Staying connected and building relationships from afar

In this week’s episode of Work Smart, IBMer Rich Edwards asks about the best practices for staying connected and building relationships from afar. I share some advice based on my own work-at-home experience, and then I ask author of Telecommuting Success Michael Dziak for his.

Gina Trapani on telecommuting and staying in touch – I can relate, yes. Meeting in person is adding substance, way beyond warm, fuzzy feelings (remember office wars) hence the successes of coworking, meeting on weekends for geek talk (and there’s some well deserved criticism of the approach, high time to re-engage and re-design), taking great lenghts for attending conferences in (marvellous) places far away, … we’re social animals, that’s what we are.

ps. check out the creepy telepresence robot in the video, this is a joke, no?

Enterprise 2.0 on z/OS

I had the pleasure to attend an IBM enterprise 2.0 workshop yesterday at the Böblingen Labs. Found out about it via Luis Suarez. Well, turned out to be a good idea, not only was I able to experience the extended version of Luis’ “Thinking out of the Inbox”, but also got some insights into IBMs mainframe business as a platform for business-critical applications. And yes, these may well include Enterprisey-2.0 stuff. And while I am still favorable of lightweight deployments, I can see their point, especially when coupled with the overall trends around virtualization, cloud computing etc.

The one day workshop (“Web 2.0 and System z”) – organized by Kevin Keller (kevkeller on Twitter) – both touched upon broad underlying motives, concepts and trends (systematized by Ansgar Schmidt under “Gutenberg 2.0”, I just loved the neologism “social translucence”) and downright IT-technological specifics.

Fot the underlying trends I think that the IBMers got it right, e.g. when pointing out the trend towards decentralized social networks, that are organized and supported by distributed players. Yes, add this to data portability and open standards and we’re on the right track. Besides, I got some nice insights into IBMs enterprise social software ideas, e.g. the internal BeeHive social networking platform (I know who called it a waste of time but am not telling …) – where already thousands of IBM employees “connect and share” and IBMs CatTail document sharing platform.

So, in addition to meeting nice people like Martin Packer, I also learned quite a bit. Yes, this is another one of the reasons why we still want to meet up with people in real-life. As Luis puts it, we want to:
– hear the story behind the argument
– confirm what we think we know (and I would also say put our ideas up for testing and refinement)
– decide what to pay attention to
– keep up with fast changing information
– feel connected

Makes a nice list of arguments for coming to the WikiWednesdayStuttgart this evening, although the planned main event has to be delayed onto the future (no I am not telling) we’ll have a nice group of people with expertise to discuss with …

From ‘lifestream’ to ‘workstream’

Via Jon Udell’s tweet: “From ‘lifestream’ to ‘workstream’ is a short conceptual leap“.

I like the concept of “streams”, social presencing and the above quote very much, yet I doubt that change management or organizational adoption of Enterprise 2.0 will profit from this nearness.

Even when the concepts are similar, these remain two separate worlds: Always-on, hyper-connected, cutting-edge knowledgeworkers are rare in the corporate setting – and there are some deep-rooted reasons for this … I don’t say that these are good or sensible reasons, but they are in effect anyway.

Facebook, Twitter und Co. – Infrastruktur für E-Collaboration?

… ist der Titel einer neuen Präsentation, die ich gerade ausarbeite. Auf Basis meiner Session am BarCampMünchen entwickle ich eine Session für das BarCampBerlin – vermutlich heute abend auf Slideshare, Comments und Feedback willkommen.

Bei diesem Thema kommt mir natürlich Mario Sixtus wie gerufen, der gewohnt launig audiovisuelle Aufklärung rund um das Thema Twitter betreibt:


Link: sevenload.com