Sep 29, 2008 | blog
You know the place, the one we all crab about, the one we all supposedly hate to go to every morning? Yeah, the place where the coffee sucks, your desk is too small, and where traffic is always a pain to get through. It’s the office – the one your employer has graciously equipped and staffed for your working pleasure.
I know exactly what many of you are thinking. We all seem to dread heading to work in the morning, knowing that there is a "pile of work" ready and waiting. It seems we associate the negatives of the work we do with the place our employers house there workers and rarely associate the positives of the office itself.
What if you could separate those feelings? What about all the work and preparation that goes into that workplace? The costs involved for employers to provide a workplace for each employee are substantial, and the goal is ultimately make it as easy as possible for you to get your assigned tasks done. Most of the time it works, though our perception is usually clouded by co-workers, outside influences, business climate, workload, and many others.
Many folks talk about working remotely, or from home. It seems that lately we’ve become so enamored with this idea that it’s like the end-all solution to our working woes. As if, just getting out of the office will make all the difference by itself.
This simply isn’t the case. You can change the scenery, but that doesn’t always solve the issue. There are great things about working from home, or being able to set up at a coffee shop for the afternoon. Getting away from drive-bys and the daily routine are highly effective ways to GTD when you need to.
Just don’t forget that on a regular basis, those remote locations, or the home office also have their distractions. Whether it be sick kids home from school, household chores that seem important during the day, or just the noise and music at your favorite coffee shop – they are distractions too. Start taking a look at your employer’s office as a space designed specifically for getting things done. The resources available far outstrip what you can set up at home, or find as a secondary workplace.
From people resources to copiers, take a fresh look and try to separate out the workplace from the work itself. You may be able to discover unused offices or conference rooms to skip off to for an hour. Or find that color printer that does 11×17 landscape that you need for your presentation – you don’t always need to go to Kinkos! Your company is paying for resources to enable you to do your job, finding out what’s available and using the existing space more effectively could make a bit of difference in your productivity and perspective. Give it a try and share your tips if you have them.
Jul 17, 2008 | blog
The more time I spend working in the Information Technology field, the more I see opportunities. Usually, it’s simply a an old technology being consumed by a newer one – like traditional telephones being taken over by VoIP phones on the corporate desktop. I’ve championed that notion for nearly a decade, and only now is that really happening at an increasing pace. Cool stuff if you get a chance to use it too.
However, that’s not what I see happening right now. It’s much simpler and much more fundamental than another Microsoft Windows server taking on another role from another team or technology. The changes that are afoot are at the root, the foundation of enterprise computing and it has a social media tie-in. I have a message for my peers in the Information Technologies field. Your world is already changing, and if you don’t see what’s happening, you’ll be left behind.
The change that’s taking place renders the corporate desktop as we know it, obsolete. The disparate servers, inefficient. This is something that I’ve been watching for some time, but only recently have seen some indications that convince me that the world has turned the corner.
What are these things that change the entire game? Why, virtualization, thin clients and “web 2.0” software of course. You already are talking about these things. You are probably working with a couple of them if not a combination of all in some way. What’s convinced me that IT ten years from now will be a wildly different landscape than it is today is the fact that virtualization works, thin clients are actually viable now, and “web 2.0” software is past the “wow” stage and into solving business needs. Add the idea that many software solutions don’t care if they run on Windows/Unix/Linux and you now have a broad base of reliable, sustainable open source systems to choose from.
There is also the introduction of Gen Y into the workforce, who bring a different expectation to work. By being more mobile, working remotely via the web, and having social media & networking as second nature, this workforce alone will bring an impressive amount of change.
So what is the bottom line I’m saying for corporate IT? I’m saying that the desktop as we know it is dead. Windows “7” may be the last “legacy” operating system to be deployed. Desktops will disappear completely as well as individual servers. Servers in general will all be virtual machines run from high availability clusters (OS does not matter) in remote data centers. If you don’t have room for one, it’ll probably be cost-effective to simply lease them from companies like Amazon and such.
While Microsoft Office will still be the “gold standard” that we compare things to, it will become irrelevant in the coming years as open source and online versions of this type of software bring more options faster, and simply chip away at the venerable office suite.
Windows itself will still remain – remaining a popular option for the consumer computing device, all of which will end up being the laptop format. Windows, along with OS X and a couple popular Linux distributions will continue to drive these machines, merging more business and entertainment functions together.
The coming change is huge, and with it the opportunities as well. Like the change that started 20 years ago where mainframe and minicomputers were starting to be replaced with microcomputers, our current definitions of enterprise computing will change radically in the next few years. Are you ready? Will you be a part of it? What else do you see?
Jun 30, 2008 | happiness
Early Monday morning in the office is an easier way of "waking up" to a week of work.
Jun 16, 2008 | blog
In past posts on the topic, I’ve often wondered when the average worker would “get” blogging. I have to admit that I finally “got it” recently, but from a different perspective. While working with larger firms, I’ve again had the chance to observe the average office worker. In doing so, “it” occurred to me while explaining how social media adds value to an organization that many folks just don’t have the bandwidth to participate.
It’s not that they wouldn’t want to, rather, it’s that the modern organization is so optimized on searching for productivity gains that there is little room to add back the socialization tools to the mix. To do so without finding the reasons for using more employees’ time doesn’t add value to the organization. Many existing efforts to engage the employee meet with mediocre results because people don’t have interest in helping their employer know more about them.
Another aspect of social media in the enterprise is buy-in. There simply is a certain demographic that will be averse to participating. The reasons for this can be nearly anything, but usually comes back to the fact that many people can’t grasp the value of participating. They may exhibit this perspective in many other aspects of their life as well by not joining community groups or friends in other activities.
So, for those organizations that are trying to leverage the knowledge of their employees, the challenge is to find the channel that they will respond to. It’s more than that however, because just like working to connect with consumers, the business needs to connect with their staff. They need to eliminate the gap between business and employee by being themselves. Executives & veeps need to show their personalities, not their “game face” that they use for business. The employees know about that all too well, they need to see that the business is made up of real people.
Social Media in general has this issue – that people aren’t willing to invest the time, or don’t see any value in participating. It’s not unique to this new way of engaging people. Similar challenges faced radio and television at one time as well, newfangled things that they were. These new community building tools & techniques are still in their infancy and will be a large part of the infrastructure of the new economy that is developing as we speak – the trends in the market prove that out every day.
Photo credit: ShadowStorm
May 29, 2008 | blog
Ok, I’m quite happy that Google released a Google Calendar Sync tool for Microsoft Outlook. Really happy.
Sure, I’m a Microsoft guy and have been for quite awhile. Because of that I’ve got significant investments in money & time in the mainline business products, namely Windows, Office, and Windows Mobile.
On the flip side, I’ve moved a number of tasks and work that I do to web based systems. GMail is obviously one of those, and earlier this year moved my calendar to GCal.
Since late March it’s been great to sync GCal with Outlook – works darn well. Now, since I use GMail (and Google Hosted Domains), I need to have all my contacts there & up to date as well. Also, there are dozens of contacts in GMail that I would like to sync to my Windows Mobile phone via ActiveSync. Currently, there is no easy way to do that.
Nearly the same time that Google released it’s GCal-Outlook sync tool, it announced a Google Contacts Sync API. I’m sure there are good things coming for everyone on nearly every platform for syncing Google Contacts with the major mail clients – at least I hope there is!
So Google, can you drop a few hints, or some info on plans to release a Google Contact Sync tool? We’d be very grateful.
