Social Glass

After many months of blood, sweat and tears, Enterprise 2.0 Implementation is finally available. Aaron Newman and I started this endeavor at the end of 2007.  Aaron Fulkerson, CEO of Mindtouch,  later came on board as our technical editor and had some great insight for us based on his experience with DekiWiki and SOA architectural principles.  Jevon MacDonald was kind enough to write a foreward for us (and thanks, Jevon, for your announcement on the FASTForward Blog), with Susan Scrupski doing a review.

It’s a weird feeling seeing this book in its tangible form after spending so much time looking at PDF proofs and author/editor modifications.  You can see the copies of the book I was sent by McGraw Hill the other day in the picture on the left.

Early feedback holds the book is a great guide for the technical aspects of implementing Enterprise 2.0, but that we’re light when it comes to discussing the softer issues about managing organizational change with such an implementation.  I’d agree, although Aaron and I set out to create a technical guide for Architects and the like, as the technologies involved tend to be more ubiquitous than the techniques for driving the people side of the equation.

I’m open to any sort of feedback or comments about the book.  Feel free to leave a comment here, or send me an email at jeremy[dot]thomas[at]socialglass[dot]com.

My former employer, BearingPoint, has recently launched newthinking.bearingpoint.com, a WordPress-powered blog seemingly open to all employees. This is a bold move as consulting companies typically guard their intellectual property with an iron first. But BearingPoint has been a leader when it comes to transparency. MIKE2, BearingPoint’s information management methodology, launched in 2005 and is “open source”, meaning it’s free for all to consume and contribute to, even competitors. The value to doing this is that BearingPoint capitalizes on the IM market taking business from rivals who would otherwise charge for the information that is free on MIKE2. And, while open, IM methodologies are complex to implement, and clients will be quick to select BearingPoint as their implementation vendor.Kudos to Nate and Jay, who must have played a huge role in getting thiew new blog rolled out. And check out this post from my buddy Sean (who’s getting married next month). Sean is an up and coming Enterprise 2.0 star at BearingPoint. I’m glad to see the new school is starting to have an impact on an otherwise traditional organization.

Update:  It looks like Paul Dunay, Global Director of Integrated Marketing at BearingPoint, is the man responsible for newthinking.bearingpoint.com.