Outsourcing
CIO, 5/03: Staff Alert
With outsourcing on the rise, CIOs are at the center of a morale crisis. They see many of their workers battling stress on the job. The best leaders learn to help employees now-and keep them in the future.
BY STEPHANIE OVERBY
Dianah Neff's staff was sick a lot last winter. But the CIO of the city of Philadelphia was worried that it wasn't just the record cold and snow that had her employees under the weather. With the city facing its worst fiscal crisis since 1991, Neff had been forced to cut 10 percent of her staff through an early retirement program. She started cross-training the remaining 535 to deal with increasing demands being placed on IT. Meanwhile, as each new project request came in, Neff was openly looking at whether outsourcing some work might be more cost-effective—another anxiety source for her already stressed staff.
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Mobile
The Wall Street Jounal, 5/15/03: Shirk Ethic: How to Fake A Hard Day at the Office
By JANE SPENCER
David Wiskus gives new meaning to the term "working lunch." The Denver tech-support worker installed a program on his Handspring Visor hand-held that allowed him to manipulate the screen on his office computer from a booth at a local diner.
As he lingered for hours over burgers and fries, he could actually open windows and move documents around on his screen via the hand-held -- creating the impression to anyone who walked by that the diligent Mr. Wiskus had just stepped away from his desk.
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Collaborative Technologies
The New York Times, 5/15/03: Instant Messaging Moves Beyond the Simple Chat
By JOHN R. QUAIN
I'M pretty much on instant messaging from when I get home until I go to bed," said Laura Gittleson, a 15-year-old in Colts Neck, N.J. She is not alone.
America Online, the service Ms. Gittleson uses, says 195 million people use its instant messaging service, their keystrokes generating more than 1.6 billion messages a day. For those users, instant messaging - or IM - has become an intrinsic part of their social fabric.
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Darwin, 5/03: Are You Ready for Social Software?
It's the opposite of project-oriented collaboration tools that places people into groups. Social software supports the desire of individuals to be pulled into groups to achieve goals. And it's coming your way.
BY STOWE BOYD
What is Social Software?
People naturally tend to use software as a means to advance personal interests and to interact socially. As a result, the most broadminded consider the "cc:" line on e-mail the starting point of social software; others restrict the term a bit more. In fact, you may be tempted to ask, "what isn't social software?"
I believe the phrase social software should be more helpful, and can distinguish software built around one or more of these premises:
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The Wall Street Journal, 5/15/03: Are Your E-Mails Read, Or Completely Ignored? Here's Some New Software to Help You
Keep Tabs on Who's Reading Your Messages
If you have any obsessive/compulsive tendencies, you probably should stop reading now. If you don't, I have a solution to questions you're bound to have asked yourself at one point or another, such as "Has the boss read my e-mail asking for a raise yet?" or "How can I check that everyone got the invite to my Tupperware party?" and "Why hasn't Auntie Mabel thanked me for my thoughtful, but somewhat cheap, birthday e-greeting?" The answer: MSGTAG.
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