Meanwhile, in Singapore ...

Here's an item out of the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, where the Singapore National Library Board announced it would be launching a new metadata-based search engine within the next six months.

Read all about it here.

So, which is it? Impossible, or inevitable?

More than 12 million employees telework more than 8 hours per week, according to Gartner, which produced the chart reproduced below. MSNBC reports that the trend will accelerate. But plenty of other coverage suggests that top management resistance to telecommuting will continue to block broader adoption.

A must-read article in GTC

According to one recent study, the number one reason for wasting time at work is the Internet.

While I did not participate in this survey, I'm not surprised by the results.

More on BPM

Just click on it:
http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/993-Just-what-do-we-mean-by-BPM?

Is this problem intractable?

The New York Times and Psychology Today report on teleworking: Although 75 percent of managers say that telecommuters are just as productive as their in-office colleagues, only 39 percent say that virtual workers are likely to advance as fast as those employees who go into the office every day. Bosses like to look at their employees and see that they look as if they are working. And being physically present in the office means that employees benefit from those chance moments when the invitation to go for a beer after work, or something like that, is extended by the boss.

One "solution" offered in the Psychology Today article would be video surveillance of the teleworker at home or at other remote job sites, so the boss gets that feeling that they can observe their employee. This wrong approach is based on the usual problem of some managers' illusion that the person they can see is more productive than the one they can't.

The right approach is to train managers to decouple their emotional need to have someone within reach to supervise from tangible, measurable outcomes that teleworkers are expected to deliver, regardless of location.

Organizations that train managers to get over their need to see their employees in person will get the benefits of teleworking, like lower facilities costs, energy conservation, and improved employee motivation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/18/business/media/18offline.html?ref=business

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20070723-000016.html

Another AIIM training offering

This one's focused on Business Process Management.

AIIM Survey on BPM

AIIM sent me a survey questionnaire a couple of months ago on Business Process Management. They got about eight hundred responses and half of them were from representatives of organizations of more than 1,000 (like Travis County, where I am one of just over four thousand employees).

When asked, What is the most important obstacle or problem for your organization during a BPM implementation? the most common answer was "Underestimating process and organizational issues."

Does that mean that BPM's focus should be on ways of working, more than technical issues? Perhaps the answer can be found in this article from the AIIM magazine.

And here is a link to the BPM page on my website.