Nadat in de lente van dit jaar Microsoft SharePoint 2010 beschikbaar is gekomen, zijn er ondertussen al redelijk wat implementaties uitgevoerd. Tijdens het inrichten van de eerste SharePoint 2010 intranet omgevingen is duidelijk geworden dat steeds meer klanten vragen naar de mogelijkheden rond ‘knowledge (en social) networking’ in SharePoint 2010. In dit artikel zal de opkomst van ‘sociale software’ binnen organisaties worden besproken en de rol die SharePoint 2010 hierin kan spelen.
Het kan best lastig zijn om het begrip ‘sociale software' goed onder woorden te brengen. De voornaamste oorzaak hiervan is dat sociale software vele verschijningsvormen kent en omgeven is door buzzwords met vage definities. Daarnaast heeft de gemiddelde burger reeds zijn persoonlijke ervaringen met sociale software op het internet of kent het van vrienden of familie. Hierdoor is vaak een eenzijdig beeld ontstaan rond een dynamisch en veelzijdig fenomeen.
Geschiedenis
De basis van sociale software is gelegd rond de eeuwwisseling, met internet standaarden zoals XML, RSS en webservices. Hiermee is het fundament gelegd voor de ‘tweede generatie van het internet', (de afgelopen jaren aangeduid met de mode term ‘Web 2.0'). Zo'n 8 jaar geleden (tot 2002) was het internet toch voornamelijk een plek waar mensen (toen ruim een half miljard) informatie aan het consumeren waren, slechts een heel klein deel van de gebruikers publiceerde ook content op het internet. Rond het jaar 2003, 2 jaar na de ‘internet bubbel' kwam er een aantal zaken tezamen. De gemiddelde snelheid van een internetverbinding thuis nam snel toe en het aantal mensen op het internet verdubbelde binnen 3 jaar naar 1 miljard gebruikers. Daarnaast werden platformen zoals Blogger (weblogs) en MySpace (Social Networks) in rap tempo volwassen.
In de jaren die volgden is het gebruik van internet sites waarmee eenvoudig content (tekst, afbeeldingen, video, etc.) gedeeld kan worden extreem toegenomen. Denk hierbij aan het succes van online platformen zoals Facebook, Twitter en YouTube. De laatste jaren werden deze platformen zakelijk steeds meer gebruikt en zijn steeds meer bedrijven gaan onderzoeken hoe deze technieken binnen de organisatie kunnen worden toegepast.
De kracht van sociale software
Wat maakt sociale software waardevol en wat zijn de voordelen voor organisaties? De term ‘Social' (en services zoals Twitter en Facebook) hebben bij enkele mensen nog een negatieve associatie. Hier kunnen verschillende oorzaken aan ten grondslag liggen, zoals ervaringen uit het verleden of vooroordelen over ‘zinloze communicatie (chatten)'. Een ander feit is dat veel zelfgekroonde goeroes zichzelf omgedoopt hebben tot ‘social media experts' en een grote hoeveelheid ruis in de media is verkondigd.
De kracht van sociale software is redelijk eenvoudig te benoemen en is voornamelijk te vinden rond het onderwerp 'laagdrempeligheid kunnen delen'. Sociale software maakt het mogelijk om binnen een minuut een bericht te plaatsen dat leesbaar is voor een groot publiek of een video toe te voegen in een (Wiki) pagina. Een ander kan vervolgens eenvoudig een reactie plaatsen of een foto toevoegen waardoor gezamenlijk (zonder technische kennis) content gecreëerd kan worden. Hier ligt de kracht, en deze kracht is met SharePoint 2010 ook beschikbaar voor intern gebruik.
Veel organisaties hebben de afgelopen jaren tevergeefs geprobeerd een actieve strategie te voeren op het gebied van kennismanagement. In slecht enkele gevallen hebben deze inspanningen ook voldaan aan de initiële verwachtingen. Als er één gebied te benoemen is waar sociale software een grote bijdrage kan leveren, dan is dat wel op het gebied van kennismanagement.
"Sociale media heeft de afgelopen jaren gezorgd voor een explosie aan waardevolle informatie op het internet, en met de juiste aanpak is dit ook binnen organisaties mogelijk".
Sociale software biedt een platform gericht op het individu: 'de medewerker', waarbij het bij 'Intranet 1.0 software' aanvankelijk ging om het geven van een platform aan de afdeling Marketing en Communicatie. In de afgelopen jaren kregen ook andere afdelingen de mogelijkheid om content toe te voegen aan het intranet met behulp van Content Management Systemen. En ook al kwam er met behulp van deze systemen (zoals SharePoint) de mogelijkheid van het publiceren van documenten bij, het laagdrempelig kunnen delen van informatie door medewerkers was maar voor enkele bedrijven weggelegd. Met de komst van SharePoint 2010 komt hier een breed scala aan mogelijkheden bij, waarmee het vullen en verrijken van informatie binnen een intranet (of extranet) eindelijk echt eenvoudig en laagdrempelig begint te worden. Een goed doordachte informatiearchitectuur en implementatie is hierbij natuurlijk wel een belangrijke randvoorwaarde.
En ja, we moeten ook nog even stilstaan bij de sceptici. Laagdrempeligheid betekent natuurlijk ook dat mensen kunnen gaan melden wat ze tijdens de lunch hebben gegeten, eventueel aangevuld met een foto van het dagmenu en het voltallige kantinepersoneel. En ja, voor de meeste mensen binnen de organisatie zal deze informatie geen directe waarde hebben. Gelukkig bestaan er dan ook vele manieren om data te filteren, zoals op onderwerp of afdeling, waardoor iedereen zijn eigen informatiebehoefte kan samenstellen. Hiernaast bestaan er krachtige hulpmiddelen zoals 'tagging, rating en recommendations', die kunnen bijdragen aan het verkrijgen van waardevolle content. Als laatste is het zo dat binnen een sociaal intranet vanzelf ‘sociale omgangsvormen' optreden, zodra iedereen de ‘etiquette van interne sociale netwerken' leert en deze afspraken een onderdeel gaan vormen van de bedrijfscultuur.
Onderzoeksbureau Gartner heeft begin 2010 een rapport gepubliceerd met de titel "Social Software is an Enterprise Reality". In dit rapport doet Gartner de voorspelling dat omstreeks 2014 e-mail voor 20 procent zal zijn vervangen door sociale software als het voornaamste communicatiemiddel van professionals. De algemene verwachting is dat de komende jaren de meeste bedrijven sociale netwerken in gebruik zullen nemen. De meeste experts verwachten dat interne sociale netwerken effectiever zullen zijn dan e-mail voor sommige zakelijke toepassingen, zoals het communiceren van status updates binnen projecten en het lokaliseren van expertise.
SharePoint 2010
Met het aanschaffen van SharePoint 2010 wordt een gereedschapskist in huis gehaald welke een hoop waardevolle sociale software componenten bevat. SharePoint 2010 biedt verbeterde mogelijkheden rond Wiki's, Blogs en social bookmarks. Verder zijn de mogelijkheden rond gebruikersprofielen sterk verbeterd, waardoor functionaliteiten die we kennen van Facebook en Linkedin (zoals noteboards en newsfeeds) binnen de organisatie kunnen worden ingezet. Eén van de meeste krachtige toevoegingen aan SharePoint 2010 is de ‘Term Store', waarmee organisaties een ‘SharePoint brede' taxonomie en/of folksonomie kunnen opzetten.
De Taxonomie (hiërarchische classificatie methode) zal bekend zijn bij veel mensen, maar de folksonomie is een relatief nieuw begrip. Folksonomie is ontstaan tijdens de Web 2.0 revolutie en is een samentrekking van de woorden Folk (mensen) en Taxonomie. Het betreft hier een vorm van ordening op basis van consensus door het volk (de medewerkers). Het mooie van een folksonomie is dat het een ‘bottom-up' aanpak is voor het realiseren van een bedrijfsbrede taxonomie. In de praktijk zal een dergelijke aanpak vele malen sneller te realiseren zijn dan een Top-Down aanpak (en kan het veel uren vergaderen besparen). Een folksonomie kan (nadat hij goed gevuld is) binnen SharePoint wel centraal beheerd en opgeschoond worden. Binnen SharePoint kan ‘alles dat een URL heeft' (Sites, pagina's, documenten en andere objecten) getagged worden, waarbij de tags ook te herleiden zijn naar een persoon.
De sociale features van SharePoint 2010 kunnen voor organisaties belangrijke voordelen brengen, in eerste instantie op het gebied van transparantie en kennisdeling. Andere voordelen zijn er te behalen op het gebied van snellere en efficiëntere toegang tot expertise binnen de organisatie, het verlagen van communicatiekosten en het verbeteren van de (afdeling overstijgende) samenwerking. Al met al zaken waar de meeste organisaties op zitten te wachten...
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Read more: http://www.computable.nl/artikel/ict_topics/ecm/3618782/1277020/sociale-software-en-microsoft-sharepoint-2010.html#ixzz1C3Ro3cV5
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Friday, December 17, 2010
Tech for Small Business
By Paul Taylor
Published: September 22 2010 10:19 | Last updated: September 22 2010 10:19
The closest thing Knight Corporate Finance has to an office is Home House, a members club in central London, where co-founders Paul Billingham and Adam Zoldan can host meetings if required. Other than that, all team members work from home, which Paul and Adam, both with young families, see as an advantage.
Knight Corporate Finance is a boutique business advisory firm which has advised on the sale of more than 20 companies in the IT and Telecoms industries in the UK since it was set up two years ago.
“Setting up our own business means that we do not have set working hours, but we do work a lot of hours,” says Paul who is based in Warrington - 200 miles north of Adam who lives in London. In addition to the two partners, there are three other employees.
“Working from home gives us the flexibility to be involved in family life and then launch straight back into business. Our team also benefits from that flexibility and we are lucky to have employees who are mature and responsible enough to motivate themselves and do what needs to be done.”
Because the partners are constantly visiting clients around the country, they decided that the business would not own any infrastructure – only devices – and that the IT services it required would be hosted using cloud-based infrastructure from specialist providers.
For example, the two partners have hosted IP telephony at home which allows them to redirect calls to their Manchester and London phone numbers, to their mobiles or to a landline at any location. If they are not able to take a call, it is routed to a live answering service where the call is answered in the company name, details taken and sent by email.
Smartphones are certainly the most used technology – Paul and Adam both have iPhones. “Being on the move a lot and working long hours means you need a device that enables you to connect in every way possible and do some non-work things,” says Adam. “The iPhone is essentially a consumer device I personally like that also connects me for work.”
Knight CF also uses a pay-as-you-go conference call service for client calls and the weekly team catch up. Email is provided by a hosted Microsoft Exchange server which can be accessed through PCs and mobile devices and allows the team to share calendars.
When it comes to documents, all information is stored and shared on a hosted Microsoft Sharepoint server – Knight CF’s central collaboration site. Sharepoint also allows client access to a secure team site - secure partitioned areas of the server accessed via the web that allows each client or approved party to share information and interact with Knight CF.
If work is stored on a user’s PC, it is backed up using an online back up service. Any working documents required on the move are saved on a cloud server so that they can be accessed from any device with a web connection and a browser. Wireless cellular antennae enable internet connection when out and about.
Adam has recently swapped his laptop for an iPad while on the move because he was experiencing shoulder ache from carrying the heavy laptop around all the time: “The PC is still essential for creating new presentations or in-depth spreadsheets but for viewing and making minor changes the iPad is fine. For email, internet and providing content it is perfect and for giving presentations it is excellent as it still provides the “wow” factor as an interesting new bit of kit.”
Because of firm’s business, the partners have a natural interest in telecoms and IT and are always on the look-out for new products for personal use and to enhance the way the business works. With everything hosted, Knight CF’s infrastructure is flexible and can easily be updated and changed if an aspect no longer works well or a new gadget catches their eye. They also know exactly how much it will cost each month.
Paul says: “Work is part of our lives and the boundaries between work and family life have become blurred. Hosted technology means we can access our virtual office as frequently or infrequently as we need and interchange with family life at different times of the day. We’re always working but also always living our lives – the two are not separate.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
..
Published: September 22 2010 10:19 | Last updated: September 22 2010 10:19
The closest thing Knight Corporate Finance has to an office is Home House, a members club in central London, where co-founders Paul Billingham and Adam Zoldan can host meetings if required. Other than that, all team members work from home, which Paul and Adam, both with young families, see as an advantage.
Knight Corporate Finance is a boutique business advisory firm which has advised on the sale of more than 20 companies in the IT and Telecoms industries in the UK since it was set up two years ago.
“Setting up our own business means that we do not have set working hours, but we do work a lot of hours,” says Paul who is based in Warrington - 200 miles north of Adam who lives in London. In addition to the two partners, there are three other employees.
“Working from home gives us the flexibility to be involved in family life and then launch straight back into business. Our team also benefits from that flexibility and we are lucky to have employees who are mature and responsible enough to motivate themselves and do what needs to be done.”
Because the partners are constantly visiting clients around the country, they decided that the business would not own any infrastructure – only devices – and that the IT services it required would be hosted using cloud-based infrastructure from specialist providers.
For example, the two partners have hosted IP telephony at home which allows them to redirect calls to their Manchester and London phone numbers, to their mobiles or to a landline at any location. If they are not able to take a call, it is routed to a live answering service where the call is answered in the company name, details taken and sent by email.
Smartphones are certainly the most used technology – Paul and Adam both have iPhones. “Being on the move a lot and working long hours means you need a device that enables you to connect in every way possible and do some non-work things,” says Adam. “The iPhone is essentially a consumer device I personally like that also connects me for work.”
Knight CF also uses a pay-as-you-go conference call service for client calls and the weekly team catch up. Email is provided by a hosted Microsoft Exchange server which can be accessed through PCs and mobile devices and allows the team to share calendars.
When it comes to documents, all information is stored and shared on a hosted Microsoft Sharepoint server – Knight CF’s central collaboration site. Sharepoint also allows client access to a secure team site - secure partitioned areas of the server accessed via the web that allows each client or approved party to share information and interact with Knight CF.
If work is stored on a user’s PC, it is backed up using an online back up service. Any working documents required on the move are saved on a cloud server so that they can be accessed from any device with a web connection and a browser. Wireless cellular antennae enable internet connection when out and about.
Adam has recently swapped his laptop for an iPad while on the move because he was experiencing shoulder ache from carrying the heavy laptop around all the time: “The PC is still essential for creating new presentations or in-depth spreadsheets but for viewing and making minor changes the iPad is fine. For email, internet and providing content it is perfect and for giving presentations it is excellent as it still provides the “wow” factor as an interesting new bit of kit.”
Because of firm’s business, the partners have a natural interest in telecoms and IT and are always on the look-out for new products for personal use and to enhance the way the business works. With everything hosted, Knight CF’s infrastructure is flexible and can easily be updated and changed if an aspect no longer works well or a new gadget catches their eye. They also know exactly how much it will cost each month.
Paul says: “Work is part of our lives and the boundaries between work and family life have become blurred. Hosted technology means we can access our virtual office as frequently or infrequently as we need and interchange with family life at different times of the day. We’re always working but also always living our lives – the two are not separate.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
..
An early future from Google
By Chris Nuttall in San Francisco
Published: December 16 2010 22:44 | Last updated: December 16 2010 22:44
Gingerbread man: the Nexus S is the first Android phone to have the 2.3 version of its operating system
William Gibson, the science fiction writer, could have been envisioning Google’s Mountain View headquarters when he said: “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
The Googleplex is where a lot of the future is currently stacked up – from experiments with driverless cars to support for robots on the moon.
Google products have names inspired by sci-fi – the Nexus One phone using its Android operating system refers to the Nexus-6 androids in the film Blade Runner. A successor, the Nexus S, has just come out along with another piece of hardware – the CR-48 notebook, which sounds like a cross between R2-D2 and C-3PO, the robots in Star Wars. In fact, it stands for Chromium-48, an unstable isotope and an all too suitable name for a shaky prototype of its Chrome computing system, first announced in July last year.
Google has decided to distribute the future more evenly. Instead of concentrating on the bug-ridden and delayed product in its labs, it is offering 60,000 or so CR-48 notebooks to users in the US to help with its development.
Samsung Nexus S
Pros: Second-generation “Google phone” made to the company’s specification; light, vivid 4in screen; decent battery life; fast processor; good camera functions; first to feature improved Android Gingerbread operating system.
Cons: Pure Google phone, so lacks added layers and services offered by other handset makers and operators; handling of music, video, games inferior to iPhone.
..I gained a glimpse of what lies ahead with review units of the Nexus S and the CR-48 – and found that both contained intriguing possibilities.
The Nexus S is the first Android phone to have the 2.3 version of its operating system, codenamed Gingerbread. One new feature is support for near field communication technology: NFC can be used for contactless payments and exchanges of information such as sharing digital photos with a friend’s phone. Another use, previewed by the Nexus S in an app called Tags, allows users to hold their phones up to NFC-tagged objects and receive information from them such as text, pictures and links to websites.
Gingerbread also has a spiffier interface overall. Upgraded apps timed for its release include YouTube, which I found more responsive and fun to use than in my web browser. Settings for the 5Mp camera are more sophisticated and accessible, and there is better support for making internet calls and an improved on-screen keyboard experience.
Samsung Focus
Pros: Windows Phone 7 showcase smartphone; superb 4in Super Amoled screen; thin and light; excellent touch sensitivity; fast processor; enticing interface; HD video recording.
Cons: Limited number of apps; no Flash capability yet in Windows Phone 7.
..The Nexus S is made by Samsung – the original Nexus One was an HTC handset – and features the wonderful brightness of colours of its Super Amoled (active matrix organic light emitting diode) slightly curved 4in screen. It feels light for its size, has good battery life, excellent call quality and is very responsive with its fast 1Ghz processor. The Nexus S is on sale at Best Buy in the US ($529, $200 with a T-Mobile contract) and is available in Europe from Monday (free on a long-term contract, or for £550 without a contract, at Carphone Warehouse and Best Buy stores in the UK).
. . .
Like its predecessor, the Nexus S is “pure Google” – designed to Google’s specifications and as a showcase for its latest, greatest version of Android. It lacks the interface layers and features that handset makers and operators have added to Android on other handsets to make up for its shortcomings against the iPhone, which still handles music, video and games much better.
Apple iPhone 4
Pros: Retina screen has highest resolution of any smartphone; intuitive operating system with more than 200,000 apps; excellent music and gaming.
Cons: Browser not Flash-enabled; no capability to turn itself into a WiFi hotspot; screen looks small next to some Android rivals; still not available in white.
..This makes it hard to get excited about the Nexus S – it is an excellent smartphone, but it lacks a defining feature that would make it stand out from the growing Android crowd.
The same could be said of the CR-48 laptop – an ordinary black box of a notebook – but then it is meant to be a plain-looking machine for testing purposes only. However, the keyboard is one element of the design that is likely to appear in the two Chrome notebooks that Acer and Samsung are expected to launch in mid-2011.
The Caps Lock key has been replaced with a search magnifying glass and the usual F1, F2 etc function keys along the top instead are symbols representing brightness, volume and the forward, back, reload, full screen, next window functions associated with a browser. This is because the Chrome OS is modelled on Google’s Chrome browser, with the idea that the web can become the operating system and the browser its desktop interface.
CR-48 Chrome notebook
This prototype is being given to 60,000 testers in the US to iron out the kinks of Google’s ambitious project to move all our computing tasks from local PCs to the web.
Pros: Decluttered notebook, thanks to the web browser operating as the operating system; instant on and off functionality; cheap, low-powered machine that is long on battery life.
Cons: Abandonment of desktop concept is hard to adjust to; internet connectivity is essential; web alternatives to tasks done locally are incomplete; the Chrome OS struggles to deal with everyday peripherals such as printers and scanners.
..This took some getting used to. I kept wanting to minimise the browser to see a familiar desktop with program icons. Instead, my programs were web applications whose icons appeared on the otherwise blank page when I selected “New Tab” in the browser. Default programs included YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, Scratchpad – for taking quick notes – and a couple of games, where I could hit the Full Screen button and play as if I was not inside a browser window.
Google’s argument is that we spend so much of our computing life inside browsers that we may as well float off into cloud computing land, where tasks from e-mail to word processing and editing photos can already be carried out. We will not need expensive computers and slow-loading operating systems because processing and storage can be handled in Google’s data centres. The CR-48 has long battery life with only a low-power Atom processor and a 16Gb flash drive for minimal storage.
However, printing, scanning, editing pictures and video, recording audio, accessing local files either failed to work, needed keystroke combinations or took much longer, and depended on the speed of my internet connection.
Such is the problem of dragging the future into the present – the web’s infrastructure and our own working habits are not equipped to deal with such a dramatic shift just yet, whereas a Blade Runner Nexus-6 android would probably cope very well.
chris.nuttall@ft.com
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
...
Published: December 16 2010 22:44 | Last updated: December 16 2010 22:44
Gingerbread man: the Nexus S is the first Android phone to have the 2.3 version of its operating system
William Gibson, the science fiction writer, could have been envisioning Google’s Mountain View headquarters when he said: “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
The Googleplex is where a lot of the future is currently stacked up – from experiments with driverless cars to support for robots on the moon.
Google products have names inspired by sci-fi – the Nexus One phone using its Android operating system refers to the Nexus-6 androids in the film Blade Runner. A successor, the Nexus S, has just come out along with another piece of hardware – the CR-48 notebook, which sounds like a cross between R2-D2 and C-3PO, the robots in Star Wars. In fact, it stands for Chromium-48, an unstable isotope and an all too suitable name for a shaky prototype of its Chrome computing system, first announced in July last year.
Google has decided to distribute the future more evenly. Instead of concentrating on the bug-ridden and delayed product in its labs, it is offering 60,000 or so CR-48 notebooks to users in the US to help with its development.
Samsung Nexus S
Pros: Second-generation “Google phone” made to the company’s specification; light, vivid 4in screen; decent battery life; fast processor; good camera functions; first to feature improved Android Gingerbread operating system.
Cons: Pure Google phone, so lacks added layers and services offered by other handset makers and operators; handling of music, video, games inferior to iPhone.
..I gained a glimpse of what lies ahead with review units of the Nexus S and the CR-48 – and found that both contained intriguing possibilities.
The Nexus S is the first Android phone to have the 2.3 version of its operating system, codenamed Gingerbread. One new feature is support for near field communication technology: NFC can be used for contactless payments and exchanges of information such as sharing digital photos with a friend’s phone. Another use, previewed by the Nexus S in an app called Tags, allows users to hold their phones up to NFC-tagged objects and receive information from them such as text, pictures and links to websites.
Gingerbread also has a spiffier interface overall. Upgraded apps timed for its release include YouTube, which I found more responsive and fun to use than in my web browser. Settings for the 5Mp camera are more sophisticated and accessible, and there is better support for making internet calls and an improved on-screen keyboard experience.
Samsung Focus
Pros: Windows Phone 7 showcase smartphone; superb 4in Super Amoled screen; thin and light; excellent touch sensitivity; fast processor; enticing interface; HD video recording.
Cons: Limited number of apps; no Flash capability yet in Windows Phone 7.
..The Nexus S is made by Samsung – the original Nexus One was an HTC handset – and features the wonderful brightness of colours of its Super Amoled (active matrix organic light emitting diode) slightly curved 4in screen. It feels light for its size, has good battery life, excellent call quality and is very responsive with its fast 1Ghz processor. The Nexus S is on sale at Best Buy in the US ($529, $200 with a T-Mobile contract) and is available in Europe from Monday (free on a long-term contract, or for £550 without a contract, at Carphone Warehouse and Best Buy stores in the UK).
. . .
Like its predecessor, the Nexus S is “pure Google” – designed to Google’s specifications and as a showcase for its latest, greatest version of Android. It lacks the interface layers and features that handset makers and operators have added to Android on other handsets to make up for its shortcomings against the iPhone, which still handles music, video and games much better.
Apple iPhone 4
Pros: Retina screen has highest resolution of any smartphone; intuitive operating system with more than 200,000 apps; excellent music and gaming.
Cons: Browser not Flash-enabled; no capability to turn itself into a WiFi hotspot; screen looks small next to some Android rivals; still not available in white.
..This makes it hard to get excited about the Nexus S – it is an excellent smartphone, but it lacks a defining feature that would make it stand out from the growing Android crowd.
The same could be said of the CR-48 laptop – an ordinary black box of a notebook – but then it is meant to be a plain-looking machine for testing purposes only. However, the keyboard is one element of the design that is likely to appear in the two Chrome notebooks that Acer and Samsung are expected to launch in mid-2011.
The Caps Lock key has been replaced with a search magnifying glass and the usual F1, F2 etc function keys along the top instead are symbols representing brightness, volume and the forward, back, reload, full screen, next window functions associated with a browser. This is because the Chrome OS is modelled on Google’s Chrome browser, with the idea that the web can become the operating system and the browser its desktop interface.
CR-48 Chrome notebook
This prototype is being given to 60,000 testers in the US to iron out the kinks of Google’s ambitious project to move all our computing tasks from local PCs to the web.
Pros: Decluttered notebook, thanks to the web browser operating as the operating system; instant on and off functionality; cheap, low-powered machine that is long on battery life.
Cons: Abandonment of desktop concept is hard to adjust to; internet connectivity is essential; web alternatives to tasks done locally are incomplete; the Chrome OS struggles to deal with everyday peripherals such as printers and scanners.
..This took some getting used to. I kept wanting to minimise the browser to see a familiar desktop with program icons. Instead, my programs were web applications whose icons appeared on the otherwise blank page when I selected “New Tab” in the browser. Default programs included YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, Scratchpad – for taking quick notes – and a couple of games, where I could hit the Full Screen button and play as if I was not inside a browser window.
Google’s argument is that we spend so much of our computing life inside browsers that we may as well float off into cloud computing land, where tasks from e-mail to word processing and editing photos can already be carried out. We will not need expensive computers and slow-loading operating systems because processing and storage can be handled in Google’s data centres. The CR-48 has long battery life with only a low-power Atom processor and a 16Gb flash drive for minimal storage.
However, printing, scanning, editing pictures and video, recording audio, accessing local files either failed to work, needed keystroke combinations or took much longer, and depended on the speed of my internet connection.
Such is the problem of dragging the future into the present – the web’s infrastructure and our own working habits are not equipped to deal with such a dramatic shift just yet, whereas a Blade Runner Nexus-6 android would probably cope very well.
chris.nuttall@ft.com
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
...
Tuesday, December 07, 2010
What is your IT organisation doing to fuel workers’ passion?
By John Hagel and John Seely Brown
Published: December 7 2010 23:23 | Last updated: December 7 2010 23:23
Passion drives performance. What is your IT organisation doing to fuel passion at every level?
In our opening column, we talked about the decades-long decline in financial performance. Return on assets across all companies have fallen 75 per cent for all public companies in the US since 1965. A profoundly destabilising technology infrastructure is a big part of this transformation.
Another key metric in decline is passion. According to the just-released 2010 Shift Index, four of five workers surveyed are not passionate about their jobs.
Sure, they are working longer hours during the downturn, but that doesn’t mean they are engaged or that they will stick with you when the economy improves. Without truly passionate workers, companies will find it difficult to turn round the steady deterioration in financial performance.
Passionate workers are more likely to take challenges and transform them into opportunities.
But passionate workers are easily frustrated by institutional, technical, and cultural barriers that make it difficult to learn and connect with others.
With the right technology infrastructure, however, organisations can fuel rather than frustrate passion. Here’s how.
Disposition for passion
Passionate workers possess two valuable dispositions.
Questing: when asked how they react to challenges, passionate employees we surveyed most often responded that they see an opportunity to learn something or solve problems rather than viewing the unusual as a nuisance or a distraction.
Passionate workers seek out challenges to test their abilities, rather than waiting for them to surface. The passionate are twice as likely as disengaged workers to display this questing disposition.
As a leader, you want people with questing dispositions to move to the next level of performance improvement.
Connecting: Passionate workers have a strong desire to reach out and connect with others who can help them get better faster. We found passionate workers are twice as likely as disengaged workers to have a connecting disposition. They exchange knowledge outside the firm through conferences and social media much more often than workers who lack passion.
Our research suggests that effective knowledge exchange will be crucial to performance improvement.
These dispositions of questing and connecting reinforce each other – both positively and negatively. If you have a questing disposition, but you lack the ability to connect, you can’t learn new things as easily from others. If you have a connecting disposition, but can’t focus your attention on interesting challenges, you’re not as likely to use connections you establish to improve performance.
Implications for technology
Since these dispositions are increasingly central to sustained performance improvement, the question for IT organisations becomes how to create the conditions that support passionate workers.
Most IT organisations have a hard time facilitating people with connecting and questing dispositions. Many people inside big corporations, in particular, view enabling tools such as social media or cloud computing as toys, distractions, or security breaches. In fact, from our experience in discussions with a range of IT executives, most IT departments are ambivalent about, if not actively resisting, the next generation of technologies.
But to help workers pursue their passion, leaders must:
Change the mindset
Most executives are deeply suspicious of workers’ passions, unless they define passion simply as working longer hours to get the usual rote tasks done. Instead, passion is the quest for unexpected challenges. Questing and connecting are huge opportunities to drive performance improvement, if you can encourage and support these traits.
Identify relevant edges
The edges of your firm and your industry – whether geographic, demographic, or between companies – offer the environments where questing and connecting dispositions flourish.
Edges are fertile ground for innovation, attracting risk takers who can drive knowledge creation and economic growth. They are where the questing and the connecting dispositions have the most freedom. Find the edges with the most opportunity and the least resistance, and mobilise passionate people to these edges so they can attack performance challenges emerging there.
Deploy the right platforms and tools
New technology can significantly enhance the impact of passionate employees. Cloud computing, and the sophisticated analytic tools that can be accessed in the cloud, provide individuals with the resources they need to experiment and improvise in addressing performance challenges.
Rather than waiting in a long line to receive resources from a central IT organisation, employees can use the emerging cloud infrastructure and access everything from raw server capacity to sophisticated research tools. They can rapidly scale up and back IT resources and take promising approaches to market.
But it’s not just cloud computing. Passionate workers can now use social networks to stay in touch with a much larger group of individuals. Shared workspaces provide an increasingly rich environment for these individuals to connect with each other and others outside the firm jointly to develop promising approaches to difficult performance challenges.
In fact, these two categories of IT, cloud computing and social software, weave together in powerful ways to integrate both the questing and connecting dispositions of passionate workers. Employees begin to see the compounding effects of connecting with relevant and diverse expertise wherever it resides and combining that expertise with a rich array of IT resources to pursue challenging performance quests.
As passionate workers on the edge of the enterprise demonstrate the kind of impact they can achieve, less engaged workers start to see how much they can accomplish through their initiatives, and passion begins to build in them, as well. As the less engaged connect with more passionate workers, they manifest more of the questing and connecting dispositions. Passion starts to spread.
Emerging technologies play a central role in breaking down many of the institutional barriers that frustrate passionate workers. Rather than feeling blocked, these workers begin to feel more empowered. As passionate employees thrive, companies in turn will find themselves in a better position to deal with performance pressures. Instead of becoming a source of increasing stress, challenges become an opportunity for passionate workers to attain levels of performance never before possible.
John Hagel III, and John Seely Brown are co-chairman and independent co-chairman, respectively, of the Deloitte Center for the Edgew
Their books include The Power of Pull, The Only Sustainable Edge, Out of the Box, The Social Life of Information, Net Worth, and Net Gain.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
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Published: December 7 2010 23:23 | Last updated: December 7 2010 23:23
Passion drives performance. What is your IT organisation doing to fuel passion at every level?
In our opening column, we talked about the decades-long decline in financial performance. Return on assets across all companies have fallen 75 per cent for all public companies in the US since 1965. A profoundly destabilising technology infrastructure is a big part of this transformation.
Another key metric in decline is passion. According to the just-released 2010 Shift Index, four of five workers surveyed are not passionate about their jobs.
Sure, they are working longer hours during the downturn, but that doesn’t mean they are engaged or that they will stick with you when the economy improves. Without truly passionate workers, companies will find it difficult to turn round the steady deterioration in financial performance.
Passionate workers are more likely to take challenges and transform them into opportunities.
But passionate workers are easily frustrated by institutional, technical, and cultural barriers that make it difficult to learn and connect with others.
With the right technology infrastructure, however, organisations can fuel rather than frustrate passion. Here’s how.
Disposition for passion
Passionate workers possess two valuable dispositions.
Questing: when asked how they react to challenges, passionate employees we surveyed most often responded that they see an opportunity to learn something or solve problems rather than viewing the unusual as a nuisance or a distraction.
Passionate workers seek out challenges to test their abilities, rather than waiting for them to surface. The passionate are twice as likely as disengaged workers to display this questing disposition.
As a leader, you want people with questing dispositions to move to the next level of performance improvement.
Connecting: Passionate workers have a strong desire to reach out and connect with others who can help them get better faster. We found passionate workers are twice as likely as disengaged workers to have a connecting disposition. They exchange knowledge outside the firm through conferences and social media much more often than workers who lack passion.
Our research suggests that effective knowledge exchange will be crucial to performance improvement.
These dispositions of questing and connecting reinforce each other – both positively and negatively. If you have a questing disposition, but you lack the ability to connect, you can’t learn new things as easily from others. If you have a connecting disposition, but can’t focus your attention on interesting challenges, you’re not as likely to use connections you establish to improve performance.
Implications for technology
Since these dispositions are increasingly central to sustained performance improvement, the question for IT organisations becomes how to create the conditions that support passionate workers.
Most IT organisations have a hard time facilitating people with connecting and questing dispositions. Many people inside big corporations, in particular, view enabling tools such as social media or cloud computing as toys, distractions, or security breaches. In fact, from our experience in discussions with a range of IT executives, most IT departments are ambivalent about, if not actively resisting, the next generation of technologies.
But to help workers pursue their passion, leaders must:
Change the mindset
Most executives are deeply suspicious of workers’ passions, unless they define passion simply as working longer hours to get the usual rote tasks done. Instead, passion is the quest for unexpected challenges. Questing and connecting are huge opportunities to drive performance improvement, if you can encourage and support these traits.
Identify relevant edges
The edges of your firm and your industry – whether geographic, demographic, or between companies – offer the environments where questing and connecting dispositions flourish.
Edges are fertile ground for innovation, attracting risk takers who can drive knowledge creation and economic growth. They are where the questing and the connecting dispositions have the most freedom. Find the edges with the most opportunity and the least resistance, and mobilise passionate people to these edges so they can attack performance challenges emerging there.
Deploy the right platforms and tools
New technology can significantly enhance the impact of passionate employees. Cloud computing, and the sophisticated analytic tools that can be accessed in the cloud, provide individuals with the resources they need to experiment and improvise in addressing performance challenges.
Rather than waiting in a long line to receive resources from a central IT organisation, employees can use the emerging cloud infrastructure and access everything from raw server capacity to sophisticated research tools. They can rapidly scale up and back IT resources and take promising approaches to market.
But it’s not just cloud computing. Passionate workers can now use social networks to stay in touch with a much larger group of individuals. Shared workspaces provide an increasingly rich environment for these individuals to connect with each other and others outside the firm jointly to develop promising approaches to difficult performance challenges.
In fact, these two categories of IT, cloud computing and social software, weave together in powerful ways to integrate both the questing and connecting dispositions of passionate workers. Employees begin to see the compounding effects of connecting with relevant and diverse expertise wherever it resides and combining that expertise with a rich array of IT resources to pursue challenging performance quests.
As passionate workers on the edge of the enterprise demonstrate the kind of impact they can achieve, less engaged workers start to see how much they can accomplish through their initiatives, and passion begins to build in them, as well. As the less engaged connect with more passionate workers, they manifest more of the questing and connecting dispositions. Passion starts to spread.
Emerging technologies play a central role in breaking down many of the institutional barriers that frustrate passionate workers. Rather than feeling blocked, these workers begin to feel more empowered. As passionate employees thrive, companies in turn will find themselves in a better position to deal with performance pressures. Instead of becoming a source of increasing stress, challenges become an opportunity for passionate workers to attain levels of performance never before possible.
John Hagel III, and John Seely Brown are co-chairman and independent co-chairman, respectively, of the Deloitte Center for the Edgew
Their books include The Power of Pull, The Only Sustainable Edge, Out of the Box, The Social Life of Information, Net Worth, and Net Gain.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
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