One of my favourite people on the planet is Luis Suarez. Not just an IBMer, a collaborator, an interlocutor or an inhabitant of Gran Canaria Island in Spain — how cool is that — he is one of the foremost outliers pushing our organizations towards a world without email. And who would blame him? No matter what statistic you read or research paper you (hopefully) digest – like this one – email traffic is growing and it doesn’t seem to be stopping. Luis argues “if there is something out there that it’s killing our very own productivity, it’s not email itself, but our abuse of it that’s killing such productivity.” I believe him. My problem is not with Luis, his approach or his quest …
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Over at HBR, resident blogger Alexandra Samuel — she with the fab wardrobe — kicked up a “shitstorm” (as she calls it) on January 16, 2013 with a post entitled “Dear Colleague, Put the Notebook Down“. The central plot in this missive was for people of today’s organizations to drop their reliance on pen and paper and to adopt an entirely digital transcribing practice. Whether through a tablet or laptop, Alexandra argues “you’d make better use of your time if you took your notes in digital form, ideally in an access-anywhere digital notebook like Evernote that makes retrieval a snap.” Who am I to argue with that? I haven’t worn a watch since 1982 when I was eleven and the last time I took a
For the past two and half years at my real job as the head of learning and collaboration, we’ve been early adopters of a virtual world product called AvayaLive Engage, developed by a company named Avaya. It was formerly known as Web.Alive, and although I’m not a fan of the name change, that’s about the only negative comment I have with the product. If you’re unfamiliar with virtual worlds, you are missing a very important aspect of workplace collaboration. At its core, virtual worlds are online 3-D computer-simulated environments in which users are depicted by avatars and interaction between them can mimic either a given real-life scenario or in some cases a fictitious and alternative world scenario. I won’t delve into the latter and will
In 2003, when Nicholas Carr penned the piece “IT Doesn’t Matter“, an overlooked definition of what he referred to as ‘infrastructural technologies‘ may now be, in 2012, unintentionally defining the relationship between IT and the organization. “The characteristics and economics of infrastructural technologies, whether railroads or telegraph lines or power generators, make it inevitable that they will be broadly shared – that they will become part of the general business infrastructure. In the earliest phases of its buildout, however, an infrastructural technology can take the form of a proprietary technology. As long as access to the technology is restricted – through physical limitations, intellectual property rights, high costs, or a lack of standards – a company can use it to gain advantages over rivals.” In