"Together" resource manager

In my quest to find a decent program that helps me organize my course resources, I stumbled upon “Together.” It’s a resource manager application for Mac OS X and comes with some nifty features. There is an option to import the content from a URL and save it directly to a PDF file format. The PDF is then placed in your resource library. Another nice feature is the extra tab slider that attaches to the edge of your screen and slides out letting you instantly search your library and make quick notes.

Together seems great for my needs. I can sort all my course resources by “course” whereby I divvy up the files in folders according to quarter and course name. I add all relevant files in each course folder and tag resources (PDF articles) with a tag labeled “resource.” I then created a “Smart” folder (similar to iTunes Smart folders) that aggregates all files tagged as “resource.”

These two ways of organizing my course resources allows me to search for files contextually by quarter and course name, as well as non-contextually using the Smart folder for my resources that span across all courses.

I start classes at RIT next week on the 7th. Two of my three classes start at noon and the third is on Thursday nights at 6pm. I’ll be taking 12 credits (4 credits each) each “quarter.” They call the sessions “quarters” instead of semesters since there are four sessions: fall, winter, spring, and summer, although I’m not required to take courses during the summer quarter. My courses this semester for my degree in HCI are:

• Foundations in Human-Computer Interaction
• Research Methods
• Programming for the WWW (using PHP)

Even though I don’t have classes this week I have two orientation sessions, one on Wednesday and the one on Thursday. I’m really looking forward to the orientation meetings because I’ll get to meet other graduate students, especially IT graduate students.

• Learn SharePoint
• Migrate eUniversity to new SharePoint site
• Modify and create medical website dashboards
• Create Diversity SharePoint site
• Create a second department methodologies SharePoint site
• Conduct project research–emerging markets in various countries (affinity analysis, etc.), professional education of surgeons (internal and external benchmarking), postoperative care for joint replacement

Many of the classes I took in the ITI program correlate with the work I’ve completed at J&J:

• Management of Technological Organizations
• My independent study with Claire–using a survey to conduct research
• Social Informatics
• Database Systems (in Ireland)
• Information Systems (in Ireland)
• Application of Research in Information Technology

When a team in the department is working on a project and wants to share information such as documents, meeting dates, and team availability, I am able to create a new SharePoint site for the group based on their specifications. The “Management of Technological Organizations” was a very helpful course, because it provided me with a general overview to understanding the dynamics of knowledge that can be captured in collaborative technology. This course was a good starting point to understanding some of the theory behind sharing information and knowledge in a corporate setting, while the internship was a great way to complete the circle by putting into practice the various theories I had learned. Two examples where teams needed knowledge sharing capabilities online are team sites where information would be shared among various departments in J&J.

My independent study with Claire was also very helpful for my internship. With my internship I conducted a survey of several undergraduate classes to understand how students learn about different majors. In conducting the survey, I had to analyze approximately 250 open-ended questions. This work was very similar to “affinity analysis” I did for survey results from J&J employees about markets in various countries. I had to sift through about 10 survey responses with 30+ open ended questions to figure out the similarities that existed between responses. These similarities were then used by a team to create new J&J business practices.

Learning about social networks in Social Informatics was helpful to the research I conducted on healthcare  social networks. Understanding the context of social networks, that people are bound up through the practice of using networks on the Internet, helped me discover networks I would not have otherwise considered. While websites like Twitter and LinkedIn are obvious networks that people use to communicate with one another, other not so obvious networks also exist. People could also use electronic databases to share best practices through visual and textual means.

Database Systems, Information Systems, and Application of Research in Info. Tech. were by far the most useful for my internship. Because I worked with SharePoint, I was able to put my database knowledge to good use. One feature in SharePoint allows a person to open a list of data (set of records) in Microsoft Access. Without my knowledge of databases and using Microsoft Access, I wouldn’t have known how to manage information in SharePoint, because sometimes situations required exporting a list of information to Access. When I had to change all the variants of a location in a list of people from “U.S.,” “United States,” or “USA” to “United States of America,” I had to change a large amount of records at once. To accomplish this change, I opened the list in Access and went down a column and replaced all the variants to one version. Without my knowledge of databases it would have taken me much longer to learn how to navigate the program and understand the structure of the data in the file.

The Information Systems course I took in Ireland was one of the most useful courses for my internship. It greatly expanded on some of the theory I learned in Management of Technological Organizations, by covering in more detail the business logic behind different types of information systems such as strategic information systems, transaction processing systems, decision support systems, executive information systems, enterprise portals, and expert systems. The course also covered in detail dashboards, key performance indicators, and OLAP technology which I found aided my work on the medical website dashboards in SharePoint.

The Applications of Research in Info. Tech. was also one of the most useful courses for my internship. Before I took this course I didn’t give much weight to the importance of data, statistical analysis, and visual representations of data, such as graphs and charts. One key insight I took away from this course was the fact that data and its visual representation are a very powerful tool. I’ve worked with data and charts in Excel and SharePoint a lot since I started the internship. I’ve created dashboards in SharePoint and linked them to Excel sheets containing further dashboards and data, proofread Excel sheets for mistakes, and working with Excel data in general.

SharePoint research for the week involved searching for a way to “calculate” a link to a person’s MySite webpage. There is a list of people profiles for the department on the department website, which was manually entered by each person in the department and by other people in departments around the world. There is a also a parallel feature on SharePoint called a MySite which is akin to a Facebook profile page that stores a person’s contact information and any other work related information about a person (skills, projects, documents, etc.). Mark wanted me to figure out a way to combine both the people profile list entries with the MySite pages. He suggested putting a MySite link into a column to associate the page with their entry on the SharePoint list. In order to automatically generate the link to a person’s MySite page, the SharePoint list first have to find a person’s account name (if it is not manually entered by the individual at time of data entry). I discovered that there is no function that will generate a person’s account name in a calculated field,  but figured out a separate way to achieve this goal. Since the people profile list already contained everyone’s email address (the first part of the email address before the “@” symbol being their account name), I created a calculated field that would acquire the first part of the email address (using Excel functions) and then concatenate this account name to the beginning of the MySite web address. This method automatically generates a MySite link for each of the profile entries in the SharePoint list, saving me time from having to manually enter each address. (This method only works if the user has already entered either their email address or account name.)

MySite pages are similar to Facebook pages and allow people to connect with other employees who share similar duties, skills, employer location, etc. By integrating (adding a link for each person on a Sharepoint list), people won’t have to manually enter information already stored in SharePoint. Much of this information is already automatically generated on a MySite page, like phone number and position. MySite pages act as a central repository with information that can be used through out SharePoint sites, saving people who manage SharePoint sites time and effort.

I spent most of my time this week continuing research for various projects. Like last week, I am still finding information for the postoperative care of women who undergo bariatric or orthopedic surgery. The team has already come together and discussed our findings with the team leader. This week we are researching topics for which the team discovered we need more information. On Wednesday we’ll come together again via conference call to discuss our findings, after which we’ll either divvy up the topics again to fine tune our research or develop further questions to answer.

Doing research for various projects is a great opportunity to fine tune my research skills in a team setting. The other two team members generally use different information sources from myself. After we share our findings I go to the sources and try to figure out the thought process they went then when searching for information to answer the questions for a given topic.

I also performed work this week for Deena by researching digital networks/connectivity efforts physicians use for communicating with other physicians within various organizations, such as the American Medical Association. This assignment took about 2 days and was extremely fun to complete. I’m finding that I really like doing research for projects. Once I completed the research, I then compiled my work with the consulting agency’s work (since they eventually finished) and found that I had only missed a few networking initiatives. It was a great opportunity to do the same research as someone else and then compare my work to theirs. I searched for the consulting firms information on the Internet that I hadn’t found. This allowed me to better understand where they were looking to find the information and the search terms they were using.

I was in a conference call with Sarah and Jerald, who works with consumer products in the U.S. (J&J). He works mostly with consumer products and knows a lot about professional education initiatives for consumer product companies at J&J. This was another great opportunity to listen in on the types of questions that are asked in business to get the right answers. Asking the right questions are especially crucial to any type of work.

The final project of the week was creating a new SharePoint site for other J&J business methodologies that don’t fit into the standard methodology categories already on the website, such as benchmarking and project management. The new site is a way for J&J team members to share their methodology examples (case studies) and toolkits with others. The site is very straightforward: people can upload their files and supply other information such as source (who to contact with questions), key insights (notes), and description.

This week I have a very intense project to complete for Deena’s team. The questions being asked related to the project objective are much harder to answer than previous research I’ve conducted. I’ll be working with two other team members who regularly work with Deena on projects as consultants. The first task involves each of us researching three topics and then converging our ideas on Thursday, after which we each take one topic to further investigate. By using this process we’ll discover any gaps or holes that could arise from individual search techniques.

On Wednesday the air conditioning unit on my floor stopped working. On Thursday the air conditioning unit still was not fixed, and because I was still conducting research for various projects, Mark let me take my work home because of the heat. While it might seem like a minuscule feature of completing my work, I was ecstatic that I was trusted to finish my work at home.

I noticed that taking work on the road and completing work at home is a trend among people at J&J (and probably many other organizations as well). I like the idea of being able to complete work at another location when unexpected things occur like air conditioners breaking, but I also wonder about the implications of taking work off-site to complete elsewhere. How will this blurring of work and home life change the way we think about and compartmentalize life in our mind? (For example, how will we make distinctions between work tasks and home tasks? How will tasks be restructured to accommodate project deadlines around home life? What tasks will be given presidence and which ones will be forgotten?)

In the long run, the balance between work and home life will be a big issue, personally as I search for a career, and as I grapple with new technologies that bring me closer to my work and farther from other aspects of my life.

For example, on the first medical site, I was having trouble figuring out a way to put a certain calculation that determined whether a milestone was met into SharePoint that required reference to today’s date. I kept trying to think of ways to calculate the current date, and because I wasn’t thinking of ways to manipulate the way the data was calculated, I kept hitting a road block. Mark suggested I change the way the formula calculated the milestone by breaking it up into two separate formulas that make no reference to the current date thus arriving at a solution that was as close as possible to the intended goal.

My goal after talking with Sam and working on the two medical sites this week is to have a more intimate knowledge of the content I’m working with in order to work around technological restrictions and discover alternate, and sometimes more creative ways at arriving at the intended result. Also, by understanding the content more, I’ll be able to better discuss information management with clients.

In the coming week I will wrap up work on the two medical websites.

I corresponded with Sam throughout the day to make changes to the site by updating the structure of the dashboard.

I then had a meeting at 2:00 to get on board with the online university site which will migrate to SharePoint. Courses will remain on the current system and the online university portal to these courses will be transferred to SharePoint before the end of 2009. The new portal will serve as a way for employees to collaborate, search, and share data and resources related to learning in the J&J work environment. New features include blogs, discussion forums, wikis, and SharePoint search abilities. The new SharePoint portal is a great way for employees to collaborate their learning experiences to become active learners.