Prompted by conversations with government contractors in the Washington DC area I’ve created a brief (and very high-level) slide presentation that lays out some of the basics of what I’ve been calling “expertise management systems.”
After Wikipedia's editing caused premature deletion of an evolving Enterprise 2.0 article (the correct term is now "enterprise social software"), I decided to investigate the costs associated with Web 2.0 applications in the enterprise.
Tom Mohr in Winning Online - a Manifesto provides a sobering view of the challenges newspapers face in adjusting to a Web 2.0 world where online advertising revenue today still accounts for less than 6% of total annual newspaper advertising revenue -- and total advertising revenue is declining.
Earlier this month in my post What is the Minimum Information You Need to Describe Your IT Projects? I mentioned that a “RACI” statement is a useful way to communicate project responsibilities:
* Who has ultimate Responsibility, who has Authority to make decisions, who must be Consulted about major actions or decisions, and who must be Informed about major actions or decisions.
One blog I read is the Microsoft Knowledge Network Team Blog (registration required). It describes development and features of the "Knowledge Network" product that will accompany Microsoft's upcoming Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 which is also in Beta status.
When considering the potential system integration costs of an enterprise web 2.0 project, one of the first things to do is to identify potential system-related “ripple effects” (if any) of introducing an enterprise web 2.0 system into the organization. We also need to consider the cost implications of addressing and managing these ripple effects over time.
Professor Andrew McAfee has an excellent series of posts related to the application of “return on investment” (ROI) calculations to enterprise IT. His posts deserve a close reading. He gets some flack for seeming to argue against measurement, but as he explains in his second post, that’s not his point; he’s basically saying that too many business cases that rely on a haphazard or incomplete calculation of IT benefits are flawed, incorrect, incomplete, or self serving.
The title refers to the Wikipedia article that was begun last week and mentioned by Andrew McAfee in his blog. It was a brief article that repeated a few of McAfee's ideas and began listing some relevant links. Recently, though, someone deleted the Enterprise 2.0 article. Gone.
The CIO in a Large Financial Services Firm Discusses "Baby Boomer Brain Drain" and His Real Staffing Concerns
Several things stand out based on this interview with Oscar in combination with information gleaned from my previous interviews and research:
There's a great series of comments over on the Freedom To Tinker blog regarding Ed Felten's post DRM Wars: The Next Generation. The post and the comments provide good insight into where arguments and enforcement efforts are headed.
Rod Boothby (or someone using Rod’s name) recently stopped by and left the following comment attached to my recent accelerating network effects post:
In Documentation Redux - a Shorthand Proposal Framework, and the PMO Surprise fellow blogger James P. MacLennan proposes a basic “table of contents” for the most basic information about projects that an IT department should have:
Dave Morgan’s Doomed Page Views argues that measuring “page views,” given the rise of RSS and related feed technology in the online world, will be obsolete within two years as a way to measure the reach that a web publisher (and by, extension, the ads served by that publisher) have with respect to communicating with an audience.
IBM’s Luis Suarez in 5 Key Steps towards Adopting Web 2.0 within the Enterprise provides a pragmatic and experience-based list of five tips on how to introduce Web 2.0 technologies into the enterprise.
The IT Director in a Large Manufacturing Company Discusses "Baby Boomer Brain Drain"
Last week I interviewed “Ferris” (not his real name) about how his company is handling the pending retirement of senior IT staff.
Ferris is the IT Director in a large manufacturing company. Ferris’ company doesn’t have the mix of custom legacy Cobol and Assembler based mainframe systems that Boris the Insurance Company CIO has.
An Insurance Company CIO Talks About the "Baby Boomer IT Brain Drain"
Last week I interviewed “Boris” (not his real name) about his and his company’s handling of the pending retirement of senior IT staff who are critical to the maintenance and operation of a number of his company’s business-critical mainframe legacy systems.
I was initially interested in learning whether Boris thought that modern social networking and collaboration tools might be useful in documenting and transferring the specialised expertise staff needed for maintaining critical systems. Instead, the discussion took a different direction and revealed some underlying issues that go beyond technology enabled knowledge sharing.
Back on July 17 I wrote about the potential impact of pending retirement related “baby boomer brain drain” on IT departments, especially those heavily invested in supporting legacy mainframe systems.
As a followup I asked for research interviews with several CIO’s I know in order to get a better handle on the issue and to find out whether emerging Web 2.0 and social networking and collaboration technologies might be supportive of knowledge transfer to younger staff.
Professor David Wolber has used a social networking tool for people-tagging called Peoplicious to create an "expert systems" group -- "those interested in tools for locating experts" -- from the links included in John Tropea's survey article called The different ways of finding experts.
One of my recent blog postings is included in the Tropea article, so I'm included in Wolber's "expert systems" group.
We hear a lot about the customer- and user-side benefits of Web 2.0 -- the collaboration, the rapid development and deployment, and the rapid formation of "communities" around common interests.
As a change from this it's a pleasure to read some clear thinking about the business models that support Web 2.0, especially models associated with open source, software as a service, and software as an "appliance."