A Technical Manager's Perspective

Great Enterprise 2.0 post

I have seen the shift in Technology and believe in the move toward an open, collaborative adoption of applications in the Enterprise. I have followed this topic in the blogosphere and shared my thoughts on many occasions.

There has been a lot written and communicated about Enterprise 2.0, however, I came across as an exceptional post on the subject that I wanted to share with you. The post called What is Enterprise 2.0 was written by Fred Cavazza, a French Technologist with a passion for change in the enterprise. This is a good starting point for folks looking to explore Enterprise 2.0, a great reference point for the Enterprise 2.0 work that has already started, as well as a great reference point for Enterprise 2.0 applications and strategies that we can start adopting now.

I have included some of Fred's thoughts and examples below, but I would urge you to read the complete post and visit the many reference links embedded within the post. I really enjoyed browsing thru the many Web 2.0 - Enterprise 2.0 tools and applications that will become the foundation for computing in the future.

Fred Cavazza - What is Enterprise 2.0:

"Enterprise 2.0 is above all about sharing and collaboration"

"real benefits of Enterprise 2.0 will only come from a renewed IT architecture"

Enterprise 2.0 is above all about sharing and collaboration. Launching a blog, a wiki or an online workspace without anticipating collaborators' adhesion is a pure waste of time and money. The biggest mistake is to under-estimate habits' weight and change reticences. Information (the one and only) is a very rare commodity and collaborators are fighting hard for it. They stock it in files which are jealously protected by password and non-shared directory.

Working in wiki-mode, sharing know-how and experience on a blog are counterintuitive ways of working, the opposite of what we hardly learn in the enterprise "jungle": being seen by your managers as indispensable to the functioning of the enterprise. This was to date the most reliable way to advance in hierarchy and to collect end-year bonus.

But the (business) world as changed: Chinese competitors can now produce goods for 1/10th of your price and Indian competitors can provide services for 1/5th of your price. Moreover, this is only the beginning since those two countries are facing similar low-cost labor work competition (Philippine for China and Sri-Lanka for India). Conclusion: To maintain competitiveness, we must change our working habits, methods and tools. The main objective is to enhance business-critical information flow.

The biggest challenge for a collaborator is not to find the right information (because it is there, somewhere…) but to find it on a minimum of time

Let me insist for the last time on two essential rules:

• All those tools are completely ineffective if collaborators do not embrace them. Global management has to show the example by validating and encouraging necessary changes in work habits and methods. Experimentations can be made to evaluate collaborators needs, but you will be forced one day or another to convince you top management.
• Efficiency is enhanced if those tools work together. Try to imagine the power of such a portal as the one described in my chart: collaborators connect every morning on their personal start page to monitor activity or project advancement ; they have powerful social tools to quickly find information or key-competence ; with some few clicks they can access or deploy adapted online applications or build some.

But remember that tools are only supporting collaboration, only users can make it happens.

Technorati : Enterprise 2.0
Del.icio.us : Enterprise 2.0
Buzznet : Enterprise 2.0

How could I improve what I do in six months

I was listening to Hanelminutes (Scott Hanselman and Carl Franklin) and they really got me thinking. I almost passed on this cast called "How to be a better developer in six months". I am not a developer, but I wanted to hear their thoughts on how to become a better developer, and it got me thinking about how I could I be a better Technical Manager.

Scott and Carl identified a number of different tasks that you could do to be a better developer in six months:

Reading books on tools, languages and development practices; Reading other Developers Code; Writing Code; Teaching; Speaking; Getting involved in the Development Community; Listening to Podcasts; and finally Hiring an Intern (Similar to teaching).

As I said, this really got me thinking about how I could improve as a Manager and a Technical contributer. I certainly agree with reading more and listening to Podcasts and Webcasts. There is so much information available on the Internet that can help you dig into a topic or become more familiar with a topic, whether that is a technical topic, a managerial topic or any topic.

Scott also mentions reading other peoples code and writing code as two examples for developers. I see this a refining the functions that a developer performs and would recommend that everyone could benefit from this basic premise by learning, practicing and refining what we do on a daily basis.

Teaching, speaking and hiring an intern, are strategies that work for Scott, but may not be readily available to everyone. Of the three, teaching is probably the task that most folks could do, and for those those folks that do not have someone to teach or share information with then writing, blogging or joining a community is a great alternative.

I think we all could improve what we do on a daily basis, and podcasts like Scott's provide examples of what we could do and leave you asking the question, "How could I improve what I do in six months ?"

Technorati : management

Balance of Work Life and Home Life

A lot of my reading is about Leadership and Management topics. I came across this great post by Jim Stroup of the Managing Leadership blog called Good Grief. Jim focuses on the impact to a team or organization when a manager focuses solely on the workplace and does not take into consideration a balanced work life and home life.

Here is a sample .....

Many managers would prefer being able to devote their full attention to the administration of non-human assets and factors in their businesses. These are easier to understand and manipulate, and they usually don't give you grief about it. But the fact is, most of the grief "human assets" give their managers is of the latter's own making.

As short while ago, Inc.com reported the results of a study which showed that "bad behavior" is caused by problems with work-life balance issues, and is not prevented by standard disciplinary measures. To be honest, such results suggest errors in research design and data interpretation. One should be cautious about taking at face value a group's attribution of its own bad behavior to the alleged shortcomings of another group (management) or of policy.

Nevertheless, the study does raise questions about the influence of managerial action or policy on staff morale and productivity. While I disagree that bad behavior is caused - or averted - by specific workplace policies, productivity and morale can be.

Of the various factors related to managing people, the one this subject touches on is the managerial duty to remove impediments to performance. It is not necessarily a manager's role to provide employees a balanced life, but it is an obligation to remove barriers - including those that are related to work-life balance issues - to peak employee performance.

To read the entire post follow this link .....

Technorati : leadership, management

Enterprise 2.0 and Busciety 2.0

After a brief time away I want to follow-up on a couple of items ....

Andrew Mcafee and Tom Davenport had their Enterprise 2.0 debate and they both came out winners. You can read Andrew's post about the debate or view the debate here.

The Enterprise 2.0.conference was held in June and unfortunately I could not attend and until last week, I had little time for reading or listening. However, I found a great link at the Collaborative Thinking blog that lists all of the Enterprise 2.0 keynotes and enables folks to view, listen, or read material from each keynote.

As I get caught up on my reading, I have really enjoyed reading Susan Scrupski and her blog ITSinsider. One post in particular that I really enjoyed and related to was this post .... "A Year's Summary of Personal Reflection "

Here is sampling .....

"In the wink of an eye, the "get-its" got it and the resistors didn't. It was a little scary this year for me. The old schoolers wanted to cling to their power base regardless of where that power emanated from. The range of dissent covered enterprise application vendors, high-priced gurus, consultants who catered to the IT department, traditional IT analysts and editors, old school research houses and publishers, and sometimes even users who just didn't want to bother to learn something new and really weren't even protecting a power base. But as the light bulbs went off around me, and I witnessed the viral adoption of how liberating web 2.0, emergent, user-driven collaboration took off in the communities where I participated and in the blogosphere… it was exhilarating .......

For those who are "left behind," I imagine there will be gnashing of teeth when all data on the planet finally transcends up into the cloud in the final days. Not because they'll miss the data, they'll miss the community. We may be a reckless, rumpled and disorderly group, but we share a common vision about information-its ownership and the right to access it. More importantly, we're all connected in the blogosphere. "

And Susan identifies another term "Busciety 2.0" that could compete with Enterprise 2.0. By Susan's definition, Busciety 2.0 is a mashup of Business with Society. "Business is mashing up with society at a fast and furious pace as social media networking and blogging continues to blur the lines between people and their professions" to read the complete post, follow this link ..... "

Watch our Enterprise 2.0, you now have to compete with Busciety 2.0.

Technorati : Enterprise 2.0