Mobility, Usability, and Disability

by Michael Kramer / Sep 28

Carrying It All Without Injury

Use a backpack, and wear it properly
Sure it may look geeky to some, but carrying five or more pounds on your back is a lot safer and more comfortable than holding on one side of the body. That also means wearing the backpack properly, not slung over one shoulder in a lazy attempt to try to look cool.

Carry only what you need for that trip
Create separate modules such as ”international”, “no outlets”, etc.
Use smaller, removable zip-up bags inside the backpack to modularize mobile needs. These modules can be removed as travel needs change. For example, …Read More

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The Virtual Office Of A Digital Nomad

by Daniel Berch of Techdirt / Sep 26

As an entrepreneur and small business owner, I spend most of my time working out of a “virtual office.” While it’s not possible to go 100% paperless, it *is* possible to reduce paper significantly and keep most work on the laptop. When I’m on the road, I have my Samsonite 22″ suitcase with 10 year warranty that I bought on clearance (best $20 I ever spent). A Targus laptop bag, and also a fold-up canvas bag that’s good for any odds and ends that might accumulate during the course of a trip.

My laptop of choice is a super-light IBM thinkpad. A spare battery is well worth its weight in gold. I’ve used Dell laptops in the past, but they’re just not built to withstand my sledgehammer-style typing. Nothing more annoying than …Read More

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Culture And Trust Necessary For Managing Digital Nomads

by Johan Hjelm of Techdirt / Sep 24

First, if people need supervision, or if the company feel they need supervision, forget mobility. You can not work in a mobile way if your workers can not be trusted to perform their tasks on their own – and the tasks can be performed in a decently decentralized way. Perhaps some managers need to learn how to distribute work for mobility to take hold, or companies may even choose to get rid of managers altogether.

Because being mobile comes down to trusting your people. Giving people a task which means lots of autonomy means giving them the opportunity to do it where they like. Tailoring the tasks to the person is tricky (not everyone can create their own tasks and run with them, at least not in a big company). Having a reporting system which lets the manager check every month or so that things are going to plan is necessary, however, as are administrative routines – which have to be 100 % electronic, except for the submission of receipts and similar. And, not too much of those either. Too much administration shows little trust.

A second thing that is needed is a strong culture, so everyone feels they are engaged in the work, and that the workplace wants them to perform – and trusts them to do it on their own.

The worker needs to feel that he has been given the power to do his job anywhere, anytime. But this is precisely where the problem lies. The worker has to be able to do his job, but he also has to be able to manage his job. Making sure there is time for friends and family, making sure there is time for relaxation. If workers just plug away a hundred hours every week, you get a stressed-out society, with people dying from overwork and population shrinking. This means a lot comes down to the person: Making the balance work means not accepting more work than you can handle in the given time, and it means making sure you are only accepting things which are right for you – as a member of a team. The goals for the team (and the goals for the individual) have to be set so that they map to the business goals of the company, of course. But they have to be possible to perform independently.

As an individual, you have to know your limits. Both in terms of work competence and time. How much time does it take to continue to build that competence? Reading a book about your area of work at bedtime may sound less attractive than reading Harry Potter, but it is one way that work will continue to infringe on life. On the other hand, going to the bank on Tuesday morning is not a problem. You have to pace yourself so you get a decent balance.

But you have to be able to trust your co-workers, especially those formerly known as managers, who are responsible for getting your budget for the work you have to do. And trust, of course, goes both ways: They have to trust you to perform. Eventually, the basis for making workers mobile is trust: in themselves, in their co-workers, in the organization they work for. And customers, as well. If you have that, there is no need for an office (other than for security reasons). Building that trust is what companies have to do – and they will be rewarded by more creative workers, who create more of the currency of the future – ideas and solutions. Because the worker is an investment, not an expense, and you have to be careful about your investments. The knowledge in peoples’ heads expand with experience, and that means every hour worked is an investment, too. So for the company to make sure that workers know how to pace themselves is going to be important – merely the cost of replacing a person who dies suddenly is going to put you back against the competition.

So ultimately, maintaining the work-life balance comes down to the worker himself. If you work in a company you trust, with people you trust, and know how to pace yourself. The company is there to help you do it. There are of course checklists you could make and long items you could write about the practicalities of this, but trust is what it all comes down to.

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Extending your reach

by Ralph Poole / Sep 23

For most of my career, I have traveled, sometimes 50% of the time at other times almost 100% of the time. One day, when I was home working on the dining room table with my laptop and my mobile phone, my daughter asked me: “You talk on the phone, do IMs and write emails. That’s what I do. Why do you get paid for doing that?” At that point in my career I was working for a global company with 90,000 people. To keep my team of 12 people in 12 different countries coordinated, motivated, and informed I wrote lots of emails, talked on the phone, did conference calls at all times of the day and night, and used IM for immediate conversations.

My sense is that a digital nomad can work anywhere and with discipline manage teams that is geographically diverse. For example, I rarely went to Australia where one of my team members worked in a local office, but we talked several times a week and emailed each other frequently. To prepare for her review, I interviewed the head of the Sydney office and several of the people she worked with to get performance feedback. For several years I gave her reviews, participated in salary discussions and managed her work. For this to be effective, however, I found that I almost had to double the time I talked to people. I scheduled weekly calls with the entire team. I made a point of talking to each person a minimum of once per week individually, so I could answer questions and give guidance. As collaborative workspaces became more acceptable we moved some of our conversation to virtual work rooms, but the lack of personal interaction diminished the effectiveness of working this way.

A digital nomad knows how to use time. Sometimes you go fast and other times you purposely slow things down. I make sure that I tell people how I will manage them and when I think we need to accelerate or be more deliberative. Working in a virtual environment requires that you actually explain your style and method of interaction very explicitly, so people do not get confused. Often, I stop and have the person tell me what they heard, so that I am confident that I communicated clearly. When something has to go quickly we shift to a virtual war room, so that everyone can participate and so that work gets distributed around the world fairly.

I recently have developers build a complex knowledge sharing application. We used the Agile methodology and team programming. However, the team was in Nicaragua and Boston. The programmers did team programming using Skype and sharing screens. This technique saved a lot of money and increased the quality of the code produced. Digital Nomads know how to organize work so that it can be done anywhere anytime.

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Four Things For The Digital Nomad To Think About

by Mike Drzycimski / Sep 21

Carrying It All

When I travel, I use the laptop bag that came with my Dell computer.  Dell designed a great bag.  It is not only stylish, but functional as well.  There are enough pockets and zippered areas to hold everything I need.  I stash everthing in my laptop bag – computer, usb mouse, ac adapter, extra battery, & papers and folders.  I also store my cell phone and backberry in the bag too.

Charging it Up

I make sure that I charge everything up before heading out the door.  That includes my extra laptop battery.  With the extra battery, I get about 6 hours of computer time.  Not bad I think.  I can usally find somewhere to plug in my ac adapter and make sure I do whenever I get the chance.  When I get to my hotel room or back home, it all gets plugged in and charged back up again.

Internet Access

Internet access is easy as I use a broadband card from Verizon.  They have the best network (the commercials don’t lie) and I never have a problem getting a signal in and around every city that I am in.  The speed is not lightning fast but being able to get the information at all is the most important aspect anyway.

Security

Security is left up to me.  I don’t let my laptop or case out of my sight.  In this day and time, you can not be lax about leaving your stuff somewhere that you don’t know who will mess with it.  The IT guys did put some software on my laptop that encrypts the data in case it does get into the wrong hands.  But, I don’t plan to let the bad guys find out they can’t access the data.  They won’t physically get my computer in the first place.  Not if I can help it.

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What About Security?

by Joseph Hunkins / Sep 19

Forget about mobile security.   Seriously.  The ship that prevents us from having a robust level of online security sailed long ago, leaving us with a choice of participating in a somewhat insecure environment, especially as we jump on and off of hotspots or insecure home networks to do our online banking.    I suppose it’s possible that I’ve just been lucky, and I certainly take the normal levels of precaution, but I think that worrying, for example, about your employees encrypting their email and surfing activity while on the road (or off the road for that matter), is an exercise in futility.

The key security holes are as much a product of an employees risky behavior as they are a product of your company’s efforts to protect everybody.    I’m obviously not suggesting you conduct any sensitive mobile computing without virus protection and firewalls, and also obviously if highly confidential information such as credit card records or medical histories is involved very high levels of security are called for, and great mobile networking precautions should be taken.

Most importantly you’ll obviously want to monitor any money related online transactions – but since you must monitor these after the mobile transaction fact anyway, trying to insure security throughout the process may be cost prohibitive.   Again obvious caveats apply, but credit cards and banking systems have fairly extensive security systems and good processes to settle online fraud already in place.

However under the normal mobile networking environments of your employees I think security issues are not so much overblown as they are outside of your control.    Outside of establishing basic common sense protocols for your workers, it may be best to simply make sure that highly sensitive informtion is not handled using mobile devices unless you’ve established a highly secure environmenent, and that normal transactions are monitored with the common sense principles you’d apply to any online activity.

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Digital Nomad Challenges Are Often Role Dependent

by Greg Fenton / Sep 16

Mobility means many different things to many different people.  Maturity of infrastructure and mobility solutions vary widely amongst small, medium and large enterprises. Larger enterprises often implementing more stringent and automated systems, whereas smaller businesses often depend on the individual mobile workers to determine their requirements and often implement them themselves.

Depending on the job function, access to different types of data dictate the user’s mobility and connectivity needs.

Trainers, field service personnel and many types of sales roles can get by simply by having a static copy of relevant data on a hard drive.  Infrequent access to email and availability by cellphone are more than sufficient for this type of worker.  These workers have laptops rather than desktops and therefore travel with their entire work environment.  Their laptops are the repository of their key data, having either created documents with or copied required documents to this device.  Responsible individuals or IT departments have secured those devices with appropriate passwords and encryption though often this is not the case.  Backups of this key data are done haphazardly to network shares, content management systems or, less frequently, enterprise backup software.

Other roles dictate the need for up-to-the-minute style of access for information.  These users are in the minority of “mobile workers” but often are senior employees/executives whose mobile requirements command a larger portion the attention of IT department’s attention.  These individuals typically can get by with less powerful devices such as tablet PCs or micro PCs.  However, their lowered need for horsepower is replaced by their need for immediacy of data; ready access to the Internet for email and to mobilized applications, typically enterprise applications that have been enhanced with a browser-based interface.

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