Team Collaboration

• Pivot 360° … Pivot Solutions announced Pivot 360°, a collaboration offering for financial services professionals for inter-enterprise communication and collaboration. It’s an upgrade to IMTRADER, Pivot’s instant messaging and chat solution. “Pivot 360° complements Pivot’s IMTRADER by managing all the information 360 degrees around a conversation or a transaction. By seamlessly bringing together people, content and services into a single collaboration point, Pivot 360° aggregates and integrates information and data across disparate sources into decision making and trading specific workflows. Pivot 360° easily integrates with proprietary and third party content to enable automated, targeted distribution. Structured data allows users to exchange transaction data to convert conversations into automated transactions that flow directly through IMTRADER.” BusinessWire
• Rational Goes Jazz … Rational Software, a business unit at IBM, launched Jazz, a toolset to encourage and foster collaboration between software development teams. “With Jazz, all users in the development process can use role-based, best-of-breed tools with a single interface to access project data from a single repository.” ComputerWorld
• Cultural Analysis … A survey by Interwise found that office culture is the main reason why remote working is slow to take off, particularly where business managers are not willing to lead a cultural change. “Other reason for slow uptake of remote working cited in Interwise’s research were lack of enabling technologies adopted in the work environment, reluctance to give up face-to-face social interaction and management distrust of remote workers. Only half of all employees said they were equipped to work remotely, despite their views that over half of the meetings they travel to, do not need to be in-person.” Consultant News

Mobility

• iPhone = US$2245 Additional … Ouch, Matthew ran the numbers on buying and servicing an iPhone for 2 years, and derives a cost of $2245 under certain conditions. ZDNet

Productivity

• Productive / Fun Meetings … Ensure that “fun” and “humor” are used to good effect in meetings … they shouldn’t be pointless add-ons. Charlie, a meetings expert, offers some ideas on how to do so. Selling Power