Ok, if you don’t know what LOL means you’re not alone so don’t feel bad. If you receive this often in text, email or instant message responses, congrats! You’re probably pretty funny.

In today’s shorthand, e-language that kids and young adults use, that acronym stands for Laughing Out Loud. I have to admit, I’m one of the young adults who utilize this abbreviated version of English on a daily basis, however, some of them leave me SMH (Shakin’ My Head). There are many people who feel this e-language is ruining our nation’s IQ. Making us forget the basic fundamentals of the English language. So, is this true? 

Fact or fiction?

Do these forms really represent a textual insurrection? People in the professional world are more than comfortable tossing around abbreviations such as ROI, BBB and ACT.

It seems that when it comes to shortened forms of the language, when adults do it we call them acronyms and they are a sensible part of officialese. But when young people do it on mobile phones, it’s called texting and it’s the end of the English language as we know it.

This is just one of the myths about e-language that we need to move past. Linguist David Crystal debunked most of them in his 2008 book Txting: The Gr8 Db8.

Crystal argued that there is nothing particularly new in text language and it is not the province of the young. More than 80 per cent of texts are actually sent by adults. And fewer than 10 per cent of the words used in instant messaging are terms such as LOL or PAW.

One Canadian study of 15- to 20-year-old’s found that texters’ were actually more literate than their peers, better able to adapt their text to different contexts.

In the US, a National Commission on Writing survey of teenagers and parents found that teenagers spend a considerable amount of time writing, and that they clearly distinguish between social media and more formal text. Their parents reported that their teens do a lot more writing than they did at the same age.

So what have we learned from this? Well, I can tell you that this abbreviated version of the language isn’t going away. Will it be the new English language? Doubtful. The sky is not falling and our society is not getting dumber. Hey, if you really need a positive from this, the next crop of court stenographer’s will be otherworldly!

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When does twittering at work become frittering away your employer’s time — and money? When your tweets aren’t work-related. Business research firm Basex puts the productivity cost of workplace interruptions, including employee abuse and misuse of social media, at $650 billion a year. Now, some companies are fighting back.

Eliyahu Federman, senior vice president of 1SaleADay.com, a deal-a-day company in Miami that sells watches, clothing, jewelry, electronics (among other things), says he got fed up with what he calls employees’ “frolicking outside the work context.”

As first reported by the New York Post — and as recounted by Federman himself in a story he subsequently wrote for the website Social Media Today — he first tried blocking employee access to social media sites. Forbes says 42 percent of all employers have tried the same tactic to the problem of frittering by Twittering. Other employers have installed network monitoring software to keep tabs on employees’ communications while at work, says Federman.

According to Nielsen/Incite’s Social Media Report for 2012, Americans spent 74 billion minutes, or 20 percent of their time, on social media sites. Such networking, Federman allows, has become part of life, both on and off the company clock. Nor does he begrudge employees their impulse to socialize.

“The need to be social is a human need,” he tells ABC News. Workers will do it around the water cooler, or they’ll do it online. But social media sites, says Federman, make it easier than ever before. “They provide a high level of engagement — like a cocktail party,” he says. “They are designed to suck you into a vortex of social mayhem, and are designed to do that very well.”

The problem with trying to block access to them, he says, is that it’s become easy for employees to circumvent such blocking by using their own mobile devices. For that reason, he tells ABC News, 1SaleADay eventually gave up on blocking and tried a different approach.

Instead of trying to suppress employees’ addiction to social media, the company chose to channel it.

Federman installed an in-house, employee-only social media platform called Yammer, and offered it as an alternative to Facebook. Such platforms, sometimes called enterprise social networks, have become a big business: Microsoft bought Yammer for a reported $1.2 billion last June.

Federman says the benefits of weaning workers off Facebook and onto Yammer have been dramatic. In the customer service department alone, he says, productivity has risen a little more than 48 percent. “We’re getting, on average, $5 an hour more per worker in productivity,” he tells ABC News. Plus, he says, morale has improved. Employees didn’t like being denied access to Twitter and Facebook. Yammer gives them an alternative most of them seem to find acceptable: Their socializing is limited to fellow workers; but limited socializing is apparently better than none at all.

No matter what an employer does, workers will, of course, still stare out windows or phone their spouses or buy sweaters online. “But this is a major step in the right direction,” says Federman. The difference between banning social media and rechanneling the social impulse, he says, is simple: “If you try to remove it completely, people will find a way to access it and will not be happy. Our idea was to replicate it within the company and, by doing that, to increase camaraderie.”

The response Federman has gotten so far to his article — much of it from other employers — has been strong: As of Monday, he says he had received more than 400 tweets and more than 100 LinkedIn shares.

Copyright 2013 by ABC News

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Have you ever wondered why you were passed over for a promotion? I think we’ve all muttered this phrase angrily, “Why would they promote _____ over me!?” We all come up with our own conspiracy theory as to what the reason MUST be whether it’s the classic favoritism angle or the sexier office blackmail/cover-up. There is always a reason why it’s not our fault, right? Well, we could be wrong. If you are ever in this precarious situation you might want to evaluate your “email etiquette” before pointing the finger elsewhere. Here are some helpful tips to follow:

1. Reply  

No matter what, always acknowledge promptly that you have received the message. If you don’t have time for a comprehensive response, let them know and create an expectation of when they can expect a reply.

 2. Don’t Forget Attachments

We’re all human and we are going to make mistakes, that’s a given. However, you don’t want to be the person who constantly forgets to attach important documents.

3. Be Thorough

We’ve all gotten those novel length emails. No matter how much they may irk you, make sure and respond to each aspect of it’s contents. There are few things more annoying to your boss than having to re-ask the same questions over and over.

4. Get To The Point

As a caveat to #3, keep YOUR emails as brief and to the point as possible. Nobody wants to investigate an email to find the action needed or important message.

5. Get Rid Of The Emoticons

Yes, I know, they are like, so cute, right? Who doesn’t want to enjoy a smiley face? While we have come to love these little guys in our personal lives, avoid them like the plague in business. Nothing says unprofessional like a little face with it’s tongue sticking out.

Stick to these simple rules and you’ll be moving on up the corporate ladder in no time. That is unless somebody caught a less than flattering picture of the boss at this years Christmas Party.

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Despite companies now recognizing the importance of their enterprise data, they still have a difficult time effectively managing it as an asset. Some of those challenges arise from a lack of business involvement and sponsorship, an inability to identify data owners and encourage accountability, or a reluctance to share data. Although it is imperative for business to lead and sponsor data governance, it is equally important to align business and IT for organizations to fully benefit in a significant and persistent way from data management.

The importance of aligning business and IT is compounded by the trend to centralize information systems, resources and integration points. Many organizations are moving to centralize IT and with that recognize that data can also be managed centrally to achieve economies of scale, improve productivity, and effectively manage information. Consequently, the IT organization sees issues that span lines of business and geography, including enterprise data issues. As such, IT may be the first to recognize and often are the initial advocates of the need for data governance before the business. For example, IT can identify where data issues start in a source system and the changes that are made as data flows through different systems. However, the impact of the changes to the data is not always obvious to IT, nor is IT in a position to recommend changes to business processes to improve data quality either at the source or over its lifecycle. Challenges arise when it is time to assign resources to be accountable for data quality and fix data issues, which is precisely when IT needs to transfer ownership of data governance to the business while continuing with oversight and the essential role IT plays in data governance success.   This places these questions into context: What is the role of IT in business-led data governance? How can the IT organization work with the business to ensure their needs are being met and the data governance initiative is a success? In order to understand the role of the IT organization in data governance, let’s first look at the goals and objectives of the data governance organization.

Data Governance Organization Goals

The overarching goals of a data governance organization are to provide direction on the capture, collection, security, transfer, quality and management of data within the organization to:

• Ensure the integrity of information
• Ensure information is secure while facilitating access
• Support decision-making
• Enhance services provided to customers and partners
• Assist in information collaboration
• Eliminate business and technical obstacles to achieving business goals
• Standardize corporate data definitions, policies and processes so the data can be more readily shared, interpreted and used
• Manage data as a corporate asset
• Reduce costs and increase effectiveness through coordination of efforts
• Ensure transparency

Organizations go about achieving these goals and measuring and reporting results in different ways based on their unique approach to data governance. What is evident is that the business cannot achieve these goals without relying on and involving IT to deploy and manage the enabling technology and tools. At the same time, business needs to own the data governance program and the decisions concerning managing data as a corporate asset.

IT and business must both play their requisite roles in data governance to avoid antagonistic or competitive impediments. Operating principles should be developed that define how the business and IT should work together in order to support collaboration. Moreover, the written guidelines should be agreed upon and communicated across and made available throughout the organization.

While there are many ways to implement a data governance organization, some common roles include the Steering Committee, Data Governance Lead and the Data Governance Working Group – each comprised of representatives from both business and IT. For example, as a cross-functional business and IT team, the Data Governance Working Group are the subject matter experts who drive data management and data quality strategy, and execution for their respective subject and line of business areas.

The Role of IT in Data Governance

The IT organization’s mandate is to ensure that the future state of information and application architectures meet the needs of the data governance organization and are aligned to business goals and objectives. It ensures that the organization’s information technologies sustain and extend the data governance organization’s strategies and objectives while providing a consistent view of the end-to-end business processes.

To meet its mandate, the IT organization must provide leadership, technical infrastructure and resources that collaborate with the business to identify data issues, provide alternatives and implement solutions.

At a minimum, the IT organization should provide the following resources to the data governance organization in order to meet business stakeholder needs:

• IT leadership at the Steering Committee level to provide leadership, vision and oversight
• An IT Partner who is a peer to the data governance lead and is responsible for development and ownership of the data governance technical roadmap
• A Data Quality Lead who works collaboratively with data stewards from the business to gain an understanding of business needs related to the quality of information and ensures that best practices regarding data quality incidents are being followed
• A Metadata Lead who creates and maintains the metadata repository and defines the content of the business
• An Enterprise Architect who works with the data governance lead to provide architecture and data integration oversight
• A Data Architect who is responsible and accountable for the creation and maintenance of the Enterprise Data Model
• Data Custodians who work closely with the data stewards and data owners to implement data governance policies and data owner requirements, and who carry out the data delivery function

The IT organization is also responsible and accountable for providing technology and technical infrastructure for the management, storage, access, security, navigation, movement and transformation of data. In this way, it implements the necessary systems to support and measure data governance requirements and data business processes. It also ensures that the data governance strategy aligns with the IT design methodology, development process methodology and best practices.

By working together with business data stewards, the IT organization plays an important role in root cause analysis on data issues and building remediation plans. It is the role of the IT organization to measure, monitor and report on data quality and deliver stakeholder service based on service level agreements.

In order to successfully provision these services and support, the IT organization needs to understand why data governance is important to each business stakeholder, what the benefits are and how best to work together with the business. When the IT organization can clearly articulate the benefits for each business function, sponsorship and ownership is more easily achieved.

Originally published by Kelle O’Neal

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