Should we worry about the children?

My ‘conference friend’ Rich has a cool new job – good stuff, Rich! I started to reply to something he wrote but it got so long I figured I’d better put it here instead.

Read Our Future Colleagues Have MySpace Accounts for the context first.

Rich, If you’re a dinosaur…I must be petrified. New grads coming into the workplace are closer in age to my children than to myself. My kids (13 and 11) are growing up wifi; not just laptops but PSPs, Sidekicks and Nintendo DS and the observations about handwriting, spelling, jargon – are on point, but in my opinion it’s more reflective of our struggle to adapt, just like the dinosaurs.

Younger folks have always integrated technology and information pipelines better than older generations. Further, If I can use my kid’s educations are any kind of benchmark, they’re getting a lot more knowledge and academic challenges thrown at them at an earlier age than we did.

The ability of any given youth to function socially still boils down to the individual level. My daughter would appear to be a poster child for ADD-style overload. She’ll be texting in her room with the TV, laptop and sometimes video iPod (with one earbud inserted) going. Yet she got amazing grades last quarter and is a social butterfly with a large circle of friends. My son is a different archetype – he’s much more of a loner, with few friends but deep passions that he explores fully offline and online. One day he casually told me he corrected the Wikipedia entry on a book series he was reading – he’s the 11 year old. He couldn’t understand why I was amazed at that.

I do see one commonality that worries me, it’s less about social engagement and getting out than it is about our increasing inability to be alone with ourselves. I see people filling up time that was formerly contemplative with some other form of connection – cell phones. Better than 50% of people I see driving, walking dogs, out for a stroll are on their phones. I don’t fear a future where life is experienced from behind a screen but one where nobody is comfortable being alone with their thoughts.

As if on cue (originally posted 12 June 07)

Google Operating System reports today that Powerpoint attachments can now be previewed as slideshows in Gmail.

Well on the way, head in a cloud (origially posted 11 June 07)

[Postscript – 22 June 2007. Another nod to life in the cloud. Thanks to Google’s cached views of this blog I was able to restore the last few posts I made.]

When I left my last employer I made a strategic decision to continue my work with online applications. At the former workplace we used roaming profiles and server storage that was accessible remotely so the notion of my ‘stuff’ being portable isn’t new. I’d already dabbled with Google apps and Zoho as well as Open Office as replacements for MS Office apps. Primarily because of the integration points I decided to focus on Google apps with Open Office as a backup if I needed more advanced features. It’s a purely personal choice – your mileage may vary and this is not an endorsement of any one product over the other.

I don’t do heavy text formatting nor am I an Excel jockey; given that I have to say that the online apps more than sufficed. For text I used Docs or Notebook depending on my intent – Notebook served for quick thoughts, logging running tasks and lists. Docs was for longer or more formatted items, Spreadsheets handled my basic tabular needs. I didn’t have to revert to Open Office at all. I am eager to see Google’s presentations solution – I flex PowerPoint heavily and the feature set is important to me.

When I traveled in Italy I everything I needed was at hand (unless I couldn’t get connectivity, which was rare). I recently got a new PC that I put in another location and as I was setting it up I thought how nice it would be if all my ‘legacy stuff’ was online rather than being sitting on a drive somewhere else. That made me realize that I’m shifting my focal point. My best photos, most immediate docs, reminders and notes are all in the cloud and now I wish it was all there for me.

Of course this approach isn’t a universal fit. There are challenges around document compatibility, sensitive data, compliance and regulatory concerns for enterprises. But no doubt that these will be resolved and the fact is we’re well on the way to a model of data retreivability and worker agility that eclipses the one we’ve been using for the last 30 years.

Ready for action

My cycling trip through Puglia was nothing short of wonderful on all counts. The landscape, company, guides and people were completely enjoyable.

The US holiday weekend is approaching, and on Tuesday I start my new consulting job. I’ve enjoyed my respite and I’m looking forward to getting engaged again. I don’t know if my new comapny has a blogging policy; considering that they take a positive stand on the role of social computing and the potential of Enterprise 2.0 I’m hopful that I’ll be able to continue in a more direct manner.

Chaos theory

In the last few weeks the year-end pace has picked up. Everyone I speak to at work is very busy, and a lot of it is unplanned activity. Many of my colleagues sense chaos and distraction, but I perceive connection. In my direct line of work I’ve written charter documents for a couple of small but strategic initiatives around our organization. My seeding of using BPM as our foundation is beginning to win converts with the right influence. Talk is about organizing around business services rather than application teams. My roadmap for 2007 is heavily weighted towards end-to-end user experience. Yesterday a colleague showed me a mashup of our locations in a Google map.

In my matrixed world, our CEO has expressed interest in blogging and online chats and I’ve been asked to help shape that effort. I also asked to step into a situation where an executive had a bad experience with a webcast we produced. I’ve joined our enterprise collaboration architecture domain.

Something is happening – all these strange attractors have a theme, and true to chaos theory they don’t know they’re going to coalesce. Thomas Otter would say that it’s getting very enterprisey around here, and Andrew McAfee would smell the Enterprise 2.0 goodness of the ingredients. I’m going to take a try at writing the Grand Unified Theory. It’ll be interesting to see which predictions come to pass.

On Friday my family and I go on a 2 week holiday. Best to all, be happy and safe!

Clear vision

I’ve spent a fair amount of bandwidth moaning about how difficult to impossible it is to get to mashup nirvana with a mixed HCM vendor environment, so don’t miss Jim Holincheck’s post Really Achieving User Centricity if you want a clearly articulated vision of how I would like to deliver services. Thanks, Jim!

UI, UX and findability

Amazingly, I now have a rollup of over 30 internal apps with target dates for migration to the standardized UI. Getting there was easier than we feared, most of the development teams were fairly receptive and the pushbacks could be anticipated – resources, overloaded work slates and budget. My team is central and funded as an expense so we were able to position ourselves as additional, no-cost resources per project. The timing issue got easier when we made it clear that we were happy to work in existing release schedules and if they needed all of 2007 to get there, that was fine so long as it wasn’t open-ended.

Next stop, another 10 vendor applications. My mileage will clearly vary. I need to spend some serious time analyzing the Portal upgrade approach and coming to a go/no-go on that.

This Tuesday I participated in a World Usability Day panel on managing the usability function within the enterprise. I met a few folks from my own organization and we are trying to maintain a dialogue. This is an emerging theme, last week I was contacted by another person internally who said she’d been trying to find me (not me personally, but whoever does what I do) for that past two years. A community of four has emerged.

Findability in the enterprise typically sucks and it’s compounded by the timidity that we have about allowing people to manage information about themselves and their expertise and even further repressed by lack of rewards for sharing knowledge. Social networking is the only way to manage this right now, but I’m hopeful that we can leverage blogs and wikis to create sturctures that help lubricate the process. But creating community in an organization is hard. Anyone with thoughts about that? Please share them, I need help with this.