Sam has written a post on his blog discussing the dumbness of email…

Email is dumb in the sense that the content of a particular message is subject to the interpretation of the person receiving it. While you know things such as a) who sent the email b) the date and time it was sent, really the crux of the message is not necessarily clear. People are notoriously poor communicators and in today’s multi tasking environment, particularly poor readers.

While the dumbness of email doesn’t matter much when email is being used for social communications, the lack of ‘intelligence’ in email really starts to matter when we’re talking about work. Deadlines. Action items. All critical to the success of a project – and our careers.

How many times have you emailed someone only to learn a week later that they ‘overlooked’ something you had asked them to do? How many times have you searched in vain, even with advanced systems like Gmail, to figure out what was assigned to you? Or how about when an email chain contains multiple changes to a deliverable’s due dates? Who changed the date and why again?

Email is not intelligent in that it lacks the ability to recognize and translate grouped text into action items. Microsoft Outlook, or iCal offer a slightly more intelligent approach. [For the full-post click here]

For other great thoughts on the failures of email check out this post by Tantek Celik:

The usability of email for me has deteriorated so much that I exclaimed on Twitter recently: EMAIL shall henceforth be known as EFAIL

Hi there! If this is your first time, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed and signup for the Beta Thanks for visiting!!!!

Tags: design, email, email dumb, ical, tumblr, twitter, workstreamr design

Rachel Happe works at research firm IDC, where she heads up research on the Digital Business Economy, covering how online business models and practices affect business environments, technology architectures, corporate processes, and contributor expectations.

Rachel also has an awesome blog where she lists examples of enterprise uses of social media as well as links to other public documents and resources. Rachel’s research is a gold mine for enterprises of all sizes looking to embrace social media. Definitely worth a look!

Do you know other leaders in the enterprise 2.0 space? Do you know someone who is the quintessential Workstreamr? If so, please email us at info@workstreamr.com and tell us about them. You never know when they may be featured on the blog

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, featured people, IDC, rachel happe, social media, workstreamr personalities

We have published a Manifesto.

It’s a collection of thoughts and principals that underly our company mission and drive our product design. Essentially, this manifesto explains our raison d’etre.

Tags: manifesto, raison d'etre, updates, workstreamr manifesto

From: Into The Big Blue Yonder by Rob Lewis

IBM has a string of KM accolades to its name – so how come it’s moving away from the whole knowledge management model? Because the decentralising impact of Web 2.0 calls for a new approach, or what the big blue calls ‘knowledge sharing’.

It’s a bold move considering the firm has been working under the management model for over a decade. Chris Cooper, knowledge sharing solutions leader at IBM Global Business Services (GBS), deems it a ‘philosophical repositioning’. “Management suggests control: control of process and control of environment. The sharing tag is quite important to us,” he explains.

IBM now sees organic and unimposed sharing as the biggest agent in the circulation of knowledge. Its stated strategy is to facilitate that sharing, not through any vertically integrated structure but through the empowerment of its many communities and individuals to network as openly and efficiently as possible.

“The focus was very much on the tools and the processes,” explains Luis Suarez, a KM specialist who works alongside Cooper in GBS. “There has been this shift in that the focus should be on the people.” As a leader in IBM’s community building team, that’s precisely what Suarez is aiming to achieve.

For the original post, click here

Tags: collaboration, IBM, knowledge management, social, web 2.0

Quoted from Elizabeth Millard

IT departments have been adjusting to the wave of consumer technology coming into the enterprise, and with Gen Y, those distinctions may be erased.

Much was made of the “enterprise ready” capabilities planned for the consumer favorite iPhone, but there could come a time in the not-too-distant future, when everything is enterprise ready.

Leadership consultant Deborah Gilburg recently noted that companies will need to work out how to accommodate new technologies as Millennials enter organizations, since they’ll gravitate toward organizations that give them access to hardware and software that they can use in both their personal and professional lives.

When a workforce is completely mobile, after all, what’s the distinction between work and home? Certainly, it’s not an office setting, and Gen Y sees no problem with using the same device to create a PowerPoint presentation and to whip up a video blog about a recent vacation

For the original article, click here

Tags: elizabeth millard, enterprise, future, generation y, iphone, millenials

Quoted from Keith Peters

The way I see Twitter is kind of like setting up a virtual shared office space where you and all your friends are going to work, hang out, etc. It’s kind of like background noise. You notice these trivial things people are doing just like you notice Jim from accounting brought back Indian food for lunch.

I see that Mike Chambers is off to have lunch with Lynda Weinman, Peter Elst got his email fixed, Danny Dura is going to the Game Developers Conference nest week, Eric Dolecki is listening to Iron Maiden while Ryan Stewart is pining for country music (ok, so my Twitter connections have questionable musical tastes :)).

For the original post, click here

Tags: attention, keith peters, office space, twitter, virtual

Quoted from Sarah Perez

Here’s another word to add to your lexicon: “Socialprise.” It’s meaning is somewhat obvious: social tools + enterprise = “socialprise.” It’s a new term, but one we hope sticks around, since it’s currently representative of one of the biggest shifts in business today.

For the original post, click here

Tags: enterprise, sarah perez, social tools, socialprise, web worker daily

From Craig Norris, The Project Economy - Industry Trend or Event?

Welcome to the strange new world of project-based work, where independent professionals coalesce around a design challenge or product launch and disband once the work is done.

Project work is not new: In Hollywood, members of the “cast of thousands” that make a film may never find themselves together until the premiere. What is new is the growing pervasiveness of project-to-project employment in an economy where a product’s shelf life is shrinking by the month, and firms are finding it necessary to reinvent themselves at regular intervals.

The advantages of a project-based workforce are clear and compelling: an ability to adapt quickly to changing competitive circumstances without an obsolete business unit’s drag on productivity, performance and profits. Large, bureaucratic companies as we’ve known them will cease to exist. They will be replaced by smaller, more fluid versions of their former selves, staffed by professional nomads who migrate to wherever the employment market promises the greatest personal and financial return.

Tags: hollywood, productivity, project work, work culture

Quoted from Umair Haque, Bubblegeneration

Yes, big business sucks. We all know it. But the question is: what does our feeling really mean? Why do we feel that?

Because the DNA of the industrial era firm is sucking the life out of the economy. Once upon a time, industrial era firms were engines of value creation. Today, they’re prisons, where trauma is institutionalized into everyone who comes into contact with them.

That feeling - like a dull toothache - is a massively powerful heuristic that something is deeply wrong; wrong with McJobs; wrong with $100m bonuses for value destruction; wrong with the evisceration of variety, choice, and happiness; wrong with the long slow death of culture and community; wrong with the sinking intuition that like you’ve signed away your life when you walk into that cube, all for a few bucks and free lattes.

So who reinvents the firm? We do.

The power of 2.0 isn’t minigames and ad nets: it’s the new DNA it brings to the table.

Tags: bubblegeneration, corporations, dna, harvard, Quotes, umair haque, workstreamr

via Adam Carson

Tags: adam carson, flickr, questions, stowe boyd, twitter, workstreamr