Reminds me of this now famous quote: “It depends on what the meaning of the words ‘is’ is…”

This is because many organizations develop an internal vocabulary and slang for how they communicate with each other about their respective product/service. Externalizing this “internal” vocabulary is difficult.

In a typical two hour meeting with multiple people from each party a good one-quarter of the time is wasted because there was no mutually understood taxonomy. Usually the meeting is well underway before it becomes obvious that “we’re confusing each other with dual-meaning words”… “let’s start over and first focus on the definitions for [...each term].”

Maybe this is a natural process that has to happen, or maybe there is a better way. With foresight and homework meeting planners can anticipate the common words that might have dual meanings and establish the vocabulary up-front. I’m going to try this tact for my next external meeting.

The store did not make me use THEIR (meaningless to me) identity to be tracked in THEIR system. This is good… If I visit the chain again, all I have to do is tell the clerk my mobile number and I’ll receive the benefit. (BTW… they don’t know this is a mobile number, to them it’s just my unique identity.)

Aside: US telephone numbers were engineered for easy memory.

I’ve had the same mobile number for about 10 years, and after this experience it dawned on me “I’ll keep this number forever.” The mobile number I chose “back in the day” has become a lifetime identity.

Mobile number portability was mandated by Congress allowing people to use their number as an “identity.”

Another identity for life that I CHOSE is my personal email address. I can’t imagine a scenario where I would change my mobile number or personal email (unless I’m whisked away into the Witness Protection Program. )

My Social Security number (really it’s my personal US Federal Government identifier) is an example of another “lifetime” identity. Contrast to passport numbers, driver license numbers, license plate numbers and student ID’s that change from time to time.

Looking around, I see other lifetime identities with my About.me profile, Facebook handle, LinkedIN URL, Twitter @name, IRC handle, GitHub, Amazon account, domain names, etc. Most or all I’ll use for the rest of my life.

This begs the question what happens to these identities after death? If I had a fantastic mobile number (e.g. 212-234-1000) could I bequeath that to an heir? A precedent for transferring “identities” already exists with coveted low number and vanity state license plates. What about mobile numbers and great email addresses? Or should the concept be the “number” is retired when the person expires?

Until a few days ago, Yahoo, along with many other Silicon Valley tech companies, embraced the “work from where you’re most efficient” model. But now Yahoo no longer has the luxury of a robust stock price and gilded image, and if there can be a positive gained from this HR policy change, it has to be investigated. The “shoulda-woulda-coulda” post-mortem will not suffice if there is no happy ending to the Yahoo story.

Aside: Many pundits are speculating this is a calculated move to rid Yahoo of slacker “dead wood” employees. Or it could be that Yahoo doesn’t really know who in the ranks are “the makers versus the takers.” The real answer is probably all of the above. The thinking is filter out the slackers by forcing everyone to commute to the office.

Harnessing the power of a distributed team is a balancing act. Not all people can or should work physically separate, but some job roles, especially individual contributors, can actually be more successful if people are allowed to “create” in the environment most suited to their individual work style. Cracking the distributed team code isn’t hard to decipher. It’s one part awesome communication and one part mandating a company-wide collaboration style that treats the distributed folks as first class citizens. When everyone is distributed then there is no problem, it’s only when the “center of gravity” shifts toward a central location. Sometimes it takes more effort to work this way, but that is offset by the gains of an all-inclusive, productive, dispersed team.

I’ve been observing legacy IT behemoths like IBM, HP and Microsoft push their white collar workers into home offices. Steelcase, Knoll and others are redesigning office furniture systems for the teams of the future. It’s all about fluid designs that promote ad-hoc meetings, less about being anchored to a stationary desk. These designs all assume people are working remote to some extent.

If Yahoo seems “broken,” it’s not because remote people stifle innovation. There are larger systemic issues at play and lot’s of history to unravel. But who knows, maybe a serendipitous hallway conversation between two “Yahoos” that don’t normally see each other might yield the great epiphany that saves the day. Still, pulling people into the office feels like a knee jerk “austerity measure” that might cause more harm than good.

Here is how my life is measurably improved because of iPad, Audible, Streaming Video, Google Services and Prezi.

iPad – 2nd Generation, WiFi + 3G model

The second generation iPad with 3G is a great tablet. Light, good battery life, and pretty good screen. The 4th generation models haven’t lured me to upgrade… yet.  The iPad is now my “go to” device for reading web content, blogs, Twitter, and watching video. And that’s how I realize many positive benefits. For example I use my iPad while exercising on the elliptical. With the abundance of streaming video for entertainment I have doubled my hours per week working out. The iPad is a great platform for giving a presentation. The pinch to zoom visual enhancement provides an interactive quality you don’t get slinging PowerPoint slides. Below are the five services that enhance my daily life routines.

Audible – Listen to the Written Word

I drive a 2+ hour commute several times a week. With Audible I listen to books for education and entertainment. Currently “reading” Walt Disney’s Biography. Without Audible, I wouldn’t be able to do much reading. With Audible, I am guaranteed at least 3-4 hours a week of reading time. And a recent cool factor enhancement is the ability to sync audiobooks to the Amazon Kindle. With sync, I can listen to a few chapters, switch to the Kindle and read a few chapters, and then resume in the audiobook.

Streaming Video Apps – PBS, HBO GO, ABC, Amazon Instant Video

The iPad plus many streaming video apps has improved my physical health. Because I am exercising many more hours a week. Previously my barrier to exercise was the boredom factor. With video, I am able to catchup on favorite television shows, discover new video content, and watch documentaries that I might otherwise miss. It’s amazing the amount of video content available just within a few apps. My favorites are PBS, HBO GO (you need to be a HBO cable subscriber), ABC, and Amazon’s new Instant Video app (you need to be an Amazon Prime member). I am never lacking “entertainment” while exercising.

Google Services – Frictionless Collaboration

I wrote a whole post about Google Apps for collaboration, and using the iPad with the various Google apps just adds more flexibility. With over 100 million units sold, Google is assured to continue to offer great application software even as they try to enhance their own preferred Android tablet platforms.

With Google Chrome, Google Drive, Gmail, Google+ and the dedicated iOS Google App, all the various web services have an app too. But it is confusing to know which apps to use or whether to use the HTML equivalent with Chrome or Safari. Google needs to do a better job packaging the iOS apps.

Google Drive and Chrome iOS apps are the “glue” that bridge the iPad to my Macbook Air. I can use the iPad as a “third screen” truly disconnected from the Macbook, but sill accessing bookmarks, open tabs and documents. I find myself carrying the iPad to meetings and leaving the Macbook at my desk. I like the “fluid flexibility.”

PDF and Prezi – New Presentation System

Recently I have been using the iPad to deliver presentations. I started by using simple PDF export of slides created with PowerPoint or Google Presentations. PDF files sync’d over Google Drive, with an iPad VGA or HDMI cable connected to a projector, brings a fresh, kinetic feel to a live presentation. With PDF, the pinch to zoom allows emphasis without fancy distracting fade in transitions. The audience focuses on me as the speaker, and when I want their attention to the screen, a simple on-demand zoom in does that. Still working out some of the logistics for physically holding the iPad and managing the cables to the projector. Airplay Wireless Video Mirroring will be really helpful when more projectors support the protocol.

In addition to PDF presentation delivery I have started to use Prezi. It’s a whole new paradigm to presentation creation and delivery. Prezi is a few things: an iOS app, a web-based SaaS service for creating and sharing presentations, and an off-line presentation creation tool. Prezi uses the concept of “zoom in” for emphasis, and the key is to use the visual techniques as an enhancement, not a “crutch” to shore up lousy content. I plan to use Prezi more as I master the toolkit.

Summary

The iPad, with a few key services, helps me live a more comfortable life.

Here is how I got started with “cloud-first” thinking:

1. Gmail

April Fools Day 2004, almost nine years ago, I made a dramatic email paradigm shift. I left Outlook and jumped whole heart into Gmail. With Outlook I obsessively organized incoming email into byzantine folder structures. Projects, customers, personal, business. For some reason whiling away the hours organizing my email made me feel good, but that was in reality a ”false high.” And to top it off a wasted effort; the folder structure became stale over time.

Gmail, with it’s folder-free, conversation-centric, fast search approach to email management was the complete opposite user experience and it just “clicked” for me.

“How could I have not seen this before?” It took thinking outside the (in)box to transform email. No more dragging to folders. Simple tagging works better. Conversations threaded automatically. Woot!

2. Google Apps

In 2007 I started using Google Apps for content creation. A similar eureka moment occurred. Just like moving from Outlook to Gmail, moving from Word + Excel to GApps Docs + Spreadsheets was a fresh, modern approach to collaborative content creation. There was so much friction in the old world. Working on a shared document required emailing the file around or keeping track of versions on a file share. With GDocs the editing was in place, versions maintained, and collaboration speed increased. Now I get hives when someone sends me a Word file looking for comments and edits.

We’re fast approaching the era where the “file,” residing on a file system, will not be the default work product unit. It will be a shared document in a collaboration space designed for multi-user editing.

It took some patience with Google as they incrementally improved Gapps. But today it’s pretty good and getting better faster.

3. Chrome + Sync

I started using Google’s Chrome browser in mid-2009. It had many rough edges for OS X, but today it’s a great integrated usage experience. With Chrome, my bookmarks, history, apps + extensions PLUS open tabs are all sync’d across my various computers and devices. For example I can start writing a document on the shared Mac in kitchen and then pickup my iPad to continue editing. Or from my Macbook Air at the office I can view open tabs at home.

Chrome brings a “fluidity” to my work-flow by allowing me to start and finish tasks on whatever device is most convenient to me “in the moment.”

4. Google Voice

A couple years ago I added Google Voice to my personal Gmail account. I created a new “shadow” telephone number, made it my central voicemail, and now use the Google Voice app and Chrome extension to read (or listen) to my voice messages, whether my smart-phone is near me or not. Sometimes the speech to text translations are so hilarious I forward the text to my caller for a mutual chuckle.

5. Google+ and Circles

I have a love/hate relationship with Google Plus. The various user interfaces for managing profiles seems confusing and not intuitive. I am never quite sure what content is shared to “the world” or private. But I do like the Circles concepts and have gradually warmed up to spending more time in the Google+ UI.

I didn’t fully appreciate the benefit of categorizing most of my Google Contacts into Circles. But because of that time investment I now get an “auto-inbox” organizing feature  simply by clicking on a named Circle. If I want to see only emails from colleagues, click “Sonian”. If I want to read only messages from family, click “Family.” This is the power of Google being able to connect the dots for me behind the scenes.

6. Separating work accounts from personal: still a *work in progress*

A popular grievance among the Google user community is the “multi-account” management debacle. Google is slowly making all their services multi-account aware, but it’s still not perfect. My Chrome browser and sessions are configured almost perfectly to allow switching between my personal @gmail.com account and work account, but occasionally something goes awry and the browser has to be restarted to get the logins working correctly. These days, restarting a browser is nearly as painful as restarting a PC.

7. Recent Optimizations

• Enabled multifactor authentication for all my Google accounts/services. Do this for data privacy and security peace of mind. At first configuring MFA was a hassle and I almost decided not worth it. But stuck it out and now I don’t mind the occasional need to enter a numeric code SMS’d to my mobile.
• iOS Gmail app. Love it. Better then accessing Gmail via Safari or using the native iOS Mail app.

Postscript

Slowly the legacy habits for creating and sharing enterprise content will shift from file centric to document centric. I can’t wait for “cloud-first” thinking to become default behavior.

1. The definition of “Cloud” will become clear
The years 2008 through 2012 started the “cloud computing” conversation, but there is quite a bit of “cloudiness – pun intended” about what the term cloud really means. Commodity-priced public clouds like Amazon Web Services and Rackspace compete for mindshare with hybrid and private cloud wares from Citrix, VMWare and others. Each camp uses the same terms interchangeably, which confuses the IT decision maker. The truth is, most businesses will use a combination of public and private cloud services. This is because there are some use-cases where the public cloud is simply the best value per IT budget dollar. And there are other examples where a unique requirement calls for a private cloud solution.

Throughout 2013 the public cloud providers will do a better job to differentiate their offerings from private cloud vendors. Public cloud vendors will showcase economics and security postures that will be very appealing to mid-size businesses. As more medium-sized organizations find cloud success, even enterprises will start to investigate their cloud options.

2. Enterprise IT will embrace cloud computing with at least  three production or research and development projects using a public cloud
The past five years of physical server migration to server room virtualization pave the way for the next big wave, which is to use “cloud” for some IT workloads. Many businesses have identified a few projects where testing public cloud is budgeted and planned for 2013. Applications that consume large quantities of storage or have dynamic (elastic) compute needs are the first ideal candidates.

However, many IT decision makers do understand we are at the beginning of a decade long migration, and there will be a lot of experimentation before massive wholesale cloud adoption is mainstream in the Global 2000.

3. The “Virtuous Cycle of Cloud Computing” will become obvious
Cloud computing represents new thinking on the “economies of scale” factoring into very large infrastructure purchasing dynamics. For example, as more customers use cloud compute and storage, the cloud vendors in essence, make larger purchases. Buying more lowers their costs, which in turn, allows the cloud vendors to drop prices. Lower prices encourages more customers to buy into the cloud, and the cycle repeats itself.

The IT industry has never before witnessed the positive effect of large bulk purchases, shared across hundreds of thousands of IT consumers. This will commoditize services for a very large buying audience. The closest allegory might be when government sponsors research (examples: the Internet, NASA) and then the private sector continues the innovation after the research phase.

4. The future of cloud applications is “Transformation,” not “Migration”
A false conventional notion about cloud adoption is that current on-premises or co-located SaaS applications can be “migrated” to the cloud and cost savings and reliability will be realized immediately. The primary cloud computing benefit is lower overall costs and increased reliability. A winning combination compared to the status quo. But the challenge is really understanding that the act of moving an application to the cloud is transforming, not migration.

Migration will get you into trouble. Transformation will set you up for success. The cloud has different “natural laws” than virtualized hardware. All enterprise apps will need to be transformed, i.e. rewritten, to take advantage of the positive attributes and avoid the pitfalls. An example is horizontal cluster scalability. In the pre-cloud world functional clusters for services like distributed file systems were designed for a physical infrastructure. Which means consistent bandwidth and hard failures. In the cloud, bandwidth is variable and the failures can be transient. Software needs to be tuned for cloud in a different way than physical infrastructure. But in many cases, the software needs to be transformed, not migrated. This is the single greatest epiphany to understand about how the enterprise will consume the cloud.

5. 2013 is “Year of Enterprise 2 Cloud” momentum
The modern cloud era began in 2007 with Amazon Web Services and the introduction of compute, storage and networking in the form of infrastructure as a services (IaaS). Enterprises were skeptical and kept their distance. But start-ups jumped feet first into the cloud and created some amazing businesses captivate the imagination. Now it is time for the enterprise to take a brave step forward and realize the cloud’s potential. This will happen because of the shifting focus from IaaS to Platform as a Service (PaaS).

PaaS is becoming more popular because the concepts remove the manual burden from provisioning IaaS services. PaaS offerings include relational database as a service, key value store as a service (NoSQL), automated application deployment, automatic scaling, virtual networking / secure computing and sending email as a service. PaaS is growing quickly and there are new offerings every six months.

The enterprise has been waiting for Platform as a Service. PaaS removes the greatest barrier to enterprise cloud adoption, because prior to PaaS, businesses could not take advantage of the raw building block components that represent IaaS. Enterprise buy solutions. Start-ups by tools to build solutions.

PaaS represents the original premise for the cloud; focus on core competencies and let others supply the commodity building blocks. An application developer creating the next hot mobile application should focus on the user experience and domain expertise. If the application developer is distracted creating an automatic deployment system built on IaaS instead of “renting” the PaaS equivalent, then it’s considered wasted effort and defocusing from the core mission.

6. Better signal to noise ratio filters for enterprise data
The cloud is the perfect place to solve an Enterprise “Big Data” problem. Building upon the PaaS momentum is the next wave; Server-less Architectures for managing big data. This is the concept that future cloud applications will be built for the idea that the cloud is a giant mainframe computer. Current cloud architectures are based on replicating the design patterns from the pre-cloud collocation era, which means dedicated or semi-dedicated virtual instances supporting application. To really solve a big data analysis problem requires new thinking about the way enterprises consume compute and storage.

This is a classic “signal to noise” ratio problem. The enterprise is awash in “noise” from large data repositories. But within the noise are actionable “signals.” Moving the data to the cloud, and processing with advanced analyzers powered by cloud computing, will reveal the valuable signal data. An example is analyzing email traffic from customer support requests. Within the email is locked away “customer sentiment.” Every CEO should want to know how their customer’s feel about the product and company. The cloud, server-less architectures and big data algorithms can figure this out more economically than any on-premises application in history.

The cloud allows new concepts to be explored over and over and at very low cost. Within the cloud there is increasing interest in creating applications that are not server dependent, but rather can function within an application virtual machine environment, melding the best of PaaS and automation with low cost and dynamic configurations that are tuned for optimal cost efficiencies. This is the way to find the signal in all the noise.

7. Cloud innovation moves from IaaS to PaaS
The modern cloud era began in 2007 with Amazon Web Services and the introduction of compute, storage and networking in the form of infrastructure as a services (IaaS). Fast forward five years later to present and next year, the next cloud innovation wave will focus on platform as a service offerings (PaaS) that provide higher-level SaaS application building blocks. PaaS offerings include relational database as a service, key value store as a service (NoSQL), automated application deployment, automatic scaling, virtual networking / secure computing and sending email as a service. PaaS is growing quickly and there are new offerings every six months.

Platform as a Service is getting more attention from leading edge independent software vendors because PaaS allows for faster time to market for new projects, and allows existing projects to scale more quickly and cost less. PaaS represents the original premise for the cloud; focus on core competencies and let others supply the commodity building blocks. An application developer creating the next hot mobile application should focus on the user experience and domain expertise. If the application developer is distracted creating an automatic deployment system built on IaaS instead of “renting” the PaaS equivalent, then it’s considered wasted effort and defocusing from the core mission.

8. “Server-less Architectures” will start to emerge
Building upon the PaaS momentum is the next wave; Server-less Architectures. This is the concept that future cloud applications will be built for the idea that the cloud is a giant mainframe computer. Current cloud architectures are based on replicating the design patterns from the pre-cloud colocation era, which means dedicated or semi-dedicated virtual instances supporting application.

The cloud allows new concepts to be explored and there is increasing interest in creating applications that are not server dependent, but rather can function within an application virtual machine environment. This means no more specific servers, and instead virtualized application framework runtimes. For example the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) runs Java programs. Imagine if there were a pool of JVM resources an application could pull from and the application did not have to be aware of specific compute instances.

Of course behind the scenes there are real servers hosting the JVM runtimes, but the application developer does not have to be concerned with provisioning or managing the host operating systems and can focus on creating the best Java application. It’s exciting to think about the cloud evolving into a large shared mainframe with superior cost and reliability baked into the core. Everyone except for the legacy server vendors will benefit.

There have been many posts on the subject “getting to inbox zero,” which means various organizing strategies and productivity tools for managing an overflowing inbox.

This post is about a different angle to email management: shining a spotlight on the sender’s responsibility, not the recipient’s, for effective email communication.

Let’s face it, an email exchange becomes a TODO for the recipient. They have to read the message, and then, in many cases, respond to questions or clarify assertions. The sender needs the message to be remarkable in some way to get a faster reply. This means the sender must put some thought into how the message will be read and acted upon.

3 Common Sense Rules for Perfect Email Communication

1. Subjects Matter
2. Use Generous White Space
3. Format the Message for Easy Replies

 Rule 1. Subjects Matter

Start with a specific, compelling subject line. Use three to five descriptive words to help your reader understand context without having to read the message. This will help them prioritize your update. Sometimes it takes more time to craft the message subject then the actual content.

Bad subject lines:

• Our company meeting
• Follow-up
• Introduction
• Our meeting

Great subject lines:

• 3 Tasks for Dec 5 2012 Company Meeting
• Follow-up to Nov 12 2012 Meeting and 3 Questions
• Mutual Introduction: Sean Smith / AcmeCo meet Ben Bove / MegaCo
• I’m running late for our Mon Nov 19 3pm meeting

Rule 2. Use Generous White Space, and
Rule 3. Format the Message for Easy Replies

The second and third rules are combined because they relate to formatting and thought organization.

Don’t write an email like you are having an informal verbal conversation. Instead use brief statements with visually compelling horizontal separation. Proper formatting is guaranteed to get a faster, more accurate response.

Don’t write 100+ word monolithic paragraphs, and don’t bury important statements or questions in the prose. An email with multiple buried questions may only get one question answered, thus adding more friction with more back-and-forth replies until all the questions are answered.

Compare the two messages below. Which version is easier to read and more likely to get a complete reply?

Version 1 

Version 1 is a typical “email follow-up” to an in person meeting. (1) The subject is “non-specific,” (2) the message body contains a meeting request, (3) 3 specific questions and and a (4) folksy comment about a miscellaneous mutual connection. These are all buried in the above sample. It’s hard to read and decipher the questions and respond to the meeting request.

Furthermore, the meeting request puts the onus on the recipient to figure out dates for “next week” and will result in several back and forth volleys to get an actual date and time for the meeting.

And finally, the reference to the mutual connection is out of context to the 3 questions, and breaks the flow.

Version 2 – Using the “3 Rules Method”  

Version 2 allows the recipient to hit reply and answer the questions “in-line” to the original, preserving the context and also functioning as a visual TODO list for the 3 questions and the request for the next meeting. The subject text is also very specific and will be easier to respond to the email

The meeting request suggests specific dates and times and a method of contact. This is more efficient and the recipient can easily reply or suggest alternatives.

Extras:

Beyond the 3 rules above, consider these additional suggestions toward “more perfect emailing.”

• Don’t mix too many different subject matters in the same email, instead use separate messages. Keep one main theme to a message for faster replies. If your reader has to consider disjointed concepts you may not get any response at all. By posing too many topics in one message you can paralyze the recipient from responding.
• Suggest absolute times and a method of contact when requesting a meeting. Don’t write “tomorrow” or “next week.” Instead state “Mon Nov 19” or “week of Dec 10.” Using relative dates puts the onus on the reader to decode the real intent. The recipient should not have to perform complicated date calculations to know what “next week” means relative to the date the original message was composed.
• And finally… Create a  new message instead of replying to an old message. The new message’s topic may not even be related to the old message. It always amazes me when I receive a message from a distant contact that is a reply to an email exchange from the previous year.