IT Project Failures has been examining the all to frequent phenomenon of government IT project failures. Central to the analysis - typically opaque bureaucracies shy away from revealing their internal machinations, especially when it has to do with something as complex as large IT projects.

What can government leaders can do to improve the situation?  [Read more →]

In “In the Air: Who says big ideas are rare?”, Malcom Gladwell describes how Intellectual Ventures works to bring together really smart people from different disciplines -physicians, physicists, inventors - in the hopes of generating a vast number of profitable patents. The company puts a group of creative, inventive people in the same room and patiently records their collective output - in one case recording thirty-six inventions during the course of a single dinner.

What Intellectual Ventures does might seem obvious – pay some luminaries to collaborate and, naturally, genius will flow forth. But what’s more important then who was invited to these innovation sessions, is that they were invited at all. Cross domain collaboration is uncommon – just look around your organization. How often does HR interact with IT? Marketing and R&D? Infrequently, at best. [Read more →]

Since we come face to face with it so frequently in the enterprise, it’s always a good idea to keep abreast of what SharePoint offers when it comes to E2.0. I blogged before about how Microsoft is avoiding rolling content creation capabilities into the platform to preserve other revenue streams, but there is  still a lot of attention being paid to how to make SharePoint credible for social media, folkonsmies, etc. SharePoint, SharePoint and stuff posted The Ultimate List of SharePoint Add Ons and Tools for Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 And Social Networking Features . I’ll also take a moment to plug my personal favorite: Atlassian’s SharePoint connector for Confluence. SharePoint excels at wrangling Office-format documents, but will require substantial tweaking to be a viable social computing platform.

Stewart Mader, the mastermind behind Wikipatterns, recently asked us to guest blog. Clearly he was either experiencing a temporary lapse in judgement, or had been drinking heavily at the time but nonetheless, the post is up!

Go check it out and make sure to browse the rest of his great content. Thanks Stewart!

Gia Lyons, who spent a while at IBM trying to show companies what’s possible with social software, now works for Jive. While checking out her blogged new employee interview, I found this especially insightful:

Customers are willing to go with pure play and niche vendors for social software because they recognize that a fresh approach is needed here. The folks who wrote your email and shared file applications approach social software through 15 years of “business as usual” thinking.

As someone who tries to convince clients that social software from vendors they never heard of can be more successful then something built by the same people who sold them their ERP or ECM systems, this is heartening. When it comes to Enterprise 2.0, firms like Jive are agile in a way Big IT can’t be, or at least is not yet willing to be. Building good social software involves an element of discarding the past - it’s easier for the firms with a very limited one.