Work resolutions 2009

Follow-up to Work resolutions 2008 from Autology: John Dale's blog

Stupidly late, here’s my annual follow-up to my work predictions from Jan 2008, and going further back, 2007, 2006 and 2005.

A year ago, in January 2008, I predicted that we would:-

• Do more to integrate with email.
• Develop fewer new applications, looking instead to extend our existing tools and make them more task based.
• Work on desktop synchronisation tools.

I’d give myself a solid two out of three. We didn’t do anything on email integration, and while I think it’s still a good idea in principle, we haven’t really found a specific example of where we could introduce it as a feature.

We certainly developed fewer new applications; none, to be precise (unless I’m forgetting something), though we substantially reworked some applications such as Search and Files.Warwick. We continue to think about the task-based approach to using our tools, especially in the context of teaching and learning, and module web spaces. And we introduced two (nearly three) desktop tools; a Files.Warwick sync tool, a video converter, and, soon, drive letter mapping into Files.Warwick so you can treat your Files.Warwick space like any other Windows Explorer or Mac Finder location, and open, save, copy and move files into and out of it.

For 2009, I’m broadening my predictions out. I predict that:-

• Discoverability will be important; there are things you can do with our tools which are great if you know about them, but there’s nothing on our toolbars or in our UI which tells you that these features exist, or what they do, or why they might be useful. We need to work more on exposing things that people can do with our systems, and I think this applies to lots of systems and at lots of levels – in the UI, in the documentation, through the helpdesk, through our training and support, through our marketing.
• 2009 will be the first year in which Warwick out-sources a major IT application.
• And also the year in which the question of our VLE provision through SiteBuilder and other tools, and its strengths and weaknesses against other VLE systems, comes to the fore.

And thanks to my tardiness, there’s now only eleven months to see whether I’m right or not.

John Dale : 02 Feb 2009 11:42 |  Tags: Musings Tech |  Comments (1) |  Report a problem