Skip to main content

The social enterprise

Alex Iskold has written a post on the "social enterprise" where he evangelizes the use of wikis, blogs, etc in enterprises. I am (of course?) all in favor for that. But the way Alex describes "enterprises" and the way they work seems at least partially wrong to me: what Alex describes does not apply to the large corporation I have insight in. Two things:
  1. Large corporations are not organized in a top-down, hierarchical fashion, where communication is required to bubble up the chain of command and down in another department. Rather, they are organized in a matrix fashion, where the project hierarchy and the line hierarchy are intermingled and therefore communication is intermingled as well.
  2. There is not a lack of communication. If anything, there is an overflow. Workers in large corporations are scared to come back from holiday, because they know their email inbox will contain several hundred emails. So the issue is the necessary amount of communication.
Again, wikis and blogs are fine. I use them all the time and could not work without them anymore. But, wikis and blogs are not able to address another problem of knowledge management in corporations: lack of time to write things down that are not absolutely necessary to be written down. I doubt that tools can solve this problem.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Python script to set genre in iTunes with Last.fm tags

Now that I have started to seriously use iTunes I figured it might be nice to have the genre tag set in a meaningful way. Since I have a reasonably large collection of mp3s doing that manually was out of question - I wrote me a Python script to do that. There seems to be a large demand for such a functionality (at least I found a lot of questions on how to automatically set the genre tag) so maybe someone else finds the script useful. It is pasted below. General Strategy The basic idea is to use Last.fm's tags for genre tagging. In iTunes the genre tag is IMO best used when it only contains one single genre, i.e. something like "Electronica", not something like "Electronica / Dance". On the other hand dropping all but one tag would lose a lot of information, so I decided to use the groupings tag for additional information that is contained in the list of tags that an artist has on Last.fm. In the example above that would be something like "Electronica, Dan...

What is Multi-Tenancy? A closer look

Lately, I had a lot of conversations about multi-tenancy (MT). So I finally wrote up my thoughts on that term. In this post I will argue that MT is a value that depends on a continuous variable. Therefore, any statement about a system being “MT” can only be made in the context of the given requirements. It is not a property of the system itself . I will also show that perfect multi-tenancy is indistinguishable from single-tenancy (ST). MT is a value that depends on a continuous variable Imagine a step-function "ST-MT" (values are either 0 or 1) that determines if a given system is MT (1) or ST (0). That function will look like this: ST-MT = function (system, business requirements) Look at  the function’s arguments: the first one is obvious – the result will depend on the system itself. The second one is more interesting: it is the cumulative set of business requirements . Typically, these requirements will include: Resource sharing: systems typically declare...

CMS vendors now and then

CMS analyst Janus Boye has just published a post on CMS vendors that discontinue their products (because they get bought out or similar) During the past 10 years, a number of software products used by online professionals have been discontinued That sentence reminded me that I had given a talk almost 10 years ago (it was in 2001 exactly) that contained a slide on the CMS market at that time: The circles denote vendors that were part of CMS market overview articles by popular German IT magazines in that year (I wanted to show how differently the market place could be perceived). A vendor placed in any of the circles had enough attention to be part of at least one evaluation. The vendors outside of the circles were not part of any of these overview articles, but somehow present in the market place - at least I knew their names back then. It is interesting to look at the landscape from that time. Of course there are a number of well-known vendors that got bought (Vignette, Obtree, Gauss...