Have we reached a "tipping point" for enterprise acceptance of Web 2.0? According to Martin LaMonica's Corporate America Wakes Up to Web 2.0, published June 26, 2006 on ZDNet News, we may have.
Tracy Coenen’s FRAUDFILES blog is this week’s Linkedin Bloggers Blog Boost target. I’ve read a number of the postings on her blog and have learned a lot in the process about “forensic accounting” that I did not know before.
I'm using Raw Sugar as a research tool. Here's what I added to my Raw Sugar directory as a description:
Expertise, Skunk Works, and Project Management
I've been researching concepts like "expert management systems," "expert location," and "expert locator systems." My goal is to get a handle on the state of the art as it might be impacted by current social networking and collaboration technologies.
Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain has published a comic book titled Tales from the Public Domain: BOUND BY LAW? A cross between a superhero adventure and the Crypt Keeper, the comic tells the story behind the knotty copyright, public domain, and fair use issues associated with contemporary documentary production.
Every now and then it helps to be reminded of the basics:
* Make the phone call.
* Get the face to face meeting.
* Thank the prospect.
* Have your elevator speech ready.
* Offer to help.
* Keep in touch (Garrison Keillor's suggestion).
* If you can't say anythng nice about somebody, don't say anything at all (My mom's suggestion).
Expertise Management and World of Warcraft
While researching the topic “expertise management” as a follow up to earlier articles posted here, I came across a fascinating article concerning the automated construction of an “expertise database” that I think has some relevance for enterprise expertise management.
I recently wrote here about using social networking and information technology to improve access to expert knowledge within the enterprise. Luis Suarez has also commented about the "knowledge management" aspects of this idea.
An interesting experiment incorporating some of these ideas is already underway here in the United States -- the Peer to Patent Project.
In the first article in this series I commented on the web based evolution of systems for matching up experts (and their expertise) with users based on relationship management and social software technologies.
In this article I discuss the implementation of such systems within large organizations
Remember near the end of the first MATRIX movie, our heroes were fighting it out on the roof of an office building. They needed a helicopter – fast:
* Tank: Operator.
* Trinity: Tank, I need a pilot program for a V-212 helicopter. Hurry…. Let’s go.
Trinity, already a member of a tightly knit community, knew the right person to call, got a download of her program, and the rest is history.
We (Martin McKeay, Dan Sweet, Robyn Tippins, Jeremiah Owyang, and I) had fun schmoozing about three topics last Saturday: (1) HP's planned reduction in telecommuting, (2) Technological threats to the continued relevance of corporate marketing departments, and (3) Increasing incompatibility in how individual web based accounts are handled.
I've been thinking some more about the issues raised in my earlier posting The Inevitablility of "Too Many Gateways".
One of the reasons the situation exists, as Ismael Ghalimi described where he has to maintain many separate accounts to manage different internet gateway services for feeds and data exchange, is that it's becoming increasingly possible to create such services and to make then available on the web.
Bloggers are commenting (e.g., here) on the replacement of Times New Roman as the default font in the beta version of Microsoft's Office 2007 released earlier this year. An initial lamentation is that the new font sets may not be available for the Mac without separate licensing. The deeper significance of this move may be that a serif font is being replaced by a sans-serif font, perhaps because the sans-serif font is easier to read on screen.
So, who cares about fonts, anyway? Well, I certainly do, ever since my introduction to the Mac back in the 20th Century.
Given the types of issues that Ghalimi raises in this article, it is interesting to speculate on the role that a corporate IT department might play in "selecting and enforcing" standard for the use of Office 2.0 applications in the real world of business. Is this a role that IT is able to play? Or would users feel "put out" by IT's heavy handed demands for standardization?
According to an article in The Mercury News, HP is cutting back on the practice of telecommuting among IT professionals.
I've worked both sides of this issue but have to give the nod to HP on this one, especially in these areas:
1. IT's interaction with business units
2. Team building
3. Training of younger staff
My friend Ken Yarmosh is doing some soul searching about blogging. Since I go through this same thing periodically myself, I understand his feelings. Here are the ten rules I left as a comment on his original post:
In the old days of planned release schedules and successively more capable release functionality, the term “beta” was applied typically to limited-release software where both distribution and user environments were tightly controlled and monitored.
Nowadays businesses are being built upon “beta” software that goes into universal web wide availability along with statements of incompleteness and limited support. Users are invited to use and write about the software. Users get early peaks at and access to useful features. Producers get real world feedback which helps further the development of future releases.
Within one week of coming home after a successful first year at Virginia Tech, Number One Daughter started her Summer job hostessing at a large and popular riverfront restaurant in Old Town Alexandria. While driving her to work one day, I asked her how things were going at the job. The conversation that followed reminded me several things relevant to intelligent management practices.
Lately I've been reading Ross Mayfield's Weblog, which I discovered while tracking back an incoming link from him to an earlier posting of mine, Corporate Resistance to Enterprise Web 2.0.
Mayfield is CEO of Socialtext and has feet (literally) in both the development and business worlds when it comes to real world applications related to Enterprise Web 2.0. I like how he thinks and writes about enterprise adoption of systems and processes based on Web 2.0 technologies.
I'm fascinated by peeks into the inside of what actually happens in the real world of Getting Things Done. The web site Bare Naked App could therefore be a voyeur's delight.