Work

I’ve been at a few conferences and meetings lately and some of the discussion has been around innovation and making Atlantic Canada more productive. Much of what I heard centered around yesterday’s problems. One theme was “how can we create more knowledge jobs”, especially in the e-learning sector. I find this backward-looking because I agree with Dan Pink’s premise that the major factors influencing North American work in the next few years can be put into the context of three questions:

1. Can someone overseas do it cheaper?
2. Can a computer do it faster?
3. Am I offering something that satisfies the nonmaterial, transcendent desires of an abundant age?

Pink says that we are moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age, and I see this very clearly. In the e-learning marketplace more and more is being outsourced to excellent companies in Asia. We cannot work cheaper than these companies and we should not try. However, most of the jobs that I see being created are in the area of e-learning content production. When it comes to services, such as e-learning development, the value is higher up the stack. High value services are based on unstructured problem solving, while lower valued services are rules based or even modular. When services are commoditized then competition is based on price and Asia will win over North America (so get used to it). Since services are constantly being commoditized, the aim should be to stay ahead of the pack and higher up the stack. We already see this happening with software development.

Therefore, I don’t believe that the e-learning courseware development model will last very long before companies shift production overseas. I doubt that the intructional designer hiring boomlet in New Brunswick will last for long, unless production moves up the stack. This will take Conceptual Age skills.

There are some companies that are focused more on creativity (right brain stuff) and I would bet that these business models will last longer. One of these companies is FatKat Animation in Miramichi. We need to foster more of these creative companies, the schools that help to educate them like NBCCD and more breeding grounds for future artists. This does not mean that we should abandon the digital economy, only that we have to become the creative and conceptual leaders in the world economy or we’ll wind up with a future generation of digital gas jockeys.

This is old stuff in terms of ideas, but I’m getting scared that our government and industry leaders are still too focused on the Information Age and don’t see the upheaval coming with the Conceptual Age. Once more Marshall McLuhan was correct when he said that, “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

At yesterday’s breakfast meeting in Fredericton we received a firehose of information on competitive intelligence and then had about 10 minutes to digest and reflect before being asked to comment. Luckily, I had already done some work in the field of web-based competitive intelligence, thanks to Conor Vibert at Acadia University, so the concepts weren’t new. I had also spent a short period as a combat intelligence officer many years ago. With the limited time available, we did not discuss how you could integrate competitive intelligence gathering techniques into your daily work flow.

If this is one of the first times that you’ve come to this site, perhaps as a result of the CSTD conference, here are some of the tools that I use for competitive intelligence. If you look at the left Navigation Bar you will see a section marked "External Info Sites". The first one is my account at Bloglines. Bloglines is a web feed reader (also called an aggregator). It allows me to view any site via a "feed" seen within the bloglines window without having to go to the actual site. If you follow the link you will see what web sites I read. Advantages of feed readers are that you can see what has changed since the last time you looked at a site, and you can preview a post without having to go to the site. This saves a lot of time and allows you to quickly scan many sources. I usually have ~100 feeds that I monitor. There are other feed readers available, such as Newsgator, but Bloglines is perhaps the simplest. If you want to know if a site has a feed then install the Firefox browser and a small orange icon in the bottom right corner will alert you.

A description of how feeds work, with a technology called RSS, is available here. I know this URL because it is saved in my Furl account. I have made this account public as well, so that I can share websites of interest that I don’t mention directly in this blog. Furl also saves a copy of the page for me so that I get to view it even if the site is taken down. Think of Furl as a replacement for "Favourites" or "Bookmarks" in your browser, with these additional advantages:

• you can use multiple categories for an individual post;
• it saves a copy for your private viewing;
• you can access your account from any computer;
• it can be publicly viewable for sharing; and
• your Furl archive is fully searchable.

If you are interested in blogging then you might want to start by Furling because it’s easier and simpler. A similar tool is Del.icio.us.

Blogging is another intelligence method, by which you can post a nascent idea and see what kind of response you get. I’ve recently posted about the benefits of blogging for small businesses. The advantage in this case is that the post to which I’ve referred is within the database of my own website. I own this data but share it under a Creative Commons license that covers everything on this site.

I hope that this is helpful for those new to blogging and the two-way web.

Yesterday we finished a strategic planning exercise at Mancomm and we had to decide what to do next. As the only New Brunswicker with this Montreal-based company, I’m usually far from the head office. I mentioned that we should put the strategic plan on our intranet as a wiki, so that we could continue to refine it. This seemed very natural to our group and the consensus was to publish the plan as a wiki..

On the other hand, I’m involved in a number of other initiatives where I receive dozens of emails per day, most of them prefaced by "Re:Fwd:Re:Fwd" etc. We all complain about email overload, but most of us still revert to the old patterns of ten years ago – just send an email.

I know that we don’t like to change and that many of us like our familiar patterns, but with technology changing like crazy we should all be trying at least one new business productivity technology every year. If not, we’ll look like those dinosaurs in the MS commercials that are popping up all over the place. So if you haven’t tried blogs, wikis, feedreaders, iPods, or whatever else, then get off your comfortable bottoms and try something new. You have nothing to lose but your antediluvian chains.