Jammy idea

I posted an idea about mail in Controlling the inbox, which is not Notes specific, but as we use Notes for email in EY I pinged Ed Brill (a prominent IBM blogger, amongst other things I'm sure - but that's how I know him) with the idea and he suggested putting the idea on IdeaJam.

I've been to the ideajam site before as Ed has mentioned it on his blog in the past, but this was my first use of it. It is absolutely brilliant. Almost every feature I have thought of is already there. The interface is clean and simple.

I want this inside EY to promote innovation.

Event: Online Information 2007

I'll be attending the Online Information 2007 event next week. I'll be walking the exhibition on Tuesday the 4th and attending Track One on Day 3. Giovanni Piazza from Ernst & Young is giving the keynote for Track Two on that same day, but I get to hear him at EY on Wednesday afternoon.

Playing loose with corporate identity

An interesting take on the impact that social networking will have on security in the enterprise.

» Social networking needs identity delegation strategies | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

Many of these applications ask users to enter their credentials for some other service so that they can provide a Facebook interface. Unfortunately, users are all too willing to do that if the application offers even a small benefit. [...]

Let me give you another type of scenario: more and more organizations are going to online paystubs. You access them with your corporate authentication credentials. Suppose an employee’s spouse is the one who does the bills. Do you really think that your employees won’t share login credentials with their spouse so that they can access the online paystubs? Don’t be naive. [...]

Letting employees and customers share access appropriately without giving them incentives to give away the keys to the kingdom requires better ways of delegating access than sharing passwords. Delegation should be an anticipated interaction model in network applications that we design and build. Unfortunately, many organizations are struggling just to get single sign-on working let alone designing a complicated delegation system into everything. Sit down for a minute and try to design a reasonable, easy-to-use, secure delegation pattern for one application and you’ll see how complicated this can be.

SL - moving on

I blogged in SL - first impressions about my first foray into Second Life. I found this article on Between the Lines informative and resonates with my experience. Below are a few quotes.

I don't intend at this stage to return to SL, in part because I can't see any more to be gained at this stage. I still have my 'ideas' that I plan to explore internally in EY, and perhaps if some of these result in actual events I might pay them a visit. The other reason is that I have inexplicably received a bill for $11 dollars on an account that is supposed to be free. The Linden Labs support site has proven to be intractable and so I've given up. My character will be exterminated in 30 days.


» On getting a Second Life | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

Many of the “real world” businesses that opened in Second Life are struggling... far, far down in the visitor rankings—deserted, in fact, most of the time. The sites that see the bulk of the traffic are “adult.”

What does seem to work in Second Life is one-off event hosting... But Kelly points out that SL’s very “physicality” (his word) creates as many problems as it solves. For example, if there are a bunch of “people” crowded around the simulated Scion (as might happen in the “real” world), you won’t be able to see it—whereas if you were on a website, you’d be able to see it clearly—along with millions of other people.

I encourage you to experience it for yourself (especially if you plan to pass judgment on it).

Controlling the inbox

The benefits of an opt in approach to the information overload conundrum has been one of the arguments underpinning the use of feeds to replace emails. We have been successful here in EY in the UK at keeping the feed reader we rolled out exclusively under the control of the individual. No feeds are enforced and the rollout included only two feeds as samples.

The inbox remains a different story. You cannot control who sends you emails or when. Notes 8 has a nifty indicator that shows the level to which an email is directed at me - if I'm the only recipient, one of a few, cc'd or one of many. However, I still can't get away from those threads where I'm cc'd in and the discussion is of no relevance. Yet, like most mail clients, Notes can trace a threaded conversation.

I can easily create rules to shunt emails into trash (based on the subject), but I thought it would be nice to be able to right-click on a message and say 'Tune out of conversation'. This would create a rule (based on the thread id) that would move any such emails to a configurable location (trash or a folder, potentially marking them as read along the way).

Over time the number of rules may grow to such an extent that performance suffers, so rules of this nature could auto-destruct after a month or two, or when the list grows beyond a certain size.

Event: Microsoft PerformancePoint Server

I'm off to the MS office in Victoria to attend a launch event for the PerformancePoint Server. I am very sad to have missed the big launch event at which Professor Robert Kaplan was the keynote speaker. I'm considering what position this product has in our BI strategy.

SL - first impressions

Every now and then someone will ask about Second Life. Sometimes they're asking if we should be paying it any attention, sometimes what we could be doing. There's been lots written about it and clearly some companies have established a presence. Much like the early days of (external) blogging it is the tech companies taking the lead. Well, I decided the other day that theory only gets you so far and so I dived in to have a look round.

My purpose is not to make friends or to find something I lack in Real Life, I'm quite happy out here. I want to understand how or what businesses like EY can benefit from entering this virtual world. None of the people I was able to engage in conversation were there to do anything by have fun, meet people, chat and dance. Couldn't really find my groove.

I visited Cisco and IBM, amongst others. I was surprised to find that there is some sort of access control mechanism in SL. I haven't researched it, but it appears that objects and whole areas can be locked down so that only certain people can gain access. This in itself leads on to a number of possibilities as one considers the use of SL for business.

In this screenshot taken at the IBM Business Center I could not get to the point indicated by the vertical red laser beam because of the cordon that appears as an invisible wall marked with rows of text reading 'No Entry'.


IBM certainly has put a lot of work into building its SL presence, although I didn't it being used for anything - perhaps that was when the cordon was up. I later visited the same place and the cordon was gone. Wandering around I found some instructions, which I skimmed through, and picked out this quote:

If you are an IBMer, the most important thing to remember about Second Life is that it is not a suitable forum to discuss IBM confidential information. Your presence and interactions in Second Life can be recorded, so don't say anything that you would not say in a public place in real life.

Sage advice to anyone in SL.

This snapshot is the conference theatre at Cisco. Staging events is an obvious use for SL and has been used for many things including famously the performance by Susan Vega. I saw advertised a presentation of Unified Communications by Cisco, but haven't tried to attend.


Besides places and events there are also groups. I didn't really know what to look for so of course I searched for Ernst & Young. Interesting I found the Ernst & Young Consultants Alumni Association. I searched for the other "Big 4" and found a Deloitte Employees Interested In SL group, but nothing discoverable by search from either KPMG or PWC. Nothing I know of from EY leads me to believe the EY group is official or sanctioned, so falls into the category of this blog I guess.

What have I learned from this foray into SL? It's worth the experience even if you change little of your opinion formed from reading of other people's experiences. I certainly have a few ideas that I'll be sharing with people in EY about how we might dip our toe into this world. Have I been hooked? I don't know... time will tell.