Month: July 2003

Character encoding quirks in the aggregator

Weird Characters in RSS. Does anyone else see these weird high-ASCII characters in the Corante: IdeaFlow RSS feed?

If it’s true that the bust is about busted, I hope that the resulting opportunity to innovate innovation itself isn’t overlooked. There’s been a lot of thought in the last few years about how to make sure innovation doesn’t pack up and leave town when the venture capitalists close their wallets. For example, in the Open Innovation scenario, loose-pocketed venture capitalists aren't as necessary for technology innovation.

[b.cognosco]

I have the same problem. It appears to be a bug in the way “Radio”'s news aggregator handles the character encoding. It doesn't happen in some other aggregators.  It's one of those standards quirks that programmers get to worry about I guess. I think of it as a bit of sand in the works — adds a bit of flavor. Since I'm not qualified to fix it, I try to ignore it.

Adding (n)Echo support to my copy of Radio

Major fun: Radio gets some kind of Echo support.   [Scripting News]

(n)echo feed. There's now a valid (formerly known as | not) echo feed for this weblog. I would hope that the namespace gets set soon, so far I've seen about 5 variations. [Simon Fell]

And it took me longer to write this post than it did to add (n)Echo support to my copy of Radio. For a user worrying about what all the noise around RSS/(n)Echo will mean, that's cool!

Extreme mobility and knowledge work effectiveness

Extreme Mobility: a rant that I had to write after reading Tim, Dave, and this all in one day. [Ray Ozzie’s Weblog]

Just getting around to reading this post of Ozzie’s from last week (one of the advantages of news aggregators). Full of lots of Ozzie’s usual excellent insights.

I believe we’re currently in a transition period for personal computing: from a tethered, desk-bound, personal productivity view, to one of highly mobile interpersonal productivity and collaboration, communications, coordination. We’re focused right now on devices and networks because we’re coming at the problem bottom-up: preoccupied by gizmos and technologies’ capabilities rather than focusing on how our lives and businesses and economies and societies will be fundamentally altered.

I’ve been living in this mobile world arguably since the early 90s. My primary computer since 1993 has been a laptop of one variety or another. I’ve lived the the scenarios Ozzie describes including the joys and aggravations of Lotus Notes when it was the only environment to deal with keeping a mobile workforce in sync.

Most organizations still operate on the notion that the corporate network is a fortress to be protected. This makes my life difficult from two perspectives. First, getting into my own network is more difficult than I would like from my selfish, time-pressed, user perspective. Second, when I am with clients, my effectiveness is compromised by the hurdles I have to negotiate to get access to material on their networks. Email becomes the lowest common denominator for coordinating work and the impacts on knowledge work effectiveness are invisible to the organization. Extra hours that I work to cope with these limits don’t show up anywhere in the reporting systems.

One aspect of this transition to extreme mobility is that I control the tools of my craft. I do have to reach an understanding with the folks in IT support so that they trust I won’t do anything stupid and will keep them in the loop. But I can experiment with new tools and practices. The challenge is to bring the useful lessons back into the organization. Ozzie sums it up well:

Regardless, one thing seems certain: with the notable exception of a small number of truly visionary CIO’s such as the one mentioned above – exceptional individuals who are willing to move their enterprises forward by taking risks – discovery and innovation in mobility and interpersonal productivity & communications – in “relationship superconductivity” – is being driven primarily from “the edge”: from small businesses, organizations and individuals who are experimenting with new communications technologies and software. Innovation now works its way into the enterprise; it no longer migrates outward. The technology leaders of the past – enterprise IT – are now focused (for very good economic reason!!) on cost reduction and efficiency, on “fast solutions”, and on a very tough regulatory environment, through strict controls. Liability, and the sheer mass and difficulty of managing broad ICT deployments encourages conservatism, and this won’t be changing anytime soon.

 

Project Management and Horses

Project Management and Horses.

Spotted this gem on Anders site:

The tribal wisdoms of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that ‘when you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount’. However, in many companies as well as in the UN and NGO community a range of far more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:

1. Changing riders

2. Appointing a committee to study the horse …

It just gets better from there.

[High Context]

It does.

Productivity tips on how to handle E-mail – thinking about how to use our tools

Taming the E-mail tiger – how to manage your E-mail to be more productive. Dennis Kennedy has some great productivity tips on how to handle E-mail.  I like his idea of a folder that is labelled something like “action items.”  That is, a place that you can move emails relating to things that need to be done, but not right away.  I recently started aggresively managing E-mail in my inbox, and it has made a world of difference.  I wish I had read Dennis’s article a couple of years ago.

The key is to keep as few emails in your inbox as possible.  If you can do that then you are in good shape.

[Ernie the Attorney]

A nice pointer from Ernie to some useful tips.

It’s also a good example of how important it’s becoming for knowledge workers to start thinking explicitly and systematically about how they use the tools they have at hand. The marketing behind most technology tools gets in the way here, because it emphasizes such fuzzy notions as “intuitive interfaces.”

For all the power built into the tools we have, we take far too little time to think about how to make most effective use of those tools in our day-to-day work. When we do, more often than not, we get stuck in inapplicable notions of productivity and throughput drawn from industrial models of mass production..

Dial-up isn’t so bad when the alternative is no dialtone

My computing life centers around my laptop computer. And I usually grumble when I have to fall back to dial-up connectivity. That was until Monday when we got to our summer place to discover that no dialtone is significantly more difficult to live with than slow dial-up.

Just when I had finally gotten the backlog of items in my news aggregator down to zero, I end up with three days of no connectivity whatsoever. At least everything was there for me to scan through (all 800 some odd items). I’ve got the backlog down to about sixty items that I want to spend some time thinking about and reacting to. something to keep me occupied over the weekend.

Ignoring the media for real insights into change.

Bashing WiFi and the Broadcast Mentality [SATN]

More insights from Dan Bricklin at SATN. Here he offers some thought about the typically lazy thinking underlying most mainstream coverage of wi-fi. Twitting a recent article in the Boston Globe about the wi-fi bubble bursting he argues:

Sounds like the old “broadcast” mentality: Something isn’t interesting or valuable unless it provides a service that a big company can charge for. It seems the fact that millions of people are buying and installing (at their own expense) WiFi for their own purposes and not just to charge others is completely uninteresting to these pundits. This is like the thinking that P2P could only be used for sharing things that would otherwise be sold mass-market.

and he repeats an observation from David Reed:

As David Reed likes to point out, automobiles were user financed purchases. We didn’t turn the US into an automobile-centric society with taxis owned by the railroad companies. People bought their own cars for their own purposes, be it to visit friends, go “to the country” (an important, fun reason in the early days), tend to the sick (doctors were early adopters), shopping, commuting, etc.

Two things are going on here. One, the media is trying to atone for its breathless coverage during the dotcom bubble replacing the herd stampeding in one direction with a change in direction not a change in approach. Which reflects the second issue operating here. We’ve been enmeshed in a mass production/mass market economy for so long, that we’ve forgotten that it was an invention itself in response to particular technological changes.

Fortunately, I don’t rely on media coverage any more, I go to the sources such as SATN and other blogs.

Weblogs and knowledge management . Don’t forget to KISS

Web logs as KM (Con’t). I’ve been struggling with this whole “what is going to make Web logs use successful” question for a while as the idea is getting more an more interest here. The bottom line, I believe is acceptance by classroom teachers as a useful technology. To me, it all starts from there. I think potential users need to know the technology is easy to use, works as advertised, and enhances the educational experience of their students. Absent widespread adoption, it’s a tough sell to try something new on a district level for “managing our knowledge.” But I think there are enough models out there to at least whet their appetites and pilot some uses. From a KM standpoint, Jim McGee finishes off a nice wrapup of Web logs as KM with this:

Weblogs are interesting in organizational KM settings because weblogs are technologically simple and socially complex, which makes them a much better match to the KM problems that matter. One thing that we need to do next is to work backwards from the answer – weblogs – to the problem – what do organizations need to do effective knowledge management. We need to avoid the mistakes of other KM software vendors and not assume that the connection is self-evident.

As usual, this has me thinking. I’ve just been appointed to “champion” the KM/Internal Communications topic at our annual “Critical Issues” gathering next month. That’s when the administrative team sits down to talk about the solutions to the issues that we feel are most important (and this came in at the top of the list.) As such, I need to develop a problem statement, so Jim’s observations are once again distinctly relevant. What exactly are our needs in KM?

  • We have two dozen committees that never “speak” to one another.
  • We have parents interested in our work that can’t access it.
  • We have teachers who could use materials and ideas and opportunities for collaboration.
  • We have students creating a whole heckuva lot of knowledge that gets lost when the day ends.
  • We have data.
  • We have results.
  • We have a lot more situations like this throughout our organization. [emphasis added]

And right now, it’s so hard to get to any of that “knowledge” that it is resulting in a real lack of communication and growing frustration with that fact. I think here it’s almost a question of communicating knowledge more than managing it (although I realize they are the same thing on some levels.) Web logs allow for inexpensive, easy creation and storage or publication of information (or knowledge) that is accessible, archivable, and searchable. Also, Web logs are flexible in terms of access and security. They are at first (and second) blush a viable solution to what is a growing problem. But only, and this is the big one, only if people use them. What I need to keep in mind is to grow into the solution instead of implementing it. I can see the end result in my brain, but I need the patience to nurture it into fruition. [weblogged News]

A nice list of examples of the kinds of simple things that weblogs enable that matter.

The simplicity of weblogs is the central reason for their success and their promise as a tool for making knowledge work easier. That same simplicity also makes weblogs (and wikis for that matter) a hard sell into organizational settings.

Technology vendors do not make money by demonstrating easy solutions to problems. Managerial wisdom in organizations is about learning to apply the 80/20 rule ruthlessly. Technology developers love to solve the tricky problems and handle the edge cases. Technology vendors have all learned to sell against one another through feature wars. No one wants to invest the time to learn how to use the tools at hand to solve the problems at hand.

knowledge workers have limited capacity to absorb new ideas and practices into their already overfull lives. You can suck up that limited capacity in learning the ins and outs of some fancy new knowledge management tool or you can use that capacity for examining individual and group work practices and adapting them. Weblogs and wikis let you dial in that  balance in a different, and potentially better, place than more complex tools.

Here’s a bit of design wisdom that is particularly important now as we seriously begin to think about how to blend technology and organizational practice to get to better knowledge work:

  In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.
  Antoine de Saint-Exupery