Enterprise Initiatives

I am a huge fan of social software, especially when it comes to networking with experts in technology. Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that I am a fanatic NY Giants fan who travels from Florida to hostile stadiums in places like Dallas and Pittsburgh to watch my beloved GMen go to battle. Last week, Jordan Haberfield, an expert at finding and placing talented SOA technicians at major corporations, asked me about a wager on the game between the Giants and his favorite team, the sell proclaimed America's Team and arch rival Dallas Cowboys. My normal bet with friends is for lunch or a few beers. Since Jordan is in New Jersey and I am in Florida, that bet did not make sense. What did make sense was betting that the loser would have to post a congrats on his blog.

Well, that was like taking candy from a baby as the Giants put a thumping on the depleted and heartless Cowpokes. To see Jordan pay his debts, go to his website called Agile Elephant. Jordan did manage to find a picture of one of the few positive plays that his Cowboys had in the game. My favorite Cowboy moment is still the Terrell Owens "My Quarterback" crying session after the Giants knocked the 'Boys out of the playoffs last year.



So add wagers to your list of things you can do with social software. It's the gift that keeps on giving and is searchable on Google!

I have spent thirteen years in the loyalty marketing industry and have seen some amazingly complex algorithms for targeting consumers based on all kinds of criteria. There are lost shoppers, top shoppers, brand switchers, brand loyals, and various other categories of consumers that brand managers try to reach out and communicate to. Social media is changing the way that brand managers need to think. Check out this interesting presentation I stumbled upon on Slideshare today.

What is interesting is that consumers are in total control of when and how they receive advertisements and incentives. We have Tivo to fast forward past commercials, popup blockers to block adds, and we have the power to choose not to go to web sites covered with advertising. So now, brand managers must listen to their consumers and coexist within their networks. This is changing how we view loyalty. Brand managers need to reach out to social networks that have a large following of loyal community members. If they can get a well known person within a social network interested in their brand, many others will follow. When people like popular blogger Robert Scoble talk about a product or service it takes on a viral effect. When Scoble and the folks at Techcrunch started slamming Twitter and talking up Friendfeed when Twitter was crashing several times a day, huge numbers of loyal community members followed. Some of these popular bloggers have as much of an impact as a product review in the New York Times.

So what does this mean for brand managers? Well it means they need to pay attention to a new kind of loyalty marketing. I call it social loyalty. No longer do the brand managers have a captive audience where they can spoon feed us whatever message they want. Now they have to cater to consumers, especially the popular leaders within social networks. The game is changing and the companies that are not paying attention are going get left behind.

I know the answer to this question. Because we always have. Can we put aside our age old habits of being herded into corporate offices like cattle to sit in cubes (I call them coffins) and try to find some piece and quiet so we can create that next document, model the next design, code the next service, or develop the next prototype? Speaking of old habits, why must our two main sources of collaboration be meetings and email? Many meetings are either about status or some person needs some information to solve a problem and invites everybody under the sun to help. Most of these types of meetings add value to very few people in the meeting at the expense of the others. Isn't it time for a change? As for email, nobody has a better story about ditching email then IBM's Luis Suarez.

Here are a few reasons why I feel that I am much more productive working remotely then at the office:

1. Fewer distractions
2. Fewer meetings
3. More tools
4. More accountability
5. No hour lunches
6. Better work/life balance

Let's discuss each one of these points in more detail:

Fewer Distractions
At the office, people are more willing to interrupt you because they can easily just walk up and ask you a question since they "know where you live". Just walking to get a cup of coffee can turn into a handful of hallway conversations, some work related, some not. When working remotely, people tend to reach out to you only after they have tried to actually find answers to their questions as opposed to just bugging the expert. Don't get me wrong, I love helping my fellow worker, but sometimes it is too easy to ask before people actually think.

Fewer Meetings
Less meetings does not equate to less collaboration. It means less scheduled interruptions. Now some meetings are necessary, but most meetings can be avoided if people were allowed to use collaboration tools to ask and answer questions. Instead of holding numerous meetings, I prefer to have ongoing conversations via some messaging tool (IM, chat, Twitter, etc.). If I really need to focus on a task I can mark myself as away. There are many interesting and free tools that I have been experimenting with that have virtual white boards, video conferencing, and chat all integrated into one platform. Google Groups is another way to set up a collaboration area for discussion threads, document sharing, and archiving.

More tools
Many corporations see tools like instant messaging, chat, Twitter, blogs, wikis and others as a security threat and block them. This is almost comical since everyone simply uses their phones to access these tools anyways. Wouldn't people be more productive using these tools on their computer then on their phone? (See my article called Security or Insecurity?) When you work remotely, you can use the tools of your choice to collaborate. Even if I was forced to use a locked down corporate laptop at home, I would fire up my own PC to get access to the tools I need to do my job.

More accountability
Some may disagree with me on this one. I believe that most worthy employees feel more obligated to focus and deliver because of the perception by management that working remotely allows people to screw off. I know that whenever I telecommuted, I sent my boss an email telling him what I expected to deliver and followed it with updates at the end of the day on what I accomplished. I felt privileged every time I worked from home and felt obligated to prove to management that I was providing value remotely.

No hour lunches
For me personally, a lunch break while working remotely, is the time it takes to get up from my desk, make a sandwich, and return to my desk (5 minutes). A lunch break at work is an escape from the daily grind at the office and usually takes an hour between the drive, ordering, getting served, getting the check, and driving back.

Better work/life balance
When I used to drive into the office every day, I would wake up at 6 to 6:30, catch up on my daily reading, and leave by 7-7:15am. Forty-five minutes and $10 of gas later, I would be at my desk by 8am. Typically I worked until 6-6:30pm and then spent another forty-five minutes and $10 in gas to get home. Now it is after 7pm. I have missed all of the kids sporting events and now its time to do help them with homework. Dinner fits somewhere in between and before you know it is after 9pm and you still have work to do before tomorrow. The cycle continues day in day out.

Now let's look at working remotely. I wake up around 7am. Catch up on my news and technology reading and start working by 8am. I work straight through until 6pm and am able to catch my kids soccer practice if I chose. We can get their homework done earlier, eat at a decent time, and still have time to play a game of Skip-O, tile rummy, or watch the Discovery Channel. Then, if I need to do more work after they go to bed, I am relaxed and feel like I am actually part of the family and not just part of their daily schedule. I also have a few more green backs in my pocket because I am not putting $75 in my tank every three days. Life is good!

Yes it can be done!
CIO.com is running a 3-part series on how a company named Chorus transformed their workforce to be entirely remote. If you look at the typical IT shop today, they are all leveraging some form of outsourcing, whether it is onshore, offshore, or both. In either case, there are a number of workers working remotely from some location other then where the IT shop is based. The irony is that these teams in other countries or in consulting firms within the states are all leveraging several of the tools that I mentioned above to effectively collaborate amongst themselves. I worked on a project recently where the consulting company had a few people onsite, some in Texas, Seattle, and Atlanta, and an offshore team in Macedonia. They were all productive from remote places across the globe. But mysteriously, telecommuting was frowned upon by the corporate culture. Don't figure! What message does that send to the employees of the company? Is it this message..."we trust our vendors to be professionals remotely, but not our own people...."?

Barriers for companies to embrace a remote environment
Having a handful of people working remotely is not a big deal. Mobilizing your workforce is. Part 2 and Part 3 of the CIO.com story about Chorus talks about the planning and the transition that they went through. Here are some of the barriers that I see that prevents companies from embracing remote work.

1. Perception and resistance to change
2. Requires capital and must be a priority project
3. Needs business justification
4. Requires good management and accountability

Perception/Resistance
Many people perceive that their employees just won't be productive away from the watchful eyes of their managers. For some people this may be true. Then again, why are you paying people that you can't trust? Other people just fear change or won't risk taking on any challenging project.

Capital and Priority
Like any other enterprise initiative, a project of this magnitude requires executive level support, a well thought out strategy and project plan, capital funds, and a high enough priority that the milestones can be achieved. Oh, and don't forget to address the human side of change.

Business Justification
If it is not good for the bottom line, then don't bother. That goes for any project these days. Whether the savings is in reduced leases, power consumption, reduced employee turnover, or whatever, you should never ask for capital without the appropriate justification. While you are at it, don't forget to collect metrics to show management at a later date that the investment was worth it.

Good Management and Accountability
To pull this off, you must work with human resources and put together a policy that clearly set expectations. These guidelines, often part of the employee handbook, should be signed by each person who will be working remotely. But the real key is management. If your management is not doing a good job of making their staff accountable today, good luck trying to make them accountable at home. Maybe the first question to ask is do I have the right management in place to pull this off?

And finally, once a company establishes a remote work force, here are some other advantages that they have.

1. Hiring - no longer constrained to local markets
2. Reduced travel expenses
3. Opportunity to sell real estate assets

Hiring
I realized through my recent experiments with social networking that the recruitment world is much bigger then the local market leads you to believe. With a remote force, I can hire people anywhere in the country and even in the world if I have the proper controls in place. This gives me access to the top talent in the world, not just the top talent in my city. Think about that!

Reduced Travel
A lot of travel is required to hold various meetings with teams that are dispersed across offices. With the proper collaboration tools including video conferencing, virtual whiteboards, and integrated voice/chat, many of these meetings can be performed online. There will still be times where it is critical to have face to face time, but many meetings can be held more cost effective via the Web.

Sell real estate
IBM did this a few years back. Here is a great article from their web site that discusses the benefits of a remote workforce. If a huge company like IBM can pull this off, then there is no reason why any other company cannot. Here are the benefits that IBM gets from mobilizing their workforce.

Productivity. Outfitting employees with mobile technology makes your business more productive because it enables employees to work from home, in transit and while visiting customers, business partners and satellite offices.

Recruitment. The ability to hire the best talent regardless of where they live can give you a leg up on competitors that still rely on a local workforce. And because most potential recruits perceive telecommuting as a benefit, this can provide a considerable advantage to your business by allowing you to fill jobs more quickly. In addition, the business becomes more efficient because lower turnover means less time spent training new employees.

Real-estate savings. With fewer people in the office, real estate expenditures and associated energy costs can potentially be reduced.

Remote computing can also help you avoid the disruption of a major move during a crucial time of growth when the business needs to focus on quality execution. A flexible workforce, often associated with the teleworking model, can also accommodate short-term spikes in business. This enables your business to add office space more judiciously rather than simply reacting to short-term demands.

Business continuity. You never know what’s going to keep your employees away from the office: inclement weather, flu or even traffic tie-ups. When employees have remote access to IT systems, they can continue working no matter what happens in or around your facility.

So what do you think? Is the cost of gas and the improvements in social software making mobile commuting more of a reality then a fantasy? Is your company thinking about this now? I'd love to hear your story.

Keeping the enterprise secure is a challenge these days. Security specialists are concerned with a variety of threats from external issues (worms, viruses, rootkits, identity theft, etc.) to internal issues (lost/stolen laptops, data breaches, voluntary or involuntary exposure of confidential information, etc.). Unfortunately, many IT shops look at security as a technology issue and forget to address the business side of security. Some shops lock down their enterprise to the point where they impact the business's ability to be successful. While researching this topic I came across an excellent abstract from the Software Engineering Institute written by Richard A. Caralli and William R. Wilson. This abstract is a must read.

What is the goal of an organization's security strategy?
Security experts must understand that everybody in the organization is their customer. Many IT shops act more like a dictatorship and continue to put policies and technologies in place that make IT a hindrance to the business. Caralli & Wilson remind us that...

..."the ultimate benefactor of the security activities that an organization undertakes should be the organization itself."

..."the industry’s affinity for technology-based solutions alienates the “business people” in the organization."

..."anything that impedes assets and processes from doing their jobs potentially derails the organization’s ability to be successful."

They suggest that the CSO (Chief Security Officer) reports to someone from the business. I don't disagree, however, if the IT department is business focused, I see no reason why the CSO can't report to the CIO. The same argument is often made for business analysts, project management, and even the Chief Architect. This is a direct result of IT becoming out of touch with the business and taking a technology first approach to all problems instead of a business first approach. The authors go on to say...

"Managing security in the context of the organization’s strategic drivers, provides both advantages and conflict. On the one hand, this approach ensures that the goals of security management are forged from and aligned with the high-level goals of the organization. On the other hand, the strategic drivers and needs of the organization are often in conflict with the actions required to ensure that assets and processes remain productive. In addition, as the organization is exposed to more complexity and uncertainty (because of the increasing use of technology and the pace at which the organization’s risk environment changes), keeping security activities and strategic drivers aligned becomes more difficult. In the end, finding the right balance between protecting the organization’s core assets and processes and enabling them to do their job becomes a challenge for security management—and a significant barrier to effectiveness."

Examples of IT security becoming a barrier
Security has similar issues as governance, standards, best practices, and enterprise architecture when the strategy is too technology focused. A great example is IT's resistance to adopt collaboration technologies like social networking, instant messaging, and even wireless access. Security professionals are often so insecure, that they lock down the enterprise to the point where they stifle innovation and productivity. All of the fears that I keep hearing related to collaboration technologies are the same fears I heard when companies where looking into providing Internet access years back. To me, it is the fear of the unknown. Instead of trying to live in the mainframe era of the 60's and 70's where everything was centrally controlled and nothing was acceptable unless it went through the all-powerful administrators, IT people need to accept the fact the world revolves around the business and not IT. We need to change our old ways of thinking and acknowledge that as technology continues to change at a rapid pace our strategies need to change with it.

How do we solve this problem?
Whether the CSO (or whatever the title of the security leader is) reports into the business or IT is not relevant to me.What is important is, this person must fully understand the overall business strategy and the related IT strategy. A too rigid security strategy can hinder IT from doing their jobs as much if not more then it can impact the business. The armies of people in IT building systems and keeping the lights on are customers of the security office as well. The security strategy should be one that is created with the collaboration of representatives in both the business and IT. Within IT, the strategy needs input from more then just security and infrastructure departments. Caralli & Wilson recommend...

"In pursuit of addressing the challenges noted herein, the first obstacle that an organization must confront is to determine what they are trying to accomplish with their security activities. In essence, the organization must ask what benefits they get from “doing security.” The organizational perspective is essential to determining these benefits and for setting appropriate targets for security."

"A resilient approach transforms the basic premise of security - that of locking down an asset so that it is free from harm—to one that positions security as a contributor to strengthening the organization’s ability to adapt to new risk environments and accomplish its mission. Aiming to make the organization more sensing, agile, and prepared provides a clearer purpose, direction, and context for security management. Looking beyond security (to resiliency) may provide the change in perspective that organizations need to balance security and risk management with the organization’s strategic drivers."

Next steps
If you are a business owner or a leader within IT, you should read the abstract and ask yourself, "is our security strategy just another mechanism for IT to say NO to its customers or is it keeping us secure while still allowing the enterprise to meet its goals". If it's the former, I suggest that you start a conversation with the leaders within company and take a fresh look at security. After all, Insecurity should not be the driver for your security strategy.

I want to share with you my personal experience with social software and how it changed my career for the better.

What is social software?
Social software is a subset of Web 2.0 that allows people to collaborate with other people over the web. Examples of social software are blogs, wikis, social networking sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.), instant messaging, chat, and a whole host of dynamic content sharing tools like YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and many others.

My Professional life before social software
Before I entered the social networking scene, a had a very small network. I had been at the same company since 1995 and did not do a good job of networking with people from previous jobs. In reality, I was basically an unknown entity outside of the walls of the building I worked in. Sure a few vendors and a few consulting firms knew me, but they knew me as a customer only. Over the years I felt the need to pursue opportunities elsewhere to broaden my experience from both a technology and business standpoint. The problem was, I didn't have a network. The only people who knew about my talents where people I worked with and I couldn't let them know I was looking. So for the past five years I applied for job after job through the old channels (job boards, classifieds, etc.). Being on the hiring side of table for so many years, I knew that my chances of my resume getting through HR were as good as hitting the lottery. So I started a journey of improving my credentials by enrolling in back to back Masters programs (Masters in IT and MBA). This made me a highly educated IT professional with no network.

Life after social networking
About a year and a half ago, I started blogging. I started out under a nickname to hide my identity so I could speak my mind without getting myself in trouble, hence the name MadGreek. I quickly found out that blogging provided a way for me to form a great network which is what my career needed. At the time I probably had 15-20 LinkedIn contacts which meant I was not getting any value from LinkedIn (I now have about 240). As I invested more of my personal time blogging, I started collaborating with talented architects, industry analysts, and various other technical IT folks from around the world.

Then I discovered Twitter. I had messed with Twitter for a short while a year ago and didn't see the value. Earlier this year my network, which is several hundred people now, were talking a lot about Twitter. So I tried it again. This time I had a great network to follow on Twitter. So I started following architects, analysts, bloggers, and various interesting people and people started following me. At the same time I started learning so much about IT trends and technologies that my company had no idea about. Through Twitter, I landed several public appearances. I have done podcasts, web interviews, presentations at Gartner and Zapthink events, you name it. All of the sudden, I became a known entity. That was my missing link.

Then I took the big step!
Then I did the unthinkable. I resigned from my job of 13 years even though I did not have a job to go to. Am I nuts? Not really. By reaching out to quality people in my network, I have started discussions about job opportunities with 5 different companies in the last two weeks. I get emails constantly from people in my network with opportunities like VP of architecture, SOA lead practitioner, enterprise architect, and various others. Unfortunately, many of these jobs are not in Florida and require me to move, but some are consulting and others are virtual. I don't even look at the job boards anymore because it is a total waste of time!

In the driver's seat
So now I am sitting in the driver's seat. I have successfully marketed my own personal brand through blogging and public appearances. I know a lot of people in the industry who know a lot of important people. I can now choose the best possible opportunity instead of grabbing the first available job that I can find. I can choose to do something that I have a lot of passion and energy for which is research technology and emerging trends and help people with their struggles in delivering enterprise initiatives. All of this is possible because of the power of social networking. My advice to those of you who dread going to your job each day is get out there and start socializing. Stay clear of religion and politics, respect people's opinions, and enjoy the experience. Remember, recruiters can Google your name once you engage on the web.

It's not just for personal benefit
But social software also provides great benefits for corporations. The last two years I initiated and led a large SOA/BPM effort. These same tools that provided all of the personal benefits I mentioned above, also provided an incredible amount of value to our SOA project. Much of our research came from blogs and wikis. When I was preparing the RFP for the SOA stack, Eric Roch posted this gem. Over time I started collaborating more and more with sharp SOA experts like Eric, the guys from Zapthink, Todd Biske, Brenda Michelson, and many others. We shared real life stories about what has and hasn't worked on SOA projects, what things to think about, what to do and not to do, who the experts are on certain topics, etc. You don't get these types of conversations talking to vendors. They only tell you the good stuff and hide the scary stuff. I truly believe that if it was not for social software, our SOA initiative would not have been half of the success that it is. Now when people from my company attend web casts or conferences on SOA or BPM, they come away saying, "We already know all of that".

Collaborate or Die
In conclusion, those companies or individuals who shy away from social software will eventually render themselves irrelevant. Technology and business is changing so fast that if you don't get "out there" you will be lost in the ways of yesterday, and become as relevant as a Y2K developer. So get out there, build a network, learn from others, share your experiences so we can learn from you and revitalize your career!

I read this post from Stewart Mader's blog on wiki patterns today and it talks about a challenge to the adoption of wiki is the fact that the new tools are too inexpensive or even free (open source).

Here is a key quote:

Sandy Kemsley’s fourth challenge to social media/enterprise 2.0 in organizations:

The fact that these technologies are inexpensive (or even free) and quick to implement causes them to be discounted by executives who are used to spending millions on information management systems.

Isn't it time that executives stopped running their IT shops like it is 1980? Spending millions on large vendors may make it easier for one to sleep at night, but it is not the best use of corporate dollars. I have been in IT for a long time and I have witnessed the same pattern across several companies over the last 20+ years. The pattern that I am talking about is IT puts more weight on "manageability" then they do on customer requirements. Some shops are so married to big vendors that they are not taking advantage of open source solutions or even worse, they are limiting the vendor selection process down to a set of tools that do not meet the customer's needs. When this happens, IT becomes its own worst enemy. First of all, adoption of tools that the users do not want or do not value as high as other tools can be a major challenge. I have seen my share of shelf-ware over the years. Second, forcing customers into solutions does not bode well for customer satisfaction and may cause the customers to look elsewhere next time. Third and maybe the worst case of all, sticking to the major vendors at all costs may prevent IT from selecting any tool due to high costs or lack of a sufficient tool. To put this into perspective, the user suffers because our favorite vendor can't deliver.

Here is an example. If you look at Web 2.0 tools today, most of the top tools are either open source or provided by startups or companies without billions of dollars in revenue. IT shops who still stick to principles from 20 years ago will simply not invest in enterprise blogs, wikis, and social networking tools. The big vendors either do not have the tools or the tools that they have cost a significant sum of money. Trying to justify spending a large amount of money on better collaboration tools is a major challenge. With open source or low cost alternatives, it is much easier to start small and grow adoption over time.

At the end of the day, we should understand that the reason that corporations fund IT departments is so that our internal and external customers have the tools, products, and services they need to do their job. The world is changing and IT must change with it. In addition to the normal technical requirements (manageability, scalability, etc.), the vendor selection process should consider the following:

• Buy vs. Build (is it a core competency?)
  
• Evaluate open source alternatives
• Evaluate SaaS alternatives
• What is the vendor's SOA strategy (integration and agility)

Is your IT shop still stuck in the 1980's? If so, what are you going to do to educate your executive team? Do the research for them and show them where technology is going. The worst thing that can happen is that people will learn something.

I have been experimenting with a few Web 2.0 tools at work over the last few months. We are working on a big BPM/SOA initiative and are trying to find better ways to communicate what we are doing to a very large audience. Email is becoming more and more useless everyday as a tool for information sharing. We are using a combination of Blogs and a Wiki to improve collaboration and knowledge sharing. We are also formalizing our SOA governance processes. A small team of about eight people are working on defining and publishing certain processes and standards. This effort requires a great deal of collaboration and in an effort to "eat our dog food" we will rely solely on our Web 2.0 tools to carry out the collaboration. No email allowed on this initiative!!!

After reading many interesting blogs recently and seeing how other companies like IBM are starting to leverage these tools, I am going to take my experiment to the next level. Up next, Twitter. When I first heard about Twitter a year ago, I couldn't understand how it would be useful for me at work. I could see the momentum building as more and more people starting signing up for this free service which led me to believe that it would eventually find its way into corporations.

In my role as the chief architect, I am often working on various projects or research efforts that most people in IT do not have much visibility into. Most people in applications development work on a specific group of applications and don't have the luxury of time to see what's going on outside their world. At the same time, the architecture team is constantly getting feedback that we need to communicate more. We spend a lot of time presenting at team meetings trying to keep the company updated. The blogs have been extremely helpful getting information out. I think Twitter can be a great tool for "quick hit" communications. For example, in two weeks, we have the guys at Zapthink running their SOA Architect Bootcamp at our office for four days (register here). As I come across some good nuggets of information I could "Tweet" them and they will show up on my sidebar of my blog. After a full day session I can then provide a more detailed summary on my blog.

Here is another use case. Let's say that I am going to a board meeting to present a business case for the next significant SOA project. In the meeting I get the thumbs up to move forward. For the next three hours, I will sit through other presentations and attend two other meetings. I quickly pull out my iPhone and Tweet the news that the project is approved. Upon receiving the news, my project manager can then start moving forward.

I recently listed a number of events that I am attending and participating in. As I encounter interesting facts or viewpoints during these presentations, I can share them back at corporate via Twitter.

Think about all of the notes and action items that you write down in the old notebook that you tout around with you all day. Many of those notes could also be handled through Twitter. Having all of that information online and searchable is much better then thumbing through my coffee stained notebook, especially with my bad handwriting!

The use cases are endless. I am going to start experimenting with this next week and will share my lessons learned shortly after. I am also going to start researching different open source tools that provide similar functionality as Facebook. If you know of some good ones, please pass them on. I am also going to look at how Serena adopted Facebook as their intranet and see if that is something that could work for us.

Stay tuned for more on these experiments in the near future.

In response to some feedback from my favorite critic James McGovern, I will discuss the impacts of leadership on corporate behavior. But first I want to clarify for James the intent of the article that he critiqued called Blogs- the innovation escape hatch. In this article I discussed how social networking allows people to speak more freely and be more innovative then they can be in a corporate environment. I was not discussing social networking in terms of a corporate technology or tool. I was just reflecting on how great it is to see people like James express their views without having to be politically correct all of the time. Oh, and one last thing. James, I don't work for CIO.com. They asked me to participate in their blogging community (for free). So anything I write is my opinion and does not reflect the opinions or beliefs of CIO.com. Enough of that.

Leadership drives corporate behavior. Many people confuse management with leadership. I have seen many people in leadership positions over the years perform entirely tactical duties and not put forth and execute anything strategic. Managers are tactical and are responsible for getting work done. Leaders are transformational and focus on people and culture. There are two basic approaches to leadership that produce two entirely different outcomes, production-oriented leadership and employee-oriented leadership. The production-oriented leader is one who focuses mainly on the technical or task aspects of the job. This type of leadership focuses almost entirely on the bottom line. Organizations with this type of leadership tend to have the following characteristics:

• Sweatshop mentality
• Strong reliance on outsourcing
  
• Frequent layoffs
• Low morale throughout the workforce

Production-oriented leadership can be very successful in terms of financial numbers, but it is usually at the expense of people. In cultures like this, introducing intangible technologies like social networking is a challenge. Without a cut and dry ROI, most initiatives don't stand a chance. Social networking is a transformational technology that can create huge increases in productivity, improved communication, employee morale, and innovation. But production-oriented leaders will be challenged to see the benefits and embrace the change.

Employee-oriented leadership emphasizes interpersonal relations and focuses on employee needs. When these leaders say that "our most important assets are our people", they actually mean it. They understand that higher morale leads to higher productivity which results in improved financial results. Organizations with this type of leadership tend to have the following characteristics:

• Thrive in innovation and creativity
• High productivity
  
• High morale
  
• Low turnover
  

Technologies like social networking can thrive in cultures with employee-oriented leadership. Social networking's strength is the power of groups. When people can collaborate freely on an idea, the idea gets continually refined and improved with the collective intelligence of many. If a corporate culture encourages this type of behavior, the sky is the limit on the gains in productivity and innovation. Social networking doesn't just happen within the corporate walls. Corporations can create powerful social networks that branch out to their customers and partners as well. Would we still need to do those painful annual customer and employee surveys if we had a social network in place? Social networking gives you real time unfiltered feedback that you don't need to hunt for. This is information at your fingertips that you can act on immediately.

Here is a great video from YouTube for those unfamiliar with social networking.

I was having a coffee with a friend and mentor of mine the other day. Tom is a PhD in Psychology and specializes in leadership and organizational change. I was explaining to him why he should look into blogging as a way to express his opinions and views on his thirty plus years of working with corporate executives.

Tom started talking about a topic that he has been researching. He talks about how people enter the corporate workforce at an early age full of hope, promise, and energy. Over time they become conditioned in a system that stifles creativity and innovation and focuses more on rules, guidelines, and "staying the course". He talked about writers, artists, and musicians and how they are able to express themselves and how they innovate. Unfortunately, those professions are a tough way to make a good living and only a small percentage of people actually prosper in that space.

Tom talks to many people in corporate America every day. He explains to me that some of the people he talks two seem to have two different personalities. One being their true inner self, capable of displaying emotional intelligence, cognitive reasoning, and are innovative and generally curious. But then they transform into their corporate personality where they assimilate, follow orders, and don't rock the boat.

Being addicted to blogging like I am, I started thinking about how this applies to the blogging community. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that blogs are a great outlet for expressing our inner self and escaping the handcuffs that are placed on us in our daily corporate lives. We can express our true opinions and be heard. It's Ok to "rock the boat" and provide radical alternative solutions. One of the blogs I read daily is James McGovern's From Incite comes Insight. James has very strong opinions both technically and politically. He has created a platform for himself where he can express his opinions with no constraints and without being bound by the walls of a corporation. He can do this because he keeps his company's identity hidden and does not represent the views of his employer. I am pretty sure James speaks in an entirely different tone at work.

Without an outlet like a blog or any other social networking platform, we would not be able to witness the true expression and innovation of technologists like James and others. For me, to discuss many of the things at work that I write about, I would have to devote a substantial amount of additional time crafting "politically acceptable" messages to cater to an audience that has certain expectations and guidelines. Although, I am not known to be a politically correct speaking individual at work and do tend to speak my mind, I still tone it down way more then I do in my blogs. With social networks, you simply express yourself and those that like it will embrace it and those that don't will either ignore it or give you opposing views. In corporate settings, especially in IT, there are many people who just won't express themselves at all. Many of them have a lot to offer but shy away from public exposure. Social networking gives these people a platform to express themselves without having to expose their identify.

I asked my buddy Tom to put his thoughts down on paper. I am educating him about the power of social networks. He is a baby boomer who is not current on technology and I am trying to show him this powerful world where he can enlighten us with his views and allow his readers to build upon his ideas in a collaborative fashion. I have been stuck on his thoughts about how people act contained and constrained in corporate settings. I think this is one of the reasons why social networking is becoming much more attractive in the last few years. What are your thoughts?

In my last article, I talked about how the younger generation’s usage of the internet was driving a lot of the technologies that make up what is now called Web 2.0. The Gen Y and Internet Generation’s desire to stay connected with their friends has led to many social networking sites like MySpace and Flickr. Their need for chatting, instant messaging, and video has changed the way people interact and communicate through the net and through wireless devices. Blogging and tagging have become a widely popular mechanism for sharing and searching for relevant information. Kids’ websites, like Webkinz, have introduced very young children to online collaboration, rich media applications, and online shopping.

All of the above items are driving up the popularity of rich interfaces usually created in Macromedia Flash or by using AJAX. Now that developers are able to build robust, fully functional browser based applications, the desktop is becoming less important (Microsoft is Dead). I ended the discussion warning that managers need to “think like” or pay attention to what the younger generation is doing on the web.

Why? Look how technologies like portals and instant messaging started. Plumtree Portal (now BEA Aqualogic), was founded by then 25 year old Glen Kelman who spawned the portal idea from his usage of My Yahoo pages. Instant messaging, which is now widely used in many corporations spawned from internet chatting. Do you see where I am going? Today, blogging and tagging are already catching on as great tools for knowledge sharing. Many folks in management who are not up to speed with the world of “Web 2.0” look down on staffers who use these types of tools because they don’t understand the significance of it. If managers would start paying attention to what millions of people are doing on the web they would realize that technologies like social networking will soon start revolutionizing the way companies communicate with each other. It might take a few years for this to catch on but it will.

So I conclude this two part article with this message. Start thinking like the younger generation and go out and explore the tools that millions of kids are using on the net today. More and more companies are starting Web 2.0 initiatives so start educating your management now before they get left behind.

For more info, the best blog I have seen by far on this topic is Don Hinchcliffe’s Enterprise Web 2.0.

I have been consumed in research on the topic of Web 2.0 the last few weeks. All of my research keeps bringing me back to the generation of kids born in the 80’s and 90’s. I sometimes wonder what my life would be like if I was born as a Gen Y (1978-1990’s)[1] or Internet Generation (1994-2001)[2] child. Much of what is driving Web 2.0[3] is the online expectations from these two generations. My two kids, ages 10 & 8, are Internet Generation kids. Here is my assessment of their generation in terms of their online expectations and abilities:

1. Technically savvy – I am probably the only member in my family who is more capable of using technology then my kids. From the web, to IPods, to cell phones, to Tivos, etc. My kids could use almost all of the features of these technologies before they knew how to read. As a matter of fact, and I am embarrassed to admit it, my daughter at age 6 had to show me how to use the “mouse” feature of my Nano when I first bought it. So much for my dual computer science degrees!

2. Technical from birth – This is slightly redundant from my first point, but I do want to point out that they resist nothing that is new. When they see something new, they embrace it. When I look at my parents’ generation, when they see something new they run from it. Do all of the clocks in your parents’ house still flash 12:00?

3. Short attention span – If it doesn’t work, if it’s too complex, or if it takes too long, they are gone.

4. Advertising is break time – They are accustomed to fast forwarding the TiVo, Adblock, and various other technologies that don’t force them to sit through or click through commercials.

5. Independent – They don’t need assistance, directions, or user manuals. They are very resourceful and learn with their eyes.

6. Low budget – Actually no budget. They don’t have cash, and they know that if they want something they have to perform some painful duty (takeout the trash, clean their room) to earn it. So they are accustomed to doing things at no or low cost.

Now take a step back and see how these characteristics apply to Web 2.0. Throw in Gen Y’s social networking demands[4] and you have described many of the characteristics of Web 2.0 technologies. Now look at some of the statistics of internet usage by age in the US[5] and the UK[6]. As you can see, the younger generations are heavy users of the web.

So why do I care? I care because I think most of corporate America is missing the boat[7] when it comes to embracing technologies like instant messaging, blogs, tagging, social networking, and AJAX to name a few.[8] How many of you have a magazine rack full of paid subscriptions to various trade magazines at your work? Do people actually still read these things? The younger generations and those of us who are “web 2.0 aware” use RSS feeds[9] to get the news that we want. If you depend heavily on main stream news and paid subscription services, you probably don’t really know what’s going on. These sources are controlled and influenced by big money. Blogging is free and Democratic. Here is an excerpt from Paul Graham’s article Web 2.0:

The second big element of Web 2.0 is democracy. We now have several examples to prove that amateurs can surpass professionals, when they have the right kind of system to channel their efforts. Wikipedia may be the most famous. Experts have given Wikipedia middling reviews, but they miss the critical point: it's good enough. And it's free, which means people actually read it. On the web, articles you have to pay for might as well not exist. Even if you were willing to pay to read them yourself, you can't link to them. They're not part of the conversation.

Another place democracy seems to win is in deciding what counts as news. I never look at any news site now except Reddit. I know if something major happens, or someone writes a particularly interesting article, it will show up there. Why bother checking the front page of any specific paper or magazine? Reddit's like an RSS feed for the whole web, with a filter for quality. Similar sites include Digg, a technology news site that's rapidly approaching Slashdot in popularity, and del.icio.us, the collaborative bookmarking network that set off the "tagging" movement. And whereas Wikipedia's main appeal is that it's good enough and free, these sites suggest that voters do a significantly better job than human editors.

The most dramatic example of Web 2.0 democracy is not in the selection of ideas, but their production. I've noticed for a while that the stuff I read on individual people's sites is as good as or better than the stuff I read in newspapers and magazines. And now I have independent evidence: the top links on Reddit are generally links to individual people's sites rather than to magazine articles or news stories.

My experience of writing for magazines suggests an explanation. Editors. They control the topics you can write about, and they can generally rewrite whatever you produce. The result is to damp extremes. Editing yields 95th percentile writing—95% of articles are improved by it, but 5% are dragged down. 5% of the time you get "throngs of geeks."

On the web, people can publish whatever they want. Nearly all of it falls short of the editor-damped writing in print publications. But the pool of writers is very, very large. If it's large enough, the lack of damping means the best writing online should surpass the best in print. And now that the web has evolved mechanisms for selecting good stuff, the web wins net. Selection beats damping, for the same reason market economies beat centrally planned ones.

Even the startups are different this time around. They are to the startups of the Bubble what bloggers are to the print media. During the Bubble, a startup meant a company headed by an MBA that was blowing through several million dollars of VC money to "get big fast" in the most literal sense. Now it means a smaller, younger, more technical group that just decided to make something great. They'll decide later if they want to raise VC-scale funding, and if they take it, they'll take it on their terms.

I will continue this topic in part II of my next article where I discuss how IT management, who are typically in their late 30’, 40’s, or 50’s, need to start thinking more like their kids’ generation and start embracing Web 2.0 before they become as outdated as their old bell bottom jeans.