Enterprise 2.0

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Nothingness

The philosopher in me found this interesting.  Alan Watts, a famous British philosopher, talks about nothingness: [?]

Netflix Envelopes

I have come to loathe these removable seal covers that come with Netflix envelopes.  I have them lying all over the place in my house.  Garbage cans are always inconveniently distant when I take these things off in order to ship my DVD back to Netflix after watching it. Yes, I’m lazy. [?]

A Little Side Project

  I’ve been reading a book called “Managing Humans” by Michael Lopp.  Michael is a Software Development Manager, and his book is more anecdotal than anything describing his experiences managing people and the conclusions he’s come to as a result.  They teach you in “Management Class”, as you climb the corporate hierarchy, that Software Development [...] [?]

We Are Software engineers

Here’s a video I put together for my teams at Active.com: [?]

Your Guys’s

Inspired by an article in the December issue of The Economist about business cliche words, I thought I’d add my own phrase to the list.  And that phrase is “from a ______ perspective”.  It is ludicrous how often I hear that phrase in my professional life .  A marketer, for example, might be giving a [...] [?]

Business of APIs Conference 2010

I was fortunate enough to be asked by Mashery to speak at BAPI New York and BAPI San Francisco this year.  I gave a quick presentation on the reasons why we need to endeavor to understand the impact our API has on our business.  Check out the presentation I gave in San Francisco: Here were [...] [?]

A Little Blurb About APIs

I just dug up this interview I did last year with Mashery about the Active.com API.  I love the hip music in the background: [?]

Active.com Wins “Best Demo” at Techcrunch Disrupt Hackathon

Cross-posted from the Active.com blog. I sent two developers, Jonathan Spooner and Brian Levine, to the Techcrunch Disrupt Hackathon to hack at the Mashery booth yesterday.  I wanted them to spend time networking, writing some code and having fun.  I sent them a few text messages of encouragement last night as they worked for 20 [...] [?]

I Hate the Use of “My”

I have always hated the use of “My” in website nomenclature.  “My Account”.  “My Races”.  Hell, I even worked for a company that built a product called “MyTelcoManager“.  There was something, albeit subconscious, that rubbed me the wrong way with the use of this word.  Now, finally, I can put my frustration into words thanks [...] [?]

A Fascinating View of What Motivates People

This is well worth the 10 minutes: [?]

A Simple Way to Figure Out Who Gave Out your Email Address

A co-worker showed me a neat little trick that will allow me to tell which companies sell or distribute my email address to spammers marketers.  Known as Sub-Addressing, the SMTP specification allows for the insertion of a tag, preceeded by a “+”, into my email address.  And it’s this tag that will lead us to [...] [?]

Rework

I’ve just finished reading and highly recommend Rework by the guys from 37Signals.  While the book is over 250 pages, it’s a quick read (I read it in about 2.5 hours). We recently dove head first into Scrum where I work, and I’m having my team read this book as an Agile “reinforcer”.   But Rework [...] [?]

Failed Intranets

I stumbled upon this blog from HackerNews today, and I thought it was worth sharing given the context of Enterprise 2.0: intranetsecrets.com.   Here’s a sampling of the posts: [?]

Sprite in China

It’s been two years since my last trip to China.  This time I’m here to conduct Agile training.  I conducted a two day workshop with practical, hands on sessions.  My team of 18 asked a lot of questions, which is usually a sign that I was getting the point across.  If we’re successful, I’ll be [...] [?]

BAPI Presentation

The Business of APIs Conference went well.  Mashery put on a great conference, and over 200 people attended.  There was an ensemble of impressive speakers, including Michele Azar of Bestbuy, Marc Frons of New York Times and Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures.  And then there was me.  Checkout my presentation below: [?]

Speaking at the Business of APIs Conference

I’m happy to announce that I’m one of the featured speakers at the Business of APIs Conference in NYC on 16 November.  I’ve been leading the charge to open our data at Active.com, and we’ve started a slow rollout of our API.  I’ll be talking about the journey we’ve taken to get to where we [...] [?]

10 Principles of Agile Development

(cross-posted from the active.com Product Development blog) I came across these while reading the Agile Software Development blog and thought they were interesting enough to share here: Active user involvement is imperative The team must be empowered to make decisions Requirements Timescale is Fixed Capture requirements at a high level; lightweight & visual Develop small, [...] [?]

Meeting with Remote Teams

I manage a number of software developers and quality assurance specialists.  Most of them live and work in San Diego.  But others are scattered across various US states and in China.  It’s challenging to create a sense of culture and community given this fact, and I’d be lost if it weren’t for Skype and tinychat.  [...] [?]

Dear Consumer

(cross-posted from the active.com Product Development blog) Dear Consumer,I’d like to address feedback we’re received about active.com from our uservoice forum and Twitter. I know I’ve written a few posts here already but thought it appropriate to take the time to introduce myself before diving in. I’m the Director of Product Development for what we [...] [?]

Ustedes

I spent some time in Mexico last weekend visiting my brother and his family.  His wife’s from Venezuela, he’s from Colorado, any they have a daughter who was born in Mexico.  They speak to her in Spanish and English at home, but mostly she speaks Spanish (I’m always fascinated by little kids who speak a [...] [?]

Why Aren’t Intranets more like Internets

1994: WebCrawler and Lycos became the first widely adopted search engines.  They flattened the Internet giving all resources an equal chance of being discovered.  Before search engines, people were meant to find content by going to “what’s new” web pages where they’d find hyperlinks to web pages that had been recently added.  From those pages [...] [?]

Succeeding with Agile

I came across a new website today that, among other things, lists Products that can be used to help facilitate agile software development. Check it out:http://www.userstories.com/products I’ve used Mingle from Thoughtworks before, and thought it was an impressive product. I also read another post from a guy writing a book called Succeeding with Agile about [...] [?]

Process?

Barry Schwartz, an economist who studies how human psychology is linked to economics and author of The Paradox of Choice, recently spoke at Ted about how process has replaced wisdom.  His thesis is (and I’m paraphrasing), that process exists because policy makers don’t trust “doers” to make the right decisions.  Process curbs risk and act [...] [?]

Managing Being a Manager

I had an interesting conversation with a good friend of mine while rock climbing tonight about being a Manager.  He runs engineering and IT Ops for a medium-sized company in San Diego, and we’re almost exactly the same age.  I asked if he ever feels settled with his job.  He said “no”. And I feel [...] [?]

Video Chat Etiquette

We use Skype all the time at work to communicate with our remote teams.  Most of my conference calls are done with Skype, and to be honest the call quality is better than what we get with our ip phone-base conferencing system.  We use MSN for private IM conversations, and Yammer for public IM conversations [...] [?]

The Stig Revealed

Top Gear is one of my favorite shows on TV.  On it they closely guard the identity of “the Stig” – the man in the white suite who test drives all of the cars they feature around their track.  Today’s issue of The Telegraph has revealed the Stig is a man called “Collins” (they don’t [...] [?]

Data. Data. Data.

Something I learned while working with the Information Management group at BearingPoint down in Australia continues to resonate for me at my “Web 2.0-ish” job in San Diego, CA.  Data integrity is king but is bloody hard to maintain.  Consider a datawarehouse, where information about information is stored, often for reporting purposes.  Datawarehouses can be [...] [?]

TED Comes to Melbourne

Ted, probably my favorite website, is hosting an event in Melbourne, Australia (my favorite city) on 17 January, 2009.  Check out the Ted post about this here.  I’m glad to see Australia getting some love. [?]

More Coming Soon

I’ve been finding it difficult to stay focused on Enterpise 2.0 after having worked at Active for about 9 months now.  As a consultant, I was living Enterprise 2.0 every day.  As a Development Manager, I’m more concerned with keeping a team of Software Engineers, QA and IT busy and engaged. I have a new [...] [?]

Yammering

When Yammer launched its public Beta I jumped on board and setup an account straight away.  I then invited everybody I knew at work to join, and within a few hours we had 30 people create accounts.  It was cool, people in Canada updated their status and people in China responded to them etc.  I [...] [?]

Aaron Fulkerson Talking to Scoble

Aaron Fulkerson over at Mindtouch recently sat down with Scoble to talk about Deki Wiki.  Check out the video. [?]

It’s Alive!

After many months of blood, sweat and tears, Enterprise 2.0 Implementation is finally available. Aaron Newman and I started this endeavor at the end of 2007.  Aaron Fulkerson, CEO of Mindtouch,  later came on board as our technical editor and had some great insight for us based on his experience with DekiWiki and SOA architectural [...] [?]

newthinking.bearingpoint.com

My former employer, BearingPoint, has recently launched newthinking.bearingpoint.com, a WordPress-powered blog seemingly open to all employees. This is a bold move as consulting companies typically guard their intellectual property with an iron first. But BearingPoint has been a leader when it comes to transparency. MIKE2, BearingPoint’s information management methodology, launched in 2005 and is “open [...] [?]

MySQL Enables Enterprise 2.0

Did you know that MySQL enables Enterprise 2.0? I didn’t realize a database could do that. MySQL defines Enterprise 2.0 as modern organizations implementing Web 2.0 technologies, architectures, and delivery models to offer browser-based, data-driven online applications to their business users. Their definition focuses on the technical side of E2.0, but doesn’t acknowledge the cultural [...] [?]

Agile is Hard to Implement

I’ve made it my mission in recent months to start doing agile development with my team. We made good initial progress, whereby each Product Manager prioritizes his backlog every three weeks and during our sprint period we “SCRUM” the larger projects (there are too many itemsto colllaborate on everything – maybe this is an issue). [...] [?]

Confluence vs. Clearspace

We recently had a debate over whether or not we should use Confluence as a replacement to twiki, our enterprise wiki. I used Confluence at my last company, and for the most part it worked well. It’s got a great set of plugins and an extensible architecture. Most of all, it has a “near out [...] [?]

E2.0 Stagnation

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 [...] [?]

Veodia. Nifty.

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 [...] [?]

E2.0, Agile and Offshore

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 [...] [?]

Why It’s Been Quiet

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 [...] [?]

Shout Out

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 [...] [?]

E2.0 Fundamentals

Recent discussions at work have prompted me to re-iterate something very fundamental that often gets overlooked when it comes to Enterprise 2.0. An organization will never adopt a single social productivity tool. Knowledge will ALWAYS be scattered. We’ve come to accept this on the Internet where search engines make information on a myriad sites searchable, [...] [?]

Why They Might Run and Hide from Enterprise 2.0

It’s been an interesting transition for me back to industry. “Industry” is the term consultants use to describe normal jobs with normal companies – the kind where people bring their plants to work and setup pictures of people they know in their cubicles. The kind where people wake up on Monday morning, drive to work, [...] [?]

Mindtouch Puts Up Some Impressive Numbers

A recent press release from businesswire.com highlights Mindtouch‘s continued growth in the Enterprise 2.0 marketplace (disclosure: I’m working with Mindtouch’s CEO Aaron Fulkerson on a side project, and I know he’s not a fan of the term “Enterprise 2.0″, but it’s the biggest tag in my tag cloud and I’m duty-bound to make it even [...] [?]

They Paint the Office Walls in China

Five of the people on my team work out of our China office in X’ian. Last week they informed me they were taking Monday off for a team building exercise. Each team was given a wall in the office to paint. And they didn’t paint murals. Nope, just a fresh coat of white paint. On [...] [?]

Jive Continues to Kick Butt

Last week I had the opportunity to speak to Sam Lawrence about Clearspace 2.0, Jive Software’s next incarnation of Clearspace. A lot has been written about this new release today, and it’s generating a lot of buzz in the blogosphere (Jive’s annoucement appeared in Techmeme for a while yesterday, which is mostly unheard of for [...] [?]

When Innovation Pays Off

Google is famous for allowing its engineers time to work on personal projects. This makes the engineers happy as they get a chance to be creative and show what they’re made of. And it makes Google happy because they get lots of innovative ideas and products from this personal time. I’m trying to instill a [...] [?]

MIA

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, [...] [?]

Agile Development

Since this is a blog that “covers the transparent enterprise”, I thought I might include a presentation I put together about SCRUM – a collaborative and transparent way to build software applications. [?]

Is Enterprise 2.0 Relevant only to “Doers”?

Enterprise 2.0 is about helping knowledge workers foster productive collaboration, innovation, and create a more connected culture. Knowledge workers keep each other informed through blog posts, author wiki pages together, and share bookmarks for interesting information resources. Together they generate folksonomies – user perspectives on corporate information assets, and bypass IT-sanctioned applications in favor of [...] [?]