Social Glass

It’s been an interesting transition for me back to industry. “Industry” is the term consultants use to describe normal jobs with normal companies - the kind where people bring their plants to work and setup pictures of people they know in their cubicles. The kind where people wake up on Monday morning, drive to work, work, drive home and do the same thing every day until Friday. It’s been three months, and I’m starting to acclimate to this routine way of living.

When I started I came in guns ablazing with a consultant’s mindset. “What, no data warehouse, no sweat. We’ll implement a master data management strategy and breathe life into dying data. And let me tell you about this nifty little thing called Enterprise 2.0. It’s going to revolutionize the world, man. Ever heard of SLATES?”. Sarcasm aside, people had actually heard about Enterprise 2.0 and were actually keen on the idea. But seeing things from the other side I’m starting to think Enterprise 2.0 will be overwhelming for many.

Here’s the logic: Enterprise 2.0 assumes that, within corporations, there are a lot of unsung heroes who’s voices are muffled by a thick wall of bureaucracy. These under-utilized knowledge workers are in dire need of a platform through which their ideas can transcend old-fashioned hierarchical structure so that their potential can be fully realized. Enterprise 2.0 promises meritocracy.

Sweet.

But consider alternative reasoning: Good workers are already very busy. Their managers already know they’re good and are filtering a saturating set of inquiries and non-critical disturbances into a trickle. Trickles enable concentration, and concentration is needed for people to do good work.

So why in God’s name would a very busy person want to put himself in a position to be even busier by seeking corporate-wide recognition for his bright ideas? He’s already well compensated. He’s already highly regarded. Why make life harder?

Good workers might run and hide from Enterprise 2.0 (and bad ones might embrace it).

A recent press release from businesswire.com highlights Mindtouch’s continued growth in the Enterprise 2.0 marketplace (disclosure: I’m working with Mindtouch’s CEO Aaron Fulkerson on a side project, and I know he’s not a fan of the term “Enterprise 2.0″, but it’s the biggest tag in my tag cloud and I’m duty-bound to make it even bigger). Mindtouch creates a product called Deki Wiki, an open source wiki and community platform. They make money by selling enterprise support subscriptions, a model that is increasing in popularity.

According to the press release, Mindtouch has seen a 100% increase in active installations (200,000 in total) since last year, and is being used by major organizations including FedEx, Microsoft, and EMC (made famous by Chuck Hollis who chronicled EMC’s adoption of Clearspace).

Deki Wiki ships with a nice WYSIWYG editor to make it easy for the technically-challenged user to add and modify content. Moreover, Deki Wiki is a mashup platform and has out of the box integration capabilities with Dapper, Google Charts, widgetbox and Digg, just to name a few services. It can also be customized to integrate with line of business applications, including those that might be exposed by mashup makers like Kapow.

Development Managers will find Deki Wiki’s integration with Subversion and Mantis (an open source issue management tool) to be a big plus.

Aaron Fulkerson is a pretty switched on guy, so I’m expecting Mindtouch to have more and more of an impact on the Enterprise 2.0 market as each quarter passes.

Five of the people on my team work out of our China office in X’ian. Last week they informed me they were taking Monday off for a team building exercise. Each team was given a wall in the office to paint. And they didn’t paint murals. Nope, just a fresh coat of white paint.

On Tuesday they were instructed to work from home to avoid the overwhelming smell of drying paint. So we had our weekly standup meeting on instant messenger (I actually found this to be a rather effective way to communicate with my team there) instead of on the phone.

I love these little cultural differences.

I must say, though, that I’ve never had a team of more enthusiastic, dedicated people than my team in China. They own their work and take personal pride in getting it done the right way. Now if I could only figure out how to do Agile with them…

Last week I had the opportunity to speak to Sam Lawrence about Clearspace 2.0, Jive Software’s next incarnation of Clearspace. A lot has been written about this new release today, and it’s generating a lot of buzz in the blogosphere (Jive’s annoucement appeared in Techmeme for a while yesterday, which is mostly unheard of for Enterprise 2.0 applications). Sam gave me an overview of the major new features:

• Project home pages can be “iGoogle-ized“. Users can personalize their home pages with drag and drop widgets.
• Cloud Participation: businesses can open up content to be shared with external business partners. Jive hosts the “cloud” where this content is uploaded and shared. The business can then draw its content back in once it’s done collaborating. In 2.0 only individual content items (documents) can be shared in this way. In future releases, entire workspaces can be shared in the cloud.
• Enhanced Reporting: Business departments can get metrics on who’s participating and who’s connecting. Good way to measure ROI, and this is key for management adoption of Enterprise 2.0.
• Social Graphs: The informal and formal networks are modeled in the Clearspace application. Clearspace 2.0 automatically derives formal networks through integration to directory services (i.e. Active Directory), and models informal networks by monitoring how users interact with each other.
• Jotlet Acquisition: Jotlet will enhance the project management features in Clearspace in upcoming releases.

Most importantly, Jive continues its focus on people, something that is lost with other “competitors” like Sharepoint. People are by far an organization’s greatest asset, and Jive’s recognition of this fact will see it emerge as the leader in the social productivity space (if it isn’t already).

Google is famous for allowing its engineers time to work on personal projects. This makes the engineers happy as they get a chance to be creative and show what they’re made of. And it makes Google happy because they get lots of innovative ideas and products from this personal time.

I’m trying to instill a similar culture across my development team at active.com. We’re in the middle of “Web 2.0ifying” the site, and my guys (and girl) have lots of awesome ideas. The challenge I have as a development manager is balancing the allocation of tasks the business needs completed while allowing enough time for my team to “innovate”. What I’ve found is they “innovate” anyway.

Case in point: on my my engineers developed a locator tool which mashes up Google Maps with an XML RPC (dare I say REST) service that we use internally. It’s a nifty little app with strong visual appeal. Last week our product director asked us to start designing and developing a feature for the web site that requires 80% of the functionality in the mashup. He hadn’t seen it before. When we showed it to him he had an “oh yeah” epiphany and subsequently modified the requirements to be more inline with the mashup as he thought the functionality in it was more consistent with the rest of the site.

What do we, as an organization, gain from this?

1. The engineer who created the mashup gets to see his idea become part of the broader product and gets recognized for his effort.
2. The time required to design and develop the new feature is significantly reduced - we already have a prototype.
3. The feature has been thought about and refined from several angles - that of the engineer and that of the product developer (no waterfall here baby).

Imagine, then, if we could reach out to other groups and leverage their ideas. In this case, the engineer, product developer and I were aligned organizationally. But what if we had the ability to discover others within my large, global organization, who had concepts or demos that could be used in a similar way? What if we had Enterprise 2.0?