I was reading the collaboration section of a magazine geared to IT professionals when I came upon an article titled Cat-Herding Nightmare.

The first paragraph echoes the Web 2.0-is-good-for-you party line I’ve heard again and again this week:

Web 2.0 collaboration tools are irresistible to end users: They’re easy to set up and use and can be accessed from anywhere. Employees can upload or create documents, spreadsheets, wikis, and blogs, then invite co-workers and partners to access, edit, and download content. These apps often include productivity enhancers such as search and tagging. And not surprisingly, vendors are encouraging the trend–Microsoft and IBM have added wikis and blogging capabilities to enterprise apps including SharePoint and Lotus Quickr, while Google and upstarts like Socialtext, PBwiki, and Jive Software are luring corporate users with freebie accounts and dead-simple deployment. provision users in minutes, pay with discretionary funds–and never make a single call to IT.

Warning to IT folks: Mayday! Mayday! Turf is being threatened. Put up the shields. Ready the cannon. Mayday! Mayday1

All these wonderful benefits. Too bad there’s a dark side.

Sadly, all IT gets out of the deal is a big fur ball as it struggles to organize corporate content run amok. The potential for exposure of sensitive information or theft of intellectual property runs high, as do concerns about noncompliance with corporate or third-party requirements as end users scatter sensitive information around the Internet. If the company gets tangled in litigation, data relevant to discovery requests may be lurking unknown on third-party servers, exposing the organization to financial or legal sanctions.

Implication: IT can’t trust those pesky users. Possible solution: Get the knock-off versions of web tools provided by IBM, EMC, BEA, and Microsoft. That lets IT continue its battle to maintain control, even if it means dumping all those great benefits. The article notes that the products from the big boys…

…also come with the downsides of enterprise software–longer and more costly deployment than software as a service, and longer lag between upgrades. Enterprises are unlikely to dip their toes into collaboration through a six-figure software deployment. It’s not uncommon to find companies using SharePoint and third-party SaaS products.

The article concludes that IT needs to keep ahead of technologies and provide services before users demand them. That would be great but I am skeptical. IT has rarely come down from its me-first perch. Why should we expect it to stop now? It’s easier for IT to focus on the damage workers might do rather than the benefits an open business gives its stakeholders. Should we really let IT make the tradeoff between the hair-ball messiness of web 2.0 and connecting with the world in order to stay in business? That’s not really an IT decision, is it? Nah, we won’t get fooled again.

I’ve look at this from both sides now, it’s up and down and still somehow, I don’t think we should be picking sides at all. IT should support the business, not the other way around.

Related:
How it’s going to be

“Thank you for calling Big Stupid Company.

We value your business and look forward to serving you.

Your call may be monitored for training purposes.

Listen carefully, for our options have changed.

If you know your party’s extension, dial it now. Otherwise,

For information about our hours and locations, press 1
To use our automated telephone account system, press 2
To report a stolen or lost card, press 3
To talk with a customer service representative, press 4
To repeat this message, press 5

[4]

Scratchy musak.
Please stay on the line. All of our customer service agents are helping other customers. Your call will be answered in the order received.

Did you know that you can order our wonderful products from our website. Great deals await you at bigstupid.com

Scratchy musak.
All of our customer service agents are helping other customers. The next agent will be available to serve you in 47 minutes.

Our fall line of products come in earth tones! We have hulu knives for everyone in the family. Take a look at our web site, bigstupid.com.

Scratchy musak.
All of our customer service agents are helping other customers. The next agent will be available to serve you in 46 minutes.

Scratchy musak.
All of our customer service agents are helping other customers. The next agent will be available to serve you in 45 minutes.

Scratchy musak.

[Click]

Translation: We do not want to talk with you.

Get Human

Learning professionals often get their best ideas from outside the field. A small group of us recently began swapping ideas and collaborating on projects. This past weekend we talked about non-learning books that made a major impact on our thinking.

The Cluetrain Manifesto raised my consciousness that in a networked world, authenticity and transparency triumph over deception and secrecy. Ten years ago this month, The Cluetrain appeared on the web, and it’s still there. Read the 95 theses. “Markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.”

Tom Stuart’s Intellectual Capital introduced me to the broader picture of organizational knowledge, beyond courses to ongoing knowledge creation. The notion that we need to capture, share, and improve our knowledge both as individuals and organizations helps create that mindshift to continuous innovation that’s so necessary in these increasingly turbulent times.

Blur: The Speed of Change in the Connected Economy, by Stan Davis and Christopher Meyer, taught me the implications of the internet. Translate time, space and mass into speed, connectivity, and intangibles, and traditional boundaries disappear. Speeding up makes measurement continual rather than episodic. If everything is connected to everything and everybody to everybody, then space is not the issue so much as the connectivity. Economic value is shifting to intangibles, as seen in the current shift in focus to talent and human capital online. Speed x Connectivity x Intangibles = Blur. Now eleven years old, I still go back when I need a hit of wisdom.

Reading The Starfish and the Spider by Brafman & Beckstrom only took one day but it’s an illuminating book. Spider organizations are those with centralized control and if you cut off the head, the rest will die. In starfish organizations, cutting off one leg will not kill it, because intelligence is distributed throughout the organism. The authors start by examining the two hundred year struggle between the Apache (starfish) and the Spanish Army (spiders), showing how a decentralized Apache nation was almost impossible to conquer because there was no head. A modern day equivalent is Al Quaeda.

What I found most interesting is that the degree of centralization for an optimal organization depends on many factors, so there is no magic recipe [like informal versus formal learning]. Finding what the authors call the “sweet spot” requires constant monitoring of the environment. Today’s sweet spot may be tomorrow’s lost cause.

Alvin and Heidi Toffler continue their series of books on the rise of the Third Wave, or knowledge economy, with Revolutionary Wealth. As with several of their other books, this one looks at the larger and deeper patterns affecting our economies and societies as certain parts of the world make the transition from the second wave (industrial) economic structure. The three deep fundamentals that most economists do not examine are said to be - time, space and knowledge. Changes in each of these are having profound effects on us. Even more so, we are seeing conflicts between first wave (agrarian) societies with second and third wave ones. In many countries, all three co-exist and tensions occur as each has fundamentally different values, priorities and institutional needs.

The discussions on energy use are a refreshing change from much of the hyperbole in the media and the few references to education are clear and succinct. “The coming clash will set defenders of our existing educational factories against a growing movement committed to replacing them - a movement comprising four key elements … Teachers … Parents … Students … Business.”

Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things was the first book to turn around our perception of the world from the point of, really, user experience. It’s an easy-to-read book that fundamentally changes the way you view the world, and then you move to how to create organizations that can create awesome product/service experiences, and finally to overall customer experiences (cf. Pine & Gilmore’s Experience Economy).

How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci by Michael Gelb is a practical guide (with exercises) to developing da Vincian powers! Working through the seven da Vincian principles - curiosita, dimostrazione, sensazione, sfumato, arte/scienza, corporalita and connessione helped me think more widely and more clearly about issues and problems, and approach them in different ways than I had before.

What outside inspirations improved professional perspective?

The strength of weak ties explains that you never find your new job through your friends; you find it through their friends. Your pool of contacts overlaps that of your friends; there’s nothing new there. But their friends are members of many different communities. In diversity, there are job leads.

The same principle holds true for information. Go to training conferences for a few years, and you find that you can almost mouth the words of some of the speakers. Novices learn lots; that’s who most of the conferences are for. Old hands may hear a few new terms, but breakthrough ideas are rare. Hence, if you’ve been around a while and are hungry for new concepts and fresh approaches, look outside of the training realm. Tune into conversations about business strategy, brain science, futurists, computer games, conceptual art, and advertising.

I’m assembling the un-book sequel to Informal Learning. It’s nothing if not multi-disciplinary. I clearing the eLearning books out of my library. Searching for something edgy, I arrive at John Hagel’s site. John’s blogroll was to the left of the article I was reading. I know, or know of, everyone there, but most of them aren’t among my incoming RSS feeds.

* BGSL - Umair Haque
* Chris Anderson - The Long Tail
* Confused of Calcutta - JP Rangaswami
* Creativity Exchange - Richard Florida
* John Battelle’s Searchblog
* Joho the Blog
* Lawrence Lessig
* Loosely Coupled weblog
* Many-to-Many
* O’Reilly Radar

When I come against an issue of, say, learning culture, I’d be more likely to get a fresh perspective from these folks than from the usual suspects in the training blogosphere.

Why not set up a custom Google Search on these blogs? It’s as easy as shooting ducks in the bathtub.

Here’s the custom search page.

If this proves useful, I’ll set up custom searches for other topics in the un-book.

Day before yesterday I installed Parallels on my MacPro; it creates a virtual machine to enable me to run Windows.

Ten years ago, something like this would have had maybe a 25% chance of working, and when it did, it would be as slow as snails on valium. And it would have taken four hours with many wrong turns to install.

Parallels was as easy and user-friendly as they come. Windows runs on my Mac faster than it did on my ThinkPad. I have yet to read the manual. I am a happy camper. And that’s why the photo of the dancing bear.

In The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, Alan Cooper compares software to a dancing bear. You don’t look for the bear to dance gracefully. The amazing thing is that the bear can dance at all.

Switching topics, does anyone know of a company making good use of e-mentoring? A student writing her dissertation on the subject needs to know.

And switching again, the cover story in the current Fast Company is about ning. Amazing growth rate. When I posted a question about some glitch I couldn’t figure out when we were starting this community, Gina Bianchi emailed me an answer in about ten minutes. I replied that her level of service blew me away. You have to admire a Stanford MBA, serial entrepreneur, investment banker who works in the trenches. It reminds me of the early days at AOL when Steve Case personally answered the questions and gripes.

Ning’s software is another agile dancing bear. Essentially, a community-in-a-box, Ning is a snap to set up. We’ve used it to run the Internet Time Community for a year now. Ning’s missing a few tricks (I still have a tough time find new posts), but by-and-large, it has provided discussion forums, blogs, albums, member pages: not bad for something that took five minutes to set up and is free. We have 200+ members.

The gremlins have just punished me for being so chipper. I had about an hours’ worth of unsaved code (don’t ask) in a web app when Firefox froze on me. WTF? This happens several times a week around here, and I’ve never been able to isolate the problem. Argh. Some bears don’t dance.

Continuing the photo tour of our outpost on Poppy Lane in North Berkeley.

What you see from Poppy Lane…

…and what you see if you peek over the fence.

Looking from the dining room to the front deck.

Here’s the view through the dining room. The top floor resembles a glass shoe-box. I’ll show you the view to the west from the southern end of the house to the north.

Inside, to the left of the front door is my office. Sliding door for privacy.

From my office.

The kitchen.

From the living room.

Slide show

Location.

The house is two blocks from the crest of the ridge across the bay from San Francisco.

Rock climbers frequent the two neighborhood parks. Cragmont Park has a magnificent panorama of the U.C. Berkeley campus. From atop Remillard Rock you can see the Marin Hills, Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, and south along the San Francisco peninsula. We are a brief walk from an immense regional park, where I frequently go hiking.

Down the hill, a five-minute drive or twenty-minute walk, is the Berkeley “Gourmet Ghetto,” home of Cafe Panisse, the Cheese Board, the original Peet’s Coffee, the farmer’s market, Black Oak Books, our wine merchant, and the first outlet for Ecco shoes in America.

Poppy Lane is a quiet, one-block street in the Berkeley hills that ends at a small public park where people come to climb Remillard Rock, watch their kids in the tiny playground, or play fetch with their dogs.

The Meyer lemon tree out front bears fruit all year long.

Bougainvillea and black bamboo hide the vaguely Japanese-looking house from the street. We’re thinking of selling the place and moving on next month.

The back deck is a tranquil spot for reading or meditation. .

The deck looks out to the redwood grove at the far end of the back yard.

View of the back of the house from the redwood grove.

We’ve let the back yard revert to nature. Skunks, raccoons, and deer sometimes take up residence.

The four rooms on the lower level look out on the back yard.

The squirrels are entertaining but I wish they won’t eat all the pears.

Deer sometimes sleep under the back deck.

I plan to put 30 Poppy on the market in about a month. In a grand Bay Area tradition, friends and acquaintances get first dibs. Drop me a line if you are interested. No real estate agents, please. ,

4 bedrooms, 2 baths, 2 decks
2,016 sqft, Lot 7,748 sqft, built 1961.

exported from next post

Continuing the photo tour of our outpost on Poppy Lane in North Berkeley.

What you see from Poppy Lane…

…and what you see if you peek over the fence.

Looking from the dining room to the front deck.

Here’s the view through the dining room. The top floor resembles a glass shoe-box. I’ll show you the view to the west from the southern end of the house to the north.

Inside, to the left of the front door is my office. Sliding door for privacy.

From my office.

The kitchen.

From the living room.

Slide show

Location.

The house is two blocks from the crest of the ridge across the bay from San Francisco.

Rock climbers frequent the two neighborhood parks. Cragmont Park has a magnificent panorama of the U.C. Berkeley campus. From atop Remillard Rock you can see the Marin Hills, Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, and south along the San Francisco peninsula. We are a brief walk from an immense regional park, where I frequently go hiking.

Down the hill, a five-minute drive or twenty-minute walk, is the Berkeley “Gourmet Ghetto,” home of Cafe Panisse, the Cheese Board, the original Peet’s Coffee, the farmer’s market, Black Oak Books, our wine merchant, and the first outlet for Ecco shoes in America.

I test-drove a BMW 128 this afternoon. Costs about $30,000. I think I’ll buy the coupe. Any car-enthusiast readers have an opinion on this one?

Sales pitch video
Vrrooom

Listen to this 8-minute update if you want to know about the Informal Learning 2.0 Fieldbook.

Books are an increasingly obsolete medium. My book on informal learning froze my thoughts as it came off the presses, as if the world is not always changing. Publishers spend a year doing what other sectors do in a month.

Hence, I’m assembling an un-book. Listen to the update.

Join me if you are interested.