Social Glass

My buddies over at e2oh.com were recently asked to blog over at wikipatterns as guest bloggers.  These guys have been instrumental in educating a very traditional management consulting firm on the values of social computing, not only for internal use but for external use with clients.  They fought many an IT battle to get the entire firm (17,000) to adopt an enterprise wiki.

Well done Nate and Jay.

With my return to the US and being in the same timezone as most E2.0 bloggers (save my Australian blogging mates) I was hoping to blog more here on SocialGlass. But I’ve been busy writing a book, doing a startup on the side, and managing developers at my new full-time gig. But, I assure you, things are tapering down and within the next few weeks I’ll be back at it.

I just had a good conversation with Sam Lawrence about Clearspace 2.0 that I’ll be blogging about next week. I’m also hoping to divulge a bit more about what I’m doing with my current employer and my new-found passion - agile development.

So stay tuned…

During my career as a Manager with a Management Consulting firm I worked with two guys, Nate Nash and Jay Hariani, based in Washington DC who embraced Enterprise 2.0 like I’ve never seen anybody do before. They spearheaded a corporate initiative to rollout social computing software fighting battle after battle to convince more traditional folks of the value proposition.

These guys work in the emerging markets segment and frequently go to places like Kabul and Amman for work. Last year they put an outline for a proposal in a wiki for one of their clients and asked for help from across the organization to add content. Members of our firm from four different countries contributed with their various areas of expertise. That’s what you call collective intelligence, baby (although I’m not sure we actually won the work).

And despite their travels to dangerous places, they’ve managed to find internet access where ever they go and have put together an excellent blog on Enterprise 2.0, called e2oh.com. They have awesome insight as to how E2.0 can positively influence emerging markets. It’s a must read and a worth edition to your RSS reader.

Jay Nate, for example, writes about his experiences doing business in the middle east, where for one client called the “Ministry”, he says:

I look around the Minsitry and I am confounded as to how there are so many people working there who are clearly unqualified. But none of that matters in these places. It is all about who you know, how long you have known them, and how much they know about you. That is power. That is the business model. This is where social software within the enterprise can and will thrive almost immediately.

Plus you’ve gotta love this picture of Nate with his grenade launcher:

Apologies for the lack of posts.  I’ve started a new job this week as a Development Manager for a company in San Diego and have been busy coming up to speed on everything (and everybody) I’ll need to know to do my job.  What an interesting 6 months.

1. I worked in Austria from late June to mid August.
2. Moved to Sydney from mid August to mid October.
3. Moved back to Melbourne from mid October to December.
4. Repatriated to the United States in December and was in Colorado to mid January.
5. Moved to San Francisco for a month, and…
6. Took a job in San Diego which I started yesterday.

All that time I’ve been co-authoring a book and have tried to keep blogging.  Man I can’t wait to be settled again.

I safely arrived in Colorado last night.  It’s been 1 year since I’ve been in the US.  I immediately noticed how festive the US is around the holidays. Carols were playing in the LA airport and people said “merry christmas” to me.  This doesn’t really happen in Australia, where if they said it they’d prefer “happy christmas” instead.  It’s also pretty cold in Denver (at least compared with how hot it’s been in Melbourne this past few weeks).  And I had my first Chipotle burrito since last December for dinner tonight. 

What I’ve noticed immediately is that most blog and twitter updates now happen throughout the day.  In Australia it was like reading the newspaper, where when I got to work most of the blog posts and twitter updates from my US counterparts had been completed already, so I’d spend 20 minutes or so catching up on the “news”.  Now my reader constantly has updates.  I’m not sure which way is better actually.

Anyway, I’m hoping to visit more conferences now that I’m in North America and meet some of my blogging friends in person.  I might look into heading to the FASTForward conference this year to get me going. 

It’s good to be back.