

Farming at work: social media in the enterprise - rakkhi
http://rakkhi.blogspot.com/2010/09/farming-at-work-social-media-in.html

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patio11
_If you have some coders or innovators in the IT team give them a 20% project
to get a Dispora instance up and running._

You might want to hold off on that.

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tszming
Diaspora? might be another security nightmare:
[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/09/22/security-lessons-
learned...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/09/22/security-lessons-learned-from-
the-diaspora-launch/)

~~~
TomasSedovic
Fun fact: user patio11 (to whom you're replying) is in fact the author of the
article you're linking to :-).

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tszming
Yes, so he should give me an up vote :)

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edw519
This sounds like a solution looking for a problem.

Enterprises don't need social solutions. They need good management and good
application software. Everything else is a band-aid on the wrong wound.

It seems like every enterprise I work at has almost every gadget imaginable on
their intranet: policies and procedures in a wiki, tips and tricks in another
wiki, special domain knowledge in yet another wiki, an HR portal, project
management apps, help desk apps, integration with email, integration with
Office, integration with smart phones, etc., etc., etc. And how much
difference does it make? Not much, I would guess.

People need access to exactly the information they need served up exactly as
the need it to solve the problem at hand. This is called "good application
software". And the need the resources, guidance, and direction to do the right
thing. This is called "good management". Without these two, it's hard to get
anything done. With them, those gadgets aren't really necessary.

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patio11
I don't know: wikis were such an enormous productivity boost at my old day job
it was difficult to overstate. We had plenty of documentation in Excel files,
and that got read pretty much never, for all the hundreds of man months burned
up producing it. The wiki was where engineers actually kept the accumulated
knowledge that ran the business. (Like the Deep Magic rituals which, when
uttered in the presence of a slaughtered chicken under a waning moon, would
let you successfully install the software on a production server.)

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edw519
"wikis were such an enormous productivity boost at my old day job..."

For whom?

We IT people have a bad habit of thinking that a good solution for us is a
good solution for everyone. From my experience in many enterprises, this is
usually not the case.

First, a few numbers...

What I've typically experienced in enterprises:

    
    
      IT people (programmers, analysts, admins)       -  1%
      indirect people (office, sales, management)     - 10%
      direct people (warehouse, factory, call center) - 89%
    

So a 1500 employee enterprise may have 15 IT people, 150 indirect people, and
1335 direct people. (The numbers may vary some, but you get the idea.)

In an engineering firm or software house, the engineers and programmers _are_
the direct people, but I don't really think of these types of firms as
"enterprise".

Remember, no one earns anything until the direct people do something. Their
production absorbs the overhead of everyone else, including IT.

Why do I bring up these numbers? Because I learned from a smart mentor long
ago that solving your direct people's problems delivers value magnitudes
greater than solving your indirect people's problems. Kinda like Willie Sutton
robbing banks because, "That's where the money is." It's strictly a numbers
game.

Back to the question at hand: your people, especially your direct people need
the right information and direction to get stuff done. Good application
software and good management have always been the most effective way of doing
this. Sure, gadgets have a place and deliver some value, but they are
generally not the solution to enterprise problems.

Like wikis, intranets, and all the rest, social media is just another gadget.

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patio11
It is probably relevant to both our comments that I previously worked at a
software consultancy and probably 60% of our headcount were some flavor of
engineer or engineering management.

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Poiesis
I agree with the wiki sentiment (also in a software/system engineer heavy
environment). The huge thing I see is the massive problem with email. There's
just _so_ much information locked up in peoples email it's not even funny.
Wikis provide a way to put some information in a public place that, three
months later, someone else that started working on the project can now see,
without requiring someone to forward the right emails. It's also generally
much more easily searchable than a bag of Word docs. Add in version control
and things like edit notification and it's really a huge win.

I really hate email in the enterprise these days. I can totally see where
tools like Google Wave (R.I.P.) and Basecamp are coming from. Pity it will
take most enterprises ten years to start using these tools regularly.

