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.

Aaron Newman and I have been working for several months on putting an Enterprise 2.0 implementation guide together. Aaron Fulkerson, CEO of Mindtouch, has been doing the tech editing for us. And we’ll have another all-star, Jevon MacDonald, doing the forward for us. This is my first book, and let me tell you the process is extensive. Figures and illustrations have to follow a special naming pattern, chapters have to meet pre-determined page counts, and the tone of the book has to be consistent (which is tough when you have two authors writing it). Aaron and I edited each other’s chapters as they were completed, then sent them on to Aaron F. for more editing.

Then it’s the publisher’s turn to edit which means even more revisions and re-organization. But I must say this process, though tedious, adds tremendous value.

What’s really interesting is I’ve never met my co-author in person nor have I had a phone conversation with him. We used Basecamp to manage our deadlines and share deliverables. Twitter, IM and email were used for everything else (Basecamp rocked). I am continually amazed at how efficient it is to collaborate using social technologies.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with the book over the past few months (they didn’t give us any chance to give our input into the cover design. I’m not sure what I think of it), which is largely why I’ve been neglecting this blog.

But besides the book I’ve spent time adapting to the consumer world with my job at active.com. We’ve got a lot in the works to overhaul the site and make it more social, engaging and single-purposed. But we’ve got a long way to go and I’ve got a lot of people to manage.

Through the transition away from consulting towards a proper job I’ve learned a lot of things about how E2.0 may or may not add value to an organization. I must say I’ve been somewhat unbalanced with this blog tending to lean in favor of Enterprise 2.0 without adequately considering alternative perspectives. Going forward I plan to entertain opinions from the dark side a bit more to drive debate into a growingly homogenized E2.0 “industry”.

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.