Social Glass

We seem to have done a good job about defining the enterprise knowledge management problem and how Enterprise 2.0 wants to fix it. Knowledge is locked in people’s PCs, file shares, is hard to find and is underutilized. Not only that, corporations fail to efficiently tap into their human resources and facilitate the creation of weak ties between employees. I think everybody gets it now.

So why is Andrew McAfee still talking about why email sucks? Haven’t we heard this story time and time again? Why don’t we talk more about how Enterprise 2.0 has helped companies, about how it’s had the dramatic impact that we predicted two years ago? Maybe it’s because it’s not happening, or maybe it’s because the doers are quietly doing and have no time to blog about it.

With that, I’m super stoked about TechCrunch’s new enterprise software-focused blog, TechCrunchIT. TechCrunch has been the defacto leader in all things Web 2.0. Maybe they’ll bring some fresh thinking to the Enterprise 2.0 space.

Veodia was just announced as the winner of the Enterprise 2.0 launchpad at the E2.0 unconference in Boston today. This makes me happy. I walked away from my trip to china with a renewed sense of how valuable social connections are between teams and started trialling Veodia last week. Video is a great way to enhance the bond between remote teams and helps build a more cohesive, single team unit.

Veodia allows me, as a Manager, to record standup meetings and whiteboard sessions and embed them on our internal wiki much as you would a Youtube video. It also allows me to create a “live meeting”, where I provide a URL to my team in China and they can see me as I talk (I suppose Skype does a good job at this too). And the beauty is Veodia is free for up to 500 MB of video storage. That’s perfect for me as I convince others within my organization of the value add.

What I don’t yet understand, and what’s keeping me from being more aggressive about rolling this out to the rest of my division, is the security model. It seems that there is “security through obscurity”, where cryptic hyperlinks are the only thing preventing a would-be snooper from viewing my content. This is unsatisfactory within an enterprise setting where confidential data is being stored and shared among internal teams. If Veodia can get their security model right they’ll kick some butt.

I’ve been in Xi’an, China this week meeting my offshore team for the first time. The picture here is of the parking lot walking into the office (the doorway is underneath the red letters). This is the first time I’ve ever been to China, and other than feeling like I’ve been smoking a pack of cigarettes every day this place has truly impressed me. There is construction everywhere, and the people are fashionable and optimistic about their bright economic future.

One of the items on my agenda was figuring out how to do agile software development with remote teams. This has been a challenging task, as agile wants constant communication, and in-person at that. Time zones and language barriers are certainly enemies to agile.

But I came across a great article from Martin Fowler discussing how Thoughtworks does agile with its remote team in India. One of the many points he makes is to use wikis to contain common information:

Any common information can be put there, story cards, design guidelines, build instructions, notes on progress - anything that needs to be written down for reference by the team. We’ve found it’s very useful to use the change notification capability that many wikis have, so that page changes trigger notifications through email or an RSS feed.

I think this should be extended to include other Enterprise 2.0 technologies. One of the primary ways to be successful with an offshore team is to build personal relationships that engender trust. Social computing is a good option here. Onshore and Offshore teams should blog about what they did on the weekend, upload pictures of their pets or the vacation they just went on, discuss ongoing projects, exchange ideas, etc. These activities help project the human element of each team member and build bonds that will come in handy under work-related pressure situations.

I will leave China with a renewed passion to implement Enterprise 2.0 for my team.

I’ll also leave with renewed respect for how good the Chinese are at crossing the street at busy intersections.