One of the perks of working at Hursley is the occasional trip to the pub at lunchtime. Today was one of those days, and in-keeping with previous trips with that particular group, I got a bit of a ribbing about participating in a relatively small number of social networking type activities. First I think it was blogging (the, um, rabble rouser 
of the group now has a blog), then it was having a SecondLife avatar, and facebook, and today it was twitter.
Every time I start by defending the technology because I’m under (gentle) attack and feel I should, then sip on a pint and the discussion disappears so we never really address the issues. This is a brief attempt to do just that, because I think it’s an interesting discussion, not because of the comments.
Blogs - I think the potential value of blogs is clear. My blog is generally of interest to me, and occasionally to others. There are other blogs, written by authors, politicians, technologists, and CEOs which get these people closer to those who are interested and have opinions than before. A good thing.
SecondLife - shrug It’s an interesting experience, and probably represents a style of interface we’ll use regularly in the future. I’m not at all hooked and may never log in to that particular metaverse again.
Facebook - An excellent way to keep in touch with friends I don’t see every day, or indeed very regularly at all. Useage has dropped off a bit recently, but that’s at least in part because I’ve been experimenting with twitter. It’s a closed data platform which really isn’t something I’m comfortable with. I want to own my social graph, so facebook having proved it’s value to me, I’ll probably move as much out of their environment as possible.
Twitter - It’s been nearly 2 months, and this experiment is ongoing. I’d liken this to working in open plan writ large. I know what lots of people are doing. Lots of it is unexciting, and easily ignored. Some of it’s interesting, and stimulates ideas or laughter, and even seems to foster a sense of team… see the #currentcost activities in hursley spilling onto twitter as an example. Twitter deserves a full post at some point, but the short version is that while it’s quite compelling, at least over the short term, I don’t really know where it goes from here.
[UPDATE] The other interesting thing about twitter from a work perspective is that it’s large scale consumer pub/sub and event notification.
Dopplr - Every so often I get a notification that someone else is sharing their trips with me. I don’t travel enough for this to be interesting to me, though I know some people who do, so I should probably speak to them to work out if it’s as useful as the theory sounds.
So some successes, some not, and some undecided. Overall, I’ve got what I wanted from them. These technologies/services are all a means to a particular end for me. The end? Fun experimentation and keeping an eye out for interesting technology trends. I don’t need these technologies to be great for the experiment to be worthwhile.
I have to say that I do quite like getting Twitter updates. I’m using it as a way to post my status on Facebook and, so far at least, that seems to be working quite well. It would be really cool if I could pick some friends on Facebook and have their status sent to my phone as well - but at the moment that would involve asking people to move over to using Twitter. That sounds like hassle.
I wonder if the ribbing is mostly coming from people from Generation X. People not being connected on social networking sites is a subject of ridicule amongst my co-workers, and judging from a talk we heard at BlogTalk, IBM is in desperate need of a *lot* more exposure to 21st century communication tools. The audience openly laughed at the presenter citing “Instant Messaging” as being “big” in IBM. Uh-huh, and do you use mobile phones, too?
Contrast this:
http://www.slideshare.net/BlogTalk2008/avram-o-donovan-bannon-blogtalk-2008/
with this (well worth 15 minutes of your time):
http://light.vpod.tv/?s=0.0.393628
Excellent video, well worth it. Thanks!
Clearly your employer is better than mine
Yes, it’s not the most recent joiners to the company who are in much greater need of convincing.
And to defend whatever IBMer made a fool of themselves with the IM comment, there was a time, a long time ago when IBM was apparently well ahead of the curve in using IM, but of course the rest of the world has moved on a bit
I guess the problem somewhere the scale of IBM (or BT perhaps?) is how you get broad adoption of new technologies in large valuable projects - the element of experimentation that is probably required to determine value is a risk that people can do without. I know that the use of wikis within IBM has grown incredibly over the last couple of years as people, once they’ve used one successfully put it as the an early thing they set up for the next project.
As it happens we have lots of pretty good social networking and web 2.0 stuff in-house, and I can use it for anything I control, but I’m not the one in control of the ‘real work’ projects.
But that returns to the point of the video. So what does that mean enterprises should do? The implication is that they should provide these tools to use and let the people who want to adopt them, but not force them on others? That might take a long time, or lead to fractious use of them in the short term.
The other aspect is letting people use ‘external’ tools for ‘internal’ work… not something I think we have an answer to (hiding in plain sight might not work for some documents…).
I did very much like the comparison between input and output focussed. It’s certainly the way I view the world, but that may be to do with growing up hearing no-win no-fee ambulance chaser adverts on TV and radio (see, I’m old, I didn’t mention the web!). That’s certainly something I’ll think more about.
heh, glad you liked the video - it’s hard not to be impressed by JP, that’s why I love working with him! I also hate to bail on IBM in particular, it’s an endemic problem of any enterprises, even within BT, that they develop strong corporate cultures with powerful immune systems to resist change. IBM is still held up as the exemplar huge company who saw the writing on the wall and was as a result capable of embracing Java, Linux and Open source, and more recently at least publishing a policy for blogs and blogging. To me the conversation has moved on somewhat, and is challenging what it actually means to work for an enterprise. In a way Web 2.0 tools are a small, fluffy symptom of that conversation. See, now you can smile when people challenge you, knowing you’re at least a part of the conversation
And as if by magic, the top story on the Hursley intranet today is about Generation Y, the way we expect to work, and an encouragement for all to join in.
Sadly I don’t seem to be able to tag the story with the link to that video…
Just to chip in on the IM point… IM *is* big in IBM and that *is* a big deal. Many organisations don’t use pervasive IM, and in some cases employees resort to MSN or Google Talk to reach each other, often without being allowed to have the software installed on their desktops. The corporate world does move slowly, and as a consultant I go out and am exposed to corporate environments that are very locked down, with Internet access restricted, ability to install software restricted, etc.. I’m not saying that is wrong, but in my experience my employer is very open-minded about letting me go out and experiment with a wide variety of social software tools.
I found the BT Web 2.0 adoption case study an interesting read. Large enterprises do need a lot of convincing and, often, the traditionalists will question how these tools can be applied. I’ve just presented at an internal conference today on these topics and the reception was warmer than it has been in the past, but it was still slightly muted in some areas.