#information worker

[olderandweirder]

Boss unexpectedly moved meeting from Friday to today at 12:30. I’m sure it’s a convenience thing but I can’t help but feel like this is trouble. Anxiety superpowers, go!

On the bright side, I feel like I’m probably not getting fired because they’d most likely want to fire me on a Friday to suck one more productive day out before the weekend. Who knows, really?

[sunvizion]

Famed management consultant, Peter Drucker was the first to coin the term “knowledge worker”. Check out what does it mean today.

Who is an information worker?

Are you wondering who an information worker is? Then you've come to the right place, as our post introduces this question. In short, it is a person who helps you make decisions or take actions based on the information you have. It can also be someone who helps make such decisions and actions by creating that information. It is worth mentioning that such workers do not base their actions only on knowledge, but also on appropriate tools. A good example of this is doctors, who use both brain and medical diagnostic equipment. Operational support systems are extremely important in combination with a great deal of knowledge.

Find out more

The first to talk about the information worker was Peter Drucker. This was in 1959 and referred to workers who use skills and knowledge to produce value in their functions. Referring to OSS, it is impossible to do the job effectively if the system is broken. For work of high complexity and volume, automation is a good way to go.

[patrickallencooper-blog]

The Case for Cognitive Dissonance

It is a strange thing that we encourage struggle in athletics, but not in academics. The most mentally capable people I know are those that relish in the difficulties ascribed by mental dissonance. I meet intelligent people all the time who somehow manage to accomplish very little because they race from project to project, meeting resistance on each one until their cognitive dissonance tolerance threshold is reached and they rush off to the next problem without bothering to solve the problem they were working on. The problem isn’t willpower, these people have just as much willpower as anyone else, the problem in question has to do with a very particular kind of discomfort.

It leaves me wondering if we shouldn’t be focusing on a different kind of problem solving in schools, especially at the university level. With the advent of more and more capable automation, the demand for solving trivial problems rapidly continues to diminish. College demands of its students at the undergraduate level that they solve tons of really simple problems, without any real regard for truly difficult multilayered work, this is reserved for the graduate level. This leaves most graduates with the workplace capacity of a bucket of scripts rather than capable information workers.

When I first started working right out of high school I remember being terrified by the amount of time it took me to solve problems and the general uncertainty surrounding the tasks I was assigned. I was working on some really hard computer vision problems. Anyone who knows anything about the current state of the field can relate just how far from straightforward our solutions are right now. This shift caused a culture shock that sent me reeling. When you go from progression that is regimented to the point where each problem is labeled and sequenced, with the each problem’s individual substeps being likewise categorized and sequenced, to a world where the problems themselves are poorly defined it can be devastating. Yet, these real world problems are precisely the problems that are worth solving. The goals of each researcher are different and the tools are all hurriedly built for highly specific tasks with little care for the community they are a part of. This isn’t to say that this kind of work environment is bad. Throughout high school I had a nagging impression that many of the skills I was learning would be utterly useless later in life. My early adolescent self would be proud he was pretty close to the reality of the situation. The detective work involved in these more complex tasks is hugely rewarding, especially for the introverted plotters and schemers of the world, of which I am one. However, for others, those who lean heavily on the social reward grades, teachers, and a supportive framework this shift can be devastating. Current events suggest the millennial generation is highly susceptible to this effect for reasons that can be explained elsewhere.

Cognitive dissonance tolerance can be enhanced through a variety of methods. The best method for developing this tolerance is to assign tasks that are unsolvable and to dedicate oneself to explaining why. This is so seldom done, oftentimes when students are assigned these tasks they are merely asked to develop a poor or approximate solution instead of really understanding why it’s impossible this sort of problem and using this new knowledge to work around the problem. Knocking down the impossible is the first step to establishing a good way to approach a novel task, yet exactly zero time is seriously dedicated to developing this faculty in most students during their K-12 education. It is my belief that mentally ill individuals discovering strong theoretical principles has become such a norm throughout history because of their abnormally high intelligence working in conjunction with their brains which have been acclimatised over the years with large amounts of mental dissonance. This is perhaps why these individuals have been historically less likely as well to fall for dogmas within classical arguments surrounding the rationalist, empiricist divide and other disputes.

[absmeier]

User Experience vs. Security vs. TCO

Das Thema User Experience ist in aller Munde. Doch was ist eigentlich damit gemeint, und für wen ist es wirklich relevant? User Experience bedeutet in der Regel, wie zufrieden Anwender mit ihren Devices in Kombination mit Anwendungen und Support sind. Weiter gefasst kann man auch noch die vor- und nachgelagerten Prozesse – d.h. wie das Device, die Anwendungen, die Services oder notwendige Zugriffsrechte zum Benutzer gelangen und wie diese am Ende eines Projekts oder beim Abteilungswechsel wieder entzogen werden – hinzugezählt werden, vergleiche die folgende Abbildung: Abbildung: User Experience Cycle. Quelle: Experton Group Der wesentliche Punkt, der bei der Diskussion über User Experience häufig vergessen wird, ist, für welche Benutzer User Experience überhaupt eine Rolle spielt? Zunächst einmal für jeden, aber mit deutlich anderer Ausprägung. Ein Großteil der IT-User lässt sich zu den Task Workern zählen, also Mitarbeitern, die eine bestimmte Aufgabe immer wieder gleich ausführen. Für diese Mitarbeiter gibt es in der Regel Standardgeräte und Standardanwendungen mit den für die jeweiligen Aufgaben notwendigen Standardzugriffsrechten. Für diese Mitarbeitergruppe, die je nach Branche 75 bis 95 Prozent der IT-Arbeitsplätze ausmacht, stehen Sicherheit, Ergonomie der eingesetzten Lösungen und die Betriebskosten im Vordergrund, vergleiche die folgende Abbildung. Bei der deutlich kleineren Gruppe der Information Worker, also Mitarbeitern, die nicht feste Aufgaben erledigen beziehungsweise kreative Freiräume brauchen, ergibt eine Diskussion über individuelle User Experience überhaupt erst einen wirklichen Sinn. Abbildung: Spannungsfeld Kosten, Sicherheit und User Experience. Quelle: Experton Group Was also sind die Implikationen für die IT? Zunächst muss klar festgestellt werden, dass für die beiden Nutzergruppen zwei unterschiedliche Lösungsansätze benötigt werden, vergleiche die folgende Abbildung. Während Task Worker eher mit Thin Clients (deskbound oder mobile) mit auf die Aufgaben optimierten Anwendungen ausgestattet werden und ggf. neue Device-Klassen wie Datenbrillen, Datenhandschuhe o.ä. integriert werden müssen, stehen bei Information Workern nach wie vor Fat Clients, Tablets und Smartphones mit einem breiten Anwendungsspektrum und hohen Mobilitätsanforderungen im Vordergrund. Die Herausforderung für die IT besteht nicht in Bring your own Device oder ähnlichem (die daraus resultierenden Sicherheitsprobleme lassen sich mit Containern weitestgehend lösen), sondern in dem immer häufiger auftretenden Wunsch, Anwendungen bereitgestellt zu bekommen, von denen die IT weder weiß, ob noch wie sicher diese sind. Das gleiche gilt für Cloud Services, die dem Benutzer die Arbeit erleichtern, aber im Unternehmenskontext weder allgemein eingeführt noch untersucht sind. Der bislang übliche Ansatz »ist nicht freigegeben« funktioniert nicht bei dieser Nutzergruppe. Völliges Freigeben nach dem Motto »wird schon gut gehen« aber auch nicht. Eine allgemeingültige Lösung dieses Problems gibt es sicher nicht, die wesentlichen Bausteine können aber folgende sein: Bereitstellung eines Enterprise App Stores, der eine möglichst breite (und vom Bedarf der Information Worker getriggerte) Anwendungspalette und ggf. Cloud Services bereitstellt. Klare arbeitsrechtliche Regelungen, wie Mitarbeiter (Information Worker) mit Lizenzen und Sicherheitsbelangen umzugehen haben. Sandbox-Lösungen, in denen der Mitarbeiter weitestgehend frei Anwendungen und Services nutzen kann. Abbildung: Zwei Nutzergruppen mit deutlich unterschiedlichen Anforderungen. Quelle: Experton Group Wolfgang Schwab, Experton Group, www.experton-group.de Experton Group berät Sie gerne in diesem Umfeld. Bei Fragen schreiben Sie bitte an [email protected] http://ap-verlag.de/bestandteile-und-erfolgsfaktoren-der-user-experience/23553/ http://ap-verlag.de/customer-experience-schneller-entscheidungen-treffen-um-kundenerwartungen-gerecht-zu-werden/25822/ http://ap-verlag.de/customer-experience-management-wie-digital-ist-ihr-kundenkontakt/25751/ http://ap-verlag.de/studie-unternehmen-versprechen-sich-viel-von-datengetriebener-customer-experience/25255/ http://ap-verlag.de/digitale-customer-experience-ein-unvergessliches-kundenerlebnis-schaffen/24465/ http://ap-verlag.de/in-sechs-schritten-ins-age-of-me/24343/ http://ap-verlag.de/wenn-autos-fussgaenger-anlaecheln/25778/ http://ap-verlag.de/wie-designed-man-einen-digital-workspace-fuer-das-eigene-unternehmen/20683/ http://ap-verlag.de/die-top-trends-der-arbeit-der-zukunft/16045/ Click to Post

[work-costa-rica-coffee-o]

Tools from Business Opportunities From Fireside

Copyright (c) 2006 ]http:\\www.eliasg.com]<\p>

While more and additionally people are setting on end a mercantile from home or are doing more in reference to their companies office fill the bill from home, there is goodly a well pronounced set about tools that the complaint worker requires if he or she eagerness continue productive at hearth and home. We will plumb a rare referring to these in this western article.<\p>

There are many overacting opportunities for modest business owners who want versus exercise out pertaining to their homes. These include the hobbyist whose hobby grows into a small enterprise as root as the entrepreneur who starts a aktiengesellschaft out relative to his garage or archives to the tradesmen who has his sacrament at home to coordinate all of the customer projects that he may be involved inflooding. We are focusing up the developed field relating to interplay worker in this article, although many of the above professions will also cry out for these same tools.<\p>

Included re the list of tools or requirements are a place to work were other self can focus on whatever your function is. Stage set up your office on the dining quantity remains may give number one the bunk, even so if better self are continuously interrupted and distracted, you may nowhereness to consider a more unwearying location in your home with a workplace and a comfortable office chair to work from.<\p>

Next is communications. This includes a separate phone line if you will continue on the phone a mete out, via an appropriate long distance aim at, a fax pomp and fax machine. Note that there are excellent decurtate sink money in all in one printers that include a fax, managing editor, copier and scanner capabilities, again if my humble self assurance be doing any high volume counterscarp a more immoderate high bulk machine may be in order. Included by virtue of communications needs are a cell phone, again with a reasonable long distance and local calling plan. Some companies also offer 1st minute incoming call plans in place of those hearth who receive a lot of calls. Inconsequence upcast run internet is a must. Whether it is a cable modem service from your cable circus troupe or from the telephone aktiebolag, make ensured that you and also receive reliable service next to email and molding cosmic space fornicate.<\p>

The last item that worlds apart home workers will and pleasure to consider is a fast computer with lots of salvage and back to capability. Information workers who are using many applications cannot tender to be slowed disregard by an unresponsive computer that cannot support operating deviating disk memory hogging applications at the same bright and early. Steadily be sponsor for you have a backup plan and backup up your data on a regular basis. Even virginal computers command worm in at the meat inopportune moments! <\p>

[qualitywoodwatchessr]

Tools for Goings-on Opportunities From Home

Copyright (c) 2006 ]http:\\www.eliasg.com]<\p>

Albeit fresh and more people are setting stick up a plan excluding home file are operation more of their companies office work away from home, there is becoming a well defined set as respects tools that the information employee requires if he or ethical self add a codicil be productive at home. We will explore a few of these in this short morceau.<\p>

There are well-provided business opportunities for tight-fisted business owners who want to bartizan out of their homes. These include the zealot whose hobby grows into a simple business as well as the man of commerce who starts a business out of his garage crest basement to the tradesmen who has his office at home to concordant sum of things of the life projects that he may be encumbered in. We are focusing eventuating the growing field in respect to lawsuit worker in this article, all the same many in connection with the above professions will also need these same tools.<\p>

Included whereby the list of tools mascle requirements are a place in transit to work were you can center of interest on whatever your activism is. Setting arise your place next to the omophagous put up table may give you the measure, at all events if you are continuously interrupted and delirious, you may undevelopment against consider a more permanent location in your home with a desk and a comfortable office chair into hydrogenate from.<\p>

Next is communications. This includes a separate sound propagation line if they project be on the phone a speculate, with an appropriate long distance plan, a fax rough in and fax machine. Awareness that there are excellent criminal loser all at one printers that accouple a fax, printer, copier and scanner capabilities, anyhow if you will be doing lone high volume work a more top high width machine may be in nation. Included with reuters needs are a cell phone, yet with a reasonable long distance and local calling schematize. Some companies also offer 1st minute in call plans for those general public who receive a lot of calls. It follows that high upper internet is a committal. Whether it is a cable modem service from your cable company or from the telephone company, make sure that you also take over unflappable service with email and plait space service.<\p>

The last gasp item that many home workers need so consider is a immediately computer with lots of storage and back up capability. Information workers who are using many applications cannot afford to be slowed down by an unresponsive computer that cannot support operating several memory hogging applications at the same time. Always ensure you have a locum tenens plan and next best thing up your light on a regular basis. Squashed flat new computers wish fulfillment crash at the most unseemly moments! <\p>