The Washington Post recently featured an article about how the new system upgrades for Microsoft and Apple (due out likely towards the end of the year in time for the holidays) might impact those in the market for new computers. Although the article is directed at individual consumers performing “typical” tasks, businesses and those working on virtual teams might… Read more →
The April 2009 issue of the Communications of the ACM, a highly respected journal, published an article by Jay F. Nunanamker, Bruce A. Reining, and Robert O. Briggs on ‘Principles for Effective Virtual Teamwork.’ The authors derived these principles from their decade long experience of working with hundreds of virtual teams. I present these principles and also provide links to… Read more →
A while back, Betsy blogged about paradoxes in virtual work. Yesterday’s NY Times had an interesting article that illustrates another paradox. Basically, virtual work can both decrease and increase visibility. Since virtual workers can be located anywhere, they are not visible to their managers. However, since virtual workers conduct a significant part of their work on or via information and… Read more →
Second Life has been in the news again recently. Despite recent changes in upper management and a recent stagnation in new users, the popular virtual world seems to be on an upswing again. Second Life is looking to corporate participation as a key element in their future business (see this CNET article).
It’s both good and bad that I can’t take my work home. These days my biggest limitation is technology. The work I do depends heavily on several expensive software packages. My employer has a policy disallowing the organization from paying for software for home computers, and these applications are too expensive for me to buy on my own dime. … Read more →
I had an interesting experience recently that reminded me of Surinder’s post on what he sees as some negative trends in email communication, only this experience happened in Second Life. I was visiting an area dedicated to online learning when I ran into another avatar–I’ll call him Mike–who began speaking with me. Mike immediately told me that he was… Read more →
In response to my last post (Clearing the Air About Corporate Blogging), Andrew Meyer of ‘Inquiries Into Alignment‘ commented about the problem of getting contributors. He points out that the number of active bloggers within a firm is typically low. In fact, in one of the research papers that I included in my post, the authors found that in a… Read more →
Blogs have been around more than a decade now, but corporate blogging, or the use of blogs within firms, is still limited. From my teaching of business executives and professionals, I believe that this is probably due to a general lack of understanding of blogs and how they can improve social relationships and task performance. In this post, I focus… Read more →
I have several email addresses, and I use them each for different purposes. I never receive personal emails on my work account. The account that came with my Internet at home has been sacrificed to spam since I use that account for every website registration. I keep an old email address that’s hardly used just in case someone I haven’t spoken to in 10 years… Read more →
Surinder and I are currently attending the Mardi Gras conference on virtual worlds in Baton Rouge along with our colleague Rui Huang. We are here to present our paper that I discussed in last week’s post and also to hear the exciting work that others are pursuing in and around virtual worlds. I am amazed by the breadth of interests… Read more →