Sam Aparicio

I’m a rabid fan of Socialtext wikis, and I’m starting to use Google Wave frequently. I wish there was a much better connection between the two services.

Socialtext is great for content.

Google Wave is great for conversation.

But conversation is content. And content generates conversation.

Sometimes conversation starts from content, but many more times, you arrive at content after a conversation.

I would like to have a Google Wave Robot that allows me to take a wavelet and turn it into a Socialtext wiki page. And this robot could also watch wiki pages and update waves with the comments that people make on the pages.

I would like to have a Google Wave button in Socialtext that allows me to discuss… jump from the current page to a wave.

From other people that collaborate with me on wikis, I hear “I would like to get a ‘cleaned up version’ of this discussion and turn it into a document or wiki page”

My friends at Socialtext just released Socialtext Signals, a sort of Twitter for the Enterprise. So what is the big deal?

Let’s admit it. Companies these days are laggards when it comes to collaboration. The consumer web has exploded with ideas that are changing how people approach their work.

And Twitter –a half measure of self-centeredness and half measure of gregariousness– has shown us that there is value in constructing a shared awareness around us.

If you think about it, one of the great tenets of execution is that it all starts with good communication. Knowing what is going on –the zeitgeist of a company– is square #1 when it comes to managing for results.

So you may dismiss social software, or enterprise 2.0, or Twitter for that matter, as another fad. And it may be the case that it comes to pass, at least in its current form.

But technology like Signals is reaching out to you, extending a helpful hand to assist you in better understanding the pulse of your company –the customer in crisis, the lead that just came in, the obscure project that everybody should know about– and that is plain, good old execution at play.

And that is why this stuff matters.

A common complaint among the collaboration digerati is how useless social networking sites are. But LinkedIn Answers was useful for me in a very practical way.

I’m trying to figure out what SAN is best for us at work and in less than 24 hours I was able to confirm:

• That EMC is probably the best out there but it costs more
• That NetApp has a very competitive product that differentiates itself on ease of management
• That players like Pillar Data and Compellent are the challengers, so they can innovate more

10 answers in one business day… that’s real value for me.

It was interesting to see that a couple of the answers were a bit too slanted towards a vendor with whom the answerer has some kind of relationship, but again, the network allowed me to see these relationships easily.

Thanks LinkedIn!

If you are a CIO and you want to stay relevant 5 years from now, your #1 job is to make every employee at your company more productive.

Yes, you have to deal with compliance, and security, and IT projects and budgets and infrastructure maintenance and cost control. But in comparison, none of those tasks can have the strategic impact and scale of achieving small incremental gains in empowering your company’s employees with technology.

By choosing to ignore (or in some cases directly hurt) this responsibility CIOs relinquish their seat at the table with the top executives at a company. Of equal value to sales, finance and operations is a function that maximizes the return on human capital, and these days it’s not really HR’s job to accomplish this. (On a personal note, I feel HR, as traditionally conceived in most organizations, is a bankrupt paradigm). It’s the CIO’s.

Some things you want to stop doing:

• Preventing employees from installing software on their computers
• Preventing employees from bringing their own laptops to work
• Blocking access to sites such as Facebook, Twitter, meebo.
• Saving money on monitors

Some things you want to start doing:

• Find the line managers trying to innovate within your organization (maybe they have Macs on their desks or are running wikis under them)
• Implement grassroots systems: IRC, Forums, wikis, IM
• Implement personal productivity tools: GTD software, email search, mindmapping software
• Help teams get organized: Basecamp
• Provide the means for semi-structured information to flourish: wikis.

The days of the centralized large IT organization delivering centralized large IT projects are counted. As viable SAAS alternatives emerge and a younger, tech-savvy, self-sufficient employees make it through the ranks, they will demand the freedom to innovate their own way, they will provide their own tech support, and will want to run their own systems.

Like Ross mentions in a recent CIO magazine article on the role of wikis

Most employees don’t spend their time executing business process. That’s a myth. They spend most of their time handling exceptions to business process.

The logical conclusion to that is that most business value is derived from empowering those employees to handle those exceptions and capturing and disseminating the knowledge generated by solving them.
And it’s real hard to do that without the right technical tools.