The Workplace Blog

Future Tense has published an excellent reading list for knowledge workers who are keen to improve their own understanding of knowldge and its place in companies. Some of the books included in the list are The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, Teaching As a Subversive Activity, How to Read a Book and my favorite the The Design of Everyday Things.

Microsoft is trying to convince corporate IT that hosted services is not only for end users, but for developers as well. At Tech Ed this week, Ray Ozzie announced that Microsoft will be offering onlines services such as single sign-on and network management. Definitely an interesting turn of events, considering the nature of corporate single sign-on. Typically, security and single sign-on is something that’s behind a company firewall and difficult to extend outside of it.

I am excited to see how Microsoft plans to get around that major challenge. On the positive side of things it seems like a hosted single sign-on approach would make it faster and easier to leverage external software to a companies internal corporate directory. Set to go live next week is a new web site by Microsoft called Windows Dev Live which will contain all the details. This bullet point on the site is great “Make it easy for the developer community to integrate with Windows Live and make money.”

If you didn’t notice, Avenue A | Razorfish recently won a webby award for the design and development of the Mercedes-AMG Website. Now this website isn’t exactly an enterprise solution but it does showcase some web 2.0 technologies that can be used in a similar fashion behind the firewall. The interaction design is compelling, the user experience powerful and the navigation system imaginative but yet intuitive. All ingredients for a successful enterprise solution!

National Semiconductor Corporation has decided to give all 8,500 of its employees a 30-gigabyte video iPod to facilitate communication as employees can download company podcasts or other news briefs. This is an exciting experiment and we can’t wait to hear about the results.

The critical questions are does National Semiconductor have enough communication to fill such a large iPod? Will the iPod be a distraction for employees? How will the iPod integrate with other company communication channels like the intranet?

Apple and National Semiconductor have always had a close relationship. Gil Amelio who led Apple for a while prior to Steve Job’s return, was the former CEO of National Semiconductor. National Semiconductor makes analog integrated circuits used in portable devices such as the iPod.

In an article for Boxes and Arrows, James Robertson discusses how one can succeed at IA (information architecture) in the enterprise. The article emphasizes that information architects need to understand overall corporate strategy to deliver tangible and visible benefits to the organization.

As the boundaries between a company and the outside world crumble, services like InnoCentive are cropping up to help employees leverage the intellectual capital outside their companies. InnoCentive matches scientists to relevant R&D challenges that companies are facing. The scientists get rewarded for their contributions.

We’re going to see more of this across a range of industries in the near future. Think of it as anonymous collaboration, the type that fuelled Linux and Wikipedia. In fact, Wired Magazine recently covered this phenomena in an article titled, ” The Rise of Crowdsourcing” using iStockphoto as an example along with InnoCentive. On iStockphoto anyone can publish their photographs and make them available for potential sale to corporate clients. The photographs are sold for a mere $1 and are royalty free. The benefits? Companies no longer have to commission expensive photographers. The photographs they are available maybe available for a pittance on sites like iPhoto.

In highlighting the strengths of these networks in the Wired Magazine article, Karim Lakhani, a lecturer in technology and innovation at MIT, zeroed in on the magic sauce, “The strength of a network like InnoCentive’s is exactly the diversity of intellectual background.” He also emphasized that the most efficient networks are those that link to the broadest range of information, knowledge and experience. Something that your own company irrespective of how large it maybe, will never have enough of.

Paula Thornton and Lisa Colvin first commented on this topic on the Information Architecture Institute mailing list.

See how we approach Enterprise Solutions with this short point of view and case study reel. You’ll need to click on the logo in the lower right hand corner for the flash reel to start. It talks specifically about the way we approach the strategy, designing and building of enterprise intranets.

Few other companies in the world (if any) have as balanced an approach when it comes to designing and building ROI driven, user centered enterprise intranets. Our 1,200+ employees are among the most talented in the world! I promise not to shamelessly promote my own company too often but thought I could get away with doing so this time.

Companies are increasingly using ethnography to understand their customers better. According to a recent Business Week article, companies like Sirius, Motorola and Citigroup are successfully using ethnographic research techniques to design products that they more directly fit in with the rest of their customers’ lives.

Is ethnographic research, which depends on direct first hand observation and in depth conversations and interviews, an appropriate technique for designing workplace solutions. Our answer is a resounding yes. Whether you are targeting customers or employees, you can only understand them if you observe how they interact with technology and the world around them. Neither customers nor employees will tell you actually what they do, they’ll tell you what they’d like you to think they do. Only through observation can you truly understand their needs, desires and behaviour patterns.

Companies often worry that to do ethnography right, they need to spend thousands of dollars and months studying employees to learn something that can help make a better product. That’s not true. Even little ethnographic research where you watch employees interact with technology in their own setting, can make a big difference. Whatever you do, don’t depend on focus groups and don’t treat the user research separate from design. Your designers need to be part of the user research team. That’s the only way that you can develop the groundbreaking solutions.

And most importantly, remember you’re not the designer. Don’t turn a blind eye to the user research findings.

The buzz surrounding Web 2.0 seems to be getting louder by the minute and not just in the consumer space. Business Week has published an article titled, “Web 2.0 Has Corporate America Spinning” in which it discusses how corporate blogging, social networks, podcasting and wikis are changing companies. We agree with them and especially with John Hagel who is quoted in the article as saying, “There’s a big cultural difference between the Web 2.0 people and the IT department.”

There’s nothing wrong with your IT department. It is critical to the success of your business and always will be. But at the same time, your IT folks may not be the best people to advise you on Web 2.0 and what you need to be doing about it. Web 2.0 is much more of a social phenomena than a technology one. It is more about customers, knowledge sharing and organizational development than about servers, platforms and computers.

More broadly speaking, Web 2.0 is fundamentally different to everything that has come before. It has changed the internet from being a publishing medium to a participatory one. People are less interested in finding information online as they are in finding and learning from each other. As the article points out, this has significant ramifications for Corporate America. Employees seek Web 2.0 experiences on their corporate intranets and employee portals. They want them to be participatory, informal, synchronous and more personal. Likewise, companies hoping to connect with customers will need to be willing to participate online even more.

So where do you start? Business Week has the best advice - begin by visiting Web 2.0 websites and experimenting yourself. Wondering which sites to visit? Sorry, we’re not going to make it too easy for you.