Mark Bower

Taking a risk

bowerm — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 20:02:00 GMT

For around the last year I have been really annoyed with myself for not living up to my full potential. Know the feeling? Perhaps the worst part about achieving some level of success in your chosen career, is that once you have something to lose you are hesitant to gamble it all.

Towards the end of last year though, some things happened in my life that now mean that just being ‘comfortable’ is no longer an option that I can live with.

Today is my last day at Microsoft. Thank you to everyone I have worked with over the past eight years. I have loved working with the all the smart, passionate and hardworking people here.

If you are interested in what I am up to next, I’ll be blogging over here from now on.

Mark.

You can’t please all the people all of the time

bowerm — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 19:22:54 GMT

Or maybe you can if you want to be bland, boring and unremarkable. Seth Godin has been rallying for some time against focus groups and design by committee. Today he has this gem:

If you are willing to satisfy people with good enough, you can make just about everybody happy. If you delight people and create change that lasts, you're going to offend those that hate change in all its forms. Your choice.

Reminds me of the Office Ribbon. Some people love it. Some people hate it. Everybody notices it.

Announcing: The Knowledge Worker Tools Early Adopter Programme

bowerm — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:24:15 GMT

This week we are kicking off the KWT Early Adopter Programme. If you work in NHS IM&T and you are about to begin a SharePoint 2007 or Office 2007 deployment then read on...

What is KWT exactly?

The Knowledge Worker Tools (KWT) project is part of the NHS CUI Programme. Our aim is to enable improved personal productivity, team work, and effective decision making by connecting the NHS worker with people, processes, information and expertise. The project is based around the 2007 Microsoft Office system and Office SharePoint Server 2007, for which client licences are available to NHS organisations in England as part of the 2007 NHS Enterprise Agreement.

And the KWT Early Adopter Programme...?

This is a structured programme of activities to assist in an initial deployment of Office 2007, SharePoint Server 2007 and the NHS KWT software based on the best-practice NHS KWT guidance.

When does it start?

Nominations are being accepted between 30-Jun-2008 and 17-Jul-2008. The programme of activities for successful applicants begins from 5-Aug.

So far, so good. Tell me more...

Here’s how it works:

First, identify a project that you are planning, or have just started, that you believe will benefit from involvement in the Early Adopter Programme
Complete the short application form attached in the briefing pack
We notify successful candidates by 23-Jul, and arrange a date for an Architecture and Design Session (ADS). This is a day-long workshop used to accelerate the project kick-off and allow guidance from an experienced consultant to be provided early in the project
We lead the ADS with business and technical leaders from your organisation, and where applicable, with technical leads from your chosen implementation partner
We write-up the ADS findings as a Vision and Scope document including the agreed project objectives, core scenarios, and a high-level conceptual architecture for the proposed solution
You, or your chosen partner, write the detailed technical design document(s)
We review the design and provide written review comments
You, or your chosen partner, build, test and deploy the solution
We host a weekly conference call to discuss progress, risks and issues, and provide ongoing technical guidance

What’s in it for me?

Early access to the KWT software and guidance deliverables
Advice from the NHS CUI KWT team on the best way to apply their software and guidance in your environment
Reviews and guidance from Microsoft Consulting Services
Telephone-based implementation and deployment support from Microsoft Consulting Services
Be promoted as a leading-edge Trust in NHS IT

What will I need to do to take part?

You will need to have the business need, benefits and high-level solution concept defined, with a business case written and approved
You must be planning to deploy Office 2007 and/or SharePoint 2007 between now and Dec-2008
You will need to agree to take part in customer evidence activities such as participating in case studies and agreeing to act as a reference site

What do I do next?

Email mscui@microsoft.com for a briefing pack and application form.

Thanks for reading this, and we look forward to working with you on the KWT Early Adopter Programme.

Technorati Tags: NHS,KWT,CUI,SharePoint,Office 2007,Early Adopter Programme

What does an information worker do all day?

bowerm — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:11:37 GMT

Interesting piece in the New York Times on the effect of interruptions caused by email, IM etc.

28% of the day handling non-urgent unimportant things, and 15% of the day spent searching for information. Some time ago I started switching off email during particularly busy times, like when I have a deadline to meet. No need to close Outlook, just disconnect from the server:

It is interesting to see how many threads that I would normally have leapt straight into resolve themselves satisfactorily without any input from me. And it has helped me learn where I can actually add most value to my team, versus where I can step back and delegate a bit more.

Go ahead, give it a try, but at the end of it all do remember to reconnect again though!

Technorati Tags: Outllook,email overload,information worker,Office

The Future of Groove and SharePoint

bowerm — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 18:22:32 GMT

Some hints from Ray Ozzie this week on the future overlap between Groove and SharePoint:

"You asked if Groove is the future UI of SharePoint. I might ask the same thing, is SharePoint the future UI of Groove"
Microsoft will increase the connections between SharePoint and Groove by tying together specific functions of the user interface in the two products that are designed to work seamlessly with one another, Ozzie said.
"[SharePoint and Groove] are very, very complementary, and you will see in [Office] 14 and beyond increasing association with the things that you can do in SharePoint, and the things that you can do with Groove and the client"

I am a Technology Omnivore

bowerm — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 21:48:05 GMT

The quiz: http://www.pewinternet.org/quiz/quiz.asp

My results:

Based on your answers to the questionnaire, you most closely resemble survey respondents within the Omnivores typology group. This does not mean that you necessarily fit every group characteristic.

Omnivores make up 8% of the American public.
Basic Description
Members of this group use their extensive suite of technology tools to do an enormous range of things online, on the go, and with their cell phones. Omnivores are highly engaged with video online and digital content. Between blogging, maintaining their Web pages, remixing digital content, or posting their creations to their websites, they are creative participants in cyberspace.
Defining Characteristics
You might see them watching video on an iPod. They might talk about their video games or their participation in virtual worlds the way their parents talked about their favorite TV episode a generation ago. Much of this chatter will take place via instant messages, texting on a cell phone, or on personal blogs. Omnivores are particularly active in dealing with video content. Most have video or digital cameras, and most have tried watching TV on a non-television device, such as a laptop or a cell phone.
Omnivores embrace all this connectivity, feeling confident in how they manage information and their many devices. This puts information technology at the center of how they express themselves, do their jobs, and connect to their friends.
Who They Are
They are young, ethnically diverse, and mostly male (70%). The median age is 28; just more than half of them are under age 30, versus one in five in the general population. Over half are white (64%) and 11% are black (compared to 12% in the general population). English-speaking Hispanics make up 18% of this group. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many (42% versus the 13% average) of Omnivores are students.

I have a feeling the majority of people here at Microsoft would fall into this category. And that of course makes it all the more important for those of us designing solutions for the NHS to understand the technology usage characteristics that typify the NHS worker. Take the test, and share your results here. Ask your friends and colleagues to take the test, and summarise those results back here too. It only takes 2 minutes.

Electronic Forms in the NHS

bowerm — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:58:12 GMT

Today we held a workshop with some NHS folk on the topic of electronic forms. The KWT team are planning on putting together an Electronic Forms Resource Kit - a set of tools a guidance for forms authors in the NHS. I'll share some thoughts from the workshop later, but in the meantime what do you think? What are the key scenarios where simple electronic forms could add value over paper forms? What are the blockers that stop you moving to paper forms? What would you want in a Resource Kit?

Slides from NHS CIO Summit

bowerm — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 19:01:00 GMT

Thanks to everyone who attended the CIO Summit today. Everyone I spoke to provided positive feedback. The real challenge was squeezing a summary into a 15 minute slot. If you missed the session I have made the slides available here:

| View | Upload your own

There are some screenshots of the software we are working on in the deck. In future posts I'll start to write more about those solutions and what we are trying to achieve with them. As always, feedback welcome.

Technorati tags: NHS, Microsoft, CIO Summit, KWT, Knowledge Worker Tools

Help the NHS get the software YOU need

bowerm — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 15:13:41 GMT

My name is Hilary Palmén, I work for Microsoft UK planning and conducting research with NHS professionals that for the NHS Common User Interface (CUI) project. More information about the CUI project is available on: http://www.microsoft.com/uk/nhs/content/articles/an-introduction-to-the-nhs-cui-programme.aspx.

In February we are planning research to build descriptions of non-clinical NHS employee’s jobs, their work goals, the challenges they encounter and the types of tasks they regularly undertake. These descriptions will be used to help the Microsoft CUI team identify opportunities to help these people achieve their goals. We are seeking non-clinical NHS employees in either secondary care trusts, primary care trusts, or general practice that are prepared to give us 2-3hrs of their time to describe their job role at their normal place of work? Below is a short description of what the research will involve.

Benefits of volunteering:

You can influence software development to make sure it supports what you, and people like you, actually need to be able to do for your job.

Microsoft is looking for volunteers who:

Work in primarily non-clinical roles including, but not limited to: Estates, Human resources, Finance, Catering, Domestic, Health education/promotion officer, Medical secretary/personal assistant, Health records staff, Housekeeper, Clinical support staff.
Are enthusiastic about communicating the challenges they encounter in their daily job.
Currently use a PC as part of their work on a daily basis. Volunteers do not have to be confident or advanced computer users.
Are not working in IT related roles.
Are willing to have a Microsoft researcher spend 1-2hrs interviewing them about their job the spend approximately 1 hour shadowing them at their normal place of work.
Are available between January 28^th and February 15^th 2008.
Work for NHS Trusts based in Southern England or the Midlands.

How to find out more and volunteer?

Contact me to find out more or to arrange a suitable time, date and place for the interview and shadowing.

NHS CIO Summit

bowerm — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 22:38:59 GMT

I'll be speaking this week at the NHS CIO Summit that Microsoft are hosting at Thames Valley Park, Reading. I only have a 15 minute slot and I am currently trying to figure out the best way to make use of the time available. Would it be better to talk specifics and show concrete examples of what we are delivering, or would you prefer a more strategic look at the course we are plotting over the next 18 months. Let me know.

Office 2007 SP1 Available for Download

bowerm — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 19:55:00 GMT

Here's the official blurb...

"We have managed to complete the engineering work slightly earlier than we anticipated and are making the download available from OfficeOnline.

What can you expect in Service Pack 1?

SP1 focuses on the issues that matter most to our customers based on direct customer feedback and error reporting tools. You can expect:

Stability. Using data from the Dr. Watson bug-reporting system, we've fixed the top software issues for each application in the 2007 Office system. The 2007 Office system SP1 also improves the stability of server components in the 2007 Office system and delivers compatibility with Windows Server® 2008, so you can confidently plan for future upgrades.
Performance. The 2007 Office system SP1 improves performance in applications and servers. Performance improvements can be found in Microsoft Office Excel® 2007, Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007, Microsoft Office PowerPoint® 2007, and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007.
Security. By incorporating incremental advances in security and results from application testing, the 2007 Office system SP1 offers home and office users better protection against malicious software and potential threats to privacy.

For a full list of improvements in SP1, download the Service Pack 1 whitepaper.

What does SP1 mean for you?

Service Pack 1 eliminates distractions and performance issues that disrupt workflow, allowing employees to be more productive in the work that they do. SP1 is also an important milestone for deploying the 2007 Office system, making it easy to deploy the most secure and reliable version of Office to date.

How do you get it?

Initially, SP1 will be available as a free download from OfficeOnline. SP1 will be made available via Automatic Update in the next 3-6 months, and we'll issue 30 day advance notice prior to delivering SP1 via automatic update."

Excel Charting to the Max

bowerm — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 16:00:41 GMT

Who would have thought Excel could produce charts as good looking as this?

I certainly would never have thought this was possible until I discovered this great screencast that shows how it's done. http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/2007/07/recreating-ny-times-cancer-graph/

Office 2007 for (almost) Free

bowerm — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 17:26:35 GMT

This is such a cool offer! If you have friends or family who work for the NHS in the UK, go tell them now: As part of the Enterprise Agreement the NHS signed with Microsoft a couple of weeks ago NHS employees are entitled to a copy of Office 2007 for use on their own home PC for just the price of post and packaging. That's £17!

To qualify for the deal, all you need is a valid nhs.uk or nhs.net email address.

And that's not the only offer either. Other Microsoft hardware and software is also available to NHS employees at discounted prices.

To get your copy of Office 2007, or to see the full range of benefits for NHS staff go here: http://www.microsoft.com/uk/nhs/licensing/ea-england-benefits.mspx

Technorati tags: NHS, Office 2007, Home User Programme

Better Intranet Navigation: Statistically Improbable Phrases

bowerm — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 18:12:50 GMT

On Amazon.com today, I noticed a feature that David Weinberger mentions in his book, but I don't think is yet available on Amazon's UK site. Books for which they have electronic access to the text have been scanned and effectively auto-tagged. These tags then become navigational aids to allow you to find books on similar topics. Two sets of tags are listed:

Statistically Improbable Phrases are phrases that occur a large number of times in a particular book relative to all books scanned.
Capiltalised Phrases are things such as names and places mentioned frequently in a book.

Going one step up the value chain:

Books on Related Topics shows other related books based on their usage of similar Statistically Improbable Phrases.
Concordance shows a tag cloud of the 100 most popular words in a book.

This got me wondering. Is there is a wide enough distribution of topics in the documents generated in a typical company to enable this sort of approach to work in the enterprise? Let's say I navigate to a document, Acme Corp Widget 3000 Marketing Plan, and alongside it I see a list of SIPs. Widget 3000 is an SIP. Clicking the link takes me to page listing other documents containing that term. Sites about the topic. Discussion lists etc. This could be a powerful way of navigating Intranet content without trying to create complex taxonomies and trying to get authors to categorize things in the right way.

I'd love to see us try something like this in Office 14. What do you think?

Technorati tags: Amazon.com, Taxonomy, Folksonomy, Tagging, Document Management

Taxonomy in a Digital World - Part 4

bowerm — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 13:19:28 GMT

Concluding my notes on Everything is Miscellaneous...A good read on the whole. Does a good job of summarizing the information management trends on the web today. If you are an information architect or consultant working in the field of knowledge management then I would say you should have a copy on your bookshelf.

Chapter 8 - What Nothing Says

The limitations of software force us to often make explicit binary choices where in reality complex implicit social interactions exist. (I am reminded of Scoble's recent dissection of Facebook friending as an example of this). Weinberger talks about CRM systems - good salespeople know more about their clients implicitly than they can say explicitly. He also talks about the fallibilities of internet dating and social networking services and the limitations of the boxes you have to tick and fill-in.

So the problem here is this: Human social interactions don't fit neatly into tick boxes.

How do we capture and catalog the implicit stuff?
How do we categorize information when the boundaries are blurry?

Weinberger points to delicious.com and tagging as an example of how giving users free reign over categorisation enables (at least some of the) implicit relationships to emerge. He also discusses the implicit data trail people leave behind as they search and browse and interestingly points out that our idea of privacy is in a transitional mode right now as we figure out what we can and can't do with this data (as Google found out recently).

One problem with tagging though is that as a young technology we don't yet know if people will tag for themselves to refind information, or to help others find information.

Folksonomy: a taxonomy that emerges from how people tag items.

Discusses (possible) limitations of folksonomies including their inability to handle equivalence, synonyms, hierarchies etc. Some argue that this will cause them to fail at significant scale. Weinberger argues that improvements in technology will allow computers to be able to get better by inferring relationships, synonyms from how people tag, and by learning more about us and our preferences. Flickr homepage has no editors - implicit metadata from tags (how many, who from and "other stuff") is used to select photos for home page. Implication? Tags may become more useful, meaningful and relevant the more there are.

Databases and rigid taxonomies strip out the open-ended context from information. Tagging, links, playlists and the rich interconectedness of the web (connecting the leaves in human ways) is adding this context back. We can gain insight and meaning from this connectedness.

Chapter 9 - Messiness is a Virtue

Most if not all categories do not have clear cut boundaries. We learn to categorize things based on prototypes: A robin is a good example of a bird, an ostrich or penguin is a bad example. The hard lines of categories come later when we are forced to draw them. A business that forces its products or employees into a predefined set of categories is performing an unnatural act.

The Semantic Web - adding structure and classification to the mess of the web. Largely so machines can work better with the information therein.

Weinberger discusses the Semantic web from a sceptical point of view. He likes some simple ideas - smart links - links that contain metadata. He dislikes the vision of rationalising, driving out the ambiguity, minimize the miscellaneous.

"This implies a massive agreement about exactly how the metadata should be expressed. Everything works perfectly if everyone just agrees on the terms and the rules to follow...Turn language into a machine and our machines will work wonders...A seamless whole that drives out ambiguity would also drive out the richness of implicit meanings."

Resource Description Framework (RDF) - a description language for defining relationships between two items. This can be used to build an ontology to describe a particular subject area. Problems with this are similar to Dewey system. People want to define huge all encompassing classification systems upfront. Knowledge is ever-changing.

Something can be 73% in a category. The edges are fuzzy. The folksonomies that are emerging bottom-up are characterized by ambiguity, multiple classification, and sort-of, kind-of relationships.

It's a sort-of, kind-of world. Things don't fit neatly into categories. Accept it.

Chapter 10 - The Work of Knowledge

This final chapter concludes with a summary of the changes happening on the web today, a look to the future and a call to share information freely.

Information has more value when it is set free. It provides an opportunity for new information based businesses to emerge. New novel uses for that data. Meta businesses - aggregating and cutting data in different ways. Travel web sites displaced the middlemen that added no value. Then web sites emerged that compared prices across travel web sites. Now the latest breed display charts of how fares change over time. And add information such as average travel delays at specific airport terminals.

As one meta business succeeds others come along to take it up a level.

It's not who you report to or who reports to you, it is how messily you are connected.
It's not what you know, or who you know. It's how much knowledge you give away.
Hoarding knowledge diminishes your power because it diminishes your presence.

Technorati tags: Everything Is Miscellaneous, Davd Weinberger, Taxonomy, Folksonomy, Semantic Web