DaveBirchall.com on Business Technology

Archive for May, 2008

These images have done the rounds on various websites, so if you cant beat them join them. They are pretty self explanitory…

Tim Berners Lee is considered the founder of the internet. Whilst some businesses are still grapling with how web 2.0 can work for your business. TBL (among others) has a vision for Web 3.0 and beyond. Whilst this can seem a pipe dream to some, bear in mind my previous post about the accelerated pace of chance and processing power thought to be available to us in the future.

The implications of this change included a shift in the way we think about our software applications. Its argued that by including the necessary metadata we are preparing ourselves for the next level of connectivity.
 

Shift HappensThis one is doing the rounds on YouTube at the moment. It highlights the pace of change from a consumer perspective and the the mountain of information being generated on a daily basis.

I meant to write about this a while back but when Mx reported on the huge toll that email is taking on our workforce I wasn’t surprised.

According to their source, a British Study, the average employee does only 4 hours of work a day. The rest of the time is being spent being bombarded by various distractions, among them email is by far the worst culprit. It noted that more than a third of emails were sent less than 100m away.

This has been a topic of conversation in my workplace for a little while now. As a software development business who delivers workflow solutions to a business, we issued a directive to ignore email requiring action from out own staff unless they are also assigned through our own workflow system. This may sound a little harsh but I will attempt to explain the rational.

Firstly ,the sender of the email is too far removed from the workload of the recipient. An email is composed and sent in seconds and the recipient is left dealing with the consequences which will most likely take far longer to administer.

Then there is the matter of whether the task in question is aligned with a common goal of the team and correctly prioritized in relation to urgency and importance. If it’s not then you have to decide whether to delegate defer or ignore the task. But how often does this happen?

By contrast with even the simplest workflow system, it is easy to recognise that email inboxs can be inundated with requests for tasks that can not and should not be fulfilled.

Then there is the distraction factor. Personally I try and turn my email off for large portions of the day. Despite this I still find myself occasionally being pulled away from the task in hand to read the latest newsletter / special offer from … whoever.

To me there is a perceived notion that because the email has been sent quickly, it must be urgent. Similarly a recent study found that higher levels of stress can be found with workers who receive work emails on mobile devices beyond normal working hours. Consequently I have heard more stories of Blackberry blackouts after hours and even a recent law suite for higher rates of pay to compensate for effectively being on call 24 /7.

Email has been been popular now for over a decade now. To put it simply it hasn’t kept up with the increasing pace of business and the need to prioritise.

So what are the answers? In our case we have agreed that a request of any nature be conducted either through an outlook task request or meeting request or better still through the company workflow system.

Workflow systems are desigend to allocate the right task and resource to the right person for action at the right time. The dashboards allow a project manager to have a real time view of the progress of the initiative as it unfolds. Add to this the ability to track the task and prioritise and you can begin to get an understanding of how life could be so different.