Susan Scrupski – Page 25

Rails Rules for the Enterprise

me and Tim Bray I spent Friday afternoon with an impressive technology crowd that gathered here in Austin from Avenue A | Razorfish. I’ve blogged many times over the past few years about how these Interactive Agencies hold the keys to the kingdom on bringing “sexyback” to the Enterprise. It’s been nearly a few months since the blog/firestorm kicked up starting with Mr. Bill (Gates) fueled by Scobleizer.

What I saw with mine own eyes at the AARF gig was red hot enterprise-worthy sexy stuff– borderline enterprise porn. 🙂 The integration was downright obscene!

One of the highlights of the event for me was meeting Tim Bray, pictured to the right here with me. Tim keynoted the event and was described to me by Shiv Singh as one of the original authors of the XML standard. Readers of this blog know what a geek fangirl I am, so I rushed poor Tim at the evening before’s cocktail party and talked his ear off for about a half-hour with mostly nonsense. He kindly took this photo, so I could post it on the blog.

The next day, Tim showed a slide on PHP referencing integration challenges with WordPress and Drupal. My video interviewing skills are (UM) lacking, but I managed to ask him about it, just in case any Enterprise 2.0 hopefuls were considering PHP as their platform choice… You’ll see Tim is very much the Ruby on Rails fan here.

Incidentally, it’s worth mentioning that BSG’s web site and our e.laborate platform is all Rails, baby. It’s times like these that I wish I were more technical, but to hear a guy like Bray gush over the simplicity and ease of agile development with Rails, makes me feel proud of our apps team. I’ve been on many calls with Scott Brittain, our with customers and with industry insiders. I always learn something from Scott and enjoy talking to the “apps guys” whenever I can. We talk a lot about how this so-called revolution is not about technology, but hey, the technology is one heck of an enabler, ain’t it? It’s like trying to imagine the 60s social revolution without electric guitars.

Rawk on for freedom you awesome geek gods.

Happy New Year!

Lots of folks on Twitter today this first day of 2008. Lots of reflecting, predicting, resolving going on… For my part, I took up Luis Suarez’s challenge to participate in his “Eight things you don’t know about me.” This is a fun blogging game of tag, somewhat, where we all randomly choose other bloggers to reveal morsels about themselves that we may not otherwise glean from regularly reading of their blogs. I chose to start a personal blog this year, so I included my “8 things” over there.

I then tagged these folks:

Todd Stephens, Collaborage blog. Also author of Trademark 2.0, which I highly recommend.
Maggie Fox, Social Media Group blog. Ms. Fox is the IT GIRL in corp. social media. We all need to know 8 more things about her.
JP Rangaswami, Confused of Calcutta blog. I think JP is approaching deity status; does he need an introduction?
Stephanie Agresta, Internetgeekgirl blog. I don’t know Stephanie, but I hear she claimed “Jersey Girl” before I could. She always seems to be having a lot of fun, and I’ve been following her on Twitter.
Shiv Singh, Going Social Now blog. Shiv is just one of those smart cats in the blogosphere. Hope he participates!
Thomas Otter, Vendorprisey blog. Thomas is my lone EI pick. He is a man of many surprises. I welcome his secrets.
Mike Stopworth. Mike is CEO of Cerebra, South Africa’s leading social media consultancy and one of the “planet’s special people.”
Vaughan Merlyn. IT Organization Circa 2017. Vaughan is my lone BSG Alliance pick. I’ve been coaching him on blogging. He’s a brilliant guy; I just need him to start linking more… Sorry Vaughan! It’s a little tough love. 🙂

My comment facility isn’t working correctly yet on the new blog, either, so anyone can comment here in the interim on that post.

As we roll into the New Year, I am wishing all ITSinsiders a tremendous ’08. May the web with with you– each and every ~~one~~ group!

Another last-minute gift for the holidays…

Find yourself online much??? Then, you my friend may be a Web-Worker. And if you’re a Web-Worker, you need to be hip to what Web-Workers need to know from the doyenne of web working, Anne Zelenka.

If you’re not familiar with Anne’s blog or her contributions on Om Malik’s Web Worker Daily or GigaOm you’re in for a treat. Add her feeds to your reader. She’s a must-read, IMHO. Anne is an expert on many things, including terrific family meals. One of the things I love the most about Anne is she is as smart as a whip on technology, AND (notice I didn’t say but?) she mingles her family and parenting life into her professional life with ease.

Best news– Anne’s new book is now available on Amazon! Another great, last minute choice for gift-giving this holiday season. Further, I couldn’t resist the image capture for Amazon’s intelligent algorithms urging us to buy Anne’s “Connect!” together with David Weinberger’s, “Everything is Miscellaneous.” Another one of my favorite 2.0 books.

It’s awesome these books are rolling off the production (on)line just at the right time– people have money to spend, people to spend it on, and a little time to relax and do a little reading.

Happy Holidays!

Practical How-to’s for Enterprise 2.0 Missionaries

Wikipatterns Book The one-two punch in Enterprise 2.0 is still blogs and wikis. It will probably be that way for a while, as so much of the large enterprise territory is still uncivilized terrain. A nice holiday gift this season for your favorite client, boss, colleague, partner, what-the-heck– give it to your mother-in-law– is Stewart Mader’s Wikipatterns which is now available in book form and available online.

I credit Stewart (Mader), the book’s author, with my magnificent enterprise 2.0 makeover from “Wiki Witch of the East” to “Gentle, Caring Collaborararian.” When I first discovered the freedom and ease of collaboration with wikis, I just could not stand the dreaded GROUP EMAIL. So, I posted a note here on the blog and a witch photo on our internal social network with a caption that reads, “Susan will come fly to your office and cast an e2.0 spell that will wipe out your hard drive if you add her to a group email list… before thinking wiki.” I think I scared everyone silly.

But, I soon discovered Stewart’s wikipatterns site. Much to my sheer humiliation and profound shame, I discovered I was a wiki bully. I have since changed my wicked ways. I can be seen, on occasion, when I can’t possibly help it, holding my hands over my ears when my colleagues relate to me grisly stories from the front about how documents and presentations are sometimes emailed to and fro to be tracked with editing changes & rev numbers & master copies and then docs are re-routed (emailed) to groups for more revisions, and so on (and on and on). It’s just too much for an Enterprise 2.0 evangelist to bear.

There is a better way. Here is an excerpt from Wikipatterns: exerpt from wikipatterns

For those of us who think this is just old hat, remember it’s not the chorus that needs preach’n to. Wikis are still a radically new phenomenon in the corporate landscape in the enterprise and can be viewed with suspicion at worst and confusion at best. Wikipatterns will go far to help educators, vendors, evangelizers, consultants, and enthusiasts spread the gospel good news on how sharing and collaborating is done in the New Age of web 2.0 Enterprise adoption.

Quick! Quick! (which is what wiki stands for in Hawaiian), order your copy today! 🙂

Enterprise Suits Up for the Ride, but Seeks a Safe Landing

This is what would happen if Santa were an Enterprise App and he tried to automagically incorporate 2.0 grooviness overnight.

The irony just got the better of me… I’ve been wrestling with wretched old-school health forms all afternoon that will undoubtedly be, um, input or maybe scanned into some old-school enterprise system that will carefully set up my health insurance for 2008. If it weren’t Sunday, I probably could do some digging and figure out exactly what the “business process” is that will determine my paper-input-to-digital-imprint record through the labyrinth of enterprise systems. Will an outsourced provider be involved? Probably. A mainframe? Probably. A large-scale database? Oh yeah.

Have I enjoyed this process today? No. Was I able to customize my health insurance policy and my coverage according to my particular family’s health situation? Not in a 2.0 way. Was I able to choose a health insurance company by my review of doctors online and get recommendations from other insureds about which health insurance companies actually paid claims on time and answered questions with friendly, caring concern? Well, definitely not.

While I’ve been grousing about doing this all day, clicking on web sites, downloading forms, etc., I’ve had Snitter (a Twitter stream) up and have been keeping my eye on the chatter of the day. It appears Robert Scoble dared to ask why Enterprise Apps weren’t sexy, and well, you can imagine how my Enterprise Irregular “guild” reacted to that. Nick Carr even got involved. It’s only Sunday too, so we’ll see where it goes. (See Dennis Howlett, Michael Krisgsman, Anshu Sharma, Vinnie Mirchandani.) Me? I agree with all of them, oddly enough. On the one hand, I’m having a miserable experience, and I agree with Nick Carr, and I really wish the health insurance company had more consumer-y features. New York Times Design Director Khoi Vinh expressed nearly the exact same sentiment with this post earlier this fall. I agreed with him then too.

On the other hand, for those of us who are working hard to try and transform, enlighten/educate enterprises on how they need to introduce some of this radical change to leverage innovation and wealth creation, we know what we’re up against. Enterprise applications are carefully managed fleets comprised of many battleships that simply cannot turn on a dime. Nor, would you want them to.

Should my son be rushed to the hospital in 2008 because he didn’t quite land that skating trick he’s been practicing in the street, I want to make sure all systems are go and the woman at the reception desk doesn’t get a message from my insurance company like this:

And now a word from our sponsor…

I’ve been sitting on some pretty big news for about a month now. This is extremely difficult for someone who is online and interacting nearly every second of every day with various folks in and around the community. The news was so top secret, I couldn’t even share it with people in my own company. Very strange in this era of openness and, ironically, mass collaboration and sharing.

The headline news today is BSG Alliance is mashing up with Don Tapscott’s New Paradigm think tank. It’s a pretty powerful combination. Tapscott, as you should know, has been pretty spot on predicting how the digital landscape will unfold. Wikinomics, the book co-authored by Tapscott and Anthony Williams, has been climbing the business book charts since 2006. Amazon.com is listing it in its top ten for 2007 (from which you can vote for the best). It was fourth when I voted last night. More importantly, the concepts in Wikinomics are opening minds all over the globe to the possibilities of massive collaboration and innovation.

This afternoon, we will be hosting a live announcement event in NYC at the Marriot Marquis. We will be webcasting live from the Marriott if you would like to join the conversation with a few of our customers. The discussion will center on the driving themes of innovation, opportunity, wealth creation, and risk in the next generation web era. This link will take you to the webcast.

I will be in Austin tomorrow, also participating via webcast. We are sponsoring the local Jelly Austin, which is a coworking event. If you’re in Austin, please come down and celebrate with us. Genuine Joe’s coffee house.

So, the journey continues. With even more interesting possibilities. Stay tuned.