From Scoble about Dan Mitchell who has a blog at www.teachnology.org covering teaching and technology, who received a cease and desist letter from an organisation that runs their site at www.teach-nology.com.
Yet another great blog, into the RSS feed reader it goes. While Dan only posts about once a week, if you are into education and technology it is worth a read he pulls together many interesting articles from around the Internet.
Just loaded up a number of photos that I took yesterday at the Melbourne Grand Prix practice day. I have also been playing with the banner on the side of the blog, now my Flickr images appear in a random order, I will see how it goes.
My post yesterday from the Grand Prix practice round made it up, but with a typo in the title. I plan to leave it there. I am in the process of uploading several other pictures to Flickr.
I am quite sad and a bit disappointed with my iPod earbuds. About two days ago while listening to Adam Curry’s DSC I started hearing static in the earbuds at certain bass level (I am not a audio expert so I might not be describing the problem correctly). Initially I thought it might have been on the podcast but no I tested a couple of other podcasts, a Midnight Oil song and yes deep base sounds now cause static in the earbuds. The really disappointing part is the iPod is only 2 months old and I have been reasonably careful with it. Normally I am very hard on technology items but I was given very clear instructions from my wife that if the iPod broke there would not be a replacement.
I searched Google but did not find any real help, iPodLounge had a similar but different issue that caused static
Another item from Trevor Cook about a very sad case of death by PowerPoint. Ok once you have read the story my pun might be a bit on the tacky side, but am currently in a project management role and the story kind of stuck a cord and no I am not suicidal 🙂
Michael from the Canadian Headhunter points to an interesting perspective from Germany on the discussion of labour shortages.
I suspect it will not pick up as a common approach.
Angus Logan pointed me to a new blog Electronic Forms from the developers of InfoView, a product that works with the Microsoft product InfoPath, I sort of referred to InfoPath on the weekend in my post on HR-XML and resumes.
The InfoView product adds a new dimension to the picture and could provide the framework for SMEs to build forms based solutions that match solutions from the large ERP vendors. On the flipside if you have an ERP solution there are numerous possible combinations on how you could connect InfoPath to your ERP, how is the so? Because of the magic of XML.
Trevor Cook as found a great opinion on family friendly workplaces via Tim Watts of the Nous Group.
I am concerned by the comments from the CEO Tim was talking to, as it seems was Tim and Trevor on how to manage the aging workforce. Gen Xs and Ys are very different to the current Baby Boomers in what drives them and what they expect from an employer. Paternalistic employers will begin to find it harder and harder to attract key talent in the future if they do not start to engage in many of the activities Tim highlights.
Many of these topics were discussed last year at AHRI’s People in Business conference. Such as how to manage when you have 3 generations in the workplace, you know when the Gen Y sitting next to you is only there 3 days week, because the other two they are running their own business in a completely different market, who’s mobile phone goes off every 5 mins with an SMS, and the IM screen buzzes as they keep contact with their social/business network. Or the Gen X’er that just wants the baby boomer in the corner office to retire so they can have their rightful place. While the baby boomer is staying in the corner office because they can no longer afford to retire. Now this is not a bad thing it is just different, and organisations need to learn how to engage with these employees.
I personally also feel that as things progress if your organisation does not present itself as a forward thinking organisation from a workplace technology point of view you will just not be able to attract Gen Y’s. This process will begin with the first contact the applicant has with your organisation, which will most likely be in an online fashion. Therefore do you track abandonment from your career’s site, maybe this should be can you? Will we need to understand why people keep arriving at your site but leaving within 10 secs and you have a very low conversion rates of visitors to job applications? There are many other examples.
Will your processes internally make is easy for employees to have a family friendly life. I know many organisations that make it extremely difficult for employees to connect back to the corporate network from home. While there is a debate that working from home is not family friendly I would far prefer to be at home to see my child and then work late at home than work late in the office and not see him. Of course in the pure sense of the term “family friendly” you really shouldn’t need to work late 🙂
Tim’s article certainly poses many great questions, which unfortunately there are not many great answers to.
Over the last few weeks I have been thinking a lot about presence. By presence I am talk about your online presence and what that means to workforce solutions. I have posted about this before but now I am seeing the whole idea pop up in several different places. The traditional area is in instant messaging, which is cool, but now all sorts of other tools have presence built in Skype, mobile phones (initially ones like a Blackberry but others will soon just listen to The Gadget show to hear more) etc.
Presence awareness when integrated into business process interesting things happen. Firstly, systems can make “intelligent” decisions based on who is available to action the next business step. Systems can become more ”event” based, such as remind Fred to approve the next step in a critical business process I know a bad example but I hope you get the idea. Alternatively time sensitive processes can automatically redirect/escalate if the first approver is not available.
Presence can also be determined via security systems (previously the old clock in clock out type tools) and more recently organisations have been trying to implement RFID to track people. Once all this data is brought together into a system two things happen, firstly we have a very powerful foundation for business process, but secondly the possibilities for poor use of the data and information aka “Big Brother” and the option for the world to become like George Orwell’s 1984.
Once we have a propagation of presence aware systems the Seven Laws of Identity become VERY important. Why because presence is a form of identity, how you feel if systems started to communicate about you and your presence either at your desk or in the office without your knowledge.
Michael Specht 