Tag Archives: sharing

10 February 2010

So many places to “be” – I’m so cornfuzzled!

By Rick Ladd

Copyright 2010 GoogleWith the release of Google’s Buzz yesterday I have added yet another platform/channel to my ever-growing arsenal of social tools with which to engage and, especially, to learn from a long list of wonderful and generous people who willingly offer their intelligence, passion, and wit by freely sharing what they know. I don’t know about others, but even with locations that federate, or aggregate (oh hell, I’m not sure which it is), many of the places I “am”, I still find it difficult to completely see the larger landscape of the social  network I’m entwined with. Dion Hinchcliffe hints at Buzz portending a change in the way the “knowledge” of who we are, what we like, who we know, etc. is treated in his “First impressions of Google Buzz: Smart, useful, long road ahead“, posted yesterday. If I understand him correctly, Google is using algorithms that can draw context from the web, associated specifically with what our (singular and collective) behavior, connections, and interests are evidence of, and serve up relevant and (one would hope) useful information for us.

I hope this turns out to be the case. I’m reserving judgement for now, as it took  me at least six months after signing up for Twitter before I could see any use for it that made sense to me. If Buzz is anything like Twitter (only better) I plan on being a bit more ahead of the curve than before. Only time will tell, but the thought of having some help in making sense of all the chatter (including my own) is pretty exciting to me. We may end up with a half-dozen different “suites” (which will, no doubt, find some overlap in the apps used) for us to choose from and I’m torn over whether or not I would prefer some sort of standardization. Nevertheless, the reality for now – for me – is that I’ve been using Gmail and other Google platforms for many years and am unlikely to pass up a chance to get (and put) most of my info into their hands.

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9 January 2010

Learning From Those who Know

By Rick Ladd

I continually struggle with how best to share here on this blog. Guess I’m trying to find my voice, which is difficult when one’s personal life is so thoroughly enmeshed with one’s professional life and the company you work for needs to keep much of what it does close to the vest. So I need to work on separating those things that are mine (my thoughts, that is) and those things that are my company’s.

Credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

There are a couple of bloggers whose thoughts I really respect and I am learning a bit from them on how to go about doing this and growing my ability to share and connect. There are others as well, but the two I’m speaking of are Euan Semple and Gil Yehuda. Euan has a blog he calls “The Obvious“. Here’s what he says in the section “About this blog”: “This is my personal blog which I began in February 2001. I called it The Obvious? when I wrote anonymously and chose the name to reflect the fact I have to overcome my inhibitions about stating the obvious!” This resonates so strongly with me as I have always felt that anything I saw had to be obvious to everyone since it was so obvious to me. I’ve learned that’s not necessarily the case, but I have yet to fully convince myself it’s true. Reading Euan and, especially, the method he uses in his blog, is very instructive to me; might be to you as well.

Gil Yehuda’s blog is a bit different, as he writes a great deal about Enterprise 2.0. In fact, the title of his blog is “Gil Yehuda’s Enterprise 2.0 Blog“. Gil doesn’t write quite the same as Euan. Most of his posts are a bit longer, though short enough to not be tedious to anyone who’s used to the rapid-fire reality of today’s online world. Since my greatest interest – indeed, my job – is centered around Enterprise 2.0 capabilities and design principles, I appreciate Gil’s clarity and constancy of purpose in sharing his thoughts. His latest post, “What to Contribute: Thoughts of a Blogger“, is a great read on how to deal with the issues I find myself pondering each time I set out to write. I have to admit I have waaay more ideas than I manage to write about.

I intend on learning all I can from these two. I’m hopeful that time will find me opening up more and engaging with greater frequency and, hopefully, clarity as I follow how they do it. There are others – in fact Gil’s latest blog (link above) points to a lot of them, the majority of whom I follow on Twitter – and I will write about them as well as time goes on. Each has a voice worthy of listening to, even if your interest isn’t Enterprise 2.0, as they have firmly established themselves in the “blogosphere”. Check ’em out.

4 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Collaboration, E2.0, Enterprise 2.0

17 December 2009

2.0 Adoption Council One of the Best Stories of Year (says Dion Hinchcliffe)

By Rick Ladd

Well, I’ve spent the better part of two years now learning about Enterprise 2.0 and how it can be applied at Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne. I have been practicing Knowledge Management for over 10 years there and it has been a constant struggle to get people to see the value in sharing knowledge, learning from our mistakes (though we pay great lip service to it in the form of never-quite-realized attempts at collecting “lessons learned”), and not re-inventing the wheel.

I first became aware of E2.0 after reading Tim O’Reilly’s seminal paper, “What is Web 2.0“, and it started me thinking about how we could use the design concepts he laid out so well to our inside-the-firewall efforts to increase our communication and collaboration capabilities. I actually thought I was in the forefront of the effort and was somewhat chagrined when I discovered Professor Andy McAfee had been writing about it for at least a year prior to my discovery. He was the one who coined the term Enterprise 2.0 and, after my initial disappointment with NOT being actually in the vanguard, I was thrilled to find there was a body of work out there I could learn from.

I also soon found Dion Hinchcliffe, who wrote prolifically and lucidly about E2.o, as well as created lots of excellent graphics that made sense of how the connections worked and what, in fact, should be connected. I have a large collection of Dion’s graphics gathered together in a rather large PowerPoint presentation that I drag out and look at now and again to remind of why I’m doing what I’m doing and how it all fits together.

At the end of July of this year I was fortunate enough to become a member of an organization of E2.0 practitioners, the 2.0 Adoption Council, dedicated to advancing the acceptance and application of Enterprise 2.0 design principles. Rather than tell you much about it, I want to point to Dion’s latest post entitled “Enterprise 2.0: The 2009 Year in Review, where he has the following to say:

Communities of practitioners began to form. One of the best stories of the year was the formation and rise of the 2.0 Adoption Council. Founded by my good friend, the tireless Susan Scrupski, the 2.0 Adoption Council is a practitioners-only community (no vendors or consultants allowed) that has developed an impressive following. Well over a hundred companies are now represented on projects from the quite small to the quite large. It’s also one the very best sources of data — their latest report is packed full of useful information — for what’s taking place with Enterprise 2.0 today. If you’re engaged in Enterprise 2.0 work, I urge you join the council and increase our collective knowledge of what’s happening with enterprise social computing.

If you are at all interested in how your business can perform better and be more effective – not merely more efficient – you owe it to yourself to understand what E2.0 has to offer you. If you are working now to get your company to adopt these practices, consider doing what Dion suggests, joining the Council and learning from some of the best practitioners in the world. You can read his entire post here.

1 Comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Collaboration, E2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Knowledge Management

16 October 2009

Seeking Balance

By Rick Ladd

Lately I’ve been having a bit of trouble coming up with things to blog about. It’s not that there aren’t subjects worthy of discussing or exploring; it’s just that most of them have to do with my job and I’m uncertain over whether or not – and to what extent – I can share what it is I’m doing and the issues my company is facing. Neither is any of it “Top Secret” (though some of our work is) but, rather, we are an old and staid aerospace company with deep roots in governmental contracting and with a strong impulse to hold everything we do close to the vest. This is, in part, to protect our intellectual property which, in the world we move in, is quite valuable, and the need to comply with the provisions of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) that provide very serious – and expensive – penalties for “exporting” controlled information and knowledge. Export-controlled knowledge is our bread and butter, so I need to be sure I err on the side of caution.

So, I guess this in the way of a caveat. I would love to reveal more about where I’m employed; after all, I’ve been there over twenty years and my experiences greatly color how I see the business world and what I have to say about my struggles to incorporate Enterprise 2.0 design principles and tools within the organization. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to do so for the foreseeable future, though I am working on figuring out just how to step up the precipice without dropping off the cliff of inappropriate posting. I suspect this will be an ongoing struggle, but I will keep trying to figure out how to share my thoughts about our efforts at developing into a company that derives a large part of its income from industrial and commercial efforts, rather than government contracts.

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7 August 2009

Social Computing Isn’t Just for Old Folk!

By Rick Ladd

I don’t suppose there are all that many people my age who get so much satisfaction out of all the social computing services and tools available on the Internet nowadays. If they do, I suspect they’re mostly on Facebook, as I am. There’s so much more available, though, and I’m trying to make the most of them. Sometimes it seems a bit overwhelming to try and keep up while also learning how these services can benefit my company (or any company – you never know) as well.

This evening was a great example of why I’m so enamored of them. The weather for the last couple of days has been quite temperate for southern California; far cooler than the previous week, when the temperatures were getting into triple digits. That was great for using the pool, but now I favor just sitting outside and enjoying the cool breeze that picks up at the end of the day.

While I’m sitting on the patio, enjoying at tall Scotch & water, I’m also using my Blackberry to communicate with people all over the country; sometimes all over the world. I have – on my BB – both Twitterberry and Facebook mobile, as well as my Gmail account. So I’m reading an email  from a friend in Florida, carrying on two Twitter conversations with friends in Texas and New York, taking and uploading a cute picture of my oldest (8 y/o) daughter, and reading a response from a friend in Arizona.

The connections available through the Internet are absolutely astounding and it pisses me off to think all this is coming in the late autumn of my life. Nevertheless, I plan on squeezing every last bit of connectivity, education, joy, and solace I can get out it before I move on. This in one awfully contented evening.

PS – As I sit here typing on my laptop, my daughter (who cannot yet type) is sitting next to me with a disconnected keyboard, mimicking my actions, Ooh! Sweet!

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