Josue Sierra

I had a conversation for an upcoming article about what technologies I love and which ones I hate with business technology writer Grace Tiscareno-Sato . As I went through the mental list, I realized how much I dislike voice mail! There is a huge opportunity here for AVAYA or some other competing company to start marketing better alternatives (that I’m sure are out there). Considering how important team communication is to most corporate environments, I’m surprised large companies are not investing more in voice mail innovation. This could translate into huge productivity gains.

To me, checking my voice mail is as annoying as calling my cable company’s 800 support number. As some of you have read here before, I’ve had some pretty annoying and lousy experiences with Comcast and Verizon customer support. When you dial in to check your voice mail, I end up having to key in my ID & PW, then go through 3 menu levels to just listen to recorded messages. So, checking a voice mail ends up taking 5 to 10 minutes or longer.

Another part of the negative usability experience of using voice mail is that it forces me to go to it on its own terms, instead of the voice mail coming to me on my terms. What if I want to listen to the voice mail of my wife first, to know if I need to stop for some milk, and ignore the voice mail from the vendor that can be dealt with tomorrow? On top of that, when I have voice mail messages, I get this red light on my phone that teases and taunts me all day. it’s a mystery indicator that provides little value and provides little information. I would love to have a phone that can tell me who’s called (by caller ID or just the number), when they called and left the voice mail, how many missed calls I have — basically, some of the features we see on cell phones. On top of that, I would love a web or PC based voice mail system that lets me search voice mails — something like what the iPhone has.

Listen to your fourth voicemail message without listening to the three before it. Visual Voicemail shows you a list of all your messages — and who they’re from — so you can play them in any order you please

In short, most of the times I check a voice mail, I find that I have already returned a call or dealt with the issue, so the voice mail is useless.

But besides the usability flaws, I think another major problem with voice mail is that most people don’t know how to leave a concise and effective voice mail message. For some reason, people feel the need to leave a complete message fully explaining the reason for the call, and providing all the background or contextual details needed. All I want to know is who called, and hear a 15 second summary of why they need to speak to me.

Everytime I go into SlideShare.net, I enjoy exploring the latest presentations. There is a wealth of knowledge and information in there from top minds.

Here is one I found today from Stephen Collins, a knowledge economy and knowledge work consultant, web strategist, information architect and social computing evangelist.

My presentation from the Office 2.0 Conference. It’s a discussion on the changing nature of knowledge workers and how their organisations can help them be better at their jobs and more productive.

Here is the Power Point via SlideShare.

I don’t usually follow Mac developments to closely, but this sounds like an interesting progress in regards to user interface.

During a private meeting last month, Apple’s traditionally tight-lipped chief executive Steve Jobs all but broke the silence onthe future of the video iPod. Speaking to employees at the Apple TownHall, he said a division of the company was hard at work onnext-generation iPods that, like iPhone, would run an embedded versionof the Mac OS X operating system.

This can have implications for the mobile telephony industry.

If it’s got wifi (hmm, and especially if I can add Skype), then I won’t need an iPhone.

HT: Wake Up!

technorati tags:iphone, apple, mac, skype, Wi-Fi

This is my kind of news! The Washington Post has a story on how a community in China was able to use text-messaging and cell phones to get around government censors, and stand up against the construction of a giant chemical factory. This is what technology in communication does for the world — it enables individuals to connect, relate, and unite.

By promoting the construction of a giant chemical factory among the suburban palm trees, the local government was “setting off an atomic bomb in all of Xiamen,” the massive message sprays charged, predicting that the plant would cause “leukemia and deformed babies” among the 2 million-plus residents of this city on China’s southern rim, just opposite Taiwan.

The environmental activists behind the messages might have exaggerated the danger with their florid language, experts said. But their passionate opposition to the chemical plant generated an explosion of public anger that forced a halt in construction, pending further environmental impact studies by authorities in Beijing, and produced large demonstrations June 1 and 2, drawing national publicity.

The delay marked a rare instance of public opinion in China rising from the streets and compelling a change of policy by Communist Party bureaucrats. It was a dramatic illustration of the potential of technology — particularly cellphones and the Internet — to challenge the rigorous censorship and political controls through which the party maintains its monopoly on power over China’s 1.4 billion people.

These questions came out of a Distance Project Management course I am taking this summer, and I thought I would share my notes.

The authors, Fisher and Fisher, list seven competencies of an effective distance leader in “The Distance Manager.” These are leader, results catalyst, facilitator, barrier buster, business analyzer, coach and living example. Interestingly enough, they indicate that “though the relative priorities or methodologies may differ, distance managers require the same behavior as other leaders…” (Fisher & Fisher, pg 10) Of course, the differences are in how these competencies are applied. Distance managers tend to rely more on technology, and will need to use different management techniques in managing their remote team.
Two key lessons for me are in the concept of being a boundary manager, and in the difference between the traditional supervisory role a regular manager has versus a remote team manager who must teach their team members to make their own work assignments, schedule vacations, authorize expenditures, and so forth while focusing on boundary issues. Fisher and Fisher write, “Boundary managers assume that team members are already doing the best they can within the constraints of the system in which they are working.”

It is clear that trust is a huge component of an effective distance leader and his or her relationship with a remote team. This means knowing how to trust and knowing how to set up a system that fosters both trust and accountability–one that provides the correct motivators for productivity. This is what the book talks about in addressing the Distance Leader’s need to work on the boundary, as opposed to a traditional supervisor’s work “inside” the boundary.

David All has joined with Jerome Armstrong from MyDD to start a new YouTube based weekly TV show, DomeNation. I watched the first couple episodes and thought it was well done. In DC, if you want to be a student of Internet and communications, you inevitably have to step into politics. These guys are coming in from both sides of the aisle to look at what different candidates are doing, and to encourage activism. They are asking YouTube user input. You can subscribe right here.

This will be my video of interest for this week — already being displayed on the right hand column.