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  • A freelancer view on tech trends

    GULP, a german platform bringing together IT projects and freelancers, took a survey on the latest tech trends according to Gartner.

    You can view the results over at their blog in German, IT project managers (dark blue) and freelancers (light blue) were asked to qualify each trend as a bubble or serious technology. The answer “bubble“ is always above, serious technology below.

    You see a clear positive statement towards Desktop virtualizing, Unified Communications and Business Intelligence. Mashups and Enterprise 2.0 are seen as bubble.
    So the result matches the well known attitude in conservative IT departments.

    Convincing the IT is still an issue and more Enterprise 2.0 examples with a clear ROI are welcome.

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    Internet Manifesto

    This week, several german journalists released the Internet Manifesto, seventeen Statements on modern journalism.

    The Manifesto is well known on the german blogosphere, but I can’t tell if it made it’s way out to the international audience.
    So I’ll go ahead and have a look, if those declarations go along with Enterprise 2.0.

    1. The Internet is different.

    It produces different public spheres, different terms of trade and different cultural skills. The media must adapt their work methods to today’s technological reality instead of ignoring or challenging it. It is their duty to develop the best possible form of journalism based on the available technology. This includes new journalistic products and methods.

    This affects the communication with customers as well as the collaboration of employees, but it’s one of the fundamentals of E2.0.

    2. The Internet is a pocket-sized media empire.

    The web rearranges existing media structures by transcending their former boundaries and oligopolies. The publication and dissemination of media contents are no longer tied to heavy investments. Journalism’s self-conception is—fortunately—being cured of its gatekeeping function. All that remains is the journalistic quality through which journalism distinguishes itself from mere publication.

    I wouldn’t speak of an empire within a company, but several gatekeepers will vanish.

    3. The Internet is our society is the Internet.

    Web-based platforms like social networks, Wikipedia or YouTube have become a part of everyday life for the majority of people in the western world. They are as accessible as the telephone or television. If media companies want to continue to exist, they must understand the lifeworld of today’s users and embrace their forms of communication. This includes basic forms of social communication: listening and responding, also known as dialog.

    Any consultant would like to see E2.0 a part of everyday work, but in most environments we’re far away from that.

    4. The freedom of the Internet is inviolable.

    The Internet’s open architecture constitutes the basic IT law of a society which communicates digitally and, consequently, of journalism. It may not be modified for the sake of protecting the special commercial or political interests often hidden behind the pretense of public interest. Regardless of how it is done, blocking access to the Internet endangers the free flow of information and corrupts our fundamental right to a self-determined level of information.

    Ask your local IT on that point. But as soon as you get out to your customers or partners, keep it in mind.

    5. The Internet is the victory of information.

    Due to inadequate technology, media companies, research centers, public institutions and other organizations compiled and classified the world’s information up to now. Today every citizen can set up her own personal news filter while search engines tap into wealths of information of a magnitude never before known. Individuals can now inform themselves better than ever.

    Yes, free the information within your company. But to be honest, there’ll always be some figures you don’t want to expose to all.

    6. The Internet changes improves journalism.

    Through the Internet, journalism can fulfill its social-educational role in a new way. This includes presenting information as an ever-changing, continual process; the forfeiture of print media’s inalterability is a benefit. Those who want to survive in this new world of information need a new idealism, new journalistic ideas and a sense of pleasure in exploiting this new potential.

    Although I wouldn’t name it journalism, Enterprise 2.0 might change the way you deal with agendas, protocols and reports. And as far as I have seen, in a very positive way.

    7. The net requires networking.

    Links are connections. We know each other through links. Those who do not use them exclude themselves from social discourse. This also holds for the websites of traditional media companies.

    Collaboration requires networking. So great we have the net.

    8. Links reward, citations adorn.

    Search engines and aggregators facilitate quality journalism: they boost the findability of outstanding content over a long-term basis and are thus an integral part of the new, networked public sphere. References through links and citations—especially including those made without any consent or even remuneration of the originator—make the very culture of networked social discourse possible in the first place. They are by all means worthy of protection.

    And they build up your professional reputation.

    9. The Internet is the new venue for political discourse.

    Democracy thrives on participation and freedom of information. Transferring the political discussion from traditional media to the Internet and expanding on this discussion by involving the active participation of the public is one of journalism’s new tasks.

    That one misses out. At least in Germany, a political discourse isn’t something you want in your company.

    10. Today’s freedom of the press means freedom of opinion.

    Article 5 of the German Constitution does not comprise protective rights for professions or technically traditional business models. The Internet overrides the technological boundaries between the amateur and professional. This is why the privilege of freedom of the press must hold for anyone who can contribute to the fulfillment of journalistic duties. Qualitatively speaking, no differentiation should be made between paid and unpaid journalism, but rather, between good and poor journalism.

    At least the customer service will open up, but imho press releases will stay for a long time.

    11. More is more – there is no such thing as too much information.

    Once upon a time, institutions such as the church prioritized power over personal awareness and warned of an unsifted flood of information when the letterpress was invented. On the other hand were the pamphleteers, encyclopaedists and journalists who proved that more information leads to more freedom, both for the individual as well as society as a whole. To this day, nothing has changed in this respect.

    You’ll need intelligent filters, but every bit of information is worth something.

    12. Tradition is not a business model.

    Money can be made on the Internet with journalistic content. There are many examples of this today already. Yet because the Internet is fiercely competitive, business models have to be adapted to the structure of the net. No one should try to abscond from this essential adaptation through policy-making geared to preserving the status quo. Journalism needs open competition for the best refinancing solutions on the net, along with the courage to invest in the multifaceted implementation of these solutions.

    I think, this depends on your environment. Even in Social Media you can keep traditions up, if your culture is ok with it.

    13. Copyright becomes a civic duty on the Internet.

    Copyright is a cornerstone of information organization on the Internet. Originators’ rights to decide on the type and scope of dissemination of their contents are also valid on the net. At the same time, copyright may not be abused as a lever to safeguard obsolete supply mechanisms and shut out new distribution models or license schemes. Ownership entails obligations.

    This is a tricky one, I’ll pass out.

    14. The Internet has many currencies.

    Journalistic online services financed through adverts offer content in exchange for a pull effect. A reader’s, viewer’s or listener’s time is valuable. In the industry of journalism, this correlation has always been one of the fundamental tenets of financing. Other forms of refinancing which are journalistically justifiable need to be forged and tested.
    See Dan Pink and Dan Ariely on that one.

    15. What’s on the net stays on the net.

    The Internet is lifting journalism to a new qualitative level. Online, text, sound and images no longer have to be transient. They remain retrievable, thus building an archive of contemporary history. Journalism must take the development of information, its interpretation and errors into account, i.e., it must admit its mistakes and correct them in a transparent manner.
    Again, ask your local IT for intranet issues. But the talk about you is out there.

    16. Quality remains the most important quality.

    The Internet debunks homogenous bulk goods. Only those who are outstanding, credible and exceptional will gain a steady following in the long run. Users’ demands have increased. Journalism must fulfill them and abide by its own frequently formulated principles.

    This applies to all you products, not only to the communication.

    17. All for all.

    The web constitutes an infrastructure for social exchange superior to that of 20th century mass media: When in doubt, the “generation Wikipedia” is capable of appraising the credibility of a source, tracking news back to its original source, researching it, checking it and assessing it—alone or as part of a group effort. Journalists who snub this and are unwilling to respect these skills are not taken seriously by these Internet users. Rightly so. The Internet makes it possible to communicate directly with those once known as recipients—readers, listeners and viewers—and to take advantage of their knowledge. Not the journalists who know it all are in demand, but those who communicate and investigate.

    I would assume that the pressure of rechecking and validating even goes down in comparison to Email-hell.

    To sum it up, the manifesto was written with journalism in mind and doesn’t cover all changes due to internet technology.
    Nevertheless, the seventeen declarations are worth a look and widely fit for other markets.

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    Experts profile: Mark Masterson

    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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    Experts profile: Susan Scrupski

    1.) What is your name?

    Susan Scrupski

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

    have been tracking the evolving sector in Enterprise 2.0 since 2006. I am primarily interested in the adoption challenges of Enterprise 2.0 in large organizations. I am very interested in products and platforms in the space, and I’ve launched the world’s first private customer community for early adoption at www.20adoptioncouncil.com.

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

    I was first drawn to tracking the SaaS market, but then veered toward the Enterprise 2.0 sector.

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

    It’s the introduction of social and collaborative principles to the large organization. It involves the use of certain technologies, but is centered more squarely on a profound change in accepted organizational behavior and a philosophical reinvention of work.

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

    Increased employee loyalty, merit-based recognition, greater agility to leverage human potential, lower IT costs, faster results, improved decision-making.

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

    Corporate politics, fear of loss of control, corporate-wide strategic vision for Enterprise 2.0, silos, security, governance.

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

    Community organizer, Agent provocateur, Friend.

    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 sister-in-spirit?

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    Andrew McAfee on Enterprise 2.0

    As Sebastian Schäfer completed my comparison of different Social Software Categorizations with an interesting model by Andrew McAfee, I’d like to share a crash course on Enterprise 2.0.
    The video is already around for a few weeks, but Mattias Schwenk reposted it today. It contains the concept of the Enterprise 2.0 Bullseye, a look on social software tools strictly through the ties between people.

    I just didn’t get to embed the video, so please go and see it on youtube in HD-glory and have a nice weekend.

    Update


    YouTube Direkt

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    Social Software Categories

    When it comes to Social Software in the Enterprise the full suite solutions are on their way. See the last Gartner Magic Quadrant for Social Software for details and vendors.
    As the pure products vanish and build up on functionality, it might be worth a look to some general categorizations of social software. So we won’t have to talk about “kind of a blog with wiki functionality” or something similar.
    Gartner uses the dimensions “ability to execute” and “completeness of vision” in the Magic Quadrant which are great for vendors or products, but not for functionality in general.

    A common approach in germany builds upon a classification system for CSCW-Systems. (Teufel, 1995)
    The first adoption for Social Software by Schmidt focused on the three funtions Informationmanagement, Identitymanagement and Connectionmanagement.
    Social Software Triangle by Schmidt
    In an improved version by Koch and Richter (Cooperation Systems Center Munich (german), Bundeswehr University Munich) changed the connection part to communication and added the loose connections to the identitymanagement. You might think of all your quiet facebook friends here.
    Social Software Triangle by Koch/Richter

    Niall Cook has a totally different Matrix, the 4C’s as in his book Enterprise 2.0 book.
    Social Software 4C
    I merged two diagrams to get this one, so some software examples aren’t in here. I’m not confident with this classification as there are some well known apps split up across the matrix, i.e. Tagging and Social Bookmarking. In the original book you’ll find more examples.
    Cook mentions cooperation and collaboration, two points which misses out on both triangles.

    Another idea is a draft by Joachim Niemeier in a german slideshare presentation.
    Social Software Quadrant
    Personally I like the quadrant best, but I would add some modifications to it. As long as my ideas on this are not fully set, I prefer even more inspiration.

    So did I miss out some well known ideas?

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    E 2.0 links

    Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT at Facebook