infoarch

Improving Your PeopleFinder

Tue, 08/26/2008 - 06:00

Vivek Deshmukh over at Boxes and Arrows (Joost thanks again for the pointer!) has an interesting post on a People Finder Application he designed. Our company calls this 'who is who'. 'YellowPages' is also a common name for this application.
Vivek's post is about how they improved their people search based on user input. His approach is straight-forward, but nonetheless very interesting.For one, I like the approach they take to peoplesearch. Basically they note that many applications have a people finder component to it. It's not only the regular stuff you would find in 'who is who' (name, phonenumber, location, emailaddress, etc.). You need people finder for meetings, visitor registration, etc too. This relates well to 'Identity and Access Management', but extended to non-colleagues, like visitors, too.
To improve their people finder they started collecting data from the way users query, specifically the incorrect entries. Based on the data they learned how they could help users find people more quickly, based on patterns. Eventually they were able to ask the user 'do you mean...?'.

This is pretty straight-forward, I hear you say. True, but how often do we improve our systems by simply collecting data on how users actually use our Intranet and other corporate applications?

By the way, (StepTwo also pointed to this post.)

Email and Broken Business processes

Mon, 08/25/2008 - 09:50

Luis Suarez pointed to an interesting post "Broken business processes contribute to our email overload". The core of the post is:

Socialtext has connected the dots between a few reports to discover that a great deal of our email comes from handling exceptions. Because business processes don't have a system to translate them into practice, we spend more than a quarter of our day emailing about the exceptions to the business process rules.
Worse than the volume of email is the amount of mental energy required by each email recipient, ergo worker, to parse each exception and determine what to do with it. E-mail was once intended to increase productivity and has now become so voluminous it is counter productive. Basex determined that business loose $650 billion in productivity due to the unnecessary email interruptions. And, the average number of corporate emails sent and received per person per day expected to reach over 228 by 2010.

Email overload due to broken business processes... Wow. I've never thought about it in that way. This would be very interesting to investigate in more detail. To which part of the email overload does this account? I don't think all of it. Because email also helps us communicate over business processes. Not all our work - I'm happy to say - can be defined or is related to business processes.

Reviewing a PhD on Blogging

Fri, 08/22/2008 - 04:40

As I posted before here and here, Lilia Efimova is working on a PhD about blogging. Lots of her work can be found on her blog, Mathemagenic - of course... She recently asked if people wanted to review a draft version of her "dissertation chapter focused on analysing my practices of using weblog as an instrument to develop PhD ideas".

Well, I went over and reviewed it. And it was definitely worth my time. It's great to read how other blogger try to use blogs for their work. And Lilia is definitely an experienced blogger. She details and analyzes all kinds of aspects of blogging. Like using blogs for personal information management, personal productivity and writing.
What I kindof missed here - and this has to do with her focus -, is the social aspect of blogging. For me too, blogging started with me wanting to write in public and see where this goes. I love this description of blogs she gives and it fully relates to my reasons and practice:

In sum, a weblog provides me with a space to create a repository of insights that otherwise would be scattered across different spaces or not documented at all. Once this information captured and organised it becomes useful...

But after posting for some time the social aspect is really exciting too. People commenting on what you have to say, people subscribing to your blog, and joining in conversations.

I'm really looking forward to read Lilia's whole book. Good luck with the final strech, Lilia!

21 Days of Wiki Adoption

Fri, 08/22/2008 - 04:39

Grow Your Wiki is a wonderful website and blog to learn how to use a wiki in your company. They have wonderful video tutorials titled "21 days of Wiki Adoption". I love the 'science fair' idea. This sounds a lot like an idea on 'wiki sessions' I posted on some time ago.
Enjoy!

Feedmysearch a couple weeks later...

Fri, 08/22/2008 - 03:35

I was pretty enthusiastic about this new app Feedmysearch and started using it right away. I'm glad I didn't delete my Google Alerts yet. I set up several Feedmysearch feeds on topics as "document management" and "knowledge management". The results are horrible. Google Alerts gives me daily results, which are pretty relevant. Feedmysearch gives me a feed every so often, and the results are really bad (old, limited, etc.). I stopped using Feedmysearch. Back to good old Alerts (and my regular feeds of course).
I wonder: Am I the only one experiencing this?

A wiki as CRM tool? Why not?!

Fri, 08/22/2008 - 03:33

Wow, interesting post by Jon Husband at the FASTForward Blog. He extensively quotes a NTTimes article about the US State Department using wiki's and blogs. One part triggered me:

IN the past, said Stacie R. Hankins, a special assistant at the United States Embassy in Rome, when the ambassador prepared to meet an Italian political figure, the staff would e-mail a memo about the meeting and attach biographies of those who would be attending to be printed out.

Today, she said, they still produce the memo, but "now they attach a link to the Diplopedia article" — Diplopedia being a wiki, open to the contributions of all who work in the State Department. The ambassador, Ronald P. Spogli, frequently reads the biographies on his BlackBerry on the way to the meeting.

This is a really interesting way to use wiki's. CRM using wiki tooling!
And it also triggered me. Companies can also use this to build up information about customers. Furthermore, information about places and conferences employees have visited can be reported on in this way too.

PENSIEVE: IBM Research's Personal Memory Organizer

Fri, 08/22/2008 - 03:31

Interesting! Is anybody actually using this? I couldn't find anyone using it on the web. If you are, please share your experiences with us! (Thanks Wolf for the pointer to the video and the Dutch article about this tool!)

Workshop on Enterprise Social Software

Wed, 08/20/2008 - 07:38

Great! I'll be participating in an interesting workshop on "Enterprise Social Software" on the 17th of September. It's being organized by the Telematica Instituut in Amsterdam. Go ahead and take a look at the program and the topics we'll be discussing. I'm really looking forward to it!

Changes to HP Blog Printing

Wed, 08/20/2008 - 07:03

Jim Lyon also got the email. I'm really disappointed about this. HP is discontinuing their blog printing service... As you may have noticed, I also used it for my blog and it works/worked wonderfully. I really hope someone else will help us bloggers with a new blog printing service. For now, back to using Aardvark...?

An Interesting Take on Information Security. Or: The Leaked Memo

Tue, 08/19/2008 - 09:31

Really interesting article by Scott Berkun titled "The Limits of Leaked Memos". I like his take! This is basically what I try to tell the corporate information security neurotics... To extend Scott's point a little bit: For me 'context' is also very important. If a memo leaks out, the reader needs 'context' to understand its meaning. Context that most people not working for the company the memo came from, don't have.

Come Work for Océ! Check out our YouTube videos

Mon, 08/18/2008 - 03:40

The company I work for, Océ, is looking for new colleagues. For this reason they launched a couple of video interviews with some colleagues of mine giving you insight in what we are about. And what it's like to work for Océ. Pretty nice!
More info can be found on our jobs site.

First Surface tabletops at select Sheratons

Fri, 08/15/2008 - 08:27

Hmm, got to find a reason to go to Boston... Anyone have pictures of people using the tabletops in these hotels?

Web 2.0 for All your Communication

Fri, 08/15/2008 - 03:58

My wonderful newspaper, the NRC, had a nice article yesterday by Marie-Jose Klaver (who also has a nice blog) about Web 2.0 in the workplace. It was titled: "Web 2.0 voor al uw communicatie" [in English: Web 2.0 for all your communication]. It has some nice examples of Dutch governmental and non-governmental organizations using web 2.0 principles and tools.
(I don't have a link to the article yet, because the article wasn't published online yet. As soon as I do, I'll let you know!)