Clash of the Titans 2020 - Peter O'Kelly
Revisiting Communication/Collaboration/Content Competition, ‘Co-opetition,’ and Culture: Opportunities for Traction Software and its Customer Community, my 2010 Traction User Group (TUG) presentation, it’s fascinating to realize how deeply the product strategies of the leading enterprise communication, collaboration, and content (3C) vendors were disrupted over the last decade.
Revisiting 3C Market Dynamics
For some high-level context setting, it’s useful to start with a review of some market dynamics that disrupted all enterprise 3C vendors over the last decade.
Revisiting the list of market dynamics enabling 3C optimization in 2010:
- The target for contextual applications shifted from PCs to smartphones and tablets, and that, from a 3C perspective, typically meant reverting to basics such as email and chat apps along with file attachments.
Slack and other 3C startups were able to build momentum against the enterprise 3C incumbents in part by starting with relatively simple mobile apps (with backend services usually hosted on AWS).
- Social content and social networking didn’t go according to the c2010 “Enterprise 2.
0” vision. Many of the wiki-focused startups faltered, and some of the market leaders were acquired and subsumed into broader product portfolios. In the consumer market, blogging and microblogging were generally disrupted by Facebook and Twitter, and many activity stream-focused enterprise offerings were similarly disrupted by the basic Internet Relay Chat (IRC) model revitalized by Slack.
- The XML information architecture that was gaining momentum in 2010, despite developer grumblings about its complexity (with XML Schema, XQuery, etc.
), was disrupted by the advent of JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). JSON had already been around for nearly a decade by 2010, and XML hasn’t been completely vanquished, but JSON’s growth during the last decade has led to some major information architecture disruption.
- The integrated work and personal tools I described in 2010 did not, for a variety of reasons, come to fruition.
Apple’s Messages and FaceTime apps are popular for people using Apple devices outside of work, for example, but they often aren’t practical in the mixed-platform enterprise world. Microsoft Teams was another surprise in this context, rushed to market in late 2016 to compete with Slack and still mostly limited, by mid-2020, to intra-enterprise 3C needs.
- The “software + services shift” described in the 2010 presentation was also disruptive.
While Google G Suite has been a cloud-based offering from the start, it took Microsoft many years to transition from the basic Exchange Online and SharePoint Online services in its early BPOS suite to its current Microsoft 365 product family. In the meantime, startups such as Basecamp, Slack, and Trello leveraged the “mobile-first, cloud-first” transition to build large customer communities.
Tumultuous Titanic Transitions
Turning to a review of the 3C product portfolios of the vendors highlighted in the 2010 TUG presentation, I’ll follow the same sequence (IBM, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and Cisco) and briefly address some of today’s market leaders that likely weren’t on the 2010 enterprise short list (or didn’t exist then).
IBM had an exceptionally difficult decade.
The IBM Notes/
IBM quietly sold nearly all its 3C products to HCL in 2019.
Microsoft’s 3C journey has also been a bit bumpy over the last ten years, but it has been far more responsive to changing market conditions than IBM was, and it had the financial resources to make massive cloud platform investments that IBM couldn’t match.
SharePoint’s shrinking role was one of the biggest changes in Microsoft’s 3C portfolio since 2010.
SharePoint was relegated to more of a supporting role by the time of the 2015 Microsoft Ignite conference, coincident with the launch of Office 365 Groups and with emphasis on newer Office apps such as Delve, but the SharePoint customer and partner communities remained committed, and a year later, at the 2016 Ignite conference, SharePoint was again back at the center of the Microsoft collaboration and content strategy.
A mere five weeks after the 2016 Ignite conference, however, Microsoft essentially threw away some SharePoint-centric parts of its 2016 Ignite script with the surprising introduction of Microsoft Teams, which became known as Microsoft’s “Slack killer.
Google also had a bit of a bumpy enterprise 3C experience during the last ten years.
Like IBM, Google also had more strategic business challenges to address, especially Facebook’s rapid growth in the digital advertising domain.
With Google appearing a bit ambivalent about its G Suite business and Microsoft hitting its stride with Office 365 (later renamed Microsoft 365), Microsoft was able to regain some competitive ground lost to Google earlier in the decade.
Soltero was previously a Microsoft Office Corporate VP, having joined Microsoft when the company acquired Acompli (of which Soltero was co-founder and CEO) to create Outlook Mobile.
Overall, despite some detours and missteps over the years, Google now appears to be poised for resurgence in the enterprise 3C market.
Oracle and Cisco, the last two “titans” highlighted in my 2010 TUG presentation, both had experiences more like IBM’s than Microsoft’s or Google’s.
Cisco had an even more difficult decade.
Some Enterprise 3C Disruptors
If I were to present a similar enterprise 3C “titan” presentation today, Atlassian would follow Microsoft, Google, and Slack, in terms of overall enterprise 3C importance.
In addition to Jira, Atlassian became a leading wiki platform competitor with its Confluence platform, introduced in 2004, and Confluence has remained a popular collaboration and content solution while other early commercial wiki platform vendors (e.
Atlassian was also an early enterprise chat competitor with HipChat, and later launched Stride, a more advanced Slack competitor, but subsequently opted for a strategic partnership with (and investment in) Slack in 2018 and retired its own chat products.
Atlassian also acquired Trello in 2017, expanding its project and task management portfolio.
Slack, of course, was arguably the biggest 3C disruptor of the last ten years.
Salesforce is another major enterprise vendor with a strong 3C value proposition.
Zoom is also well-positioned as a future enterprise 3C titan, of course.
As a final titan-level vendor note, Amazon has been primarily mentioned in reference to AWS so far in this post, but Amazon also has a variety of 3C offerings including Amazon Chime for voice and video meetings, Amazon WorkDocs for file storage and sharing, and Amazon WorkMail for enterprise messaging.
Amazon also faces a classic “co-opetition” conundrum, however, in that most of the 3C apps/
Traction: Still the Collaborative Hypertext Journaling System Pioneer
A decade after my 2010 TUG presentation, I continue to believe Traction TeamPage best exemplifies the hypertext 3C potential that industry legends including Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and Andy van Dam envisioned more than fifty years ago.
Although Traction is still a relatively small vendor, its sustained focus on substantive customer solutions and ongoing refinement of its platform make it a vendor to consider for all organizations seeking to benefit from the transition to the types of contextual activities that remain central to the overall 3C value proposition.
Related
- Clash of the Titans - Peter O'Kelly at TUG 2010 - Transcript, video, slides, and related posts
- 12-15 Oct 2010 | Fifth Annual Traction User Group Meeting, TUG 2010 Newport - On Observable Work
- The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style - Understand how TeamPage connects people and their work.
- Original Traction Product Proposal - TeamPage: A hypertext journal.
Product proposal and references
Clash of the Titans - Peter O'Kelly at TUG 2010
I'm happy to present a transcript and quotes from Peter O'Kelly's TUG 2010 talk Communication /
Peter's TUG 2010 talk was based on both his experience and his lively interest in hypertext and compound/
"Hypertext is simply a better form-follows function fit (than print-centric approaches) for the way people actually think and work.
Compound documents facilitate focusing more on information work than on disparate technologies and tools, and foster more effective content management. Interactive document models are used to automatically and unobtrusively offer supplemental resources and actions in context, providing opportunities to more effectively leverage tools and metadata without disruptive context shifts. "
In his TUG 2010 talk, Peter outlines a 25 year view on what he calls a 3C framework: Communication, Collaboration, and Content.
Using this 3C framework, Peter analyzes the history and culture of competing titans: Lotus /
Peter O'Kelly 1:54 I'm going to talk about the Battle of the Titans that's going on right now because there's a very intense platform versus focused or best of breed, player kind of battle going on right now.
Then I'll talk about where I see Traction fitting in and talk about a few cultural considerations. It's interesting for me, especially having been involved with Notes going back to the late 1980s. It's interesting to hear, these are perennial challenges, the sorts of things we've been discussing this morning. Peter O'Kelly 2:22 So I'll try and share some good news.
And again, bad news on that. And then discussion, my guess is we're going to run a little bit short on time because we're going to be hungry. So for discussion, I'm going to be around through lunch through the clambake tonight and also be around tomorrow afternoon because things they want to go into more detail on. Peter O'Kelly 2:38 So: a very brief history of 3C.
See the crux of this slide is this stuff's not new. People have been doing this for a long time. It's sort of good once in a while to stand back and say, really, why are we doing this, what we're doing this in order to get things done, we can get very creative about definitions of words like communication, collaboration and content, but ultimately the measure of this has to be 'Is it useful for getting work done?' Does it help people work together more effectively, as we've discussed this morning. From my view content, it's interesting if you do look up things in the dictionary once in a while I consider it procrasti-research to go out and check them. . . Peter O'Kelly 3:52 It's a lot easier these days because people understand as you mentioned, you should do this you may be on your way to Guantanamo or you might just be unemployed.
You know, you don't want to be the one who has problems with information, governments regulatory compliance. And again, everybody is just incredibly burdened for effective time and attention management, both at work and in things we do outside of work as well. So with that, one of the things are just again on a brief history on this tip of the hat to Vannevar Bush - some people say Vannevar Bush - as well. I'm sure many of you have been in the Traction community for a long time understand 65 years ago, in July 1945 there was this seminal article in The Atlantic Monthly ‘As We May Think’ there's a link behind this you can go look at as well if you want to check it out. I'm pretty sure he was from another planet because he was so prescient on what he was able to deliver he in turn influenced Doug Engelbart and it just kind of went from there with Andy van Dam, Alan Kay a bunch of others. Peter O'Kelly 4:51 It's we've been doing this for a while.
Another one that's kind of interesting is with Plato, which doesn't get a lot of air play in this. The Plato group had it 50th anniversary as well, and Ray Ozzie's down there. So Plato begat Plato Notes, VAX Notes, Lotus Notes other things, again, you see a very long term history of this. And it was interesting, then a couple of points this morning, the idea of conceptual models or using models of working with these things have has come up. And I think the products that have lasted the longest, the ones that have been most influential are ones that had a really clear sense of what they were trying to accomplish. And I'll come back to that later on in a comment about Traction. Peter O'Kelly 5:32 One of the things that's kind of challenging about this space is marketing people tend to get very creative.
So for some vendors, everything is about communication. Collaboration is a subset of communication, Eg Cisco thinks everything's about communication. For others, communication is a subset of collaboration, very squishy, and you're using common names and synonyms and not being clear on it. So one of the things I found is useful is to start with just a vendor and product independent framework that says, what are we talking about and how these pieces fit together. Peter O'Kelly 6:00 Very briefly communication is just about the transmission of information from point A to point B.
That's it usually comes in different communication channels, items and channels. Collaboration is joint purposeful work. It usually happens in workspaces with shared artifacts. Everybody gets it that communication is that is asynchronous communication. emails, the biggest one there I'd argue are blogs, and some NNTP or Usenet style discussion forums are also communication channels. Most people understand real time or synchronous communication is dominated by telephony and instant messaging, web conferencing for synchronous collaboration, most people understand that probably at least participated in web conferences and things like Live Meeting, and WebEx. Peter O'Kelly 6:44 But this last one, which is central to what we're talking about today, is the asynchronous collaboration.
That's sort of the wild frontier for a lot of people still so you've got document libraries, lists, wikis, workspace based discussion forums, I think that's the one that's least mature in the market right now. Peter O'Kelly 7:00 It also turns out to be one that has an incredible return on investment if you play it well.
So I'm just putting this framework up here, because I'm going to come back in a couple minutes and talk about IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, Google, and we are going to eat lunch at about 12:30!
What about Traction TeamPage?
See the live live Otter.
Other titans were similarly riding off madly in all directions.
Peter O'Kelly TUG 2010 transcript
Peter O'Kelly TUG 2010 video
See also
Related
- 12-15 Oct 2010 | Fifth Annual Traction User Group Meeting, TUG 2010 Newport - On Observable Work
- October 2006 | Burton Group Report - Hypertext and Compound/
Interactive Document Models - More Observable Work - Transcribing Jim McGee's TUG 2010 Keynote - Transcript, video, slides, and related posts
- Enterprise 2.
0 and Observable Work - "Invisibility is an accidental and little-recognized characteristic of digital knowledge work" - Original Traction Product Proposal - TeamPage: A hypertext journal.
Product proposal and references - Traction Roots - Doug Engelbart - ".
. . three primary knowledge domains: intelligence, dialog records, and knowledge product"
More Observable Work - Transcribing Jim McGee's TUG 2010 Keynote
Working from home like much of the world, I thought it would be a good time to try out a new tool to transcribe Jim McGee's Doing and Managing Knowledge Work TUG 2010 keynote.
Jim and Jon spun out the value of 'observable work' in blog posts from 2002 through 2010.
"One thing that differentiates knowledge work today from other craft work is that, except for final product, knowledge work is essentially invisible.
All the important stuff takes place inside knowledge workers's heads. This has not always been true of knowledge work and need not be true. . . One unintended consequence of today's technology environment is to make the process of knowledge work less visible just when we need it to be more so.
The end products of knowledge work are already highly refined abstractions; a financial analysis, project plan, consulting report, or article. Today, the evolution from germ of an idea through intermediate representations and false starts to finished product exists, if at all, as a series of morphing digital representations and ephemeral feedback interactions. "
In 2010 Jon wrote:
"In the pre-industrial era, education and work were: Observable, connected
In the post-industrial era, they are: Non-observable, disconnected"
I don’t think the notion of visible work or observable work is new: mentoring, apprenticeship, and letting trusted folk watch, learn and use what they see on their own is how law, medicine and other professions were originally taught and refined as collaborative practices - and it's still so today.
I believe that principles of open, observable work – like open book financial reporting to employees – is a simple and powerful principle that people at every level of an organization can become comfortable using.
Jim's opening keynote set the stage
Jim McGee 18:14
I had an insight many years ago when I was trying to understand why it was that we weren't seeing take up of the system, the knowledge management systems we were deploying.What was, why weren't we getting knowledge sharing? Why wasn't it happening? And what I realized in the shower one morning, where all best ideas occur, I got it. I knew who the lazy SOB was, wasn't doing the share. It was me six months ago. Jim McGee 18:49
I wasn't sharing with myself.I wasn't paying attention to what I needed to do when I did it. And so I couldn't I couldn't find my own work. And I can't find In my own work and on the other knowledge workers in your organization can't find their own work. Jim McGee 19:27
And the sharing takes places, the sharing if you look at the social dimension of knowledge sharing in most organizations, it all starts with a conversation or a phone call.You never find anything useful going directly into the knowledge management system. Never. You always find something useful talking to someone who will point you to - and we keep thinking of that as a bug, not a feature. Jim McGee 19:59
But that's really the only way it's going to work.
Jim used a two dimensional diagram to show artifacts of work, with individual to socially constructed artifacts shown vertically, and informal to formally structured artifacts shown on the horizontal axis.
Jim McGee 31:13
So if you get if you get too focused on deliverables you lose sight of what sort of what comes after the deliverable, which is the decision or the action.So, but you start with deliverables and you start making you start tracking and you keep you pay attention. Jim McGee 31:28
But the next piece is then you move back to a concept that I learned back in my days when I had to work in an auditing firm.I was a consultant, but it was it was Arthur Andersen and they wanted all of us to pretend that we knew something about auditing. I actually had to go into a vault once and literally count stock certificates and bond certificates as part of an audit. Jim McGee 32:05
But one of the brilliant things that auditors did is they created this notion of working papers.They were all paper that but you know all of the documents and memos in the in the intermediate products that they worked with along the way to get to the. . . Cause the deliverable for an auditor was it was a two page letter. Right? Jim McGee 32:27
And in fact, 90% of that two page letter was strict boilerplate.So what they needed to do in order to justify it to themselves and to their clients, but they needed to, they needed to be able to demonstrate what work had gone into creating a deliverable. We reviewed this many accounts, we sent these letters out to, you know, shareholders, we did X we did Y we ran this analysis, we found that and so this notion of working papers is a useful one to recover and to think in terms of as you do the work work you're doing is to think in terms of the intermediate products because the intermediate products are the ones where real reuse is going to be possible. . . Jim McGee 33:42
Okay, now I got to source the data differently, but the analytic piece still holds.Now if it's buried in a deliverable I can't I can't find it. So you know, I can I you know, what, what you'll do if you're if your knowledge system is only working with deliverables is you go in, you open up a bunch of deliverables and you skim through it, you look for the graph, and then you try, then you hope you can find the particular analyst who did the work. Jim McGee 34:10
Because, you know, damn well the partner doesn't understand what went into the analysis and track that individual down and say, you know, Mary, what, how was it that you did that? Right? And what was the creative? So, you know, I think the next piece of this, you know, to attack is going after work again, creating those intermediate objects and making those visible with tags, nothing, nothing exotic.
Jim McGee 34:39
You just, you want to be able to find them when you need them.And give a little bit of thought to that. And eventually, you know, I think we're gonna get back to capturing scraps of ideas and notions and whatnot. I saw over there. I Oh, and I always have paper on, you know, little notebook in my pocket, just because you I'm old enough, if I don't capture it, if that idea comes, it's going in a hurry. If I don't get it as it goes by, it's never coming back. Jim McGee 35:15
And so you do those and then and then the other thing that I've learned with you that you then have to write it down a second time.If to take a little note and you have to read the note and reconstruct what you were thinking when you wrote the note. Right? And if you do that within 24 hours that usually works. If you wait 48 hours, it's -- I can't actually I can't read my handwriting after about 72 hours.
Traditional notes and working papers have been limited to textual documents or playable media files.
Otter.ai and Observable Work
Otter.
I ran across Otter.ai on Twitter based on it's review in TechRadar's Best speech to text software in 2020: Free, paid and online voice recognition apps and services:
Otter is a cloud-based speech to text program especially aimed for mobile use, such as on a laptop or smartphone.
The app provides real-time transcription, allowing you to search, edit, play, and organize as required. Otter is marketed as an app specifically for meetings, interviews, and lectures, to make it easier to take rich notes.
However, it is also built to work with collaboration between teams, and different speakers are assigned different speaker IDs to make it easier to understand transcriptions. There are three different payment plans, with the basic one being free to use and aside from the features mentioned above also includes keyword summaries and a wordcloud to make it easier to find specific topic mentions.
You can also organize and share, import audio and video for transcription, and provides 600 minutes of free service. [per month] The Premium plan comes in at $8.
33 per month when paid annually, and on top of existing features also includes advanced and bulk export options, the ability to sync audio from Dropbox, additional playback speeds including the ability to skip silent pauses. The Premium plan also allows for up to 6,000 minutes of speech to text. [per month] The Teams plan comes in at $12.
50 per user for a minimum of three users, and also adds two-factor authentication, user management and centralized billing, as well as user statistics, voiceprints, and live captioning.
I experimented several alternatives, including the Otter.
Otter.
Otter.
Cloud based speech to text software has become a lively market, but based on its charm as a personal note taking App that spans all of my Apple devices - including Siri and my Apple watch - and its utility when importing audio or video files for transcription, Otter.
Jim McGee TUG 2010 Keynote transcript
Jim McGee TUG 2010 Keynote video
See also
Related
Enterprise 2.0 and Observable Work
I really like Jim McGee's Jun 23, 2010 blog post Managing the visibility of knowledge work.
"The Importance of visibility in craft work Almost by definition, the final product, process, and intermediate stages of craft work are visible.
Jim continues with an exceptional analysis of what he calls "Knowledge work today as invisible craft"
"One unintended consequence of today's technology environment is to make the process of knowledge work less visible just when we need it to be more so.
Two connections sprang to mind (and I didn't need a hyperlink to divert my attention - mea culpa):
1) Jon Udell's April 2009 talk at the April 2009 Open Education Conference.
"In the pre-industrial era, education and work were: Observable, connected
In the post-industrial era, they are: Non-observable, disconnected"
Jon notes that only recently have work processes become network observable, and that this was rare in practice for all but software people.
2) Thomas Stewart in his book The Wealth of Knowledge (and my personal experience working on projects at the Naval Research Laboratory many years ago).
"A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard," said Herman Melville's Ishmael; when it came to learning my job, circulating correspondence was mine.
I don’t think the notion of visible work or observable work is new: mentoring, apprenticeship, and letting trusted folk watch, learn and use what they see on their own is how law, medicine and other professions were originally taught and refined as collaborative practices - and it's still so today.
"With e-mail, word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation tools, maintaining visibility of your knowledge work (at both the individual and workgroup level) requires mindful effort.
I believe that Enterprise 2.
Enterprise 2.0 and Observable Work: Brian Tullis and Joe Crumpler, Burton Group Catalyst 2010 Santa Diego
Brian Tullis and Joe Crumpler did a lively talk on Enterprise 2.
12-15 Oct 2010 | Fifth Annual Traction User Group Meeting, TUG 2010 Newport
Wed 13 Oct 2010 will feature an opening keynote by Jim McGee followed by a TeamPage update by Chris Nuzum CTO and co-founder of Traction Software, a talk by Attivio VP of Engineering Rik Tamm-Daniels, customer stories, and a closing keynote by Jon Udell.
The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style
Understand how TeamPage connects people and their work.
The important requirement is making tasks, projects, pages, discussions and other work products first class sharable, named objects that can be connected to each other and what you're working on, discussed, tagged, tasked, and navigated as well as found using search.
Traction Roots - Doug Engelbart
Like much modern thought on collaborative work, I'd trace the origins of Observable Work back much further than 2002 - to Douglas Engelbart, starting with his Augment/NLS project in 1968.
"A result of this continuous knowledge process is a dynamically evolving knowledge base as shown in Figure-7 below, consisting of three primary knowledge domains: intelligence, dialog records, and knowledge products (in this example, the design and support documents for a complex product).
Intelligence Collection: An alert project group, whether classified as an A, B, or C Activity, always keeps a watchful eye on its external environment, actively surveying, ingesting, and interacting with it.
Dialog Records: Responding effectively to needs and opportunities involves a high degree of coordination and dialog within and across project groups.
Knowledge Product: The resulting plans provide a comprehensive picture of the project at hand, including proposals, specifications, descriptions, work breakdown structures, milestones, time lines, staffing, facility requirements, budgets, and so on.
Figure-7:: The CODIAK process -- collaborative, dynamic, continuous.
Figure 7 itemizes the evolving knowledge base within three categories: (1) Dialog Records: memos, status reports, meeting minutes, decision trails, design rationale, change requests, commentary, lessons learned, (2) External Intelligence: articles, books, reports, papers, conference proceedings, brochures, market surveys, industry trends, competition, supplier information, customer information, emerging technologies, new techniques (3) Knowledge Products: proposals, plans, budgets, legal contracts, milestones, time lines, design specs, product descriptions, test plans and results, open issues.
from 'Toward High-Performance Organizations: A Strategic Role for Groupware' Douglas C.
Ineffective meetings - Here's an answer
Are you are a business owner, executive or senior manager? Then you’ve experienced the good, the bad and the ugly of management meetings.
Management meetings are the heartbeat of any business and are in place to keep teams productive, accountable and focused.
Meetings are the primary channel for communication and goal alignment throughout the business. If you and your teams are dissatisfied with the quality of your meetings, then you are fortunate enough to have a giant improvement opportunity in your business, with low implementation cost and high reward.
When you think about it, the actions that come out of your meetings are the smallest unit of improvement of your business.
The rate at which you and your teams close tasks is the real rate of improvement of your business. It is a measure of engagement and agility. Tasks matter.
The Pain
Your meetings hurt you? You’re not alone… Our customers vary in size and maturity.
Invariably, meetings are essential and if they are inefficient or serve no purpose, then they carry a hidden cost to the business.
Our Customers have this to share
When asked the question, How has impi! and our technology, TeamPage, changed your meetings? This is what some of our customers had to say:
David Walker, Director at Common Architecture
"The TeamPage Meeting module gives us a dynamic way of managing actions that come out of our meetings.
Actions can be given a due date and assigned to different team members.In addition to the task title, there is also space to record more information needed to complete the meeting task.
To ensure that our meetings are purposeful, our decisions are also recorded when we log the meeting actions.
Overdue actions from previous meetings stand out so that we only review by exception.Actions that have been completed since the previous meeting are visible and are reviewed during the meeting as well.
We use TeamPage to manage our design projects as well and it is useful to be able to attach meeting actions to our various projects.
Overall, it’s a really great tool that helps us record our meetings quickly and reduces the risk of forgetting our commitments from previous meetings.
Anton Claassens, Finance Director at Conversation LAB
"We have been able to stick to the rhythm"
Since engaging with impi!, we have been reminded on the value that effective meetings deliver to businesses.
Our meetings have therefore been more regular as a result…we have been able to stick to the rhythm.
Our discipline inside our meetings has also improved by sticking to the allocated time for agenda items and moving other ‘non-agenda’ items outside of our meetings.We are keeping it focused and productive.
By using TeamPage, our task and decision management is easier during meetings and having our agenda automatically generated each time we open a session has been handy.There is no need to spend time writing minutes after the meeting, everything is captured live on TeamPage.
Thomas Cogdell, Knowledge Coordinator at Athens Group
"It used to take us 2-3 days to consolidate information for our monthly quality meetings.
We began using TeamPage in 2009, as a document management system for Quality Management, our Industry Knowledge Base and our Training Curriculum.Essentially this served as our company Intranet.
We later added other TeamPage & impi! solutions to track, manage and document our onsite QMS activities.The Nonconformity & Corrective Action solutions are examples.
We have been able to build links into our meeting space to gain direct access to our QMS documentation and reports immediately during our meetings.We review and log comments on our reports in a liveenvironment during the meeting so we don’t need to go back and make adjustments to our reports after the meeting nor do we have to create meeting minutes. Our meetings have become more efficient since.
It used to take us 2-3 days to consolidate information for our monthly quality meetings.
With TeamPage & impi! it takes us 5 minutes.
Our Solution
Through observation and experimentation with our customers, we have identified 6 aspects that are critical to running effective meetings within your business.
In addition to these critical aspects, we also advise our customers to make use of digital platforms for their meetings.
We, and our customers, use our technology platform, TeamPage, to support all of our key business processes including our management meetings.
Together, through discipline and repetition, we have broken through our own pain barriers and have gained maximum value and enjoyment from our meetings.
Originally published on Impi! blog, see Welcome to impi! for more.
The parable of the four unfit friends
In this article we tell the parable of four friends and some of their life choices.
Four unfit friends make a decision for change
Amelia, Bradley, Charmelle and Dimba became friends at university and over the years kept in contact.
Amelia had friends, the Jones's, who had built a gym in their mansion.
Bradley superficially considered joining the gym but when he saw the annual subscription cost he told his friends: "this gym thing is quite expensive and if you can't show me an immediate return, I'm not interested".
Charmelle and Dimba decided to join the gym.
Dimba kept going and joined another group at the gym who shared coaching sessions.
Seven years later
Seven years later, Amelia sold her machines on the internet for 20% of the purchase value.
Bradley, well, Bradley is in Stage 2 lung cancer.
Charmelle is not too happy with her fitness level, but she occasionally attends a few classes of pilates or Zumba or anything trendy.
Dimba ran his first half-marathon four years ago, three marathons last year and is currently training with his new friends for the Ironman in Holland this summer.
Four unfit organisations make different strategic choices
So what does the story of Amelia, Bradley, Charmelle and Dimba mean for businesses?
Every organisation moves along a life cycle curve and in the various stages they will experience normal maturity problems but also abnormal ones that they need to manage.
Amelia represents organisations that embark in ISO9001 certification for the wrong reason: their customers are demanding it.
ISO 9001 is designed to support the drive for organisations to be profitable through sustained customer satisfaction.
- Tell me how you run your business;
- show me how you run your business and;
- if what you show me is different from what you tell me, then show me how you are improving your business.
.
Bradley represents Execs in organisations whose drive to change is lower than the perceived cost of change.
Charmelle represents the Execs in many organisations with a disconnect between the strategy and its implementation.
Dimba represents Execs that have established a vision for their organisation and understand the need to develop healthy leadership habits that bring about transformation.
A call for action
impi! is to organisations what the gym is to people: an enabler for transformation.
The Execs make a decision to change.
Related
Introducing impi! - Pierre Bienvenüe - founder of impi Business Improvement Solutions Pty
impi! What's in the name? What's in the logo? - Discipline and creativity
Aug 2018 | TeamPage ISO 9001:2015 Solution adds integrated Risk and Improvement Project Management
impi! and TeamPage Reduce Administration of Document Control
In this article we build a case for using TeamPage and impi! wiki templates to save administrative time for document control and support the intent of ISO9001:2015 to distribute the responsibility of the Quality Management System to the leadership of the organisation.
In 2018, Impi Development engaged in business development talks with a manufacturing company in the Durban area.
In May 2019, Pierre enquired with Liezel Eksteen, Quality Assurance (QA) manager at CounterPoint Trading (cpttrading.
CounterPoint was successfully accredited for the ISO 9001 Quality Management System in April 2019.
Technical benefit of using TeamPage.
The moderation capability allows for wider collaborative content change, but easy content control and monitoring.
The audit trail records all changes – not just edits – including tag changes, publish /
Systemic benefit of using impi!
The organisation of the documentation in a wiki type, access to a multitude of standard templates and the use of signature requirements makes it easy for process owners to take procedural responsibilities.
So the time that Liezel saves in non-value activities that the Durban QA manager still performs manually makes up for a large share of the cost of the annual licensing for TeamPage/
Related
Introducing impi! - Pierre Bienvenüe - founder of impi Business Improvement Solutions Pty
Jun 2016 | ISO 9001:2015 Requirements Met By impi! Solutions - Meeting ISO 9001:2015 requirements using the impi! model
impi! What's in the name? What's in the logo? - Discipline and creativity
Dec 2016 | Business Process Improvement with impi!, Plug-in extensions, TeamPage improvements
How to create a simplified custom front page for TeamPage
The other day, I helped a Japanese IT Support company build a client support site with TeamPage.
Their main request was to make the top page ("front page") of TeamPage simple as possible to be more welcoming and prevent clients from being confused.
In this blog post, I will briefly introduce how I did the customizations using a TeamPage plug-in developed and delivered to the company.
How? Why TeamPage?
Let me introduce how TeamPage allow us to build a client support site with private and public spaces.
A "space" is like a "room" in a TeamPage building.
- A client can not enter the private rooms for the other clients.
- Internal support staff including the administrators can enter all rooms.
For example, the support requests, on-site remedy schedules, and the other articles and comments posted in the "Client A" room are allowed to be viewed by Client A only.
On the other hand, the internal staff has a high level overview of everything.
The company decided to start using TeamPage to build their support site because they had found Teampage as the best tool to manage the information security, track the latest situation for all clients, and research support records posted in the past by search.
Why We Simplify The Top Page
The top page before customization had the following interface.
- There were 3 green buttons, "Inquiry Form for PC", "Request via Phone", and "Request via Email".
- The buttons were embedded in an article and I put the article on the top page.
- The buttons were embedded in an article and I put the article on the top page.
- The blue button "Go To Members' Page" was supposed to lead a client to his/
her private space. - The New Articles section showed the 5 newest article so that people could catch what was going on quickly on the top page.
- The Customer Information section showed the 5 newest articles with the "Customer Information" tag so that the internal staff can take a look quickly on the top page.
I thought this was simple enough and sufficiently refreshing, but my customer wanted me to simplify more and more.
- Let the clients understand "Go to the membership page first" and do not allow them to do other operations on the top page.
- Add attractive graphics including a fancy character.
The top page with text and buttons does not look inviting and may turn off the clients.
TeamPage has lots of links and buttons on the page.
It's designed to be flexible.
I think this might be because of the difference of the educations in the U.
How to customize
Okay.
Hiding the unnecessary parts
First of all, I had to hide unnecessary tabs and buttons as much as possible.
Home icon on the top-left
The "home" icon for returning to the top page is unnecessary on the top page because you are supposed to be already on the top page.
.view-home #loc .loc-home {
display: none;
}The stylesheet can be set on the "Design" dialog or Proteus Custom JavaScript & CSS plug-in.
Setup and Invite menus
The "Setup" menu shows up only when a user logs in to TeamPage as an administrator.
The "Invite" menu shows up only when a user logs in to TeamPage with a user account with the "Invite" permission.
Tabs
The tabs in the header bar is a frequently-used navigation In TeamPage.
The tabs may be unnecessary for clients who are not familiar with TeamPage, but they are convenient and powerful navigation for those who are accustomed to TeamPage (such as administrators).
So, I decided to set up "to hide the tabs for clients and display the tabs for administrators".
The plugin-in that I recently created for this purpose is Set Special Class(es) to The HTML Body Tag plug-in which checks whether a logged-in user account belongs to a specific group and adds a special class(es) to the HTML <body> tag.
I set it up to add class="is-admin" to the <body> tag if a logged-in user belongs to the administrator group.
This allows me to display the tabs to the administrators only with the following stylesheet.
body:not(.is-admin) #sect-nav {
display: none;
}Sidebar
Hide/Show Side Column plug-in, which is installed by default, has an option which allows users to select collapse (hide) or expand (show) the sidebar by default.
Sections
I disabled the sections in [Server Settings] > [Front page] configuration page.
Coloring the notification badge
The notification badge tells you the number of your notifications.
.
It was also easy to color the badge red.
.menu-notifications .notifications-count {
background-color: crimson;
}A Fancy Character
I asked a web designer in the IT Support company to draw an image of the top page with a fancy character.
TeamPage has (1) the "Embed Content" plug-in which allows me to put any HTML code in an article and (2) the "Dashboard" capability which allows me to display a specific article(s) on the top page.
However, it turned out that there was a problem.
The "Members' Page" means "the dashboard page in the client's private space".
So I created a special small plug-in that checks the private space of a logged-in user and put the space name into the destination URL.
Each client user is supposed to have the read permission in his/
<!--- Create a comma-separated list of the spaces where the user has the read permission,
and put it into the "readableSpaces" variable. -->
<var.set name="readableSpaces">
<projects.read>
__project.name__
<loop.last not>,</loop.last>
</projects.read
</var.set>
<!--- Create a list of the public spaces
and put it into the "publicSpaces" variable. -->
<var.set name="publicSpaces">Bulletin,FAQ,Forum</var.set>
<!--- Check each space in the list.
If a space is in the public spaces list, do nothing. -->
<foreach list="${readableSpaces}">
<compare.contains "${publicSpaces}" "__foreach.current__">
<!--- Ignore! -->
<else>
<!--- Draw the blue button. -->
<a href="/traction#/dashboard&proj=__foreach.current__">Members' Page</a>
</compare.contains>
</foreach>The programming language for TeamPage customization is called "SDL" (Skin Develop Language).
After customization
Ta-da! Finally, the top page customizations are done.
The IT Support company liked the simplified face of the top page.
Summary
On the standard front page of TeamPage, you can arrange sections such as "New Articles" and "New Tasks" like a newspaper, or you can put a specific article on it like a poster.
In addition, you can change the landing page from the front page (the team-shared dashboard) to your own page.
Using JavaScript, CSS, and TeamPage's SDL programming language makes it possible to further customize.
The TeamPage plug-in architecture makes it simple to install the customization, and allows the company to install new TeamPage updates without having to re-install the plug-in.
One of the IT Support company said: "It was surprising and inspiring to me to know that TeamPage has such wonderful flexibilities and possibilities.
If you are interested in customizing TeamPage, please feel free to contact us.
Related articles
Working Across Boundaries .
The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style .
お客様が迷わない！スッキリ簡潔なトップページのカスタマイズ例 Japanese language version of this blog post, on the Traction Software Japanese Business Office website.
Why, How and What of the impi Standard Meeting Plug-in for TeamPage
The new impi! Standard Meeting Plug-in for TeamPage enables easier, faster and more accurate minute taking for recurring meetings which agenda is standardized.
The task is the unit of continuous improvement and the MBU meeting the delivery forum
In a Lean enterprise, the unit of continuous improvement is the task or action.
Visual management is not restricted to a wall. TeamPage provides electronic visual management
However, for MBUs where the nature of the standard meetings is more systemic or strategic, tasks become more complex and numerous.
The Standard Meeting Plug-in leverages the capability of TeamPage for task management and contextualizing information.
The plug-in is a productivity tool and a time saver
We researched examples of minute taking templates (some of them very complex in the Quality Assurance domain) and observed for two years the habits at CounterPoint Trading our industrial partner with whom we experiment all impi! solutions.
- The administrative information that identifies the standard meeting e.
g. meeting name, location, attendees, etc. - The Meeting profile that describes the 4 P's (Purpose, Players, Preparation and Plan - the agenda)
- General Information or Detailed minutes
- Decisions made during the meeting
- Open and closed tasks from the current meeting and open tasks from past meetings.
The resulting solution allows the team to capture on the go tasks and decisions associated to the meeting profile.
CounterPoint Trading interview
Here are the first impressions on using the plug-in from the original users at CounterPoint Trading:
How does it work?
A standard meeting is defined by its 4Ps.
A standard meetings section is configured In MBU spaces (e.
By adding a meeting profile in the meeting section, we create a container where all the meeting minutes will be collected in sequence for that particular profile
We can navigate from to the previous and next meeting directly from the current minutes.
Open tasks from past meetings are shown in the current meeting minutes
Learn More
Here is a more detailed tutorial on how to use the Standard Meeting plug-in:
Related
Introducing impi! - Pierre Bienvenüe - founder of impi Business Improvement Solutions Pty
Jun 2016 | ISO 9001:2015 Requirements Met By impi! Solutions - Meeting ISO 9001:2015 requirements using the impi! model
impi! What's in the name? What's in the logo? - Discipline and creativity
Dec 2016 | Business Process Improvement with impi!, Plug-in extensions, TeamPage improvements
impi! What's in the name? What's in the logo?
Impi is a Zulu word for any armed body of men.
Shaka's influence in improving the impi was sustained to the point that 71 years after his death, at the battle of Isandlwana in 1879, the numerically superior Zulu impi defeated the British despite a vast disadvantage in weapons technology.
Relevance to our project
impi! as a set of solutions offers a disciplined and structured approach to establishing the Business Management Systems (ISO 9001 compliant) of organisations based on continuous improvement.
So if an organisation and its employees constitute an impi, who would be the enemy? The various risks associated to operating a business and the wasteful activities embedded in the processes are the enemy.
Reference to Lean principles
Social Structure and Technical Structure of an organisation as per Paul Adler (1999).
A stunning observation of the evolution of the impi under King Shaka is the level of innovation and creativity stemming from the cultural traditions and the simultaneous increase in discipline.
A common view of organisational structures is to look at discipline and creativity as the two ends of the same structural continuum.
Long before we started building the blocks (the solutions) for impi! in 2012, we wanted to lay a foundation: a dynamic model that would help understand how a customer driven company operates.
Back in 2005, the author became a champion for the implementation of a continuous improvement programme.
Defending with the shield; attacking with the spear.
The evolution from this picture to the Core Cycle happened over the years.
Rooted in our values
As we develop a relationship with our clients, partners as well as a nascent Community Of Practice, we hope to strengthen our values and live by them:
- We care relates to the protection offered by the shield.
We care for others, the business model, the systems and processes, shareholder value, etc. - We Continuously Improve relates to the spear and carving a future for impi!, our partners and clients.
- We Contribute by defeating the enemy: risk and waste (value addition).
Revealed in the impi! logo
The impi! logo below represents the i of impi! and the exclamation mark; continuously spinning, like Deming's wheel, the PDCA cycle.
And by the way, why an "!" at the end of impi! ?
Because the impi is powerful, compelling and exciting.
Related
Welcome to impi! - an evolutionary business improvement system for the digital era.
Introducing impi! - Pierre Bienvenüe - Concepts impi! uses to build business management systems.
ISO 9001:2015 Requirements Met By impi! Solutions - ISO 9001:2015 requirements based on lessons learned working with one of my clients since July 2015 under the guidance of one of the contributors to the new version of the standard.
A Fabric, not a Platform
Apple and Google are competing to build a fabric that connects everything you own and use, working outward from the globally meshed supercomputer you carry in your pocket.
Juggling Plates
First of all, work is not all done in one place.
This isn't a bad thing:
- Nothing is ever done in one place; work is intrinsically intertwingled.
People will use their own smart phones and apps to route around omissions and ugly bumps that IT provides. - Trying to stuff all work into one big box is much, much worse: I remember the global bank whose Lotus Notes repositories spent almost all of their cycles synchronizing with each other.
- In a competitive marketplace, progress is made in fits and starts.
New apps, platforms and services are far better, cheaper and more fun to use than apps fossilized by IT for a small captive, internal audience, written and maintained by the lowest-cost outsourced bidder. - It's an opportunity for companies like Salesforce and others to build big service platforms to create cozy places for familiar activities, lowering friction and adding guardrails for guidance.
- Sharing platforms like Box, Dropbox, and Google also aspire to become platforms for work, trying to convince customers and developers to choose their platform to build cozy places for specific activities.
- But having a multitude of channels repeats the plate juggling problem if you have too many places to look when you try to get organized, see Group Chat Doesn't Suck.
The Way We're Using It Sucks
How can we make work actionable?
Actionable Work
I hope you all agree that one way to make life easier for people trying to get work done together is to make their work observable.
In an ideal world, the information you want, things you need to work with, and people who you should talk with should be just a click - or a "Hey Siri" - away.
Objects - Documents, pages, messages, tasks, discussions, and transactions need to be findable, addressable, and usable as objects of action verbs, whether than verb is an action taken using a click, API call, message to a bot, or request to an assistant like Siri.
Context - To make work actionable, you need to implicitly or explicitly identify the context of an action's reference; context itself becomes an object of actionable work.
Although this sounds like something that only a programmer would say, think about how you reference objects in a conversation: "How are we doing on the Acme Products proposal?" A human being you work with either has a pretty good idea of what you mean in some shared context, or will ask you a question to clarify.
A good reply might be "We're waiting for Chris.
Software objects have addresses or names that can identify that object in the context of some open domain like the web or a closed domain like a database.
Work Graph - Whether shown on a screen or mentioned in a relevant context, context makes objects of actionable work findable, usable, and fall readily to hand.
Work like the web - You don't need to get into arguments about the world of apps versus the work of the web so long as the underlying objects you use are addressable and usable with standard W3C protocols.
We're close to this basic interoperability using nothing more than a web browser, web standards, and web addressable services.
A Fabric, Not a Platform
Traditionally, "platform" refers to a software product with APIs used to construct or extend applications and services, like the original version of Lotus Notes.
Sharing services like Box and Dropbox began opening up their platforms to enable apps as well as people to share documents and handle closely related activities.
Platform wars - The fact that all of these services are available via the cloud makes a basic level of W3C-based interoperability possible, if not exactly easy or pleasant.
At the same time, the shift to mobile first drives adoption of bot and AI conversational interfaces since: 1) there's no room to show a long list of results or screens that look like an old fashion airplane cockpit on a mobile screen; 2) people aren't willing to put up with the clutter; 3) people feel comfortable with a conversational interface that reliably understands what they want done and asks for clarification or confirmation when appropriate.
I believe what's needed is a fabric for actionable work that lives over traditional cloud platforms and services.
Transactional and other work done inside a system of record or a selected service platform will still be done using that platform, linked from the actionable objects in the work graph using standard W3C links or vendor API services.
For example, Traction® TeamPage offers social enterprise web capabilities (summarized below) that automatically index the content of any external web reference, and make that page an actionable object which can be discussed, tasked, tagged, and searched from within TeamPage.
TeamPage permissions make it easy to define who can see and use actionable objects, expressed in the context of a business activity like Quality Management.
The work graph and its actionable objects are the right resources for bots and AI's to learn how to make what you care about effortlessly findable, easily usable, and accessible to bots and AI's you trust.
Related
From The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style
".
The upshot of the latter data structure is having all the information we need when we need it.
TeamPage Work Graph
TeamPage watches what you do, and automatically maintains two-way links and relationships as you edit, keeping an accurate version history of everything so you can easily see what changed, when, and who did what.
TeamPage's work graph automatically connects articles, comments, status messages, tasks, milestones, projects, links, shared references, and relationships stored in TeamPage to the TeamPage profile of the person who created, edited or tagged the work, along with a time stamp for the action.
This concept of a work graph is helpful in describing what TeamPage automatically creates and maintains as you work.
But what counts is how TeamPage uses its work graph model to cut clutter, make it much easier to work with people anywhere inside or outside your organization, and make files and records already in IT systems easily accessible to get work done.
The same work graph information is organized and presented two different ways: by person, or by unit of work.
Working with external and internal teams - use permission rules to clip what the work graph lets you see
TeamPage's work graph model includes permissioned access that automatically clips content to show just those work items, relationships, and search results each person is allowed to read.
This makes it simple to use TeamPage for work that can cross boundaries, linking customers, suppliers, partners and internal teams with different permissions to different business activities on the same TeamPage server.
TeamPages' work graph model allows you to put a private comment (or task) in a more private space where it's only visible to a smaller group.
Typically each external client has a private space (like separate clients of a law firm), and internal team members have a birds eye view across all clients and most or all internal spaces.
Extending the work graph to content on the public Web, Intranet pages, and siloed systems of record.
TeamPage's Social Enterprise Web enables you to share, tag, task or comment on any page your browser can see on the public Web or on your private intranet.
The Social Enterprise Web also lets you add a TeamPage share button (like Facebook or Google+ share buttons) or comment box (like Disqus) to any public or intranet Web page your organization controls.
As a bonus, the content of a page linked to TeamPage with the browser plug-in, share button, or comment box is automatically indexed for TeamPage search and drill down navigation.
The Social Enterprise Web makes pages on the public Web or your organization's intranet simple to see, share, find and connect to TeamPage tasks.
For example, add a TeamPage comment box to an Purchase order page in a Web based ERP system by adding a JavaScript snippet, and see something like this:
You can then search, share, task, tag or comment on any work item in these external systems, making live external transactions part of your TeamPage work graph, including integrated TeamPage and external content analysis, search and navigation.
More
Reinventing the Web II (2014) Why isn't the Web a reliable and useful long term store for the links and content people independently create? What can we do to fix that? Who benefits from creating spaces with stable, permanently addressable content? Who pays? What incentives can make Web scale permanent, stable content with reliable bidirectional links and other goodies as common and useful as Web search over the entire flakey, decentralized and wildly successful Web? Includes links to the 2016 Internet Archive Decentralized Web Summit and other resources.
Continuity and Intertwingled Work (2014) A level above an Internet of Things: Apple aims to deliver a seamless fabric spanning what's in your phone, tablet, car, and home, for you, your family, and trusted services at work.
Google::Apple is the new Microsoft::Apple (2016) A two player race between the most valuable and capable enterprises on earth.
Contextual Computing At Work (2013) Peter Morrison argues that the future or work isn't mobile, it's contextual: "Always-present computers, able to sense the objective and subjective aspects of a given situation, will augment our ability to perceive and act in the moment based on where we are, who we’re with, and our past experiences.
Intertwingled Work (2010) No one Web service or collection of Web servers contain everything people need, but we get along using search and creative services that link content across wildly different sources.
Enterprise 2.
Introducing impi! - Pierre Bienvenüe
I'm happy to introduce Pierre Bienvenüe, founder of impi Business Improvement Solutions Pty, a South African business improvement firm and TeamPage solution partner since 2012.
Pierre Bienvenüe writes: Since 2012, the trigger to develop impi! was primarily the realisation that mid-size companies couldn’t afford quality improvement programmes à la TRACC, 20-Keys, Mission Directed Workteam or BMGI offering.
Additionally, for a few years now we have experienced the convergence of Quality Assurance and Continuous Improvement.
Why choosing mid-size companies? Their systems are usually less mature than that of large corporations and therefore, the implementation of an IT system underpinning the BMS wouldn’t usually clash with legacy systems.
A few concepts to build a business management system
impi! is applying the Lean tools and techniques other programmes offer (and probably not as well due to my limited experience and resources to develop the content).
1.
The question here is how to ensure that improvement results in standardisation and standardisation in sustainability.
Another tension exists between the daily operation (immediate) and its systemic improvement (essential).
My response to the two challenges is:
- A dynamic business model, the Core Cycle, summarised by Drucker definition of management: “the essence of management is to make knowledge productive”.
This model helps me to have an integrated view on how a business operates and therefore develop interlocking solutions to build its BMS. I attach a presentation of the Core Cycle, a subset of the foundation course I train my clients with; - A technology (social media for companies: TeamPage) as an enabler of the Core Cycle that provides an integrated work environment, flexibility, ease of use and at the same time provides structure and visibility.
With the technology we can have knowledge workers and even supervisors to collaborate, share, task, project manage, create and manage documents, etc.
I experimented and now understand that the technology - social media for companies (Enterprise 2.
- Adler - Building Better Bureaucracies
- Bob Emiliani - The Toyota Half-Way
- This presentation is designed for PowerPoint 2010.
the core cycle model is animated, so don’t move forward too quickly: Core Cycle slides
2.
I found that a two-weekly cycle of project review sets up a pace for the company and puts the right pressure on both top management and project leaders.
Everyone with a computer runs an improvement project (initially) related to their processes.
Then implementation of any system is pushed through that improvement process.
3.
We create spaces for the systemic, strategic and selected operational mini-business units.
4.
Sharing of knowledge is woven into the BMS.
- All impi! solutions are built on TeamPage on a wiki space and are standard documents.
Every solution starts with a Policy (the why) and a Standard Operating Procedure (the how). The SOP is the hub that links all the other documents (the spokes). The templates used for these documents are the same that the client can use for their own controlled documentation in their own wiki space called “Knowledge Central”. Two outputs of every improvement projects are a) an operational improvement and b) documentation in Knowledge Central. The project templates used to run improvement projects comprise standard articles that will naturally become elements of the BOP (e. g. SIPOC, business process maps). When the project leader reaches the Control or Adjust part of the project, large chunks of the documentation would have been written. Using the capability of TeamPage simplifies the linking and tagging of documents. The organisation steadily builds its very own Wikipedia, and it’s ISO 9001 compliant. The risk of deadwood documentation is reduced: team members create their own documentation, hyperlinking contextualises the documentation and tagging and search capability ease retrieval of information. - Several templates are available for improvement projects (e.
g. PDCA, DMAIC). With each project milestones are associated standard articles e. g. project charter, project checklist, Fishbone diagram, business process “AS IS". To each milestone there are also associated tasks. In each task is a tutorial on its own with tips and links to glossary terms, One Point Lessons (e. g. How to use a risk assessment matrix) or external reference in the public domain, e. g. Wikipedia, Lean Institute.
Finally, here is a one page summary of impi! and the synopsis of one of the three solutions that Traction and I have released thus far and are currently being used at clients.
Voilà - I hope there is enough meat here to stimulate a conversation or two.
Since I have only developed impi! thus far with my clients and for my clients, I haven't started a public website.
Related
Jun 2016 | ISO 9001:2015 Requirements Met By impi! Solutions - Meeting ISO 9001:2015 requirements using the impi! model
impi! What's in the name? What's in the logo? - Discipline and creativity
Dec 2016 | Business Process Improvement with impi!, Plug-in extensions, TeamPage improvements
Why, How and What of the impi Standard Meeting Plug-in for TeamPage - A customer interview and walkthrough of one new part of the impi! BMS solution
Chris Nuzum Hyperkult XXV Video | Tripping Up Memory Lane
Watch this video of Chris Nuzum's Tripping Up Memory Lane talk at Hyperkult 2015, University of Lüneburg, 10 July 2015.
Live video Christopher Nuzum: Tripping up Memory Lane Hyperkult XXV
Adobe Flash required for desktop Chrome or Internet Explorer 10 and earlier.
More
Related
Tripping Up Memory Lane - Chris Nuzum's written notes for his Hyperkult XXV talk.
Traction Roots - Doug Engelbart - About Doug Engelbart's Journal and Traction.
Original Traction Product Proposal - Hypertext roots and evolution of Traction TeamPage.
Doug Engelbart | 85th Birthday Jan 30, 2010 - "Doug Engelbart sat under a twenty-two-foot-high video screen, "dealing lightning with both hands.
Thought Vectors - Ted Nelson: Art not Technology - "To give up on human understanding is to give up hope, what we call in English 'a counsel of despair.
The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style - The social dance of getting things done, dealing with exceptions, and staying aware of what’s going on around you
Introducing the TeamPage iOS App
I was delighted to find that our TeamPage iOS companion app was published on the App Store this morning.
A Simple, Useful Start
We've often thought about what we wanted in a mobile TeamPage app.
The app that we released today is not the app we thought we needed to build.
It's the app that we were tired of living without.
It has a simple objective: make it easy to stay in the loop when you're living your life away from your desk.
Two Views, for Two Ways of Dealing with Information
TeamPage provides dozens of ways to slice and present information: feeds and dashboards scoped to spaces, projects, and milestones; task lists; section tables; tag change and history views, cross-references and audit trails.
Desktop TeamPage, that is.
We boiled the mobile app down to two views: Notifications and Discussions.
Notifications are:
- Low volume, focused on what you care about and what you need to know.
- Great for responding to @mentions, seeing tasks assigned to you, following discussions you've participated in, and tracking activity on projects you own, spaces you subscribe to, and people you follow.
- Perfect for individual contributors, engineers, and people who prefer to work with headphones on, since it keeps the level of distraction to a minimum.
Discussions are:
- For when you want to, or need to, scan everything that's going on.
- Perfect for analysts, support staff, and managers who need to scan for activity of interest and either jump into the conversation or follow up in detail later.
Personally, if it's been a while since I checked in, I review my notifications first, and then scan through discussions.
The list view showing notifications and discussions uses a new unread tracking capability built into TeamPage and synchronized with the iOS application to give you a snippet of the next unread message in the thread, while showing you the avatar of the person who posted it.
The discussions and notifications views are ordered based on how recently the thread was active, so you only need to scan down the list until you've reached an item you've seen before to know that you're all caught up.
A New Detail View
The Desktop version of TeamPage uses nesting to visualize replies in context, which works very well for getting the big picture and for threads you haven't read.
In the app, to facilitate catching up on the latest additions, we organize the replies chronologically, and use the unread tracking to scroll you down to the next unread reply.
We also make it easy to swipe left and right or use left and right arrows to go to the next or previous thread in the list, which makes it very easy to catch up on activity using only one hand.
Two Actions, to Put Your Mind at Rest ⋮
When it comes down to it, when something comes to your attention on your mobile device, you either can deal with it then and there, or you can't.
If you just need to answer a question, you can use the Reply via Email action to type or dictate a quick reply.
If you need to come back to it later, you can add it to your Worklist, where it will show up on top when you get back to your desk.
And if you need access to the full TeamPage web interface, e.
Finally, you can use the Share Sheet to share a post's URL with other iOS apps.
That's It
For starters, anyway.
What's Next?
We welcome your feedback, ideas, and, inevitably, bug reports.
Depending on how you use TeamPage, you'll probably have a different opinion about what should come next.
Please send questions and feedback to ios@tractionsoftware.com, or post in the TeamPage Forum.
Note: The TeamPage app requires a TeamPage server version 6.
If you're interested in how we built the app, stay tuned for my next post, Behind the Scenes of the iOS TeamPage App.
Daily Report 日報 = Observable Work: Takashi Okutsu
Takashi Okutsu of Traction Software's Japanese Business Office recently posted an update to his Daily Report TeamPage plugin.
Takashi's plug-in adds a Daily Report form to post and edit daily reports, along with a Daily Reports tab that includes a feed view, summary table, calendar view, and optional ranking.
Like other TeamPage plug-in extensions Takashi's Daily Report is packaged as a single file that can be uploaded and installed with one click.
See Takashi's Daily Report Form post for screenshots and examples.
Related
- Jul 2016 | TeamPage Real Time Daily Report 日報 (Japan): Traction Software Japanese Business Office releases dedicated Daily Report 日報 solution.
- 日報プラグインをリリース: Takashi's TractionSoftware.
jp post on his Daily Report plug-in. View Google English translation. - Eat your spinach: Email is good for you, but it could taste a lot better: Takashi explains the Japanese business practice ホウレンソウ (HORENSO) ".
. . a way of information sharing by way of aligning members' understandings and synchronizing actions about changing circumstances that happen in and out of an organization. " - Quality Management: Document your processes; track risk and improvement actions; watch what's going on throughout your organization, and make your auditors smile.
- Enterprise 2.
0 and Observable Work : "The right starting point is to simply make the flow of work more visible." Jim McGee - The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style Understand how TeamPage connects people and their work.
Shaka, When the Walls Fell
"Pooh?" said Piglet.
"Yes, Piglet?" said Pooh.
"Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra," said Piglet.
"Shaka, when the walls fell," said Pooh.
— Michael G. Munz (@TheWriteMunz) November 17, 2015What?
In Shaka When The Walls Fell (The Atlantic, June 18, 2014) Ian Bogost poses a challenge based on Darmok, a 1991 Star Trek New Generation episode.
".
DATHON, the Tamarian captain: Rai and Jiri at Lungha.
(no response from Enterprise, looks at First Officer in frustration)
(slowly, deliberately) Rai and Jiri.
In the Star Trek universe, a “universal translator” automatically interprets between any alien language instantly and fluently.
Picard calls the Tamarian's communication model metaphor, Troy calls it image, but according to Bogost's analysis they're both wrong:
"If we pretend that “Shaka, when the walls fell” is a signifier, then its signified is not the fictional mythological character Shaka, nor the myth that contains whatever calamity caused the walls to fall, but the logic by which the situation itself came about.
Read Bogost's essay for a fascinating dive into what Bogost calls “procedural rhetoric”—the use of computational processes to depict worldly processes.
I was struck by a simpler point: If the Tamarian's communicate using shared references, this implies:
1) A shared corpus of events known by every member of the Tamarian civilization;
2) A shared means of economically denoting a particular significant event in that corpus, with little likelihood of ambiguity or error;
3) A biological, technological, or technologically augmented biological means for every Tamarian to choose the appropriate event to communicate the desired interpretation (or logic in Bogost's analysis).
This seems like a tall order, but consider that most of us now live in a civilization that assumes that no factual question need go unanswered for more than a few minutes, after poking or talking at pocket sized supercomputer screens meshed with an associatively addressable, world spanning corpus that's glued together by annoying commercials, a few giant companies, and unicorn dreams of VCs.
What Tamarian's need (or have) is a culture spanning version of Doug Engelbart's Journal, a shared, addressable record of Tamarian history and its logic.
Doug on the screen in San Francisco. Dealing lightning with both hands.
Related
In Shaka When The Walls Fell (The Atlantic, June 18, 2014) Ian Bogost.
And here's what Enterprise 2.
Thought Vectors - Vannevar Bush and Dark Matter Vannevar Bush's 1945 concept of trailblazing, across the dark matter of the Internet.
The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style Addressable work.
Original Traction Product Proposal
I hope you'll enjoy reading the original Traction Product Proposal, dated October 1997.
Motivated by Chris Nuzum's recent Tripping Up Memory Lane talk at HyperKult 2015, and Takashi's Design Concepts followup, I'm happy to continue the Traction history theme.
Traction Software folk may make occasional blog posts referencing the Traction History project on this blog or on Twitter.
The scribbled picture above from about the same time was my visualization of the Traction goal: To link and use anything that would cross a business person's desk using the Web as a platform, rather limiting hypertext to content stuffed inside silos like Lotus Notes.
.jpg)
When we introduced TeamPage in 2002, the word "blog" was often dogmatically defined as the unedited voice of a person.
TeamPage extends the concept of an activity stream or channel to include:
- Editable entries with a full audit trail, including wiki history
- An extensible family of entry types (task, status, .
. . ) and relationships (comment, . . . ) - Dashboard and other views that collect, organize, and show entries in context
- A unified permission model that makes it simple to roll up entries across spaces and navigate or search by topic, context, author, or other criteria, see The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style
Clay Shirky got the concept in his 2003 review: Traction: Weblogs grow up in Social Software: A New Generation of Tools, Release 1.
"Somewhere around your 30th responses to a response to a response in Notes, you start to wonder where all this group discussion leads.
While it’s useful to share documents, hold ad hoc discussions and post groupwide projects, the essence of groupware may be the ability to manage a business outcome by divining a group's thought process.
Eric Lundquist, The Next Big Thing in Groupware PC Week 1 July 1996.
Team Problem Solving from Traction Product Proposal Oct 1997
The core Traction concept was granted US Patent 7,593,954.
The original business case for TeamPage cited project work as the most important use.
We learned how to model permissions to extend work across many internal as well as external groups such as the clients of a consulting firm, or the suppliers and customers of a manufacturer.
By adding individual and group permissions to a space with an ACL model, internal and external groups share the same TeamPage server while seeing and participating in just the set of projects and activities that are appropriate for every individual.
Email and TeamPage has an interesting history.
The Digest remains a popular features of TeamPage, later augmented by email notifications with auto threaded email replies: your reply to a TeamPage email notification is posted as a comment by you, linked at the right point in the discussion thread - requested by major consulting firm.
This combination of capabilities is particularly valuable for projects that intertwingle collaborative writing, team communication, and action tracking such as: quality management, product development, product support, consulting, and competitive intelligence.
A note on links: Although some of the links in the proposal still work, many point to sites which have been moved, including Doug Engelbart references which have moved from bootstrap.org to dougengelbart.org.
More
Related
Tripping Up Memory Lane - Hyperkult 2015: Hypertext lessons learned talk by Traction Software CTO and Co-founder Chris Nuzum
Teampage hypertext journal: Design concepts, by Takashi Okutsu Director of Traction Software's Japanese Business Office
Traction Roots - Doug Engelbart - About Doug Engelbart's Journal and Traction.
Enterprise 2.
Intertwingled Work - Working and scaling like the Web.
The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style - The social dance of getting things done, dealing with exceptions, and staying aware of what’s going on around you
Teampage hypertext journal: Design concepts, by Takashi Okutsu
Takashi Okutsu of Traction Software's Japanese Business Office wrote a blog post, Teampage hypertext journal: Design concepts.
Teampage's model was inspired by the work of Doug Engelbart, who in 1975 wrote:
Our Journal system was conceived by this author in about 1966.
- I felt it important in many dynamic operations to keep a log (sometimes termed a "journal") that chronicles events by means of a series of unchangeable entries (for instance, to log significant events while evolving a Plan, shaping up a project, trouble-shooting a large operation.
or monitoring on-going operations). These entries would be preserved in original form, serving as the grist for later integration into more organized treatments. - I also wanted something that would serve essentially the same recorded-dialogue purpose as I perceived a professional journal (plus library) to do.
Compcon 75 Digest, Sep 1975 pp 173-178, Douglas C.
Working from Chris's presentation notes (pdf), Takashi explains how to Teampage builds on Engelbart's model to support editable, stable two-way links, relationships, and content.
Takashi uses an animation cel analogy to illustrate how the effect of multiple entries in a TeamPage journal can be superimposed to show the effect edits at any point in time.
Related
Tripping Up Memory Lane Traction Software co-founder and CTO Chris Nuzum talk on hypertext lessons learned, Hyperkult 2015 conference, Lüneburg Germany, 10 July 2015
Traction Roots - Doug Engelbart About Doug Engelbart's Journal
The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style Understand how TeamPage connects people and their work
Tripping Up Memory Lane
Last week I gave a talk at the Hyperkult 2015 conference.
Sometimes it seems like collaborative software projects are designed in an ahistorical vacuum.Like all our ideas are new. Maybe that’s because so much software is designed by young people fresh out of computer science programs heavy in programming and data structures, but often paying little more obeisance to the history of software than to acknowledge that once people programmed on punch cards, however that worked.
In 1996, after celebrating the 50th Anniversary of As We May Think at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and inspired by a long, encouraging talk with Doug Engelbart, I co-founded Traction Software (originally Twisted Systems, Inc.) and set out to design a memex-inspired literary machine for the augmentation of collective intelligence. In this talk, I’d like to demonstrate how the Traction Hypertext Journaling Engine underlying Traction Software’s TeamPage product borrows from and builds on insights and ideas from Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart, and Ted Nelson. I’ll also talk a bit about what ideas we’ve abandoned and why, and end with some thoughts on ideas that I think haven’t yet had their day.
I'd never given a talk in Germany before, but since the German word Vorlesung means "reading", I thought I had better be prepared with something I could read, even though that's not how I'm used to presenting.
For anyone interested, I've posted the script I prepared for the talk: Tripping Up Memory Lane Script.
I hope you'll enjoy.
Update: See the University of Lüneburg's video of this talk.
Eat your spinach: Email is good for you, but it could taste a lot better
Takashi Okutsu of Traction Software's Japanese Business Office says that email is like spinach.
Takashi often works with customers who depend on email for external and internal communication.
It's simple to email content into Teampage.
People can receive an email notifications when an article they are interested in is posted to Teampage.
When you receive an email notification, you can reply to the email to automatically add a comment to the threaded discussion.
But too many email notifications can be overwhelming.
You can use email notifications for your highest priority interests, and use the email digest to catch up on everything else.
Takashi concludes (in Google translation): "I think you have done already the spinach by e-mail.
Understanding Spinach Update: Takashi writes that the Japanese word ホウレンソウ (HORENSO) has a literal English translation "spinach", but it is used to refer to a Japanese practice that aligns members understanding and synchronizes actions.
"HORENSO is a way of information sharing by way of aligning members' understandings and synchronizing actions about changing circumstances that happen in and out of an organization.
Related
Constellation Research Analyst VP Alan Leoposky aka @alepo frequently debunks claims that "email is dead" (or should be), pointing out: 1) Email is universal.
Dec 2014 | TeamPage @ Mentions Bring any TeamPage item to someone's attention, bring them into the followup conversation
July 2014 | TeamPage Notifications Introducing inline notifications
The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style Understand how TeamPage connects people and their work
My Part Wor ks
About 50 years ago, Andy van Dam joined the Brown University faculty with the world's second PhD in Computer Science (earned at the University of Pennsylvania).
I’m part of the Stone Age cohort.
Starting with a tiny, two person department - and as a matter of principle - Andy recruited undergraduates as teaching and research assistants, a tradition that continues to this day.
“Offering teaching and research assistant opportunities to undergrads,” he says, “was even more unusual, indeed was viewed with everything from skepticism to outright hostility.
In 1965, a single, intense full-year course could cover much of the breadth, if not the depth, of the systems-oriented portion of the discipline, not including theory, AI, numerical analysis, and a few other topics.
Not just checking for the right answer but giving useful feedback on structure, style, and efficiency required careful reading and one-on-one help with concepts and debugging.
“The undergraduate teaching assistants,” Andy explains, “though they were initially called graders, didn’t just grade programs -- they not only provided one-on-one help to students but also became active participants in course design and in subsequent years read research papers and brought new ideas into the curriculum.
Few people appreciate it more than Ed Lazowska ‘72, who will lead the first (“Stone Age”) panel for Celebrate With Andy.
To provide feedback for the course, students wrote detailed, multi-page evaluations, something that was almost unheard of in 1965.
On his commute home from work, Andy would listen to tape recordings of his lectures, filling the empty minutes with self-critiques: “Boy, was that a clumsy explanation! Get rid of the ‘um’s and the ‘you know’s.
An interesting aspect of the UTA program is that the system has essentially never been challenged by students due to the built-in checks and balances.
Originally something made up as they went along, the UTA program matured over a period of decades.
You can read about Andy’s honors and achievements on his Wikipedia page, and Professor Shriram Krishnamurthi's answer to Why is professor Andy Van Dam (Andy) so cool? Here are two short stories from me.
After Dinner
Photo of Andy on WBGH Boston’s After Dinner show, broadcast live at 7:30PM Monday October 20, 1969.
After Dinner featured Andy van Dam, Chris Braun, Bev Hodgson (then Brown Daily Herald editor), Al Basile and myself talking about hypertext for 30 minutes on a stage set that was supposed to look like a professor’s living room, right next to Julia Child’s WGBH TV kitchen.
AvD writes: You might mention that the topic wasn’t just hypertext per se, but the use of hypertext for non-linear narratives, esp.
My Part Wor Ks
Brown Computer Science circa 1969.
The story as I recall: Most people chose an individual final project for AM 101/
A grader did an in person review with a two person team, noting a problem.
It became a team programming mantra.
The first part was made into a button, with Wor ks spelling.
More
Related
Andries van Dam - Wikipedia page
Celebrate With Andy: 50 Years Of CS At Brown - May 2015.
Why is professor Andy Van Dam (Andy) so cool? - Quora, Jan 2015.
Pastepost - One more AvD story.
As We May Work - Andy van Dam - Tokyo 2008
The MIT/Brown Vannevar Bush Symposium - Celebrating the 50th anniversary of Bush's As We May Think.
Hypertext Editing System - Wikipedia page.
Enterprise 2.0 - Are we there yet?
Andrew McAfee writes Nov 20, 2014: "Facebook’s recent announcement that it’s readying a version of its social software for workplaces got me thinking about Enterprise 2.
Why did it take so long? I can think of a few reasons.
Whatever the causes, I’m happy to see evidence that appropriate digital technologies are finally appearing to help with the less structured, less formal work of the enterprise.
What do you think? Is Enterprise 2.
Andrew – As we’ve discussed in the past, I don’t believe there’s a specific ‘Are we there yet?’ for Enterprise 2.
The lessons I learned from your excellent book and research are still relevant today.
The effect of new technology on an enterprise is too often like picking up and shaking a sleepy beehive.
We’ve come a long way towards the vision that software and devices used inside a company will become more like software, Web services and mobile devices people use at home.
As Peter Drucker taught, organizations need to adapt and innovate to make use of these capabilities, which opens the door to new technology, capabilities, and markets for enterprise software and services at every layer of the stack.
I’m not surprised that this takes time - and like Bill Buxton’s analysis in his Long Nose of Innovation article from 2008.
I’ll also keep my faith in Peter Drucker and Doug Engelbart as the twin patron Saints of Enterprise 2.
cheers,
Greg
Related
Enterprise 2.
Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges Andrew McAfee, Harvard Business Review Press, Nov 2009
The Long Nose of Innovation Bill Buxton, Bloomberg Business Week, Jan 8, 2008
Enterprise 2.
Ada Lovelace Day | Emmy Noether, Mathematician
Ada Lovelace Day celebrates
the contributions of women in science and technology, follow @FindingAda for news and events.
"Within the past few days a distinguished mathematician, Professor Emmy Noether, formerly connected with the University of Göttingen and for the past two years at Bryn Mawr College, died in her fifty-third year.
Born in a Jewish family distinguished for the love of learning, Emmy Noether, who, in spite of the efforts of the great Göttingen mathematician, Hilbert, never reached the academic standing due her in her own country, none the less surrounded herself with a group of students and investigators at Göttingen, who have already become distinguished as teachers and investigators.
ALBERT EINSTEIN.
Princeton University, May 1, 1935
In The Most Important Mathematician You've Never Heard Of Dr Dave Goldberg summarized Fräulein Noether’s life, her academic struggles - championed by Göttingen mathematicians David Hilbert and Felix Klein - and contributions to the foundations of modern physics.
"Hilbert and Noether skirted the rules by listing Hilbert as a course instructor and then having Noether as the perennial guest lecturer, though this didn't extend to getting Noether any sort of paycheck.
When I was called permanently to Göttingen in 1930, I earnestly tried to obtain from the Ministerium a better position for her, because I was ashamed to occupy such a preferred position beside her whom I knew to be my superior as a mathematician in many respects.
In all events, bringing her to Göttingen turned out to be an incredibly good idea.
Fräulein Noether’s name and contributions to mathematics will live forever, despite the obstacles she had to overcome as a mathematical genius of the first rank - who happened to be a woman.
No woman should require the endorsement of mathematical legends like Hilbert, Klein, Einstein, Weyl, and Weiner to pursue and excel in the mathematical, scientific, or other career they love.
Update See Marie Curie [ and Emmy Noether ] cartoon by xkcd "You don't become great by trying to be great.
Ada icon by Sidney Padua From the Thrilling Adventures of Babbage & Lovelace for your iPad (free).
Named Data Networking - Boffin Alert
On Sep 4, 2014 the Named Data Networking project announced a new consortium to carry the concepts of Named Data Networking (NDN) forward in the commercial world.
For a short non-technical introduction, see Wade Roush's Sep 2012 piece on Van Jacobson and Content Centric Networking The Next Internet? Inside PARC’s Vision of Content Centric Networking.
The fundamental idea behind Content Centric Networking is that to retrieve a piece of data, you should only have to care about what you want, not where it’s stored.
It’s easy to see how much sense this makes compared to the current client-server model.
But the photos on Flickr are just copies of the originals, which are stored on my camera and on my laptop, about 15 feet away from my TV.
“The simplest explanation is that you replace the concept of the IP address as the defining entity in the network with the name of the content,” says Lunt.
“One of the things that’s intriguing about not having to go to the source is that you could start to think about implementing applications differently,” Lunt says.
Such architectures might give users more control over privacy and security of their data, and let them share their own data across devices without having to go through proprietary services like Apple’s iCloud, PARC executives say.
“What Apple is trying to do with iCloud is to say: You shouldn’t have to care which device you got an app on, or which device you took a photo on, whether it was your iPad or iPhone or MacBook Air.
In my option, one of the technically sweetest characteristics of NCN is its relationship to current TCP/
Like IP, NDN is a “universal overlay”: NDN can run over anything, including IP, and anything can run over NDN, including IP.
Communication in NDN is driven by the receiving end, i.
The router stores in a Pending Interest Table (PIT) all the Interests waiting for returning Data packets.
Names
NDN design assumes hierarchically structured names, e.
Name conventions are specific to applications but opaque to the network, i.
I haven't quoted from short sections on Data Centric Security, Routing and Forwarding, Intelligent Data Plane, Caching, or Intellectual Property Approach and open source.
Much of this is QED Marketing - I told you how it works, not what it means for you.
1) Secure efficient transport of content crossing many boundaries is a hard problem, getting harder as the number of people, things, and places on the Web grow, and as people look for a seamless and trusted way to deal with things they care about at home and at work.
2) NDN offers the possibility of doing a lot of the hard work at the network level, which is a win if it offers a economic benefit to those who pay for the fabric of the internet, and opportunities to invent and grow scalable businesses more effectively.
3) NDN might offer an appropriate secure, flexible framework for connecting people to content at work.
With respect to the network issues, I'm a fan, not an expert, but the NDN proposal seems to share many of the (relatively) simple, scalable, decentralized characteristics that fueled the growth of the Web and evolution of TCP/
With Cisco and Huawei on board as founding industrial partners of the NDN Consortium, you can bet that a lot of caching routers can be sold, and NDN routing technology will take the fast track if there's economic payback for NDN, which will drive better payback, faster adoption, etc.
The good thing is the program has advanced to the stage where many of these questions can answered by experiment - we shall see.
Will the NDN Consortium take off? Will Google, Apple and Microsoft jump in? Or will NDN join the queue of technically sweet solutions that never really get off the ground? I'm optimistic that NDN has the right technical characteristics and pedigree, with smart experienced people leading the charge.
Related
Named Data Networking Architecture: Motivation & Details The best short technical overview I've found of the objectives and approach of the Named Data Networking project.
A New Way to Look at Networking - Van Jacobson's Aug 2006 Google Tech talk on TCP and Content Centric Networking (CCN).
Reinventing the Web II (Aug 2014) The Web won vs "better" models by turning permanence into a decentralized economic decision.
Continuity and Intertwingled Work (Jun 2014) A level above an Internet of Things: seamless experience across devices for you, your family, your health and trusted service providers, at home and at work.
Intertwingled Work (Jul 2010) No one Web service or collection of Web servers contain everything people need, but we get along using search and creative services that link content across wildly different sources.
Thought Vectors - Ted Nelson: Art not Technology (Jul 2014) Ted Nelson should be smiling - but I won't hazard a guess.
Linked, Open, Heterogeneous
%2dDDegler%2dApr2014%2d500w.png)
Art, Data, and Business Duane Degler of Design For Context posted slides from his 5 April 2014 Museums and the Web talk, Design Meets Data (Linked, Open, Heterogeneous).
"The tide of available information continues to rise.
Emerging design approaches help you find ways to make the most of your opportunities for new types of interactions and engagement with Information Objects.
- Exploration, serendipity, use: Rich, relevant design requires an intimate understanding of information and the way people interact with it.
- Scalability, persistence, authority: Rich, relevant design also takes the long view.
Your institution becomes a gateway to an ecosystem of artistic imagery, scholarly insights, history, perspectives, and related objects.
Related
Dark Matter by Michael Peter Edson 19 May 2014.
Thought Vectors - Vannevar Bush and Dark Matter (2014) Inspired by Michael Edson's essay.
Reinventing the Web II (2014) Why isn't the Web a reliable and useful long term store for the links and content people independently create? What can we do to fix that? Who benefits from creating spaces with stable, permanently addressable content? Who pays? What incentives can make Web scale permanent, stable content with reliable bidirectional links and other goodies as common and useful as Web search over the entire flakey, decentralized and wildly successful Web?
Intertwingled Work (2010) No one Web service or collection of Web servers contain everything people need, but we get along using search and creative services that link content across wildly different sources.
Hello! Greetings from Takashi Okutsu
Hi everyone.
I have worked for Applied Knowledge in Japan as technical support staff, and have a long association with TeamPage since 2007.
I am very happy to keep supporting these customers, introducing our products to new clients, and consulting with all TeamPage customers based on my experience.
If you should need additional information regarding me or Japan Business Office, or if you need any help regarding TeamPage, please do not hesitate to contact me.
皆様、こんにちは。私は、奥津岳と申します。横浜にある Traction Software の日本支店（トラクション・ソフトウェア・インク）の代表を務めています。
TeamPage には 2007 年から長く関わっています。前職では、株式会社アプライドナレッジにて技術サポート スタッフとして、TeamPage を通じて多くのお客様の業務改善のお手伝いをさせていただき、たくさんの経験を積むことができました。今年からはトラクション・ソフトウェア・インク代表として、お客様へのサポート、製品の紹介、経験に基づいたコンサルティングなどご提供しております。
私たちの製品 TeamPage は、とても柔軟性があり、様々な業務に適用できる製品／サービスであると自負しています。多くの方々に気に入っていただけることを願います。
トラクション・ソフトウェア・インクや製品／サービスにご興味がございましたら、お気軽に私のメールアドレス takashi@tractionsoftware.
I18N ERROR: @tsiskin#footer_RSS_Feed