I'm a total subscriber to LowFi living when it comes to doing information work on the road and on the run. I'd long ago stopped carrying around my PDA for most jaunts around town in favor of a Hipster PDA-type organizer.

For a while I simply carried around a small Moleskin Notebook and a pen. My setup has since evolved to be extremely low-fi. I now carry around the Fischer Space Pen I got for Christmas a few years ago, a Nick(it) wallet I got for free in the goody bag from MAD Museum's Mad About Dance event, and a small stack of index cards.

[click above to see the annotated version on flickr]

Dimensions are 3 7/8" x 5 3/8". Here's the folded and closed view:

Problem is that I often take the pen out and throw it in a bag or something so I find myself on a subway train with an idea, but nothing to write with. Tina pointed to the Inka Pen, which looks perfect.

If I attach it to my keys, I'll never be without it. Sweetness.

UPDATE: There are a good deal of reviews on the Inka on Merlin's 43 Folders. Check them out before you buy. So far it's seeming to me that the Space Pen might still be better and that the Cross Ion might be a viable competitor -- fewer steps to open/use the Ion. Nice to have found some blogger reviews of the Inka before I went out and looked for it. I'll still play with it if I make it to the NYC location that carries it: Art Brown at 2 West 46th St.

Baseline has a feature story exposing bits about How Google works and what we can learn from them. Most of the story focusses on the unique infrastructure Google has been building to support its expanding needs. But most interesting to me is the small bit that takes a lok Inside Google's Enterprise. The article refers to Page and Brin's pronouncement in their IPO that the company is not conventional and doesn't intend to become so. And this appears to be true judging by the way they run the company internally. They won't follow the pattern of what's been done to run businesses in the past if they can find a better way themselves.

This is exactly the attitude that has slowly been building up a revolution inside the ranks at enterprises large and small. Knowledge workers, fed up with the way things are have turned away from conventional software to manage they way the work in favor of better, simpler applications that get out of their way and let them get on with with it.

The article talks about how Google uses a simple system that manages project information using relatively unstructured email as the interface. The system mails employees every week asking what they worked on the week prior and what they plan to work on during the current week. The response is parsed, fed and indexed into a searchable system that is open to the enterprise so that anyone else can track other employees projects that they are interested in. They call it "living out loud".

What they're doing is creating an open system that matches an open knowledge sharing ecology. That openness allows for the "cross pollenation" of ideas. Even better, it provides opportunity for the one thing that is driving nearly every aspect of the innovative web today -- open conversation. They're creating a system that better ensures sustainability because it works with an existing, accepted process -- communicating through email. This removes barriers to use because email is easy. The unstructured nature of the format also means that it can evolve with the needs of the system on the back end. The computer works harder so that the knowledge worker can just dash off a note and get on with their work.

Wow, right? That's revolutionary thinking, and it's so simple on the user-facing end that you hardly have any excuse for not participating. And opportunists that exploit the system by mining and tracking with it will benefit from it immensely. This is the evolving face of knowledge management. The idea of telling the technology to get out of the way so we can do work is what's driving the enterprise blog and wiki revolution. We all need to publish, share and collaborate, but we want to do it as simply and effortlessly as possible. Google embodies that idea completely inside and out.

Gerry McGovern makes excellent observations on CMS feature simplicity and sustainability of use in his article, "Complexity delivers short-term gain but long-term pain". He bases his argument on the "feature fatigue" phenomenon, cited by researchers at the Smith School of Business, which claims that most people focus on features when buying a product not on usability. The study notes:

"Consumers give more weight to a product's capability benefits and less weight to a product's usability before they use the product than after they use the product-despite the fact that a product's usability strongly influences their satisfaction with the product."

McGovern argues that the same can be said of CMS and that buyers of CMS should beware this tendency to be wowed by features over usability.

Feature fatigue and CMS

The Smith study focusses only on pre-purchase behaviors and perceived satisfaction during use. They say that it's only in the actual use of a technology that you can determine satisfaction. I don't know if the study mentions any data about sustainability, but the article on the Smith study implies that when users of consumer electronics are confronted with complex, unfriendly technologies they may eventually abandon them, as they say "chucking it in frustration".

I'm a believer that satisfaction is a good determining factor when it comes to sustainability and that another statement would also be true. If users are confronted with an easy-to-use technology, they will be more likely to continue to use it. You'd have to prove that, of course and I don't know if it follows logic to simply say that since unusable technology has one effect, that usable technology should have the opposite effect. But it seems obvious. I would go further to say that an even worse outcome is that if a given technology is necessary for running your business and that technology perceived as a user-hostile experience, that it will interrupt the normal flow of one's work and slow the company down.

Putting the feature fatigue concept in the context of enterprise CMS seems a logical analogy. However, there are variables in corporate environments that may make it difficult to make a clean-cut transition out of existing systems unless there is understanding from the top of what pains users lower down the chain. The concept of user satisficing—the tendency to select the first option given that can work for the situation rather than the "optimal" solution—is one phenomenon that contributes to the complex issue of use and sustainability. People make do with what they have.

That leads me to wonder what the path to change is when people have become accustomed to using complex software that is difficult to use? What factors exist in this situation? Are people on the low-end able to communicate upwards what they experience in terms of dissatisfaction? Is that information received? Can it be used to evaluate current technologies as successes or failures in supporting sustainable information management processes?

It may seem difficult to change in the direction of usability and satisfaction when you've invested heavily in technologies that are the cause of your pain. Moving away from a family of products may feel disruptive if bulk licenses are already paid for and staffed to support those specific technologies. But the bottom line for decision makers is that the payoff comes in business intelligence, the ability to make sound decisions based on experience. That past and ongoing experience is retrievable because your employees capture it in an easy to use CMS. Let's look at a few dimensions affected by ease of use to illustrate why it's an important element in affecting a company's bottom line.

1. Ease of use leads to satisfaction with CMS and sustained use
2. Sustainability leads to a richer information repository (CMS)
3. Rich information repositories lead to more meaningful information mining
4. Rich information mining leads to more informed decision making
5. Better decision making leads to fewer dollars lost and more business opportunities

In the end, it's about money. If you believe that ease of use leads to making more money, you start to take it seriously. We need to see some studies demonstrate that. But what we're talking about here in terms of actions is simply ensuring the satisfaction of your key asset, your knowledge workers. To put it simply, if employees are happy to keep adding reusable knowledge to the business, the business benefits in explicit terms that may be traced back to the information capture. If you want to prove it, it would seem that if you can capture longitudinal data to compare the flow of knowledge into the CMS with ease of use and satisfaction dimensions, then you can provide some insight into return on investment.

Evangelizing simplicity in the enterprise (the software user's story)

So the question for corporate decision makers feeling the pain of complex and unusable technology becomes, "how do we sell our company on the idea of usability as a strategic move?" If the revolution can't happen from below, the vision has to come from above. But the people above need to be convinced through the experience. Sometimes, the perfect pitch can go nowhere without concrete examples. The way you sell it is by demonstrating value through use.

First, point out success stories. If you read and agree with 37 Signals' popular ebook "Getting Real" then you don't need to be convinced that simplicity and usability can equal dollars. They focus on simplicity because it ensures satisfaction in 95% (or some high number like that) of their customers. That 95% uses 37 Signals' customers comes to 37 Signals because the specific solutions they provide are the antithesis of what they've used for processes like project management and collaboration. They want small, simple and efficient and they leave satisfied that they can get in, do what they need to do to collaborate or organize their stuff and get back to work. How's that for a productivity pitch?

Second, prove the concept. Set up real world demonstrations. Put it before people and show them how it works. Remove obstacles and make it easy. Provide an open testing period, do a super-short training screencast or cheat sheet and then let your staff have at it. You can set up pre-determined areas for activity and open up the system for personal information management. This way, users determine it's usefulness. But most importantly, they get to try it out and experience an environment that makes their information management process simpler and more satisfying.

I've been privy to demonstrations where vendors allow some testers to use their software beta in order to build up some excitement around their software's release. Vendors get potential customers to start experiencing their sofware ahead of releasing. And if they create an environment of open communication they also get to establish a relationship with their customers. Other benefits include word of mouth recommendations, feedback on improvements,and if their software is well received, better assurance of its use. All of this before they even release the software commercially. It should go without saying that a vendor would benefit greatly from beta tests.

As a CMS customer, a company could follow this lead and do the same thing, testing vendor software in an enterprise environment. Set up a private testing period for a select set of users and create an open environment of communication around it. Let the feedback stream in and use it to build momentum around the technology. If it's received as a simpler, more usable way of doing business, you're on the right track. Use the feedback to improve how it integrates with your processes. Use that feedback to get better usability improvements out of your vendor. When you're happy that your test users are satisfied with the experience, release it to the enterprise and keep the communication environment open.

Using simplicity as a design strategy (the vendor's story)

And how do you employ usability as a strategic factor if you are a software vendor? First, believe that ease of use should lead to satisfication with your product, and that usability in turn leads loyalty to the company in terms of renewals. I hate to sound like a Mac Fanboy, but the Macintosh Operating System is proof of that. Google search may be proof of that as well.

Consider that usabilty and simplicity is one of the key factors making weblogs attractive as replacements for complex CMS in the first place. It's the main reason that many corporates took the leap and tried this new thing, blogs as the 99 cent KM solution. Many were likely comparing the simplicty of blogs to failed KM solutions they bought. Use that knowledge to your advantage. Simplify your experience to show customers a better way.

When the software you have developed has evolved over time into a more and more complex environment, are you out of luck? Of course not. You step back, take a look at the customer's experience of using the software -- everything it evokes as they use it. Find ways to make it easier. Simplify where you can. Remove obstacles. Do whatever you can to take the pain away. Guage satisfaction constantly by listening to feedback and factor it back into improving the user experience with your software.

It may not happen over night, but making your software usable is a worthwhile goal. Overall, it's not impossible to change in the direction of simplicity. More concrete advice is to break the process down into smaller steps.

1. Cement your strategy with user experience and usability as a keystone.
2. Understand your users by creating personas that describe who your users are and what their goals are. Focus design on them (persona-based user-centered design).
3. Describe the use cases that apply to personas.
4. Describe specific scenarios for each use case above. What types of actions would they take with your software in order to achieve goals?
5. Prescribe improvements to the user experience that match with the expectations found in the use case scenarios. Suggesting flow and interaction improvements. Suggest usability improvements to elements of your user interface.
6. Validate the implementations and test against real people.
7. Use the feedback to validate information about the design process you just underwent. Iterate.

That's all there is to it! Well, no, there is a lot more to it, but this is a start.

Food for thought

The Smith study and McGovern's article should be enough food for thought. It's our job as users and makers of software to just understand that satisfaction can be improved when software, however complex or simple in features, is easier to use.

Applying the Smith study's consumer electronics research is just a start I think. It would be valuable if someone did longitudinal studies that track satisfaction and abandonment or sustained use in other areas, especially with regard to personal and enterprise productivity and content management software.

Dabble DB is the most practical business-related Web 2.0 application I've seen this year. It allows you to copy data from MS Excel into the web application and manipulate that data in ways you can't do easily in Excel, including turning that data into a more easily managed relational database. Furthermore, the service makes it possible to share the data easily with others via RSS and iCal.

If you use Excel a lot, you'll want to check out the demo video. Note that this is not a free service.

CorpKnowPedia is an interesting wiki that attempts to monitor the corporate landscape. See, for instance:

* Lists_of_companies
* Master_list_of_corporations

Their purpose as stated on the home page:

"The end goal is to expose the traditionally covert and behind the scenes operations of corporations that increasingly control the world's resources. In order to exercise control over such entities, consumers must recognize the power of their consumptive dollar."

9 years ago I had ideas about how some of the advantages of doing online research that I enjoyed the academic world would be commonplace practice for everyone with a library card. It's been years since I've done research in the New York Public Libraries because I have access to most of the electronic databases I need at work, but occassionally I'll get an article citation that isn't covered by the database vendors we normally purchase. I've been having some of those source gaps lately as I start to look into different subject areas.

A few months ago, noticing that I've not been able to find full text for some articles, I ordered a library card for the New York Public Library. A library card is available for free (this is what your taxes are for) to anyone who lives, works, pays property taxes, or attends school in New York State. Others may apply, with payment of a $100 annual fee, for a nonresident library card. Really good deal if you consider all the electronic resources this gives you access to.

Having a library card gives you access to over 300 commercially-produced research databases. I've been spending most of my time searching for articles in Ebsco Host (Academic Search Premier). Ebsco is a database vendor that provides abstracts and indexes and some full text for periodicals in subjects ranging from business to the social sciences. Most of the major information work journals I would read are available here as are newspapers and magazines.

I'm posting this here because I'm sure a lot of people rely primarily on the publicly available web to deliver their information and stop there if they can't find full text for a citation they've found. What's cool is that you don't need to phsyically go to your local public or college library when that happens now, because you can just order a library card and use their online resources. I have a feeling a lot of people don't know you can do that.

The upcoming C2: Connect & Collaborate conference at the New York Hilton (Sept. 27-28) looks interesting. They have a call for speakers deadline of March 15, if you're interested in this topic and want to propose a presentation. I'd love to see/hear what others are doing, so if you're working on enterprise blogs and your proposal gets accepted to C2, do let me know.

I don't think I'll be submitting a proposal. After I do one last upcoming talk this spring, I think I will stop speaking on this topic for a while. We're at the point now where we're watching to see how some of our current projects do and monitoring what the interest and growth possibilities are for weblogs in the intranet. We're really still at an early phase in our roadmap, so there's a lot of internal evangelism and waiting at this point.

Fredrik Wackå posted an entry related to the rise of blog consultancies that are appearing in the marketplace. In "Internal Blogging More In Focus - Blog Consultants Beware", Wackå makes the following statement about the dangers of pushing for the introduction of corporate weblogs.

It's one thing to for example build a personal brand with blogging for an individual. It's an entirely different thing to try to change corporate culture, working methods and so on with blogging as one of many tools. Where a good writer and decent businessman can build a blog consultancy to do the first, it takes strategic organizational and communicative competence to do the other.

I'm going to go out on a limb and agree with him here, although I'm sure everyone in the professional blogging consultancy market will disagree. Fredrik's point here, I think, is that weblogging is not just a technology that's introduced into the information ecology. There are aspects about weblog publishing that are directly related to how one views there place in the company and its culture. The point is well made in a comment left by Agile:

My experience is that corporate employees exhibit risk-averse behaviour in word and deed. In spite of the fact that the upper management will exhort iniative and outspokenness amongst staff. Because middle management will in turn punish such behaviour severely. Everybody knows that. So internal blogging will equally be a very sanitized version of what could and should be said.

Corporate blogs are effective and relevant when they're organically created out of a need to share from the grassroots, and not merely from a mandate chucked down from the C levels. It is, however, important to have the support of higher-ups for a weblogging culture to emerge. His point about lower-level employees avoiding the risk of stirring the waters or inviting criticism sounds acutely attuned to the type of behavior that tends to exist in large corporations. Because of lack of support or fear of reprisal for openness, people may tend to do as little as possible to keep their job and as much as possible to maintain the status quo. If the status quo has not included openly sharing/publishing information, then the shift to blogging will be pretty significant.

I'll reiterate again a point I made in past presentations about the importance of diversity and decentralization in the information ecology. For blogging to be useful, it has to grow out of one's own expressed needs to share. This keeps ownership close to the blogger and makes the probability of sustainability and success greater. I don't think you can effectively incentivize blogging from above. You can create policy to support an open environment for communication. You can create a technology platform to ease people into the tools to publish. But the real incentives to publish what one knows must come from the author. For the blog author to communicate genuinely and directly, they have to be willing and able to do so. This is the tipping point you are looking for. When the culture exists to allow people to feel comfortable to blog, probability exists that blogging may succeed in the company. If a consultant sells you on a technology platform, but fails to discuss users, the ecology of prospective corporate bloggers and their culture, they're selling you snake oil. The only up side to buying into a technology such as weblogging without having these discussions, however, is that you won't have to pay the huge pricetags that we saw with KM packages in the last 5 years.

I'm saying all of this above because I think the emergence of the business blogging industry is very much directed by the writing of those who are keenly attuned to the possibilities afforded to companies by this format. On the buying side, there are many high level management folks within companies that are buying the "blogs will help your company" sales pitches. But consultancies and prospective corporate customers should be aware that in your needs assessment and discovery process, the aspect of culture cannot be overlooked. Otherwise, all we are doing is packaging corporate messages, rather than allowing true conversations (in the spirit of the ClueTrain) to emerge.