Took some time today to work with the new communication meme - Google Wave. I wouldn't call it a fundamentally new way to communicate - well, not yet. I think Google is safe to continue with a "preview" label - clearly not even "beta" yet. No horrible bugs - at least on the Windows platform - but some obviously missing features. And, I am not all that impressed with the basic idea - it's just a mashup of Google Docs,…
Here is a simple question to ask yourself: do I insist on solving problems myself? A noble goal, until it takes too long to get the answer. Why don't we fail fast enough to ask the question to someone who knows? Remember, we pay a ton of money for annual maintenance to our enterprise software providers, so we should [more quickly] be "giving up", and submitting the question to the "experts" to get to answers quickly. In an earlier post,…
Got some rare Re-Tweets today on a techie insult - so snappy, I had to write a post to use it for a title! Deep in the problem analysis and debugging process, the typical IT hack experiences counter-balancing pressures that impact decision making - Capable Independence vs. Speed to Value. Capable Independence is just fancy-talk for the idea that I should know what I'm doing. Ego 1 - Who needs manuals, I wrote this thing from the ground up? Ego…
"What will you do with that car if you actually catch it?" -- what the cat asked the dog (from the Chicago Reader, circa 1989) So you've gone all "Enterprise 2.0", spinning up a wiki, a blog, and a SharePoint or Drupal server inside your firewall. Now what happens? The groundswell of interest in "cool tools" brings a wave of users and a burst of feed reader activity - for a few weeks. Before long, however, the organization will get…