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It seems that too many punters perceive the device as a new form of laptop and expect a fully functional (multi-tasking, media-agnostic and USB connectivity) box, rather than a scaled-back tablet.

Nevertheless, I think that the iPad will inevitably sustain its current appeal and market – for the time being at least.

The forthcoming wave of competing tablets are likely to offer media-friendly features (such as Flash support) that severely hobble the iPad and prevent it from being a truly great product.

Of course the iStrategy is not about the hardware per se; the after-market (content) is obviously the primary business driver. The iPad is a razor, not a Ferrari.

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One of my favourite debating points at the moment is the question of how we can effectively transmit the perceived wisdom and hard-won practical experience from generation to generation of IT managers and directors.

This conundrum has taxed me for some time because I still can’t see any substantive evidence of a general willingness to build on the understanding of those who have gone before us – at least in the business critical realms of IT management and organisational development.

It’s almost as if we enjoy playing out the role of the headstrong, self-willed, eternal teenager, who won’t listen to advice and who doesn’t want to grow up. Ever.

Harsh words, perhaps, but very often the behaviour is a simple consequence of not knowing where to find a readily available fount of relevant IT management wisdom.

For sure, it is easy enough to find technical reference material by the bucket load. But it’s very hard to find a simple, practical guide to common IT management problems – and even harder to find such a guide that is widely recognised by practitioners as the standard reference.

Whereas, when Lawyers and Doctors are faced with a problem beyond their personal knowledge and experience, they have rapid recourse to whole libraries of precedent and advice, all properly indexed and neatly cross-referenced. Which is one of the basic reasons why those more mature and august professional bodies are usually better positioned to command and sustain a much higher level of personal and corporate credibility than those of us wallowing around in the mire of IT management.

So let’s all agree now that we want to stop making life harder for ourselves than it should be.

Let’s start sharing our experience within a properly structured framework.

That must be the best way for us to pass on those sparkling pearls of wisdom and to break the endless, costly cycle of always finding things out for ourselves the hard way.

Surely it’s long overdue for the multifarious IT membership associations and professional bodies to start working together, to really create a systematic and sustainable professional approach to managing technology.

Of course, this might require some people to move beyond their well-established comfort zones, of competition and isolationism, into that apparently dangerous minefield of co-operation, collaboration and consolidation.

We certainly have a lot of catching up to do if we are ever to realise our own professional aspirations, i.e. of IT genuinely being regarded as a profession rather than merely an extended cottage industry.

This catching up exercise will not be easy and will take some time to bear fruit. In the meantime, the cost of neglect will continue to hamper our professional development.

Isn’t it high time that we got ourselves better organised and properly equipped, with a real body of professional knowledge, to manage technology and technicians more effectively?

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But a technology-based productivity toolkit is harder to manage, because the purpose and relevance of personal productivity tools may not be so clear-cut.

Indeed many such tools do not work together well, if at all. They compete and overlap, confusing the unwary novice and the skilled enthusiast alike.

Do we end up with a well-balanced, personal productivity toolkit, full of precision tools that really help us to do our best day in, day out; or just a confusing clutter of hardware, software and services?

Well, choosing technology for personal productivity is intrinsically subjective; each of us adopts hardware, software and services for quite different reasons.

Perhaps the real test of our choices lies in how often we really use the tools, rather than simply ‘possess’ them in our toolkit. Here are the products and services that regularly help me most:

1. WordPress
2. LinkedIn
3. Google
4. Hootsuite
5. Microsoft OneNote
6. MindManager
7. Evernote
8. GoogleChrome
9. Android
10. Spotify

My list is all about gathering, organising and communicating ideas and information.

Your productivity choices will reflect a different agenda but there may be some common themes and tools that would help us put together a genuinely productive toolkit. Any suggestions?

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Setting up a group is easy, we begin with the obvious elements:

• Identity
• Common interest
• Accessibility
• Organization

But that’s not the end of the story, or even the beginning – more like laying the foundations. At this stage the new group is an empty stadium, like Kevin Costner’s act of faith in the movie, Field of Dreams.

For sure the principle of ‘build it and they will come’ may well draw an early crowd but that is not a community. We need to develop the value proposition and that depends on healthy group dynamics, specifically:

• Participation
• Contribution
• Interaction
• Sensitive moderation

Even with these attributes and behaviours in place, much time and effort can still be wasted by leaders and members, if the group lacks the final magic ingredient for community: cohesion.

Cohesion is the fundamental difference between a group and a community; it is key to long-term success and depends on an effective mix of:

• Trust
• Familiarity
• Belonging

With the best will in the world, these are difficult to engender and sustain among a group of strangers, even those who have communicated online for many years. Perspective and insight can be masked by the medium.

Paradoxically for an online community, the strongest driver for cohesion is usually the outcome of physical meetings between members. Nothing beats getting together occasionally, to put faces to names and to bond the group into a community.

The Yorkshire Mafia is a great example of how to turn an online group into an effective community. In a relatively short period of time, the wiseguys and gals of the Yorkshire Mafia clustered together online, by the thousands.

They are now a non-secret society that has spread from the virtual world of LinkedIn.com into regular real world encounters; networking events which draw hundreds of members, where the rules of engagement specify: “no overt selling.”

Cohesion has grown quickly from the face-to-face sit-downs.

Internet-based communities are not a new phenomenon; they have been around for at least a couple of decades and some virtual groups have better longevity than formally constituted organizations.

Copyright © Colin Beveridge 2010 All rights reserved.

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