Bo Selections!

5 core Strategy questions

2005-04-07T11:37:00.000+01:00

Jess McMullin's blog points me to an inetersting approach towards strategy:

Why Bother? Who Cares? So What? Is It Better? How Do We Get There?

1) Why Bother?For your team, and for your organization, ask: Why are we addressing this issue? What are our goals? What are the basic benefits we hope to achieve?
2) Who Cares?Markets are conversations, and you have to know who you’re talking with: Who is affected and involved? Who are the stakeholders, and what are their goals? What are their hopes, dreams, needs, and desires? What does their social network look like? Do we have a rich picture of our customers, our users, our stakeholders? What do they eat for breakfast; how do they get to work? What do they read online and in the bathroom? Do we really know them? On a first name basis? Do we empathize? Can we walk in their shoes? What about our competitors?
What (and who) else competes for attention with our product or service offering?
3) So What?If we go forward, what are the outcomes and impact? We should consider benefits and costs - not just financials, but across the spectrum from brand impact to the triple bottom line and corporate social responsibility. Are there second order effects to consider, and can we anticipate unintended consequences? Are there potholes and roadblocks in realizing our anticipated benefits? What about potholes for our stakeholders?
4)Is It Better?Too often, projects make things worse and generate negative ROI. Compared with how things are now, will they be better? How? Will they be better by an order of magnitude? Will customers say ‘Wow’? How will we measure success? How will we incorporate these metrics into a feedback loop for ongoing improvement? Do our measures balance across dimensions of both business and customer value?
5)How Do We Get There?Answering how we get there is the bridge between strategy and tactics. Given a green light, what’s the path to achieving our objectives? Do we have a clear mandate? Budget? Staffing? Buy-in? Timelines?
I love things that come in plain words, don't you?

Should Groove have gone open source?

2005-04-07T11:26:00.000+01:00

interesting comments from Mitch Kapor's blog re:Microsoft acquires Groove. Mitch was founder of Lotus and the first external investor in Groove Networks.

"...the world looks very different in 2005 than it did in 1998...Now I would say a project like Groove should most likely be started as free/open source software."

MSN Desktop Search

2005-03-11T15:33:00.000Z

Microsoft joins in the desktop search battle...see Blinkx, see Google Desktop Search, etc..

here are a few of the import slaves (i.e. filters for indexing files of different formats), called iFilters, that the tool uses. You can even connect and index content from Sharepoint sites and SQL servers. Not bad.

If you want to know more about iFilters, visit Michael Kaplan's blog.

Microsoft buys Groove

2005-03-11T15:29:00.000Z

News or not news?

need time to reflect on this...my first impression? it had to happen sooner or later.

some early analysis from Michael Sampson here

2005-02-06T11:27:00.000Z

Toucan Collaborate Groove tool for emergency response

Groove partners team up for emergency resolution

2005-02-06T11:20:00.000Z

Nice work done by Information Patterns and CH2M HILL, Groove Partners, in the development of a tool to provide collaborative Geographic Information Systems (GIS) solutions for emergency response to municipal, state and federal agencies.

virtual teamwork practices

2005-02-05T19:02:00.000Z

I've just come across yet another article about how to make distributed teams work effectively. You will certainly come across and read about the following tips many more times in the future, but belive me, these practices are easily said but very hardly done! It's all common sense, but after all, not so common!

1) Set clear objectives and communicate the objectives to the entire team
2) Agree on a set of group norms in a facilitated session.
3) Be patient with people who don't speak English.
4) Communicate much more frequently to a virtual team than to a co-located team.
5) Do fun things that help the team learn about each other.
6) Plan developmental activities.
7) Relationships are so important that scheduling a one-on-one conversation
with each team member once per week is important.

Read on more here.

The cost of Classification

2005-01-26T17:58:00.000Z

Rather interesting article re: faceted classification: The Cognitive Cost of Classification.

There are three related reasons I see for this imbalance between invested mental effort and perceived return:
1) Classification is hard work. The benefit of assigning a single term is small—good classification effort requires ongoing consistent diligence to pay off. There’s only marginal benefit in classifying a single document with a single term.
2) People discount the future. Saving current effort spent on diligent classification is better than saving future effort in easier document findability.
3) Classification benefits the group more than the individual. An individual can have an arbitrary method of organizing the information they create, and still have good success in finding it later—but to access that same content others rely on the guidance of a shared classification.

Read on if you're interested how social software can suppoprt smart tagging and improve the findability of information. It's the first step towards solving the metacrap problem!

ontologies, tagging and categorizing, why?

2005-01-26T16:41:00.000Z

As a result of my last two weeks in Mexico implementing Autonomy mainly for information retrieval and categorization, I had the opportunity to assist to a couple of interesting lectures about ontologies and taxonomies. These presentations, I must admit, made me think over again of the value of building complex hierarchical information structures. Is it really worth the effort?

And today I came across an interesting rough-n-ready "article". I must thank Hugh Pyle for pointing me to this rather interesting post re: ontologies and taggs(Tags != folksonomies && Tags != Flat name spaces). The more I learn about developing complex taxonomies, the more I'm against it.

...the suckiness of ontology is .....the need to declare today what contains what as a prediction about the future. Let's say I have a bunch of books on art and creativity, and no other books on creativity. Books about creativity are, for the moment, a subset of art books, which are a subset of all books. Then I get a book about creativity in engineering. Ruh roh. I either break my ontology, or I have to separate the books on creativity, because when I did the earlier nesting, I didn't know there would be books on creativity in engineering. A system that requires you to predict the future up front is guaranteed to get worse over time.

And the reason ontology has been even a moderately good idea for the last few hundred years is that the physical fact of books forces you to predict the future. You have to put a book somewhere when you get it, and as you get more books, you can neither reshelve constantly, nor buy enough copies of any given book to file it on all dimensions you might want to search for it on later.

Ontology is a good way to organize objects, in other words, but it is a terrible way to organize ideas. ....

The move here is from graph theory (arrange everything in a tree graph, so that graph traversal becomes the organizing principle) to set theory (sets have members, and the overlap or non-overlap of those memberships becomes the organizing principle.) This is analogous to the change in how we handle digital data. The file system started out as a tree graph. Then we added symlinks (aliases, shortcuts), which said "You can organize things differently than you store them, and you can provide more than one mode of access."

"Not only does it not matter where something is stored, it doens't matter whether it's stored. A URI that generates the results on the fly is as valid as one that points to a disk." And once something is no longer dependant on tree graph traverals to find it, you can dispense with hierarchical assumptions about categorizing it too.

Lets translate this to the management of my personal information. Hey, in a smaller scale, we suffer the small information overdose as corporations do.

Well, as a "good" and disciplined engineer I believe in good organisation. Until recently I used to organise all my incoming emails in folders (i.e. admin, customer accounts, personal, etc..)..it was a bit time consuming, but it worked, it was effective. Well not anymore, as I got involved in more and more jobs and my work load increased, I found it increasingly hard to maintain a consistent and logic hierarchy of folders. The great breakthrough, the moment I decided to stop using folders in Outlook was Blinkx, a smart tool that indexes all my emails (even the webmail ones) and also all my local documents in m y desktop, attachments, etc and points me to them instantly....When I need to check a quote that I sent through email to one of my customers, I don't need to check under the customer's Inbox folder, or the "Quotes" folder....no, no...I fire up Blinkx and I type the customer name and quote and in less than a sec, I have a direct link to the document which was attached in an email.

The bottomline is, why do we want to categorise when we can rely on strong powerful retrieval tools? Don't get me wrong, categorising may be beneficial for companies that want to maintain a current taxonomy or thesauri, but hey, first of all, before you act, stop and think twice...what is the true objective behind categorising? is it just allowing people to easily access and find information? then, you may be surprised to learn that categorising and structuring your own information universe may be an arduous task which will occupy to much of your valuable time and resources for far too little in return. In most cases, building up an ontology (i.e. a set of inter-related taxonomies) doesn't pay off! Let me know what you think folks...

Groove 7 minute webcasts

2005-01-26T15:35:00.000Z

Interesting short webcast series highligting how small businesses benefit from the use of Groove. Small steps toward big gains!

Groove Virtual Office is here to stay

2005-01-06T18:42:00.000Z

Groove is a critical business tool, more valuable than email in my case. Thanks to Groove software I can efficiently manage and fullfil my two current jobs: one as an independent Groove consultant and the other running a small services company in Spain.

1) As an external Groove Networks consultant and contractor, Groove allows me to be “connected” and in permanent touch with the professional services team in Boston. Above everything it gives me visibility and awareness. Let me expand this idea: We have a space for managing client engagements, where I see what jobs I’ve been assigned to, what products + services the client has bought and why (i.e. business pain), contact details, etc..but the best thing of all is that I can also see who else is doing what and when, and this fact allows all of us on the pre-sales and consulting front to share insights into our jobs, the client in particular, common support incidents, tips into how to deliver a new course, how to approcah structured interviews, etc..As a consultant I can acknowledge and alert one of my pre-sales colleagues to contact a current account and offer a new product that I envision may be needed. Pre-sales people also alert me about the need to emphasize or focus on X, Y or Z during my engagement due to all the knowledge generated during the sales process.

On a separate space we manage training jobs, both online and on-site courses. Thanks to the “always-synchronised” Groove capability, I know who does what and when; that is, if one of my colleague trainers cannot make a course and it has been assigned to me I would be notified, also everyone knows my availability thanks to our calendar tool, etc. Also there is a Time-cards tool designed in Forms 2.5 where we input all of our hours of work, which are synchronised with Notes in the back-end, which later invoices the customer. All of it happens automatically. Of course all these spaces also host discussion boards where we share our ideas on how to improve the way we work and AOB.

Being part of these spaces allows me to permanently stay in synch with all work mates (i.e. members of same workspaces), who are mostly based in the Boston area. It breaks time-zone barriers (I’m based in Madrid these last few weeks) and organizational barriers (I’m self employed in this case), and provides me awareness without constantly having to check on progress.

2) Groove is also a big part of our small business in Spain. We use Groove as our CRM, our Intranet, our project management tool and as our shared file system. And we use for two main reasons: One is because it’s cost-efficient (it does require any servers, shared drives, etc..), and requires no admin, and two, because it drastically boostes our productivity.

We have 4 main spaces or space areas:
- CRM Space: This is the space where we store and synchronise our current and prospect account. Here we can check contact details of each customer, what our role in each account has been, who the main contact is, whether there are any future opportunities, etc. We use a customised version of the Customer Reference rapid solution. We’ve also added two more tools: a pipeline tool to manage our forecasts more efficiently and to be more reactive to customer demands; and a Time Cards tool where we input the hours spent on each account. This last tool is I would say one of the most crucial ones because it allows us to invoice customers in accordance with time and dev time spent.

- Team Space: This is where we go and check our availability, our incoming jobs, key deadlines, etc.. through a Team Calendar tool. Very easy but terribly valuable. My motto is Think Big, start Small! I like simple things that work. Also we have a discussion board where we share ideas, jokes, etc..this space is our own intranet, where our team dynamics happen.

- This third space I would say is just a collection of spaces, a folder of spaces. We have one for each customer, and this is where we manage deployments, support or relationship matters.

- The fourth space is a big GFS folder where we store most of our files. It’s synchronised and works nicely.

Some of those funny days, where our ISP plays with us and leaves us with drops of connectivity, well….the only (operational) thing that works internally in the office is Groove! We loose connection to our mail server, no Skype,…all it’s left is Groove and the good old phone!

Summing up, Groove is a critical part of my day-2-day jobs. You need figures? Well, as a consultant and working very closely with customers during the early stages of engagements, coming up with hard metrics is a must. I try quantifying how much money a tool like Groove saves to our business, however once the tool becomes a part of your day to day activities you stop thinking about figures, the value is so tangible that you cannot think of living/working without it. If you can figure out the ROI for your email or telephone send me a message.

2004-12-23T08:32:00.000Z

Rapid Solutions Exchange

2004-12-17T15:50:00.000Z

During the last couple of weeks I've had the time and opportunity to deliver half a dozen Intro to Groove online training courses to three global organizations currently deploying Groove. This effort has made me reflect about the enablers and barriers re: the adoption of the technology.

Groove has been designed and is tailored to be adopted at three different levels:
1) Sharing Files and folders
2) Managing Projects
3) Extending Processes

All of them, naturally, facilitating inter-enterprise secure collaboration, offline support, automatic synchronization, etc..

Let's start with the corporate world first of all. I think Groove's added-value here comes as a platform for extending current centralized internal processes across organizational boundaries, ensuring secure rich communications among distributed individuals from different companies. The way we do business today has changed. We all work from home every now and then, we work with colleagues from other companies, some of them are ex-corporate who are all of the sudden external independent consultants, and most of us are rarely in the office for longer than three days in a row. As Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes and current chairman and CEO of Groove Networks highlights in this interview, "whereas Notes was more about changing the nature of the organization, Groove was about changing the nature of business in general". As I've noticed from most Groove corporate users during the last few weeks, this a true realm. The way we collaborate today with our project colleagues has changed for good. Mobility and external collaboration is a major NEED, we need to learn how to work better and closer to our project partners, regardless of their location, time-zones, cultural and organizational ties, gee...why do I need to get in touch with your systems administrator if all I want to do is work with you and your team during the next couple of weeks? We need tools that help us "connect".

We are all addicted to email, (next time you jump on a train with commuters or a boarding gate in an airport, take a minute and observe everyone around you connected to their BlackBerrys, wireless connected laptops and the likes...mobility is here folks!!). Unfortunately email is not enough, what really bangs my productivity and the one of the ones working with me is shared spaces, the docs + messaging containers of all my current projects. To my surprise people take longer than expected to get used to working in shared spaces, it required too many things to be changed too quickly. The times when the shared space recipe sticks is when it is embedded in the process and people just about notice it. I believe in incremental change, taking things step by step. That's why I believe Groove Forms are such an important evolution, because it enables corporations to rapidly and cost-effectively extend and synchronize their current systems (i.e. SAP, Siebel, Oracle etc) and processes outside their corporate walls. In fact, the success of Groove depends on how quickly it can adapt to ongoing business processes. I haven't seen many projects where a newly introduced process takes everyone on board and bangs it. It's the little steps that make the difference.

In this line, I see with interest and satisfaction Groove putting big efforts on encouraging external partners and VARs into developing applications on the Groove platform. I strongly encourage everyone visiting the Rapid Solutions Exchange site and trying out some of the solutions. We currently use within our small company in Spain the Customer Reference and the Time Card solutions for managing our accounts and our day to day work. These two little applications on its own have tremendously helped us change the way we do business today.

In the next coming days, I will write in more detail how we use Groove to run our business. A good example to any SME with a need to be more agile and reactive to market opportunities. We've applied the 3 years of experience of Groove usage as a user and consultant to running a business on Groove. Today, Groove acts as our CRM, our Intranet, our shared network drive, project management tool and customer support platform.

Happy Christmas to all of you.

high business activity = Low blog activity

2004-10-22T13:02:00.000+01:00

Some of you may be wondering about the small amount of updates during the last couple of months; the answer is very simple, i've been way too busy to post new stuff. During this period, I've fully immersed myself into the world of Autonomy; business mandates my friends, yet I'm still doing freelance Groove consultancy that keeps my knowledge on distributed online collaboration sharp and up-to-date. As a result, I envision this Blog progressively expanding into the area of unstructured information management (information retrieval/search, automatic classification, categorization & taxonomy generation, agents, profiles, , etc..). Nevertheless, this blog will maintain a true emphasis on Groove and online collaboration.

I will start writing about our current Autonomy projects in the Spanish and Latin-American markets as soon as I get some breathing time. These projects are fascinating! Promise.

In the meantime, my Bloglines site, where I subscribe to many RSS feeds in areas such as Groove, Other collaboration tools, Social Software, Information Retrieval and Search, Business & Innovation, etc..is starting to become unmanageable. I've got 2456 messages to read...I'm thinking about getting rid of some of the not-so-relevant, not-so-critical subscriptions.

Keep connected!

2004-10-18T19:24:00.000+01:00

Strong Angel II..read on...

2004-10-18T19:16:00.000+01:00

Groove real-time multilingual chat tool

Strong Angel II (Second Part)

2004-10-18T18:56:00.001+01:00

I've just run into another presentation or brief on The Strong Angel project I talked about in this blog (see entry SA2 Lessons on Wed August 4th). It just keeps amazing me how innovative these series of technological exercises got in the desert in Hawaii last July. Check out the photos of the real-time multilingual chat tool in Groove (see above). Also, mp3 audio files were shared and synchronised on Groove to support the translation of radio announcements between agencies and translation support groups in remote locations. And what about the real-time streaming video translator using Virage? For the ones that haven't seen Virage before, you should take a look at it. It uses a technology called Autonomy in the back end for automating processes such as information classification, retrieval, taxonomy generation and clustering and all of it, independent of language!! Thanks to Virage and Autonomy we can analyze in real-time the incoming information from hundreds of TV channels round the world (i.e. English, Arabic, Spanish, etc) and identify patterns and threats that require immediate action. Excellent scenario to showcase the capabilities of Groove, Autonomy and Virage in humanitarian aid coordination activities such as this experiment. Great job guys!!

If you want to see the full presentation, click here.

Enjoy!

2004-10-18T18:54:00.000+01:00

Real-time translation of audio and video using Virage and Autonomy

2004-10-18T18:52:00.000+01:00

distributed Groove collaboration for interagency rapid assesment

2004-10-18T18:49:00.000+01:00

Toucan Navigate: GPS integrated Groove tool

Search in Groove GFS

2004-08-13T20:42:00.000+01:00

I've recently briefly talked about Blinkx, which is a great tool for desktop search (not so great for web search). Well, the great thing about this tool is that it facilitates conceptual search across local files in your desktop. But, what I'm really excited about is that, at last, I can now search full text across all files stored in Groove shared folders!! After a few tests, I can confirm that after firing up a search, Blinkx will suggest links to relevant files which are stored and synchronised through GFS folders. Further testing also reveals that Blinkx indexes the full text within files in GFS folders; that is, if I have a file, say a pdf, that mentions in a paragraph "RAD environment", Blinkx will pick it up. Brilliant!!

Blinkx in action

However, this cannot be achieved in Groove workspaces, simply because workspaces and the content within them are encrypted and unreadable to Blinkx or any other search engine. Hey, but being able to search across GFS folders is a blessing!

To all groovers out there, go and download Blinkx for free GFS search.

CASAHL easily connects Groove to enterprise systems

2004-08-05T11:45:00.000+01:00

Among the number of challenges that IT organizations face today, up in the list we find supporting mobile users and cross-organizational teams. Enterprises find it increasingly difficult and expensive to connect the "disconnected"; on the other hand, employees, particularly those who spend a long time on the road (i.e. mobile/remote) and also external contractors, find it extremely cumbersome to easily tap in into their organization's ERP, CRM and other enterprise systems and databases.

Last week, Groove Networks, industry leader in collaboration software, and CASAHL, industry leader in data integration, announced an strategic partnership which will make a lot of people affected by the above-mentioned issues grin a big smile. CASAHL has developed a Groove "connector" to enable IT groups quickly and cost-effectively build and deploy secure, cross-organizational, online/offline and automatically synchronized "data transports" between existing enterprise systems and databases and Groove workspaces.

Casahl's Groove connectors will help IT organizations dramatically reduce development costs and deployment time-cycles since build work will only need to occur at the front-end and not at an infrastructure level. Using Groove 3.0 Forms, even non-developers will be able, with the help of a wizard, to synchronize a data field, say in an oracle database, with a field in a Groove form template.

Moving data to and from Groove and enterprise systems has been made easy now. Thanks to this Groovy middleware solution your organization could effortlessly and with a minimal cost, extend the secure cross-company collaborative capabilities of your existing systems (i.e. DB2, Oracle and SQL Server databases, Lotus Notes/Domino, Exchange public folders, Microsoft SharePoint and InfoPath).

Loads of ideas spring into mind...think of ways in which you could embed and automate workflow and business process properties between centralized systems and distributed apps such as Groove..or simply build your app to search, track, map and synchronize data among systems. Endless opportunities, start thinking about how the CASAHL eKnowledge Groove connector could super-charge your existing systems with its unique "always-on" security, firewall traversal, offline usage, bandwidth optimization and synchronization capabilities.

[Link]

SA2 Project Lessons

2004-08-04T16:54:00.000+01:00

Strong Angel II, a research project largely funded by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has taken place in Kona, Hawaii, in July. The goal of this humanitarian project was to experiment how technology could enable military and civilian disaster-relief people to deal more efficiently with each other -- and with the people who need assistance -- in the turmoil that follows catastrophes.

Dan Gillmor writes about the experience in this article. Various technologies were put to test (62 trials were reported) in austere conditions, ranging from advanced wireless networks, high-quality video-conferencing software, real-time translation software, to leading edge collaboration and synchronization tools. Nevertheless, as Dan points out, SA was about many more things than only technology:

I observed much more than some brilliant technology, I saw how people with poles-apart political perspectives could blend, in common purpose, to achieve remarkable results.
The endeavor was subtitled, ``Designing the Edge'' -- a recognition that increasingly ubiquitous data networks have turned some traditional notions of command and control almost inside out. Now, when people at the edge of networks can get the information they need in a timely way, and get what they know to others, they can work faster and more efficiently.

Experience from Iraq has taught that media awareness and rapid understanding and communication between troops and other humanitarian field forces is crucial; unfortunately, media in the battle field doesn't speak English. Thus, translation software has been extensively tested on extreme conditions (+100 degrees F). As Cmdr Rasmussen, SA2 manager, recognizes in this Wired article, "the influence of the press is enormous and we often have a genuine impediment to understanding the population around us if we don't keep track of what the local media is saying".

In one demonstration, a satellite dish outside a tent was capturing and recording the Al-Manar TV station, a Hezbollah outlet in Lebanon. Audio was extracted from the news broadcasts and converted to text in a speech-to-text program. Then the Arabic text was translated, also by a machine, into English. The results, twice removed from what the announcers said, were approximations. But they captured the gist of the reports.

Among other tools tested, Groove Virtual Office software was used for securely sharing files and communication among all soldiers and sailors, doctors and relief workers, technologists and managers involved in the project.

Laptops were everywhere, of course, and most were running Groove Networks'
powerful collaboration software, which lets people share information smoothly and securely. With Groove, people can work offline and then synchronize data when they connect, in a way that ultimately lets everyone on the network -- without any centralized ``server'' computer -- update to the latest information.

What I found very interesting is how Groove was also used to support (virtually) real-time translation; that is, human-assisted machine translation. Since the quality of the machine-generated translation was not accurate enough, soldiers would add the snaps of the trasncript in MP3 format into a Groove synchronized folder (GFS) so that a colleague/"trusted translator" sitting in the central office in DC could instantly and accurately translate the most important and relevant chunks of information.

This blending of human and machine translation capabilities makes the best use of both. The machines get us part of the way. Humans capture more subtlety, but machines can winnow out a lot of the dross first.

Another interesting observation is that, ever since the WTC 11S attacks , it is evident that centralized systems are a far easier target for the enemy, as Michael Friedlich recalls them: "hard targets".

Firefighters couldn't talk to local law enforcement and phone lines to the world went down in Washington. Yet the decentralized technology frameworks survived and aided in the response.....Only the edge can truly survive.

SA2 was about commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products being aimed at planes,
sunk under ten feet of water, dragged through lava fields, and just plain working in a jungle base camp when all that "ran" was a generator and a humvee that came through and picked up the "data" because it served as a mobile switching center. This was a test of extreme computing at the edge where any hopes of a server was a luxury at best, and a myth in a worst case scenario (total devastation). Adaptive processes, culturally neutral workspaces, and decentralized technologies delivered the goods in a big way.

2004-08-04T16:35:00.000+01:00

Acticam, team webconferencing tool for Groove

Acticam: a (Beta) webcam tool for Groove

2004-08-04T16:18:00.000+01:00

I remember back in 2001 Hugh Pyle worked on a team webconferencing tool for Groove 1.1, or perhaps 1.5 to enable webcam image sharing among members in a shared space. The tool was tested at Unilever, my previous company, and the results were quite satisfactory in testing, yet it didn't do well enough to be used in real projects neither made into production stage. This tool could feed images from up to 7 distributed webcams very well, however, issues arised from a platform perspective. How could we prevent other members in the space, who may be offline at the time, from stacking up 100MB on their transceiver's inbound trays?

Ashok Hingorani, Groove Partner, has come up with a new solution which selectively synchronises information (in this case images) among online members - only- in a space.

Special Features:
View 9 cameras at a time out of any number in the workspace
Remotely control cameras if member has allowed it.
Log activities if not able to be present during a session
[link]

2004-08-04T15:05:00.000+01:00

chillin in Eastnor

2004-08-04T15:04:00.000+01:00

Open Air Stage

Big Chill 2004 rocks!!

2004-08-04T14:52:00.000+01:00

Well, back to work. I've just had a fantastic weekend in the middle of british countryside with about 20,000 more people! It's the Big Chill festival in Eastnor Castle, Hereforshire. Fab music (luckily not very big bands), lovely weather, wicked atmosphere and great people.

Highlights of the 3 day weekend have been: Ralph Myers & The Jack Herren Band, Gilles Peterson, Faze Action, Norman Jay, Coldcut, Lemon Jelly, and Victor Malloy and his band rocked at Tom's Top Tent!!

If your clubbing days are well behind you but still enjoy moving it to some jazzy beats, this is your place!

my Blended Formula

2004-07-20T18:11:00.000+01:00

Just posted some comments following up a response where I've published my work-boosting-collaboration-toolkit.

[the Blended formula]...that does it for me is the following: Groove is great for getting day2day work done (i.e. synchronising my project colleagues PC's together and boosting up productivity on distributed document and project management), Skype is brilliant for audio/ VoIP, GotoMeeting for occasional real-time meetings when I need people to look at my screen, and the last one in the list is Blinkx, excellent desktop search tool that automatically suggests related and relevant emails, docs, etc within my PC and also blogs, websites, etc out in the Internet...Goggle take a note!

Of course, I still use Outlook and the telephone...but less and less......

Please welcome new boy on the block: "spim"

2004-07-16T17:29:00.000+01:00

Here's "spim", the little brother of spam, who I'm sure you've already met before. Spim is spam sent over IM, i.e. instant messaging. As the wider adoption of IM systems by most corporations is a rapidly increasing and hence the number of directories, "the Spam-loaded IMs will jump from 400 million in 2003 to 1.2 billion in 2004, according to a recent report from Palo Alto, Calif.-based research firm Radicati Group Inc. ".

A Microsoft Corp. spokesman said that "while the vast majority of complaints Microsoft receives [about spam] from its customers regards traditional spam, Microsoft has received complaints about spim as well and is working on a number of initiatives to address the problem."

I must say though that, I'm not truly worried about this phenomenon, at least in the short term. In order to send someone an IM, I need first of all, to have that persons contact. The IM contact is a small file containing information (i.e. signature and encryption public keys) about your unique identity. Furthermore, contacts are shared at your discretion, that is, I choose who I want to share my contact with. So, if I choose not to list my contact in any public directory, I doubt someone will be able to spim me. ^_^

Also, there may other ways to prevent spim. For instance, I could choose to receive messages only from people who are part of my contacts list. Also, "when a user adds a new contact, the person being added is notified and offered to decline or accept the invitation."

Well, I think we can rest in peace so far. Nevertheless, unwanted, not requested, annoying and distracting IMs will soon arrive into your dearest IM client!

IE browser: living its last days?

2004-07-14T09:33:00.000+01:00

I've recently read many articles on the security, lack of thereof, of Internet Explorer. This one though, eWeek's "IE May Share Shell Hole Found in Mozilla", openned my eyes. A company in Denmark, VeriSign's Managed Security Services, (formerly Guardent), announced four extremely critical security flaws.

The holes could allow a malicious Web site to circumvent the browser's security settings and execute script in the browser that could download and execute malicious software....
The first of the four discovered holes allows a remote Web site to "spoof" a function within a script with a function of the same name from a malicious Web site....
Another vulnerability tricks users into using "drag and drop" functions of the browser without their knowledge to add malicious script to browser resources such as the "Favorites" menu..
Secunia advised users that the only current solutions to these potential threats are to "disable Active scripting" or "use another product"—a browser other than IE.
The increasing number of vulnerabilities in general-purpose Web browsers may spur a trend toward simpler, trusted browsers..

Ed Brill on enterprise comms

2004-07-13T17:57:00.000+01:00

Interesting comments on email,IM and workspaces from Ed Brill, IBM/Notes, in response to Ross Mayfield's, CEO of SocialText, article "The State of Email".

Notes on IM:

in some organizations, IM can be treated like a "post-it note" and you just jump right into your question, while in others you need to do the chat equivalent of knocking on the door/cubicle before starting the real conversation.

Notes on workspaces

"Occupational Spam, email sent out of context characterized by CCs, is 30% of corporate email. You know this problem and are a part of it. You want to keep people informed and you want to be informed" Now, cc:-the-world isn't really the right way to solve the problem -- teamrooms and the like are.

Ross argues

"The problem is email wasn't designed and its best use is for one-to-one communication. Enter Workspaces, which in our latest case study dropped group email from 100 messages per day to practically zero."

and Ed disagrees

We've had "Workspaces" in Lotus Notes for, oh, 15 years or so, and I still get 100 messages a day. Now, some of those are pushed links to teamrooms and the like (because heaven-forbid I have the time to proactively surf all my Workspaces and find out what's new...I don't)... I consider this a perfectly appropriate use of individual e-mail.

I see some of the shifts to "contextual collaboration" may change that.

Collaboration First, Then Knowledge Management: Practical Advice

2004-07-13T17:13:00.000+01:00

Matthew Clapp, independent consultant, writes some rather interesting comments on evaluating collaboration tools. I believe, as much as the author does, that remote teams can actually be as or even much more productive than groups that meet daily face-to-face. The author also enumerates the key players within the area of collaborations tools ( Lotus Workplace, Documentum eRoom, Interwoven Worksite (formerly iManage), Vignette Business Workspaces (formerly Intraspect), OpenText LiveLink, Oracle's Collaboration Suite or desktop-based peer-to-peer applications, like Groove. What I appreciate more about this article is the proposed simple yet effective best practices on how corporations should confront the deployment of a collaboration tool.

- Pilot a collaboration tool with a few groups that are motivated and eager to try something new — ideally in a way that may help solve some larger problems for the corporation.
- In exchange for supporting their teams, pilot participants will offer to provide you with both positive and negative feedback about the process and the technology.
- Take this feedback and incorporate into your business case and subsequent requirements documentation if you go for an enterprise solution.
- Measure your success both in terms of the effectiveness by which people complete projects, as well as their ability to share and leverage knowledge.

there's no "one size fits all"!

2004-07-13T16:02:00.000+01:00

The launch of Groove 3.0 has left no one indifferent! Out they go the detractors (and converted supporters) of the product. Ain't that great? A product that polarizes opinion, that provokes sincere fascination or dislike, but leaves no one indifferent, it's a great product.

The fact that Groove only works on Windows and not on OS X is a major put-off to Volker, who works most of the time on Macs. Three major things have killed his groovy enthusiasm:

1. It only runs on Windows.
2. It's a proprietary closed system.
3. You need to install a fat client.

Very valid points.

I agree with him that Groove is a big, fat resource hog, but to some of us it pays off in functionality and security. Ideally, Groove could be broken up into a list components from which you could choose what features you want to install or not. The idea of compartmentalizing Groove into functional blocks, allowing a "more granular" adoption, is something that should be taken into consideration in the future.

The need to install a client may surely be an obstacle, but I cannot think of alternatives ways to provide offline support. Regardless of the tool you use, if you want to access your documents without an Internet connection, you'll need to install a client to do so. Correct me if I'm wrong.

What I've learned during the last few years working in the area of collaboration software is that there are no silver bullets, there's no tool that fits all of customer collaboration needs. You may need a screwdriver to do your job, but hey, all I need is a hammer and two nails!

2004-07-12T13:53:00.000+01:00

Groove's new fresh website goes hand-in-hand with launch of Groove Virtual Office 3.0

2004-07-12T13:36:00.000+01:00

When the Workplace Is Many Places, Source: Harris Interactive

IBM Workplace 2.0: Better Rich than thin!

2004-07-12T12:14:00.000+01:00

I read with interest how IBM's new collaboration product Workplace 2.0 (press release May 10th 2004) reconsiders and develops a Rich Client to overcome the barriers of poor browser-based functionality and imperfect connections typical of a server-client architectures and more importantly, to lower costs. I would also add the list, to facilitate offline support.

"The client-side technology used in Release 2.0 of IBM Lotus Workplace is a dramatic new model of delivery that will lower the cost of ownership while increasing the richness of the client."

I'm a strong supporter of rich clients for rich productive collaboration. There's a lot of talk these days about middleware, and this is only emphasizing the need to leverage enterprise client/server architectures with powerful edge rich-client technologies.

The benefits of rich-clients are evident:

-Client technology can provide powerful functionality, similar to that of standard PC applications, in contrast to, limited browser-based limited functional capabilities (even topped up with plug-ins).

- Offline Support. This means that you can work even when disconnected from the server. And believe me, this happens more often than you may think. Today, about a quarter of the U.S. work force works from home at least some of the time, while another quarter is mobile or works from customer locations (Source: When the Workplace Is Many Places, Harris Interactive). So if you're a remote worker (i.e. a road warrior, a home bunny and/or a wanderer), you'll be pleased to hear about this sort of connection capabilities.

- Reduce Cost. Today, rich-clients such as Workplace 2.0 and Groove can be delivered, managed, and updated directly from a central server, thus significantly reducing IT costs.

The ability to control and manage clients from the server side will definitely attract a lot of corporate IT departments; nevertheless, whilst having richer functionality, rich clients also have disadvantages. What appeals about thin clients is the ease and low cost of administration; it's easier to control, and as Gordon Haff, senior analyst of Illuminata points out in this MIT Tech Review article, "there's no doubt that the thin client is in general better for security. Simplicity and security go hand in hand". This is a very good point indeed. Corporations are desperate to build secure information infrastructures "in an ever-more-insecure online world". Rich clients thus, must be built from scratch within a very tight security model. This particular area is where Groove excels, since it ensures with a military strong 192-bit encryption both on storage and transportation that no-one will be able to sniff out data traveling through the Internet. For more on Groove security go to here.

Groove 3.0 is out next week

2004-07-09T19:39:00.000+01:00

The time has come chaps. The dramatically improved next generation of Groove Workspace 2.5 is out next week. It will be renamed to Groove Virtual Office 3.0 and most of the work has been put into a much more intuitive and easier-to-use UI, and improved performance (3 to 5 times faster) and security.

"This is the deepest security you're going to find in a commercially available product--period," analyst Peter O'Kelly says. Reference

Of course the list of new features goes on and on, Groove File Sharing, new Forms,alerts etc... As described in the article, it's a distinct product that lives apart from competitors (i.e. MS Sharepoint, IBM Workplace, Documentum eRoom, Macromdeia Breezer, etc). Groove's uniqueness relies on offline capabilities, user-immune "always-on" super strong security, cross-enterprise collaboration with real-time capabilities built into it. Recipe for success!

Virtual Office is available immediately, according to Groove Networks. The File Sharing Edition for costs $69, the Professional Edition is $179 and Project Edition is priced at $229.

Computer World: [Link]

InstantMessagingPlanet.com [link]

ZDNet: [link]

Information Week: [Link]

Find more links to press releases here

Groove Web Services put to work!!

2004-07-09T19:19:00.000+01:00

Very impressive indeed; best of all is, the scope of potential ways in which you could supercharge an existing or a new application with Groove's intra-organizational, secure, bandwidth optimization and real-time communication capabilities. Take a look at the work Hugh Pyle has done.

Earlier this week I talked about GFS (Groove File Sharing), and how nicely Groove goes to the heart of our Windows file explorer. All of the sudden, everyday folders become shared spaces where we can securely synchronize files across firewalls, be alerted about new changes to files, even chat/instant message with the people we share the folder with. This single feature could ship as a product on its own!!

Well, then Hugh moves on to describe how easily you could build or integrate the unique groovy collaborative features into any application by using the new 3.0 GDK (Groove Development Kit). This is something that will definitely attract a lot of customers. If your users work 80% of their time within one single application (Outlook, SAP, etc), why would you try to change the way they work and migrate them into Groove? Wouldn't it be easier if you extend their current app with Groove's unique cross-enterprise, secure, offline capabilities?

You might use Groove's workspace services simply to store local data securely.

Or, more interestingly, you might put work-in-progress documents into a Groove workspace ("underneath" your app) so that multiple users can work with them as part of your larger process. Because the workspace is Groove, those users wouldn't even need to be online to have access to the shared data. They wouldn't necessarily even need to be in the same company.

Check out the example application Hugh built called Minimal App launcher.

First I talked about GFS, the very useful folder-synchronization feature in Groove V3. This puts Groove's collaborative-workspace features right into the Windows shell. Folders are workspaces.

AppLauncher (part one) describes how to build the same type of integration into Any Windows App, so that YourApp has a Groove workspace underneath. The application is launched from Groove with a commandline saying how to access the workspace's services.

AppLauncher (part two) shows the glue which binds "your application" into the Groove user experience.

Worth a visit folks.

2004-07-09T18:30:00.000+01:00

future of communications (voice + data)

2004-07-09T18:27:00.000+01:00

Application Independence

The Future of Enterprise Communications

2004-07-09T18:10:00.000+01:00

This month's Gartner Webcast explores the future of enterprise communications. Elaborates on the differences between unified messaging (oriented towards integrating mobile users) and unified communications (oriented towards business process integration). Among the three webcast contributors we have representatives from Gartner Research and Verizon Communications. Naturally, considering the sponsor of the webcast is a company within the Applied Voice and Speech Technology arena, there's a high emphasis on how mobile workers can be localized and connected through voice over IP technologies. Very soon, messaging applications (i.e. VoIP, IM, eMail, webconferencing, etc..)will be quickly integrated to enterprise systems through agile middleware in order to enable all employees to retrieve messages in any format, anywhere anytime.

[Link]

2004-07-08T13:13:00.000+01:00

Organisations involved in peacebuilding in Sri Lanka

Untying The Gordian Knot: ICT For Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding

2004-07-08T13:09:00.000+01:00

Fascinating paper from Sanjana Hattotuwa titled "Untying the Gordian Knot: ICT for Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding" June 2004, courtesy of Robin Good, on how Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have been used in the peacebuilding and conflict resolution process in Sri Lanka.

Infoshare, organization to which Sanjana belongs, deployed a series of collaboration technologies to empower and connect individuals within different regions and organizations (e.g. NGOs, INGOs, Donors, Humanitarian agencies) to help them directly participate in the peacemaking process in Sri Lanka by enabling knowledge sharing, instant and secure access to key information, ad-hoc network forming,"swarming", etc..

Sanjana has done a brilliant job putting in words what the key challenges and barriers in deploying ICTs in the full-field peacebuilding process are. If you're interested about full-field technology access, adoption and appropriation,

..ICT does not promise a goal, it fertilises the process of peacebuilding itself.

... effective communication and collaboration is a cornerstone in any peace process, and has a pivotal factor in the progress of the process itself. For stakeholders engaged in a peace process, the overwhelming abundance of raw data must be weighed against always accessible, secure, trusted information that helps them to work together, and collaborate on programmes, projects and interventions that buttress peace building.

This study argues that the defining characteristic of ICT in peacebuilding is that it enables information flows that not only radically subvert existing patterns of knowledge flows and power centres, but in empowering organisations, groups and individuals to produce and share information between other (and within sectors), helps bring a greater degree of cohesion, transparency and accountability to processes of conflict transformation that were hitherto unthinkable.

...ICT interventions, however well intentioned, may actually serve to exacerbate existing fault-lines within and between ethnic groups and communities.

....there are a plethora of technologies that are already used for communication and collaboration, but the greatest potential for the use of ICT for peacebuilding comes from technologies which are broadly termed Peer-to-Peer (P2P). see diagram below

You can access the full report (Word 2.81MB) from here [link]

2004-07-08T13:08:00.000+01:00

access, adoption, appropriation

2004-07-08T12:28:00.000+01:00

Communication and collaboration technologies used in Sri Lanka

The Top 10 New Technologies For State And Local Government

2004-07-08T11:09:00.000+01:00

This Forrester report (requires subscription)identifies 10 technologies to help State and local government agencies' IT organizations achieve their common goals (e.g. cutting IT costs, improving IT security, ensuring regulatory compliance, and improving inter-agency communication...) The first on the list is "composite applications, portals, and collaboration technology".

[link]

2004-07-07T19:01:00.000+01:00

Barry Bennett, communications director for the G-8 summit

The G8 Summit "sherpas"

2004-07-07T18:59:00.000+01:00

Fascinating comments from Michael Helfrich's weblog on how World Leaders and their accompanying "sherpas" used Groove Networks for secure encrypted communication and ink chat support.

Earlier this week, a couple of us traveled to Savannah Georgia to the site of the Press Center for the G8 Summit. The security was mindblowing, and rightly so, given that the world's most powerful leaders would be assembling on an island 80 miles to the south to discuss world issues. Barry Bennett, communications director for the G-8 summit is shown above with a tablet.

Groove was selected as one of the IT innovations that would be used by the delegations and their research staffs. Each leader (i.e., President Bush) has a policy advisor, who is referred to as a "sherpa". The sherpa is given a Motion Computing tablet loaded with Microsoft OneNote and Groove. During the negotiation sessions, the sherpa can use the ink chat to securely connect with their research support staff who are in a room some 3000 feet away. Groove was selected because of the secure, encrypted communications between peers, as well as because of the ink chat support. Clicky keyboards have made too much noise at the table in years past, and runners with handwritten notes is low tech.

The Wall Street Journal picked up on the story this morning in their "Digits" section (B4):

"But at the G-8 summit in Sea Island, Ga., this week, in many sessions each leader worked with just one principal policy analyst -- known as a sherpa -- in the room. Each sherpa was issued a Motion Computing tablet PC, equipped with Microsoft OneNote for organizing handwritten information as well as encrypted collaboration software from Groove Networks Inc."

Ray Ozzie: next candidate for a Nobel Peace Prize

2004-07-07T18:50:00.000+01:00

Interesting comments in this CRN article:

Words we never ever imagined writing: France's president, Jacques Chirac, has gotten his "Groove" on"along with the other members of the G-8.

During last week's summit in Georgia of the leaders of the world's eight top economic powers, officials used Groove Networks' software and other technology to help with communications. If Ray Ozzie can help some of these guys communicate better, we'll nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize.

[link]

here's a new one: welcome to blikis

2004-07-07T15:56:00.000+01:00

If you haven't heard about Blikis yet, let me introduce you to the concept. A bliki is a Blog with wiki capabilites; that is, a Blog with publishing capabilities for blog readers. This tool offers yet another way to facilitate individuals to easily publish their own content online and collaborate asynchronously.

[link]

2004-07-07T14:31:00.000+01:00

Networked Innovation diagram from Forrester

Gmail re-opens debate on Thin vs Rich clients

2004-07-07T13:45:00.000+01:00

Gmail, most talked-about free Email service from Google, blazingly fast service proves that Web-based applications can be just as good as ones running on your desktop computer. Is it better for applications to run on my computer or on a remote server? Read on comments from Simson Garfinkel's article, "Google conquers Email" at MIT Technology Review (subscription required).

Gmail validates a claim that Sun has been making for nearly a decade—that it’s possible to replace a network of PCs running Windows with world-class computers offering computing services to low-cost and easily-managed desktop machines—perhaps machines so inexpensive that they don’t even have a hard disk. Sun called such computers “thin clients.”

But Gmail does work just as well as a copy of Outlook Express running on the desktop. In some way, in fact, it works better....

Until Gmail, practically every Web-based application was a pale imitation of that same application running on a PC. Web-based applications had the advantage that they were accessible from any computer on the Internet on professionally managed servers, that the data was backed up, and that the applications themselves were constantly updated. But compared to applications running on your local machine the web versions had fewer features and performed more slowly.

Gmail is different. For starters, it’s blindingly fast—so fast that it feels like it is running on your local computer and not in some data center....

Gmail shows that Web applications with thin clients can have advantages over software running on your desktop. The most obvious is reliability: Gmail runs on Google’s servers, not your hard drive, and Google almost certainly does a better job than you do with routine maintenance, backups, and the like.

Now, what happens if I'm not connected to the Internet? I'd never be able to read my Email unless I've had previously downloaded it...Uhmm, not very handy indeed.

[link]

Thomas Malone at Supernova 2004

2004-07-07T13:00:00.000+01:00

Great notes from Heath Row on the speech from Thomas Malone, author of the book "The future of Work", at Supernova.

We are now in the early stages in an increase of human freedom in business that may in the long run be as important a change for business as the introduction of democracy was for governments. New technologies allow us to have the economic benefits of large organizations as well as the human benefits of small organizations. The reason that's possible is that technology is reducing the cost of communication to such a level that everyone in even huge organizations can have all the information they need about the big picture to make decisions without waiting for someone above them to tell them what to do. What will change things, though, is not the technology. It's what people want. We need to think more deeply about what we humans really want.

read on here

Ray Ozzie at Supernova 2004

2004-07-07T12:49:00.000+01:00

Ray Ozzie, founder and CEO of Groove Networks, delivered last week a compelling speechnote at Supernova, a unique event that brings together experts from the software, communications and media industries to discuss decentralization and pervasive connectivity.

Heath Row, from Fast Company, puts together highlights from Ray's speech.

This is real. This is not theoretical. Work is changing now. So what have we learned at the edge? One, design is the key to achieving value. A tool's value rises dramatically as does its fitness for purpose. Awareness-based swarming and ad hoc groups are real and valuable. Hybrid architectures are key in organizational contexts. Two, successful joint work feels simple and local. Real and compelling local need to work together is required. Individuals participate largely for selfish reasons. Trust, accountability, and privacy are required for participation.

And three, active resistance is a fact of life. Deal with it. Even though we're working at the edge, servers are centers of territorial power. Regulatory, compliance issues are real but are used as weapons. Embrace the regulatory stuff and have a plan to work through it. And increased transparency and accountability can be threatening to people who have built their careers on brokering information and keeping people from talking to each other.

[Link]

2004-07-07T12:31:00.001+01:00

Groove folder-synchronization

2004-07-07T12:31:00.000+01:00

Groove 3.0 folder-synchronization workspaces

GFS: Secure Folder synchronization

2004-07-07T12:15:00.000+01:00

One of the features I like most about Groove v3.0 is the ability to seamlessly synchronize folders and files across distributed individuals. The great thing is that you don't even need to create a shared space, you can do it directly from the Windows file Explorer (see picture above). All you need to do is select a folder, click on the Groove button and select who you want to synchronize the folder with. You can even synchronize it across your computers (office and home without the need for both to be online simultaneously). This feature takes advantage of all of Groove capabilities (e.g. cross-organization, always-on security, binary differencing algorithms to optimize bandwidth, alerts for new content, etc... Hugh Pyle, Groove Networks developer, writes in detail about Groove File synchronization (GFS).

MOre interesting comments on GFS from Paresh Suthar here

[Link to Hugh's entry.]

Homeland Security launches Groove pilot

2004-06-28T16:49:00.000+01:00

The Department of Homeland Security launches this week in Dallas the first pilot for their Security Information Network-Critical Infrastructure Programme. The solution will be based on Groove Workspace and MS Sharepoint. The solution will connect 50 states, five territories, Washington D.C., and 50 major urban areas to strengthen the exchange of threat information.

[Link]

Groove brings quantifiable savings to SMB's

2004-06-24T09:16:00.000+01:00

An article from the July issue of Inc. Magazine. "The Next Best Thing to Being There" highlights how two small companies are using Groove to connect their employees and suppliers across thousands of miles. Groove is noted as providing a quantifiable ROI for Alaska Sports — their "communication costs are down 70%", and AlgoRX Pharmaceuticals — they've "saved thousands of dollars in travel and telecom costs."

[Link]

Google employees Google-bomb their own bosses!

2004-06-24T09:03:00.000+01:00

Try this out now: Go to Google, type in “out of touch management", and click “I’m Feeling Lucky." Surprise, surprise...already signs of friction inside the company in preparation to the highly expected IPO?

The Technology Review Blog reports

[A buried article in The New York Times lastr week] cited “a person close to the company“ as the source for its assertion that Googlers themselves engineered the prank.

Google bombing is the practice of creating so many links to a particular Web site that it fools Google’s popularity-based search algorithms, forcing that site to come up first in Google’s search results for the words in that link. Earlier examples have included “miserable failure,“ which linked to George W. Bush’s White House biography...

Ironically, as Technology Review reported.... Google itself predicted in its initial filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the IPO could “adversely impact relations“ inside the company. In that case, the company was referring to inequities in the distribution of stock and stock options among Google employees. Could relations be souring even before Google’s stock price rockets to the heavens?

[Link]

IDC: Training up but lags behind projected pickups in other areas of IT

2004-06-24T08:52:00.000+01:00

Sandra Gittlen comments re: recent IDC report titled "Worldwide and U.S. IT Education Services" on her last NW newsletter on IT Education and Training.

"A proportion of technology infrastructure has reached the end
of its useful life, which will lead to upgrades."

This is great news for IT managers arguing for a boost in
training budgets. What you can draw from this statement is that
now is the time to invest in education so that planning for new
technologies is efficient.

...will need growth in skills development, including network
security, mobile computing, storage management, customer relationship management, Web services and business intelligence.

.... e-learning will continue its upward climb; however, IDC says to look for more blended models of learning.

Not surprisingly, security is projected to be a top area for
training.

[Link]

2004-06-23T13:47:00.000+01:00

7 Tips for Managing Distributed Projects

2004-06-23T13:46:00.000+01:00

7 Tips for managing distributed projects

Successfully Managing Distributed Projects with Groove

2004-06-23T13:23:00.000+01:00

Geographical distribution, time-zone differences, different organizations, systems and cultures...I think we've all come across these distributed project management problems which result in "awareness deficits". This Webcast, sponsored by Groove Networks and TeamDirection, throws in some great tips on how you can manage your resources more effectively and how to reduce distributed-team coordination costs by using their "digital project home" solution, based on Groove Project Edition.

[Link]

Supporting remote workers

2004-06-22T13:20:00.000+01:00

I read with interest the comments from Sandra Gittlen on the Network World Fusion newsletter on IT Education and training. Sandra was last week on the road with the Remote Office Networking Technology Tour in Arlington, VA, discussing with IT managers the issues surrounding supporting remote workers.

The list of challenges is pretty long, however she brings up the following: Security, Policy enforcement and awareness, harnessing executives, replicating the desktop environment within the remote terminal, etc. Read on for more.

[Link]

Piloting Iterative And Agile Processes

2004-06-22T13:01:00.000+01:00

interesting Forrester report on how to pilot new processes and the tools that support them. Focus on new project management techniques, and think of comparative metrics!

Here's the exec summary.

Companies considering adopting iterative or Agile development processes need to institute a pilot program from the start. The program must not only address the new processes but must also pilot any new tools(development or life-cycle management), project management techniques, and most importantly, new metrics. Project managers and developers must embrace the new processes and adapt their management styles accordingly. Without baseline and comparative metrics, it's impossible to know whether a new process has delivered any value or improved on the quality or productivity the teams had before.

Collaboration: The Future Is Contextual, Process-Centric, and Community-Driven

2004-06-21T19:06:00.000+01:00

I found this article from META Group report, Mike Gotta, 29 April 2204, thanks to the Telework Times, a great source of knowledge for tele-workers, "exploring news and ideas on the business, technical, political, and social aspects of telework, remote collaboration, distributed development, and the virtual workplace of the 21st century".

The article META Group , stresses the need to focus on process alignment when introducing new collaboration systems into companies. "Effective collaboration strategies will enable workers and teams to be more productive within processes, with success measured via improvement in process outcomes and more sustained levels of innovation resulting from community insight."

Tools alone won't entice a group of coworkers to work more efficiently, as proven by a multitude of failed knowledge management projects. Mike Gotta counts off the hurdles to overcome, like "persuading people to work differently, establishing incentives and performance measures that foster greater information sharing and cooperation," but then moves right on to discuss benefits: "Community-building efforts are valuable to create synergies across processes and functional groups."

[via The Telework Times]

Managing virtual teams

2004-06-21T18:15:00.000+01:00

This article throws in some brilliant tips on long-distance management. William Pape, highlights back in 1999 some of the techniques that make his distributed teams work as if they were in the same location.

Have regular virtual meetings or videoconferences, including managers, to strenghten relationships among distributed fellow workers.

At least some of the time, have managers operate in cyberspace , rather than out of the main office. "Sitting in a central office without plugging into the virtual culture is almost a guarantee of failure," Pape says. "You don't know what's going on, and you signal your employees that operating virtually isn't really important." And, like Carline Davis, who brings her managers together regularly for strategic planning, Pape believes it's important for employees to get together frequently.

Make sure home-based employees have appropriate work space. Have a separate room (with door included)to act as an office. Don't work from the kitchen table or your room, as you'll find extremely difficult to separate work time-frames from your private life.

Promote face2face meetings for monthly/bi-monthly strategic meetings.

Strengthen relationships between remote workers and employees at the main office . "People who work out of their homes or at customer sites also need to spend some time in an office with their colleagues," Pape argues. "Any face-to-face meeting -- a regular status meeting or an annual, sales, or planning meeting -- is an opportunity for cross-fertilization."

Help employees feel connected to the organisation.

Make sure, Pape advises, that remote employees receive frequent -- perhaps even daily -- updates about company progress. Include them in planning initiatives, and make your corporate mission and vision clear to every employee. "When you become a virtual organization, your staff suddenly loses all those interactions in the hallway, in the elevator, and by the water cooler that help move projects forward and smooth out conflicts," Pape says. To compensate, he suggests making regular use of videoconferencing and telephone conversations. Relying on e-mail too much, he finds, can allow conflicts to escalate. "When workers do most of their communicating by e-mail, small irritations easily grow into major conflicts," Pape says. "Learning how to disagree remotely is an important component of being able to operate virtually."

[via T+D Blog]

2004-06-19T10:50:00.001+01:00

Oficial Org-Chart

2004-06-19T10:50:00.000+01:00

Informal Social Network

How Org charts lie!

2004-06-18T18:48:00.000+01:00

Tons of money has been put into collaboration technologies, but not much effort into understanding what the socio-cultural ties that make us collaborate are . This article form Harvard Business Review, an excerpt from the Hidden Power of Social Networks by Rob Cross and Andrew Parker, elaborates into the intricacies of collaborative working.

"It has taken us years, and I think we are still not sure if we are getting things right even after substantial reengineering projects, a move to teams, new HR practices, two acquisitions, and a ton invested in technology. By now we should have reduced costs and created a more nimble company without a focus on hierarchy or fiefdoms. But it's tough to ensure that this is really happening. Most of us in this room have thousands of people we are accountable for stretched across the globe. It's impossible to manage or even know what's going on in the depths of the organization. I mean, each of us can fool ourselves into thinking we're smart and running a tight ship. But really the best we can do is create a context and hope that things emerge in a positive way, and this is tough because you can't really see the impact your decisions have on people. So you just kind of hope what you want to happen is happening and then sound confident when telling others".
—Executive vice president, commercial lending

AOL offers at voice and Web conferencing

2004-06-18T17:15:00.000+01:00

AOL announced last week two new services will be launched from the AOL free Instant Messenger client (AIM). One will be AOL Web Conferencing (i.e. VoIP or audio through the Internet) provided by Lightbridge, and AOL Web Meeting, provided by WebEx.

"The AIM service plays an important role in accelerating business communications, and many of the two billion daily instant messages sent on our network progress into telephone calls and meetings," said Ed Fish, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Desktop Messaging, America Online, Inc. "At work users now have a seamless way to move from one-to-one exchanges to new shared and collaborative experiences through AIM. Presence and real-time communications help boost efficiency, making the AIM service an even more valuable business tool."

The new services don't come for free though. In order to start a web meeting session, you'll need to set up a debit account with a credit card . However, I think this pay-as-you-go model is an excellent idea. I believe it's an important move because it will extend the capabilities of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and bring them closer to these type of collaborative technologies without the need to allocate a big budget for it. This way, SMEs will be able to have a go at these tools and learn about their own collaboration requirements, and to answer some of those difficult questions (i.e. what type of functionality do we require in a conferencing tool to effectively collaborate with our geographically distributed partners and customers? Are these tools good enough to save us some money and time from traveling?

The services can be accesed via AIM @Work. Pricing per participant:

Online Meeting: $.33/min
Call-in Teleconferencing: $.05/min
Call-back Teleconferencing: $.20/min

America Online, Inc. Launches AIM Business Services

read on Business Wire press-release

Yahoo's pre-emptive strike against Gmail

2004-06-18T16:56:00.000+01:00

What a nice surprise I had yesterday!! All of the sudden I went from 10MB of storage to 100MB. All for no extra cost. Isn't that nice! Gotta thank Google already for stretching out Yahoo.

"While Google continues limited beta tests of its new Gmail service, which offers one gigabyte of online storage, Yahoo has gone the search king one better, offering two gigabytes of storage to subscribers to its premium e-mail package, up from 20 megabytes. Users of Yahoo’s free e-mail service, meanwhile, will get 100 megabytes of storage, up from 10 megabytes. At the same time, Yahoo has streamlined its Web e-mail interface and says it has given the software and servers behind the system a major tune-up, improving speed and searchability. (Search Engine Watch has a useful report on the change.) With such large amounts of storage at hand, Yahoo mail users may have less reason to switch to Gmail, although Yahoo mail stil lacks certain features of Gmail, such as the ability to display threaded e-mail conversations."

2004-06-18T16:46:00.000+01:00

games in your iPod

Memo to Steve Jobs: Give iPod Color!

2004-06-18T16:26:00.000+01:00

Great little article on how the iPod should move on into the future, and which direction its product line should take. To everyone out there that shares the passion and love to your cool-looking MP3 playing device as much as I do, here're a few hints:

More storage:

"there was the June 2 announcement by Toshiba that it increased the capacity of its 1.8-inch hard drive (the one used by iPod) to 60 gigabytes—20 gigabytes more than its previous high-end unit in that form factor. Sixty gigabytes is “more music [storage] than anyone will ever need,” says Phil Leigh, an analyst with Inside Digital Media."

Perhaps, more functionality, though I wouldn't mix photos, and say, email capabilities into it. Would you put mix your Blackberry and iPod into one device? Though..a bit of a friendlier colourful UI wouldn't do any harm, right?

"Apple CEO Steve Jobs has resisted calls to offer non-music applications on the iPod, most famously quipping, “It’s the music, stupid” during an April press conference"

Link to original article (requires subscription to MIT Technology review)

2004-06-15T19:03:00.000+01:00

Advance by Netsenger Corp.

new tool for Groove: Advance!

2004-06-15T18:58:00.000+01:00

New tool, developed by Groove's Partner Netsenger in Japan, to facilitate advanced messaging capabilities in Groove, e.g.IM back up and search.

"Features:
Groove Instant Message export and import - Now you can backup all those messages!
Forwarding of Groove IM's via email - Use to send and receive IM's on your mobile phone!
Store pictures and multiple emails/phone numbers/addresses etc. of your contacts.
Advanced search capability of your activities, contacts, and messages.
English and Japanese support.
Works with Groove v2.5 and v3.0 beta"

link

Disruption Theory

2004-06-14T11:37:00.000+01:00

A look into disruptive technologies, such as Voice over the Internet (VoIP) and Instant Messaging.

"These technologies could start to displace the telephone first along the fringes, with instant-messaging teenagers and penny-pinching small entrepreneurs. Before you know it, the telephone will have gone the way of the telegraph. It will still be here, but who'll use it?"

Link to Business 2.0 article by Erick Schonfeld.

Three IT pains

2004-06-14T11:30:00.000+01:00

Outdated review, yet very up to date.

"Sara Radicati, president and CEO of The Radicati Group, spoke to press and analysts at the November 2002 OracleWorld Conference in San Francisco. She identified three key pressures that IT departments are feeling right now:

- A slow economy is making containment of infrastructure costs imperative.
- Globalisation is forcing companies to implement advanced messaging capabilities to stay competitive.
- IT must support an increasingly mobile set of users. "

Oracle goes head-to-head against IBM and Microsoft

2004-06-14T11:10:00.000+01:00

There must have past over a year now since Oracle launched its own solution into the collaboration infrastructure software market. Today, Forrester publishes yet another interesting review.

The Oracle Collaboration Suite (OCS)has brought into the market another platform for collaboration, i.e. an asynchronous traditional eMail and scheduling infrastructure with some real-time capabilities such as instant messaging (IM) and web-conferencing.

Full Forrester report: Oracle's Path To Collaboration Success: Around, Not Through, IBM And Microsoft

Nike does it right

2004-06-14T11:05:00.000+01:00

Nike's Just-in-Time training strategy has driven sales in stores by 2%.

"In the fast-paced, ever-changing retail world, training employees about new products, new technologies, and selling skills across a globally dispersed company with different populations is a challenge. Nike has tackled this challenge by making online learning immediate, updatable, informative, and engaging. Nike developed training with minimal disruption to the retail sales environment that engages a tech-savvy audience to increase seasonal product knowledge, improve selling skills, and enhance customer dialog at the point of sale. By focusing attention on quality, speed, consistency, and relevance of learning, Nike's online training efforts have shown significant early results with a minimum of a 2% increase in dollars in sell-through at participating retail locations."

Link to original paper from Forrester. Subscription required.

information quality life-cycle management

2004-06-14T10:52:00.000+01:00

I like this concept. How to turn data into quality valuable information or intelligence on which you can act, is what most companies struggle to understand; and believe me, software companies within the content management arena make the most of it. This paper from Forrester throws in some interesting views from a process perspective into the mix.

"Information quality has a life cycle and so does the process of managing the information quality. As data is transformed into information as it migrates through the information supply chain, it gets new owners, consumers, and managers. Therefore, the quality of the information must likewise be managed throughout the cycle."

Link to paper. Subscription required.

Information Overload

2004-06-11T17:34:00.000+01:00

Great piece of writing from Robin Good.

"Information overload is reaching, as long forecasted, new heights. It is becoming increasingly difficult to manage it all, or even to decide what to discard and what not. In the end, lots of relevant information is lost or it never reaches its ideal destinations.

The connection between information creators and information users is to be perfected.

As the network starts rapidly organize itself, different levels of automatic filtering will gradually make it easier for people to access the "right" information, and for information to be rapidly found by whoever seeks it.

This is what I see:

Yes, search engines are going to be playing an important role in this, and I personally anticipate the gradual, probably slow, but definite demise of the Google-approach to information search. Meta, and visual search engines will play a much bigger role in our future information searches. People working in
information architecture, information design, and data visualization and interface design have a fascinating future ahead of them as we need them to create the new metaphors, visual analogies and intuitive access routes that will greatly improve our abilities to rapidly access relevant information.

There is already a flurry of new search tools around but you can be sure that the trend has only started. We are finally going to have some effective, powerful and innovative alternatives. "

Here's the link

I'm an astut follower of technologies that help us filter and digest information to our own needs. At an infrastructure level you can look at advanced information retrieval tools that facilitate conceptual search such as Autonomy, and if your interested in clustering and information visualisation, check out Grokker, and Vivisimo.

eMail may not die, but hey, its role will never be the same

2004-06-11T17:03:00.000+01:00

good news to all eMail addicts out there, pretty soon your life will not be hanging off your eMail Inbox.

There are plenty of tools out there that will make email a small part of your day2day life. We have instant messaging (IM), collaborative workspaces to work on projects and help you "swarm" teams together, social networking technologies to find people with similar interests to yours, and the RSS feeds will bring the blogs and other news right to your deskptop, for you to read at your convenience. Isn't that fab?!

"Ironically, attempts to shut down information exchange have the opposite effect. A Microsoft speaker told the conference that IM traffic is now outpacing e-mail inside the Redmond firewall. And there are fundamental incentives for preserving information transparency.

...And finally, the elephant in the room: RSS. While INBOX wrestles with the intractable problems of blurred international boundaries, too-complex authentication solutions and too-expensive computational and payment schemes, more and more of us are routing around e-mail for all but the most basic services.

IM for supply-chain communications, social networks for collaboration spaces, and RSS as the glue that ties these data points together.

This real-time services fabric is that deadliest of competitors to e-mail: It shifts attention slowly and surely away from a producer-consumer economy to a publisher-subscriber ecology."

Read on Dan Gillmor's article "As E-Mail Hassles Pile Up, RSS Is the Elephant in the Room" on eWeek

2004-06-11T16:58:00.000+01:00

empowering individuals

Empowering individuals

2004-06-11T16:57:00.000+01:00

Just came across the slide above in one of Tom Peters presentations. Well, my thoughts are the following, how about if we flip the tortilla? I agree that empowering individuals may make the world "unstable and dangerous", but it also throws in a lot of good opportunities. Governing form the centre doesn't mean we have a safer life. In fact, central systems are always more susceptible to attacks. As our organizations begin to decentralize, power is shifting towards the edges, for the good and the bad...lets make the most of it. Lets embrace edge technologies such as blogs and P2P to make a difference.

For anyone that's interested in decentralization and to understand how the nature of our work is changing, I strongly recommend watching "The Present and Future of Work" webcast. The book written by Tom Malone is also a great read.

"As managers, we need to shift our thinking from command and control to coordinate and cultivate, and Groove provides a communication infrastructure to support this."

- Thomas Malone,
Groove v3.0 press release

Brand you!!

2004-06-11T16:00:00.000+01:00

Todays dynamic and ruthless market conditions force us to be permanently marketable. We're are just one more product out there. Well not really, we're all special and unique, but what is your uniqueness? what qualities make you different and stand out from the crowd?

Tom Peter's Brand You book is always a book a return to. You gotta re-invent yourself!! Transform yourself from an "employee" into a brand.

"Cubicle Slaves...Hack off your ties...flip off your heels.."

"Y-O-U can make a difference! Bash your cubicle Walls! the white-collar revoluiton is on!...be distinct or be extinct"

Great stuff,now, I've just come across this other resource of know-how re:self-marketing thanks to Robin Good's recent post

Here are six simple steps you can take to standout and prosper in the new world of work:
1. Think like a free agent.
2. Discover what sets you apart and market it shamelessly.
3. Get visible.
4. Stop networking, and build a network.
5. Add value - and then some.
6. Accelerate your brand power by getting in sync with a major trend in your field and moving to the head of it. " I would add:
7. Marry an important, ethical cause as a complement to what you like to do
8. Share before looking for profit
9. Help others become as successful as you
10. Question yourself and your approach systematically - get forever curious

here's the link to the original source

2004-06-11T11:47:00.000+01:00

my babe...on the right

dogs can understand human language

2004-06-11T09:48:00.000+01:00

"A clever border collie that can fetch at least 200 objects by name may be living proof that dogs truly understand human language, German scientists reported on Thursday....
Rico's abilities seem to follow a process called "fast mapping," seen when young children start to learn to speak and understand language, they report. "

Wired News, June 10 go to reference