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Gary Edwards

Business Process Documentation: Automate It! | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...documentation-automate-it.html

Business-Process-Documentation

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Training Documents. Creating step-by step-documents for training business users on how to perform normal process activities (such as creating a new order or processing a shipment), has historically been time consuming, tedious, and quickly outdated. With software like Worksoft AnalyzeTM, step-by step-training materials include a narrative of each process step along with sample data, full screenshots, and even highlighted data entry fields used for every transaction. Results are automatically generated in MS Word or PDF documents. Best of all, when part of a process changes (because a business user has captured a process in a new way), new documentation is generated with the click of a button. With automation software, the generation of training material is automatic, and automatically updated.
  • Audit & Compliance Documents. When external or internal auditors are deployed in your organization, one of the first things they ask for is a description of the processes used in your business. In my experience this is time-consuming and takes away valuable time from your team’s normal activities. In addition to detailed, plain-English process narratives described above, Worksoft Analyze allows you to provide auditors with up-to-date flow charts describing the overall process (when an overview is needed), as well as detailed step-by-step documentation. Manual steps or signature approval blocks can be easily added because the process description is generated in easy-to-edit formats, like MS Word. There’s much more we could discuss, so don’t hesitate to contact me if you’d like to continue the conversation. Next time, we will describe how you can layer analytics on top of captured business process flows for process optimization, streamlining, and re-engineering.
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Jun 15
     
    "Audit. Compliance. Team training. Process re-engineering. Every one of these activities requires that your team have accurate business process documentation in-hand to maximize success. Is it optional? Not really. For a variety of reasons, complex enterprises need to have a firm understanding of how they actually conduct business and "how things really work around here." And it needs to be written down in a way that your team, your auditors, your regulators, and your business analysts will understand and be able to use and customize for their intended purpose. Challenges. The problem is that generating and maintaining accurate business process documentation is a real pain because it's time consuming and difficult. The knowledge of the process has to come from business users and business analysts, whose time is expensive - and any time spent creating documentation takes them away from their primary mission of running the business. Even worse, once this hard-won information is captured, it can become out-of-date in a matter of days or weeks as business processes change over time. The cost of documenting your business processes can run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars in direct costs for consultants, interviewers, and document preparation - not to mention your team's opportunity cost which can be much greater. An Automation Path. If you've made it this far, it's because you're looking for a better way - and the good news is that automation provides today's most effective solution. With software for automated business process documentation, the business user turns on a process "capture" feature from their desktop toolbar when executing a business process in their enterprise application of choice, such as SAP or a web application. When the process is complete, they simply turn off the capture feature. Every business process function, keystroke, and transaction has been uploaded into the automation software. In this way, the softwar
Gary Edwards

Gigaom | 'Work Processing' and the decline of the (Wordish) Document - 0 views

gigaom.com/...work-processing

Work-Processing Documents Visual-Productivity Cloud-Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • Chat-centric work management, as typified by Slack-style work chat, is getting a tremendous surge in attention recently, and is the now dominant form of message-centric work technology, edging out follow-centric work media solutions (like Yammer, Jive, and IBM Connections).
  • Workforce communications — relying on a more top-down messaging approach for the mobile workforce — is enjoying a great surge in adoption, but is principally oriented toward the ‘hardwork’ done by workers in retail, manufacturing, transport, security, and construction, and away from the ‘softwork’ done by office workers. This class of tool is all about mobile messaging. (Note: we are planning a market narrative about this hot area.)
  • Today’s Special Advertisement Today, I saw that David Byttow’s Bold — a new work processing app — has entered a private beta, with features that line it up in direct competition with Google Docs and the others mentioned above. Bold raised a round of $1 million from Index Ventures in January 2016. Advertisement The competition is hotting up.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Work Processing Will Be The New Normal Advertisement What I anticipate is the convergence on a work processing paradigm, with at least these features: Advertisement Work processing ‘docs’ will exist as online assemblages, and not as ‘files’. As a result they will be principally shared through links, access rights, or web publishing, and not as attachments, files, or PDFs, except when exported by necessity. Work processing apps will incorporate some metaphors from word processing like styling text, manipulating various sorts of lists, sections, headings, and so on. Work processing will continue the notions of sharing and co-editing from early pioneers (Google Docs in particular), like edit-oriented comments, sharing through access-control links, and so on. Work processing will lift ideas from work chat tools, such as bots, commands, and @mentions. Work processing will adopt some principles from task management, namely tasks and related metadata, which can be embedded within work processing content, added in comments or other annotations, or appended to ‘docs’ or doc elements by participants through work chat-style bot or chat communications.
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Jun 16
     
    "I've been exploring a growing list of web-based tools for the creation and management of what most would call 'documents' - assemblages of text, images, lists, embedded video, audio and other media - but which, are in fact, something quite different than the precursors, like Microsoft Word and Apple Pages documents. The big shift underlying these new tools is that they are not oriented around printing onto paper, or digital analogues of paper, like PDF. Instead, they take as a given that the creation, management, and sharing of these assemblages of information will take place nearly all the time online, and will be social at the core: coediting, commenting, and sharing are not afterthoughts grafted onto a 'work processing' architecture. As a result, I am referring to these tools - like the pioneering Google Docs, and newer entrants Dropbox Paper, Quip, Draft, and Notion - as 'work processing' tools. This gets across the idea that we aren't just pushing words onto paper through agency of word processing apps, we're capturing and sharing information that's critical to our increasingly digital businesses, to be accessed and leveraged in digital-first use cases. In a recent piece on Medium, Documents are the new Email, I made the case that old style 'documents' are declining as a percentage of overall work communications, with larger percentages shifting to chat, texting, and work media (enterprise social networks). And, like email, documents are increasingly disliked as a means to communicate. And I suggested that, over time, these older word processing documents - and the use cases that have built up around them - will decline. At the same time, I believe there is a great deal of promise in 'work processing' tools, which are based around web publishing, web notions of sharing and co-creation, and the allure of content-centric work management."
Gary Edwards

Former Apple HTML5 Leader Builds His Own Apps Platform - 0 views

www.readwriteweb.com/...er-apple-html5-chief-build.php

Charles-Jolley SproutCore Strobe Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Most importantly, Strobe.js resolves the problem of scripting that applies to multiple domains simultaneously, leading to the kinds of cross-domain discrepancies that security tools presently associate with hijack attempts, and which newer browsers disallow. HTML5 developers will want their apps to include links to functionality from Facebook, Twitter, and other social services. These links seem simple enough, but their security protocols require logins and virtual sessions - which means the domains of these services' URLs must be addressed somehow.
  • Strobe.js creates a level of indirection, letting apps use Strobe servers as proxies to authenticate themselves on social services and use their APIs, without having to build OAuth functionality directly into their apps, or to force users to log in separately. This is the core of the Strobe Social add-on, which is key to the company's unique business model.
  • Strobe's business model relies on how much and how often deployed apps use Strobe's server-side API. "It works a lot like an analytics system, like Omniture," explains Strobe's Charles Jolley. "Every time you launch an app, it hits our server for an update to see if there's a new version available. That's an API call. If you turn on one of these add-ons to get the server to do social, that's an API call. You buy packages from us based on API calls."
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  • The first 10,000 API calls placed per month on a developer's account are free, as well as the first 10 GB of bandwidth on Strobe's servers. That's to give developers a leg up during the testing phase. Typically once apps are deployed, the bandwidth use will expand to a level worth charging for. Up to 1 million API calls per month, and 50 GB of bandwidth, carry a $19 monthly fee. API calls numbering up to 10 million per month with 250 GB of bandwidth, costs $95 monthly.
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Sep 11
     
    The articles about Charles Jolley and Strobe continue.  This time it's ReadWriteWeb.  They do a much better job explaining Strobe and the business model Strobe seeks to implement.  IMHO, Strobe's concept for mitigating the exchange of data across server domains could be ODBC for Cloud Productivity. ODBC and OLE are of course inter-application processes essential to the desktop productivity environment and the creation of compound documents.  I'll try to contact Charles and discuss this. "One of the big reasons I left [Apple] is because I really believe that the next great app ecosystem for mobile especially, but also for PCs and television, is going to be built around HTML5," Jolley tells RWW. "If you look at the people who are building mobile apps today, 70% of those people will say they want to use HTML5. But a lot of them don't make it to market, except for a few large companies like Amazon and Financial Times, most people aren't able to deliver HTML5 apps." The Apple platform for apps delivery is rich and compelling, Jolley points out. Unlike an ordinary "open" platform that, almost by definition now, is all self-service, Apple provides direct, personal business services to help developers organize themselves and get on their feet, even if their employer is already recognized around the world. Then Apple provides hosting and deployment services, managing user entitlements and licenses. It creates an ecosystem and then nourishes the entities that live within it, and that's why Apple's platform works as well as it does. "Apple makes it very, very easy for someone to build an app and take it to market. You have these small groups of one or two people who can create businesses around them. And today with HTML5, that's simply not possible," says Jolley. "Even though there's a huge benefit to HTML5 - you can be in any app store, you can go direct to the consumers, you can build any kind of business model you want - if you're going to reach all the 1.2 billion p
Gary Edwards

Office 2016: Reinventing productivity and business processes - The Official Microsoft Blog - 0 views

blogs.microsoft.com/...ctivity-and-business-processes

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Third, productivity requires a rich service spanning all your work and work artifacts (documents, communications, and business process events and tasks). It is no longer bound to any single application. It’s a service that leverages the cumulative intelligence and knowledge you and your organization need to drive productivity.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 25 Sep 15
       
      This statement misses an important point. Productivity demands "focus". Spreading the artifacts of productivity across the broad spectrum of communications, messaging, conferencing, scheduling and documents is anything but productive. Take eMail for example. It's a great messaging and communications platform, but it takes the focus away fromt he workflow and puts into a forced focus on a broader messaging flow. If conversations are focused on the documents in a workflow, and the workflow is tracked and managed by document, the focus remains exactly where it should be - ON THE DOCUMENTS! Things like eMail, collaborative editing and comments, real time messaging, phone calls and scheduling, are critical to capturing the conversation, but they need to be tied to the document in question and the overall activity of the workflow. Keep the focus on the documents; keep the conversation surrounding the documents with the documents; and the focus will be exactly where it needs to be! Use the notification systems to notify workers of what is happening with each document, and keep them aware of how the workflow is progressing.
  • Mobility. Conversations. Intelligence.
  • Its entrepreneurs see Office as a universal language for their company to fuel collaboration with their team across a range of devices and for data-driven decisions about their inventory as they ship more than 10,000 designer dresses every hour.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Our ambition to reinvent productivity includes reinventing business process. In the past, these processes were rigid, imposed and inflexible. Office and Microsoft Dynamics are changing the game with solutions that make business processes a catalyst to organizational productivity.
  • striving to build a new productivity and business process system that any organization can use to harness the power of human networks, respond to business events in real time, and find and share data insights as businesses create more information than they can consume.
Gary Edwards

MS Office 365 and its Influence on Business - 0 views

microsoft.cioreview.com/...business-nid-12911-cid-50.html

Office-365

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • “MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats”
  • Office 365: what is going on at the market? Offline version of MS Office has actually not many competitors with the comparable functionality. LibreOffice, OpenOffice, CorelOffice etc. may be referred among them. But if you examine the cross-platform solutions for the offline document editing, MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats.
  • Costs of the full-fledged package MS Office 365 (including its cloud-based capacities) and the offline version of MS Office 2013/2016 for the home users are comparable. Therefore the progressive transition of the majority of users to MS Office 365 may be forecasted.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Currently the primary market spreading the MS Office 365 services is the corporate sector. However soon, due to the flexible pricing policy of Microsoft, new home users will progressively give their preference to MS Office 365. Rise of popularity of the off-the-shelf Microsoft solutions in the corporate sector, especially in the midst of the small and mid-sized business, is also expected. Integration of MS Office 365 with SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Skype, OneDrive, PowerBIand Lync Online allows the full-scaled employment of the MS stack for document management and solution of other company tasks (video conferences, corporate mail, team-work with documents, data monitoring and analyze etc.).
  • There are three essential reasons why Office 365 will be highly demanded by business: - Business currently needs services for collaborative editing of the huge documents as well as for arrangement and management of their ample quantities; provision of the required safety level in the document workflow systems without additional expenses. Set of the Microsoft services and its integration with MS Office 365 offer solution for these tasks with some minor reservations. -Integration of MS Office 365 with existing services and employment of the off-the-shelf Microsoft solutions for organization of the document workflow are also the promising trends. -Good results can be expected from employment of the cloud-based Azure platform for extension of the MS Office 365 capacities and building process setup and document workflow systems in the small and mid-sized business environment.
  • But if you examine the cross-platform solutions for the offline document editing, MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats.
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Mar 16
     
    "Microsoft Office 365: what is important for business to know about the "cloud-based" office? Cloud-based service Microsoft Office 365 has become more and more popular solution for managing document workflow in companies. Subsequently, the number of MS Office 365 subscribers is growing by tens percent every year. For instance in the third quarter of 2015 the cloud-based services Office 365, Azure and Dynamics CRM became the principal drivers of the profit markup of Microsoft. Office 365: what is going on at the market? Offline version of MS Office has actually not many competitors with the comparable functionality. LibreOffice, OpenOffice, CorelOffice etc. may be referred among them. But if you examine the cross-platform solutions for the offline document editing, MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats. Costs of the full-fledged package MS Office 365 (including its cloud-based capacities) and the offline version of MS Office 2013/2016 for the home users are comparable. Therefore the progressive transition of the majority of users to MS Office 365 may be forecasted. Currently the primary market spreading the MS Office 365 services is the corporate sector. However soon, due to the flexible pricing policy of Microsoft, new home users will progressively give their preference to MS Office 365. Rise of popularity of the off-the-shelf Microsoft solutions in the corporate sector, especially in the midst of the small and mid-sized business, is also expected. Integration of MS Office 365 with SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Skype, OneDrive, PowerBIand Lync Online allows the full-scaled employment of the MS stack for document management and solution of other company tasks (video conferences, corporate mail, team-work with documents, data monitoring and analyze etc.). "MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats" "
Gary Edwards

Is Enterprise content management becoming obsolete and irrelevant? | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...g-obsolete-and-irrelevant.html

ECM SaaS

shared by Gary Edwards on 16 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Moving content to a cloud based file storage vendor can lower operational cost. However, this is not enough to gain any real competitive advantage. Cloud based file storage vendors do not reveal any additional insights over traditional ECM solutions. Companies are moving to big data solutions to gain better insights into their data. Yet, they have had limited success in obtaining value from unstructured content in big data file stores. This includes keyword proximity searches, classification and sentiment analysis on unstructured data streams like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
  • Big data capability provides little value to those company executives that are retaining terabytes or petabytes of static content. How does one make sense of all this unstructured data? There is no silver bullet to gain optimum insights. One way to provide value from your unstructured content, is to bridge it with your structured content. However, there seems to be lacking an overall industry accepted strategy describing how to realize unstructured data into actionable insights.
  • n A.I. concierge services – realizing the promise of big data, I introduced the concept of an information framework based upon W3C open specification Resource Description Framework (RDF). RDF is a perfect solution for capturing and bridging unstructured and structured data. RDF provides a true enterprise solution for contextual mapping and protects a company from vendor lock-in. You now have the capability to turn your unstructured data repository into an oracle of corporate knowledge. More like this Health IT glossary A.I. concierge services – realizing the promise of big data Overcoming 5 major supply chain challenges with big data analytics on IDG Answers Can I install iOS operating system in my android and how? Achieving semantic maturity will enable you to build a knowledge management system that will transform the business. New type of capabilities can be realized, everything from auto answering emails, to adaptive and multiagent systems that process transactions. Imagine how these new capabilities will change ITs ability to service the business. You can now tie your knowledge management solution to your business process to provide invaluable insights.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • You have now shifted your IT environment from simple processing transactions to understanding transactions.
  • The challenge for ECM vendors is to provide true information insights on unstructured data. In order to thrive and prosper, these vendors will require more than simple indexing, storage and retrieval of content. ECM vendors needs to shift their view from data storage to knowledge management. Holding onto the current capabilities will no longer be viable to stay competitive in a billion dollar ECM market place.
  • Gary Edwards on 16 Mar 16
     
    "As CIOs look for better value from their enterprise content management (ECM) solutions, they're finding more cost effective ways of operating from cloud based file storage vendors. Box, Google Drive, AWS and others provide the same capabilities offered by expensive ECM solutions. In this article, ECM refers to a solution that stores unstructured data, such as documents, images, and plain text. Traditional ECM solutions are no longer cost competitive and do not provide any additional value over the simple indexing, storage and retrieval capabilities. Shifting ECM management of infrastructure, maintenance and operations to cloud based file storage vendors seems unavoidable to stay cost competitive."
Gary Edwards

Two types of fear, or how to win in the next stage of the cloud | ZDNet - 0 views

www.zdnet.com/...in-the-next-stage-of-the-cloud

business-process-management workflow Productivity Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • For years, big software providers like Oracle, SAP, IBM, and HP have been taking their big software solutions for managing business processes and slicing them into industry-specific solutions. And, of course, they'll also send an army of consultants who can help you customize those solutions to your specific company--for a big fee. All of these big software providers are now trying to transition their solutions to the cloud, or offer private cloud or hybrid cloud solutions. They usually aren't in a hurry to make this switch because it means swapping lucrative licensing and maintenance fees for software-as-a-service subscription fees. But, customer demand is driving the move to SaaS, and so is a host of new competitors--smaller, industry-specific vendors who can better cater to the needs of specific industries and sub-specialties.
  • Many of these smaller vendors are SaaS-first or have been able to navigate the transition to the cloud must faster because they are smaller and more narrowly-focused. We refer to this emerging movement as the "industry cloud" and we recently released a joint ZDNet-TechRepublic special feature on the industry cloud to delve into how it's affecting businesses of all sizes and in various industries and to give our readers some guidance and best practices for navigating it. If you're faced with the decision of sticking with a traditional vendor or trusting an upstart cloud company with your company's most important applications and data, then I'd definitely suggest reading our special feature to understand all of the nuances involved, as well as the drawbacks of going with an upstart cloud provider.
  • But, I'll also boil down the decision-making process for you. In this type of decision, there are two types of fear. And, it depends on which one motivates you more. If you have a solid market advantage to protect and don't need to innovate so much as simply remain steady and stable, then you should probably stick with your traditional vendor. Your biggest fear is making a mistake that could rock the boat.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • On the other hand, if your biggest fear is getting lapped by a competitor because you can't move fast enough, then you should give some serious consideration to the industry cloud upstarts, who can give you some important shortcuts and more hands-on service. They can also enable you to punch above your weight limit.And just to give you a little perspective on how the industry cloud is suddenly reshaping things, take a look at the following data point from the original research we did as part of our special feature:
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Jun 15
     
    ""The real opportunity is moving mission critical systems in the cloud. [Industries] are the biggest hold out. We see that as the biggest opportunity." That's how Stephan Scholl, co-president of Infor--an enterprise software company that specializes in solutions for specific industries--explains what he sees when he looks at the cloud market. For all of the endless hype about cloud computing over the past five years, most companies have remained slow to move their most important applications to the cloud. Sure, the cloud has been good enough to run a few experiments and save big money on licensing fees with less critical apps like HR and collaboration and some overly-glorified shared address books. That's because if those services go down or get hacked or employees have a slow internet connection then it's no big deal because people can still get their work done. It's different when it comes to the software that your whole company is logged into every minute of the business day. That was the conventional wisdom. But, it's starting to change. PINBOX The Industry Cloud: Why It's Next Read More Large enterprises, SMBs, startups, and everything in between are now taking a hard look at moving their core business applications to the cloud. While that obviously includes software like ERP and financial systems, the even more interesting story is the software that's specific to each industry--insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, real estate, etc. These industries all have specialized needs because they all have very different kinds of business processes. In many of them there are even sub-specialties within industries that have even more specialized needs. "
Gary Edwards

3 steps to digitizing your work for maximum productivity | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...-for-maximum-productivity.html

Office-365 productivity Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Why go digital?One advantage for businesses to ditch paper– and perhaps the single most important factor – is convenience. Digital data is both highly searchable, and is also easily transferrable. What’s more, the mature state of cloud services today means that you can expect the information you store online to be available across whatever devices you may own -- be it a smartphone, tablet, PC laptop, Mac computer – or even a Web browser at a cybercafé or hotel lobby when on a vacation.Digital documents are also clearly suited to data backup. Despite the calibration required to get things set up in a way that works for you, it’s infinitely easier to make a copy of digital data versus photocopying stacks of printed invoices or bills. And a growing list of cloud storage services (Dropbox and SugarSync, to name two) have taken document storage a step further by saving multiple versions of a doc so you can revert to earlier versions of a document if necessary.
  • Finally, digitization opens the door to greater levels of collaboration at work by making it easy to collaborate with coworkers on only the relevant data. On this front, an entire generation of online tools are available for a diverse range of tasks such as time tracking (Toggl), project management (Asana) and collaboration (Yammer) – of which all are captured digitally without printing out a single piece of paper.So how should you go about joining the digital document revolution? More like this 12 Evernote hacks and apps for power users 8 time-saving productivity hacks 20 uses for Evernote that you probably haven’t thought of yet on IDG Answers How to disable the Windows button on a Microsoft Surface tablet?
  • 1. Choose a digital notebook systemOne of the starting points for digitizing your business docs is to decide on a platform for filing away notes, ideas and documents. Not only does it serve a critical role as a virtually unlimited digital repository for filing important details, charts, audio clips or screen grabs, a good digital system will make it easy to organize and find the information when you need it.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Microsoft OneNoteThe popular Microsoft OneNote allows you to enter rich text, images, media files or even drawings into fully searchable notebooks. OneNote works on a variety of platforms, including Windows PCs, Mac computers, Android and iOS devices, and even from a Web browser.The strength of OneNote is its support for freeform data, with complete freedom to align (or misalign) text and all supported objects. The latest version also adds Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for images, making it easy to search for specific words within new images, and adds support for Dropbox on top of Microsoft’s own OneDrive cloud storage service.
  • EvernoteEvernote is another popular, free, online note-taking service. It offers effectively unlimited storage, albeit with a monthly upload cap (which is much larger for users willing to shell for one of the two fairly inexpensive tiers). The advantage of Evernote is its support for an incredibly diverse list of platforms, which includes native support on the BlackBerry 10 smartphone, third-party clients for Linux, and even scanners with the capability to scan straight into Evernote.Notebooks can be shared among multiple users – including those without a paid account – while individual notes can be shared publicly with a unique URL. Evernote also saves multiple versions of a document, which ensures that any accidental edits can be undone. Finally, paid users get to work offline, and can utilize the service to conduct text searches through Office docs and PDFs, as well as stored in Evernote.
  • Other optionsFor those of us who keep a to-do list, Trello and Todoist are digital equivalents that can facilitate collaboration with colleagues. Google Keep captures notes, lists, photo and audio via supported Web browsers and mobile devices. Finally, there is the text-only SimpleNote, or even the Notes feature in Microsoft’s Office 365 or an on-premises Exchange Server deployment.
  • 3. Effortlessly digitize legacy dataHaving the tools and the capability to natively capture your notes, docs and the like in digital form is a good thing. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to stop receiving paper bills, invoices, statements, receipts, business cards, product brochures and other printed material.One of the best ways to minimize ink-on-paper collateral is to aggressively digitize all documents whenever possible. You have a variety of options. The easiest is to use a smartphone app such as Scanner Pro to quickly capture everything from business cards to paper printouts. Quality may vary, however, depending on such environmental factors as lighting and the quality of your smartphone’s camera.
  • A more robust alternative is to make use of an automatic sheet-fed scanner – such as the NeatConnect Wi-Fi scanner – to scan printed sheets straight to OneNote or Evernote. Portable scanners also exist, such as the battery-powered Doxie Go Wi-Fi and Doxie Flip. The former lets you scan wirelessly to an iPad or iPhone, while the latter is best described as a portable flatbed scanner that can be inverted to scan items that are fixed in place, or which are too thick to pass through a sheet-fed scanner.
  • Finally, the Fujitsu ScanSnap SV600 is a deskbound scanner that simplifies digitizing magazines and bound books. Items are placed face-up on its scanning mat. The scanning takes about three seconds to dump into a USB-connected computer. Any curvature in the pages is automatically smoothed out via software, resulting in a high quality capture.Depending on your needs, the ScanSnap SV600 could allow you to continue scribbling down your ideas and notes in a physical notebook, yet be able to quickly scan the physical pages into their digital notebook of choice at the end of each day.
  • Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to digitizing your work. There are hundreds of tools that exist to facilitate the full range of business activities and processes without ever having to involve a single printed sheet.
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Jul 15
     
    "From the earliest days as a marketing slogan, the elusive concept of the so-called paperless office may finally be taking shape, if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by. A growing number of small businesses and startups, unencumbered by legacy processes, are quietly ditching printouts for an all-digital ecosystem, buoyed by soaring BYOD ownership and growing familiarity with a plethora of cloud services. IT Resume Makeover: How to add flavor to a bland resume Don't count on your 'plain vanilla' resume to get you noticed - your resume needs a personal flavor to READ NOW Perhaps not-so-surprisingly, the driving factors are collaboration and productivity, as opposed to any ecological or "green" concerns. With this in mind, we take a look at the advantages of going digital, and outline how workers can embrace this new digital-first paradigm to collaborate more, do things faster and work more efficiently than ever."
Gary Edwards

NEC partners Nintex to provide workflow automation for SharePoint and Office 365 - ARN - 0 views

www.arnnet.com.au/...tomation-sharepoint-office-365

workflow-automation business-process-automation

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • As cloud computing grows, particularly in Australia, customers are increasingly looking for ways to create efficiencies and automate critical business processes.” Nintex's workflow automation platform, which includes Nintex Workflow and Nintex Forms for SharePoint and Office 365, streamlines processes on and between today's most-used enterprise content management systems and collaboration platforms, connecting on-premises, cloud workflows, and mobile users. Nintex vice president of sales in APAC, Dan Parker, said the company was founded in Australia, and that the local market had always been a key focus for the company.
  • Its diverse partner channel supports hundreds of customers in Australia, including several ASX 200-listed companies and multinational corporations across all industries. Melbourne-born entrepreneurs, Brian Cook and Brett Campbell, founded Nintex in 2006.More than 5,000 organisations in 90 countries are currently running millions of workflows daily using Nintex technology.
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Jun 15
     
    "Nintex has partnered NEC Australia to provide customers with the company's workflow and forms solutions. The partnership with NEC Australia will allow Nintex to provide additional support to the many customers looking to boost their workplace efficiency and effectiveness. Nintex has a strong presence in Australia and is continuing to evolve its partner network in the region to ensure customers have the best possible experience with Nintex's workflow productivity platform. The rise of organisations focusing on streamlining and automating their business processes demonstrates an increase in partners looking to Nintex to provide a value-added offering around workflow automation to their services and solutions, according to a company statement. NEC Australia partner alliance practice lead, Tim Pagram, said he had seen businesses across the board experience significant gains in productivity and customer satisfaction by using Nintex technology."
Gary Edwards

Werner Vogels: Amazon builds it own tech - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/azon-builds-it-own-tech-2016-3

AWS Cloud-Computing

shared by Gary Edwards on 13 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • To decode that a little, he's saying that by using AWS, businesses turn their IT into a monthly operating expense. But Amazon still has to cough up huge chunks of capital-expense cash in advance to outfit its data center, so it's motivated to find ways to do that as cheaply as possible.
  • That's already playing out with Facebook's OCP project. Although Amazon hasn't publicly said it is working with the OCP, just about every large cloud company has signed up, including Apple, Microsoft and, more recently, Google. And so have some very large enterprises like Goldman Sachs.  While vendors like Dell and HP are involved in OCP, they aren't in the driver's seat. For the first time, that seat is filled with the companies who are using the equipment, not the vendors selling it.
  • Vogels believes the move to the cloud will get even more intense (and most market researchers agree with him).
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  • It has already reshaped how startups are launched. AppleThese days, all you need to launch a startup is a laptop."The startup world is radically different today than it was 10 years ago. A typical investment 10 years ago, to be able to get a business off the ground that needs to scale in one way or another, was around $5 million. Today, for $50,000-$100,000, you can get yourself a pretty good businesses started ... the rise of the whole startup culture is largely driven by cloud." The same thing is happening now to established companies, even those who previously ran their own private data centers. "Moving over to the cloud allows them [companies] to have their engineers focus on things that matter for the business," he tells us.
  • "If you look at other cloud providers in the market, there's quite a few of them still sort of in the phase where AWS was five, six years ago — in 2010 — at the moment we were still much more focused on the infrastructure side of things than the sort of rich collection of services."
  • Gary Edwards on 13 Mar 16
     
    "There's no question Amazon is turning the screws on the $140 billion data-center-tech industry. Amazon has grown to become the largest player in the rapidly growing cloud industry as its cloud platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), celebrates its 10-year anniversary.  And in the process, AWS has sent shockwaves through the traditional enterprise sector. In an interview with Business Insider, Werner Vogels - the CTO of Amazon in charge of AWS - explained why hardware companies aren't going to get any respite any time soon. Hardware builders are getting squeezed out the game Right now, instead of buying all of their own computers, networks, and software, businesses large and small are opting to rent it all from cloud-computing vendors. That spells bad news for companies like IBM, HP, Dell, EMC, Cisco, the hardware makers selling companies the servers, storage, and management software."
Gary Edwards

Google cloud chief on tackling the enterprise | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...n-tackling-the-enterprise.html

Google-Cloud Google-Cloud-Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Now that companies can store all the data they want in the cloud for as little as $0.01 per GB per month, figuring out what to do with it all is a significant challenge, according to Greg DeMichillie, Google Cloud Platform's (GCP) director of product management, who spoke with CIO.com at the GCP user conference last week. "It's the needle in the haystack," DeMichillie says. "Companies are drowning in data that they know, or that they suspect, there's value in ... but they don't know how to get the value out of it."
  • "You don't replace a well-functioning application just because there's newer technology," he says. "You replace when the business need drives a need to modernize the application." 
  • Web serving technologies, data and analytics, archiving, storage, and developer tests tend to be the lowest hanging fruit for most companies, according to DeMichillie, because they're the easiest to move and deliver the quickest ROI. Businesses should try to shrink the footprint of legacy IT with the goal of moving all future development in the cloud, he says.
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  • Google's own products also benefit as the company open sources more of its technical infrastructure for GCP customers. For example, GCP shares a lot of underlying technology with Google for Work, including identity and access controls, users provisioning, and synchronizing with on-premise Microsoft Active Directory, according to DeMichillie.
  • Many enterprise cloud customers use a mix of offerings from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, IBM, GCP and other providers. "We have customers who are very multiplatform as a design principle," DeMichillie says. "They say, 'Look, I remember the '90s, I remember picking a vendor, then 10 years later being stuck.' We want to build not just on-ramps, but off-ramps.""If you are deeply unhappy with Google, you should be able to move off of us," he says. "You should stay with us because you're happy, not because we've put a bunch of hooks into the system that make it impossible to leave."
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Mar 16
     
    "Google is looking to strategically tackle the enterprise cloud market by open sourcing some of its internal technologies, embracing a multiplatform design principle and setting what it thinks are reasonable expectations for what its customers should move into the public cloud. The company hopes to continue making strides in the crowded market, which Amazon dominates, by helping enterprises identify business processes that can rapidly transition to the cloud and deliver the fastest ROI. Download the March 2016 digital issue Inside: What you need to know about staffing up for IoT, how cloud and SDN set Veritas free & much more! READ NOW Now that companies can store all the data they want in the cloud for as little as $0.01 per GB per month, figuring out what to do with it all is a significant challenge, according to Greg DeMichillie, Google Cloud Platform's (GCP) director of product management, who spoke with CIO.com at the GCP user conference last week. "It's the needle in the haystack," DeMichillie says. "Companies are drowning in data that they know, or that they suspect, there's value in ... but they don't know how to get the value out of it.""
Gary Edwards

The Real Power of Platforms Is Helping People Self-Organize - 0 views

hbr.org/...s-helping-people-self-organize

Uber

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • It’s also interesting to note that Uber doesn’t expect exclusivity from its extended labor force. Many people who drive for Uber also drive for competing services like Lyft. That lifts a key constraint — namely that the company must optimize a fixed amount of a worker’s time. Drivers opt-in to drive the schedules that work best for them — maybe the free time they have between dropping kids off at school and then picking them up. For others, they may opt to work 12-hour-long days. There is no central actor setting the rules such as having to manage artificial constraints like a fixed eight-hour workday. Nothing is pre-planned and everything is left to the market to come up with efficient solutions.
  • they focus on creating a market where people with cars can connect with people who need rides.
  • How does Uber handle the holiday crunch? They let the market solve that issue through surge pricing. At peak times, prices rise — which reduces demand AND increases supply of drivers. Sure, some folks consider this price gouging at times. But it’s interesting to see how the higher fares create incentives for more drivers to hit the roads to meet that demand. Problem solved, again without any preplanning.
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  • It so happens that open source software works very similarly to Uber in terms of stoking active participation beyond any one company’s boundaries. Contributors choose to participate on a project. They may have a job or be in school. Regardless of what they do, they voluntarily opt in to a system, which self-organizes based on the need at hand. As with Uber, there is no preplanning of resources or scheduled shifts; everything is self-organized by volunteers interested in tackling that job at that time.
  • If these participative systems can solve complex optimization problems without central planning, like managing Uber’s logistics or developing the open source Linux kernel, what else can they do? Traditional institutions as we know them today will not exist in their current forms in twenty years. The boundaries of the traditional corporation are becoming more and more porous as the value of centralized planning and coordination declines. That’s a truly disruptive development and something that every organization, regardless of industry, should be paying attention to.
  • Gary Edwards on 25 Apr 16
     
    "Uber, the car-sharing service, has become ubiquitous. It's now a multi-billion-dollar global business. It's even become a noun of sorts - uberization - which people use to describe a disruptive change to a staid industry ripe for innovation (though, to be sure, the popularization of the word "disruptive" means that it is often used in ways that the concept's author, Clay Christensen, didn't intend). But I would argue that the real reason Uber is disruptive is because it is reshaping how we can think about organizing people, not cars. Uber has shown how you can actually empower many thousands of people to self-organize to tackle a task (shuffling people to their destination in this case) without the preplanning that is the norm in traditional enterprises. Put another way, Uber's business model extends a very complex supply chain beyond the boundaries of a corporation in a way that creates real results without any planning in advance. That is a remarkable example of how technology will reshape how we organize to get work done at scale in the future. For context, I worked at Delta Air Lines for many years before I joined Red Hat, the open source software provider where I am now CEO. When I was at Delta, we spent enormous resources in terms of time and money on planning. Airline operations are a huge optimization challenge. There are hundreds of planes, thousands of pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, and ground crews that must be properly deployed for the system to work efficiently. We needed to process reams of data using expensive and sophisticated software and computers to predict demand, know the capabilities of each aircraft type, and to understand each work group's constraints. We also had an army of PhD-caliber people whose full-time jobs involved figuring out this puzzle in a way that we could still make money. Uber's value chain has a similar optimization challenge - it needs to deal with variable demand, thousands of drivers,
Gary Edwards

Why CIOs can't sell enterprise collaboration tools | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...prise-collaboration-tools.html

collaboration Cloud-Computing Cloud-Productivity-Platform wordsdk

shared by Gary Edwards on 13 May 15 - No Cached
  • Enterprise collaboration is a dubious pursuit. You can almost sense its impending failure the minute it gets introduced to a workforce and becomes just another tool that employees are supposed to use.It doesn’t help when CIOs downplay the value of collaboration tools by simply procuring something that meets the lowest common denominator and enables them to check another item off their to-do list. More like this 6 IT leaders share tips to drive collaboration How Mobile, Social Tech Elevate Enterprise Collaboration CIOs Need to Snap Out of Complacency on IDG Answers How to retrieve data lost from Outlook address book after creating a shortcut? State of the CIO 2015 More than 500 top IT leaders responded to our online survey to help us gauge the state of the Read Now “There’s a lot of failures in enterprise collaboration, loosely termed, because people don’t really know what they’re aiming for so obviously they don’t hit it,” says Joel Confino, CEO and founder of the enterprise Q&A platform Haydle.
  • The promise of collaboration is to replace face-to-face communication, but if the implementation isn’t well-planned, it can’t become something extra that people have to do, Confino says. Collaboration also has to perform better than the incumbent, which is email for most people.
  • CIOs can’t merely launch a tool and tell employees to go forth and collaborate. The C suite needs to lead by example and use these new tools to accomplish meaningful business objectives.“The majority of these implementations are underperforming and plenty of them are just outright ghost towns,” says Confino.
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  • Why these tools are failing to supplant a technology as static as email is a question vexing the minds of countless IT managers. The reason for enterprise collaboration is still so hazy that relatively few CIOs agree on what challenges lie ahead.
  • CIOs and other IT decision makers face a host of challenges in their pursuit of enterprise collaboration, some of which are ingrained into the culture of their companies. Resistance to change is the obstacle facing CIOs at most companies and the reasons could include anything from workplace culture to perceived cost and complexity, says Scott McCool, group vice president of IT and CIO at Polycom.
  • One of the biggest challenges is determining how to implement enterprise collaboration in cross-functional manner, says John Abel, senior vice president of IT at Hitachi Data Systems,“Teams are pretty good at communicating within their own group but when it comes to integrating across departments silos tend to happen, which ultimately becomes problematic when each team needs to align on certain campaigns or key topics,” he says.NetScout’s CIO and Senior Vice President of Services Ken Boyd says the landscape of collaboration tools available today makes it difficult to pick the best ones for a specific workforce.
  • “Locating a collaboration tools provider that can offer the right balance for the needs of our enterprise users can be a significant challenge,” he says. There are many point solutions for voice, video, chat and document collaboration, but splicing together those solutions from multiple vendors isn’t always the most productive or cost -effective method.
  • “There is an atomic shift taking place in how the enterprise operates, and so the CIO and CIO's team must decide whether [on-]premises and cloud-based collaboration tools can and will address the needs of the enterprise users -- anytime, anywhere, and on any device -- plus smoothly work between business and consumer applications,” says Boyd.
  • CIOs must also navigate and please the different age groups, says Chris McKewon, founder and CEO of the managed services provider Xceptional Networks.
  • Millennials are more comfortable with video, short messaging and have embraced newer collaboration tools like Slack and HipChat while older execs are still trying to master WebEx and GoToMeeting, and unfortunately there’s no common ground, McKewon says.“CIOs need to shift their mindset, strategies and projects to be more inclusive and collaborative,” says Shamlan Siddiqi, vice president of architecture and application development at the systems integrator NTT Data.
  • The biggest challenges, according to Siddiqi, are organizational buy-in on major transformational decisions, employee adoption, sustainable engagement, security, content quality, standardization and tool selection.
  • Brian Pillar, IT manager at the software firm TechSmith, agrees that adoption is a major challenge. Enterprise collaboration tools rarely come cheap, so making sure the organization rallies around the new platform is key.Organizations will never realize their return on investment for collaboration until individuals or teams stop creating workarounds to avoid an enterprise collaboration tool altogether, says Pillar.
  • Ruven Gotz, director of collaboration services at the IT solutions vendor Avanade, says collaboration is about helping people work together to achieve more meaningful and impactful outcomes.As such, the biggest challenges lie in approaching collaboration with the right mindset, he says.“Technology is an amplifier of human touch and interaction. Its effectiveness in enabling collaboration is entirely dependent on achieving results with methods that make sense to the way people actually accomplish work,” says Gotz
  • “You really have to understand the true nature of the business results you seek to achieve,” says Gotz.If you can’t see the business result you seek to achieve, take the time to stop and find it. If you can’t rationalize a process that is simple to understand, don’t try to automate it, he says.“Understand what the tool imposes on the experience,” says Gotz. “Don’t let the tool bind natural human interaction.”
  • Gary Edwards on 13 May 15
     
    "Collaboration platforms offer the promise to eliminate unnecessary meetings, phone calls and other time-consuming interactions. However, to succeed those tools have to perform better than the incumbent, which for most people is still email."
Gary Edwards

Task management app Asana raises $50M at a $600M valuation led by YC's Sam Altman | Tec... - 0 views

techcrunch.com/...aluation-led-by-ycs-sam-altman

Asana Productivity Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • As more businesses move their work processes online — creating documents and other data in apps like Quip or Google Docs or Microsoft through; communicating with each other (think Slack or Yammer) — productivity apps are having a moment right now. Just last week, BetterWorks — another platform that helps workers set and manage tasks and goals — announced a Series B of $20 million.
  • Indeed, in addition to BetterWorks and Asana itself, there are others like Basecamp, Wrike and Trello all offering ways to boost productivity and help organize so-called knowledge workers (essentially, those tied to keyboards or screens to get their jobs done). That makes for a competitive landscape but also a sign of how there is a ripe opportunity to do more.
  • For its part, Asana has been testing a beta of a product called Track Anything, which sounds like a dashboard-style product that will let people automatically signal to colleagues jobs for completing tasks without them having to do the legwork. In a working world where we are forever multitasking and may be more intent on getting things done rather than ticking and updating progress reports to let people know that we have, adding in automation seems to be an essential development. This is a challenge that others are tackling, too. BetterWorks is building integrations with whatever software use most, which in turn communicates our progress on a task in the background.
  • Gary Edwards on 30 Mar 16
     
    "Asana, an enterprise app that lets people set and track projects and other goals, has hit a goal of its own: today, the company is announcing that it has raised $50 million. The Series C round - led by Y-Combinator's Sam Altman - values the company at $600 million, the company tells me. As a bit of context, Asana last raised $28 million in 2012; that Series B was at a $280 million valuation, according to our sources. Co-founded in 2009 by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and early FB employee Justin Rosenstein out of the belief, in their own words, that "every team in the world is capable of accomplishing bigger goals, and that software could help empower them to drive work forward with more ease, clarity, and accountability," the company will be using the funds to continue building out Asana's functionality (more on that below) and also expand its customer base internationally (it's largely a US-based list of clients today)."
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