How To Use The Internet For Your Career

How to use the Internet for your career
By Franck Martin

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Getting information
• Keeping yourself informed.
• Keeping people informed.
• Getting information on people.
• Following meetings.
• E-mail everywhere and Internet presence.
• Why travel when you can meet on the Internet?
• Paying your bills online.
• Networking, Networking, Networking...
• In conclusion...

Introduction

I think the best explanation of e-government I can do is to show how I use the Internet today in my work. I think people will learn more from my experience than anything else.

How the examples relate to e-government? Well, e-government is how to use Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to exchange information between the government and citizens, businesses, organisations and other part of the same government. As an individual these examples will show you how to use Internet to better interact with others, while they are not specifically e-government related they will help every one in their work.

Getting information

The first important part is where to get information, I usually use two sites, www.google.com and www.wikipedia.org. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia which is rated as good as (or as bad as) a classic encyclopedia. For everything you see on the Internet you need to have an “esprit critique” and never believe what you read at first value. Wikipedia contains encyclopaedic articles on everything. It is a great source of information. For instance if you want to learn more about e-government, just go there and do a search on e-government. You can even configure your web browser so it has a special search bar to fetch directly the relevant web page. This is what I have.


I also use google in other cases when I look for non-encyclopaedic information, like presentations, reports, news items,...

Keeping yourself informed.

You can subscribe to various mail services, the first one is news.google.com which sends you any news related to the topic of your choice. For instance I receive daily the news bulletins based on the following keywords “ICT Pacific”, “Internet Pacific”, “ISOC” and “Internet Society”. There is a little bit of false positives (noise) but it usually gets me the information before anybody else.
Another tool that I use is www.netvibes.net. This site presents to you on a dashboard summary of other peoples blogs. I'm a Trustee on the Board of the Internet Society, therefore I'm following the Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds of blogs of my fellow trustees. It allows me to follow their current thinking and what they are working on, or which issues are important to them. I follow also some technological rss feeds. A RSS is a way to publish in a short format web site updates so that specialised software can pull them automatically.

Keeping people informed.

I blog, or Weblog, I have a site www.peachymango.org where I record as a diary my activities. I have two main topics, The first one is on my work inside the Internet Society and the other is about Kite Surfing. These blogs allows me to communicate to other people in a non intrusive way. I have set up a Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feed so that sites like netvibes can extract my new postings easily. A lot of politicians, companies uses weblog as a form of personal press release. Usually blogs allows users to comment, so you get feedback on the issue that matters to you.

Getting information on people.

When I set up a meeting with people I don't know, I google their name to find who they are, what document they have published, which organisations they have worked, etc... It is amazing what you can find about somebody before you meet him. In one instance, I was meeting with a consultant who was coming to review a project I was working in. I found out he was also a qualified sex therapist. Well the discussion got very interesting and we kept good contacts. In other cases, I learnt in which previous projects, consultants have been working and if they were familiar with the ideas I wanted to present to them. You adapt your speech in these cases.

Following meetings.

I always request to have full wireless connectivity at meeting. Well, I can surf the web, if it becomes too boring, but seriously I use Internet there for two purposes. The first one is too keep myself in touch with the office. I'm away but still virtually present. I don't have a pile of work waiting for me when I come back. Secondly I can get more information on the topic presented. I recall, one meeting on marine science where I was searching on every topic presented. I'm not a marine specialist, so I needed background information. I found out that quite a few presenters were discussing novel ideas that were, well, several years old. Some others were telling us to go to such and such web sites for more information and data, and I found that these sites did not work properly, or I downloaded immediately the information and the full text of the paper presented.

Having Internet during a meeting, allows me to get approval before I make a statement. I can quickly send an e-mail or instant message, to explain that a new topic is raised, and I feel I should do a statement on the behalf of the organisation I work for. I can get an approval very quickly that way and get the meeting to progress.

E-mail everywhere and Internet presence.

E-mail is great but it is even greater if you can get it anywhere. People in the office when I'm away, often thinks I'm at my desk, because I answer their e-mails from wherever I'm. How many out of office messages do you receive? How many times you have said “This person is never in the office, always travelling”. Well I keep people guessing most of the time and never set an out of office response. I just check my e-mails often from anywhere in the world.

I also use Instant Messaging and Skype. These software give people the opportunity to send me short text messages or even speak to me, wherever I'm on the Internet. This is great for support and keeping contact. I use Instant Messaging with good contacts in countries to ensure that important documents are received and acted upon. Sometimes I ask a contact to call somebody else in his/her country to make sure everything is going smoothly. I also plan travels that way, getting all the details right before I send an official memo. This is invaluable.

Recently two new technologies are changing the way we work. The first one is best symbolised with the blackberry handsets. They allow you to receive and to respond to e-mails over the wireless telephone network. The handset is so small, you carry it everywhere and it acts as a phone too. In my case I receive text alerts from the monitored servers when they start to fail. I can remedy to the problem before users notice. In the same scenario, you can stay in touch with the office especially in places where they don't provide you with a wireless Internet access for your laptop.

The other technology is Voice over IP (VoIP). Our PBX is entirely software based using Internet Standards. It means that my office phone is an application on my computer. When someone dials my extension the call is picked up by this application on my computer and I have a set of handset with a microphone and can answer the call. If I'm not there a recorded message is sent via e-mail. My computer can be anywhere on the Internet. It means wherever I am, my office phone is with me. I can work from home or from the other side of the world and still be “at the office”.

Did you notice, people start to think you do not work because they always receive out of office e-mails: “Is he/she ever in the office to do some work?” Well, this is now a thing of the past, if you are a nomad.

Why travel when you can meet on the Internet?

I'm part of the Internet Society board. We have 3 faces to face meetings a year and one teleconference every month. We use a software called www.marratech.com to do our meetings. We could do it using skype conferencing, but marratech offers greater flexibility as it has a white board. In this whiteboard anyone can upload a presentation or document and people attending virtually the meeting can update the document or follow the presentation. This type of meeting needs a little bit more preparation as well as getting used to it, but you to do a lot of work like this without having to fly across the world.

In a similar fashion, a lot of technical conferences now videocast or audiocast their sessions. I tend to follows like this conference I cannot attend to. It is like listening to the radio. Usually they set up an instant messaging channels where participants can discuss during the presentation and can type questions that will be read to the presenter. You can then listen his answer.

Paying your bills online.

Well this is not related to work. Well, kind of. When I have to pay my electricity bills, phone bills, or others, I have to take time out from work to go and pay. This take serious time from work. Also, when I'm on travel, I'm obliged to anticipate the bills and prepay to avoid disconnection.

Not any more, I have join Internet Banking and can go to my bank website and pay bills online. I can also refill my credit card. I usually do that in the evening when I'm relaxed at home. It takes 5 mn instead of 30mn, to drive, park and queue to pay for each bill. I save a few hours every month, I can

Networking, Networking, Networking...

Well, I'm lucky, I have a page on wikipedia where people can learn more about who I am and what I do, but I also use linkedin.com. This is the professional version of sites like myspace.com or hi5.com. You enter there your CV, which is organised by categories and you link to other people you know personally or via e-mail. I recommend to link only to people you know or worked in the same organisation or educational institute. You need a strong bond. If I change some details on this online CV, all the people that I'm linked with will receive an update, similarly I can track other people carrier changes. It is so much better than keeping business cards. I always have a current e-mail address like this. If I need expertise, advice, help or anything else, I can post a message on the site and it will be distributed to people I know of or people who know the people I know... By experience most business deals are done with people that you know, that you can trust. This is a great way to keep an important contact list.

I also have a big list of contacts on my Instant Messaging applications, so I can contact people when needed without disturbing them (too much).

In conclusion...

These are some of the tools that I daily use for my work. I hope you will find them as useful as I find them. I'm sure you will be able to master them without becoming a slave to them. For instance, If I have a person in my office, I never answer my phone, there is voicemail for that (and e-mail and instant messaging when people know me) because I value more the face to face meeting than being disturbed by something unknown. Same I process my e-mails when I have time, I'm not necessarily answering them as they come. It is important to use the tools but also to use them when they disturb the less.

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