Leave the 90s behind by introducing agility into service management fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Service management is one of the core competencies of today’s IT department. After all, IT is responsible for making sure end users are able to complete their digital tasks. Yet, the ideologies behind service management have change very little over the decades, amounting to a concept where an end user reports a problem, the resolution of that problem is then escalated through a variety of mechanisms, until it is hopefully resolved.

While in theory, the process of servicing end users works acceptably in the enterprise, the fact remains that the majority of end users are often unhappy with their service experience, a fact illustrated by a recent survey from ServiceNow. Further illustrating the lack of satisfaction is the sobering statistic that popular consumer services ranked 103% better on the company’s “Service Experience Index”, when compared to workplace services.

That statistic alone should be a clarion call for enterprise to take an in-depth look at their internal service mechanisms. While consumer related services are driven by the metric of customer satisfaction, workplace services are instead judged on success of resolution. In other words, consumer facing companies are looking to keep customers happy, while enterprises are more about completing the check boxes associated with solving a problem.

And therein lies the real problem, the disconnect between satisfaction and issue resolution, which becomes readily apparent when consumer services are compared to in-house services. Now some may wonder why that is a problem at all. After all, consumer facing businesses are looking to improve customer loyalty and garner more sales. It’s an old axiom, a happy customer is a repeat customer.

Enterprises on the other hand, have very little concern for end-user happiness, after all they are dealing with a captive audience. Yet, happiness can be directly correlated to productivity and speeding problem resolutions also boosts productivity. In essence, enterprises need to learn from the successes of customer facing service to improve service management.

ServiceNow’s survey points out some critical differences between successful customer services and what the overall impact is. Case in point, the survey reports:

The Service Experience gap is driven by outdated technologies that sap productivity:

• At work, managers are five times more likely to use email and five times less likely to use a mobile app than for consumer services.
• Only 28% of managers use the web or a mobile app to request workplace services, versus 84% for consumer services.
• Only 5% of managers tap mobile apps for workplace services.
• 69% of managers say that manual workplace services leave them less time for strategic initiatives, lower their productivity or cause them stress.
• 79% say that monitoring email interferes with completing tasks, as they spend an average of four hours a day (three at work and one at home) processing work emails.

Dave Wright, Chief Strategy Office at service now explains “Consumers live in a Web and mobile world where machine logic does the heavy lifting, speeding their requests and sending alerts on status or when people need to act.”  Wright added “At work, firms expect employees to manually push the services forward with email, wasting extra cycles on chasing work status and searching inboxes. Email itself is not the enemy. It’s a symptom of a broken process that waylays corporate productivity.” Wright makes an interesting point, one that clearly shows that email may be the productivity sap of the service process, and that manual tasks add to the overhead of issue resolution.

Perhaps the resolution to enterprise service strife comes in the form of adopting another methodology that has taken hold in IT departments, and that is the concept of agility. The core offering from an agile process is continuous improvement, something that is sorely needed in the service management experience. Also, agility introduces some other benefits, such as frequent iterations of a solution, driven by end user needs. That said, agile thinking is only one part of the solution.

Enterprises looking to improve the service process should also consider the following:

• Increasing the focus on innovations, such as introducing improved tools, including web access, mobile device support and collaboration solutions
• Embracing automation: Bring M/L based solutions into the process to improve service issue escalation and resolution.
• Moving away from email: Email has been a stop gap in the services equation and is often inefficient, as well as a productivity such. Specialized tools that offer tracking, collaboration and reporting prove to be a much better way to resolve service related issues.

Simply put, striving to put productivity back into the service management process means that enterprises must learn from the successes of customer facing service paradigms and embrace the change those organizations leveraged to increase satisfaction.

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Prezi for Business: Moving out of the Auditorium to the Meeting fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

I had a chance to chat last week with Peter Arvai, the founder and CEO of Prezi, the company behind the ‘infinite canvas’ presentation tool of the same name. He wanted to brief me on the company’s progress and plans, and give me a heads up on the company’s new offering, Prezi for Business.

Prezi is an innovative break from the boxy, bulletpoint heavy style of presentations, allowing a more visual and storytelling-oriented approach to presentationology. By allowing a more free form way to cover the information in a presentation, the presenter can easily adjust to different audiences given the same presentation. As Arvai said, agility is becoming very important everywhere, even in the domain of presentations.

It’s hard to do Prezi justice in words, so maybe you should wander through this prezi I created a few years ago with Harold Jarche for Sibos. It’s by no means a wonderful presentation — especially without the words that Harold and I added to the presentation — but it’s one that I made with a small investment of time.

You can click on the arrow icons to walk through the prezi, or zoom in and out to see more details, in any order.

The new Prezi for Business — which I have not used fooled with — supports real-time cocreation (multiple authors, commenting, and so on), real-time shared presenting (in HD, without other third-party tools), as well as sharing of links to prezis.

Especially in that third use case, Prezi’s new analytics help understand who is viewing what in your shared prezis. This includes leaderboards, very helpful in sales organizations.

Peter talked with me about the science of better presentations, like the factoid that presentations with compelling visuals are 43% more persuasive than those that lack them, for example.

The company’s grounding in the science behind presentations and storytelling has been effective. Nine months ago the company announced that there have been over one billion views of prezis, and that is now over 1.6 billion. They have had 52% year over year growth in sales.

As part of this release, they’ve created a Slack integration so that team members can be informed in Slack about modifications made to prezis down to the object level.

And we started to range farther afield, talking about the possibilities for AI in presentation creating, where information from various sources could be combined into rich, navigable tableaux linked by semantic connections.

Prezi for Business won’t be the last major release from Arvai and his people, that’s for sure.

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Microsoft Planner is rolling out on Office 365 fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Microsoft Planner — the work management complement to Office 365 — was made available as a preview in December 2015, but has entered ‘general availability’, meaning it will become immediately accessible to users of eligible subscription plans. In Office 365, it will appear as another tile in the Office 365 tools (see the leftmost tile in the second row, below).

Microsoft Planner is a task-centric work management solution, despite the ‘project management’ terminology other reviewers are using. The orientation of the tools is to support teams and team members tracking tasks and coordinating task work through social communications.

Planner is one of several task-oriented solutions that Microsoft is working to integrate, including Wunderlist and Microsoft Project. Conceptually, this means that users will be able to manage personal tasks (in Wunderlist), team work (in Planner), and to manage project planning (in Microsoft Project), and for these to be integrated in sensible ways. So for example, it might be helpful if I could see my work-related tasks, perhaps created and annotated in Planner, in a mobile Wunderlist app. Or to analyze the cost implications for a shift in personnel in a Planner project within the portfolio of company projects managed in Microsoft Project. That’s one part of the company’s long-range vision for Planner and the other tools manipulating task information. But it is going to be a long time before all the kinks and use cases are worked out for that grand vision. And at any rate, ultimately Planner will have to stand on its own, based on how good of a work management tool it is.

And that assessment poses another issue. If Planner requires Office 365 in order to use it — or even experiment with it — many prospective users will simply never jump through the hoops to try it out. I have raised that very issue with Microsoft representatives this year, as I was being briefed on the product. My suggestion is that Microsoft should create a standalone version of planner — at least a web app, if not mobile apps — so that an individual, team, or company could do an apples-to-apples comparison with Asana, Trello, or Wrike, and not the apples-to-oranges comparison with the umpty-ump boxes in that Office image, above. Also, that is the best way for Planner’s functionality to improve — in head-to-head competition — and not as a captive work management ‘capability’ locked into Office 365, relying on its integration with Office email, Outlook, Groups, and other tools.

The following is a condensation of the review of Planner from the in-process 2016 Work Management Narrative (much delayed), that I am authoring.

Planner is based on the well-known kanban-style, ‘board’ architectural model, and three modes of boards are supported at present: user-defined ‘buckets’, task assignment to members, and progress. As shown in the screenshot below, there is a left hand column where I have selected a plan, in this case Work Management Narrative, and I chose to display that plan as Buckets, not by Progress or Assigned to. In the ‘research tools’ bucket there is a single task, ‘research Microsoft Planner’, which shows icons indicating 0 of 2 subtasks have been completed, that there are comments, and the task has been assigned to Stowe Boyd. The half moon icon indicates that the task is in progress, a third state for tasks: unstarted, in progress, and completed.

Clicking on ‘write method section’ expands that task (or, in the usual terminology, turns over the ‘card’), as we see in the screenshot below. At the foot we see a stream of comments — the one with a white background was entered in an associated discussion, about which more later. There are a variety of other attributes, showing a rich task model, however, lacking support for some common social communications like ‘@mentions’.

What’s not clear from this zoom into Planner is that the ‘work management narrative’ plan corresponds to a Office 365 group of the same name. Groups support group-oriented communications, but those are not accessed in the Planner section of Office 365.

I believe that Planner users will find the need to return to Outlook to conduct conversations about their projects annoying, as opposed to the more normal model of an in-context — or best, in-project — activity stream. I bet that Microsoft will hear this as a frequent suggestion for additional Planner functionality. However, I often operate in multiple windows on the same project workspace, and so, having a conversation window and a Planner board view open at the same time is really not very different, and may be workable for many. Note also that if Microsoft builds a standalone version of Planner there will be no Outlook to lean upon, so an in-context activity stream or chat model would be best.

Office 365 users are likely using the spectrum of features — Outlook, OneDrive, Office apps, Groups, OneNote, and Planner — and therefore will rapidly habituate to transiting the many loosely integrated components, and will likely adapt to a model of use involving a lot of moving around. 

By itself, Planner would only be considered a team task management tool, not a true work management tool, since it lacks activity streams, @mentions, and other baseline social communications. However, that’s a red herring, since Planner — at present — is never without Groups and Outlook, and can’t be separated from them.

At present, I think the initial implementation of charts is a better indicator of where Planner is headed. In the screenshot below I’ve pulled an example from the Microsoft website (since my examples aren’t rich enough), and this shows the ease of quickly grasping the status of a Planner ‘document’ through a dashboard view.

I also want to give a nod to the designers of Planner for including the three state model for task status: not started, in progress, and completed. The in-progress state is incredibly powerful, and after using it in some tools, I now chafe whenever confronted with a solution that lacks it.

Planner is an obvious choice for those already committed to Office 365 as a baseline for work productivity. However its current level of integration with Office 365 services — like Outlook, OneDrive, and OneNote — falls short of work management nirvana. Still, it’s early days, and when I reviewed it the product was only in a ‘First Use’ release phase.

I can imagine that within a very short time frame the myriad hooks that could make Planner a first-class member of the Office 365 suite will begin to emerge. I wager that creating tasks from email, or in the comments of a Groups or OneDrive comments — as just some of the most obvious examples — will be implemented within the next few releases, or sooner.

 

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WeWork making cuts; Fadell leaves Nest; BitTorrent spins out Sync fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

All sorts of changes going on:

• WeWork plans to cut around 7% of its staff, according to Bloomberg’s Ellen Huet, and has paused hiring. The $16B coworking/coliving startup raised $430 million a few months ago led by Chinese investors, and plans to expand in Asia. It seems that WeWork might be responding to the advice of many investors to cut back on burn as the economy seems to be cooling.
• Tony Fadell has left Nest following months of bad press and growing friction within Alphabet/Google, which acquired the company in 2014 for $3.2 billion. Positioned as a ‘transition’, the move is more likely the case of Fadell being pushed out. The new Nest CEO is Marwan Fawaz, who was a Motorola Mobility executive vice president, and who oversaw the sell off of that company after Google’s acquisition of Motorola. Looks like Alphabet/Google is positioning Nest for a sale, since Google’s developed its own line of smart home products that don’t play nice with Nest’s technologies.
• BitTorrent has spun out Sync, its file sync and share technology, into a new firm, Resilio, and Sync will be renamed as Connect. Former BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker will be heading up the new company, after trying to repositioning BitTorrent as an enterprise software company. It now seems the existing BitTorrent company will focus on a new live streaming app.

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Why is securing the Internet of Things so difficult? fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

It’s inevitable, isn’t it, that the security industry should be all over the Internet of Things. If you’re feeling like you’ve heard it all before, you probably have. Top of the list of topics is that the ‘things’ themselves are going to be insecure. They’re running operating systems and software, neither of which may have been considered with security in mind.

The consequence is a massive increase in what security pros know as the ‘attack surface’, that is, the scope of stuff that can be targeted by malicious hackers, fraudsters or other nondescripts. The resulting challenge is very real, particularly given the personal nature of information being captured — from heart rates to locations — and its potential for misuse.

In the spirit of a brainstorm, let’s make an assumption however: that there is nothing we can do about it. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle, let us say, and our every movement and behaviour can and will be logged for personal, commercial and governmental purposes. While we may benefit, we also may need to live with the security risks.

This ultra-transparent scenario may not become the case, but even if it doesn’t, there will be situations that make it seem that way. What is more, the devices that we rely upon will inevitably become both smarter, and more susceptible to attack. We need to face up to our complicity in this: who thinks about data security before buying a fitness device, for example?

By seeing such risks as read, we can bank them and move on to other areas of concern. The above covers data, but in its most granular sense — facts about individuals, or login details, are a risk in themselves. But there’s a deeper level — that the data is open to manipulation.

For sure, insurers may refuse to cover an individual whose fitness device shows the occasional heart flutter. But what if the data stream itself is modified, through malice or through incompetence, such that numerous heart rates incorrectly indicate a flutter?

Some have speculated about the potential to modify agricultural data as a way of manipulating futures markets. Equally, a home automation company could rig your systems so it made more money — for example, turning on the heating for 29 seconds extra every day. Not a figure to register on one thermostat, but one that would ring up a large amount of small change.

So, not only do we need mechanisms to protect the confidentiality of our data, based on the same assumption that the bad thing is reasonably likely to happen, we also need to consider how to prove that the data is valid.

One possibility is to make every single sensor reading linked to a security key, but the phrase sledgehammer and nut springs to mind. Equally, the scale of the solution would be too costly to be achievable.

Is there an answer? Yes indeed, and it lies in taking a leaf from the works of the Jericho Forum, that body of Chief Information Security Officers founded in 2002 and disbanded a decade later, when the group deemed its work on ‘de-perimeterisation’ to be complete. Complete? Really? How could information security ever be complete?

The CISOs realised that they needed to manage data wherever it was, rather than trying to keep it in one place — and to do so, they needed a way to identify who, or what, was creating or accessing it. In November 2010 they announced the Identity and Access Management Commandments, a set of design principles technologies need to adopt.

This finding — that identity needs to be present — is profound. A corollary principle has been adopted by Google in its Beyond Corp initiative for its internal systems, which treats networks as insecure and instead, enables data access based on being able to identify the device, and the person, making the access request.

We could take this insight one step further. That data which cannot prove its provenance (i.e. from an identifiable person or device) could, or even should be treated as invalid. The notion of security by design is a start, but perhaps it will only be through identity by design that we can architect the Internet of Things to be both transparent and trusted.

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Three Ways to Help Millennials Better Manage Themselves fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

This article is the third in a series of six. It is excerpted from Not Everyone Gets a Trophy: How to Manage the Millennials by Bruce Tulgan

Millennials are often amazingly advanced in their knowledge and skills at a very young age, yet they often lack maturity when it comes to the old-fashioned basics of productivity, quality, and behavior. What’s worse, managers often report that Millennials tend to be unaware of gaps in these basic skills and are completely unconcerned about it. In response to this gap in skills, some managers just get frustrated. After all, when Millennials come to the workplace, shouldn’t they already be mature enough to arrive on time, dress appropriately, practice good manners, stay focused on their key tasks, and do lots of work very well at a good, steady pace? Should managers be expected to teach them these sorts of things? As a restaurant manager put it, “Nobody taught me how to wipe my nose in my jobs. I had to learn how to manage myself.”

That may be. But if you are the boss, then this gap in skills is your problem. If you manage Millennials who lack some of the basics of self-management, I’m sure you are frustrated too. Here’s what you need to do: Help them. Lift them up. Make them better. Teach them to care about the basics. Teach them to be more aware of those gaps in their repertoires. Teach them to fill those gaps, one at a time. Teach them how to manage themselves.

1) Help Them Set Priorities

Setting priorities is usually step one in most time management programs and seminars. If you have limited time and too much to do, then you need to set priorities—an order of precedence or preference—so that you control what gets done first, second, third, and so on. That setting priorities is the key to time management is obvious to most professionals. The hard part is teaching Millennials how to set priorities.

When it comes to big-picture priorities, set clear priorities with Millennials, and communicate those priorities relentlessly. Make sure your Millennials are devoting the lion’s share of their time to first and second priorities. When it comes to setting day-to-day priorities, teach Millennials how by setting priorities together with them. Let them know your thinking process. Walk through it with them: “This is first priority because X. This is second priority because Y. This is low priority because Z.” Over time, you hope they learn. Until they learn, you have to keep making decisions for them. Teach Millennials to postpone low-priority activities until high-priority activities are well ahead of schedule. Those are the time windows during which lower-priority activities can be accomplished, starting with the top lower priorities, of course.

2) Help Them Eliminate Time Wasters

Remember that Millennials treasure time above all other nonfinancial rewards. When you help them eliminate time wasters and limit the time they spend on low priorities, you are helping them focus their time on top priorities and giving them free time they otherwise would have wasted. That is a reward that keeps on giving. They’ll really appreciate it.

When helping Millennials identify time wasters to eliminate, don’t mistake distractions for time wasters. They may or not be. Remember that Millennials are used to multitasking—they’ve been doing their homework for years with an MP3 player in one ear and a cell phone buzzing text messages on the table. Just because it might be distracting to you doesn’t mean it is distracting to them. If the task in question is being performed well within expected time frames, then the employee is probably not distracted. Pay attention to which of the so-called distractions help them remain absorbed in their tasks at work as opposed to those that draw their attention away.

3) Teach the Habits of Critical Thinking

Managers often tell us that the biggest constraint on maximizing young workers is their lack of seasoned judgment.

What is good judgment anyway? It’s not the same thing as sheer brain power, mental capacity, or natural intelligence. It’s not a matter of accumulated knowledge or memorized information. It is more than the mastery of techniques and tools. In very simple terms, good judgment is the ability to see the connection between causes and their effects.

Teach Millennials to be strategic by using decision/action trees every step of the way. Teach them to think ahead and play out the likely sequence of moves and countermoves before making a move: “If you take this decision or action, who is likely to respond, how, when, where, and why? What set of options will this create? What set of options will this cut off? How will it play out if you take this other decision/action instead?

The senior executive of a media company asked, “How does a person learn real-life lessons faster than he can experience real life? Is there any way to jump-start this process?” One way is to learn from the life experiences of others or from history. This is why the case study method is used by most business schools. Real company cases are presented to students in detail. Who were the key players? What were their interests and objectives? What happened? How did it happen? Where? When? What were the outcomes? Students are then taught to apply the methods of critical thinking to the facts of the case. They are taught to suspend judgment, question assumptions, uncover the facts, and then rigorously analyze the decisions and actions taken by different key players in the case study. The pedagogy is simple: look at the outcomes, and trace them back to see the chains of cause and effect.

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About the Author

Bruce Tulgan is an adviser to business leaders all over the world and a sought-after keynote speaker and seminar leader. He is the founder and CEO of RainmakerThinking, Inc., a management research and training firm, as well as RainmakerThinking.Training, an online training company. Bruce is the best-selling author of numerous books including Not Everyone Gets a Trophy (Revised & Updated, 2016), Bridging the Soft Skills Gap (2015), The 27 Challenges Managers Face (2014), and It’s Okay to be the Boss (2007). He has written for the New York Times, the Harvard Business Review, HR Magazine, Training Magazine, and the Huffington Post. Bruce can be reached by e-mail at brucet@rainmakerthinking.com; you can follow him on Twitter @BruceTulgan, or visit his website.

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Missive looks like a MVP ‘Social Email’ tool fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

I’ve written for years about my hopes for a ‘social email’ tool — one in which email threads could be

1. 1. shared between coworkers,
2. 2. discussed in chat threads,
3. 3. responded to at will by one or more of the group members.

Some of the tools that I have looked at as possible social email solutions over the years have been interesting, but none have become a breakthrough, or even useful enough for me to adopt. (See Social email ranges from cool to creepy , Nimble fails as social email, and IBM’s Mail Next looks like the first social email, for a sampling.)

However, companies still are innovating around email. Established internet giants like Microsoft and Google continue to innovate with Office 365 and Google Inbox, respectively. And there are a steady stream of innovators who take another run at trying to get the balance of email and social right.

One new entrant is Missive (www.missiveapp.com), that is trying to build an answer to the three points I made above. At present, the solution only works with Gmail and Google Apps, but it’s not hard to imagine versions for other email providers.

Here’s the Missive UI, with Gmail labels at the top right, like inbox, starred, etc. Below on the right are chats. Emails can be replied to — as Rafael has done below — or just commented on by those sharing access:

Here’s a screenshot showing an email being 1/ coedited by two contributors (note the two avatars in the upper right of the email), and 2/ commented on by an even larger group (as shown in the comment thread on the right):

The tool provides a general chat capability, as well, independently of emails.

What I thought would be missing was the integration I rely on between Todoist and Gmail. Said a different way, I would need an equivalent capability — either a native implementation of task management, or a smart integration with leading task management solutions, such as Todoist, Trello, Asana, etc — in order to actually transition to using the tools.

It turns out that the Chrome plug-in for Todoist works just about as well for Missive as it does for Gmail. Here you see an email in the Notes folder (Gmail label):

I click the Todoist icon on the Chrome toolbar, which leads to creating a linked task, referencing back to the email. It works because Missive creates and exposes a unique URL for each email, which the Todoist plug-in grabs and stores, as shown below:

Over in Todoist, I then see the new task in the Personal project tasks.

(Strangely enough, Todoist doesn’t surface the URLs of individual tasks unless you are editing them, but there is still a way — although laborious — to link from the chat session in Missive to the task in Todoist. A better integration — a dedicated Chrome plug-in for Todoist and Missive — could solve that problem, though.)

While this isn’t perfect, it’s good enough. So I am going to give Missive a try for the next week or so, and see what else I can learn from it. More to follow.

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