While leading up to an advocacy for the Mac as the backbone of corporate IT, the Good Times essay by John Gruber is really an advocacy piece on the importance of open standards and an insightful warning into the ways the IT world gets twisted to serve the technologists rather than those who must use their chosen technologies, exemplified with the sorry and irrational state of corporate Outlook/Exchange addictions.

The solution is to ask whom Outlook is good for. It’s not good for the world at large, as witnessed the problems caused by each Outlook virus outbreak ... once a month or so, there would be a voice mail message warning everyone not to launch Outlook until we got another voice mail indicating the coast was clear. No one but me saw this situation as absurd.

I've been there. The only voice-mail to ever arrive in my Medialinx mailbox (since I was the off-site consultant) was these regular Outlook warnings. John continues by asking questions of how email is actually used, what purpose and use-case it serves for real people, and how these 'extra' and proprietarily hidden complexities of Outlook are not really serving the staff body, but enslaving their minds; John also proposes a sinister and political reason for why CIO's are so fond of Exchange and other similar seemingly paradoxical technology choices where the utility is lost in the beauty of the weapon ...

Most corporations now have a CIO (chief information officer), whose clout is directly proportional to the number of people employed in the company’s IT division. More IT staff means a larger budget, and budgets are the rulers used to measure wangs in corporate America.

It is thus in the interests of corporate IT staff to deploy technology that requires a large IT staff for maintenance.

An interesting thesis, and as an escape from it, John proposes how a change in political perks might veer the CIO into serving the needs of their constituents, and how a change in the corporate expectations for IT departments, one that no longer anneals to the Outlook/Exchange types of security risk solutions, might dampen the next Sobig.F@mm vacation:

It’s all about expectations. We, as a society, have decided that indoor plumbing should be held to high standards of reliability and maintenance. And somehow we’ve been convinced that indoor computing should not.

[ Source: Daring Fireball: Good Times ]

Knowledge management systems seek to organize corporate information assets in ways that can aid future process, yet in almost every case, KM systems fail to deliver. John Robb tips us to a post by Huron Consulting Group's Jim McGee that muses on why traditional KM fails and advocates a fundamental shift not in the way we actually do our business, but in the way we try to model it:

The fatal flaw in thinking in terms of knowledge management is in adopting the perspective of the organization as the relevant beneficiary. Discussions of knowledge management start from the premise that the organization is not realizing full value from the knowledge of its employees. While likely true, this fails to address the much more important question from a knowledge worker's perspective of "what's in it for me?". It attempts to squeeze the knowledge management problem into an industrial framework eliminating that which makes the deliverables of knowledge work most valuable--their uniqueness, their variability. This industrial, standardizing, perspective provokes suspicion and both overt and covert resistance. It also starts a cycle of controls, incentives, rewards, and punishments to elicit what once were natural behaviors.

Hands up all those who's see that happen! Jim continues his analysis by looking at the human factors of an organization, at how the common language of KM consulting has boxed their projects into these awkward containers, and how our goal really should be to make it easier for a knowledge worker to create and share unique results, and to share them with people. What Jim says about boxing our knowledge worker support systems into containers is true, too: In doing my usual scouting for web artifacts to annotate this article, I typed knowledge worker into the Google image search, and sure enough, I had to sift several pages to find an image of people communicating with people among dozens of slaves changed to some kind of machine.

One has to ask which of these two worlds is the one where we want to work, and which would be the one where we'd expect to collect the most benefit.

If you ask me, it's no accident that you and I both learned of Jim's unique results through the dynamic interactions in our networks of social software and not through some discovery via a document management system ...

[ Source: McGee\'s Musings ]  read more »

You know the web is starting to come into radar range when people start to invoke Fitts' Law, and any tutorial that starts with the work of Shumin Zhai is definately OK in my books -- anyone interested in human-computer interaction needs to take a browse through What is Fitts law? and its relation to HCI

Fredy D. Ore has posted a weblog entry on Fitts Law, and its relationship to usability. To quote: Fitts Law is a robust model of human behavior which enables the prediction of human movement and human motion based on rapid,...

James Robertson hips us to a collection of papers, tutorials and even a quiz with some related blog posts on recent applications of the methods to web-based products such as TypePad.

[Source: James Robertson]