Social Glass

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.

My former employer, BearingPoint, has recently launched newthinking.bearingpoint.com, a WordPress-powered blog seemingly open to all employees. This is a bold move as consulting companies typically guard their intellectual property with an iron first. But BearingPoint has been a leader when it comes to transparency. MIKE2, BearingPoint’s information management methodology, launched in 2005 and is “open source”, meaning it’s free for all to consume and contribute to, even competitors. The value to doing this is that BearingPoint capitalizes on the IM market taking business from rivals who would otherwise charge for the information that is free on MIKE2. And, while open, IM methodologies are complex to implement, and clients will be quick to select BearingPoint as their implementation vendor.Kudos to Nate and Jay, who must have played a huge role in getting thiew new blog rolled out. And check out this post from my buddy Sean (who’s getting married next month). Sean is an up and coming Enterprise 2.0 star at BearingPoint. I’m glad to see the new school is starting to have an impact on an otherwise traditional organization.

Update:  It looks like Paul Dunay, Global Director of Integrated Marketing at BearingPoint, is the man responsible for newthinking.bearingpoint.com.

I’ve made it my mission in recent months to start doing agile development with my team. We made good initial progress, whereby each Product Manager prioritizes his backlog every three weeks and during our sprint period we “SCRUM” the larger projects (there are too many itemsto colllaborate on everything – maybe this is an issue). For a while this seemed to be working, but there was confusion across the different products that feed into my group as to how we wanted our requirements.

“Do you still want Software Requirement Specifications?” they’d ask.

“No, just give me user stories“.

“What’s a user story?”

“Uh, well tell me a story from the user’s perspective. We’ll collaborate on design and further detail the feature during the sprint period. And remember, you’re a pig and that guy over there’s a chicken.”

“Oh. Well I’d rather just give you an SRS. And why are you talking about farm animals?”

The main issue, as I’ve come to discover, is that people are entrenched in the waterfall method. Strategize, design, build, test, deploy, operate. People find comfort in this model. It’s all they’ve known. So I’ve been challenged as a middle manager to implement agile software development processes. A friend of mine says it’s impossible to do without executive sponsorship. Somebody’s gotta make the product owners do this, otherwise they’ll fall back to their comfort zone.

A long road lies ahead I’m afraid.

We recently had a debate over whether or not we should use Confluence as a replacement to twiki, our enterprise wiki. I used Confluence at my last company, and for the most part it worked well. It’s got a great set of plugins and an extensible architecture. Most of all, it has a “near out of the box” capability for migrating in twiki content making for a smoother transition.

But the UI sucks.

Oh yeah, and it’s not people focused. Well at least not as people focused as Clearspace. We use Clearspace externally, and through our relationship with Jive also have an enterprise license. So to me it was a no brainer that we’d rollout Clearspace instead of Confluence.

But before that would happen I had to show why the “people” element was important. All the sponsoring group wanted to do was provide a space to collaborate around content. They weren’t considering the serendipitous establishment of weak ties between disconnected employees, and that people connecting around shared interests would boost efficiency at a hard-to-measure macro level.

After several weeks of debating over email we’ve decided to go with Clearspace, to my joy. I’m stoked to start using it with my China team, to find out more about who they are as people, and for them to get a feel for who we are as people too.

The one point that’s hard to drive home, however, is that knowledge will always be federated. During my consulting career and even here I’ve consistently run into people who want to create a single repository that will house all important corporate information assets, and that said repository will be the single place for people to turn to to find information. Such was the impetus behind our original corporate wiki. Although we’re not there yet, I’m starting to convince people that Discovery must be the center point of our Enterprise 2.0 rollout.

In time, I hope.

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.