Social Glass

I’ve been finding it difficult to stay focused on Enterpise 2.0 after having worked at Active for about 9 months now.  As a consultant, I was living Enterprise 2.0 every day.  As a Development Manager, I’m more concerned with keeping a team of Software Engineers, QA and IT busy and engaged.

I have a new found appreciation for the middle management layer,  and I’m ever more aware that management is an art (and I’m not sure how good of an artist I am yet).

But, I plan on visiting this blog more often, hopefully to include more information about how I’m working with my offshore team, the business and IT in the most efficient and emergent way.  I also think we should be talking more about agile software development when we talk about Enterprise 2.0.  It seems agile wants to remove barriers and flatten hierarchies for the sake of efficiency and high-quality output, just like Enterprise 2.0.  As we’re trying to be more agile at work this is definitely a topic I’ll be touching more on.

When Yammer launched its public Beta I jumped on board and setup an account straight away.  I then invited everybody I knew at work to join, and within a few hours we had 30 people create accounts.  It was cool, people in Canada updated their status and people in China responded to them etc.  I even flew from San Diego to Florida, had a layover in Dallas, “yammered” that I was available for 30 minutes from my iPhone app if somebody needed to talk, and received a call from an IT guy with a question.
The diversity of participants was perhaps the coolest factor.

But then it started to die down.  While our company user count is high in Yammer, volume is restricted mostly to a small group of 15 people, all of whom work in the same division.  Maybe it’s a coincidence that we work on the Consumer Media side of the house, and that the others who initially signed up are less social media savvy.  But I think we’ve drowned the other guys out.  The 15 remaining people use Yammer to:

• Share links to Proof of Concepts or blog posts
• Broadcast when servers are being rebooted
• Declare deadlines for code deployments
• Indicate when a service is down or unresponsive
• Let others know they’ll be out of the office for an hour

But what I’m really interested in is what’s happening elsewhere in my company.  What new service is the enterprise services group releasing into Beta?  What new ad campaigns is the marketing group launching?  Does anybody want to start a Ruby on Rails is not scalable debate?

My conclusion: Yammer is great for my team, but the signal to noise ratio flushes the rest of the organization out as others don’t seem to care about what’s important to my group.