November 24, 2008 at 6:22 pm | Posted in Attention Management, communication, Information Work, social software | Leave a comment
In all this talk about aiding social interactions through instant messaging, community posting boards, blogs, and social networking there is one technology that I see missing from the list: a use of technology I’ll call (with tongue firmly planted in cheek) “Notification through Automated Governance” or NAG systems. These are the automated reminders that are sent out when a system has detected you haven’t done something you’re supposed to, usually via e-mail although IM, SMS, RSS, and voice are options. NAGging is actually a good example of the use of communication technology to improve social interactions.
Let me explain where I’m coming from. When I was a project manager, my most dreaded task was going around weekly to programmers and business clients to get their updates on percentage completion and dates. They were supposed to e-mail this to me each week, but of course they often didn’t. So I became a nag, which soured my relations with people and turned me into a human focus point for their frustrations with the project. If I had the ability to automate the tracking of the weekly entry of this information and have notifications come from a system rather than me, a nasty part of my interaction would be eliminated and I could focus on qualitative discussions about the project. This is now easily possible with many different products or a little scripting.
Nowadays there are systems I work with that send out automated nags about not getting information entered and I appreciate them. They are fair and sent to everyone that forgot without singling me out. I can’t take them personally, since they are not sent by a person. Accordingly, they don’t impact my opinion of anyone (“geez, I’m only one day late and you’re bugging me? How about when you were late with xxx …”), and they act as a handy reminder of something I may have forgotten.
NAGging has to be done with caution. Sometimes the interaction that occurs when it’s done personally is valuable and forces a discussion that should take place – one that may be improperly avoided if left to a computer. Also, we’ve all had the experience of being NAGged by systems that think we didn’t do something that we did.
But done properly, I think they are well worthwhile and easy to implement. And in these times when it’s difficult to get funding for new software, it acts as a good example of using technology you already own to improve productivity by greasing the gears of communication between enterprise information workers.
Note: This is a cross-posting from the Collaboration and Content Strategies blog
November 3, 2008 at 8:54 am | Posted in collaboration, Content Management, Microsoft SharePoint | Leave a comment
Here’s a quick pointer to a good article on the status of SharePoint in the enterprise by J. Nicholas Hoover of InformationWeek. Over the past year there has been a noticeable shift in the SharePoint zeitgeist. Before that SharePoint mostly flew under the radar while word of mouth and Microsoft events and press releases touted its ease of use and popularity. Now it’s been picked up on radar and is being examined more closely. I have had several conversations with the IT press writing articles such as Hoover’s that describe pros and cons, question its abilities, or warn against wandering into it without thinking. Another good example is “Microsoft SharePoint popularity comes with issues” by John Fontana of NetworkWorld. Our SharePoint workshops at Burton Group continue to be filled by attendees that want a more objective view of SharePoint’s good and bad points than can be found in inexpensive seminars by Microsoft partners. And our clients continue to ask us these questions on a regular basis. All of this points to a shift in the way SharePoint is being examined.
I want to point out these articles are cautionary in tone, not negative. The frequency with which you see common sense advice being applied to SharePoint (understand it, plan, manage your resources, pay attention to governance, avoid or shore up its weak points, etc.) reflects the hurried, ad hoc approach that SharePoint is often deployed with. I’m glad to see that SharePoint is now being tracked by the IT radar so its benefits, of which there are many to go along with its faults, can be exploited by the organizations that are desperately in need of collaboration support. And I hope that the extra introspection and examination step being introduced before deployments encourages organizations to perform due diligence against alternatives from other vendors, some of which they may already have in house, before assuming that the end users cry for SharePoint isn’t just a general cry for a simple web-based collaboration or content management solution.
