for making decisions and the right tools to take action.
Power to the people
Both approaches are valuable and necessary. Which one you prefer has much to do with where you sit within the organization, as this article on productivity points out. But there are good reasons why we should favor the personal productivity over organization effectiveness.
- Web 2.0 technologies follow a user-centered approach. Applying Web 2.0 sensibility to organizational problems will require lots of customization and re-engineering. Applying those designs to knowledge workers is a much better fit.
- Many employees are already familiar with the conventions of these social tools. They use them at home. You lower training costs by following those models as closely as possible.
- User adoption has been a major stumbling block in most Enterprise 1.0 technology deployments. It makes sense to highlight the benefits to employees.
- While there have been at least two or three different waves of enterprise products targeted at organizational effectiveness (ERP, portals/KM, BPM, CRM, etc.) the suite of office tools used by knowledge workers have changed very little since the early 90s. There’s simply more opportunity for improvement there.
- Small changes applied across all knowledge workers can lead to dramatic gains. Just like in finance, productivity improvements yield compounding interest. If you can save a few extra minutes per day or per week, over time it can add up to something revolutionary.
For these reasons and others, I believe that companies pursuing Enterprise 2.0 should start — and think — small. What can we do to simplify, streamline or eliminate the tasks that prevent our knowledge workers from producing their best work? How can we provide support to small, agile, ad-hoc teams?
For me, the defining characteristic of Enterprise 2.0 is that it is about the individual, not the organization. There would be no need for an Enterprise 2.0 approach if Enterprise 1.0 approaches had worked.
Instead of Enterprise 2.0, perhaps it should be Employee 2.0?
Ribbon Hero uses game design principles to help users learn Microsoft Office
Kathy Sierra, design and usability advocate, is famous for saying, “If you want people to RTFM, make a better FM.” In 2007, Danc, a game designer and author of the Lost Garden blog, claimed that any user activity that can be learned, measured, and returned as feedback can be made into a game.
An alternative to Minesweeper?
Some folks on Microsoft’s Office Labs team took up the challenge. They’ve released a game called Ribbon Hero, which helps users master the Microsoft Office “ribbon” toolbar.
Danc discusses the design philosophy behind Ribbon Hero and shares his thoughts on turning a traditional application design into one that incorporates learning, fun, and a sense of accomplishment.
I’ve always thought that computer games have a lot to teach the rest of the software industry about design and usability. It’s fascinating to see software developers putting those ideas into practice.
A New Year’s gift for the easily distracted
I have a confession to make. It’s the New Year, and it’s time for resolutions, and perhaps for being a bit honest with yourself, so I feel among friends making this assertion:
I am easily distracted.
It’s true. And just between you and me, the Internet is not helping.
Look at Twitter, overflowing with real-time data streams full of people who are way more interesting than me, doing all kinds of fabulous things at the rate of one every three seconds.
Look at aggregation services like Reddit and Digg, and RSS, which brings me more interesting content in a day than I could possibly consume in a week.
Underneath all of it is the Web itself, pages and pages of interesting stuff which is fundamentally NOT WORK. As Paul Graham says, it’s like somebody snuck a TV onto my desk when I wasn’t looking.
So, in an effort to trick myself into completing tasks, and avoiding a spacewalk off into the unrelated, I decided to browse websites on how to become productive. (This is, in itself, unproductive, I know, but one has to start somewhere)
In my travels, I came across this inspired productivity hack from 43 Folders: 10 + 2. It’s based on the notion that you can do 10 minutes of anything. Just 10 minutes. You can do that, right?
The way it works is that you start yourself a timer, do those 10 minutes of, you know, your job, and then you can take a 2 minute break to do anything you want. Catch up with the tweetstream. Read your RSS. Heaven forbid, you could even go outside, or stretch. Then after those 2 minutes, you return to the task at hand, or if you like, pick another task that you’ve been avoiding and do that for 10 minutes.
Here’s where all those numbers add up — if you follow this method for an hour, you’ll have done 50 minutes of productive work, and spent 10 minutes being distracted. If you’re like me, you’ll find that this compares pretty favourably with an hour spent without the timer.
I couldn’t find a good Windows timer to help with this hack, so I made one for us – you can download it here. It’s a no-frills Windows only timer, that counts to 10 minutes, plays a dinky sound, then counts to 2 minutes, and then starts again. It’s pretty light on features, but if you find you need it to do something extra, let me know — I might be able to update it.
If I’m not too busy completing all my productive work this year, of course. 
Using the Right Tool for the Job
One day your boss walks into your office. With a sheepish expression on his face, he says, “Um…yeah. We’d like you to dig a hole to China. Here’s your spoon.”
What do you do when your company-provided tools aren't up to the job?
What do you do next? Do you take the spoon and start digging, trusting that the boss knows what he’s doing? Or do you explain that the tool just isn’t up to the task?
If you work in a large organization, you face this choice every day. The tools provided by the IT department are usually of the one-size-fits-all variety. But specialized tasks require specialized tools.
When did the Information Technology department become the Impeding Technology department?
In a misguided attempt to cut costs, many organizations have settled for a standardized office suite and cookie-cutter intranet portal. But if your company trades in information and is staffed with knowledge workers, IT is saving money at the expense of productivity — your productivity.
You were hired for your skills and expertise. If your company forces you to use sub-standard tools, you can’t be effective in your role.
But there are signs that the tide is starting to turn. The Wall Street Journal says it’s time to let knowledge workers pick their tools. More and more companies allow their employees to use tools that operate outside the corporate firewall. And we think there’s hope for desktop and mobile devices as well.
