An online notebook
Five for Friday is WorkSmart’s weekly roundup of interesting stuff from the week’s reading.
We also now have a LinkyDink group which will automatically email you links to read everyday!
I spend a lot of my time at the moment talking about digital capability. To my mind, this means the ability of people throughout an organisation to make the most of the opportunities offered by digital technology.
Capability is less about skills though, and more about confidence – or maybe comfort.
Sure, a certain amount of skill is involved. I sometimes refer to this as the ‘Alt-Tab’ test. If someone knows that Alt-Tab means to quickly flick between applications on a Windows based computer (it’s Command-Tab on a Mac), they are probably going to be ok in the new digital world.
To me though, digital capability is more about knowing where to look for the answers as it is knowing the answers in the first place. It’s about understanding why people might want to use a certain tool, rather than using it yourself. It’s about being curious, networked, agile, user centred and flexible rather than knowing how to use this app or that.
This matters because the landscape is changing. A few years ago, an average worker in an office might need to use four or five systems on a regular basis. Their email, the database for doing their jobs, Office, the intranet and perhaps an HR or other system.
These days though, people are being invited to Dropbox folders, Huddle projects, Asana task lists, Trello boards, Basecamps, Nings, Yammer networks, Google Docs and more. The numbers of different systems are growing and often the first people will have heard of them is when they are invited and expected to use them.
Nobody can learn in advance about systems they have never heard of! Instead, they need the confidence and comfort with digital tools that they can recognise how they probably work, and have the knowledge to know they are unlikely to break them just by having a go.
As I have written before, and will do again, the days of monolithic, one size fits all IT systems is over. As Euan Semple says in a recent blog post:
Building a technology ecology from small iterative deployments of specific tools, with a throw away mentality that allows more constant adaptation, driven by ongoing conversations with users is the only way to do technology efficiently.
In this new world, everyone needs to be comfortable with switching between apps, even when those apps are doing rather similar things, just in a slightly different way. This won’t come from learning each app one by one, but instead by understanding the principles of digital tools, and the underlying philosophy of how they work.
As is often the case, the online comic XKCD nails it:
Some interesting developments from Dropbox – everyone’s (well, most people’s) favourite cloud storage/backup/sharing tool.
Firstly, a new app called Carousel, which is a photo gallery app. According to the blurb, it
…combines the photos in your Dropbox with the photos on your phone, and automatically backs up new ones as you take them. Carousel sorts all these memories by event so you can easily travel back in time to any photo from any date. And unlike other mobile galleries, the size of your Carousel isn’t constrained by the space on your phone, which means you can finally have your entire life’s memories in one place.
Sounds good. Note that this is a separate app rather than a new feature in the existing Dropbox app. Further evidence that the native app space is all around doing one thing well rather than cramming as much functionality into one app as possible (for another example see Facebook moving messaging out of the main FB app and forcing users into the dedicated messaging app).
Here’s a video with the details.
[vimeo 91475918 w=500 h=281]
Carousel: Your entire life at your fingertips from Dropbox on Vimeo.
Next is an update to Mailbox, which was an iOS only email client. It’s now on Android too, and had introduced a new feature that learns from your use of it which emails you are likely to immediately archive, for example, so that in future it can automate that task for you.
An email client that deletes emails on your behalf? That’s one way to inbox zero!
The other updates relate to Dropbox for Business, rather than the consumer version that most people use (for free). One is that now users will have two Dropbox folders – one for personal stuff and one for work. The work one will be in the control of the employer, who will be able to remotely wipe files from ex-employees, or for other security reasons.
A second new feature is account transfer, which allows employers to move an account to another employee, due to promotions or other movements. Thirdly, a sharing audit function will enable an organisation to track who has seen what files.
These are important updates for Dropbox to be seen as a serious contender in the cloud storage and sharing space, particularly in bigger organisations. However the real game changer has only been hinted at, and that is Project Harmony, which will bring collaboration to Dropbox documents.
Dropbox say that Harmony will
let you see who’s editing a file, have a conversation with other editors, and keep copies in sync — all right inside the apps you already use
So it won’t matter if one person is editing a file in Word on a Mac and another using a different version of Word on Windows – real time collaboration will still be a possibility.
These are really interesting developments from Dropbox, and the cloud storage space is hotting up at the moment, with price drops from Google, and new feature announcements from the likes of Box too.
Which storage service is your current favourite and what are the features that matter most to you?
A quick post as I am just back from a short break with the family and didn’t have anything lined up to publish today!
Altimeter Group have just published a really interesting report called Digital Transformation: Why and How Companies are Investing in New Business Models to Lead Digital Customer Experiences. It has its own microsite and everything.
There are seven key findings in the report, detailed on page 5. I found the following most interesting:
1. Social, mobile, real-time and other disruptive technologies are aligning to necessitate bigger changes than initially anticipated.
3. Mapping and understanding the customer experience is becoming critical in guiding transformation efforts.
5. Digital transformation is driven partly by technology and also by the evolution of customer behaviour.
In other words, digital matters because customers are using it.
All in all, it’s a great report and well worth trading your email address to get access to it.
I’ve just got into using Asana to manage my projects, thanks to a tip from Simon Booth-Lucking at Claremont Communications.
It’s a great web-based task manager. What I really like about it is that it work on two levels – you can build a very simple task list very quickly, or you can do some much more sophisticated project management if that’s what you require.
It’s also great value. You can have as many projects as you like, shared with up to 15 people, all for free. Only if you go above the 15 person limit do you need to start paying.
Here’s a video introducing Asana. If you want to see some more demos of what it is capable of, then the YouTube channel is the place to go.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liO5VbbIqIs&w=560&h=315]