Adventures in home working

This looks like an excellent group for people like me, working within a large enterprise, providing advice and solutions to large enterprises and trying to manage the disruptive enterprise 2.0, web 2.0 disruptive wave of change - while keeping our business and their’s running and profitable.

The mandate of the group:

The goal is to have a private forum for people inside companies to join virtual forces in driving Enterprise 2.0 into the mainstream. What makes this group different is that we will work to bring in experts to answer key topics and foster conversation. It is not a passive community.

Dave Pollard has a typically excellent post contrasting Knowledge Management 1.0 (which I remember being pushed at me, but thankfully resisted) and KM 2.0 that’s been inspired by the Internet and web 2.

I have two thoughts worth noting:

1. Things that work at Internet scale don’t always translate to the enterprise
2. Dave’s post doesn’t seem to put much emphasis on the information lifecycle, for example
1. blogs are a great way of narrating your work to improve ad-hoc collaboration between your known and unknown community of interest. 
2. However at some point information needs to be refined by collaborative effort and then maintained by other people (the original creators move on or loose interest) and wiki’s are better for that.

Having read Tom’s article where’s the working in social networking and Charlene Li’s counterpoint on the business value of social networking I’m still a bit torn.

I think my conclusion is that whilst I definitely see the value in inter-enterprise social networking,  I don’t see the technologies that provide it as an enterprise solution, I see them as a personal complement to an enterprise solution. 

For me an enterprise social networking solution can tap into so much extra information, that Facebook will never see,  that will enhance the networking experience, including:

1. Formal and harvested expertise information
2. HR information
3. Contact information
4. Formal hierarchy information
5. Business applications
6. Presence and real-time collaboration services
7. Personal and enterprise knowledge
8. Enterprise Search
9. etc

That’s not to say that inter-enterprise social networking solutions like Facebook and LinkedIn don’t have a role - they do - but just as my social network is personal, so is my Social networking technology provider.  That said I can certainly see that some content from my enterprise environment might be delivered on my Facebook page (just like Twitter updates are today) and vice-versa.

I can also definitely see some new social networking scenarios being very important to business, like this one that Charlene mentions:

Here’s an example – LinkedIn described to me a new social application that would show events in your industry that are coming up – and who in your network is going to them. It will also show you people in that city that you could connect with. So if you know that colleagues, suppliers, partners, funders, customers, etc. are going to be gathering, you’re going to want to be there too.

I had a good laugh at this article in Wired where Seth describes how the search for increased productivity can easily become a goal in itself, in fact dwarfing actually doing real work.  This snip tells it all:

When my fiance came home from work each evening, we’d ask each other how our respective days had gone. She’d describe the small frustrations and victories that punctuate office life. I’d say something along the lines of “Today I spent three and a half hours organizing my Google Bookmarks” or “You’d be amazed at what you can turn up if you play around with Google US Government Search.” Then we’d both laugh. It took a couple of weeks before I finally noticed the concern in her eyes. Then she asked: “What else did you do?”

That’s when I realized I wasn’t actually accomplishing anything. My campaign to increase productivity had become yet another distraction — and a significant one

It’s a big issue, sites like LifeHacker (and so many others) provide a constant stream of new tips and tools to improve your productivity, but they become an end in themselves.  Part of my job is to work through the hype and make recommendations to enterprises on how to improve personal productivity so I’m in an even worse situation,  I’m paid to try out all of this stuff. 

Still I have a real job as well so I have to work hard at finding balance, but tweaking is so much fun!

Within CSC we have recently been seeing a strong trend towards consumerization of IT with many tech savvy employees now pushing for control over their work IT, especially their desktop PCs, collaboration and personal productivity tools.  A few years ago these desktops were locked down business tools, now users are happily tweaking away and managing them themselves. 

Certainly they are happier - everyone likes control (at least when things are working) - but are they more effective?  Our current focus is on finding the sweet spot:

1. Giving people enough control to allow them to innovate and tweak to suit their personality and skill level
2. Making it easy to fix things when they go wrong, a bit of - protect people from themselves
3. Making their environments transparently secure
4. Making it easy to do the right thing, and find out what the “right thing is”

Hopefully avoiding Seth’s situation:

Thanks, Google. You’ve turned me into the most efficient time-waster ever

I’m a user of Web 2.0 applications and on the whole I find them great.  However although I know almost nothing about the current technologies involved used in their development, although I’ve become increasingly nervous about their complexity.  Then I listened to a very scary talk by Rasmus Lerdorf who invented PHP and now works for Yahoo.  Rasmus explained some of the security issues associated with modern JavaScript dependent web sites.  Rasmus concluded that it’s essentially impossible to ensure that the web is a secure place to work and he himself for example uses two browsers, one for personal work (buying, selling, banking etc) and one for everything else.   He mentioned IBM’s web site on Cross Site Scripting pointing out that it was in fact vulnerable to Cross Site Scripting! 

He went further saying that he had developed a scanning tool that looked for web sites that were vulnerable to various attacks but couldn’t release it because he found that almost every site on the web was vulnerable.  He didn’t want to be responsible for bring down the whole Internet.

I finished listening to this talk a very worried man, but the worry faded over time, until today I read this article on the Google Android initiative which included the following statements:

“Web 2.0″ has to be the worst programming environment to ever achieve wide popularity. It is incredibly buggy, poorly standardized, slow, and basically broken in every imaginable way. So it is rather difficult to see its very real virtues.

and

“Web 2.0,” which is basically a collection of random unspecified features written by 23-year-old goth acidheads at Netscape in 1995, cannot even begin to solve the kinds of application problems that an Android Java application can solve. And the Web 2.0 platform is mature. You can slap layers on it, but the standard is unfixable and unimprovable.

Worse, every comment agreed with the analysis!  Now I suppose I should commit some real effort into exploring the reality of these risks. 

Only last week I was looking through the reliability stats for my PCs and noticed that web browsers (IE, Maxthon and Firefox) that I use were by far the least reliable applications that I use, doesn’t fill me with confidence as I depend more and more on these increasingly complex applications.