The state of Enterprise 2.0
Dion Hinchcliffe scans the state of using social tools in the enterprise.
"However, increasing evidence abounds that Enterprise 2.0 adoption has begun in earnest with a typical example being Wells Fargo taking the plunge, having rolled out Enterprise 2.0 platforms to 160,000 workers. It has become clear that we’re moving out of the early pioneer phase to a broader acceptance phase."
Permalink | Thursday, November 01, 2007
Rather graphic
A blog on using the visual language to communicate ideas. Neat.
[via soulsoup]
Permalink | Thursday, November 01, 2007
Google guide
"Google Guide is an online interactive tutorial and reference for experienced users, novices, and everyone in between. I developed Google Guide because I wanted more information about Google's capabilties, features, and services than I found on Google's website. --Nancy Blachman"
Permalink | Thursday, November 01, 2007
European Guide to good Practice in Knowledge Management
I'm attending the KM Singapore conference and listening to Ron Young talk about developing KM competencies. He referred to the work of the European Committee for Standardization and their best practices publications in KM. The guides are around framework, culture, implementation and measurement. Interesting stuff.
Permalink | Thursday, November 01, 2007
Planning & performing an information audit
Sue Henczel writes about conducting an information audit. She writes about the components of the audit and how to go about do them.
"An information audit is a research process that has planning, data collection, analysis, evaluation and reporting stages. The planning stage is often the longest and most tedious, as it needs to examine all aspects of the audit process and then customise them to align with the characteristics of the organisation to be audited."
Permalink | Thursday, October 25, 2007
Engaging e-learning interactions
B.J. Schone has published an e-book on Engaging Interactions for E-learning (PDF). In his blog, he describes the 25 interactions described in the book. Nice stuff.
Permalink | Monday, October 22, 2007
The roses of successs
The Broadway musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is in town. I rented a DVD of the movie to refresh my memory of the production. One of the great songs in the movie is titled Roses of Success. It's about failing and stumbling. Now read the lyrics and think about the last time you shied away from trying something different for fear of failing. I have learnt a few things from this experience.
Every bursted bubble has a glory!
Each abysmal failure makes a point!
Every glowing path that goes astray,
Shows you how to find a better way.
So every time you stumble never grumble.
Next time you'll bumble even less!
For up from the ashes, up from the ashes, grow the roses of success!
...
For every big mistake you make be grateful!
Here, here!
That mistake you'll never make again!
No sir!
Every shiny dream that fades and dies,
Generates the steam for two more tries!
(Oh) There's magic in the wake of a fiasco!
Correct!
It gives you that chance to second guess!
Oh yes!
Then up from the ashes, up from the ashes grow the roses of success!
...
Disaster didn't stymie Louis Pasteur!
No sir!
Edison took years to see the light!
Right!
Alexander Graham knew failure well; he took a lot of knocks to ring that
bell!
So when it gets distressing it's a blessing!
Onward and upward you must press!
Yes, Yes!
Till up from the ashes, up from the ashes grow the roses of success.
Permalink | Monday, October 22, 2007
Information R/evolution
This You Tube video traces evolution of information from its constrained beginnings to its current free miscellaneous state.
Permalink | Monday, October 22, 2007
Top 100 User-Centered Blogs
From Virtualhosting.com comes this list of the top 100 user-centered blogs. Great page to bookmark.
Permalink | Monday, October 22, 2007
Microsoft and Nokia Go User-Friendly
Interesting movement taking place on the mobile front:
"Competing makers of smartphones—wireless handsets that double as mini computers—have gotten the message. And in the wake of the iPhone launch, many are taking pains to improve their own software and hardware to eliminate the often arduous or non-intuitive task of gaining access to even the most basic information."
Permalink | Monday, October 22, 2007
Learning theories
Stanton Wortham from Wharton/University of Penn describes the popular learning theories in use today and the assumptions they make about how people learn. He describes these theories in 4 videos. Very refreshing stuff.
Permalink | Friday, October 19, 2007
Clay Shirky on arrogance and humility in design
This statement by Clay Shirky is a classic:
"Figuring out how to be arrogant and humble at once, figuring out when to watch users and when to ignore them for this particular problem, for these users, today, is the problem of the designer."
Permalink | Monday, October 15, 2007
Websites May Require Visually Impaired Access In California
This legal case between the National Federation of the Blind and Target might turn out to be the tipping point for similar accessibility rulings in other countries and governments.
"The case centers on Target not providing basic accessibility to vision impaired users via the use of alt tags for images, keyboard options for navigation and missing navigation headers."
Permalink | Monday, October 15, 2007
Information architect as a change agent
Matthew Clarke nicely brings out the connection between IA and change management. This connection is going to get stronger in the future. I would like to add Kotter's classic book, Leading Change, as one of the best books on the subject.
"This business context, in which organizational factors contribute more to the success or failure of projects than technical factors, is far from unique. In such a context it is insufficient for the IA to contribute just their technical input to the system design: the effective IA must also play a role as an agent of change. Sometimes this role is within the product development team: educating and channeling the team to “take on board” good IA practices. At other times this role is oriented towards the customer: educating the end users and preparing the soil in which the new system will be planted."
[via ColumnTwo]
Permalink | Thursday, October 11, 2007
Step Two: Intranet redesign for Canon Australia
Nice case study of the Canon Australia intranet. The problems faced and the methodology to solve these problems are explained well. For example, there is the typical taxonomy problem - you create two seemingly distinct levels but then find items which can occupy both levels. The solution they went with was to use the levels as the organizing principle and provide cross-links as the safety net.
There are, however, some topics that do not fit cleanly into either section. Examples include: health and safety, environment, facilities and corporate philosophy. The information architecture attempts to address this by separating these subjects into the aspects which directly affect staff (placed in Info for staff) and aspects that relate to corporate policy and 'PR' (placed in About Canon).
Additionally, cross links between the two sections attempt to get staff to the right information if they happen to look in the 'wrong' section.
Permalink | Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Building a culture of collaboration
CIO has an article on the difficulties in getting people to collaborate and share in the enterprise.
"You can't snap your fingers and say you're going to be collaborative," says Ed Colbert, SPHR, director of organizational effectiveness for Dow Corning Corp. in Midland, Mich. Dow's workforce has been collaborative for decades.
"The culture has to focus on the organization first," he says. "People have to have common goals. This is the first requirement for collaboration."
Permalink | Tuesday, October 09, 2007
UC Berkeley puts courses on YouTube
TechCrunch reports on UC Berkeley's YouTube experiment.
"The initial round of lectures covers 300 hours of video on subjects including Chemistry, Physics and Non-Violence, with more content to come. The move by Berkeley is claimed to be a first by some, however some of the videos have been previously available elsewhere, including iTunes and Google Video; perhaps it’s a first for YouTube."
Permalink | Thursday, October 04, 2007
Filling Much Needed Holes
Don Norman gives a scathing commentary on our rush to meet or close every unmet need in product or services. Some needs, he says, are best left unmet.
"We teach our students – and our executives – to do field observations, to define and create, to brainstorm and innovate. Come up with the better idea and the world will rush to your door. We take existing products and tweak them, modify them. We add intelligence and features. The world of products grows ever more complex every year, every hour.
But most innovations fail. Most new products fail. What does that tell us about the unmet needs? Maybe most of them deserve to be unmet. "
Permalink | Sunday, September 30, 2007
Instructional video websites
There seems to be a lot of interest in instructional videos. Graspr just joined the fray. Others well-covered websites are:
[Via TechCrunch]
Permalink | Wednesday, September 26, 2007
UXWeek sessions online
Presentation slides and audio (for some) are up from the recent UXWeek conference. Real nice.
Permalink | Saturday, September 22, 2007
What a Knowledge Sharing Policy Might Look Like
This guide by Patrick Lambe is very timely, going by the growing interest in collaboration and knowledge sharing. It clearly shows that there is more to knowledge sharing than just plugging in the latest software.
Permalink | Monday, September 17, 2007
Demystifying Data Analysis
A good article by Rachel Hinman on a process to take you through field research.
I usually wiki my notes from an interview. This gives my team an opportunity to review the notes and add in any missing pieces or new insights. Next, I go through the notes and highlight the ones that matter to the project. Then I collect all the highlights and present them with supporting notes. But I like the 'Emerging Insights' theme that Hinman uses to present her findings. It makes the presentation more direct and appealing.
Permalink | Monday, September 17, 2007
Ross Dawson on Web2.0 and KM
I'm at an IKMS session, listening to Ross Dawson talk about Web2.0 and KM. Here are the main points:
Interesting slide on how the value of the economy has increased dramatically over the years but the actual weight of products created has only marginally increased. Knowledge and services make up for the difference.
Web2.0 is about participation. In the past, we were cast as passive consumers, but now we are becoming active producers. In this way, Web2.0 is a social revolution.
The real turning point for this social revolution was Blogger and other free blogging platforms.
All this participation also results in a coherent structure or output, for example, a wikipedia article.
There is also a bit of exhibitionism in all these environments. We like to say and broadcast what we do and think.
Facebook is popular because it created a platform that enables anyone to create applications.
IBM's QEDWiki is a tool that allows brining together different applications and content. Gartner predicts (arguable) that IT budgets are going to fall over the years because of such new tools.
Knowledge management is more like media management. Its constructive to think about the merging of social media and mainstream media.
Because we are so busy, media is becoming shorter. Things are getting more and more concise.
It is essential that the human interactions be designed and understood to be better enabled (social network analysis).
Energy is the primary driver in social networks.
Permalink | Thursday, September 06, 2007
Management by numbers - when they don’t count
Interesting post by Bob Sutton. He explains that qualitative data provides better insights than quantitative data in these 3 conditions:
- When you don't know what to count (much of design research fits in here)
- When you can count it but it does not stick
- When what you count doesn't count
[Via Ancedote]
Permalink | Friday, August 31, 2007
Home Page Design
Daniel Szuc has written an article on factors to consider when designing a home page. He also explains how these factors show fare in popular websites such as Flickr and Blogger.
Permalink | Friday, August 31, 2007