Contemporary workplaces are riddled with stimulation (predictable and otherwise) that derails productivity. E-mail pinging, IM, arm-waving, and impromptu meetings all pull workers out of “the zone.” And because every interruption costs workers an estimated 20 minutes of productivity, workplaces where contributors are pinged three times an hour are perfect black holes that zero out productivity altogether.

So take a tip from iPod affinity, and design selective insulation into facilities and systems. Most engineers and developers, for example, need more insulation (give them offices), while successful help desk staff generally need to interact more (where cube farms work better). For insulation seekers, a daily two-hour “no-interruption period” when incoming communications are blocked or ignored is something I’ve had immense success with as a manager. Caution, though: People who tend to buffer themselves too much are less likely to attain information they could not glean from other sources, to synthesize, ergo, to create and learn.

On the app side, the iPod’s success suggests that highly customizable programs that allow for an element of personal taste are more likely to make end-users feel invested in using them. Systems that deliver have-it-your-way portals or dashboards are fast becoming essential. And it doesn’t hurt to inject a little cool. Attractive, usable software isn’t hard to design, and it usually pays for the front-loaded extra work within a few days of deployment.

-- Jeff Angus

TiVo
Digital video recorders have forever changed TV viewing habits. TiVo, the product now synonymous with “digitally recording TV,” has led the charge -- outlasting rivals such as ReplayTV in part due to a trouble-free setup and a novice-friendly UI.

In addition to features for time shifting, powering through uneventful content, and multitasking, TiVo’s appeal has been fostered by value-added facilities for content filtering. Its search mechanisms sift metadata to auto-record programming and reduce missed opportunities -- an intelligence yet to be widely implemented in competing boxes.

IT departments can take a cue from TiVo in an effort to ensure that relevant data gets channeled to the right people at the right time by giving employees greater control over the contextual flow.

Reports and analytics juiced by this proactive science are already cropping up in BI products such as Hyperion System 9. Desktop alert subscriptions and an intuitive Smartspace UI allow knowledge workers to tune to custom data channels. SaaS controls for BI will soon be big business.

Enterprise RSS readers, such as Attensa Feed Server and Attensa for Outlook, also help tune and prioritize feed streams. Much like TiVo’s user-controlled program weightings and suggestions, Attensa prioritizes internal and external data based on user behavior, monitoring activities such as feed selections and time spent reading a feed, as well as articles tagged, deleted, and forwarded. Weighted rankings then push key data to the top of your workgroup’s display stack.

Behind the scenes, network backup could benefit from TiVo reliability -- specifically D2D (disk-to-disk) backup. As costs for hardware have fallen, the idea of tossing tapes while improving access times looks appealing. Yet existing tape solutions don’t always play well with disk backups. D2D must be better integrated -- even TiVo offers backward compatibility to VCRs.