1.) What is your name?

Mark Masterson

2.) Who are you and what are you doing?

I’m an enterprise architect with CSC, and a blogger. I’ve worked as a parasite of the financial services industry in Frankfurt and London for the last 20 years. I’ve spent the last two years researching, and working with clients of all sizes on cloud computing, SaaS and Enterprise 2.0. Other research interests and development experience are focused on BPM and distributed systems in enterprisey organisations, as well as systems management and performance engineering. In a previous life, I was a UNIX sys admin, and have the scars to prove it. I also jumped out of helicopters, and drove trucks full of missiles around in the dark whilst going entirely too fast in the first Gulf War. I am a founding member of the 2.0 Adoption Council.

3.) How did you get to the E2.0 topic?

I started working for CSC, and discovered that they needed it. Seriously. In 2006, almost immediately after joining CSC, I blogged about the terrible state of things there, from my perspective. Mere days after that, in the process of researching what might be done about that, I stumbled across the term “Enterprise 2.0″ for the first time, and wrote a slightly snarky post titled “OMG, it’s Enterprise 2.0!“. In that post, I concluded by saying

“In any case; to the Woodrow’s, Phil Wainewright’s and Susan Scrupski’s of the world, here’s my message to you: I’m CSC, I get it, and I’m working on it. Watch this space.”

Now, in late 2009, I am helping to lead an initiative at CSC to roll out Jive’s SBS platform to all 92k employees, and I am convinced that it is already transforming the company.

4.) What is your understanding of the core concept of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

It’s about enabling collaboration, which itself is dependent on the visibility of the social graph and structural holes within it and the information that has value to the organisation, as well as sophisticated and low-barrier means of communicating about these things. There is a host of enabling technologies, but in my view it’s about what they get used to do. It may also be about the emergence of a new form of organising people and systems to do work, but the jury will be out on that one for quite awhile yet.

5.) What are the main potentials of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

It enables more efficient, functionally rich business interactions, at a lower cost. It may also help free the battery humans.

6.) What are the main challenges, threads and issues of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

Fear of change, as with any significant, transformational event. I am also deeply concerned about people underestimating its impact — something I think that happens largely because they can’t see the forest for the trees. At CSC, we’ve seen things like the outsourcing team in Viet Nam coming into direct contact with fierce debate between a cadre of green Australians and a cadre of climate change sceptics in our Texas offices. These sorts of cultural collisions are new — not in their nature, of course, but in their scope and speed. We aren’t well prepared for that.

7.) Please give us three tags that describe your person and work best?

Troublemaker, thinker, sexy (the latter being a placeholder for the attribute “tends to crack completely inappropriate jokes”).

8.) Please give us three links to articles/contributions that describe your views best?

9.) Please give us three names of colleagues that you would refer to as siblings-in-spirit?

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