Endless Knots

Meet Jeffrey Walker

I've blogged before about the special gifts that come uninvited to speakers. People, strangers, all perfect in their own ways, say outrageously nice things, tell you their stories, say they know you from some chapter in your life where their characters may not have been as well-portrayed to you.

So it was that when Jeffrey Walker introduced himself at the Enterprise 2.0 conference this past June, said he knew us from when we consulted to Index Systems, a long-gone but then high-end consultancy based in Cambridge, Mass, I, reading his nametag, exuberantly replied, "We have to talk!"

Jeffrey is President of Atlassian Software, the Australian company that makes Confluence, a sleek wiki product that simplifies collaboration. We were introduced to Confluence through a client using our virtual team methodology; within days, that company's clever engineers had adapted our People-Purpose-Links-Time model to their wiki.

As things worked out, it took a few months before we scheduled our call but, during that time, Jeffrey sent an insightful note about his views of the conference with a good list of +/- (I was on the Advisory Board), invited me to be "LinkedIn" to him, and observed that I hadn't joined Facebook (corrected as of 48 hours ago). This morning I received his acknowledgment as his "friend" on Facebook (if you haven't joined, this could sound ridiculously hokey but there is something very compelling here, still to be understood by moi)...and so I checked out his "wall." There I noticed a number of notes where people were wishing him a speedy recovery and such...which caused me to click through to his blog where I discovered that Jeffrey has been blogging about his cancer, an arcane form, his recent surgery following what appeared to be a recurrence (fortunately benign), and the tremendous energy he has brought to recovery, i.e. just post-op, he asked the nurses where the hospital gym was, they looked at him as if he were mad, and long-short, he ended up with a treadmill in his hospital room.

Jeffrey is also a painter and a jazz musician. He lists Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" as his fave all-time album, which gives us common cause right there, and, business interests aside, I am very happy to have made his acquaintance. You will be too.

PS: His blog, radiowalker, is must-reading for those interested in Web 2.0.

"Google Docs in Plain English"

Google hardly needs my help in promotion but I'm more than happy to raise the flag again for my new best friends at CommonCraft. Got an email today from Lee LeFever, who, with Sachi LeFever, is cranking out the very clear and useful little videos on Web 2.0-y type stuff. This one is Google Docs in Plain English, adding to RSS in Plain English, Wikis in Plain English, and Social Bookmarking in Plain English.

Never heard of Google Docs? I hadn't until about nine months ago when I found myself on a planning call for Enterprise 2.0. A woman for whom I have the deepest respect - and whom I would call first if I started to think I'd completely lost my way in the 2.0-world - said, "Everyone's sending Google Docs around." They are/were? I was, as usual, out of it. Turns out that Google has cracked the collaboration nut, which, of course, has been cracked so many times before, but they made it even easier to share docs (i.e. real documents, spreadsheets, and such not) on the web.  It's an alternative to expensive enterprise knowledge management systems (oops, I recently was told that knowledge management is passe as a term) or home-cooking of web sites for document sharing.

What CommonCraft has done is to explain Google's solution, yet again "in plain English." Very well done, once more, Lee and Sachi. And by all means, keep churning out this stuff. Nothing I've seen in years has been this concise and useful. (Google Docs Team was the client for this so thanks to you guys too for commissioning these great conceptual artists.)

And, IT, HR, and Communication departments: Hire them!

Setting your IT budget? Consider this...

This one's about two things: the arcane topic of how IT budgets are set AND how this might affect virtual teams, collaboration, and such not.

The email from a colleague at a large technology company prompted a bit of conversation late last week here on ye olde blogge: In its efforts to cut costs, this company may be rounding up all its telecommuters and insisting that they work only from the office - even though 2/3 of them work with people in remote locations (like Asia, for example, while these folks are in, say, Kentucky or Massachusetts).

In possibly an unrelated connection, It turns out that this company sets its IT budget as a percentage of revenue. When revenue falls, IT budget shrinks. It would appear that someone thinks this will cost less.

Is this good business? I've been asking what others think, especially since this is the time of year when organizations start planning their IT budgets, which typically are set by Fall (for organizations operating on a calendar year, that is).

I just got off the phone with Bob Perrin, who heads Magellan Associates, a global management consulting firm. "This has nothing to do with telecommuting and costs will only increase by bringing people back in-house. Lights, electricity, and office space versus hoteling?" No contest, says Bob. A former CIO himself, Bob says that setting IT budgets as a percentage of revenue "is not a very popular approach." Many organizations instead choose a zero-cost increase regardless of revenue then add budget based on what needs to be done.

So for those of you reading who don't run organizations or worry about things like this, this kind of stuff is very important. It means that you either receive a laptop or wait months - as has happened with one of our clients. There, existing employees have had to wait out a budget freeze. Meanwhile new employees automatically receive laptops. Which doesn't sound all that important unless you've got people on teams that need to have conference calls at 5 AM because that's the only time their colleagues halfway around the world are at work. You need a laptop for this. Just one small example (but not small to the laptop-hungry employees).

Organizations: regard IT as strategic not perfunctory. Who does your CIO or CTO report to? Another topic but the answer to that question speaks to the same concerns about the role IT plays in making work easier and more productive.

90% people (smiling, hearing), 10% technology (video in this case)

Catherine Shinners is an anthropologist working as a marketing and strategy consultant who understands technology. We met at Enterprise 2.0, which I've blogged here and others have blogged here.

Shortly after the conference, I received this nice note from Catherine. Here she focuses on the "90% People, 10% Technology" session that I ran. She points to the affective/emotional elements of the presentations--the smile of one presenter (Milton Chen, on screen), the profound hearing loss of another (Jeff Stamps, third from right). Also here from right me, Bill Ives, Tom Witkin, Dan Somers, photo from Michael Sampson, who took verbatim notes.

Excerpted here with Catherine's permission. Thanks!

Jessica,

I thought you and Jeff brought a great energy to the conference and had a few impressions to note in this brief email for now.

Jeffrey's personal story about how he best collaborates and the effective way he collaborated with the young man in India was communicated in such a direct, personal way, and was very moving to me and I'm sure the rest of the audience.

Milton Chen's VSee demo was astonishing in its simplicity and impact, and he has, what must be the most disarming smile ever....when is a smile a smile?  When Milton is communicating his passion.

The sessions you crafted that focused on how real people do real things with the tools and technologies were so relevant to an audience wanting to know how to make it really happen.  It was an important balance to a conference that highlights technology.

Best regards
Catherine Shinners
Merced Group
650-704-38898
www.mercedgroup.com

Conferring on the enterprise

*If you heard my email promise at Enterprise 2.0 Town Hall, please reply to this post.

Write books, go to conferences. One follows the other. Twenty-five years ago exactly, Doubleday published  Jeff Stamps' and my Networking: The First Report and Directory. Shortly, we spoke at World Future Society--an explosion of people and ideas, a moment when I felt in exactly the right place and that unexpected things would come to pass. They did.

Enterprise 2.0, just in Boston, feels the same. Attending: Inventors, entrepreneurs young and old, educators, thinkers, analysts, scientists, executives all passionate about figuring how to bring organizations across the Great Plains of the Internet. I'm staring at a two-inch pile of business cards hurled my way (and remembering a crazy promise I made in the final session*).

What stands out:

David Weinberger opening with an old-time slide show (disguised as Powerpoint). He flashed an interesting picture (two Fiats driving through an Italian toll booth--together), said something clever (which I can't remember now.) My mind does keep tripping over this: "a conversation among strangers." How many of these have you had today? Something about very thin lines that connect people, these pixels that allow us to know one another in a different way. The name is not the thing; the e-person is not me, but both are parts.

John Abele, founder of Boston Scientific, about creating a culture of trust, in a small workshop called "Group Intelligence."

In the same workshop, learning that IBM has a voicemail system that allows people to dial in to conference calls and announce their arrival all by pressing 1. Optimized for conf calls while driving, it seems, which worries me. I disapprove. But I do approve of their new product, Effective Meetings, that puts everyone on a conference call in a seat at a virtual conference table, points to the person who's speaking. Next up, IBM? Please build the "behaviors" for good conference into the product too...easy peasy.

A conversation with Grier Graham of TechDirt about the Enterprise Irregulars, their blogs so well-read that companies have invited them in. One great story: a company invited the bloggers to a big event, along with traditional media. Even gave the bloggers a section in the Press Room, their own seats and outlets. Then the company handed each their "time slots" for interviewing the company's executives, separately. No, no! the bloggers protesteth! We want to work together, talk about what we're hearing, write our own posts, then link to each other's blogs. The company was dumbfounded. This is the new journalism.

Bumping into the same woman in the ladies' room the first time I visited, the last, and several times in between. Conferences cause strange synchronizations (like what happens to girls in dorms with periods).

Engineers Sujatha Bodapathi of ProdexNet and AssetPulse and Carole Boudinet of Volvo IT explaining their technical approach to collaboration: First, culture.

Beginning each session where I had the mike by asking people to stand, one-by-one, say their names loud, say where they're from. (Fact: Even for 100 or so people, this only takes a couple of minutes, brings everyone's voice into the room.)

They were from the Supreme Court, CIA, Ford, Sun, Microsoft, the Taiwan government, a zillion venture capital firms, SAP, Cisco, Fidelity, Reuters, and a google of start-ups, with very hip names like Comotiv and CoreMedia and BrightCom.

And there were a lot of bloggers there, too. I can't guarantee these guys were blogging precisely -- maybe they were teleporting around Second Life -- but everywhere I looked there were people with laptops, tapping away. Separately, I'll post a buncha links to conference blogs.

And, finally, for all those who translated "network" into many languages for our keynote, thanks. I read off the word in Swedish, Afrikaans, Russian, German, Norwegian, Japanese and Thai, all the same with slightly different accents, simply "network" all around the world.

From left: Carole Boudinet, Volvo IT, Jen Pahlka and Steve Wylie from CMP

Thanks, CMP. A good time was had by all.

*Crazy promise: to email everyone who handed me a biz card.

Reports from Enterprise 2.0

The Enterprise 2.0 conference here in Boston is going strong, with great attendance. Michael Sampson has been blogging up a storm - see his notes on Jeff Stamps' and my keynote today. And here are his  notes on Reports from the Frontier, the workshop we ran today with Sujatha Bodapathi from ProdexNet and Carole Boudinet from Volvo IT. Thanks, Michael, for all the press!