IT@Intel Blog

3 Posts tagged with the productivity tag
Click to view mcdelia's profile
2

It's inevitable… a few times a week, my system slows to a crawl doing seemingly mundane tasks. Moving from one application to the next, or even navigating our intranet becomes a trial of patience. Originally I thought it was the application set I was using on a daily basis. Enterprise resource planning, internet browsers, development studios, mail and instant messenger clients. Each of these a known resource hog vying for what little available scraps of memory my system would cough up.

After some hallway grumbling with my co-workers, I turned my attention to not what I was running but what was being run for me. Automatic backup utilities, automatic patching software, and in the anti-virus suite with its omnipotent host intrusion protection. These applications lurk in the background, helping to keep us safe from the pitfalls of the electronic age. They are absolutely necessary to protect our company and its stockholders, but the value can come at a high cost.

Any one of these apps coupled with your normal application load can bring an older system to its knee's on its own, but how about your backup utility kicking off while your antivirus software is in mid-scan as you happen to be running collaboration software sharing out a debug session in your development studio. Not pretty.

The productivity loss is cumulative... two minutes here, five minutes there, ten minutes for a reboot after a hard crash. Soon you've lost an hour or two over the course of the week, or a day or two over the course of a month. These things can be minimized by having systems capable of handling the multiple application loads that both the users need, and the ever shifting security environment requires. The threats won't ever go away. More than likely, they will get worse and the applications needed to stop them will get bigger and more resource intensive.

2 Comments Permalink Tags: information_security, productivity
Click to view Laurie Buczek's profile
5

As social media adoption is beginning to gain ground, "the" requests are starting to trickle in. "I want to start blogging/wiki/forum internally or externally....but I only want a certain group to have access to the blog/wiki/forum." The enterprise and marketing social mediaites have done our due diligence and attempted to find solutions to meet the business needs, but it typically means advising them that social media may not be the right fit. Then, I read today that a company called Mixx (Digg equivalent) is adding private email and group message boards to its offerings. Whoa! Stop the presses. I am challenged by what appears to me to be counter intuitive. Stepping back and looking into the enterprise I ask, "Can social productivity really be social productivity with velvet ropes?"

I have always been of the mindset that in order for community to be built, innovation to be fostered and collaboration to be achieved, that everything needed to be public. If you started to form "silos" of private groups, private messages, private forums, private blogs then your ability to leverage the power of the community would be lost. As Steve Bell in Social Networking - Bookmarks - Social Productivity and Sam Lawrence have referenced in previous posts "Social productivity...is about getting work done outside the team of like-minded people you work with everyday....an idea is introduced and all sorts of people get to chime in...your idea has developed openly by all sorts of people who bring their own valuable perspective." Sam cites Wikipedia as a prime example of nontraditional collaboration at it's finest. Intel started internal blogs & forums in 2004; built Intelpedia, our first internal wiki, back in 2005; and subsequently launched the internal IT Innovation Zone, collaboration & sharing site, in 2006. These are open to the entire company and we have had strong success with these tools. So is IT now getting requests to go smaller, go private because these tools aren't meeting business needs or because we as a company haven't fully embraced the culture shift to social productivity? With the Mixx announcement I am giving deeper thought to what social media looks like within the enterprise; the desired results of social productivity and whether private subcommunities are necessary for optimal collaboration and communication. I still say "no". I beleve that velvet ropes and social productivity are like oil and water. They don't mix. Am I wrong?

5 Comments 0 References Permalink Tags: social_media, social_productivity, productivity, social_networking
Click to view Steve Bell's profile
0

Welcome to My World

Posted by Steve Bell Aug 22, 2007

I look forward to sharing my thoughts related to the areas of collaboration and office productivity. I currently manage three teams within our engineering world. First, I will start with our office productivity team that is responsible for the client software packages for our Intel users. This team works in very broad spectrum from focused Microsoft Office products to extended office products from a variety of suppliers. Next up is our collaboration team that is focused on social media, async collaboration like meeting workspaces, team sites and much more. Last but not least, is the Learning and User Adoption team. This team is focused on providing content for training and focus on helping with users adopting the tools that could help them within their jobs.

I feel that we (IT shops) are being asked to keep the lights on, infrastructure running smoothly and doing this with the lowest possible budget that we tend to leave out the help that we could provide the end user with improved productivity and collaboration solutions. Within my world, we have been slowly introducing these items with mixed impact and effectiveness. Is it the products? Training? Acceptance from the users? Old dogs, new tricks? Boomers to Generation Y'ers? Too late to the party?

I am wondering what others experiences have been? Please share the good, the bad and helpful not the too ugly...

In the future, I am planning on each area in more detail. I look forward to discussing my experiences and gaining new knowledge from those that would like to share.

0 Comments Permalink Tags: collaboration, productivity