What We’re Reading: Lemons to Lemonade Edition

Jenny Sweeney — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 22:48:44 +0000

The recent software and tech news is all about making the best of what you have. Bloomberg reports that in Venezuela, they’re tweeting their way around traffic snarls to get to work on time; Chief Learning Officer reports on the unlikely good that’s come out of the recession; and CIO.com offers three tips to get the most out of Microsoft Office. Read on…

Training is likely the number one way to get more out of Office, or any software for that matter.

Tweeting in Traffic is OK… in Venezuela

Whoever says Twitter is an ego-driven time-waster should spend a day in a Caracas traffic jam. In a recent Bloomberg News article, reporter Daniel Cancel writes about the Twitter revolution in Venezuela. Because the country’s gasoline is so cheap, there are twice as many cars than the roads can handle — which, naturally, means ample traffic jams. Enter the BlackBerry, Twitter and @Trafico, which Venezuelans are using to navigate their way through the gridlock.

Venezuelans, Cancel notes in his article, are way ahead of the rest of the world in terms of using Twitter as a traffic tool. And, for anyone concerned about Tweeting while driving, average speeds in Caracas are 7 to 9 miles per hour. Read the story here.

The Beauty of Recession: Increased Adaptability

November’s Chief Learning Officer offers up the finest in Glass-Half-Full news with “Recession’s Silver Lining? Increased Adaptability,” which reports that American workers have become more flexible in the past few years. Some highlights from the piece:

57 percent of business leaders say the people in their department or organization are more adaptable
Senior executives and managers say their colleagues are more knowledgeable (50 percent) and more productive (44 percent) compared to a few years ago

The lining isn’t entirely shiny, however. The same survey found that employee happiness has decreased.

(The survey was conducted by NFI Research, a U.S.-based research firm that identifies and analyzes trends and attitudes in business, organizational management, information technology and organizational behavior.)

Read the full story here.

Office: It’s Here to Stay

Everyone’s talking about The Cloud and how it will revolutionize the way we work. The reality, however, is that many companies – 78 percent, according to Forrester Research – will not be switching to it from much-maligned Office any time soon.

The Office suite — and Office 2007 in particular — may be despised across the board, but for many workers and IT leaders, it’s all they have to work with. Their job is not to critique it (publicly at least), but to figure out the best way their employees can use it.

This week, CIO.com offers a trio of tips for “making the most of” Office, and it’s a good read. For the first tip, author Shane O’Neill suggests that IT leaders divvy up their workers by the applications they use most frequently. Not all employees need Access or PowerPoint, for example. Others work mainly in Outlook. By determining how much of your workforce actually needs full Office functionality, he writes, you can cut costs.

In another tip, O’Neill merely hints at the issue of training, which deserves more attention. Training is likely the number one way to get more out of Office, or any software for that matter. Back in May, I wrote about the troubling trend of “oversoftwaring,” which is when companies install up-to-the-minute software on its workers’ computers but do not teach them how to use the new features. In that post, I pointed to an Accenture survey in which researchers found that organizations use only 64 percent of their enterprise systems’ basic functions. In the same study, about a fifth of respondents said they didn’t use certain features because they didn’t have the time to learn how.

PC Helps Blog » Caracas

What We’re Reading: Lemons to Lemonade Edition

Tweeting in Traffic is OK… in Venezuela

The Beauty of Recession: Increased Adaptability

Office: It’s Here to Stay