Having finished a number of books related to E2.0 I thought that it was only right that I made a quick summary of my views on them. As a very slow reader of books and someone who always has at least 4 books on the go at any one time excluding manuals 
content can get fused. This has the plus side of allowing me to remix ideas and content to suit my business requirements. For example real world stories from non E2.0 books may actually provide context or anecdotes for business scenarios. I tend to read a lot of history related books, which is very strange considering it was one of my least favourite subjects at school. Typically I read military based history books so at the moment I am reading Tobruk: The Great Siege 1941-42 by William Buckingham as well as Admirals by Lambert. Both these show how people interact, work, collaborate,fail and succeed.
So back to the two books I have finished in recent months on E2.0. The first was the long awaited Andrew McAfee – Enterprise 2.0 : New Collaborative Tools for your Organization’s Toughest Challenges and the second was Willms Bushe, Soren Stamer – The Art of Letting Go Enterprise 2.0. The first thing that struck me about both these works was the excellent references to real world examples.
Coming from a technology background and having implemented, supported and sold collaborative capabilities over the past 12 years I am always looking for content that will aid me challenge my customers views of the new fads in the IT world and how to look for unique business opportunities to drive adoption and participation of E2.0 platforms.
I think this book really captures the essence of Andrew’s blog and hopefully will provide the opportunity for him to deliver a follow-on work that provides a more detailed insight into the progression of E2.0 and of course E3.0, or whatever term is coined to label the next wave of collaboration capabilities.
One final comment relates to the term social, I like Andrew’s idea of avoiding this term in some circumstances as in reality this is about collaboration and this has been a perfectly good term to describe the capabilities.
Moving on to the Art of Letting go this was a great example of essays from different people on real world situations and implementation of E2.0 style technologies to fulfil business requirements as well as enhance businesses standing with their customers. The book drew on experiences from Prof Andrew McAfee, Craig Cmehil (SAP), Stephen Johnston (Nokia), Stefan Bocking (Vodafone), Willm Buhse (CoreMedia AG), Suw Charman-Anderson, Nicole Dufft (Berlecon Research GmbH), Gotz Hamann (Die ZEIT), Prof / Dr Michael Koch, Prof / Dr Kathrin Moslein, Prof Dr Frank Piller, Prof / Dr Ralf Reichwald and Soren Stamer (CoreMedia).
All of these different authors bring their experiences to you enabling you to see how different organisations implement and use these types of capabilities everyday. I would recommend both of these works.
What makes a network social? I suppose the first part is people, the second is interaction and third is collaboration. If I take a look at my various networks all are social in some shape or form, so doesn’t that mean all people networks are social. Point open for discussion no doubt and I think I wanted to puts some comments down on some of my experiences over the years with my various networks.
If I look today I have a number of electronic tools that help me connect to my networks, theses include internal works only sites and external public sites. So what do I use, lets take a look:
Work Intranet – We have components of the intranet that have now been productised (is there such a word) into Lotus Connections and with more to come as the product evolves. Basically I have a number of different sites within IBM that allow me to build networks and connections between colleagues regardless of where they are. Today I can use Lotus Connections, Bluepages+1 and Project Beehive (Internal Project not to be confused with Oracle Beehive).
Another tool is Lotus Connections.
What these two tool allow me to do is build my internal networks, neither is externalised so only IBMers in these networks, which works well in a lot of circumstances, but in the real world I need that mix of both internal and external, which I can get via the Lotus Greenhouse project (greenhouse.lotus.com), but this means having my details populated in another place, so that would be 4 in total with Beehive, Connections, Fringe and Greenhouse. This is just pushing the boundary to far in terms of maintenance. Basically with any social networking tool the ability to use and maintain is key so having multiple tools we need to have update once write multiple times.
Thats internal covered what about external, well to be honest I have three tools that I use regularly. They are Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. All of these have the notion of networks and the ability to be friends with people. With the concept of Twitter we have a different spin to that of Facebook and Linked as I can easily follow someone without the person necessarily knowing me. What this does mean is I can get information from maybe influential or for interest perspective. With the other two sites it is a notion of a friend on Facebook or colleague on LinkedIn. There is the need for someone to accept your friendship unlike twitter which you would need to block people to stop unwanted people following you.
So what do I use these sites for? Facebook is a way to interact with both friends and colleagues but more on a social level rather than professional level and I have friend and family as well as colleagues on the site from all walks of life and age ranges.
With LinkedIn I only use this for professional contacts with fewer updates. I have used on a number of occasions recently when ensuring I have links to some of my colleagues in the US who may be moving on. I will write more on my experiences of LinkedIn in the next week or two.
So I have babbled on for a while about networking and have decided that all of these tools are social in some shape or form and that each has its uses. The one thing I love and also hate is the fact I link my twitter updates (tweets) to Facebook , but sometime the tweets are lost on a lot of my facebook friends, really need a method to tell twitter not to always update facebook.
Well I will write more on this subject as time passes..
Today started early, up at 5am after not being able to sleep so did some bits and pieces whilst everyone else slept. Cameron was awake at 5.45am and decided he was hungry so sorted out his milk and tea for CJ. Cameron later managed to knock the tea over, good job the carpet in the bedroom is beige in colour. So glad today was a holiday
Spent the morning playing with Cameron mixed with finishing my packing for Lotusphere 09 which nearly completed apart from a few power cords and electronics such as my phone and mac.
Registered on Brightkite today to see what it gives apart from location based information so will report back over coming weeks on how I am finding it. Spent some time on LinkedIn updating content and connecting some of my colleagues past and present.
Checked in for my Virgin flight to Orlando tomorrow so that just need to join the long queue doing just baggage drops. I will be interested to see if this queue is bigger than the normal I am checkin in queue. This has been my experience in the past so let wait and see.
Parking all sorted and just need to go
Next entries will be related to trip to Lotusphere and all the announcement and my views on what happening.
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Clock is ticking to LS09 and I have started to form my agenda items for the weeks proceeding and only a few clashes. If it follows previous trips to Orlando my planned scheduled will go out of the window as I change my mind once I revisit the descriptions etc of the sessions, plus sometimes I just lose the will to walk back to the other hotel.
So some topics I will be looking into will be Portal, Connections and general collaboration updates announced. Must do’s are visiting all my remote colleagues and friends from the development, technical and services teams that will be in Orlando including visiting booths/Peds for ID/Redbooks, ISSL and Products, plus all of our BPs.
I will most definitely be visiting the Labs to see what going on and what research etc are up to in the coming months. Hopefully I will get the chance to get some decent info for my customers and of course myself.
In addition to the fun and games of Lotusphere there will be the compulsory shopping during the week, it just a pity the exchange rate is so poor at the moment. I will be going to the apple store at some point as it is compulsory to double check to see if there is anything worth buying. Sorry I should rephrase that to see what I can justify buying, maybe one day the IBM powers will furnish me with a MacBook for work so I can get rid of the stinkpads. Or they should just give me some money and I will buy my own 
well more about Lotusphere over the coming week and whilst I am there I will blog about it when I can
