Synergise IT

Andrew McAfee wrote about the most important factors for Enterprise 2.0 and one of the points is “Tools are egalitarian and freeform”. I totally agree with him and in the ideal world, it would be the best that everyone on the platform is equal, respected and treated the same way. Sounds great doesn’t it - communism in theory is a great idea too but it will never ever work in real life.

How can we ensure or promote such kinds of behaviour within the organisation? Also, can the tool have any features to prevent “bullying” from happening?

In Australia, baby boomers are classified as people born between 1946 and 1961, therefore, the oldest member of the baby boomers are 62 and the youngest is 47 this year. Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) survey also found that around 76% of men had retired before 63 and 76% of women had retired before the age of 60. If this this the case, baby boomers have started leaving the work force and the amount of knowledge and skills that they carry would be lost.

Employees, by age group. Source: ABS

With the massive skill shortage in Australia at the moment and employers need to keep whatever knowledge and skill they have even when employees leave the company. I believe this is a big problem in many large organisations in Australia and Enterprise 2.0 is needed to solve this problem NOW! I am not saying that Enterprise 2.0 once implemented, this problem would be solved but the earlier you do it, the earlier people use it, the earlier people store their knowledge, the more benefits the company reaps. Timing is of essence in this issue.

The aim of Enterprise 2.0 is the single point of truth for the whole organisation. However, we all know that large organisations have many systems and its not easy to achieve the single point of truth nirvana. As far as I can see, organisations tends to change such reference systems quickly as its cheap to do so (this is especially true for project based reference systems).

Recently, I heard a story of how a project changed the reference tool (read: knowledgebase / resource inventory) three times in 10 months. Everytime it moved over, new information was added, some were lost and it changed the way people did their work tremendously. This is disruptive.

Enterprise 2.0 is disruptive as well. It not only changes the way people execute their work on a daily basis, it also changes the culture and mindset of people. Having experience such forms of changes, I would say that an organisation can only go through it once and it must be successful.

Fixing a cultural bug is not as easy as fixing it on Java. Humans are complicated creatures.

Its the FireFox 3 Download Day today! I have never been part of a world record event and this shall be my first and a extremely simple one too - just download a file! Come and pool in your bandwidth and create a world record for the sake of open source software!

Download Day starts at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time on Tuesday, June 17th. For local times see here.

Google and Yahoo just signed a search ad agreement deal! Its the end of Micro-hoo!

I wrote an email today at work - no surprises here. Its a 100+ word email that really needed 15 words to get the main message across.

The next thing I did once I completed this was to check out my new twits and everything I read was less than 160 characters but told me everything I needed to know. From new blog posts to dinner pictures from complaining about work to constructive discussions about work - everything was recorded in less than 160 characters. What a beauty.

That set me thinking is there a place for Twitter type software within the organisation? I would say yes absolutely. I think there are so many people who write long emails and lose the whole context of the email within those words. (I am guilty too!). However, with only 160 characters, you get the main message across effectively and the reader saves alot of time reading the formalities and explanation. So I thought Twitter has a place in the organisation!

Few hours later, I was sitting with a colleague discussing something and my twitter bell went off and my client was interested to know what it was. I explained to him what twitter was. He (Gen-Y) then thought it was really cool and I asked if he would use it in the office? His reply was - “Aren’t there enough work coming in from emails? Now you want Twitter? You must be crazy”

So do you think there is a place for Twitter within the organisation?

With globalisation of companies and more employees traveling around more often, Enterprise 2.0 and its social collaborative applications surely help keep everyone connect and up-to-date with latest news, team members, documents and almost everything that matters (corporate applications) and thats online. All that is required is a laptop and internet connection. Nothing quite wrong with this in some industries like consulting or IT where computing power is important (alot of generalisation here!).

However, for some sales people in various industries, they use alot of hand held devices like Palm or BlackBerry and do need to access corporate applications to get their daily work done faster, more accurate and more responsive to growing customer demands. Gone where days where an insurance agent can say, “let me work out the sums and get back to you in three days”. Customers want in now and want it right.

We are living in a world where we want information on demand. Corporate applications must be able to deliver all the desktop applications to your little phone and conduct transactions securely, quickly and accurately. I do foresee the future of enterprise 2.0 to move towards mobile computing. Maybe in future, there might be a new term called social mobile computing? Or should it be called Mobile social computing??

Mike and myself is in a Mindtouch frenzy at the moment. We have both looked at Mindtouch previously, felt that its easy to use, pretty, great navigation and all, we actually missed out exploring in depth into the extension side of things until a few days ago. Read Mike’s review here.

I have to admit, I am not the best of programmers nor a code crunching nut - in fact, I don’t even consider myself as an amateur. However, if I can do it, then ALOT of people can do it. Its that simple. I have spent half the weekend playing with the extensions and its great fun, powerful and most importantly - simple.

Having said all these, I spent the other half of the weekend looking for a wiki - preferably a free one. This is a personal wiki for my post-graduate studies (for my supervisor and myself to collaborate on and a online repository for my thesis) and I looked at a HUGE amount of Wikis. TikiWiki, PhPWiki, SocialText, WetPaint, MediaWiki and Mindtouch. I have personally either installed or tried the online versions of all of them and decided on Mindtouch Deki Wiki hosted on Wik.is. Even though that means I have to pay $99 per year for only 10GB of space. Oh well, good things comes at a price.

I cannot emphasise enough how simple Deki Wiki is. Creating content is simple, managing the Wiki is super easy as well. It also has the power to extend its platform to add almost anything under the sun is something NO OTHER WIKI can do. Simplicity and power at its best!

After one weekend of Deki Wiki, I am surely a convert now. Keep up the good work MindTouch ROCKS and keep up the good work.

Sam previously wrote about the Enterprise Octopus and now he has introduced Norman Naysayer. To understand my post you would have to read both the above links - if you haven’t.

I actually do think that Norman Naysayer, to a certain extent, can be a good person. I have met a few Normans in my company and after explaining and demonstrating Enterprise 2.0 to them, they saw the benefits of it and got more interested - some even got “converted”. I do not think many of Enterprise 2.0 / social media enthusiasts got excited about it at the first instance they read/experience it. They would have read, experienced, explored and understood much about Enterprise 2.0 and social media and believed that it can actually help improve an organisation. My point is Normans exist because of the lack of education of E2 and have probably never experienced the power of social media before. Many employees are deeply entrenched in their hundreds of emails a day and stuck reading senseless CC’ed emails everyday. Email is a fantastic tool but people have abused it and Enterprise 2.0 is here to help.

I am a consultant and my job is not to evangelize Enterprise 2.0 or social media. My job is to make sure that companies benefit from a better information flow, ease of information search, increased connectivity and streamlined communication. I must address the issues that Normans have and make them understand the beauty and benefits of Enterprise 2.0.

Having said this, I do know of a few hard-headed Normans and they drive me up the wall - their problem is that they do not listen. Urgh…

As usual, great post from Sam!

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25/05/2008 1705hrs (Melboure)
Oh just to add, Norman Naysayer generally loses. What a wonderful post!

A couple of my colleagues have been invited to write on Stewart Mader’s (author of WikiPatterns ) blog. Please see this post here.

Nate, Jay - Congrats and well done!