InformationWeek on Enterprise 2.0
InformationWeek has published a detailed research report on Enterprise 2.0. The finding:
The usual impediments. Business technologists are concerned about security, return on investment, and their staffs' skill in implementing and integrating new Web tools.
[However]
Reticent companies ignore the movement at the peril of their competitiveness. Within a few years, rich, collaborative software platforms that include a slate of technologies like wikis, blogs, integrated search, and unified communications will be the norm. Employees will expect to work that way, and it'll be up to IT to solve the still significant problems and deliver.
Permalink | Friday, March 02, 2007
Social Software in Libraries
This book looks interesting. Libraries seem to be ideal places for social tools to make an impact, but like everything else, it matters how the strategy is crafted and the implementation is done. This book hopefully shows the way.
Permalink | Friday, March 02, 2007
Non hierarchical navigation
Paul Boag writes about a case he faced that did not fit a hierarchical navigation model. His alternate model deals with using search, breadcrumbs and tagging to navigate the content space.
Permalink | Friday, March 02, 2007
Wikipatterns
Atlassian wiki evangelist Stewart Mader has just launched Wikipatterns. This website is a collection of do's and don't's that you can refer to when starting on a wiki project. But instead of just listing points out, they describe it in terms of patterns and anti-patterns. For example, People Patterns include:
- WikiGnome: A WikiGnome is a person who performs small edits on a wiki to continually improve its overall quality.
- WikiFairy: A WikiFairy is someone who makes format changes to make the wiki more visually appealing.
And People anti-patterns include:
- WikiTroll: A WikiTroll is someone who constantly criticizes the effort.
- DoItAll: A DoItAll will not let the community get involved and will do the needful on his own.
Permalink | Saturday, February 24, 2007
IBM on Business Collaboration
The current issue of IBM Systems Journal is on business collaboration. [via Martin White]
Permalink | Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Learning More While Working
This CIO article states what we already know for a long time - corporate training is not enough and is not effective as it is made out to be.
I have 20 percent that seem to find a way to take advantage of every opportunity for education, learning and/or training,” said another respondent. “The shame is that they are only responsible for 20 percent of the output. The 80 percent who deliver day in and day out you almost have to order to go for training.
Permalink | Wednesday, February 21, 2007
How Not to Talk to Your Kids
A fantastic read by Po Bronson on the perils of praising your kids. [thanks Venkat]
When parents praise their children’s intelligence, they believe they are providing the solution to this problem. According to a survey conducted by Columbia University, 85 percent of American parents think it’s important to tell their kids that they’re smart.
But a growing body of research—and a new study from the trenches of the New York public-school system—strongly suggests it might be the other way around. Giving kids the label of “smart” does not prevent them from underperforming. It might actually be causing it.
Permalink | Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Improve the writing in your organisation
Here's a template to write 100 word articles. Pretty neat. [Phil Turner]
Permalink | Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Customer-Controlled Innovation
Patricia Seybold writes at length on her pet topic: how collaborating with customers leads to innovation and profitability. She describes several case studies of customer led innovation and gives us a strategy for making it happen in our organizations.
Enlightened CIOs are getting in front of this "engaged customer" parade to provide the leadership, tools, and resources that let their companies reap the rewards of customer-led innovation. In many of the organizations I studied, CIOs play a crucial role in integrating online-community platforms with their firms' customer self-service infrastructures.
Permalink | Monday, February 19, 2007
Finding the Right Job for Your Product
In this MIT Sloan article, the authors argue that a different kind of understanding is required to find the right product for the right market. This understanding, called the job-based structure, is knowing how the product fits into the daily lives of customers who just want to get their jobs done.
Customers simply need to get things done, whether that be fixing their car, staving off boredom, or finding something fun to do with their kids. These situational needs for which customers are looking to “hire” products or services go unnoticed during traditional market research and segmentation. As a result, the true breadth of competition often goes unnoticed too. When companies understand what they are up against in the mind of the customer, they can piece together the real size of the market in which they compete.
[free download available for limited time period]
Permalink | Saturday, February 17, 2007
Tutorials on Microformats
Roger Costello has written a tutorial on Microformats. This stuff is going to go mainstream this year with talk of Firefox gearing up to provide support for it in upcoming versions.
[thanks maxdesign]
Permalink | Friday, February 16, 2007
DOM Scripting & Ajax workshop with Christian Heilmann
After a successful first event on CSS with Russ Weakley, my company PebbleRoad is announcing the second event in the Web Standard Series: DOM Scripting & Ajax workshop with Christian Heilmann. Do consider attending this event If you're in the SE Asia region and would like to learn the right way to script web pages and build interactions. More details are given in the event writeup.
To get a sampler on what we’ll be covering, view these 10-minute screencasts on DOM Essentials made by Christian Heilmann.
Permalink | Wednesday, February 14, 2007
InfoVis Diagram
The folks at infovis take a shot at explaining the cognitive processes that take place during visualisation. Here's a nice quote:
Information Visualisation acts as a vehicle for the building of knowledge, revealing the underlying patterns in data.
Permalink | Wednesday, February 14, 2007
A perfect mess - the hidden benefits of disorder
This is an interesting book from an information architect's point of view. The authors take the stand that there are costs associated with order and sometimes these costs outweigh the perceived benefits. More interestingly the authors list out the benefits of disorder: flexibility, completeness, resonance, invention, efficiency and robustness. They provide many examples of each benefit from Arnold Schwarzenegger's impromptu work habits to Alexander Fleming's bacteriological lab where he accidentally discovered penicillin. I haven't finished the book yet, but it's proving to be an interesting read.
Permalink | Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us
Fantastic video on the state of the web. [thanks Venkat]
Permalink | Thursday, February 08, 2007
The Holy Grail of Information Architecture
Christopher Fahey writes about our tendencies to box our design deliverables -- try to get at a procedure or a master process document, the holy grail as he calls it. He suggests that we have an open mind and try out different ideas when communicating design:
Every client/project is unique. We simply cannot assume that any deliverable template will work for every job. Templates are great for “normal” design tasks, but more and more interaction design tasks simply aren’t normal.
This is the first reason why the Holy Grail will never be found.
[via maxdesign]
Permalink | Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Ethnographic study of collaborative knowledge work
New study from IBM:
In our findings we describe how knowledge workers develop their own strategies and techniques for getting their work done in complex, dynamic environments in which prescribed work processes serve only as reference models. By presenting instances of such environments from our study data, we illustrate how such individualized work processes are created and demonstrate the need for new supporting technologies and tools.
[via Column Two]
Permalink | Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Relearning Learning-Applying the Long Tail to Learning
An MIT video of a John Seely Brown lecture on the changing face of learning:
The challenge of 21st century education will be leveraging the abundant resources of the web – this very long tail of interests – into a “circle of knowledge-building and sharing.” Perhaps, Brown proposes, the formal curriculum of schools will encompass both a minimal core “that gets at the essence of critical thinking,” paired with “passion-based learning,” where kids connect to niche communities on the web, deeply exploring certain subjects. Brown envisions education becoming “an act of re-creation and productive inquiry,” that will form the basis for a new culture of learning.
Permalink | Thursday, February 01, 2007
How to do a peer assist
The eLearning Centre at the University of Ottwa has create a nifty animation that shows how to do a peer assist. [via CPSquare]
Permalink | Sunday, January 28, 2007
Wikis for exam creation
Elizabeth Lane describes using a wiki for setting an exam:
I tried an experiment this quarter in my Human Factors class. I set up a SocialText wiki, extended invitations to all of my students, and told them that 10% of their midterm grade would be the quality of their submissions to the wiki. Everyone was expected to submit a minimum of 10 points worth of questions to the wiki, and I promised that once the submission deadline had passed, only questions on the wiki would appear on the exam.
Permalink | Saturday, January 27, 2007
To fix education, think Web 2.0
John Seely Brown on the future of education:
Rather than treat pedagogy as the transfer of knowledge from teachers who are experts to students who are receptacles, educators should consider more hands-on and informal types of learning. These methods are closer to an apprenticeship, a farther-reaching, more multilayered approach than traditional formal education.
Permalink | Saturday, January 27, 2007
Some Thoughts On Online Education At The Halfway Point
Jennifer Macaulay is a graduate student in the Masters of Library Science program at Southern Connecticut State University. The program is part-time program and all classes are held online. Jennifer shares her experiences with online education:
However, what really bothers me is that I haven’t read anything about concerns about faculty performance in the online setting. The professor can make or break a class. And an online class has no chance to succeed if a faculty member conducts a class as if it were no different from a traditional one and without significant preparation time. Sadly, I feel as if several of my MLS classes have suffered from this problem.
Permalink | Saturday, January 27, 2007
Understanding Customer Experience
A HBR article that gives the lowdown on customer experience management.
To understand how to achieve satisfaction, a company must deconstruct it into its component experiences. Because a great many customer experiences aren’t the direct consequence of the brand’s messages or the company’s actual offerings, a company’s reexamination of its initiatives and choices will not suffice. The customers themselves—that is, the full range and unvarnished reality of their prior experiences, and then the expectations, warm or harsh, those have conjured up—must be monitored and probed.
Permalink | Saturday, January 27, 2007
Mapping your website redesign strategy
I've published an article at PebbleRoad on using the eliminate-reduce-build-create framework from the Blue Ocean Strategy to map our website redesign strategy.
Permalink | Saturday, January 27, 2007
Paper Prototyping
A how-to article at A List Apart on using paper prototypes to brainstorm and evaluate designs.
Paper prototyping can also help improve the final product: the prototyping stage is the right time to catch design flaws and change directions, and the flexibility and disposability of paper encourages experimentation and speedy iteration. Instead of “deleting” hours worth of layout code you’ve used to position a column in the right place, you can draw a prototype, throw away the ideas that don’t work, and move on.
Permalink | Wednesday, January 24, 2007