RodeWorks

Brown takes the Gmail plunge

Randy — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 10:34:00 +0000

Brown University switched students to Google Apps for education a little over a year a ago, and recently completed a similar transition for faculty and staff. In the interviews with CIO Michael Pickett one primary reason for the switch is requests from staff for collaboration tools, and a common platform with students. In traditional education structures there often are silos for student systems and business systems. Why the artificial divide? And who made the initial decision? According to Pickett student behavior led the charge. The majority of students were already using Gmail – what better way to ‘listen’ to users than to observe their behavior and be guided by those choices. Another shift from traditional IT top-down decision making. And integrated video chat? No more schlepping cross-campus for F2F meetings? Sign me up!

Brown University goes Google

Brown’s CIO, Michael Pickett, told me that student adoption of shared documents and the collaborative features… Now … faculty and staff have come on board as well…He was also quick to note that both Google’s and Microsoft’s solutions in this space were quite good and he recommended that universities evaluate both to see which might meet their needs better.

Brown University has gone Google

Our students were really the ones that led us down the Google path… We also decided to go this direction because of the functionalities that we believe will bring our university together, namely tools like collaborative documents, better email (with nearly 30 times the storage space we had with our previous system!) and video chat.

Gmail@Brown – Brown’s email service for Undergraduates | Brown University

Over 60% of Brown undergraduates already use Gmail to read their Brown email. Moving undergraduate accounts to Gmail is a win/win situation: a great opportunity to give undergraduates the mailbox capacity they need, while also helping the university reduce expenditures.

Google Apps vs. Exchange: Microsoft Outlook Perspective on Google Apps EMail

I have lived through several eras of business communication and the most important lesson I have learned is to not cling to the past. Outlook and Exchange mail haven’t changed much in over a decade and it was time for me to move on. I won’t miss Outlook any more than I miss the typing pool.

Taking hidden bias out of decision making

Randy — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 10:03:00 +0000

Which trap do you fall into?

Action-orientated: any action is better than no action
Interest: emotional, perceptual or attachment factors
Pattern-mis-recognition: I’ve seen this before (but you is wrong)
Stability bias: we’ve always done it this way in the past…
Social bias: keep everyone happy

Don’t kid yourself. In any decision-making process most (if not all) of these biases are present. As a human they are hard-coded into our DNA – you can’t avoid them. But you can recognize they exist and manage the process to minimize their impact. For instance counter pattern recognition bias with problem reframing and role reversal to help participants see the issues from a new angle. See this McKinsey article for more tips.

The case for behavioral strategy – McKinsey Quarterly – Strategy – Strategic Thinking

…we need new norms for activities such as managing meetings (for more on running unbiased meetings, see “Taking the bias out of meetings”), gathering data, discussing analogies, and stimulating debate that together can diminish the impact of cognitive biases on critical decisions. To support those new norms, we also need a simple language for recognizing and discussing biases, one that is grounded in the reality of corporate life, as opposed to the sometimes-arcane language of academia.

Keeping score of institutional technology successes

Randy — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 10:04:00 +0000

In the world of Higher-Education summer is a time of reflection on the past season, and planning for the new college year (all too rapidly approaching!) My own reflections this year are getting some inspiration from a recent CIO Magazine editorial: A Simple Scoring system for Complex Times. How does your organization score accomplishments and initiatives? In the article it is suggested that doing the expected – like maintaining system uptime or performing regular software upgrades – gets a 0. That zero. Why? In part because users don’t give us much, if any, credit for doing these things. And these items don’t actually add any value to the organization – we maintain existing value, but aren’t adding anything. Clear wins – projects that are noticed by users as generating new value or improvements – get a +1. And clear losers, where people notice and are unhappy, get a –1.

Over time the –1s will trend up towards 0, at least in a healthy organization where, for instance, mistakes in a deployment are corrected given a little extra time. But equally the +1s trend back down to 0 as the improvements become the accepted and expected standard. In looking across all projects in an organization we’ll expect to see a range of scores with a balance of +1s, 0s and –1s. There is a fair amount of just regular work that needs to be done – 0s. And resources are limited, so not every new initiative can be a +1 – some may fall to just a 0, and some may even hit as a –1. A –1 needs to be addressed over time, but doesn’t necessarily indicate a lack of planning. It may just indicate an attempt to keep budget tight, resources pulled off to support another project, and a few unexpected circumstances that kicks a planned 0 down below the grade. No mistakes indicates that you’re not trying hard enough, while too numerous or persistent –1s could indicate some structural problems.

I like the idea – it fells very real, and focuses attention on what really matters. On one end of the spectrum, how you add value to the organization? And on the other where did we miss the mark, why, and how is that corrected over time?

Secret CIO: A Simple Scoring System For Complex Times — Secret CIO — InformationWeek

Most IT organizations either a) need fixing, because things aren’t working; b) are doing OK because nothing’s on fire; or c) are enabling competitive advantage by boosting revenue, cost savings, customer satisfaction, and overall business value.

Don’t get lost in the weeds – taking time to think

Randy — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 09:23:00 +0000

How do you take time in your busy day to just think and plan? Especially with the constant stream of operational demands – the weeds – knocking on your door and appearing at the email in-box. A recent article in CIO Magazine suggest tactics such as staying focused, setting aside scheduled non-operational time during the day, delegating to staff and outsourcing commodity work. I find blogging is a really helpful exercise, allowing me to pull together ideas I’ve gathered from various sources and think through how they relate to my own experiences. Conferences and workshops are always a great way to get out of the day-to-day and gain some perspective – particularly if you are also contributing through a presentation to your colleagues. It is all too easy to allow time to get eaten up through many small needs and distractions. We all owe it to ourselves to make a conscious decision to create time for planning, general information gathering, and strategic thinking.

How to Make Time for Strategy – CIO.com – Business Technology Leadership

One item that showed up on every CIO’s top-three list was “You were hired to be strategic, but you are forced to spend most of your time on operational issues.” I spoke to five of the Council’s most strategy-minded CIOs about how they managed to get out of the operational morass.

Steps to a web site redesign

Randy — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 09:18:00 +0000

Planning for a web site redesign involves a lot of components – and the real job is only just beginning when the design itself is done. From Adaptive path comes this diagram of a typical site redesign process. Take-aways: Strategy & Design is approximately 1/6th of the total job – technology considerations don’t really enter until after strategy & design are done (it IS really all about the content and communication, isn’t it?) And the content owner (also known as the client) has the lion’s share of the work. No surprises here for those of us who’ve been through this a couple of times, but nice to see it all so well illustrated. Bring this to your next site-design kick-off meeting!

adaptive path » blog » Chiara Fox Ogan » Strategy & Design; But Wait, There’s More

I’ve put together this this diagram that shows the general tasks that go into a typical site redesign with a new CMS implementation. It shows where the Strategy and Design tasks stop and where Implementation starts. It also shows what roles are involved in the different stages.

Google Analytics tips ‘n tricks

Randy — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 12:40:00 +0000

I attended a day-long workshop yesterday on Google analytics, run by LunaMetrics. For those of you who may not know, Google analytics is one of their free services that let’s web site owners gather website visitor statistics which can be used to provide more effective sites. It was a great workshop, and I’ll be incorporating the ideas into some web-application re-writing I have planned for the summer.

One of his quick tips was for this Firefox add-on, which makes it easy to include some of your site tracking tags into shortened URLs used on services like Twitter and Facebook.

A Firefox sidebar to easily shorten URLs, plus add Google Analytics tracking tags. Great for measuring traffic from Twitter. Snip-n-Tag currently supports five of the most popular URL shortening websites, including tr.im, bit.ly and tinyurl.

Snip-n-Tag :: Add-ons for Firefox

A tale of two DIY’ers

Randy — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 12:35:00 +0000

Do-it-yourself (DIY) is back in style again and on bookstore (and library) shelves. I recently read two of these books which take decidedly different tacks on the perils and rewards of a DIY lifestyle. In Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World, Mark Frauenfelder, editor of Make magazine and Boing Boing (tech culture and weirdness blog) provides a pretty positive outlook on the benefits of doing it himself. Manny Howard in My Empire of Dirt: A Cautionary Tale isn’t quite so sunny.

Howard takes on a writing assignment where he is to turn his Brooklyn backyard into an urban farm with enough produce to provide all his food for one month. Perhaps in modern America’s supersize, convenience-food culture this seems like a tough challenge. But let’s face it – most of us could fast for 30 days and survive. Howard’s book has it funny moments, especially in the early chapters.—at one point I had to put the book down because I was laughing hysterically on the commuter train and was afraid my fellow passengers would think I was insane (at least more so than usual.) But by the fourth or fifth chapter I grew tired of Howard’s whole desperate approach which in many cases almost predicted his eventual disastrous outcomes.

Frauenfelder has his share of bad outcomes, but somehow seems to avoid disaster. Not so much because the outcomes are very different from Howard’s (although he does manage to keep all of his fingers attached, something Howard couldn’t avoid.) but because of his attitude both going in and coming out of a project. Is DIY more expensive and time consuming than buying pre-packaged? Yes. Is a successful outcome less likely to occur? Yes. So why bother? For Frauenfelder the reason is to enjoy a stronger connection to the world around us. Consider a package of shrink-wrapped lettuce purchased in the local sprawlmart vs. home grown, raised from seed, backyard lettuce. Backyard lettuce certainly has been chewed on by some of the local fauna (i.e. slugs or rabbits) and may not look as pretty, But it carries a personal satisfaction that shrink-wrap never will.

For Frauenfelder DIY is about the journey, not necessarily the outcome. A less-than-perfect outcome is not a failure and if it informs future iterations it may well lead to future successes. Embrace this reality, and you adopt an approach that keeps the size of these failures small and manageable. For Howard the focus is always on the outcome, with failure not even an option. As a result he too often seems to be fighting the world around him rather than embracing it. And ultimately he misses out on the fun and joy that Frauenfelder and his fellow DIY-er’s find.

Extreme Powerpoint

Randy — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 09:53:00 +0000

Here is a new approach for all business/academic presentations – 20 slides, 20 seconds each that auto-advance. You have 6 minutes and 40 seconds – go! I wonder if this would accomplish the intention of getting people to focus on sending a clear message with no filler/no distractions. Or would it just dumb-down further the already dumbed-down, low information quality of most Powerpoint-driven presentations. I gotta find some place to try this out soon…

Let us now bullet-point our praise for Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein, two Tokyo-based architects who have turned PowerPoint, that fixture of cubicle life, into both art form and competitive sport. Their innovation, dubbed pecha-kucha (Japanese for "chatter"), applies a simple set of rules to presentations: exactly 20 slides displayed for 20 seconds each.

Pecha Kucha: Get to the PowerPoint in 20 Slides Then Sit the Hell Down

Making smooth presentations

Customer focused

Randy — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 09:45:00 +0000

“This is a point of confusion for many of our customers.” So began a tech support response that was the latest in a string of messages. The good news is that this was the message that actually helped me solve the problem. The bad news is that came at the end of almost a day and a half of frustration and confusion on my part. I searched the help system. I consulted knowledgeable colleagues (and got them confused and frustrated too.) This was for an initial setup of a new system, so I expected there to be some annoying setup issues. But I’m left wondering “If so many customers have the same issues, how about altering things so we don’t all experience this problem.”

We in technology often fall into this trap — this isn’t the first time I’ve heard this type of response to an issue. Why do we do this? Because for the most part we’re focused on the technology. Which isn’t a bad thing. But how about a focus on the customer and what they need? Which is easy to use, quick to implement technology. Some thoughts:

Find the shortest way to accomplish standard customer tasks. Then invest time in making them even shorter and easier. Time is money for your customer and every second counts.
Make furniture and fixtures fade into the background. For instance they don’t need to be able to change colors and layout on their control panel interface — that’s furniture. What they need is an easy streamlined way to add and edit content.
The customer is not always right. Listen to what the customer asks and solve their problem, don’t just answer their questions. In my tech support issue mentioned above I received a solution which involved accessing another control panel with its own different login and a whole different toolset. While it did answer my questions, upon pondering the situation anew I realized my whole approach was incorrect, and there is actually an easier, more direct way to accomplish the task. The answer I receive stated essential “If you want to do it that way you’ll need to log into this other tool and do this other setup task.” What they should have said is “Why are you doing it that way? (Customer is not always right) And “we normally see people have better success doing it this way.”

A customer focused approach in tech support, application design, and other technology implementation creates value and will be seen as an asset. Too much of a technology focus creates hassle and a perception of technology as a cost — and these days we’re all trying to cut costs. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather been seen as an asset.

Soulcraft in the workplace

Randy — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 09:52:00 +0000

In Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work Matthew Crawford explores ideas around work in today’s society and the nature of the modern office workplace. His ideas are presented in a clear, well argued and well substantiated manner. The book is well worth reading.

For a book with a motorcycle on the cover it was surprisingly philosophical – like with references to Kant and Heidegger (a real pissant and a boozy beggar according to Monty Python) But then again with a doctorate in philosophy the author is not your typical motorcycle mechanic. Crawford draws quite a bit on his own negative experiences in both the academic world and the white-collar world of a think tank job, and draws conclusions from those experiences that came off to me as somewhat colored by the experience. Not that, in a world where Dilbert comics and the popular TV series The Office often feel more like fact than fiction, we don’t need to skeptically question the modern white collar office. And the educational system that prepares the new recruits – we do. But there has always been a certain tension around the role of the employee in a business workplace, be it Charles Dickens, Will Rogers, or Scott Adams. I don’t know that we’re any worse off today than we were 100 years ago, and in many ways maybe a little better.

Crawford does raise some great points. In a section on the idea of displaced agency he refers to the modern tendency for interactions to be pre-determined by technology. Take a modern public restroom with its sensor driven toilet flushers, faucets and paperless hand driers. You the user don’t get to determine when the toilet flushes, how hot the water is that you use to wash yours hands or how long the hot air runs over your hands. Some designer far removed from your current circumstance has determined those details for you. What a personally unsatisfying experience it can be – and how absurd that we no longer get to determine these little variables ourselves. Project this design esthetic into places of our lives that really matter, and it is pretty clear how dehumanizing technology can be when poorly implemented.

Where technology is well implemented is allow workers to be the master of their own stuff; make decisions based on their personal experience; participate in a community of fellow workers/enthusiasts/professionals; and take responsibility for the outcomes. Roles should be defined in the workplace so that experience in a particular area is respected. And there is a clear pathway from neophyte to progress to this master status. Designers far distanced from an experienced can’t create a truly human situation. The richest and most human experiences happen when the designers are also the users – think open source software like WordPress, or an owner-built cabin. We don’t all need to drop out of the rat race, and become motorcycle mechanics (tempting as that may be.) But the qualities and ideas behind the notion of craft can inform and define a pathway to excellence on a human scale.

Max Bloomquist brings his considerable talents to Crawford’s meditation on the meaning of work and disparity between blue collar and white collar occupations. Crawford draws on his own experience—he quit a miserable think tank job and has found joy and meaning working as a motorcycle mechanic—to question the presumed value of the cubicle working world, deplore society’s disconnection from the material world and vividly convey the reward of working with one’s hands. Bloomquist reads with authority and erudition; his steady, everyman narration makes Crawford’s well-founded arguments even more persuasive.

Amazon.com: Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of…

RodeWorks

Brown takes the Gmail plunge

Related Posts

Taking hidden bias out of decision making

Related Posts

Keeping score of institutional technology successes

Related Posts

Don’t get lost in the weeds – taking time to think

Related Posts

Steps to a web site redesign

Related Posts

Google Analytics tips ‘n tricks

Related Posts

A tale of two DIY’ers

Related Posts

Extreme Powerpoint

Related Posts

Customer focused

Related Posts

Soulcraft in the workplace

Related Posts