September 8, 2008

Roxanne Kenison

Are you a 1.0 person living in a 2.0 world? Here is one information worker's take on what Web 2.0 means for information work, some techniques and tools for adapting, and why you should care.

Applies to
Microsoft Office

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My Inbox in Outlook is like a giant catcher's mitt. Nearly everything I need to pay attention to, plus a lot of things that I ought to ignore, land there reliably. In bygone days, to keep up to date and to communicate with colleagues, the only thing I needed was my Inbox. I loved my Inbox. Sure, sometimes it got over-full like a gluttonous dinner guest, but I learned how to tweak my rules in Outlook. I adopted habits for getting things done (yes, the David Allen method), and streamlined my techniques for processing the contents of my Inbox. Ultimately, I controlled my Inbox, and it made my life clear and simple.

Those days are gone.

These are the days of 2.0. By 2.0, I mean the social, interactive, connected, communicative, feedback-oriented nature of the Web nowadays. But it goes beyond the Web; it's the 2.0 life.

What's the 2.0 life?

To me, these are the hallmarks of the 2.0 life: it's participatory, it's instantaneous, it's diffuse. It changes how the game is played. If my Inbox is a giant catcher's mitt, then the 2.0 life is a vast cocktail party, without the fancy clothes. The conversations are everywhere, all the time.

If you're like me, you probably wonder where people find the time to follow so many bloggers, subscribe to so many feeds, watch so many videos, and blog about their profession and their latest vacation — complete with photos, which other people tag with metadata. And they're doing all this while they're Twittering, IM-ing, and writing on the walls of their friends. They have lots of friends.

It seems to me that these people not only read every page on the Web, they post comments about what they read. Inexplicably, they even have time to read BOOKS (an antiquated technology), and then they post reviews. Then they rate the reviews that others post. Oh, and they're still sending as much e-mail as ever. Some of it even lands in my Inbox.

Is anyone getting any work done?

Doing your job vs. doing your work

In my group, within the Office organization here at Microsoft, we think of our customers as "information workers." My definition of an information worker is someone whose job entails sharing, communicating, processing, or acting upon data, facts, knowledge, and ideas. Chances are, that's you. It certainly is me. It's the Information Age, remember? Today, 'most everyone is an information worker.

A few years ago, my manager had our team read Job Shift, by William Bridges, an author with expertise in careers and change management. Even back in 1995, when Job Shift was written, Bridges posited that jobs as we traditionally think of them are a thing of the past. Increasingly, workers don't merely produce a deliverable; they are expected to contribute to the intellectual capital of their organizations. If you're an information worker, chances are your employer wants you to synthesize ideas, to learn on the job, to be creative, innovative, even entrepreneurial.

With all these expectations, you may be wondering, "When am I supposed to get my work done?"

But that's just the point: all of this is now your real work. Your deliverable, plus the way you synthesize ideas you get from everywhere, your thoughts about your organization and your industry, they way you work with your colleagues, and the way you reach across organizational boundaries to innovate — as an information worker, all of this is now your day job. When you come to realize this, you gain a new perspective on the 2.0 life.

Suddenly, the 2.0 life isn't a fad, an inconvenience, or a lot of hullabaloo. It's necessary.

Retooling for 2.0

The 2.0 life is all about making connections: connecting people with each other, with information, and with goods and services. The technology of 2.0 — the RSS feeds, wikis, instant messaging, blogs, social networking sites — all these things clamor for my attention and burden me with information overload. Yet, these things are also the tools that today's information workers need to do their jobs.

SharePoint is for blogging

I'm in the infancy of my 2.0 life. When I stumble upon a great idea, I still fire off e-mail to my immediate colleagues. Then I remember our team has an Idea Exchange blog, and the next time I have an idea I post it there instead.

I've started using SharePoint's blog feature to publish updates of the projects I'm working on. At first I duplicated efforts, posting to the blog and sending the same content in e-mail. In the e-mail, I encouraged people to subscribe to the blog if they were interested in continuing to receive the updates. I still duplicate the post and the e-mail, but now I send the e-mail version to a much smaller audience.

Outlook to the rescue

Why not dispense entirely with sending the e-mail version? I'm not yet ready to trust that the these updates will be seen by the relevant audience unless I place it in their Inbox. There's still a place for the Inbox, at least in my organization. I certainly still rely on mine. In Outlook, to ensure that I see content that I subscribe to, I resorted to dragging the most important of my RSS Subscription folders up, to make them subfolders of my Inbox.

Now that I'm writing this Office Hours column, I've been perusing past submissions, and noticed that Michael Affronti has some great ideas for using Outlook to track RSS feeds efficiently. I look forward to trying these. He contributed two pieces: Office Hours: Outlook and RSS: A match made in syndication and Office Hours: Advanced RSS usage: Buckle your seatbelts.

See you in the Townsquare

I like to tell my colleagues that I just don't get Facebook. It feels too public, too invasive — and too frivolous. And yet, within the company we have a SharePoint application called Townsquare, which brings some Facebook-like features to the enterprise. I was surprised to find that in the context of the workplace, things that turned me off about Facebook feel legitimate on Townsquare.

For example, I can see at a glance that a colleague has updated a document that's related to a project we're both working on. Later that afternoon, she sends me an instant-message with a question about the project. The instant message doesn't feel like an intrusion. On the contrary, I half expect it, having seen her activity on Townsquare.

Similarly, I have a Twitter account that I've never found a reason to use. Yet on Townsquare I enjoy dashing off my status update and reading the status of colleagues, whether or not the status information is work-related. As I write this, one co-worker, "needs more coffee," another is "out of the office," and provides information about who to contact in his absence. According to my status, I am "going to check in my Office Hours column today, by gum."

If you want to read more about Townsquare, check out this EWeek article.

Connecting with Communicator

Office Communicator is another tool that's bringing me into the 2.0 life. For one thing, it's synchronized with Exchange and with Townsquare, so if I update my Twitter-like status message, the same message appears in both Communicator and Townsquare. If I have a meeting on my calendar in Outlook, Communicator is smart enough to display my online status as "In a meeting," and anyone who has me in their contact list can see this. In fact, everyone's presence information is continuously up to date. In Outlook, the colored dots next to people's names on the To and From lines tell me who is available, who is offline, who is away, and so on. If I hover my mouse over their name, I can also read their Twitter-like status message.

I used to hate instant messaging because I like the asynchronous quality of e-mail, and it felt downright rude to receive an instant message. "Drop everything and answer me, right now!" It's odd that the telephone is at least this intrusive, but it didn't bother me, probably because I'm so accustomed to it. Recently I discovered that I no longer mind receiving instant messages. I even initiate them now. Using Communicator, if I notice that a colleague is available and I have a quick question, I send them an instant message. I find that it's actually less intrusive than the telephone, since your hands never leave the keyboard.

No going back

Change is difficult, especially when it's as fast-paced as the change in my workplace. Still, despite feeling overloaded at times, despite the stress of trying to track too many things at once, I like what the 2.0 life has to offer. As efficient as my Inbox is, I always suspected there was a great big world outside of it, and living in 2.0 means living in that world.

The thing I like best about the 2.0 life is that I'm always learning something. I can't always make a direct connection between what I learn and what I deliver as an information worker, but in the 2.0 life, that's perfectly okay. In the 2.0 life, it's less about what you deliver and more about what you share, and how you contribute. When I look at it that way, I realize that my 2.0 life is tremendously enriching. I'm out of my Inbox for good.

About the author

Roxanne Kenison is a technical writer in the Office group and was first aware of Microsoft as a logo on a building next to her local Burgermaster. She laments the lack of time to pursue several hobbies, but manages to get outdoors occasionally with her husband and son, with whom she makes her home in Seattle. You can follow her blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/techwritrr.

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