(I've been meaning to do this for months - probably years, actually, but been too lazy/busy. When I upgraded my Radio Userland software recently, the WYSIWYG editing no longer worked. Lazy/busy won out yet again, but this time it was easier to move the blog.)
11:39:47 AM    
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Thanks Mike Gotta, for asking me to come out to play. The blog-tag game was started by Jeff Pulver as a way to get to know bloggers beyond their standard blog postings. Sounds like fun to me.

Part 1 of the game is to divulge five things that few blog readers know about me:

1. I'm a high-school drop-up, now with a BS and Masters degree. Maybe I shouldn't dissuade you from thinking I was some kind of child prodigy for jumping into college without finishing high school, but it wasn't that big of a deal. Too often we assume things are "laws of the universe", when it turns out that almost everything is negotiable. You just need the imagination and courage to ask for what you want. Life Lesson: Creativity requires taking risks.

2. My first post-college job was as system administrator for the Cromemco miniframe that my government consulting company ran its business on. Here's my big confession: I DID peek at salaries. Everything IS negotiable, but here I learned that some people were stellar negotiators... and that I was not one of them :-( Life Lesson: Know your weaknesses; maximize your strengths :-)

3. The best decision I ever made in my life? Marrying my best pal over two decades ago. OK, so that's not really much of a secret. But it's just working out so well :-) Life lesson: invest in your passion!

4. I have a fortune cookie fortune taped over my desk that says: "Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm." I'm not exactly sure what it means. Some days it seems so encouraging, other times it's just insanity talking. Maybe there simply is no recipe for success, so... Life lesson: Make your own Luck!

5. I haven't blogged in a month... because... I'm... addicted... to YouTube. Play is fun, and can be a really serious learning environment. That's one of the foundational concepts of the tech start-up I've been working on. It blends the fun of social networking with government agencies' education and outreach mandates. Wish me luck that this entrepreneurial effort lets me embrace the life lessons ab ove. I'm supposed to make my own luck, I know, but you can never have too much luck, can you? Life Lesson: there's always more to learn.

Part 2 of the Blog-tag game is tagging five more people. I have to pass on that one, as my short list of folks have already been tagged while I was busy YouTubing.
3:18:32 PM    
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My thanks to Mike Gotta for filling in some missing context from an interview I blogged (see Business blogging - start with RSS-enabled Status Reports) recently. I have a terrific respect for Mike's long history in this new world of collaboration tools, but reporters often have space restrictions, and the quote that made it into the article left me wondering what was missing!

Here's what Mike wrote me:

'Hi Dana, the quote did lose some context. I do see activity by large enterprises in terms of making external content available via RSS for customers, partners and so on. Within the enterprise however, this is still an emerging technology. There is little! support from portal vendors, ECM vendors and so on. There are specialized vendors (Attensa, KnowNow, NewsGator) but the totality of their install base is still small (they can all point to some large customes but that's different from the potential market overall). Regarding the quote, there are many examples that I can come up with myself for possible RSS use. The quote was more rhetorical - what are CIOs seeing themselves for internal use -where does it improve process performance or user productivity - what's the business case for rolling out technology from specialized vendors vs. getting it "for free" from existing vendors - security is another topic(see some recent posts on that angle) - and if it becomes popular in terms of adoption with users having dozens of feeds, do e-mail like problems re-occur. So to a large extent, we are still exploring the human aspects of this channel as well as the technology aspects.'

I'd love to know what CIOs are doing today, too. I look forward to Mike's future postings on the topic.

6:39:03 PM    
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Are businesses figuring out yet how to manage information with blogs and RSS? "By Invitation Only" (CIO Magazine, Sept 1, 2006) gives us a peek at a few companies that are (IMHO) fooling around with it as an alternative to email and intranets. I'm betting that this is just the tip of the iceberg. It's tough to see what's happening on corporate intranets, where business blogs may be privately proliferating.

I found Mike Gotta's quote surprising in its lack of vision,

"We don't really know how we can use RSS for work purposes," says Mike Gotta, principal analyst at the research firm Burton Group. While pioneering CIOs are already exploring some possibilities, they're all guessing at this stage, he notes."

While CIOs may be just waking up to the potential power of RSS, Mike Gotta has been enlightening us on collaboration technologies long enough to see multiple uses in the enterprise. I have to assume that in this case, the reporter's translation was off base.

The problem is not a lack of vision (what could be in the future) nor a lack of application (what we can do now), but a lack of adoption. Busy CIOs are at the awareness stage, but  given the compelling need for relief from information overload in today's knowledge-driven businesses, expect them to move quickly along the adoption curve.

One approach is to start simply with RSS-driven status reporting. This application shifts an already mandated task to a technology that is more easily consumed, requiring minimal behavior changes and a straightforward measure of success. Rob Boothby has a great post on this topic, and suggests an even easier behavior change: use email and cc: the project blog. 

A manager would subscribe to the RSS feeds of each of his direct reports. The team lead for a short-term project would subscribe to categorized feeds of team members that pertain only to that project. An individual contributor might subscribe to his or her manager, coworkers, peers, and mentors in diverse parts of the company.

Management may attempt to control the flow of information so they can put their own spin on things, requesting group-based security to limit who can view their team's reports. Resist this request as much as possible, although compromise may be necessary for initial buy-in. In the long run, staff will adjust to the increased visibility of their reports, and an open communication channel will allow cross-fertilization of ideas throughout the company.

Beyond the internal usefulness, businesses that encourage intranet blogging can begin to mine the native talent looking for candidate external bloggers. The value proposition of carefully selected public bloggers is becoming more obvious as marketing objectives move beyond awareness towards engagement and relationship building activities.

What is your business doing with intranet-based blogs? What do you *wish* they were doing? Send me an email at collaborblabber@maximumspring.com

11:04:19 AM    
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AOL, the market giant of consumer-based instant messaging, just released AIM Pro for the business user market. The IM tool enables chat, voice and video communication as well as desktop sharing between registered users. And, like the original consumer version, it's free.

Many business users have already adopted IM as part of their personal communication suite, but often against the advice of corporate information systems departments. IS managers have pointed to well-documented security issues including viruses and lack of encryption for sensitive business conversations. The new version claims to plug these holes with SSL encryption and automatic virus scanning, while appealing to business users' convenience demands by integrating with Microsoft Outlook's email and calendar functionality, and WebEx's collaboration tools.

According to the July 19, 2006 article in Red Herring, "AOL AIMs at Corporate Crowd",

"With the launch of AIM Pro, AOL is positioning itself to give Microsoft’s soon-to-be-released Office Live a run for its money. AOL also said that in the future a more robust, paid version would rival Microsoft Live Communications Server and IBM’s Lotus Sametime. "

Will this be the tool that finally brings down the barriers to real-time collaboration in the enterprise? IS will have to respond to the grass roots demand from business users with a better answer than "we don't have enough bandwidth".

4:39:16 PM    
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Are you a knowledge bridger? That's someone who takes expertise from one field and applies it to solve a problem in a completely different field, thereby creating a breakthrough product or service. Wharton's David Hsu and National University of Singaporee's Kwanghua Lim looked at knowledge bridging in biotech startups and concluded that among the possible strategies to increase knowledge bridging in an organization, the trick was simply to "hire the right people and give them the freedom to follow their curiosity".

If it were only that easy. Just look at the first part, "hire the right people". What would the job posting on Monster look like? And as with any hire, how do you know that you've hired a solid performer rather than an impressive interview performance? Then there's that pesky problem: superstars behaving badly. Will your latest talent turn into a disruptive prima dona? Then there's the availability issue. If you are lucky enough to find the right person, can you win them away from competing job offers? If you "win" them over now, how do you keep them?

These are central issues for the knowledge economy. One approach is to grow your own superstars. Give them resources and opportunity to succeed individually and also take steps to open your corporate culture. Ideas include creating wide transparency across the enterprise; encouraging cross-training, continuing education, and sabbaticals; encourage a sense of community in both physical spaces and electronic ones (via today's collaboration and social software); make sure your innovation process is the best possible; and of course be ready to embrace your distributed knowledge bridgers, wherever they may live or travel.

You can even look for inspiration by being a knowledge bridger... take, for example, Management by Baseball.

4:22:53 PM    
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