With school in session and the summer officially over, we thought it fitting to take a look at productivity for this week’s post.

Two articles stood out among the rest this week.

Bernard Golden looks beyond the buzzword to what BYOD will mean for the workplace.

The first, on CIO.com, reports on a recent study that found that employees who were permitted to surf the web were more productive than those who weren’t.

The study, conducted by the National University of Singapore, included 98 participants with an average age of 21, who were divided into three control groups. Each group either surfed the web for 10 minutes, did whatever they wanted during the time period except look at web pages, or performed the task of bundling sticks into groups of five. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Consumerization of IT, What We're Reading, Worker Productivity Apple, BYOD, CIO.com, iPad, National University of Singapore, SAP

Remember when “increased productivity” was a phrase no worker in the business world wanted to hear? About two years ago, during the height of the economic depression, the last thing employees wanted to hear about were ways to increase productivity, or how to “do more with less.” To them, it was just code for taking on more work for the same pay.

With a waning recession, the notion of increased productivity isn’t so frightful — especially not if it means getting your mitts on a neat new iPad.

But today, with a waning recession, the notion of increased productivity isn’t so frightful — especially not if it means getting your mitts on a neat new iPad and the accompanying apps.

With the growing acceptance of tablets in the workplace, some industry folks like Gigaom’s Darrell Etherington see the same happening with apps. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Apps, iPad, tablets, Worker Productivity CIO.com, Gigaom, iPad, recession, TCGeeks.com, TechRepublic

This week’s crop of articles restates the obvious: That smart phones and tablets are nudging out the PC in the enterprise. This is good news for the world’s workers (Increased productivity! Style! Portability! All access, all the time!), but it poses a challenge for IT departments. With new devices come increased support needs. (But that’s a topic for another post.)

Gartner predicts that by 2013, more people in the world will access the Internet on a mobile device than on a PC.

“Smartphones have conquered PCs” — CNN

According to research firm IDC, over the past two years, smartphone shipments have tripled, while PC shipments grew by only 45 percent. The trend, reports CNN, is indicative of a marked change in the kinds of devices people are using for everyday computing needs. The article also points to research from Gartner that predicts that by 2013, more people in the world will access the Internet on a mobile device than on a PC. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Mobile Devices, tablets CIO.com, CNN, Forbes, Gartner, Help Desk, IDC, PCs, smartphones

In case you missed it, Forrester Research Group released a report in December warning of the pitfalls when upgrading to Microsoft Office 2010. And it’s what we here at PC Helps have been saying all along — as far back as Office 2007 upgrades.

We think the FAQ is a wonderful thing. But a FAQ cannot stand on its own.

As reported on recently by CIO.com’s Shane O’Neill, the Forrester report outlines four pitfalls to avoid during upgrades: underestimating compatibility issues, leaving workers to figure out the migration with no assistance, assuming workers will use the software’s new features, and neglecting to emphasize peer-to-peer learning.

Here’s what we’ve been saying: Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Office 2010 CIO.com, Excel, Forrester, Microsoft, productivity, shadow support, SUMIFS

Tech publications are abuzz about Windows 7. One article in particular, written by CIO.com’s Shane O’Neill, offers smart ways to use your migration as an opportunity to increase IT department efficiency.

Look for case studies of companies that have already migrated successfully. Use them as a guide.

Good stuff, all around. If there was one loud-and-clear point in the piece, it was that planning is vital to a successful (and not exorbitantly expensive) migration — no matter the operating system or software suite.

And it happens to be this company’s mantra. We know from experience that, whether it is a small firm switching over a few hundred users from Lotus Notes to Outlook or a Fortune 500 company upgrading to Office 2007 en masse, a successful migration depends largely on preparation.

In addition to the four points mentioned on CIO.com, I’d like to add a few more migration tips for CIOs:

1. Seek out proven migration successes: Look for case studies of companies that have already migrated successfully. Use them as a guide. Read up on Windows 7 trouble spots (that is, where users will likely experience productivity loss. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Windows 7 CIO.com, migration, productivity loss

Way back in April 2009, I posted a piece on CIO.com titled “Office 2007 Doesn’t Really Suck; It’s Just Misunderstood.” Little did I know it would create such a fuss.

Over the past 11 months, the piece has received a smattering of comments, many of which are tinged with vitriol. Office 2007 doesn’t just suck, according to CIO’s readers; it’s reviled, despised, detested, loathed.

Taking a stand by sticking with an earlier version of Office is hardly a political move.

Here’s a sampling of the comments:

“I’m a longtime Office user (since its inception). Office 2007 is an abomination and shows just how out of touch those developers are with real world use and workflow.”

“Thought my suckage meter was just already broken or something, it being beyond the warranty period, but as the 10 or so days went by from having installed this step backwards in software development, and having not latched onto what I had assumed was some kind of groundbreaking innovation in GUI, I started to suspect that Microsoft’s product itself had gone beyond the limits of my suckage meter and broken it… and everyone here has affirmed that.” Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Office 2007, Rants AT&T, CIO.com, FORTRAN, Help Desk, Icelandic, Office 2007, software support, Swahili

If you read only one article this week (not counting this blog post), make sure it’s this one by CIO.com’s Thomas Wailgum – “Enterprise IT’s Top Enemy: Its Own Arrogance.”

An IT department that points and laughs is hardly encouraging learning and business alignment.

The piece highlights the fact that the help desk, despite the growing importance of IT/business alignment in the enterprise, remains in the “condescending gatekeeper role.”

As evidence, Wailgum includes a video that features Andy Bitterer, co-chair of Gartner Group’s BI Summit, doing Jay Leno-style “man-on-the-street” interviews in London. Among Bitterer’s questions to the masses: “Do you use a database?” “Do you know what Business Intelligence tools are?” “Do you know what OLAP is?”

Honestly, does this Gartner bloke really expect everyday people to know what these things are? As Wailgum asserts, Gartner conference attendees may find it amusing (ha, look at the stupid users!), but it really demonstrates how out of touch IT is with its customers. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney FAIL, Help Desk Andy Bitterer, BI, business intelligence, CIO.com, Gartner, Jay Leno, London, OLAP, Thomas Wailgum

The headline of a recent article in Computerworld magazine grabbed my attention: “Help Desks Under Siege.” An image of angry workers armed with flaming torches popped into my mind. They were storming the help desk, calling for an immediate moratorium on rebooting and demanding basic rights like software that doesn’t require patches and updates. There were even rumblings of self-serve password reset capabilities.

A supply closet as an office? For employees who are responsible for the computing capabilities of an entire company? Shame on them.

Alas, the piece wasn’t about corporate coups d’etat (it’s a little far-fetched, I concede), but it did highlight the pressing issues help desks are facing today, in this sorta-kinda-post-recession era. Namely…

1. Efficiency

The piece’s author, Cara Garretson, mentions improvements that would make help desks more efficient, such as a central knowledgebase, remote control capabilities, and a database of standard responses to common problems. The problem, says Garretson, is that those improvements cost employee hours.

They don’t have to.

There are companies out there, outsourcers or “best-of-breed” service providers like us, Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Help Desk Cara Garretson, CIO, CIO.com, computerworld, Customer Service, outsourcers, temps

We may very well be embarking on the decade of the customer. Social media, especially Twitter, has empowered customers, and the recession has reminded businesses that keeping clients is easier than bringing in new ones.

It’s like watching your siblings bicker at Sunday dinner. Ugh. Enough already. Bring on a solution.

With the current state of customer service, a renewed focus would be a welcome change.

Look at current tech publications and you will surely find a rant or three about horrific customer experiences (for a recent one, see CIO.com’s “Tech Vendors Behaving Badly”). Search Twitter for “customer service” and you will find scores of tweets cursing the ineptitude of Company X and Company Y.

It’s like watching your siblings bicker at Sunday dinner. Ugh. Enough already. Bring on a solution.

You can start by taking note of a recent book, “Your Call is (Not That) Important to Us,” written by Emily Yellin (http://www.emilyyellin.com/) and featured in a recent AARP Bulletin story. Yellin, a journalist, wrote the book after enduring a particularly frustrating customer service experience herself.

Her book presents a fresh look at the customer service industry, and offers the average person some insight into the reasons many companies opt to automate and outsource to foreign companies. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Customer Service AARP, CIO.com, Customer Service, Dell, Emily Yellin, FACEBOOK, JetBlue, Outsourcing, Twitter, Zappos

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: Read more…

Jenny Sweeney This Week in Tech News @Trafico, Bloomberg, Caracas, Chief Learning Officer, CIO.com, Cloud Computing, Microsoft Office, recession, Twitter, Venezuela