The People Part of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Tuesday Morning = Quiet Time … 300 engineers and managers at Intel are involved in a pilot program to combat information overload. “Every Tuesday morning they will all set their email and IM clients to “offline”, forward their phones to voice mail, decline all meetings, and isolate themselves from “visitors” by putting up a “Do not disturb” sign at their doorway. Thus, for half a day each week they will have the ability to focus on the “thinking work” that researchers have shown is critical to creativity, innovation, and to faster, better production of output.” IT@Intel
• Habits of Success for Teleworkers … “Any person may be able to perform their job duties at home but is this right for you? According to The Virtual Office Survival Handbook by Alice Bredin, you need to understand your working habits. You should consider your ability to: resist distractions, manage your time, set limits on work, and deal with challenges. You also need to determine if you are internally or externally motivated and if you are an over- or underachiever. Know what your virtual office skills are before you try to sell the concept to your employer.” Career Advice
• Fake Emotions … Ariane frets that IM and text messaging may lead to poorer emotional aptitude over time. “When I tried monitoring myself while instant-messaging, I found that I’ve been using words too casually. Maybe I’m overreacting and maybe I’m overanalyzing, but what if I am not? What if this is just the beginning to a generation that can no longer read each other or express its real thoughts and feelings because of an overuse of letters that don’t mean a thing. Letters that are used as fillers to conversations more than anything. It’s already difficult to read people when you are face-to-face with them seeing their reactions and analyzing their emotions. Imagine how much tougher it is when chatting online. If we add an overuse of random abbreviations and smiley faces, what will become of us in a few years?” connpost.com
• Penalizing Collaboration … Students are taught that “collaboration is wrong”, but are then expected to collaborate in the workplace. Are we training for failure or high performance?
• Less Money = More Collaboration … At least, that’s the expectation within the DoD over the next few years. “Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles Croom, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency, said Sept. 6 that the budget challenges will bring DOD components closer together. “I embrace them,” Croom said of potential budget shortfalls. “The lack of money will drive jointness. The services are never more joint than when there is a shortage of money.”” FCW

The Technology Trends of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Collaboration = Cisco’s Future … The CEO of Cisco believes that collaboration technology is a key to its future growth. InfoWorld
• Office 2.0 = Real Time … Clint rounds up the recent Office 2.0 conference, noting the importance of real-time collaboration, while essentially saying that wikis and blogs are real-time tools (hello?). eWeek
• Attensa and Clearspace … Attensa has embraced Clearspace from Jive Software for internal collaboration, and likes the results: 96% adoption and 31% reduction in email. Slideshare (Janet has some additional insights, although I don’t agree entirely with her characterization of email vs RSS.)
• Watch Out … Joshua argues that while the ideas of Office 2.0 are going to stick around, he has less faith in the staying power of current vendors. “This I believe will be the trajectory of OEW 2.0 as it evolves from the primordial corporate ooze to the top of the food chain. It will take a similar big company with similar droits de seigneur to make OEW 2.0 something the CFO can put his or her signature to. So watch what IBM, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft have to offer in coming years. Once they hit the OEW 2.0 market big time, a lot of the theory of OEW 2.0 will become reality.” ZDNet

Insights on Being Productive and Effective as an Individual

• Are You Doing the Right Work? … “In Think of Work, the 22nd episode in this series, we are going to examine the issue of professional engagement and excitement. All to often professionals are doing tolerable work for tolerable people or worse, work that they dislike for people they don’t care about. The impact of this, not only on a personal level but in the marketplace, is staggering. We will look at ways to change this in your professional life.” David Maister
• Six Sigma = Bad? … “The companies that are truly succeeding today are not the ones obsessed with squeezing the last drops of efficiency out of workers and products, but the ones that take risks and invest in research and development—free-wheeling innovators such as Apple and Google.” reportonbusiness
• 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People … Seven habits to avoid: not showing up, procrastinating the day away, working on unimportant tasks, thinking too much, seeing negatives everywhere, being closed to new ideas, and choosing information overload as a way of life. Positivity Blog