Social Glass

I’ve mentioned it a few times in my blog entries, but I thought I’d divert away from the Enterprise 2.0 topic for one post and discuss life in Australia. I’m an American who’s been living and working in Australia for about 4 years all up (there’s a two year gap when I went back to the states to be a geek Software Engineer).

I must say life down here isn’t that different than it is in the states. Australia is a wonderful place and I’ve never met a culture that has such a good work/life balance.

I have Foxtel (cable) at home and as a result get a healthy dose of US TV including CNN, ESPN, Fox News, and Monday Night Football (broadcast live on Tuesday morning). This helps me keep in touch so I can talk with my brothers about the important stats.

But there are a few differences - like “Rice Bubbles”. Why can’t they call them “Rice Crispies” like they are in the states? And why do Aussies say (and forgive my horrible attempt at phonetics) “straw-bry”, “ras-bry”, but “blue-berry” (”bry” vs” “berry”)? Believe me I’ve had hours of fun with my Aussie friends debating these very important issues.

And I love vegemite.

Onto more serious matters, despite all of the press talking about Australian Web 2.0 companies seeking venture capital from abroad because Australian VCs are just too conservative, there is a healthy a share of Web 2.0 companies based in Oz. Check out Vishal Sharma’s list of these companies here. Omnidrive and Atlassian are perhaps the most famous of these. Google also has a significant presence down here.

So, while there are roughly 19,000,000 people in Australia (California has close to 60,000,000 for a little perspective) I’d say that per capita the Aussies aren’t doing too badly in the Web 2.0 space as far as company presence goes.

I spoke with a prospective client about Enterprise 2.0 the other day. I started with the origin - how Web 2.0 came to be, the core philosophies of Web 2.0, then how those philosophies can be applied behind the firewall. The audience was mid-level management, and I should have realized earlier in the presentation, but a lot of them had never heard the term “Web 2.0″ before, nor had they ever visited wikipedia.org or indulged in MySpace or SecondLife. So I had to spend a lot of time educating them on what these sites do so that I could link the relevant characteristics of these and other sites to the business value of Web 2.0 later on in the presentation.

The question that ran through my mind during this process was “is it worth it?”. Is it worth spending the time to educate these 40 somethings on E2.0 when it’s supposed to happen organically, from the bottom-up anyway? In our inner circle we read posts like Euan Semple’s, dare I say, notorious suggestion that management do nothing and Enterprise 2.0 will happen. I agree with a lot of the points from this argument and am a believer that generation “Y” is going to catalyze Enterprise 2.0 adoption.

Despite all of that, it is worth it. I found that after the meeting, having taken the time to properly explain the value proposition and site examples of Enterprise 2.0 adoption (nobody wants to be the first for some reason), even my once oblivious audience, rational as they were, wanted to hear more and continue the exploration.

The bottom line is businesses want to innovate, they want to compete, and if we successfully relate the business value of Enterprise 2.0 to business people they will implement it.