Technology for the post-search world

On the road this week to attend and present at the PeopleMatter Collaborate '14 event, so today's take will be a short one, and really is not much more than a recommendation to check out this fascinating piece on Quartz titled This is what comes after search, a really interesting look at how the way we interact with the web (particularly on mobile devices) is changing.

Long story short, we don't really 'search' in the traditional sense, by typing some words into a box on Google.com, nearly as much on mobile devices as we traditionally have on personal computers, (where 'searching' was essentially the only way to find anything).

And since more and more the only thing that really matters is mobile, this change is user behavior and preferences for information discovery are having a pretty profound impact on both the major sellers or search, (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft), and the new companies that are developing technologies that are meant to deliver the next generation of 'search', where searching happens automatically, is context-aware, and is personalized for you.

Here is a excerpt from the piece on Quartz to give you an idea of what the 'post-search' world might look like:

In the old days, if you wanted to do something - navigate to the restaurant where you've got a dinner reservation - you might open a web browser and search for its address. But in the post-search world of context - in which our devices know so much about us that they can guess our intentions - your phone is already displaying a route to that restaurant, as well as traffic conditions, and how long it will take you to get there, the moment you pull your phone out of your pocket.

Manually searching for things, especially for basic information like the names of places or their locations or details about a person with which you are about to meets just seems kind of old school, kind of a 2002 way to interact with information.

Earlier this week I posted about Microsoft's Oslo project, the beginnings of their attempt at making 'search' less onerous and even unnecessary for the people in organizations that have pretty much their entire work lives tied up in Microsoft Office applications. That project, and the ones that are detailed in the Quartz piece both serve as signals of a sort, that the days of you having to figure out what it is you are looking for, then manually issuing a request to some kind of search tool to help you find the right information, and finally you figuring out which choice to make from hundreds or thousands of options are perhaps drawing to a close.

For the solution providers that will thrive in the second part of this decade, it's not about making technology that helps you find things anymore. It is about making technology that delivers the right information, in the right context, before the user even had to search.

CHART OF THE DAY: Is College Still a Good Investment?

There are and will continue to be just enough incredibly successful people who did not either attend college at all or did not earn a degree to raise at least some doubt in many parents and students minds regarding the 'Is it still worth it to attend college?' question.

While there is no disputing the achievements of people like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, maybe the guy who owns your local chain of car dealerships, who did not actually complete college, it seems these examples are more likely outliers, and that for most people/students, heading down (and completing) the path towards a college degree remains for the most part a sound personal economic strategy.

Here's the chart. from the Federal Reserve of San Francisco, that I want to call your attention to that (Jobs and Gates aside), makes the 'college' case pretty strongly. It shows the earnings premium for college grads, and people with some college over people with just high school degrees.

So the data is pretty clear, college has been and remains a pretty sound investment for most. 

The research summary reads as follows:

Earning a four-year college degree remains a worthwhile investment for the average student. Data from U.S. workers show that the benefits of college in terms of higher earnings far outweigh the costs of a degree, measured as tuition plus wages lost while attending school. The average college graduate paying annual tuition of about $20,000 can recoup the costs of schooling by age 40. After that, the difference between earnings continues such that the average college graduate earns over $800,000 more than the average high school graduate by retirement age.

There are a couple of caveats here - one is that the researchers used about $20,000 as an estimate for annual costs of college - as most parents know this could be really, really low especially for private or 'prestige' schools. And the data is not terribly recent, tapping out in about 2011 or so, not taking into account the latest wave of teenage App Store millionaires.

Sure college still probably isn't for everyone. But if you are a student or you are the parent of a student getting ready to face this decision you'd be wise to keep this research in mind. 

Have a great day!

Inspirational quotes that can be retired

Everyone has heard these, or read these, or had someone present them to you again again probably hundreds of times. Everyone gets them now. Please stop repeating/Tweeting/Instagramming them:

(Note: I may get a couple of specific words wrong on these quotes, but you will recognize them I bet)

1. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

You also miss 100% of the shots you miss. Pass the ball once in a while, you chucker.

2. I don't skate to where the puck is, I skate to where the puck is going to be.

Okay Kreskin. Let me know where the puck will be in say about 2 years so I can skate there and wait for everyone else.

3. "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." Ok, so this isn't so much 'inspirational' as it is 'empty'.

My 4th grade baseball team had an awesome culture. We also couldn't hit, field, or pitch worth a darn and we never won a game. But we had fun!

4. Be the change you wish to see in the world.

Really? The change I wish to see in the world is never having to see this quote again. I mean it. I am really wishing hard for it right now.

5. Do or do not, there is no try.

Ok, sure. Of course the world is that simple from the perspective of an imaginary 800 year-old puppet. Don't 'try' anything. Just do. Or do not. What in the heck does that even mean?

6. Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.

Translation: You are always right. Right?

7. Believe you can and you’re halfway there.

I believe I can be a point guard for the Knicks. Hooray - I'm halfway to the NBA!

8. If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat! Just get on.

You will not ever be offered a seat on a rocket ship.

9. A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.

This one is attributed to Albert Einstein, who had earned shall we say A LOT more wiggle room to make mistakes than the rest of us.

10. The past is a ghost, the future a dream. All we ever have is now.

This is also the mindset of the dumbest dogs you'll ever meet. Their entire time horizon is 2 seconds. This second right now and the one that is about to happen. That is it.

Ok, I am out. That is what a Monday spent catching up on email will do to me.

What do you think?

Did I miss any? Share your favorites (least favorites) in the comments.

A Smarter Office

No. I'm not talking about a better desk chair, a standing/walking desk, or some kind of modern hybrid open office with a jungle gym or a trampoline or a ping-pong table, I am talking about that workplace institution known as Microsoft Office.

Since at least as far back as I can  remember, (sadly, a long time), Microsoft Office and its components have been a necessary evil in every job that I've had, and probably most of the ones you've had too. Sure, in any given job the mix might change - you might have been an Excel jockey in one role, then spent literally hundreds of hours managing Word documents in another, and maybe ended up learning the finer points of PowerPoint after that.  And while the Office suite is certainly powerful and capable, the tools allowed you to get work done, they never really seemed to help you get work done, if that makes sense. Not to mention the ages and ages of hours spent searching for Office files, on hard drives, on shared drives, in email attachments and so on.

In many ways the Microsoft Office applications were (and are) overly powerful - we very rarely call upon their advanced capabilities, heck, their basic capabilities are usually good enough for what we have to do. And we also have the benefit of familiarity with them. I would hate to be a novice MS Word or PowerPoint user today. 

But since in many organizations, almost all work gets done, (or is documented) in an Office application, (and even some non-Office but still Microsoft applications like Exchange, Sharepoint or Yammer, (remember them?)), the folks at Microsoft have kind of quietly begun thinking about ways that these tools, and their ubiquity in many enterprises can become more than just information storage mechanisms and evolve into something smarter.

A few weeks ago I wrote about a new tech term called CALO - a Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes, and speculated that CALO would be the next important acronym in HR and workplace technology. Well it seems like the folks working on Microsoft Office are with me on that, (or really, I am with them), on this concept of CALO as evidenced by a project that was announced back in March, but I just heard about this past week, something called Oslo.Microsoft Oslo

What is Oslo? 

Check this excerpt from a blog post in March on the Office blog announcing the concept:

Next-generation search and discovery – let information find you

The goal for Oslo was not just to reimagine search, but to help people get their work done in a quicker, more informed, and even delightful manner. After all, your job isn’t just to “search.” You use search as a tool to get your actual job done. This more ambitious goal drove us to ask how we could remove the information silos that exist across applications, better support information discovery, and enable teams to work together as a network. The result is not just a search solution, but a new way of working – proactive, transformational, and delightful. Oslo is the first in a new breed of intelligent and social work experiences.

Rather than list an exhaustive set of features, let’s see how Oslo transforms the world of work.

Oslo is proactive and personalized for you

If you are like me, your days at work are packed: several hours of scheduled meetings, lots of emails waiting to be read and responded to, and usually a lot of folks who need to talk about urgent issues. There just aren’t enough hours in the day. Sound familiar?

Oslo can bring moments of peace to those hectic days. It cuts through the noise by showing you what you need to know today, and even what’s likely to be important in the near future. You can see information trending that is associated with what you are working on, and the people within your work network. The information is delivered in a way that is easy to consume and quick to scan.

With Oslo, you don’t have to change anything about the way you work. Through the Office Graph, Oslo is automatically populated with activities you already do every day, such as which documents you share, which people you meet with, and which documents you read. There are private activities, like what documents you viewed, and public activities, like the people you follow in Yammer. Private activities always stay private.

It might be a little hard from that brief description to grasp at the real capability (even in its early stages) of a tool like Oslo, but if you break it down what Microsoft is attempting to do is a classic CALO example.

Oslo is going to 'learn' about you, based on the documents you create, share, and on which you collaborate, the people you email and attend meetings with, the characteristics of those people, the things you search for, the Yammer groups you visit, and the like. Oslo will present information and documents to you based on these signals and importantly, before you had to search for them. And finally, Oslo will help make work more about collaborating with the people you work with, and less about the documents you are working on.

If that still sounds a little cryptic, but you are still interested in this, take some time this week and watch the demo video below, (Email and RSS subscribers will need to click through), that provides some good examples and explanations of Oslo's intent. 

If you watch the video you will get a better feel for where Microsoft is heading with Oslo. It's being Beta-tested right now with select customers and should be available to the general public by the end of 2014.

I give props to Microsoft on what they are building with this technology - if they can make working with Office files easy and even fun then they are my heroes.

Have a great week!

WEBINAR: The Recruiter Makeover

Just in time for the Springtime hiring season (that is a real thing, right?), I call your attention to the next installment of the often imitated but never duplicated Fistful of Talent webinar, this one tailor made for recruiters and talent acquisition pros that might need their own professional spring cleaning.

Titled, The Recruiter Makeover: 7 Ways Recruiters Can Reinvent Themselves as Marketers, the FOT crew are partnering with the cool folks at Jobvite for a fresh and edgy look at ways recruiters can re-cast themselves for today's 'everything is marketing' age. In this FOT webinar you'll see how the world’s full of great products/services that eventually became commodities, and how unfortunately, there are a lot of recruiters in danger of becoming commodities as well if they don’t change with the times. Odds are you feel the shift under your feet—great candidates are less responsive than ever to average recruiters, which means you have to become a more effective marketer of the brand and opportunities you represent to keep your closing rate high.

If you’re still reading, that means you haven’t been average in the past.  Join the FOT crew on May 8 at 2pm EST and, and the gang will give you the roadmap for a career makeover that includes the following goodies:

- The Ugly “Before” Picture. We’ve all seen the “before” pictures used in makeovers and this one is no different.  Using your “average Joe/Jane” recruiter, we’re going to take a snapshot of the recruiter most in need of our makeover.  Brace yourself, because “before” pictures in makeover workups all look like mug/prison shots of Lindsay Lohan, right?

- Trendspotting 101. We can’t start prescribing the skill equivalent of makeup or liposuction for recruiters until we tell you about the trends that are causing the need for the makeover.  Candidates have more options and messages flowing to them than ever before.  Whether its the emergence of Indeed, Glassdoor, LinkedIn or the social recruiting scene, recruiting is morphing into marketing.  We’ll compare and contrast some of the trends to tell you why recruiters are evolving into marketers even as they keep their core recruiting skills strong.

- 7 Ways Recruiters Can Reinvent Themselves As Marketers. Makeover time. We’ll hit you with our list of things you can do to reinvent yourself as a marketer who just happens to recruit for a living.  You can do this. Don’t believe the naysayers that will say this is hype.  Those people are just trying to keep you average.

- Our Top 5 List of Recruiters Who Have Strong Marketing Game. It’s all empty talk until we give you examples, right?  The FOT crew will break down our top 5 list of recruiters who have added the marketing toolkit to their games, complete with emphasis of which of our “7 Ways” list they specialize in.  Everyone in the world needs role models—even recruiters.  We’ll tell you who to connect with and emulate to become a marketer in the recruiting game.

Evolving your game as a recruiter isn’t easy. It takes thought, expertise and time you don’t have, because you’re busy filling positions.  Join FOT on May 8 at 2pm EST for The Recruiter Makeover: 7 Ways Recruiters Can Reinvent Themselves as Marketers, and we’ll show you how to add marketing chops to your personal recruiting brand so you don’t get left behind.

Use the link above to register for the FREE FOT Webinar and feel better about yourself for at least the next 12 minutes.And as always the FOT Webinar comes guaranteed - 60% of the time it works every time.

Have a great weekend!