Social Glass

A peer of mine within my company setup an external website (based on Wordpress) for us to blog about internal matters, industry trends, what we ate last night for dinner etc. He and I are both Technical Managers and, as such, are responsible for about 10 people collectively. We asked each of these people to contribute to the site on a regular basis. Without much prodding and within about a week we managed to create a vibrant system of communication and sharing with lots of blog posts and comments.
What’s fascinating to me about all this as a Manager is the insight I get into the knowledge our new hires possess. Some of these kids, fresh out of university, are in the pocket with Web 2.0 and are able to relate it to business value - ideas like using Adobe Flex, Silverlight and Java FX to break out of the J2EE MVC rut and change the way we approach UI development and user experience as a technology organization. We talk about Ruby on Rails and one of our very junior guys has launched http://enterprise20.rubyforge.org/, an open source Enterprise 2.0 project using this technology. This insight is valuable to me when staffing projects or understanding my people’s strengths and weaknesses.

In a consulting organization we spread out, travel the world, and often find it hard to create or identify with our corporate culture. A very simple blogging application has gone a long way to create a community amongst resources working in Sydney, Melbourne, Austria and the US - all for just $8 per month. To me that’s pretty cool.

I’ve become fairly interested in search technology over the past year or so.  Today I was watching a video about how Robert Scoble picks the blogs he wants to read from his feed reader when he mentioned Search Engine Land.  I’ve added it to my feed aggregator and have found it to have some really interesting and industry-relevant posts.

Anyway, it’s worth a read.

Back when I first became passionate about Enterprise 2.0 its most attractive aspect was transparency. For a while I naively devalued corporate content security in exchange for an altruistic system of openness and sharing. I’ve since come to value security, and I understand that there are very solid reasons for maintaining content access control.

I’ve recently come back from a weekend holiday to Croatia (picture on the left) where I had time to reminisce and remember what it felt like to seek transparency, tear down borders, and open up. That all within the enterprise wouldn’t abuse this trust we’d placed in them with our Enterprise 2.0 system. I’m glad to see companies like Powerset are embracing transparency and changing the ways in which they communicate with the market. Transparency manifests integrity. It shows that the public face is not just a facade, that there’s depth and something of substance underneath the covers. Amen.

I’m finding I’m more behind the blogosphere being in Austria (for work) than I am in Australia. Anyway, when people ask me “what is Enteprise 2.0″, I point them to Scott Gavin’s presentations: